Lost Man's River (31 page)

He put the letter down. For a moment, looking away, he could not speak. Then he took a deep breath, saying, “I'm truly sorry. I am here under false pretenses, as you suspected. L. Watson Collins is a pen name.” He stood up slowly and went to the window, making unnatural loud creakings on the warped pine floor. Behind him, no one spoke.

“I am Lucius Watson,” Lucius said.

He turned in the sun shaft from the window and apologized for his deceit, and for imposing on them. In preparing a biography, he had needed to know the truth about his father's life here in Fort White and had feared that they might be less candid had they known that he was Uncle Edgar's son. Having failed to identify himself in the phone call to Cousin Ellie, he had decided to withhold the truth until he could learn a little more, though of course he would have told them who he was before departing. He stopped and raised his hands and dropped them in despair, sickened by his own wretched excuses.

And still the Collins women made no answer. When he went toward the door, nobody stopped him. “I'm sorry,” he said again, speaking to Hettie, and seeing a mist of tears in her eyes, he felt bewildered, too. “For some reason, it seemed … 
important
. To learn the truth, I mean.” Again he stopped, unable
to bear the crushed innocence of her expression. He had no place here any longer. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him.

The window beside the door was open. Inside the old schoolhouse, his kinswomen would still be sitting there in shock and ire. Cousin Ellie's voice would be the first to speak, and would not speak kindly. He hurried to his car.

Seeking to compose himself before confronting Arbie—
Rob!
—Lucius drove to the Fort White cemetery, probing his brain for the right components to fit things back together. Who would have recognized Rob Watson in that furious, foul-mouthed old drifter in rags and scraggy beard at Gator Hook!

Was his rough crust and cryptic coloration an evidence of prison life? Had “Poor Rob” (as even the sly Arbie had referred to him) taken his mother's maiden name because he was a fugitive? It had never occurred to Lucius that a disreputable old drunk with an urn filled with “Rob's” bones might be Rob himself! That urn was simply part of his disguise!

The taking of human life is only justified when taken in defense of life or home
—that tone had certainly worn off in Rob's long years as a drifter, along with the manners and good grammar that his stepmother had taught him in her years of patient tutoring in Oklahoma. But perhaps that moralizing Rob, outraged by injustice all his life, was still hidden in there at the heart of him.

I have no time to bother with the girls
. Had he had time or opportunity in the years since? How could such a cautious fellow reprove wild-hearted May, borne off by the baseball hero Leslie Cox, all unaware, that morning at the schoolhouse, that her elopement would be paid for with the earth-greened silver dollars of poor Calvin Banks?

Beyond the trees at the new high school in Fort White, a boys' baseball game was in full progress. The faraway shrill of the small players, the proud cheers of their parents, flew like bird cries through the dry branches in the cemetery. Lucius Watson was swept by poignant reveries of some intimate midsummer sadness, infused with melancholy for something forever lost and far away—an innocence of “home” that he himself had never known since leaving Chatham Bend decades before.

He wandered out among the stones in search of Cousin May. Here lay Cousin Martha, Wife of Jos. Burdett, died on March 21 of 1912, shooting her broken heart out on that cold first day of spring so that she might join
the sweet seven-year-old who lay beside her. Little Frank had perished in that same fateful month that his brother Herkie had left home for good to marry Edna Bethea Watson in north Florida, and the loss of both boys had undone poor Mattie, said the Collins women.

In her photograph in the Collins album, taken not long before her death, Martha Collins Burdett had sad bruised eyes and a heavy downturned mouth. At age forty-eight, she shot herself, leaving no note—proof to her sister (Hettie's grandmother) that Aunt Mattie's death was not a suicide—“Why, poor Mattie was just deathly afraid of guns!”

