Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

  Disgusted, he put the packet down, asking the old man how he had met Rob Watson. Arbie explained that he had helped his cousin Rob escape his father on a freighter out of Key West after E. J. Watson’s murder of those poor Tucker people back in 1901. He was the only relative, he said, whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch with till the day he died.

  “Alleged murder of the Tuckers,” Lucius corrected him. “It was never proven. E. J. Watson was never even charged.”

  Arbie hurled his cigar butt at a swallow that was coursing for mosquitoes over the spartina grass along the creek. “L. Watson Fuckin Collins, Ph.D.!” he yelled. “Too bad poor Rob is not alive to hear his brother say something as bone stupid as that!” The old man was fairly shivering with fury. “Before you go to writing up this damn whitewash of yours, you better talk to the Harden men, talk to that black feller Henry Short, cause they were the ones who had to deal with the damned bodies!”

  Calmly, Lucius returned the subject to Rob Watson, who had ended up a hobo, Arbie told him. “Seems to me he was always on the road. Rob never had an address, had no bank account, never paid taxes in his life. Never had to, cause they had no record of him—he was never on the books!”

  For many years, Rob had worked as a “professional driver”—“the first professional in the U.S.A. to drive an auto more than twenty miles an hour.” Thanks to his road flair and big company limousine, Rob had been much in demand in the night liquor trade. He had finally been offered “a lucrative position in that industry.” In Prohibition, he became a trucker, and in later years, he operated an enormous mobile auto crusher in which he had traveled up and down the county roads all over the South, compacting car bodies and selling the product to small steel mills on small ruined rivers at the edges of the small cities of America.

  According to Arbie, Rob had died but a few years before, in the basement of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left strict instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had sent along his urn. Arbie pointed at the urn in the houseboat window. Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, the old man looked furious, and Lucius decided to let it go. “Rob never married?” he asked. “Never had children?”

  “Nosir,” the old man muttered, yawning. “That was the only bad mistake Robert Watson never made.” Sneezing, he lifted his red foulard to wipe his bristly chin. “After Rob died, I wanted to carry him back home to Columbia County, but about that time my auto quit—that pink one in the weeds at Gator Hook?—so I never got around to it.” He measured Lucius. “I thought maybe we could go up there in yours.”

  They went inside. Lucius poured whiskey, and they toasted their meeting silently and drank, and he poured again. Ceremonious, he set the urn on a white cloth on the small table between them, placing beside it a pot of red geraniums, grown on his cabin roof. The old man observed this ritual with cold contempt.

  Considering the urn, they drank in silence, in the play of light and water from the creek. That this cheap canister contained all that was left of handsome Rob made Lucius melancholy. The family would have to be notified, but who would care? “Rob came to find me years ago but I never saw him,” he said finally. “I haven’t laid eyes on him since I was eleven.”

  “You might not care to lay eyes on what’s in here.” The old man picked up the urn and turned it in his hands, and a mean grimace crossed his face. “Cause it don’t look like much.” Watching Lucius, he shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the container and shook it like a cocktail shaker. “Hear him rattlin in there? Folks talk about ashes, but there’s no ashes, it’s just chunks and bits of old brown bone, like dog crackers.” He shook the urn again, to prove it.

  “Don’t do that, damn it!”

  Lucius took the urn from the old man and returned it to the table, and Arbie laughed. “Rob doesn’t care,” he said.

  “Well, I care. It’s disrespectful.”

  “Disrespectful.” Arbie shrugged, already thinking about something else. “One of these days, you can carry that thing north to Columbia County, see if there’s any room for him up that way.” He cocked his head. “I was thinking we could maybe go together.”

  That evening, with a grin and flourish, Arbie produced a letter clipped from the Florida History page of The Miami Herald. Its author, he said, was D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state,” who had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. Concluding some strenuous throat hydraulics with a salutary spit, the old man launched forth on a dramatic reading, but within a few lines, he gave this up and turned the trembling paper over to Lucius.

