Killing Mister Watson

by Peter Matthiessen

  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 León, 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 the nosiest damn man I ever come across. But he would loot them graves first thing, because some way he was starved by life, and greedy, and here was maybe his last chance at fame and fortune. I was watching him as close as he watched me, and I seen his crippled hand twitch while he spoke.

  "Well," say I, "one day I was out des-ecrating with my oldest boy, had ten-twelve pretty skulls lined up on a log, airing out, y'know. Chip the crown off for your ashtray, rig the head for your cigars. For a human humidor you just can't beat it." I hum a little, taking my time. "Them redskin skulls done up artistic for the tourist trade will bring you some nice spot cash down to Key West."

  He is really staring. "Commaung?" he says. These Frenchmen say "Come on!" like it's a question-Com-maung?

  "Yessir. One them skulls had a hole conched into it, and I give that one to my boy, and he stuck a buzzard feather in there, looked real pretty." I let him sit with that one for a minute.

  He says in a funny voice, "Where this place was?" He couldn't take the chance I might be fooling.

  "Nosir," I says, "I wouldn't let on to my worst enemy about that place!" and I drop my voice right down to a whisper and touch knees. "Cause when we lined them skulls up, put the feather in, why, all of a sudden, them trees went silent on us! That silence was so silent it was ringing!" I set there and nod at him awhile. "Yessir, we was plenty scared, and we got out of there, and we ain't never been back. Left them twelve skulls lined up on that log grinning good-bye. Cause that ringing silence, know what that was? That was the venging spirits of Calusa Indins!"

  Then I show him my Indin face, refusing to answer any questions for his own damn good, and he had to accept that out of his great respect for the noble redskin. He went away, shaking his head over the idea that a Indin could desecrate Indin graves, and bound and determined to do some desecrating on his own. I knowed just the mound the Frenchman wanted, and after that day, until he died, one of my kids was generally his guide, to keep him headed off the scent, keep him away from there as best we could.

  Every one of these small creeks and canals had some kind of small shell mound at the head of it, he could hack his way into a hundred and not hit the right one. But south and west of Possum Key, well hid from the world in all them miles of mangrove, was a big old clamshell mound called Gopher Key, had a Calusa-built canal we called Sim's Creek that led straight out to the Gulf of Mexico. Don't know too much about ol' Sim, might been one them misfits from the Civil War hid out back up there on that key, took plenty of gopher tortoise for his dinner. Gopher Key weren't the place Chevelier was after, but it give him enough shell to dig the whole rest of his life.

  Anyway, we took him over there to keep him busy. He got excited when he seen how well hid it was, and that long and straight canal built out of shell was his sure sign that Gopher Key must be a sacred place. For some years, the poor furious little feller was back in there digging white shell every chance he got. Heat was terrible, and the skeeters bit him up so bad he didn't have no French blood left in his old carcass. My boy Walter-that's the dark one-Walter said, Time those skeeters finished with him, that Frenchman would of lost all that French blood, he'd talk American just as good as we did.

  Speaking of blood, my grandfather was real pure-blood Spanish Indin, didn't want a thing to do with the Muskogee and Mikasuki Creeks-the Seminoles-that was taking over his Calusa country. But finally he understood what Chief Tecumseh warned us, that if Indin people didn't put away our feuds and fight the whites all in a bunch, there wouldn't be n
o land left to fight over. Sure enough, the white men lied and broke all their agreements. Here in Florida, they aimed to pen up any Indin they hadn't killed, ship that redskin sonofabitch to Oklahoma.

  So Chekaika took some Spanish Indins and Mikasukis and went up the Calusa Hatchee and licked Lieutenant Colonel William Harney and his soldiers that was setting up the trading posts in Indin territory. Yup, Chekaika run Old Harney off into the bushes in his underwear, which were not forgiven and were not forgot. Chief Billy Bowlegs was a young man then, he was in on that one. After that, Chekaika took seventeen dugouts down around Cape Sable and over to the Keys, went to the Port of Entry on Indin Key, killed Dr. Henry Perrine, the famous botanist, and caused a uproar. People called it a massacre, but this Dr. Perrine had been recommending a canal to drain Cape Sable, in Calusa territory, they leave out that part.

