Lost Man's River(270)

“This was still Depression times, and very few jobs anywhere. Henry Short had no steady work, so he spent a lot of time huntin for gold. Henry had heard about this new-fangled machine, and he got the loan of it for a few days, wanted to try it out. He was convinced that the Calusa—or maybe the Frenchman, or maybe Mr. Watson—had left buried treasure on Chatham Bend.

“One day Henry shows up at South Lost Man’s. I believe you must of been away. For such a calm man, he was fevered and upset, but finally he sat down and ate something. Lee Harden said, ‘How come you’re so worked up? You find your treasure?’ Henry shook his head. He shoved a rusty ax head and a big ol’ screw-lid jar acrost the table. That jar was full of belt buckles and metal buttons and cheap one-blader pocketknives, part steel, part brass, except the steel was all et out by rust. And a few—a very few—spent bullets. Accordin to Henry, he found this stuff in an unfarmed piece up in the northwest corner of the Bend. All that box had picked up near the building, Henry said, was metal scrap and a few busted tools.

“Lee Harden grew very very quiet. He said, ‘You find anythin else?’ And Henry said, ‘Bones.’ ‘Well hell,’ Pa said, ‘he had cows on there and pigs, even a old horse at one time, so bones ain’t nothing!’ ‘Skulls,’ said Henry. And three or four had holes that might been made by bullets.’ Said them bones was laying in these shaller graves along with the knives and buckles. About half the graves had a single bullet lay in in amongst the bones, and one grave had three.

“Pa was still resistin Henry’s story. He went and mentioned that old horse again, and bones of old-time Injuns that used to live there, and this time some color come to Henry’s face. Says ‘Darn it, Lee, there ain’t no mistakin a human skull, not for no horse or hog! And anyways, domestical animals don’t generally wear belts and buttons, and only a very few will tote a pocketknife!’

“Lee Harden lit up his cob pipe, took a few puffs to settle down his nerves. He was very surprised to hear Henry Short snap out at him that way, and Henry looked startled, too, but he didn’t quit or nothin. He said, ‘And they ain’t no old-time Injuns, neither! You know who them poor souls were just as good as I do!’ My pa put them pathetical things back in that big jar while he got a bridle on his temper. Then he said, ‘All right. How many skulls?’ And Henry tells him nine or ten and probably some more where them ten came from.

“Pa went back with him to Chatham that same day. He seen for himself them molderin green bones in the dirt and leaves. Straightened up to get his breath and looked south through the trees at the back of the Watson Place out on the river, and the sight of that old walleyed house give him the shivers.” Here Whidden paused. “He told Henry that Colonel Watson might not care to have them graves dug up nor even spoke about. He said, ‘Let’s you’n me fill in them graves and cover ’em up and never speak of ’em again.’ I reckon Pa and Henry never spoke of it again. Pa never told nobody except only me, and this was some years later.”

“How did Speck Daniels hear about it, then?”

“He didn’t. The rumor Speck heard—Andy mentioned it day before yesterday—come from that one body that showed up on the bar down from the Bend. That’s where that whole story got started, back in your dad’s lifetime.”

Whidden checked his line, picking off weed. “I sure am sorry, Mister Colonel.”

Lucius remembered that torn sodden body, and how it was shown to him by a black man who came south with Papa from north Florida. Over the years, as he now recognized, he had sealed away the entire episode, and “Black Frank” with it, so resolutely that he might have gone to his grave without recalling it—well, no, not quite. Reese’s name had resurfaced in those court documents in Columbia County. And even before Andy’s mention, that dead man on the bar would rise to the surface of his dreams from the farthest reaches of unknowing, as petroleum rises in strange rainbow traces in black marshland pools.

“So Henry found his buried treasure after all,” Lucius felt poisoned by his own bitterness. “I mean, dammit, Whidden, where’s that boy with the black box? Where’s that damn button jar? There has to be evidence for this kind of story!”

“That young feller went adrift, I reckon—we ain’t never heard about him. Charlie Green, he’s acrost on the east coast someplace.”

“You never saw those graves and bones yourself.”

Whidden shook his head. “Dig out all that hard shell ground back in that thorn? With all them rattlers that’s back in there?”