Had my father been fleeing the fray before it ended? Very likely. Was he a coward, then? Despite all his boasting, I had never been certain of my father’s courage. In any case, he and Will Coulter were among the four men indicted for murder. My father’s attorneys were Gary & Gary and also John L. Addison, my mother’s brother. In his summation, General Gary called these homicides “the most desperately fought combat that ever transpired in this dark and bloody region.” The Bald Eagle of the Confederacy would discount the testimony that placed Elijah Watson at the scene, whereas Ring-Eye’s old nemesis, Calbraith Butler, had passionately argued the reverse. All defendants were acquitted and sent home.
Where home might have been in my father’s case was a good question. The transcript established that within a few years after his family had abandoned him, the fallen Lige had wandered into dissolution, sharing a disreputable roof with the Widow Autrey. Being unacquainted with this lady, Miss Mims had no idea what had become of Mr. Watson. When she’d tried to inquire about him from one of the archive’s founders-and she nodded toward the door through which Aunt Sophia had made her getaway-she was told that in the eyes of his whole clan, Elijah D. was dead. “They just don’t talk about him. They had his name stricken from the census.” Miss Mims shook her head in pity. “He’s what the old folks used to call a ‘shadow cousin.’ ”
Edgefield’s long tradition of violence had actually worsened after 1877, when the new president, a Mr. Hayes, withdrew the Union troops, leaving the “darkies” to the mercies of white vigilantes. Miss Mims produced a contemporary account submitted by a local black attorney to the newspaper.
Those Herlongs had told Mama that not long before they left, Lige Watson had found work as a state prison guard. Had he also been a road-gang guard during the building of that railroad? An embittered Confederate veteran who had lost his land and reputation and was prone to drunken violence might have struck the authorities as just the man to oversee black convicts.
I caught Miss Mims observing me to see how much I knew. “Mr. E. D. Watson,” I said tersely. “Any record of illegitimate children?”
She located a handwritten note, dated 1879, in what looked to me like Colonel Robert’s hand.
Aching with peculiar feelings, I went outside into Court House Square and gazed about me. The town seemed uninhabited, not one soul to be seen. At the place where the famous homicides had taken place, the name A. A. Clisby was fading on the sign over the door. Standing there, I could envision my red, sweating father, pistol in hand, reeling across these dusty cobbles on a stifling August afternoon. How many times since his family had fled had he been hauled up those courthouse steps and marched into those cells behind the courtroom?
Before riding onward to the Ridge, I made inquiries about my father at the tavern, where the older clients mostly concurred about Elijah D.
“You mean ol’ Ring-Eye? Lived with the widder, one we called Ol’ Scrap? I heard that feller lost his work gang job a few years back. He was usin up too many niggers buildin track beds for the Greenville railroad. Went through them niggers like goobers, worked ’em straight to death, ol’ Ring-Eye did. They told him, ‘Ring-Eye, dammit all, maybe them monkeys come down out of the trees, but they don’t
“Nosir, ol’ Ring-Eye could not stay out of trouble, he was givin his family a bad name. So finally them Watsons come to fetch him, put him to work in their boneyard tendin their dead, cause he sure ain’t welcome around any that’s alive. Ol’ Ring-Eye! Yessiree! Now there’s a feller could tell you a war story or two and never spoil his tale with the real truth of it.”
THE GRAVEDIGGER
I caught up with him over at the Ridge, digging a new grave in our Rock Wall cemetery. He was wheezing in his pit not eighty feet away, spelling himself after every spade of dirt. I sat my horse and watched him for a while to make him nervous. After a few more aimless pokes, he saw me. He leaned the spade into the corner of the grave, put his hands on the brown grass behind, and kicked himself up and back a little so that he was seated on the edge, doffing his soiled hat to the silhouetted horseman on the highroad. “That you, Will? You looking for me, Will? Yessir, you just name it, Will, Lige Watson is your man and proud to help.”
Realizing the rider was not Coulter, he became aggressive. “What you after, mister?” For the moment, I ignored him, let him sweat a little. I dismounted and climbed over the wall, affecting to inspect the headstone of our sainted Captain Michael. Seeing my poor clothes, he cried, “What do you want here?” I disdained to answer.
Michael Watson’s widow, Martha, had later wed one Jacob Odom, a churlish man of muddy origins who had confirmed the family’s poor opinion of him by making her pay room and board for her four small children. On May 21, 1791, General George Washington had honored the hero’s widow and her children by lodging with them overnight on his journey from Augusta to Columbia. On this occasion, “the odious Odom,” as Aunt Sophia called him, had attempted to charge the first president of the United States for bed and supper. Fittingly, it was young Polly Watson (rather than some Odom offspring) who was taken upon the presidential knee and presented with an enamel snuffbox containing a new twenty-dollar gold piece.
“Private property!” my father bawled in a hoarse whiskey voice. “Family property!”
When Martha died in 1817, her remains, contaminated by Odom’s name, were forbidden interment in this cemetery. When one of her two children by Odom was installed here surreptitiously, Aunt Polly-the keeper of the gold piece-had raised an immemorial rumpus.
Our Watson stones were of white marble set on brick foundations. Captain Michael’s son Elijah (the Old Squire) was present, as well as Elijah Junior (the Young Squire) and his brother Artemas, my grandfather. And here was my father’s youngest sister, late wife of Robert Myers of Columbia and my great-aunt Ann Watson Myers, dead at twenty-two:
A MYSTERIOUS PROVIDENCE VERY SUDDENLY REMOVED THIS WIFE AND MOTHER OF THREE SMALL CHILDREN FROM THE RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME TO THE AWARDS OF ETERNITY.
Great-Aunt Ann’s Robert was the brother of Colonel William Myers who had married Laura Watson, and the “three small children,” somewhat older than myself, included the two nephews in William Myers’s will who were supposed to inherit Ichetucknee but would only do so over Sam Tolen’s dead body.
• • •
“Hold on, mister! This is Watson property!” Wary of the stranger’s silence, my father had clambered up out of his grave; when I turned toward him, he took up his shovel. Behind him, in the corner of the wall, brown leaves swirled like winter sparrows in the cold wind eddies. I let the revolver slide into my hand, hoping he might make my
