Our sloop drifted us way back into the woods. Gert set her washtub over our smallest, trying to keep him dry. By daybreak, the worst of it was past, the wind was down, but the sloop’s hull got stove in, all busted up. She never made it back to the salt water.
All the world looked heavy dead lead-gray, like all life and color had been bled away. The river was thick with mud and broken branches; gray marl crusted the banks and trees like a disease. With Lost Man’s Key awash from end to end, the river mouth looked a half mile across, with tide and current jumbled in thick roil and tree trunks passing. Some trees had varmints clinging tight, looking back where they come from as they was rode far out to sea. After that long night, the women and kids was all wrung out exhausted, and seein them wild things starin back as they passed away forever is what finally gave our kids their excuse to cry.
The shore was empty, all our cabins gone. Hamiltons lost about everything except their lives. Seeing what had befell him in that one black night, Mr. James Hamilton looked all around him like a little child woken up. Everything that old feller had put together in twenty years’ hard work was twisted down or washed away. Never cursed nor wept nor acted jagged, only stared around him hour after hour. After that day, talk didn’t interest him, he hardly spoke again, just took to murmuring his memories of lost hopes in times gone by.
Having no regular family, then marrying young Gert, I become kind of a Hamilton, and like the Hamiltons was not so proud about our Harden kin, but when Owen come over from Wood Key to see how we was farin, I was glad to see him-took that storm to make us talk like neighbors. Him and me sailed his skiff north to the Watson place to see who might be left. That white house was still there but she looked stranded, up on her bare mound, and the outbuildings was all smashed flat: boat shed and bunkhouse swept away and the cabin, too. Called and called but got no answer, only silence. Neither of us made a move to go ashore. We never spoke about it. It weren’t we were ashamed so much as havin no words to explain what we was feeling.
Some way the Gladiator had rode it out lashed tight to them big poincianas and the busted dock. With my sloop gone, I reckoned Mister Watson would not mind if I used his ship to carry our Lost Man’s folks to Chokoloskee. Owen told me Hardens would stay put, start rebuilding right away, but Thompsons and Hamiltons sailed north next day, taking Andrew Wiggins along with wife and baby. Having lost their boat, that family abandoned the Atwell place and had picked their way along the shore to Lost Man’s Beach from the mouth of Rodgers River. We was anchored off Smallwood’s by early evening and got our first word about the Chatham massacre an hour later. Hearing that news, and recalling that silence on the Bend the day before, give me the creeps all over again, cause me’n Owen never knew about them dead, never imagined this man Cox might of been watching through some broken pane. Maybe he never answered because he had drew a bead on us, to kill us, too. That night I had a ugly dream about Cox laying in wait, mouth set in the way a snake’s mouth sets, little fixed smile.
By the time the hurricane struck in, Cox was all alone on Chatham Bend, if you don’t count that dead squaw in the boat shed or the corpses across the river or Mister Watson’s old horse running wild, shrieking and crashing through the cane. Maybe Cox never believed in God, no more’n me and Mister Watson, but if he did, he must of figured God had come to blast him straight to Hell for his black sins. We was down there in the rivers and we seen it: the roaring of the Hurricane of 1910 would of scared the marrow out of anybody, let alone a killer that has slaughtered feller human beings and gutted out their carcasses like they was hogs. Cox would of spent that storm night on his knees wild-howling for forgiveness, never knowing there weren’t nobody to forgive him.
At Pavilion Key, Tant hoisted Aunt Josie into the mangroves, but waves broke all across the island and tore her babe out of her arms. Found him by miracle at low tide next morning, little hands sticking up out of the sand-like he was cryin for his mama to come pick him up, Tant said. Maybe folks made too much of it that Mister Watson’s offspring was the one soul lost but it makes you wonder, don’t it? Even if you don’t believe in God.
After all them years, the time had come to say good-bye to Lost Man’s River. Thompsons come out all right, far as our health, but that hurricane blowed what fight was left out of our families. Lost our boats, our homes, had to take charity from kinfolk that didn’t have nothing neither. We moved Grandpap James Hamilton to Fakahatchee but he never found his way back from that storm and died soon after.
Them Hardens swept off of Wood Key settled again near our old ground back of Lost Man’s Beach. The dark one, Webster, built a cabin a good ways up into the river like he wanted to hide from hurricanes (or maybe his own niggerness, as I told Gert). All them people ever wanted was, Let us alone. Course mulattas never had no right to that proud attitude, never mind all the good fishing ground they claimed, but say what you like about that family, them Hardens was the only ones that never left. I’m talking about real pioneers trying to make a life down in the Islands, not moonshiners nor fly-by-nights that came and went.