Lucius turned to him at last. “How about me, Arb?” he said quietly. “You think I have a crazy streak like my old man?”
“Well, I’d sure say so!” Arbie yelled recklessly. “Got to be crazy to be wasting all these years trying to redeem a man like E. J. Watson! And now his bastard is slipping you right into his dirty pocket, and you so damn fanatic you don’t even notice!”
“Why would he do that? Give me one good reason.”
“How would I know! Maybe he wants the southwest Florida historian to clean up Watson’s ugly reputation before the truth of his own ancestry gets out! By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed, you’ll have all us dumb local folks rolling our eyes to the high heavens and thanking our Merciful Redeemer for that kindly old farmer who put our sovereign state of Florida where she’s at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent about all their mean tales about him, and how they done him wrong: So maybe Ol’ Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol’ Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First redneck president in the U.S.A. to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol’ redneck breed that made this country great!”
They spent that evening at a motel camp on the Withlacoochee River. While the old man slept off a long day, Lucius drank his whiskey in the shadow of the porch, in the reflections of the giant cypress in the moon mirror of the swamp, deep in forest silence. The gallinule’s eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as exquisitely in place as the shelf fungi on the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead father, as pale saplings straining for the light twist up and around the fallen tree, drawing the last minerals from the punky wood before the great log crumbled in a feast for beetles.
Alone on the porch, he returned to that September day of 1910 when he had left Chatham on the mail boat after a dispute with his father. Not all of the story would come back to him—was he resisting it?—yet it seemed to him that the dispute had been caused by Cox, who had stood behind Papa that day, watching Lucius go. From the stern, rounding the bend downriver, he beheld his father for the last time in his life, the bulky figure in the black hat on the riverbank, fists shoved hard into the pockets of the old black Sunday coat he wore habitually over his coveralls. No, Papa had not waved to him, not in the warm way he wanted to remember. Nor was this really the last sight of Papa, although the next image to veer into his brain was not his father but a thing, a bloated slab of putrefying meat encrusted with blood-blackened sand, half-submerged in that gurried water pit on Rabbit Key.
Lucius drank half his whiskey, gasped, and shuddered hard, shaking himself like a dog shaking off water.
From the bare spring twilight came loud ringing calls of Carolina wrens. The urgency of this song from the forest pained him, and he sighed in the throes of ancient longing, mourning that bad parting. What was he forgetting? And why had he wandered so far from his own life in useless inquiry into the deeds of the lost father whom all his siblings were so anxious to forget?
He sniffed the charcoal in his whiskey. Perhaps he was being obsessive—that’s what Eddie had once called him. Was it obsession when his father’s life enthralled him far more than his own? He supposed that the ongoing search for Mr. Watson had become his solace for his life’s solitude and slow diminishment, and he dreaded the hour when this quest would end. It gave continuity to his existence and even a dim purpose to his days. Purpose to his days! Ironic, he raised his glass to the great cypresses, but the glass was empty.
Sensing him, he turned to confront the old man in the cabin window. Arbie was watching Crazy Lucius talking to himself, watching him toast no one at all, raising an ever-emptied glass to the towering clerestories of shrouding moss and the night creatures and the black moon water.
Lake City
In the early days of the Florida frontier, what was now the capital of Columbia County was a piney-woods outpost known as Alligator Town, after the “Alligator Chieftain,” Halpatter Tustenuggee. A strong ally of the war chief Osceola, Alligator had been attacked by Tennessee irregulars on an expedition of “Indian chastisement,” to revenge the Creek uprising against the settlers in Georgia and Alabama and the subsequent flight of Hitchiti and Muskogee Creeks into north Florida. (To the Creek people who stayed behind, these fugitives were known as the People of the Distant Fires, siminoli.) After the United States bought Florida from Spain, and the first pioneers rode south into the region, the Seminole chief Charley Emathla, living by the clear black pond at Alligator Town, was executed by Osceola for allowing himself to be bought off by the white men.