After that feller lost half his foot the year before, a cane cutter named Zachariah had gone around stirring up trouble, claiming the work was much too dangerous for such long hours and poor pay and threatening to start a strike. Spouting the union agitator talk that was causing all the trouble on the east coast railroad, he infected the whole crew with discontent.
For want of capital, my company was now at a critical place: it would suffer another setback it could not survive if this black bastard started a strike here in the harvest season. I called him aside, promised him more money if he would keep this quiet and just shut up about his fucking union; he was shrewd enough to protect himself by calling to the others through the window that the Boss was trying to bribe him. Then he informed me he was fighting for the workers of the world, not just himself, so that workers everywhere might fairly share the profits. I cursed him for a dirty communist and finally threatened him: he passed this guff through the window to the crew, which clapped and whistled.
I threw him out but I already knew that this one was going to be back. Sure enough, when that man bled to death, Zachariah accosted me again, demanding better pay and safer work conditions. A young cutter named Ted had caught his fever, helped him organize a strike for the first day of the harvest unless Island Pride met their demands.
From his new mansion at Palm Beach on the east coast, Mr. Henry Flagler was dealing with foreign syndicates and immigrant labor and all kinds of communistical ideas, but he also had hard overseers to deal with troublemakers and he brought in strikebreakers. These thugs enforced their own idea of law and order on his rail line, up to and including capitalist punishment, as Tant called it, and other big new industries around the country were doing the same: announced they’d never negotiate with commie scum, then nailed ’em hard and quick before the journalists arrived and trouble spread, same way they took care of the strikers in the mines.
These business leaders we celebrate as great Americans let nothing stand in the way of their own ambitions-that’s the secret of their greatness. Such men are more than willing to invest their workers’ lives so long as they are spared all the unpleasantness. Never have to bloody their soft hands or hear about excessive violence, not if their lieutenants know their work: Go out and play yer golf game, Boss, enjoy yer nice sea air. Soon as the owner is safely off the property, armed men rush the unarmed strikers: Dirty dagos! Want yer wop heads busted? Never wait for an answer, just sail right in with clubs and pistols, smash a few faces, break some arms, and run the rest off the property unpaid. Those men lying on the ground who never stand up again turn out to be the very troublemakers they were after in the first place, and someway there are never consequences, no investigation, because the press is kept away and the law, too. “Hardest fight I ever fought,” Henry Flagler told reporters the next day, this rich sonofabitch who never saw one minute of the fighting. His henchmen spared him all the ugliness and bloodshed.
If we had gone after Zachariah that same way, the harvest strike at Island Pride would have been over quick. In the rough justice of the American frontier, men who stood in the way of Twentieth Century progress had only themselves to blame. Can’t make coffee without mashing a few beans-ever heard that one?
Foreman Tucker would not agree that violence or dirty work went with his job. Sonborn would have jumped to take his place if his daddy told him to, but that feller would have been more useless still, being by nature on the poor man’s side. As for Tant, he wanted no responsibility for strike-busting or anything else-wanted no part of it. That’s who Tant was.
Already my harvest was starting late. The ringleaders had to be dealt with-I could not scare them. I wasn’t a Flagler or a damned Carnegie with hired strike-breakers but only a pioneer farmer in a frontier wilderness where a man had to enforce his own rules quick, live with the consequences. Also, my time was running out. In my late middle age, a fugitive with a long-suffering family and bad reputation. I was fighting desperately for a fresh start in life and my last chance was here on this wild river. I had made good progress with my legal claim on Chatham Bend and also on a smaller tract across the river, anticipating the surge in west coast development that was bound to follow Everglades drainage and the highway across south Florida I’d already discussed with Napoleon Broward, whose election as governor now seemed inevitable. Should all those hard years, all my great plans, go to waste? If I wanted to survive, it was up to me. I couldn’t afford to lose Zachariah but I could afford to keep him even less.
