Lost Man's River (10 page)

“You're the one who showed it to Speck Daniels.”

The old man nodded. One evening out at Gator Hook, noticing the name Crockett Daniels on the list, he'd called it to Speck's attention as a joke.

“Speck think it was funny?”

“No, he sure didn't.”

“Mr. Collins? I'd like that list back.”

The old man resumed reading, raising the page to hide his face. “That list is the lawful property of Robert B. Watson, who left his estate to me.”

Lucius sat down carefully on a blue canvas chair. “Are we related? Through the Collinses in Fort White?” This old man, washed and clean-shaven, reminded him of his Collins cousins—slightly built and volatile, black-haired, with heart-red mouths and pale, fair skin.

“Sure looks like it!” Arbie waved the title page, derisive. “ ‘L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.'!”

Sheepishly, Lucius explained that the publishers had insisted on a pseudonym and also on citing his degree. That “Ph.D.” was ridiculous; he had not bothered to attend his graduation, much less used his title. In fact, he was not really an historian—

“A historian.” Arbie grinned slyly at his host's surprise.

This raffish old man was somewhat educated. He was also careless, dropping and creasing pages, flicking ash on them. Finally Lucius stood up and crossed the deck and snapped his notes off Arbie Collins's stomach, exposing the white navel hair that sprouted through the soiled and semibuttonless plaid shirt. “You certainly make yourself at home!” he said.

“Well, I'm a guest. You invited me, remember? You sure don't act too glad to see me—”

“I don't like people rooting through my notes—”

“I
found
'em.” Arbie Collins sat up with a grunt and swung his broken boots onto the deck. “Right where you left 'em, on the table inside. And they look to me like notes for a damn whitewash.” He stood up spryly and performed a loose-boned shuffle, snapping his fingers. “ ‘
Notes on the Ol' Family Skeleton
.' ” He cackled. “Clackety-click.” Like a skeleton danced on a string, the old man shuffled jerkily through the screen door. In a moment he was back, lugging a big loose weary carton. “The Arbie Collins Ar-chive,” he announced, setting it down.

Politely, Lucius rummaged through the carton, in which dog-eared folders stuffed with clippings were mixed with scrawled notes copied out of magazines and books—mostly lurid synopses and brimstone damnations from the tabloids, dating all the way back to the newspaper reports from October and November of 1910. Most of the items were well-known to Lucius—the usual “Bloody Watson” trash, all headline and no substance. None was as interesting as the fact that this old man had made a lifelong hobby of Ed Watson.

One coffee-stained packet of yellowed clippings slid from Lucius's lap to the porch floor. Retrieving it, he recognized the top clipping in the packet, which had come from the official tourist guide to the state of Florida—ripped from a library copy, from the look of it. It described how the young widow Edna Watson, informed by her husband's executioners that she might reclaim the cadaver by following the rope strung from its neck to a nearby tree, had inquired coldly, “Where is his gold watch?” That was certainly not poor Edna's character, and anyway Papa had sold that watch to help pay off his legal debts, as Edna knew.

Disgusted, he put the packet down, asking the old man how he had met Rob Watson. Arbie explained that he had helped his cousin Rob escape his father on a freighter out of Key West after E. J. Watson's murder of those poor Tucker people back in 1901. He was the only relative, he said, whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch with till the day he died.

“
Alleged
murder of the Tuckers,” Lucius corrected him. “It was never proven. E. J. Watson was never even charged.”

Arbie hurled his cigar butt at a swallow that was coursing for mosquitoes over the spartina grass along the creek. “L. Watson Fuckin Collins, Ph.D.!” he yelled. “Too bad poor Rob is not alive to hear his brother say something as bone stupid as that!” The old man was fairly shivering with fury. “Before you go to writing up this damn whitewash of yours, you better talk to the Harden men, talk to that black feller Henry Short, cause they were the ones who had to deal with the damned bodies!”

Calmly, Lucius returned the subject to Rob Watson, who had ended up a hobo, Arbie told him. “Seems to me he was always on the road. Rob never had an address, had no bank account, never paid taxes in his life. Never had to, cause they had no record of him—he was never on the books!”

For many years, Rob had worked as a “professional driver”—“the first professional in the U.S.A. to drive an auto more than twenty miles an hour.” Thanks to his road flair and big company limousine, Rob had been much in demand in the night liquor trade. He had finally been offered “a lucrative position in that industry.” In Prohibition, he became a trucker, and in later years, he operated an enormous mobile auto crusher in which he had traveled up and down the county roads all over the South, compacting car bodies and selling the product to small steel mills on small ruined rivers at the edges of the small cities of America.

According to Arbie, Rob had died but a few years before, in the basement of the Young Men's Christian Association in Orlando. He had left strict instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had sent along his urn. Arbie pointed at the urn in the houseboat window. Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, the old man looked furious, and Lucius decided to let it go. “Rob never married?” he asked. “Never had children?”

“Nosir,” the old man muttered, yawning. “That was the only bad mistake Robert Watson never made.” Sneezing, he lifted his red foulard to wipe his bristly chin. “After Rob died, I wanted to carry him back home to Columbia County, but about that time my auto quit—that pink one in the weeds at Gator Hook?—so I never got around to it.” He measured Lucius. “I thought maybe we could go up there in yours.”

