Lost Man's River (69 page)

When Mr. Watson tried that shooting dance in Tampa, he got thrown in jail. But Key West was a wilder kind of place, seamen and soldiers, ships from all over the world,
DINING AND DANCING, NINE TO ELEVEN; FIGHTING FROM ELEVEN TO TWO
—that was the sign in Eddie's Bar! There were so many fights that Mr. Watson could cut loose all he wanted, he just fit right in.

For many years Ed Watson was the bad man in that town. But until that extra drink when he got unruly and the crowd was looking for the door, they all wanted to step up and drink with him, they all wanted to trade stories
about him, they were proud as pelicans about good ol' E. J., so my dad said. The men told strangers in the bar how their ol' pardner here, Ed Watson, had killed tough hombres out in Oklahoma where he had that famous shoot-out with Belle Starr. And Ol' Ed, he'd just sit there looking dangerous, and finally he'd drawl out kind of modest how Belle and her foreman rode him down, had him cut off in a narrow neck of woods, so he had no choice but to swing around and drill 'em both.

There'd be a wild cheer for frontier justice, and right while those men were cheering he would turn to Cap'n Bembery and give him that slow old wink of his, hiking his thumb over his shoulder as if that bar crowd was the dumbest bunch of hayseeds he had ever come across. Them onlookers might not care for that, but they kept laughing anyway, pretending they knew right along it was all a joke.

Maybe five years after your dad's death, before you came back to the Islands, my brother Rob was fishing with Harry McGill, and they went upriver to the Bend and took some cane cuttings. That plantation was already growed over, very rough and shaggy, but new cane sprouts were still volunteering through the tangle. They grubbed 'em out, stacked 'em on deck, and carried a boatload up the coast and on up the Calusa Hatchee to Lake Okeechobee. They say that small boatload of cane from Chatham Bend was the start of the Big Sugar industry as it is today. Probably your dad is rolling in his grave over how his cane—after his years of hard struggle—has made fortunes for other growers at Moore Haven, because those Watson cuttings stretch today from Okeechobee south to the horizon. Many's the time I've thought about how Emperor Watson could of stood up on those dikes and enjoyed a grand view of that sugarcane plantation he had probably dreamt of all his life.

The white courthouse building on the circle reminded the old friends of Barron Collier, a New York businessman who became interested in Deep Lake through Walter Langford. Talk about enterprise! Now there was a man whom Emperor Watson himself might have admired! When Langford died in 1920, Barron Collier acquired the Deep Lake holding, railroad and all, then bought up the whole south half of Lee County, more than a million acres of unbroken wilderness, the biggest private empire in the U.S.A. By then the Trail was under way, and it looked like the authorities had been paid off to get the section coming due west from Miami turned northwest beyond Forty-Mile Bend, circumventing the Chevelier Road and Monroe County in favor of Barron Collier's domain and leaving the Chevelier Corporation stuck in the mud. Meanwhile Collier paid off politicians to get his empire set
aside as a whole new county, which he named in honor of himself—“the biggest landowner in Florida,” Hoad said, “if not the country!”

When the Storters sold most of Everglade to Collier, the Storter River became the Barron River, and Everglade was renamed Everglades City. Because Collier needed a county capital that was more than just a trading post and a few shacks, he brought in twelve-inch suction pipe and dredged enough mud out of the river to make a channel for large boats and build up spoil banks and high ground to enlarge the settlement. This was 1923, when the only other settlements in his new county—Naples, Immokalee, Marco, Chokoloskee—could not claim a thousand souls between them, even with outlaws and Indians thrown in!

That same year, Prohibition became law, and one of the “Pro-hi” agents who came here hunting moonshine stills never made it back out of the Islands. Bahamas rum came in at night and was stacked in Collier's pasture, Hoad recalled. The Deep Lake railway was extended to Immokalee by 1928, the same year the Trail was finally completed, and distilled spirits loaded here in Everglade traveled straight from Immokalee to Chicago on the Atlantic Coast Line. “I don't know if that's true or not,” Hoad Storter said, “but men who knew something believed that Barron Collier paid for his new county during Prohibition by running contraband liquor to Scarface Al Capone. That is none of my darn business nor yours neither, but it goes to show you what your daddy knew so well, that a businessman who aims to make his mark here in America can't let no finer points of law stand in his way.”

With the completion of the cross-Florida highway, modern times thundered right past Everglades City, down there in the mangroves eight miles off the Trail, and this community died back down to nothing. In the Depression, the Collier Corporation dumped its brave new county back on the federal government, and as usual, the taxpayers picked up the bill. Some of it was set aside as the Big Cypress preserve, and the rest would be called the Everglades National Park. The Park dedication in 1947 was the first ceremony of significance ever held in this Collier County Courthouse, and the last one, too, because the county seat was moved to Naples.

They contemplated the white courthouse on the empty circle, the sterile facade set about with planted palms. They recalled the brass band and the flags and windy speeches, and also the stony grief of the Mikasuki—the ragtag “Cypress Indians”—who stood off to one side, watching the Muskogee Creeks in their bright-striped blouses who stood beside the white people hailing the new Park. These government-sponsored “Seminoles,” who had never inhabited these southern Glades, ignored the silent witness of the Mikasuki, who long ago had withdrawn into the Grassy Waters,
Pa-hay-okee
,
still undefeated by the U.S. Army, only to be vanquished by bureaucrats a century later. Excluded from their hunting and fishing grounds around Shark River, they camped like refugees on the north boundary of the Park, along the canal banks of the Trail. The president of the United States was declaring the new park a grand beginning, but for the silent Mikasuki, this great day was the beginning of the End.

