Lost Man's River(12)

“You’re drunk! You’re talking crazy!” Eddie had shouted when Lucius asked these dire questions at a Thanksgiving celebration at the Langfords, scarcely a month after the death. And all reminded him of the clan decision never to speak of their ancestor again.

Lucius cried, “Well, maybe I am crazy! Who knows? If Papa was who you think he was, I might wake up one day and just start killing people! And you might, too! That doesn’t scare you?”



That winter of 1911, estranged from his family and unable to rest, he had set off in search of his beloved oldest brother, who had not been heard from since he’d fled from Chatham Bend ten years before. Lucius took the train north to Fort White, in Columbia County, in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson or their Collins cousins.

Granny Ellen, he discovered, had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins had no idea who Lucius might be, far less what he might want of her. Aunt Minnie, who would die within the year, had been sheltered from the scandal (and indeed from her own life) by morphine addiction and premature senescence. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, she would not speak with this interloper in her household, who only added to her confusion and distress.

As for her children, they scarcely remembered the young cousin who had stayed with them briefly sixteen years before. Sympathetic at first, his relatives became uncomfortable and then impatient with his questions, reminding him of the code of silence which the Collins clan had scrupulously observed. Shamed in their rural community by their uncle Edgar, they were not grieved by his death, and when Lucius finally understood this, he burst out, “He was acquitted! He was found innocent!”

The Collins brothers did their best to mend things. They had loved their uncle, they acknowledged, but they would never agree that he was innocent. When Lucius departed, Cousin Willie called from the train platform, “Y’all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” This was meant kindly, yet they were content with his departure and could not hide it.

While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father’s widow, who had fled Chokoloskee and gone to live near her sister Lola in northwest Florida. Edna Watson was close to Lucius’s age, they had been dear friends, and he felt sure he would be cheered by a good visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison after Granny Ellen’s family. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of the shooting, which Little Ad had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old on that dark October day, struck Lucius as subdued and melancholy, rather timid.

His young stepmother was kind to him, and nervous. He had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. Though Edna was too shy to say so, her sister, pressing him to leave, warned him gently that “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl’s life.” At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Edna would soon marry her childhood sweetheart from Fort White, who had offered to give his name to her three young ones.



In Fort Myers, Lucius worked awhile as a fishing and hunting guide for Walter Langford’s business associates. After his years at Chatham River, he was a skilled boatman and fisherman and a dead shot. He was also a loner, preferring books to loud camaraderie, and indeed so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received indirect complaints, not about Lucius’s guiding, which was expert, but about his “unfriendly” attitude, his silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he was hobbled by introspection, guilt, and melancholy. At heart he was a merry person who saw something amusing wherever he turned, but in his darker times, Lucius’s humor turned cryptic and laconic. His one close friend—and eventually his lover—was a young girl named Lucy Dyer whose parents had worked at Chatham Bend in the first years of the century and who retained fond childhood memories of “Mr. Watson.”

In the dull white summer of 1912, Lucius sought refuge in the Merchant Marine, taking along a duffel full of books. Upon his return, he was prevailed upon by Carrie to attend the University of Florida at Gainesville. There he passed three years in quest of a degree in American history, proposing for his thesis a life of the Everglades pioneer and sugarcane planter Edgar Watson—an objective biography which (he proposed) might replace the legend with the facts, and testify to E. J. Watson’s intelligence and generous nature as well as his remarkable accomplishments. But his outline was rejected as too speculative—“too subjective” was what was meant, since the candidate was Watson’s son. However, the faculty was much impressed by his deep knowledge of remote southwestern Florida, even to its Indian people and its wildlife, and urged him to prepare instead an account of pioneer settlement on the Everglades frontier.