Killing Mister Watson

Chatham Bend?' He looks around again, shaking his head. 'You are squatt-aire? You have squatt-aire right?' This old feller has spotted my dusty hide, he has mistook me for some kind of help.

In them days there weren't but maybe ten souls altogether on this whole eighty mile of coast, south to Cape Sable, which is why this feller is so surprised to find us pioneers back up the river. He complains that the Bend was uninhabited when he passed by here plume hunting a few years ago. Why, only last week, folks at Everglade and Chokoloskee had told him he could move right in. 'Many year my heart have settled on this place!' he yells, putting the fingertips of both hands on his heart. 'For why nobody knows it you are here?'

'They know I'm here,' I say.

At that he turns to look at me more careful. Then he looks at the woman in the doorway of the shack, and our little boy.

'You met John Weeks up there at Everglade? That there woman is his daughter, and that there little feller is my youngest boy.' At them words, Mary looks away and goes inside. 'Or supposed to be,' I say. She bangs a pot.

I can tell from the stranger's face that he has heard some rumor on this matter. 'Ah, je com- prawng!' he says. He weren't no Yankee, I knew that much.

Since our visitor was taking things so hard, I told him stay awhile, have a look around, and he shrugs some more like he is doing me a favor. We go down with the tide to detach his gear off a Key West schooner, Captain Carey, that was anchored at Pavilion Key. The captain hollers after him, 'Sure you're all right? When shall I fetch you?' But the old man perched in the stern don't hardly wave at him, don't even turn around, and finally the captain drops his arm, shaking his head.

The Frenchman is so busy asking me questions that he don't hardly wait to get an answer. As days go by, I inform him how this once was Pavilion River, but these Indins around here don't know nothing, so they say Pavioni. Well, this dang French know-it-all tells me how Pavilion got its name! Says a pirate from the Spanish Main was camped here on a offshore key with a young girl off a Dutch merchantman. Girl said even though he had killed off all her family, she would gladly suffer the fate worse than death so long as he spared her own dear life. Well, his crew got sick of looking on while he lay down with her, they said it was her or him, and so he had no choice but to poison her. Before he left, on account he loved her, he built her a thatch shelter to keep the sun off while she died in agony. When an American man-o'-war caught up with him, the Spaniard described this kindness to the Dutch girl to prove how such a courtly feller did not deserve to hang. After they hung him, they went up there and found most of the girl under that shelter. Called it a pavilion, named that key for it, and we call it 'Pavilion' to this day.

Chevelier said he'd found no 'Chatham' in the old accounts. Said 'Chatham River' might of come from the Indin name of Chitto Hatchee, or Snake River, as it was called on the old war maps around 1840. Fakahatchee, now, where John Leon was born, that is Fork River. The Frenchman knew that Indin tongue like he was born with it.

This old French feller-I always think of him as an old feller cause of that stiffness in him, though he weren't so many seasons older'n me-he told us later that he come from France with a French 'ornithologue' name of Charles Bonaparte. He was an ornithologue himself and never cared who knowed it, but he sold bird plumes, too, to make ends meet. Looked like some rare old bird hisself, damn if he didn't, quills sticking out all over his head, beady eyes and a stiff gait-the dry way a man will look who lives too long without a woman. Spent too much time with his feathered friends, looked like to me, cause when he got excited, his hair went up in back just like a bird crest, he looked all set to shit and no mistake, and he screeched as good as them Carolina parrots he was hunting for.

It was right there on Chatham Bend that Jean Chevelier shot the first short-tailed hawk was ever seen in North America, something like that. Weren't much of a claim cause it weren't much of a bird-tail too damn short, I guess. Why he thought this o' scraggy thing we couldn't eat would make him famous I don't know. He seen Carolina parrots, too, far away up inland, freshwater creeks. Bright green little things, size of a dove, all red and yeller on the head, but they was shy and he never did come up with one.

Them parrots used to be thick as fleas back in the hammocks. I told him I would eat a few when I went in there after deer and turkey. 'Eat it? Mange? Le perroquet?' He squawked and slapped his brow. Well, that was a long time ago, I told him, and I ain't seen one since. I believe they told me not so long ago that them pretty birds has flewed away for good.

