with an intense intruder who brought only confusion to her household in what would turn out to be the last year of her life.
As for her children, they scarcely recalled this Cousin Lucius who had lived among them briefly long ago when all were little. Sympathetic at first, they became uncomfortable when queried about his father’s life here in Fort White. Disgraced in their rural community by Uncle Edgar, they reminded Lucius of the family code of silence agreed upon with Cousin Ed before he returned to Fort Myers.
“But he was acquitted!” Lucius protested. “He was found innocent!”
The Collins brothers had loved lively Uncle Edgar, they acknowledged, but they would never be persuaded he was innocent. Willie Collins called from the train platform, “Y’all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” Though this farewell invitation was meant kindly, he knew it was not really meant at all.
While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father’s widow, who had gone to live near her sister Lola in the Panhandle. Edna Watson was close to Lucius’s age, they had been dear friends at Chatham, and he looked forward to a visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison Watson after Granny Ellen’s family in South Carolina. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of that October dusk, which Little Ad, unluckily, had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old when her father died, struck Lucius as pensive and withdrawn.
As for his young stepmother, she was friendly and very nervous; he had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl’s life,” her sister warned him, gently pressing him to leave. At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Kate Edna would soon marry Herkimer Burdett, her childhood sweetheart, who had offered to give his name to her three little ones.
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
In the dull white summer of 1912, Lucius enlisted in the Merchant Marine, taking along a duffel full of books. Since his arrival there at the age of seven, Lucius had been fascinated by southwest Florida history, all the way back to the first aborigines and early Spaniards, and his interest had widened like a circle in a pond to encompass the natural history and archaeology of this low flat limestone peninsula lately risen from the sea, whose only hills were the astonishing shell mound accumulations of the seagoing Calusa which the Indians had climbed in time of hurricane. Ever since, he had explored every corner of its history, from its subtropical flora to its coastal fisheries, ancient and modern, also its pirates, pioneers, plume hunters, and gator poachers, its rum-runners, smugglers, and fugitives, from the Calusa Hatchee River south to Cayo Hueso or Bone Key, now called Key West.
On his return to Fort Myers he was prevailed upon by Carrie and Walter to attend state university and study for a degree in Florida history. The topic he proposed for his senior thesis was an objective study of the Everglades pioneer sugarcane planter Edgar J. Watson that might challenge the lurid legend propagated in the press about the man now commonly referred to as “Bloody” Watson.
Lucius Watson’s proposal was rejected as “inappropriate,” by which was meant that its subject’s identity as the author’s parent must surely compromise his objectivity. However, the faculty was much impressed by the applicant’s wide knowledge of remote southwestern Florida and invited him to prepare instead a history of that all but unknown region called the Everglades Frontier, which in 1916 was still a wilderness of swamp and raining river, lacking a written history more recent than the U.S. Army accounts of the Seminole Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.
Discomfited (though not honestly surprised) by the rejection of his first proposal, Lucius was nonetheless intrigued by the proposed history of “the undiscovered country,” as his father had called the Everglades, invoking its immensity and mystery with that metaphor for death from Mama’s cherished
Returning to Fort Myers weak and ill, in a deep pit of melancholy, Lucius went directly to the Langford household to accept responsibility and blame for his disgrace. His sister gasped at his haggard demeanor. “Oh, it’s such a waste!” she mourned: she was not referring to the lost tuition fees, though Lucius heard it that way. Lucius’s morbid clinging to the past, his refusal to grow up, his brother Eddie informed him, were what caused him to drink too much and fail to finish everything he tried.
A minor officer at Walter Langford’s bank, Eddie Watson was already well settled as a married man with children, a churchman and sober citizen who shared most if not all of his brother-in-law’s conservative opinions. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he shook his head over his brother’s chronic folly while deploring his ingratitude to their generous host, whose vision and hard work had paid for that wasted tuition. Embarrassed, Walter frowned judiciously, rapping out his pipe. Whether he frowned over the waste of money or the waste of Lucius’s education or in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey, was not clear, but that frown intensified Lucius’s regret that he had accepted family assistance in the first place.
Because he’d never lived in Fort Myers long enough to make good friends and had not felt much like making any after his father’s death, Lucius became a loner. Absurd as it seemed even to him, a young girl, Nell Dyer, had become his only confidante, hearing him out on those rare occasions when he felt like ranting and encouraging him to eat something when he felt well enough.
NELL DYER
Lucius had first laid eyes on Nell in early 1903, not long after his father, passing through Fort Myers on his flight north, hired her parents to manage Chatham in his absence. Fred Dyer was handsome, black curly locks and wiry, with too much energy for his own good. Though acting as foreman, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building a new cistern and the boat shed and the small cabin for his family a hundred yards downriver that a few years later would be occupied by Miss Hannah Smith and the hog fancier Green Waller. Fred’s wife was Sybil and they had two children, a secretive, sullen ten-year-old named Watt, or “Wattie,” who lived with relatives in Fort Myers, disliked Chatham and only visited on school holidays, and a sprightly five-year-old named Nell whose bowl haircut, trimmed high over the ears to deter fleas, was permitted to fountain on top, then fall over her face, half blinding her. Nell wore odd garments sewn by Sybil from checkered flour sacks and toddled around on tubular small legs lacking visible knees.
The occasional clear day with wind was what Sybil called “the Mosquito Sabbath,” when those demons rested and she walked out in the sun and played along the river with her little daughter. Those bugs were God’s Own Malediction, sighed Mis Sybil. Her little girl’s nostrils were black with oily smoke from the kerosene rags burned in the smudge pots, and she had to rig netting to Nell’s bonnet and wrap old newsprint around her legs every time the child went outdoors to the privy: in wet weather, the ink came off the paper and turned her legs a dark bruised blue. Day in, day out, they remained shut up indoors, which in those dark months was damp and stifling, with air so heavy that the lungs grew weary hauling it in. No child was allowed out of doors at night because of bugs or for fear of bears or panthers, not to mention the cottonmouth moccasins that collected on the mound in time of flood. Everyone used chamber pots-“chambers,” the child called them.
In those first years of the new century when his boss was mostly in Columbia County, the new foreman often accompanied Erskine Thompson on the Watson schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for dry goods, hardware, and materials. According to Erskine, Dyer prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he could handle and running up debts that harmed the Island Syrup Corporation’s reputation. He persisted in these reckless habits even after his employer had returned from northern Florida.
