“I really have no recollection of my … of Mr. Watson, but Mama always said I had his hair.” She touched her auburn hair. “A strong and handsome man, they say! He didn’t have a potato face like mine!” She blushed at Lucius’s protest. “I’ve wished so often I could find his picture, to see if it matched the one in my mind’s eye, but no one in our family kept a photo of him, not even Mama!” Eager, still wary, she was sitting forward. “Do you have one, by any chance?” Told about the Collins picture, she shook her head. “I don’t suppose that I shall ever see it.”
“Nonnie?” Ad growled. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” She smiled at Ad briefly, out of kindness.
In two of her photos dim figures were grouped on the porch steps at Chatham Bend. The imposing man in black suit and black hat, central and dominant in both, was E. J. Watson, but the features were lost in the dark of the hat shadow. “That’s all I remember anymore—that shadowed face!” She giggled uneasily. “A memory of shadows!” Startled by that phrase, she took a great deep breath. “I will tell you everything I can recall,” she said. “Then we’ll be finished with it.”
“Mama’s mother died when she was twelve. A few years later, Grandfather Bethea and her new stepmother encouraged her to go to Mr. Watson. They wanted the grown daughter out of the house, so her own family encouraged her marriage. Mr. Watson had a fine house and plantation, and he came courting in a red buggy with a fine big horse. They were married in May of 1904, and I was born in Fort White in May of 1905.
“Mama’s half brother, William P. Bethea, is only a year or two older than I am, but he claims he remembers meeting Mr. Watson. He says that he liked Edgar Watson and so did all the rest of the Bethea family, he doesn’t recall a single adverse comment. My cousin Pearl McNair felt the same way.”
Ruth Ellen’s curiosity about her father had been intensified a few years earlier by a letter from her Cousin Pearl. When she said this, her brother lunged forward and seized the letter from her little table and shoved it at the Professor, creasing the paper. At his needless intrusion among her things, his clumsiness and ungovernable impulse, her brow knitted minutely but soon cleared again.
Dear Ruth Ellen—
I’m going to tell you a little bit about your father.
Before your mother married him, Mama and I went to see Grandpapa Bethea. The Burdetts lived on a sharecropper’s farm across the Fort White Road. Mr. Joe Burdett had a son and a daughter. Herkimer Burdett and Aunt Edna were childhood sweethearts. The Burdetts would come over and sing and play the organ, guitars, string instruments, etc., pull syrup candy. Fine times we enjoyed! We went to a Christmas tree, and Herkie gave all the kids a present. Mine was a bracelet with blue stones. While we were at Grandpapa’s a Mr. John Porter came by with his wife and little girl named “Duzzie.” What a name for a girl! She had a red dress on. The Porters met Mama and went back home and told Mr. Watson about Preacher Bethea’s widow daughter Lola McNair visiting. They carried him back to meet Mama, but we were about to leave for home. Your father saw Aunt Edna then, fell in love with her instead, and asked for her hand.
I do not know too much about your father but I do remember him. Mama went back there to tend her little sister so we were in your home when Addison was born. Your father had a big plantation, acres and acres of land near Fort White, Florida. I can tell you about the place. You were a baby then, walking but wobbly. My brother and I loved to take your hands and walk with you.
Jane Straughter was the cook. Your father gave your mother a mare named Charlie, gray color with black speckles, a very pretty little horse. A colored man named Frank would hitch up the horse and buggy for Aunt Edna. With you in my lap, we would drive to Mr. Edmunds’s General Store in Centerville, and toffee was always on the list!
Minnie Collins was your father’s sister, a beautiful lady. I dream of her house. It was a pretty place near your father’s place, a large mansion in those days in west Florida.
Mr. Watson wanted to take the whole Bethea family with him to the Ten Thousand Islands. Grandpapa’s wife Jessie did not want to go. Good thing she did not go, because the mosquitoes were so awful down in the Islands that they had to screen the cow stalls! But your father kept plenty of help and had two large boats. Those days men wore a gun belt and a revolver in a holster. Your father was a nice-looking man, tall and handsome. Your mother was treated like a Queen. No doubt your mother lived a romantic life, with lots of excitement. Those were the days! Ruth Ellen, I repeat so much. Take all mistakes for love always.
