Regulators meant to ride out there and take care of that traitor that scared you,” he confided. But next morning, returning to finish the job, they had heard a shot, seen Watson’s boy run out with a musket. They rode away but somebody must have talked. “Ol’ Zip, I reckon.”
“I might have gone and murdered that old nigra,” I muttered, as the truth fell into place.
“Tap, you mean? Tap knows?” Slowly he rose and came over to the bars.
“You left him dying. You’ve implicated me.” He deserves to die, I thought.
“For the love of Jesus, boy! Don’t show that devil face to your own father!” Blaming everything on Coulter, he spat up the rest. Coulter had sent Claxton to the Union garrison with word about a shooting out at the old Tilghman place. As the only person in Edgefield District known to frequent Deepwood, young Edgar Watson was the natural suspect, but just to make sure, Claxton reported that the Watson boy, armed with a musket, had been seen out there early that morning. “Can’t hardly believe that skunk’d go and do that to me,” my father said. He had lowered his voice, conspiratorial, as if inviting me to help him plot the Terrible Retribution of the Watsons.
Eyes closed, I pressed my forehead to the cold iron of his bars. Until he had confessed it by mistake, I had not even been aware that my life had been put at risk to cover their tracks!
“You’re pale, Edgar! Are you all right?” Reaching through the bars, the Coward Watson cupped my nape gently in his big hand. The hand remained too long. I stiffened. Had it occurred to him that I might go fetch his gun and shoot him through the bars? I thought, he aims to break my neck right now while he has his chance.
“You have grown up too fast,” Papa said sadly, letting go.
“Yessir.” My voice broke with despair. “I have grown up very fast.” With all of Edgefield District on my trail- even the jailer was out looking for me-I had risked coming here, not to kill him, not to tell him his family had forsaken him, nor even that I meant to take his horse. After all these years of terror and humiliation, I had come here to see him one last time, hoping to receive his thanks for shouldering the blame for the botched murder of Selden Tilghman.
“You hate me, don’t you.” He was whining. “First the mother and the girl and now my only son.” The victim’s eyes glistened in self-pity when I nodded. He whispered, “I am forsaken, then.” And I said, “Yes, you are.”
I was at the door when he called after me a last time. “Tap knows what happened? That what you come to tell me?” He gave me an awful smile. “Son? You’ll take care of that before you leave?” When I was silent, he said meanly, “Never mind, boy, the men will take care of it. Just you run away after your mama, save your own skin.” How I hated him for that! “Come back and see your poor old Papa someday, will you do that, son? You promise?”
“Yessir. I will be back, I promise. I aim to kill you, Papa.”
Crossing the still courtroom, I heard Lige Watson’s howl of woe as the truth of his lost life fell down upon him.
From the courthouse terrace, I stared at my home country-the first time I’d really looked at it since Corporal E. D. Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers had borne me up these steps in the first year of the War. The terrace was not so high above the square as I remembered, and its noble prospect of blue mountains appeared sadly diminished. The countryside looked commonplace and the world small because my heart and hope had shrunken down to nothing.
The hostler had raised the alarm and people in the square were pointing as I ran down the steps and mounted. Tap was still out in the field. He, too, must have heard I was a fugitive, must imagine now that I was riding out to kill him. Having no place to run, he only straightened as the big horse came down on him. Slowly he laid down his hoe and sack and removed his lumpy hat to await the rider.
“I done jus’ like you tole me, Mist’ Edguh.” His voice was dull and dead. “I ain’t spoked to nobody about nothin, nosuh.” He was trembling.
Behind me, a shroud of winter dust arose from the hooves of horses. I said, “All the same, you know too much. They will be coming.” I told him he must find Lulalie, hide till nightfall, then depart. I handed him all the money left in the Colonel’s packet. “Buy a mule,” I said. They should slip away at dark, head for Augusta, catch up with the womenfolk on their way to Fort White, Florida.
Tap refused the money. “Nosuh, Mist’ Edguh. Dis yere Carolina country is mah home. I ain’t done nothin wrong so I ain’t goin. Trus’ in de Lord! Dass what Preacher Simkins tole ’em at our church when dem riders come for him. Dem white men listened, den dey went on home.”
“This kind won’t listen, Tap. They won’t even ask.” But Tap had always known better so he never heard me. He was watching the dust over the town. “I b’lieve dey comin. You bes get goin. Tell dat woman, please, dat Lalie and me be waitin on her when she get ready to come home.”
“God help you, Tap,” I said, turning the horse.
Avoiding the main roads, I headed south and west and forded the Savannah River near the fall line early next morning. When the roan clambered up the Georgia bank, I turned in the saddle to gaze back. I had left my native Carolina, and everywhere ahead was unknown country.
CHAPTER 2
ON ECHO RIVER
I caught up with the women on the old Woodpecker Trail down west of the Great Okefenokee. Rode up alongside the wagons on a warm afternoon as if joining them had been my plan right from the start. Those poor females looked relieved, Aunt Cindy, too, but seeing that roan horse made them uneasy. Perhaps because I was unsmiling and untalkative, they never asked about Job’s ring-eyed owner and I never offered to explain, not then, not later, having no wish to lay open the wound of my lost life at Clouds Creek, and the great waste of it. On that cold afternoon, I hitched the roan to the tailgate of the wagon and crawled inside amongst their bedding and slept straight through until early the next morning.
Seeing my head poke out, Aunt Cindy whooped; she fixed me a big dish of scraps before pressing me about her little family. How was her sweet Lalie getting on? Had that fool Tap sent word?
I could scarcely look her in the eye. The truth would worry the poor woman to distraction, and in the end, a lie-that Tap and Lulalie were on their way to join us-would be still worse. Finally I said that, living at Clouds Creek, I had scarcely seen them. In my gut I knew that Tap was done for, and as for Lalie, who knew what had become of her? Aunt Cindy soon saw that behind my stiff smile and tough manner, my heart was crippled, and she gave me a queer look, but it was not her place to question me too closely so she didn’t.
On the twelfth of March of 1871, we crossed over into Florida. With two state lines behind me, I was breathing easier. Only now did I introduce myself to my fellow pioneers-Edgar A. Watson, overseer of the Artemas Plantation at Clouds Creek, South Carolina, at your service, sir. Nobody knew quite what to make of this husky youth who was no boy but not a man yet either. What he was, in truth, was a fugitive from his own land and rightful heritage, angry and dangerous as a gut-shot bear.
The last leg of the journey was by slow barge south to Branford Landing on the Suwannee River, “far, far away, that’s where my heart is turning ever, that’s where the old folks stay.” That old song misted my eyes with upwellings of loss. Curled in my nest in the warm tar-smelling hemp hawsers on the bow, I wallowed in tender emotions.
Try as I would to find relief in my escape from the cold rain and mud of Piedmont winter with its meager food and numbing drudgery, nothing seemed to ease the ache of longing. The farther I traveled from where I belonged, the more unjust my exile seemed. I reviled my misbegotten father, reveling in fantasies of a dire patricide. From Cousin Selden’s
