Killing Mr. Watson
By Peter Matthiessen
Random House, 416 pages, $21.95
One night a few years ago, dozens of federal agents from Miami set out in a secret convoy across the state of Florida. Their unlikely mission was a massive drug raid against two small coastal hamlets, Everglades City and Chokoloskee.
Knowing what they were up against-wily cracker families and a dizzying, jigsaw geography-the agents chose a drastic strategy: a total land and sea blockade. It worked. By dawn, a sizeable percentage of the male population was in custody on smuggling charges.
This territory on Florida`s southwest coast is known as the Ten Thousand Islands, and has been a haven for loners and renegades for more than a hundred years. Today`s marijuana scammers owe their heritage, and often their bloodlines, to the rumrunners and bird poachers of yesterday.
It is among these tangled mangroves, at the turn of the century, that Peter Matthiessen sets his wonderful new novel, ”Killing Mister Watson.” In it he richly brings to life a legendary killer and the ragged clans who pioneered one of America`s last true frontiers.
The book opens with a powerful and unforgettable scene, a few days after the terrible October Hurricane of 1910. The popping of a small outboard engine drifts up the swollen river, and one by one the men of Chokoloskee gather with their guns on the bank.
Finally the boat appears, piloted by a tall chestnut-haired man in a black frock coat. The man cuts the skiff`s engine and lets it drift toward shore, where his neighbors are waiting. After a few curt words, they shoot the boatman down and keep shooting long after he is dead.
This is the end of Edgar J. Watson but the beginning of Matthiessen`s tantalizing story. Chapter by chapter, Watson`s fate is explained in the words of those who knew him and those who killed him. He is portrayed variously as a devoted husband, loving father, honest farmer, loyal neighbor, devious swindler, no-account thief, philanderer, slavemaster and backshooting assassin.
It`s all the more intriguing that some of the same men who shot Ed Watson loved him as a true friend.
As with many novels built around a true-life character, much of the fun in this one is guessing how much of it really happened and how much has sprung from Matthiessen`s imagination.
This is known: Edgar Watson was a real person who was shot to death by a posse of his island neighbors on Oct. 24, 1910. The events leading to the killing never have been sorted out because most writers have preferred to promulgate the myth rather than investigate it.
For six years Matthiessen researched the history of this mysterious fugitive who settled on the Chatham River in about 1890. He made use of journals, courthouse records, newspaper clippings and interviews with old-timers who had encountered Watson, and the novel`s fictionalized
testimonials are both detailed and lyrical. Here is Mamie Smallwood, wife of the postmaster: ”At Chokoloskee we were way behind the times, though not all of us knew it, and pretty desperate for a look at something new.”
Ed Watson had the first and only motorboat in the islands. He also had a reputation as a killer on the lam, though nobody had the nerve to ask for particulars.
It was understood that many of those who came to the Ten Thousand Islands were running from someplace else. That they had run so far usually was a measure of their desperation or the gravity of their crimes. Southern Florida was as rugged and dangerous as the Old West, and Matthiessen revives it vividly. Here blacks were still hanged for looking too long at a white woman; Indians were treated as hapless drunks; outsiders, especially Yankees, were encouraged to drink up fast and keep moving.
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Families who settled these parts learned to hunt `gators, net mullet, trap otters and grow whatever paltry vegetables the salty hardscrabble might give up.
These were the days when white plumes were elegant fashion up North. Everglades riflemen would wipe out huge egret rookeries in a matter of hours, leaving the chicks for the buzzards and raccoons. From a character named Bill House:
”It`s the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghosty white trees and dead white ground, the sun and silence and the dry stink of guano, the squawking and shrieking and flopping of dark wings, and varmints hurrying without no sound. . . .”
This was survival on the edge of the civilization-a life of plundering, of brutally seized opportunity and little regard for the law. Nature was the highest authority, and nature was damned unpredictable.
In this mosquito-cursed wilderness, Edgar J. Watson became a prosperous cane farmer and trader, a would-be developer who dreamed of draining the swamps and building resorts. Yet he was never able to shed his outlaw reputation, and he came to inspire an air of pure terror wherever he traveled. By the time of his death Watson had been blamed for many murders and atrocities. Some he could not possibly have committed, but a few-including the savage execution of a harmless squatter and his pregnant wife-were probably Watson`s doing. It was also believed, though never proven, that he recruited escaped fugitives to work on his sugar plantation, only to shoot them on payday.
To his credit, Matthiessen resists the temptation to embrace and exploit this bloody lore. Instead his characters present us with a Watson who actually was as admired as he was feared, a complex man whose kindnesses are as fully chronicled as his dead-eye marksmanship.
The use of so many voices can be confusing; many of Matthiessen`s speakers have similar names and intertwining lineage. It`s not always easy to remember who they are, or how they fit into the story. But even when you lose track of who`s talking, the words dazzle: ”At night there was only cold, cold stars, so high and beyond us, and the awful tangle of black limbs, owl hoot and heron squawk, the slap of a mullet faraway down that lonesome river.”
Matthiessen has an affectionate ear for the dialect, and a perfect instinct for how Southern stories get passed around. Accounts of the squatter`s murder, for instance, customarily have noted that the victim`s
”nephew” also was found slain. It wasn`t a nephew-the tale had been altered because no one wished to believe that Mister Watson could have murdered a pregnant woman.
The full truth about Ed Watson will never be known because he was the only one who could tell it. Still, Matthiessen gives a brilliant glimpse of this menacing figure and of the rivers he ruled. Even a hundred years later, when lawmen go down there, they don`t go alone.