Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius remembered Leslie’s scar—“a good little scar upside his head where a mule kicked him,” Grover Kinard had called it. Like Levi, he’d said that Leslie had lain unconscious for some hours and had lost all memory of the days before. Their boy had been “different” after that, so his family claimed once Leslie got in trouble.

  Severe amnesia and discontinuity of thought (which had made him seem backward as a boy), indifference to the feelings of other people, coldness and detachment, fits of violence—all could be symptoms of the damage caused by such a blow. But even if that mule kick could account for his behavior, it was only one of many “reasons” why human beings reverted to animality, whether singly or in gangs and mobs, and none of these were consolation to the victims.

  Cox’s family seemed satisfied that “Les” had killed both Tolens. Dyer would make good use of this, yet Lucius felt uneasy. Was Papa there in the leaf shadows when those Tolens died? Even if it were true that Leslie Cox was the man most responsible for the Watson myth, it also appeared that in subtle ways, his father had been responsible for Cox—had encouraged hero worship and exploited Leslie’s unstable condition, perhaps prying apart a dangerous fissure in his brain.

  And what of Mr. Watson’s brain? Lucius tended to discount April Collins’s suggestion that his father had been brain-damaged by Ring-Eye’s beatings. Violence begetting violence—that seemed indisputable—yet by no criteria he knew about had Papa seemed deranged. He had farmed successfully for forty years after leaving Carolina, and established and maintained good relations not only with his neighbors but with various women and their children. All but Rob.

  At the motel there was no word from Arbie. What awaited him was a hand-delivered note scrawled in crude carpenter’s pencil on lined yellow paper. Well, well, he thought, excited and surprised. He returned to the motel room and poured himself a drink.

  Before leaving for Columbia County, he had sent a letter to the chubby shy little half sister whom he had not seen in over forty years.

  Dear Ruth Ellen,

  I am an older brother whom you scarcely knew and won’t recall, although he recalls you fondly from Chatham Bend. I remember so well the day the skiff’s bow painter came loose and you sailed away downriver in the skiff, and remember how brave you were for such a little girl—you weren’t even crying when our papa found you!

  May I intrude upon your privacy and ask if one day soon I might pay a call? I will be traveling through Neamathla on my journey to Fort White, where you were born. I am very interested in any memories you might have about our father—I should tell you at once that I am writing his biography—but I am also interested in your branch of our family, and anything your lovely mother might have told you.

  There had been no answer to that letter, nor to a postcard notifying her that he would spend a few days in Lake City before heading south. Summoning forth this secretive creature was like whistling to an unknown bird hid in the leaves, to judge from the scared and flighty silence that returned to him like the echo of a shot across the miles of silent swamp, red hill, and muddy river.

  Lucius had suffered a mild paranoia. Even his stepfamily was turning away from him, cutting him off, having no wish to be put in touch with their Watson past. But now word had come, and on the very day that their brother Rob, who had never met this youngest Watson family, had risen from the dead. He sat on the bed and sipped his drink before opening the letter.

  In a formal tone contrasting strangely with the writing implements, the note advised him that Mrs. Ruth E. Parker had shown his letter to the undersigned, who wished to inform him that Mrs. Parker could not imagine how she could possibly assist his research, since she’d been but five when her father died, remembered nothing, and was quite unable to converse on this painful subject.

  He poured himself another drink and reread the letter, which was signed A. Burdett. He had hardly finished when the phone rang—Rob! Instead, a strange voice, gruff and heavy, said, “Did your damned attorney deliver my damned note? Because I represent the Burdett family.” In grudging speech, A. Burdett said that, despite the note, Mrs. Parker would “receive” Lucius Watson after all. He did not say why she had changed her mind but merely said that he, Burdett, would be present at any meeting “to protect her interests.”

