Shadow Country

graduate studies and completed his doctoral thesis, A History of Southwest Florida and the Everglades Frontier. To his surprise, it was very well received and the university press selected it for publication. For the time being, he kept secret his greater ambition to complete and publish The Undiscovered Country, his objective biography of the pioneer sugarcane planter E. J. Watson.

Between terms at the university, Lucius returned to his barge shack at Caxambas. His friend Hoad Storter, who now lived not far away at Naples and had turned up in Caxambas on a visit, had been delighted by his friend’s decision to leave Lost Man’s and return to his unfinished books, including the Watson biography, which Hoad thought would fulfill his responsibilities to his father and set his heart at rest in a way that darned old posse list could never do. Hoad also thought that E. J. Watson was destined to become famous. Some ten years earlier, he’d been seining mullet with his brother-in-law in the little bays inside the mouth of Chatham River. One day, short of water, they went upriver to the Bend. “The cane fields were all overgrown, looked rough and shaggy, but new sprouts were volunteering through the tangle. We grubbed ’em out, stacked ’em on deck, ran ’em north to the Calusa Hatchee and on up east to Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven, the only camp on Okeechobee at that time. Those cuttings were the start of this whole new sugar industry, did you know that, Lucius?” Hoad shook his head. “After all his hard years, your dad’s fine cane will make fortunes for other men. ‘Great waste and a pity’ as Cap’n Bembery used to say,”

Lucius nodded. Oh, God, how he wished poor Papa could have stood on those high dikes and enjoyed that view.

• • •

On the wings of his published history, Lucius submitted his biography proposal to the university press; his vantage point as Mr. Watson’s son, he said, would not blind him to the true nature of his subject’s character.

This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth.

The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one perpetuated by the Islanders themselves, for as Dickens observed after his visit to this country, “These Americans do love a scoundrel.” Because his informants tend to imagine that the darkest interpretation is the one the writer wishes to hear, the popular accounts (until now, there have been no others) are invariably sensational as well as speculative: the hard facts, not to speak of “truth,” are missing. Also, this “Bloody Watson” material relates only to his final years in southwest Florida; one rarely encounters any reference to South Carolina, where Edgar Artemas Watson passed his boyhood, nor to the years in the Indian Country (always excepting his alleged role in the slaying of Belle Starr), nor even to the Fort White district of Columbia County in north Florida where he farmed in early manhood, married all three of his wives, and spent almost half of the fifty-five years of his life.

In Watson’s youth, the Piedmont hinterlands of South Carolina were little more than frontier wilderness, and to judge from my limited correspondence with the last Watsons in that region, our subject’s branch of a strong Carolina clan is all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, his sister’s family maintains a stern vow of silence about “Uncle Edgar,” and locating the scattered elders who might relinquish scraps of problematic information would probably not repay the journey. Even here in southwest Florida, much local lore has disappeared under the earth of cemeteries.

The biographer’s difficulties are inevitably compounded by the immense false record-“the Watson myth”-as well as by the failure to correct that record on the part of Mr. Watson’s family, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character is surely one reason why a dangerous reputation has expanded so grotesquely since his death. In the absence of family affirmation of that humor and generosity for which Edgar Watson was noted even among those who killed him, he has become a kind of mythic monster. The biographer’s aim is to discover the hard truths and reconstitute E. J. Watson and restore him to humankind as a paleontologist might reconstruct some primordial being known only from a few scattered shards of bone. As his second wife, the former Jane Susan Dyal of Deland, observed to her son Lucius not long before her death in 1901, “Your father frightens them not because he is a monster but because he is a man.”

To honor her wisdom and redeem my subject’s essential humanity is the task before me.

THE INDIAN

Lucius Watson rose onto one elbow, ransacking torn dreams for the hard noise that had awakened him-that rattling bang of an old auto striking a pothole in the sandy track through the slash pine wood north of the salt creek. Who could that be? He had no neighbor on Caxambas Creek nor even a mailbox on the old road to Marco, a half mile away, that might betray his whereabouts.

A dry mouth and stiff brain punished him for last night’s whiskey. Licking his lips and squinching his nose to bring life back to his numb skin, he rose softly and peered out through the screen, certain that some vehicle had come in from the paved road and eased to a stop inside the wood edge where the track emerged onto the marsh- the point from where the black hulk of his old cane barge, locked in the shining mud of the ebbed tide, would first loom into the view of whoever had come down along the creek on midnight business.

For a time he saw nothing, heard nothing, only the small cries of earth that formed within the ringing of the great night silence. Tree frogs shrilled from the freshwater slough on the far side of the road, in counterpoint to the relentless nightsong-wip-wip-WEE-too-from the whiskery gape of the gray-brown mothlike bird half hidden by lichens on a dead limb at the swamp edge, cryptic and still as something decomposing.

The Gulf moon carved the pale track and black trees. An intruder would make the last part of his approach on foot-there! A shape had detached itself from the tree shadows. An Indian. How he knew this he could not have said. The figure paused to look and listen then came on again, walking the sand track’s mane of grass in order to leave no sign.

Lucius yanked pants and shirt onto his bony frame. Lifting the shotgun from its rack, he cracked the cabin door, wondering briefly (as he often did) why he would isolate himself way to hell and gone out on this salt creek without neighbor or telephone, or plumbing or electricity, for that matter. Yet simplicity contented him, simplicity was what he needed, as another might crave salt. A cracked cistern and a leaning outhouse near the burned-down shack on shore, a small woodstove and a storm lantern with asbestos filament. Once in a fortnight, he retrieved his negligible mail at Collier’s Marco Store, bought a few stores, then took a meal with a few speakeasy whiskeys at Rusty’s Roadhouse.

Approaching the sheds, the intruder’s silhouette had stopped and turned in a slow half circle, sifting night sounds like an owl before passing behind the outhouse and old boat hull and pausing again at the foot of the spindly walkway over the salt grass. Then he came along the walkway, gliding out over the bog, in silhouette on the cold shine of moonlit mud. Whatever he carried on one arm was glinting.

Breaking the shotgun, Lucius dropped two buckshot loads into the chambers, snapped it to. Though the click of steel was perhaps thirty yards away, the Indian stopped short, his free hand rising in slow supplication. He stared at the black crack of the opened door. Very slowly then, he bent his knees and set his burden down on the split slats with a certain ceremony, as if it were fragile or sacred. When he straightened, his hands were held out to the side, pocked face expressionless. “Rural free delivery,” he told the door crack, trying a smile.

Under the moon, the canister appeared to pulse. Widening the doorway with his shotgun barrels, Lucius stepped outside. He pointed toward the shore. “Move,” he said. “Take that thing with you.”

“It ain’t a bomb or nothin,” the Indian murmured. He was a big man, round-shouldered and short-legged and small-buttocked, long black hair bound in a braid by a red wind band: he wore a candy-striped Seminole blouse, old pants and sandals, with a beaded belt slung below the curve of a hard belly. When the white man only motioned with the gun, he bent and retrieved the canister in one smooth motion and, as Lucius followed, returned over the