sleep.
Making his way along the woods road to the old sheds by the creek, he took pains with the potholes. He shut the car door carefully when he got out and made his way out to the barge over the spindly walkway. Down the still creek, a raccoon fishing mud clams at the tide edge sat up to peer around and watch him pass.
Noisy on purpose to warn away the ghosts, he wrenched open the salt-swollen door. Framed in the window, in silhouette against the mirror of the creek, the urn awaited him. Stopped short on the threshold by unnamable emotions, he was startled when his own voice said, “Papa? I’m home.”
In a tumult of unsorted memories and premonitions, he crossed to the window and with both hands lifted the urn, touching it to his forehead to break its spell. “May God forgive you, Papa”-how inappropriate this was, since, like his father, he had lost faith in any deity. What should he do with this damned thing?
He lay down wide-eyed on the moon-swept cot, clasping his hands on his gut to quell his restlessness. In the morning he fetched Rob’s envelope from the car, made coffee, sat out on the deck.
Luke:
I am writing down as best I can remember the events of New Year’s morning, 1901, so you will better understand why I ran away. It takes all the courage I have left to let you read this. I’m taking you at your word that it’s the truth you’re after.
You and Eddie were still in school, living with Carrie and Walter in Fort Myers, when Wally Tucker fled Key West with his pregnant sweetheart to escape bad debts and scandal, having heard that Mr. Watson at Chatham River would employ them. Some months later, your father’s hogs sniffed out two shallow graves beyond the cane fields. Wandering out there calling in the hogs, the Tuckers discovered the remains of two young cane cutters. These men had told Wally that they wished to quit but were owed more than a year’s back wages and could not get “Mr. Ed” to pay attention.
The Tuckers fled the Bend without their pay. I found them rushing their stuff down to their little sloop, almost hysterical. He murdered Ted and Zachariah! “That’s impossible,” I said. “He paid those boys last month and took them to Fort Myers. I saw them off myself.” Well, we did, too, but it’s Ted and Zachariah all the same! Though they didn’t dare say so to his son, they were terrified of what might happen if the Boss found out what they knew. When I got angry, asking Tucker if he was accusing Mr. Watson, he did not back down. Who else? he said. He was in tears.
I ran out through the cane fields to that place and I smelled those bodies long before I got there. The ground was hog-chopped all around. I went in close enough to look and had to get away on that same breath to keep from puking. The bodies were all bloated up, half-eaten, but there was no question it was Ted and Zachariah.
By the time I got back, the Tuckers were gone. Papa lay like a dead man in the house. He was drinking very heavily that year. According to Aunt Josie, who came flying out to warn me to stay away from him, Wally put his Bet aboard their sloop, then took his gun and walked up to the house and pounded on the wall to wake the Boss, demanding the wages they had coming. Your father was furious because two workers were quitting without notice with the cane harvest hardly begun; he was further incensed when he threatened to strike Wally and Wally raised his gun. “You point a gun at E. J. Watson, you conch bastard, you better damn well shoot him. Go on! Shoot!” That drunken bellow terrified Aunt Josie because it sounded so insane, but as usual, E. J. Watson knew his man. Wally Tucker was no killer, never would be. Moving to strike him, Papa reeled and stumbled and fell down and the Tuckers fled.
I was very frightened. I saw his jug of moonshine on the table. I jolted a big snort to nerve myself, then opened the storm shutters to let in air and light. Your father lay snoring on his bed with muddy boots on. When I shook him awake, he opened one eyelid, raw bright red as the slit throat of a chicken. Then he rolled over, dragging a pillow over his head; he couldn’t take the light or stand the sight of me.
I told him what had happened. His voice growled from beneath the pillow that he knew nothing about it. Then he said that Mr. Wally Tucker better be damned careful about spreading slander against E. J. Watson. This reminded him that they’d left him short-handed; he reared up with a roar, rolled off the bed, but blacked out again and crashed against the wall.
At these times, “hair of the dog” was all that helped him. By the time I fetched the jug, he was sitting up holding his head, wheezing for breath. His skin was blotchy and his breath came out of Hell. He opened his eyes and glared at me, then looked away. He did not bother to lie. “How could I pay ’em, Sonborn?” he said quietly. “Nothing to pay ’em with.”
Sick as he was, he went with me after dark. This time I puked and so did he: maybe the first thing we ever did together! We heaped and scraped those remains onto some burlap, made a big sack of it, filled the pits and scattered brush, lugged that sack between us to the river downstream from the boat sheds, and let it go into the current. All that while, we never spoke a word. He was sober now and trying to suggest that Ted and Zachariah had been thieves as well as troublemakers and maybe the other hands had killed them. I wanted badly to believe that. Anyhow, he said, there was nothing to be done about it, and for the sake of our plantation’s good name, I must forget what I had seen. Being too needy, too eager to please him, I agreed. He was very worried that the Tuckers might spread lies.
With the Tuckers gone and Tant off hunting, there was no one to talk to but the harvest crew and Josie. I was all alone in my awful knowledge. I don’t believe Josie ever learned about those hog-chewed cadavers, but even if she’d known, she would have claimed that no matter who did ’em in, they probably had it coming. Her “Mister Jack” paid no attention to what Josie overheard, knowing this little woman was so crazy for him that no secret that might do him harm would pass her lips.
Unpaid and penniless after their long year of hard work, the Tuckers were taken in by Richard Harden at Lost Man’s River. Because they risked jail at Key West, he suggested they camp on Lost Man’s Key, which was quit-claimed by the Atwell family up in Rodgers River but uninhabited. Lived aboard their sloop and subsisted mostly on palm tops and on shellfish while they built a driftwood shack, having borrowed tools, gill net, and seed corn from the Hardens. They planted a piece of ground across the river mouth, near the spring at the north end of Lost Man’s Beach.
Toward the end of 1900, your father bought that quit-claim from the Atwells, who took back his rough note warning Tucker to remove himself in three days’ time. With his vegetables still green and his wife near term, Tucker was outraged: he sent word back reminding Watson that “as was well known or soon would be,” he and his wife were still owed a year’s wages, and until these were paid, they would not leave Lost Man’s Key “come Hell or High Water.” My heart sank when I saw that message, knowing your father would take it as a usurpation of his quit-claim and a threat.
On the last night of the old century, your father broke out a new jug of Tant’s moonshine and sat down heavily at the table. Aunt Josie came in with Baby Pearl in hopes of New Year’s cheer but took one look at his closed face and went right out again. She knew better than to break his mood and she didn’t need to warn me to keep my mouth shut. We sat in the dark kitchen in deep gloom.
Josie warmed up beans but we hardly ate. Your father read Tucker’s note over and over; he drank and brooded until nearly midnight. Finally he took a last big slug and shoved the jug across the table, commanding me (as he often did) to hide it from him. I put it on that ledge under the cistern cover-you remember, Luke?-where I placed the buckets when I fetched in water.
In a while he staggered out onto the riverbank to check the tide. We knew where he was going. When he came back in, he took his shotgun off the wall but dropped it on the floor. I picked it up for him, astonished to see him drop a weapon, drunk or otherwise.
Praying he might sag down and sleep, I complained that I was weary-“Sleep, then, damn you!” Maybe we should wait till daylight to depart. “We? You’re staying here!” In the doorway, Aunt Josie put a finger to her lips. But desperate to save him from some terrible mistake, I slipped ahead of him into the sailing skiff, which he nearly capsized when he crashed aboard. By that time, he’d forgotten that he’d
