Lost Man's River (104 page)
Authors: Peter Matthiessen
I stood stupidly, unable to take in what he was saying. Patiently he said that Bet Tucker was a witness. I must go after her at once. “We cannot stay here,” he repeated gently, and still I did not move. “You came this far, Rob. You better finish it.”
I gasped, teeth chattering, whole body shivering, I was fighting with all my might not to be sick. I yelled, “
You
finish it!” He gazed where she had gone. “I would take care of it myself,” he said, “but I'd never catch her. It is up to you.” I started yelling. Shooting these poor young people in cold blood was something terrible and crazy, we would burn in hell!
He was losing patience now, although still calm. He folded his arms upon his chest and said, “Well, Rob, that's possible. But meanwhile, if she gets away, we are going to hang.”
I would not listen. I couldn't look at Wally's body without retching, so how could I run down his poor Bet and point a gun at her and take her life? I wept. “Don't make me do it, Papa! I can't do it!”
“Why, sure you can, Son,” he told me then, “and you best jump to it, because you are an accomplice. It's your life or hers, look at it that way.”
“You told me we were coming here to settle up our claim!”
“That's what we did,” he said. He stood up then and turned his back to me, looking out toward the Gulf horizon. “Too late for talk,” he said.
I was running. I was screaming the whole way. Whether that scream was heard there on that lonely river or whether it was only in my heart I do not know.
Being so cumbersome, poor Bet had not run far. In that thick tangle, there was no place to run to. I found sand scuffs where she had fallen to her knees and crawled in under a big sea grape. Panting like a doe, she lay big-bellied on her side, wide-eyed in the shock of what had happened. I stopped at a little distance. Seeing me, she whimpered, just a little. “Oh Rob,” she murmured. “We did you no harm.”
I called out, “Please, Bet, please don't look! I beg of you!” I crept up then and knelt beside her, and she breathed my name again just once, softly, as if trying to imagine such a person.
I never expected death to be so â¦Â intimate? That white skin pulsing at her temple, the sun-filled hair and small pink ear, clean and transparent as a seashell in the morning lightâso full of life! Her eyes were open and she seemed to pray, her parted lips yearning for salvation like a thirsting creature. She never looked into my eyes nor spoke another word on earth, just stared away toward the bright morning water.
Raging at myself to be merciful and quick, I grasped my wrist to steady my gun hand. Even so, it shook as I raised the revolver. Already steps were coming up behind, crushing the sand, and hearing them, her eyes flew wider and her whole body trembled. Before she could shriek, I placed the muzzle to her ear, forcing my breath into my gut to steel myself and crying aloud as I pulled back on the trigger. I pulled her life clean out of her. My head exploded with red noise. Spattered crimson with her life, I fainted.
For a while after I became aware, I lay there in the morning dance of sea grape leaves reflected on the sand. Light and branches, sky and turquoise waterâall was calm, as in a dream of heaven.
I forced open my eyes. I yelled in terror. She was gone. Closing my eyes again, I prayed for sleep, I prayed that nothing had taken place, that the dream of trees and sky and water might not end.
He came and leaned and shook my shoulder. Gently, he said, “Come
along, it's time to go.” He had already hauled the bodies out into the river. Alive and unharmed in the warm womb of its mother, the unborn kicked in blind foreboding beneath the sunny riffles of the current.
I struggled to stand up but I could not. The weakness and frustration broke me, and I sobbed. I saw the boot prints, the sand kicked over the dark bloodstain, like a fatal shadow on the earth.
He leaned and took me underneath one arm and lifted me easily onto my feet. He used a brush of leaves and twigs to scrape the brains and bloody skull bits from my breast, for I had fallen down across her body. Never before had this man touched me with such kindness, nor taken care of me in this strong loving way. I actually thought, What took so long? After all these years, he loves me! But his compassionâif that is what it wasâhad come too late. My life was destroyed beyond the last hope of redemption. What had happened here had bound me in a shroud. I was a dead man from that day forward, forever and ever and amen.
I retched and fought away from him but fell, too weak to run. He bent again and lifted me, half-carried me toward the skiff.
