Lost Man's River (24 page)

“Collins honor.” Hettie smiled.

“Collins honor!” April cried, saluting. “Watson honor, too! If it weren't for darn old Cousin Ed, down in Fort Myers, our men might have loosened up a little after all this time!”

“Well, Cousin Ed feels more strongly than anyone, and who can blame him? But Daddy told me that our cousin Lucius felt quite differently. Sometime before World War I, he actually came here just to talk about his father!”

But
I
am
Cousin Lucius
! How he longed to say that!

“Know anything about Granny Ellen's husband?” Ellen was testing him.

“Ol' Ring-Eye? Yes, indeed!” He managed a cousinly laugh, and the women exchanged glances, reassured.

Granny Ellen had left them a daguerreotype of Lige Watson in Confederate uniform, Hettie told him, handing it over. As his kinswomen observed him, he studied the brown-spotted picture for a long time, adjusting the face to the apparition of Ring-Eye Lige in his imagination.

Young Lige, gone for a soldier, had snouty, arrogant good looks, wild upright hair, and that sort of confused tumultuous demeanor that can burst forth in joy or storm with little warning. Even in the photograph, his broad mouth seemed to be shifting from a curling snarl to a grand boyish smile. And his gaze, too, had that hard white crescent beneath the pupil, that bald shine. Though the ring around his eye was still to come, that left eye loomed strangely larger than the right, as if aghast at the spectral knife that was awaiting him.

The women gossiped about family jewelry which Granny Ellen had brought south from Carolina—how she had hidden jewels in her hair to keep them out of Ring-Eye's clutches, and how Aunt May had probably grabbed them. Soon they fell still, joining their guest, who had turned again to the huge portrait on the wall.

Lucius found himself drawn deep into his father's eyes. A countenance which had seemed serene, without a wrinkle, was stirring, shifting, and resettling into a hard mask swollen with intransigence—an effect, he decided, of that white crescent beneath the pupil, hard as boiled albumen. As he watched, the eyes grew unrestrained, like the glare of a trapped lunatic, peering out through the eye slits of that transfixed face. Lucius took a deep breath, then let go, and the real image snapped back into place, as composed and handsome as the mortal Papa whose memory he had cherished all his life. Yet those eyes unsettled him, stirring unwelcome recollections. In those last years at Chatham Bend, his father had often been less calm than he appeared—not tense but gathered in a deadly quietude, like a cat at a mouse hole.

Ellen Collins was saying that whenever Ed Watson became angry, he would smile. “My mother was told that all her life:
When that man smiled that smile, better watch out!
Uncle Edgar could be such a pleasant man, ever so generous and considerate, but never cross him! Oh, he had a
violent
temper! It's in the family chemistry, I guess. I have it, too, and my brother has it worse—just an explosive temper! My brother would pick a quarrel with a fence post! Away from the family, he always said, ‘If I had lived in Uncle Edgar's day, I would have killed those Tolen bastards, too!' ”

“If he said that once, he said it a million times,” April said gleefully, winking at Lucius.

“Well, a little temper goes a long long way,” gentle Hettie said. “Uncle Edgar never did learn to control it—didn't have to, I don't suppose. I do know something dreadful happened in his youth, back in South Carolina. Those rumors came in with the Herlong family, who arrived from Edgefield County after he did. The Collinses would never repeat those Herlong stories because Granny Ellen wished to put Edgefield behind her. Pretty soon, of course, we had our own stories around here to take their place.”

“It's told for truth in the Collins family that Uncle Edgar killed a black person in Lake City.” April was checked by a polite cough from her aunt. “I shouldn't tell him that?”

“You already did,” her aunt Ellie snapped, taking over her story. “They had wood sidewalks at that time, of course, and the sidewalks were narrow
and the streets were muddy, and I guess he figured this darkie should have made way for him, stepped off into the mud. And Uncle Edgar was drunk and there were words, and then he killed him, right there in broad daylight. Now that was in Redemption times when no one paid too much attention if you killed a nigra. But you didn't go do it in broad daylight! In the public street!”

“Right in front of church!”

“April? I don't remember anything about a church.” Ellie Collins shook her iron head in disapproval, worried anew about their visitor and not concealing it. “The whole thing was probably made up, one of those Watson stories. But Granddad Billy always said that when Uncle Edgar walked Lake City's streets, the nigras got clear over on the other side!”

“Well, Aunt Ellie, I would imagine so!”

This time even Ellie had to giggle.

“Years ago, somebody read someplace that Uncle Edgar had to move away to Oklahoma because he'd killed his brother-in-law!” Hettie smiled at Lucius with astonished innocence. “Seems funny the victim's family never heard about it!” she added, smiling happily when Lucius grinned. She had also read somewhere that Edgar Watson killed three men in Georgia on the way to Oklahoma and a couple more in Oregon before he returned east. “You'd think he'd say something about it to his mother or his sister if he'd gone to Oregon!”