  From Indin Key Chekaika went back to Pavioni, but he figured the Army knew about them gardens, and Pavioni'd be the first place they'd come looking, so he took his people and went up Shark River to a big hammock maybe forty miles from the east coast. Shark River in them days was called Chok-ti Hatchee, the Long River, cause it was the main river of the Everglades, flowed all the way south from the Big Water, Okee-chobee. Not knowing about "Chok-ti," the white people figured them dumb Indins was trying to say "Shark," and that was that.

  One afternoon he showed my mam the beautiful swallow-tail hawk, kiting back and forth across the trees. Ton-sa-be, he said, very slow and careful, so his little daughter would remember it forever, the sun and the bird and the shining water-grass west of the hammock. Tonsabe. That word come rumbling out of him like a voice out of the earth. He told her how, seen from above, that bird's wings reflected the sky blue, but only God could see it from above, so tonsabe was God's bird, sent to watch over us.

  Some of them whiskey Seminoles took dirty money to scout out Chief Chekaika's camp, and the Army sent Harney in pursuit out of Fort Dallas, on the Miami River. Took him by surprise on his home hammock. My mam and some others run off into the reeds, but her father was shot, and they strung him up before he finished dying. His people crept back in under the moonlight a day later, seen him hanging in the shadows of that big madeira, turning and turning. They took him down and buried him Indin way.

  Mikasukis call that hammock Hanging Place, and they claim Chekaika for a Mikasuki, although he were Calusa to the bone. Chekaika was the biggest man in the People's memory, them Mikasukis will say the same even today. Some Mikasukis claim Chief Osceola, too, though Osceola was half-breed Muskogee Creek. Them poor Indins are desperate, I imagine.

  After Harney got revenge on Chief Chekaika, he went on west across the Glades, come out at what they now call Harney River. The white people said he was the first to cross the Glades; Indins don't count, of course, and never did. After that he went out West, killed a bunch of Sioux. Made ol' Harney a general for that one, but he never got to be president like Andy Jackson and Zach Taylor and the rest of them Indin-fighters we had down here, cause us red fellers whipped Bill Harney's ass from start to finish.

  The spring after Chekaika's death, the few warriors left put out word at the Green Corn Dance that any Indin seen talking to a white man would be killed, and they kept on hiding for another twenty years, till the whites got sick of getting licked and went off to fight their civil war instead.

  The Florida Wars was the only Indin wars the U.S. Army never won, had to trick and bribe and steal to get the job done, get one Indin fighting with another. Finally they got to Billy Bowlegs, who had started out with Chekaika on the Calusa Hatchee. Took Old Billy over there to Washington, D.C., give him the name Mr. William B. Legs, snuck him into some upstanding hotel where no durn greasy redskins was allowed. A few years after that, they made him rich, and Billy took his people west, out to the Territory.

  Before Harney lit out for the Wild West-Chevelier told me this-that sonofagun was recommending the drainage of the Everglades, same as Dr. Perrine. Recommended the ruin of south Florida is what it was, though it took 'em up till the new century to get around to it.

  My mam went west to Wewoka, Oklahoma, with Billy Bowlegs's people from Deep Lake, signed right up with the Catholic mission so's to get her kids a bite to eat. I was out there in the Indin Territory all through my youngerhood. Later I went for a soldier in the Union Army, whole cavalry regiment of breeds and nigras slapping leather and raping and carousing all over the Territory and beyond. Some of them men was half-red and half-black, come down from strong slaves that run off across the wilderness and were taken in by Indins who prized their bravery, and they was the biggest, strongest men I ever saw. Indins called us buffalo soldiers cause the darker ones was buffalo color, with the same dark woolly nap. Indin women who seen us coming would lay down quick and throw sand up inside theirselves to take the fight out of us boys, y'know, unless we got a lasso onto 'em first. That was part of the game, and seems like they had as much fun as what we did. Most of 'em, anyways.

  Today I might be a little ashamed that I took up arms against my own Indin people, but in soldiering days, I didn't see them western tribes as people. Them lonely plains wasn't our country, and anyway, your Kioways and Comanches and Pawnees and whatnot weren't nothing but bare-ass renegades, couldn't make out a single word we said.

