In early October, Kate came home from Chokoloskee. People were turning cold toward her, she said. By now it was common knowledge that Ed Watson was harboring two convicted killers and no doubt other criminals as well: according to rumor, the Watson Gang aimed to found an outlaw nation in the wilderness. Even Ted Smallwood, who still passed for a friend, was referring sardonically to “Emperor Watson.” I could no longer pretend to myself, far less to Kate, that our children were safe here on the Bend, and anyway, the time had come to confront those Bay folks and their stories before more damage could be done. I ordered Kate not to unpack, I was taking her back next morning. “Where will we stay?” she asked. “Nobody wants us.”
At his own request, Dutchy came with us. “I been needin a change of air,” he said, “after all them weeks cooped up with that yeller skunk you got for foreman.” The knowledge that Cox was laying for him and would kill him at first chance-and his growing uneasiness about where I stood-were wearing away at Dutchy’s spirits; he had dark circles under his eyes from watching his back throughout the day and listening all night. As soon as we left the Bend, he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and lay down in the stern. He fell asleep flat out on the bare boards while the children stared at him and never woke up till the launch nudged Ted’s dock at Chokoloskee.
Dutchy’s Wanted poster was plastered on the porch of Smallwood’s post office store so naturally the whole community lined up to take a gander at this armed and dangerous fugitive. Folks were elbowing and grinning, wondering aloud if those guns were real, so Dutchy performed a sudden back flip on the dock, coming up with six-guns blazing at the sky and scattering his thrilled audience into the trees. But when he strutted across the yard and banged his heels on the store porch, he was followed by a low and ugly groan. As Smallwood explained, folks felt humiliated by “Watson’s hired gun” and they blamed me. “Dammit, E. J.,” Ted whispered, “we just don’t want that kind of outlaw around here.”
“How about my kind, Ted?”
“Nor that Cox feller neither.” Smallwood was in no mood to be teased.
I gazed after Kate, who had gone off with Mamie to see Marie Alderman’s new baby.
Ted looked alarmed. “Nosir, it weren’t your missus, E. J.! It weren’t Edna told us! Some feller was mentionin Smith’s scar and another feller said, ‘That so-called preacher you are talkin about sounds mighty like a killer name of Leslie Cox.’ ”
“Alderman,” I said.
“No, no, E. J.! I never said that! Can’t rightly recall who might of mentioned it, but it weren’t Wilson!” Just when I needed someone I could count on, Smallwood was lying to protect a neighbor.
From his porch steps, I announced to the small crowd that I never hired fugitives intentionally. Those men had turned up uninvited (Dutchy bowed, ironical: nobody laughed). At harvest time, as folks well knew, a cane planter had to take what he could get; those men would be sent away after the harvest. With my new family and my syrup industry, I was making a fresh start here in the Islands and hoped to remain on the best of terms with my old friends and neighbors. But nobody seemed reassured, and my drunk gunslinger didn’t help much when he cheered my speech by shooting off his weapons, making children screech.
Kate rejoined me, very close to tears. Like Smallwood, my wife was faltering just when I needed her. She dreaded going back to Chatham and she dreaded staying here where doors were closing. She no longer felt welcome at Marie Alderman’s house. “How about Mrs. Smallwood?” I asked in a low voice. “Oh no, I can’t! We’ve imposed on them so often!” Wigginses? McKinneys? She shook her head. Even here, she feared for our little children, who would not stop crying.
I went to Aldermans. “Wilson, come on out!” He cracked his door. I snapped, “You listen here, boy. It’s nearly two years since I came back, and I have never said one word to you about how you ran off from north Florida when your help was needed as a witness.” I let that sink in. “And now you’ve told John Smith’s real name to this community. Want me to tell him you did that, Wilson?”
Alderman tried to talk. Nothing came out. He dared not say what his wife had hinted to my Kate, that he’d fled south before my trials because he thought that I was guilty but was scared to testify against his boss.
“So I’d be much obliged if you and Marie could take in Kate Edna and the children while I finish up my harvest at the Bend.” Wilson said he’d be happy to have ’em and I said I’d be happy to pay their keep. That’s the way we left it.
