Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.
In the wake of hurricane, the coast lies broken, stunned. Day after day, a brooding wind nags at the mangroves, hurrying the unruly tides that hunt through the flooded islands and dark labyrinthine creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands. Brown spume and matted salt grass, driftwood; a far gray sun picks up dead glints from the windrows of rotted mullet at highwater line.
From the small settlement on the Indian shell mound called Chokoloskee, a baleful sky out toward the Gulf looks ragged as a ghost, unsettled, wandering. The sky is low, withholding rain. Vultures on black-fingered wings tilt back and forth over the broken trees. At the channel edge, where docks and pilings, stove-in boats, uprooted shacks litter the shore, odd pieces torn away from their old places hang askew, strained from the flood by mangrove limbs twisted down into the tide. Thatched roofs are spun onto their poles like old straw brooms; sheds and cabins sag. In the dank air, a sharp fish stink is infused with the corruption of dead animals and overflowed pits from which the privy shacks have washed away. Pots, kettles, crockery, a butter churn, tin tubs, buckets, blackened vegetables, saltslimed boots, soaked horsehair mattresses, a ravished doll are strewn across bare salt-killed ground.
A lone gull picks at reddened mullet cast on shore, a dog barks without heart at so much silence.
A figure in mud-fringed calico stoops to retrieve a Bible. Wiping grime from its caked cover with dulled fingers, she straightens, turns, and stares toward the south. The fingers pause. From the black mangrove forest down the Bay, a boat motor, softened by distance, comes and goes and comes again, bound east through Rabbit Key Pass from the Gulf of Mexico.
“Oh Lord no,” she whispers, half-aloud. “Oh please no, Mister Watson.”
Along toward twilight, Postmaster Smallwood, on his knees under his store, is raking out the last of his drowned chickens. Hearing the oncoming boat, he groans in the putrid heat. Soon one pair of bare feet, then another, pass in silence on their way down to the landing. More men follow. He knows his neighbors by their gait and britches.
Over low voices comes the pot-pot of the motor. Three days before, when that boat had headed south, every last man on the island watched it go, but the postmaster had been the only man to wave. He, too, had prayed that this would be the end of it, that the broad figure at the helm, sinking below the tree line into darkness at the far end of the Bay, would disappear forever from the Islands. Said D. D. House that day, “He will be back.”
That old man’s Sunday boots descend the Indian mound, then the bare feet of his three sandy, slow-eyed sons. The oldest, Bill House, climbs the steps and enters the store and post office, calling to Smallwood’s wife, his sister Mamie. Bill House’s feet creak on the pine floor overhead.
In the steaming heat, in an onset of malaria, Smallwood feels sickly weak. When his rump emerges from beneath his house and he attempts to stand, he staggers and bangs heavily against the outside wall, causing Mamie to cry out in the room above. He thinks, This dark day has been coming down forever.
“Lookit what come crawlin out! Ain’t that our postmaster?”
“Keep that spade handy, Uncle Ted! Might gone to need it!”
Wincing, Smallwood arches his back, takes a dreadful breath, gags, hawks, expels the sweet taste of chicken rot in his mouth and nostrils. “Got four rifles there, I see,” he says. “Think that’s enough?”
The old man pauses to appraise his son-in-law. Daniel David House is silver-bearded. He wears no collar but is otherwise dressed formally, in white shirt, shiny black frock coat, black pants hauled high by galluses. He is crippled. He says, “Where’s his missus?”
“Inside with her young’uns. With your daughter and your grandchildren, Mr. House.” When the elder grunts and turns away, Smallwood’s voice pursues him. “Them women and children gone to have ’em a good view. That what you want?”
Henry Short has stopped behind the House men, holding his rifle down along his leg. “You, too, Henry? You’re making a mistake.”
“Leave Henry be,” says Bill House from the door. House is thirty, a strong, florid man creased hard by sun. He is followed outside by his sister, who is weeping. Mamie Smallwood cries, “Shame on you, William House! Shame on you, Papa!” The old man turns his back upon his daughter. Lloyd House and Young Dan at his heels, he hobbles down the slope toward the water.
In a shift of wind, the pot-pot-pot of the oncoming boat comes hard as a pulse. A frantic young woman runs out of the store-“Oh dear God!” She hurries down the steps, calling her little boy.
Near the shore, Henry Short leans his old lever-action.30-30 into the split in the big fish-fuddle tree that the hurricane has felled across the clearing. The rifle is hidden when he turns, arms folded tight in sign that he is here against his will, that none of this is any of his doing.
The men are gathering. Charlie T. Boggess, ankle twisted in the hurricane, limps past the store. He turns and shouts back at a woman calling, “All right, all right!” To Smallwood he complains nervously, “Ain’t you the one said he was gone for good?”
“Not me! I knowed he would be back!” Isaac Yeomans, fiery with drink, acts cheered by what the others dread. “His kind don’t like to be run off. You recall Sam Lewis, Ted? At Lemon City?”
Smallwood nods. “They lynched Sam Lewis, too.”
“This ain’t no lynching,” Bill House calls.
