“Right about then, the news come out how that damned Speck was the one who told the owner how he seen us boys butcher that steer. We done it, all right, cause times was hard, but Speck Daniels never seen us do it, he just heard about it. Nobody couldn’t figure out why he was so willin to make trouble, knowin it wouldn’t earn him one thin dime. Well, not long after that, ol’ Speck was found half-dead back in the bushes here, boot treads all over him and a mouthful of broken teeth. I believe he spent a pretty good while in the hospital. Anyone else would of left the Bay or tried to make amends. Didn’t do neither. He took his punishment, never spoke about it, went right on like before. Takes a real ornery sonofabitch like him to stick around a place where nobody had no use for him at all. Didn’t need no friends in life, I guess.”
Albritton glared at him, in pain. “I never talked to nobody about this stuff!” he said, resentful.
“Sandy, you don’t have to tell me—”
“I told you it already. Anyways, if I don’t tell, they’s other ones that will. Might’s well hear the truth.” He hawked and spat again. “So years fly by the way they do, and next thing you know, this Sandy Junior and Speck’s daughter Sally, they get goin pretty hot and heavy in the high school. Annie got wind of it and done her best to break it up without spillin no more beans than what she had to. That Marco woman that I got in there”—he pointed at his house—“interfered so bad she almost caused a feud in the two families, cause only Speck knew what she was up to, and Speck never cared to admit nothin nor get drawed into the mess in any way. Them two kids could hump their selves to death for all he cared. But Annie nagged and threatened him so much that he got fed up and tossed poor little Sally into his truck and hauled her away to some kinfolk in Fort Myers.
“Only thing, them kids had no idea what they done wrong. The boy was rarin to foller her, he just weren’t aimin to be stopped, so that female in there, she feared the worst. Finally she come blubberin to me with the whole story about how my ol’ partner Speck Daniels was the natural born daddy of the both of ’em.”
He nodded for a long while, looking grim. “I put a stop to it. I notified Sandy Junior Albritton how his rightful name startin that day was Crockett Junior Daniels, and I sent him off to live with Crockett Senior. And his little sister that he loved so dearly and wanted so bad to put his dingus into was told the sad news as soon as she come home.”
They sat in silence for a while, out of respect for this disagreeable life situation.
“So that poor girl settin inside was so darn horrified by her own daddy, and so tore up in her feelins about her brother, that she run out of her house, never went back. Took her mama’s name, but her mama bein dead, she didn’t rightly have no place to go. Well, me and Annie, we was scrappin all over the house, but we always been so fond of our almost-daughter-in-law that we put her in Sandy Junior’s room in place of him. Probably been in there with her panties off a time or two already, but none of us didn’t say nothin about that.
“That’s how come that girl got married so fast, sheerly out of her terrible mortification. Sally got scarred up pretty bad, and she ain’t over it. You ever notice she got kind of a sharp tongue? She is still pretty hot under the collar, and she’s out to prove somethin, don’t ask me what.
“I never blamed Annie all that much. I wore out a stick on her big butt so’s she couldn’t sit down for a month and let it go at that. I understood her, see. She was full of life to overflowin back in them days, and Speck bein her husband’s oldest friend, he sidled up while I was in the pen. Got some liquor into her, to comfort her, y’know, and next thing you know, she had to have it. They’s fellers will take advantage of a sad and lonesome female, especially females that look as good as Annie did. And anyways, it weren’t nobody but me that asked that bastrid to look out for my darlin while I done my time. I kind of knew who Speck was before then, but I didn’t think he’d do somethin like that to the last friend he had left in southwest Florida.
“I never took a stick to Speck, in case you’re wonderin. With Speck, there ain’t no halfway measures. You shoot at Speck, you best not miss, cause he ain’t goin to.” He squinted at Lucius. “Sure, I thought about it. But I knew I couldn’t kill him, not in a fair fight, and I also knew I weren’t the kind to shoot him from behind. Not that there’s many would of minded. Folks would of stepped right up and shook my hand, I reckon, stead of laughin behind my back all my whole life. But I made my choice and I have lived with it, and I’ll die with it, too, one of these days.
