Shadow Country

his clips. “ ‘Bad Man of the Islands.’ ‘Red-bearded Knife Artist.’ How’s that for data?” Slyly he would frown and harrumph, weighing his words in what he supposed was an academic manner. “Speaking strictly as an archivist, L. Watson, that man’s beard was not what a real scholar would call red. It was more auburn, sir, more the color of dried blood.”

“Color of dried blood, yes, indeed.” The archivist’s colleague frowned judiciously in turn. “Doubtless a consequence of his well-known habit of dipping his beard in the lifeblood of his victims, don’t you agree, sir?”

“Precisely, sir. Point well taken, sir.”

It was soon clear (though they had not spoken of it) that Arbie Collins had quit Gator Hook for good and made the barge his home. For the moment, this was agreeable to his host, who enjoyed his company and was waiting to be told Rob’s account of the Tucker story.

Arbie Collins was infuriated by any perceived defense of Edgar Watson. In an attempt to soften his savage prejudice (based largely, it seemed, on what Rob must have told him at Key West), Lucius read him a passage from his biography describing the violent circumstances of young Edgar’s upbringing in South Carolina.

According to his mother, Ellen Addison Watson, the boy had scavenged the family’s food throughout the Civil War while receiving only rudimentary schooling. Even after the War, jobs had been scarce, child labor cheap, and the family poor and desperate. Her son had toiled from dawn to dark at the mercy of a dirt farmer’s stick, an ordeal worsened by the return from the Civil War of his drunken distempered father.

Lucius raised his gaze to see how his colleague was receiving this. Arbie glowered, silent as a coal, but for once he held his tongue. “ ‘Surely the dark temper of Edgefield District,’ ” the Professor resumed, “ ‘blighted the spirit of an unfortunate boy who had been but six when the War began and reached young manhood in the famine-haunted days of Reconstruction.’ ”

“Dammit, these are just excuses!” Bristle-browed, hoarse from cigarettes, beset by strangled coughs, Arbie rummaged up a letter clipped from the Florida History page of the Miami Herald: its author, D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state, “had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. After some strenuous throat hydraulics topped off with a salutary spit, Collins launched forth on a dramatic reading, which he shortly abandoned, turning the clip over to Lucius.

He inherited his savage nature from his father, Elijah Watson, who was widely known as a fighter. In one of these fights he was given a knife wound that almost encircled one eye, and was known thereafter as “Ring-Eye Lige.” At one time Elijah Watson was a warden at the state penitentiary. He married and two children were born to them, Edgar and Minnie. The woman had to leave Watson on account of his brutality and dissolute habits. She moved to Columbia County, Florida, where she had relatives.

Lucius read this to himself as Arbie, gleeful, watched his face. “Old stuff like that probably won’t interest serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., correct?”

“You think Herlong has these details right? I mean, ‘Ring-Eye Lige’?” Just saying his grandfather’s name aloud made Lucius chuckle in astonishment: here was the first document of worth in Rob’s ragtag “archive,” the first real clue to those early years which Papa had scarcely mentioned. From the rest of Herlong’s letter he was able to deduce that Granny Ellen Watson and her two childen must have fled South Carolina not long after the 1870 census, when Edgar was fifteen; if his drunken father had abused his wife, it seemed reasonable to suppose that he’d beaten his son, too. The Florida relative who took them in had been Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had accompanied her married daughter and her son-in-law to the Fort White region a few years earlier. By the mid- eighties, when Herlong’s father left Edgefield and moved south to that Fort White community, Elijah Watson back in South Carolina was already notorious as Ring-Eye Lige. The Herlong reminiscence was wonderfully complementary to an account of Watson’s later life by Papa’s friend Ted Smallwood which had turned up in a recent history of Chokoloskee Bay. These two narratives from different periods and regions were nowhere contradictory, therefore more dependable than any biographical material he had found to date.

Arbie reached for his clipping, grinning foxily when Lucius appeared loath to give it up. “This Herlong feller knew all about Edgar Watson’s checkered past,” Arbie assured him, “because Herlongs lived less than a mile from Watsons in both Edgefield and Fort White. Got some Herlongs in those Fort White woods even today.” Arbie was transcendent with self-satisfaction, all the more so when Lucius referred to him slyly as “a historian of record” and promised to acknowledge “the Arbie Collins Archive” in his bibliography and notes.

Intrigued by the Herlong clipping, Lucius wondered if he should not return to Fort White for further research. His chances of finding significant new material by poking through old county records seemed remote, but after all these years of family silence, a kinsman ready to talk about Uncle Edgar might be located, and even perhaps a few old- timers who knew something about the fate of Leslie Cox.

Unfortunately the university press would underwrite no further research: his teaching salary was negligible, he was nearly broke. However, Watt Dyer soon phoned to say that his client United Sugar Associates stood ready to underwrite the author’s travel and would also sponsor a series of paid lectures to educate the public about Planter E. J. Watson, sugarcane pioneer, controversial frontier figure, and confidant to the late Governor Broward. And because U.S.A. had a powerful lobby in the statehouse, the attorney’s politician clients could be prevailed upon to endorse the Watson land claim and perhaps the preservation of the Watson house as a state monument.

Although delighted, Lucius was aware of a recent news report that the U.S.A. corporation was notorious for the dreadful living conditions and near-slavery of its field workers and also that its massive use of chemical fertilizers was a serious threat to the future of the Everglades. Even so, as a reward to their “Big Sugar” campaign donors, another writer claimed, the federal government was abetting the state in its wasteful draining of the Glades for agriculture and development, including the construction of huge concrete canals to shunt away into the sea the pristine water flowing gradually south from Lake Okeechobee as the Shark River watershed.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Dyer’s derisive mirth had a hard edge of anger. “Can’t we leave all that negative stuff to those left-wing whiners in the papers?” Things were moving! he said. Court hearings on the Watson claim were scheduled for the following week at Homestead, and the first of several public events designed to organize local support would be sponsored by the Historical Society at Naples, which would offer an evening with the distinguished historian Professor L. Watson Collins.

“That name won’t work in Naples. Sorry,” Lucius said. “Too many people know me on this coast.”

Emitting that curious hard bark, Dyer simply hung up, leaving the question unresolved.

MURDER IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY

Rob Watson’s carton contained notes on his long-ago wanderings to Arkansas and Oklahoma to investigate what lay behind the legend of his father’s career in the Indian Nations. From these, Lucius put together a brief survey of that obscure period in his subject’s life.

Edgar Watson fled Fort White in north Florida in late 1886 or early 1887 under circumstances still disputed in that community. Although there is no clear record of his movements, it appears that in the spring and summer of 1887, he sharecropped in Franklin County, Arkansas, continuing westward after the crop was in and settling near Whitefield, in the Indian Territory, in early January of 1888.

The period in Mr. Watson’s life between January 1888 and March 1889 is relatively well documented, due to the part he was alleged to have played in the death (on February 3, 1889) of Mrs. Maybelle Shirley Reed, whose multicolored legend as Belle Starr, Queen of the Outlaws, has generated endless articles and books, poems, plays, and films, to the present day.

Hell on the Border, a grim compendium of Indian Country malfeasance published in 1895, was the first book to suggest that Belle Starr’s slayer was a man named Watson; this name appears in the closing pages of most of her numerous biographies, despite widespread dispute as to her real slayer’s identity. Was the culprit one of those shadowy assassins who intervene in famous destinies only to vanish in the long echo of history? Or would the same man reappear as the notorious desperado shot down by his neighbors on the coast of southwest Florida in 1910?

In the federal archives at Fort Worth, Texas, is a lengthy transcript of the hearings held in U.S.