crackle, and that sweet odor in the air like roasting corn. As I come nearer, I could see the woods just shimmering in that heat, and the dark hawks and buzzards and the white egrets that will come from as far as they can see that oily smoke to feed on the small critters killed or flushed from cover in a burn.
I believe that Mister E.J. Watson might been the first planter in south Florida to try burning his field before the harvest, figuring work would go much faster with less labor once the leaves and cane tops was all burned away. Nothing but clean stalks to deal with, not much sugar lost, and a smaller payroll. Only thing was, cane sugar don't extract good from the stalks even a few days after a fire, and this here was a field of thirty acres, and he hadn't brought no cutters in for the fall season. There was only him and me and Rob, and maybe Tant if we were very lucky. He must of gone crazy is the way I figured, he was firing a canefield we would never harvest.
When I come into the Bend, first thing I seen was Mister Watson all alone out in his field, still setting fires, on the half run like he'd heard a shout from Hell. I didn't see no sign of Rob, let alone Tant. Mister Watson was the only man on that plantation, drifting over that black ground like a huge cinder swirled up by the wind, in a ring of fire. Had his shotgun with him, and that made no sense neither, cause the birds had no plumes in this season, and he hadn't lit fires on three sides the way we done sometimes when we wanted a shot at whatever run before the flames. In a unholy light where sun rays come piercing down through the smoke's shadow, something was hanging in that hellish air and whatever it was kept me from calling. I wouldn't go nowheres near a man who looked like he had set himself afire. I didn't go near the house even, just waited for him by the river. Toward nightfall, when the flames died down, and he come in, his face was fire-colored, eyes darting everywhere. He was coughing hard, fighting for breath. 'Who you hiding on that boat?'-that's his first words. He went on past, down toward the dock, and halfway down, he swings that gun around quick as a viper, like he means to throw down on me and fire.
I yell out, 'Hold on, Mister Ed! I come alone!' Cause orders was, if ever I come into the Bend with someone hid aboard, I would lay off there on the river, give him time to get in close behind the poinciana, get the drop on any man who tried to come ashore.
He don't lower the muzzle of his double-barrel. I face the holes. Ever try that? Makes you feel like you might fall in pieces even before you're blown apart. Then he swings back around and keeps on going. He don't like having his back to me but he minded his back turned to the schooner even more. And damned if he don't poke that shotgun into every cranny on that boat, from stem to stern.
Coming out, he mutters, That's right, boy, no harvest. He don't explain that but I understood it later. With all that cane unharvested, and no fire, he was afraid that next year's crop would be choked out.
I don't know where Rob is, and I don't dare ask.
Rob was very dark in spirit along about that time. One day, setting on the stoop, he picks up his dad's old double-barrel that is leaning up against the house. First he puts the muzzle in his mouth and turns so I can see. Then he points the gun at Rex, who is laying there in the poinciana roots having a nightmare. I am close by but inside, keeping away from him, I can hear him muttering at the skeeters through the screen. Says, 'Rex, if I get bit once more, I am going to pull these triggers. And if this here gun is loaded, boy, then this is your last day as a dog, cause both barrels is aimed to blow your head off.'
Well, that's exactly what he done, and after he done it he ran wild, ran around the house, round and round, and let out a shriek every time he passed the carcass. Mister Watson took that poor dog by the tail and flung him in the river, and still Rob shrieked each time he turned the corner. Must of run around the house nine times before we could catch hold of him and talk him down.
All me and Mister Watson ate for supper was Tant's cold venison, left on the hearth. No bread baked and didn't fix no greens. The meat weren't smoked through proper because Tant got drunk and let the fire die, it had a purply look and old rank smell to it. 'Might be nigger meat,' Mister Watson growls when he seen me gag on it, and he snorts like he's going to laugh but the laugh don't come, not once, not that whole evening.
I still had fears from seeing him on fire in that field, and I prayed to God he would not start in to drinking. All you could hear besides the skeeter whine was us men chewing meat. I thought I'd never get that meat down, that's how dry my mouth was, and I never cared for venison that day to this.