Pearl
On another occasion, Cousin Pearl had told Ruth Ellen that when she was a girl, a number of things happened that didn’t make sense to her at all. One day at Fort White, she was riding with Aunt Edna and Uncle Edgar in the buggy when Uncle Edgar stopped at a crossroad. He had very small feet, and he put on Edna’s shoes and went over to a fence corner and walked all around there making footprints. He would not explain it, just said it was a joke. Not long thereafter, they received word that Sam Tolen had been ambushed at that very spot.
In regard to her father’s role in the Tolen killings, Ruth Ellen said that her mother’s only comment was “He was found innocent.”
“Addison was born at Fort White in 1907, and Amy was born in Key West in 1910. Amy was a babe in arms when that terrible Hurricane of 1910 struck Chokoloskee. I was only five but I never forgot that night at the little schoolhouse. I was sitting on a bench, children were crying. Mama was crying, too, that’s how terrified we were. I asked her why she was crying and she couldn’t answer. But I can remember seeing that salt water rising several inches deep over the floor. The men were building a raft for the women and children, there was a lot of hammering, and Mama said, ‘Whatever happens, we will stay together.’ We went up the hill. Mr. Walter Alderman lugged me and Ad under each arm, Mama had Amy.
“That hurricane frightened poor Mama to death, she was scared of bad weather the whole rest of her life. And Mr. Watson died only a few days later. On her twenty-first birthday! The twenty-fourth of October was her birthday! And she felt so dreadful, knowing Mr. Watson had been killed because he came back just to be with her on that anniversary. Before he left Chokoloskee the last time, she begged him not to put his life in peril, she told him to go south to Key West while he had the chance. But Mr. Watson was too bold and willful, and he just smiled and kissed her, saying, ‘A promise is a promise.’ For the rest of her life, she would never celebrate her birthday again.
“Poor Mama was just terrified by the shooting, which sounded worse than the Great Hurricane, she said. It’s very scary when a crowd of men turns violent, that’s what she told me. All she could think of was getting her little ones out of those dark islands just as fast as she could go.”
Neither Edna Watson nor her children had ever laid eyes upon Rob Watson. Ruth Ellen had a dim memory of Eddie from her early childhood in Fort White, and thought she recalled Carrie Langford from the time when her family had rested one night at Fort Myers on the way north after her father’s death. However, she remembered Lucius well from her days on Chatham River. Here she blushed and fell silent, not ready yet to accept the author of the Florida history as her lost “Woo-shish.” To cover her confusion, she produced a photo of Carrie Langford and her husband, Walter, which was one of her mother’s few keepsakes from the old days. Carrie had been a few years older than her stepmother, Ruth Ellen said.
Lucius knew this photo well, though it had been years since he had seen it—his dark-haired and beautiful sister, with her pale skin, elegant nose, full mouth and bosom. Walter Langford, newly wed, with pale hair shining on both sides of a broad part, wore a wing collar and cravat. He looked handsome, affable, and ill at ease in a pale linen suit, much less than a match for his Miss Carrie, whose bold brows curved down around large eyes which betrayed that strange white crescent below the pupil.
“I always wondered if those Langfords gave us money for our trip north,” Ruth Ellen said, returning the photo to its precise place on her little tab
le, “because I know that Mama didn’t have a penny, and we received nothing from the sale of her husband’s property.”
“Nonnie?” Ad barked, going quite red in the face. “Nonnie?” He was speaking loudly, like a deaf man. Hadn’t Mama told them that Walter Langford sold off what was left of the property and sent the money to their family, and some of the good furniture, besides? “You said yourself that the money sent by Mr. Langford paid for Mama’s house when we came here to stay!”
“Goodness, dear, I suppose I did!” she said, adjusting the white collar on her blouse.
