Before his trip north to visit his Collins cousins, Lucius had written to his father’s widow, asking if he might pay a call on the way back from Fort White. In affectionate teasing he signed the letter, “Your loving stepson, Lucius.” There had been no answer to that letter nor to a later postcard. To judge from the silence that returned like the echo of a shot across long miles of swamp, red plain, and muddy river, reaching shy Edna was like whistling to an unknown bird hidden in the leaves.
But forwarded to his return address-he had specified General Delivery in Lakeland-was a note scrawled in carpenter’s pencil on lined yellow paper. Its formal tone contrasted oddly with the writing. Mrs. Herkimer Burdett wished to inform him that she could not receive him at this time nor assist in his biographical research. The letter was signed not by Edna but by “A. Burdett.” He had hardly reread it when the phone rang. In a voice gruff and grudging, Mr. A. Burdett announced that Mrs. Edna Burdett would receive his visit after all. He did not explain why she had changed her mind.
“Mrs. Burdett resides in a town that will go unnamed,” the voice added-for the pure love of that phrase, it appeared, since without being privy to her whereabouts, Lucius could not have sent his letter in the first place. Downing his bourbon to calm himself, he said, “So she wants to see me after all?”
“I thought it was you who wanted to see her.”
“And you’ve decided to accommodate me. Why?”
Taken aback, the caller protested, “Now hold on a minute, mister! Are you drunk? My mother is shy about the telephone; she asked me to call!” When Lucius was silent, the voice cried, “I think you’re drunk!”
“Addison? Is that you? We haven’t met since you were four but I’m your brother, remember?” He listened to trapped breathing. “How about tomorrow?” They could meet at his mother’s house, Lucius suggested, making the point that he knew the address and could go there with or without Addison’s permission. More silence. “I wouldn’t want to intrude, of course,” he added quickly. “I have no wish to see her unless she wishes to see me.” Though said to dispel Addison’s wariness, this happened to be true.
“I’ll call back.” The caller hung up, and Lucius groaned. But within minutes, his gruff brother called back. He would meet Lucius next day at noon at the gasoline station in Neamathla.
A. Burdett, checking his watch, turned out to be a husky young man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. He was built much like their father, Lucius noted, but otherwise looked nothing like him. Thin brown hair was plastered back on a big brow; a downturned mouth clamped a tense and worried face. As in much older men, the ears and knobby workman’s hands looked too large for his body; he had the hollow look of a man uncaressed by woman. Without meeting Lucius’s eye, he needlessly identified himself, still using the initial. “A. Burdett,” he said, already at a loss for what he might say next.
“A for Addison, right?” To dispel the clotting atmosphere, Lucius spoke enthusiastically. “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa’s dock at Chatham.”
Ad Burdett looked wary. “Papa,” he muttered. “That’s what us kids call Mr. Herkie.” He stared in gloomy resignation at his paint-splotched shoes. “Might as well get going, then,” he said. In his poky auto, he led his older brother into the village.
In sycamore shade of a quiet street of modest houses, Edna Burdett awaited Lucius, standing on her stoop. At the sight of him, she slipped inside and awaited him anew, holding up his History of Southwest Florida like a hymnal. “Would you be kind enough to sign your book, Professor Collins?” Only then did she offer a small smile. She was a bit thicker through the waist than he remembered, otherwise much the same-not quite pretty and yet handsome, with long honey-colored hair pinned up behind. Kate Edna Bethea Watson Burdett. Had she dropped the “Watson”? Papa had been the only one who called her Kate.
On the upright piano in the sitting room perched her wedding portrait with Herkimer Burdett and framed photographs of Addison and his sisters at various young ages, also a tinted photograph of a new child, Herkie Junior, who was off at school, she said. Lucius inquired about all of them before taking a seat.
Edna had backed herself into a stuffed chair under a lamp. From this redoubt, having smoothed her feathers, she permitted herself a better look at him. What do you want with us? her scared eyes said.
Addison stood awkward in the doorway, hat in hand. “Addison, do please sit down,” his mother said, as if he were a pupil standing up at his school desk for no good reason. When Lucius tried to include him in his questions about their family, Ad said gloomily, “How long does he aim to stay? I have to get back to work.”
His mother said, “You’re not expected back today, you know that, dear.” To Lucius, she said, “Addison is a housepainter like Mr. Burdett.”
The spring day ticked past on a big loose alarm clock in another room. She showed Lucius an old schoolbook, The History of Ancient Greece, that Papa had cherished and read over and over all his life. Lucius was touched that Edna had thought to take it when she fled.
“Your father was always good to me and kind and loving with his children; you do know that, don’t you, Lucius? When my sister came to visit in Fort White, she could not get over how much time that busy man would spend with his little children-very unusual for any man back in those days.” She passed him a faded photo of dim figures grouped on the porch steps at the Bend, and Lucius recognized the husky man in black suit and black hat whose features were lost in the dark of the hat shadow. “That’s all we have-that shadowed face. A memory of shadows!” She took a great deep breath. Edna could not bring herself to use his name, not even “Mr. Watson.” When Lucius mentioned him, she tweaked her blue blouse, crisscrossed her ankles. But neither did she betray resentment or shame or regret: his father’s actions had nothing to do with her, her manner said, nor alter the truth, that she had been a faithful God-fearing wife.