They went inside. Lucius poured whiskey, and they toasted their meeting silently and drank, and he poured again. Ceremonious, he set the urn on a white cloth on the small table between them, placing beside it a pot of red geraniums, grown on his cabin roof. The old man observed this ritual with cold contempt.

Considering the urn, they drank in silence, in the play of light and water from the creek. That this cheap canister contained all that was left of handsome Rob made Lucius melancholy. The family would have to be notified, but who would care? “Rob came to find me years ago but I never saw him,” he said finally. “I haven't laid eyes on him since I was eleven.”

“You might not care to lay eyes on what's in here.” The old man picked up the urn and turned it in his hands, and a mean grimace crossed his face. “Cause it don't look like much.” Watching Lucius, he shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the container and shook it like a cocktail shaker. “Hear him rattlin in there? Folks talk about ashes, but there's no ashes, it's just
chunks and bits of old brown bone, like dog crackers.” He shook the urn again, to prove it.

“Don't do that, damn it!”

Lucius took the urn from the old man and returned it to the table, and Arbie laughed. “Rob doesn't care,” he said.

“Well, I care. It's disrespectful.”

“Disrespectful.” Arbie shrugged, already thinking about something else. “One of these days, you can carry that thing north to Columbia County, see if there's any room for him up that way.” He cocked his head. “I was thinking we could maybe go together.”

That evening, with a grin and flourish, Arbie produced a letter clipped from the Florida History page of
The Miami Herald
. Its author, he said, was D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state,” who had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. Concluding some strenuous throat hydraulics with a salutary spit, the old man launched forth on a dramatic reading, but within a few lines, he gave this up and turned the trembling paper over to Lucius.

Gleeful, Arbie watched his face. “Probably stuff like that is of no interest to serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.”

Dr. Herlong went on to describe Edgar Watson's arrest for murder in the Fort White region, and Lucius read more and more slowly as he went along. Arbie was waiting for him when he raised his eyes.

“We heading for Columbia County, Professor?”

Lucius nodded. “You think Herlong has these details right? Like ‘Ring-Eye Lige'?” Just saying that name aloud made him laugh in pleased astonishment.
What he held in his hand was his first real clue to his father's early years, which Papa had rarely mentioned. Since the drunken Ring-Eye, home from war, had been abusive to his wife, it seemed quite reasonable to suppose that he'd beaten his children, too.

Because Old Man Collins's bias against Watson seemed so rancorous and powerful, the historian evoked the tradition of violence in which young Edgar Watson had been raised in South Carolina. According to his research for the biography, the Cherokee Wars preceding the first settlement had given way to a wild anarchy imposed upon the countryside by marauding highwaymen and outlaws, followed by the bloodiest, most bitter fighting of the Revolutionary War, with neighbor against neighbor in a dark and gruesome civil strife of a ferocity unmatched in the nation's history. The sons of these intemperate colonials would be noted for their headlong participation in the War of 1812, then the Mexican War, while maintaining high standards of mayhem there at home. In 1816, President George Washington's chronicler Parson Mason Weems, revisiting this community, which he had served formerly as Episcopal priest, began his account with “Old Edgefield again! Another murder in Edgefield!… It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!” In the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, in a rural settlement of less than one hundred scattered households, some thirty-nine people had died violently, nearly half of them slaves killed by their masters. And all of this tumult, Lucius told the old man, had taken place within a single century! By every account, Edgefield District had been far and away the most unregenerate and bloody-minded in the Carolinas, leading the South in pro-slavery violence and secessionist vendettas, feuds, duels, lynchings, grievous bodily assaults, and common murders.

Edgar Watson's father, it appeared, had gone off to the “War of Northern Aggression” as a common soldier, which suggested that he had fallen from the landed gentry. Three years later, still a private, he was mustered out of the Confederate Army, by which time he apparently had lost the last of his property and inheritance. From Herlong's account, it was easy to infer that Lige Watson had been touchy, full of rage, and more likely than most to resent the freed blacks who were now his peers. And as a drinker, Lucius supposed, he might well have taken out his hatreds and frustrations on the hide of his young son who, according to Granny Ellen Watson, had scavenged the family food throughout the War while receiving only rudimentary schooling. Even after the War, jobs had been scarce, child labor cheap, and the family poor and desperate, and the boy had toiled from dawn to dark at the whim of some dirt farmer's stick. Her son's travail and punishment had only been intensified by the return of the distempered father.

In the shadowed wake of war, its soil exhausted, the Southern countryside
lay mortified beneath its shroud of anarchy and dust. And how much more galling Reconstruction must have seemed to an impoverished war veteran, for even in his reduced circumstances, Lige Watson would retain those grandiose ideas of Southern honor and the Great Lost Cause which would fire the bigotry of the meanest redneck for decades to come.

Throughout this dissertation, Arbie glowered like a coal. He did not speak.

Surely, Lucius reasoned mildly, the dark temper of this district had infected the outlook and behavior of the ill-starred Edgar, who had been but six when the War began and reached young manhood in the famine-haunted days of Reconstruction—

The old man whipped around upon him with a glare of real malevolence. “Dammit, you are just making excuses! Think I don't know what you are up to?” Gat-toothed and bristle-browed, hoarse with emphysema, Arbie yanked his cap down harder on his head. This ferocious elder might be rickety and pale, but he was no man to be trifled with. The glint in his deep eyes was now a glimmer, but his strong silver-black hair and rakish burnsides, with their hard swerve toward the corner of his mouth, asserted a wild intransigence and even menace.