‘Watson’ Continues With Son’s Quest

On Oct. 24, 1910, Edgar J. Watson was shot to death in front of Postmaster Ted Smallwood’s hurricane-battered store on Chokoloskee Island in the Florida Everglades. Although more than 20 armed men were standing on the beach with Watson, and although 33 pieces of lead were removed from what remained of Watson’s corpse, no one was ever charged with the murder.

Out of this single event, census and marriage records and dozens of interviews with southwestern Floridians who remember (or whose ancestors remembered) Watson, novelist, naturalist and poet Peter Matthiessen carved his extraordinary 1990 “Killing Mister Watson.”

The book is fiction, Matthiessen said in an author’s note, “in no way ‘historical’ . . . since almost nothing here is history. On the other hand, there is nothing that could not have happened.” In spite of this double negative, Matthiessen created his portrait of Watson, a Rashomon of the bulrushes. A visionary planter to some, a coldblooded killer of pregnant women and black field hands to others, Watson was also a dedicated integrationist or the worst kind of redneck with several “backdoor” families, depending on where you stood. No matter what the vantage, however, Watson occupied the highest point and the tallest tale in the endless flats of the Everglades.

Now Matthiessen has built a second book from that October day, “Lost Man’s River.” Forty-some years after the killing, Lucius Watson is on a mission to rehabilitate his father’s reputation. Fisherman, hunting guide, loner and sometimes historian, the 60-year-old Lucius is determined to write a biography that will free his father from the legends that have pinned more than 50 murders on him and led to his lynching.

First, Lucius must search out the descendants of the 20 men of the “Watson posse” and sift fact from fiction. “Accuracy is important,” is his credo. But the frequent response is, “Not to us folks around here.” The old men and women sitting behind closed doors in the middle of nowhere have surrounded their houses with chain-link fences to protect them from accuracy, which, in a climate where ancient family feuds breed thick as the mosquitoes, means less the truth than the ability to shoot a man dead at 20 paces.

The more Lucius searches, the more the stories and faces on his list blend into an unnavigable waste of histories and people who are “all related to each other, backdoor, front, and every which way.”

Complicating his quest are the legal and emotional petitions of half-brothers, full siblings, faded loves and current amours. Lucius is skeptical of their stories, wary of the way the marriage of truth and poetry can beget legend. So is Matthiessen. There is none of that good ol’ Southern flavor, the local poetry of a Faulkner. Matthiessen’s “Hamlet” is not a town but a man who trades poetry and love and revenge for the prosaic thumbing of documents and retracing of keel marks around the shell mounds and oyster bars that make up this geography. He carries on him a smell of the ordinary that makes it hard to paint a tragic veneer over the ugliness of life in the settlements of the postwar Everglades, where nobility is lost in a struggle against the suck of hunger and defeat.

All histories, as Lucius learned from his father and his father got from Shakespeare, are explorations of the “undiscovered country” that is Death. Lucius’ struggle to salvage the last years of his own wasted life mirrors Matthiessen’s pitch for the resuscitation of the dying land of the Watsons. Truth, for both men, is like the fresh water that has been drained, leaving the Everglades prey to “the brackish water [that] has moved back up into the creeks . . . where a net fisherman can’t work.”

Fearlessly, Matthiessen has fathered a triple-breed parable in “Lost Man’s River,” part history, part novel and part prolegomenon to some future ecological manifesto. While at times that means the characters can sound like Green Peace militiamen, the ultimate effect, a movement to action as well as tears, is powerful.

“The Lord’s Creation is too old to adjust to our meddling,” one blind old-timer says of the ravaged wilderness. The same may be true of human creation at play in the swamps of the Lord. And that, finally, is not only poetic but mythic.