Shadow Country (50 page)

“Feller who generly told the truth claimed he run across Les down around the coast, said ‘I'm your cousin.' Said Les told him, ‘Well, that don't mean that if you ever say you seen me, I won't shoot you.' ”

Will Cox squinted. “Some said it was Watson done for Les. I said, ‘You talkin about
E. J.
Watson ? Shit, no!' I said. ‘E. J. was my good old friend, he never done no such of a thing.' ”

Will Cox toed the clay soil with his broken shoe. “We heard it was a nigger man killed Watson. Heard Ed's own boys never raised a hand to set that right.” He studied Lucius. “Which boy was you?”

“I'm Lucius, Mr. Cox.”

“Times must of changed when I weren't lookin, Lucius.” Will Cox spat tobacco juice, turned back toward the road. “Me'n my younger boys, we was fixin to go south to Watson's, find out what they done with Les, hunt up that nigger, too, while we was at it. But like I say, I been down sick and never got to it.” He spread his hands in the hot sun and both men watched them shake. “Don't look like I'm ever goin to get there, what do
you
think?”

“Nosir,” Lucius murmured gently, “I don't think you are.”

Baleful, Cox regarded him. “Don't think so, huh?” Both grinned and Lucius took him home.

Lucius's instinct was to take Will Cox's word that after his son's departure in the spring of 1910, his family never laid eyes on him again. Either Leslie had lived out his bad life in other parts or Papa had shot him dead at Chatham Bend just as he'd claimed.

Lucius remembered Leslie's mule kick scar—“pretty good scar upside his head,” Grover Kinard had called it. Coldness and detachment, fits of violence, indifference to the suffering of others—weren't those known symptoms of brain damage?

To judge from Will Cox's pride in him, his family seemed well satisfied that Leslie had killed both Tolens—another argument in Papa's defense. In north Florida as well as south, it was turning out that the murders behind much of the Watson myth had been committed by another. Yet he felt uneasy. Had Papa encouraged hero worship in the unsophisticated Leslie and then exploited him, prying wide a dangerous fissure in his brain?

And what of “Uncle Edgar” 's brain? Yet Papa had never beaten his children nor appeared deranged even in drink, at least at home. For forty years after leaving South Carolina, he had farmed and traded, maintained neighborly relations, and remained beloved of his family, always excepting the one nicknamed Sonborn—the prodigal son, the long-lost brother, Robert Briggs Watson. R. B. Arbie. Rob.

IN THE FALL

After supper on his last evening at Chatham Bend, Lucius had joined his father on the river porch. Papa awaited him in his rocking chair, placed in the darkest corner. He seemed to know that this would be a showdown over Cox.

In his power, Papa's foreman had grown so intimidating that the field hands would fall mute the instant he appeared, shuffling about their work with eyes cast down, reduced in moments to drones of the human animal, stripped of every trait of voice and movement that each man might have shown without Cox present. They moved like penitent dull beasts rather than draw the smallest attention to themselves. Cox's utter indifference to their welfare, their very humanity, had made them indifferent to it, too: he moved them about like checkers on a board he might knock over on a whim at any moment, scattering these lives into the grass. In other years it had pleased Papa to tease the hands, cajole them into acceptance of their hard and dangerous labor. Now he scarcely noticed, and when Lucius protested Cox's cruelties, roughly waved his son away, not wanting to know what the foreman was up to so long as the work got done.

Lucius's outrage and frustration drove him to challenge his father on another matter. Declaring his intention to find Rob, he asked if his father knew what had become of him, and this time he did not back off when Papa sighed, his eyes half shut, sinking heavily into that iron silence. “Papa? He's my brother. I have a right to know.”

Through the window, the porch was dimly lit by the kerosene lantern on the supper table inside but he was unable to make out the expression of the figure in the shadows. Lucius said, “If you don't know, please say so. Maybe I can locate that Collins cousin he knew in Key West.”

His father sat up in a sudden rage, upbraiding him for resurrecting ugly stories. Lucius heard him out, then protested mildly, “Papa? I'm only asking about Rob.”

