When Mister Watson turned around, his face had settled, but his eyes stayed cold. He introduced my mother as the housekeeper. His family was staring at Min's hair, turned by the sun to the dark fire color of his own. And seeing his wife's face, and Rob's, Mister Watson gathered himself up, and coughed, and come right out with it. 'This is your baby sister, Rob. Her name is Minnie, after your Aunt Minnie.' He made a small regretful bow to Mrs. Watson.
Mrs. Watson seemed not to expect no better, and knowing her as I come to do, I believe she was relieved he had not lied. She took out a lace handkerchief and dabbed her lips, then smiled at Henrietta. I was grateful. When Henrietta went inside, she turned to her husband and said quietly, 'Pity the place wasn't swept out before we got here.'
I run my mother to Caxambas the next morning.
When Mister Watson learned that his family would come join him, he had the pine boards for a big new house shipped down from Tampa, and carpenters, too, and all the people on the place turned out to help. Used Dade County pine, which is workable when green but cures so hard you'd be better off trying to drive a nail into a railroad track-best wood in Florida. When his house was finished, he painted her white, and he kept her painted, and that big white house stood high in them dark rivers for the next half century. Except Storters at Everglade, there was nothing between Fort Myers and Key West come close to it, not even the old Santini house on Chokoloskee.
The few families squatting in the Islands had nothing like that house on Chatham Bend. What other people called a house was nothing more than old gray storm boards flung together. Most of 'em settled for dirt floor and palmetta thatch, grew a few coconuts and vegetables, maybe some cane, got by mostly on white curlews and mullet. Mister Watson was experimenting with all kinds of vegetables, tobacco, had his horse and cart, besides two cows, and hogs and chickens. Only victuals we traded for was salt and coffee. Bought the green beans, wrapped 'em tight in burlap sacking, hammered 'em up with a marlin spike. We smoked our meat, made our own grits and sugar and some spirits, too. Seasons when vegetables was short, we'd pole up the Glades creeks to the pine ridges, gather coontie root for starch and flour, cut cabbage-palm tops in the hammocks and some Injun greens.
Miss Jane was poorly when she got to Chatham Bend, and he took care of her. Even when she could still walk a little, he liked to carry her around the place, set her chair in shade where the breeze come fresh upriver from the Gulf, under them blood-red poincianas planted years before by the old Frenchman. Passing by where she sat so still against the heat, in her dress of pale blue like the Gulf sky, I always wondered what sweet kind of thoughts was going through her head. Miss Jane watched the mullet jump and the tarpon roll, and the silent herons flying up and down the river, and the huge old gator like a cypress log on the far bank. Every year it come down out of the Glades with the summer rains, and our kids called it the giant crocodile.
One day she beckoned me in close and said, 'Since little Min is your half sister, Henry, we're some kind of kinfolk, isn't that true?' And when I nodded, she said, 'Then please don't call me Mrs. Watson. What would you think about 'Aunt Jane'?' And she seen the tears come to my eyes, and took me in her arms real quick so both of us could pretend she never saw them.
Wasn't too long after she come that Mister Watson decided he would pack up Mrs. Watson and go to pay a social call on the Frenchman, 'let bygones be bygones with that old-fangled sonofabitch whether he likes it or not' is what he told me. His idea was that educated company would persuade his wife that life in the Islands might not be so dreadful as she thought. He were somewhat drunk but quiet, feeling friendly, and he took his jug along. Took his guns, too, 'in case M'sieu didn't take kindly to a social call. I won't put up with his rough language,' Mister Watson added, 'not in front of Mandy.'
Aunt Jane wasn't feeling well, but this day he didn't pay that no attention, just bundled her down to the dock. A world of good would come from a little turn along the river, is what he told her. When they come back late that evening-it was summer, there was still a little light-he told me they wasn't so welcome at the start but things smoothed out like cream as they went along. By the end, he said, 'M'sieu Chevelier was all that might be wished for as a host.' Hearing them words, Aunt Jane just smiled that thin and crooked smile, too tired to talk. All the same, that visit perked her up. She had liked the Frenchman more'n he did, and made a plan to exchange books with him, but never did.
Aunt Jane always kept her books beside her, but after a while she never looked at them. Mister Watson read to her from the Good Book every day because she needed that, and he read to the rest of us on Sundays, 'whether we needed it or not.' He never got sick of that old joke long as I knew him.
Tant had a sassy way with Mister Watson, having learned real quick that he ran no risk at all. He got took up by Mister Watson in a way I never would be, for all my loyalty and longing. And the thing of it was-this ate my heart- Tant never cared a hoot about what I would have given my right eye for, all he seen was ways to have some fun and smooth his road.
Sometimes in the evenings Mister Watson read from Rob's book,
We was all shocked when that part was read out, not the words so much as the way he read it, he was just delighted. He'd tease me, call me Captain Thompson, because that captain's name was Thompson, too. 'You could learn a thing or two from a man like that,' he said. Aunt Jane told me right in front of him to pay him no attention. To him, she said in a low voice, 'You do them harm.'
One time I asked, Mister Watson, sir, do you believe in God? And he said, Believing in Him doesn't mean I trust Him.
Sometimes he would tease Aunt Jane by telling us how all the greatest hymns was wrote by slavers, cause slavers was so religiously inclined. And his wife might smile but she would whisper, 'I pray you make your peace with God before you die.' We didn't know what either of 'em was trying to say, and wasn't meant to. And he would whisper back, 'I have, I have,' and lift his fine voice toward Heaven like an offering.
…how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come.
Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
Before his family come, Mister Watson never had no interest in religion, not one bit, and he never had none after they was gone. I didn't neither. Time he was done with me, all I believed was what I saw in front of my own face, day in, day out. Later in life, there was a few held my Godless ways against me, but I couldn't help it. I didn't know who God was, or Him me.
One morning not long after Aunt Jane and the children arrived, I heard men's voices shouting off the river, and I knew his visitors from the north had come for Mister Watson. I run downstairs as he jumped to get his gun. Mrs. Watson went all trembly, saying, 'Oh, please, Edgar!' She didn't want no trouble and I don't guess he did neither, not with little children in the house. So what he done, he took a bead and skinned half the handlebar mustache off of the ringleader, who had stood up in the boat and was hollering about how E.J. Watson was under arrest. Mister Watson shut him up and run that posse off his river with one bullet.
Later Bill House come along and told me how it started, and I told him how it all panned out. Bill thought it was funnier'n I did, but he was excited all the same, and had all kinds of questions about Mister Watson. Bill House was in that Chokoloskee crowd on that black Monday in October 1910, and he talked about Mister Watson all his life.
