Shadow Country

“What do I care if the man was bad or good, or what was said about him? I care what people say about our family.” To Lucius he said, “Just leave us out of your damned book, okay?” He was deep dull red in the face, his breathing heavy. “I’m not a Watson, I’m a Burdett. I have a good name and I want to keep it.”

“Those dark things happened a long time ago,” his mother mourned. “Maybe folks reading Lucius’s book will understand your father in a different way and we won’t have to be so nervous about who we are.”

“It’s important to establish the truth,” Lucius added quietly, less and less sure of this.

“The truth! Ruth Ellen was toddling around with the Smallwood kid back in the store, she never saw it. But I ran down to the landing hollering ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ ” Ad gasped up a few breaths before resuming in a stunned low voice. “I fell down in the mud. That crashing of those guns, oh God, I thought the sky was falling down. And dogs! Those dogs were mean and scary, they bit children! They never quit howling and fighting all night long.” His lip was trembling. “I was three years old! Know what I saw? I saw my father fall. I saw the blood. That the kind of truth you’re after here? Professor?”

“I’m still your brother, Ad. I’m asking you to trust me.”

Burdett shook him off, frantic to go. Lucius followed him toward the door. “Listen,” he said. “Since you feel this way, why did you let me come?”

“I was against it. I still am. But she wanted you and I knew from your letter you would find the way sooner or later.” He went out.

For a little while they sat in silence, giving the house a chance to get its breath. Finally Edna cleared her throat. Ad had gone south a second time but had never said a word about it; she had learned of it in a Christmas letter from the Smallwoods. “And I never questioned him, that’s how scared I was that he’d found out something worse than what we already knew.”

This explained a nagging mystery, Lucius told her. A few years before, someone had gone to Chatham Bend and given the wind-weathered house a fresh coat of white paint.

“That’s him. I’m so glad you mentioned it. Oh, he’s a fine housepainter, Lucius! But even as a little boy, he always seemed… you know. Troubled.” Edna tried to explain that Ad’s abrupt and hostile manner stemmed from confused feelings. “He even considered changing his name to Watson-”

“His name is Watson.” Despite his sympathy, Ad had made him cross.

She shook her head. “Not legally.” She hurried on. “Ad grows lovely vegetables, you know. Spends all his spare time out in his garden.” She stared at the clenched hands in her lap. “He is very very upset today. He will go and drink. His father was a dangerous drinker, as you know.” She looked up. “Lucius? Do you have a good life? Do you have children?” When he shook his head, she flushed and hurried on. “Addison has few friends left: he’s become a loner. He won’t even come to family gatherings. He can’t take a drink but he drinks anyway. He gets aggressive, very very angry. We worry that this violent anger might be dangerous to other people.”

When Lucius answered, “I’m sure he’ll be all right,” his stepmother nodded doubtfully. “Well. We have lots to be thankful for. I mean, Everybody has to live with something, isn’t that true?”

Seeing the fear in her face, he took her hand. “I dragged my kids under the store,” she murmured, holding his hand tight. “That’s how scared I was those men were going to kill us. And I worry that it was my fear that scared Ad worse than anything. He still hears those guns in his sleep, wakes up hysterical. He just can’t rid himself of the smell of those drowned chickens.” She pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Me, either. How many years?” Her voice had diminished to a whisper. “I’ll go to my grave with that stench of death, I’m sure.”

She gave him the Greek history. “That’s yours now, Lucius.” For his sake, Edna had revisited her life as Mrs. E. J. Watson but now she wanted him to go.

“I’m sorry you didn’t meet Mr. Burdett and Herkie Junior or see your little sisters.” From her doorway, waving a shy hand, she invited him to visit next time he came through, but probably she knew as well as he did that they would not meet again, which was all right, too. When he turned to wave, she only gazed at him, head cocked ever so slightly. Lucius? Why did you come? What do you want with us?

SOUTH

On a green and blue day, Lucius headed south to Arcadia on the Peace River. In his father’s day, as the new capital of Manatee County, Arcadia had claimed such frontier comforts as hard drink, whores, and gambling, knife fights, shootings, and common brawling: according to a local account, as many as four men had been killed in a single fight and fifty fights might occur in a single day. Untended stock on the county’s unfenced range had encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were stolen by the herd, and in 1890, four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. Inevitably the range wars attracted desperadoes from the West, and death by knife and bullet was a commonplace when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to later memoirs by friend Ted Smallwood, slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass:

Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with his knife and Watson told Bass… he had worked on the man enough. And Bass got loose and came towards him and he begin putting the.38 S & W bullets into Bass and shot him down.

The date of Watson’s arrival in Arcadia, his livelihood and length of stay-Smallwood set down no such details, only that Watson had paid his way out of his scrape before leaving town.

At the county clerk’s office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, the town’s earliest Criminal Docket Book, exhumed from the basement, made no mention of a Watson. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893-his last appearance in the docket book. Since his surname was otherwise absent from this record of every felony committed in the new county between 1890 and 1905, only LeQuinn could have been the Quinn Bass of Smallwood’s account, yet his demise at the hands of E. J. Watson was nowhere recorded.

THE DOMESDAY BOOK

Arriving in Fort Myers the next day, Lucius found a note from Arbie-Rob!-at General Delivery saying that Lucius might find him in late afternoon at the bar of the Gasparilla Inn, where Lucius had arranged a supper meeting with Watt Dyer. In the meantime, he would visit the library and newspaper, noting Watson references and dates.

A sketch of Sheriff Frank Tippins in a local history attested that Tippins, “who arrested many desperate criminals during his career and acquired a statewide reputation for fearlessness,” had always been frustrated by the “unsolved killing of Ed Watson. Due to the fact that Watson was said to have killed the notorious Belle Starr, his murder attracted national attention and stories about him are still being printed.” Lucius was much encouraged by these references to the “unsolved killing” and “murder” of his father and also the mention of the thirty-three bullets removed from the riddled corpse, which reflected the sheriff ’s skepticism that an armed crowd of twenty or more men shooting a lone man to pieces had acted in self-defense.

At the Lee County sheriff ’s office, the stiff leaves of old court ledgers long unopened exhaled the breath of desiccation, and the sepia ink was as faint as the blue watermark. In these stained pages, the first name of interest was “Green Waller,” jailed in 1896, 1898, and 1901 for “larceny of hog.” Subsequently this dogged pig thief had found sanctuary at Chatham Bend, where he could commune with these estimable animals to his heart’s content. Waller also appeared in the Monroe County census for May 1910, where he was listed in the E. J. Watson household as servant and farmhand. His mountainous lover Miss Hannah Smith was registered as cook; field hand “John Smith” was the fugitive Leslie Cox. Last on the census list was “Lucius H. Watson, mullet fisherman.” His own name startled him, flying off the faded page like a medieval moth trapped in the Domesday Book.

As in Arcadia, Lucius was mystified by the dearth of information on his father. Sheriff Tippins’s records for 1910