"Good thing you ain't smiling, girl," Grandma Ida said, with one of her big sniffs, to make sure this Mr. E.J. Watson heard her good. No, I wasn't smiling, I was vexed, cause this bold man was treating us like a bunch of ninnies. Mister Watson seen I seen this, and his gaze held me, them chestnut brows and blue eyes of soft stone. Mamie Smallwood and her brothers were not liable to forget about those Tuckers and he knew it, he knew what he was up against with our House family. And so he gave me that quick wink, the kind of wink made all our hopes and struggles in this world seem kind of silly, due to our sinful foolishness and greed. I bit my lip so as not to giggle, I pretended I never even seen it, because nothing mattered, according to that wink. It didn't matter that our mortal days were bloodsoaked, cruel, and empty, with nothing at the end but disease and darkness.
Mister Watson sighed and said how homesick he had got for fresh palm heart and oyster-flavored pork at Chatham Bend, and how fine it felt to be back home in the Islands.
All the while young Mrs. Watson smiled politely, though she never left off murmuring to her baby. She had nice manners by our local standard, but she was tuckered out, looked a bit peaked. As the poor thing had a babe in arms and another on the way, Ted whispered it was only fitting to put 'em up in our house for the night. I didn't want to but I had to. Besides Laura Wiggins, nobody else had a spare room to put 'em in, on account of we had planned our house for children. Also-I might's well admit it-I didn't want just anybody claiming Mister Watson, who was Ted's friend before he ever knew most of these others.
Aunt Lovie Lopez-Penelope Daniels she was, married Gregorio-Aunt Lovie was jealous, and she could not hide it. She said, What? You aiming to take a desperader in your house with two helpless little children? She meant Thelma and Marguerite, cause Robert and the youngers wasn't born yet. Ain't you afraid? Aunt Lovie said.
I was afraid, all right, but my man weren't, and that was good enough for me, I said. Wouldn't be near to good enough for me, Aunt Lovie said, and they don't come no meaner'n my husband.
Gregorio Lopez, he come with the bark on, he was rough. Course you had to be mean if you was a Spaniard, back in them grand patriotic days. From Injun times, Spaniards wasn't popular in Florida, nor Cubans neither, and that is about the only thing ain't going to change.
That evening Mister Watson gave us all the news of Columbia County, where the Smallwoods came from. Columbia always were a bond between them. Mrs. Watson told me all about the fine new farmhouse he had built up near Fort White, how he got that land producing again after years of ruin, and how he aimed to do the same at Chatham Bend. She confided she was native born there in Columbia, said she knew about the blame was laid on Mister Watson in his youth due to his hellfire temper, as she called it. If she knew his evil reputation here, she did not let on. She was out to redeem him, it was plain to see, she had made that her holy mission in this life, she was real wide-eyed and serious about it.
Kate Edna Bethea, she was. He called her Kate, but that name was for him. All the rest of us that came to love her called her Edna.
"He's got him a feud going in Columbia," Ted whispered when he came to bed that night.
"That why he got so homesick for these parts?" Ted reached across and put his hand over my mouth, because Watsons was just the other side of a slat wall. I was irked that Ted was so impressed by Mister Watson, so proud about having a killer for a friend, though he wouldn't admit that in a month of Sundays. Saying nothing, I just lay there in the dark, hearing the south wind toss the palms, the hard little waves lick at the landing. I had this intrusion in my heart, as if something bad was growing through the wall from the other room. Ted was restless as a deaf old dog, puffing and twitching. I'd be darned if I would show my curiosity, knowing he was waiting for that across the dark. Finally he muttered, "Family trouble. Couple bad actors name of Tolen. Watson come back down here to cool off."
"Cooled them off, too? Or are they still alive?"
"Still alive, I figure."
There was something eager in my man's voice I didn't want to hear. I picked it up every time he told them stories of the mayhem he had seen up around Arcadia or over to the east coast, Lemon City. Being a peaceable good man who hated fighting, he was kind of bewitched by men of violence, of which we had plenty down around south Florida back in frontier days. Most of our Chokoloskee men were gentle, though you'd never know it, with their old torn clothes, dusty bare feet, and beards. For all their men's talk, they were little boys awed by bad actors, same way Ted was.
