Shadow Country (34 page)

Papa's old launch
Warrior,
refitted with a new engine, would be ready the next week. More and more excited to be leaving for the Islands, he packed rough clothes and a rifle, bought a new shotgun, gill net, and other gear as well as a supply of dry stores and canned provisions.

On the eve of departure, Lucius submitted himself to a final broken evening at the Langfords', who had lately removed to a new brick house on First Street, at the foot of the Edison Bridge over the river. Joining them for coffee, Eddie declared that Lucius's “morbid obsession” with his father's death was merely an attempt to lend significance to a feckless existence. “You're nearly thirty! Sober up, go find a job, get on with life!” said Eddie, reminding his brother of those stern warnings against returning to the Islands “at your father's burial”—“
your
father,” not “our father,” not “Papa,” Lucius noted.

“That was eight years ago. I'm sure it's all died down.”

“Then you're a fool!” Eddie exclaimed. His conviction that his brother must come to harm brought tears to Carrie's eyes and deep furrows to the ever-ascending brow of her balding Walter, who rose at once and stepped into the pantry to fortify himself with another noble whiskey. Knowing better, Lucius joined him, and whiskey would fire a final dispute over Lucius's vow to find out what evidence there was, if any, that Papa had ever killed a single soul.

“Name one person who can claim he ever saw Papa shoot at
anyone.
”

“That's ridiculous,” Eddie said, even as his upset sister begged her brothers not to talk about their father anymore. “You promised, Lucius.”

“
You
people promised. I never promised a damned thing.” Clearly his upright siblings lived in dread, he said, not merely of scandal but of what their ancestry might signify if even one of those terrible stories about “Bloody Watson” proved to be true. If Papa deserved his monstrous reputation, then what did it mean to be the get of such a man, the blood inheritor? “That seed might sprout in one of his descendants, ever think of that? That doesn't scare you?”

“You're talking crazy,” Eddie said.

“Maybe I
am
crazy. Maybe you are, too, ever think of that?”

Going out the door, he heard his sister reprimanding Eddie. “He's
not
crazy! He's just idealistic and impractical!”

Lucius knew he had been unreasonable and also that Carrie did not disagree with Eddie, not entirely. He no longer cared. After eight years of wandering in his own head, he felt anarchic, in no mood to mend things. He was so relieved to be
acting
on a brave new life that he actually exulted over his break with his Fort Myers family. Scared, he suppressed a longing to seek out Nell for the blessing and encouragement he did not deserve.

TO LOST MAN'S RIVER

Lucius headed south at dawn next day. At Caxambas, he was disappointed to discover that his father's “backdoor family” had mostly moved north to find work in the new coastal resorts at Naples and Fort Myers Beach. Caxambas itself had all but disappeared since the Great Hurricane, lacking even a store, and its high dunes were for sale to Yankee developers, who were planning a new winter community. Knowing the long history of this place as an Indian site, he found this saddening.

In Everglade, where he refueled the boat, the Storters told him that their trading post on the tide creek known as Storter River would be sold and rebuilt as a hotel for Yankee anglers. Hoad still thought that his friend's return to the Islands was a bad idea, and Lucius left early next morning in sunken spirits, going straight west to the Gulf through Indian Key Pass to avoid Chokoloskee. Off Rabbit Key, he passed a stone crab boat whose crewmen recognized Ed Watson's
Warrior
and straightened from their work to stare. Neither man returned his wave.

At Chatham Bend he found a boat tied to the dock and Willie Brown and family camped in the house. An old friend of his father, Willie seemed unable to imagine why Lucius would come back to the Islands, even when he explained. Kicking dirt, Brown said, “I spoke out agin it and I took no part and I don't aim to tell you who did. For your own damn good, boy! Any man gits the idea the son is huntin him might feel obliged to git that damn fool first, you take my meanin?”

Willie said his family would move out as soon as Lucius was ready to come in (by “ready to come in” he meant “prepared to live alone”). Staring at his childhood house where all those folks had died, he was overtaken by loneliness; he invited the Browns to stay. They seemed uneasy about this. A few days later, when he returned from Everglade with fresh supplies, their boat was gone.

