At first, he had resented his professors for having dismissed his parent as a subject unfit for biography. (At the same time, Lucius understood that, in light of what had been written about Papa in the magazines and newspapers, unanswered by any protest from the Watson family, they could scarcely have concluded anything else.) Dispirited, he turned instead to the proposed history of southwest Florida, which progressed rapidly. It was nearing completion when he lost heart and abandoned it, and a few weeks later, he dropped out of graduate school without a word. For the first though not the last time in his life, Lucius Watson embarked on a prolonged alcoholic odyssey which only ended when he awoke in jail.
Returning eventually to Fort Myers, he went straight to the Langford house and stood before the family, ready to endure their recriminations. Poor Carrie gasped at his appearance. “Oh, it’s such a waste!” she mourned. Inevitably Eddie reminded him of his profound debt to the generous man who had paid for his tuition—here Eddie bent a meaningful look upon his own employer, Walter Langford, who frowned, judicious, from his armchair, rapping out his pipe. Whether Walter frowned over the waste of Lucius’s efforts or the waste of money—or perhaps in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey—Lucius felt ashamed that he had accepted Langford’s money in the first place.
It was Lucius’s “morbid fear of life,” Eddie declared, which had caused him to flee the university before completing his thesis and receiving his degree, and which also kept him from settling down and getting married. (“That poor, dear little Lucy Dyer!” Carrie had grieved, when Eddie condemned his brother’s unmarried status.) A churchman and sober citizen who shared most and possibly all of Walter’s opinions, Eddie was already married, with two daughters. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he sighed in his most world-weary way, shaking his head over his brother’s ingratitude and chronic folly.
Next day, without notifying Lucy, Lucius enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He went overseas with a vague ambition to die for his country but came back having failed in this as in all else. Still brooding about his murdered father, still fantasizing about Southern honor (and even honorable revenge upon the ringleader—or perhaps the first man to fire—since it seemed impractical to wipe out the whole posse), he had convinced himself that to salvage his own life, he must return to the Ten Thousand Islands, not only to confront the executioners but to learn just why Edgar Watson had met that grotesque end on October 24th of 1910, at Chokoloskee.
Before departing for the Islands, Lucius spent one broken evening at the Langford house—their new brick house on First Street, at the foot of the Edison Bridge over the river. On this occasion, Eddie declared that Lucius’s “unhealthy obsession” with his father’s death was merely a way of lending false significance to his own immature and feckless life. And when Lucius was silent, he went on to warn him that returning to the Islands could only end in violence, since the local men, in their guilt and anger, would inevitably feel threatened by E. J. Watson’s son. This dire prediction evoked an outburst of dismay from Carrie and unusually deep frowns from her husband, who stepped at once into the pantry to fortify himself with a noble whiskey, in which Lucius joined him. And whiskey fired the final argument over Lucius’s declared intention to find out precisely what had happened on that fatal day nine years before—find out just who had shot at Papa, and what evidence there was, if any, that E. J. Watson had ever killed a single soul.
“Oh Lord! You are crazy!” Eddie hollered.
“Name one person,” Lucius shouted back on his way toward the door, “who ever claimed that he saw Papa shoot at anybody!”
“Precious Lucius” thought himself superior, Eddie was yelling, for refusing to honor the family agreement never to discuss their father. And Carrie chimed in—“You did promise, you know!”
“You people promised! I never promised a damned thing!”
Carrie was reprimanding Eddie as the door closed—“He is not feckless! He is simply romantic and impractical!”—but she did not disagree with Eddie, not entirely. When Lucius had gone overseas without advising Lucy Dyer that he was going, the desperate girl had confessed her love for him to Carrie, and recently Carrie had learned that he had not called on Lucy since his return. The next day, too ashamed to make amends—he had some idea that he must first prove himself worthy—he departed for the Ten Thousand Islands.
At Chatham Bend he found a boat tied at the dock, and the family of Willie Brown camped in the house. Though old friends of his father, the Browns seemed uneasy, unable to imagine why a Watson son would ever come back to the Islands. Willie Brown assured him that they would move out whenever Lucius was ready, by which he meant “ready to live alone.” Fearing that loneliness, he told them they were welcome to stay on in the main house while he patched up the old Dyer cabin down the bank. A few days later, when he returned from Everglade with a boatload of supplies, the Browns were gone.