That ruined winter of 1910-1911, Lucius Watson worked as a fishing and hunting guide out of Fort Myers, serving Yankee sportsmen and business associates of Walter Langford. As a skilled boatman, fisherman, and hunter, he was well qualified, but he was so quiet as he went about his work that his brother-in-law received complaints about his daunting silence. Try as he would to be “one of the boys,” he remained hobbled by melancholy and introspection. Even his humor, once so cheerful, had turned cryptic and laconic, to the point where he was thought unsociable-the worst of defects in a sportsmen’s guide.
In the end, Lucius had heeded his family’s pleas and his friend Hoad’s solemn warnings at the burial to stay away from Chokoloskee Bay, where local emotions were a volatile bad mix of guilt and fear and where the appearance of a Watson son with a reputation as an expert shot would be asking for serious trouble. Though Lucius understood this well enough, he felt, in addition to his grief, unbearably ashamed that Papa’s murderers had never been held accountable by his grown sons.
Alienated from his brother Eddie, Lucius longed for Rob’s advice in deciding how to deal with their father’s killers. Unlike Eddie and Carrie, Lucius had lived with Rob at Chatham Bend, and having been closer to his hair-trigger half brother than anyone in the family, he was desperate to know why he had run away after the Tucker deaths in 1901-had he participated, then?-and what had ever become of him. Yet over the years, on the few occasions he had dared inquire, his father had met him not with anger or evasion but something worse, something strange and scary, a hard obdurate silence, as if Rob’s name had never been mentioned at all.
In early spring, unable to rest, Lucius set off on a vain search for his brother, traveling north to Columbia County in the hope that Rob might have been in touch with Granny Ellen Watson and their Collins cousins. As it turned out, Granny Ellen had died a few months before her son, and Aunt Minnie Collins, afflicted by a morbid condition known as “American nervousness,” had been sheltered from the family scandal and sequestered from her own life by morphine addiction and premature senescence: she could scarcely recall who this young man was, far less what he might want of her. Like one rudely awakened, on the point of tears, the Widow Collins could not deal with an intense intruder who brought only confusion to her household in what would turn out to be the last year of her life.
As for her children, they scarcely recalled this Cousin Lucius who had lived among them briefly long ago when all were little. Sympathetic at first, they became uncomfortable when queried about his father’s life here in Fort White. Disgraced in their rural community by Uncle Edgar, they reminded Lucius of the family code of silence agreed upon with Cousin Ed before he returned to Fort Myers.
“But he was acquitted!” Lucius protested. “He was found innocent!”
The Collins brothers had loved lively Uncle Edgar, they acknowledged, but they would never be persuaded he was innocent. Willie Collins called from the train platform, “Y’all come back and see us, Cousin Lucius!” Though this farewell invitation was meant kindly, he knew it was not really meant at all.
While in Fort White, Lucius had learned the whereabouts of his father’s widow, who had gone to live near her sister Lola in the Panhandle. Edna Watson was close to Lucius’s age, they had been dear friends at Chatham, and he looked forward to a visit with his little half sisters Ruth Ellen and Amy and their roly-poly brother, christened Addison Watson after Granny Ellen’s family in South Carolina. But Ruth Ellen was still terrified by the din and violence of that October dusk, which Little Ad, unluckily, had witnessed, and even Amy, only five months old when her father died, struck Lucius as pensive and withdrawn.
As for his young stepmother, she was friendly and very nervous; he had dragged unwelcome memories to her door. “Mr. Watson is a closed chapter in that poor girl’s life,” her sister warned him, gently pressing him to leave. At the railroad station, Lola informed him that Kate Edna would soon marry Herkimer Burdett, her childhood sweetheart, who had offered to give his name to her three little ones.