“Know somethin? I don’t hate that man no more. As the years go by, it’s him I miss the most out of that bunch I was raised up with! Crockett Daniels is a lot of fun to get rip-roarin drunk with, I will tell you that. A lot of fun! He was right there when we drowned poor ol’ Doc Tiger by mistake! Ain’t hardly got a enemy that won’t admit that ol’ Speck was his drinkin buddy to start off with. Yessir, we had wild nights together, Speck and me. I get to thinkin about them times we had as boys, huntin and drinkin, chasin after the bad girls, we just never seemed to stop hootin and laughin. Life was real long back in them days, and the nights never seemed to end. Funny, ain’t it? I been thinkin lately that I miss Speck more than I would of missed that woman in there if she got drunk and fell into the river. But all them good old times we had never meant no more to that damn feller than the fish gurry in the bilges of his boat.”
Watching the women come out onto the porch, Sandy raised his voice to drown out his wife, who was railing at him for taking Colonel outside. When Lucius rolled his window down, Annie Albritton told him to return next morning when her husband was out if he wanted the real lowdown on his daddy—“no ifs, ands, or buts!”
“Might give you more butt than you bargained for!” her husband shouted for her benefit, but his voice was muffled by his rolled-up window.
“She was brave to come to you that time, to protect the young people,” Lucius reminded him before leaving the car.
“Well, that ain’t none of your damn business, Colonel, but it’s true. That’s why I’m still settin here thirty years later.”
Sally pointed across a weedy lot toward the small houses on the creek. “You can go visit those old friends of yours,” she said ill-humoredly, as if suspicious of what Sandy might have told him. “One of those damn Carrs who shot the Harden boys, I mean. See that purple house, the one on posts? See that chain-link fence he’s got around it? It’s Sunday so he’s probably in there right this minute. Afraid some Harden might come by and blow his head off before he can get safely to his grave.”
Lucius climbed the outside stair to the door of the purple house. At his knock, a reedy voice told him to come in. Mr. and Mrs. Owen Carr, seated in their front room, were intent on a small black-and-white TV, and neither rose or offered him a seat, or seemed to hear his apologies for the intrusion. He thought at first they’d been expecting someone else, since Owen Carr, looking thin and sickly, was staring at him with that horror of mortality which seemed to anticipate a dark old age. Eyes and nostrils reddened, thin arms twitching, he clutched his chair arms as he might a wheelchair. His wife was an ample pinkish woman, uncomplicated in demeanor. Her face had betrayed a tremor at Lucius’s intrusion, then composed itself as smoothly as a pond. She continued knitting.
A little tall for the low room, Lucius seemed to loom over the inhabitants. Penny Carr pointed her baby-blue needle at a chair, but not until he was moving toward it of his own accord. “We got word you’d be coming,” she told Lucius, her voice flat, without inflection.
Before he could ask how they had learned so fast, Owen Carr burst out, “I was just tellin Penny how Walker Carr was your dad’s best friend, right from the day a stranger name of Watson first showed up at Half Way Creek and bought a schooner from William Brown, who was my granddad on my mamma’s side. My daddy and Ed Watson, they was real good friends! Watson visited regular, liked to talk crops, and our whole family had a high opinion of him, a very high opinion!” Carr talked faster and faster.
“Colonel, if I said it once, I said it a thousand times, I don’t believe the Watson family got one thing to be ashamed about!” By now he was glancing wildly at his wife.
Lucius was astonished by Carr’s fear of him, which he worsened inadvertently by saying, “I believe you were a witness to my father’s death—”
The man’s stare reflected his belief that Colonel Watson must have come in search of vengeance. Racing to disassociate himself from that event, he quickly became short of breath, in fact looked ill. “In 1910, I was only a little feller, Colonel! Only nine years old! I was over on the island, stayin with kin. Whole island knowed trouble was comin!
“My dad was dead set against that killing, and I sure hope nobody ain’t told you different! Him and Willie Brown yelled at them men to go to Everglade, see Justice Storter, see what they should do accordin to the law. Tried and tried but he couldn’t head ’em off, it was too late. Every man there knew what was goin to happen! They aimed to shoot Ed Watson dead no matter what! I heard it was Old Man Henry Smith spoke up and said, ‘Let’s draw straws, put a live round in only the one gun, so’s nobody will know for sure who done the killin!’ But no man there thought one bullet would stop him!”
