Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius cried, “Well, maybe I am crazy! Who knows? If Papa was who you think he was, I might wake up one day and just start killing people! And you might, too! That doesn’t scare you?”

  That winter of 1911, estranged from his family and unable to rest, he had set off in search of his beloved oldest brother, who had not been heard from since he’d fled from Chatham Bend ten years before. Lucius took the train north to Fort White, in Columbia County, in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson or their Collins cousins.

  Granny Ellen, he discovered, had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins had no idea who Lucius might be, far less what he might want of her. Aunt Minnie, who would die within the year, had been sheltered from the scandal (and indeed from her own life) by morphine addiction and premature senescence. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, she would not speak with this interloper in her household, who only added to her confusion and distress.

  As for her children, they scarcely remembered the young cousin who had stayed with them briefly sixteen years before. Sympathetic at first, his relatives became uncomfortable and then impatient with his questions, reminding him of the code of silence which the Collins clan had scrupulously observed. Shamed in their rural community by their uncle Edgar, they were not grieved by his death, and when Lucius finally understood this, he burst out, “He was acquitted! He was found innocent!”

  The Collins brothers did their best to mend things. They had loved their uncle, they acknowledged, but they would never agree that he was innocent. When Lucius departed, Cousin Willie called from the train platform, “Y’all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” This was meant kindly, yet they were content with his departure and could not hide it.

  While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father’s widow, who had fled Chokoloskee and gone to live near her sister Lola in northwest Florida. Edna Watson was close to Lucius’s age, they had been dear friends, and he felt sure he would be cheered by a good visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison after Granny Ellen’s family. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of the shooting, which Little Ad had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old on that dark October day, struck Lucius as subdued and melancholy, rather timid.

  His young stepmother was kind to him, and nervous. He had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. Though Edna was too shy to say so, her sister, pressing him to leave, warned him gently that “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl’s life.” At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Edna would soon marry her childhood sweetheart from Fort White, who had offered to give his name to her three young ones.

  In Fort Myers, Lucius worked awhile as a fishing and hunting guide for Walter Langford’s business associates. After his years at Chatham River, he was a skilled boatman and fisherman and a dead shot. He was also a loner, preferring books to loud camaraderie, and indeed so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received indirect complaints, not about Lucius’s guiding, which was expert, but about his “unfriendly” attitude, his silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he was hobbled by introspection, guilt, and melancholy. At heart he was a merry person who saw something amusing wherever he turned, but in his darker times, Lucius’s humor turned cryptic and laconic. His one close friend—and eventually his lover—was a young girl named Lucy Dyer whose parents had worked at Chatham Bend in the first years of the century and who retained fond childhood memories of “Mr. Watson.”

  In the dull white summer of 1912, Lucius sought refuge in the Merchant Marine, taking along a duffel full of books. Upon his return, he was prevailed upon by Carrie to attend the University of Florida at Gainesville. There he passed three years in quest of a degree in American history, proposing for his thesis a life of the Everglades pioneer and sugarcane planter Edgar Watson—an objective biography which (he proposed) might replace the legend with the facts, and testify to E. J. Watson’s intelligence and generous nature as well as his remarkable accomplishments. But his outline was rejected as too speculative—“too subjective” was what was meant, since the candidate was Watson’s son. However, the faculty was much impressed by his deep knowledge of remote southwestern Florida, even to its Indian people and its wildlife, and urged him to prepare instead an account of pioneer settlement on the Everglades frontier.

  At first, he had resented his professors for having dismissed his parent as a subject unfit for biography. (At the same time, Lucius understood that, in light of what had been written about Papa in the magazines and newspapers, unanswered by any protest from the Watson family, they could scarcely have concluded anything else.) Dispirited, he turned instead to the proposed history of southwest Florida, which progressed rapidly. It was nearing completion when he lost heart and abandoned it, and a few weeks later, he dropped out of graduate school without a word. For the first though not the last time in his life, Lucius Watson embarked on a prolonged alcoholic odyssey which only ended when he awoke in jail.