  “Nonnie resides in a town here in the lake country that will go unnamed,” he added—for the pure love of that phrase, it appeared, since without being privy to its name, Lucius could not have sent his letter to Mrs. Parker. Downing his bourbon to calm himself, he gasped in agreement, waving excitedly for Sally’s attention as she came through the door. “Where’s Arbie?” she whispered, and he only shrugged, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Addison!” he whispered. To the telephone he said, “You want me to meet Nonnie after all.”

  “It’s you who wanted to meet her, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “And you’ve decided to accommodate me. Why?”

  The caller paused, taken aback. “She told me to get hold of you! Told me that before she dies, she wants to learn about Ed Watson—‘the good, the bad, and anything in between,’ she said!”

  “Why?” Lucius repeated, groping for any sort of clue that might help to explain his own obsession.

  “Now you just hold on a minute! Are you drunk?”

  Sally leaned and whispered, “You trying to scare him off?” She shook her head and went into the bathroom.

  “I mean, why does Ruth Ellen want to know?”

  “What’s that? Why not? He was her father!”

  “Yours, too. Mine, too. You seem unhappy about this—”

  “Look, I don’t know you! I don’t even like talking to you!” Burdett cried. “I think you’re drunk! There’s something funny going on! Your damn attorney showed up here day before yesterday, using your name! Not so much as a phone call! Wanted us to support some useless claim to the Watson house down in the Everglades!”

  “Well, good! I hope you will!”

  “Hell, no, I won’t! I told my sister about it, and she got all flustered up, fished your damn letter out to show me. You claim to be her long-lost brother!”

  “Addison? Yours, too.”

  Burdett’s laugh was forced. He made no answer.

  “Look, Ad, I’d like to see you. I haven’t laid eyes on you since 1911. You were four.”

  From the telephone came trapped breathing and more silence.

  “How about tomorrow?” Lucius said, banging down his glass and standing up as if ready to set off this very moment. If Burdett liked, they could meet at Ruth Ellen’s house. This made the point that he knew the address and could have gone there without Addison’s permission any time he wished. “I wouldn’t want to upset her, of course,” he added quickly. “Wouldn’t want to intrude.” More silence. “I have no wish to see her until she wishes to see me.” Though this was calculated to dispel Burdett’s wariness, it also happened to be true.

  “I’ll call back,” Burdett blurted abruptly, and hung up.

  “I’ll be amazed if you ever hear from him again.” Sally sat down on the bed edge, took his hand. “You drink too much, do you know that, Professor?”

  “Arbie tell you to say that?” He tried to smile. “You’ve been known to take a drink yourself.”

  “What’s my drinking got to do with it? You’re supposed to be a biographer, researching a damn book! And here your long-lost brother calls and you screw it up!”

  “That the tone you always take with your employer? Anyway, I didn’t screw it up.”

  The reproof hushed her. But he was unsettled by her gaze, aware that Sally’s acquiescence had nothing to do with regret, far less submission. He also knew that she was right—he drank too much, and he had probably screwed it up. However, Burdett called back in a few minutes. Without mentioning his sister, he said he would meet Lucius in two days’ time, at noon, at the motor inn at the highway interchange outside Neamathla.

  Next morning Lucius called Hettie Collins to apologize and say goo
d-bye. She seemed relieved to hear from him, saying she quite understood why he felt he had to disguise his identity. In fact, she had worried about him all that evening, realizing how upset he must have been about “R. B. Collins.” How happy the Collins clan would be to welcome Rob Watson back into the family after all these years! And Rob’s brother Lucius, too, she added, her smiling voice warming his heart. He asked if one day he might pay another visit, and she told him shyly that she dearly hoped he would. “Come soon,” she said, rather suddenly, and he said, “I will,” and put the phone down, his heart pounding. She knew she was dying, he decided.

  The police had received no report of any stray old man, dead or alive. Probably Rob was on a bender and holed up someplace, in which case he might be gone for days. When Lucius rang Sally to let her know that they were leaving, she cried, “You can’t abandon that old man!”

  “He’s a very tough old man. He can take care of himself. He always has.”

