Lost Man's River(11)
Grinning, Speck stood rocking on his heels on the top step, hands in hip pockets. “Lucius? You don’t aim to say good-bye? And here you ain’t even told me yet how that ol’ list of yours is comin along!” Getting no answer, he yelled louder. “How come Henry Short ain’t on your list? Ain’t never died off yet that I ever heard about. Or don’t a nigger count, the way you look at it?”
Lucius backed his old car around, the tires spitting mud. He idled in neutral in the ruts as he cranked his window down, the better to contemplate the furious man on the top step. Behind Daniels’s head, over the roof peak, a turkey vulture made trackless circles through the sky, the red skin of its bare head glinting like a blood spot on the sun.
Speck licked his lips. “You and me is very different, Lucius, I am proud to say. If I believed a certain man helped to kill my daddy, Lucius, I sure wouldn’t go to drinkin with that feller, Lucius, like you done just now. And I sure wouldn’t need no damn ol’ list to tell me what to do about it, neither. That man would of come up missin a long time ago.”
“Crockett Senior Daniels.” Lucius pronounced the name slowly, as if to lock it in his memory. “I do believe that is the last name on the list.” Wobbling the old clutch into gear, he exulted at the flicker in Speck’s grin, and drove off chortling, yet he knew he had pushed his luck, and his heart was pounding. A man as ruthless and wary as Speck Daniels would hear those last words as a threat, and a threatened man, as Papa used to say, was not a man to turn your back on in the Glades country.
The List
In December of 1908, E. J. Watson had been acquitted in a murder trial in north Florida, a notorious event that had required Gov. Napoleon Broward’s intercession to prevent a lynching. Eddie Watson and their sister’s husband, Walter Langford, had testified for the defense, yet upon their return to Fort Myers, these two refused to discuss the trial with the younger brother, asserting that stern silence in this matter was “a family decision” made with their Collins cousins in Columbia County. The silence deepened two years later when “the head of the family”—Eddie’s snide way of referring to his father—was killed by the Island men on Chokoloskee.
Taken in custody by Sheriff Frank B. Tippins and brought north to Fort Myers, the Islanders had been deputized as “the Watson posse,” although their quarry was already dead and buried. This stratagem, which avoided worsening the scandal with a public trial, was approved by Banker Langford and by Eddie Watson, who soon thereafter left his employ as deputy court clerk in order to take a job in Langford’s bank. Eddie refused to discuss the hearing with his brother or reveal to Lucius the identities of those who had participated in their father’s death, lest Lucius attempt to seek revenge or otherwise “act crazy.”
From the start, Lucius Watson had lashed out at the whole business as hypocritical disloyalty to Papa. For a time, he had an ally in his sister, Carrie Langford, who had also loved their warm and jolly father and would not believe that Papa had been guilty of the alleged crimes. (Carrie was especially tormented because in recent years—since the murder trial in Columbia County—she had turned her father from her door, to protect her husband’s business reputation.) Sharing grief and bewilderment as well as the hope that somehow dear Papa would be vindicated, the two were stoic in their stifled rage at the street whisperings, the stares in church, the seething gossip which attended the reburial of the blood-blackened, half-rotted corpse exhumed from Rabbit Key and reburied almost furtively in Fort Myers Cemetery. Only the Langfords’ prominence and wealth had protected the family from public disgrace. But eventually Carrie, too, would adopt the code of silence, telling Lucius that she could not bear any further talk about dear Papa. Walter and Eddie were right, she had decided. For the sake of her poor children, Carrie wept, she must cut Papa from her life and mind as best she could. When she begged Lucius not to mention him again, he turned and left her house without a word, completing his estrangement from the family.
Clearly, his upright siblings in Fort Myers had no wish to learn “the truth” about their father, perhaps because they lived in dread of what such ancestry might signify if even one of the terrible tales proved to be true. And despite his loyalty, Lucius himself was uncomfortably aware of shrouded memories, half-hidden, half-forgotten—specters of the half-light, dimly seen, which drew near the surface of certain dreams and threatened to burst forth into the waking day. If Papa had deserved his reputation, then what did it mean to be the get of such a man, the biological consequence, the blood inheritor?