“I suppose you know the one about Belle Starr?” Ellie inquired. “How Uncle Edgar did away with Belle in Oklahoma? When asked, he admitted it was true, but he said he'd had no choice about it. Belle would ride around his place at night, shooting guns and carrying on, spooking his horses, so one night, he said, he just ‘stepped out and took care of it.' ”

“Maybe he was only fooling. They say he never boasted much but he sure liked to tease.”

“Well, Granddad Collins was offended by that story. He told his boys it was dishonorable to shoot a woman, no matter what. Granddad died before the trouble with those Tolens, but he had a pretty good idea about his brother-in-law before he went.”

“One thing we do know, Uncle Edgar's favorite song was ‘Streets of Laredo.' He used to sing it with real feeling. Said it came from an old Celtic lament which tingled up his blood—The iron blood of our Scots Highlands ancestors,' he used to say.

“Brought that song back from Oklahoma, along with his black hat. A black slouch hat was the way it was described to us. You didn't catch him out without that hat on.”

“Probably going bald,” April suggested. “Wore black most of the time,
sang those sad songs. Had a premonition he would die before his time and was already in mourning for his misspent life.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” They all hooted in delight.

According to their old documents, the Collins family had descended from the brothers Charles and William Collins, English immigrants and pioneers. Charles H. B. Collins founded the section near Fort White still known as Tustenuggee. Mary Lucretia or “Minnie” Watson married Charles's grandson Billy—“that's our branch of the family”—and Uncle Edgar married William Collins's granddaughter, Ann Mary.

Asked why Grandmother Minnie was missing from the oval photo, Cousin Hettie murmured, “We don't rightly know. We have an idea—”

“Family business,” Ellie snapped.

Hettie said, apologetic, “There is a letter in which Grandmother Minnie is described as beautiful!”

Ellie nodded. “We've always heard that, but there's no known picture. She
hated
the idea of her own likeness. She died a couple of years after Uncle Edgar—I was just a baby—and those who might recall her face are all gone, too. None of her grandchildren have the slightest recollection what the poor soul looked like!”

What these women knew of the years of family shame had come mostly from Laura Hawkins Collins, whose husband, Julian, with his brother, Willie, had harbored such tormented feelings about Uncle Edgar. Laura had been Edna Bethea's dearest friend, and had spent six months with her in the Ten Thousand Islands after Edna's marriage to Edgar Watson. When Laura died, her daughter-in-law Hettie had taken over her research into the family, poking into shelves and crannies, satchels and letter packets, stirring up the crusty reminiscences of ancient neighbors.

“Oh yes, our in-laws care more about our family history than we do ourselves,” said Ellie, with an undisguised edge to her voice that made Hettie raise her brows. “For the blood relatives, you see, the scandals are still too painful, too close to the bone.”

“All those deaths and tragedies and bitter conflicts in the family,” Hettie agreed. “And then Aunt May eloping with that murderer”—“We didn't tell him
that
part!” Ellie warned her—“and Uncle Edgar's evil reputation and his grisly death. And we had a drug addict in poor Grandmother Minnie, and we had a suicide—that was our cousin Martha Collins Burdett, whose son Herkie was to marry Edna Watson. And all these tragedies befell our family in the space of a few years! The family was in shock!”

Lucius inspected the photos of Billy Collins and the two sons, Julian and
Willie—“Willie Collins was
my
daddy,” Ellie reminded him. Like their father, the two Collins boys had been small and slight, with black hair and thin beards and handsome faces. What he recalled of them from his visit years ago was the pensive quality in their dark eyes, as if their young manhood had been saddened by their father's early death, their uncle's infamy, their mother's utter failure of the spirit. Like their father, they had tired early and died young.

“No one can blame our Collins men and Cousin Ed for wanting everybody to hush up about it,” Hettie murmured. “My brother-in-law never laid eyes on him, but he won't mention Uncle Edgar to this day.”

“No indeed! His daddy wouldn't talk about it, so my uncle knows only a little bit, but he guards that little bit extremely closely,” April said. “So closely we don't even know if he knows
anything
!”

The women laughed with the affectionate malice of close families. All three seemed festive in this chance to dust and air the old closed rooms of the family past. The Collins clan, their manner said, had no reason to hang its head, even if its men were hopelessly old-fashioned.

Paul Edmunds, whose family had owned the general store in Centerville, had been invited by the Collins women to meet their guest. Mr. Edmunds wore his blue serge Sunday suit and high black shoes and a denim shirt without a tie. The shirt was buttoned to the top, pinching his gullet. Behind him his wife Letitia, in fussed-up hair and glinty glasses and dust-colored woolens, came in out of the sunlight like a large timorous moth.

“Your store is still out there in the woods,” young April shouted, aiming her voice at his hearing aid. “I bet I could still find it for you, Mr. Edmunds!” Paul waved her aside and kept on coming. He wanted to get down to business, which for him signified men's business, and men only.