Now Tant was strong and wiry as well as lazy, but he purely hated being stooped over all day amongst the bugs and snakes, arms wore out, and brains half-cooked, and the earth whirling-you was seeing things, that's how frazzled out you was with weariness and thirst and common boredom, whacking away in the wet heat at that sharp cane that could poke your eye out if you were not careful. On top of half killing you, the work was risky, cause them big damn cane knives sharp as any razor could glance off any whichy-way when a man was tired. One bad swing from the man next to you could take your ear off, or your knife might glance off last year's stalks and slash your own leg artery or sinew.
Most of our cutters was just drinkers or drifters, or wanted men, or hard-luck niggers, maybe young folks like them Tuckers from Key West, trying to get a start. Mister Watson scraped 'em off the docks at Port Tampa and Key West, sometimes Fort Myers, brought 'em back and lodged 'em in a dormitory we built back of the boat shed. Told 'em the roof and corn-shuck mattresses was theirs to enjoy to their heart's content but half their day's pay would be deducted for their grub. Made you sad to see them worn-out people working them hard fields in their old broken shoes, never had straw hats nor gloves nor canvas leggings like what we had less they rented 'em from Mister Watson. Anyplace else, they was here today and gone tomorrow, but they was stuck on Chatham Bend, couldn't get off. Kept 'em scared of running off with all his talk of Injuns and cottonmouths and giant gators, and anyways, there was nowhere to run to, nothing but mangrove and deep-water rivers, miles from anywhere. Knowing how hard it was to find trained help, Mister Watson made sure they was always owing, never let 'em back aboard his schooner until they was too sick or lunatic to work. By that time they was begging to swap any back pay they had coming for a boat ride to most anywheres, having come around to Mister Watson's view that they was a lot more trouble than they was worth.
Sometimes his wife might protest, saying, Do unto others, Mister Watson, as you would have them do unto you. And he would say, They would do the same unto Mister Watson first chance they got-that's human nature. You're a hard-hearted man, she would say, shaking her head. And he would answer, I am not hardhearted, Mandy, but I am hardheaded, as a man must be who aims to run a prosperous business and support his family.
Only man who stood up to him was a young feller name of Tucker who needed his back pay before we got the harvest finished in the autumn. Mister Watson got so irate that he run him off without no pay at all. But Tucker was mad, too, and hollered out, This business ain't finished by a long shot! And Mister Watson yelled, Might be finished by a short shot, I ever catch you on this place again.
The only feller who ever come back for more was a drifter and drinker, Old Man Waller, who had the same way with hogs as Mister Watson did. When Waller was sober, them two could talk hogs day and night. So Old Man Waller got put in charge of livestock, and snuck out of a fair amount of field work. One evening when Mister Watson was away he got drunk with Tant and went to the hog pen, give the hogs a speech and their freedom, too, and the hogs went straight to the damned syrup mash, got drunk right along with Old Man Waller. One full sow that went to sleep it off got half et by a panther, piglets and all. I told Old Waller it wasn't funny, but he didn't agree.
Waller decided to leave Chatham Bend with Tant early next morning, but a year later he showed up again with a fine hog, said he had seen the error of his ways and made amends. Mister Watson explained that Old Man Waller had replaced the hog but was wanted for hog theft at Fort Myers. But Waller said, Nosir, what it was-begging your pardon, Mister Watson-island life has been prescribed for me by my physician.
As time went on, something changed there at the Bend. I never was around too much of it, I was off running the boat most of the time, but everybody got to drinking up Tant's aguedente, they got the idea that they could let things go. Mister Watson would shout, "This place ain't fit for niggers!" and they'd jump up, rattle things around, go right back drinking. Tant might even holler out, Did I hear "niggers"? How about white trash? How about outlaws? Then Tant'd pretend he'd scared himself half to death, and apologize for calling Mister Watson a outlaw when he weren't nothing but a common desperader. Mister Watson might grunt a warning, but pretty soon he'd say, To hell with it, and pour more liquor. He grew heavy.