With hard short strokes he rowed upriver, against the ebb tide. His heavy coat lay on the thwart beside me. He himself seemed stunned, half-dead, and he had forgotten the revolver. My hand found the gun furtively, over and over, whenever he turned to see the course ahead. I wanted to take it, cover it with my shirt, but I felt too shaken and afraid. In that long noon, ascending Lost Man's River, I realized I should have killed him when he first gave me that gun, sparing Bet Tucker and her baby. Now I had taken those two lives and lost my own.
He told me on the long row home that the delta tide would carry the bodies off the shallow bank into the channel and the deeper water, where sharks following the blood mist in toward shore would find them. I did not answer him. I could not. I felt a loathing as profound as nausea. I never spoke a word to him again.
By oar and sail, he returned to Chatham Bend, using the inland passages to avoid being seen by the Lost Man's settlers or the Hardens on Wood Key or the few drifters and net fishermen along that coast. He told me to keep my head below the gunwales, so that if the bodies were discovered and Watson's skiff had been reported in that region, the son would not be implicated in the alleged crimes. That was his word that dayâ“alleged”âand that is the word that you, Luke, are still clinging to.
All that New Year's afternoon, curled up like a hound on the bilge boards near his boots, I observed that murderous drunkard at the tiller, the blue eyes squinted in the sun, the ginger beard under the scuffed black hat, against the sun shafts and dark rising towers of far cumulus.
At the Bend, Aunt Josie was nowhere to be seen. He resumed drinking. Before he finally lost consciousness, he reviled me for ingratitude and cowardice and shouted threats against imagined enemies, while saving his vilest curses for the Tuckers. I found the revolver and I aimed it, but I could not fire.
That evening I slipped the schooner's lines and drifted her downriver on a falling tide. At first light, I worked her out beyond Mormon Key, where an onshore wind was chipping up the surface, and ran a course south for Key West, where our cousin Thomas Collins worked in a shipping office. Tom found a buyer right away because I sold the schooner cheap, aware of the one who, even now, must be in hard pursuit of me, to claim her. That same night I shipped out as a crewman on a Mallory steamer, bound for New York City.
In this way, your brother forsook home and family. My history in the half century since (under an alias) is not worth recording, having no relevance to your Watson archive.
(signed) R. B. Watson
For a long time Lucius lay inert in the mildewed cabin. His heart felt like a core of lead with flayed nerves stretched around it, and its beating hurt him.
Some time later he arose and took the bedrolls over to the beach. He spread them at a little distance from the fire, not far downriver from the place where Rob and Papa must have slipped ashore. The Tucker shack had been around the point, on the west shore, and he dimly recalled the great hardwood from some tropic river, cast up by hurricane, against which Wally Tucker must have leaned his rifle while he patched his pants.
In the firelight, Andy and Whidden were laughing warily with Daniels. Instinctively, Sally sat behind her husband's shoulder, keeping Whidden between her and her father. By reputation, the hard-drinking Daniels would remain upright and articulate to a point just short of brain death before passing out.
“Course my daughter here got the queer idea that her daddy prefers gators to niggersâhell, that ain't right at all! I was brung up with old-fashioned views but I kept up with the times better'n some.” Daniels glanced slyly at Sally Brown, whose face was closed. “If I go in a restaurant, Key West, and a nigger comes in there and sets down, I ain't gone to open my damn mouth, cause I respect the law. But far as one comin into my own house and pullin a chair up to my table, well, I weren't raised that way. After we're done eatin, he can come on in, case of a mergency, to use my phoneâthat's
different. But as far as settin down just like a white person? Nosir! I don't hold with that. I weren't raised that way, and it's hard to change so much after all these years.”
Sally burst out, “Don't let him get started! He just bullies everybody with his viciousness. And it isn't funny just because he's drunk!”
Speck Daniels turned slowly to confront his daughter, looking her over in the same judicious way in which earlier he had met criticism from the blind man. “Course my daughter here was raised up with her daddy's views, ain't that right, Sally? When she was young, some people name of Hyatt come to town and word was going round they might be coloredâ”
“Oh don't!” begged Sally, jumping up. “I was only twelve!”
