Shadow Country (42 page)
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. Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late February and early March of 1889, to determine if evidence of his guilt was sufficient to bring one “Edgar A. Watson” before a grand jury on a murder charge. From this transcript, together with reports from the local newspapers and some speculative testimony winnowed from the literature on the life and death of Maybelle Shirley Reed, one may assume that the “E. A. Watson” accused in Oklahoma was none other than the “E. J. Watson” gunned down in Florida two decades later. Whether or not he was guilty of Belle Starr's death may never be known, but it should be noted that many if not most of her acquaintances disliked the victim and that almost as many were suspected of her death by her various authors.
What can we conclude about his years on the frontier apart from the widespread allegation that Watson was “the Man Who Killed Belle Starr”? At least three of Mrs. Starr's biographers declare that after his departure from Oklahoma, Watson was convicted of horse theft in Arkansas and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary and that he was killed while resisting capture after an escape. (Here as elsewhere they follow the lead of
Hell on the Border,
published within six years of Belle Starr's death and considerably more accurate than many of the subsequent accounts, despite its premature report of Watson's end.)
Watson's destination after his escape from the Arkansas penitientary remains unknown, though he later related that he headed west to Oregon, where he was set upon by enemies in a night raid on his cabin. Obliged to take a life, possibly two, he fled back east. Another account states that on his way to Oklahoma, Ed Watson passed through Georgia, where he killed three men in a fracas. Like the many false rumors from South Carolina and Florida, these seem to be “tall tales” unsupported by separate testimony or even anecdotes within the family.
Ed Watson reappears in Florida in the early nineties, in a shooting at Arcadia in DeSoto County in which, by his own account, he slew a “bad actor” named Quinn Bass. In the rough frontier justice of that region, our subject was permitted to pay his way out of his difficulties, according to one of Belle Starr's hagiographers, who asserts that “a mob stormed the jail, determined to have Watson, but the sheriff beat them off.” In a different account, outlaws Watson and Bass disputed the spoils of a marauding expedition whereupon Bass was shot dead through the neck.
Though E. J. Watson (as a fugitive, he appears to have changed his middle initial) is rarely identified as an outlaw, it should be noted that in the nineties, range wars, cattle rustling, and general mayhem were rife in De Soto County, and gunmen and bushwhackers from the West found steady work. It is also true that Watson turned up at Chokoloskee Bay not long thereafter with enough cash to buy a schooner, despite his reported recompense to the Bass family for the loss of Quinn. Considering that he was penniless when sent to the penitentiary and without known income or employment after his escape, one can only speculate where that cash might have come from.
In his first years in southwest Florida, Mr. Watson assaulted Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee in an altercation in a Key West auction house; this knife attack, which did not prove fatal, was also taken care of with a money settlement considered very substantial for that period. Again, our subject's source of funds after long years as a fugitive remains mysterious. One cannot dismiss the possibility that from the time of his prison escape in Arkansas until he took refuge in the Ten Thousand Islands, E. J. Watson made his living as an outlaw.
BLACK MOON MIRRORS
In the next days, inviting his guest along on research visits to Fort White, Fort Myers, perhaps Chatham Bend, Lucius was taken aback by the vehemence of Arbie's refusal. “To hell with that damned place!” he yelled in regard to Chatham Bend. “Burn it to the ground, burn that damned stain out!” When Lucius stared at him, he yelled some more. “Don't look at
me
! Rob told me about that bloodstain on the floorâ
black
blood, he told me! Said the only way to get it out was
burn
it out!”
Arbie had tried to dissuade Lucius from making these research expeditions, but in the end, he decided to go along. Was this curiosity about his Collins kinsmen in Fort White or real interest in his new role as researcher? Unwillingness to be left behind on a remote salt creek orâconceivablyâthe fun of his host's company? For even their bickering and hard teasing was good fun. Lucius concluded it was all of these. “Free food,” grumped Arbie.
