That summer my wife was feeling poorly; she spent long hours in that river breeze, in the shifting sun and shade. To provide distraction from our insect-ridden life, I rowed her upriver one fine Sunday for some cultured conversation with Baron Msyoo de Chevelier-“Shoveleer,” as the local people knew him. Long ago, I’d shot the Frenchman’s felt hat off his head as a warning to keep out of my plume bird territory and I warned Mandy that, seeing my boat, he would rush into his cabin for his weapon. When he did just that, Mandy had to smile, but fortunately that kind smile reassured him: he set down his fowling piece and resigned himself to Watson’s imposition.
Jean Chevelier sniffed crossly as he picked his way about. Those hooded eyes of his were a raccoon’s eyes, bright black and burning. He had long since lost the last of his good manners, having shrunken in old age and solitude to a peevish little gnome who would bark their orders to a firing squad lined up to shoot him. Ignoring my courtly introduction, he neither greeted Mrs. Watson nor welcomed her to Possum Key. Instead, he thrust under her nose the ugly queer black blisters on his withered forearm, cackling in triumph when her challenged husband could not tell her what had caused them. “Man-chi-neel!” he cried. In a perverse impulse of scientific inquiry so typical of this old man, he had purposely taken shelter from the rain beneath a manchineel or poison tree, a small smooth-barked reddish tree found in the Glades country. To tease him, I claimed I’d seen manchi-neel on Gopher Key-was that where he got those blisters? Rattled, he cried Am-po-see-bluh! To the end, he pretended he knew nothing of Go-phaire, though everyone knew he had dug up that whole mound in a frantic latelife hunt for Calusa treasure.
Mandy was plainly entertained by his prickly scientific stance and could scarcely wait to report back to Lucius that the big “ironhead” or wood ibis was not a true ibis, in Chevelier’s view, but a New World stork and that the “shit-quick” was the reed heron or bittern. “Sheeta-queek!” he yelled at Mandy, who shifted in her seat. “All birts sheeta-queek, for fly away queek, voo com-prawn, Madame?”
Deftly Mandy changed the subject to that huge greenish gator which frequented the riverbank across from Chatham Bend. Firing snippy questions to display her husband’s ignorance, the Frenchman sneered that in the unlikely event that my description could be trusted, my giant “alligator” was no alligator but a saltwater crock-o-deel, rare in south Florida. Surely a more observant man, Chevelier insinuated, would have noticed the pointy snout, quite unlike the shovel snout of the brownish, blackish alligator, and that even when its mouth was closed, its teeth protruded along the entire length of its lower jaw.
I might have known that the first naturalist to describe this brute had been a Frenchman. But the crocko-deel, Chevelier complained, had been falsely claimed by a mere French colonial, the rascally Jean-Jacques Audubon, who had dared to belittle Chevelier’s old mentor Rafinesque-Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz-after robbing him of his discovery. Chevelier’s hatred of “fokink Aud-u-bone” was only exceeded by his oft-expressed disdain for God Almighty. (In the face of sacrilege, Mandy batted her eyes prettily, her smile an entreaty as well as a signal that her honor would remain unsullied if her husband did not rise up in wrath to strike this villain down.)
However, to spare Mandy, I distracted him: “Is it true there are white shell canals at Gopher Key?” The old man hitched forward, a gleam of duplicity lighting his eye. Avoiding all mention of Gopher Key, he proposed that the white shell found in such canals could only have derived from a huge clam bed somewhere along this coast-an obvious conclusion that had not occurred to me. If he were a younger man, he assured Mandy-he had yet to address me directly, far less look me in the eye-he would locate and stake out that area for a canning industry. I pictured the coast charts in my head: that clam bed’s location could only be the vast shallow bank off the empty coast north of Chatham River, easily accessible from Pavilion Key.
Seeing me distracted, cracking my knuckles, Mandy guided the conversation to the topic of French poetry, agreeing with Msyoo that Edgar Allan Poe was less esteemed in his own country than in France, where he’d been discovered and translated by the poet Beau Delair, ness pa, Madame? But what Msyoo was most anxious to discuss was the inferiority of all aspects of American culture when compared with those of La Belle Frawnce, a paradise to which he hoped to return before death caught him een thees fokink Amerique.
Msyoo presently declared that France had conquered Florida back in the 1590s, as proven by such local names as Cape Sable and Cape Romaine: had it not been for the Louisiana Purchase, France’s rightful territories would include most if not all of North America. He scurried inside to dig out mildewed books by a pair of clever Frenchies who knew a great deal more about America than we Americans could ever hope to learn.
De Tocqueville, who had visited this country in the 1830s, had been appalled on the one hand by the callous indifference with which most Americans regarded slavery and astonished on the other by the slaves’ strange apathy and acceptance of their lot, which not only inured them to wretched servitude but caused them to imitate their oppressors rather than hate them. In my own experience, this was also true of chain gangs, cane crews, and other hard-used men, not merely blacks, but Chevelier dismissed my idiotic quibble by flicking his fingers toward my face in the way he might brush cake crumbs off his lap. “Compared to lay negres,” the Frenchman said, “lay poe rooge, lay redda-skeen-”
Here Mandy neatly intervened, observing that most European writers-the French writer Chateaubriand, for one-seemed to cherish a romantic view of les peaux rouges, perhaps to compensate for their prejudice against les peaux noires. She politely reminded him that to avoid capture and a bitter return to slavery, black warriors had reinforced and often led Seminole resistance to the whites.
