Lost Man's River (109 page)

Reading these hard-earned pages as Lucius passed them along, Ad Burdett wept. “Rob must have been drunk and crazy, to write stuff like this!” Lucius shook his head, attempting to explain. Their brother had suffered unspeakable loss, then the unjust penance of a long and hollow life without hope of redemption. The only crazy thing about him was the crazed endurance it required to survive such an ordeal so long on nerve alone.

Mercifully, Rob had been spared Ol' Luke's innate melancholy and self-doubt, as well as the self-pity which plagued Addison. And how very different he had been from Eddie, who had aged so early and whose mask was cracking with fatigue. Poor Eddie, worn out by propping up appearances, would end his days the craziest of all. Lucius would have to notify him of Rob's death—not that Eddie would care, having always disliked Rob, in his fear of Rob's unvarnished insights and outspoken ways.

No, he was too tired to explain this to the housepainter, who was mopping his leaky nostrils with his knuckles. Without much heart, he tried teasing Ad a little. “If you think Rob was crazy, how about us? Runs in the family—The crazy Watson brothers'! Wait till you meet Eddie!”

“My name's not Watson and I am not crazy!”

“No, of course not.” He patted Lucius Ad's shoulder. “Carrie and your sisters are fine, too.”

“I don't
know
Carrie.” Ad complained, his voice starting to rise, with tears behind it. “I was
never
crazy.”

“I guess I was talking about ‘crazy'
gestures
, like spending all your savings to come here from north Florida to paint an abandoned house, even though you were told it might be destroyed. I mean, that is a
great
gesture, Ad! I really admire it!” But Addison would not be consoled, he would not smile, nor even take pleasure in the compliment. Bowing his neck, he stared at his own paint-spotted shoes, moved to grief once more over his losses.

Oh Lord, thought Lucius, how much he missed Rob!

Under the ancient poincianas, he reread Rob's jaunty and heartbroken letter, which brought on an up welling of pity for this man beside him. He had no business finding fault with Ad and Eddie. In the view of his entire family—all but Rob, perhaps—the greatest fool, the brother who was given the best chance of all and threw his life away, had been none other than Lucius Hampton Watson. “It's hard to put your finger on the fool”—wasn't that dear Mama's saying, too?

Ad Burdett was not a fool, merely a casualty. Wasn't that true of all the Watson brothers? Even Dyer?

Clouds came from the Gulf, dragging shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands and raising acrid steam from the brooding embers. The brothers took shelter with the Hardens and Andy House in the boat cabin, where in dense wet heat, they sat too close and knee to knee. Finding room for Ad, trying to make him feel welcome and comfortable, Sally actually permitted herself a few sips of the moonshine which Whidden had miraculously discovered tucked away beneath the
Belle
's rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers. He winked at Lucius, holding up one of Speck's unlabeled bottles. “Astoundin, ain't it?”

The rain had stopped, leaving black puddles on the ground. The dull thumping of the helicopter, still circling in the eastern distance, had come and gone in the close silent air, but now the sound came again, and grew much louder. There was no time to move the
Belle
, or even hide. Ad Burdett relapsed into his moans, his big hands twitching, and Lucius called to him, “It's all right, Ad! It's all right!” But Harden whispered, “It ain't all right. Not if they decided—” But he left this thought unfinished, since it was too late.

In ricocheting wind and racket, the glinting thing roared low over the river, and the mad leaves danced as it cleared the trees and rocked to a stop in midair over their heads. Shattering the sun and light, the blades spun fire sparks and smoke into sudden dust devils and small tornadoes. An emblem on the fuselage behind the portholes resembled an American flag, yet the covert machine was not identifiable with the armed forces. Perhaps it was assigned to anonymous agencies. Perhaps the vast federal apparatus and its armed might, and all the war-oriented industries behind them must be invested in this shining thing.

Binoculars peered at them out of the portholes like submariners goggling at abyssal life. Was one of these lens-eyed creatures Watson Dyer?

In a shift of wind came a metallic squawk and static, and a moment later, the machine shot skyward. Soon it was far out to the west, rising high over the Gulf where the sky was clearing. Higher and higher the great dragonfly rose, black on the sun. Then it whirled downwind, returning toward the east in its silver gleaming, magnificent in its indifference to the small figures below.

Peering after it, Lucius was dismayed when his eyes misted, and he felt an impulse to salute the power of that swift and shining thing—God Bless America!

Whidden crossed the river to fetch Ad's skiff while Lucius waited with his brother on the bank. Ad had relapsed into a brooding silence, and the two stood together in discomfort, pretending to watch the
Cracker Belle
while struggling to make sense of what had happened. Ad burst out, “This house, and Rob, all this bad old-time stuff—it's none of my damned business! I only came to paint the house!”