Lucius nodded. “How about Henry Short? Was he there with them?”
Owen Carr winked slyly. “Now don’t you go fallin for that ol’ rigamarole! Them men was hunters, they could clip the plumes off an egret’s head, never draw blood! They never needed no damn nigger to take care of nothin!” He uttered a derisive squawk, meant to be laughter. “Colonel? You still keepin that ol’ list? Cause if I was to think back on it a little, I bet I could name you every last man in that crowd!”
“You already named one,” his wife warned him. “Anyways, the man didn’t ask you about names.” Coolly she met Lucius’s gaze, her needles feeding swiftly on the wool like the quick mandibles of a blue beetle. “He can read the names off of his own list any time he wants.”
Owen spoke again, in gusts of breath. “Course I don’t rightly remember now just who was in on it. All us boys runnin around—Crockett Daniels, Harley Wiggins, Sandy Albritton—Jim Thompson might been with us, come to think about it.”
Here he glanced at his wife, who said, “Might been, is right. Jim weren’t but six years old.”
“Well, I was there and don’t deny it! A eyewitness! I seen your dad’s old shotgun comin up, double-barrel shotgun! I ain’t never forgot that sight! Then a rifle cracked out of the dusk, and after that, all hell broke loose, just a hellacious racket, I can sit back and hear it still today! Cause if all of ’em shot, then who would know who done it? I reckon that’s what they settled on beforetime!”
“According to your daddy,” his wife said.
Owen Carr’s testimony, which directly disputed the posse’s claim of self-defense, was too significant to be accepted lightly. Lucius gave the man a moment to calm down. Then he said carefully, “So the killing was planned in advance. You are quite sure of that.”
The Carrs looked at each other. “That’s what come down in our families,” Penny said.
“That’s right! It come down in our families!”
“Did your father tell you which men planned it?” Lucius paused. “Or when the killing was discussed? You can tell me, Owen—they’re all dead now—but accuracy is important.”
“Important to who?” the woman said coldly. “Not to us folks around here.”
Lucius ignored her, trying to hold the eye of Owen Carr, who twitched in consternation. “I was there that day,” he muttered. “I weren’t but nine years old. I remember a heck of a racket and dogs barkin. Mrs. Smallwood sent after his gold watch for Mrs. Watson, and Isaac Yeomans laughed and said, ‘Tell the Widder Watson that we sure are sorry but that nice gold watch has been blowed to smithereens.’ ”
“That’s two,” his wife said.
“I had those names long ago,” Lucius assured her, keeping his gaze fastened on her husband.
Carr cried out eagerly, “One thing our family always did agree about, Colonel Watson was a real fine man, same as his daddy! I was younger’n you but we knew you good because you was in friendship with our family before the trouble!”
“The trouble,” said Lucius, to encourage him.
“He never asked you nothing about that,” his wife warned Owen, who gave her a panicked look. She was knitting more rapidly, quick-fingered, impassive, and Lucius decided to back off a little.
“You say someone told you I was coming here today?”
“Now, honey, who was tellin us about Colonel Watson?” Owen looked furtive again, and his voice had lost all animation. Trying to dodge his visitor’s gaze, he whined a little like a dog in nightmare, as if racking his poor brain for names was exquisite torment.
To give them a chance to smooth their feathers, Lucius asked after Penny’s father, Jack Demere, who had worked at Chatham Bend in Papa’s time—did she think he might sign a petition? “Nosir, I don’t think he will,” she said. “He’s dead.” When he said he was sorry to hear that, she shrugged. “Oldest man on Chokoloskee. Couldn’t hold that job forever, I don’t guess.”
While she talked, her husband twitched and brooded, frowning hard. As if unable to bear so much suspense, he brought up the Harden feud again of his own accord, but so obliquely that for a moment Lucius had no idea what he was talking about. “I already told folks all I know about that, Colonel. You was there. You come there to the Bend that day, come with the Harden men.” Having blurted that out, he looked confused and gloomy, lifting his arms from the chair, letting them fall again, then falling still except for spasmodic twitching of his hands. “Life happens to a man, is all it is,” he mourned.
