One by one, from varied sources-cryptic gossip and sly woman talk, drunk blurtings-Lucius learned the names of every armed man present in that October dusk at Smallwood’s landing and in most cases the extent of his participation. New information gave him reason to eliminate a name or add another or simply refine the annotations that kept his list scrupulous and up-to-date. With its revisions and deletions, comments and qualifications, ever more intricate and complex, the thing took on a whole different significance, as what had begun as a kind of morbid game evolved into a kind of obsession.
Eventually the folded packet of lined yellow paper, damp from the salt air and humid climate, had gone so transparent at the creases from sweat and coffee spills and cooking grease and fish oil, so specked by rust, so flecked with bread crumbs and tobacco, that his neat small script all but disappeared and the list had to be replaced. The painstaking writing-out of a fresh copy was no chore; on the contrary, he welcomed it as a ceremony of renewal and a source of inspiration. As vital research for the suspended biography that might redeem his father’s name, the creation of the list somehow justified his return to the Islands; at the very least, it helped compensate for a wasted decade of inaction. So long as it continued to evolve, he saw no reason to give it up; so long as critical details were missing, so long as minor corrections might be made, it would never be finished. Not until much later would he face the fact that he had dreaded finishing the list because he questioned his ability to act on it, although he had known almost from the start that this was so. Any capacity he might have had for taking human life had ended in those days of mud and carnage on the Western Front.
And so, once again, he was overtaken by the dread that he had failed his father in some way, that he had betrayed the hickory breed of old-time Carolina Watsons who, according to Papa, would have risen in the very teeth of Christian morality and consequences to avenge their Celtic blood. His own vague alternative was confrontation-a succinct damnation (as he imagined it) uttered while staring deep into the eyes of each listed man, a stare long enough and cold enough to dispel the smallest doubt that Watson’s son knew the precise degree of his involvement. Each man would have to deal with the enigma of what this son might do in retribution; each man’s suspense and fear would be his punishment.
Though Lucius kept his list concealed, the time would come when he was shunned on Chokoloskee Bay. Toward the end of his first year in the Islands, rough warnings changed to threats. One twilight up in Lost Man’s River he heard the echo of a rifle shot that followed a bullet’s hornet whine across his bow. A stupid joke? Harassment? Something else? Glimpsing a skiff ’s worn blue paint through the mangrove branches on the point, he had suspected Crockett Daniels, known as Speck, a poacher and moonshiner who as a youth had been present in the dusk at Chokoloskee and was already a suspect on his list.
Lucius received word of Walter Langford’s death too late to reach Fort Myers for the funeral. When he turned up next day at his sister’s house, Carrie assured him she had understood his absence but it was plain she could not quite forgive him. “Nobody seriously expected you,” Eddie said sourly. With customary spite, he informed his younger brother that the president of the First National Bank had died of drink and liver failure, having neglected to provide properly for their sister.
Nell Dyer was present. They greeted and chatted painfully, hurried apart.
While Lucius was absent in Fort Myers, the Warrior was rammed and sunk at Everglade, where she had been tied up at the fish dock. Though shaken, he would not retreat, dreading the lurking danger less than what he saw as a crippled life of cowardice or weakness. The Storter trading post had been enlarged as a new lodge for sportsmen, and Hoad had moved to Naples; it was the Hardens-the last friends he could trust-who finally prevailed on him to leave the Islands; he headed south around Cape Sable to fish out of Flamingo until things cooled down.
Returning to Lost Man’s some months later, Lucius learned that in his absence, a stranger had come looking for him in a rented skiff, having rowed south twenty miles from Everglade. “Feller with straight black hair and a thin beard, spoke short and crusty,” Owen said. “Knew what he was doin in a boat and seemed to know this coast. Got too much sun and his hands was raw, all blistered up, but he was tough, never complained. I said, ‘You off a ship someplace?’ and he said, ‘No, I rowed from Everglade.’ I reckon that was far enough for a man whose hands ain’t callused up from pullin oars. ‘What can we do for ye?’ I said. From the start, we thought he looked some way familiar.
“This feller told us his name was John Tucker. Claimed to be Wally Tucker’s nephew, said he wanted to pay respects where his kinfolks was buried. I took him over to the Key, showed him where we buried ’em that day in 1901. He went all pale and sweaty, could not hide it. When he asked the whereabouts of Lucius Watson, we guessed he had a feud to settle, so I told him that the last we heard, Lucius Watson had left for parts unknown. That stranger give me a hard eye, very dissatisfied and cross. He said, ‘That’s what they told me in Chokoloskee, too.’ And I said, ‘Well, for once they told some truth.’ ”
“From his questions we figured he knew more than he should about the Tuckers, considering there weren’t no witnesses that could have told him,” Sarah said. “Finally it come to us why he looked familiar, beard or no beard. ‘John Tucker’ weren’t nobody else but E. J. Watson’s oldest, that wild Rob that run off to Key West, taking his schooner.”
Owen said, “He never believed our story that you went away. He seemed convinced that Island people, maybe us, might of killed his brother, hid the body in the mangroves. That’s why he left here angry and dissatisfied.”
“I wrapped his blisters in greasy rags before he rowed away, headed back north,” Sarah told Lucius. “Didn’t hardly say thanks.”
While in Flamingo, Lucius had decided to rid himself of his incriminating list. He cursed the hours had he wasted revising and refining it, down to the smallest detail, in his hunger to get closer to some “truth” that might free him from the past. Far from easing the old pain in his heart, its existence had become a burden and reproach, reminding him of the great folly of years wasted in self-exile-years that might have been spent in the company of Nell, raising pretty children, finishing his education and his books.
Though he knew the thing by heart and was sick of looking at it, he could not bring himself to burn so many years of work in a few moments-work that might eventually be used in the biography. To eliminate the risk of loss or discovery, he sent the list to Nell Dyer for safekeeping; in the same packet he included a note for Rob in the hope that his brother might turn up again. But in the course of changing households, Nell would misplace the packet, as she confessed in the same letter that brought word of her impending marriage to the senior Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was Lucius by her abandonment that he scarcely reacted to the news of the lost list.
At Lost Man’s, he resumed a hard sparse life as a commercial fisherman, and over time, the Island men got used to him, as talk died down and the list that nobody had ever seen reverted to vague rumor. Without hope of Nell, however, he had lost heart for Island life, yet had no other. Only an idiot would have assumed, he mourned, that despite his years of folly and neglect, his first love would wait in limbo while he solved his life so that they could travel on together into a golden future, having never aged.