Lost Man's River(16)

Returning to Lost Man’s, Lucius was determined to dispense with the useless list he had worked on for so many years, always changing and adjusting and revising, always striving to get closer to the fact, the “truth,” which might permit him to put the thing behind him, and his father, too. He realized that, short of his own death, there was no end to that list, any more than there could be an end to life itself. Far from putting his heart to rest, its very existence had become a burden and a danger, rebuking him not only for his failure to avenge poor Papa but for the folly of his self-banishment to the Islands, and for the huge part of his life which had been wasted. How much better that time might have been spent in a real life with Lucy Dyer, raising children—that was his fresh new dream.

That year, Lucius received word of Walter Langford’s death. He arrived in Fort Myers too late for the funeral. Carrie assured him that she understood, but it was plain that she could not quite forgive him for never having visited or written. “Nobody seriously expected you,” Eddie said sourly. With customary spite, from behind his hand, he informed his younger brother that the President of the First National Bank had “died of drink,” having failed to provide properly for their sister. As for himself, he was prosperously embarked on his own insurance business.

During his visit, Lucius entrusted Lucy Dyer with a packet for Rob Watson in the vain hope that Rob might turn up again. Since he could not bring himself to destroy it, he enclosed the posse list, to avoid any chance of its discovery by the men listed and to be rid of it once and for all. But a few years later, in the course of changing households, Lucy would misplace the packet, as she confessed to Lucius in a letter which also brought word of her recent marriage to old Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was he by her abandonment (he had somehow assumed that his first love would await him forever) that he scarcely noticed her mention of the list.

In the next years, he made a hard sparse living as a hunting and fishing guide and commercial fisherman, and most of the men accepted him again as talk of his list died down. His only trouble came about through his association with the Hardens, whose side he would take in a dangerous feud with the Bay people which had ended in the murder of two Harden sons.



In 1947, when the Ten Thousand Islands were appropriated for the national park, Lucius moved north to Caxambas. There he found a warm welcome from the women and children of the Daniels-Jenkins clan, whom his father had always spoken of as “my backdoor family.” A decade later he returned to the University of Florida at Gainesville, where he accepted a teaching post as an assistant professor while completing his History of Southwest Florida. In his class was Sally Brown of Everglade, a lovely young woman with long flaxen hair bound loosely with rawhide at her pretty nape who had recently separated from Lee Harden’s son Whidden and returned to college.

Sally made herself wonderfully useful in his work, not only as a researcher but as a source of information on the Island families. Of Everglades pioneer stock on both sides—he had almost forgotten that she was Speck Daniels’s daughter—she had repudiated what she perceived as the racism and redneck ignorance in her community which had made life so dangerous for her husband’s family. But as she ruefully confessed, her fierce tirades in defense of the Hardens had reawakened a lot of the mean gossip which that family imagined had been put to rest, until finally the Hardens themselves rebuked Whidden for not bringing his wife’s tongue under control. For this reason—and others—the marriage had come apart. “My fault,” Sally admitted, making no excuses.

Sally Brown was passionate, intemperate, and very angry (he suspected) for more primal reasons than those that she invoked. Though never certain how much he could trust her version of local events, he liked her because she was generous and wry and because her high opinion of “Mister Colonel” Watson, learned from the Hardens, had made her delightfully affectionate right from the start. Indeed, he felt affectionate himself, and had longed to kiss her from the first day she came by his rooms to say hello.

Lucius had been careful not to flirt with Sally, even in an avuncular sort of way. A courtly and old-fashioned man, he thought his need unnatural, considering their discrepancy in age. He also condemned it as immoral, since he was close to the Harden family and had been a sort of uncle to her husband, back in the early days at Lost Man’s River. Besides, he was unhappily aware of his emotional limitations, which all his life had made him choose loneliness over commitment, no matter how fearful he might be that his one life on earth would pass him by. One night in a bar, he had confessed to the attraction, denouncing himself as “a dirty and villainous old man.” Sally, who had long since known he was attracted, informed him that his whole attitude was ridiculous.