Shadow Country (92 page)

On my next visit, when I went to the sheriff 's office to offer my congratulations, I happened to mention the information which brought justice to Will Raymond. Wincing, he slid open a drawer and forked over $250 in hard cash reward without a word.

I never kept a penny of that money. I went straight over to Peg's boardinghouse on White Street and offered it to the Widow Raymond as a consolation in her time of bereavement. By now, the Widow was looking a lot better or at least a good deal cleaner. Perky, she said, “Mr. Stranger, this sure is my lucky day and you sure are my savior, bless your heart!” She offered corn spirits and a simple repast, then took me straight to bed, out of pure gratitude and the milk of human kindness.

Buttoning up, I mentioned the late Mr. Raymond's quit-claim, and she implored me to accept it with her compliments, declaring her sincere and fervent hope that she would never set eyes on that cursed place again. Altogether, a touching story with a happy ending. I strode away to the docks with a lilting heart, confident at last that my path in life had made a turning in the right direction.

On my next voyage to Key West, I encountered Captain N. N. Penny, a fine, fierce fellow with a cigar thrusting from the very center of his mouth who had made his mark hauling freed slaves to Liberia after the Civil War; However, his clipper ship would arrive in port somewhere up the coast only a few days later without its cargo; also missing was the heavy anchor chain he was rumored to replace after each voyage. Even today Cap'n Penny was renowned as a practical man who would march his cargo overboard rather than risk capture by a federal vessel. We exchanged but a few words before he recognized me as another man who meant to get ahead in life and entrusted me with the information that the commerce in human beings which had made our nation great was by no means dead. Chinese coolies and other illegal immigrants would gladly pay enterprising captains to set them ashore in Florida, where most wound up as indentured labor for the new railroad companies, resort hotels, large-scale drainage schemes, and development enterprises seeking to bring both of Florida's wild coasts into the modern world. It made his red blood tingle and his pockets jingle, quoth this jolly patriot, to contribute prime “Chinks” to Florida's exciting future.

Captain Penny and I were especially convivial since we shared a liking for hard drink and dark humor; he suggested that we might “do some business.” However, I had already perceived that Penny was only a small cog (a very large small cog) in the great engine of our nation's progress. The very next day, introduced by Penny at the Catherine Street mansion of the cigar tycoon Teodoro Pérez, I made the acquaintance of Napoleon Broward, Esq., who was already preparing for the dashing role in Cuban liberation which would get him elected governor of Florida a few years later. With Mr. Broward was the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, a pale small man, very thin and tense, with more hair in his long sad moustachios than on his pate: José Martí's financial support in the fight for Cuban independence came mostly from these rich cigar manufacturers in Key West and Tampa.

Napoleon Broward was a bold sanguinary man of direct action, in the mold of Gould and Astor, Carnegie and Frick—in short, a man who could be counted on not to be squeamish about how the nation's progress was achieved while never losing sight of his private interests, whether in politics or in industry and business. To the sweet chortling of redbirds, which our cultivated Spanish host displayed in small wicker cages like crimson canaries, Broward spoke admiringly of Hamilton Disston, who had pioneered the shipping canal connecting Lake Okeechobee to the Calusa Hatchee River and the Gulf, and I made bold to mention some of my own ideas about the drainage of the Everglades for large-scale agriculture and also the eventual development of the virgin southwest coast and the Ten Thousand Islands. Here Broward raised his beetled brows: “Hold on there, my friend.” Mistaking our host, Señor Pérez, for the butler, he snapped his fingers and commanded him to fetch Mr. Watson and himself another round of brandy and cigars.

Broward remarked that we had common interests and must by all means stay in touch. By the time we met again in the year following, I had studied all the Everglades reports, all the way back to the visionary schemes of Buckingham Smith, who had written the first drainage recommendation in the days of the Seminole Wars; I also furnished him the details of that 1850 Act of Congress which had patented this entire “swamp-and-overflowed wilderness” to the state of Florida. As early as the 1860s, a colonel of the Army Engineers had estimated that if Lake Okeechobee's water level could be lowered by six feet, nine inches—the approximate fall from the lake to the Atlantic—the vast wetlands from the Kissimmee River south could be settled and cultivated without fear of annual overflow and flood.

