Lost Man's River (23 page)

New Bethel Church, by a main highway, was sorely buffeted by diesel winds and the wail of tires. “New Bethel was built out of heart pine in 1854, so she's solid as ever,” an elder in the churchyard assured them, shielding his eyes to admire his church in the morning light. This old man turned out to be the sexton, there to console any random pilgrim dismayed to see such a House of God beset by so much noisome progress.

While Arbie and the sexton swapped Lake City lore, Lucius and Sally hunted the granite rows for the name Watson. Eventually his eye was led by a flit of sparrows to a tilted headstone set apart by a lone juniper. The stone's lettering had been eroded by black lichens, wind, and rain, and he knelt upon the grass to piece it out.

Here were fine hard bits of information of the sort so scarce in his father's history, including the precise identity and dates of Papa's first wife, as well as what could only be the fatal birthdate of Rob Watson on that unlucky thirteenth
of September. He waved excitedly to Arbie, who came and slouched around the grave, hands in his pockets. “Can't hardly read it,” he complained, seeming more interested in the dark evergreen behind. “Might have planted that ol' cedar the same year he planted her,” he added roughly, turning abruptly and heading for the gate.

“Arb? This is Rob's
mother
, Arb!” Lucius called after him, exasperated by the apathy of the old man, whose interest in their quest seemed to diminish by the day. “I
know
who it is!” he shouted back.

That headstone inscription was the earliest record of his father's name which Lucius had yet come across—a gravestone record in a time of family grief, therefore unlikely to be imprecise. And the initial
A
in E. A. Watson verified those court documents pertaining to the Belle Starr hearing at Fort Smith that until this moment he had thought to be in error. It suggested that
A
had been the original initial, and that the subsequent change to
J
had been intended to obscure his identity after his escape from the Arkansas state prison.

Arbie had not waited at the cemetery gate but was headed north on foot along the highway shoulder. When they pulled up alongside, he would not get in the car. The old man hollered that he'd been on the road all his damned life, and had pounded highways and rode rails to hell and gone across the country, so he reckoned he was tough enough to make it back the three miles to Lake City. Close to tears, he would not look at Lucius but kept walking. When Sally urged him not to miss this meeting with those Collins cousins whom he'd said himself he had not seen since he was young, he yelled, “Stop pesterin me!”

The wrongheaded old man meant what he said. Lucius waved and wheeled the car and crossed the double lines and headed south again, but in a few minutes, he turned back, for Sally was worried and had suddenly decided she would wait for the old man at the motel. Passing Arbie, Lucius slowed to give him a chance to change his mind. Arbie ignored him.

Driving south on the Fort White Road, Lucius realized that there was time for a brief visit to the Tolen house before his meeting with the Collinses. At Herlong Lane, he turned off the pavement onto the cool track of white clay which ran due west through the woods for a mile and a half to the plantation's southwest corner at the vanished railroad crossing. On the north side, the wall of virgin forest was parted by the old carriageway. Here he parked
the car and followed the old road, still dimly defined by a woodland emptiness which parted tall spring trees. Burled oaks and hickories of the original Ichetucknee Plantation were entangled with vine-shrouded magnolias and tupelos, rising through long shafts of light to far blue patches of bright morning sky. How fresh this woodland morning air, and how delightful!—cardinal song, sad plaint of titmice, the bell note of a blue jay in resplendent spring.

Deep in the forest, the carriage drive joined a more recent track which came in from the old Junction Road off to the west. Here the fine pale clay was innocent of tire tracks, or even horseshoe prints and dapple of manure, only small heart signs made by deer, rat tail of possum, and thin hand of coon, the flutter marks of dusting quail, the wispy tracings of the quick white-footed mice.

Soon the trees parted and the carriage drive climbed toward a white-columned facade fresh-washed by morning sun, as if the forest had opened out into the lambent sunlight of an older century. The house might have arisen from Aunt Tabitha's memory of some old Watson plantation at Clouds Creek, for the high white dwelling with its hand-hewn siding was fronted by a broad veranda with square pillars which supported an upper porch and balustrade, and the columned facade faced down the drive, awaiting the gentry who would never arrive in this far country of the Florida frontier. The new house had been larger than any other in the region, but the money for construction had run out, for its grandiose facade seemed out of scale with the makeshift building and small kitchen wing stuck on behind. Its two skinny brick chimneys seemed too narrow, and the rooms upstairs under the eaves had pinched small windows.

Behind the kitchen, chinked sheds and a poor barn sagged amongst the oaks, and beyond, a worn pasture was surrounded by ragged woodlots opened up by cattle. From the distance came the groan of cows, at the feed barn on the far side of the Fort White Road.

How odd that in an abandoned place, no eave window was broken, and no stoop overgrown. The ground-floor windows were unboarded, and the grass all around appeared rough-mowed. There was no junked truck or rusted harrow, no litter of neglect, only a bareness which extended to the worn-out paint, only the silence. Everything looked tidied in the morning light, as if the house were awaiting his arrival. An unlawful occupant might be peering out at him this very moment.

Stranger still, the kitchen door stood wide, as if the inhabitants had run away, hearing him coming. Someone or something—perhaps the heartbreaking spring wind—had swept the veranda where on such a morning
Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson might have creaked in her high-backed rocker, gazing without hope at the ancient forest from which those longed-for friends from home had never come.

