Lost Man's River (46 page)

At his approach, she emerged from her car, wincing a little at the loud creak of the hinge, or her own stiff joints, or both. “This pesky flivver,” she declared, “is as out of date as I am!” When she slammed the door, it screeched again. “My auto and I,” she said, smoothing her dress. “We're in this darn thing to the finish.” Still unable to look at him, she went around to the far side and reached in through the window for her graveside flowers. Half-hid behind the shield of blossoms, she raised her eyes, then burst into a joyful smile, laying the flowers on the hood and holding out both hands. “Oh Lucius!” she whispered. “Oh my darling!”

Still at arm's length, he held her small white hands in his brown rough ones. He cleared his throat, inept and shy. “Miss L,” he murmured.

“Miss L!” she cried, with a fleeting shiver of her brow. “Indeed! The very one! None other!” For all her frailty and evanescence, she was still vital, she had never lost that petal skin and delicate neck and waist. She wore a long, simple, and expensive dress of a faint shade of lavender—as faint, he decided later (trying his hand at an elegaic poem) as “the bougainvillea petal which masquerades as its own blossom—as light and evanescent as a leaf of peach hibiscus, spinning in the sunlight corner of a spider's web.” In the tumult of that evening's events, this ode to Lucy, like most of Lucius's poems, was quickly put away and as quickly lost.

“For pity's sake, don't stare! It won't improve matters!” She turned away, preceding her long-ago lover through the gate. Over her shoulder, in a sprightly voice, she told him that she'd seen a notice of the forthcoming meeting of the Southwest Florida Historical Society tomorrow evening in Naples, which would be addressed—and she turned to curtsy—by “ ‘the noted historian and author L. Watson Collins!' ” She pirouetted in a quick neat circle, dancing out into the sun on the far side of the banyan into the suspended time of the old graveyard.

He waited on the white shell path while her lavender figure turned among the stones to offer flowers at a grave under an oak—the last resting place of the late Mr. Summerlin, he supposed. She pointed him toward the Watson plot, where he went without her. “On your right, remember?” Lucy called. “Just by the path.”

The stones were grouped close around a
WATSON
marker, and Papa lay where he belonged beside Jane Dyal Watson. The sight of his mother's small
white marble headstone brought a peculiar prickling to his temples. Only once had he visited her grave since her death a half century before, in a cold north wind on the December day of Papa's burial.

In late October of 1910, Lucius had accompanied Sheriff Tippins and the coroner to Rabbit Key, on the outer coast south and west of Chokoloskee, and made himself look down into that hole at the crusted carcass. Returning north on the gray toiling Gulf, hearing the lumpish thing that had been Papa rolling and bumping dully in its box, assailed by that stink that would lurk forever in his sinuses, seeping forth whenever that dreadful image overtook him, he had puked and coughed into the waves that turned along the hull. At home, he discovered that none of his family wished to hear about the autopsy, and perhaps their reluctance had been sensible, but at the time—he was twenty-one—he thought it typical of the family's unworthy effort to elude scandal. Shouting back that this policy of silence served the interests of the First National Bank far better than the family honor, he had stalked out of the house, walking eastward on the river road to the Alva Bridge and west again as far as Whiskey Creek, dry-eyed and dry-hearted, heart bitter as stone. Early next morning, he and the coroner, gagging into bandannas tied bandit-style over their faces, had dragged his father's black Sunday suit onto the foul cadaver and nailed it back into its coffin for reburial. Carrie had come, and she did her best to help, though they scarcely spoke.

With no river breeze to stir the dusty leaves, the burning banyan seemed to writhe and shimmer. The thick fig leaves looked black, the graveyard white and black, no color anywhere. The air swarmed with black specks—midges or soot. In the pitiless sun on the white monoliths, the shine on the live oak leaves, the hot scent of lime and drone of bees, his brain was smitten by bare light, causing swift vertigo. He sank down abruptly on a grave.

Lucy drew near, calling a question to cover her concern. “Did you find it?”

“Find what?” Struggling to clear his head, he spoke more brusquely than he had intended.

She reached for his hand, offered an airy arm. Grateful that she asked no questions, he let her lead him toward the shade of the great banyan. “Kinfolks,” she said, patting her hand on the glazed stone of a sepulchre, encouraging him to take a seat beside her. “Won't bother 'em a bit.”

With her fingertips, Lucy traced the incised name, then turned and took his hand in both of hers and gazed full at him. “I was terribly in love with
you, did you know that, darling? Even after you went off to war and never told me … never sent word. Oh Lucius! After the way we were—!” Her cheeks went scarlet but she held his eye. “I was never angry, please believe that, dearest. I knew who Lucius Watson was, even back then, I knew the man I had dearly hoped to spend my life with. And even knowing who you were, I wish you'd married your lovelorn Miss L! Have you ever heard of anything so pathetic?” In his silence, she added quietly, “People so often say they love someone. But so rarely do they really mean they love them as they
are
, including the behavior that is hurtful.”

Lightly he touched her cheek, her temple. What was there to tell her? He longed to take Lucy in his arms and pretend that all that joy in life had not been wasted. He was heartbroken by their life loss, yet scared and eager, too, and also disgusted with himself, indeed infuriated—all these emotions! How could he have been such a weakhearted fool?

