“Something’s after ’em, that’s all. Coming up from underneath.”
“Hush,” she murmured. “Watch.”
Hand on her shoulder, I watched with her, indifferent to this everyday sight but content in our shared sadness. The children, worried, came out on the screened porch. Sensing something, they observed us but they did not call. At last she offered her pale hand and I half lifted her onto the dock. She did not explain her sudden dread and said it was not serious but I knew she’d had some sort of premonition.
Mandy seemed to waste away, perishing from the inside out like a hollow tree. Finally I took her to Fort Myers and put her in the care of Dr. Langford, who lived in a big house near the river between Bay and First Streets. Carrie went along to tend her and the younger boys followed in late summer and stayed on for the school year. The only one left at Chatham Bend was Sonborn.
One gray day, feeling a hollow stillness back in the mangroves, I went ashore at Possum Key to see how that mean old man was getting on. He had not answered when I hailed the cabin and so I was not overly surprised when at the door I was met by the smell of death. Then I saw the long white whiskers in the shadows, the small paws in the air above the chest. The Frenchman lay stiff as a poisoned rat. I removed my hat.
I dug his grave in the soft soil of his garden. Putting rags over my hands, I returned into the cabin and lifted the light bundle in its mildewed blanket and carried him like a smelly little bride over the doorsill and out into the sun. Sinking to my knees, I lowered him into the earth, remaining there a few moments out of respect. As an unbeliever, I had no prayer to give, and anyway, no prayer could bless this ferocious God-hater in the hereafter or anywhere else.
“Le Baron Jean de Chevelier.” In that great quiet, with the swamp forest listening, I tried to pronounce his name in French the way Mandy had taught me. I had nothing else to offer by way of earthly witness. I had pitied him a little, yes, toward the end, but I had never liked him much and would not miss him.
Quock! The tearing squawk of a flared heron overhead startled me badly; I never saw the bird, only its shadow. Msyoo had loved birds better than people: his grim crier had come. In the next moment, on a limb, I saw a young owl, all woolly with astounded eyes, that must have attended the burial; it did not fly off into the wood until I’d finished spading the black soil into the pit. These odd birds spooked me a little, I must admit.
Before some hunter came by and stripped the cabin clean, I poked around for excavated treasures but was able to depart with a clear conscience, having been tempted by nothing in the place. At the boat, I ran afoul of two young Hardens come to clean and feed him; knowing how much that old man had detested E. J. Watson, these boys were shocked to see me. When I told them Msyoo Chevelier was dead, young Earl glanced at his brother, growing scared, and I knew right then that no matter what I said, Ed Watson would be blamed for the Frenchman’s death.
THE GREAT CALUSA CLAM BED
In his theory about the great Calusa clam bed, the Frenchman had tried to distract me from whatever he was up to back on Gopher Key. Even so, his guess was correct. Coming up the coast one day at dead low water, I eased myself barefoot over the side. Right away my feet located hard shapes under the sand: upright clam valves in what proved to be a clam bed close to a mile wide—I mapped it out—extending almost six miles north from Pavilion Key. This was exciting. Establishing a clam fishery so close to home where I could keep an eye on things might finance my whole operation. I would stake a claim and form a company as soon as my harvest was finished in late winter.
At this time, young Bill House was working upriver from the Bend on his dad’s new plantation at House Hammock. For a year or two, he had collected rare bird eggs for the Frenchman, and old Jean must have mentioned his clam cannery idea to decoy that boy away from Gopher Key, because one day I came by House Hammock and found Bill constructing a crude dredge. What’s that for? I inquired. Bird eggs? When he grinned sheepishly but said nothing, I changed the subject quick: knowing this young House for a slow mover, I was not discouraged. I sailed to Marco the next day and confided my great discovery to Bill Collier, inviting him to join me as a partner. This man had been unusually successful in his business enterprises and had the experience and capital I lacked. To my surprise, Collier seemed skeptical of the whole proposition, even when I mentioned my clam-dredge idea. I would have to find a partner or at least a backer among my business acquaintances in Fort Myers.
