'Seen his gun yank when he hauled on it,' Georgie explained.
'They tell you that, boy? Or is that what you imagine?'
We were all upset.
'You sound like you doubt your son's word,' my mother said.
'It ain't his word I doubt,' he said. 'But I doubt something.'
Some men come out with it in later years, said folks had enough of Mister Watson, said the execution had been planned, though not all knew it. Others claimed that was the first
Dad said, 'Only thing that ain't in doubt, they killed him.'
Harry McGill, who later married my sister Maggie Eva, he was among them men who fired. So was Charley Johnson. Old Man Dan House, Bill House, young Dan and Lloyd-them four never denied that they took part. I don't know who else for sure, cause too many of 'em changed their stories, but I heard it was men from almost all ten Chokoloskee families, along with a few fishermen on the way through. Isaac Yeomans, Andrew Wiggins, Saint Demere, Henry Smith-all them fellers might been in on it. They was at least twenty there with guns.
Nelson Noble's daughter Edith, married Sammie Hamilton, she always said her dad was in on it, but he sure wasn't. He was coming around the point with my young brother, like I said. They seen the finish. And others that said they was just there to arrest him, not to shoot him, said they never fired-well, they
A lot of people still ask me about Mister Watson. I don't like to speak about him much. I like to talk about him as a gentleman, because that's the way Storters remember him. I didn't know what was inside of him, I just knew him for a jolly friendly man.
Until all this killing started, Ed Watson was all right, wasn't nobody down on him. My dad always said Ed Watson'd give you his last dollar with his left hand, slit your throat with his right. You hear a lot of people saying that today. I can't recall if anybody said it while Mister Watson was alive, but he already had a reputation at the time I knew him.
Folks just got tired of him, I guess.
BILL HOUSE
My Nettie has read me from a famous Florida book where the man who fired the first shot at Watson was Luke Short, a white fisherman. That is dead wrong but about as right as all the rest. Same writer claimed that the leader of the posse, C.G. McKinney, got wounded when Watson fired. Well, Old Man McKinney wasn't leader of the posse, he wasn't even there, and the only man got wounded on that day was E.J. Watson.
All them stories in the books and magazines, they never mention who was on that posse, and that is because nobody would tell 'em. When strangers came around asking nosy questions, nobody would talk to 'em at all. Me, I don't know for a fact who pulled the trigger and who didn't, but from the look of him when they got done, very few hung back.
If Watson's gun had not misfired, my daddy would been deader'n a doornail. Knowing that, he turned his back on all that racket and just walked away. Some way he had busted a gallus and was holding up his trousers with an arm across his belly, walked soft and slow like he had a gut ache or was carrying new ducklings. I never forgot that way he walked, I never before seen my pap as an old man.
We followed him, though us boys wanted to stay, being so bad twisted up over the end of it. Dan was in tears, he was so mad, and didn't even know what he was mad at. The men who shot and the men who stood aside, they felt relief and they felt sick, too, because all of 'em had enjoyed Ed Watson and didn't have nothing personal against him-the most of us had known his generosity, one way and another. We tried to spit it up, over and over. But D.D. House never spoke of it again, and it went bad in him, turned him stiff and sour and old within the year.
When the crowd drifted back into the dark, and the dogs forgot why they was barking, Charlie T. Boggess hobbled down there with a lantern, helped Ted turn him turtle, drag a canvas over him. Smallwood tried to fold the arms across the chest, but ever so slow them arms opened up wide, like the two claws on a crab. Or that's how Charlie Boggess told about it, cause Charlie T., he made up for his short size with his tall stories. He was spooked by them slow-opening arms much worse than by that bloody eye, is what he would tell to visitors in later years, when everyone had forgot the truth, Charlie T. included.
Ted tried to close the blue eye that was left, but he come too late, the dead lid peeled right back off the gory eyeball. So they hunted around amongst the hurricane scraps spread through the bushes, found a boy's flag from the Fourth of July to lay across his face. Might been a sacrilege up North, who is to say. In the South it wasn't fifty years yet since the War Between the States, and D.D. House, who had rode off for a soldier, he never did get used to the Stars and Stripes.
Leaving a body out all night on the cold ground was bothersome. Didn't feel no guilt or nothing, just couldn't sleep with Watson laying down there by the water, so I went and paid my respects under the moon. Ted and Charlie aimed to drag him under cover but they didn't, and I went down with the same plan, didn't touch him neither. There was no place for him, he wasn't even welcome where he was. Dogs or boys had snapped away the tarp and tore that flag off him. I tucked him in again as you might say, then took my hat off and said, Mister Ed, I stand by what was done, but I want to say it sure weren't nothing personal.
One-eyed Ed Watson stared up at the stars, arms wide in welcome. Looked kind of strange with his black hat off, you didn't often catch him out without it. Hadn't been no rain at all, not since the hurricane, and the beard and mouth was caked with dust and blood, like a bear that's snuffled out a gator nest. In the lantern shine, that one bald eye was glaring through the black snakes of dry blood down his forehead. One of them little cowboy boots was shot away, and the other stripped off for a souvenir, and his small feet looked like gray-white dough, with yellow toenails. That broad tooled cowhide belt from the Wild West was missing, and that good black hat from Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Already kids was acting out how Bloody Watson fell, you could hear the yelling
That night it was agreed without no argument that there wouldn't be no burial on Chokoloskee, cause even dead, that man still scared the island. It was voted we would take him out to Rabbit Key. By the time we went to scrape him up, at sunrise, he'd lost his good eye to a crow or gull, or a poked stick.
In the hard daylight you could see how E.J. Watson was pretty well shot to pieces, mostly buckshot but plenty of bullets, too. Them nice clothes was black-caked with blood-Bloody Watson!-a stiff blind carcass in the dirt, shirt ripped, hairy belly-button, black pellets deep under the skin and all them mean red holes like bites, and the flies buzzing. The mouth in them sunburnt dusty whiskers was the worst of it. His front teeth all busted out, lip tore and stretched like he was snarling, but a little twist to his expression like a smile. Seeing that, the men scared themselves all over again, telling how Mister Watson grinned as he kept coming at the crowd through the hail of fire.
Looking around, I seen no sign of Edna Watson. My sister was making sure she didn't see him. 'Give us a hand,' I told the men, but only Tant stepped forward, who had took no part. Tant was tearful, might of had some drink. He took the ankles. Hoisting him, he give the opinion that dead men are heavy cause their bodies yearn for rest deep in the ground. Well, Tant, I said, he's full of lead, besides.
'It ain't no joking matter, Bill,' Tant says, because Tant loved him.
'No, it sure ain't,' I said.
A angry moan come from the burial party when we swung that bloody carcass to the gunwale. Wouldn't help hoist him over, lay him in the cockpit, wouldn't even touch him-as if touching him might be bad luck-though I reckon it was more some kind of horror. Some then announced they would not travel with him in the boat, you'd of thought one slow black drop of Watson's blood might could start a plague. We had to hear all this superstitious horseshit while we was still struggling to get him in.
