In the early days, Mister Ed Watson was touchy about people tellin slander, but he always enjoyed the attention he got for knowing famous outlaws in the Territories and he made the most of them bad stories about himself. Didn’t encourage ’em so much as not quite deny ’em, cause his reputation as a fast gun and willing to use it kept other men from staking claims anywhere near him.
Good dry ground was running out along the southwest coast but very few tried to settle what was left. People came and then they went: they never stayed long. After Tuckers, that country emptied out all the way south to Rodgers River. Used to be three plantations up that river, royal palms, date palms, too, and tamarinds. Well, quit-claims to all of ’em was up for sale and had no buyers. After all the hard years Atwells put in, their gardens was long gone, cabins sagging, cisterns lined with slime and rot from animals that fell in trying to get their water. Later years when the Storter boys went up in there seining for mullet, they seen crude-painted skull-and-crossbone signs stuck into the bank. Might of been a warning or it might of been a certain feller’s idea of joke, most likely both.
Around Lost Man’s there was two strong families left. Hardens lived on Hog Key and Wood Key, just north of Lost Man’s River, that was one clan; the other was Old Man James Hamilton and family and their Daniels kin south of the river mouth. That was the long white coral beach Mister Watson had his eye on, and all them people knew that, too, because when I married young Gert Hamilton I told ’em. I was helpin Hamiltons construct a shell road through the jungle to a big Injun mound we called Royal Palm Hammock but along with that I ran his ship for Mister Watson.
Headed south to Flamingo or Key West, Mister Watson and me used to enjoy the view of all them royal palms back of Lost Man’s Beach. One of them cattle kings, Mr. Cole, claimed them palms was goin to waste out in the wilderness so he had ’em all grubbed out, using our dead-broke Island men for the hard labor; he was out to prettify the city streets to bring more tourists to Fort Myers. Tropical paradise, y’know. Course most of them street palms died in the first dry spell because nobody thought to water ’em, so they might’s well have stood where they belonged. Like the Boss said, Cole should of ordered up some gumbo-limbos-what us local folks call the tourist tree for just a joke on account of that red skin bark that’s always peeling, get it?
After the wild things was all gone, there weren’t much left but donkey work digging clams and ricking buttonwood for charcoal, so our whole gang went over to Pavilion Key for the clam fishery that supplied the new Yankee cannery built at Caxambas. My uncle Jim Daniels was the captain of the dredge and my mother and George Roe set up a store and post office. Aunt Josie was there, too, with her latest husband. Josie took seven by the time the smoke cleared, counting the man that she took twice, and she seen every last damned one of ’em into his grave.
In later years them two ladies who had kept house at the Bend would relate wild stories about Mister Watson to get attention to theirselves, claim some credit out of a hard life. Netta and Josie was hooked hard on that man and always would be, so it seems kind of funny it was them two women started up a rumor that Ed Watson was killing off his harvest help on what folks took to calling “Watson Payday.” Naturally his business competition was happy to pass along a story which explained why Mister Watson done so much better with his cane than they did.
That puts me in mind of his old joke down in Key West. Feller might ask him, “What you up to these days, Mister Watson?” And he’d wave his bottle, maybe shoot a light out, yelling, “Raising cane!” I would laugh like crazy every time I heard that story, tell it every time I had the chance. Warmin up them ones that might of missed the joke, I always laughed a little more while I explained it: “Raisin Cain-C-a-i-n! You get it?” And one or two might laugh along with me a little, but in a way that made me feel bad, kind of left out. When folks finally told me I might as well forget it, I’d sing out, “Well, nobody can’t say that Erskine Thompson got no sense of humor!”