Lost Man's River (8 page)

At Chatham Bend he found a boat tied at the dock, and the family of Willie Brown camped in the house. Though old friends of his father, the Browns seemed uneasy, unable to imagine why a Watson son would ever come back to the Islands. Willie Brown assured him that they would move out whenever Lucius was ready, by which he meant “ready to live alone.” Fearing that loneliness, he told them they were welcome to stay on in the main house while he patched up the old Dyer cabin down the bank. A few days later, when he returned from Everglade with a boatload of supplies, the Browns were gone.

Lucius wandered the overgrown plantation in the river twilight. In the old fields, cane shoots struggled toward the light through the thorn and vine. Fetching his whiskey from the boat, he sat in the empty house all that long evening, until finally he was so drunk and despairing that he crawled outside and fell off the porch steps, howling in solitude. Next day he headed south to Lost Man's River, where Lee Harden and his Sadie, who were close to his own age, had always been his friends and made him welcome. On impulse, he offered them the place on Chatham Bend. They were disturbed by his haggard appearance and did not believe that he was serious, and Lee Harden had lived on the Bend as a small child and had no wish to return there, having already filed a claim on Lost Man's Beach. He thanked Lucius politely, reminding him that the Hardens were fishermen. There was no sense in letting a forty-acre plantation go to waste. Anyway, they informed him gently, the Chevelier Development Corporation had somehow acquired rights to Chatham Bend.

Having no heart or temperament for a legal battle, Lucius abandoned the Bend and built a cabin near the Hardens at South Lost Man's, where he resumed his former life as a commercial fisherman. Though he did his best to be friendly with everyone, he refused to ignore his father's death. He wished to identify every man who had been present in that October dusk on Smallwood's landing, and to look him so squarely in the eye that he could not doubt that Watson's son knew all about his participation. In this way, he hoped he might be free of that bitterness and atavistic shame which had crippled his spirit for so many years.

The first man Lucius sought out for advice was Henry Thompson, who had worked for E. J. Watson back in the nineties and later became captain of his schooner. Henry had always been his father's friend and had denounced the killing. Yet it seemed that Henry was avoiding him, perhaps because he himself avoided Chokoloskee, where the Thompsons lived. When they finally met one day on the dock at Everglade, and he asked Thompson who had been involved, it appeared that Henry had forgotten. Though he put both sets of knuckles to his temples and racked his brain extra hard, he could
not recall a single name from that crowd of men. When Lucius expressed astonishment, Thompson turned cranky, as if held responsible unjustly. He all but suggested that Watson's son had no business returning to the Islands in the first place. “All that Watson business” was over and done with, he told Lucius, and the less said about any of it the better. He did not add “if you know what's good for you,” not in so many words, but very clearly that was what he meant. Better let sleeping dogs lie, Henry advised him as they parted, and anyway—this was shouted back over his shoulder—Mr. E. J. Watson still owed Thompsons money! After that day the Thompson family, which had always been so friendly, turned cold and avoided him, like the Willie Browns.

But Lucius persisted in his quiet inquiry, speaking with anyone willing to discuss his father's life and death. The men of Everglade and Chokoloskee had liked “Ed Watson's boy” back in the old days, and when he had first returned, and appeared friendly, some of the men put their uneasiness aside and answered questions about Mr. Watson's years on Chatham Bend, his crops and economics, boats and marksmanship, his moonshine and plume-hunting days, even his wild rioting in Tampa and Key West—anything and everything but the dark events which finished in that October dusk at Smallwood's landing.

They called him Colonel. The nickname had not been affectionate, not in those early days, but only certified his separation from the Island people due to his courtly educated tones and “city manners.” The more amiable he became, the less they trusted him, in their stubborn suspicion that his friendliness was intended to disarm them while some course of bloody retribution was being plotted. As posse leaders, the men of the House family had most reason for concern. The patriarch, Daniel David House, had died two years before, but the three House boys who had taken part were very leery of him, especially the eldest son, Bill House.

Rumors drifted like low swamp mist through the Islands that “Colonel” Watson was asking the wrong questions. The local men became more taciturn each time he approached. Braving cold-eyed silences everywhere he went, Lucius did his best to avoid blame or rancor, but the Islanders grew ever more uneasy—indeed, those families which had decried the killing were at least as reticent as those which had participated, or approved it. Some were wary, some were scared, backing inside and shutting the door when they saw Watson's son coming. He could knock for ten minutes without response, knowing that if he touched the latch, somebody hidden behind that door might blow his head off. That this quiet and soft-spoken man would risk this—that despite the hostility of the community, he kept coming back—was only more proof that “Watson's boy,” who could “drop a curlew
bound downwind with a bullet through the eye,” was “every bit as dangerous as his daddy.”

Yet one by one, by various means—cryptic allusions and sly woman talk, drunk boastful blurtings—he learned the names of “the men who killed Ed Watson,” and from early on, he kept a list, with commentary. Every gleaned scrap of information gave him his excuse to brood over the names, eliminate one, write down another, or simply refine, make more precise, the annotations which kept the list scrupulous and up-to-date. Coming alive, always evolving, the list seemed a justification of his return to the Ten Thousand Islands, reassuring him that what he was doing was research for that abandoned biography which might redeem his father's name. At the very least, it eased the pain of a lost decade of inaction and self-loathing in which he had forgiven neither his father's killers (as he still perceived them) nor the Watson sons—Lucius Watson in particular—for failing to find an honorable resolution.

