Lost Man's River (7 page)

Clearly, his upright siblings in Fort Myers had no wish to learn “the truth” about their father, perhaps because they lived in dread of what such ancestry might signify if even one of the terrible tales proved to be true. And despite his loyalty, Lucius himself was uncomfortably aware of shrouded memories, half-hidden, half-forgotten—specters of the half-light, dimly seen, which drew near the surface of certain dreams and threatened to burst forth into the waking day. If Papa had deserved his reputation, then what did it mean to be the get of such a man, the biological consequence, the blood inheritor?

“You're drunk! You're talking crazy!” Eddie had shouted when Lucius asked these dire questions at a Thanksgiving celebration at the Langfords, scarcely a month after the death. And all reminded him of the clan decision never to speak of their ancestor again.

Lucius cried, “Well, maybe I
am
crazy! Who knows? If Papa was who you think he was, I might wake up one day and just start killing people! And you might, too! That doesn't scare you?”

That winter of 1911, estranged from his family and unable to rest, he had set off in search of his beloved oldest brother, who had not been heard from since he'd fled from Chatham Bend ten years before. Lucius took the train north to Fort White, in Columbia County, in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson or their Collins cousins.

Granny Ellen, he discovered, had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins had no idea who Lucius might be, far less what he might want of her. Aunt Minnie, who would die within the year, had been sheltered from the scandal (and indeed from her own life) by morphine addiction and premature senescence. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, she would not speak with this interloper in her household, who only added to her confusion and distress.

As for her children, they scarcely remembered the young cousin who had stayed with them briefly sixteen years before. Sympathetic at first, his relatives became uncomfortable and then impatient with his questions, reminding
him of the code of silence which the Collins clan had scrupulously observed. Shamed in their rural community by their uncle Edgar, they were not grieved by his death, and when Lucius finally understood this, he burst out, “He was acquitted! He was found innocent!”

The Collins brothers did their best to mend things. They had loved their uncle, they acknowledged, but they would never agree that he was innocent. When Lucius departed, Cousin Willie called from the train platform, “Y'all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” This was meant kindly, yet they were content with his departure and could not hide it.

While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father's widow, who had fled Chokoloskee and gone to live near her sister Lola in northwest Florida. Edna Watson was close to Lucius's age, they had been dear friends, and he felt sure he would be cheered by a good visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison after Granny Ellen's family. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of the shooting, which Little Ad had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old on that dark October day, struck Lucius as subdued and melancholy, rather timid.

His young stepmother was kind to him, and nervous. He had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. Though Edna was too shy to say so, her sister, pressing him to leave, warned him gently that “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl's life.” At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Edna would soon marry her childhood sweetheart from Fort White, who had offered to give his name to her three young ones.

In Fort Myers, Lucius worked awhile as a fishing and hunting guide for Walter Langford's business associates. After his years at Chatham River, he was a skilled boatman and fisherman and a dead shot. He was also a loner, preferring books to loud camaraderie, and indeed so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received indirect complaints, not about Lucius's guiding, which was expert, but about his “unfriendly” attitude, his silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he was hobbled by introspection, guilt, and melancholy. At heart he was a merry person who saw something amusing wherever he turned, but in his darker times, Lucius's humor turned cryptic and laconic. His one close friend—and eventually his lover—was a young girl named Lucy Dyer whose parents had worked at Chatham Bend in the first years of the century and who retained fond childhood memories of “Mr. Watson.”

In the dull white summer of 1912, Lucius sought refuge in the Merchant Marine, taking along a duffel full of books. Upon his return, he was prevailed
upon by Carrie to attend the University of Florida at Gainesville. There he passed three years in quest of a degree in American history, proposing for his thesis a life of the Everglades pioneer and sugarcane planter Edgar Watson—an objective biography which (he proposed) might replace the legend with the facts, and testify to E. J. Watson's intelligence and generous nature as well as his remarkable accomplishments. But his outline was rejected as too speculative—“too subjective” was what was meant, since the candidate was Watson's son. However, the faculty was much impressed by his deep knowledge of remote southwestern Florida, even to its Indian people and its wildlife, and urged him to prepare instead an account of pioneer settlement on the Everglades frontier.