After her death, Sam Tolen had lived here alone. In the decades since, others had come and gone away again, and now, Grover Kinard had said, the house stood empty. It was as if, after all these years, the dank mold of the common dread of Cox and Watson had never been aired out of this countryside, where even the local people shunned this place at the far end of the dark path through the forest.

For a long time, in a silence like an echo, he stood listening. Though drawn toward that open door, he did not approach—an unreasonable fear, but there it was, of something secret, even sinister, a secret he longed not to know. So disturbed had he become that he dared not cry out, in dread of awakening the warders of the place, whether quick or dead.

Circling the house, keeping his distance, he was startled by the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, poised for flight from its nest limb in a big live oak by the house corner. So close to the building, the nest was a sure sign that the house was uninhabited, yet he could not put his uneasiness aside. That door ajar on the back steps—he scarcely dared to turn his back on it! He imagined the specter of gaunt Tabitha or even brutal Tolen looming through that opening, wiping ham fat from his mouth with hairy knuckles, demanding to know who the stranger was, what the hell he wanted, and why he should not be set upon by dogs.

Lucius walked quickly down the shadow drive toward Herlong Lane, glancing back at the lost house until it disappeared into the trees. The birdsong had stilled in the midmorning heat, there were only the dry caws of crows, the burring flight of unseen quail, a dead limb cracking, and the rush and earth thump of its tearing fall.

From Herlong Lane, he traveled south on a nameless clay track as white as bonemeal, so soft that the car tires made no sound. He passed no house, no farm, he heard no dog. The settlement called Centerville had long ago withdrawn into the woods.

In a mile or so he came to the old schoolhouse, on a knoll under great oaks in a clearing. The door was opened by a composed, iron-haired woman who introduced herself as Ellen Collins. Gazing over her shoulder from across the room were three figures in a huge dark oval photograph in a massive frame. In the portrait, between her seated elders, stood a young girl in a
white dress, full-mouthed, innocent, and knowing. To her left sat a pert, quizzical old lady in white scarf and cameo brooch. On her right was a handsome and imposing man in black suit, embroidered white shirt, and black bow tie. His hair was plastered to his head after the fashion of the time, and a heavy mustache flowed sideways into heavy sideburns. His gaze was forthright and unequivocal and his brow clear.

“Great-Uncle Edgar,” said Ellen Collins primly, as if introducing them, for she had missed his consternation in this sudden confrontation with his father. “With Great-Grandmother Watson and my aunt May Collins as a girl.” As he recalled, May Collins had been born around 1891. Since she was a near adolescent here, the photograph had presumably been taken about 1904, before his father's marriage to Edna Bethea.

He turned as Ellen introduced two women who had now entered the room. Cousin Hettie Collins, silver-haired, had the freshness of a younger woman in the mouth and eyes. When she offered a spontaneous welcome with a warm peck on his cheek, her daughter teased her—“Are we kissin cousins?” April Collins was handsome, about twenty, with taffy hair hacked short in a no-nonsense manner, and she had the bald unswerving gaze of her great-uncle Edgar on the wall, with that crescent of white beneath the pupil shared by Watson Dyer and also Carrie Langford. When Lucius glanced back at the photograph, the young woman laughed. “Yup,” she said cheerfully, “those ‘Crazy Watson eyes.' Still in our family.”

Ellen Collins was pointing at a chair. From the sofa, the three women watched him. “This is the first photograph of Mr. Watson I have ever seen,” he explained, finding his voice at last. He searched for something “crazy” in his father's face, but there was no sign of aberration unless it was that transfixed gaze, as if E. J. Watson had never blinked in all his life.

He thought about the Watson sons, and “the blood of a killer” seeping through their veins. Perhaps his brothers, in their very different natures, shared his dread that one day, in the eruption of a gene, they might go “crazy.” Or perhaps they had no wish to face that, far less understand it. Perhaps he was truly alien to all the others.

“It's the one known photograph,” Ellen was saying. “How could you possibly have seen it?” She sat back stiffly, folding her arms to bar his way into the bosom of the family.

“He's
kin
, Aunt Ellie!
L
.
Watson Collins? Got
to be kin!”

“That might be his nom de plume,” said her aunt severely. Though her brash niece mimicked her—
num de ploom!
—Ellie Collins saw nothing to laugh at. Plainly she was having second thoughts about permitting this pseudo-Collins to cross their stoop.

To confess at this point that he was here under false pretenses, that there
was no such person as L. Watson Collins—that in fact he was not a Collins after all—would ruin this vital contact with the family before it started. If they mistrusted him, they would tell him nothing. On the other hand, he must declare himself before he was exposed—oh Lord! Every moment that he put it off, the more complicated it was bound to be.

The ladies awaited him in a stiff row like hard-eyed women of the pioneers, squinting over the hammers of long muskets.

Clearly the kinsman in Lake City had not passed the word that Cousin Lucius was in town. But this could occur at any time, and he frowned intently at the picture, racking his brain for some way to offset the danger of exposure. “So this is Granny Ellen,” he sighed, to break the silence. “Yes. I'm named for her,” his cousin Ellie said. “And Aunt May's brothers were my father, Willie, and April's grandfather, my uncle Julian. Uncle Julian's son lives in Lake City, but we rarely see him. Anyway, you could cut his tongue out before he'd ever talk about Great-Uncle Edgar.” She shook her head. “The father wouldn't mention him so the son won't either. Nor my late father either, nor the grandsons. It's our male tradition.”