Down in the Islands, “we were coughing up the dust of our nation’s progress,” said C. G. McKinney. The only memorial to our brave victory in the Spanish War was the mahogany in Everglade that was planted by the Storter family at the trading post. That tree promised to last a good deal longer than all the crepe, flags, bombast, and parades.
With my wife in Fort Myers and Netta gone, I installed Tant Jenkins’s sister as the housekeeper at Chatham Bend. Josie Jenkins was small and kind of pretty with her Cherokee mother’s dark brown eyes. “Our daddy Mr. Ludis Jenkins loved his Injun Seleta,” Tant told me. “When she left him for another, he got over her, I reckon, but the poor feller had to kill himself to do it.” Noticing his odd smile, I realized with surprise that he had told the truth but wanted me to laugh anyway and so I did. Tant needed to make people laugh no matter what.
My syrup enterprise, though still short of capital, was growing fast again under its new name, Island Pride, and that was because, in my humble opinion, our product was the best on the west coast. Sugarcane is a giant grass and any fool can grow a grass: the difference lies in the timing of the burn. In south Florida, the cane begins to ripen with the first drop in night temperature in September. In October, an experienced hand who knows the wind goes out with a firepot and burns it over. Without the big leaves that clog the mill, the stalks are much lighter and more easily handled, and good strong stalks lose very little sugar to fast-moving flames. Also, the burning clears the field of snakes and scorpions and chases out wild game; a good shot ranging along the field edge during the burn can generally bring down more than enough to feed the crew.
Dry cane ignites all in a rush with a heavy roaring as in storm: if the burning is timed right, the fire produces a black smoke so thick and oily that it has a kind of muscled look as it rolls skyward, leaving the earth in deep sepia shadow and strange light. If the field is dry, I organize the burn on the day before harvest, in late morning. Burning too early harms the plant and causes the cane to grow back with thinner stalks, until finally it leans and sprawls before it can be reaped, especially where cane rats (which throw big litters six times in a year) have been gnawing. Even then, being so hardy, the crop keeps right on growing, slowing the harvest where wind-tangled cane forms a thick green matting on the ground.
A steam engine ran the mill that pressed the stalks. I rigged a frame for a big kettle over a buttonwood fire for boiling the syrup, which smelled so fine that Richard Harden claimed it made his mouth water three miles downriver and another half mile off the coast at Mormon Key. My giant kettle, two hundred and fifty gallons, was twice the size of any kettle in the Islands, and our plantation produced ten thousand gallons every year, over three times the amount produced by Storters, who hauled their stalks from Half Way Creek to their mill at Everglade. We packed the syrup in onegallon tins and saved the skimmings to make moonshine, sold off our white lightning by the quart jar.
Harvest started in October, when a cane crew was fetched in for the labor: free transportation, a dry bunk, and three square meals a day. Most of the crew were drifters of all colors from the shantytowns and saloon alleys of Ybor City and Key West. Some bitched that they were kidnapped while dead drunk, and I’d say, “Well, you might as well work now that you’re here because otherwise you’ll be taken out and shot instead of paid.” That backed ’em down, made ’em chop a little faster; they never felt too confident the Boss was joking. But scaring those men was a bad mistake, firing those rumors of “Watson Payday” that would plague me in the years to come.
Cutters use a cane knife like a big heavy machete. Because the long blades are honed to a singing edge as sharp as sawgrass, the work is dangerous and accidents are common, especially among the drinkers but also among the green hands, older men, and those exhausted. They go bleary. The veterans may rig themselves crude shin guards or hide leggings, having hacked an ankle or sliced off toes at one time or another, often their own but sometimes those of the man beside them. When a cutter working tired or too fast stoops to grab a clump for chopping, his sweat-filled eye, sometimes an eardrum, can be pierced by a leaf tip, hard as any spine. In this humid climate, there is heat collapse; sore backs go with the job. Every little while, even the strongest may straighten in a slow half turn, arched like a bow, the heel of one hand pressed into the lower back to ease those muscles.
Rather than lose time to injuries, I was strict about our safety measures, and in the early years, we had very few bad accidents. Then a big cutter working tired sliced his foot half off when his knife glanced off a root clump. I rowed him out to Mormon Key, got that foot sewed back together by Richard Harden, but not before the man half bled to death. Being superstitious, he would not return upriver so he lost his pay.
Late in 1899, a new nigra feeding stalks into the mill caught his burlap apron in the feeder belt, which grabbed his hand as he wrenched at the apron and chewed up his whole arm right to the shoulder. I was away. The crew foreman, a young Key Wester named Wally Tucker, called his wife out of the house to rig a tourniquet; seeing so much blood, Bet lost her head and rushed that dying man into the house, let him bleed all over the corner of the front room while people ran like chickens to fetch useless things and he died anyway. By the time they thought to mop that blood, it was too late, the pine boards drank it. Tried to hide that bloodstain under a straw mat but even strangers heard about it. The next time I went to Everglade, Bembery Storter warned me about a rumor going around that when it came time to pay his help, Ed Watson knocked ’em on the head and dumped ’em in the river. I told Bembery the truth and I guess he took my word but it was no use. That story spread like a bad flu as far as Tampa, where my buyers beat down my price with hard questions about black blood in Watson’s syrup. For six months or more, we sold hardly a quart of the best cane syrup in the U.S.A.
That bloodstain that would not wash away spooked everybody on the place, just as the business was starting to go well. Every visitor came inside to stare, we could have charged admission! For a long time after, Island Pride syrup was very hard to market because of that rumor there was blood in it. Time and again and ever since, I have tried to leach that stain out, paint it over, but sooner or later, for some damnable reason, the blood shadow rises through the paint like the slow rise of a gator from deep water, drifting slow, slow, slow up to the surface.