"Why did he tell you about that?" I whispered back after a while.
"I reckon he wants his friends to know he is trying to avoid trouble, and if trouble comes, how he acted in self-defense."
"Are we his friends?"
When Ted just sighed and started to roll over, I kept after him. "That man Bass that Daddy knew up in Arcadia-didn't our 'friend' call that self-defense, too? If our friend is such a peaceable feller, how come these people all attack him?"
"His wife believes in him, you seen that for yourself, and she was up there with him in Columbia. She knows his past. A preacher's daughter! If she believes in him, we got no reason not to."
I knew right then that Mister Watson had Ted Smallwood in his pocket. Ted weren't in the mood for no more questions, but we had Little Thelma and our Baby Marguerite under the same roof with a murderer, so I was determined I would see this through. I said, "Maybe them Tolens are in his way, like them poor Tuckers. And maybe one day the Smallwood family will be in his way too."
And my husband said, "It just ain't fair to talk that way. We know he cut Santini, but that's all we know. He never got convicted of a crime, far as I know of. There ain't no proof he ever killed a single soul!"
"How come he dusted out of here so fast after them Tuckers? And dusted out again, two years ago, when that carpenter just happened to die, too?"
"That feller's heart quit! And of course Ed knew that the blame would be laid on E.J. Watson, and by gosh, it was! He was scared about a posse, you can't blame him! When Guy Bradley got gunned down, who was the first man they laid it on? And Guy was killed way down there by Flamingo!"
I said, "I don't believe he was scared about a posse! He's too hardened by his sins to be scared of anything! He does what he wants and then he laughs at us, dares us to stop him!"
Ted's hand covered my mouth again. He pointed at the wall.
I was suddenly as bad upset as I ever been in my whole life, as if I'd known some dark truth all along but only recognized it after I had said it. Ted took me in his arms in that warm comfy way of his, big strapping man, you know, fine head of hair and big black mustache, and big deep voice he has only to raise once to clear the drunks and drifters from the store. "Ed Watson's a very good farmer," he reminded me, starting in on the little speech that all the women got to hear that night in every shack on our scared little island. "He's a hard worker with a good head for business, and a generous neighbor, too, always ready to help-they ain't a family in the Islands won't say the same."
This time he heard himself, the echo. "All right," he said. "But maybe a new young wife and family will steady him down. Ed opened an account this evening, paid out two hundred dollars just for credit. So I got no choice but to give that man a chance, cause he's the only customer we have that ain't behind."
"Talk about a good head for business, it's your friendship he has paid for, in advance! He thinks if he's got the postmaster on his side, and the House clan, too, Chokoloskee won't give him any trouble. Except he hasn't got the House clan! He hasn't got Daddy nor my brother Bill, nor young Dan neither. They're all leery. All he's got is you."
"How about my wife?" Ted whispered. When I didn't answer, he rolled his back to me to show he didn't want to hear no sassy talk. Being such a big old ox, there's no mistaking his intentions when he rolls.
I lay there quite a while. I wanted to say, Well, where does his money come from? You told me yourself, if that man had not had money, he'd be on the chain gang y
et today, for attempted murder of Dolphus Santini! But I knew Ted would only say that Mister Watson's money must of come from farming in Columbia, and tell me to hush up and go to sleep.
Ted's esteem of Mister Watson was sincere, of course, and Daddy House felt somewhat similar. Admired his accomplishment, enjoyed his jokes, liked his good manners. And because they liked him-you couldn't help but like the man, Bill liked him, too-they was tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, Ted said, he ain't the only one makes his own law as he wants it, and most of them ones that criticize him ain't anywheres near to E.J. Watson, not when it comes to good providers, solid citizens. Why, them plume hunters, them moonshiners back in the Glades are a sight more dangerous, they shoot at anyone who messes near their territory! Look what they done there to young Bradley!
