The Spanish War was a great boon to our Lee County patriots, in particular the ranchers, whose cow hunters were out beating the scrub for every head of beef they could lay a rope on. These scrags were herded to Jake Summerlin’s corrals at Punta Rassa and shipped off to the U.S. troops in Cuba for what our small-bore capitalists might call “a tidy profit” and what more honest folks would call a goddamn hog killing.
Naturally I felt patriotic, too, since in its modest way my syrup industry was prospering. Mostly I traded at Tampa Bay, which had been dredged for coastal shipping and was soon to be accessible by railroad, and mostly I stayed at the Tampa Bay Hotel under curlicue arches and birthday-cake minarets that made the place look like a five-hundred-room whorehouse near the Pearly Gates. I wanted to take Mandy to Tampa to see the sights and attend a concert and do some fancy shopping, but by the time I finally got her there, she was too weak to enjoy it and I brought her home.
To the nation’s astonishment, the people of the Philippines rebelled against the Yankee invasion that freed them from the Spanish yoke, but we dealt smartly with such base ingratitude, spilling a lot of Filipino blood for their own damned good. Now that we’d realized how far behind we were in bringing Christ and capitalism to benighted lands around the globe, our American red blood was fired up, and plans were afoot for annexing every territory we could lay our hands on.
Aside from Ben Tillman (who would protest that fooling with these Fillypeenos was bound to inject the inferior blood of a “debased and ignorant people into the body politic of the U.S.A.”), the one notable American who denounced our glorious triumphs over small brown countries was Mandy’s revered author, Mr. Clemens. A turncoat Southerner who had dared to blame the War of Northern Aggression on the South, Mark Twain declared that our nation’s bold new spirit of conquest was based on nothing more nor less than greed. In our business circle, I had strongly disapproved of Twain’s radical tendencies, but privately I had to own that he was sharpwitted and comical, and that even his traitorous opinions rang true except where my own interests were at stake.
HELL ON THE BORDER
Not very long before the wedding, a book entitled
Word spread quickly and pretty soon all sorts of stories had sprung up, a few of which, to my regret, Carrie brought to her mother’s attention. I went to Carrie and commanded her to relate the mean things being said, but all she knew was the gossip overheard at Miss Flossie’s Notions Shop by Walter’s aunt Etta and aunt Poke.
The story was that Edgar Watson, born to wealthy plantation owners in South Carolina, was the black sheep of a fine family, causing so much trouble that he had to flee. He opened a gambling joint someplace on the Georgia frontier (there were fallen women, too, one lady whispered) with the Outlaw Queen Belle Starr. Belle’s method was to have “big winners” followed, killed, and robbed, with Belle herself handling this end of the business if no henchman was handy. “Oh, Edgar and Belle were bad as bad can be!” Carrie mimicked Aunt Etta, smiling to show me how ridiculous all this stuff was, but it was plain that my gallant daughter was truly disturbed.
“There’s more, Papa. The Langfords-” She was unable to continue. I turned to Mandy, who told me the rest of it, trying bravely to amuse me.
It seems that Mr. Desperado Watson had a telescope in a lookout high up under the eaves of his white house from where he kept close watch on Chatham River. Desperado spent most of his day scanning the Gulf in case men came after him or “his past caught up with him,” as some would have it. One day he shifted the channel marker at Shark River (actually a drift timber stuck into a sandbar) and on a night of storm, he shone a light to attract a Spanish ship that was on her way north to Punta Rassa to pick up a cargo of cattle for South America. Since she could not continue up the coast and round the shoals of Cape Romaine in such high seas, she took shelter in the river mouth, missed the channel, and went hard aground just as Desperado had planned. Ever so courteous, Desperado rowed over and worked hard to help get her off and afterward they invited him aboard to drink some rum. As soon as those Spaniards got drunk (as was their wont as “Romans”) he slew every last man and took the gold they’d brought to buy the cattle, then towed the ship out to deep water and chopped a hole in her and sank her, having locked the cabin so that no telltale bodies would float to the surface.
