Well, I went back into the courtroom and I swore in every man except House and Smallwood. Nothing was done, then or later, to establish responsibility, since deputizing the shooters made the shooting legal. Langford and Cole were overjoyed to get the case dismissed without a trial-last thing these well-fixed fellers wanted was a scandal-and young Eddie seemed to see it the same way. As for the new deputies, they went home feeling a whole lot better about what was done on October 24th in the line of duty.
The only discontented ones were me and House. He drew off by himself, he fumed, he punched the wall. Then he came forward. In front of the rest, he denounced the tricky way they had ducked criminal charges, when in his estimation no crime had been committed in the first place. He said he'd sooner go to Hell than be deputized in this dishonest way, said he'd damn well go to trial by himself if that was the only way he could get vindicated.
Bill House stayed behind when the others left. At the court clerk's desk where I stood sorting Eddie's documents, he said in an accusing way, "What's going to happen to that nigger, Sheriff?"
"Key West," I said, not looking up, to show him I was busy. When he waited there, expecting more, I said, "Justice." Finally, I cocked an eye at him and said, "That nigger's gonna see some justice, Bill." I managed a wry smile, making a joke of this, but I wasn't in a mood to smile, and he wasn't, either. I held his eye, to warn him, and he stared right back. "Same justice you gave Watson, Bill," I said, "according to your Chokoloskee story."
For a florid feller, House went a dangerous color. When I said, "No hard feelings," and held out my hand, he shook his head, turned toward the door, and kept on going, following the rest out into the sun, down toward the wharf.
Cox had closed the book on Dutchy Melvin, who was the man most wanted in Key West. As for Green Waller, if that was his real name, he was on the books here in Fort Myers as a hog thief, twice convicted back in the late nineties. After that nobody knew what had become of him. Got sick of running and drifted south to the Ten Thousand Islands, I imagine. Ed Watson had plenty of hogs to keep Green happy, and Big Hannah was down there later on to warm his bones.
In the opinion of my new-sworn posse, Cox might still be down there in the Islands, and nobody could say when or where he might show up. They had decided Cox was crazy, Cox would kill again. If E.J. Watson had saved his life by setting him ashore someplace, Cox might stop at nothing to avenge him, might sneak back in and kill some posse members in the night.
At least they had known Watson to talk crops with, at least their women had passed the time of day with his wife and children. For better or worse Ed Watson was their neighbor. Cox was a stranger, known to no one, and strangers were capable of almost anything.
Afterwards, trying to piece it all together, I came up with more questions than good answers. I knew one thing. My witness fooled the men at Pavilion Key by acting the part of a dumb, scared coon after doing his best to implicate Ed Watson. No matter how much I cuffed him in the jailhouse, that smart, hard nigger stuck like wet rice to the second story that he gave Thad Williams, who had messed things up by challenging the first one. Nosuh, nosuh, Mist' Ed ain' nevuh knowed one thing about it! Ah jes 'cused him cause Mist' Leslie tole me do it!
Thad admitted he had always liked "Ol' E.J.," and so had his nephew Dickie Moore and all that family. They wanted to believe in Ol' E.J.'s innocence, and they weren't the only ones. But if Watson was innocent, why did the nigger make up that first story, which could only get him in more trouble? Was he really so scared of Cox he couldn't think straight?
In my belief, he told the truth the first time, and he went over to Pavilion Key to tell it. If Jim Cannon and his boy had not passed by on the day that woman rose out of the river, the sharks and gators would have beat us humans to the evidence, and if that nigger hadn't told the truth at Pavilion Key, no man would have ever known what fate befell those three lost souls, never mind the squaw. There would only be more rumors about Watson.
I signed the prisoner over to Sheriff Jaycox for transport to Key West. On the dock Jaycox summed up his understanding of the situation with the prisoner standing right in front of him.
"White woman. Foul-murdered, mutilated and left for nude," Clem Jaycox said.
"That is sure right."
"No jury ain't going to stand for that, what do you think, Frank? Don't hardly seem fair to ask the citizens of Monroe County to waste their money on no trial, when we know the verdict 'fore it starts."
