Lucius had first laid eyes on Nell in early 1903, not long after his father, passing through Fort Myers on his flight north, hired her parents to manage Chatham in his absence. Fred Dyer was handsome, black curly locks and wiry, with too much energy for his own good. Though acting as foreman, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building a new cistern and the boat shed and the small cabin for his family a hundred yards downriver that a few years later would be occupied by Miss Hannah Smith and the hog fancier Green Waller. Fred’s wife was Sybil and they had two children, a secretive, sullen ten-year-old named Watt, or “Wattie,” who lived with relatives in Fort Myers, disliked Chatham and only visited on school holidays, and a sprightly five-year-old named Nell whose bowl haircut, trimmed high over the ears to deter fleas, was permitted to fountain on top, then fall over her face, half blinding her. Nell wore odd garments sewn by Sybil from checkered flour sacks and toddled around on tubular small legs lacking visible knees.
The occasional clear day with wind was what Sybil called “the Mosquito Sabbath,” when those demons rested and she walked out in the sun and played along the river with her little daughter. Those bugs were God’s Own Malediction, sighed Mis Sybil. Her little girl’s nostrils were black with oily smoke from the kerosene rags burned in the smudge pots, and she had to rig netting to Nell’s bonnet and wrap old newsprint around her legs every time the child went outdoors to the privy: in wet weather, the ink came off the paper and turned her legs a dark bruised blue. Day in, day out, they remained shut up indoors, which in those dark months was damp and stifling, with air so heavy that the lungs grew weary hauling it in. No child was allowed out of doors at night because of bugs or for fear of bears or panthers, not to mention the cottonmouth moccasins that collected on the mound in time of flood. Everyone used chamber pots-“chambers,” the child called them.
In those first years of the new century when his boss was mostly in Columbia County, the new foreman often accompanied Erskine Thompson on the Watson schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for dry goods, hardware, and materials. According to Erskine, Dyer prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he could handle and running up debts that harmed the Island Syrup Corporation’s reputation. He persisted in these reckless habits even after his employer had returned from northern Florida.
Sybil Dyer made most of their clothes. She was fair-haired, rather delicate, and in E. J. Watson’s fond opinion, “pretty as a primrose.” As a widower, he had been lonely, and around Sybil, this hard-minded man, chuckling and blushing, would turn warm and soft as buttered hominy. In quest of her good opinion, the heretofore godless Papa held Bible readings every Sunday morning, leading his makeshift and indifferent congregation in spirited renditions of “Jesus Loves Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “The Little Brown Church in the Dell.”
As time went on, especially when drinking, Papa would confide in the foreman’s wife the saga of his shadowed childhood and the loss of the family plantation in Clouds Creek, South Carolina. Inevitably his unsophisticated seamstress would conclude that she alone was privy to the heart of Planter Watson, so generous and kind despite his ill repute; doubtless she imagined, like so many, that the love of a good woman could heal his soul and redeem his sinful ways.
Years later, it occurred to Lucius that while Papa might shout disgustedly when his foreman passed out or turned up late on the job, he actually encouraged Dyer’s absences and lapses, the better to remove him from the path of conquest. Even when Fred was present, Papa acted possessive about Sybil and enjoyed teasing her husband, and Dyer had laughed along too loudly because, for all his lip and strut, he was afraid. In his coast travels, the foreman had heard tales concerning the young Key Westers killed at Lost Man’s Key, and in the summer of 1905, when the Audubon warden was murdered at Flamingo, his nerve succumbed to the false rumor that Ed Watson had killed Guy Bradley in a plume dispute. The Dyer family had departed on the next mail boat, and the only one Lucius truly missed was the child Nell.
Except for a brief encounter at his father’s burial, Lucius did not see Nell again for years: she was fourteen by the time he came across her next in a Sunday crowd on the Fort Myers pier. Feeling compelled to turn around, he found her watching him. The girl was still dressed artlessly, almost randomly, with only a slight modification of that haircut (it no longer looked clownish, merely quirky), yet her appearance startled him, like a figure emerged from a dream upon awaking and beheld in sunlight and fresh air for the first time.
Though the day was cloudy, the girl’s face shone like a wild lily in a sunshine between rains. He saw in the first instant that this face had been dear to him forever, she had always touched him, stirring happiness. In that instant, for want of words, he longed to kiss the freshness of her teeth and lips, but since this was unthinkable in public, he teased her about how peculiarly pretty she’d become-“ ‘Peculiar’ is right!” she laughed. Then they fell quiet, searching each other’s gaze, smiling and smiling, until simultaneously they looked down, putting away their delightful secret without a word. At Dancy’s Candy Stand, Mr. Lucius H. Watson treated Miss N. Dyer to the chocolate ice cream that she’d been about to pay for out of her clutched cigar box of old pennies.
They perched together on the pier end, swinging their shoes over the current, recalling Chatham. The tar and rope smells of the splintery dock timbers brought back fine memories of the sailing schooners and the southward voyage on the Gladiator. She offered a turn at licking her ice cream cone. She said, “I have missed you.” In that moment, chocolate mouth and all, the girl struck him as delightful in her Nell-ness, perfect and complete just as she was. In his inexperience, undone by strange emotions, he had not yet recognized first love. The following day when they met again and wandered along the river holding hands, Nell swung their arms up toward the sun as a way of working off her happy tumult and high spirits, summoning up a disgraceful twitch in her companion’s trousers.
