Shadow Country

  Mama and Papa lie just near the Langford plot, which shelters my own little John Roach Langford, 1906–1906, and Infant Langford, stillborn in 1907. Two little stones. Whichever family I am put in with at the end, I will be near them.

  For Papa, Lucius had ordered a simple small white headstone with no epitaph, just the bare name and dates. At the sight of it, my tears came quietly, at last, at last.

  EDGAR J. WATSON

  NOVEMBER 11, 1855–OCTOBER 24, 1910

  When my Faith asked in her sweet clear voice what the J. stood for, the mourners looked startled. Nobody knew. All these years he had been E. J. Watson; it took a child to ask about that J! Mama once told us that his given name was E. A. Watson: why he changed the A to J she did not know.

  Papa’s woman from Caxambas turned when she heard Faith’s question. In a whiskey voice, more like a croak, she called out “Jack!” Lucius hurried her along, but she tottered sideways, seeking my eye, and called again: “E. Jack Watson!” Lucius would confirm that she had called him “Jack,” though why he could not say. “What does it matter?” Lucius said.

  Leaving the cemetery, Walter’s aunt Poke, the deaf one with all the rings, asked Walter loud enough for all to hear if Eddie Watson had considered using his middle name—if he actually intends to remain here, is what she meant. Calling himself “Elijah” might spare the poor boy (as she called him) future embarrassment.

  I suppose we’d all thought about “Ed Watson Junior” but no one before Aunt Poke had said a word. And we all knew she was speaking for the Langfords. Eddie restrained himself from bursting out with anything unseemly in a cemetery but Lucius stopped and turned. “Are you afraid your family will be shamed if he doesn’t change his name? Because our family will be shamed if he does.” And he gave that old lady a fierce look that challenged not only Aunt Poke but all the Langfords.

  That ringed hand flew towards her throat but she made no sound. It was only afterwards, as we filed through the gate, that she whispered to Walter, “That boy has something of the father in him, don’t you agree?”

  HOAD STORTER

  In early November, I went north with Captain Bembery to pay our respects at the burial of his friend E. J. Watson. But all I could think about was Lucius, who had boarded with my family in Everglade when we were ten or eleven, gone to school with me and got some tutoring from Mama, who adored him. I bet he read every darned book we had. He was my best friend and I thanked the Lord he had not been a witness on that shore at Chokoloskee. He would have done his utmost to protect his father and might have gotten himself killed right along with him.

  After the burial, Lucius took me aside and asked me to look after his dad’s boat until he came back to reclaim the Watson place and “get to the bottom of this ugly business.” I warned him right there at the cemetery that he must not return, not now and maybe never. Those men were afraid of him, it would be too dangerous. Cap’n Bembery told him the same thing and so did Willie Brown and Tant: he nodded politely, but I don’t guess he paid us much attention. For such a quiet modest feller, Lucius Watson can be very very stubborn, and watching his eyes, I was pretty sure that sooner or later he was going to be back.

  BOOK TWO

  Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.

  —JOHN MILTON, Areopagitica

  A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few

  eyes can see [its] mystery.

  —JOHN KEATS

  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

  —GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  WINTER

  That ruined winter of 1910–1911, Lucius Watson worked as a fishing and hunting guide out of Fort Myers, serving Yankee sportsmen and business associates of Walter Langford. As a skilled boatman, fisherman, and hunter, he was well qualified, but he was so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received complaints about his daunting silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he remained hobbled by melancholy and introspection. Even his humor, once so cheerful, had turned cryptic and laconic, to the point where he was thought unsociable—the worst of defects in a sportsmen’s guide.

  In the end, Lucius had heeded his family’s pleas and his friend Hoad’s solemn warnings at the burial to stay away from Chokoloskee Bay, where local emotions were a volatile bad mix of guilt and fear and where the appearance of a Watson son with a reputation as an expert shot would be asking for serious trouble. Though Lucius understood this well enough, he felt, in addition to his grief, unbearably ashamed that Papa’s murderers had never been held accountable by his grown sons.