Lucy was studying her small livered hands as if to say, Can these really be mine? “You think I'm being foolish, don't you, Lucius? You think it's much too late for us and that we are too … old?” She lifted her gaze then, and her eyes pled with his. “It's just that I'm so happy to see you, dearest.… It's just … Well, I'm just babbling, I know!” But she was undone by his expression. Patting his wrist, she said, “Now never mind.” She slipped a leather diary into his hands. “Perhaps you'll understand things better written down. Looking into each other's eyes only confuses things.” She touched the journal in a kind of parting as she rose. “It's a love letter, I suppose. I thought about ripping these soppy pages right out of my life, but there's so much of my heart in it, and the writing it all out consoled me so, that I can't bring myself to burn it. The only way to set myself free is to offer it to the person it belongs to.”

To spare them, Lucy added brightly, “I have your
History
in the car! Will you inscribe it for me?” He nodded vaguely, and she squeezed his hand and moved away among the blinding stones.

Lucius closed the journal. So much harm? What nonsense! His father had loved him very much, in his own way.

Lucius had returned to Chatham Bend in 1902, not long after a new foreman had been found to replace the Tuckers. Fred Dyer, though small, was a handsome, wiry devil, with too much energy for anybody's good. When on the Bend, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building the cistern and the boat
shed, and also his small family cabin just downriver, which was later taken over by Green Waller.

As foreman, Fred Dyer was away often on the schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for hardware and dry goods and materials. According to Papa, who was sometimes with him, he prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he knew how to handle, picking fights. As long as the work got done, Papa never harassed him, though always free with harsh comment about others. Not until years later, comparing notes with Lucy, had Lucius realized that his father might have encouraged Dyer's wanderings just to get the man out of the way.

Mrs. Sybil Dyer was a seamstress and made most of the clothes—a lovely creature, “pretty as a primrose,” Papa called her. This was before Papa met Edna Bethea. He had been lonely as a widower, and confessed to his son that he was “very taken with Miss Sybil,” though he never presumed nor did he claim that she was drawn to him. For such a strong, hard-minded man, he would go to pieces around Sybil Dyer, chuckling and blushing, turning to mush before their very eyes. In quest of Mrs. Dyer's good opinion, he took to reading the Bible aloud on Sunday mornings, and leading them in spirited renditions of “Jesus Loves Me” and “The Little Brown Church in the Dell.”

When Papa was drinking, he would talk to Mrs. Dyer about his childhood and about the loss of family land at Clouds Creek, South Carolina. He had also assured her—for she told this to her daughter, who confided it in later years to Lucius—that much of his bad reputation in the region had been spawned by envy. His innocent seamstress inevitably concluded that she alone was privy to the secret heart of Mr. Watson, so generous and kind despite his ill repute. And perhaps she imagined, as so many had before her, that “the love of a good woman” was all that was required to cause this man to mend his sinful ways.

Out of Sybil Dyer's presence, Papa was often restless and short-tempered. He could be jolly in an ironic sort of way, and he dearly loved to amuse his son with sardonic teasing, but when he was drinking, his teasing turned cynical and brutal. Upbraiding the help, both white and black, he advanced the opinion that their small brains, laziness and insatiable stomachs would send him straight into the poorhouse.

In 1905—the year Gene Roberts brought the news about the murder of Guy Bradley in Flamingo—a little boy was born to Sybil Dyer. This boy was christened Watson Dyer, known as Watt or Wattie. Lucius supposed that the foreman wished to flatter his employer, mostly because, for all his lip and strut, he was afraid. Out in the world, Dyer had heard tales of those young Tuckers who had preceded his own family on Chatham Bend, and that summer,
his nerve was broken by these wildfire false rumors that Ed Watson was Guy Bradley's killer, too.

Not long after the autumn harvest, the Dyers fled, in forfeit of a whole year's pay. They left Chatham River on the mail boat, returning to Whiskey Creek, outside Fort Myers. Papa, who was absent in Key West, never forgave them, and he never paid them. Feeling bad about that withheld pay, Lucius introduced Mrs. Dyer to Carrie Langford, which led to a modest livelihood as dressmaker to Fort Myers ladies, not only the Langfords but the Summerlins and Hendrys and in the winter season Mrs. Edison, upon whose bust Sybil Dyer would make clothes to be sent north to New Jersey in the summer.

Years later, Lucy would confess that she had cried for a whole week after her family left Chatham, so lovesick had she been for her lost Lucius! She also revealed that her mother had wept when the news came of Mr. Watson's violent death. Some years later, after Fred Dyer left his family, Lucy asked her mother if Mr. Watson's feelings for her had been reciprocated, and instead of teasing back, Sybil Dyer wept anew, declaring that Mr. Edgar Watson had the most mysterious blue eyes she ever saw. Yes, he had told her that he loved her, and yes, she had loved him, though even in the early days she had heard that he would declare undying love to a lot of women. She excused him, saying that in his deepest heart was a great big aching hole which the poor man could never fill.