Lost Man's River(15)
Yet one by one, by various means—cryptic allusions and sly woman talk, drunk boastful blurtings—he learned the names of “the men who killed Ed Watson,” and from early on, he kept a list, with commentary. Every gleaned scrap of information gave him his excuse to brood over the names, eliminate one, write down another, or simply refine, make more precise, the annotations which kept the list scrupulous and up-to-date. Coming alive, always evolving, the list seemed a justification of his return to the Ten Thousand Islands, reassuring him that what he was doing was research for that abandoned biography which might redeem his father’s name. At the very least, it eased the pain of a lost decade of inaction and self-loathing in which he had forgiven neither his father’s killers (as he still perceived them) nor the Watson sons—Lucius Watson in particular—for failing to find an honorable resolution.
Fed mostly now by stray allusions, random gossip, the list of names with its revisions and deletions, footnotes, comments, and qualifications, grew ever more intricate and complex, as what had begun as a kind of game became obsession. For a few years, he went nowhere without it. The folded packet of lined yellow paper, damp from the subtropical sea air, had gone transparent at the creases from sweat and coffee spills and cooking grease and fish oil, and so specked by rust from tools and hooks and flecked with sundry bread crumbs and tobacco, that Lucius could scarcely decipher the small script and had to write out a fresh copy—a renewal ceremony and a source of secret satisfaction. So long as he kept perfecting it, making certain it was accurate down to the last detail, he would never have to give it up. It filled some void and longing in his life—he knew that. Yet he could not admit this to himself for fear of removing its peculiar healing power, and the order it brought to his wandering mind.
He dreaded finishing the list, not wishing to deal with his inability to act upon it. He did not believe he could take a human life, even in the name of family honor. And though he could accept this, his romantic side would always be disappointed, knowing that the hickory breed of old-time Watsons would have acted forcefully in retribution, never mind the morality or consequences. He longed to talk with his brother Rob, whom he remembered as hotheaded and outspoken—hardly a man to accept family dishonor.
By the end of his first year in the Islands, there were threats. Although afraid, Lucius perceived his potential martyrdom as a resolution of his life, somehow less terrifying than cowardice or weakness. One night he dreamed of the huge crocodile which had lived in Chatham River throughout his boyhood, hauling out on the far bank as if to watch the house. One day it attacked an alligator. When its prey washed up half eaten, Papa said, “That’s not much of a gator anymore.” He spoke balefully, as a cautionary lesson to the younger children, who were only allowed to splash in the river shallows when that fourteen-foot creature was across the river, laying out there like a drift log, in plain view. In his dream Lucius rowed across the river, and the monster had opened its terrible jaws in a slow warning, then risen suddenly on its short legs and thrashed into the current in a great brown, roiling surge. Because he had challenged his own death, it was there just underneath him, awaiting its moment to capsize the skiff and seize him and drag him down. He awoke in horror.
Though he had sense enough to keep his list a secret, the time would come when he was shunned on Chokoloskee Bay. One day on the dock at Everglade, outside Browns’ fish house, he received a warning from “your daddy’s oldest friend” to “stop this snoopin around, for your own damn good.” Kicking dirt hard, Willie Brown said, “I weren’t mixed up in it, and I spoke agin it, but I’m giving you fair warnin all the same. Any of these local men who figures E. J.’s son is out to get him might feel obliged to get that feller first, you take my meanin, Lucius?” Willie Brown, who had called his father E. J., was one of the few who still used Lucius’s real name.
For once, his brother Eddie had been right. The crude warnings and drunken threats were followed by the hornet whine of a bullet across his bow, the echo of a rifle shot across the water. Then one day his boat was sunk on one of his rare visits to Chokoloskee. Hearing of this, the Harden family—the last friends whom he could trust—prevailed on him to head south around Cape Sable and fish out of Flamingo until things cooled down.
During Lucius’s stay in Flamingo, where he lived at the house of his father’s friend Gene Roberts, his brother Rob had come looking for him in Fort Myers. During his brief visit, Rob told the Fort Myers family almost nothing about himself except to say that he was always “on the road” and had no address where he might be located. Rob had learned from Carrie that Miss Lucy Dyer might know their brother’s whereabouts, but all Lucy could tell him was that Lucius might be living near the Harden family at Lost Man’s River. Rob traveled by mail boat, then rowed a skiff for the last twenty miles, from Everglade to Lost Man’s, where Lee Harden, suspicious of this intense stranger (Rob had called himself John Tucker), would only reveal that Lucius Watson was away.