Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

  “How would I know! Maybe he wants the southwest Florida historian to clean up Watson’s ugly reputation before the truth of his own ancestry gets out! By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed, you’ll have all us dumb local folks rolling our eyes to the high heavens and thanking our Merciful Redeemer for that kindly old farmer who put our sovereign state of Florida where she’s at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent about all their mean tales about him, and how they done him wrong: So maybe Ol’ Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol’ Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First redneck president in the U.S.A. to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol’ redneck breed that made this country great!”

  They spent that evening at a motel camp on the Withlacoochee River. While the old man slept off a long day, Lucius drank his whiskey in the shadow of the porch, in the reflections of the giant cypress in the moon mirror of the swamp, deep in forest silence. The gallinule’s eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as exquisitely in place as the shelf fungi on the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead father, as pale saplings straining for the light twist up and around the fallen tree, drawing the last minerals from the punky wood before the great log crumbled in a feast for beetles.

  Alone on the porch, he returned to that September day of 1910 when he had left Chatham on the mail boat after a dispute with his father. Not all of the story would come back to him—was he resisting it?—yet it seemed to him that the dispute had been caused by Cox, who had stood behind Papa that day, watching Lucius go. From the stern, rounding the bend downriver, he beheld his father for the last time in his life, the bulky figure in the black hat on the riverbank, fists shoved hard into the pockets of the old black Sunday coat he wore habitually over his coveralls. No, Papa had not waved to him, not in the warm way he wanted to remember. Nor was this really the last sight of Papa, although the next image to veer into his brain was not his father but a thing, a bloated slab of putrefying meat encrusted with blood-blackened sand, half-submerged in that gurried water pit on Rabbit Key.

  Lucius drank half his whiskey, gasped, and shuddered hard, shaking himself like a dog shaking off water.

  From the bare spring twilight came loud ringing calls of Carolina wrens. The urgency of this song from the forest pained him, and he sighed in the throes of ancient longing, mourning that bad parting. What was he forgetting? And why had he wandered so far from his own life in useless inquiry into the deeds of the lost father whom all his siblings were so anxious to forget?

  He sniffed the charcoal in his whiskey. Perhaps he was being obsessive—that’s what Eddie had once called him. Was it obsession when his father’s life enthralled him far more than his own? He supposed that the ongoing search for Mr. Watson had become his solace for his life’s solitude and slow diminishment, and he dreaded the hour when this quest would end. It gave continuity to his existence and even a dim purpose to his days. Purpose to his days! Ironic, he raised his glass to the great cypresses, but the glass was empty.

  Sensing him, he turned to confront the old man in the cabin window. Arbie was watching Crazy Lucius talking to himself, watching him toast no one at all, raising an ever-emptied glass to the towering clerestories of shrouding moss and the night creatures and the black moon water.

  Lake City

  In the early days of the Florida frontier, what was now the capital of Columbia County was a piney-woods outpost known as Alligator Town, after the “Alligator Chieftain,” Halpatter Tustenuggee. A strong ally of the war chief Osceola, Alligator had been attacked by Tennessee irregulars on an expedition of “Indian chastisement,” to revenge the Creek uprising against the settlers in Georgia and Alabama and the subsequent flight of Hitchiti and Muskogee Creeks into north Florida. (To the Creek people who stayed behind, these fugitives were known as the People of the Distant Fires, siminoli.) After the United States bought Florida from Spain, and the first pioneers rode south into the region, the Seminole chief Charley Emathla, living by the clear black pond at Alligator Town, was executed by Osceola for allowing himself to be bought off by the white men.

  “Your Collins clan,” the historian concluded, turning off the highway, “was among those early pioneers. They founded the Methodist community called Tustenuggee.”

  “Well, I never knew too much about ol’ Alligator,” Arbie admitted, peering out at the concrete oversprawl of strip development crisscrossed by highway overpasses under soaring signs of noble motor inns. “But I first saw the light of day in Columbia County, and rode up here to the county seat in a damn wagon. Lake City was a pretty nice town back then! Wasn’t all this shit, piss, and corruption they call progress.” Arbie sighed. “All the years I was on the road, I had this dream I would come home to this county, marry a local girl, you know, put me down some roots. It never happened. I never came close.” The old man looked straight ahead again, contemptuous of his own sentimentality. “Just as well, from the look of the damn place, not to mention me.”

