All that long summer of 1910, crops withered in the worst drought Daddy Richard could remember. With fishing so poor and the last clam beds off Pavilion staked out by Bay crackers, all we had left was ricking buttonwood for charcoal.
For ricking, a man has got to cut ten cords a day. Tote ’em and stack ’em, cover the rick with grass and sand to make it airtight, all but a vent on top and a few holes at the bottom to fire it. Get twenty bags of charcoal at the most for all that donkey work and still don’t make a living. Man winds up with a sooty face and a crook-back, is about all.
For fishermen used to open water and Gulf breeze, ricking is killing work in the wet heat. Up at first light, work till dusk, lay down stinking cause you’re too tired to wash. Get up bone stiff, sore, half bit to death, still stinking, do the same damned thing all over again, day after day, year after year. See any sense to it? Daddy Richard weren’t up to the chopping and stacking, not no more, not ten cords in a day. No feller that age is going to last long ricking but our stubborn old man aimed to die in the attempt. Down at Shark River, they was cutting out the last of them giant mangrove trees for fuel for tanning, but that work was too heavy for him, too. So it looked like Hardens might have to leave all our hard years behind-clearings, cabins, fish docks, all our gear. Say good-bye to Lost Man’s and our old free life, go to Caxambas to work in the clam cannery because Daddy Richard had worn out his heart down in the rivers and it was too late in life to start again.
Up till very near the end, my folks never bothered their heads about all them Watson stories. Hadn’t Ed been our good neighbor? (But maybe they were forgetting certain stuff, cause when I was little, my ma used our neighbor as the Bogeyman: You don’t jump into that bed real quick, John Owen Harden, Mister Watson’ll gitcha!) Only now in his despair did Richard Harden listen to Earl’s gossip about “Watson Payday.” He came to fear that his friend Ed Watson would take over Wood Key as soon as our family left to find work elsewhere. “Well, that’s better than before we leave, like Tuckers!”-that was Earl and for once nobody hushed him. Dread was growing in the Islands, dread was always in the air, like haze from Glades wildfires over eastward, and finally Hardens got infected, too. In my nightmares-I never mentioned ’em to Sarah-Mister Watson loomed up in the night window, the moonlight glinting on his gun and whiskers.