After our marriage, times was hard, and in early years, the man that helped to pull us through was Mister Watson. Coming north and south on his way to Key West, he liked to stop over and eat with us, and he always spared us extra grub, extra supplies just when we needed it. He done the same for the whole Hamilton clan, Gene and Becca, too, and they took his help, even though Gene would bad-mouth Mister Watson before his boat was over the horizon.
Leon never asked for help, not even once. Mister Watson could guess what us poor squatters needed and would bring old clothes from his own children, some spare food, maybe give us the lend of his good tools and equipment. We tried as best we could to pay him back, brought him fish sometimes, turtle and manatee for stew, palm bud, guava syrup. We did this and that, and I guess he knew we was ready to help out any way we could.
Course Gene told Leon that Mister Watson was just paying in advance for having the Hamiltons and their guns to back him if it come to trouble. I hated Gene for saying that but couldn't be so sure it wasn't true. Leon told me I was too suspicious, same way Gene was, but Gene's idea begun to eat at my poor man, and finally Leon give the order we was not to take no more from Mister Watson. We was getting more beholden to another man than he could live with.
Mister Watson was a generous man, and a real gentleman, I never knew him not to tip that broad black hat. Many's the time he ate at our table, and we was always glad to see him, he was lots of fun. Leon says that Mister Watson loved his children. But after his family moved up to Fort Myers, and them Daniels females came and went at Chatham Bend, Mister Watson went back to his hard drinking, he got mean and he got heavy, and didn't waste no time at all getting in trouble.
Not that Mister Watson killed as many as folks say he did. He never killed nobody in his whole life, he told us, except when saving his own skin, though of course it was him-this was his joke-who got to decide when his own skin needed saving. He allowed as how he always lived on one American frontier after another, and that to survive on the frontier you had to show yourself ready to defend your honor. If you backed down even once, showed the whites of your eyes, you would have to slink off with your tail between your legs, you would have to start all over someplace else. After that story got out about Belle Starr, every violent death in southwest Florida got blamed on Mister Watson. One time he was eating at Daddy Richard's table, Mormon Key, when a man was killed down to Key West. Next thing you know, there was a sheriff's deputy up this way hunting E.J. Watson, figured he'd claim the reward all by himself. This was the man Mister Watson got the drop on and put to work out in his field, that's how fired up he was about injustice. Sent word back to Key West with that deputy that the next one might not be so lucky, and I guess they remembered that message at Key West, because them ones that come hunting him after the Tuckers died were not so cocky.
It weren't Tucker and his nephew, the way Chokoloskee people say, it was Walter Tucker and his young wife, little Bet. She and her husband come back from Key West with Mister Watson, they was fine young people, and she called him Wally. Wanted to get some experience farming and fishing, put a grubstake together with their wages, try it on their own, so they took work on the Watson Place at Chatham Bend. Being kindhearted, Mister Watson built these newlyweds that little shack down the bank a ways from the main house, far side of the boat shed and the workshop. Like all young people, they just thought the world of him.
When their time was up, Mister Watson was still in need of help to finish up his harvest, which went from autumn right into the winter. So he told 'em they had never give him notice, said they was ungrateful after all he taught 'em, said he wouldn't pay 'em off till after harvest-that's the story he told us when he come back to the Islands a few years later. But he admitted he had been in a bad drinking spell, and he got so hot he run the Tuckers off the Bend without no pay. They headed for Lost Man's, stopping over to see us at Wood Key about a gill net and some grub and seed to get them started. This was the year of 1901, same year the Hamilton boys got started on Wood Key and was shipping sixteen-twenty barrels of salt fish a week to Key West and Cuba.
Now the Atwells had a longtime claim on Lost Man's Key, but they let the Tuckers knock that jungle down, set up a cabin. There was plenty of game and fish down along there, and a patch of good ground with a freshwater spring across the river mouth, not far from the north end of Lost Man's Beach. Wally figured they knew enough by now to live along. Bet was expecting, and Richard Hamilton was nearby, he delivered all the babies in the Islands. The Tuckers aimed to buy the quitclaim from the Atwells as soon as they could save a little money.
Both gangs of Hamiltons and the Atwells back in Rodgers River, all had big clans for company and help. Without that, only peculiar people could stand up to the lonesomeness and heat and insects in them rivers, and that mangrove silence that lay over everything, like mold in rainy season. Being stuck too long in muddy camps with toilsome chores, half bit to death, nothing to look at, and nothing but scuffed-up kids and dogs to talk to, it was mostly women who went crazy in the Islands. The men drank moonshine and got violent, to work them silences out of their system.
With the Tuckers it was just the opposite. We thought it was Wally might not have the grit to make a go of it on Lost Man's Key, but Bet had all the spirit in the world. Without his Bet, that sweet young feller would have howled his heart out in them swamps within the year.