Aunt Mattie got her men off to the field, fixed dinner, cleaned the house, hung out the wash. On the wood porch—“She didn't want to nasty up the house!”—she spread out an old quilt on which to die. Down she sank onto this hard bed in her last lonely meeting with her Maker, clutching the cumbersome cold weapon, shivering and self-condemning even in this final act, with only a moment left of life on earth, because this good old quilt with years of life in it would be stained by her life's blood—“and bloodstains are so darned hard to get out!”—and others would be obliged to clean up after her. That's where they found her, cold and staring on the quilt, shot through the heart. A country woman, she figured out how to work the trigger with her toe.

At the far end of the cemetery, the Herlong brothers rested in peace, attended by the monoliths of kith and kin, each with its heavy skirt of well-mulched grasses. The tribe was still dominated by the patriarch, Old Dan, upon whose headstone was inscribed “
AN HONEST MAN'S THE NOBLEST WORK OF GOD
”—an honest man, Lucius reflected, who had perjured himself by signing a mendacious affidavit, assuring the court that Neighbor Watson could depend on a fair trial in a county already aboil with men who sought to lynch him.

On his way toward the cemetery gate, where two old men fetched in green wreaths for a fresh grave, he came upon the stone memorial to “Maria Collins Cox.” Sweet Miss May of the oval photograph who had posed so prettily in her white dress lay in an untended grave, unclaimed by the Cox family, unwelcome in the Collins plot at Tustenuggee. There was no epitaph, no wire container for vanished flowers, nor a fallen vase. Because of her fatal elopement and her importunities in the years since, there had been no mourners and no witnesses, only the two thin dutiful embittered brothers, standing stiffly in hot black Sunday suits on the baked ground under dry oaks. The vast suet of their sister, wedged into a pine box in the dress she died in, had been delivered to her Maker in the July heat of Independence Day, in the racket of fireworks staccato from the dying phosphate town beyond the trees.

May Collins's parents and her grandmother lay in Collins ground a few miles southeast of Fort White in the Methodist cemetery at Tustenuggee, in that bare sadness of lost country churchyards which weather and woods and small wild creatures are silently taking back. The white church was spare and clear in a way that reminded him of Hettie Collins, who was fashioned from the same native heart pine. She had touched his heart, and he would not see her again. Why was he so sure that she was dying, or would soon be dead? One day she would be left behind in this still churchyard at the end of its long lane through the thin woods, in a clay earth as white as powdered bone.

Near a large cedar, under pale and shining stones which had replaced the leaning wooden crosses, the Collins clan was prominent in the small churchyard. Billy Collins had gone to his reward on February 7, 1907, three months before Sam Tolen went to his. Ellen Watson had died at eighty on June 10 of 1910, four months before her son was slain at Chokoloskee. Safe at last in the narrow grave squeezed in between them lay their Minnie, who had breathed her last on March 14 of 1912.

In no hurry to confront Rob with their brotherhood, Lucius tarried. A jay's blue fire crossed the sun from one wall of spring leaves into another. In the stillness, a stray thrush song came in wistful query from the wood, and he stopped and turned and listened. There was nothing. All he heard was time, a moment on the turning earth, a falling twig.

A churchyard in a woodland at the end of a white road where an infant's gravestone had Jesus's little lamb carved on the top. Everything in order and in place, far from the world. Old family cemeteries made him feel … homesick? There it was, that old longing to go home. But as he moved among the graves, an earlier sense of buried roots which grounded him in this Collins clan of Tustenuggee gave way to an instinct—more like dread—that he had not come home after all, that this encounter with his kin could never change the fundamental solitude of his existence. Home was not these upland woods of oak and hickory in the north-central peninsula but the lonely house in the Glades rivers.

