Lost Man's River(21)

Edgar Watson’s father, it appeared, had gone off to the “War of Northern Aggression” as a common soldier, which suggested that he had fallen from the landed gentry. Three years later, still a private, he was mustered out of the Confederate Army, by which time he apparently had lost the last of his property and inheritance. From Herlong’s account, it was easy to infer that Lige Watson had been touchy, full of rage, and more likely than most to resent the freed blacks who were now his peers. And as a drinker, Lucius supposed, he might well have taken out his hatreds and frustrations on the hide of his young son who, according to Granny Ellen Watson, had scavenged the family food throughout the War while receiving only rudimentary schooling. Even after the War, jobs had been scarce, child labor cheap, and the family poor and desperate, and the boy had toiled from dawn to dark at the whim of some dirt farmer’s stick. Her son’s travail and punishment had only been intensified by the return of the distempered father.

In the shadowed wake of war, its soil exhausted, the Southern countryside lay mortified beneath its shroud of anarchy and dust. And how much more galling Reconstruction must have seemed to an impoverished war veteran, for even in his reduced circumstances, Lige Watson would retain those grandiose ideas of Southern honor and the Great Lost Cause which would fire the bigotry of the meanest redneck for decades to come.

Throughout this dissertation, Arbie glowered like a coal. He did not speak.

Surely, Lucius reasoned mildly, the dark temper of this district had infected the outlook and behavior of the ill-starred Edgar, who had been but six when the War began and reached young manhood in the famine-haunted days of Reconstruction—

The old man whipped around upon him with a glare of real malevolence. “Dammit, you are just making excuses! Think I don’t know what you are up to?” Gat-toothed and bristle-browed, hoarse with emphysema, Arbie yanked his cap down harder on his head. This ferocious elder might be rickety and pale, but he was no man to be trifled with. The glint in his deep eyes was now a glimmer, but his strong silver-black hair and rakish burnsides, with their hard swerve toward the corner of his mouth, asserted a wild intransigence and even menace.

“Reconstruction!” He was seized by a fit of coughing. “Mr. Ed J. Watson never got reconstructed, I can tell you that much!” He cackled savagely, hoping to give offense, but Lucius winced merely to humor him and continued his mild-mannered reflections on that dark period after the War when the Northerners ran the South, put blacks in office—

“The darkie period, you mean? Burr-head niggers in yeller boots, lording it over the white folks, giving the orders?”

Already, Lucius had intuited that despite that rasping tongue, hell-bent on outrage, Arbie Collins was an inveterate defender of the underdog, including—perhaps especially—the underdog of darker color. What infuriated this old man was any perceived defense of E. J. Watson. “Who are you to preach to me about Reconstruction?” he was hollering. “I was born in Reconstruction, practically! Scalawags and carpetbaggers! And after Reconstruction came Redemption, when we run those suckers right out of the South!” Slyly amused by his own fury, Arbie had to struggle to maintain its pitch. Within moments, his passion spent, a boyish smile broke his hunched face wide open. His quickness to set his snappishness aside, Lucius reflected, was one of his very few endearing qualities.

Arbie Collins, by his own description, was “a hopeless drunk and lifelong drifter,” and Lucius Watson was coming to suspect—from the man’s pallor and side-of-the-mouth speech and odd allusions—that a good part of his life had been spent in prison. For his arrival at Caxambas, he had perked up his worn clothes with a red rag around his throat like a jaunty sort of backcountry foulard. Lucius was touched by this flare of color, this small gallantry.

“You’re a hard feller, all right.” Lucius smiled, already fond of him.

“L. Watson Collins, P-H-D!” The old man spat hard to fend off his host’s affection.

Since the Herlong letter indicated that Edgar Watson had been raised in northern Florida, Granny Ellen must have fled there with her children not long after the 1870 census, when Papa was fifteen. The relative who took them in had been Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had accompanied her married daughter to the Fort White region. By the mid-eighties, when Dr. Herlong’s father moved south to that community, Elijah Watson back in Edgefield was already notorious as Ring-Eye Lige.

Arbie reached to take his clipping back, grinning foxily when Lucius appeared loath to give it up. “This Herlong knew about Ed Watson’s checkered past, no doubt about it,” Arbie assured him, “because Herlongs lived less than a mile from Watsons in both Edgefield and Fort White. Got some Herlongs in those Fort White woods even today.”