“Telltale bodies.” I nodded with approval. “Looks like Mr. Desperado knew his work.”
“Mr. Desperado’s Island neighbors revealed that story to somebody’s lawyer’s sister,” Mandy assured me, “so it must be true.” We were both nodding now. “However, everyone is mystified since all agree that Mr. Despersado is unfailingly considerate and kind to his grateful wife. Unfailingly.” Here she batted her eyes primly, doing her best to smile away her tears. “Also, it turns out that Belle was not killed after all, her death was just a trick Belle and Edgar played to get her out of trouble. Belle even came east and helped him nurse his invalid wife while she wasted away down there in those awful Islands.” When Carrie left the room, Mandy looked up. “Do you suppose these ladies have confused Maybelle with that woman you had living there when I arrived?”
This teasing was as close to a reproach about Netta Daniels as she ever came. Mild though it was, it changed her mood: she chose this day almost a decade later to ask me quietly if I had been Belle’s slayer. “I answered that question back in Oklahoma,” I said shortly. “I know you did,” she said, gaze unrelenting. I only huffed as if too offended to answer. She nodded carefully, closing her eyes as if content, which she was not.
One evening at the Bend, Mandy had reminded me that the man she married was a Mr. E. A. Watson and inquired politely what that new middle initial might stand for. I resented this question for some reason. “How about Jesus?” I suggested rudely, going right on with what I was doing, which was molding bullets at the table. A moment later, I looked up, defiant. She was awaiting me as I knew she would be, a born poker player gauging me over her cards. Eyebrows raised a little in that way she had, pale brow as clear as porcelain even in that heat, she held my gaze. Her fixed expression gave me the feeling she was looking straight through my pupils at Jack Watson, who had dropped his gaze in shame, for Mandy had an unmuddied soul and could outstare Jack Watson without even trying.
Arranging a bank loan on good terms, I had bought my wife a little house. “It’s small,” I told her, “but I reckon it will hold both cats.” Mandy smiled in a soft burst of joy, so happy was she at the prospect of living privately under her own roof while she was dying.
By 1900, Tampa Bay had its first automobiles and cobbled streets where shod horse hooves might skitter on the fresh manure. The Tampa Electric Company had more business than it could handle, and the cigar industry was booming, with over two hundred small factories at Ybor City. To avoid complications at Fort Myers, I conscripted field hands in the Scrub, a makeshift settlement east of Ybor where black folks huddled in their shacks in the scrub palmetto, but my business dealings took place mostly in saloons.
One afternoon, forsaking the saloon to pick up my supplies at Knight & Wall Hardware, I grew somewhat impatient with the clerk, who kept the line waiting while he demonstrated some silliness he’d picked up at the dancing school. To command his attention, I stepped forth, drew my revolver, and fired holes into the floor around his shoe. “If you prance as fancy as you talk,” said I, “let’s see you prove it.” Someone ran out, the deputies arrived, and after I was overpowered, I was marched to jail. One deputy said, “I’m sorry, Ed, but nobody saw no fun in that exceptin you.”
Tampa Bay was becoming a large port where few folks knew me; when I grew unruly, Fort Myers rarely heard about it. However, my luck had now started to change, because news of this episode reached Fort Myers before I did.
As everyone knows, Americans love a desperado, not the scurvy villain with a scar but the suave rascal of style and courtly manner. Having lawman made a dangerous reputation at Key West and Tampa, I couldn’t walk the street without folks pointing. Almost overnight, Mr. E. J. Watson had become the most celebrated citizen in town after Tom Edison-or perhaps the most notorious, as Jim Cole liked to say, trying to bend things in the Langfords’ favor in the transactions over the terms of Carrie’s marriage.
Cole had already seen to it that I was no longer welcome in the business circle and now it appeared that he’d persuaded the Langford family that a fugitive from justice and accused murderer could not be permitted to be seen
