Lost Man's River (54 page)

“Well, Speck's mama,” a woman called, “got herself hitched up to her own first cousin, and a good half of their ten, twelve head of kids come out not so smart or something worst.”

Somebody hee-hawed but the rest of the hall filled with coughs and chair scrapes, whisperings, and indignation. “Well, Aunt Josie had a girl named Jenny,” another woman said carefully, “and she was supposed to been a Watson, too!” And the first woman said, “No, no, honey, what they claimed, Jenny was raped by Mr. Watson!” This was vehemently disputed by a third. “Say what you like about Mr. Watson, he were not the kind to go around rapin his own daughter!”

“Ain't that Jenny Everybody we're talkin about?” Preston Brown inquired, in the first lull in the tumult. Detecting titillation, he cried out over the hubbub, “Yessir! Called her Jenny Everybody! Cause she weren't particular!”
He looked confused when his joke was met with a disjointed silence. The elderly audience fretted and knitted, shifted, itched, and coughed in disapproval. “Called her Jenny Everybody cause she weren't so particular,” the old man repeated without heart.

“If Speck was in
that
bunch, he got the brains of all them other ten mushed into one!” an old voice cackled. “That feller been called names aplenty, but nobody never called him Not-So-Smart!”

“Nobody that ain't lookin to outsmart hisself!” Crockett Junior bellowed. Whidden Harden gazed straight ahead, expressionless, as Sally rose and hurried toward the rear.

Preston Brown came forward to peer more closely at “Professor Collins.” His prolonged scrutiny was already encouraging cranky speculation from the audience about whether this darned know-it-all professor should be trusted. Concluding his inspection, Old Preston brooded. “I always heard it was Young Ed that helped his daddy—heard that all my life. Them old-timers had no reason to lie to us. Seems kind of funny this here man would just walk in here and go to sayin that our old folks would lie to us like that.” Pointing at Lucius, the old man said, “You're coverin up for Eddie Watson, ain't that right?”

Lucius turned toward the night windows, imploring forgiveness from the old man who might be out there in the dark. He said quietly, “No. It wasn't Eddie. The most likely witness—
if
E. J. Watson killed the Tuckers, and
if
there was a witness—was the oldest boy, who left this part of Florida long, long ago.”

“I never heard about no older boy in that darned Tucker business.” Old Brown pointed accusingly at the speaker. “You must be some kind of a Watson. ‘L. Watson Collins'—they got that wrote right down here on my program!”

“L. Watson Collins is my pen name,” Lucius told him. He smiled at his friends, then lifted his gaze to the whole room. “Mr. Brown is correct. My name is Lucius Watson. Most old-timers on this coast know me as Colonel.” He scanned the audience for Watson Dyer. “The late Mr. E. J. Watson was my father.”

The silence was broken first by a low groan, then a squeaked “I
knew
it!” then “No wonder!” An old man called out, “How
you
doin, Colonel? I'm pleased to meet up with you again! I was just tellin these folks here how much you looked like you!” But an old lady toward the back held up his
History
. “If I was to ask you to sign this book, which name would you sign? If your daddy never murdered nobody, the way you're telling us, how come you're so ashamed of him that you don't put your own name on your own book?”

In the hard light, the church hall hummed with anticipation. Preston Brown cried, “Didn't I tell you this was Eddie's brother? See why he claimed it weren't Eddie killed them Tuckers but that older boy?”

“It
was
the older boy, you cock-eyed old idjit! The man is telling you the truth!”

At that slurred shout careening through the window, the young men in the doorway rushed outside. Lucius jumped from the stage and hurried up the aisle. In the door he was blocked by the one-armed man, who grasped him by the shirtfront. Crockett Junior growled, “Don't come no further south, you understand me?” Shoving Lucius away, he went out into the darkness. Sally Brown was dragging at his arm, entreating him not to follow. By the time he fought his way outside, the men were gone.

Most of the audience, disgruntled, was rising to leave, and Preston Brown had taken advantage of the speaker's absence to regain the floor. “See, nobody wanted to go up in that wild river looking for Watson,” he was shouting. “But there was one deputy was running for Sheriff, and his platform was, I will arrest Ed Watson, bring him up before the bar of justice. So he went up to Chatham River and Watson got the drop on him and took his guns away and put him to work in the cane harvest. That feller come back in two weeks' time with a neck bad sunburnt and calluses on his hands, and very very glad to be alive. Said Ed J. Watson was as fine a feller as any man could ever hope to meet, and the only planter worth a damn on that whole coast.”

“That's quite a story,” Lucius told the audience as he reached the podium. “Does anyone else have anything they'd like to add?” Upset by Rob's folly in coming here at all, he was anxious to bring the evening to an end.

Old Brown stood there in his high black shoes, the last of his life aglimmer in his eyes, and still he would not take a seat, as if afraid that his decrepit apparatus might never propel him back onto his feet. His fingers worked the back of his steel chair. When he raised his hand again, clearing his throat, Lucius interrupted gently, observing how helpful it would be if these old stories had any sort of documentation. He invited the audience to empathize with the frustrations of the historian, who had to be conservative about unconfirmed stories, however colorful. Lucius had hoped that this approach would be approved by an old-fashioned community which felt not only protective about “Mister Watson” but superior in their inside knowledge to people from outside the county.
Nosir, Ol' Ed weren't near so bad as what outsiders try to tell you, not when you knowed him personal the way we done
. How often he'd heard old-timers say that!

Realizing that his testimonies had been discounted, the old man suddenly sat down, and his chair creaked loudly in the hush of disapproval. In questioning
an elder's recollections, consigning them to myth, the speaker had undermined the integrity of local legend and tradition, and now his hearers made it plain that any diminishment of the Watson legend, even by his son, would not be tolerated. The faces pinched closed in their suspicion that this fake professor had tried to pull the wool over their eyes. More old people tottered to their feet with a loud barging of chairs and the rest followed, as Lucius called, “Good night! Thank you for coming!”

