Taking a Key West nigra and a mule, I went straight home to Chatham Bend. With some half-ass help from Erskine Thompson, who placed little value on hard labor, I got that high ground in production in a hurry since there was no real forest to contend with. The Calusa who had a village here before the Seminole Wars had kept the jungle down, and since then, a fisherman, Richard Harden, then the old plume hunter Jean Chevelier-the last occupant before the late Will Raymond-had burned it over every year to discourage jungle scrub. What settlers wanted around any dwelling was nice bare ground that provided no cover for bad snakes, not to mention the no-see-ums and mosquitoes. In regard to discomfort and disease, the most dangerous creature in the Glades by far was the mosquito, which had driven men cast away or stranded on this coast to madness, even death.
With the rains in spring and fall, the river became a broad and burly flood, sandy brown and heavy with Glades silt, leaving thick crusts on the marl behind the mangrove fringes. Because the river was brackish from the tides, what we drank (before my rain gutters and a cistern were put in) was dead water from a rain barrel, and very glad to have that, too, in this salt country. That first year I built a palmetto log house with palm thatch roof-two big rooms and an outside kitchen. Next came a small dock, then a big shed, then a pasture with limb fenceposts cut from the red gumbo-limbo tree, which will take root when stuck into the ground. By the end of the year, my horse Job, a mule, a milk cow, and five hogs cohabited the old Raymond shack-more livestock than any settler south of Chokoloskee. All that was missing now was Mandy and the children.
Clearing off that second growth was hot and wearisome, and turning over the black soil, packed hard with shell, was worse. That shell had to be chipped out with a pickax, though once it was reduced to soil, it was black and fertile. I started out with tomatoes and peppers, then peas, beets, radishes, and turnips. All sprouted fine, but by the time we got our produce to Key West, it looked old and limp, half-spoiled. We grew our kitchen vegetables, of course, and planted fruit trees-bananas, mangoes, guavas, papayas, citrus.
Chatham Bend was the first good ground I ever worked on my own behalf rather than leasing or sharecropping for someone else, but truck farming would never make my fortune in the Islands. The following year we cleared more ground and grew a crop of sugarcane on about ten acres. Cane is a cast-iron plant that can survive flood, fire, and brief freezing and does not spoil in the shipping like fresh produce. As a perennial, it yields four or five crops before new cuttings must be planted: I worked out how to double-crop with cow peas to restore the soil and planned to rest each section every few years, leaving it fallow. Learning quickly that cane stalks were too bulky to ship economically to a market eighty miles away, I increased crop acreage, brought a crew in for the harvest, and switched to the manufacture of cane syrup-the first planter in the Islands ever to try it. (I had already replaced the small Veatlis with a sixty-eight-foot schooner called the Gladiator.)
The cane harvest extended till late winter, early spring, when I got rid of all my crew except Erskine and my new housekeeper, Henrietta Daniels, Erskine’s mother. Though glad to have a roof over her head, Netta was terrified of the wild people, and hid back in the house at the first glimpse of a dugout-very strange, since many of her Daniels kin had Injun blood.
Netta Daniels had led an errant life, working as a tobacco stripper in the Key West cigar factories and marrying often. Despite her trials, she remained a fervent Catholic, never danced nor swore nor slept in the same bed with a man who had been drinking, as I discovered on the night of her arrival.
“Listen,” I told her the next day, “it’s not seemly for a lady to sleep in the same room with her son. That kind of behavior will not be tolerated on the Bend.” After that, she bunked with me, which is pretty much the way I’d planned it in the first place. She was a few years older than myself, with hazel-green eyes and light brown hair and small cupped ears that made her look kind of crestfallen when she was tired. Still, she was a pretty woman and a willing one. She would clean a little but not much, can our preserves and feed the chickens, do simple cooking and her bounden duty by her master, namely me.
Erskine mostly ran the boat and slopped the hogs and did a few odd jobs when we could find him. So did Netta’s half brother Stephen, who turned up not long thereafter. Mr. S. S. Jenkins, as he introduced himself, was more commonly called Tant. He was mostly famous for the moonshine or “white lightning” he manufactured from raw sugar and chicken feed (a half sack of corn and a half sack of sugar in a charred oak barrel: that oak barrel, which he lugged everywhere, was his trade secret). Ferment worked quickly in this climate, and the “buck,” as he called it, was ready to distill in about ten days, but Tant was tasting it for flavor long before that. “Comin along real nice, Mister Ed!” he’d whoop, to keep my hopes up, but by the time he got that shine distilled, he had drunk most of it and had to start all over. Sometimes all we got out of the deal were the checkered feed sacks from his corn that Netta saved to make our shirts. Although still a young man, Mr. S. S. Jenkins was twitching like the dickens, he had to fold his arms around his chest just to stay put in his chair.