“That’s what you said,” Ad persisted, looking aggrieved. “And we had a piano, and Mama saw to it that you girls had piano lessons, because she herself could only play by ear. He’s after the truth here, Nonnie, not old family stories.” Beset by honesty, he became short of breath. “We have to keep things straight. And we know because Mama said so that her husband lost all his money—he owed every last penny to the lawyers—so maybe Langford was being kind to send us anything at all.” His voice thickened. “I guess we were kind of charity cases for a while.”
Embattled by her dogged brother, Ruth Ellen showed Lucius an old schoolbook, The History of Ancient Greece. An inscription on the flyleaf read, Edgar Watson, City. “That is our only sample of his handwriting. Apparently he cherished this old history, read it over and over, kept it all his life.” Lucius thought he recalled this book from Chatham Bend, and was mildly surprised that Edna had taken it when she fled north.
“ ‘City’ was Lake City,” Ruth Ellen said. “Mama told us Mr. Watson attended school in winter after coming to Florida. She said that because of the Civil War, there was never time for decent schooling in his boyhood.” She smiled a little. “Mama always called him Mr. Watson. Which is why I refer to him that way,” she added hurriedly.
After Mr. Watson’s death, her mother refused to discuss him with her father. She scarcely visited Fort White before going to her sister Lola in north Florida. Her brother Jack told Herkie Burdett, who followed her to north Florida and stayed and married her, and gave his name to her three little ones, “to spare us scandal. Mama and our new papa were married in November 1911 by the Reverend Sidney Catts, who later became governor of Florida, and they had a little boy together, Herkie Junior, whom we always thought of as our baby brother.
“Our new papa loved my mother very much and my mother loved him. We never heard a harsh word in that house, and we had a very peaceful upbringing. Herkie Junior grew up to be a housepainter like his father, and Ad did, too. We loved our new papa very, very much. But the day before my wedding, he called us together and told us we were not really Burdetts!
“We were bewildered, we felt lost, and our new Papa was distraught. We asked, ‘Who are we, then?’ I felt as if I were nobody at all! He asked if we wished to take his name, and we all cried out, ‘Oh, yes! We do!’ He adopted us legally that very day, so nobody could say a word in church against my wedding. And we never let on but that he was our father, because that is what Herkie Junior thought until one of his high school classmates let poor Herkie know he wasn’t one of us, and told him that our real name was Watson.” She sighed. “There’s always somebody who finds a way to let you know what you don’t need to hear.
“I just could not imagine a Ruth Ellen Watson! I had hardly any memory of Mr. Watson, so how could I think of him as my real father? Even today he is only that dark figure with the shadowed face.” She picked up the group photo and peered into it. “Mama said he was always very good to her, and very kind and loving with his children, and cousin Pearl always said the same, and her mother, too. Aunt Lola never got over how much time that busy man would spend in playing with his little babies—rather unusual for any man in those days!
“For years after we left Chokoloskee, Mama exchanged letters with Mamie Smallwood, who took us in that terrible day and was so kind to us. Later I exchanged letters with the older Smallwood daughters Wilma and Ernestine. When Ernestine was eleven—this was 1918—she sent a postcard showing Charlie Tigertail’s Indian trading post, way back up in Lost Man’s River in the Everglades!
“A few years ago when I visited Chokoloskee, Wilma showed me clippings—showed me terrible things that had been written about Mr. Watson. I didn’t ask to see them, she just showed them to me, I can’t think why. I don’t think Ernestine would have done that. Wilma was running the store by then, she never married. My husband and I could not help noticing how tightly she hung on to her purse, kept it right on her lap when she was eating, kept one hand on it. I guess the Smallwood family decided that Wilma was just the one to run the store!
“Anyway, I was horrified by those clippings, and later I asked Mama if Mr. Watson was the one who murdered our dear cook Hannah Smith, and those two white plantation hands, and Mama said, ‘No, honey, he did not. It was his foreman, a very handsome but cold-blooded young man named Leslie Cox.’ Just mentioning that name got her all nervous, and it seemed she was still deathly afraid of this man Cox, because nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Mama had asked Mr. Watson why he permitted a man like that on Chatham Bend. And Mr. Watson would not talk about it, he only said he was in Cox’s debt and felt obliged to take him in.