  He inherited his savage nature from his father, who was widely known as a fighter. In one of his many fights he was given a knife wound that almost encircled one eye, and was known thereafter as Ring-Eye Lige Watson. At one time he was a warden at the state penitentiary.

  He married and two children were born to them, Edgar and Minnie. The woman had to leave Watson on account of his brutality and dissolute habits. She moved to Columbia County, Florida, where she had relatives.

  Gleeful, Arbie watched his face. “Probably stuff like that is of no interest to serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.”

  Dr. Herlong went on to describe Edgar Watson’s arrest for murder in the Fort White region, and Lucius read more and more slowly as he went along. Arbie was waiting for him when he raised his eyes.

  “We heading for Columbia County, Professor?”

  Lucius nodded. “You think Herlong has these details right? Like ‘Ring-Eye Lige’?” Just saying that name aloud made him laugh in pleased astonishment. What he held in his hand was his first real clue to his father’s early years, which Papa had rarely mentioned. Since the drunken Ring-Eye, home from war, had been abusive to his wife, it seemed quite reasonable to suppose that he’d beaten his children, too.

  Because Old Man Collins’s bias against Watson seemed so rancorous and powerful, the historian evoked the tradition of violence in which young Edgar Watson had been raised in South Carolina. According to his research for the biography, the Cherokee Wars preceding the first settlement had given way to a wild anarchy imposed upon the countryside by marauding highwaymen and outlaws, followed by the bloodiest, most bitter fighting of the Revolutionary War, with neighbor against neighbor in a dark and gruesome civil strife of a ferocity unmatched in the nation’s history. The sons of these intemperate colonials would be noted for their headlong participation in the War of 1812, then the Mexican War, while maintaining high standards of mayhem there at home. In 1816, President George Washington’s chronicler Parson Mason Weems, revisiting this community, which he had served formerly as Episcopal priest, began his account with “Old Edgefield again! Another murder in Edgefield!… It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!” In the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, in a rural settlement of less than one hundred scattered households, some thirty-nine people had died violently, nearly half of them slaves killed by their masters. And all of this tumult, Lucius told the old man, had taken place within a single century! By every account, Edgefield District had been far and away the most unregenerate and bloody-minded in the Carolinas, leading the South in pro-slavery violence and secessionist vendettas, feuds, duels, lynchings, grievous bodily assaults, and common murders.

  Edgar Watson’s father, it appeared, had gone off to the “War of Northern Aggression” as a common soldier, which suggested that he had fallen from the landed gentry. Three years later, still a private, he was mustered out of the Confederate Army, by which time he apparently had lost the last of his property and inheritance. From Herlong’s account, it was easy to infer that Lige Watson had been touchy, full of rage, and more likely than most to resent the freed blacks who were now his peers. And as a drinker, Lucius supposed, he might well have taken out his hatreds and frustrations on the hide of his young son who, according to Granny Ellen Watson, had scavenged the family food throughout the War wh
ile receiving only rudimentary schooling. Even after the War, jobs had been scarce, child labor cheap, and the family poor and desperate, and the boy had toiled from dawn to dark at the whim of some dirt farmer’s stick. Her son’s travail and punishment had only been intensified by the return of the distempered father.

  In the shadowed wake of war, its soil exhausted, the Southern countryside lay mortified beneath its shroud of anarchy and dust. And how much more galling Reconstruction must have seemed to an impoverished war veteran, for even in his reduced circumstances, Lige Watson would retain those grandiose ideas of Southern honor and the Great Lost Cause which would fire the bigotry of the meanest redneck for decades to come.

  Throughout this dissertation, Arbie glowered like a coal. He did not speak.