It was Gene Roberts, up here visiting Will Wiggins, who told us how plume hunters from Key West murdered the young warden at Flamingo. And Ted reminded me for the tenth time how there was other deaths down in the rivers that no one ever heard about. Big plume hunters like the Roberts boys, they never liked no interference and they never will, but Gene Roberts was spitting mad about Guy Bradley. South Florida won't never make it into the new century, Gene said, if every man is so darn quick to settle his accounts up with his rifle!
Whispering all this, Ted sounded triumphant, even in the dark, like he'd pinned the tail on his old donkey once and for all. But when I asked if what Gene Roberts said about settling accounts didn't go to show my point about Ed Watson, Ted just flounced over with that sigh that said, There's no sense talking no sense to a woman.
The postmaster was nearest thing we had to U.S. government, so the people were waiting to see what my menfolk would do. Ted Smallwood and Daniel David House were leaders in our community, and my brother Bill was already looked to for good sense. Though they kept their distance, Houses were farming pretty close to Chatham River, and didn't want a feud with their nearest neighbor. If my husband and the House men made up their minds to give Ed Watson a fresh start, the rest of the Island men would go along. Boggesses, McKinneys, Wigginses, and a few Browns was already on his side, and that was close to half of the whole island.
I went along with Ted after a while. Mister Watson was such a gentlemen, you see, without being fancy in a way that made the men suspicious, and the women could not help but like his fine clothes and his compliments, and the nice fashions worn by his young Edna, and that dear little Ruth Ellen, and the new baby, little Addison, who came south with the Watsons in the spring of 1907. The former Mrs. Watson, Jane-Ted says Jane was the second wife, he never knew the first one's name, only that she died up in Columbia-Jane Watson took sick and went back up to Fort Myers and died just a few years after she first came here, so we never knew her, but Bill said Jane was just as sweet as Edna only not so pretty.
Now that he'd been simmered down by that young wife, most people was just as glad to have him back. He took some interest in our common lives, which we had thought was dull and dreary, and he kept things lively. All his great plans for the Islands made us imagine that progress must be on the way. We were not so backward as we thought if a man as mettlesome as this one came to live here.
It wasn't Mister Watson's manners won me over, though Lord knows manners was scarce in this rough section. It was the way he carried himself, kept a little apart. What that man understood so well-he explained this to me-you had to keep a sharp eye on your life. One careless mistake and a life unraveled, Mister Watson said, and there weren't no way in hell-Forgive me, ma'am!-to mend it back.
I said, "How come a man with such nice manners gets in so much trouble?"
He looked at me just long enough to make me nervous. Very softly he said, "I don't go looking for trouble, ma'am. But when trouble comes to me, why, I take care of it."
Later I figured he might been teasing, but the way he said "take care of it" made my chest go hollow, set my heart to jumping like it wanted to escape.
From 1906, the Watsons traveled between Columbia County and the Islands and would stay with us sometimes on their way through. Other times they stayed at Wigginses, across the island. Laura kept her little store and William farmed good cane at Half Way Creek. Now and again Watsons visited McKinneys, and Edna and young Alice, who would marry J.J. Brown, got to be friends. Mister Watson kept up his credit all around, or maybe he thought that storekeepers was more fit company for his kind of people than the fishermen and drifters who lived in the little shacks along the shore. He had his syrup business going strong again, and already he was making plans to throw in with his son-in-law and a Chicago man in their big new citrus plantation at Deep Lake. "You can't keep a good man down"-that's what he told us.
In early 1908 he went up north again, and we didn't see him until early 1909, cause he went to jail. Young Walter Alderman that married Marie Lopez, Walter worked for Mister Watson in Columbia that year, came back ahead of him. Said there'd been trouble, said he'd run off to avoid testifying. Walter Alderman would say no more in case Mister Watson got turned loose and headed south. And sure enough, that man came back to us right after the New Year, early 1909, this time for good.