“By God, Watson, you intrigue me!” Flushed and fulsome, Broward vowed that if he were ever to be elected governor as was his ambition, E. J. Watson would be summoned to the state capital at once to help set Glades development in motion. “You're an up-and-coming feller, Ed,” Nap said warmly as we parted. “If I am elected, you can write your own damn ticket.” By God, I thought, it's happening! I'm on my way!

ON CHATHAM BEND

Taking a Key West nigra and a mule, I went straight home to Chatham Bend. With some half-ass help from Erskine Thompson, who placed little value on hard labor, I got that high ground in production in a hurry since there was no real forest to contend with. The Calusa who had a village here before the Seminole Wars had kept the jungle down, and since then, a fisherman, Richard Harden, then the old plume hunter Jean Chevelier—the last occupant before the late Will Raymond—had burned it over every year to discourage jungle scrub. What settlers wanted around any dwelling was nice bare ground that provided no cover for bad snakes, not to mention the no-see-ums and mosquitoes. In regard to discomfort and disease, the most dangerous creature in the Glades by far was the mosquito, which had driven men cast away or stranded on this coast to madness, even death.

With the rains in spring and fall, the river became a broad and burly flood, sandy brown and heavy with Glades silt, leaving thick crusts on the marl behind the mangrove fringes. Because the river was brackish from the tides, what we drank (before my rain gutters and a cistern were put in) was dead water from a rain barrel, and very glad to have that, too, in this salt country. That first year I built a palmetto log house with palm thatch roof—two big rooms and an outside kitchen. Next came a small dock, then a big shed, then a pasture with limb fenceposts cut from the red gumbo-limbo tree, which will take root when stuck into the ground. By the end of the year, my horse Job, a mule, a milk cow, and five hogs cohabited the old Raymond shack—more livestock than any settler south of Chokoloskee. All that was missing now was Mandy and the children.

Clearing off that second growth was hot and wearisome, and turning over the black soil, packed hard with shell, was worse. That shell had to be chipped out with a pickax, though once it was reduced to soil, it was black and fertile. I started out with tomatoes and peppers, then peas, beets, radishes, and turnips. All sprouted fine, but by the time we got our produce to Key West, it looked old and limp, half-spoiled. We grew our kitchen vegetables, of course, and planted fruit trees—bananas, mangoes, guavas, papayas, citrus.

Chatham Bend was the first good ground I ever worked on my own behalf rather than leasing or sharecropping for someone else, but truck farming would never make my fortune in the Islands. The following year we cleared more ground and grew a crop of sugarcane on about ten acres. Cane is a cast-iron plant that can survive flood, fire, and brief freezing and does not spoil in the shipping like fresh produce. As a perennial, it yields four or five crops before new cuttings must be planted: I worked out how to double-crop with cow peas to restore the soil and planned to rest each section every few years, leaving it fallow. Learning quickly that cane stalks were too bulky to ship economically to a market eighty miles away, I increased crop acreage, brought a crew in for the harvest, and switched to the manufacture of cane syrup—the first planter in the Islands ever to try it. (I had already replaced the small
Veatlis
with a sixty-eight-foot schooner called the
Gladiator.
)

The cane harvest extended till late winter, early spring, when I got rid of all my crew except Erskine and my new housekeeper, Henrietta Daniels, Erskine's mother. Though glad to have a roof over her head, Netta was terrified of the wild people, and hid back in the house at the first glimpse of a dugout—very strange, since many of her Daniels kin had Injun blood.

Netta Daniels had led an errant life, working as a tobacco stripper in the Key West cigar factories and marrying often. Despite her trials, she remained a fervent Catholic, never danced nor swore nor slept in the same bed with a man who had been drinking, as I discovered on the night of her arrival.

“Listen,” I told her the next day, “it's not seemly for a lady to sleep in the same room with her son. That kind of behavior will not be tolerated on the Bend.” After that, she bunked with me, which is pretty much the way I'd planned it in the first place. She was a few years older than myself, with hazel-green eyes and light brown hair and small cupped ears that made her look kind of crestfallen when she was tired. Still, she was a pretty woman and a willing one. She would clean a little but not much, can our preserves and feed the chickens, do simple cooking and her bounden duty by her master, namely me.

