Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

"You'll never know," Dick Sawyer said, and winked at Lucius, trying to curry favor. "Not if you want to leave him in one piece. Like ol' Ed here used to say, it's a lucky man who gets to his grave all in one piece."

I advised Doc that Lee County was now satisfied that the proximate cause of death had been determined. Sawyer laughed but the coroner reproved me with a doleful bark like a dog sicking up its bone. What lay before them on that sand, he mourned, was not a laughing matter. In a manner of speaking, you might say-Doc paused to rig a sort of loincloth, make the body decent-I think of this here thing as my own patient.

"Get the box," I told the diggers. Doc used his heel to wipe off his thin knives as the rest of us backed off a ways to get a breath.

The diggers hoisted up the carcass and set it in a strong pine box. They laid rags across their hands before they touched him, and no amount of shouting stopped their moans and prayers and yelps and nigger racket. Well, you couldn't blame 'em. Between the wounds and knife cuts, this hard-swollen red-gray-and-blue carcass looked more like some skinned animal than the dangerous man I had drunk with on the Falcon.

Sawyer said, "I been reading where they fill 'em full of lead out West, but I never thought I'd see that in south Florida."

"You talk too much," I said.

Lucius knelt before he fell. He touched his father's forehead with his finger. He said, "The Lord have mercy on you, Papa." He laid the lid and took the nails and hammer from Dick Sawyer and did his best to nail that stench in tight.

As Dick Sawyer would declare for years thereafter, Well, we moved him, that's God's truth. But any man goes ashore on Rabbit Key can get him a whiff of that ol' devil yet today!

OCTOBER 25, 1910. It's over now. I am exhausted, as if I had fled before this day for twenty years, breathless and despairing, filled with dread.

Dear Lord, I knew this day of woe must come, and now it's here. My heart is torn by a sharp pain, this awful ache of loss and sorrow, never to be assuaged here on this earth: His daughter could have done something and failed to do it. Instead she turned her own father away.

The agony is real, but is it grief?

Oh Mama, if only you might slip through that door to hug me, tell me what to think, because there is no one near me who can understand. In this life, Our Lord seems very far away, and so I open up my heart to you, knowing that you are nearer God, in prayer that you will hear me and forgive me, heal me, because you know that I loved Papa, too.

I'm glad, Mama. I grieve but I am glad. I repent but I am glad.

I'm glad, I'm glad! May God forgive me.

OCTOBER 27, 1910. "It's over, Carrie"-that's all Walter will say to comfort me.

It's for the best, says Eddie (who sounds as pompous, copying Walter, as Walter sounds when he copies Mr. Cole). I can't imagine what goes through Eddie's head. I love him dearly, and I grieve to see him so congested, but I long to kick him. As a boy he was so open to life, so filled with curiosity, but when he came back from north Florida, something had thickened. He seems curious about absolutely nothing. He talks too much, he drones, he blusters. He is conceited about his clerk's job at the courthouse though everyone knows it was arranged for him by Sheriff Tippins. He wears that public smile like a cheap necktie.

When I asked Eddie how he could commit to paper the lies told at the courthouse by those awful men, he said wearily, How are we to know which are the lies? And anyway, they are not awful men. They are merely men.

He is so worldly-wise I want to smack him. A job's a job and someone's got to do it-that's the kind of wearisome dull thing he says these days, shrugging philosophically. He's affecting a pipe, which doesn't suit him, only encourages him to weigh his words, which have no weight, so far as I can tell.

When Papa's name comes up, Eddie goes deaf, and he's been that way since he came back from Papa's trial. He has hardly spoken to Papa in two years. I asked him- begged him-Papa was innocent, wasn't he? Wasn't he, Eddie? And finally Eddie grumped, That's what the jury said. He refused to speak about it anymore.

Because of this unmentionable hurt we share, we are estranged. That's not poor Papa's fault, of course.

Eddie was living with Papa at Fort White when all that trouble happened back up north, but he won't talk to anyone about it, he calls it "a closed chapter" in his life. He won't discuss it even with poor Lucius, who seems less bitter about Papa's killers than about Papa's so-called friends at Chokoloskee, all those men who failed to intervene.

Even so, Lucius went to Eddie for the list of names of those men at the courthouse, and when Eddie refused him-he had that much sense!-they had an ugly argument in public! What can folks think of our poor ruined family! Eddie said he was concerned about his younger brother's safety, and besides it would be unethical for the deputy court clerk to reveal the names of witnesses. Lucius shouted that the deputy court clerk didn't care about his father, and wasn't "concerned" about one d____________________ thing except his stupid little title, which wasn't nearly as important as he thought it was!

To lose his head and shout that way is so unlike poor Lucius, who is taking Papa's death harder than anyone. Lucius spent most of his time at Chatham Bend after Papa's return, two years ago, and was friendly with those poor wretches who were killed. He stayed for weeks last summer with his friend Dick Moore, hunted and caught fish for the table, worked in the fields and on the boats, went on an excursion with his father to Key West-he refuses to believe that the jolly generous father he thought he knew was the evil murderer that people say. Lucius intends to go up to Fort White and learn the truth in that part of the country, and after that he will go back to the Islands, ask some questions. Lucius has already talked to someone who witnessed just what happened, he is making a list of the men and boys involved.

Winking at Walter, Eddie warned "dear baby brother" to "leave bad enough alone." In that bored voice of his, the phrase seemed disrespectful to our father, and Lucius jumped up and demanded that Eddie take that back or step outside!

Leave well enough alone is all I meant, said Eddie, winking again at Walter, who rattled his paper unhappily, pretending not to see. And Lucius said, What's well enough for you may not be well enough for me.

I saw our Eddie clench his fists, outraged by this impertinence. Eddie favors Papa, he is huskier than Lucius, who is lean and taller. But Eddie got himself under control, and shrugged, as if nothing his young brother might do could be taken seriously.

Walter walked Lucius out of doors and came back with worry in his eyes. "It's only his way of thrashing out his grief. He won't hurt anybody." When I snapped impatiently, "Can you imagine Lucius hurting anybody?" he said nothing. He sat down, picked at his paper, drove me crazy.

"Well, for pity's sake, what is it, Walter?"

"He better not go back down there hunting no names."

"Stop him, then. I don't want him to go back!"

Walter doesn't care to interfere in Watson family matters, never has and never will. He hid behind his paper. "That boy is just as stubborn as his daddy," his voice said. "There ain't nobody going to stop him."

"Isn't," I said.

"Isn't nobody going to stop him," Walter said before I snatched his paper from his hands. "If I know Lucius," he said gently, taking the paper back, "he'll be asking them hard questions the whole rest of his life."

OCTOBER 30, 1910. How changed is poor young Widow Watson from his girlish Kate brought here by Papa just four years ago! Miss Kate Edna Bethea, as I still think of her, lacked utterly our mama's elegance and education, but I saw at once her merry spirit and high bust and drayhorse haunches, her rosy prattle about farmyard animals back in Fort White-this young thing suited our vigorous papa better than Mama's indoor virtues ever had.