  Returning eventually to Fort Myers, he went straight to the Langford house and stood before the family, ready to endure their recriminations. Poor Carrie gasped at his appearance. “Oh, it’s such a waste!” she mourned. Inevitably Eddie reminded him of his profound debt to the generous man who had paid for his tuition—here Eddie bent a meaningful look upon his own employer, Walter Langford, who frowned, judicious, from his armchair, rapping out his pipe. Whether Walter frowned over the waste of Lucius’s efforts or the waste of money—or perhaps in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey—Lucius felt ashamed that he had accepted Langford’s money in the first place.

  It was Lucius’s “morbid fear of life,” Eddie declared, which had caused him to flee the university before completing his thesis and receiving his degree, and which also kept him from settling down and getting married. (“That poor, dear little Lucy Dyer!” Carrie had grieved, when Eddie condemned his brother’s unmarried status.) A churchman and sober citizen who shared most and possibly all of Walter’s opinions, Eddie was already married, with two daughters. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he sighed in his most world-weary way, shaking his head over his brother’s ingratitude and chronic folly.

  Next day, without notifying Lucy, Lucius enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He went overseas with a vague ambition to die for his country but came back having failed in this as in all else. Still brooding about his murdered father, still fantasizing about Southern honor (and even honorable revenge upon the ringleader—or perhaps the first man to fire—since it seemed impractical to wipe out the whole posse), he had convinced himself that to salvage his own life, he must return to the Ten Thousand Islands, not only to confront the executioners but to learn just why Edgar Watson had met that grotesque end on October 24th of 1910, at Chokoloskee.

  Before departing for the Islands, Lucius spent one broken evening at the Langford house—their new brick house on First Street, at the foot of the Edison Bridge over the river. On this occasion, Eddie declared that Lucius’s “unhealthy obsession” with his father’s death was merely a way of lending false significance to his own immature and feckless life. And when Lucius was silent, he went on to warn him that returning to the Islands could only end in violence, since the local men, in their guilt and anger, would inevitably feel threatened by E. J. Watson’s son. This dire prediction evoked an outburst of dismay from Carrie and unusually deep frowns from her husband, who stepped at once into the pantry to fortify himself with a noble whiskey, in which Lucius joined him. And whiskey fired the final argument over Lucius’s declared intention to find out precisely what had happened on that fatal day nine years before—find out just who had shot at Papa, and what evidence there was, if any, that E. J. Watson had ever killed a single soul.

  “Oh Lord! You are crazy!” Eddie hollered.

  “Name one person,” Lucius shouted back on his way toward the door,
“who ever claimed that he saw Papa shoot at anybody!”

  “Precious Lucius” thought himself superior, Eddie was yelling, for refusing to honor the family agreement never to discuss their father. And Carrie chimed in—“You did promise, you know!”

  “You people promised! I never promised a damned thing!”

  Carrie was reprimanding Eddie as the door closed—“He is not feckless! He is simply romantic and impractical!”—but she did not disagree with Eddie, not entirely. When Lucius had gone overseas without advising Lucy Dyer that he was going, the desperate girl had confessed her love for him to Carrie, and recently Carrie had learned that he had not called on Lucy since his return. The next day, too ashamed to make amends—he had some idea that he must first prove himself worthy—he departed for the Ten Thousand Islands.

  At Chatham Bend he found a boat tied at the dock, and the family of Willie Brown camped in the house. Though old friends of his father, the Browns seemed uneasy, unable to imagine why a Watson son would ever come back to the Islands. Willie Brown assured him that they would move out whenever Lucius was ready, by which he meant “ready to live alone.” Fearing that loneliness, he told them they were welcome to stay on in the main house while he patched up the old Dyer cabin down the bank. A few days later, when he returned from Everglade with a boatload of supplies, the Browns were gone.

