“Justice of the Peace Jim Hodges married ’em.” April recited her fact proudly. “I talked to Justice Jim many’s the time. He said, ‘Miss May, are you aware that on your wedding night, this young man will lay his head down on an iron bunk in the county jail?’ And May Collins answered smartly, ‘No sir, Judge, I ain’t aware of no such of a thing. All I know is I aim to marry up with this here feller so let’s get a move on.’ But when she was told she could not sleep with him in jail, she headed home.”
“Miss May Collins did what she darn pleased no matter what!” Ellie exclaimed.
“The train back to Lake City was flagged down at Herlong Junction and Leslie was arrested,” Hettie told Lucius. “So in the Lord’s eyes—and our Collins eyes, too—that unholy wedlock was never consummated. As the years went by, even Aunt May came to believe she was a virgin.”
“Don’t smile, Hettie Collins! That is the Lord’s truth! When Daddy got there, they were already married, yes, but her brother would not let her board that train. And Leslie didn’t try to fight or Daddy would have killed him!”
In Columbia County Court on December 11, 1909, William Leslie Cox was found guilty of first-degree murder, but the jury begged the mercy of the court in order to spare this fine-looking young man the death sentence. Reading between the lines of these accounts—the release on negligible bond so that he might marry, the jury’s plea for compassion—Lucius doubted that Cox would have been indicted for those negro killings had he not been previously implicated in the death of whites.
“After Leslie was sent away, May went to live with Coxes because this family was so scandalized they wouldn’t have her.” Censorious, Ellie shook her head. “Even after she came home, one of those Coxes would show up once in a while, take her away, and after a few days, she would come home again. This was after he escaped and before he left to go join Uncle Edgar in the Islands. Aunt May would never say she had seen Leslie but we suspected it.”
“When she wasn’t claiming that Uncle Edgar had led her young husband astray,” Hettie told Lucius with delight, “Aunt May would declare that she couldn’t be blamed for running off with Leslie because Leslie had given her a bewitched apple. Once she had eaten that terrible witched apple, she was obliged to obey his least command.” She and Lucius laughed together, enjoying each other very much.
Ellen laughed, too. “Now where d’you suppose that boy found that darned apple? At the Edmunds store?”
Paul Edmunds hooted. “Not unless he paid down most of that Banks gold. We sold witched apples pretty dear, them bony-fidey ones.”
Unnerved by the tension in the room, Letitia Edmunds, frantic to depart, had risen from her chair. Her husband ignored her. Not until his wife had hugged the Collins women and peeped good-bye to the Professor did he get slowly to his feet. “Murdering fool, that Cox boy was,” Paul Edmunds grumbled. “Within six months, he killed three more down in them islands. Counting nigger-as, he killed eight head, and here he was, only nineteen years of age.” From the doorway, he told Lucius, “If Leslie’s dead, he ain’t been dead too many years.” He turned and went outside into the sunlight. “Rotting in some hole out in these woods, wouldn’t surprise me,” his voice came back. “Best place for a mean varmint such as that.”
A FAILURE OF THE SPIRIT
While his kin said good-bye to their guests, Lucius inspected the framed photos of Billy Collins and his sons. Like their father, Julian and Willie had been slight, with curly black hair, fair skins, and refined faces, and a pensive quality in their dark eyes like a foreboding. Anxious to pursue his questions before a phone call from Lake City ended the interview, he asked how the family had reacted when Julian and Willie were arrested as accessories after the fact in the Mike Tolen case and jailed on one thousand dollars bail. He assumed the family knew of this since it was on the record at the courthouse.
Agitation entered the room like a wild bird through the window, thumping and fluttering behind the curtain. The ladies stared at him.
“Jailed?” Ellie Collins drew herself up to stare him down: her baked expression seemed to say, Is this how you repay me? The family knew no such thing, she told him in a tone suggesting it could not be true and that, in grubbing through court documents, this self-styled “Professor” had indulged in unprofessional and dishonorable behavior.
“Detained, perhaps?” Hettie ventured carefully.
