Lost Man's River(265)

I struggled to stand up but I could not. The weakness and frustration broke me, and I sobbed. I saw the boot prints, the sand kicked over the dark bloodstain, like a fatal shadow on the earth.

He leaned and took me underneath one arm and lifted me easily onto my feet. He used a brush of leaves and twigs to scrape the brains and bloody skull bits from my breast, for I had fallen down across her body. Never before had this man touched me with such kindness, nor taken care of me in this strong loving way. I actually thought, What took so long? After all these years, he loves me! But his compassion—if that is what it was—had come too late. My life was destroyed beyond the last hope of redemption. What had happened here had bound me in a shroud. I was a dead man from that day forward, forever and ever and amen.

I retched and fought away from him but fell, too weak to run. He bent again and lifted me, half-carried me toward the skiff.

With hard short strokes he rowed upriver, against the ebb tide. His heavy coat lay on the thwart beside me. He himself seemed stunned, half-dead, and he had forgotten the revolver. My hand found the gun furtively, over and over, whenever he turned to see the course ahead. I wanted to take it, cover it with my shirt, but I felt too shaken and afraid. In that long noon, ascending Lost Man’s River, I realized I should have killed him when he first gave me that gun, sparing Bet Tucker and her baby. Now I had taken those two lives and lost my own.

He told me on the long row home that the delta tide would carry the bodies off the shallow bank into the channel and the deeper water, where sharks following the blood mist in toward shore would find them. I did not answer him. I could not. I felt a loathing as profound as nausea. I never spoke a word to him again.

By oar and sail, he returned to Chatham Bend, using the inland passages to avoid being seen by the Lost Man’s settlers or the Hardens on Wood Key or the few drifters and net fishermen along that coast. He told me to keep my head below the gunwales, so that if the bodies were discovered and Watson’s skiff had been reported in that region, the son would not be implicated in the alleged crimes. That was his word that day—“alleged”—and that is the word that you, Luke, are still clinging to.

All that New Year’s afternoon, curled up like a hound on the bilge boards near his boots, I observed that murderous drunkard at the tiller, the blue eyes squinted in the sun, the ginger beard under the scuffed black hat, against the sun shafts and dark rising towers of far cumulus.

At the Bend, Aunt Josie was nowhere to be seen. He resumed drinking. Before he finally lost consciousness, he reviled me for ingratitude and cowardice and shouted threats against imagined enemies, while saving his vilest curses for the Tuckers. I found the revolver and I aimed it, but I could not fire.

That evening I slipped the schooner’s lines and drifted her downriver on a falling tide. At first light, I worked her out beyond Mormon Key, where an onshore wind was chipping up the surface, and ran a course south for Key West, where our cousin Thomas Collins worked in a shipping office. Tom found a buyer right away because I sold the schooner cheap, aware of the one who, even now, must be in hard pursuit of me, to claim her. That same night I shipped out as a crewman on a Mallory steamer, bound for New York City.

In this way, your brother forsook home and family. My history in the half century since (under an alias) is not worth recording, having no relevance to your Watson archive.

(signed) R. B. Watson



For a long time Lucius lay inert in the mildewed cabin. His heart felt like a core of lead with flayed nerves stretched around it, and its beating hurt him.

Some time later he arose and took the bedrolls over to the beach. He spread them at a little distance from the fire, not far downriver from the place where Rob and Papa must have slipped ashore. The Tucker shack had been around the point, on the west shore, and he dimly recalled the great hardwood from some tropic river, cast up by hurricane, against which Wally Tucker must have leaned his rifle while he patched his pants.

In the firelight, Andy and Whidden were laughing warily with Daniels. Instinctively, Sally sat behind her husband’s shoulder, keeping Whidden between her and her father. By reputation, the hard-drinking Daniels would remain upright and articulate to a point just short of brain death before passing out.

“Course my daughter here got the queer idea that her daddy prefers gators to niggers—hell, that ain’t right at all! I was brung up with old-fashioned views but I kept up with the times better’n some.” Daniels glanced slyly at Sally Brown, whose face was closed. “If I go in a restaurant, Key West, and a nigger comes in there and sets down, I ain’t gone to open my damn mouth, cause I respect the law. But far as one comin into my own house and pullin a chair up to my table, well, I weren’t raised that way. After we’re done eatin, he can come on in, case of a mergency, to use my phone—that’s different. But as far as settin down just like a white person? Nosir! I don’t hold with that. I weren’t raised that way, and it’s hard to change so much after all these years.”