The ladies awaited him in a stiff row like hard-eyed women of the pioneers, squinting over the hammers of long muskets.
Clearly the kinsman in Lake City had not passed the word that Cousin Lucius was in town. But this could occur at any time, and he frowned intently at the picture, racking his brain for some way to offset the danger of exposure. “So this is Granny Ellen,” he sighed, to break the silence. “Yes. I’m named for her,” his cousin Ellie said. “And Aunt May’s brothers were my father, Willie, and April’s grandfather, my uncle Julian. Uncle Julian’s son lives in Lake City, but we rarely see him. Anyway, you could cut his tongue out before he’d ever talk about Great-Uncle Edgar.” She shook her head. “The father wouldn’t mention him so the son won’t either. Nor my late father either, nor the grandsons. It’s our male tradition.”
“Collins honor.” Hettie smiled.
“Collins honor!” April cried, saluting. “Watson honor, too! If it weren’t for darn old Cousin Ed, down in Fort Myers, our men might have loosened up a little after all this time!”
“Well, Cousin Ed feels more strongly than anyone, and who can blame him? But Daddy told me that our cousin Lucius felt quite differently. Sometime before World War I, he actually came here just to talk about his father!”
But I am Cousin Lucius! How he longed to say that!
“Know anything about Granny Ellen’s husband?” Ellen was testing him.
“Ol’ Ring-Eye? Yes, indeed!” He managed a cousinly laugh, and the women exchanged glances, reassured.
Granny Ellen had left them a daguerreotype of Lige Watson in Confederate uniform, Hettie told him, handing it over. As his kinswomen observed him, he studied the brown-spotted picture for a long time, adjusting the face to the apparition of Ring-Eye Lige in his imagination.
Young Lige, gone for a soldier, had snouty, arrogant good looks, wild upright hair, and that sort of confused tumultuous demeanor that can burst forth in joy or storm with little warning. Even in the photograph, his broad mouth seemed to be shifting from a curling snarl to a grand boyish smile. And his gaze, too, had that hard white crescent beneath the pupil, that bald shine. Though the ring around his eye was still to come, that left eye loomed strangely larger than the right, as if aghast at the spectral knife that was awaiting him.
The women gossiped about family jewelry which Granny Ellen had brought south from Carolina—how she had hidden jewels in her hair to keep them out of Ring-Eye’s clutches, and how Aunt May had probably grabbed them. Soon they fell still, joining their guest, who had turned again to the huge portrait on the wall.
Lucius found himself drawn deep into his father’s eyes. A countenance which had seemed serene, without a wrinkle, was stirring, shifting, and resettling into a hard mask swollen with intransigence—an effect, he decided, of that white crescent beneath the pupil, hard as boiled albumen. As he watched, the eyes grew unrestrained, like the glare of a trapped lunatic, peering out through the eye slits of that transfixed face. Lucius took a deep breath, then let go, and the real image snapped back into place, as composed and handsome as the mortal Papa whose memory he had cherished all his life. Yet those eyes unsettled him, stirring unwelcome recollections. In those last years at Chatham Bend, his father had often been less calm than he appeared—not tense but gathered in a deadly quietude, like a cat at a mouse hole.
Ellen Collins was saying that whenever Ed Watson became angry, he would smile. “My mother was told that all her life: When that man smiled that smile, better watch out! Uncle Edgar could be such a pleasant man, ever so generous and considerate, but never cross him! Oh, he had a violent temper! It’s in the family chemistry, I guess. I have it, too, and my brother has it worse—just an explosive temper! My brother would pick a quarrel with a fence post! Away from the family, he always said, ‘If I had lived in Uncle Edgar’s day, I would have killed those Tolen bastards, too!’ ”
“If he said that once, he said it a million times,” April said gleefully, winking at Lucius.
“Well, a little temper goes a long long way,” gentle Hettie said. “Uncle Edgar never did learn to control it—didn’t have to, I don’t suppose. I do know something dreadful happened in his youth, back in South Carolina. Those rumors came in with the Herlong family, who arrived from Edgefield County after he did. The Collinses would never repeat those Herlong stories because Granny Ellen wished to put Edgefield behind her. Pretty soon, of course, we had our own stories around here to take their place.”
“It’s told for truth in the Collins family that Uncle Edgar killed a black person in Lake City.” April was checked by a polite cough from her aunt. “I shouldn’t tell him that?”