“Detained, I mean.” Lucius hastened to say there had been no question of Collins complicity or guilt; he spoke formally and a bit pompously, hoping that an officious tone might dignify his indiscretion. But of course he knew—and knew that they knew, too—that if the brothers had testified against an uncle of their blood, they had transgressed the oldest code of those Celtic ancestors who, despising all authority, loyal only to the clan, had borne their tattered pennant of archaic honor across the seas into the New World.
“When they were detained as witnesses, Julian and Willie refused to take the stand and tell lies under oath—that was their upbringing as honorable young Christian men,” murmured poor Hettie. “And Julian’s Laura had no choice but to support her husband, though it broke her heart. She had always adored kind Uncle Edgar.”
“But what was their testimony?” Lucius said.
“We were never told,” Ellie said shortly.
In the stillness of the old schoolhouse, he suffered with them the weight of shame inflicted on this family by Papa. In the end it mattered little what those young men had said. Through no fault of their own, his cousins had found themselves in an intractable dilemma. No wonder they had clung so fiercely to that vow never to discuss or mention Edgar Watson. But these years of silence, so dignified in the family legend, had only embedded that painful splinter of ambiguity and guilt, that ineradicable black line under clear skin.
In her black bombazine and Sunday bonnet, chin held high, Granny Ellen had made a fine impression at the trial, smiling in proud witness to the innocence of her distinguished son as well as to the honor of her handsome grandsons, there to attest to her son’s guilt. In the court recess, she bestowed thin smiles without discrimination, handing around nice mincemeat sandwiches in a napkined basket.
Minnie Collins had not attended her brother’s trial. Even before her Billy’s death, they told him, she had sunk away into a long slow dying, passing the remainder of her days all but unnoticed. By all accounts, she had always been a colorless person, with faint life in her, and her likeness was utterly absent from the family record. As if her countenance had been too tentative to be caught on film, no known photograph existed, nor was there a family memory of what she had looked like, thought, or said. Minnie’s one known attribute was her rare beauty, but what form her beauty might have taken, none could recall.
“Minnie Collins hated the idea of her own likeness, no one knows why,” said Ellie. She had died in 1912, two years after her brother, and even her children had only a vague memory of what she looked like.
“In later life, she had this malady that doctors used to call ‘American nervousness,’ ” Hettie added. “Paregoric was prescribed which contains opium and it seems she was susceptible.” Hettie supposed it was her drug addiction that caused her family to turn its back on the poor soul. It seemed more merciful to help her pretend she wasn’t there than to struggle to include her in her household life. After a time, they scarcely saw the spectral figure creeping past, still gently tended by her mother’s former slave. Only Aunt Cindy had been present when Minnie Collins, still in her fifties, died of pure failure of the spirit on a cold March day. She sat unnoticed in her corner until the tall black woman tried to rouse her for her evening gruel.
“Aunt Cindy saw to everything,” Hettie said. “Cinderella Myers was born a slave, an old-fashioned slave of good strong character who stood by her young mistress after she was freed. She even left her own new family to go south with her Miss Ellen, knowing how unfit she was to manage on her own.”
Lucius suggested the young slave girl might have come from
the Myers Plantation in Columbia, South Carolina, perhaps as a wedding present to Ellen Addison, since according to the census, they were approximately the same age. But of course such facts told nothing about who Cindy really was, a young woman with her own desires who had endured her long travail on earth so far from home and family. “How lonely the poor thing must have been,” he said.
That an outsider should be so concerned about their servant’s feelings struck his cousins as perverse. Chagrined by how little they knew of her themselves, they could not answer his upsetting questions. No, there was no known picture of Aunt Cindy, either. After Granny Ellen and her daughter died, the old woman had persevered without complaint in her shack behind the house, tottering about her chores and chickens even after she started to go blind, until finally, in reward for her half century of faithful service, she was sent home. Her little satchel had been packed for weeks when a “Miss L. Watson,” her “baby daughter” of long, long ago, came to fetch her back to those Carolina uplands her old eyes would never see and her mind could scarcely imagine anymore.