  “But you saw how upset he was, leaving that cemetery! He was weeping! And small wonder!” She sounded on the point of tears herself. “Probably saw his poor young mother’s grave for the first time in his life!”

  “Sally, he knew I’d learn the truth, that’s why he needed an excuse not to come with me. He’s sleeping off a drunk someplace. He’ll meet us in a day or two. You’ll see.”

  He left a note at the motel desk in a sealed envelope containing money for bus ticket and food and the address of the Gasparilla Inn in Fort Myers. He addressed the envelope to “Mr. R. B. Collins” but the note said he would be delighted to be reunited with his long-lost brother. In an effort to cheer up the old man, he told him that, whatever his damn name was, he’d better not spend the enclosed money on more liquor, but get his old ass onto the bus down to Fort Myers and identify the occupant of that damned urn.

  In Neamathla

  A. Burdett, checking his watch in the parking lot outside a gas station in Neamathla, turned out to be a heavy man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. Glimpsing a female asleep in the backseat, he jerked his head away. He wore pale spectacles under a big brow with thin hair plastered back on a balding pate, and his pale auburn brows and thin downturned mouth closed a gray face. He was built like his father, Lucius thought, and earlier in life must have been strong, but now—too early—he had the hollow look of someone whose woman had left him years before. The ears and loose-skinned neck and knobby hands seemed too large for his body, and he seemed unsteady, as if he had suffered a small stroke. Without looking at Lucius, he identified himself—“A. Burdett”—at a loss as to what he might possibly say next.

  “A for Addison, right?” Lucius smiled to make amends for having rattled this poor fellow over the telephone. Burdett looked wary. A man’s Christian name was his own business, that look said, as Lucius struggled to dispel the clotting atmosphere. He said, “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa’s dock at Chatham Bend.”

  “Papa,” Burdett said, tasting the word. “That’s what us kids called Mr. Herkie …” His voice trailed off and he wiped his palms down the sides of his pants, lowering his gaze in gloomy resignation. “Papa,” he repeated, aimless.

  A bit desperate, Lucius gazed about the little town. Was it true that Neamathla had taken its name from the great chief of the Mikasuki Creeks?

  “How’s that?”

  “Do you suppose … I am like a bat that hangs by its claws in a dark cave, and that I can see nothing of what is going on around me? Ever since I was a small boy I have seen the white people steadily encroaching upon the Indians and driving them from their homes and hunting grounds. When I was a boy, the Indians still roamed undisputed over the country between the Tennessee River and the great sea of the south, and now when there is nothing left them but the hunting grounds in Florida the white men covet that. I will tell you plainly if I had the powers I would tonight cut the throat of every white man in Florida!”

  Self-deprecating, Lucius laughed at his own recitation, inviting Burdett to cheer up, but Ad just stared at him. “My Lord!” he said. “You memorize that stuff?” He stared at his splotched shoes. “Might as well get going, then,” he said.

  Lucius tailed his lump of a half brother west on the county road, wondering why he was looking up the tailpipe of that pokey two-tone car when he already knew Ruth Ellen’s address and could probably get there faster by himself. If Ruth Ellen turned out as obdurate as Addison, he would not stay long. He would not even bother to wake Sally.

  In a quiet street of one-story houses shaded by sycamores, Ruth Ellen Parker stood awaiting them upon her stoop. Mrs. Parker hugged her stolid brother, who said, “Hullo, Nonnie.” Oddly, he introduced her to “Professor Collins.” Before Lucius could greet her, Ad launched forth in sudden speech on the subject of his sister’s many triumphs over adversity, blurting his words in the inchoate way of someone with a real horror of human converse. Persisting doggedly even after her hands started to flutter, speaking faster and faster to get it over with, he described how his sister had lived in this small house since her marriage to the late Mr. Parker. Nonnie had always hoped to be a teacher, and later in life, during the summers, had paid her own way to three different colleges in order to obtain a teaching certificate from the state board—

  “Well, that’s really something!” Lucius exclaimed, cutting him off as kindly as he could manage, for the sister had fled, leaving the brother to peer mystified at the screen door. Behind Ad, he saw Sally’s blond head pop up in the backseat window and pop down again, not wishing to be observed, far less introduced.