Fed mostly now by stray allusions, random gossip, the list of names with its revisions and deletions, footnotes, comments, and qualifications, grew ever more intricate and complex, as what had begun as a kind of game became obsession. For a few years, he went nowhere without it. The folded packet of lined yellow paper, damp from the subtropical sea air, had gone transparent at the creases from sweat and coffee spills and cooking grease and fish oil, and so specked by rust from tools and hooks and flecked with sundry bread crumbs and tobacco, that Lucius could scarcely decipher the small script and had to write out a fresh copy—a renewal ceremony and a source of secret satisfaction. So long as he kept perfecting it, making certain it was accurate down to the last detail, he would never have to give it up. It filled some void and longing in his life—he knew that. Yet he could not admit this to himself for fear of removing its peculiar healing power, and the order it brought to his wandering mind.

He dreaded finishing the list, not wishing to deal with his inability to act upon it. He did not believe he could take a human life, even in the name of family honor. And though he could accept this, his romantic side would always be disappointed, knowing that the hickory breed of old-time Watsons would have acted forcefully in retribution, never mind the morality or consequences. He longed to talk with his brother Rob, whom he remembered as hotheaded and outspoken—hardly a man to accept family dishonor.

By the end of his first year in the Islands, there were threats. Although afraid, Lucius perceived his potential martyrdom as a resolution of his life, somehow less terrifying than cowardice or weakness. One night he dreamed of the huge crocodile which had lived in Chatham River throughout his boyhood, hauling out on the far bank as if to watch the house. One day it attacked
an alligator. When its prey washed up half eaten, Papa said, “That's not much of a gator anymore.” He spoke balefully, as a cautionary lesson to the younger children, who were only allowed to splash in the river shallows when that fourteen-foot creature was across the river, laying out there like a drift log, in plain view. In his dream Lucius rowed across the river, and the monster had opened its terrible jaws in a slow warning, then risen suddenly on its short legs and thrashed into the current in a great brown, roiling surge. Because he had challenged his own death, it was there just underneath him, awaiting its moment to capsize the skiff and seize him and drag him down. He awoke in horror.

Though he had sense enough to keep his list a secret, the time would come when he was shunned on Chokoloskee Bay. One day on the dock at Everglade, outside Browns' fish house, he received a warning from “your daddy's oldest friend” to “stop this snoopin around, for your own damn good.” Kicking dirt hard, Willie Brown said, “I weren't mixed up in it, and I spoke agin it, but I'm giving you fair warnin all the same. Any of these local men who figures E. J.'s son is out to get him might feel obliged to get that feller first, you take my meanin, Lucius?” Willie Brown, who had called his father E. J., was one of the few who still used Lucius's real name.

For once, his brother Eddie had been right. The crude warnings and drunken threats were followed by the hornet whine of a bullet across his bow, the echo of a rifle shot across the water. Then one day his boat was sunk on one of his rare visits to Chokoloskee. Hearing of this, the Harden family—the last friends whom he could trust—prevailed on him to head south around Cape Sable and fish out of Flamingo until things cooled down.

During Lucius's stay in Flamingo, where he lived at the house of his father's friend Gene Roberts, his brother Rob had come looking for him in Fort Myers. During his brief visit, Rob told the Fort Myers family almost nothing about himself except to say that he was always “on the road” and had no address where he might be located. Rob had learned from Carrie that Miss Lucy Dyer might know their brother's whereabouts, but all Lucy could tell him was that Lucius might be living near the Harden family at Lost Man's River. Rob traveled by mail boat, then rowed a skiff for the last twenty miles, from Everglade to Lost Man's, where Lee Harden, suspicious of this intense stranger (Rob had called himself John Tucker), would only reveal that Lucius Watson was away.

Returning to Lost Man's, Lucius was determined to dispense with the useless list he had worked on for so many years, always changing and adjusting and revising, always striving to get closer to the fact, the “truth,” which might permit him to put the thing behind him, and his father, too. He realized that, short of his own death, there was no end to that list, any more than there could be an end to life itself. Far from putting his heart to rest, its very existence had become a burden and a danger, rebuking him not only for his failure to avenge poor Papa but for the folly of his self-banishment to the Islands, and for the huge part of his life which had been wasted. How much better that time might have been spent in a real life with Lucy Dyer, raising children—that was his fresh new dream.

That year, Lucius received word of Walter Langford's death. He arrived in Fort Myers too late for the funeral. Carrie assured him that she understood, but it was plain that she could not quite forgive him for never having visited or written. “Nobody seriously expected you,” Eddie said sourly. With customary spite, from behind his hand, he informed his younger brother that the President of the First National Bank had “died of drink,” having failed to provide properly for their sister. As for himself, he was prosperously embarked on his own insurance business.

During his visit, Lucius entrusted Lucy Dyer with a packet for Rob Watson in the vain hope that Rob might turn up again. Since he could not bring himself to destroy it, he enclosed the posse list, to avoid any chance of its discovery by the men listed and to be rid of it once and for all. But a few years later, in the course of changing households, Lucy would misplace the packet, as she confessed to Lucius in a letter which also brought word of her recent marriage to old Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was he by her abandonment (he had somehow assumed that his first love would await him forever) that he scarcely noticed her mention of the list.