Finally our boss went on a rampage, just took and cleared that whole bunch out of there after the harvest, including some no-account niggers he brung in to cut the cane. Told 'em they had drank up all their pay, and his profits, too. He picked a day when Tant were gone, cause he hated to blame a single thing on Tant, who drank more than the rest of 'em put together.
That day I had come in from Key West, and I hardly had the boat tied up when them females and young come quacking down the path like a line of ducks, with Mister Watson right behind kicking their bundles-should of been kicking their fat bee-hinds, he said later. Hollered at me to get 'em the hell out of there before he lined 'em up and blowed their brains out, if they had any. Told me to take 'em out into the Gulf and throw 'em to the sharks, for all he cared.
I don't guess he meant that but they thought he did. Nosir, they weren't sassing him that afternoon! Them women was dead sober, they looked scared. They finally knowed that they had played with fire. It was only after we dropped down out of the river and was safe at sea that they started in complaining they had not been paid. If I had not come back there when I did, Cousin Jennie blubbered, that ginger-haired monster would have murdered the women and children, never thought twice about it.
In years to come, when them kinfolks who kept house with Mister Watson was living at Pavilion and Caxambas, they would repeat Cousin Jennie's words when they was drinking-not spiteful, you know, they done it to get attention to theirselves, get some excitement out of life, cause they was all of 'em sweet on Mister Watson, always would be. I never paid none of 'em much mind, and don't today.
All the same, it was them Daniels women got that story started how Mr. E.J. Watson always killed his help on payday, and of course our competition in the syrup business was glad to hear an explanation of how come Mister Watson done so much better raising cane than they did.
That puts me in mind of his old joke down in Key West. Feller would ask him, What you up to these days, E.J.? And he'd wave his bottle and yell out, Raising Cain!
Heck, even I got that one! I would laugh my head off every time I heard it, and told it every time I had the chance, till folks begun to ask me to hush up about it. Well, I'd tell'm, it just goes to show you it ain't true that Henry Thompson got no sense of humor, way some say! Heck, I'd say, I like a joke good as the next man! They'd laugh along with those words, too, though some way I felt kind of left out.
Anyway, I never knowed him to be nothing but fair in his dealings with his help, he was hard but fair, and Hiram Newell, S.S. Jenkins, and all them other ones that worked for him would say the same. As for niggers, I never heard a nigger speak a word against him.
I took them women on back to Caxambas and stopped over for supper to George Roe's place, where Miss Gertrude Hamilton from Lost Man's River, age fourteen, was a new boarder. By that time Henrietta had hitched up with Old Man Roe, and a few years later, must been 19 and 03, some Yankees started the Caxambas clam factory, so our whole gang went down to Pavilion Key for the clam fishery. Uncle Jim Daniels was the crew boss, and Mr. and Mrs. Roe had the store and post office, and Aunt Josie was there, too, with her latest husband. Josie took seven by the time the smoke cleared, counting the one that she took twice, and she saw every last one of them fellers into his grave.
Speaking of funerals, old Johnny Gomez drowned in 1900, tangled his cast net on his ankle, looked like, and the weights pulled him off balance, tugged him overboard. He was still tangled when some men from Marco, stopping by on their way north from Key West, found him hooked by his trousers in the mangrove at low tide, with his nose-warmer washed up alongside him. Had a funeral at Everglade, and Mister Watson's good friend R.B. Storter-Mister Watson always called him Bember
y-took the Widow Gomez home to Panther Key. She was still on the young side so didn't stay long. In later years, running the Gladiator for Mister Watson, I used Johnny Gomez's thatch shack for my camp when I stopped off at Panther Key to get my water and moon a little about Carrie, and when Hiram Newell took over my job, he used it, too. Matter of fact, it was Hiram found Old Johnny's body, him and his brother-in-law Dick Sawyer. Dick was another friend of Mister Watson, least he claimed to be. Claimed he was in the bunch that seen Santini's throat slit, and helped to get the knife away from Mister Watson.
One afternoon of autumn, 1901, I seen the towering black smoke of burning canefield from way out in the Gulf off Pavilion Key, and the fire was still going strong all the way upriver, the growing roar like storm, and the hard crackle, and that sweet odor in the air like roasting corn. As I come nearer, I could see the woods just shimmering in that heat, and the dark hawks and buzzards and the white egrets that will come from as far as they can see that oily smoke to feed on the small critters killed or flushed from cover in a burn.