My friend Nap Broward had made his name by smuggling contraband arms to the Cuban rebels and was urging me to use the Gladiator in this night business. Broward was anxious to avenge his friend José Martí, who had been shamed into returning to Cuba by fellow rebels; claiming he did too much talking, not enough fighting, his own men got that little feller killed when he tried to prove them wrong. In the end my ill wife persuaded me to avoid such a reckless venture. After so many long hard years of separation, we should cherish this precious time, she said.
Very weak, Mandy gazed into my eyes in a shy way that told me she knew she would not live much longer and warned me to be careful for the children’s sake. She showed me a Copley print called Watson and the Shark, which portrayed a man fallen out of a longboat who was being seized by a huge shark in Havana Harbor. “I think you’d better stay away from Cuba!” Mandy said. The doomed Watson was a soft, pale, naked fellow, wallowing helplessly in the shark’s jaws and rolling his eyes to the high heavens, and the only crewman trying to save him was the one black man. “Well,” I laughed, “it’s a damned good thing that Watson feller had his nigger with him!”
“I imagine you mean ‘nigra.’ ”
“Yes’m, I do.” And that was true. I did. I had spoken carelessly.
Mandy had never accepted my excuses—that that word’s use was just a careless way of saying “nigra” and that nigras often used it, too. Good black people, she said, used “black folks”: “nigger” was somebody shiftless, “no account,” even disgraceful. I wasn’t so sure, though. I guess I would go along with that most of the time. Some say “coloreds,” ladies preferred “darkies.” If you were black, she reminded me, every last one of these white man names would be insulting, wasn’t that true? They were just dark-skinned human beings. They were people. This whole race business distressed Mandy very much. She felt that Emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction—all of that loss and suffering—had come to nothing, and that our great national disease remained uncured.
1898
In July of 1898, our Carrie would marry Doc Langford’s son, a handsome young fellow who lived in his father’s household and had plenty of opportunities to pull the wool over the eyes of my young daughter. Carrie imagined she loved him, of course, and the Langfords loved Carrie, but I believe their main ambition was to settle Walter down. Because Doc Langford was my business partner or at least a backer, and because that family had been so hospitable to my own, I felt obliged to go along.
Young Langford had worked as a cow hunter in the Big Cypress. Every Saturday his hell-and-high-water bunch rode into town, drank up their pay at the saloon, and rode out again half dead late Sunday; they rounded up scrub cattle the rest of the week to pay for another Saturday of raising hell. Walt decided he was through with those wild Saturdays and would now make something of himself for Carrie’s sake. He still had his bad drinking bouts from time to time, but instead of shooting up the town, he would go down to the Hill House Hotel, turn his gun in, rent a room, and pay the colored man to bring him moonshine. The man would keep him locked up with his jug until he had drunk himself stone stiff and sick and blind. With his craving for liquor worn out of his system, he would crawl home, gagging at the merest whiff of spirits for the next six months.
I had known this young feller for some years and liked him well enough, but I was not delighted by this match, which had been brokered by the Langfords’ friend Jim Cole. At thirteen, Carrie seemed too young, I could not fool myself, so my dealings with Cole and Walter’s family compro
mised what I thought of as my principles, which were already in trouble. To make myself feel better, I arranged a formal meeting with the bridegroom in which I might lay out a father’s thoughts on honeymoon etiquette.
At Hendry House, we sat down over a brandy. Unfortunately we had two or three before I warned Walt kind of abruptly against getting drunk and taking my thirteen-year-old by force—against taking her at all, in fact, said I, raising my voice, “until she was damn well good and ready, hear me, boy?”
Young Walt took my friendly counsel as an insult to his honor as a Southern gentleman, which had never been questioned before now. Though he struggled to contain his anger, he finally burst out, “Well now, Mr. Watson, sir, if she is too young, then why do you permit this marriage in the first place?” But we both knew why and we both knew better than to speak about it since it was unspeakable. Nevertheless, he was red in the face with brandy and embarrassment, and very much resented the insinuation that he might ravish a young lady with no more control over his lower instincts than one of those black devils excoriated by Pitchfork Ben in the last election.