The fire steamed. An iron sun loomed through the mist and was soon gone. On the gnarled roots of the scorched poincianas beside the river, the rough bark was blackened on the side nearest the fire, and there was no shade because the leaves had burned away. “I'm sorry, Ad,” Lucius said finally.

“I think Rob told the truth!” Ad cried. “And I don't care!”

“All right.” Lucius kicked an old scrap of gator hide into the water.

“You knew all these things? All your life?”

“Well, yes and no. I knew it and I didn't. There were dreams …”

“And you're putting that bad stuff into your book? About those bodies? Weren't you the one who made excuses for him? In Neamathla?”

Across the river, the
Belle
had the blue skiff in tow and was starting back.

“There won't be any book.”

Lucius had not realized he had decided this until he said it. How could he celebrate his father's real accomplishment while pretending ignorance of what he knew. And after all, he had been warned, long, long ago that Papa was an unfit subject for biography.

How bitter it seemed that the “truths” he'd learned in long hard years of research had turned out to be only marginally more dependable than the Watson myth. The only “truths” of E. J. Watson were the intuitions rising at each moment—for example, that during his long years on the Bend, his driven father, whether or not he had ever paused to listen, had heard the song of an ancestral white-eyed vireo, all but identical to the dry wheezy trill which even at this moment came and went over the thump and pop of the rain-banked fire. The Calusa Indians had heard it, and the Harden clan and the old Frenchman, and a pretty little girl named Lucy Dyer, and even the lean and hungry Cox, alone on this storm-battered river, awaiting the return of Mr. Watson. In the stark wake of hurricanes and fire, the delicate bird went on and on about its seasons, oblivious of the mortal toil of man.

Addison was sneaking looks at him, in hope of something. But the long silences which had started to occur between them would only become chronic, Lucius knew, should they try to graft kinship onto loss, for there had been no twining of their vines since those fallow days here on the Bend fifty years before. In those days, Edna's Little Ad was solid as a meteor, rushing to Lucius in his churning run, falling forward all the way from the place he started to the point of impact on his chest. His joyful voice had accompanied every activity, even maniacal banging on pots and pans. That headlong rush for life would always be his fondest memory of Ad, who seemed to have sprouted with insufficient sap and was already browning and awaiting death. He would part with him sadly, yet without sorrow. They were not true brothers. Their roots were too long separated, dug up, dried out. Their only tie had been this house at Chatham Bend.

Ad hurried down the embankment to his boat. At a loss as to how to comfort him, Lucius trailed him to the water's edge, where Ad stared uncomprehending at his proffered hand. Lucius seized Ad's hand and shook the lifeless thing and let it drop.

“You don't want to wait a little longer, Ad? For the burial, I mean?”

“I have to go!”

Having fumbled their parting, the brothers tried to mend things in a rough embrace, and Lucius was relieved that Andy House, who stood nearby, had been spared such a disconcerting spectacle. Uncomfortable and
abrupt, they had banged foreheads painfully. In that disjointed moment, hugging the stiff bulk of his unbathed brother, Lucius sensed his fundamental hollowness, as if long ago, due to deprivation or disease of spirit, a strong skeleton had failed to form inside him.

In his last years, their father had grown rather heavy, but not in the way of this youngest of his sons, who was already in his mid-fifties, or about Papa's age on the day that Papa died. Aunt Josie Jenkins had once remarked that when she hugged her Jack—and it turned out she had hugged him almost to the end—he was firm as ever, not merely well-muscled but as hard inside as the huge pit of a mango, scarcely contained within the sheath of flesh. Only in those final months, realizing that for all his hard work and the risks taken he could no longer outstrip his lifelong failure, had the furious furnace of Jack Watson's spirit started to die. That steel inside him turned to lead as he drank more and became sodden. By the end of it, all he spoke about with love was the lost plantation at Clouds Creek, his boyhood home in Edgefield County, South Carolina.

Duly the two brothers vowed that one day they would meet again, to get to know each other. Lucius even agreed to a return visit to Neamathla. Knowing the meeting would never take place, these honest men toed and kicked the ground in great discomfort. Then Ad broke away, lurched down the bank, and sprawled into the skiff, shoving her off without first starting the motor. He was out in the current yanking at the pull cord when the motor, which he'd left in gear, took hold with a roar and drove the boat out from beneath him. While he sprawled and thrashed to regain his balance, the skiff carved a tight half circle on the current before straightening on a downriver course. Lucius waved but Ad did not look back. He sat hunched in the stern like some strange outgrowth of the motor, rusted solid.