  Lucius wandered the overgrown plantation in the river twilight. In the old fields, cane shoots struggled toward the light through the thorn and vine. Fetching his whiskey from the boat, he sat in the empty house all that long evening, until finally he was so drunk and despairing that he crawled outside and fell off the porch steps, howling in solitude. Next day he headed south to Lost Man’s River, where Lee Harden and his Sadie, who were close to his own age, had always been his friends and made him welcome. On impulse, he offered them the place on Chatham Bend. They were disturbed by his haggard appearance and did not believe that he was serious, and Lee Harden had lived on the Bend as a small child and had no wish to return there, having already filed a claim on Lost Man’s Beach. He thanked Lucius politely, reminding him that the Hardens were fishermen. There was no sense in letting a forty-acre plantation go to waste. Anyway, they informed him gently, the Chevelier Development Corporation had somehow acquired rights to Chatham Bend.

  Having no heart or temperament for a legal battle, Lucius abandoned the Bend and built a cabin near the Hardens at South Lost Man’s, where he resumed his former life as a commercial fisherman. Though he did his best to be friendly with everyone, he refused to ignore his father’s death. He wished to identify every man who had been present in that October dusk on Smallwood’s landing, and to look him so squarely in the eye that he could not doubt that Watson’s son knew all about his participation. In this way, he hoped he might be free of that bitterness and atavistic shame which had crippled his spirit for so many years.

  The first man Lucius sought out for advice was Henry Thompson, who had worked for E. J. Watson back in the nineties and later became captain of his schooner. Henry had always been his father’s friend and had denounced the killing. Yet it seemed that Henry was avoiding him, perhaps because he himself avoided Chokoloskee, where the Thompsons lived. When they finally met one day on the dock at Everglade, and he asked Thompson who had been involved, it appeared that Henry had forgotten. Though he put both sets of knuckles to his temples and racked his brain extra hard, he could not recall a single name from that crowd of men. When Lucius expressed astonishment, Thompson turned cranky, as if held responsible unjustly. He all but suggested that Watson’s son had no business returning to the Islands in the first place. “All that Watson business” was over and done with, he told Lucius, and the less said about any of it the better. He did not add “if you know what’s good for you,” not in so many words, but very clearly that was what he meant. Better let sleeping dogs lie, Henry advised him as they parted, and anyway—this was shouted back over his shoulder—Mr. E. J. Watson still owed Thompsons money! After that day the Thompson family, which had always been so friendly, turned cold and avoided him, like the Willie Browns.

  But Lucius persisted in his quiet inquiry, speaking with anyone willing to discuss his father’s life and death. The men of Everglade and Chokoloskee had liked “Ed Watson’s boy” back in the old days, and when he had first returned, and appeared friendly, some of the men put their uneasiness aside and answered questions about Mr. Watson’s years on Chatham Bend, his crops and economics, boats and marksmanship, his moonshine and plume-hunting days, even his wild rioting in Tampa and Key West—anything and everything but the dark events which finished in that October dusk at Smallwood’s landing.

  They called him Colonel. The nickname had not been affectionate, not in those early days, but only certified his separation from the Island people due to his courtly educated tones and “city manners.” The more amiable he became, the less they trusted him, in their stubborn suspicion that his friendliness was intended to disarm them while some course of bloody retribution was being plotted. As posse leaders, the men of the House family had most reason for concern. The patriarch, Daniel David House, had died two years before, but the three House boys who had taken part were very leery of him, especially the eldest son, Bill House.