“Don’t think so, Bill? What if he’s just coming to pick up his family, keep on going?”
The men stare away toward the south as the oncoming boat comes into view, a dark burr on the pewter water. Most have worn the same clothes since the hurricane, they are rank as dogs and scared and cranky, they are anxious to enlist Ted Smallwood because the participation of the postmaster might afford some dim official sanction.
If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?
“No hanging back!” shouts Old Dan House, glaring at Smallwood.
Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops a shell in, sets his felt hat. “Best throw in with us, Ted,” he urges his old friend. “We don’t care for this no more’n you do.”
“He always pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain’t got no fight with him and you fellers don’t neither.”
“Hell, Ted, this fight ain’t nothin to be scared of! Not with his one against more’n a dozen.”
“Maybe I ain’t scared the way you think. Maybe I’m scared of murder in cold blood.”
“He ain’t scared of cold blood, Ted. Colder the better.”
The twilight gathers. Hurricane refugees from the Lost Man’s coast have gathered by the store, fifty yards back of the men down by the water. “You fellers fixin to gun him down?” one hollers. “Thought you was aimin to arrest him.”
“Arrest Watson? They tried that the other day.”
The postmaster can no longer make out faces under the old and broken hats. Too tense to slap at the mosquitoes, the figures wait, anonymous as outlaws. Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and singleshot.22s. Shouted at, they retreat and circle back, stealthy as coons.
In his old leaf-colored clothes, in cryptic shadow, Henry Short sifts in against the tree bark like a chuck-will’s-widow, shuffling soft wings. Dead still, he is all but invisible.
Not slowing, the oncoming boat winds in among the oyster bars. Her white bow wave glimmers where the dark hull parts the surface, her rifle-fire pot-pot-pot too loud and louder. The boatman’s broad hat rises in slow silhouette above the line of black horizon to the south.
The wind-stripped trees are hushed, the last birds mute. A razorback grunts abruptly, once. Mosquitoes keen, drawing the silence tight. Behind the rusted screen of Smallwood’s door, pale figures loom. Surely, the postmaster thinks, the boatman feels so much suspense, so much hard pounding of so many hearts. The day is late. A life runs swiftly to its end.
In the last light Ted Smallwood sees the missing child crouched in the sea grape, spying on all the grown-up men with guns. In urgent undertones he calls; the amorphous body of armed men turns toward him. He does not call again. He runs and grabs the little boy.
Hurrying the child indoors, he bangs his lantern. His wife raises a finger to her lips as if the man coming might hear. Does she fear denunciation of her husband for attempting to alert the boat? Hadn’t they learned that, warned or not, this man would come in anyway? Mamie whispers, “Is Daddy the one behind this, Ted? Bill and Young Dan, too?” He squeezes a mosquito, lifts his fingertips, winces at the blood. “Light that smudge,” he tells his little girl, pointing at the mangrove charcoal in the bucket.
He says, “They’re all behind it.” He cannot stop yawning. “They want an end to it.”
The motor dies in a long wash of silence. His daughter whimpers. The postmaster, queerly out of breath, sends her to her mother. He joins the young woman on the porch. “Please, Edna,” he entreats her, “go back inside.”
In the onshore wind out of the south, the boat glides toward a point just west of where the store landing had been lost to storm. Like a shadow, Henry Short crosses behind the men and positions himself off the right hand of Bill House, who waves him farther forward, into knee-deep shallows.
Smallwood’s heart kicks as the bow wave slaps ashore: a wash and suck as the wood stem strikes with a violent crunch! of dead shell bottom. Bearing his shotgun, the boatman runs forward and leaps. A moan rises with the rising guns.
The earth turns. Time resumes. The reckoning has been deferred but the postmaster’s relief is without elation. An exchange of voices as a few men drift forward. Starting down the slope toward the water, Mamie Smallwood and her friend are overtaken by the little boy, who runs to meet his father.
The shift toward death is hard and sudden. Rising voices are scattered by the whip crack of a shot, two shots together. There is time for an echo, time for a shriek, before the last evening of the old days in the Islands flies apart in a volley of staccato fire and dogs barking.
The young woman stands formally as for a picture, brown dress darkened by the dusk, face pale as salt. Though Mamie Smallwood drags her back, it was Mamie who shrieked and the young woman who takes the sobbing Mamie to her bosom; she regards the postmaster over his wife’s shoulder without the mercy of a single blink. He stumbles toward them, stunned and weak, but his wife twists away from him, mouth ugly. In a low, shuddering voice she says, “I am going, Mr. Smallwood. I am leaving this godforsaken place.”
The young woman goes to her little boy, who has tripped and fallen in his wailing flight. Patches of hurricane mud daub his small knees. She pulls the child away from the churning men, who in the dusk are milling on the shore like one great shapeless animal. In a moment, she will crawl under the house, dragging her brood into the chicken slime and darkness.
“No, Lord,” she whispers as the terror overtakes her.
“No, please, no,” she moans.
“Oh Lord God,” she cries. “They are killing Mister Watson!”