I believe that Mister E.J. Watson might been the first planter in south Florida to try burning his field before the harvest, figuring work would go much faster with less labor once the leaves and cane tops was all burned away. Nothing but clean stalks to deal with, not much sugar lost, and a smaller payroll. Only thing was, cane sugar don't extract good from the stalks even a few days after a fire, and this here was a field of thirty acres, and he hadn't brought no cutters in for the fall season. There was only him and me and Rob, and maybe Tant if we were very lucky. He must of gone crazy is the way I figured, he was firing a canefield we would never harvest.
When I come into the Bend, first thing I seen was Mister Watson all alone out in his field, still setting fires, on the half run like he'd heard a shout from Hell. I didn't see no sign of Rob, let alone Tant. Mister Watson was the only man on that plantation, drifting over that black ground like a huge cinder swirled up by the wind, in a ring of fire. Had his shotgun with him, and that made no sense neither, cause the birds had no plumes in this season, and he hadn't lit fires on three sides the way we done sometimes when we wanted a shot at whatever run before the flames. In a unholy light where sun rays come piercing down through the smoke's shadow, something was hanging in that hellish air and whatever it was kept me from calling. I wouldn't go nowheres near a man who looked like he had set himself afire. I didn't go near the house even, just waited for him by the river. Toward nightfall, when the flames died down, and he come in, his face was fire-colored, eyes darting everywhere. He was coughing hard, fighting for breath. "Who you hiding on that boat?"-that's his first words. He went on past, down toward the dock, and halfway down, he swings that gun around quick as a viper, like he means to throw down on me and fire.
I yell out, "Hold on, Mister Ed! I come alone!" Cause orders was, if ever I come into the Bend with someone hid aboard, I would lay off there on the river, give him time to get in close behind the poinciana, get the drop on any man who tried to come ashore.
He don't lower the muzzle of his double-barrel. I face the holes. Ever try that? Makes you feel like you might fall in pieces even before you're blown apart. Then he swings back around and keeps on going. He don't like having his back to me but he minded his back turned to the schooner even more. And damned if he don't poke that shotgun into every cranny on that boat, from stem to stern.
Coming out, he mutters, That's right, boy, no harvest. He don't explain that but I understood it later. With all that cane unharvested, and no fire, he was afraid that next year's crop would be choked out.
I don't know where Rob is, and I don't dare ask.
Rob was very dark in spirit along about that time. One day, setting on the stoop, he picks up his dad's old double-barrel that is leaning up against the house. First he puts the muzzle in his mouth and turns so I can see. Then he points the gun at Rex, who is laying there in the poinciana roots having a nightmare. I am close by but inside, keeping away from him, I can hear him muttering at the skeeters through the screen. Says, "Rex, if I get bit once more, I am going to pull these triggers. And if this here gun is loaded, boy, then this is your last day as a dog, cause both barrels is aimed to blow your head off."
Well, that's exactly what he done, and after he done it he ran wild, ran around the house, round and round, and let out a shriek every time he passed the carcass. Mister Watson took that poor dog by the tail and flung him in the river, and still Rob shrieked each time he turned the corner. Must of run around the house nine times before we could catch hold of him and talk him down.
All me and Mister Watson ate for supper was Tant's cold venison, left on the hearth. No bread baked and didn't fix no greens. The meat weren't smoked through proper because Tant got drunk and let the fire die, it had a purply look and old rank smell to it. "Might be nigger meat," Mister Watson growls when he seen me gag on it, and he snorts like he's going to laugh but the laugh don't come, not once, not that whole evening.
I still had fears from seeing him on fire in that field, and I prayed to God he would not start in to drinking. All you could hear besides the skeeter whine was us men chewing meat. I thought I'd never get that meat down, that's how dry my mouth was, and I never cared for venison that day to this.
He gets the bottle out, but he don't drink. He just sits there with his shotgun, panting, staring toward the river. "Sometimes it gets me," he muttered once, but he don't explain it.