He gets the bottle out, but he don't drink. He just sits there with his shotgun, panting, staring toward the river. 'Sometimes it gets me,' he muttered once, but he don't explain it.
That evening I got to thinking about moving on. It was time for me to start out on my own. I was near to twenty and I had my eye on young Gert Hamilton, whose brother Lewis was to marry Cousin Jennie. Mister Watson had taught me good all about farming. I could shoot and trap, hang mullet nets and skin off egret with the best of 'em, and anyways it weren't hard to tell that our good old days at Chatham Bend was near their end.
After I done the dishes, he coughs and hacks, says, I am sorry for the way I acted. You are my partner, are you not? I am, say I, and proud to be so. He nods his head for a long time. Then he begun talking, slow at first, relating all about his life, and why it was he come down to the Islands.
Mister Watson confessed he were a wanted man in Arkansas and also in Columbia County, in north Florida. As a young feller in Columbia, he had a good farm under lease, and made him a fine crop, but after he sold his crop off, he hurt his knees in a bad fall at O'Brien, Florida, was bedridden a good while and his plantation went all to hell, and he had to borrow money from his brother-in-law. This was after he lost his first young wife in childbirth-that was Rob's mother.
In a few years he found him a pretty schoolteacher, Miss Jane S. Dyal of Deland, Florida, but that brother-in- law kept after him about the money, kept hounding him and sneering, 'right up until the day that feller died,' Mister Watson said. He smiled just a little when he said those words, and I give him a quick smile back. 'It come down to a matter of honor,' Mister Watson said, and he watched me again. Mister Watson never said he killed that man, and I never asked him, but some way the man's friends must of found fault with him.
Along about then, he decided it was time to go out West. 'No sense getting lynched,' he said, 'before getting to tell my own side of the story.' He packed up his family in the same old covered wagon his mother had brung south from Carolina, and him and his boy Rob and new wife, Jane, with little Carrie and Baby Ed, left by night and lit out northward for the Georgia border.
The following spring-this was 1887-they sharecropped a farm in Franklin County, Arkansas. Got his crop in and kept right on going, all the way to Injun Territory, maybe seventy miles west of Fort Smith, what he called the Nations. Injun Country was the first place he felt safe, because there was next to no law in the Nations. Injun police never messed too much with white men so long as they left Injuns alone; Injuns figured that any white in trouble with other whites couldn't be all bad, Mister Watson said.
That whole region was a hideout for outlaws and renegades from Missouri west to Texas, because the only law was the same law we had here, eye for a eye and a man's honor, so better shoot first and get the details later. Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys who rode with Quantrill in the Border Wars and fought in his guerrilla troop for the Confederacy naturally went on to a life of outlawry, and most of them men hid out and drank and roamed anywhere they wanted in the Nations.
There was plenty of renegade Injuns, too, and the worst of 'em, Mister Watson said, was Old Tom Starr, whose father was head of a wild Cherokee clan on a stretch of the South Canadian River where the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee Nations come together. Tom Starr was huge, and kept himself busy wiping out another clan who had a mind to bump off Tom Starr's father.
'Killed too many, got a taste for it, know what I mean?' Mister Watson said. I thought he give me a funny look, but he probably never. 'Sure do,' I said.
Tom Starr and his boys set fire to a cabin in this feud, and a little boy five years old run out, and Tom Starr picked him up and tossed him back into the flames, that's how bad the feud was.
'I don't think I could do a thing like that, could you, Henry?' Mister Watson said-he was frowning, you know, like he'd thought hard on it before deciding.
'Nosir,' I said.
Old Man Tom Starr asked another Cherokee if he thought God would ever forgive him for that deed he done, and his friend said, No, I don't reckon He would.
'I wouldn't care to give that answer to a black-hearted fellow like Tom Starr, what do you think, Henry?'
'Nosir,' I said.
'Nosir,' Mister Watson said.
Mister Watson wasn't there a year when somebody put a load of buckshot into a woman named Myra Maybelle Shirley, who lived with a dang Injun, Tom Starr's son. Shot her out of the saddle on a dead cold day of February '89, and give her another charge of turkey shot in the face and neck right where she was laying in the muddy road. At
