As a sort of offering, Lucius brought the manuscript of the biography. Laying it in the embers, he watched the page corners turn brown and darken as his life’s labor curled up into nothingness. He had not told the others. He supposed they understood what he was doing.
In a small grave spaded out between the two old poincianas by the river, they buried the scant remains in the stained blanket. Until he could return here with a casket, he would defer his brother’s wish to be buried in Columbia County, but he murmured the old hymn as Rob had wished.
Across death’s river our friends have gone,
And we are following, one by one …
They adorned the grave with crimson coral bean and scarlet poinciana, which reminded Sally of Rob’s flagrant red bandanna. “What’s the matter with me?” Sally sniffled, dabbing her eyes. “I hardly even knew that poor old man!” But of course she was mourning the lost brother, the long-lost lover, and refused to be comforted even—or especially—by Whidden. Nor had she cried out when shortly after her father’s departure, the shooting stopped and the helicopters departed. “I could feel it coming,” she whispered intensely. “I could feel it.” After that, she would not speak and could not stop weeping. Even so, in a subdued way, she seemed at peace, and gentle and affectionate with everyone, even the blind man.
Smoke plumes rose from the darkening embers, wandering like companies of ghosts. Dark herons crossed the mangrove and the river. With his friends already in the boat, he paid a last visit to the grave. Off the bank, the snag of a drowned tree dipped and beckoned in the heavy current. The channel was shifting and the bend eroding as slabs of old alluvial earth were borne away into the Gulf of Mexico. He promised Rob he would come fetch him before his grave was taken by the river.
In the boat, the blind man murmured quietly, “Well, how you doin, Colonel? Goin to be okay?”
The Cracker Belle drifted down current before her propeller, gathering her weight, took hold of the muddy flow and churned her back upstream past the burned clearing. “Jungle will take this ol’ place back before you know it,” Whidden said, with a last look around him. “Won’t be nothing left of the old days for our kids to look at.”
Gazing downriver as the Bend turned and disappeared, Lucius saw how this wild river had looked before the first crafts of the aborigines rounded the point, in those ageless days innocent of human cry, only the puff of manatee and suck of tarpon, harsh heron squawk and shriek of tern on the gray sky, the mournful calling of the white-pated black pigeons. And he wondered if life would ever bring him back.
Following the inside route, the old boat headed east and north into the diadem of amber waters between the outer Islands and the coast, crossing the oyster bottoms and broad tannin reaches of the inner bays. Feeling the shift in her vibrations and the rise of water in her wake, Andy nodded in contentment. “Chokoloskee to House Hammock, we traveled these back bays, but as my granddad used to say, the water could be pretty skinny in through here.”
Lifting free from the green walls, white egrets crossed the bow, and hearing their guttural hoarse squawks, the blind man said, “Them white birds scare a whole lot easier than the blue ones, ever notice? Many years have come and gone since the last plume hunting, but them egrets has learned all they need to know, because they’re still scared of anything two-legged.”
“Me, too!” cried Sally. She gave the blind man an impulsive hug. “Well, now, Mister Andy House, you happy you came with us? Cause we sure are!” On her way below to rest, she stuck out her tongue at the other two, and Harden smiled at Lucius. “You seen the way she took it? About Junior? I believe she has let go of something, don’t ask me why. I believe she might be past the worst of it.” He grinned. “Your ex-ex-wife—that’s what she called herself just now! I believe my ex-ex-wife is really back!” And Lucius smiled, too, in profound loneliness.
Whidden would drop his passengers at Everglade, then head back south to help Speck if he could. “Them boys was my partners,” Whidden said, dispensing with any further explanation. When Lucius asked him if Sally would mind the risk he might be taking, Whidden shook his head. “She knows I have to go,” he said, “and she knows that I won’t stay.”