  Alienated from his brother Eddie, Lucius longed for Rob’s advice in deciding how to deal with their father’s killers. Unlike Eddie and Carrie, Lucius had lived with Rob at Chatham Bend, and having been closer to his hair-trigger half brother than anyone in the family, he was desperate to know why he had run away after the Tucker deaths in 1901—had he participated, then?—and what had ever become of him. Yet over the years, on the few occasions he had dared inquire, his father had met him not with anger or evasion but something worse, something strange and scary, a hard obdurate silence, as if Rob’s name had never been mentioned at all.

  In early spring, unable to rest, Lucius set off on a vain search for his brother, traveling north to Columbia County in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson and their Collins cousins. As it turned out, Granny Ellen had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins, afflicted by a morbid condition known as “American nervousness,” had been sheltered from the family scandal and sequestered from her own life by morphine addiction and premature senescence: she could scarcely recall who this young man was, far less what he might want of her. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, the Widow Collins could not deal with an intense intruder who brought only confusion to her household in what would turn out to be the last year of her life.

  As for her children, they scarcely recalled this Cousin Lucius who had lived among them briefly long ago when all were little. Sympathetic at first, they became uncomfortable when queried about his father’s life here in Fort White. Disgraced in their rural community by Uncle Edgar, they reminded Lucius of the family code of silence agreed upon with Cousin Ed before he returned to Fort Myers.

  “But he was acquitted!” Lucius protested. “He was found innocent!”

  The Collins brothers had loved lively Uncle Edgar, they acknowledged, but they would never be persuaded he was innocent. Willie Collins called from the train platform, “Y’all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” Though this farewell invitation was meant kindly, he knew it was not really meant at all.

  While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father’s widow, who had gone to live near her sister Lola in the Panhandle. Edna Watson was close to Lucius’s age, they had been dear friends at Chatham, and he looked forward to a visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison Watson after Granny Ellen’s family in South Carolina. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of that October dusk, which Little Ad, unluckily, had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old when her father died, struck Lucius as pensive and withdrawn.

  As for his young stepmother, she was friendly and very nervous; he had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl’s life,” her sister warned him, gently pressing him to leave. At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Kate Edna would soon marry Herkimer Burdett, her childhood sweetheart, who had offered to give his name to her three little ones.

  THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

  In the dull white summer of 1912, Lucius enlisted in the Merchant Marine, taking along a duffel full of books. Since his arrival there at the age of seven, Lucius had been
fascinated by southwest Florida history, all the way back to the first aborigines and early Spaniards, and his interest had widened like a circle in a pond to encompass the natural history and archaeology of this low flat limestone peninsula lately risen from the sea, whose only hills were the astonishing shell mound accumulations of the seagoing Calusa which the Indians had climbed in time of hurricane. Ever since, he had explored every corner of its history, from its subtropical flora to its coastal fisheries, ancient and modern, also its pirates, pioneers, plume hunters, and gator poachers, its rum-runners, smugglers, and fugitives, from the Calusa Hatchee River south to Cayo Hueso or Bone Key, now called Key West.

  On his return to Fort Myers he was prevailed upon by Carrie and Walter to attend state university and study for a degree in Florida history. The topic he proposed for his senior thesis was an objective study of the Everglades pioneer sugarcane planter Edgar J. Watson that might challenge the lurid legend propagated in the press about the man now commonly referred to as “Bloody” Watson.

  Lucius Watson’s proposal was rejected as “inappropriate,” by which was meant that its subject’s identity as the author’s parent must surely compromise his objectivity. However, the faculty was much impressed by the applicant’s wide knowledge of remote southwestern Florida and invited him to prepare instead a history of that all but unknown region called the Everglades Frontier, which in 1916 was still a wilderness of swamp and raining river, lacking a written history more recent than the U.S. Army accounts of the Seminole Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.

