Killing Mister Watson

life down in the Islands, not moonshiners nor renegades that came and went.

My grandmother Sallie Daniels and old Mary Hamilton was Weeks sisters from Marco Island, so Walter and Gene and Leon and the girls was Mama's cousins. But the two families wasn't close because we was not so proud about 'em, they was another bunch of dogs entirely. Some of 'em was pretty dark, though the dark ones had good features and the girls was comely. Mama and her sister-in-law, Aunt Gertrude Thompson, decided we weren't no kin whatsoever. How they figured that one out they never said.

I guess I wasn't proud about our cousins, but they never bothered me, we got on good. Like I say, I never was ashamed about 'em, ceptin maybe the one who acted shamed about himself. No, me and Dexter never had no trouble with them boys. They was all nice fellers and fine fishermen, they just wanted to be left alone, but folks didn't like their standoffish attitudes, wouldn't let 'em be.

Way I heard it, one time Old Man Richard Hamilton was telling Henry Short from Chokoloskee how he was Choctaw Injun out of Oklahoma. And Henry told him, You ain't Choctaw, you're chock full o' nigger, just like me! Henry Short was a good nigger, and I reckon he still is if he ain't died or something.

In the spirit of its epigraph ('No Stormy Weather Enters Here, Tis Joyous Spring Throughout the Year') the Fort Myers Press ran the headline THE STORM CAME BUT WE ARE HERE. It conceded the devastation caused by the Great Hurricane of October 17, reporting, however, that 'All Are Optimistic' and that 'No fear for the Future' could be detected.

FORT MYERS, OCTOBER 20, 1910. In Key West, the storm disabled the anemometers at the weather observation office, along with seven hundred feet of new concrete dock being installed by the War Department, and finished off the three-story concrete cigar factory of the Havana-American Company, severely damaged in the hurricane the year before. Winds reached their greatest velocity on Monday afternoon of the 17th, with gusts up to 110 miles per hour. The rainfall, however, could not be measured, the gauge having been carried out to sea.

The recent storm occupies the thoughts of everyone…one's sympathies are with the small householders, who in many instances have spent their savings in erecting a little home, often built in the cheapest style, which was ill-fitted to withstand the violence of the storm, and is either shattered or so injured as to require considerable outlay in repairs before becoming habitable. The colored population has in these ways encountered heavy losses…

ESTERO, OCTOBER 20, 1910. One peculiarity of the wind was that it would blow steadily for a minute or more with increasing violence, bending the trees before it, then there would come a hard puff that appeared to have a circular motion, twisting and whipping the trees until it seemed they must be torn to pieces or lifted out of the ground. About midnight the wind began to shift from northeast toward the south, until by Tuesday morning it had veered around to almost the opposite direction, that is, from the southwest… then abated…

CHOKOLOSKEE, OCTOBER 21, 1910. We are all in a fearful condition here. Some are destitute of a house, or clothing, only what they happened to have on when the gale struck on the night of the 17th.

Mr. J.M. Howell lost his home, and quite a number of people lost their homes down the coast and at Fakahatchee. All our crops are gone. Water rose about eight feet, filling a lot of cisterns with salt water. Some of the folks ran out and climbed trees; some fled to the highest mounds and had a bad, damp rest. Fishermen lost all nets and some boats.

One poor woman on Pavilion Key climbed a tree with her baby and was compelled to let it go adrift from her arms. She had the luck to save herself and buried her baby after the water went down.

We are all in a bad fix; provisions nearly all ruined in the stores.

Notwithstanding water ran eight feet on some cattle pastures, some of the cattle lived it out. I have seen some dead rabbits, and a big lot of fine chickens got drowned…

Mr. C.T. Boggess sprained his ankle or at least it slipped out of joint. His little power fish boat was driven up in the bushes a good ways and is nearly a wreck.

Great quantities of dead mullet and other fish are on the shores, and some today are not dead, but cannot swim, possibly from muddy water getting into their gills.

The Everglade schoolhouse went off of its foundation and went up the river.

Mr. Wm. Brown, on Turner's River, lost his crop, and his cistern-the best and largest in the county-was filled with salt water. All the Everglade cisterns were ruined with salt water.

A lot of our folk here fled to the schoolhouse. The water ran up over the floor ten inches and they took off the door and the blackboards and made a raft of them, tied with a rope, on which to flee to other parts if the house left its foundation. Nearly three fourths of Chokoloskee Island was underwater. We began to realize what those high mounds were built for.

All of our own folk are very busy hunting up their lost household goods and stores of grub, boats, nets, etc. Some of us are planting again. I find a few of my peppers sprouting out and growing and some tomatoes and cabbage that the water was six feet deep over are growing. Okra could not stand the racket at all, but I have some seven-top turnips that are growing and they were under three feet or more…

SAMMIE HAMILTON

The day Mister Watson come to Lost Man's was a Friday, three days before the hurricane and four days after Cox went wild at Chatham Bend. Where was he all them days in between? Mister Watson told us he come up from Key West, but later we learned he was at Chokoloskee, him and Dutchy. Did he come to us after he dropped off Dutchy? What was he doing so far south? Where was he headed? Did he want us to back up his Key West story so he had an alibi? And where was Cox? Was that bloody-handed sonofabitch hid in the cuddy of that launch while he was talking to us?

I believe he knew about the killings, I believe he was setting up an alibi he never needed. Being such a thorough man, he must of knowed he was in bad trouble whether he ordered them three deaths or not. Maybe he figured if he took our savings, he could head out for Key West or Port Tampa, find a ship out of the country. Tampa, more likely-they would be looking for him at Key West. If so, something changed his thinking, cause he showed up again in Chokoloskee one jump ahead of the bad news from Pavilion Key, and he talked his way out like he had so many times before. Swore he was going for the sheriff, swore he would bring Cox in, then got away from there while the getting was good.

By the time the hurricane struck in, Leslie Cox was all alone on Chatham Bend, if you don't count that dead squaw in the boat shed or them three bodies in the pit across the river. You had to wonder what was going through his mind, if he was dead drunk or just wild-eyed and jittery, like Watson's horse, whinnying away out in the shed. That storm must have looked to him like the wrath of God come to strike him off the earth.

We was down there in the rivers and we seen it, and I'm telling you now, it filled our hearts with dread. That howling sky and gales and roaring river in that Hurricane of 1910 was enough to scare the marrow out of anybody, let alone a direful sinner that has slaughtered three poor souls and gutted out their carcasses like they was hogs and rolled the bodies off the bank into the river. If Leslie Cox had a human spark left in him, he spent that night upon his knees just a-howling for the Lord's forgiveness. Whether or not he got it no one knows.

Few days later, Mister Watson come back through alone, and went hunting for Cox down Chatham River. So many times I have pictured him walking around that place of his, shouting and listening, feeling them old ghosts. Maybe Cox hailed him from the mangrove, maybe they talked. All we know is, there was no sign of life when Henry Thompson went up there after the storm. Course Uncle Henry never knew there was three dead buried by the river, never imagined Leslie Cox might been watching through some crack or broken pane. When he realized that, he got the shakes. Took a snort every little while to stiffen up his nerves, and never lost that habit all his life.

Yessir, we had a time of it that day! Hurricane of 1910, October 17th of 1910. That storm was the worst to strike this coast until Hurricane Donna come along fifty years later. Every house at Flamingo washed away. Louie Bradley and the Roberts boys, all the docks and houses down there, even that old copra warehouse on Cape Sable. As for us islanders, most was living in board cabins, and some had lean-to camps, y'know, moving from garden to