Crossing Alligator Bay, the Belle passed the mouth of the grown-over canal dredged originally by the Chevelier Corporation. “Follow that canal maybe six miles, you’ll hit a good high hammock,” Andy told them. “As a young boy, Charlie Green was in there deer huntin with his daddy and the Robertses. They’d shot four or five curlew for their supper, so Charlie’s dad said, ‘Well, we got enough to eat, so you boys go hunt us a good place to camp on that high hammock yonder.’ Charlie and the Roberts boy found a good place, all right, but somebody was on there a good while ahead of ’em, cause his skull lay grinnin at ’em from the brush. Alongside the skeleton, fallin apart, was a flat-bottomed scull boat, hauled up and hid a little ways back in the hammock, and also an old rifle and old coffeepot and fry pan. Well, that was enough, they made camp someplace else!
“At Chokoloskee, Charlie told Ted Smallwood all about it, and some old feller in the store claimed he recalled that hunting pram from Chatham Bend, and another chimed in, ‘Well, Old Man Waller that got killed by Cox was supposed to had a muzzle loader of that same description.’ So they put their heads together and come up with the idea that what those boys had come across were the remains of Leslie Cox, laid low by snakebite! Uncle Ted was so excited, he called the whole island over to the store to hear tell about it! None of ’em could think who else that skeleton might be and by nightfall it was all decided: Leslie Cox hid that boat back in the bushes before makin camp, probably stepped on some big ol’ rattler that swum on there to escape high water. The good Lord had His serpent lay in there just a-waitin for that evil-hearted feller!”
“Wouldn’t hogs and gators pull that body all apart?” Lucius protested.
“Well, you’d sure think so. But they argued that Cox might been back there through the twenties, livin with Injuns, tradin plumes and hides. And maybe them wild things was so scarce and hunted out that they never come across the body. Buzzards’d never find him in that jungle, and bobcats nor panthers wouldn’t never touch him, and anything smaller that might chew on him would leave him mostly in one piece. One or two has been found like that, across the years.”
“Well, I suppose so,” Lucius said doubtfully. Death by rattlesnake back in the Glades seemed too fortuitous to suit him. He preferred his own instinct that somewhere along the back roads of America, Cox was still living under a false name.
Coming down out of Lopez River in the twilight, they could see the weak small lights of Chokoloskee. A minute earlier, Andy House had called out from the stern, “Any lights yet, Whidden? Feels to me like we must be in the Bay.” He was pointing toward where Chokoloskee had to be even before the others saw the high dark shape of it.
“Course all they had back then was kerosene lamps,” Andy said, when Lucius went aft and sat beside him, “but that big dark mound rising up out of the dusk was what your daddy seen on his last evening.”
That evening, in bittersweet mood, Lucius placed a telephone call to Lucy Summerlin. He confessed to “Miss L” his lifelong shame about the way he’d acted years before, and his regret about “the happiness I threw away.” When Lucy was silent, he asked shyly if he might pay a call on her some time soon. After a moment, composing herself, Lucy asked her former lover if he had been drinking, and when he protested untruthfully that he had not, another pause made it clear that she knew better. Later he feared she had been weeping and was struggling to compose herself, for he heard a discreet sniffling into a handkerchief.
Lucy murmured that their encounter in the Fort Meyers cemetery had been “just lovely” and had “done her old heart a world of good.” However, she did not think she should meet with him again any time soon. She would love him always, and wished him a long and happy life. When he pressed harder, she reproved him gently, saying that she might take him a bit more seriously if he
were to ring her up again when he was sober.
“Are you doubting my word, Miss L?”
“I’m afraid so, sweetheart.”
“Well, I can’t say I blame you.” He tried to laugh.
Making light of his drinking—surely that had been a bad mistake, worse than the whiskeys, worse than the dissembling. He would call back in the morning and apologize. But when morning came, he felt stunned and unravelled, sitting on the bed edge by the telephone for a long while before deciding it might be best to wait a decent interval before soliciting his beloved “Miss L” again. He must be patient, he must draw near with the greatest sensitivity and care. One day soon there was bound to come that limpid moment when they would melt into each other’s eyes, in rediscovery of those illuminations of those fond lost days long, long ago.
Lucius had not told her of Rob’s death, not wishing to win her favor by seeking sympathy. And although saddened by her refusal, he was also in-admissibly relieved, though he would not admit this to himself until days later.
