Monday, October twenty-fourth. Kate’s birthday. At dawn, I committed my fate to Chokoloskee. Hadn’t I promised my wife I would be with her and given my word to my neighbors that I would return? I would offer Cox’s weapons and his hat as evidence that the murderer was dead. Could they doubt the word of a man returning of his own free will when he could have fled? In Key West, large ships weighed anchor every day, I would exclaim. The east coast railroad had already reached Long Key. With these alterna-tives, only an honest man would put himself at a crowd’s mercy.
They would not believe the truth. As for the lie, that bullet-holed hat would never be enough.
In that last noon, I torched my fields, running like a madman down the wind. The cane ignited quickly with a low thunderous booming, creating a column of thick oily smoke. I did this only for my own sense of completion. There was no crew to harvest the blackened stalks.
Flames still leapt and darted, rekindled by the wind, when in late afternoon I left the Bend and went away downriver. In this way, in the light of fire, I forsook my white house in the wilderness and the voices of those generous spirits who had lived here with me, all those souls so sadly bruised by my headlong passage on this earth, every life changed and not one for the better. In the smoke shadow, as the house withdrew into the forest, the cinder spirits vanished skyward and were gone. Then the Watson place was gone, the Bend, the future, lost and gone. Ahead was the falling of the river to the sea and the lone green islets in the salt estuary and the horizon where dark high clouds of drought prowled the battered coast.
Clear of the delta, I drifted for a time in a gray mist, awaiting some last sign; I heard faint fish slap and soft blow of porpoise, parting the sea with cryptic fins in their soft breathings. “No!” I shouted, startling myself. What I was about to do was lunacy. Sell the Warrior at Long Key, board the train, find a new frontier: hell, yes! I turned her bow, fled south toward the Keys.
The Warrior plowed the leaden Gulf. I howled, cursed foully, ground my teeth. As the pale strand of Lost Man’s Beach formed in the mist, I howled one last time, spun the helm, and headed north again in the direction of Kate Edna and the children. What was left of my life could have no other destination.
Off Wood Key, I suffered a sentimental urge to pay a final visit to the Hardens, but when I slowed and turned inshore, a choking fuel exhaust swept forward on the following wind, and my plan was obliterated by a sudden metallic clatter, then a faltering of the pop-pop of the motor. If I truly wished to reach Chokoloskee before dark, I was already late. I resumed my course, shouting at my ricocheting wits to clear my careening brain, make room for reason. To die half mad with fear and doubt-my God!
All of us must die. Why make a fuss about it? Achilles to Hector.
You die in your own arms, as the old people say.
I roared at the world all the way north along that coast. When this purge was over, I was cold-soaked in evil-smelling sweat but I was clear. I let the boat glide to a stop. I stripped, leaned overboard, and splashed my body, gasping in the cool October air. Cleaned at last, perched naked on the stern to dry, I tried to imagine what awaited me.
The men would hear Watson’s motor twenty minutes in advance, they would be ready. Unless they planned an ambush, shooting in a volley as the boat came within range, they would try to take me into custody.
If you are captured, having failed to prove that Cox is dead, will they lynch you in front of your young wife and kids? This I could not permit.
Stuffed in my pocket was that hat with the fresh bullet hole burned through. I also had Leslie’s.22 revolver and the matched Colts he had stripped from Dutchy’s body. I loaded the shotgun, peeling the outer paper off Smallwood’s swollen shells and jamming them into the chambers of both barrels, just in case-just in case what? Are you prepared to shoot? I checked the rounds in my own revolver, returned the weapon to my inside coat pocket, then laid the loaded six-guns under a rope coil near the helm, keeping them handy, just in case-just in case what? Old habit. Even with these weapons added to my own, I could never shoot it out with twelve or twenty nervous men: the moment I raised a weapon, I would be gunned down all in a volley.
Shooting one or two men would be pointless. Things would only go harder for my family, and anyway, taking another life was out of the question. I could argue and harangue, try to bully my way free, but I would not kill for it. Why did you load up, then? Or I might fire these guns to scatter the crowd once I got my family safely aboard. No boat on the Bay could catch the Warrior, which carried two oil drums of spare fuel, enough to take her to Long Key and the railroad-too late now, Mister Watson.
Would a bluff work? I bluffed them last time and the time before. These men were truck farmers and fishermen, unlikely to challenge a well-armed desperado grown strangely indifferent to whether he lived or died.
You men must know that Leslie Cox would never have given up these weapons of his own accord.
All true. Would the truth satisfy my neighbors? It would not. In a time of fear, my so-called evidence would not have satisfied me, either. Something more was needed. If they won’t believe the truth, I thought, they will damn well believe blood.
Where white terns dove on sprays of bait near Rabbit Key, I slowed the boat and circled the breaking fish, trolling two handlines. The tin spoons gleamed in the white lace of the wake. Almost at once they were struck hard by a Spanish mackerel, then a crevalle. I hauled the big fish in hand over hand and knocked them off the hooks with hard smacks of my fish club-not on the crown, which makes a nice clean job of it, but on the gill covers, to send blood flying as they slapped and skittered in the stern. When the fish lay quiet on the bloodied deck, gill covers lifting and closing, I went aft and dropped them overboard. Too late I noticed the small boat in an open channel between islands. That boy might have seen me dealing with those fish but by the time he brought his catch in after dark, it wouldn’t matter.
In Rabbit Key Pass when out of nerves I slowed the Warrior to check the weapons a last time, her overtaking wake, lifting her stern and running on, slapped into the stilt roots all along the channel. In a little while she cleared the Pass and turned north up the Bay toward Chokoloskee, which rose dead ahead like a black fortress as the western sky withdrew its light from the iron water. In this twilight of late October, all my days had gathered.
I slowed the boat and unloaded every weapon.
Gurgling softly at low speed along the oyster bars, the engine sounded much too loud, unbearable. They would be waiting yonder in the shadows of the trees, the rifles pointed at my heart. As the boat neared, the helmsman’s silhouette would offer a target that even men quaking with buck fever could not miss. I might see but I would never hear that burst of fire. All was too late, there was no sanctuary and nothing left undone. The War-rior rounded the last bar into the anchorage and slipped between the moored and anchored boats, coasting toward shore, as what had looked like vegetation in the dusk emerged as a misshapen mass of human figures.
I was now well within rifle range. I was afraid again. Fear seeped into my lungs, gave me the shivers. I longed to crouch down out of view but that instinct was the wrong one. I stood rigid.
In the last light, the wind had backed around into the east. There it was, my darkling star, fleeing the sharp point of the quarter moon. In the days past, I had imagined I’d experienced the innermost despair, the utmost loneliness. I was mistaken.