simplest is to go along with Eddie and Walter and never speak his name after today; I would tell my children not to mention Grandpa because it upset Mommie.
Lucius feels no such obligation. In a way I am touched by his loyalty to his father, but refusal to abide by our family decision is a lot easier for a young footloose brother who can always escape than for me and Eddie, both married with small children, who are stuck in Fort Myers probably for life and must suffer all the stares and whispers.
Mama and Papa lie just near the Langford plot, which shelters my own little John Roach Langford, 1906-1906, and Infant Langford, stillborn in 1907. Two little stones. Whichever family I am put in with at the end, I will be near them.
For Papa, Lucius had ordered a simple small white headstone with no epitaph, just the bare name and dates. At the sight of it, my tears came quietly, at last, at last.
EDGAR J. WATSON
When my Faith asked in her sweet clear voice what the J. stood for, the mourners looked startled. Nobody knew. All these years he had been E. J. Watson; it took a child to ask about that
Papa’s woman from Caxambas turned when she heard Faith’s question. In a whiskey voice, more like a croak, she called out “Jack!” Lucius hurried her along, but she tottered sideways, seeking my eye, and called again: “E. Jack Watson!” Lucius would confirm that she had called him “Jack,” though why he could not say. “What does it matter?” Lucius said.
Leaving the cemetery, Walter’s aunt Poke, the deaf one with all the rings, asked Walter loud enough for all to hear if Eddie Watson had considered using his middle name-
I suppose we’d all thought about “Ed Watson Junior” but no one before Aunt Poke had said a word. And we all knew she was speaking for the Langfords. Eddie restrained himself from bursting out with anything unseemly in a cemetery but Lucius stopped and turned. “Are you afraid your family will be shamed if he doesn’t change his name? Because our family will be shamed if he
That ringed hand flew towards her throat but she made no sound. It was only afterwards, as we filed through the gate, that she whispered to Walter, “That boy has something of the father in him, don’t you agree?”
HOAD STORTER
In early November, I went north with Captain Bembery to pay our respects at the burial of his friend E. J. Watson. But all I could think about was Lucius, who had boarded with my family in Everglade when we were ten or eleven, gone to school with me and got some tutoring from Mama, who adored him. I bet he read every darned book we had. He was my best friend and I thanked the Lord he had not been a witness on that shore at Chokoloskee. He would have done his utmost to protect his father and might have gotten himself killed right along with him.
After the burial, Lucius took me aside and asked me to look after his dad’s boat until he came back to reclaim the Watson place and “get to the bottom of this ugly business.” I warned him right there at the cemetery that he must
BOOK TWO
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.
– JOHN MILTON,
A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory-and very few eyes can see [its] mystery.
– JOHN KEATS
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
– GEORGE ELIOT,
WINTER
That ruined winter of 1910-1911, Lucius Watson worked as a fishing and hunting guide out of Fort Myers, serving Yankee sportsmen and business associates of Walter Langford. As a skilled boatman, fisherman, and hunter, he was well qualified, but he was so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received complaints about his daunting silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he remained hobbled by melancholy and introspection. Even his humor, once so cheerful, had turned cryptic and laconic, to the point where he was thought unsociable-the worst of defects in a sportsmen’s guide.
In the end, Lucius had heeded his family’s pleas and his friend Hoad’s solemn warnings at the burial to stay away from Chokoloskee Bay, where local emotions were a volatile bad mix of guilt and fear and where the appearance of a Watson son with a reputation as an expert shot would be asking for serious trouble. Though Lucius understood this well enough, he felt, in addition to his grief, unbearably ashamed that Papa’s murderers had never been held accountable by his grown sons.
Alienated from his brother Eddie, Lucius longed for Rob’s advice in deciding how to deal with their father’s killers. Unlike Eddie and Carrie, Lucius had lived with Rob at Chatham Bend, and having been closer to his hair- trigger half brother than anyone in the family, he was desperate to know why he had run away after the Tucker deaths in 1901-had he participated, then?-and what had ever become of him. Yet over the years, on the few occasions he had dared inquire, his father had met him not with anger or evasion but something worse, something strange and scary, a hard obdurate silence, as if Rob’s name had never been mentioned at all.
In early spring, unable to rest, Lucius set off on a vain search for his brother, traveling north to Columbia County in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson and their Collins cousins. As it turned out, Granny Ellen had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins, afflicted by a morbid condition known as “American nervousness,” had been sheltered from the family scandal and sequestered from her own life by morphine addiction and premature senescence: she could scarcely recall who this young man was, far less what he might want of her. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, the Widow Collins could not deal