  Discomfited (though not honestly surprised) by the rejection of his first proposal, Lucius was nonetheless intrigued by the proposed history of “the undiscovered country,” as his father had called the Everglades, invoking its immensity and mystery with that metaphor for death from Mama’s cherished Hamlet. In his father’s honor, he chose “The Undiscovered Country” as a working title, and with so little new research to be done, commenced at once. Proceeding too rapidly, perhaps, he was nearing completion when his inspiration faltered: he lost faith in his thesis structure and kept wandering off course to work on the aborted biography of E. J. Watson at the many points where the two books overlapped. He drank too much. Debilitated and depressed, he “forced” his prose, doing it such damage with his fitful scribblings that finally, trying to patch all this poor stuff, he came to hate it. Late one evening, reeling drunk, he uttered a despairing howl and swept the whole unpaged scrawled manuscript off his table, notes and all. A fortnight later, after an alcoholic odyssey that ended disreputably in jail, he was suspended from the university a few months short of receiving his degree.

  Returning to Fort Myers weak and ill, in a deep pit of melancholy, Lucius went directly to the Langford household to accept responsibility and blame for his disgrace. His sister gasped at his haggard demeanor. “Oh, it’s such a waste!” she mourned: she was not referring to the lost tuition fees, though Lucius heard it that way. Lucius’s morbid clinging to the past, his refusal to grow up, his brother Eddie informed him, were what caused him to drink too much and fail to finish everything he tried.

  A minor officer at Walter Langford’s bank, Eddie Watson was already well settled as a married man with children, a churchman and sober citizen who shared most if not all of his brother-in-law’s conservative opinions. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he shook his head over his brother’s chronic folly while deploring his ingratitude to their generous host, whose vision and hard work had paid for that wasted tuition. Embarrassed, Walter frowned judiciously, rapping out his pipe. Whether he frowned over the waste of money or the waste of Lucius’s education or in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey, was not clear, but that frown intensified Lucius’s regret that he had accepted family assistance in the first place.

  Because he’d never lived in Fort Myers long enough to make good friends and had not felt much like making any after his father’s death, Lucius became a loner. Absurd as it seemed even to him, a young girl, Nell Dyer, had become his only confidante, hearing him out on those rare occasions when he felt like ranting and encouraging him to eat something when he felt well enough.

  NELL DYER

  Lucius had first laid eyes on Nell in early 1903, not long after his father, passing through Fort Myers on his flight north, hired her parents to manage Chatham in his absence. Fred Dyer was handsome, black curly locks and wiry, with too much energy for his own good. Though acting as foreman, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building a new cistern and the boat shed and the small cabin for his family a hundred yards downriver that a few years later would be occupied by Miss Hannah Smith and the hog fancier Green Waller. Fred’s wife was Sybil and they had two children, a secretive, sullen ten-year-old named Watt, or “Wattie,” who lived with relatives in Fort Myers, disliked Chatham and only visited on school holidays, and a sprightly five-year-old named Nell whose bowl haircut, trimmed high over the ears to deter fleas, was permitted to fountain on top, then fall over her face, half blinding her. Nell wore odd garments sewn by Sybil from checkered flour sacks and toddled around on tubular small legs lacking visible knees.

  The occasional clear day with wind was what Sybil called “the Mosquito Sabbath,” when those demons rested and she walked out in the sun and played along the river with her little daughter. Those bugs were God’s Own Malediction, sighed Mis Sybil. Her little girl’s nostrils were black with oily smoke from the kerosene rags burned in the smudge pots, and she had to rig netting to Nell’s bonnet and wrap old newsprint around her legs every time the child went outdoors to the privy: in wet weather, the ink came off the paper and turned her legs a dark bruised blue. Day in, day out, they remained shut up indoors, which in those dark months was damp and stifling, with air so heavy that the lungs grew weary hauling it in. No child was allowed out of doors at night because of bugs or for fear of bears or panthers, not to mention the cottonmouth moccasins that collected on the mound in time of flood. Everyone used chamber pots—“chambers,” the child called them.