The young man’s anger in a public place triggered my own. “I am not insinuating, sir,” I interrupted. “I am stating a well-known fact about men’s lust, a fact as plain as the red nose on your face.” To which he retorted hotly that the bride’s father had no right—with all due respect, sir—to instruct another man about how to comport himself with his own wife when her father had approved the marriage for financial considerations: should that father make the bridegroom pay for his own shame?
That was the first time and the last that Walter Langford ever dared to stand up to me in such a way. I let the silence fall until he sobered and had started to apologize, then raised my hand and cut him off rather than witness the underlying weakness in this young man that I’d suspected all along. Also—aware I’d gone too far—I had to get my own outrage under control. True, I resumed after a long pause, I had let my daughter go in deference to fiscal circumstances and had therefore given up my right to dictate terms: I’d only felt obliged to speak out as I had because of the groom’s well-known habit of excessive drink.
I was speaking softly now, inspecting a farmer’s broken fingernails. Walter awaited me, very uneasy. Was I apologizing or was I insulting him again? When I raised my eyes, he shifted in his seat. “But right or no right, boy,” I growled, unreasonably angry of a sudden and letting it all go, “let me say this: you will answer to me and you will regret it dearly if you fail to protect my daughter from all that is coarse and ugly in yourself.”
Walter was licked. In a hushed voice, he swore that he loved his bride-to-be with all his heart and he vowed to be very gentle. Since my first grandchild would not be born until five years later, the young man may have been gentle to a fault.
Despite the cautionary spite of thin-mouthed old Aunt Etta, whose very breath carried a hint of constipation, the Langfords welcomed our lively Carrie and her parents, too, at least at first: once our little frontier family had been fitted with uncomfortable town clothes, we became fashionable by Fort Myers standards, thanks to Mandy’s elegance and quiet manners, and were often included in the Langfords’ social gatherings. One evening we were introduced to “America’s Electrical Wizard,” Thomas Edison, who had built his grand Seminole Lodge on land overlooking the river and would later invite his friend Henry Ford to admire the property. Though her parents never had that privilege, my daughter would meet the great automaker when he visited the Edisons, who also expected a visit any year now from their friend Sam Clemens. “Mark Twain, dear!” Aunt Etta instructed Mandy, who had probably read more of Twain’s damned books than the total of those read by every Langford in the state of Florida. Mandy dearly hoped that she might live long enough to behold her hero, if only from afar, but that was our secret. She forbade me to say any such thing to anybody.
Back in ’93, Tom Edison’s General Electric Company had failed in the Great Depression, which had also propelled Edgefield’s one-eyed Ben Tillman into the Senate seat of my father’s old nemesis, General Calbraith Butler. Pitchfork Ben would rage that Mr. Edison had been bailed out by the bankers, and that, unlike his hungry workers, he had been inconvenienced not at all in his rich way of life, to judge from his opulent winter retreat in sunny Florida.
That a great American industry might be bankrupted and a great American spat upon by agitators had alarmed our self-styled “cattle capitalists,” who denounced Senator Tillman as the devil incarnate. Because I could speak knowledgeably of the Edgefield County Tillmans, the Langfords and Jim Cole introduced me at a meeting of their business club, to which I held forth over coffee and cigars. From Walter, Carrie would gather and report that her daddy was considered “very smart, humoristical, and lively.”
As for me, I enjoyed being included in discussions of the epochal economic changes taking place in America at the approach of the new century, especially since all these men might be so useful in my future plans. I addressed them, of course, as a stern supporter of the capitalist system, since I aimed to become a capitalist myself, but privately I had to agree with Mandy—who was better educated and a good deal brighter than anybody in our business circle—that Tillman, for all his opportunism and ugly speech, led the one political party as yet uncorrupted by the corporations. “Give him time,” I sighed.
