I rowed east up Lost Man’s River and then north toward home. The tide was against us and the humid air too light for the skiff ’s sail. With my last strength, exhaling deep breaths to drive the iron smell of blood out of my lungs, I hurled my shoulders into every stroke until my hands were blistered and my arms were burning and I almost passed out and even so I could not burn out such great despair. The journey through the string of bays back of the barrier islands took all day, and all this day, curled up in the stern, he watched me, neither asleep nor dead but in a kind of stupor. Two or three times his eyes slid toward the revolver butt protruding from my coat, which was folded on the stern seat. I believe he considered seizing it and slipping it beneath his shirt and finally did so, though whether his plan was to destroy his father or himself I could not know nor did I care. Either choice, the way I felt, might have been a mercy.
At Possum Key, the Frenchman’s cistern had been fouled by a drowned deer. We had no water. With the heat and exhaustion, I was almost blind, and now a blackness settled, the merciless knowledge of how cruelly I had dealt with him, of how I’d failed him. You have destroyed his life. Even if I could have persuaded him I had loved him all along and rediscovered him, that would never be good enough. I had done this brave wild boy a lifelong harm.
By the time I turned back toward the coast, down Chatham River, all I could think about was that brown jug. In the confused departure of the night before, I might have drained it to the bottom and left none. I was terrified.
I could never absolve myself of the great crime of ordering him to act against his every instinct; I had crushed him under a fatal burden that was rightly mine. I had cried out to him too late. Even at that moment, I think, I had been aware that the murder of Rob’s spirit would remain the most heinous of my sins, so dreadful I would never banish it, despite all efforts to pretend that Lost Man’s Key was an evil hallucination from which one day I might awaken.
Rob would not look at me. He could scarcely climb out of the boat. “Come when you’re ready,” I said. I did not take the pistol away from him. I rushed inside and whimpered in relief that my jug still had a slosh in it.
Josie and the child were gone. I guessed that Tant had come in this morning and taken them to safety at Caxambas. They had left a half-cooked haunch of venison behind.
I ran to my fields and set fire to the cane, for we would have to leave before first light. The fire and my running figure frightened Erskine when he came in with the Gladiator toward evening. We ate cold deer meat and I drank and ranted until he went out to piss under the stars. When he came back, he was so scared he could scarcely speak. The schooner was missing, and Rob, too. While we talked, he must have slipped her lines, let her drift away downriver.
I felt it coming and I could not stop it: with every panting breath my outrage grew. All that sentimental maundering about my son, and look! The fool had run off with my ship just when we had a chance to mend things-mend things? Sonborn and I? On this dark day? Having left two bloody dead at Lost Man’s Key? Have you gone mad, then? Are you going mad? Rage, confusion, fear, love, hate, despair-I felt all these at full force all at once, but who was feeling and toward whom?
Horribly thwarted, I went shouting through the house. I’d never had the chance to tell him that I had not meant them to die and that what had happened was my responsibility, not his. Tell him my feelings. Let him know he was forgiven-what are you saying? Forgiven for what? Fuck your forgiveness! It was not his fault!
I’d had no chance, rather, to beg his forgiveness, to assure him I’d do everything possible to protect him. Unable to speak to him, to seize him, shake him, take him in my arms-that, too!-I felt dangerously stifled. I would have embraced Rob, squeezed his father’s love into his bone and marrow, so fervently that never again would he doubt my feelings. And I would bless him, I would kiss him on the forehead.
Yes. I would kiss him on the forehead. I would kiss him, my begotten son, born of the writhe of Charlie dying, saved on that black September day from drowning in her blood…
I found no relief. The jug was empty and the son I had failed was gone.
I took off in the sailing skiff into the river dark, navigating by thin starshine and the wall of trees. By daybreak, I was well offshore, bound for Key West, where Rob’s uncle Lee Collins worked in a shipping office. In my night madness, I had left behind my hat and brought no water, and in late afternoon, when a coasting vessel took me in tow south of Cape Sable, I was sunparched, raving. I no longer recall what I kept yelling, I only know those yells scared hell out of that crew, which was very glad to cast me loose inside the Northwest Channel.
• • •
With Lee Collins’s help, my son had shipped out on a New York freighter but not before using my schooner as collateral against a loan from this hostile kinsman I had not seen since that day in Fort White when I took Rob away and left for Oklahoma. I accused Collins of exploiting his nephew with some scheme to broker my stolen vessel at an easy profit; that was my excuse to knock him down in front of the new bank on Duval Street where he’d imagined that it might be safe to meet me.
From the look Collins gave me as he picked himself up off the cobbles, I feared Rob might have told this man too much. “All right,” I said, “how much do you intend to make me pay for my own schooner?” “Two hundred dollars,” Collins said quietly, pulling out a receipt from Rob in that amount. I snatched that paper, tore it up, before counting out his dollars. “How about my revolver?” I said.
“You’ll have to ask your son about your revolver,” he said, coldly, defiantly, from which I knew he knew something. I did not dare challenge him.
“You deserve to be jailed for brokering stolen ships,” I told him to save face. “If you weren’t Charlie’s brother, I would get the law on you.” And Lee Collins said, “Edgar? I would not go near the law if I were you.”
We stood a moment, some distance apart. “I am sorry I assulted you,” I said. “I was worried and upset. I just hope my son is going to be all right.” Lee Collins considered me in disbelief. “Sonborn, you mean? You’re crazier’n hell, you know that, Edgar?” And he walked away.
Winky Atwell had spread the tale of my dispute with Tuckers, as I learned from Dick Sawyer when I stopped by Eddie’s Bar for a badly needed constitutional. I wanted to pay a call on Winky but Sawyer advised me to leave town before the sheriff sent his deputy around to ask some questions.
“About what?” I challenged him loudly so that anyone who’d heard the rumors would know that Ed Watson had nothing to hide. But in a little while, Deputy Till showed up. I followed him outside. Clarence warned me that the sheriff was still looking for a way to get me extradited back to Arkansas. “Better sail tonight,” he said.
• • •
The day after I left Key West, Earl Harden arrived with the report that he and his brothers and Henry Short had found the Tuckers’ bodies. The Hamiltons on Lost Man’s Beach had heard two shots and later some trapper had seen Watson in his skiff headed upriver; he reported that Watson was alone. Earl did his best to hang it all on Watson but he had no evidence besides his own opinion. Until things cooled down, however, that one opinion might suffice to get me lynched: I decided to head north for a year or two. My friend Will Cox had written recently to say that local folks had mostly forgiven E. J. Watson for that Lem Collins business. Will had grown up in Lake City with the new sheriff, a man named Purvis, who promised to be understanding if Will’s friend decided to return.
With some misgivings, I arranged to leave the Bend in charge of a man named Green Waller. He was a drinker but he knew his hogs and could be depended on to stay where he was safe, since he was wanted on three counts of hog theft in Lee County. As for companionship, those pink-assed shoats would probably see him through. Erskine ran me north. By now he’d heard the rumors and was silent and uneasy. I told him he could use the schooner if he helped out at the Bend when a ship was needed to bring in supplies or field hands for the harvest, or pick up my syrup in late winter for delivery to the wholesalers at Tampa Bay.
At Caxambas, Tant was nowhere to be found. His sister Josie said he’d heard about those Tuckers and would never work for me again-her way of conveying her own moral disapproval-but called softly as I went away that she would always love me. Within the week, Sheriff Knight and his deputies would raid the Bend, where Green Waller, in his official capacity as plantation manager, informed him that Mr. E. J. Watson was no longer in residence at this address, being absent on business, whereabouts unknown.