clam crew at Pavilion Key; in early October, he was fishing with the Roberts boys out of Flamingo. That’s where he was in mid-October when the word came of bloody murders at the Bend, along with the first warnings of the Great Hurricane. He departed next day but was turned back at Cape Sable by the storm. Because his boat got damaged and needed repairs, it was late in the week before he started out again, rounding Cape Sable and camping that night at Shark River. Next morning at Lost Man’s, the Hardens informed him that his father had stopped by two days before the storm, behaving strangely; they could not quite make out why he had come and seemed uneasy.
Lucius rushed north. Finding nobody at Chatham Bend, he came to our house in Everglade, where we broke the awful news. He went out on the dock and watched the river for a while; Lucius was always beloved in our family, and as Mother said, it was a blessing that he was with good friends at such a time. We talked all night and he left for Fort Myers at dawn. because he had refueled at our dock, he did not stop at Marco, where he might have learned that his father had crossed paths with the sheriff before heading south to deal with Cox at Chatham Bend. What actually happened there will always be disputed and it seems unlikely we will ever know.
BILL HOUSE
If Watson’s gun had not misfired, Daddy House would of been dead-Daddy knew that, too. He turned his back on all the racket and just walked away looking real old and rickety because some way he had busted his one gallus and was holding his pants up with a forearm across his belly. Walked stiff and slow like he had a bad gut.
His sons was pretty twisted up about how it ended. All the blood and them damned dogs and kids running around. Young Lloyd, follering his daddy home, was so mad he was in tears but never could figure out what he was mad at. For days us boys tried to talk it out, but our dad would never join in. What happened there at Smallwood’s had went bad in him and turned him sour. I reckon that was his first day as an old man.
When the crowd drifted off into the dark and the dogs forgot why they was barking, Charlie Boggess fetched a lantern, helped Ted turn him over. Ted tried to fold the arms across the chest, but on account of rigger mortis, them arms opened out again like the claws on a blue crab speared through the back. Or that’s how Charlie Boggess told it, because Charlie T. made up for his short size with his tall stories. He was spooked by them slow arms much worse than by that one bloody blue eye-that’s what he related to visitors in later years after everyone had put away the truth, Charlie T. included. Seems Ted had tried to close that eye but come too late. The lid was stiff, it just peeled back off the eyeball. Hunting around amongst the hurricane scraps spread through the bushes, them two come up with a toy flag from the Fourth of July, spread that over the eyes. (D. D. House had rode for a soldier in the War Between the States and never had no use for the stars and stripes, but he concluded that a Yankee flag was good enough for the man that tried to kill him.)
Even his friends knew Watson’s time had come, that’s why them Lost Man’s fellers stood back there by the store and watched him killed. From the way he brought his boat ashore in the face of all them guns, I got to believe Ed Watson knew it, too.
The men agreed there would be no burial on Chokoloskee. Even dead, that body scared the women. At sun-up, we would take him out to Rabbit Key. But leaving a man I knew most of my life lay out all night alone by the cold water, that bothered me. I couldn’t sleep. Toward dawn I went back over there to pay respect or something. Dogs had snatched that bloody flag and one-eyed Ed lay staring at the stars, arms wide. One boot was stripped off, the other shot away, and those dead feet with cracked old toenails looked like lumps of dough.
I never sucked up to Watson and I never had no regrets, that day or later. We done what we had to do. But I will admit I was ashamed of how some kept shooting after he was dead, like they was trying to wipe him off the face of the good earth and their own guilt with him. Some shot until their guns was empty, and more’n one reloaded, shot some more. One wild boy Crockett Daniels run in afterwards, put his.22 to the back of the dead man’s head. I believe it was them boys robbed the corpse for souvenirs, cause his tooled big-buckled cowhide belt was missing, also his black felt hat from Arkansas. Watson weren’t often caught out in the sun without that hat on, and now that white skin under his hairline made him look naked.