He remained at the podium, shuffling his notes into some sort of order, upbraiding himself for letting the evening collapse so swiftly into such a shambles. The plastic glass, with its tired lemon, was a silent rebuke in the corner of the rostrum, but mercifully the Program Director had fled. Only Hoad Storter came up to shake his hand, and even Hoad, who was keeping people waiting, had to leave quickly, saying he hoped to see Lucius in a day or two at Everglade.

Last to depart was old Fred Dyer, who limped past in a syphilitic shuffle, evading the speaker's eye. When Lucius followed him up the aisle and touched his elbow, the empurpled man tottered around in a half circle with a grimace of alarm, backing like a crayfish into a row of seats. “You remember me, Mr. Dyer?” Lucius asked quietly. “I guess I wasn't much more than fifteen when your family left the Bend.”

“Family!”
The man spat upon the church hall floor. “My own children would like to see me dead, they're so ashamed of me!” He kept on going, but Lucius moved beside him.

“Your son—”

“He's your damned kin, not mine.” Fred Dyer stopped short and looked Lucius in the eye for the first time that evening. “What's that ungodly bastard up to anyways? Couple months ago, he shows up real friendly where I drink, buys me a round or two while he sits there sucking a damn cherry soda. Says, ‘You still tellin people that I'm Watson's son?'
Hell, yes!
‘You willin to sign that in a affidavit?'
Hell, yes!
Next thing I know, there's a legal paper settin in front of me which says it is the opinion and sincere belief of the undersigned, Fred Dyer, that Watson Dyer, born December fourth of 1905 on Chatham Bend in Monroe County, is the natural son of the planter E. J. Watson!” He shook his greasy head. “Here I been sayin that same thing for forty years, and now this damn contrary bastard wants me to
sign
it!”

Yet Fred seemed bewildered, even a little hurt. “I said, ‘Wattie, for Christ's sake, what's this all about? Ain't it a little late in life to renounce your name?' And he told me, ‘Fred, you got sick of living a lie, and I feel the same.' Said he aimed to live in truth just as soon as he could get around to all the paper work. Called me Fred! Made me feel funny—the cold mean way he said my
name. When I signed that paper, he was grinning like a alligator. Tucked it away, stood up, and winked. Never said so much as a good-bye.”

At the door, Fred Dyer yanked his bent straw hat onto a head of yellowed silver hair, which straggled to his collar. “You was always a pretty good feller, Lucius, even as a boy. Only thing, you never done right by my little daughter.” He went on outside into the night.

Sally and Whidden greeted Lucius at the door. When he had seen Whidden last, a few years earlier, Lee Harden's son had been pretty close to thirty, a fishing guide and gator hunter and a hell-raiser. Outwardly, he had changed little—more weatherworn, perhaps, still lean and fit. The wheaten hair had iron wisps and the sun-squinted green eyes had crow's-feet in the corners.

“This here's my ex-husband-to-be,” Sally said affectionately, taking Whidden's arm. “I guess you've known him a lot longer than I have.”

“Watsons and Hardens always been in friendship, right back into the old century”—Harden smiled—“and Mister Colonel was my dad's best friend from 1919 until we left the Islands.” As her husband spoke, Sally's expression entreated Lucius to put their recent intimacy behind him and let it stay there.

Lucius gazed down the dark street where his brother had disappeared with Crockett Junior and his men. The Hardens kept him company, peering around them. “Maybe it's all a mistake. Maybe they'll bring him back and let him go once they've had a talk with him,” Sally said. Whidden shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don't think so. I believe them boys come huntin him. That's why they was here.”

To free them to go home, Lucius told them he would walk down to the Gulf while he was waiting, leaving a note for Rob in his car window. But they were solicitous, and in the end they accompanied him to the beach and walked out on the long pier in the faint light of the stars, which descended to the Gulf far out to westward. By the time they returned to the church hall, the town was empty. With the crowd gone and the doors locked, there were only the caves of gloom around the streetlights, the clacking of royal palms in the Gulf wind. While Whidden went to fetch their car, Sally told Lucius she'd decided that she loved her husband after all. “That's wonderful,” he said. “Any regrets?” he said. She shook her head. “How about you?” she inquired, not much interested in his answer. “I'll always love you, Prof,” she said. “I mean it.” And she hugged him.

Persuading Lucius to leave his car behind, they took him home to the ranch house in North Naples from where Whidden was starting a landscaping
service for winter residents from up north. “Them snowbirds don't know one darn thing about scaping land,” he grinned, “and I don't neither.” On the way there, Whidden said that if Mister Colonel was planning a trip to Chatham Bend, they would be proud to take him on the
Cracker Belle
. “She's just settin down there rottin, so we might's well use her.”

At the house, they sat Lucius at the kitchen table and asked him if he'd like some coffee. “I bet he'd like beer or whiskey a whole lot better,” Whidden said, and Sally rapped her spoon. “You've given that up, remember, Whidden? We don't use liquor in this house,” she told their guest, ignoring his raised eyebrows.

Still upset by the church hall meeting, Sally denounced the local attitude toward Whidden's family. “Mister Colonel ain't writin his book about my family,” Whidden warned her. But when he was asked the Hardens' opinion of what actually happened to Ed Watson, Whidden said, “Well, Sal could tell you better. She talked to the old folks, hours on end, and she got the details on my family down better'n I do.” Whidden waited politely for Sally to speak, and when she wouldn't, he frowned and cleared his throat, then sat forward reluctantly and folded his hands before him on the table in sign that, to the best of his knowledge, what he would say was responsible and fair as well as true.