From the small settlement on the Indian shell mound called Chokoloskee, a baleful sky out toward the Gulf looks ragged as a ghost, unsettled, wandering. The sky is low, withholding rain. Vultures on black-fingered wings tilt back and forth over the broken trees. At the channel edge, where docks and pilings, stove-in boats, uprooted shacks litter the shore, odd pieces torn away from their old places hang askew, strained from the flood by mangrove limbs twisted down into the tide. Thatched roofs are spun onto their poles like old straw brooms; sheds and cabins sag. In the dank air, a sharp fish stink is infused with the corruption of dead animals and overflowed pits from which the privy shacks have washed away. Pots, kettles, crockery, a butter churn, tin tubs, buckets, blackened vegetables, saltslimed boots, soaked horsehair mattresses, a ravished doll are strewn across bare salt-killed ground.
A lone gull picks at reddened mullet cast on shore, a dog barks without heart at so much silence.
A figure in mud-fringed calico stoops to retrieve a Bible. Wiping grime from its caked cover with dulled fingers, she straightens, turns, and stares toward the south. The fingers pause. From the black mangrove forest down the Bay, a boat motor, softened by distance, comes and goes and comes again, bound east through Rabbit Key Pass from the Gulf of Mexico.
“Oh Lord no,” she whispers, half-aloud. “Oh please no, Mister Watson.”
Along toward twilight, Postmaster Smallwood, on his knees under his store, is raking out the last of his drowned chickens. Hearing the oncoming boat, he groans in the putrid heat. Soon one pair of bare feet, then another, pass in silence on their way down to the landing. More men follow. He knows his neighbors by their gait and britches.
Over low voices comes the
That old man’s Sunday boots descend the Indian mound, then the bare feet of his three sandy, slow-eyed sons. The oldest, Bill House, climbs the steps and enters the store and post office, calling to Smallwood’s wife, his sister Mamie. Bill House’s feet creak on the pine floor overhead.
In the steaming heat, in an onset of malaria, Smallwood feels sickly weak. When his rump emerges from beneath his house and he attempts to stand, he staggers and bangs heavily against the outside wall, causing Mamie to cry out in the room above. He thinks, This dark day has been coming down forever.
“Lookit what come crawlin out! Ain’t that our postmaster?”
“Keep that spade handy, Uncle Ted! Might gone to need it!”
Wincing, Smallwood arches his back, takes a dreadful breath, gags, hawks, expels the sweet taste of chicken rot in his mouth and nostrils. “Got four rifles there, I see,” he says. “Think that’s enough?”
The old man pauses to appraise his son-in-law. Daniel David House is silver-bearded. He wears no collar but is otherwise dressed formally, in white shirt, shiny black frock coat, black pants hauled high by galluses. He is crippled. He says, “Where’s his missus?”
“Inside with her young’uns. With your daughter and your grandchildren, Mr. House.” When the elder grunts and turns away, Smallwood’s voice pursues him. “Them women and children gone to have ’em a good view. That what you want?”
Henry Short has stopped behind the House men, holding his rifle down along his leg. “You, too, Henry? You’re making a mistake.”
“Leave Henry be,” says Bill House from the door. House is thirty, a strong, florid man creased hard by sun. He is followed outside by his sister, who is weeping. Mamie Smallwood cries, “Shame on you, William House! Shame on you, Papa!” The old man turns his back upon his daughter. Lloyd House and Young Dan at his heels, he hobbles down the slope toward the water.
In a shift of wind, the
Near the shore, Henry Short leans his old lever-action.30-30 into the split in the big fish-fuddle tree that the hurricane has felled across the clearing. The rifle is hidden when he turns, arms folded tight in sign that he is here against his will, that none of this is any of his doing.
The men are gathering. Charlie T. Boggess, ankle twisted in the hurricane, limps past the store. He turns and shouts back at a woman calling, “All right, all
“Not me! I
Smallwood nods. “They lynched Sam Lewis, too.”
“This ain’t no lynching,” Bill House calls.
“Don’t think so, Bill? What if he’s just coming to pick up his family, keep on going?”
The men stare away toward the south as the oncoming boat comes into view, a dark burr on the pewter water. Most have worn the same clothes since the hurricane, they are rank as dogs and scared and cranky, they are anxious to enlist Ted Smallwood because the participation of the postmaster might afford some dim official sanction.
If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?
“No hanging back!” shouts Old Dan House, glaring at Smallwood.
Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops a shell in, sets his felt hat. “Best throw in with us, Ted,” he urges his old friend. “We don’t care for this no more’n you do.”
“He always pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain’t got no fight with him and you fellers don’t neither.”
“Hell, Ted, this fight ain’t nothin to be scared of! Not with his one against more’n a dozen.”
“Maybe I ain’t scared the way you think. Maybe I’m scared of murder in cold blood.”
“
The twilight gathers. Hurricane refugees from the Lost Man’s coast have gathered by the store, fifty yards back of the men down by the water. “You fellers fixin to gun him down?” one hollers. “Thought you was aimin to
“Arrest Watson? They tried that the other day.”
The postmaster can no longer make out faces under the old and broken hats. Too tense to slap at the mosquitoes, the figures wait, anonymous as outlaws. Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and singleshot.22s. Shouted at, they retreat and circle back, stealthy as coons.
In his old leaf-colored clothes, in cryptic shadow, Henry Short sifts in against the tree bark like a chuck-will’s- widow, shuffling soft wings. Dead still, he is all but invisible.
Not slowing, the oncoming boat winds in among the oyster bars. Her white bow wave glimmers where the dark hull parts the surface, her rifle-fire
The wind-stripped trees are hushed, the last birds mute. A razorback grunts abruptly, once. Mosquitoes keen, drawing the silence tight. Behind the rusted screen of Smallwood’s door, pale figures loom. Surely, the postmaster thinks, the boatman feels so much suspense, so much hard pounding of so many hearts. The day is late. A life runs swiftly to its end.
In the last light Ted Smallwood sees the missing child crouched in the sea grape, spying on all the grown-up men with guns. In urgent undertones he calls; the amorphous body of armed men turns toward him. He does not call again. He runs and grabs the little boy.
Hurrying the child indoors, he bangs his lantern. His wife raises a finger to her lips as if the man coming might hear. Does she fear denunciation of her husband for attempting to alert the boat? Hadn’t they learned that, warned or not, this man would come in anyway? Mamie whispers, “Is Daddy the one behind this, Ted? Bill and Young Dan, too?” He squeezes a mosquito, lifts his fingertips, winces at the blood. “Light that smudge,” he tells his little girl, pointing at the mangrove charcoal in the bucket.
He says, “They’re all behind it.” He cannot stop yawning. “They want an end to it.”
The motor dies in a long wash of silence. His daughter whimpers. The postmaster, queerly out of breath, sends her to her mother. He joins the young woman on the porch. “Please, Edna,” he entreats her, “go back inside.”
In the onshore wind out of the south, the boat glides toward a point just west of where the store landing had been lost to storm. Like a shadow, Henry Short crosses behind the men and positions himself off the right hand of