That evening I got to thinking about moving on. It was time for me to start out on my own. I was near to twenty and I had my eye on young Gert Hamilton, whose brother Lewis was to marry Cousin Jennie. Mister Watson had taught me good all about farming. I could shoot and trap, hang mullet nets and skin off egret with the best of 'em, and anyways it weren't hard to tell that our good old days at Chatham Bend was near their end.
After I done the dishes, he coughs and hacks, says, I am sorry for the way I acted. You are my partner, are you not? I am, say I, and proud to be so. He nods his head for a long time. Then he begun talking, slow at first, relating all about his life, and why it was he come down to the Islands.
Mister Watson confessed he were a wanted man in Arkansas and also in Columbia County, in north Florida. As a young feller in Columbia, he had a good farm under lease, and made him a fine crop, but after he sold his crop off, he hurt his knees in a bad fall at O'Brien, Florida, was bedridden a good while and his plantation went all to hell, and he had to borrow money from his brother-in-law. This was after he lost his first young wife in childbirth-that was Rob's mother.
In a few years he found him a pretty schoolteacher, Miss Jane S. Dyal of Deland, Florida, but that brother-in-law kept after him about the money, kept hounding him and sneering, "right up until the day that feller died," Mister Watson said. He smiled just a little when he said those words, and I give him a quick smile back. "It come down to a matter of honor," Mister Watson said, and he watched me again. Mister Watson never said he killed that man, and I never asked him, but some way the man's friends must of found fault with him.
Along about then, he decided it was time to go out West. "No sense getting lynched," he said, "before getting to tell my own side of the story." He packed up his family in the same old covered wagon his mother had brung south from Carolina, and him and his boy Rob and new wife, Jane, with little Carrie and Baby Ed, left by night and lit out northward for the Georgia border.
The following spring-this was 1887-they sharecropped a farm in Franklin County, Arkansas. Got his crop in and kept right on going, all the way to Injun Territory, maybe seventy miles west of Fort Smith, what he called the Nations. Injun Country was the first place he felt safe, because there was next to no law in the Nations. Injun police never messed too much with white men so long as they left Injuns alone; Injuns figured that any white in trouble with other whites couldn't be all bad, Mister Watson said.
That whole region was a hideout for outlaws and renegades from Missouri west to Texas, because the only law was the same law we
had here, eye for a eye and a man's honor, so better shoot first and get the details later. Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys who rode with Quantrill in the Border Wars and fought in his guerrilla troop for the Confederacy naturally went on to a life of outlawry, and most of them men hid out and drank and roamed anywhere they wanted in the Nations.
There was plenty of renegade Injuns, too, and the worst of 'em, Mister Watson said, was Old Tom Starr, whose father was head of a wild Cherokee clan on a stretch of the South Canadian River where the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee Nations come together. Tom Starr was huge, and kept himself busy wiping out another clan who had a mind to bump off Tom Starr's father.
"Killed too many, got a taste for it, know what I mean?" Mister Watson said. I thought he give me a funny look, but he probably never. "Sure do," I said.
Tom Starr and his boys set fire to a cabin in this feud, and a little boy five years old run out, and Tom Starr picked him up and tossed him back into the flames, that's how bad the feud was.
"I don't think I could do a thing like that, could you, Henry?" Mister Watson said-he was frowning, you know, like he'd thought hard on it before deciding.
"Nosir," I said.
Old Man Tom Starr asked another Cherokee if he thought God would ever forgive him for that deed he done, and his friend said, No, I don't reckon He would.
"I wouldn't care to give that answer to a black-hearted fellow like Tom Starr, what do you think, Henry?"
"Nosir," I said.
"Nosir," Mister Watson said.
Mister Watson wasn't there a year when somebody put a load of buckshot into a woman named Myra Maybelle Shirley, who lived with a dang Injun, Tom Starr's son. Shot her out of the saddle on a dead cold day of February '89, and give her another charge of turkey shot in the face and neck right where she was laying in the muddy road. At the funeral at Youngers' Bend, Mister Watson was accused by Starr of murdering his dearly beloved wife.
Killing Mister Watson Page 16