Lucius never forgot the bitterness in those black eyes, tight as currants stuck into brown dough. One big strong Indian had drunk too much and fallen off the bridge before he had hardly set out on his long walk home, and Lucius and Hoad had waded in and dragged him out. This man was said to be descended on his mother's side from the “Big People”—the vanished Calusa, later called Spanish Indians, because a few found refuge with the Spaniards in Cuba. This despairing man was in spiritual training, and not long thereafter he had disappeared, taking along the sacred Green Corn Bundle. What became of him the Mikasuki did not know, they only knew that without the sacred bundle, the old ways must wither. The story was that he had gone to Oklahoma in search of the Creek Nation elders, whose counsel might teach him how to help his people find their way in a time of change and terrible desecration of the Mother Earth. Not until some years had passed had the man returned with the sacred bundle, and not until this moment—he recalled that dim sense of recognition at Caxambas—did Lucius realize with a start that the Indian could only have been Billie Jimmie.

“Billie Jimmie. Yep. That was him,” Hoad agreed.

The Miami Herald
had sent a reporter to the Park ceremony. Inevitably, she had dragged Lucius's father into her article, reporting that he was still “a touchy subject.” Lucius quoted from memory: “If everybody who says he shot Watson actually shot him, the dock must have been a frightful mess.” This reporter would write a fine book about the Everglades in which E. J. Watson was awarded three whole pages, including the misinformation that Watson shot and wounded C. G. McKinney (who had not been present), and was thereupon killed by a white fisherman, Luke Short.

“So
that
's where Ol' Luke came from!” Hoad cried, remembering the query from the Naples audience. “Luke Short! He on your list?” The old friends laughed.

At the bridge, they circled back downriver, passing the fish houses and the stone crab and mullet boats along the docks and the stacked crab pots, gray-green with dried algae. It was near twilight. A few old cars came and went.

“Uncle George was Justice of the Peace when he sold out to Barron Collier, so he was made the first county judge there at the courthouse. Funny
thing was, the two cases that most interested him never came to trial. The first one was the Watson case—was Watson lynched?—and the second was the mystery of those two young Hardens who disappeared in the late twenties down around Shark River.”

Lucius nodded, “One was Roark, Whidden's older brother. Roark and his cousin were murdered.”

“That so, Lucius? It's like the Watson case—depends on who you talk to. Suspicious circumstances, Uncle George called it. Maybe those boys had it coming, maybe not.”

Lucius changed the subject. “Lots of For Sale signs around here. Looks like too many houses up for sale and too few takers.”

“Naturally. The place is dead. Only reason I come back here is because I'm homesick, but I sure don't care much for this ‘Everglades City.' Can't hardly find old Everglade no more, can't hardly make head or tail of the whole place. Big trees gone, old houses, too, got all these power lines and trailer homes and plywood houses that look more like chicken coops. Instead of citrus, bougainvillea, they pave the whole yard, nothing but driveway. Brick barbecues, y'know, and tin flamingos. Got their plastic boat parked on the concrete alongside the car.

“Can't hardly tell boats from cars no more, with all the shine and chrome. And the noise of them big outboards—Lord! Scaring the last fish out of the bays! Hit the throttle when they hit the water, take off howling, throw up waves that bash our old wood boats against the bulkheads. No experience of fish or tides or weather, no knowledge of the backcountry, no idea where in heck they might be headed for, let alone why, just roaring around bouncing off each other's wakes like damn fool chickens with their heads cut off!”

Stopping to get a breath, Hoad glared at Lucius, poking his stick at the insolent hard weeds that pushed through big cracks in the broken sidewalk. “Even this darn
weed
only come here lately!” He smiled unwillingly. “Well, dammit, Lucius, a man's boat has no business in his yard!
That
ain't Everglade! Might be Everglades City but it sure ain't Everglade! That Yankee never done this place one bit of good!”

Hoad stopped waving his thin arms and resumed walking. “Lord!” he groaned, disgusted with himself. “No wonder people hate crabby old men! I can't live with what I'm turning into! Heck, my family got nothing to complain about—I know that. Storters sold our old home place, so it's our own darn fault! Sold out our paradise for paper money—not greenbacks even, just numbers in the bank that only exist in thin air! Traded in our fine old home for a pink ranchette on a grid street in a new subdivision on a hot bare stretch of bulldozed scrub inland. The same thing Andy done! Big show window with a ugly view of the same darn ugly thing cropping up next door!”

He frowned and smiled at the same time, trying to air out his dyspeptic humor. “Ranchettes sure ain't much to leave your grandchildren. They sure ain't nothing much at all when you go comparing 'em to the wood homes we used to have here on this good old river. The mullets jumping and the pelicans, and all that good ol' family living that we lost.”

He paused again to stare balefully at Lucius, who could think of no way to console him. Torn and incomplete, the two old friends stood ruminating in the dusk. At the end of every street, the encircling green mangroves lay in wait, as if this dense forbidding growth might come in after dark to smother the small town, returning the former Haiti Potato Creek to coastal jungle. “Our family had our good out of this place, and we never came back,” Hoad Storter said. “My dad died the year the Park came in—good thing for him!—and my brother Claude's gone, too. That sign might still say Storter Avenue, but there aren't too many living there today who would even remember who the Storters were.”