Lost Man's River (11 page)

“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.”

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:

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 Mr. 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
.