The old man stops to contemplate his son-in-law. Daniel David House has silver in his brows and his mustache juts into ax-head sideburns. Though he wears no collar underneath his beard, he is dressed as if for Sunday, in white shirt, shiny black frock coat, wiped boots, and stiff black pants hauled high by galluses. He stands apart from the sandy, slow-eyed boys delivered him by the former Ida Borders.
'Where's his missus, then?' the old man says.
'She's right inside here with her young 'uns. With your daughter and granddaughters, Mr. House.' When the old man grunts and turns away, Ted's voice goes higher. 'Them women and children gone to have 'em a good view!'
Henry Short, expressionless, moves past, holding his rifle down along his leg.
'You, too?'
'Leave Henry be,' says Bill House, coming out. Bill House is thirty, a strong florid man creased hard by sun.
Mamie Smallwood has followed Bill outside. When her brother turns to calm her, the plump young woman cries, 'Let me alone!' She weeps. 'Where is her little boy? He's only three!'
Old Man Dan shakes his big head and keeps on going, refusing to listen anymore. Young Dan and Lloyd follow him close, down toward the shore.
A young woman comes around the house. 'Mr. Smallwood? Please? Tell me what's happening?' When the postmaster stands mute, she cries, 'Oh Lord!' and hurries off again. She is still calling her boy.
The island men are gathering, twenty or more. All have shotguns or rifles.
Charlie T. Boggess, who twisted his ankle in the hurricane, is limping. 'All right, woman, all
Ted says, 'Don't hear Ethel hollering? You best hobble home, take care that ankle.'
Isaac Yeomans, coming by, says, 'Key West? Nosir! That feller ain't the kind likes to back up.' Isaac is fiery with drink; he looks almost cheered up by what the others dread. 'You recall Sam Lewis, Ted? At Lemon City?'
Smallwood nods. 'They lynched Sam Lewis, too.'
Bill House stops on the steps. 'This ain't no mob!'
'Don't think so?' The postmaster pitches his voice toward Bill's father. 'What if he's just coming back here to pick up his family and keep right on going?'
Bill House says, 'Keep right on going, Ted, just like you say, and do the same thing somewheres else.'
'Mr. Smallwood? Have you seen little Addison?'
The men turn their backs to the young woman and stare away toward the south. The oncoming boat is a small dark burr in the pewter light of Chokoloskee Bay.
Henry Short leans his 30-30 Winchester into a fork of the big fish-fuddle that the hurricane has felled across the clearing. The gun is hidden when he leans against the tree, and his arms are folded as if in sign that none of this is any of his business.
Twilight gathers behind the coming boat. The armed men stand half-hidden in the undergrowth, too tense to slap at the mosquitoes. In the dusk of a dark day, in the tree shadow, the postmaster can no longer make out faces beneath the old and broken hats. His neighbors seem anonymous as outlaws.
Not slowing, the boat winds in among the oyster bars. The helmsman stands in silhouette, his broad hat forward on his head.
Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops two shells in, sets his felt hat. 'Seems like you ought to throw in with us, Ted.' Isaac is gazing out over the water. 'We're in friendship with him too. We don't care for this no more'n you do.'
'He pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain't got a single thing agin him.' Smallwood speaks urgently to Yeomans and to Boggess, who have been his friends for fifteen years. 'You boys never had no trouble with him, and you can't hit nothing anyway. Put them damn guns down.'
Others hesitate beside the store, as if loath to go down to the landing. They have worn the same shirts for a week, they are scared and cranky, they are anxious to involve Ted Smallwood. At the very least, the postmaster's participation might make what must happen more respectable. If no one is innocent, who can be guilty?
Storm refugees from Lost Man's River stand back by the store porch, a hundred yards from the boat landing.
One calls, 'Looks like y'all are fixing to gun him down.' Henry Thompson is a tall and sunworn man, lank as a dog.
Another man nods urgently, clearing his throat. 'Thought you fellers was aiming to get deputized! Thought you was aiming to
'Won't
'Best if nobody hangs back!' calls Old Dan House.
One man says, 'I believe Ted knows what must be done as good as we do. He just don't want no part of it.' Another cackles, 'Why, hell, Ted, bushwhacking ain't nothing to be scared of! Not with his one against two dozen!'
'Maybe I ain't scared the way you think. Maybe I'm scared of killing in cold blood.'
'He ain't scared of cold blood, Ted. Colder the better.'
'Ain't nobody proved that in a court of law!'
'Ain't no law down here to prove it by.'
Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and single-shot.22s. Shouted at, they slink into the trees and circle back, bright-eyed as coons.
In his old leaf-colored clothes, in the brown shadows at the wood edge, Henry Short has sifted in against the tree bark like a chuck-will's-widow shuffling soft wings. He seems intent on the white bow wave where the dark boat parts the gray chop of the channel, and the rifle-fire
The women are calling from the wood. Old Man Dan shouts to his son-in-law, 'If you're his friend, go find his little feller!'
He circles through the wind-stripped trees. The wood is hushed, the last birds mute, the dogs gone still. Only mosquitoes are abroad, keening in the twisted gumbo-limbos.
He calls and calls.
A razorback hog grunts abruptly, once, in the startled silence.
The young mother follows him back to the house and goes inside. In white aprons, behind the salt-dark screen, the women loom like ghosts. Neither weeps. Their little daughters tug softly at their skirts. The children's eyes stare toward the boat over sucked thumbs.
Smallwood pushes past, indoors, not sure where he is headed. His wife is gripping the hand of the boy's mother. 'Ought to kept him home,' he says. When he bangs his lantern, Mamie raises a finger to her lips, as if the man out in the boat might hear.
'Daddy's the one behind this, ain't he?' she whispers. 'Bill and Dan, too!'
Smallwood slaps a mosquito, lifts his fingers, investigates the blood. 'Light that smudge,' he says. Little Thelma runs to the crumpled bucket of black mangrove charcoal damped with earth.
He gazes at his Mamie Ulala, ignoring the young woman, who appears entranced. He says, 'They're all behind it. All but the men from Lost Man's.'
This dark day has been coming down forever. Even the young woman, in her pale foreboding, seems to know this. The day is late, and a life runs swiftly to its end.
'They want an end to it,' he mutters.
Little Thelma and her friend Ruth Ellen stand in the corner, guarding the toddlers from something scary. Ruth Ellen's mother clutches Baby Amy, born five months before down at Key West. 'Ad,' she whispers to the missing boy. 'Oh, please.'
The motor dies, in a long wash of silence. 'Daddy,' Thelma says, starting to whimper. When the postmaster takes her up into his arms, she sucks her thumb. Beside himself, he thrusts her at her mother and follows the young woman back outside. He cannot stop yawning.