He strayed across the sun-worn grass among the gleaming stones. Solitude among lone oaks and cedars, fingertips tracing the inscriptions, brought him a kind of melancholy peace. He was moved by the pains taken with the lettering—the anonymous hand which had labored in last witness to a life now returned into the earth, to be devoured by minuscule earth demons. Respecting the dead—or perhaps Death—he did not hurry. In his odd mood, he felt humbled by the great age of the granite. Even the dry crust
on the stone, touched by his blood-filled finger, was derived from black lichens millions of years old—blind algae and fungi working minutely with wind and rain and sun to obliterate man's scratchings on this upright rock hewn from granites heaved up into the sun and air by planetary fire. The industries of these lichens, their remorselessness, filled him with longing—longing for what? He supposed he missed what he had never known, the simplicity of churchly life in a small country community, the rooted peace of living day after slow day in communion with one's forebears, in the great stillness of a Florida frontier of sparkling air and crystalline fresh water, and ending one's days where one began, where one belonged.

The loss of simplicity, was that it? Loss of the simple harmonies and truths, the earth's natural order and abundance? Perhaps that ruin, mourned by the earth itself, was the most profound of all life's losses, underlying all the rest. Not fear of death, which was fear of a wasted life—that fear he would endure—but deep generic dread of the death of earth as witnessed in the despoliation of the New World, the great forests and rivers of America, the wilderness and the wild creatures, still abundant in his childhood, now fragmented and broken or bound tight by concrete, poisoned everywhere by unnameable pollutions.

Death, he supposed, was his hope of the simplicity he longed for. Therefore he was drawn to the clarity of churchyards, the solace of old cemeteries—a morbid solace, some would say, though most historians might feel as he did. If nothing else, old names and dates incised in stone were more or less dependable, preserving the critical particulars. The graveyard was the last sanctuary, inviolable, not to be transgressed. And yet Lucius had always known—or known, at least, since October of 1910—that in the end there was no sanctuary except free self-relinquishment into the eternal light of transience and change, leaving no more trace than the blown dust of an old mushroom or the glimmer of a swift minnow in a sunlit sea or the passage of a lone dark bird hurrying across a twilight winter sky.

From Fort White, Lucius followed a thin county road which ran west across old cattle range north of the great Alachua Prairie, a meager scrub which made him wonder how the banished Coxes had even subsisted. Eventually the narrow road passed a graying church set at the scrub edge, and farther on, another mile, a few small dwellings had been patched into the wasteland.

Levi Cox was winding down his days in a little red shack in a yard full of
junked trailers. “Next time you'll find my grave but you won't find me,” he sang out cheerily from his shack doorway. He wore a windbreaker and had his hat on, as if this stranger had turned up very late on a visit Levi had awaited for long years. He crossed the yard slowly and got into the backseat uninvited, not inquiring who this might be and paying negligible attention when Lucius introduced himself as L. W. Collins. “Been quite a spell since I seen where I am headed for,” said Levi Cox. “Let's go on up to the churchyard, have us a look.”

The small graying church back up the road, a single white room with a derelict piano and small pulpit, turned out to be the Second Adventist Church founded by Will Cox not long after the family came from Ichetucknee. All around the building and the unfenced churchyard, the clay sand lay exposed, so hard and barren that weeds could not obscure the few small graves. No bird call brought the hot scrub wood to life, nor was there any note of color, only the sun-worn petals of the plastic flowers.

Lucius assisted the failing man out of the car. “Be up here for good before you know it,” Levi Cox declared, gazing about his final resting place with satisfaction. “Yessir, I'll have me a one-way trip. I am just ate up with cancer, so they tell me.”

He shuffled forward, removing his old hat, pointing a wavering finger toward two humble stones which marked the place where the clan patriarch and his spouse lay together. The twin stones were ten inches high and barely wide enough to carry the small initials. “W.W.C.—that's William Wright Cox. And C.F.C., that's Cornelia Fralick Cox, layin alongside of Pa where she belongs. Loved each other forevermore and died in the same year back in the thirties. Ain't got the dates wrote on there yet. I been aimin to put a big tombstone to their grave, but I been down sick about twenty years and never got to it.” C.F.C.'s grave was set about with ancient jam jars that had once held flowers, and also an ancient conch shell from the coast. Lucius wondered if that conch had come from the Ten Thousand Islands, and if Leslie lay back there in the still trees in an unmarked grave.