In May, pink-haired little Ruth Ellen was born in my new farmhouse, and as soon as Kate was on her feet again, we made our preparations to head south. Kate was happy to escape the gossip, not to speak of the dangerous Tolen feud. One night not long before we left, driving Eddie and my nephew Julian along Herlong Lane, I halted the buggy on a sudden premonition, listening and peering, that’s how sure I was that a bushwhacker crouched behind one of those trees. Perhaps I was mistaken or perhaps he slipped away, but after that I kept a sharp lookout everywhere I went, lest I be murdered by a Russ or Tolen.
We traveled south on the new railroad, stopping off at Fort Myers to introduce the baby to my older children. Walter and Carrie were melancholy, having recently lost their infant boy, but Carrie walked her new stepmother over to Miss Flossie’s and decked her out in an egret bonnet in the latest fashion. From there, they strolled to the photo parlor where Kate had her portrait taken with her baby. I carry that picture in my billfold, show it to anyone who cares for a look and some who don’t.
Though both of these young women worked hard to be charitable and understand each other, Kate and Carrie had no more in common than chocolate and grapefruit. My wife, who was four years younger than her stepdaughter, was calm and rather quiet (“a bit bland,” Carrie would remark to Eddie, who made sure I heard this later), while my daughter had an obstreperous side that she had to stifle for her banker’s sake except when her bad daddy was around to egg her on.
While I was in town Jim Cole stopped by the house. He grew uneasy when he saw me, talking too loudly about Henry Ford’s impending visit to “Tom” Edison. Eventually he got around to the great prospects for Walt’s Deep Lake citrus plantation, and his mealy-mouthed manner told me he had carved himself a fat slice of that pie and also that Deep Lake must be in trouble. The partners knew that Watson Syrup Company was the fastest-growing business on the southwest coast, and though Cole tried to be casual about it, my son-in-law made no bones about the fact that they needed advice.
From Fort Myers to Deep Lake was a long slow forty miles through the Big Cypress over poor track. As president of the First National Bank, Walt was twice the weight and half the fun of the hard-drinking cowboy I’d first met ten years before, but he was desperate enough to ride out there with me, spend a few days. The forest floor was crisscrossed by bear and panther tracks and a hundred turkeys came into that clearing every evening; just as I’d heard, the old Indian gardens at Deep Lake had enormous promise. The soil was dark and soft, just beautiful, and all the young trees were doing well, yet that golden fruit lay rotting on the ground because the place was surrounded by vast cypress swamps and thorny limestone thicket, with no good road to bring in labor and supplies and get the citrus out.
My son-in-law had acquired the expansive style of most bankers and businessmen, who paste on great big friendly grins and wink to sugar all the lies they have to tell. Being new at the wilderness plantation game and anxious to look the part, Walt lit up a cigar and hooked his thumbs into his armpits, rocked back on his heels, and smiled unmercifully for no sane reason before letting me know that when Lee County got around to putting in its western section of the proposed Tampa-Miami Trail, which would pass Deep Lake only a few miles to the south, all their marketing problems would be solved for good. It was only this first year that was the problem-
I raised my hand. There had been talk of a cross-Florida road long before Nap Broward became governor, I said, and not one cypress or saw palmetto had bit the dust so far. This beautiful citrus might lie rotting on the ground year after year. He’d be a hell of a lot better off, I told him, to persuade his railroad partner Mr. Roach to lay a narrow-gauge rail spur not forty miles northwest to Fort Myers but twelve miles south to the salt water at Ever-glade, get that citrus out each week on the coastal shipping.
Walt stared at me. He’d never thought of that. “As for field labor,” I continued, “your good friend Sheriff Tippins would probably rent you big buck niggers cheap, right off his chain gang. He could set up a road-gang camp out here, kill two birds with one stone.”
By the time we got back to Fort Myers, Banker Walt was so excited by my new ideas about citrus railroads and sound labor management that he promised to write to Mr. Roach recommending my participation in the venture. Hearing him talk with such enthusiasm, Carrie was delighted. “Daddy, your dreams are coming true!” she whispered. And Kate was smilng, too, of course, eager to join in the celebration but not yet clear why my own family had not sought and welcomed my participation before now.
• • •
Strolling around the growing town, I was astonished by the changes in Fort Myers. The oil and gas lamps, the horse-drawn buggies of the nineties were all but gone, replaced by backfiring and very smelly autos, and the railroad whose new river bridge had connected our frontier cattle town to the outside world. One day soon, I predicted, winter visitors would come here in the aeroplane, which had had its first flight in North Carolina just three years before. For two thousand years, there had been no improvement on the horse as the speediest mode of human travel, and now America had led the world into the Twentieth Century with what the newspapers were calling “a veritable explosion of invention,” with two of its greatest pioneers, Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford, exchanging bold ideas here in our little town.
How painful and humiliating, then, that at Chatham Bend we were still mired in the living conditions of a century ago and for many dark centuries before that. It was enough to drive a man of enterprise half mad to be left so far behind in this rush of progress. My head ached with throttled rage every time I thought about it. Ed Watson was a very able man-I knew it, all our businesspeople knew it-yet all his fate permitted him to contribute to his times was an adaptive strain of sugarcane and a few good ideas that other men would profit by such as Deep Lake’s citrus railway. His passthrough window between his indoor kitchen and the dining room, his mesh screens primed with motor oil to keep out black flies and mosquitoes, an improved hand pump that raised three hundred gallons of water to a roof tank from where gravity feed delivered it to the indoor sink-such innovations made farmhouse life so much more tolerable that my naive Kate compared her Mr. Watson to Mr. Ford and Mr. Edison as an American genius, when in fact not one of these strokes of genius would deserve a patent, far less invite capital investment. Oh God, how puny my contributions were when compared with electricity and the combustion engine, which had already changed the world.
The only sign of modern times one could find at Chatham Bend was the first motor launch ever to ply the coast south of Fort Myers, a twenty-six-footer with an eight-foot beam, a one-cylinder engine, a large cargo space aft, and a framed canopy of black canvas forward, forming a cabin. I named her Warrior to keep my courage up until I could join the flow of progress and make my mark.