Lost Man's River (36 page)

She gazed fondly at Little Ad, who was staring at the wall. “That's what Papa Burdett called Ad before he got so big! Little Ad was the first one in our family who went down south to learn the truth about our father.”

“Had some time to kill,” Addison grumped. “But ‘Little Ad' never cared about all that, not the way you did.”

She stared at him, astounded. “Didn't care? You went all the way down to Chatham Bend all by yourself!”

“That's not his business!” Ad Burdett shouted. Pointing at Lucius, he lurched to his feet, hands working, his big gray face so furrowed and menacing that Lucius stood up, too. “How do we know what you're going to write?” Ad shouted. “Why should we trust you?”

“Please stop shouting! This is
Lucius
!” cried his sister, speaking this name for the first time. “You must be more careful how you speak, dear!”

“ ‘It's a closed chapter in my life'—that's what Mama always said! Let's leave it closed!”

“Lucius is a
historian
, Ad! And he doesn't think Mr. Watson was so bad as a lot of people have made out. Aren't you glad to hear that?”

Distressed by her distress, Ad frowned, bewildered. “What do I care if the man was bad or good, or what was said about him? I care what people say about
our
family!” To Lucius he said, “You leave us out of your damned Watson Claim, and your book, too!” He had gone brick red in the face, with heavy breathing. “I told that lawyer I won't sign the petition! I have no interest whatsoever in what becomes of that old property! I'm not a Watson, I am a Burdett. I made a good name in my profession! I want it kept that way!”

“Those dark things happened a long time ago,” Ruth Ellen mourned. “If Lucius is correct—if that house can be made into some kind of a monument—folks are bound to look at Mr. Watson in a different way! We won't have to hide him anymore, Ad! We can hold our heads up!”

“It's important to seek out the truth,” Lucius told Ad. “You said so yourself.”

“The truth!”
Burdett said bitterly. He pointed at his sister. “She was toddling
around with the Smallwood girls over in the store, she never saw it! But I ran down to the boat landing to meet him! I was three years old, hollering ‘Daddy! Daddy!' ” Addison's eyes widened and he waved his arms. “Know what I saw? I saw my own daddy shot to pieces!”

His sister gave a little cry, longing to mother him.

Ad gasped a few breaths before resuming in a dull and quiet voice. “All I remember is that crash of guns, I thought the sky was falling down on top of me. And the dogs. Those dogs were mean and scary, they bit children. Those dogs never stopped barking all night long.” His lip was trembling. “
That
the kind of truth you're after, Mister?”

“I'm your brother, Ad, remember?”

Burdett scowled, shaking him off. He leaned over to peck his sister's head, frantic to go.

Lucius followed him toward the door, where they spoke quietly.

“Why did you let me come here if you didn't trust me?”

“I was dead against it. I still am. But I knew you would find the way sooner or later.” Burdett was calm again. He shook Lucius's hand, saying brusquely, “Maybe I'll think about your damn petition.”

For a little while, they sat in silence, giving the house a chance to get its breath back. Finally Ruth Ellen cleared her throat. “Mama dragged us underneath the store, that's how scared she was those men would kill us, and her fear scared Ad, too, he was hysterical. He still wakes up smelling the dreadful odor of those dead chickens under there, drowned in the hurricane!” Involuntarily she pinched at the bridge of her nose. “I'll go to my grave with that odor in my nostrils!” She tried to smile, tried to explain how much of Ad's hostile manner stemmed from confused feelings. At one time he had actually considered changing his name to Watson—

“His name
is
Watson,” Lucius reminded her.

She hurried on. “Addison is such a wonderful gardener, he grows lovely vegetables,” she said brightly. “He spends almost all of his spare time out in his garden.” She stared at the clenched hands in her lap before she wept. “He spoke more today than he has spoken in the last ten years together. He is very very upset, I'm not sure why.” She dabbed her eyes. “He's really a very gentle man, and his life has been so sad. He was a bad sleepwalker throughout childhood, and small wonder! Then he quit school in the eighth grade. We couldn't get him to go back, finish his education. He worked as a housepainter awhile, got married, moved away. Nobody heard from him for years, not even an answer to a registered letter that we sent when Mama almost
died. He only came back a while ago, after his daughter was killed in a car accident.” Only now did she look up at Lucius. “Mr. Watson was a hard drinker, I have heard. Do you suppose there's a curse of alcohol on the Watson men?”

“I drink too much myself,” Lucius admitted, in answer to the unspoken question, “or so I've been told.”

“Lucius? Have you had a happy life? Do you have children?” She flushed and hurried on. “Addison had a few friends in the old days, but since his wife died, he has been a loner. He won't even come to family gatherings. He can't take a drink but he drinks anyway. He gets aggressive, very very angry. And we have to ask ourselves if that violent anger is something that came down from his father, and how dangerous it might be to other people.” When Lucius nodded sympathetically but made no comment, she murmured, “Well. We have lots to be thankful for. I mean, everybody has to live with something, I suppose.”

Soon after the Park took over, in the late forties, Ad had gone south to Chokoloskee, and Mr. Bill Smallwood had taken him to Chatham Bend—the first time since 1910 that any of her family had returned there. She had learned of his trip in a Christmas letter from Ernestine Smallwood, because Ad never said a word about it even after he returned.

