Lost Man's River(243)
Whidden smiled faintly. “Got this big fight goin against herself, and they ain’t no way she can win, poor little sweetheart. She wants it both ways, same as the rest of us, but can’t admit to it. That’s why you see her strugglin so hard.”
“And that’s hard on Whidden,” Lucius said.
“I wanted to think we could heal things some between our families by bein together, bein who we was. Sally agreed with that idea but she don’t cooperate. She’s been to college, takes it real hard about race prejudice, she just despises people for despisin nigras. Sally says over and over that the color of your skin don’t matter, it’s your heart and mind that count. Trouble is, at the same time she is sayin skin don’t matter, she is out to make them old-timers admit that the Hardens weren’t mulattas, but only had some Injun in their blood. She even wants ’em to admit that Henry Short was probably Injun, to show the world that Libby Harden never run off with a colored man.
“Well, them old-timers ain’t going to admit no such a thing. That generation got their idea about the old-time Hardens and they ain’t goin to change it. And with the world they knew changin so fast, you can’t hardly blame ’em.”
“You don’t blame them?”
“Aunt Libby married a brown man, Henry Short, then Aunt Abbie run off with a black one. Can you blame folks for thinking the way they do?”
“Blame,” Lucius said shortly, tasting that word.
“I been talking about Sally, ain’t I. But it looks like I am fightin that hook, too.”
Lucius Watson had helped raise Roark Harden. He knew Wilson, too, since these cousins had been inseparable. Because of Earl’s hostility, he had never been quite comfortable with Wilson, but had always very felt close to Roark, who was nine when they first met, and who, even as a boy, had been generous and dead honest like his father. However, Lucius was also fond of Walker Carr’s son Alden, who had remained friendly throughout that period in the twenties when almost everyone except the Hardens was avoiding him.
When the Johnson boy brought word from Tavernier that Alden Carr had made a drunk confession in a bar, the Harden men had loaded up their guns. Even Earl, who took such pride in his Bay friends, was raging around about a raid on Chatham Bend. Lucius went to Lee and offered to go instead. He would talk with Alden, make sure they had the story straight before steps were taken that might get the wrong ones killed. Suspicious, Lee had studied Lucius’s eyes before he nodded.
By the time Lucius turned up at the Bend, poor Alden was more frightened of his brothers than he was of Hardens, but he took responsibility for what he’d said at Tavernier and did not try to contradict that story. When Lucius confronted the others, both denied it, saying that when Alden was drunk, he sometimes made up crazy stories to get attention to himself, which, alas, was true. Then Old Man Walker, who had been listening behind the door, blew up and came bursting in, yelling at the visitor to ease his nerves. Before his boys could hush him, he hollered out that those damned Hardens had stolen five hundred dollars’ worth of pelts, then threatened his boys when they went to get them back. One of their guns must have gone off, and his sons, afraid they were being shot at, had no choice but to return their fire, “not intendin to hit nobody! It was self-defense!” After firing that one wild volley in the dark, his boys had hurried back to their own camp. So far as they knew, the Harden boys had left Shark Point early the next morning, for their skiff was gone.
When their father started hollering, Owen and Turner slipped away, but Alden trailed Lucius to the dock. He asked whose side Lucius was on, and Lucius asked how he could take sides without knowing the truth. Alden squinted at him. “What Pa told may not be the God’s truth, Lucius,” Alden said coldly and carefully. “But it’s our Carr truth. This year, anyways.”
Lucius was already cast off when Old Man Walker roared down to the dock and cuffed poor Alden out of the way and bellowed at Watson’s son across the water. “I was very old friends with your dad! You know it, too! Done my best that day to stop that crowd. So if it comes down to some kind of a showdown, Lucius, are you on your old friends’ side or ain’t you?” Next, he hollered, “Lucius, boy, for ten years now you been wanderin around these islands askin a whole hell of a lot of stupid questions, and it sure looks like you’re doin that again! If it weren’t for me tellin the men you was only a heartbroke poor damn fool that meant no harm, it’s you who might of come up missin, boy, not no damn Hardens!” Red and sweating, Walker Carr turned his back on him and stumped away. Within a day, the Carr family was gone from Chatham River.