Lost Man's River (67 page)

Sally pointed across a weedy lot toward the small houses on the creek. “You can go visit those old friends of yours,” she said ill-humoredly, as if suspicious of what Sandy might have told him. “One of those damn Carrs who shot the Harden boys, I mean. See that purple house, the one on posts? See that chain-link fence he's got around it? It's Sunday so he's probably in there right this minute. Afraid some Harden might come by and blow his head off before he can get safely to his grave.”

Lucius climbed the outside stair to the door of the purple house. At his knock, a reedy voice told him to come in. Mr. and Mrs. Owen Carr, seated in their front room, were intent on a small black-and-white TV, and neither rose or offered him a seat, or seemed to hear his apologies for the intrusion. He thought at first they'd been expecting someone else, since Owen Carr, looking thin and sickly, was staring at him with that horror of mortality which seemed to anticipate a dark old age. Eyes and nostrils reddened, thin arms twitching, he clutched his chair arms as he might a wheelchair. His wife was an ample pinkish woman, uncomplicated in demeanor. Her face had betrayed a tremor at Lucius's intrusion, then composed itself as smoothly as a pond. She continued knitting.

A little tall for the low room, Lucius seemed to loom over the inhabitants. Penny Carr pointed her baby-blue needle at a chair, but not until he was moving toward it of his own accord. “We got word you'd be coming,” she told Lucius, her voice flat, without inflection.

Before he could ask how they had learned so fast, Owen Carr burst out, “I was just tellin Penny how Walker Carr was your dad's best friend, right from the day a stranger name of Watson first showed up at Half Way Creek and bought a schooner from William Brown, who was my granddad on my mamma's side. My daddy and Ed Watson, they was
real
good friends! Watson visited regular, liked to talk crops, and our whole family had a high opinion of him, a
very
high opinion!” Carr talked faster and faster. “Colonel, if I said it once, I said it a thousand times, I don't believe the Watson family got one thing to be ashamed about!” By now he was glancing wildly at his wife.

Lucius was astonished by Carr's fear of him, which he worsened inadvertently by saying, “I believe you were a witness to my father's death—”

The man's stare reflected his belief that Colonel Watson must have come in search of vengeance. Racing to disassociate himself from that event, he quickly became short of breath, in fact looked ill. “In 1910, I was only a little feller, Colonel! Only nine years old! I was over on the island, stayin with kin. Whole island knowed trouble was comin!

“My dad was dead set against that killing, and I sure hope nobody ain't told you different! Him and Willie Brown yelled at them men to go to Everglade, see Justice Storter, see what they should do accordin to the law. Tried and tried but he couldn't head 'em off, it was too late. Every man there knew what was goin to happen! They aimed to shoot Ed Watson dead no matter what! I heard it was Old Man Henry Smith spoke up and said, ‘Let's draw straws, put a live round in only the one gun, so's nobody will know for sure who done the killin!' But no man there thought one bullet would stop him!”

Lucius nodded. “How about Henry Short? Was he there with them?”

Owen Carr winked slyly. “Now don't you go fallin for
that
ol' rigamarole! Them men was hunters, they could clip the plumes off an egret's head, never draw blood! They never needed no damn nigger to take care of nothin!” He uttered a derisive squawk, meant to be laughter. “Colonel? You still keepin that ol' list? Cause if I was to think back on it a little, I bet I could name you every last man in that crowd!”

“You already named one,” his wife warned him. “Anyways, the man didn't ask you about names.” Coolly she met Lucius's gaze, her needles feeding swiftly on the wool like the quick mandibles of a blue beetle. “He can read the names off of his own list any time he wants.”

Owen spoke again, in gusts of breath. “Course I don't rightly remember now just who was in on it. All us boys runnin around—Crockett Daniels, Harley Wiggins, Sandy Albritton—Jim Thompson might been with us, come to think about it.”

Here he glanced at his wife, who said, “
Might
been, is right. Jim weren't but six years old.”

“Well, I was there and don't deny it! A eyewitness! I seen your dad's old shotgun comin up, double-barrel shotgun! I ain't never forgot that sight! Then a rifle cracked out of the dusk, and after that, all hell broke loose, just a hellacious racket, I can sit back and hear it still today! Cause if all of 'em shot, then who would know who done it? I reckon that's what they settled on beforetime!”

“According to your daddy,” his wife said.

Owen Carr's testimony, which directly disputed the posse's claim of self-defense, was too significant to be accepted lightly. Lucius gave the man a moment to calm down. Then he said carefully, “So the killing was planned in advance. You are quite sure of that.”

The Carrs looked at each other. “That's what come down in our families,” Penny said.

“That's right! It come down in our families!”

“Did your father tell you which men planned it?” Lucius paused. “Or when the killing was discussed? You can tell me, Owen—they're all dead now—but accuracy is important.”

“Important to who?” the woman said coldly. “Not to us folks around here.”

Lucius ignored her, trying to hold the eye of Owen Carr, who twitched in consternation. “I was there that day,” he muttered. “I weren't but nine years old. I remember a heck of a racket and dogs barkin. Mrs. Smallwood sent after his gold watch for Mrs. Watson, and Isaac Yeomans laughed and said, ‘Tell the Widder Watson that we sure are sorry but that nice gold watch has been blowed to smithereens.' ”

“That's two,” his wife said.