I went back to the boat and told my wife that she and the children could expect a warm welcome at Aldermans. She moaned, in tears, which was not like her. I told her sharply to get hold of herself and not upset the children any further.
Dutchy helped me lug their stuff. Having no hand free to draw, he stepped along uneasily, turning halfway around every few steps, thrashing his head from side to side like a stepped-on snake.
Dutchy was sodden by the time we left and I drank with him most of the way home. He looked bewildered, sensing the darkness in my mood. Again and again he turned to look at me, as if to catch an expression on my face that might reveal what I was thinking. He knew I liked him despite everything and he wanted to count on my support in case of ambush. But not knowing what he wished to say and not wanting to beg, he lifted the jug, kind of shy and wistful, just to toast me. “Mister Ed,” he said.
I ran the boat down the autumn coast, thinking of nothing. Cloud re-flections sailed beneath the surface of the sea like sunken snowy mountains. Ascending Chatham River on a falling tide, the Warrior throbbed hard against the cold weight of the current. Toward dusk, we were in sight of Chatham Bend.
Splashing water on his face, sobering quickly, Dutchy loosened his guns in their holsters, studying the house and sheds as we drew near, not knowing if and where Cox might be hiding. For all his long sideburns and bravado, he looked like a young boy. He slapped a mosquito, rubbed his neck, touched his gun butts lightly over and over. The walls of silent mangrove, the oncoming night, ate at his nerve: I suppose he was still trying to persuade himself that as long as I was with him, he was safe.
I eased the boat in, letting the current slow her. Hopping off onto the dock, awaiting the tossed line, he peered about him. Instead of tossing him the line, I let the Warrior drift back clear of the dock, then turned her bow. Next time he looked, the distance was too great to leap.
“Mister Ed?” he called out softly. “Where you going, Mister Ed?” I wanted to yell at him, Duck down! because from the house in this late light he would be silhouetted on the river. I had never talked to Cox about this, never approved it, but Cox would have heard the boat and would be ready.
“Lost Man’s River,” I said, feeling all wrong about everything.
“Tonight? You never said nothin about Lost Man’s!” Notched high, his voice stabbed me. I lifted my hand, good-bye, good luck, and gunned the boat into her turn. His wild curse wandered on the river.
Knowing that on that dock he was a dead man, Dutchy Melville bounded in swift zigzags toward the boat shed, seeking cover. I did not turn to see that-he had no choice.
A voice-was that Reese?-yelled out a warning. I fixed my gaze dead ahead, gunning the motor to increase the noise, but could not escape: when the shot rang out, I heard it. A second shot scattered the echo of the first.
In the lee of Mormon Key, phosphorus glimmered where the anchor gouged the water. In memory of Herbie Melville, I drank off what remained in Dutchy’s jug.
Mister Ed? Where you going, Mister Ed? The first tears in many years came to my eyes.
That was the tenth of October, 1910, a Monday. At first light next day, I went south to Key West. Entering by the back door, I remained three days at Eddie’s Bar, left for dead by unknown companions who hauled my carcass somewhere out of the way. Crawling out into noon light, clothes caked with beer spill and rank sawdust and piss (not all of it my own), I returned to my boat and left that town without any clear idea where I might be headed.
This was my story: I dropped Dutchy at the Bend on my way to Key West. That much was true. If there was a shooting after that, I was not responsible, and if Green and Hannah doubted me, I could not help it. As for Frank Reese, who understood that what Dutchy had done could never be forgiven-yet at the same time hating Cox, hoped I would forgive him-I might have to order him to keep his opinions to himself.
On the way north across the Banks, the Gulf sky to the west looked blotched, peculiar. I stopped at Lost Man’s to make sure I was seen by the Hamiltons or Hardens on my return journey. This was a Saturday. With her men off somewhere in the Glades, Mrs. Harden seemed leery of me and behaved queerly, never offering so much as a bite to eat. The Hardens were troubled by the weather. The heavy stillness made everybody irritable and restless. And pretty quick I sensed that somebody behind that window had a bead on me.
I anchored off Mormon Key again and at daybreak I headed for the Bend. I dreaded facing Hannah most of all.
