him under a fatal burden that was rightly mine. I had cried out to him too late. Even at that moment, I think, I had been aware that the murder of Rob’s spirit would remain the most heinous of my sins, so dreadful I would never banish it, despite all efforts to pretend that Lost Man’s Key was an evil hallucination from which one day I might awaken.
Rob would not look at me. He could scarcely climb out of the boat. “Come when you’re ready,” I said. I did not take the pistol away from him. I rushed inside and whimpered in relief that my jug still had a slosh in it.
Josie and the child were gone. I guessed that Tant had come in this morning and taken them to safety at Caxambas. They had left a half-cooked haunch of venison behind.
I ran to my fields and set fire to the cane, for we would have to leave before first light. The fire and my running figure frightened Erskine when he came in with the
I felt it coming and I could not stop it: with every panting breath my outrage grew. All that sentimental maundering about my son, and look! The fool had run off with my ship just when we had a chance to mend things-mend things? Sonborn and I? On this dark day? Having left two bloody dead at Lost Man’s Key? Have you gone mad, then? Are you going mad? Rage, confusion, fear, love, hate, despair-I felt all these at full force all at once, but who was feeling and toward whom?
Horribly thwarted, I went shouting through the house. I’d never had the chance to tell him that I had not meant them to die and that what had happened was my responsibility, not his. Tell him my feelings. Let him know he was forgiven-
I’d had no chance, rather, to beg his forgiveness, to assure him I’d do everything possible to protect him. Unable to speak to him, to seize him, shake him, take him in my arms-that, too!-I felt dangerously stifled. I would have embraced Rob, squeezed his father’s love into his bone and marrow, so fervently that never again would he doubt my feelings. And I would bless him, I would kiss him on the forehead.
Yes. I would kiss him on the forehead. I would kiss him, my begotten son, born of the writhe of Charlie dying, saved on that black September day from drowning in her blood…
I found no relief. The jug was empty and the son I had failed was gone.
I took off in the sailing skiff into the river dark, navigating by thin starshine and the wall of trees. By daybreak, I was well offshore, bound for Key West, where Rob’s uncle Lee Collins worked in a shipping office. In my night madness, I had left behind my hat and brought no water, and in late afternoon, when a coasting vessel took me in tow south of Cape Sable, I was sunparched, raving. I no longer recall what I kept yelling, I only know those yells scared hell out of that crew, which was very glad to cast me loose inside the Northwest Channel.
• • •
With Lee Collins’s help, my son had shipped out on a New York freighter but not before using my schooner as collateral against a loan from this hostile kinsman I had not seen since that day in Fort White when I took Rob away and left for Oklahoma. I accused Collins of exploiting his nephew with some scheme to broker my stolen vessel at an easy profit; that was my excuse to knock him down in front of the new bank on Duval Street where he’d imagined that it might be safe to meet me.
From the look Collins gave me as he picked himself up off the cobbles, I feared Rob might have told this man too much. “All right,” I said, “how much do you intend to make me pay for my own schooner?” “Two hundred dollars,” Collins said quietly, pulling out a receipt from Rob in that amount. I snatched that paper, tore it up, before counting out his dollars. “How about my revolver?” I said.
“You’ll have to ask your son about your revolver,” he said, coldly, defiantly, from which I knew he knew something. I did not dare challenge him.
“You deserve to be jailed for brokering stolen ships,” I told him to save face. “If you weren’t Charlie’s brother, I would get the law on you.” And Lee Collins said, “Edgar? I would not go near the law if I were you.”
We stood a moment, some distance apart. “I am sorry I assulted you,” I said. “I was worried and upset. I just hope my son is going to be all right.” Lee Collins considered me in disbelief. “
Winky Atwell had spread the tale of my dispute with Tuckers, as I learned from Dick Sawyer when I stopped by Eddie’s Bar for a badly needed constitutional. I wanted to pay a call on Winky but Sawyer advised me to leave town before the sheriff sent his deputy around to ask some questions.
“About what?” I challenged him loudly so that anyone who’d heard the rumors would know that Ed Watson had nothing to hide. But in a little while, Deputy Till showed up. I followed him outside. Clarence warned me that the sheriff was still looking for a way to get me extradited back to Arkansas. “Better sail tonight,” he said.
• • •
The day after I left Key West, Earl Harden arrived with the report that he and his brothers and Henry Short had found the Tuckers’ bodies. The Hamiltons on Lost Man’s Beach had heard two shots and later some trapper had seen Watson in his skiff headed upriver; he reported that Watson was alone. Earl did his best to hang it all on Watson but he had no evidence besides his own opinion. Until things cooled down, however, that one opinion might suffice to get me lynched: I decided to head north for a year or two. My friend Will Cox had written recently to say that local folks had mostly forgiven E. J. Watson for that Lem Collins business. Will had grown up in Lake City with the new sheriff, a man named Purvis, who promised to be understanding if Will’s friend decided to return.
With some misgivings, I arranged to leave the Bend in charge of a man named Green Waller. He was a drinker but he knew his hogs and could be depended on to stay where he was safe, since he was wanted on three counts of hog theft in Lee County. As for companionship, those pink-assed shoats would probably see him through. Erskine ran me north. By now he’d heard the rumors and was silent and uneasy. I told him he could use the schooner if he helped out at the Bend when a ship was needed to bring in supplies or field hands for the harvest, or pick up my syrup in late winter for delivery to the wholesalers at Tampa Bay.
At Caxambas, Tant was nowhere to be found. His sister Josie said he’d heard about those Tuckers and would never work for me again-her way of conveying her own moral disapproval-but called softly as I went away that she would always love me. Within the week, Sheriff Knight and his deputies would raid the Bend, where Green Waller, in his official capacity as plantation manager, informed him that Mr. E. J. Watson was no longer in residence at this address, being absent on business, whereabouts unknown.
FOREVER AFTER
I stopped over at Fort Myers to pick up my horse and bid good-bye to Mandy and the children. Mandy had moved to the ground floor because she could no longer make it up the stairs. Though it was midday, I found her in bed. Entering the small chamber, I realized that this would be the last time in this life I would set eyes on this creature I first knew as the young schoolteacher Jane Susan Dyal from Deland.
She’d been reading, as usual: her prayer was that her sight would see her to the door. She looked up with that bent shy smile that had enchanted me so many years before. I smiled, too, trying to hide my shock: the woman lying there was dying while still in her thirties. Already death inhabited her eyes and skin-a sharp blow to the solar plexus to see my dearest friend in this condition. How thin she was, how watery her eyes, her hair already lank and dead.
I leaned and drew her forward in my arms, pressing my lips to her yellowed neck to hide my tears. Scenting the death in her, I must have hugged too hard to cover my distress, for I had hurt her and she murmured just a little. When I drew back she looked at me and nodded. Mandy’s brain-and eyes and hands and mouth-knew all of Edgar Watson well, I could hide nothing.
I sat on the bedside and took her hands in mine, resisting an image of long years before, our Fort White cabin in early afternoon, the hot moss mattress and this willowy creature, hips soft yet strong astride me, eyes lightly closed and sweet mouth parted, releasing my hands and leaning backwards, twining her arms upwards in the air’s embrace, as if her transport must depend on that joyous arching. Even at this somber moment, the remembrance caused a disgraceful twitching in my britches. I did not wish to think about how those hips looked now, grayish and