“Nobody was home the day Aunt Cindy left, that’s what my daddy told me,” Cousin Ellie said. “Isn’t that awful? Daddy never forgave himself. Not a sign of her, not even a note, because in all those years no one took the time to teach her how to read and write.”
“The poor old thing just vanished,” Hettie agreed. “Aunt Cindy gave this family her life, and no one was home to thank her for her life or even say good-bye.”
TWO GREEN ONE-CENT STAMPS
Hettie rummaged from her box a letter postmarked Somerville, Massachusetts, January 14, 1910. It carried two green one-cent stamps bearing the profile of Ben Franklin and was addressed to Mr. Julian Edgar Collins, R.D. #2, Fort White, Florida.
Dear Julian,
Your very nice and interesting letter reached me yesterday and as usual I was delighted to hear from you. Glad to hear that all the folks are well. As to May, I have not heard from her. I am very sorry that she blames me for my opinion of Leslie, but I am sure that I have not wronged him and that he himself is to blame for the opinion held of him by all good people. . . . If I understand his case correctly, robbery was his motive, therefore making it a most dastardly crime. I doubt very much if Leslie cares for May as such people are not capable of true affection.
Hope that eventually I will be able to come back and settle down and marry some fair southern maid. I have no time to bother with the girls now as I have to work Sundays and holidays. Hoping that you will grow more prosperous as you grow older and with my very best wishes to Laura and babies I remain,
Sincerely, Rob
“We think that can only be Rob Watson. But he never came back or Julian would have said something about it.”
The last time Lucius had seen him, Rob was a tense dark-eyed young man of “poetic” appearance, with straight black hair worn nearly to his shoulders. What did he look like now? I have no time to bother with the girls. Had he had time in the years since? Rob’s lonely moralizing letter made him sad.
“That’s the last letter?”
“That’s the only letter. Rob makes it sound like a regular correspondence but it wasn’t. We can’t even imagine how he found out what he seems to know. Clearly he needed to feel closer to the family, being homesick and lonely but afraid of coming home.” Hettie looked distressed. “Long ago, you see, Rob took his father’s ship and sold it at Key West with the help of a young Collins, at least that’s what Uncle Edgar told this family.”
Lucius nodded. “That was Arbie Collins,” he reminded Ellie. “The cousin I told you about.”
The women glanced at one another. Ellie spoke sharply, “Sir, we can’t imagine who this cousin of yours might be.”
“Well,” Lucius said, “he almost came with me today,” as if this explained things. He resisted the intuition now fighting its way to the forefront of his brain.
“You see, Professor”—Hettie was almost whispering in her distress—“our cousin Lee told us years ago that he was the Collins who helped Rob sell that schooner.”
“There’s no R. B. Collins in this family,” Ellie declared flatly. “I tried to tell you that over the telephone but you didn’t want to hear it for some reason.” She pointed at Hettie’s lineage sheets, spread on the table. “We rechecked every name before you came this morning, just to be sure.”
“Now R. B. Watson—Robert Briggs Watson—that’s Cousin Rob, of course,” Hettie said carefully, her eyes pleading with Lucius to absolve himself. “And Rob’s mother was Cousin Ann Mary Collins, as you know—”
September 13, 1879. That date had tattered the corner of his mind since the visit to the New Bethel churchyard early this morning. Ann Mary Watson’s death date was the birthday never mentioned in Papa’s household even when Rob was still a boy. He studied Rob’s letter. Oh God. Of course! The oddly familiar script, with its looping y’s and g’s, could have been written by a young, stiff, priggish Arbie, whose hand he knew well from all the margin notes in his “Watson Archive.”
“We can’t find ‘L. Watson Collins,’ either,” Ellie persisted. “If that’s really your name, sir, we have no idea who you might be.”
“No, of course not.” He set Rob’s letter on the table. “ ‘L. Watson Collins’ is a pen name.” He stood up and crossed to the window with loud creakings of the old warped pine floor. With his back to them, he said, “I’m your cousin Lucius. I’ve deceived you. I am truly sorry.”