  From sun-glinted smog rose the billboard of the Royal Alligator Motel, where Watson Dyer was to join them the next day on his way north to Tallahassee. In their room the old man, high black shoes unlaced, reclined on the zinc green nubble of the spread while Lucius forced open a mean gimcrack window to air out the stink of sanitizing sprays and cheap cigar smoke. The old man had already closed his eyes by the time Lucius located in the phone book a grandson of E. J. Watson’s sister, Minnie Collins. Asked to ring his relative, Arbie groaned and shuffled his shoulders, complaining that he had been interrupted just when he was getting off to sleep.

  Lucius was still shy from the reception he’d received when he’d come north in search of Rob, decades before. To his relief, the voice cried out how much “the family” had heard about “Cousin Lucius” and bade him a warm welcome to Lake City. But when Lucius mentioned the purpose of his visit, his relative declared that even if he knew anything—which he assured him he did not—he would have to abide by the family decision never to discuss Great-Uncle Edgar.

  “Look, I’m his son.”

  “So’s Cousin Ed,” the terse voice said.

  “But Eddie was living here back then, he knew what happened. I never did know, and I’m trying to find out.”

  “May I ask why?”

  A moment later, when the call was finished, Arbie sat up, holding his palms to his temples. “He may be named Collins, but he’s a Watson, too!” He fell back on the motel bed. “They just won’t talk about him! If you hadn’t mentioned your damn biography, he might have asked you to the house, out of common courtesy, and you might have learned something!”

  “I don’t want to be sneaky about what I’m doing,” Lucius said. “Anyway, I’m not ashamed of him!”

  Since the library and municipal offices were closed for the day, they went to the Lake City Advertiser, where Lucius’s ad requesting information on an E. J. Watson, “arrested for murder in this county around 1907,” had failed to smoke out a response from the Collins family. However, there was one soiled letter, in smudged pencil:

  Sir:

  I suppose I am one of the few people still living in this area that knew Edgar Watson, having been raised in the same community near Fort White. I only know a couple of people that are old enough to remember much about those days and I do not know how well their memories are working.

  As a small boy I knew the Tolens, the Getzens, and many details about Watson’s reputation. The Betheas were our neighbors and close friends. I was too small to play on the old Tolen Team, a country baseball club. I picked up fowell balls and threw them in as the team could not afford to waste balls. I thought Leslie Cox was the greatest pitcher in the world. My brother Brooks was the catcher. They played such teams as Fort White and High Springs, and most always won if Le
slie was pitching. The Coxs were our friends until all this trouble started.

  Grover G. Kinard

  Lucius’s heart gave a small kick—not just that casual mention in the second paragraph—Leslie Cox!—but the replacement of Cox the Backwoods Killer with Young Leslie, Star Pitcher of the Tolen Team, pockets stuffed—as he imagined it—with a country boy’s baseball cards and fishing twine and crumbs and one-penny nails, in those distant days before World War I when every town across the country had a sandlot ball club, when Cy Young, Ty Cobb, and Smoky Joe Wood were the nation’s heroes. Leslie Cox, whiffling fastballs past thunderstruck yokels on bygone summer afternoons, doubtless bruising more batters with his untutored hurling than Iron Man Joe McGinnity himself! The crack of a bat in the somnolent August pastures, the yells of boys and cries of girls and the dogs barking, all innocent of the workings of the brain behind the young pitcher’s squinted eyes in the shadow of that small-brimmed cap, which was surely all most of the teams had worn in the way of uniform.

  A postscript to Kinard’s letter said, “Might think about paying a visit pretty soon, because my heart is not exactly on my side, the way it used to be.” Lucius telephoned at once, and Mr. Kinard came on the line. After a few alarming sounds not unlike death rattles, he advised his caller that he was feeling poorly but would agree to entertain a visitor in two days’ time. Oh please don’t die, prayed Lucius. Keep that ol’ ticker going!