  Inside, Ruth Ellen greeted him anew, holding his History in both hands like a hymnal. Not having seen him since she was five, she did not really recognize him, and after five decades, he could scarcely perceive in this middle-aged woman the snub-nosed child in the sun and salt Gulf breezes at Chatham Bend, who had dressed up in her peppermint frock and bright wildflower bonnet to kiss “Woo-shish” good-bye, yet had been so hurt by the abandonment that she’d run away around the house and set up a great caterwaul behind the cistern.

  Like Addison, Ruth Ellen had retained the auburn hair of their late father, and her scrubbed pink countenance was plump as a fresh bun. “I believe Mr. Watson’s sister married a Collins,” she told the Professor, who smiled back. It did not seem the moment to remind her that he was a Watson—in fact, her half brother. Politely she offered him a seat, but not before she had backed herself into a stuffed chair under a lamp where he supposed she passed most of her days. From this redoubt, having smoothed her feathers, she permitted herself a better look at him. What do you want with us? her scared eyes said.

  On the walls all around were cheerful oils, unframed, including a painted copy of an old photograph of the Bethea homestead at Fort White. Ruth Ellen Parker thanked him kindly for gathering so much information about her family, and Lucius complimented her on her floral still lifes, and Ruth Ellen said she regretted her lack of training. Addison stood awkward in the doorway, hat in hand, anxious to be sent away. When Lucius smiled in his direction, trying to include him, Ad said gloomily, “Besides all this art, she designs and sews all her own clothes and makes fine patchwork quilts—that’s another hobby.”

  “Addison, do please sit down,” his sister said, as if he had stood up at his school desk for no reason.

  They skirted fifty years of family news but soon gave up on these civilities—the ways had parted far too long ago. Lucius told them of the plan to burn the house at Chatham Bend and asked them to sign a petition which might save it. “You and Ad and little Amy were the last of our family to live there, and anyway, it would help our claim if we could show that the whole family supports it.”

  “Who is ‘we’? You and that attorney? Count me out,” growled Ad, shaking his head. His sister sighed.

  On a little table set out for Lucius’s arrival were a few mementos from the Watson years that Ruth Ellen hoped might make his visit worth
while. Her pale fingertips moved these about like counters, to be offered one by one as the spring day ticked past on a big loose alarm clock in another room. The first was a gold wedding ring, inscribed “E.D. and Edna”—perplexing, they agreed, since E.D. had been not their father’s initials but their grandfather’s.

  After so many years, Ruth Ellen could not bring herself to say “my father,” only tweaked her pink blouse or crisscrossed her plump ankles at each mention of him. On the other hand, she betrayed no shame or resentment. Such a man had nothing to do with her, her manner said. She had led a God-fearing life, as the world knew, and had nothing to fear in the Lord’s eyes. However, she asked for Lucius’s assurance that he would keep her location and identity a secret.

  “All those bad things happened when we were small,” Addison complained, “but to Nonnie we aren’t talking about the past, we are talking about her father, we are talking about horrible crimes in her own family that none of her neighbors know about even today!” His voice was rising, and his color, too. “What would they think of her? Our younger sister won’t mention his name, not even to us! And you intend to write about it!”

  “Addison? Please, dear.”

  Ruth Ellen touched a few mementos before tendering a photograph of a mother and small infant—“me.” She smiled. Her mother was posed formally in a large round hat of black straw perched atop thick upswept honey hair—a wistful young woman, pretty enough, tense, sensual, large-featured, with a guarded smile. “Mama had hazel eyes,” Ruth Ellen said fondly. The portrait studio was in Fort Myers—on the back was scrawled “Fort Myers 1906”—and Lucius supposed that “Mr. Watson,” as Edna always called him, must have brought his new wife and baby daughter through Fort Myers while tending to his cane syrup business in the Islands.