Lost Man's River(278)
Addison was sneaking looks at him, in hope of something. But the long silences which had started to occur between them would only become chronic, Lucius knew, should they try to graft kinship onto loss, for there had been no twining of their vines since those fallow days here on the Bend fifty years before. In those days, Edna’s Little Ad was solid as a meteor, rushing to Lucius in his churning run, falling forward all the way from the place he started to the point of impact on his chest. His joyful voice had accompanied every activity, even maniacal banging on pots and pans. That headlong rush for life would always be his fondest memory of Ad, who seemed to have sprouted with insufficient sap and was already browning and awaiting death. He would part with him sadly, yet without sorrow. They were not true brothers. Their roots were too long separated, dug up, dried out. Their only tie had been this house at Chatham Bend.
Ad hurried down the embankment to his boat. At a loss as to how to comfort him, Lucius trailed him to the water’s edge, where Ad stared uncomprehending at his proffered hand. Lucius seized Ad’s hand and shook the lifeless thing and let it drop.
“You don’t want to wait a little longer, Ad? For the burial, I mean?”
“I have to go!”
Having fumbled their parting, the brothers tried to mend things in a rough embrace, and Lucius was relieved that Andy House, who stood nearby, had been spared such a disconcerting spectacle. Uncomfortable and abrupt, they had banged foreheads painfully. In that disjointed moment, hugging the stiff bulk of his unbathed brother, Lucius sensed his fundamental hollowness, as if long ago, due to deprivation or disease of spirit, a strong skeleton had failed to form inside him.
In his last years, their father had grown rather heavy, but not in the way of this youngest of his sons, who was already in his mid-fifties, or about Papa’s age on the day that Papa died. Aunt Josie Jenkins had once remarked that when she hugged her Jack—and it turned out she had hugged him almost to the end—he was firm as ever, not merely well-muscled but as hard inside as the huge pit of a mango, scarcely contained within the sheath of flesh. Only in those final months, realizing that for all his hard work and the risks taken he could no longer outstrip his lifelong failure, had the furious furnace of Jack Watson’s spirit started to die. That steel inside him turned to lead as he drank more and became sodden. By the end of it, all he spoke about with love was the lost plantation at Clouds Creek, his boyhood home in Edgefield County, South Carolina.
Duly the two brothers vowed that one day they would meet again, to get to know each other. Lucius even agreed to a return visit to Neamathla. Knowing the meeting would never take place, these honest men toed and kicked the ground in great discomfort. Then Ad broke away, lurched down the bank, and sprawled into the skiff, shoving her off without first starting the motor. He was out in the current yanking at the pull cord when the motor, which he’d left in gear, took hold with a roar and drove the boat out from beneath him. While he sprawled and thrashed to regain his balance, the skiff carved a tight half circle on the current before straightening on a downriver course. Lucius waved but Ad did not look back. He sat hunched in the stern like some strange outgrowth of the motor, rusted solid.
A man came in out of the fire mist, crossing the shadow land of the killed woods. He drifted, disappeared, and came again through smoke and blackened thorn, moving from willow clump to bush like a panther traveling across open savanna.
Coming downriver from the inland passage, Crockett Senior Daniels had slipped ashore above the Bend and made his wary way in through the thickets. Now he straightened and came forward, and still he peered about him, trusting nothing. He said sharply, “Where the hell is Chicken?” They told him what had happened. Daniels cursed. When he turned slowly to contemplate the ruin, Lucius saw the stiffness in him, the old man. “Ol’ Chicken,” Speck said. “Christ Almighty!” He did not seem very much relieved that Addison Burdett had escaped death. He looked around him, arms folded on his chest, trying to take it in. “Ol’ Chicken,” he repeated quietly. “I give him that name years ago when he first showed up at Gator Hook. Hopeless damn drunk, was all he was. Threw him out, then come across him a week later, holed up in a little chicken coop under the buildin!”
Speck groaned and muttered as his daughter watched him with something like concern. “Purty good old man,” Speck mourned. “Purty good friend of mine.” He raised his arms high and his hands wide, dropped them again.
He considered Lucius, not entirely without sympathy. “Poor ol’ Colonel,” he said finally. “Stuck in the same ol’ mud.” He jerked his grizzled chin toward the embers. “Even that old man layin in there understood the way things work better’n you.” After a while, he said, “Won’t do no good to report ’em, case you’re thinkin about it. Them people will only pump out more lies about the accidental death of a dangerous killer that throwed in with the Daniels gang.”