Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen Page B

urn, they drank in silence, in the play of light and water from the creek. That this cheap canister contained all that was left of handsome Rob made Lucius melancholy. The family would have to be notified, but who would care? “Rob came to find me years ago but I never saw him,” he said finally. “I haven’t laid eyes on him since I was eleven.”
    â€œYou might not care to lay eyes on what’s in here.” The old man picked up the urn and turned it in his hands, and a mean grimace crossed his face. “Cause it don’t look like much.” Watching Lucius, he shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the container and shook it like a cocktail shaker. “Hear him rattlin in there? Folks talk about ashes, but there’s no ashes, it’s justchunks and bits of old brown bone, like dog crackers.” He shook the urn again, to prove it.
    â€œDon’t do that, damn it!”
    Lucius took the urn from the old man and returned it to the table, and Arbie laughed. “Rob doesn’t care,” he said.
    â€œWell, I care. It’s disrespectful.”
    â€œDisrespectful.” Arbie shrugged, already thinking about something else. “One of these days, you can carry that thing north to Columbia County, see if there’s any room for him up that way.” He cocked his head. “I was thinking we could maybe go together.”

    That evening, with a grin and flourish, Arbie produced a letter clipped from the Florida History page of
The Miami Herald
. Its author, he said, was D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state,” who had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. Concluding some strenuous throat hydraulics with a salutary spit, the old man launched forth on a dramatic reading, but within a few lines, he gave this up and turned the trembling paper over to Lucius.
    He inherited his savage nature from his father, who was widely known as a fighter. In one of his many fights he was given a knife wound that almost encircled one eye, and was known thereafter as Ring-Eye Lige Watson. At one time he was a warden at the state penitentiary.
    He married and two children were born to them, Edgar and Minnie. The woman had to leave Watson on account of his brutality and dissolute habits. She moved to Columbia County, Florida, where she had relatives.
    Gleeful, Arbie watched his face. “Probably stuff like that is of no interest to serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.”
    Dr. Herlong went on to describe Edgar Watson’s arrest for murder in the Fort White region, and Lucius read more and more slowly as he went along. Arbie was waiting for him when he raised his eyes.
    â€œWe heading for Columbia County, Professor?”
    Lucius nodded. “You think Herlong has these details right? Like ‘Ring-Eye Lige’?” Just saying that name aloud made him laugh in pleased astonishment.What he held in his hand was his first real clue to his father’s early years, which Papa had rarely mentioned. Since the drunken Ring-Eye, home from war, had been abusive to his wife, it seemed quite reasonable to suppose that he’d beaten his children, too.
    Because Old Man Collins’s bias against Watson seemed so rancorous and powerful, the historian evoked the tradition of violence in which young Edgar Watson had been raised in South Carolina. According to his research for the biography, the Cherokee Wars preceding the first settlement had given way to a wild anarchy imposed upon the countryside by marauding highwaymen and outlaws, followed by the bloodiest, most bitter fighting of the Revolutionary War, with neighbor against neighbor in a dark and gruesome civil strife of a ferocity unmatched in the nation’s history. The sons of these intemperate colonials would be noted for their headlong participation in the War of 1812, then the Mexican War, while