In the winter of 1898—officially, at least—the Spaniards sank the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. (Broward, back from Cuba, confided that our government was quite aware that our battleship had exploded by mistake, without Spanish assistance, but as a businessman I knew much better than to be the bearer of unpatriotic news.) The war with Spain was quickly under way as Admiral Dewey steamed halfway around the world to destroy the rickety Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and was just as quickly finished four months later—in short, a “splendid little war” as it was called by our splendid little secretary of state, who like most patriotic politicians sending young soldiers off to battle had never in his life seen red blood spilled nor heard a terrified young human being scream in agony.
In Mandy’s view, Mr. T. Roosevelt, the myopic Yankee in charge of our Cuba expedition, might be making up for a sickly childhood with his noisy brandishing of flags and guns and cavalry charges up San Juan Hill; she detested his vision of Americans as a “masterful” people whose God-given duty was to bring our superior civilization to the darker breeds. In fact, our nation’s imperial ambitions distressed my failing wife so sorely that I dared not confess to her how right and sensible they seemed to me. After all—as the newspapers kept reminding us—the nations of Europe were establishing huge colonies in Africa and Asia and the U.S.A. would do well to grab its share of colonial territories and resources while the grabbing was good, wasn’t that true? (As it turned out, all our far-sighted leaders were grabbing was hind tit and Spanish thorns.)
In early June, a month before Carrie’s wedding, the U.S. troops—66,000 restless men, including black conscripts and the pudgy Mr. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—disembarked right up the coast at Tampa Bay. Already the black soldiers were offending the good citizens, complained the Tampa Tribune, in an editorial I read out loud to amuse my wife. “A number of disturbances resulted, the most serious when black troops objected to white soldiers from Ohio target-shooting at a black youngster. A riot ensued, injuring twenty-seven persons. . . . It is indeed very humiliating to American citizens and especially to the people of Tampa to be compelled to submit to the insults and mendacity perpetrated by the colored troops.”
“Oh, do stop! Please, Edgar.” Pins in her mouth, Mandy was basting Carrie’s wedding dress. The editorial had upset her so that she pricked her finger and a round red dot had blossomed on the creamy satin, and because she had not noticed the red dot, no cold water was quickly applied to remove the stain. “I don’t know which is worse,” she fussed, “those Ohio soldiers shooting at that child or that cruel, hypocritical editorial.” She looked up. “Or my own husband finding that story amusing—”
“No, no, I was smiling at what follows!” I lied, in need of my ill wife’s good opinion. Hastily I read to her a feverish account of the hordes of soldiers rampaging through Tampa’s bars and brothels, the drinking and wreckage and the shooting at the ceiling that had punctured the left but-tock of an unlucky prostitute as she plied her trade upstairs. “First casualty of our splendid little war, I reckon.” I frowned hard to hide my chuckle in a fit of coughing, ashamed because the mention of whores’ buttocks had reminded me of how long it had been since we’d made love.
“It can’t have been funny for that young woman, Edgar Watson!” Mandy cried, with more vigor than she’d shown in months. “What the heck’s the matter with us, anyway? Maybe we should all be shot in our white buttocks, give us something to think about besides blood profit and our own darn meanness!” Sucking her pricked finger, she had taken up the newspaper to make sure I wasn’t joking. Mandy was by no means humor-less but she detested human cruelty in small matters as well as large, including this whole business of imperial ambitions and race prejudice, which in talking to Lucius she had said “still casts its shadow on the face of our new country.”
The Spanish War was a great boon to our Lee County patriots, in particular the ranchers, whose cow hunters were out beating the scrub for every head of beef they could lay a rope on. These scrags were herded to Jake Summerlin’s corrals at Punta Rassa and shipped off to the U.S. troops in Cuba for what our small-bore capitalists might call “a tidy profit” and what more honest folks would call a goddamn hog killing.
Naturally I felt patriotic, too, since in its modest way my syrup industry was prospering. Mostly I traded at Tampa Bay, which had been dredged for coastal shipping and was soon to be accessible by railroad, and mostly I stayed at the Tampa Bay Hotel under curlicue arches and birthday-cake minarets that made the place look like a five-hundred-room whorehouse near the Pearly Gates. I wanted to take Mandy to Tampa to see the sights and attend a concert and do some fancy shopping, but by the time I finally got her there, she was too weak to enjoy it and I brought her home.
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