father as other than a bold choleric man, abounding in energy and generosity, good humor and intelligence, more instinctive with crops and farm animals, work boats and tools, than any other man in all the Islands. Even today he felt haunted and constrained by that powerful human being he called Papa, the doomed man he had seen for the last time in September of 1910, waving somberly from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. But as his biographer, he understood that his task must be to set aside love and admiration and reconstitute a more objective figure, much as a paleontologist might re-create some ancient creature from scattered shards of bone, pieced together on a rickety armature of theory. Mistrusting the warp of his own memory, he hoped to collect the more critical fragments of the âtruthâ from the common ground in the testimonies of his subjectâs friends and enemies, retaining those which seemed consistent with the few known facts.
In the popular accounts (and there were very few others), the material was largely speculative as well as sparse. Most stories about Edgar Watson related to his last decade in southwest Florida, with which Lucius himself was already familiar. There was virtually no mention of South Carolina, where Papa had spent his boyhood and early youth, nor even of north Florida, where he would live well into early manhood, marry all three of his wives, and spend almost half of his entire life.
To judge from his own correspondence with the last Watsons in Clouds Creek, his fatherâs branch of that large Carolina clan was all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, the Collins cousins went knife-mouthed at the very mention of Uncle Edgar, and tracking down the last few scattered elders who might still hoard a few poor scraps of information was a poor alternative, since in Papaâs day, these hinterlands had been little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy and without the libraries and public records already available in less benighted regions. As in southwest Florida, much local lore, with its blood and grit and smells, had simply vanished.
The biographerâs difficulties were made worse by the immense false recordââthe Watson mythââand also by the failure to correct that record on the part of the subjectâs family and descendants, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character was surely one reason why his evil reputation had been so exaggerated. In the absence of family affirmation of that warmth and generosity for which E. J. Watson had been noted even among those who killed him, he had evolved into a kind of mythic monster. Yet as Luciusâs mother had observed not long before her death, âYour father scares them, not because he is a monster, but because he is a man.â
Long, long ago down the browning decades, in the sun of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw and smelled and laughed and listened, touched and tasted, ate and bred, and occupied earthly time and space with his getting and spending in the world. If his biographer could recover a true sense of his past, with its hope and longings, others might better understand who that grown man might have been who had known too much of privation, rage, and suffering, and had been destroyed.
Driving north to Columbia County, Arbie Collins picked through Luciusâs research notes, fuming crossly over certain phrases. Flicking the pages with a nicotined fingernail as yellow as a rat tooth, he coughed and rolled his eyes and whistled in derision, all to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus and broad cattle country as they drove along.
â âWe cannot make an innocent man out of a guilty one!â â Arbie declaimed, slapping Luciusâs notes down on his kneecaps. âWell,
In the popular accounts (and there were very few others), the material was largely speculative as well as sparse. Most stories about Edgar Watson related to his last decade in southwest Florida, with which Lucius himself was already familiar. There was virtually no mention of South Carolina, where Papa had spent his boyhood and early youth, nor even of north Florida, where he would live well into early manhood, marry all three of his wives, and spend almost half of his entire life.
To judge from his own correspondence with the last Watsons in Clouds Creek, his fatherâs branch of that large Carolina clan was all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, the Collins cousins went knife-mouthed at the very mention of Uncle Edgar, and tracking down the last few scattered elders who might still hoard a few poor scraps of information was a poor alternative, since in Papaâs day, these hinterlands had been little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy and without the libraries and public records already available in less benighted regions. As in southwest Florida, much local lore, with its blood and grit and smells, had simply vanished.
The biographerâs difficulties were made worse by the immense false recordââthe Watson mythââand also by the failure to correct that record on the part of the subjectâs family and descendants, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character was surely one reason why his evil reputation had been so exaggerated. In the absence of family affirmation of that warmth and generosity for which E. J. Watson had been noted even among those who killed him, he had evolved into a kind of mythic monster. Yet as Luciusâs mother had observed not long before her death, âYour father scares them, not because he is a monster, but because he is a man.â
Long, long ago down the browning decades, in the sun of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw and smelled and laughed and listened, touched and tasted, ate and bred, and occupied earthly time and space with his getting and spending in the world. If his biographer could recover a true sense of his past, with its hope and longings, others might better understand who that grown man might have been who had known too much of privation, rage, and suffering, and had been destroyed.
Driving north to Columbia County, Arbie Collins picked through Luciusâs research notes, fuming crossly over certain phrases. Flicking the pages with a nicotined fingernail as yellow as a rat tooth, he coughed and rolled his eyes and whistled in derision, all to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus and broad cattle country as they drove along.
â âWe cannot make an innocent man out of a guilty one!â â Arbie declaimed, slapping Luciusâs notes down on his kneecaps. âWell,
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