By her own account, Nell had wept for weeks after her family left Chatham, so heartsick had she been for her lost Lucius. A year later, after her mother died, she would confide that Sybil Dyer had sobbed without restraint when the news reached Fort Myers of his father’s death. It seemed that Mr. Edgar Watson had declared his love for his sweet seamstress, and yes! she, Sybil, had loved him in return! Mr. Edgar Watson had the most glorious blue eyes she ever saw! Recounting this, Nell laughed affectionately at her simple-hearted parent. And there was more. Increasingly over the years, despite his black hair and pasty skin, her brother Watt had reminded Fred Dyer of E. J. Watson, until finally he’d confronted his wife on the evidence of her unseemly grief at the time of Watson’s death. Accusing him of being drunk, she expressed hurt and astonishment that her husband dared abuse her after all his well-known infidelities.
Nonetheless, his suspicions rose from day to day, and his voice, too, and in the end, driven to distraction by his hounding, her mother abruptly conceded, out of her outrage and exhaustion, that in the early nineties, a stranger named Watson, arriving in Fort Myers after a journey on horseback to southern Florida from Arkansas by way of South Carolina, might have taken advantage of an unwary young woman kneeling before him while painstakingly engaged in taking pant leg measurements for his new suit.
Nell parodied the parental exchange to make it less embarrassing to relate: her ear for her parents’ accents was so good that he had to struggle not to laugh aloud at this distressing tale-
“Weren’t that right before you signed me up to marry, woman? My lands, Frederick, Mr. Dyer dear, I suppose it was! And weren’t that why you was in such a rush after tellin me no for close onto a year? Well, I don’t think-Never mind thinkin! Answer me! Weren’t that damned kid already in the oven when we wed? I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Frederick-Jesus Christ! You got the guts to stand there and admit this? My lands, Mr. Dyer! No need to raise your fist and scare these children-Answer me!”
It was finally agreed that E. J. Watson might have been Watt’s parent and furthermore that he and Sybil had renewed acquaintance, so to speak, after Mr. Watson, hearing that her husband was out of work, offered employment at Chatham Bend a few years later. Was it her fault that one afternoon when Frederick was absent as usual and her children off in the skiff somewhere with Lucius, Mr. Watson had forced his way into Mr. Dyer’s cabin-
“Forced his way into Dyer’s wife, ain’t that it?” Dyer raged. “How come you never told your own damn husband you was raped?!” And she cried out, “For the same reason you didn’t want to know! You would have had to act and he might have killed you! “
In the end, unconsoled by moonshine, her father had collapsed across the table, weeping in shame and rage, unable to decide whether his wife had confessed the truth or was exacting some perverse revenge for all his gadding. With no strong brain but keen instincts for survival, Sybil had emerged as the injured party: indeed, she had transcended the entire matter, saying, “Mr. Dyer, let us never speak of this again.”
“My God,” Lucius said in awe.
For some months, Nell’s parents chewed on their hard situation. But one day her father grew so incensed at the sight of surly Watt that he drove him barefoot from the cabin, throwing his boots after him. Discovering this too late to call Walt back, her mother, whose dressmaking paid the rent, ordered her husband to pack up and be gone. He departed penniless, fatally bitter, and was not invited to return. In the years since, Nell’s unfortunate father would swallow his pride down with his liquor and rant about his wife’s affair in the saloons: “No, no, boys, weren’t no damn rape about it! If it were rape like the way she claimed, how come she never used the gun he give her to run him off when he was drinkin? How come that bitch give her bastrid kid that name? Nosir, boys, I would of kilt that sonofabitch if them Chuckerluskee fellers hadn’t beat me to it!”
It was true that in his all-embracing way, Papa had been courtly with the ladies, unusually attentive and considerate, and that he had bought Sybil that small, silver revolver as a protection against his drunken self, though of course this gesture had been drunken, too. But in a man so wrong-headed when rampant, love alone might not have deterred him from a tender rape. When Ed Watson drank, the whole coast agreed, he was a buccaneer and an unholy terror. At the palm-thatch whore shack on Black Betsy Key, south of Flamingo, he’d once declaimed in festive spirit, “When I fuck ’em, they stay fucked!” Their “Jack” took all he wanted when he wanted and the way he wanted, too, his Caxambas ladies would attest, with shy smiles that looked oddly askew.
Lucius’s river walk with the Dyer girl had been observed, Eddie complained that evening, creating gossip that their family could ill afford at such a time. “Oh Lord, Eddie! She’s a schoolgirl! Scarcely fourteen!” Lucius was offended, knowing that Eddie was snobbish about Nell because her mother was the seamstress and the father a disintegrating drunk and the brother Watt a runaway to God knows where. Carrie would agree, he knew, that Eddie was exaggerating, but she only snapped crossly with a glance at Walter, “At fourteen I’d been married for a year.”
One day in 1917, Lucius vanished without warning. Fifteen months would pass before his family learned that he had enlisted in the Army and gone off to the Great War in Europe. He wrote to no one, not his sister, not his lovelorn Nell.
Carrie Langford invited Nell to tea at the Royal Palm Yacht Club. “He was always our best hope for this family,” Carrie mourned, “and now we’ve lost him.” Very upset, she commanded Nell to banish any notion of a future with a man who could only be counted on to hurt the ones who loved him most. “You’ve lost him, too, so accept that, girl, and get on with your life. Because if that fool doesn’t get himself shot over in France, he’ll find some way to get the job done here at home, even if he has to shoot himself to do it.” She took Nell in her arms. “I don’t mean that, sweetheart. I say those hard things to shield myself, in case.”
Only Lucius despised Lucius, Nell observed: the contempt he saw in the eyes of others was only the reflection of his poor opinion of himself.