Lost Man's River (13 page)

“Lord!” Dyer's bark of derisive mirth had a hard ring of anger. “Why don't we leave all that negative stuff to those whining left-wingers!” Dyer moved swiftly to his point about corporate sponsorship of Lucius's biography in progress. “Assuming of course that your book makes clear E. J. Watson's connection with the industry.” United Sugar, he declared, was eager to promote any worthwhile literature about pastoral traditions on the pioneer plantations of the nineteenth century, so a book by a well-known historian that mentioned the prominence of sugarcane in Florida agriculture—why heck, that would hit the nail right on the head!

Setting down Lucius's notes again, the old man groaned. “I mean, what good is a land claim way to hell and gone inside the Park? Let 'em burn that damn house to the ground, if you ask me!”

Lucius ignored this. “Dyer wants to bargain for full repair and maintenance of the house as a Park ranger station or state monument—”

The old man stiffened like a dog on point. His burnsides bristled. “How about a
murder
monument? Big-time tourist attraction! First monument to bloody murder in the U.S.A.!” Unable to to maintain the huff and pomp of indignation, Arbie grinned. “Murder museum and snack bar! White rubber skeletons and black skull T-shirts, red licorice daggers! Maybe gore burgers and some nice ketchup specialties!”

But Arbie stopped smiling when he happened upon the offer from the Historical Society of Southwest Florida to pay for a lecture on the legendary planter “Emperor” Watson. Professor Collins's name, the letter said, had been suggested by one of their esteemed sponsors, the United Sugar Corporation, which had also agreed to underwrite his honorarium.

Arbie's worst suspicions were borne out. “They got you cheap.” He slapped the pages down. “L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.! If it ever comes out, down the road, that Watson Dyer is your bastard brother—” The old man lifted his palm to ward off protest. “No, L. Watson, I cannot
prove
that your daddy mounted your attorney's mama. But I
do
know her ex-husband Fred has been hollering for fifty years:
That goddamn Watson put the horns on me!
”

Lucius was aware of Fred Dyer's claim, and his daughter Lucy had confirmed the story, confided to her by the late Mrs. Sybil Dyer. Nevertheless, he had been sworn to secrecy, which was why, in these notes on Arbie's lap, there was no mention of a Dyer son born out of wedlock.

“Course, Dyer don't want this to come out,” Arbie was warning him. “According to Speck, this feller means to run for politics one of these days. It's bad enough being Watson's bastard without voters suspecting that he might have a crazy streak like his old man!”

Lucius turned to him at last. “How about me, Arb?” he said quietly. “You think I have a crazy streak like my old man?”

“Well,
I'd
sure say so!” Arbie yelled recklessly. “Got to be crazy to be wasting all these years trying to redeem a man like E. J. Watson! And now his bastard is slipping you right into his dirty pocket, and you so damn fanatic you don't even notice!”

“Why would he do that? Give me one good reason.”

“How would I know! Maybe he wants the southwest Florida historian to clean up Watson's ugly reputation before the truth of his own ancestry gets out! By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed, you'll have all us dumb local folks rolling our eyes to the high heavens and thanking our Merciful Redeemer for that kindly old farmer who put our sovereign state of Florida where she's at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent about all their mean tales about him, and how they done him wrong:
So maybe Ol' Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol' Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First redneck president in the U.S.A. to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol' redneck breed that made this country great!
”

They spent that evening at a motel camp on the Withlacoochee River. While the old man slept off a long day, Lucius drank his whiskey in the shadow of the porch, in the reflections of the giant cypress in the moon mirror of the
swamp, deep in forest silence. The gallinule's eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as exquisitely in place as the shelf fungi on the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead father, as pale saplings straining for the light twist up and around the fallen tree, drawing the last minerals from the punky wood before the great log crumbled in a feast for beetles.

Alone on the porch, he returned to that September day of 1910 when he had left Chatham on the mail boat after a dispute with his father. Not all of the story would come back to him—was he resisting it?—yet it seemed to him that the dispute had been caused by Cox, who had stood behind Papa that day, watching Lucius go. From the stern, rounding the bend downriver, he beheld his father for the last time in his life, the bulky figure in the black hat on the riverbank, fists shoved hard into the pockets of the old black Sunday coat he wore habitually over his coveralls. No, Papa had not waved to him, not in the warm way he wanted to remember. Nor was this really the last sight of Papa, although the next image to veer into his brain was not his father but a thing, a bloated slab of putrefying meat encrusted with blood-blackened sand, half-submerged in that gurried water pit on Rabbit Key.