And so that early Sunday morning I braced my spine with a hard jolt from the jug and drove those two men, still half asleep, out of the bunk room and aboard the boat, hollering real loud so the rest could hear how I was running these damned agitators as far as Marco, dumping ’em off without their pay to compensate the company for the time wasted. Zachariah assured the crew that I was bluffing, they had the Bossman right where they wanted him, he’d have to negotiate or lose the harvest. From the boat, Ted waved cheerily to all his friends.
Below the Bend, I ran the boat up on the bank, drew my revolver, and ordered ’em ashore. Zachariah said warily, “What’s up, Mist’ Watson?” I brought out the shovel I’d hidden in the cabin, tossed it to the boy; the hatchet I slipped into my belt. Zachariah was looking at the hatchet, no longer so sure I was bluffing and too scared to realize I could not shoot them. We were too close to the Bend. The sound would carry. He said, “I reckon we’s licked, Boss, take us back. We get some cane cut befo’ noon.”
“Let’s go,” I said. I marched them inland through the marl scrub west of the cane fields. Young Ted yelped as he stumbled along that he aimed to work hard from now on, make no more trouble. When he turned and walked backwards, pleading with me, he tripped and fell, then would not get up, he was in tears. Zachariah stopped, too, but he never turned around. In a guttural thick voice he demanded rudely, “Why we stoppin for?” This man was mule-headed, he would stick to his defiance.
Finally I stopped. I longed to negotiate, admit that I’d been bluffing. “Dig,” I told them. The boy whimpered, “What we diggin fo’ out’cheah, Mist’ Boss?” Zachariah soothed him. “We’s diggin fo’ gold out’cheah, Ted. Diggin fo’ gold.”
Zachariah and Ted were both strong workers, among the strongest on my crew. I liked them, for Christ’s sake, and I respected them. I almost babbled some excuse about why I had to do this, how they had given me no choice, claim I didn’t like this any more than they did and express sincere regret; what kept me from offering these weak excuses was rage at Zachariah for getting us into this fix and the triumph I feared would come into his eyes if I let them go.
At my signal, they stopped digging. Each stood silent in his shallow grave. I motioned to them to turn and face away. “Zach!” the boy cried suddenly, as if awakening. “Nemmine, Ted, you gwine be okay,” the other whispered, hoarse. I told them to be quiet and stand still if they knew what was good for them. Zachariah still hoped that I was bluffing because when I said that, he grunted out a kind of laugh just at that moment when, sucking up my breath, I felled him with a hard blow to the skull, using the hammer end of the big hatchet.
I shudder like a horse each time I recall it. It’s true. I shudder. The crown of the skull, which I’d always thought was hard, seems to squash under a hammer blow instead of cracking cleanly like an egg. Seeing him fall, the boy cried, “Lo’d God, Zach!” and wet his pants utterly as he sank onto his knees, staring at Zachariah’s kicking feet. Asked if he’d like to pray, he nodded, just to live those extra seconds, and when he bent his head, I felled him. If I’d waited for his prayer, I could not have done it.
Both were still yanking and kicking. Dropping the pistol, leaning forward, hands on knees, I gulped deep breaths. When at last they lay still, I crossed their arms and covered them with marl, then returned in a halftrot to the boat, already fearful that those graves might not be deep enough to hide what I had done and yet too horrified and too exhausted to go back.
I scrubbed myself with rough mud at the river edge, lay stunned on the hard deck. When I sat up, I saw the same brown current ever descending between forest walls. I thought, You have just deprived two human beings of their lives. How can this river and this forest look the same?
At the Bend, I claimed I’d put those cutters on a fishing boat on her way north to Tampa. Unpaid? That’s right. No pay. Any more questions?
Back in the cane field by late afternoon, I worked as a cutter until dusk. That evening, wishing above all not to think, I resorted to the jug, hit myself hard. There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man’s wrong and each man’s right are different. Just depends, as the old fellers say. Everything depends. What I’d done must have been wrong by my own lights because I’d hated the doing of it and still felt sick to death, no matter how often I insisted to myself that my business and my family’s future and my great plan for developing this southwest coast were simply more important than the loss of two anonymous brown lives, which were, by comparison, inconsequential. Sad but true, as even Mandy would agree. Well? Would she agree? You’re not sure, Mister Watson?