Rarely caught in the cane field, Tant fished and hunted our wild food, harvesting wild duck in the creeks and sloughs and sometimes a few of those black pigeons that hurtled up and down the river in the early morning. He was a tall and lanky feller with a small head and a comical tuft for a mustache, and he made me laugh right from the start, distracting my attention from his natural traits of bone laziness and alcohol addiction. Tant understood long before I did that I would tolerate his flaws of character only so long as he kept me amused.
One day at Chokoloskee, knowing I was watching, this fellow snuck up on Adolphus Santini’s cow pen, causing a regular stampede by poking his head over the fence and ducking down, up and down, over and over, until those critters went crazy with suspense, galumphing around colliding with one another. I got laughing so hard I could hardly find my breath, even when Dolphus ran out hollering. Seeing me there, Old Man Dolphus folded his big arms like an old blue heron folding its big wings. Never said one word.
Another day we were out shooting white ibis for our supper, back over toward what is now called Watson Prairie. A big gator maybe twelve foot long was crossing some dry palmetto ground between two sloughs, and
S. S. Jenkins, drunk as usual, yells, “Look here, Mister Ed!” Ran across the clearing and jumped onto that reptile piggyback, threw an arm lock around the jaw, crossed his ankles under the belly, all the while whooping like an Injun. That big gator was so scared it hauled Tant all over the palmettos, you never heard such a racket in your life, and that fool never let go till he hit the water. “That’s the last time I will ever take a bath,” Tant told us when he crawled out on the bank. “Don’t see no sense to it.”
Tant had always been a bachelor and never so much as considered female companionship except when drunk. One evening he approached his half sister on his hands and knees, said, “Netta, I aim to go get me a bride! All you got to do is recommend me, Netta, and I’ll try to live up to it!” Netta just smiled. She loved Tant the way he was, never tried to change him and never tried to find him a wife, either, knowing how hopeless that would be. Like many a lovable, whimsical feller, Tant Jenkins was a very lonesome man.
In the breeding season, in late winter and early spring, we hunted the white egret rookeries, stripping the plumes. These we traded to young Louis and Guy Bradley of Flamingo, who had hunted this coast with the Frenchman back in the ’80s. In October, when the long chill nights would knock down the mosquitoes, Tant baited his old traps, using salt mullet, and set a trapline along creek banks for otter, coon, and possum, which all humped along the shoreline at low tide. The rest of the year, forswearing hard liquor, he’d journey up the creeks into the Glades, as far from honest toil as he could go, returning with wild turkey and deer meat and hides from the hammocks and pine islands. The venison and turkey breasts were salted overnight, then smoked for a few days on palmetto platforms over coals. That smoked meat would keep a good long while before it was soaked to remove the salt, then cooked and eaten. The deer hides were stretched on frames and dried; we sold them for credit at the trading posts, along with his gator hide and coon and otter pelts. Occasionally he brought in a big gopher tortoise or swamp rabbits or other varmints; roasted possum tasted almost like young pig if you tasted hard enough, and the white tail meat of a young gator was fine, too. Tant even ate rattlesnakes he’d skinned out-“Fit for a king!” he’d say. Might have tasted like chicken, as he claimed, but he had that snake meat mostly to himself.
Netta was always disappointed when Stephen, as she called him, failed to bring the small wild key limes and wild grapes. She doted on wild butter beans from the hammock edges and prickly pears dug out for making pie. Occasionally Tant brought palm hearts from the inland hammocks, also coontie root; this sold well in the trading posts as “Florida arrowroot,” a starch for cakes and puddings. However he detested the insect swatting and hard grubbing in hot windless woods that went into every barrel, and the washing and grinding of the pulp, the soaking, fermenting, and drying. For seven cents a pound, he said, that was too much common labor, and anyway, “I can’t abide the feel of sweat and never could.” So Netta mostly baked her dough using salt and boiling water and her bread came out like a loaf of hardtack cracker. Well, we told her, hardtack was better than the gray bread in C. G. McKinney’s trading post, which C. G. himself sold as “fresh wasp nest.”
Cash being scarce on the frontier, most trade was barter. I’d swap cane syrup for big oranges, two for a penny, or saltwater oysters, sixty cents a barrel. At Key West or Tampa Bay, such treats as coffee beans and olive oil and chocolate were available, and sacks of onions and potatoes from the North. On the Bend, we ate better and a whole lot more than I had ever eaten in my life, which made me worry about Mandy and the children.
In April of 1895, a baby daughter was delivered to Henrietta by Richard Harden. Her mother named her Minnie after my sister. Having wanted a son, I was ready to call her “Ninny” and be done with it but Netta would not hear of such a joke.
For a gentle person, Netta had some courage. One day when my old horse Job the Younger would not pull the plow no matter how hard I switched him, I lost my temper and grabbed up a length of two-by-four to knock some sense into his head. Netta called out through the window, “Mister Watson! Don’t you do that, Mister Watson!” I felt sheepish. “Sometimes I’m a damned fool, Netta,” I told her later. I was sorry she had scared herself so bad that she begged forgiveness.