Shadow Country (36 page)

“This feller told us his name was John Tucker. Claimed to be Wally Tucker's nephew, said he wanted to pay respects where his kinfolks was buried. I took him over to the Key, showed him where we buried 'em that day in 1901. He went all pale and sweaty, could not hide it. When he asked the whereabouts of Lucius Watson, we guessed he had a feud to settle, so I told him that the last we heard, Lucius Watson had left for parts unknown. That stranger give me a hard eye, very dissatisfied and cross. He said, ‘That's what they told me in Chokoloskee, too.' And I said, ‘Well, for once they told some truth.' ”

“From his questions we figured he knew more than he should about the Tuckers, considering there weren't no witnesses that could have told him,” Sarah said. “Finally it come to us why he looked familiar, beard or no beard. ‘John Tucker' weren't nobody else but E. J. Watson's oldest, that wild Rob that run off to Key West, taking his schooner.”

Owen said, “He never believed our story that you went away. He seemed convinced that Island people, maybe us, might of killed his brother, hid the body in the mangroves. That's why he left here angry and dissatisfied.”

“I wrapped his blisters in greasy rags before he rowed away, headed back north,” Sarah told Lucius. “Didn't hardly say thanks.”

While in Flamingo, Lucius had decided to rid himself of his incriminating list. He cursed the hours had he wasted revising and refining it, down to the smallest detail, in his hunger to get closer to some “truth” that might free him from the past. Far from easing the old pain in his heart, its existence had become a burden and reproach, reminding him of the great folly of years wasted in self-exile—years that might have been spent in the company of Nell, raising pretty children, finishing his education and his books.

Though he knew the thing by heart and was sick of looking at it, he could not bring himself to burn so many years of work in a few moments—work that might eventually be used in the biography. To eliminate the risk of loss or discovery, he sent the list to Nell Dyer for safekeeping; in the same packet he included a note for Rob in the hope that his brother might turn up again. But in the course of changing households, Nell would misplace the packet, as she confessed in the same letter that brought word of her impending marriage to the senior Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was Lucius by her abandonment that he scarcely reacted to the news of the lost list.

At Lost Man's, he resumed a hard sparse life as a commercial fisherman, and over time, the Island men got used to him, as talk died down and the list that nobody had ever seen reverted to vague rumor. Without hope of Nell, however, he had lost heart for Island life, yet had no other. Only an idiot would have assumed, he mourned, that despite his years of folly and neglect, his first love would wait in limbo while he solved his life so that they could travel on together into a golden future, having never aged.

OWEN AND SARAH

Despite his sorrow over the loss of Nell, Lucius was plagued in this time of loneliness—plagued disgracefully, in his opinion—by a desperate attraction to Owen Harden's wife. Sarah loved her husband, he felt sure: she was mainly upset because Owen had been eking out poor fishing seasons by working part-time with Crockett Daniels, who had now acquired a local reputation as “the last of the plume hunters”; Speck Daniels shot egrets wherever he could find the scarce and scattered birds and smuggled the plumes to foreign markets by way of Cuba.

Because Lucius had prevailed on Owen to give up plume hunting, Sarah made him her confidante in her campaign to return her husband to a lawful life. Almost daily, she sought his counsel, wandering barefoot down the beach to his bachelor's shack with fresh fish or spare greens and once a week a small basket of his laundry. She also provided endless anecdotal information on the Island families, all the more useful now that he had resumed bad-weather work on his two books.

By her own account, Sarah had married Owen in rebellion against the prejudice in her own family, in particular those kinsmen on Chokoloskee Bay who made life disagreeable for the Hardens. Sarah's outspoken disdain of redneck ignorance—“They ain't just
red
neck, they are
no
-neck!”—had stirred a lot of old-time meanness back to the surface, until finally his own family chided Owen for not bridling his wife's sharp tongue. This had led to quarrels with her husband, confessed Sarah, unrepentant, even gleeful.

Though Sarah made no secret of her admiration for Owen's educated friend—and certainly no effort to hide her visits—the fact that she turned up mostly in the daytime when her husband was off somewhere in his boat made Lucius uncomfortable: Lucius, not Sarah, was the guilty one because he, not she, hid an impure heart that leapt every time he saw her coming, this slim small-breasted girlish woman, in her thirties now, flaxen hair bound up in braids with deerhide thongs, small brown feet skipping light as fishes in the tide shine at the water's edge.