He turned to face them. Having had no luck with Julian, he explained, he had hesitated to identify himself before he’d learned a little more about his father’s life here in Fort White; he had feared his cousins might be less than candid had they known that he was Uncle Edgar’s son. He had planned, of course, to confess this before leaving—but here he stopped short and raised his hands and dropped them, sickened by his own half-truths and excuses. He moved toward the door.
Speechless, they made no effort to detain him. But he’d seen tears mist in Hettie’s eyes and to her he offered a last plea from the doorway. “It seemed so important to establish the truth—” Unable to bear her wondering gaze, he stopped again. “Please forgive me,” he said.
Cousin Ellie’s unforgiving voice pursued him outside. “The truth seemed so important that you lied!” He closed the door, went to his car. The window was open and Ellie would speak again, and he was not sure that denunciation by these newfound kinswomen he liked so much would be quite bearable.
At the road corner, a woman walking toward the schoolhouse waved him down. “Mist’ Lucius? Don’t remember Jane the cook? From when you was a boy at Chatham Bend?” The woman, handsome, simply dressed, was indeed familiar, and when she smiled, he recognized Jane Straughter, who had accompanied Julian and Laura Collins on a year’s visit to the Bend; he vaguely recalled a crisis over Jane and Henry Short, which Papa had resolved by banishing Henry from the Watson place.
Without preamble, Jane Straughter asked after “Mr. Henry Short,” how he was faring. Where was he living? Lucius could not help her since he did not know. Yet she seemed confident he would see Henry again. “When you see him,” she said, “kindly give that man the warmest wishes of Miss Jane Straughter. Please say it that way, Mist’ Lucius: Miss Jane Straughter. Tell Mr. Short that Miss Jane was asking after him. Inviting him to please come visit one day if he wishes.”
THE CLARITY OF CHURCHYARDS
At the Collins cemetery in Fort White, the white church at the end of its long lane through the woods was spare and clean in a way that reminded Lucius of Hettie Collins, who was fashioned from the same native heart pine. They had responded to each other and now, already, she was gone. His emotion was so poignant that for the moment he’d forgotten Arbie—Rob! He could scarcely believe it. Who could have recognized the prim Rob of that letter in the unshaven and disreputable “Chicken” at Caxambas, stripped by hardship and rough company of all the manners and good grammar taught him by dear Mama in those years of patient tutoring, and disguised fur
ther by that cryptic urn said to contain Rob Watson’s bones?
In the wistful melancholy of a country churchyard which time and weather and the woodland creatures were gradually taking back, he wandered among the modest headstones that had lately replaced the wood crosses Hettie had referred to. Here was Uncle Billy Collins, gone to his reward in February of 1907, three months before Sam Tolen. Nearby lay Granny Ellen Watson, dead at eighty in June of 1910, just four months before her son. In a narrow grave between mother and husband lay what was left of timid beautiful Aunt Minnie, safe at last.
The clarity of churchyards: everything extra worn away and what remained in order and in place, sequestered from the tumult of the world, in pristine stillness. He tried to sort his feelings. Old cemeteries made him homesick, wasn’t that it? In the Collins schoolhouse, he imagined he had sensed long-buried roots here in Fort White, yet these uplands of the north-central peninsula were not his home. Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as “homegoing,” a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging. Chatham for him was what Clouds Creek in the Carolina Piedmont had been for Papa.
One day when the sun caught it, he had seen a little pool shining in the heart of an old stump on a Glades hammock, a silver black glitter like a black diamond, filled with exquisite light. Here no wind breath feathered the surface, only perhaps a leaf speck or breast feather, a wild bit of color fixed minutely to this reflection containing all—high wind clouds and eternal sky all mirrored, immanent. That was home, too.
He strayed across the sun-worn grass among old lichened monoliths, touching and tracing the inscriptions. The pains taken with the lettering astonished him—the knowing hands of nameless artisans, themselves long buried, incising stone calligraphies in memory of strangers. The age of these granites, hewn from crusts heaved up into the sun by planetary fire from miles beneath the surface of the earth, stirred him and humbled him. In quest of eternity, the upright stones yearned toward the firmament, even as they too were gnawed minutely by the bloodless fungi and blind algae that worked with the wind and rain to obliterate man’s scratchings.