We had to winch and haul the
I moored the boat in a lee cove and walked across to Aldermans, jimmied the door, and crawled in beside Kate, who pretended she had not awakened. Bereft, I had a desperate need to hold her. She was trembling but made no sound. “Kate?” I whispered. “No,” she murmured. “Please, no, Mr. Watson.” Angry, I forced entry but wilted and withdrew, more desolate than ever.
Arms at her sides like a tin soldier, Kate stared straight up at the ceiling.
“You came through here before the storm and never let your family know!” she cried. “We almost drowned!” Chokoloskee was a muddy ruin, with windrows of dead fish, uncovered privy pits, piled storm debris and broken boats, and sea wrack high up in the branches. Every cistern was flooded out with brine, with no rain since the storm and no fresh water. The island stank.
Before the winds abated and the seas retreated, the Great Hurricane of October 1910 had engulfed most of the island. The wind had been worse than the year before, everyone said-something terrible and wild, Kate whispered, like the wrath of God. She was trembling again and came into my arms. Next Monday the twenty-fourth would be her twenty-first birthday and I vowed that her loving husband would celebrate that important anniversary with his dear wife. No, she begged. Next Monday would follow two “black Mondays” of murder and hurricane, she said, and bad luck and disasters came in threes.
I was desperate for rest but dared not sleep even when Kate rose and watched and listened from the window.
I awakened erect, sleepless, and short-tempered, deeply melancholy with the ache of life. When I let my breath all the way out, I had trouble drawing it back in. I forgot what I was doing from one minute to the next, I mislaid things, dropped things, utterly clumsy. I lost track entirely, sitting immobilized for minutes on end before remembering to put on the other boot.
Alderman was morose and scared at the same time. I disliked lodging where we were so unwelcome, but Will Wiggins had moved north to Fort Myers, McKinney’s was stacked to the rafters with storm refugees, and Smallwood’s had been seriously damaged, with boards torn away on the ground floor and no escape from the sweet reek of drowned chickens, caught by high water in a wire pen under the store.
In an endless day lost to engine repair, I stalked all over Chokoloskee, worried because Tippins might arrive before I left. Maintaining my innocence to anyone who asked, I refused to lie low. The shotgun on my arm was warning against interference. People mostly stayed out of my way but eyes were watching everywhere I went. Those men who were not off hunting fresh water or lost boats were biding their time until the sheriff ’s arrival, but their mood was dangerous. Though she didn’t dare say so, it was clear that Marie Alderman wanted us out of her house and her house out of the line of fire before the men organized to come and get me.
While Mamie rummaged through the piled-up goods for some double-ought loads for my shotgun, I slipped my boots off and stretched out on their long counter. Ted promised to warn me if anybody came. Within moments, I was dead asleep, and was still unconscious when Old Man House barged through the door, shouting for Mamie. I sat up quick, grabbing my revolver. D. D. had seen me now but did not approach to shake my hand. He turned quickly and went out. Ted Smallwood said, “Darned if I know how that old feller got past me!” I thought, I can’t trust Ted either.
D. D. House returned with Charley Johnson, Isaac Yeomans, a young Demere. By that time, I had my boots back on and my shotgun handy on the counter where his posse could see it. Old Man Dan told me I must wait for the sheriff, give some testimony. Casual, I picked up the gun, saying, “Nosir, Mr. House. I already talked to the sheriff at Marco, told him all I knew: what I’ll do now is go to Chatham Bend and tend to Cox.”
Those men stepped outside to consult. D. D. House came back, saying, “Well, we’ll send men with you.” And I said, “Nosir, you will not. As I told the sheriff, that boy is a good shot and will shoot to kill any man who tries to stop him. If I go alone, he will suspect nothing. I can get the drop on him and bring him in.”
They thought that over. When I saw their resolve gathering again, I added that if Cox gave me any trouble, I would bring his head.
“His head?” House looked startled. “You’ll bring him in dead or alive, that what you’re saying?”
“Might wind up somewhat more dead than alive, is what I’m saying.”
“This is no joke, Watson!”
Though they were unhappy about letting me go, House had surely mentioned the revolver and they could see the shotgun for themselves. Again they went outside to consult. They were arguing. Charley Johnson got excited: “Hell, boys, he ain’t crazy! He’ll keep goin sure’n hell! Won’t never dare come back here to the Bay whether he shoots that skunk or not!” In short, they were persuading themselves that if I left, Chokoloskee had seen the last of E. J. Watson.
Mamie brought me a few loads, explaining that they were storm-swept, kind of waterlogged. “I wouldn’t count on ’em,” Ted warned, “not if I was dealing with a man like that.” I broke my gun to try them. The shells were too swollen to slide into the chambers, but I took a few anyway, saying the wind might dry them out on the way south. They glanced at each other, startled when they saw that my shotgun had been empty all the while I talked those men out of detaining me. It was still empty, since I couldn’t load these shells; for all they knew, my revolver, too, might be unloaded. They did not report this-not while I was there-to Mamie’s daddy and those men, who were still muttering and shifting on the porch, but whether that was fear or friendship, I will never know.
“Good-bye, E. J.,” Ted said somberly, shaking my hand as if for the last time. No longer wishing to seem close to Watson, he did not come outside to see me on my way. From the shadows just inside their door, my old friends watched me walk to the boat landing, shotgun on my arm, lifting my free hand to my silent neighbors in parting.
THE KILLER
In the wake of great storm, the broken coast lay inert as a creature run to earth, ear weakly flicking toward the passing sounds. An egret with wing dragging hunched in the mangrove roots, a drowned deer leaping upside down among the branches. And still the Glades was emptying in gray-brown raining rivers, washing through the mourning walls of broken mangrove. With every channel choked by limbs, I headed westward out the Pass to the exhausted Gulf, turning south along a salt-burned coast to Chatham River.
At the Bend, the riverbank had sagged away into flood silt so thick that a man could hoe the water. My dock was gone, all but one piling, and the boat shed leaned precarious over the current.
No one appeared out of the house and my shout was met with silence. And yet… a waiting in the air, something out of place, half-sensed, half-seen, half-hidden-
Three copper figures had risen from the reeds in a little cove upriver. One raised an arm and pointed at the house and left his arm extended.
Dressed in old-time banded skirts and blouses and plumed turbans, they bore two muskets and a long flintlock rifle. The formal dress and antiquated weapons-there was ceremony here, but what it signified I could not know.
Bare-legged on its cement posts, wind-tattered peak and broken panes, my house looked old. The lower walls, the steps and porch, the Frenchman’s poincianas, were caked with pale clay marl in a heavy odor of earth rot and carrion. Diamondbacks stranded by high water, seeking warmth, had gathered on the cistern concrete, sliding and scraping with a soft chittering of rattles as I circled the house. One by one the flat heads turned, ob-serving the intruder through vertical gold slits: black forked tongues ran in and out in their quick listenings.
One boot on the porch step, I stopped. “Ho! Les! You in there, boy?” Through the window came the light clicking of a spun revolver, meant to be heard. For a long time the house held its breath. I crossed the porch, rapped on the torn screen, feeling the presence tensed behind the door: who was he now? Pursued down endless nights and days by the slaughtered and their ghosts, terrified by solitude and storm, he might have howled and