Papa seemed to sense that this time his son meant business—that he might in fact be on the point of losing the last of his older children from whom he was not estranged and the one, further, whose assistance was critical for that autumn's harvest. He rose and slammed inside. Lucius thought he'd gone for good. Instead he lit a fresh cigar at the table lantern, came back out, and resumed his seat. While he smoked, the tobacco ember glowed. He cleared his throat.

For years, he said, he'd been sad to see the fear behind the feigned warmth in his neighbors' faces. Fairly or unfairly, his reputation was torn beyond repair, and since he was already fifty-five, that situation was unlikely to change. Though he'd never been unduly bothered by public opinion, he explained, he hated the idea that because of rumors, he might be thought a cruel killer in his own family, and in particular by the son who would inherit this plantation and the syrup business. (In the near dark the cigar ember described a sweeping arc to include the boats, outbuildings, house, and fields.) Kate Edna and her kids, he said, would have to be con-tent with the Fort White farm. Not once did he mention his three older children.

Waiting out this preamble, Lucius said nothing. Annoyed by his silence, his father said that Lucius could believe any rumor he wished: the truth was something else. Here he stopped to grind out his cigar, as if to bring this degrading discussion to an end, but in a moment, he said, “There's no evidence. Two sets of tracks reported by some mixed-blood fishermen. Who took them seriously? People would have forgotten the whole business a long time ago if your brother hadn't lost his head and run away.”

“Was Rob guilty, Papa?”

“The whole thing was an accident.”

“Both deaths.”

His father nodded. And because Rob had fled, he added, it had seemed sensible to remove himself, too, to avoid questioning. When he returned a few years later, he was never challenged. Before this evening, in fact, he had never mentioned that day to anyone except Lucius's mother. “You are the first person to confront me, boy.”

“If it was an accident, why would he leave so suddenly? Taking your ship?”

His father leaned back into the shadows. “He was afraid, I reckon.”

“Of his own father?”

“That, too. Of being arrested and accused . . .” His voice trailed off.

Lucius took a great big breath. “Papa? Are you saying—you seem to be saying—”

“I'm saying I take sole responsibility for what happened at Lost Man's Key. Satisfied? Now leave me the hell alone.”

Lucius followed him inside and back out again. “How come we can't ever mention Rob? Why did you call him Sonborn? He
hated
that!”

“ ‘Son Born' was the only notation in the Columbia County register in Lake City because I turned my back on him from the first hour and never bothered to go there and record a name.” Blurting this out, his father was gasping in distress.

“Did you ever love him, Papa?”

“No. Yes. Much too late. I never realized it until that day at Lost Man's. After I'd harmed him.”

“Did you let him see it?”

“He was probably too stunned to see it, and he fled before I found a way to reach him. After that, I didn't want to think about him. I couldn't—I still can't—handle it. Not man enough, I guess.” Papa had always been caustic about his own weaknesses, the drinking, women, and propensity to violence that had led to his worst missteps; he seemed to take a perverse satisfaction in catching himself out on even the smallest evasions. But this remark bared a weary self-disdain that his son had never thought to see.

“Oh Lord, Papa.” They sat a while. “Why didn't you explain to people that the whole thing was an accident?”

“Who would have believed that, for Christ's sake? You don't believe it even now and you're my son.”

“I do believe you, Papa.” This was true. As far as it went, he trusted his father's account, and for the moment, he was even grateful for its ambiguity. As Papa had probably intuited, he didn't wish to know any details that might oblige him to condemn father or brother, though it was mostly his unwillingness to entwine his father in a lie that had kept him from resuming his inquisition. Two young people had been shot. Somebody had shot them. Was it really possible that both had died in the same “accident”?
The girl, Papa? Why was she killed?

That evening, he had had no wish to crowd him further. His father had exonerated Rob—that had to be enough. Yet clearing Rob of responsibility fell short of saying that Rob had not taken part. His father had specified that the full responsibility was his alone. Was this tantamount to an admission that he'd killed those people? That accidentally or otherwise, he had been the shooter?