Christmas 1888, Captain Carey brought presents from Key West for all the kids, give each one an apple, candy cane, and Roman candle. That evening Old Man Chevelier says, How would you like to help me collect birds? And he spells out all the kinds he wants, not a plume bird in the bunch. Wants wild eggs, too. I'm nodding away to show I get the drift, and when he says 'swallowtail hawk' I nod again and smile and say 'Tonsabe.'

At that he flies right at my face-'Where you get it that word?' I tell him that is Indin speech for swaller-tail hawk, and he asks, real sly, 'Which Indin?' 'Choctaw,' I says. I call myself by my mother's tribe just to get on in life. Choctaws was good Indins, I tell him, helped Ol' Andy Jackson fight them Creeks, helped him steal most all of Georgia for the crackers. But when they made him president, Ol' Hickory packed the Choctaws up right along with the dang Creeks, sent the whole sad and sorry bunch off to Oklahoma. I told the Frenchman that Ol' Hickory kept a soft spot in his heart for Choctaws all the same.

That Frenchman weren't much interested in my historical lore. He asks what is this river in my language, and I tell him that the old words for this country have been lost. He nods quick, like he's sprung a trap. 'Tonsabe is old word, is it not?' He grins. 'Tonsabe is Calusa, is it not?'

He had took me by surprise and my face showed it. That word ain't used by Mikasuki, nor Muskogee neither, that word come straight down from my granddaddy, Chief Chekaika.

Back in them days, Chekaika's name was a dirty word to white people, so I says, real coony, 'Choctaw and Calusa must be pretty close.' But he keeps staring right into my eyes, nodding his head like he can read my brain. Then he sets down on a crate, so we're knee to knee.

'Vair few Calusa words survive,' he says, nodding and staring.

I decide to trust him just a little, cause it ain't often I find somebody who knows what I am talking about. Well, I say, my people was not Calusa, not exactly, they was what white men called the Spanish Indins.

Damn if that don't overjoy him so, he has to jump up and sit down again. He tells me Spanish Indins was descended from Calusas that the Spaniards took over to Cuba. Being Spaniards, they snuck some Indins back in to this coast to stir up trouble when the Americans was grabbing off the State of Florida. 'So! You are Calusa!' Gives me that skull smile of his when I do not answer. 'You know all about where is Calusa burial!' I shrug again.

Chevelier told me he had studied up the maps and such, read the Spanish archives in Madrid, visited all of the big mounds in the Ten Thousand Islands before he decided that Chatham Bend was a main Calusa mound way back in Spanish times. Somewhere pretty close to here, the Calusa took eighteen canoes and attacked Juan Ponce de Leon, and maybe they withdrew into these hidden rivers to escape the Spanish poxes, cause poxes done a lot more damage than all them swords and blunderbusses put together. If his theory was right, then somewhere in these godforsook green islands was a burial mound, built up higher than the village mounds, using white sand, and one sign of it would be traces of canals out to open water, like some he had seen already, up the coast. Any temple would be gone by now, and the white sand overgrowed, but all the same there was a burial mound on one of these here islands, had to be! He was very excited, but gave up in disgust when I just shrug. 'I ain't nothing but a dumb old Indin,' I tell him.

'Indians say 'dumb Indin,' white pipples say 'dumb Injun'-why is that?'

'Maybe dumb Indins are too damn dumb to know how to say 'dumb Injuns,' what do you think?'

'Ay-coot,' he says, 'I am vair interest in Indiang pipples. These foking crack-aire are know-nothing, are grave rob-baire! Are des-ecrating!' He talks this way to get on the good side of this dusty feller who might not care too much for his cracker neighbors.

He wanted to study a Calusa burial place, he says, blurting it out.

'Calusa treasure?' I smile him my best smile. He does not answer.

All the while the Frenchman talked about his mound, he was watching my eyes like a cardplayer to see if I might put him in the way of it. I knew him a little bit by now, and I believe he did want to study that mound, just like he wanted to study birds, cause he was a real scientist, he was born curious, he was