Of course, Lucius thought. That explained a nagging mystery. “In 1947 or '48,” he told her, “right after the Park announced its plan to burn all the houses and old cabins, someone went to Chatham River and gave that old house a fresh coat of white paint.” He shrugged. “It might have worked, because the Watson Place is the only one still there.”

“Ad never told me he'd done
that
! But of course I never questioned him about his trip. If he didn't want to talk about it, then probably he'd found out something awful. I was scared to death that what he told me might be even worse than the truth I dreaded all my life!” Yet a few years later, Ruth Ellen had made her own pilgrimage to Chokoloskee and was taken to the Watson Place by one of the Smallwood daughters and her husband.

Ruth Ellen sighed, still brooding about Ad. “He would never go see Mama in the rest home, and he was the apple of her eye! Poor Mama was nearly blind, you know, all she had was a darned old parrot to keep her company, but Ad said it made him feel too bad to see her looking so decrepit. He never thought about how Mama might feel, or how much he hurt her.

“Herkie Junior is close to his half sisters, and he tried to look out for poor Ad, too, but even Herkie gave up on Ad after a while—couldn't get close to him!

“Ad used to be such a big man, you know, and very strong—he took after his father in that way. He seems much smaller now. He was always quiet, always
a loner, as I said. Even as a little boy, he never had very much to say, he was always quiet and reserved, always a little troubled. But he wasn't always off in his own head, the way he is today.”

Her voice had diminished as she spoke. Soon she fell still. They listened to the ancient clock in the other room. When she looked up, she smiled at him politely, and he knew that after her brother's admonitions, she would speak no more about their father. Perhaps she had told what little she knew and perhaps she hadn't, but now she wanted him to go.

Standing in her doorway, Ruth Ellen invited him to stop by and say hello the next time he came through Neamathla, though her kind smile told him that she knew he wouldn't, which was all right, too. And still she looked at him, head cocked ever so slightly—
What do you want with us?

On a green and blue day, headed south with Sally Brown beside him, Lucius reveled in a rare sense of new life, and showed off boyishly in his excitement. Crossing the Alachua Prairie, he told Sally that even in his father's day this was still a trackless country of red wolves, bear, and panthers. Half-wild cattle had wandered through this scrub since the time of the first Spaniards, who had more than thirty ranchos in north Florida by the end of the sixteenth century. Then the British came from Charleston, that was 1704, and killed every last Spaniard and every Indian they could lay bloody hands on, women and children, too—seven thousand Indians was a fair estimate. They slaughtered their fellow men like sheep.

“Fellow men,” the young woman agreed, nodding sagaciously. “Like sheep.”

Sally was smoking one of her “funny smokes,” and now she proffered it, raising it to his lips with warm, light fingers. At her instruction, he drew deeply, holding the smoke deep in his lungs before swallowing, suffusing it upwards to his temples. When he exhaled at last, the smoke seemed to drift out through his ears. His brain was warming and his mouth slid toward a grin.

Because she had been his history student, the Professor could hold forth on Florida history to his heart's content, spilling a whole lifetime of study into her sweet ears. Yet her interest was real and her teasing of him affectionate, and in his own intoxication and plain happiness, he was delighted to babble on and on about the fugitive
siminoli
and the escaped black slaves who taught them how to grow tropical crops, and the strong alliance of
these peoples against the white men who came to recapture the slaves and kill the Indians—

“Like sheep,” she repeated, still back there in his earlier discourse. And now this soft, unbridled person draped herself languidly on his arm and shoulder, peering around his chin in comic awe, her shining eyes scarcely an inch from his, her lips brushing the corner of his own, until he could scarcely see the road.

He kissed her then. “Back off,” he said, backing off himself. “You'll get us killed.” The male voice was apart from him, not quite his own.

She whispered breathily, across great distances, “Just a-hangin on my darlin's ever' word, is all.”

Alarmed, he struggled to be serious again. “The Indians had rounded up wild horses and cattle. Alachua Seminoles, they called 'em in this part of the country, ran their cattle down here on Paynes Prairie … biggest cattle raisers in all Florida …” But he was feeling neither here nor there, he was getting mixed signals, he was driving very fast, or so it seemed. Did this edible wild girl want to make love? The creature laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear, whispering softly, “You slow down a little, hear me, darlin?”

He nodded, stirred by the fine sweet smell of her hair. The can of frosted beer between his legs moistened his jeans. “You, too,” he said in a blurred voice. Realizing these words made no sense, he began to laugh.

Their road passed through Silver Springs, where Leslie Cox had escaped the prison road gang. Silver Springs was formerly Fort King, the historic site of one of the great episodes of the Indian Wars. On December twenty-eighth of 1835, Osceola had led forty Mikasuki in the destruction of Fort King, while on the same day, east of Tampa Bay, the war chief Alligator—Halpatter Tustenuggee—led his Muskogee in a direful ambush, destroying Major Dade's detachment of more than one hundred men. Three days later, the war chiefs joined forces in an attack on the troops of Gen. Duncan Clinch, and the Seminole Wars were under way. “Clinch is the Clinch of the Clinch River Nuclear Reactor in Tennessee, and Dade is the Dade of Dade County, Florida, drug, vice, and murder capital of America,” he informed her.