At first, he had resented his professors for having dismissed his parent as a subject unfit for biography. (At the same time, Lucius understood that, in light of what had been written about Papa in the magazines and newspapers, unanswered by any protest from the Watson family, they could scarcely have concluded anything else.) Dispirited, he turned instead to the proposed history of southwest Florida, which progressed rapidly. It was nearing completion when he lost heart and abandoned it, and a few weeks later, he dropped out of graduate school without a word. For the first though not the last time in his life, Lucius Watson embarked on a prolonged alcoholic odyssey which only ended when he awoke in jail.

Returning eventually to Fort Myers, he went straight to the Langford house and stood before the family, ready to endure their recriminations. Poor Carrie gasped at his appearance. “Oh, it's such a waste!” she mourned. Inevitably Eddie reminded him of his profound debt to the generous man who had paid for his tuition—here Eddie bent a meaningful look upon his own employer, Walter Langford, who frowned, judicious, from his armchair, rapping out his pipe. Whether Walter frowned over the waste of Lucius's efforts or the waste of money—or perhaps in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey—Lucius felt ashamed that he had accepted Langford's money in the first place.

It was Lucius's “morbid fear of life,” Eddie declared, which had caused him to flee the university before completing his thesis and receiving his degree, and which also kept him from settling down and getting married. (“That poor, dear little Lucy Dyer!” Carrie had grieved, when Eddie condemned his brother's unmarried status.) A churchman and sober citizen who shared most and possibly all of Walter's opinions, Eddie was already married, with two daughters. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he sighed in his most world-weary way, shaking his head over his brother's ingratitude and chronic folly.

Next day, without notifying Lucy, Lucius enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He
went overseas with a vague ambition to die for his country but came back having failed in this as in all else. Still brooding about his murdered father, still fantasizing about Southern honor (and even honorable revenge upon the ringleader—or perhaps the first man to fire—since it seemed impractical to wipe out the whole posse), he had convinced himself that to salvage his own life, he must return to the Ten Thousand Islands, not only to confront the executioners but to learn just why Edgar Watson had met that grotesque end on October 24th of 1910, at Chokoloskee.

Before departing for the Islands, Lucius spent one broken evening at the Langford house—their new brick house on First Street, at the foot of the Edison Bridge over the river. On this occasion, Eddie declared that Lucius's “unhealthy obsession” with his father's death was merely a way of lending false significance to his own immature and feckless life. And when Lucius was silent, he went on to warn him that returning to the Islands could only end in violence, since the local men, in their guilt and anger, would inevitably feel threatened by E. J. Watson's son. This dire prediction evoked an outburst of dismay from Carrie and unusually deep frowns from her husband, who stepped at once into the pantry to fortify himself with a noble whiskey, in which Lucius joined him. And whiskey fired the final argument over Lucius's declared intention to find out precisely what had happened on that fatal day nine years before—find out just who had shot at Papa, and what evidence there was, if any, that E. J. Watson had ever killed a single soul.

“Oh Lord! You
are
crazy!” Eddie hollered.

“Name one person,” Lucius shouted back on his way toward the door, “who ever claimed that he saw Papa shoot at
anybody
!”

“Precious Lucius” thought himself superior, Eddie was yelling, for refusing to honor the family agreement never to discuss their father. And Carrie chimed in—“You
did
promise, you know!”

“You people promised! I never promised a damned thing!”

Carrie was reprimanding Eddie as the door closed—“He is
not
feckless! He is simply romantic and impractical!”—but she did not disagree with Eddie, not entirely. When Lucius had gone overseas without advising Lucy Dyer that he was going, the desperate girl had confessed her love for him to Carrie, and recently Carrie had learned that he had not called on Lucy since his return. The next day, too ashamed to make amends—he had some idea that he must first prove himself worthy—he departed for the Ten Thousand Islands.