In the next days, inviting his guest along on research visits to Fort White, Fort Myers, perhaps Chatham Bend, Lucius was taken aback by the vehemence of Arbie’s refusal. “To hell with that damned place!” he yelled in regard to Chatham Bend. “Burn it to the ground, burn that damned stain out!” When Lucius stared at him, he yelled some more. “Don’t look at me! Rob told me about that bloodstain on the floor-black blood, he told me! Said the only way to get it out was burn it out!”
Arbie had tried to dissuade Lucius from making these research expeditions, but in the end, he decided to go along. Was this curiosity about his Collins kinsmen in Fort White or real interest in his new role as researcher? Unwillingness to be left behind on a remote salt creek or-conceivably-the fun of his host’s company? For even their bickering and hard teasing was good fun. Lucius concluded it was all of these. “Free food,” grumped Arbie.
Driving north to Lake City, where Columbia County records might be found, Arbie picked through Lucius’s research notes, fuming crossly over phrases. Flicking the pages with nicotined fingers, he rolled his eyes and whistled in derision-to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus orchards and broad cattle country that replaced the subtropical growth of the lower peninsula at the Peace River.
“ ‘E. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the most ambitious and innovative farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands’-that’s what he’s known for?” Arbie slapped the notes down on his knees. His eyes glittered and his tongue flew, hell-bent on outrage. His long black hair and rakish sideburns with their dangerous swerve toward the corners of his mouth gave this taut, irascible man the wild aspect of a peregrine, Lucius noticed. At the same time, he was aware of something brittle, something fractured; he was careful not to feed the instability that flickered like heat lightning in Collins’s eyes.
Perversely then-unwillingly amused by his own indignation-Arbie let a boyish smile suffuse his face, but when Lucius smiled with him, he scowled at once, as if his privacy had been invaded. “L. Watson Collins, P-H-D!” he jeered, fending off any sign of his host’s affection. Behind his abrasiveness, Lucius guessed, was self-dislike, or even detestation of a man who, by his own description, was nothing but “a damn-fool drunk and lifelong drifter.” From the deep pallor, wary eyes, and side-of-the-mouth speech, Lucius was coming to suspect that a good part of Arbie’s life had been spent in prison, which might explain why he had holed up for so long at Gator Hook.
“If this new Everglades park comes through,” Lucius mused, “our attorney Watt Dyer-”
“Watson Dyer? What’s that guy want with you?”
“You know him?”
“Speck caretakes for him at Chatham Bend. Speck can tell you all about that skunk. Big real estate lawyer, made a killing on the land boom. Represents the bunch that’s trying to stop that park.”
“Can’t be. Not if he’s trying to help the Watson claim.”
“Probably working both sides of the street like all the rest of ’em.”
“Don’t you trust anybody? Dyer thinks we might even petition for maintenance of the Watson place as a historic monument.”
Arbie stiffened like a dog on point, and his burnsides fairly bristled. “Historic monument? How about a murder monument? First monument to bloody murder in the whole U.S. and A.! Massacre museum! Gobbet bar! Nice ketchup specialties! Red rubber skeletons!” Unable to maintain the huff and pomp of indignation, Arbie hooted, but within moments he was scowling again. “You really hope to make that house a monument to Pioneer Ed? That’s already a monument to dark and bloody deeds? Dammit, I’m not joking!” He was pointing his finger into Lucius’s face. “Have you ever seen somebody murdered? And heard it, oh my God, and smelled it? It’s terrible and scary. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t. That’s why you can write about a killer as some kind of hero.”
That German soldier with his pants down. Yes, I have seen somebody murdered. Yes. I murdered him.
Arbie had tossed the notes onto the dashboard. Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a loose page wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased his paper down as Arbie poked his head out. “You’re twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! I know how much you loved him, Lucius, and I’m sorry, but there’s no way you can write your way around a murderer!”
Out of breath, Lucius got back behind the wheel. “Don’t toss my work around like that, all right?”
That Arbie had witnessed violent death was plain, yet Lucius did not feel he could question him about his past, not yet. Already this tightly wound man had turned away from him, taking refuge in a few loose notes on Lucius’s discussions with the attorney. “By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed,” he said, “folks’ll roll their eyes to the high heavens thanking their Merciful Redeemer for that kindly farmer whose magical seed cane put our sovereign state of Florida where she’s at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent all their mean tales about Bloody Ed. So maybe Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol’ Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First U.S. president to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol’ redneck breed that made this country great!”
They spent that evening at a tourist camp on the Withlacoochee. While Arbie slept off his long day, Lucius drank his bourbon in the shadow of the porch, contemplating the reflections of the giant cypress in the still moon water of the swamp. The gallinule’s eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as quintessentially in place as the lichens and shelf fungi fastened to the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead father-pale saplings yearning for the light twisting up and around the fallen tree, drawing last minerals from the punky wood and straining toward the sun even as the huge log crumbles in a feast for beetles.
From bare spring twilight came the ringing call of a Carolina wren, and the urgency of its existence on the earth filled him with restlessness. He could not dispel, or not entirely, Arbie’s denunciations of his father nor his dread that if those charges were correct, he had wandered far from his own life in a useless search for vindication of a man whose reputation was beyond redemption.
“Morbidly obsessive”-that’s what Eddie called him. Was it obsession because his father’s life enthralled him far more than his own? The ongoing search for the “truth” of E. J. Watson that provided a dim purpose to his days-was that to be his recompense for a life of solitude and slow diminishment? With the death last year of Mr. Summerlin, he had thought with longing about young Widow Nell: would she ever be open to him again? Would he always be too late?
The scent of charcoal in his whiskey evoked the warm and woody smells of Papa’s fine cigars. Rueful, he toasted the great emptiness and silence all around. Papa? I miss you,
Startled by those words spoken aloud, feeling himself observed, Lucius turned to confront the scowling visage in the cabin window. Arbie Collins had watched him talking to himself, watched him raise his empty glass to the black moon mirrors.