  Surely, Lucius reasoned mildly, the dark temper of this district had infected the outlook and behavior of the ill-starred Edgar, who had been but six when the War began and reached young manhood in the famine-haunted days of Reconstruction—

  The old man whipped around upon him with a glare of real malevolence. “Dammit, you are just making excuses! Think I don’t know what you are up to?” Gat-toothed and bristle-browed, hoarse with emphysema, Arbie yanked his cap down harder on his head. This ferocious elder might be rickety and pale, but he was no man to be trifled with. The glint in his deep eyes was now a glimmer, but his strong silver-black hair and rakish burnsides, with their hard swerve toward the corner of his mouth, asserted a wild intransigence and even menace.

  “Reconstruction!” He was seized by a fit of coughing. “Mr. Ed J. Watson never got reconstructed, I can tell you that much!” He cackled savagely, hoping to give offense, but Lucius winced merely to humor him and continued his mild-mannered reflections on that dark period after the War when the Northerners ran the South, put blacks in office—

  “The darkie period, you mean? Burr-head niggers in yeller boots, lording it over the white folks, giving the orders?”

  Already, Lucius had intuited that despite that rasping tongue, hell-bent on outrage, Arbie Collins was an inveterate defender of the underdog, including—perhaps especially—the underdog of darker color. What infuriated this old man was any perceived defense of E. J. Watson. “Who are you to preach to me about Reconstruction?” he was hollering. “I was born in Reconstruction, practically! Scalawags and carpetbaggers! And after Reconstruction came Redemption, when we run those suckers right out of the South!” Slyly amused by his own fury, Arbie had to struggle to maintain its pitch. Within moments, his passion spent, a boyish smile broke his hunched face wide open. His quickness to set his snappishness aside, Lucius reflected, was one of his very few endearing qualities.

  Arbie Collins, by his own description, was “a hopeless drunk and lifelong drifter,” and Lucius Watson was coming to suspect—from the man’s pallor and side-of-the-mouth speech and odd allusions—that a good part of his life had been spent in prison. For his arrival at Caxambas, he had perked up his worn clothes with a red rag around his throat like a jaunty sort of backcountry foulard. Lucius was touched by this flare of color, this small gallantry.

  “You’re a hard feller, all right.” Lucius smiled, already fond of him.

  “L. Watson Collins, P-H-D!” The old man spat hard to fend off his host’s affection.

  Since the Herlong letter indicated that Edgar Watson had been raised in northern Florida, Granny Ellen must have fled there with her children not long after the 1870 census, when Papa was fifteen. The relative who took them in had been Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had accompanied her married daughter to the Fort White region. By the mid-eighties, when Dr. Herlong’s father moved south to that community, Elijah Watson back in Edgefield was already notorious as Ring-Eye Lige.

  Arbie reached to take his clipping back, grinning foxily when Lucius appeared loath to give it up. “This Herlong knew about Ed Watson’s checkered past, no doubt about it,” Arbie assured him, “because Herlongs lived less than a mile from Watsons in both Edgefield and Fort White. Got some Herlongs in those Fort White woods even today.”

  Lucius nodded, intent on the details. Besides providing clues for systematic research, this Herlong reminiscence was complementary to an account of Watson’s later life by his father’s friend Ted Smallwood, which had turned up in recent years in a history of Chokoloskee Bay. Both brief memoirs had been set down nearly a half century after Edgar Watson’s death, and yet—and this excited Lucius most—these separate narratives by two men who had never met were nowhere contradictory, and therefore more dependable than any material he had come across so far.

  Returning the clipping to the old man, who was all but transcendent with self-satisfaction, the historian promised to acknowledge “the Arbie Collins Archive” in his bibliography and notes. Though Arbie would not admit it, the prospect of seeing his name in print delighted the old archivist, persuading him that he, too, was an historian of record, and that his lifelong pursuit of Watsoniana had been worthwhile research after all.