Erskine mostly ran the boat and slopped the hogs and did a few odd jobs when we could find him. So did Netta's half brother Stephen, who turned up not long thereafter. Mr. S. S. Jenkins, as he introduced himself, was more commonly called Tant. He was mostly famous for the moonshine or “white lightning” he manufactured from raw sugar and chicken feed (a half sack of corn and a half sack of sugar in a charred oak barrel: that oak barrel, which he lugged everywhere, was his trade secret). Ferment worked quickly in this climate, and the “buck,” as he called it, was ready to distill in about ten days, but Tant was tasting it for flavor long before that. “Comin along real nice, Mister Ed!” he'd whoop, to keep my hopes up, but by the time he got that shine distilled, he had drunk most of it and had to start all over. Sometimes all we got out of the deal were the checkered feed sacks from his corn that Netta saved to make our shirts. Although still a young man, Mr. S. S. Jenkins was twitching like the dickens, he had to fold his arms around his chest just to stay put in his chair.

Rarely caught in the cane field, Tant fished and hunted our wild food, harvesting wild duck in the creeks and sloughs and sometimes a few of those black pigeons that hurtled up and down the river in the early morning. He was a tall and lanky feller with a small head and a comical tuft for a mustache, and he made me laugh right from the start, distracting my attention from his natural traits of bone laziness and alcohol addiction. Tant understood long before I did that I would tolerate his flaws of character only so long as he kept me amused.

One day at Chokoloskee, knowing I was watching, this fellow snuck up on Adolphus Santini's cow pen, causing a regular stampede by poking his head over the fence and ducking down, up and down, over and over, until those critters went crazy with suspense, galumphing around colliding with one another. I got laughing so hard I could hardly find my breath, even when Dolphus ran out hollering. Seeing me there, Old Man Dolphus folded his big arms like an old blue heron folding its big wings. Never said one word.

Another day we were out shooting white ibis for our supper, back over toward what is now called Watson Prairie. A big gator maybe twelve foot long was crossing some dry palmetto ground between two sloughs, and

S. S. Jenkins, drunk as usual, yells, “Look here, Mister Ed!” Ran across the clearing and jumped onto that reptile piggyback, threw an arm lock around the jaw, crossed his ankles under the belly, all the while whooping like an Injun. That big gator was so scared it hauled Tant all over the palmettos, you never heard such a racket in your life, and that fool never let go till he hit the water. “That's the last time I will ever take a bath,” Tant told us when he crawled out on the bank. “Don't see no sense to it.”

Tant had always been a bachelor and never so much as considered female companionship except when drunk. One evening he approached his half sister on his hands and knees, said, “Netta, I aim to go get me a bride! All you got to do is recommend me, Netta, and I'll try to live up to it!” Netta just smiled. She loved Tant the way he was, never tried to change him and never tried to find him a wife, either, knowing how hopeless that would be. Like many a lovable, whimsical feller, Tant Jenkins was a very lonesome man.

In the breeding season, in late winter and early spring, we hunted the white egret rookeries, stripping the plumes. These we traded to young Louis and Guy Bradley of Flamingo, who had hunted this coast with the Frenchman back in the '80s. In October, when the long chill nights would knock down the mosquitoes, Tant baited his old traps, using salt mullet, and set a trapline along creek banks for otter, coon, and possum, which all humped along the shoreline at low tide. The rest of the year, forswearing hard liquor, he'd journey up the creeks into the Glades, as far from honest toil as he could go, returning with wild turkey and deer meat and hides from the hammocks and pine islands. The venison and turkey breasts were salted overnight, then smoked for a few days on palmetto platforms over coals. That smoked meat would keep a good long while before it was soaked to remove the salt, then cooked and eaten. The deer hides were stretched on frames and dried; we sold them for credit at the trading posts, along with his gator hide and coon and otter pelts. Occasionally he brought in a big gopher tortoise or swamp rabbits or other varmints; roasted possum tasted almost like young pig if you tasted hard enough, and the white tail meat of a young gator was fine, too. Tant even ate rattlesnakes he'd skinned out—“Fit for a king!” he'd say. Might have tasted like chicken, as he claimed, but he had that snake meat mostly to himself.