“Those bad things happened when us kids were small,” Ad complained suddenly. “Horrible crimes that none of her neighbors know about. But for her, they are not safely in the past.” His voice was rising and his color, too. “What would folks think of us if they knew?-that’s what scares her.”
“Addison? Please, dear.” Edna’s glance assured Lucius that Ad was voicing his own trepidations and not hers. “Poor Amy was only five months at that time. She never knew her father and was never told what happened. One day, a woman whose uncle was in that mob told her dreadful tales. I suppose this person wished to justify what those men did, but for poor Amy, it was terrifying. To this day, the poor thing cannot bear to hear one word about her father. If anyone asks, she says she knows nothing about him except that he died long ago of a heart attack.”
“My mother and her sister can’t even mention him,” Ad grumbled, “and you intend to write about him.”
Edna sighed. “Amy was only a babe in arms when that storm struck Chokoloskee. I’ve been deathly afraid of rough weather ever since. And when your father perished in that very place just a week later, that hellish noise terrified us all over.” She put her hand over her heart. “Lucius? That day was my twenty-first birthday. That’s why he came back.”
“You’re still one week older than I am,” he said, trying to lighten things; she scarcely heard him. “Before your father left Chokoloskee that last time, I begged him not to risk his life by coming back for us. I knew the evil feeling on that island. He must get away to Key West while he had the chance, I told him, and send for us later if he wished. But he was a bold and willful man, and he just smiled and kissed me, saying, ‘A twenty-first birthday is important, Kate, and a promise is a promise.’ Your father was killed because he kept his promise, did you know that?”
“She still forbids any celebration of her birthday,” Addison complained.
Widow and children had traveled to Neamathla to stay with her sister Lola. “Mr. Burdett came to visit. He stayed on and we married. He gave my children his name.”
“We felt lost,” Addison muttered, avoiding Lucius’s gaze. “I said, ‘Well, Mama, who are we, then?’ We felt like nobody at all. Then kids in school found out our real name.”
Lucius nodded. “Someone always finds a way to let you know what you don’t need to hear.”
“For years after we left Chokoloskee, I exchanged letters with Mamie Smallwood, who took us in that day and was so kind. A few years ago my Ruth Ellen went there for a visit. Wilma Smallwood-she never married-was running the store by then. Wilma showed that poor girl these dreadful clippings-terrible things that had been written about her father. She didn’t ask to see them, Wilma just showed them. Ruth Ellen was horrified. When she came home, she asked if it was true that Papa had murdered our dear Hannah and those men, and I said, ‘No, honey, it was his foreman.’ ”
Upset by her own reference to Leslie Cox, Edna rose abruptly, then busied herself at the piano, straightening the photos.
Because “John Smith” was not only a fugitive but a kinsman by marriage to whom he was indebted, his father had instructed Edna to keep his real name secret. Lucius himself had never been told much more about John Smith than he had picked up in the first five minutes. He could have used a friend of his own age to hunt and fish with but Leslie Cox had no idea how to be a friend, let alone have fun. All he cared about was killing more game than anybody else and getting the credit for bringing back more meat. He stayed mostly half drunk, he terrorized the workers, he made mean remarks, poking up trouble.
Edna looked around as if hearing someone slip into the house, then lowered her voice to a near whisper, confessing that Leslie slipped in close every time her husband turned his back. Complaining that “a man needed a woman,” he would whisper that her husband was betraying her with those Daniels sisters on Pavilion Key. But after all the trouble at Fort White, she was so scared of more violence that she dared not tell her husband she was being harassed. In those last weeks of that long hot summer, afraid for her children in the deadly atmosphere at Chatham Bend, she had mostly stayed with friends in Chokoloskee.
Lucius nodded. “I left, too. And three weeks later, all hell broke loose, just as you feared.” He turned to Addison. “Your mother is right, Ad. Those killings were Cox’s doing and so were the killings at Fort White. Your dad was not to blame.” But saying this, he felt obliged to add, “As far as I know.”
“Or want to know, right?” Ad said unpleasantly.
“Lucius? Remember when your father hitched our dog Beans to a little red wagon and trained him to pull Addison? And the wagon tipped over, rolling our little boy down the riverbank, and Little Ad so scared of that awful crocodile that he could not stop crying? I can still hear him, across all these years!” She gazed fondly at her son, who was glaring at the wall. “ ‘Little Ad’ is what Mr. Burdett called him before Ad got so big! And Ad was the first one who went south to seek the truth about what happened to your father.”
Lucius smiled at Ad. “Our father,” he said.
“Time off between jobs, that’s all,” Ad grumped. “I never really cared about this Watson stuff.”
“Addison? You took your whole vacation! Went all the way down there by yourself!”
“That’s none of his damned business!” Burdett lurched to his feet, his big face so menacing that Lucius stood up, too. “Don’t put that in your book! I’ll sue! How do we know what you’re going to write? Why should we trust you?”
“Please stop shouting. This is Lucius.”
“ ‘It’s a closed chapter in my life’-that’s what you said, Mother! So for God’s sake, leave it closed!”
Edna flinched but let his swearing pass. “Lucius is a historian, Ad. And he’s found out your father was not so bad as people made him out. You’re not glad to hear that?”
“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?