Lucius drank half his whiskey, gasped, and shuddered hard, shaking himself like a dog shaking off water.

From the bare spring twilight came loud ringing calls of Carolina wrens. The urgency of this song from the forest pained him, and he sighed in the throes of ancient longing, mourning that bad parting. What was he forgetting? And why had he wandered so far from his own life in useless inquiry into the deeds of the lost father whom all his siblings were so anxious to forget?

He sniffed the charcoal in his whiskey. Perhaps he
was
being obsessive—that's what Eddie had once called him. Was it obsession when his father's life enthralled him far more than his own? He supposed that the ongoing search for Mr. Watson had become his solace for his life's solitude and slow diminishment, and he dreaded the hour when this quest would end. It gave continuity to his existence and even a dim purpose to his days.
Purpose to his days!
Ironic, he raised his glass to the great cypresses, but the glass was empty.

Sensing him, he turned to confront the old man in the cabin window. Arbie was watching Crazy Lucius talking to himself, watching him toast no one at all, raising an ever-emptied glass to the towering clerestories of shrouding moss and the night creatures and the black moon water.

In the early days of the Florida frontier, what was now the capital of Columbia County was a piney-woods outpost known as Alligator Town, after the “Alligator Chieftain,” Halpatter Tustenuggee. A strong ally of the war chief Osceola, Alligator had been attacked by Tennessee irregulars on an expedition of “Indian chastisement,” to revenge the Creek uprising against the settlers in Georgia and Alabama and the subsequent flight of Hitchiti and Muskogee Creeks into north Florida. (To the Creek people who stayed behind, these fugitives were known as the People of the Distant Fires,
siminoli
.) After the United States bought Florida from Spain, and the first pioneers rode south into the region, the Seminole chief Charley Emathla, living by the clear black pond at Alligator Town, was executed by Osceola for allowing himself to be bought off by the white men.

“Your Collins clan,” the historian concluded, turning off the highway, “was among those early pioneers. They founded the Methodist community called Tustenuggee.”

“Well, I never knew too much about ol' Alligator,” Arbie admitted, peering out at the concrete oversprawl of strip development crisscrossed by highway overpasses under soaring signs of noble motor inns. “But I first saw the light of day in Columbia County, and rode up here to the county seat in a damn wagon. Lake City was a pretty nice town back then! Wasn't all this shit, piss, and corruption they call progress.” Arbie sighed. “All the years I
was on the road, I had this dream I would come home to this county, marry a local girl, you know, put me down some roots. It never happened. I never came close.” The old man looked straight ahead again, contemptuous of his own sentimentality. “
Just
as well, from the look of the damn place, not to mention me.”

From sun-glinted smog rose the billboard of the Royal Alligator Motel, where Watson Dyer was to join them the next day on his way north to Tallahassee. In their room the old man, high black shoes unlaced, reclined on the zinc green nubble of the spread while Lucius forced open a mean gimcrack window to air out the stink of sanitizing sprays and cheap cigar smoke. The old man had already closed his eyes by the time Lucius located in the phone book a grandson of E. J. Watson's sister, Minnie Collins. Asked to ring his relative, Arbie groaned and shuffled his shoulders, complaining that he had been interrupted just when he was getting off to sleep.

Lucius was still shy from the reception he'd received when he'd come north in search of Rob, decades before. To his relief, the voice cried out how much “the family” had heard about “Cousin Lucius” and bade him a warm welcome to Lake City. But when Lucius mentioned the purpose of his visit, his relative declared that even if he knew anything—which he assured him he did not—he would have to abide by the family decision never to discuss Great-Uncle Edgar.

“Look, I'm his son.”

“So's Cousin Ed,” the terse voice said.

“But Eddie was living here back then, he knew what happened. I never did know, and I'm trying to find out.”

“May I ask why?”

A moment later, when the call was finished, Arbie sat up, holding his palms to his temples. “He may be named Collins, but he's a Watson, too!” He fell back on the motel bed. “They just won't talk about him! If you hadn't mentioned your damn biography, he might have asked you to the house, out of common courtesy, and you might have learned something!”

“I don't want to be sneaky about what I'm doing,” Lucius said. “Anyway, I'm not ashamed of him!”