“As was recognized by the U.S. Army and most historians,” I chimed in, quoting a general who had told the Congress that the First Seminole War was essentially a “Negro war.” Even De Tocqueville had remarked, said Mandy-I was so proud of her!-that escaped slaves who in the early days had turned up among Indian tribes throughout the South had to be men of exceptional courage and fortitude to survive a hostile wilderness and its wild peoples. Therefore they were much admired by the Indians and often married into the head families, producing a mixed-blood progeny of fine physical specimens of high intelligence-
“May ben sewer!” cried Chevelier, who had to recapture control at once or jump out of his skin. Was this not an affirmation of de Crиvecoeur? And he read out a passage that Mandy kindly regurgitatated for my benefit: What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood you will find in no other country. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men! The Frenchman cited “the half-a-breed Hardens,” as typical of these new Americans, embodying the tough, enduring qualities of the black, red, and white races. The Hardens, he said, with grudging admiration, represented the essential character of “thees fokink ray-poo-bleek.” I interrupted as he glared: the Hardens were by no means the only family on this coast with dark genes that had sifted down through generations, and they may or may not have manifested his new race of men, but they were good people and the best of neighbors in the Lost Man’s country.
To gall him, I added what Napoleon Broward had remarked, that it was the destiny of E. J. Watson to develop this southwest coast. The old man scoffed rudely, Lemper Roo-er! Lemper Roo-er Vot-sawn! And my wife smiled to chide me for my boasting: I had not heard the last of “Emperor Watson.”
Chevelier was wildly emboldened by her smile. When Mandy suggested that the Ten Thousand Islands, with their myriad channels, evoked the Labyrinth in Greek mythology, he speedily retorted that if the Islands were the Labyrinth, Madame’s own mari must be the fokink Mee-no-tore. Squeezing my arm to restrain me, Mandy said that the fearsome Minotaur could also be very gentle. “Minotaur Watson?” she would tease me later. “Emperor Watson? Which do you prefer?” (She had never cared for sentimental stale endearments for her husband; she preferred her own pet names, all of them quirky, slightly disrespectful.)
Msyoo le Baron Jean de Chevelier had the gall to be galled by Mandy’s fondness for her husband and did not trouble to hide it: he stared at us half-mad, mouth twisting cruelly. (Elderly indigestion, she suggested later.) Plainly this bachelor gentleman had been smitten by an educated lady and was trying to court her with his hard-earned rare knowledge, and when my wife hinted at his real emotion, overtaking him too late in life in this painful way, it seemed absurd to be angered by his insults. Standing up, I reminded him that his bullet-punctured hat still hung on a kitchen peg, to be returned on his first visit to the Bend. Which would be most welcome, Mandy added.
Leaving Mrs. Watson to accept his fond adoos, I bid him good-bye-we did not care to shake hands-and went back to the boat. Mandy thanked him for his kind hospitality, though this old misery hadn’t offered us so much as a cup of rainwater. “Bun shawnce, share Madame! Bella fortuna!” he called after her (wishing her good luck in two languages, she would explain, to compensate her for the dark fate of her marriage to a minotaur).
All the way home we talked with animation, though I knew my wife had to quell ascending sadness. At the dock she said, “Wait, Edgar, please,” too weak to leave the boat. She was watching the silver mullet down along the bank, leaping skyward as if to escape their natural element, only to fall back with those thin little smacks into the darkening water.
“Something’s after ’em, that’s all. Coming up from underneath.”
“Hush,” she murmured. “Watch.”
Hand on her shoulder, I watched with her, indifferent to this everyday sight but content in our shared sadness. The children, worried, came out on the screened porch. Sensing something, they observed us but they did not call. At last she offered her pale hand and I half lifted her onto the dock. She did not explain her sudden dread and said it was not serious but I knew she’d had some sort of premonition.
Mandy seemed to waste away, perishing from the inside out like a hollow tree. Finally I took her to Fort Myers and put her in the care of Dr. Langford, who lived in a big house near the river between Bay and First Streets. Carrie went along to tend her and the younger boys followed in late summer and stayed on for the school year. The only one left at Chatham Bend was Sonborn.
One gray day, feeling a hollow stillness back in the mangroves, I went ashore at Possum Key to see how that mean old man was getting on. He had not answered when I hailed the cabin and so I was not overly surprised when at the door I was met by the smell of death. Then I saw the long white whiskers in the shadows, the small paws in the air above the chest. The Frenchman lay stiff as a poisoned rat. I removed my hat.
I dug his grave in the soft soil of his garden. Putting rags over my hands, I returned into the cabin and lifted the light bundle in its mildewed blanket and carried him like a smelly little bride over the doorsill and out into the sun. Sinking to my knees, I lowered him into the earth, remaining there a few moments out of respect. As an unbeliever, I had no prayer to give, and anyway, no prayer could bless this ferocious God-hater in the hereafter or anywhere else.
“Le Baron Jean de Chevelier.” In that great quiet, with the swamp forest listening, I tried to pronounce his name in French the way Mandy had taught me. I had nothing else to offer by way of earthly witness. I had pitied him a little, yes, toward the end, but I had never liked him much and would not miss him.
Quock! The tearing squawk of a flared heron overhead startled me badly; I never saw the bird, only its shadow. Msyoo had loved birds better than people: his grim crier had come. In the next moment, on a limb, I saw a young owl, all woolly with astounded eyes, that must have attended the burial; it did not fly off into the wood until I’d finished spading the black soil into the pit. These odd birds spooked me a little, I must admit.
Before some hunter came by and stripped the cabin clean, I poked around for excavated treasures but was able to depart with a clear conscience, having been tempted by nothing in the place. At the boat, I ran afoul of two young Hardens come to clean and feed him; knowing how much that old man had detested E. J. Watson, these boys were shocked to see me. When I told them Msyoo Chevelier was dead, young Earl glanced at his brother, growing scared, and I knew right then that no matter what I said, Ed Watson would be blamed for the Frenchman’s death.