  He rushed to compare Grover Kinard’s letter with the Herlong clipping. “Herlong referred to the Getzens, too,” he told Arbie excitedly.

  Edgar and Minnie grew up and married in that section. Edgar rented a farm from Capt. T. W. Getzen. Minnie married Billy Collins and raised a fine family.… Watson came back to Columbia County a few months later. His closest friends were Sam and Mike Tolen.… One day Sam Tolen and his horse were found on a little-used road, both shot to death. Suspicion pointed to Watson and he was arrested and jailed. There was talk of a necktie party and the sheriff moved him to Duval County Jail. He got a change of venue to Madison County.

  “You’ve read me that letter maybe three times already, and now you’re reading me Herlong again!” Arbie complained.

  That evening he called Sally Brown in Gainesville. He brought her up-to-date on the biography, and told her amusing stories about Arbie, but finally he was defeated by her silence. “You okay?” he said. No, she was not “okay,” Sally said, because she had to go back south and find a lawyer and talk to Whidden Harden and clean the rest of her stuff out of their house for the divorce. “Anyway, you sure took your sweet time before you called me!”

  Why, he wondered, did this pretty young woman give a damn whether he called or not? Until now, he had supposed that Sally cared for him only as a friend of the Hardens, or because he was her professor, or because the poor thing, in her distress over her marriage, had shifted her feelings of affection to a “father figure” or whatever. A little perplexed, he said he was sorry, he had not wanted to presume—“Presume!” she exclaimed. He could not tell if she were weeping, but that she had been drinking was quite clear. He told her he was headed south in a few days—would she like to come? “You and me and your mean-mouthed old sidekick? I’ll have to think about it.” But she took down the name of the motel.

  Watson Dyer, seated squarely in the lobby, turned out to look like nothing so much as his own account of himself over the telephone, a major in the U.S. Marines (Reserve) and an attorney “specializing in large-scale real estate development and state politics.” And in fact, his bulk was clad in the big suit and damp white shirt that Lucius had always associated with politicians. He was a heavyset man but not a fat one, with silvered auburn hair in a hard brush around a moonish face. Strong brows were hooked down at the corners, hooding pale blue eyes, and the left eyebrow but not the right was lifted quizzically as if in expectation that whatever stood in his way must now get out of it. White crescents beneath the pupils made his eyes seem to protrude, though they did not. The eyes seemed inset in the skin, like stones in hide.

  “Major Dyer?” Lucius presented the old man beside him. “Mr. Arbie Collins.” Though Arbie was more or less shined up for the occasion, the Major’s hairline was so crisp that Arbie, by contrast, seemed disheveled, and his red neckerchief, lacking its usual flair, made him look raffish, even seedy. “And I’m Lucius Watson.”

  Creasing his newspaper, Dyer considered this presentation before responding to it, as if how these people were to be addressed was for W. Dyer to decide. His eyes seemed to be closing very slowly, as in turtles, and when they opened once again, Lucius noticed a rim of darker blue on the pale blue pupils, and also a delicate shiver on the skin surface around the mouth, as if within, for his own fell reasons, this man was trembling with rage. When Dyer grinned, which he did sparingly, inexplicably, those delicate shivers played like mad around a snub nose (like a wen, Arbie said later), though these phenomena had little to do with mirth. It was almost as if he laughed unwittingly, perhaps by accident.

  “So you’re calling yourself Watson,” Dyer said finally, heaving himself onto his feet in a waft of shaving lotion. Flashing the meaty good-guy grin of the corporate executive or politician, he extended a well-manicured hard hand.

  “That’s his name,” Arbie said sharply, glaring at Dyer with such bristling suspicion that Dyer stiffened with a bearish grunt. Stepping forward to have his own hand shaken, the old man winked conspiratorially at Lucius, who ignored this.

