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Lost Man's River(20)

By:Peter Matthiessen


According to Arbie, Rob had died but a few years before, in the basement of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left strict instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had sent along his urn. Arbie pointed at the urn in the houseboat window. Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, the old man looked furious, and Lucius decided to let it go. “Rob never married?” he asked. “Never had children?”

“Nosir,” the old man muttered, yawning. “That was the only bad mistake Robert Watson never made.” Sneezing, he lifted his red foulard to wipe his bristly chin. “After Rob died, I wanted to carry him back home to Columbia County, but about that time my auto quit—that pink one in the weeds at Gator Hook?—so I never got around to it.” He measured Lucius. “I thought maybe we could go up there in yours.”

They went inside. Lucius poured whiskey, and they toasted their meeting silently and drank, and he poured again. Ceremonious, he set the urn on a white cloth on the small table between them, placing beside it a pot of red geraniums, grown on his cabin roof. The old man observed this ritual with cold contempt.

Considering the urn, they drank in silence, in the play of light and water from the creek. That this cheap canister contained all that was left of handsome Rob made Lucius melancholy. The family would have to be notified, but who would care? “Rob came to find me years ago but I never saw him,” he said finally. “I haven’t laid eyes on him since I was eleven.”

“You might not care to lay eyes on what’s in here.” The old man picked up the urn and turned it in his hands, and a mean grimace crossed his face. “Cause it don’t look like much.” Watching Lucius, he shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the container and shook it like a cocktail shaker. “Hear him rattlin in there? Folks talk about ashes, but there’s no ashes, it’s just chunks and bits of old brown bone, like dog crackers.” He shook the urn again, to prove it.

“Don’t do that, damn it!”

Lucius took the urn from the old man and returned it to the table, and Arbie laughed. “Rob doesn’t care,” he said.

“Well, I care. It’s disrespectful.”

“Disrespectful.” Arbie shrugged, already thinking about something else. “One of these days, you can carry that thing north to Columbia County, see if there’s any room for him up that way.” He cocked his head. “I was thinking we could maybe go together.”



That evening, with a grin and flourish, Arbie produced a letter clipped from the Florida History page of The Miami Herald. Its author, he said, was D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state,” who had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. Concluding some strenuous throat hydraulics with a salutary spit, the old man launched forth on a dramatic reading, but within a few lines, he gave this up and turned the trembling paper over to Lucius.

He inherited his savage nature from his father, who was widely known as a fighter. In one of his many fights he was given a knife wound that almost encircled one eye, and was known thereafter as Ring-Eye Lige Watson. At one time he was a warden at the state penitentiary.

He married and two children were born to them, Edgar and Minnie. The woman had to leave Watson on account of his brutality and dissolute habits. She moved to Columbia County, Florida, where she had relatives.



Gleeful, Arbie watched his face. “Probably stuff like that is of no interest to serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.”

Dr. Herlong went on to describe Edgar Watson’s arrest for murder in the Fort White region, and Lucius read more and more slowly as he went along. Arbie was waiting for him when he raised his eyes.

“We heading for Columbia County, Professor?”

Lucius nodded. “You think Herlong has these details right? Like ‘Ring-Eye Lige’?” Just saying that name aloud made him laugh in pleased astonishment. What he held in his hand was his first real clue to his father’s early years, which Papa had rarely mentioned. Since the drunken Ring-Eye, home from war, had been abusive to his wife, it seemed quite reasonable to suppose that he’d beaten his children, too.

Because Old Man Collins’s bias against Watson seemed so rancorous and powerful, the historian evoked the tradition of violence in which young Edgar Watson had been raised in South Carolina. According to his research for the biography, the Cherokee Wars preceding the first settlement had given way to a wild anarchy imposed upon the countryside by marauding highwaymen and outlaws, followed by the bloodiest, most bitter fighting of the Revolutionary War, with neighbor against neighbor in a dark and gruesome civil strife of a ferocity unmatched in the nation’s history. The sons of these intemperate colonials would be noted for their headlong participation in the War of 1812, then the Mexican War, while maintaining high standards of mayhem there at home. In 1816, President George Washington’s chronicler Parson Mason Weems, revisiting this community, which he had served formerly as Episcopal priest, began his account with “Old Edgefield again! Another murder in Edgefield!… It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!” In the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, in a rural settlement of less than one hundred scattered households, some thirty-nine people had died violently, nearly half of them slaves killed by their masters. And all of this tumult, Lucius told the old man, had taken place within a single century! By every account, Edgefield District had been far and away the most unregenerate and bloody-minded in the Carolinas, leading the South in pro-slavery violence and secessionist vendettas, feuds, duels, lynchings, grievous bodily assaults, and common murders.