Sarah Harden was inquisitive and indiscreet, thin-skinned, scrappy, blunt, yet easily hurt or angered. Her unhappiness about Owen's associates led her to nag her quiet husband, comparing his prospects as an “outlaw” with those of his educated neighbor down the beach. Owen's resentment had already seeded vague suspicions and having foreseen this, Lucius tried hard to avoid those moments when through door or window of their cabin he'd glimpse Sarah naked or half-dressed—a crisis that was ever pending, since the unself-conscious Sarah wore little in the humid heat except soft faded overalls gone slack in the front or light cotton smocks with nothing underneath, at least so far as he was able to determine from his unwilling and unstinting study of her curves and shadows. In Sarah's mind, she had no neighbors, therefore no peepers, only the harmless bachelor a hundred yards away, who in fact had longed to peep on her from the first day she had leaned into his window to ask how his work was going and he saw nestled between the loose blue straps of her overalls those untethered and confiding small brown breasts as warm as fresh-laid eggs.

One day coming and going they collided clumsily in his doorway, and his hand, bearing a paper, brushed an erect nipple. Like a demon's wand, the touch unleashed them; they embraced and kissed with a common moan of joy and consternation. Sarah gasped, “Oh my God!” and fled. Without thought, he rushed after her, calling her name not once but twice before seeing Owen, who was just docking his boat. Lucius halted abruptly and abruptly waved; Owen paused a moment, staring after the disappearing Sarah before waving back.

Called Owen, “She forget her drawers? Or ain't she wearin any?”

He was joking, of course. Owen enjoyed wryly outrageous jokes. But also he was not joking, and Lucius's laugh, to his own ears, rang hollow and deceitful. It was time to leave Lost Man's Beach. His disloyalty to Owen was no longer to be borne and his Island life was no longer enough and he missed his studies and library research. Excited by fresh ideas about how to shape the unfinished history and the roughed-out biography, he had lawman started a new set of notes.

CAXAMBAS

Months before, his common-law kinfolk of the Daniels-Jenkins clan had offered him the use of a small shack built on the deck of an old cane barge run aground at high water in a tidal creek under the high dunes of Marco Island. Rising behind the prehistoric site known to the old-time Indians as Caxambas, “Place of Wells,” these elevations overlooked the white ribbons of surf where the Gulf Coast curved back toward the southeast at Cape Romaine. The great dunes seemed to him a monument, mysterious and moving, to those seagoing Calusa fatally dispersed by the
conquistadores.
The Spaniards, too, had come and gone away, and the smugglers and pirates and runaway African slaves, and finally the ancestral farmer-fishermen, the pioneers—precisely the atmosphere he wanted for his work.

Like Everglade, eight miles to the southeast through winding island channels, the small settlement on Caxambas Creek was isolated at the far end of a rough track only suitable for large-wheeled oxcarts and all but unnavigable in most seasons by the tin-can autos honking south like geese in the great Florida Land Boom of the Twenties. Acquiring most of Marco Is-land, developers had moved or destroyed the small cabins at Caxambas and burned down the clam cannery while they were at it, leaving the concrete floor to crack in the hot sun, sprouting hard weeds. Even the old store had been boarded up, the better to speed the last inhabitants on their way. The master plan—to level the dunes and clear the scrubby sabal palm and gumbo-limbo to make way for hotels, winter homes, and artificial lawns—would be shelved for decades by the Great Depression, already on the wind.

Lucius struggled to support himself as a fishing and hunting guide for sportsmen lodged in a new resort at Marco, working on his manuscripts in stormy weather. The following year, dead broke and in debt, he sold his boat and accepted an assistant teacher's post in the history department at the university. There he resumed his graduate studies and completed his doctoral thesis,
A History of Southwest Florida and the Everglades Frontier.
To his surprise, it was very well received and the university press selected it for publication. For the time being, he kept secret his greater ambition to complete and publish
The Undiscovered Country,
his objective biography of the pioneer sugarcane planter E. J. Watson.

Between terms at the university, Lucius returned to his barge shack at Caxambas. His friend Hoad Storter, who now lived not far away at Naples and had turned up in Caxambas on a visit, had been delighted by his friend's decision to leave Lost Man's and return to his unfinished books, including the Watson biography, which Hoad thought would fulfill his responsibilities to his father and set his heart at rest in a way that darned old posse list could never do. Hoad also thought that E. J. Watson was destined to become famous. Some ten years earlier, he'd been seining mullet with his brother-in-law in the little bays inside the mouth of Chatham River. One day, short of water, they went upriver to the Bend. “The cane fields were all overgrown, looked rough and shaggy, but new sprouts were volunteering through the tangle. We grubbed 'em out, stacked 'em on deck, ran 'em north to the Calusa Hatchee and on up east to Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven, the only camp on Okeechobee at that time. Those cuttings were the start of this whole new sugar industry, did you know that, Lucius?” Hoad shook his head. “After all his hard years, your dad's fine cane will make fortunes for other men. ‘Great waste and a pity' as Cap'n Bembery used to say,”

Lucius nodded. Oh, God, how he wished poor Papa could have stood on those high dikes and enjoyed that view.

•                           •                           •

On the wings of his published history, Lucius submitted his biography proposal to the university press; his vantage point as Mr. Watson's son, he said, would not blind him to the true nature of his subject's character.