“I had those names long ago,” Lucius assured her, keeping his gaze fastened on her husband.

Carr cried out eagerly, “One thing our family always did agree about, Colonel Watson was a real fine man, same as his daddy! I was younger'n you but we knew you good because you was in friendship with our family before the trouble!”

“The trouble,” said Lucius, to encourage him.

“He never asked you nothing about that,” his wife warned Owen, who gave her a panicked look. She was knitting more rapidly, quick-fingered, impassive, and Lucius decided to back off a little.

“You say someone told you I was coming here today?”

“Now, honey, who was tellin us about Colonel Watson?” Owen looked furtive again, and his voice had lost all animation. Trying to dodge his visitor's gaze, he whined a little like a dog in nightmare, as if racking his poor brain for names was exquisite torment.

To give them a chance to smooth their feathers, Lucius asked after Penny's father, Jack Demere, who had worked at Chatham Bend in Papa's time—did she think he might sign a petition? “Nosir, I don't think he will,” she said. “He's dead.” When he said he was sorry to hear that, she shrugged. “Oldest man on Chokoloskee. Couldn't hold that job forever, I don't guess.”

While she talked, her husband twitched and brooded, frowning hard. As if unable to bear so much suspense, he brought up the Harden feud again of his own accord, but so obliquely that for a moment Lucius had no idea what he was talking about. “I already told folks all I know about that, Colonel. You was there. You come there to the Bend that day, come with the Harden men.” Having blurted that out, he looked confused and gloomy, lifting his arms
from the chair, letting them fall again, then falling still except for spasmodic twitching of his hands. “Life happens to a man, is all it is,” he mourned.

“I went there with the Harden men when you boys still denied it,” Lucius said gently. “I never did hear your side of that story.”

Penny's needles paused as if the mandibles had stopped while the beetle listened. “What story might that be?” she warned again, as her frail husband took cover in a coughing fit. She took a deep breath and put her needles down entirely, smoothed her lap. She stood up. “Well, we won't keep you,” Penny said, compelling Owen's silence with a needle pointed at his eye.

Before departing, Lucius asked them to sign his petition to the Park to save the Watson house, since both members of this household had known Chatham Bend well during their youth. Mrs. Carr glanced at her husband, who seemed unnerved by their visitor's request. She said, “Nosir, we won't sign nothing in this house. Not today.”

Entering the dark pine lobby of the Everglades Hotel, with its yellowing marine charts and huge mounted fish, Lucius stopped a moment at the desk. The blue-haired receptionist, engaged in her own telephone gossip, was utterly indifferent to his presence, and he waited at a discreet distance, hands clasped behind his back, flexing his legs a little with small knee bends. When eventually he cleared his throat, the woman looked up, battle ready. The color of her eye makeup was running, and she seemed to be biting the telephone as she talked. Finally she tucked it under her ear and waved him forward. Perhaps, he thought, she would be less haughty if she knew how much lipstick was smeared like gore across her teeth.

Asked if there were any message for L. W. Collins or Lucius Watson, Blue-hair snapped, “Which?” When he gently persisted, the woman yawned with that red grimace, like a carnivore. “No messages,” she said, without a glance at the scattered memos on her desk. He wondered how to tangle with this brute. “From Mr. Arbie Collins? Or a Robert Watson? How about Watson Dyer?” She ignored him.

Disgruntled, he went out onto the porch overlooking the water, where Hoad Storter was describing the river scene to Andy House with gestures which the blind man could not see. Lucius listened with pleasure as his old friend portrayed the crab boats passing down the tidal river and the gold-and-purple bronzing on the heads of pelicans on their nests on the bright mangrove wall across the water. Although aware that his listener was dozing, he urged the blind man to listen for the silver mullet, flipping upward toward the air and light, then falling back to the surface of the channel with that dainty smack so mysteriously audible from far away. Lucius suspected
that these wistful sketches were for Hoad's benefit, too, imprinting images against the day when he could no longer come to Storter River to witness these common miracles moment by moment as they rose and vanished in the great turn and glisten of his passing world.

Hoad greeted Lucius with that chipmunk grin, pointing to an old green wicker chair. “I come back every year just to remember! Course Andy knows everything I'm telling him, but he might have forgotten a few things about this coast after so many years as a city slicker in Miami.” He chuckled when the blind man grunted in comfortable protest, refolding his big hands on his stomach.

Hoad was a small man with round red cheeks and a seraphic smile, and his transparent girlish skin appeared to have gone unshaven throughout life. In fact, he looked much as he had when they were boys, fooling and fishing in small boats along this river. “Speaking of mullet, you recall them schools we seen south of Caxambas? Remember, Lucius? Two-three miles across!”

When Lucius nodded, his friend laughed out of sheer pleasure in the sight of him. “Andy told me you'd be coming, Lucius!” Having known him since boyhood, Hoad used his given name. “I expected to see that professor who spoke at Naples, all dressed up in navy blue jacket and linen trousers like those Yankee yachtsmen who tied up to this dock back in the twenties, you remember? And what do I see but the same good old feller I remembered! Same old sun-bleached khakis and salt-rotted sneakers and faded shirt buttoned at wrists and collar against insects—‘so's the dirt won't show,' you used to say, though all of us knew that Lucius Watson wore the cleanest shirt—maybe the only clean shirt!—in the Ten Thousand Islands!