  “R. B. Collins,” the Major pronounced in a flat voice, as if scratching that name off some ultimate list. Again the stone blue eyes closed very slowly, and when they reopened, they were fixed on Lucius. The Major took the historian’s elbow and guided him toward the dining room, letting the old man fall in behind. “Let’s not beat around the bush,” he said. “The historian I’m sponsoring—the objective authority the sugar folks are sponsoring—is L. Watson Collins, the noted author of A History of Southwest Florida.” He strode a ways while that sank in, then summoned Arbie alongside to enlist his support. “Now, boys, I ask you,” he complained, “if a biography of E. J. Watson signed by the well-known Florida historian wouldn’t have more impact? Make the most of a fine reputation in the field?”

  “How do you know so much about his reputation?” Arbie demanded.

  Lucius said mildly, “I’ve never pretended to be a professional historian—”

  “Avoid any suspicion that the author might be prejudiced? As Watson’s son?” Dyer raised those heavy eyebrows, thick as wedges. He leaned in closer as if to peer through Lucius’s eyes into his psyche, taking Arbie’s elbow in a confidential manner. “To answer your question, sir, I know all about him,” Dyer said in a soft voice, “and all about you, too.” He held Arbie’s eye for a long moment. “A routine background check.” He raised both palms to fend off any outrage. “Standard business practice. Underwriting a project, you first investigate the background of all participating individuals.”

  “Routine background check,” Arbie exclaimed later in their room, rolling his eyes heavenward for succor. “Participating individuals.” When Lucius suggested that Dyer might be bluffing, Arbie shook his head. “You think that guy’s bluffing?”

  “No,” said Lucius, “I do not.”

  Awaiting a table, Major Dyer explained that yes, indeed, he needed affidavits from “the Watson Boys” to expedite the claim to the Watson property, and hoped Lucius would help in obtaining one from Addison, the youngest son. Arbie shot his hand up high like a schoolroom pupil. “What makes you think Bloody Watson had good title? How come nobody ever heard about this title until now?”

  “Let the Major finish, Arbie.”

  “Let the Major begin might be more like it,” said the Major, smiling shortly in an attempt at a fresh start. “Bear with me long enough to let me finish what I drove across the whole state to explain.” Again he stared the old man down. “Once our claim to a life estate is established—which avoids condemnation, in recognition of a prior right—why, we??
?ll negotiate for preservation of the house as an historical monument or whatever.”

  Arbie said, “What’s the ‘whatever’ here? And who’s the ‘we’?”

  Dyer winked at Lucius. “Well? What do you say? First, we get the newspapers to cover the Historical Society meeting at Naples where our famous historian, Professor Collins, will demonstrate that there is no hard proof that E. J. Watson murdered anybody! Next, we make a fuss at Smallwood’s store in Chokoloskee, get signed petitions from the locals against burning the historic home of the man who brought the sugarcane industry to Florida—”

  “Oh, Lord!” Lucius shook his head. “I never claimed that!”

  “See? L. Watson Collins just won’t be a party to a goddamned swindle!”

  Arbie barked this impudence into Dyer’s face, and Lucius, afraid for him, recalled what he had witnessed long ago on a bear hunt with his father in the Glades—the morose animal biding its time, then the sudden swipe of long curved claws that gutted the raucous dog and left it whimpering, in awe of its own blood.

  Major Dyer’s pale blue eyes considered Arbie. He said in an intense cold voice, “Tell me, sir, what is it that you call yourself, sir? Arbie?”

  “None of your damned business—”

  “Yes, sir,” Dyer insisted quietly, “it is very much my business, do you understand me?” Controlling great anger, he frowned at his watch and whacked his leg hard with his newspaper. When the hostess came for them, he tossed his loose newspaper onto the sand of the cigarette-butt canister and strode ahead.

  At the table, Lucius showed the Major the synopsis of his notes on the Belle Starr murder, and Dyer read the entire document while the waitress stood there, awaiting their order. He paid no attention to Lucius’s impatience, far less to the poised pencil of the nervous waitress, but sat hunched forward over the table, mantling the papers like a raptor.