This much was to his credit: in refusing to discuss the episode with anyone, not even to defend his name, he had chosen to live with the local opinion that E. J. Watson had been solitary in that dreadful act. He had done his best to spare Rob any consequences—which was only just, Papa explained, since the plan to run those squatters off his claim had been his alone. However, he had not wished them to die, the way people said. And it tortured him to think that his younger son and his dear Kate Edna might suspect that he had murdered them. . . . Unable to finish, he raised his big hard hands and dropped them on his knees, as if to say,
I shall go to my grave bearing terrible slanders that will never be put to rest.

Again, his son was silent. What could he say? But in denying his beloved father his filial reassurance, he had wounded him, that much was clear. He had also angered him, set him to brooding, so that when eventually he thanked Papa for easing his mind about Rob's role, remarking in passing that he'd never thought Rob capable of violence, his father had made that unsettling deep grunt, shifting his boots on the porch floor. “You were pretty young back then, still a schoolboy in Fort Myers,” he had muttered, as if to suggest that Lucius had not really known his brother.

Lucius disliked this insinuation just when he thought Rob's innocence had been confirmed, and perhaps his quick stare of resentment—
Do you mean what you seem to be implying, Papa?—
had stung his father, who had given him a long appraising look. “You don't remember how wild-tempered he was?” he said. “The crazy way he killed his dog that morning?”

Lucius met his eye. “I remember,” Lucius said. But his brother had been wild-hearted, not wild-tempered, and in no way crazy.

It had happened there between the river and the porch at a time when Rob was very dark in spirit, brooding for days over some rough thing Papa had said. On that hot noon, coming from the field, Papa had removed his coat and hung it on a chair before going inside. The revolver butt protruded from the inside pocket. Rob, coming behind him, had taken out the gun and with a queer look on his face placed the muzzle in his mouth to scare his younger brother. It had scared him, of course, not because he imagined Rob might kill himself—Rob had always seemed far more likely to kill Papa—but because Rob might have forgotten that even at Chatham, Papa's gun was always loaded. That's who their father was.

“Watch out with that thing, Rob!”

In a peculiar voice, Rob said, “All right.” He kneeled in front of his young bluetick hound, which lay twitching flies in a noon snooze. “Rex? Want to play roulette?” Lucius never forgot the soft thumping of Rex's tail. His brother picked five of the six rounds out of the chamber, spun it a few times, then put the muzzle to the dog's head. Shaky, he whispered, “Good luck, Rex, because I sure would miss you, but I aim to fire, so this may be your last day as a dog.” Even as Lucius yelled, Rob pulled the trigger.

That scaring
Bang!,
the spurting neck, the blood-drenched animal in spasm pushing itself in a half circle on the dirt as if to screw itself into the ground, had shocked Rob so that he jumped up with a screech, hurled the revolver after Papa, and lit out around the house. Headed nowhere, he ran only to escape himself. Round and round and round he went, screeching each time he passed the twitching body of this pup that his kind step-mother had given him. He was trying to run right off the earth.

Papa strode out in a red fury. He stooped and took Rex by the tail and circled once as he ran forward toward the bank and whirled the carcass through the air into the river. Next he intercepted Rob at the house corner, hoisted him with his legs still running, and shouted into his face, “God damn you, Sonborn! What the hell's the matter with you!” When his son closed his mouth tight over locked teeth, Papa hurled him to the ground, then grabbed his collar, yanked him back up onto his feet, and knocked him sprawling. He stood there panting, staring down at Rob as he got his breath.

Rob lay quiet, watching Papa. Never wiped his face and never spoke a word. “Damn you anyway,” Papa said quietly. Retrieving his revolver, he returned inside.

On their last evening in September, 1910, they were civil when they said good night but there was no healing the disease between them. Next morning when Lucius told him he was leaving, Papa said, “Do what you must,” and turned his back. Not until Lucius was casting off his skiff did his father appear; he stood apart from the others on the riverbank. He had not waved like Hannah Smith and Green and Dutchy and even the hard black man known as “Little Joe,” who offered a grin and a half wave from the kitchen doorway.