Driving north to Lake City, where Columbia County records might be found, Arbie picked through Lucius's research notes, fuming crossly over phrases. Flicking the pages with nicotined fingers, he rolled his eyes and whistled in derisionâto no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus orchards and broad cattle country that replaced the subtropical growth of the lower peninsula at the Peace River.
“
âE. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the most ambitious and innovative farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands'
â
that's
what he's known for?” Arbie slapped the notes down on his knees. His eyes glittered and his tongue flew, hell-bent on outrage. His long black hair and rakish sideburns with their dangerous swerve toward the corners of his mouth gave this taut, irascible man the wild aspect of a peregrine, Lucius noticed. At the same time, he was aware of something brittle, something fractured; he was careful not to feed the instability that flickered like heat lightning in Collins's eyes.
Perversely thenâunwillingly amused by his own indignationâArbie let a boyish smile suffuse his face, but when Lucius smiled with him, he scowled at once, as if his privacy had been invaded. “L. Watson Collins, P-H-D!” he jeered, fending off any sign of his host's affection. Behind his abrasiveness, Lucius guessed, was self-dislike, or even detestation of a man who, by his own description, was nothing but “a damn-fool drunk and lifelong drifter.” From the deep pallor, wary eyes, and side-of-the-mouth speech, Lucius was coming to suspect that a good part of Arbie's life had been spent in prison, which might explain why he had holed up for so long at Gator Hook.
“If this new Everglades park comes through,” Lucius mused, “our attorney Watt Dyerâ”
“Watson Dyer? What's that guy want with you?”
“You know him?”
“Speck caretakes for him at Chatham Bend. Speck can tell you all about that skunk. Big real estate lawyer, made a killing on the land boom. Represents the bunch that's trying to stop that park.”
“Can't be. Not if he's trying to help the Watson claim.”
“Probably working both sides of the street like all the rest of 'em.”
“Don't you trust
any
body? Dyer thinks we might even petition for maintenance of the Watson place as a historic monument.”
Arbie stiffened like a dog on point, and his burnsides fairly bristled. “Historic monument? How about a
murder
monument? First monument to bloody murder in the whole U.S. and A.! Massacre museum! Gobbet bar! Nice ketchup specialties! Red rubber skeletons!” Unable to maintain the huff and pomp of indignation, Arbie hooted, but within moments he was scowling again. “You really hope to make that house a monument to Pioneer Ed? That's already a monument to dark and bloody deeds? Dammit, I'm not joking!” He was pointing his finger into Lucius's face. “Have you ever
seen
somebody murdered? And
heard
it, oh my God, and
smelled
it? It's terrible and scary. I know what I'm talking about. You don't. That's why you can write about a killer as some kind of hero.”
That German soldier with his pants down. Yes, I have seen somebody murdered. Yes. I murdered him.
Arbie had tossed the notes onto the dashboard. Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a loose page wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased his paper down as Arbie poked his head out. “You're twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! I know how much you loved him, Lucius, and I'm sorry, but there's no way you can write your way around a murderer!”
Out of breath, Lucius got back behind the wheel. “Don't toss my work around like that, all right?”
That Arbie had witnessed violent death was plain, yet Lucius did not feel he could question him about his past, not yet. Already this tightly wound man had turned away from him, taking refuge in a few loose notes on Lucius's discussions with the attorney. “By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed,” he said, “folks'll roll their eyes to the high heavens thanking their Merciful Redeemer for that kindly farmer whose magical seed cane put our sovereign state of Florida where she's at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent all their mean tales about Bloody Ed.
So maybe Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol' Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First U.S. president to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol' redneck breed that made this country great!
”
They spent that evening at a tourist camp on the Withlacoochee. While Arbie slept off his long day, Lucius drank his bourbon in the shadow of the porch, contemplating the reflections of the giant cypress in the still moon water of the swamp. The gallinule's eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as quintessentially in place as the lichens and shelf fungi fastened to the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead fatherâpale saplings yearning for the light twisting up and around the fallen tree, drawing last minerals from the punky wood and straining toward the sun even as the huge log crumbles in a feast for beetles.