"No, it sure don't."
Jaycox straightened his hat and waited. I didn't like this much. His prisoner wouldn't sit down on the cargo where I pointed, just stood up straight, hands tied behind, observing us.
"What you looking at, nigger boy?" Jaycox said, real soft and low, hiking his belt.
"The prisoner is now in Monroe custody," I said, "so you got to do what Monroe thinks is right." Clem Jaycox winked at me to show he understood, which he probably didn't. "It's surely been my pleasure working with Lee County, Frank." And he winked again.
I was still trying to stare down that nigger, but never once did he lower his eyes. He knew he had nothing more to lose, I guess.
I said, "Your last chance, boy. Did Mister Watson order those three deaths or didn't he?"
But he never even blinked, nor moved his head. A very, very dangerous type of nigger. Wasn't surprised when a rumor came back from Key West how he fell overboard and drowned trying to make a getaway.
When Carrie Langford visited the courthouse to ask after the remains, the posse was already gone-a mercy. I was full of admiration for her courage. Upon learning from Eddie that their father's "gruesome carcass"-those were Eddie's words-had been towed four miles to a sand spit on the Gulf and dumped in a crude pit without a box, Carrie busted out in tears about "those dreadful men" and the lonesome fate of her poor papa. I had my chance to take her in my arms, the first time ever. Told her I'd be happy to arrange with Captain Collier to have the remains brought to Fort Myers for a decent burial, as she wished.
"The remains," she said.
I told her the sheriff would go, too, to make sure everything was decent, and next day I decided to take the coroner along. Jim Cole wanted to know why, since neither the family nor the state desired an autopsy, nobody wanted that autopsy except for me. Anyway, as Doc Henderson pointed out, it could have been done more efficiently "at home." There was plenty of rotted dead men in Doc's line of work, and the fair sex, too, without having to hear shovels scrape the bones. That body would have to be boxed, I said, no sense doing it twice, so bring a coffin. He finally admitted he was scared to see Ed Watson glaring up at him out of the sand. "It's okay, he's face down," is what I told him.
Lucius Watson favored his late mother, very gentle, graceful in his ways. He often hummed some little tune to let people know that he was there, that's how hard it was to hear him coming. This quiet of Ed Watson's younger boy was already unsettling to certain people, and so was his determination, which was not what you expected from the look of him.
I told Lucius, You're not going, son, and that is that. But Lucius followed me to Ireland's Dock, came up behind as silent as my shadow. That tall slim boy-he was going on twenty-one-could do handsprings in the courtroom and you wouldn't hardly know that he was there, while his brother Eddie could peek in the window and you'd feel his weight all over the damn building.
Lucius said softly, "I am going, Sheriff. I aim to make sure he's treated with respect."
The day before, he had protested the family decision not to prosecute his father's killers, which his brother and his sister had approved. Lucius thought those men from Chokoloskee should be prosecuted. He said he'd lived at Chatham Bend for the past two years and seen no evidence whatever for their stories, whereas the evidence of his father's murder had never been challenged even by the perpetrators.
"Well, now, it is not that simple, son-"
"Murder is murder. You could have charged them with or without his family's cooperation."
&nbs
p; Though Lucius was furious, he never made it personal, in fact, he never raised his voice. And he had an argument, no getting around it. Bill House and the others might have told me nothing but the truth, but it wasn't the whole truth, and I knew it. Lucius admitted he had no experience with death and didn't really know how he might react. "You're not going," I said, as he stepped aboard the boat. "One day you'll thank me."
Mister Watson lay face down beneath two crossways slabs of coral rock that the hurricane broke loose and heaved ashore. His wrists and ankles were lashed tight to discourage locomotion, and the gray flesh of his mortal coil had swollen so that it almost hid the twine. Dick Sawyer threw a hitch onto these bindings, and the body, like a side of beef, was hoisted by my niggers from the hole and set on a canvas tarpaulin brought by the coroner. The terrible sight and stench of Mister Watson scared a yell out of the diggers, who tried to back away.
Doc, a trim and silver man, said "Ready?" His voice was muffled by the gauze over his nose. When he rolled the body over, Lucius turned and peered away to sea over his handkerchief.
