Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Yes, in his way-”

“You doubt that? You don’t mean what you say here?” He snapped open a page and read aloud: ‘The great majority of these Watson tales are rumors unsupported by real evidence.’ In all your interviews, all your research, you never learned of a single witness to even one of his alleged murders, isn’t that correct?”

“All true. But it’s not so simple-” Lucius stopped because Arbie had come back. “Hell yes, there was a witness,” he told Dyer. “His own son.”

Dyer watched Arbie produce a pint bottle and dose two water glasses under the table. “I understand from the Professor’s notes,” he began quietly, “that you claim to have encountered Robert B. Watson at Key West when Robert B. Watson turned up there with his father’s schooner?” He paused until Arbie assented. “And you now assert that Robert Watson told you some wild story about how his father murdered somebody named Tucker?”

“Wild story? Hell, no-”

“And you further assert that you aided and abetted Robert B. Watson in the illegal sale of his father’s stolen ship and his flight from Key West on a steamer?” Dyer fired his questions at increasing speed, maintaining a dangerous, neutral tone. “Is that your story, sir?”

Lucius protested, “Hold on, Dyer-”

“Is that or is that not your story? Yes or no?”

“You calling me a liar, mister?”

“Not yet.” Dyer wrote some notes. “And after Robert B. Watson had escaped, you spread his wild tale about the alleged murder of these Tucker people. Is that correct?”

Arbie stood up in disgust and left the room.

“Why all this lawyerly bullying?” Lucius demanded. “What reason do you have to doubt his story?”

“None.” Dyer squashed out his cigar. “I have no reason to accept it, either. Anyway, hearsay evidence is worthless. So if, as you say, there were no known witnesses to the other alleged killings, then it’s plausible that E. J. Watson never killed any body, isn’t that true?”

Though Lucius had made this argument himself, hearing it from this man’s mouth seemed to cast doubt on it. “It’s conceivable, I guess.”

“It’s conceivable, you guess. Well, that is how we shall argue if the Park Service maintains that E. J. Watson’s land claim should be forfeit or invalid because of a criminal record or whatever. And I hope that no Watson nor any Watson relative”-he peered at the door through which Arbie had gone-“will contest our argument. Should that occur,” he warned after a pause, cementing his points as neatly and firmly as bricks, “then the Watson house which was to stand as a monument to your father’s pioneering achievement will receive no further protection from the courts and will almost certainly be condemned and destroyed.”

Dyer spread his napkin as his food arrived. “I have a caretaker watching the place. I’ll file for an injunction against its destruction first thing next week,” he said, over a raised forkful of golden chicken. He spoke no more until he had finished eating, after which he locked his briefcase and stood up, leaving Lucius to pay the bill. He was still “on the road,” he said, “taking care of business,” but in two days he’d be headed home.

“Where the heart is,” Lucius said, unable to imagine a Mrs. Dyer and the kiddies.

“Most good Americans have faith in that,” the attorney warned him. However, it was true that he had no wife or children. He didn’t lead that sort of life, he said.

Lucius found Arbie hunched near comatose in the car, in his lap his small flask of corn whiskey: Okefenokee Moon 100 Proof. Guaranteed Less Than Thirty Days of Age. A rivulet of saliva, descending from a cleft in his grizzled chin, darkened his neckerchief. Lucius helped himself to a jolt of Arbie’s rotgut, then urged him erect and guided him to their room. “ ‘Routine background check!’ ” Arbie bitched as he fell back on the bed. “ ‘Participating individuals!’ ” When Lucius suggested that Dyer might be bluffing, Arbie squinted at him. “You think that sonofabitch is bluffing?” And Lucius said, “No, I don’t.”

“He’s bad news,” said Arbie. “Stay away from him.”

Next morning, Arbie lay so still in bed that Lucius was afraid to awaken him in case he couldn’t: he was loath to touch him. His neck was arched and the parched mouth stretched too wide; his bloodless lips were dry on dry small teeth. With his dry hair, he looked as flat and scanty as a run-over rabbit on a summer highway.

The cadaver sucked up breath and coughed. One eye sagged open, contemplating Lucius, as a spavined hand went palpitating toward the cigarette pack on the bedside table. Lighting up, he growled in phlegmy tones that he had better things to do than waste a day with some gabby old-timer.

New Bethel Church, just off the main road on the way south, had been “built of heart pine back in 1854 and was solid as ever,” said the old sexton in the churchyard gate, shielding his eyes to admire this house of God in the fresh morning light. “Watson? Was she a Collins? Come in here back in the eighties?” He pointed. “You’ll find her over yonder.”

Lucius hunted the old rows until a flit of sparrows drew his eye to a lone juniper; half hidden by that tree was a tilted headstone with eroded lettering crusted by black lichens. He knelt on the sparse grass to piece it out.

ANN MARY WATSON

WIFE OF E. A. WATSON

AND DAUGHTER OF

W. C. AND SARAH COLLINS

BORN APRIL 16, 1862

DIED AT HER HOME IN

COLUMBIA CO. FLORIDA

SEPTEMBER 13, 1879

Ann Mary, dead at seventeen on that unlucky thirteenth of September. Her headstone was a precious record, all the more so because particulars engraved in stone could be depended on. This one provided not only the name and dates of Papa’s first wife but the earliest record of his original initials Lucius had come across. That middle A was still appearing ten years later on Arbie’s court transcripts relating to Papa’s stay in the Indian Nations; subsequently he had changed it to J, presumably to obscure his identity as a fugitive.

Turning off the old Fort White road, Lucius followed Grover Kinard’s directions into low dust-filmed woods (“alive with redskins,” according to an 1838 report). At the specified address, he was shown inside by a bespectacled man attired in black trousers, cream-colored jacket, and open-collared shirt. Deacon Grover G. Kinard bade him no welcome and scarcely troubled to introduce him to his wife, a pretty-pink person sitting primly on the front room sofa in a bower of artificial flowers and silver-framed photos of smiling offspring seated with their own smiling offspring; she was listening to a sermon on her radio. “That there’s Oriole,” said the Deacon, passing by without a glance, and Oriole Kinard fluttered timid fingers at the visitor as her husband marched him into her shining kitchen. The churchman offered him no coffee, just sat him at the kitchen table while he hammered out on its linoleum just what was what.

“Yessir, I knew all them folks,” the Deacon said, drumming his fingers. “I’ll show you where Edgar Watson lived, tell you all about Coxes and Tolens and all the killing down in them old woods.” Kinard jerked his thumb in the direction of the little person on the other side of the pasteboard wall. “She ain’t a Cox exactly but she’s related,” her husband said. Over the churchly exhortations on her radio, Oriole protested, “No, I ain’t never! Leslie’s grandmother’s daddy was my granddaddy’s cousin, but I wouldn’t know that murdering devil if I bumped into him in church!”