Lost Man's River(25)
To judge from his own correspondence with the last Watsons in Clouds Creek, his father’s branch of that large Carolina clan was all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, the Collins cousins went knife-mouthed at the very mention of Uncle Edgar, and tracking down the last few scattered elders who might still hoard a few poor scraps of information was a poor alternative, since in Papa’s day, these hinterlands had been little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy and without the libraries and public records already available in less benighted regions. As in southwest Florida, much local lore, with its blood and grit and smells, had simply vanished.
The biographer’s difficulties were made worse by the immense false record—“the Watson myth”—and also by the failure to correct that record on the part of the subject’s family and descendants, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character was surely one reason why his evil reputation had been so exaggerated. In the absence of family affirmation of that warmth and generosity for which E. J. Watson had been noted even among those who killed him, he had evolved into a kind of mythic monster. Yet as Lucius’s mother had observed not long before her death, “Your father scares them, not because he is a monster, but because he is a man.”
Long, long ago down the browning decades, in the sun of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw and smelled and laughed and listened, touched and tasted, ate and bred, and occupied earthly time and space with his getting and spending in the world. If his biographer could recover a true sense of his past, with its hope and longings, others might better understand who that grown man might have been who had known too much of privation, rage, and suffering, and had been destroyed.
Driving north to Columbia County, Arbie Collins picked through Lucius’s research notes, fuming crossly over certain phrases. Flicking the pages with a nicotined fingernail as yellow as a rat tooth, he coughed and rolled his eyes and whistled in derision, all to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus and broad cattle country as they drove along.
“ ‘We cannot make an innocent man out of a guilty one!’ ” Arbie declaimed, slapping Lucius’s notes down on his kneecaps. “Well, you’re sure trying! ‘E. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the finest farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands’—that’s what he is known for?!” Moments later, he burst out, “You’re saving that house as a state monument to Pioneer Ed?” He was actually yelling. “All that house has ever been is a monument to dark and bloody deeds! As for the so-called Watson family which is supposed to help out on this land claim, some of them don’t know they’re Watsons and the others don’t admit it, so who’s going to help you?”
The old man hurled the notes onto the dashboard, and Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a few pages wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased down his work as Arbie poked his head out, yelling after him, “You’re twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! Well, take it from me, the man was a killer!”
Out of breath, Lucius got back into the cab. “Don’t toss my work around like that, all right?”
“I know what I’m talking about! You don’t! Have you ever seen anyone killed? It’s not pretty, goddammit! It’s terrible and scary! And once you’ve seen it—and heard it, yes, and smelled it!—it’s not so easy to make some kind of a romantic hero of the killer, I can tell you that!”
The old man turned away from him, taking refuge in some loose pages of notes on Lucius’s conversations with the attorney. “Watson Dyer!” he said, disgusted. “Jesus H. Christ!” He looked up. “I know how much you loved your father, Lucius, and I sure am sorry, but there’s no way you can write your way around the man he was!”
Before their departure for Columbia County, Attorney Dyer had telephoned to say that court hearings on the Watson claim had been scheduled for the following week at Homestead. He also mentioned, not quite casually, that one of his “major accounts” was United Sugar, a huge agricultural conglomerate near Lake Okeechobee, and that this company had recently discovered that the first cane ever planted in the Okeechobee region had apparently come from a hardy strain developed originally on Chatham River by Mr. E. J. Watson.
“I guess they ‘discovered’ that in my History—”