First day of January, 1901, sailin north from Lost Man’s Beach, I seen the black smoke of a cane fire from way out in the Gulf, smelled that burned sweetness in the air like roasting corn. That fire was still going strong when I passed Mormon Key and tacked into the river.
At the Bend, the trees was just a-shimmering in that heat, and the hawks and buzzards comin in from as far away as cane smoke can be seen to feed on small varmints killed or flushed from cover.
What was burning was our thirty-acre field. This year we was too broke to hire outside labor for the harvest season, so there was only the Boss and me and Rob, and maybe Tant if we were lucky. The Boss must of gone crazy-that’s the way I figured. He was firing a cane field we could never harvest.
Tying up, I seen no sign of Rob, let alone Tant. All I seen was Mister Watson on the half run in his field setting fires like he’d heard a shout from Hell; he was drifting over the black ground in a ring of fire like a giant windswirled cinder. Had his shotgun in his other hand, and that made no sense neither, cause he hadn’t lit fires on three sides the way we done when we wanted a shot at any critters that might run before the flames. Something was on the prowl here in the hellish air and spooky light where the sun pierced the smoke shadow. I never hollered or went near the house, just waited on the dock.
Toward nightfall, with his fires dying down, he come in from the field, eyes darting everywhere. “Who’s aboard that boat?” He was coughing hard, fighting for breath. He went on past, then swung that gun around quick as a cottonmouth, like he meant to wipe me out. I yell out, “Hold on, Mister Ed! I come alone!” but he don’t lower the muzzle. Don’t like turnin his back to me but minds his back turned to the schooner even more. And damned if he don’t go aboard, checking on me over his shoulder, and poke that shotgun into every cranny on that boat, from stem to stern.
Coming out, he growls, “No harvest, boy. I’m broke.” He explains the fire: if the cane is left unharvested, with no burn-off, next year’s crop would be choked out. We walked up to the house, me in the front.
Tant and Josie were gone. Rob never come to supper. Me and Mister Watson ate Tant’s cold venison, left on the hearth. No bread baked, no greens. No life in that house, just us two men chewing old cold meat not smoked through proper because Tant never banked the cooking fire, just let it die, as usual; damned meat had a purply look and a rank smell to it. I never get none down, that’s how dry my mouth was. Mister Watson threw it to the dogs and we et grits. He gets the bottle out, then forgets about it, just sits there panting, staring out over the river. And right then I begun to know that our good old days at Chatham Bend was over and I’d better be thinking about moving on. I was near to twenty and had my eye on young Gert Hamilton at Lost Man’s Beach who was boarding at Roe’s up to Caxambas while she went to school.
Mister Watson coughs and hacks. He says, I am sorry for the way I acted, Erskine. You are my partner, are you not? Yessir, say I, very serious and proud. Then he tells me he is leaving in the morning and all about what he wants done in his absence. He nods his head awhile, and after that, starts in confiding about his bygone life.
As a young feller in Columbia County, Mister Watson had a good farm leased, made a fine crop, but lost his first wife that was Rob’s mama in childbirth, broke his knees in a bad fall, was bedridden while his land went all to hell, drank himself senseless, got in bad trouble. Never said what the trouble was and I never asked him. “Matter of honor,” Mister Watson said. So him and his new wife head west with the kids. Left by night and lit out northward for the Georgia border.
The next spring-this was 1887-they sharecropped a farm in Franklin County, Arkansas. Got his crop in and went on west into the Injun Nations, Oklahoma Territory-the first place he felt real safe, he said, because Injuns figured that any white in trouble with other whites must have some good in him. Plenty of renegade Injuns, too, and the worst of ’em, Mister Watson said, was Old Tom Starr, head of a Cherokee clan on the South Canadian River where the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee Nations come together.
“Tom Starr was a huge man and he killed too many. Got a taste for it, know what I mean, boy?” Mister Watson nodded, kind of sarcastic, when I piped up real eager, “I sure do!” In one feud Tom Starr and his boys set fire to a cabin and a little boy five years old run out and Tom Starr picked him up and tossed him back into the flames. “I don’t know that I could do a deed like that, how about you, Erskine?” Mister Watson was frowning like he’d thought hard on this question before deciding.
“Nosir,” I said.
“ ‘Nosir,’ he says.”
So Old Tom Starr asked a white Christian acquaintance if the white man’s God would ever forgive him for that black deed he done, and this Christian said, “Nosir, Chief, I don’t reckon He would.” Mister Watson’s queer laugh come all the way up from his boots, and that laugh taught me once and for all this man’s hard lesson, that our human free-for-all on God’s sweet earth never meant no more’n a hatch of insects in the thin smoke of their millions rising and falling in the river twilight.
Right away he was looking grim again. “I’m not so sure I’d want to give that answer to a black-hearted devil like Tom Starr. What’s your opinion on that question, Erskine?”
“Nosir,” I said.
“Nosir is right.” He was peering into my face, shaking his head. “Looks like I will have to do the laughing for us both,” he muttered.
A woman named Myra Maybelle Reed lived with Tom Starr’s son. Mister Watson was there only a year when somebody put a load of buckshot into Maybelle, shot her out of the saddle on a raw cold day of February ’89 and give her another charge of turkey shot in the face and neck right where she was laying in the muddy road.
At her funeral, Jim Starr accused Mister Watson of murdering his woman. They tied his hands and rode him over to federal court in Arkansas but after two weeks he was released for want of evidence. Went on home, got framed by friends of Belle, jailed for a horse thief but escaped from prison, headed back east. That’s how he wound up in southwest Florida, which was about the last place left where a man could farm in peace and quiet, and no questions asked. Only thing, going through Arcadia, a killer named Quinn Bass pulled a knife in a saloon. “Gave me no choice. I had to stop him.”
Mister Watson cocked his head to see how I was taking his life story. He never said who killed Belle Starr nor what “stopped” meant for Bass.
“Any questions, boy?” Them blue eyes dared me.
“I was only wonderin if that Quinn Bass feller died.”
“Well, death was the coroner’s conclusion.”
Mister Watson never talked no more that evening. For a long while, he sat leaning forward with his hands on his knees like he aimed to jump right up and leave only couldn’t remember where he had to go. But what he’d told gave me plenty to think about while me n’ him set at his table in the lamplight, waiting for Rob to come and get his supper. He never come.
I went outside for a moonlight leak, feeling small and lost under cold stars like I had awoke in that night country where I will go alone like Mister Watson, knowin him and me won’t get no help from God.
I stared again. The schooner was gone, drifted away, like I had forgot to tie her up. I backed away, wanting to run, but there was nowhere but them blackened fields to run to. The earth was ringing in a silver light, the stars gone wild.