In the lantern shine, the one bald eye glared out through the black tracks of dry blood down across his forehead, but the dust-caked bloodied mouth in them stiff whiskers was the worst of it: front teeth all busted out, lips tore and stretched, but still a little twist to ’em, a little grin. He sure looked like he could use a glass of water. Well, Mister Ed, I whispered, hoarse, I come to say good-bye. It ain’t that I’m sorry about what was done but only that your neighbors had to do it, men like me that weren’t never cut out to be killers.
• • •
By the time we went for him at sunrise, to run him out to Rabbit Key in his own boat, Watson had lost his good eye to some night varmint, maybe a poked stick. His clothes was mostly rags, black-caked with blood. Shirt ripped, hairy belly button. Them mean red spots was pellets deep under the skin. In the hard light of day it was plain he was shot to pieces, mostly buckshot rash but plenty of bullet holes, too, and flies already humming. A few men scared themselves all over again, telling how Watson, grinning like a skull, come after the posse through that hail of fire. (They was calling theirselves a “posse”; nobody cared to be a member of no “mob.”) I warned Mamie what the dead man looked like and she headed off his widow before she went down to visit with the deceased. “Give us a hand,” I told the men, and Tant Jenkins who had took no part was first to step forward and grab the ankles. Straining to hoist, Tant puffed out the opinion that dead men are unnatural heavy cause their bodies pull down like dowsing sticks, yearning for eternal rest under in the ground. “Well, that could be,” I told him, “but being full of lead might make a difference.”
“It ain’t no joking proposition, Bill,” sighed Tant, who most days would joke his way right through a funeral. Tant was tearful, might of had some drink, but there ain’t no doubt that except for Tuckers he truly loved Ed Watson. Later he told me my remark upset him because it was just what Watson might have said with a straight face about his own damn death. Watson loved them sour kind of jokes, which I enjoyed myself. I mean, ain’t life some kind of a sour joke? Might’s well laugh, that’s the way him and me seen it, whether nice folks seen the joke or not. One time when Watson caught me grinning along with him, he give a wink and lifted up his hat.
A angry moan come from the burial party when we swung that bloody carcass onto the transom. A couple of men flat refused to help us lay him in the cockpit, nor even touch him, as if even one drop of this devil’s blood was curtains. We had to listen to this horseshit right while we was struggling to heft him, and sure enough he got away from us, slid off the transom, flopped into the shallers. I was outraged and I spoke too rough and later some would use that anger to show how Houses always hated E. J. Watson.
“Come on!” I yelled. “Stop screwing around! Let’s get it over with!” I grabbed some line, bound up his ankles, run a hitch under the arms and worked it snug, then rigged a bridle off the stern cleats. Went aboard, cranked up his motor while them others clambered in, and snaked him off that shore like a dead gator, as yelling kids run out into the shallows, kicking water splashes after the body. Might been Billy Brown or Raleigh Wiggins who was wearing Watson’s hat, or maybe that tough Caxambas kid he nicknamed “Speck.”
“Get away!” My own voice sounded cracked, half kind of crazy. Where were their families, who claimed to be Watson’s friends? How come they let their kids behave no better than camp dogs? Were they too scared of us ones who done the shooting? But when I calmed down, I was angry at myself for hauling him off the shore as rough as that, which only encouraged the other men to act rough, too.
We towed him all the way to Rabbit Key. Sometimes he come twisting to the surface, causing a yell of fear; other times that grisly head was thumping on the bottom, I could feel the thrumming when I took in on the bridle-
They buried him face down-“Give that red devil a good look at Hell!” yelled Isaac-then toppled two big coral slabs on top, one across the legs and the other across the back, to make sure he would not rise at dusk and come hunting in the night for thems that slew him. One feller hitched a noose around the neck, run the bitter end to a big old wind-twist mangrove on the point, the only tree left standing by the storm.
By the water, Tant Jenkins was weepin about how good he was treated all them years by Mister Ed but even