  Rumors drifted like low swamp mist through the Islands that “Colonel” Watson was asking the wrong questions. The local men became more taciturn each time he approached. Braving cold-eyed silences everywhere he went, Lucius did his best to avoid blame or rancor, but the Islanders grew ever more uneasy—indeed, those families which had decried the killing were at least as reticent as those which had participated, or approved it. Some were wary, some were scared, backing inside and shutting the door when they saw Watson’s son coming. He could knock for ten minutes without response, knowing that if he touched the latch, somebody hidden behind that door might blow his head off. That this quiet and soft-spoken man would risk this—that despite the hostility of the community, he kept coming back—was only more proof that “Watson’s boy,” who could “drop a curlew bound downwind with a bullet through the eye,” was “every bit as dangerous as his daddy.”

  Yet one by one, by various means—cryptic allusions and sly woman talk, drunk boastful blurtings—he learned the names of “the men who killed Ed Watson,” and from early on, he kept a list, with commentary. Every gleaned scrap of information gave him his excuse to brood over the names, eliminate one, write down another, or simply refine, make more precise, the annotations which kept the list scrupulous and up-to-date. Coming alive, always evolving, the list seemed a justification of his return to the Ten Thousand Islands, reassuring him that what he was doing was research for that abandoned biography which might redeem his father’s name. At the very least, it eased the pain of a lost decade of inaction and self-loathing in which he had forgiven neither his father’s killers (as he still perceived them) nor the Watson sons—Lucius Watson in particular—for failing to find an honorable resolution.

  Fed mostly now by stray allusions, random gossip, the list of names with its revisions and deletions, footnotes, comments, and qualifications, grew ever more intricate and complex, as what had begun as a kind of game became obsession. For a few years, he went nowhere without it. The folded packet of lined yellow paper, damp from the subtropical sea air, had gone transparent at the creases from sweat and coffee spills and cooking grease and fish oil, and so specked by rust from tools and hooks and flecked with sundry bread crumbs and tobacco, that Lucius could scarcely decipher the small script and had to write out a fresh copy—a renewal ceremony and a source of secret satisfaction. So long as he kept perfecting it, making certain it was accurate down to the last detail, he would never have to give it up. It filled some void and longing in his life—he knew that. Yet he could not admit this to himself for fear of removing its peculiar healing power, and the order it brought to his wandering mind.

  He dreaded finishing the list, not wishing to deal with his inability to act upon it. He did not believe
he could take a human life, even in the name of family honor. And though he could accept this, his romantic side would always be disappointed, knowing that the hickory breed of old-time Watsons would have acted forcefully in retribution, never mind the morality or consequences. He longed to talk with his brother Rob, whom he remembered as hotheaded and outspoken—hardly a man to accept family dishonor.

  By the end of his first year in the Islands, there were threats. Although afraid, Lucius perceived his potential martyrdom as a resolution of his life, somehow less terrifying than cowardice or weakness. One night he dreamed of the huge crocodile which had lived in Chatham River throughout his boyhood, hauling out on the far bank as if to watch the house. One day it attacked an alligator. When its prey washed up half eaten, Papa said, “That’s not much of a gator anymore.” He spoke balefully, as a cautionary lesson to the younger children, who were only allowed to splash in the river shallows when that fourteen-foot creature was across the river, laying out there like a drift log, in plain view. In his dream Lucius rowed across the river, and the monster had opened its terrible jaws in a slow warning, then risen suddenly on its short legs and thrashed into the current in a great brown, roiling surge. Because he had challenged his own death, it was there just underneath him, awaiting its moment to capsize the skiff and seize him and drag him down. He awoke in horror.

  Though he had sense enough to keep his list a secret, the time would come when he was shunned on Chokoloskee Bay. One day on the dock at Everglade, outside Browns’ fish house, he received a warning from “your daddy’s oldest friend” to “stop this snoopin around, for your own damn good.” Kicking dirt hard, Willie Brown said, “I weren’t mixed up in it, and I spoke agin it, but I’m giving you fair warnin all the same. Any of these local men who figures E. J.’s son is out to get him might feel obliged to get that feller first, you take my meanin, Lucius?” Willie Brown, who had called his father E. J., was one of the few who still used Lucius’s real name.