The Bend was empty. No one came out onto the porch. The fields were empty and the house was silent and it was near noon. Perhaps they had learned of the oncoming storm and gone off with the mail boat or some fisherman. I called and shouted. There was no echo, yet I heard my own voice coming back.
Taking the shotgun, I approached the house and peered in through the windows at the unwashed pots and mildewed food left on the stove and table. At one end of the room, an overturned chair lay in a thickened blackish pool that looked like molasses or spilled oil. I did not go in.
At the boat shed, Dutchy’s coveralls hanging from their nail gave me a turn: he might lie closer than I wished to know. In broken light, the west wind rattled the dry cane stalks stacked beside the boiler, feeling out the Watson place for the coming storm.
Again I called but there was nobody-nobody, at least, who wished to answer. That silence crept around behind me. I did not call again.
At Pavilion Key the clam boats were gone. Instead of running to throw her arms around my neck, my sweet Pearl fled me, flying across the littered barren where the tents had been. From behind her mother’s shack, she called out in a frightened voice that everyone had left, even young Minnie. “That poor girl run off to Key West to get away from you!” Josie hollered through her canvas door.
I commanded her to pack up quick and board my boat because a bad storm was on the way, but it was her brother who opened the flap and stepped outside to discuss the coming weather: said this storm could never be as bad as the hurricane of 1909, which they’d survived here. “You’re all idiots,” I told him, very angry.
Tant Jenkins was past thirty now, already stooped. He still clung to that comical mustache that when he spoke jumped on his upper lip “like a l’il ol’ hairy toad,” his sister said. Tant wore it anyway, content to conceal his shyness behind his lifelong disguise as a damn fool.
Josie did most of the talking from her bed. “If we’d wanted to leave here, Mister Jack, we’d of left this mornin with the rest of ’em. But I have concluded that this key ain’t goin nowhere so we’re stayin.”
As I have related, this small woman was spry in the head and spry in bed, with plenty of high spirits to go with it, but common sense was quite another matter.
“Well, you and Tant can perish if you want but if that little feller on your teat is mine, the way you’re telling people, I am taking him with me and Pearl, too.”
And Josie said, “You show up at Chokoloskee with your backdoor family, Mister Watson, li’l Mis Big-Butt Preacher’s Daughter gonna kick your ass right out of bed!” I said, “My wife is not your business, missus. And unlike some, she don’t drink hard liquor and knows how to hold her tongue.”
I was sorely tempted to take my daughter by the scruff and throw her aboard the Warrior if I had to but I saw no sign of her. Josie gave me a queer wry look, saying that what with all the awful stories, poor Pearl was scared of her own father. “So you can go to hell, Jack Watson, and take Pearl with you if she’s fool enough, but me’n your sweet baby boy aim to stay put where we’re at, and Stephen, too!”
Stephen S. Jenkins offered a small rueful smile by way of saying that if his sister and her kids had their hearts set on staying, he reckoned he’d stay, too, kind of look out for ’em. This bachelor whom nobody took seriously had always felt responsible for this ragtag bunch he called his family. I told Tant, “If you damned people are so drunk and shiftless you won’t save yourselves, then you better start praying to that God of yours.”
Pearl slipped out from behind a shack and followed me down toward the water, keeping her distance like a half-wild dog. At the dock, gray wind waves slapped along the pilings. Except for Tant’s moored sailing skiff, rising and banging on wind-dirtied whitecaps, the anchorage was empty.
The child watched me haul my anchor, frightened to leave and frightened to be left, frightened of the future altogether. I called, “You sure, Pearl?” and she nodded gravely, leaning back into the wind, pale and tattered as a cornstalk against the dark wall of that weather. “Your daddy loves you, sweetheart!” Because I’d never told her that, not in so many words, I startled her. She glanced back toward the shack, then ran along the shore a little ways, crying something like, Did you do it, Daddy? Is it true? What was she talking about? Then blown sea mist closed over her and she was gone.
This was Sunday, the 15th of October.
Off Rabbit Key, the Warrior passed the last clam boats, on their way north toward Caxambas. Nobody aboard those boats returned my wave.