grabbed him and knowing there would be hell to pay when Josie heard about it. Too late, I realized that I still had my revolver in my hand-probably why he kept his head down in the reeds and never answered. I put that gun away and shouted more, I even yelled that he could stay here on the Bend, that’s how worried I was that the big croc might get him if he splashed along the riverbank too long. I even drifted down the current in the skiff but saw no sign of him.
Next morning I went to Pavilion Key with the bad news and the first person I saw on shore was Crockett Daniels. Turned out he had drifted all the way downriver on his back, crawling out every little ways to make sure no shark or gator got a bead on him. Finally he swam and waded out to Mor-mon Key, where a fisherman spotted him and took him home.
Speck had some spunk so I wanted to tell him I only meant to scare him, not to kill him, but when I drew near to shake his hand and maybe rough his head, he backed away. When I stopped, he stopped, too, regarding me out of greenish eyes as bright and cold as broken glass and nodding his head to indicate he knew my game. Then he turned and walked away. He never followed me again. That year this Crockett kid was no more than thirteen, but he was not one to forget that Watson winged a bullet past his ear, much less forgive it.
The clammers watched as Josie shrieked how that crazy Jack Watson had shot at a poor homeless boy with intent to kill. She was not to be reasoned with, there was no changing her mind, though I followed her right to her shack. And if Josie Jenkins would not listen to my side of the story, then who would?
Through the door she said, “You’re dead, Jack Watson, and you don’t even know it. Your heart has died from pure blackness of spirit.” Astonished and moved by these words from her own mouth, Josie opened the door to gauge their effect on the one cursed. Eyes filling up with moonshine tears, she raised her hand to touch my cheek and lips, then let it flutter down like an old leaf onto my trouser buttons. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered.
“Stop that,” I growled because young Pearl was watching. This tempestuous bitch slammed her door right in my face, and as poor Pearl backed away in fright, I kicked that rickety little slat right off its hinges.
The clammer families and their mutts fell back as I turned to leave. “Why don’t you go fuck yourselves,” I urged them with as much good-will as I could muster. I returned to my skiff and headed home, feeling so lonely as I entered Chatham River that even the company of Crockett Daniels might have proved welcome.
Christmas of 1909 was a sad occasion, with no money whatever to spend on presents. In low spirits, I drank too much of our own moonshine, which was free, and concluded I’d made no progress in my life since that starved Christmas in the muddy snow out in the Nations.
A year had passed since our return to Chatham. That winter Kate grew more remote as she grew large with child and spent more time away. One day after a bad quarrel, I ran her and the children north to Chokoloskee so that we might enjoy a vacation from each other.
• • •
In the Fort Myers
I swallowed my pride and wrote a letter to my son-in-law offering my services one last time: after one year as overseer, if I had not solved Deep Lake’s problems, I would quit. I didn’t have to tell him I would work like hell: he knew that. Among other contributions, I would survey and stake out the small-gauge railway I had mentioned, to transport his produce south to Everglade for travel by fast coastal shipping to the markets.
As the man who brought the railroad to Fort Myers, Banker Langford could have hired his father-in-law at little risk: the job would banish E. J. Watson some fifty miles southeast to wild country where even Watson could cause him no embarrassment. But Walter had his reputation as a stuffed shirt to keep up, and not having the guts to refuse me out-right, he sent word that he would have to think about it. He was a slow thinker, I knew that much, and perhaps he is thinking about it still. No letter came. Instead I got word, later in the summer, about Langford’s new “citrus express,” a small-gauge rail line from Deep Lake to Everglade. Already his crew was pushing through the coastal mangroves, building a railbed by digging that black muck with shovels and heaving it up onto a broad embankment. Also, Langford had arranged with Tippins to lease black convicts for his labor just as I had recommended years before. From what we heard, his road bosses were chewing up those prisoners like goobers and covering the bodies in the spoil bank where they fell.
So what would I have done out there as manager? Turned a blind eye? Made sure our banker knew the human cost? At any rate, this bitter news convinced me I was justified in eliminating those two agitators at the century’s turn. It had come down to a matter of survival, it was them or us. All the trouble came because Bet Tucker left that pen gate open and turned loose my hogs-that was the tragedy.
BIG HANNAH
One day at Everglade, Green Waller introduced me to Big Hannah Smith, an enormous woman in a long gray old-time dress that covered her right down to her high brogans. Able to outwork most men, Green said, and thrash the rest to huckleberry jelly, she had a fair start on a handlebar mustache and a pair of shoulders that a man could yoke into a team of oxen, but she also had a woman’s generous heart and tender ways. That day she told us all about her childhood on Cowhouse Island in the eastern Okefenokee, where she had three sisters as mighty as herself and three more of the common size for human females.
Out of Green’s hearing, Miss Smith reminded me of another year when I passed through Georgia on my way south from Carolina and stayed on Cowhouse Island with her family. “They called me Little Hannah then, remember? You knowed me in the Biblical way,” she whispered, closing bashful eyes in a face of the brown hue of a large spiced ham.
A few years earlier, Hannah had come to the southwest coast hunting her sister, the Widow Sarah McClain, who had headed for Florida after her husband was hung by mistake in Waycross, Georgia. As the first mortal to cross the Glades driving an ox team, this sister was well known as the Ox-Woman. That had been a few years earlier, in the dry season of 1906. These days she lived near old Fort Denaud on the Calusa Hatchee.
Hannah called the Ox-Woman Big Sis and our name for Hannah was Big Six, her being somewhat more than six foot tall. Hannah first showed up at Carson Gully, near Immokalee, and the Carson family remembered her distinctly. “My mother and me was all alone with our dog Cracker,” one child told me, “and Cracker come from Key West, and he would bite ye. Cracker was barking so we sung out, ‘Who’s there?’ And a voice come back, ‘A lady from the Okefenokee Swamp!’ So we tied up Cracker, lit the lamp, and went on out, and there she stood amongst the cypress snags, had a little black dog on a big rope tied to her belt. I was scared to death of her! ‘Well, can I come in?’ she said, ‘cause I’ve walked all day and ain’t had nothin to eat.’ So she come inside-had to bend half over not to hit the lintel-and we give her some grub and she ate and ate and
Hannah showed us a wedding photo of her sister Lydia, who was every inch as big as Hannah and Sarah and was wearing a whole rosebush for a hat. Sat in a chair with the groom in her lap and his hat only came to her shoulder. She called him Doll Baby. Doll Baby was shortly convicted of murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison, but Lydia, unable to tolerate her lover’s absence, offered financial incentive to the warden to see to his release, then went to the penitentiary, wrote a check, and lugged Doll Baby away under her arm. Soon as she got home she stopped payment on her check, and all that warden could do short of going to jail was shake his head over Miss Lydia’s financial acumen. “Ain’t a man alive who can out-figger me,” Miss Lydia liked to say. “I always said I could make five dollars out of every dollar I could lay my hands on,” and she had laid her hands on plenty, Hannah told us.
These days Miss Smith worked for C. G. McKinney on the farm he called Needhelp up in Turner River, plowing and hoeing, building fences, too. Grew malangas and cabbages, which C. G. rowed down to the Bay and shipped to Key West on the
