Oh Lord, thought Lucius, how much he missed Rob!
Under the ancient poincianas, he reread Rob’s jaunty and heartbroken letter, which brought on an up welling of pity for this man beside him. He had no business finding fault with Ad and Eddie. In the view of his entire family—all but Rob, perhaps—the greatest fool, the brother who was given the best chance of all and threw his life away, had been none other than Lucius Hampton Watson. “It’s hard to put your finger on the fool”—wasn’t that dear Mama’s saying, too?
Ad Burdett was not a fool, merely a casualty. Wasn’t that true of all the Watson brothers? Even Dyer?
Clouds came from the Gulf, dragging shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands and raising acrid steam from the brooding embers. The brothers took shelter with the Hardens and Andy House in the boat cabin, where in dense wet heat, they sat too close and knee to knee. Finding room for Ad, trying to make him feel welcome and comfortable, Sally actually permitted herself a few sips of the moonshine which Whidden had miraculously discovered tucked away beneath the Belle’s rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers. He winked at Lucius, holding up one of Speck’s unlabeled bottles. “Astoundin, ain’t it?”
The rain had stopped, leaving black puddles on the ground. The dull thumping of the helicopter, still circling in the eastern distance, had come and gone in the close silent air, but now the sound came again, and grew much louder. There was no time to move the Belle, or even hide. Ad Burdett relapsed into his moans, his big hands twitching, and Lucius called to him, “It’s all right, Ad! It’s all right!” But Harden whispered, “It ain’t all right. Not if they decided—” But he left this thought unfinished, since it was too late.
In ricocheting wind and racket, the glinting thing roared low over the river, and the mad leaves danced as it cleared the trees and rocked to a stop in midair over their heads. Shattering the sun and light, the blades spun fire sparks and smoke into sudden dust devils and small tornadoes. An emblem on the fuselage behind the portholes resembled an American flag, yet the covert machine was not identifiable with the armed forces. Perhaps it was assigned to anonymous agencies. Perhaps the vast federal apparatus and its armed might, and all the war-oriented industries behind them must be invested in this shining thing.
Binoculars peered at them out of the portholes like submariners goggling at abyssal life. Was one of these lens-eyed creatures Watson Dyer?
In a shift of wind came a metallic squawk and static, and a moment later, the machine shot skyward. Soon it was far out to the west, rising high over the Gulf where the sky was clearing. Higher and higher the great dragonfly rose, black on the sun. Then it whirled downwind, returning toward the east in its silver gleaming, magnificent in its indifference to the small figures below.
Peering after it, Lucius was dismayed when his eyes misted, and he felt an impulse to salute the power of that swift and shining thing—God Bless America!
Whidden crossed the river to fetch Ad’s skiff while Lucius waited with his brother on the bank. Ad had relapsed into a brooding silence, and the two stood together in discomfort, pretending to watch the Cracker Belle while struggling to make sense of what had happened. Ad burst out, “This house, and Rob, all this bad old-time stuff—it’s none of my damned business! I only came to paint the house!”
The fire steamed. An iron sun loomed through the mist and was soon gone. On the gnarled roots of the scorched poincianas beside the river, the rough bark was blackened on the side nearest the fire, and there was no shade because the leaves had burned away. “I’m sorry, Ad,” Lucius said finally.
“I think Rob told the truth!” Ad cried. “And I don’t care!”
“All right.” Lucius kicked an old scrap of gator hide into the water.
“You knew all these things? All your life?”
“Well, yes and no. I knew it and I didn’t. There were dreams …”
“And you’re putting that bad stuff into your book? About those bodies? Weren’t you the one who made excuses for him? In Neamathla?”
Across the river, the Belle had the blue skiff in tow and was starting back.
“There won’t be any book.”
Lucius had not realized he had decided this until he said it. How could he celebrate his father’s real accomplishment while pretending ignorance of what he knew. And after all, he had been warned, long, long ago that Papa was an unfit subject for biography.
How bitter it seemed that the “truths” he’d learned in long hard years of research had turned out to be only marginally more dependable than the Watson myth. The only “truths” of E. J. Watson were the intuitions rising at each moment—for example, that during his long years on the Bend, his driven father, whether or not he had ever paused to listen, had heard the song of an ancestral white-eyed vireo, all but identical to the dry wheezy trill which even at this moment came and went over the thump and pop of the rain-banked fire. The Calusa Indians had heard it, and the Harden clan and the old Frenchman, and a pretty little girl named Lucy Dyer, and even the lean and hungry Cox, alone on this storm-battered river, awaiting the return of Mr. Watson. In the stark wake of hurricanes and fire, the delicate bird went on and on about its seasons, oblivious of the mortal toil of man.