The late E.J. Watson was crusted with blood-black sand and blind, with bullet-smashed teeth, nose and lower lip half shot away, black-and-blue face and neck and arms and dead-white farmer's body turning a bad gray-purple around the bullet holes and buckshot rashes, and sand fleas hopping all over the whole mess.
I shuddered hard but only once, the hard shiver of a horse, or a wet dog. Lucius was coughing, and went off to be sick. He was back quickly. He knelt and cut his father's bonds, looking surprised that the unbound limbs didn't spring free.
Lucius said vaguely, "Are you sure it's him?"
Doc whipped around on Lucius, clutching his small knives, as if his handiwork had been insulted, and I told Lucius, Go back to the boat.
"Looks like something washed in from the sea," Lucius was whispering, very pale, and I came up close behind in case he fainted.
"Not to me he don't," said Doc, whose hands jittered when he got upset. "What he looks like to me is the goriest case of homicide I ever come across in my career!"
Lucius stood up, swaying, going white again, starting to tremble, and I said sharply, "You seen what you came to see? Then walk away from it, and don't look back." But he didn't hear me, and began to shake. I slapped him hard across the face three times, shouting at him with each slap, Forget it! Then I took him by the shoulders, turned him away, and led him to the boat. "You set right here until it's finished."
Doc cut the last rags off the body. Small knives flashed. The autopsy was done in the hard sun and sea air, with little Gulf waves rolling up on the white sand and the green water shimmering on the boat's white paint of the hull, and gulls crying in the smoky light of the last hot day in that long shadowy October. An hour passed with only the small slitting sounds, low gasps for breath. Doc never bothered about buckshot. Thirty-three slugs, one by one, clunked into the coffee can.
Lucius was back. He cleared his throat and said in a soft voice, "You've cut him up enough, wouldn't you say so?"
Doc's ears turned red, and his hands stopped, but he did not look up. "Probably a few more in there yet," he said.
"You'll never know," Dick Sawyer said, and winked at Lucius, trying to curry favor. "Not if you want to leave him in one piece. Like ol' Ed here used to say, it's a lucky man who gets to his grave all in one piece."
I advised Doc that Lee County was now satisfied that the proximate cause of death had been determined. Sawyer laughed but the coroner reproved me with a doleful bark like a dog sicking up its bone. What lay before them on that sand, he mourned, was not a laughing matter. In a manner of speaking, you might say-Doc paused to rig a sort of loincloth, make the body decent-I think of this here thing as my own patient.
"Get the box," I told the diggers. Doc used his heel to wipe off his thin knives as the rest of us backed off a ways to get a breath.
The diggers hoisted up the carcass and set it in a strong pine box. They laid rags across their hands before they touched him, and no amount of shouting stopped their moans and prayers and yelps and nigger racket. Well, you couldn't blame 'em. Between the wounds and knife cuts, this hard-swollen red-gray-and-blue carcass looked more like some skinned animal than the dangerous man I had drunk with on the Falcon.
Sawyer said, "I been reading where they fill 'em full of lead out West, but I never thought I'd see that in south Florida."
"You talk too much," I said.
Lucius knelt before he fell. He touched his father's forehead with his finger. He said, "The Lord have mercy on you, Papa." He laid the lid and took the nails and hammer from Dick Sawyer and did his best to nail that stench in tight.
As Dick Sawyer would declare for years thereafter, Well, we moved him, that's God's truth. But any man goes ashore on Rabbit Key can get him a whiff of that ol' devil yet today!
CARRIE LANGFORD
OCTOBER 25, 1910. It's over now. I am exhausted, as if I had fled before this day for twenty years, breathless and despairing, filled with dread.
Dear Lord, I knew this day of woe must come, and now it's here. My heart is torn by a sharp pain, this awful ache of loss and sorrow, never to be assuaged here on this earth: His daughter could have done something and failed to do it. Instead she turned her own father away.
The agony is real, but is it grief?
