In the southern mist rose Mormon Key off the mouth of Chatham River. Farther on, the cries of oystercatchers purled across the bars, rising and falling. Hoad smiled to hear that sound. “I reckon that wild cry was here when the first Calusa came in the old centuries.”
The Cracker Belle entered the mangrove delta. “These west coast rivers are so low due to Glades drainage that your dad’s schooner would go aground before he ever made it to the Bend,” Hoad said. “Got to go by dead reckoning. Got to listen to your propeller.” He was talking too much because he was worried about what might await his friend upriver. Lucius nodded but remained silent.
Where storm trees had stranded on a shoal, dead branches dipped and beckoned in the wash of the boat’s wake. At Hannah’s Point, perhaps a mile below the Bend, was the common grave of Hannah, Green, and Dutchy, never visited and now all but forgotten in the desolate salt scrub as the dark events of that long-ago October passed from local history into myth. “About all us local folks have left is our long memories,” Hoad was saying. “Hurricanes roil things up a little now and then but it’s bad deaths that carry our remembrances back, sometimes a hundred years.”
Still visible back of the mangrove fringe along the bank was a square impression about one foot deep, as if a half-buried barn door had been levered up out of the white paste of the marl. “This place really spooks the few who know about it,” Hoad said, “me included. Graves without coffins generally sprout a good strong crop of weeds but nothing grows here.”
“Very strange,” Lucius agreed politely, anxious to keep moving.
“Those poor folks had no families to come after them like Mister Watson. But they were darned lucky to get into the ground before that bad storm carried ’em out to sea. Course they won’t stay.”
Hoad pointed to a corner of the grave that was eroding bit by clod into the river.
They listened to the river’s lic-lic-lic as it curled past. In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, white-pated black pigeons craned and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe.
“Come on, Hoad, let’s go.” He spoke abruptly.
In a shift of wind the smell came heavy on the air. Waves fled the bow to crash into the banks in the boat’s wake as they rushed upriver. The hard pine in the house had blasted pitch into the sky, casting a sepia pall over the thunderheads. Where the Watson place had stood on its high mound was a strange hollowness, a void, thick shimmerings of heat. Behind the house’s shadow presence, what foliage remained on the gaunt trees was gray with ash. All around on the blackened ground lay the belly flats of alligators, curled up in crusts.
They called and called. Circling the dying fire, he clenched his heart against the sight of a charred shape in the crack and shudder of the last collapsing timbers, the whisperings of embers and blue hiss of mineral flame.
Face scorched, Lucius turned from the burning at a call from Hoad. Rob’s satchel had been left on the bare ground beyond the gator scraps. Lucius approached and picked it up and finally opened it, extracting the unloaded revolver. The note he dreaded was there, too. Clumsy, he dropped it, picked it up again.
Dear Luke,
Thanks for coming. Sorry about the house. I don’t ask your forgiveness. A keepsake-our old family heirloom. I know you wonder why I kept it all those years. I think I needed it. I think I needed this steel thing and the cold precision of its parts to hold reality together. In some way I don’t claim to understand, that red day at Lost Man’s was the last reality I ever knew.
So long. No need to wait, no need to worry. Yr ever-lovin brother, R.B. Watson
He raised his gaze to the brown river, read the note, passed it to Hoad. Hoad read it and looked up, clearing his throat. “Listen,” he began. He stopped. With nothing else to say, they stared away downriver.
Clouds from the Gulf dragged shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands, raising an acrid stream from the brooding fire. He took shelter in the boat cabin with Hoad. In the cramped space, in dense wet heat, among the Belle’s rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers, Hoad said, “You aim to put all the bad stuff in your book?” This was less a question than a warning. Lucius ignored it.
When the rain stopped, they returned ashore. Lucius buried the box of belt buckles and bullets where the shed had been-the slave quarters, Leslie Cox called it, with that bruising laugh. The urn he took to the leaning poinciana in whose thin shade dear Mama had rested in the long afternoons, watching the passing of the river. Replacing the earth, he remained there on his knees for a few minutes. “Well, Papa,” he whispered finally and stood up.
Thin smoke plumes rose like companies of ghosts. Out to the west where the Gulf sky was clearing, an iron sun loomed through the mist and vanished. From upriver came the hollow knocking of that big black woodpecker. In the river silence, it seemed far away and also near.
Hoad was waiting by the boat.
“We’re going,” Lucius said, fetching his manuscript.
His old friend trailed him back to the fire in alarm. “Wait,” Hoad said.
Out of respect for so much work, he lifted the manuscript to the level of his breast before bending and consigning it to the red embers. In silence they watched the top page brown a little at one corner as the fire took hold. A moment before bursting into flame, it lifted on an updraft, danced, planed down again among the gator scraps.
Hoad jumped to retrieve it before it blew away but when his friend only shook his head, he returned it to the fire.
“Okay? Let’s go,” said Lucius Watson.
Long long ago down the browning decades, in the light of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw, who laughed and listened, smelled and touched, ate, drank, and bred, occupying time and space with his getting and spending in the world. What his biographer will strive to recover is a true sense of this human being, with all his particularity and hope and promise, in the hope that the reader might understand who the grown man might have become had he not known too much of privation, rage, and loss.*