“Mama got so upset by our discussion that she jumped up from the kitchen table, spilling the peas. ‘That’s a closed chapter in my life, girl! I won’t hear another word about Leslie Cox, or Mr. Watson, either!’ She never mentioned those two names again. But I got the feeling it was Leslie Cox, not Mr. Watson, who had truly terrified her, whose very name she could not bear to hear.”
Asked by Addison if he knew Cox, Lucius told them how Leslie had turned up at the Bend in the late spring of 1910, and how he had never known much more about Leslie than he had picked up in the first five minutes. They were the same age, and he could have used a friend to hunt and fish with, but Leslie had no idea how to be a friend, he had to be in charge. He wasn’t fun to hunt and fish with because he wasn’t interested in wildlife or Indians or exploring back up in the Glades, all he cared about was shooting things and bringing back the meat. He stayed mostly half drunk, he liked to crowd people, he prowled around making mean remarks, poking up trouble. Anyway, he only lived there a few months before he committed the three murders which led directly to their father’s death.
Lucius explained that their mother had grown up with Leslie in Fort White, she’d gone to school with him. Knowing who he was, knowing his true nature, she lived in dread of him. She implored Lucius to keep an eye on Leslie at all times because Leslie was pestering her on the sly, complaining that “a man needed a woman,” and reporting how her husband was betraying her with a woman over on Pavilion Key. He was after poor Edna every time Mr. Watson turned his back, and meanwhile, his feud with another fugitive named Dutchy Melville was keeping everyone on edge.
After all that had happened at Fort White, poor Edna was so scared of more violence that she dared not tell her husband about Cox. Every chance she had, in that last hot summer, she had taken her children and gone to stay with friends in Chokoloskee. When her husband protested, she told him that the Bend was bad for little Amy’s health.
“That September, I left Chatham River to fish out of Caxambas,” Lucius told them. “Your mother took you children away soon after that, and a few weeks later, all hell broke loose, just as she feared. How Papa could let things get so out of hand, I’ll never know.”
“So those three killings were all Cox’s fault. Your father … Mr. Watson … he was not to blame.”
“Not as far as I know.” And then he blurted, “Not as far as I want to know, might be more like it.” Later he regretted saying such a thing, which told less about his father than about himself.
Ruth Ellen was anxious to change the subject. “When the goldenrod bloomed, Mama would take hay fever, so finally we all moved south to Neamathla.” She smiled at her brother, who nodded sullenly in affirmation. “My sister Amy would become a teacher. At one time Amy worked in Lakeland, and the woman who ra
n her boardinghouse was a daughter of one of the House men who led the crowd which killed her father. She was actually bragging about what happened, telling poor Amy dreadful, dreadful tales. I guess that woman had to justify what those men did, but for poor Amy, it was terrifying. To this day, the poor thing cannot bear to hear one thing about her father, and her children know nothing about him. She told them their grandfather died of a heart attack!”
Ruth Ellen looked around as if hearing someone slip into the room, and when she spoke, she lowered her gentle voice to a near-whisper. “Come to think of it, I do remember something from Chatham Bend! I remember that my father hitched a dog to a little red wagon and trained him to pull our little boy, and the wagon tipped over, and Little Ad got scared and cried and cried. I can still hear his voice through all these years! He was only three!”
She gazed fondly at Little Ad, who was staring at the wall. “That’s what Papa Burdett called Ad before he got so big! Little Ad was the first one in our family who went down south to learn the truth about our father.”
“Had some time to kill,” Addison grumped. “But ‘Little Ad’ never cared about all that, not the way you did.”
She stared at him, astounded. “Didn’t care? You went all the way down to Chatham Bend all by yourself!”
“That’s not his business!” Ad Burdett shouted. Pointing at Lucius, he lurched to his feet, hands working, his big gray face so furrowed and menacing that Lucius stood up, too. “How do we know what you’re going to write?” Ad shouted. “Why should we trust you?”
“Please stop shouting! This is Lucius!” cried his sister, speaking this name for the first time. “You must be more careful how you speak, dear!”
“ ‘It’s a closed chapter in my life’—that’s what Mama always said! Let’s leave it closed!”
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