“I went there with the Harden men when you boys still denied it,” Lucius said gently. “I never did hear your side of that story.”
Penny’s needles paused as if the mandibles had stopped while the beetle listened. “What story might that be?” she warned again, as her frail husband took cover in a coughing fit. She took a deep breath and put her needles down entirely, smoothed her lap. She stood up. “Well, we won’t keep you,” Penny said, compelling Owen’s silence with a needle pointed at his eye.
Before departing, Lucius asked them to sign his petition to the Park to save the Watson house, since both members of this household had known Chatham Bend well during their youth. Mrs. Carr glanced at her husband, who seemed unnerved by their visitor’s request. She said, “Nosir, we won’t sign nothing in this house. Not today.”
Entering the dark pine lobby of the Everglades Hotel, with its yellowing marine charts and huge mounted fish, Lucius stopped a moment at the desk. The blue-haired receptionist, engaged in her own telephone gossip, was utterly indifferent to his presence, and he waited at a discreet distance, hands clasped behind his back, flexing his legs a little with small knee bends. When eventually he cleared his throat, the woman looked up, battle ready. The color of her eye makeup was running, and she seemed to be biting the telephone as she talked. Finally she tucked it under her ear and waved him forward. Perhaps, he thought, she would be less haughty if she knew how much lipstick was smeared like gore across her teeth.
Asked if there were any message for L. W. Collins or Lucius Watson, Blue-hair snapped, “Which?” When he gently persisted, the woman yawned with that red grimace, like a carnivore. “No messages,” she said, without a glance at the scattered memos on her desk. He wondered how to tangle with this brute. “From Mr. Arbie Collins? Or a Robert Watson? How about Watson Dyer?” She ignored him.
Disgruntled, he went out onto the porch overlooking the water, where Hoad Storter was describing the river scene to Andy House with gestures which the blind man could not see. Lucius listened with pleasure as his old friend portrayed the crab boats passing down the tidal river and the gold-and-purple bronzing on the heads of pelicans on their nests on the bright mangrove wall across the water. Although aware that his listener was dozing, he urged the blind man to listen for the silver mullet, flipping upward t
oward the air and light, then falling back to the surface of the channel with that dainty smack so mysteriously audible from far away. Lucius suspected that these wistful sketches were for Hoad’s benefit, too, imprinting images against the day when he could no longer come to Storter River to witness these common miracles moment by moment as they rose and vanished in the great turn and glisten of his passing world.
Hoad greeted Lucius with that chipmunk grin, pointing to an old green wicker chair. “I come back every year just to remember! Course Andy knows everything I’m telling him, but he might have forgotten a few things about this coast after so many years as a city slicker in Miami.” He chuckled when the blind man grunted in comfortable protest, refolding his big hands on his stomach.
Hoad was a small man with round red cheeks and a seraphic smile, and his transparent girlish skin appeared to have gone unshaven throughout life. In fact, he looked much as he had when they were boys, fooling and fishing in small boats along this river. “Speaking of mullet, you recall them schools we seen south of Caxambas? Remember, Lucius? Two-three miles across!”
When Lucius nodded, his friend laughed out of sheer pleasure in the sight of him. “Andy told me you’d be coming, Lucius!” Having known him since boyhood, Hoad used his given name. “I expected to see that professor who spoke at Naples, all dressed up in navy blue jacket and linen trousers like those Yankee yachtsmen who tied up to this dock back in the twenties, you remember? And what do I see but the same good old feller I remembered! Same old sun-bleached khakis and salt-rotted sneakers and faded shirt buttoned at wrists and collar against insects—‘so’s the dirt won’t show,’ you used to say, though all of us knew that Lucius Watson wore the cleanest shirt—maybe the only clean shirt!—in the Ten Thousand Islands!
“I remember your daddy, too! Other night there at the church hall, I was thinking how my dad Cap’n Bembery always saw the good side of Ed Watson. Harry McGill who married my sister Eva, he might of been in the crowd that day at Smallwood’s, but there weren’t no Storters mixed up in it, not one. It was only when my uncle George got old, after so many years of telling newcomers about Ed Watson, that he concluded he had took part, too. Lucky thing we had written proof that Uncle George was on jury duty at Fort Myers or he might have wound up on some darn old list!”
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