The boy ran off and the men found places to sit in the shade. Dawkins picked up a small towel from the gunwale and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. I sat, exhausted, on one of the short rows of traps, trying to hide my heavy breathing.
"That was Ms. Emma's story," Dawkins said, letting his voice go softer as he sat against the gunwale. "Only Grandma would tell it."
I said nothing and waited on him.
"When Grandpa hauled the dynamite out there, the foreman in Everglades City would have him deliver some kind of pouch to the job boss at the end of the line. Grandpa had never learned to read so he didn't know what the stuff was, but he did take a look-see, men bein' natural nosey, and they was only papers and documents and maps and such.
"Sometimes out at the dredge site, if it was late, he would stay overnight and he was allowed to eat with the workers. They was a raggedy bunch. Most of 'em down and out. Some runnin' from the law, but that wasn't unusual out here.
"Granddaddy wasn't much for ungodly men, so when he met a fellow out there prayin' before mealtime with his sons, they struck a friendship. He's the one who would give granddaddy the letters, and as soon as he got back, he'd go an' mail 'em out from the post office at Smallwood's, kind of secret-like."
When Dawkins took a pause, I interrupted, the possibility too close.
"Was the man's name Mayes?" I asked. "Cyrus Mayes?"
"Granddaddy wasn't much on names, Mr. Freeman. Like I said, he didn't read."
I sat for a beat, thinking about another identifying mark, some way to tie Cyrus Mayes with Dawkins.
"There was mention in one of the letters of a gold watch," I said.
"He gave it back," Dawkins said, and his tone was suddenly defiant and defensive at the same time. The captain's tone stopped the young boy in his tracks as he was approaching with the water. Dawkins stood up and smiled at the boy and took the two spouted coolers from him.
"Thanks, Jordan." He handed me one of coolers and I could feel the ice bumping inside it.
"Ms. Emma told the story of the day Grandpa come back from a trip to the road crew and set down to show her a big gold pocket watch. Said the man who had him deliverin' the letters gave it to him in payment.
"Them were tough times, and it didn't bother Ms. Emma till she opened the watch. Inside the place for a little picture was empty but there was an inscription. Grandpa couldn't read it, but when Ms. Emma saw it was scripture and engraved to a man's son, she told him he had to give it back lest the Lord take it as a sin."
Dawkins took a long drink of his water. There was a look in his eyes and I waited until he had enjoyed the memory of his family.
"These were stories, you know?" he said. "Just stories of the old times told around the fire at night to us kids. Granddaddy tol' 'em. My daddy tol' 'em. I tell them to my own kids. They ain't written down."
Dawkins stood up and let loose his whistle and the crews got up again and moved to their positions. As the lift driver rolled up with another pallet, I pulled on my own gloves.
"Captain Dawkins. There was one name that did appear in these letters. He might have been a local, name of Jefferson. That mean anything to you?"
For the first time, a darkness clouded the big man's face and he did not look at me when he spoke.
"I don't mind tellin' my family stories, Mr. Freeman, because they're mine. But other folk's families, those are their stories. If others are tellin' 'em, it's just rumor and I ain't gonna hurt nobody with rumor."
While we finished the stacking, Dawkins engaged us with the story of the day Al Capone came to Everglades City on a fishing trip and stayed at the Rod amp; Gun Club, and the embarrassment of the staff when they realized they'd put the famous mobster in the same room earlier occupied by President Truman. He chuckled and we all sweated and chuckled with him.
When the loading job was finally finished, the captain thanked me for my help and asked if I wouldn't mind spending the next thirty-six hours with the crews as they went to sea and dropped the traps for the first true and legal night of stone crab season. I declined.
"Well then, you can come back next week when we start pullin 'em up," he said, smiling again. "Then you'll see the real work. And the payoff."
"I'll see the payoff at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale," I said.
"Then pray for a high price, Mr. Freeman, and maybe we'll break even this year," he said, and shook my hand.
As I walked away, the forklift driver was just pulling up with a load of frozen chicken parts and trash fish. Dawkins took up an ax, and the sound of his chopping blade faded behind me.
The captain had given me directions to the cafe. It was a fifteen- minute walk, and even though I'd taken only three or four steps at a time back and forth across Dawkins's boat deck, my legs felt rubbery and my hamstrings tight from the two hours of work. My arms and shoulders ached like I'd rowed the fifty-footer to Key West and back. When I got to the cafe, Nate Brown was sitting out front on a pinewood patio in the shade. He'd already eaten and had his heels up on a small wooden keg with a huge bowl of ice cream in his lap. I sat down at a table near him without a word. Within a few seconds, a middle-aged woman came out with a large ceramic cup of hot coffee and when I smiled up at her she said, "Mr. Brown said ya'll would be coming. Can I get you something to eat, sir?"
I ordered a fresh grouper sandwich and when she left I watched Nate working his bowl of vanilla like a careful child who'd been warned it would be his last if he wasn't polite. From the cream- colored pile in his bowl the old man carved off a spoonful and then took only parts of it into his mouth at a time, sanding off the lump with his cracked lips three or four times before it was gone.
"You an' Captain Dawkins have a talk?" he finally said between his sculpting.
"He work that hard all the time?" I said.
"Yep," Brown said. "All his life. Ain't no other way for a man like him to git a two-boat operation like that and keep her goin'."
If there was a racial implication in the "man like him" statement, I couldn't hear it.
"His daddy was like that and his granddaddy before that. Handed it down just like the name."
I asked him about the scars, the scrolled lines of damaged flesh on the captain's forearm.
"From the trap lines," he said. "When they start to pullin' them traps, they got the trap line on that power winch an' she don't never slow down. A man got to hook the trap when she comes up from the bottom, snatch out the crab, throw the new bait in, lock it down an' dump her over agin, just in time to hook the next trap. Got to do it like clockwork, and it goes on for hours.
"You get your glove or your movin' hands caught in that line, it'll wrap on you and pull your arm off. Every stone crabber takes that chance."
I took another deep sip of my coffee and silently chastised myself for whining about sore muscles.
"He wasn't willing to talk about this Jefferson character Mr. Mayes mentioned in the letter," I said. "But it sounded like he might have known the family."
"Oh, everybody knowed of the family," Brown said, and went quiet, concentrating on his spoon. Across the road a half-dozen pure white ibis worked a low patch of grass. A heron let loose a high "quark" somewhere behind us.
"First time I seen ice cream I was eighteen years old," Brown said, staring at a new lump on his spoon. "It's still like a miracle to me."
Brown kicked the throttle up, heading out through Chokoloskee Pass. The Gulf was green in the late afternoon light, and out to the southwest low clouds were scudding just above the horizon.
"We'll take her on the outside an' beat that line a squall," Brown said, looking out in the same direction. "Course, a bit of rain never hurt. An' it'll maybe keep them folks in the helicopter out of the air."
His words made me look back and scan the sky. It was empty except for a line of pelicans, their crooked wings fanned out as they cruised north over a long lump of mangroves. Brown swung us toward the east and pushed the boat up on plane and we began slapping over the light chop. I stood up next to him, gripping the console, and asked him why he had not told me that he recognized Jefferson's name when I'd first read him the Mayes letters.