Inexplicably Lucius thought about his father’s urn. It seemed urgent now to restore those bones to the Fort Myers cemetery. Yet in his twisted state of mind, the brass urn spooked him—not the bones, the ancestral bones, but the raging spirit trapped in that container. Though he knew he was being superstitious or plain childish, he had no wish to lay eyes on the man or find himself alone with it at home.
The night before, over the telephone, Whidden Harden had learned that Henry Short was in the hospital at Okeechobee. Torching fields before the cane harvest, he had been caught in a back burn when the wind shifted. Lee Harden had visited him in the hospital, where he was told that the patient’s burns were fatal.
Whidden delivered this news early in the morning when he and Sally came to say good-bye, and hearing it, Andy House went red, very upset. “Henry is too old for work like that—that’s dangerous work! And Big Sugar don’t care nothing at all about their workers! He is very experienced and he ain’t a drinker, but he’s too old for hard and heavy work around big burns!”
Those empty plantations were miles and miles to the horizon and Henry had been way out there, beyond help. Running hard for an irrigation ditch, he had fallen and was overtaken by the flames. Burned over most of his body, he was not recuperating. He was lucid at times, yet seemed too weak to breathe and was not expected to survive the week, Lee Harden said.
In a tumult of feelings, Lucius took leave of the Hardens and headed north at once. He did not feel he had a choice about it. Andy House, who felt the same, talked unhappily about Henry most of the way to the hospital at Okeechobee.
“Henry told Lee Harden he wanted to leave me his gold-digging equipment, all his treasure maps, cause he wouldn’t have no use for ’em no more. Said he knew about some buried gold that was well off from the house on private property, where a man could go and dig at night, not get the dogs on him. He had made him a good map, wanted me to have it! Never heard that I went blind, I guess. Not that I would use it anyways. I don’t care for the idea of sneakin onto private property!
“That side of Henry always did surprise me, because he was the most honest man I ever met, and the most religious, too. Come the Holy Day, he would never do no labor, that was his rest day and he read his Bible. But when it come to gold, he didn’t see straight, it was gettin so he would break his own commandments and go dig on Sunday. I doubt he ever give much thought to what he’d do with all his gold if he ever found any, but after so many long years alone, I reckon he dreamed that striking gold might make up some way for the life that passed him by.”
At Okeechobee Hospital
At the hospital, they had to hunt for the old Negro ward, a long room with creaking fans and narrow shafts of dusty sun and decrepit cabinets which seemed to stand at odds with the streaked walls, in a sepia light and weary atmosphere which reminded Lucius of soldiers’ wards in old prints or daguerreotypes of the Civil War. Torn screens in high narrow windows let pass myriad small things which crawled and flew, and distant crow caws, and the airlessness of the hot woods.
The discreet figures wandering the ward were mostly black people. Seated humbly on small hard chairs by the door were two white men in dark Sunday serge with weathered, steadfast faces. Recognizing Andy House, they smiled and stood, but the blind man brushed right past their hands before Lucius could mend the situation.
Henry Short lay flat and still as if extinguished by the humid heat. Pinned to the coarse sheets like a specimen, the old man twitched and shifted in his purgatory. His blue cotton nightshirt was open down the front, and his chest was patched with cracked and crusted scabs, like a side of charred beef leaking thin red fluid. From his bed on its small roller wheels rose a peculiar odor of disinfectant, broiled flesh, and sharp urine. Yet the reddened eyes that peered out from the bandages seemed calm, observing Lucius as he guided Andy House around the cot. They stood beside him, one man on each side.
Through broken lips, the burned man murmured, “Well now. Mist’ Lucius! And Mist’ Andy.” Henry Short had first encountered Lucius as a boy of eight, down in the rivers. Even so, it astonished Lucius that this dying man had recognized a visitor he had not seen in two decades and could not have supposed he would ever see again.