In river twilight, Lucius wandered the overgrown plantation. Long swords of untended cane struggled up through thorn and vine. Back of the cistern—it must have smelled fresh water—lay the long toothy skull of Papa's ancient roan, run wild and finally abandoned. Deep in rank weeds not far away was the rust-red skeleton of the Model S Ford brought into this roadless wilderness by Papa. The children had admired its big single headlight and the lantern and hand grips on the rear wall of the “cabriolet” half-roof where Sip Linsey had perched on the toolbox as the only auto ever to arrive in the Ten Thousand Islands bounced and backfired around the cane field. “Looky dis nigger ridin shotgun,” Sip was heard to say to nobody in particular, as he suffered this ass-busting indignity.

He fetched his whiskey from the boat and sat on the ragged porch all that long evening, until finally he stumbled off the steps and fell, wrenching his shoulder; a despairing howl rose from his cry of pain. He dreaded the house, the broken glass in its black empty windows: he could not sleep there. Lying down on the
Warrior
's cabin roof, he stared across to the far bank where the huge crocodile of boyhood had hauled out “to keep watch on my house,” Papa had said. One day it furiously attacked and killed a large alligator that had strayed into its territory, and Papa said, “I reckon that's not much of a gator anymore, not after
that.
” Papa's baleful understatement seemed mostly uttered for his own grim amusement. He used the incident to reinforce his strict instructions to the children, who were never allowed to splash in the shallows unless that croc across the river lay out like a drift log in plain view.

In dream, Lucius rowed across the water. Very slowly, the brute opened its long jaws in warning before raising itself on its short legs and rushing at him with horrid speed, jaws wide, before thrashing away in a thick roil into the current. In terror that the crocodile was just beneath the skiff and must surely rise to capsize, seize, and drag him down, he was awakened by his own cry and gasped for breath. He sat up on deck in the cold mist and dew, peering fearfully into the river deeps.

Yes, he was full of dread and could not hide this from himself. He went at dawn to Lost Man's River, where Owen Harden and his Sarah had always been his friends and made him welcome. That same day, on impulse, he offered them the Watson place: he could rebuild the Dyer cabin. Troubled by his distress, they refused to take the offer seriously. There was no sense wasting Chatham's forty acres of black soil on fishermen. Anyway some development company had recently acquired rights to the Watson property. Bill House, who was working not far upriver on the high ground at House Hammock, would take over as caretaker early next year.

“The leader of the lynch mob! Living in your daddy's house!” Sarah exclaimed.

“Acquired rights from
whom
?” Lucius demanded. These damned developers were usurping Papa's land claim and perhaps his vision for the future of this coast. But Lucius had no heart for a legal battle which he probably could not win.

Owen Harden kindly invited his friend to build a driftwood cabin here on Lost Man's Beach and use the Harden dock and icehouse. And as Sarah pointed out, this cabin project would allow a little time for his father's executioners to adjust to Lucius's sudden reappearance in the Islands.

He began his inquiries gradually, trying to remain objective and avoid recriminations. From early on, he kept a secret list with notes. The Island men had liked “Ed's boy” back in the old days, and at first some put their wariness aside, even volunteered information about Ed's early years on Chatham Bend, his farming innovations, his quickly acquired seamanship, uncanny marksmanship (which he never minded showing off), his humor and good humor, and the colorful tales, not all of them apocryphal, of his riotous behavior in Tampa and Key West—everything, in short, but the background and events of that black autumn evening in October of 1910. Keeping Lucius at a distance, they nicknamed him “Colonel,” less in amicable teasing than in recognition of his educated speech and manners—for even at their most obliging, they mistrusted him, so fearful were they that those quiet manners might be hiding schemes of bloody retribution. The situation worsened as his inquiries became more specific, touching on the identities of posse members: he always said “posse” though he wanted to say “mob.”

Rumor spread quickly. The Islanders grew taciturn, then cold; he braved cold-eyed silences everywhere he went. The men might head their boats off course as his approached; their women might simply back indoors and let him knock repeatedly without response. Knowing that if he touched that latch, some frightened body behind the door might blow his head off, he went away. That this soft-spoken man would take such risks, that he kept coming, only served as further evidence that Lucius Watson must be crazy, maybe just as dangerous as his daddy. From the start, Bill House and his brothers—the patriarch D. D. House had died—refused to deal with Watson's son at all.