Based on the account of Dr. Herlong, Mr. Watson returned to Columbia County after the Tucker killings (which were never investigated, to judge from the fact that no attempt to arrest him was made during his final sojourn in the Ten Thousand Islands. Smallwood remarks that those killings "cost him plenty" but this remark is not explained unless what's meant was a fatal worsening of Watson's reputation). Fleeting visits excepted, he had been absent from Fort White for at least twelve years, and his mother and sister and the long-established Collins clan were there to shelter him, and he had money. For these reasons, and perhaps others, he was permitted to return.
According to Smallwood, Mr. Watson acquired a ruined farm and brought it back into production, and meanwhile he married a preacher's daughter, whom he later brought to the Ten Thousand Islands. But Mr. Watson was not in Columbia very long before he was in trouble once again.
Herlong says that Watson's best friends were Mike and Samuel Tolen; that the ill wife of the latter was close to Watson's new wife and was commonly said to have willed her a lot of silver and a piano; and that when Mrs. Tolen died, her husband refused to comply with her will. Not long thereafter, both Sam Tolen and his horse were shot to death on a lonely road. (According to some accounts, his brother was also slain, though Herlong makes no mention of Mike Tolen's death.)
Watson, arrested, was in such imminent danger of a "necktie party" that the sheriff had to move him out, to Duval County. According to Herlong, Watson's lawyers obtained a change of venue to Madison County, where the aforementioned Jim Cole, an associate of Watson's son-in-law with powerful friends in Tallahassee, helped pick the jury. As for the state, it mustered just one witness-a black man-against Mister Watson, who was shortly acquitted. Captain Cole (so Herlong says) was heard to tell him, "Now you get back to the Ten Thousand Islands as fast as you can! And stay there!"
Apparently Dr. Herlong lived his whole life in north Florida after following the Watsons south from Edgefield County, and the substance of his account of Edgar Watson's life in Columbia seems as objective and dependable as Ted Smallwood's reminiscence of the later years. But finally he succumbs to the Watson legend, asserting that Watson "inherited his savage nature from his father…" and concluding his account in the best dime-novel manner "No one can say definitely what happened to change him from a decent young man, son of a good mother, to a heartless killer. I don't suppose it will ever be known how many human beings he murdered."
Even were all his victims known-I am increasingly convinced of this-the number would not be revised upward, as Dr. Herlong implies, but sharply down. Also, I question whether or not he was a "heartless killer," a designation that suggests a psychopath. Let me repeat here that Mr. Watson had admirable domestic virtues, almost never associated with the "heartless killer," far less with what is termed these days the "serial killer
," who seems unable to sustain human relationships. A dangerous brawler, yes, especially when drunk, a hair-trigger temper, a seeming paranoia when threatened with exposure, and a lifelong banishment to one frontier after another in a period when making one's own law was the custom in backcountry America-and even, one might well observe, a philosophical foundation of the national policy that condoned high-handed seizure of the Spanish colonies and other territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. While not everyone behaved as Mr. Watson did, this headlong frontier climate must surely have contributed to actions that seemed to him justified by the brutal hardships of his life.
CARRIE LANGFORD
CHRISTMAS, 1908. When Walter and Eddie and Captain Cole came back from Papa's trial in Madison County, Jim Cole was the only one who seemed to celebrate.
Innocent? he'd wink. O' course! We got him acquitted, didn't we? And he'd guffaw even louder if I frowned, and try to nudge me. He thinks I'm charmed by him, isn't it astonishing? To be so thick-skinned and stuck on yourself, I mean? That old piney-woods rooter, Mama called him-oh, Mama, I miss you so!
Papa will return to southwest Florida for good, so Eddie says. I don't know how I feel about this, either. This evening I asked John Roach in front of Walter if there was any way of finding a position for Papa at Deep Lake. And Walter burst out, Absolutely not! (Just as John Roach was saying tactfully, Well, your dad has a good business head, no doubt about it!)
Walter never speaks to me so sharply, I got quite upset. It's not as if my father were a criminal, I cried. He was acquitted! Even the Madison newspaper spoke well of him!
Killing Mister Watson Page 25