Unwelcome now in Tom Starr country, I leased a farm in Crawford County, Arkansas. Having lost a month in jail, I got my seed in late and had to watch the weak sprouts wither in that summer’s drought. By winter I was in serious debt, with three hungry kids and a new baby. Sonborn was ten now and helped some with the chores, but Carrie and Eddie were still toddlers who helped most when they stayed out of the way.
We called our newborn Lucius Hampton Watson, after the family patriarch Luke Watson of Virginia and General Wade Hampton, our great Carolina hero. In ’76, General Hampton was elected governor; later, he became a U.S. senator. People voted for him even though he spoke out against segregation on the railroads. I couldn’t go along with that, not altogether, but I had to admire this rare public man who stood up for his principles, which was why I named my youngest after him. I considered “Lucius Selden Watson,” but with my lifelong nightmares about Deepwood, I thought that name might curse my little boy with evil luck.
I had not welcomed this little feller, who looked like he had come into this world only to pule and die. Once winter set in, there were times I felt that little Lucius would be far better off dead. He brought no joy to our meager hearth but only plagued us down those cold dark days with his starved fret and yawling. Mandy was shocked when I spoke this way, and reproved me for my “brutal way of talking.” I told her that the world was brutal, man’s lot, too, so if there really was a God, she had better face God’s will. “That is your God’s will, not my God’s, Mr. Watson,” my wife said.
We had no Christmas that year, none, no friends nor relatives nor even neighbors. Huddling with our offspring in a damp and dirty shack, doing our utmost to forget our stomachs and stay warm, we passed that winter in the nightmare sleep that famine brings, a kind of fitful hibernation. The dull cold misery of dark days without end-dark winter days all but inseparable from night-was worse than Edgefield District in the War, as if somehow I had fallen back into that hellish period. I was tormented by the children’s hollow eyes, the coughing and mute suffering, as those pinched and staring faces shrank against the bone. In my helplessness, I lay there stunned, breath cold and slow as the toad’s breath in winter mud. Poor Mandy did her gallant best to poke up my dead ashes: “Don’t lay too long without breathing, Mr. Watson. Wouldn’t want rigor mortis to set in.” But Mandy’s eyes had gone dull, too, and in the dim light from the single bleary pane, her face looked haunted.
Was it Plato who said, Life is terrible, but it isn’t serious? Did he mean that man is a hostage to his life while held captive by death, so why take such a life seriously? Fuck it, I thought. Fuck God, fuck everything.
One frozen day three riders with stiff faces brought a string of ponies, offering twenty dollars in advance if I would tend them for the rest of the winter. Two did the talking while the third stayed to one side. If nobody came to claim ’em by the spring, they said, then I could sell ’em. That told me these animals were probably stolen, but I was in no place to ask hard questions.
While those two put their heads together, counting out the coins, the third man, who’d dismounted to piss, eased alongside. He was a halfbreed man in half-uniform, a deserter from the buffalo soldiers from his looks. Says, “Watson? Any kin to a Jacob Watson?” “Reckon so,” I said. He had no time to discuss how he knew my name. “These boys are friends of Belle,” he warned under his breath. “They won’t be back. You better run this string into the Nations, sell ’em quick-either that or chase ’em off your place soon as we’re gone.” He moved away.
I had no chance to peddle those ponies because the deputies rode in at daybreak the next morning. Pocketed my twenty dollars, lashed my wrists behind my back, and boosted me into the saddle. As we rode out behind the ponies, I heaved around to stare at my huddled family a last time, but with arms bound tight, I could not even wave.
With bitter weather hard behind an iron sky to northward, and no man to help her and no food, Mandy had finally lost heart and sank down weeping. Though I barked at him to stay out of the way, my oldest in his thin torn jacket and split soggy boots came running and hollering amongst their stirrups until he got knocked sprawling in the muddy tracks. Poor Sonborn thought the world of me and I never did learn why, because my face stiffened at the sight of him and my heart, too. Every time I remember how he ran after me that day, I feel all wrong in my heart but I could not help it.
In the Territories, stealing horses was a crime far worse than murder, which was very common and mostly well-deserved. I could count my lucky stars, the lawmen told me, grinning like coyotes, that they hadn’t strung me from the nearest cottonwood. Perhaps these men felt merciful because they were in on the whole frame-up, which they hardly bothered to deny. On January fourth of 1890, in the county court there in Van Buren, I was given fifteen years at hard labor and carted off to Arkansas State Prison.
I will say this for Eddie Reed, he knew what he owed me for my friendly counsel. He moved my family into a good household in Broken Bow, in the Choctaw Nation, where Mandy would earn their room and board as cook and housekeeper. Reed did not live long after that, being even wilder than his father. A drunk at twelve, a moonshiner running likker into the Indian Country by age fourteen, he was a robber, gunslinger, and killer all of his short life. The following year, convicted of horse theft, he was sentenced to five years in prison. The story goes that his sister Rosie Lee pled with Judge Parker before sentencing to give that remorseful orphaned boy another chance, and the Hanging Judge told her it would do no good. Said, “That young feller was born ornery and he won’t quit so he’s better off right where he is. If I let him out, he’ll be dead within the year.”
But Rosie Lee wagered the judge he was mistaken, offering her own person as security, so he took the bet. Eddie received a suspended sentence on the condition that he quit drinking and go straight. He took a job as a railway guard, serving when needed as a deputy U.S. marshal. Eddie was always a crack shot, and in a brief gunfight in the line of duty, he killed Luke and Zeke Crittenden, halfbreed Cherokee brothers, who had resisted a routine arrest for shooting up the streets. (The Crittenden boys were also deputy marshals, having never been criminals or drunken troublemakers except in their spare time.) But Reed himself would be slain within the year under similar circumstances and so his little sister lost her bet. In arrears to the Hanging Judge and to her brother’s lawyers, the brave girl embarked upon her own career in show business. Under her professional name, Pearl Younger, she showed it all nightly at the Pea Green House in Fort Smith, a gorgeous whorehouse celebrated far and wide as The Pride and Joy of the Great American Southwest.