Soft mist rose off the salt marsh, thinning in the sun.
Was all this true? Perhaps all Papa had ever intended was to run those people off his claim and burn their shack. As the man who would be vilified and damned, Edgar Watson, too, had been a victim of Tucker’s desperate lunge, and in his despair might have succumbed to the seeming necessity of suppressing that girl’s witness rather than see his last hope of redemption on his new plantation end on the gallows, leaving his penniless family to the mercies of the Islanders. Bet Tucker’s life or his family’s future: that was his terrible choice and he had made it, accepting responsibility for both deaths and unspoken abomination in his community. Hadn’t he concealed his son’s participation, even his presence? Wasn’t that why he had made him lie down in the boat, out of sight below the level of the gunwales? Had Rob realized this? It would not seem so.
Or was he awarding Papa too much benefit of too much doubt? If Papa was guilty of the Tucker deaths, how could that upright and responsible historian, L. Watson Collins, proceed with the “whitewash,” as Rob called it? Had he ignored inconvenient facts and disturbing intuitions because of his love for Papa (and ambitions for his book)? Had he thought he might skim over the Tucker episode without risk of contradiction since the only conceivable witness was the missing Rob?
At least Papa had not lied. Rob’s own account established that Papa had not drawn attention to how panicky or inept or careless Rob might have been as a cause of that first death nor attempted to evade the fundamental blame. Because he’d wished his younger son to know that there were mitigating circumstances (imagining that his oldest son was gone for good, and in any case safe from prosecution) he had hinted that Rob might have shared the guilt.
Look at Papa’s first reaction to Tucker’s death, as recalled by Rob. Couldn’t that “SHIT!” signify tragic dismay? What have you DONE boy! Yet apparently Papa had stifled his recriminations, for subsequently-Rob’s account again-he had actually attempted to comfort his stricken son, assuring him it was self-defense and not his fault. To protect his son’s feelings-and right from the start-Papa had acted with a certain stoic grace, wasn’t that true? And ever since, he had stoically endured the massive judgment that those deaths had brought upon him.
Though arguing back and forth this way made him feel a little better, he knew he was skirting his father’s apparent willingness to send his son to silence that young woman. And how could an honest biographer account for the execution of those two cane cutters which had brought about the Tucker episode in the first place?
So near its finish after all these years, his life’s work would be utterly invalidated were he to accept Rob’s testimony. “The one surviving witness,” Rob had called himself. How different his biography might have been had that sole surviving witness never reappeared-this was the unwelcome thought he had to banish.