  In those first years of the new century when his boss was mostly in Columbia County, the new foreman often accompanied Erskine Thompson on the Watson schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for dry goods, hardware, and materials. According to Erskine, Dyer prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he could handle and running up debts that harmed the Island Syrup Corporation’s reputation. He persisted in these reckless habits even after his employer had returned from northern Florida.

  Sybil Dyer made most of their clothes. She was fair-haired, rather delicate, and in E. J. Watson’s fond opinion, “pretty as a primrose.” As a widower, he had been lonely, and around Sybil, this hard-minded man, chuckling and blushing, would turn warm and soft as buttered hominy. In quest of her good opinion, the heretofore godless Papa held Bible readings every Sunday morning, leading his makeshift and indifferent congregation in spirited renditions of “Jesus Loves Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “The Little Brown Church in the Dell.”

  As time went on, especially when drinking, Papa would confide in the foreman’s wife the saga of his shadowed childhood and the loss of the family plantation in Clouds Creek, South Carolina. Inevitably his unsophisticated seamstress would conclude that she alone was privy to the heart of Planter Watson, so generous and kind despite his ill repute; doubtless she imagined, like so many, that the love of a good woman could heal his soul and redeem his sinful ways.

  Years later, it occurred to Lucius that while Papa might shout disgustedly when his foreman passed out or turned up late on the job, he actually encouraged Dyer’s absences and lapses, the better to remove him from the path of conquest. Even when Fred was present, Papa acted possessive about Sybil and enjoyed teasing her husband, and Dyer had laughed along too loudly because, for all his lip and strut, he was afraid. In his coast travels, the foreman had heard tales concerning the young Key Westers killed at Lost Man’s Key, and in the summer of 1905, when the Audubon warden was
murdered at Flamingo, his nerve succumbed to the false rumor that Ed Watson had killed Guy Bradley in a plume dispute. The Dyer family had departed on the next mail boat, and the only one Lucius truly missed was the child Nell.

  Except for a brief encounter at his father’s burial, Lucius did not see Nell again for years: she was fourteen by the time he came across her next in a Sunday crowd on the Fort Myers pier. Feeling compelled to turn around, he found her watching him. The girl was still dressed artlessly, almost randomly, with only a slight modification of that haircut (it no longer looked clownish, merely quirky), yet her appearance startled him, like a figure emerged from a dream upon awaking and beheld in sunlight and fresh air for the first time.

  Though the day was cloudy, the girl’s face shone like a wild lily in a sunshine between rains. He saw in the first instant that this face had been dear to him forever, she had always touched him, stirring happiness. In that instant, for want of words, he longed to kiss the freshness of her teeth and lips, but since this was unthinkable in public, he teased her about how peculiarly pretty she’d become—“ ‘Peculiar’ is right!” she laughed. Then they fell quiet, searching each other’s gaze, smiling and smiling, until simultaneously they looked down, putting away their delightful secret without a word. At Dancy’s Candy Stand, Mr. Lucius H. Watson treated Miss N. Dyer to the chocolate ice cream that she’d been about to pay for out of her clutched cigar box of old pennies.

  They perched together on the pier end, swinging their shoes over the current, recalling Chatham. The tar and rope smells of the splintery dock timbers brought back fine memories of the sailing schooners and the southward voyage on the Gladiator. She offered a turn at licking her ice cream cone. She said, “I have missed you.” In that moment, chocolate mouth and all, the girl struck him as delightful in her Nell-ness, perfect and complete just as she was. In his inexperience, undone by strange emotions, he had not yet recognized first love. The following day when they met again and wandered along the river holding hands, Nell swung their arms up toward the sun as a way of working off her happy tumult and high spirits, summoning up a disgraceful twitch in her companion’s trousers.