Finding an unburned place on the inert forearm, Lucius pressed the cool skin with two fingertips. “How are you, Henry?” He spoke in a soft low voice in keeping with the hush over the ward. “How do, Henry,” Andy said, wide-eyed and smiling. Unable to see Henry’s dire condition, anxious lest he molest his awful burns, he extended his arm over the bed like a crude feeler as the black man, in great pain, slowly lifted a white mitt toward the blind hand. Lucius reached to draw their hands together just as both men lost faith and gave up.
Though Henry did his best to smile, his awful travail turned his eyes murky and twisted his parched mouth. “Fiery furnace!” Still working at that death’s-head smile he gasped out that phrase from the old spiritual. Teeth chattering, he closed his eyes and rested a little until he got his breath.
An old black woman two beds away called to the white men that Deacon Short was a true man of God, and if he had ever sinned, none could recall it. “Praise the Lord!” the old woman cried, and there came a shy chorus of assent rose from the hushed room. Like mourners in a slow procession, the ward visitors did not gather around Henry but continued walking, and now they began a crooning in warm harmonies. And the burned man muttered, “Hear them angels? Hope they come for me!” Though he struggled with it, he could not work his smile.
Lucius returned to the two men by the door, who stood again, eager to know if that man at Henry’s bed could be Andy House. They had come here from Arcadia, they said. Their name was Graham. Years ago, Henry had spoken of Lucius Watson’s kindness, and they thanked him warmly for this visit to their brother. They were concerned that nobody was on duty to give him something for his pain, but they also said that Henry had been refusing medication. As best as they could fathom his strict code, uncomplaining acceptance of his agony signified some sort of purification to the dying man. They left the bedside frequently because they themselves could not endure the sight of such hard pain.
When Lucius told Andy that Henry’s brothers were there and wished to greet him, he was overjoyed. “Grahams? Them two fellers knowed me when they seen me?” Tears came to his eyes as Lucius led him back across the room and the Grahams rose and sat him down between them.
When Lucius took the rickety chair beside the bed, Henry Short’s mouth fixed itself in that grim semblance of a smile, but the broken eyes, discolored red and yellow, had gone glassy. “You’re a tough old gator, Henry, you are going to make it,” Lucius told him.
The patient dissented with a small twitch of the chin. A moment later, he gritted out, “I had enough.…” Tears escaped onto his caved cheeks. Again Lucius pressed two fingers to that one unburned place on the ropy forearm, and Henry pressed his forearm upward against Lucius’s hand. “You come to ask about your daddy,” he w
hispered urgently, as if he might die before their business could be finished. He nodded when the other did not deny it.
“I lied, Mist’ Lucius. Lied to Houses, lied to Hardens, lied to you. Been lyin and lyin all of my whole life.” He was not repentant, only bitter. “White folks ever stop to think how they make us lie? How honest Christian nigras got to lie? Lie and lie, then lie some more, just to get by?”
Lucius found a towel to wipe his brow. “Don’t tire yourself, Henry. No need to talk—”
“Yes! A need! I got to finish it!” Henry rasped this with asperity. He gasped out the truth in fits and starts after making Lucius promise that what he had to say would never be repeated to the Hardens. “I’m scared my friends might disrespect me when I’m gone.”
Henry closed his eyes and kept them closed, as if reading a history burned into his eyelids. “Yessuh, they is a need. A cryin need.” He emitted a sharp cough of pain, and the churchwomen knit their brows, afraid this white stranger was draining the Deacon’s strength.
“Mis Ida House, she told me grab my rifle and go foller Old Mist’ Dan. Told me look out for him, cause he was agitatin about gettin old and had got himself all fired up to do some foolishness. And I stared at that old lady. I couldn’t believe what she was askin me to do! I started in to actin the scared nigger, only this time it was true, I was scared to death. I rolled my eyes up, prayin to Heaven, and I cried out, ‘Please, Mis Ida, ma’am, that ain’t no place for no nigger with no rifle! Not today!’
“So that old lady got upset, and she told me I owed it to her husband! Harked back to how Old Mist’ Dan done saved the life of a pickaninny child on the road south out of Georgia. Time she got done, I didn’t see no choice about it. I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and I fetched my rifle and trailed after ’em toward the landin, so heavy in my heart I couldn’t hardly walk.”