Speck kept nodding. “So this Hyatt girl told her best friend Sally Daniels she was white, and I guess she was, to look at. But my daughter was kind of a mean girl back at that time, talked and thought like her own kind of people. So Sally would not let it go, and them two had a catfight in the school yard every day. Sally called the other girl a dirty nigger, and other kids got into it and then the grown-ups. Finally it was settled, Hyatts was black. Wanted to be white in the worst way but people wouldn't let 'em. So they got moved acrost the bridge and their kids was sent to the nigra school, and Miss Sally Daniels got most of the credit.”
Her husband put his arm around her but no one could protest, since Sally did not deny that it was true. “That was the way he brought us up!” she cried. Speck contemplated his daughter while she wept. He said, “Them people suffered somethin terrible, y'know. I was almost sorry it was me let on to Sally how they might be niggers.”
Nobody spoke. The blind man, who had propped himself onto his elbows, let himself down again and folded his big hands over his eyes.
“I will say this much, when it come to looks, that Hyatt girl was about as cute as us fellers ever seen in our hometown. Had a couple of state cops hangin around there a good while that wanted to shack up with her, that's how pretty that girl was, but her people proved to be niggers all the same.
“Black nor white, a person can't control what he was borned to be. It's like a dog or cat. A good cat's a good cat, and a good dog's a good dog. I like a good dog, but a sorry one is about the sorriest thing there is on God's good earth. You take a good nigger, it's the same. But a sorry niggerâ”
Whidden said, “Speck? Let'sâ”
“All I'm sayin is, God give His own strength to the white race! And the strong ones eat the weak ones and they always did, that's the way of fish and the way of man and the way of God's Creationâdog eat dog! And for all us poor fools know about it, this dog-eat-dog might just be the way God
wants
it! Might be His idea of
justice
, ever think of that? Keepin His Creation strong? Might be God's
Mercy
!”
“I'm ashamed,” Sally murmured, weeping. “Truly ashamed.” She got up and headed for the boat, and her father leaned forward around Andy House to admire her movements. “Ain't she sweet?” He sighed when he sat back again. “I got another daughter in Miami just as purty, only this girl purely
loves
her daddy, loves to set on her bad old daddy's knee.” He winked at Whidden, who looked past him, watching Sally brush her teeth and crawl into her bedroll. Her father nodded in approval, as if she were being a good little girl about her bedtime.
“Speakin of that other daughter, you fellers hear about them black boys that busted in when I was over visitin Miami? When my little grandchild run outside and left the door unlocked while I was layin on the sofa? These two snuck in and when they seen me, they run right over and started in to beatin on me. One straddled me and broke my nose all up while the other was yankin at my pockets, huntin my wallet, and neither of 'em spoke a word the whole time they was there. Money for dope, that's what the cops told me, but it seemed more like plain old hate to me. Old man that never done a thing to them damn people, and here they're invadin in broad daylight, just
a-beatin
on him?
Got
to be hate! I sure don't know what's the matter with that kind, with all our tax money they are gettin free on nigger welfare!
“Had a stray bullet whap into my daughter's house, fall on the floor, when the cops was runnin dopers there on the back avenues. This is dangerous stuff that's goin on! Used to be you could leave everythin unlocked, now you have to guard your house twenty-four hours a day. I ain't so much a religious person, but I think that the Old Man Up There, He'll have to take and thin some of this out. The world is gettin so wicked, y'know, something has to stop. They talk about old-time desperaders like Ed Watson, but the killin back then ain't nothin like it is today. See more killed in one week on the news than Watson done away with in a lifetime!
“Miami now, there's a barbecue on the next block has a nigger in it who just thinks the world of me. Said he'd find them ones who beat me up, get 'em took care of. Good nigger people, they don't want that kind around no more'n we do.
“Next day a man drove right up to the house. Very easy and polite, like he was in some kind of law enforcement. Handed me a card without no name on it, only a Miami phone number. Says, âMr. Daniels, I seen in the papers where niggers invaded into your home and robbed and beat you. You think you would know them ones that done it? Cause if you ever run acrost 'em, you can call this number and describe 'em, say where they are at. You can reach this number twenty-four hours a day, you understand me, Mr.
Daniels? Twenty-four hours every day. All you got to do is call and then you're out of it.' Got back in his big car and went away. Don't seem like that man worked in law enforcement, what do you think?”