  The two Watson authorities soon agreed that they must go to Columbia County to complete their research on their common subject. Given the makeshift life of frontier Florida, the chances of finding significant data by rummaging through old records seemed remote indeed. However, they might hope to locate some Collins kinsmen who might talk with them, and perhaps some old-timers who could claim a few dim reminiscences of the Watson era. But when Lucius invited Arbie to accompany him on a later visit to the house at Chatham Bend, which the Park Service was threatening to burn down, Arbie shook his head. “Not interested,” he said.

  It was understood (though they had not spoken of it) that Caxambas had become Arbie Collins’s home. In the next days, the old man remained more or less sober, working happily to reorganize his rough data. “I been updating my archives, Professor,” he might say, picking up one of Lucius’s pipes and pointing the pipe stem at its bemused owner. Clearing his throat and frowning pompously, weighing his words in what he imagined was an academic manner, the old man sorted his scrofulous yellow scraps. “ ‘Bad Man of the Islands,’ ” he read out with satisfaction, “ ‘Red-bearded Knife Artist.’ How’s that for data?” Slyly he would frown and harrumph, pointing the pipe. “Speaking strictly as a scholar now, L. Watson, that man’s beard was not real red. It was more auburn, sir. More the color of dried blood.”

  “Clearly a consequence of his inveterate habit of dipping his beard in the lifeblood of his victims,” Lucius observed, taking back his pipe. He was having great fun with this bad old man. At the same time, he took pains not to feed an anarchic streak which flickered like heat lightning in Arbie’s brain, and sometimes cracked the surface of his eye.

  “That could be, L. Watson. That could be, sir.”

  Murder in the Indian Country

  Hell on the Border, that grim compendium of Indian Country malfeasance first published in 1895, identified “a man named Watson” as the killer of “the outlaw queen” Belle Starr. Was this man one of those shadowy assassins who intervene in greater destinies, then are gone again into the long echo of history? Or did he later reappear as the enigmatic “Mister Watson,” shot to pieces by his neighbors on the coast of southwest Florida in 1910?

  Edgar Watson fled north Florida in late 1886 or early 1887. In a recent letter to The Miami Herald, which Mr. R. B. Collins has brought recently to my attention, Dr. D. M. Herlong, a neighbor of the family, describes how Watson departed their community “in the dead of night,” though he relates nothing of the circumstances:

  One bright moonlight night, I heard a wagon passing our place. It was bright enough to recognize Watson and his family in the wagon. The report was that they had settled in Georgia, but it could not have been for long.

  Although there is no clear record of his movements, it appears that in the spring and summer of 1887, Edgar Watson sharecropped in Franklin County, Arkansas, continuing westward after the crop was in and settling near Whitefield, in the Indian Territory, in early January of 1888.

  The period in M
r. Watson’s life between January 1888 and March 1889 is relatively well documented, due to the part he may have played in the life and death of Mrs. Maybelle Reed, popularly known as Belle Starr, Queen of the Outlaws, whose multicolored myth has generated endless articles and books, poems, plays and films, to the present day. Because Belle Starr’s murder in the Indian Territory on February 3, 1889, was attributed only six years after the event to a man named Watson, this name appears in the closing pages of most (but not all) of her numerous biographies, despite many doubts as to the true identity of the real killer.

  In the federal archives at Fort Worth, Texas, is a lengthy transcript of the hearings held in U.S. Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late February and early March of 1889, to determine if there was sufficient evidence of his guilt to bring “Edgar A. Watson” before a grand jury on the charge of murder. From this transcript, together with reports from the local newspapers, and also some speculative testimony winnowed from the exhaustive literature on the life and death of Maybelle Reed, I have ascertained beyond the smallest doubt that “the man named Watson” accused in Oklahoma was the man gunned down in Florida two decades later. Whether or not he was the “Man Who Killed Belle Starr” may never be known, but it should be noted that many of her acquaintances disliked the victim, and that almost as many were suspected of her death by her various authors.

  Additional material from the Indian Country is taken from rough notes taken by Mr. R. B. Collins, who has made a lifelong avocation of his distant kinsman.