In the Islands, my foreman had been hearing Tucker rumors, his wife told me when I returned to Chatham in late autumn. Dyer came reeling to the dock, advising me without so much as a greeting that he wanted to be paid off right now since he aimed to quit. I looked him over up and down and sideways. When he could no longer meet my eye, I reminded him that this Chatham Bend plantation had always required a year’s notice from a foreman. If he left before the harvest, he would have to forfeit this year’s pay. No word escaped his frightened face, but with Sybil’s help, he sobered up and changed his mind.
In November, when Mis Sybil was near term, her husband had been off at Tampa on a bender. Having no time to summon Richard Harden, she delivered her child with only the help of our Indian woman, who told her to get out of bed and squat. This ill-smelling old aborigine disdained the boiling water and hot towels fetched to the cabin door, just hacked and coughed and spat that out before closing it again. Having broken in her own tough twat long since, she could not imagine what the fuss was all about: giving birth for her was more like yawning. When the child arrived stillborn, the squaw indicated in sign language that when that weepy white woman got her breath back, she could walk down to the river and wash off if that was what she wanted.
Hurt by her husband’s absence-and confused when I told her that he had remarried-Sybil tried to feel grateful for my concern. She never reproved me for forcing her door, saying I had warned her: hadn’t I given her that pistol to protect herself? It was scarcely my fault, she said with a weak smile, that she could not bring herself to pull the trigger.
The following year I was away when Fred showed up, red-blotched, shaky, and ashamed, according to Lucius; he had been frightened by a story at Key West that E. J. Watson had murdered the plume bird warden Guy Bradley at Flamingo a few weeks earlier. By the time I got back to the Bend, the Dyers were gone. Lucius said they had departed on the mail boat, leaving only a scrawled address where the five hundred dollars that Dyer claimed was due him should be sent. All things considered, their departure was for the best. I certainly felt no obligation to send money.
Young Lucius, who was now living at the Bend, told me Mis Sybil had urged her husband to await my return and not leave till he was paid. Dyer was too frightened, however, telling his wife that he was leaving and that if she did not come with him, she and the children would never see him again. By now he had persuaded himself that I would send his salary anyway after the harvest. “Mis Sybil knew better,” Lucius said in a wry tone, sounding skeptical of his daddy’s business practices.
Sybil’s small Nell, who adored Lucius just as much as her mother adored me, had left in a flood of grief, and Lucius confessed that he was going to miss that lively little Nell, though he was sixteen and the girl was only seven.