Oh Mama, if only you might slip through that door to hug me, tell me what to think, because there is no one near me who can understand. In this life, Our Lord seems very far away, and so I open up my heart to you, knowing that you are nearer God, in prayer that you will hear me and forgive me, heal me, because you know that I loved Papa, too.
I'm glad, Mama. I grieve but I am glad. I repent but I am glad.
I'm glad, I'm glad! May God forgive me.
OCTOBER 27, 1910. "It's over, Carrie"-that's all Walter will say to comfort me.
It's for the best, says Eddie (who sounds as pompous, copying Walter, as Walter sounds when he copies Mr. Cole). I can't imagine what goes through Eddie's head. I love him dearly, and I grieve to see him so congested, but I long to kick him. As a boy he was so open to life, so filled with curiosity, but when he came back from north Florida, something had thickened. He seems curious about absolutely nothing. He talks too much, he drones, he blusters. He is conceited about his clerk's job at the courthouse though everyone knows it was arranged for him by Sheriff Tippins. He wears that public smile like a cheap necktie.
When I asked Eddie how he could commit to paper the lies told at the courthouse by those awful men, he said wearily, How are we to know which are the lies? And anyway, they are not awful men. They are merely men.
He is so worldly-wise I want to smack him. A job's a job and someone's got to do it-that's the kind of wearisome dull thing he says these days, shrugging philosophically. He's affecting a pipe, which doesn't suit him, only encourages him to weigh his words, which have no weight, so far as I can tell.
When Papa's name comes up, Eddie goes deaf, and he's been that way since he came back from Papa's trial. He has hardly spoken to Papa in two years. I asked him-begged him-Papa was innocent, wasn't he? Wasn't he, Eddie? And finally Eddie grumped, That's what the jury said. He refused to speak about it anymore.
Because of this unmentionable hurt we share, we are estranged. That's not poor Papa's fault, of course.
Eddie was living with Papa at Fort White when all that trouble happened back up north, but he won't talk to anyone about it, he calls it "a closed chapter" in his life. He won't discuss it even with poor Lucius, who seems less bitter about Papa's killers than about Papa's so-called friends at Chokoloskee, all those men who failed to intervene.
Even so, Lucius went to Eddie for the list of names of those men at the courthouse, and when Eddie refused him-he had that much sense!-they had an ugly argument in public! What can folks think of our poor ruined family! Eddie said he was concerned about his younger brother's safety, and besides it would be unethical for the deputy court clerk to reveal the names
of witnesses. Lucius shouted that the deputy court clerk didn't care about his father, and wasn't "concerned" about one d____________________ thing except his stupid little title, which wasn't nearly as important as he thought it was!
To lose his head and shout that way is so unlike poor Lucius, who is taking Papa's death harder than anyone. Lucius spent most of his time at Chatham Bend after Papa's return, two years ago, and was friendly with those poor wretches who were killed. He stayed for weeks last summer with his friend Dick Moore, hunted and caught fish for the table, worked in the fields and on the boats, went on an excursion with his father to Key West-he refuses to believe that the jolly generous father he thought he knew was the evil murderer that people say. Lucius intends to go up to Fort White and learn the truth in that part of the country, and after that he will go back to the Islands, ask some questions. Lucius has already talked to someone who witnessed just what happened, he is making a list of the men and boys involved.
Winking at Walter, Eddie warned "dear baby brother" to "leave bad enough alone." In that bored voice of his, the phrase seemed disrespectful to our father, and Lucius jumped up and demanded that Eddie take that back or step outside!
Leave well enough alone is all I meant, said Eddie, winking again at Walter, who rattled his paper unhappily, pretending not to see. And Lucius said, What's well enough for you may not be well enough for me.
I saw our Eddie clench his fists, outraged by this impertinence. Eddie favors Papa, he is huskier than Lucius, who is lean and taller. But Eddie got himself under control, and shrugged, as if nothing his young brother might do could be taken seriously.
Walter walked Lucius out of doors and came back with worry in his eyes. "It's only his way of thrashing out his grief. He won't hurt anybody." When I snapped impatiently, "Can you imagine Lucius hurting anybody?" he said nothing. He sat down, picked at his paper, drove me crazy.
Killing Mister Watson Page 40
