Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen Page A

headline and no substance. None was as interesting as the fact that this old man had made a lifelong hobby of Ed Watson.
    One coffee-stained packet of yellowed clippings slid from Lucius’s lap to the porch floor. Retrieving it, he recognized the top clipping in the packet, which had come from the official tourist guide to the state of Florida—ripped from a library copy, from the look of it. It described how the young widow Edna Watson, informed by her husband’s executioners that she might reclaim the cadaver by following the rope strung from its neck to a nearby tree, had inquired coldly, “Where is his gold watch?” That was certainly not poor Edna’s character, and anyway Papa had sold that watch to help pay off his legal debts, as Edna knew.
    Disgusted, he put the packet down, asking the old man how he had met Rob Watson. Arbie explained that he had helped his cousin Rob escape his father on a freighter out of Key West after E. J. Watson’s murder of those poor Tucker people back in 1901. He was the only relative, he said, whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch with till the day he died.
    â€œ
Alleged
murder of the Tuckers,” Lucius corrected him. “It was never proven. E. J. Watson was never even charged.”
    Arbie hurled his cigar butt at a swallow that was coursing for mosquitoes over the spartina grass along the creek. “L. Watson Fuckin Collins, Ph.D.!” he yelled. “Too bad poor Rob is not alive to hear his brother say something as bone stupid as that!” The old man was fairly shivering with fury. “Before you go to writing up this damn whitewash of yours, you better talk to the Harden men, talk to that black feller Henry Short, cause they were the ones who had to deal with the damned bodies!”
    Calmly, Lucius returned the subject to Rob Watson, who had ended up a hobo, Arbie told him. “Seems to me he was always on the road. Rob never had an address, had no bank account, never paid taxes in his life. Never had to, cause they had no record of him—he was never on the books!”
    For many years, Rob had worked as a “professional driver”—“the first professional in the U.S.A. to drive an auto more than twenty miles an hour.” Thanks to his road flair and big company limousine, Rob had been much in demand in the night liquor trade. He had finally been offered “a lucrative position in that industry.” In Prohibition, he became a trucker, and in later years, he operated an enormous mobile auto crusher in which he had traveled up and down the county roads all over the South, compacting car bodies and selling the product to small steel mills on small ruined rivers at the edges of the small cities of America.
    According to Arbie, Rob had died but a few years before, in the basement of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left strict instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had sent along his urn. Arbie pointed at the urn in the houseboat window. Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, the old man looked furious, and Lucius decided to let it go. “Rob never married?” he asked. “Never had children?”
    â€œNosir,” the old man muttered, yawning. “That was the only bad mistake Robert Watson never made.” Sneezing, he lifted his red foulard to wipe his bristly chin. “After Rob died, I wanted to carry him back home to Columbia County, but about that time my auto quit—that pink one in the weeds at Gator Hook?—so I never got around to it.” He measured Lucius. “I thought maybe we could go up there in yours.”
    They went inside. Lucius poured whiskey, and they toasted their meeting silently and drank, and he poured again. Ceremonious, he set the urn on a white cloth on the small table between them, placing beside it a pot of red geraniums, grown on his cabin roof. The old man observed this ritual with cold contempt.
    Considering the