To Lucius's surprise, friends such as the Browns who at the time had denounced the Watson execution as a lynching were as reticent about the lynchers' identities as those who had been involved. Even Erskine Thompson, his father's ship captain, seemed to avoid him—very curious, since Erskine had no reason to be nervous. Or did he? Lucius often wondered what had happened to the schooner, which at Papa's burial he had asked Hoad Storter to see to: Hoad later reported that the ship was missing. Had someone sold her and pocketed the money?

Lucius caught up with the lank, sun-baked Thompson on the dock at Everglade. After some stiff conversation, he asked this old friend from Chatham days if he still believed that E. J. Watson's death had been planned in advance. Erskine nodded in assent, but when asked who the planners might have been, he said, “Damned if I know.” Asked whom he had noticed at the scene, the only man he could come up with was Mr. D. D. House, four years deceased.

“Nobody else? You sure? You were right there, Erskine.”

Over the years, Thompson had soured in the way of lazy men, and Lucius's incredulity turned him peevish. He was soon insinuating that no son of Ed Watson should go around Chokoloskee Bay asking nosy questions: that whole business was better left alone, less said the better. Instead of asking his fool questions, Thompson called back, starting away, the son should settle up all those back wages that the father had never paid his schooner captain.

“Speaking of schooners,” Lucius shot back, “whatever happened to the
Gladiator
? Isn't her captain the man who should know best?” Thompson cupped his ear, feigning deafness, before waving Lucius away with disgust and finality and walking on.

NIGGER SHORT

Though even his father's friends concealed the identities of the posse members, these families made sure that Watson's son heard rumors that “Nigger Short” had participated in the shooting. Lucius dismissed these stories as absurd until Hoad Storter told him that he, too, had heard this. Hoad said unhappily, “Well, he might have been there, Lucius. People say they saw him. That doesn't mean that he participated: don't let 'em tell you that. Henry's
colored
and he's not suicidal. He's got very good sense.”

He asked the Hardens. After a long pause, Owen said flatly, “Sure. He might of been there. Houses' orders, probably.” He shrugged it off as insignificant but it was clear that, for Henry's sake, he didn't want to talk about it.

In the interests of objectivity, Lucius felt obliged to seek Short out, hear him deny any participation in his own words, but Short had not been easy to track down. He no longer visited the Hardens, who had no idea (they said) where he might be found. Probably this was more or less true, but it was also true, as Owen and Sarah admitted, that though they trusted Lucius, they could not count on what he might do as Watson's son. Did they doubt his sanity or his intentions? Lucius wondered. And why were they so protective of Henry if he had not been involved?

It was Henry Short, as it turned out, who had dismantled the Frenchman's shack on Possum Key (an act that for years had been attributed to Leslie Cox). In his sailing skiff he had moved it piece by piece all the way south to West Cape Sable and lugged the boards three miles or more inland to a desolate area of scrub and brackish water where nobody would come looking for him, let alone find him. “That whole cabin traveled on that one man's shoulders,” Sarah marveled.

“Henry Short come straight to Lost Man's after your daddy was killed. ‘Wait and see,' Henry said. ‘They'll try to hang it on the nigger.' But Daddy Richard had taught that man the Bible. Henry was a fine strong Christian, swore by the First Commandment so we knew he could never line a man up in his rifle sights and pull the trigger.”

“And anyway, he had nothing against my father,” said Lucius.

“I ain't so sure. Remember Jane? Light mulatta gal that come down from Fort White to cook for your daddy at the Bend?”

Lucius smiled. “Jane Straughter? Sure. I thought I was kind of in love with her.”

“Me, too. That's how I learned I could love two girls at once.” Owen glanced at his young wife in comic fear. “Well, Henry confided he had loved Jane dearly and believed she loved him, too, but your daddy found out and sent Henry away. When she went back to Fort White, that poor feller was heart-broke. Took him years to get over her. Finally married my sister Liza, got tore up again.