  It was only later I got talking to an old medicine man, a Creek, and he asks me where I was born and bred, and I tell him Florida, and he says, How come you ain't standing on the land? Took me a while to see what he meant, Indin way, and then I seen it, and I run off from the buffalo soldiers and started working my way back south and east to the Land of Florida. Last thing I heard, the Union was still after me, but that was a long time ago. I was what you might call a deserter, and I been deserting ever since, least when it comes to white men and their ways.

  There were three good reasons I come home. The Indins here-wild Mikasukis hiding back there in the Cypress-were still real Indins that never surrendered to the missions, never mind the Union. Also, the Islands was a sacred place of the Calusa homeland. Also, Chekaika lived at Pavioni before he retreated back into Long River, so Pavioni was as close to home as I could get.

  Long about 1875, I threw in with William Allen, who was the first pioneer down in the Islands. Settled on Haiti Potato Creek-Haiti potato, that's cassava, so the Frenchman taught me-and changed the name to Allen's River. Kept that name right up until the nineties, when the Storter family changed the name to Everglade. I was never a man to be scared off by hard work, and things went along real amiable with my feller pioneers until I got close to Mary Weeks, at Chokoloskee Island, down the Bay.

  Chukko-liskee, way the Indins say it, means "old house"-old Calusa house, I reckon, because Cypress Indins wasn't there in early times. Nobody remembered no old house, but the Frenchman figured it must of been some kind of temple. That big mound is back in there where Turner River comes down from the Glades with good fresh water-Turner River was once Chukko-liskee Creek-and it's well sheltered by five miles of outer islands. The settlements at Everglade and Half Way Creek was only mud bank, had their feet in water, but Chokoloskee Island is a shell mound of one hundred fifty acres, some of it twenty foot above the sea. Them Indins knew what they were up to, they'd never be washed off Old House Key, not by no hurricane.

  My father-in-law, Old Man John Weeks, pioneered truck farming down at Cape Sable in the Civil War, moved up to Haiti Potato Creek, moved around the Islands. He come full circle, washed ashore at Cape Sable once again before he died. This stumpy feller was the first to settle Chokoloskee Island. Pretty soon he sold off half the island to the Santinis, and after that Old Man Ludis Jenkins-Tant Jenkins's daddy-come in there with his Daniels woman and her Daniels children. One of them Daniels girls was later spoken for by Nicholas Santini and the other one was Henry Thompson's mother.

  Old Man John Weeks, he passed for white, he had his honor there to think about, but it took me a while to figure out white people's attitudes. If I was a Choctaw, like I said, then I was a "goo
d Indin." And if I was mulatta, like they claimed, then I was a free man, a free citizen. But this was 1876, right at the end of the Reconstruction, when the Rebs got things turned back their way all over the South, and life got uglier than it was already for people wasn't pink enough to suit 'em. So these crackers decide to protect their womenfolk and run this dang Choctaw right out of the settlement, maybe tar and feather him while they was at it. You ever seen a man in tar and feathers?

  Well, I left quick, but I took Mary Weeks right along with me. We headed south, down the Ten Thousand Islands, all the way to the Calusa mound at Pavioni.

  Folks never bothered us in them first years. It was only after Watson come, and mounds got scarce, and the Bay men was drifting farther south to find good fishing, that they began to take a different attitude. They was even friendly when I went up there to do my trading, once they seen I wasn't showing off my woman. They had her figured for a tramp that run off with a brown boy, and just so long as I didn't brag on it by showing her off before God-fearing citizens, why then it was not the nigger's fault, is the way they said it. Cause when it comes to white women, they'd say, a nigger just can't help hisself. Being a animal at heart, the poor devil just goes all to pieces.

  Now that don't hardly mean that dingy rascal won't get gelded, burned, and lynched, cause they's only so much of his deviltry that decent Christian folks is going to tolerate. But so long as he respects their religious feelings, the way I done, and takes his low-life slut-that's what they called her!-and lives with the runaways and desperados, way out to hell and gone in them dark Islands where only the Devil is witness to their sacrilege-well, then, by Jesus, live and let live, ain't that right, boys? Let the Blessed Lord Above take care of His own sinners, cast 'em straight down to perdition on the Day of Judgment.

  Some of them gray summers in the Islands when that rain never stopped, and children crying, and nothing for days and days and days but mud and hunger and bad skeeters, in a hellish steam wet and thick enough to stifle a dang frog-them long gray summers in that heat made a man half wonder if Judgment Day wasn't arrived already.