Releasing her, I banged my chair down hard. “Missy,” I said, “I don’t like threats, remember?”
Jane retreated into nigger talk as quick as our house lizard changes from leaf green to dry stick brown. “I’se sorry, Mist’ Edguh, I sho’ doan mean to go threatnin nothin, nosuh.” And she ran out, sobbing. After that, she stayed mostly out of sight.
A few weeks later, I was cleaning up for supper when Kate Edna sent Jane out to the well with some hot water and a towel. When I asked how she was enjoying married life, she splashed hot water roughly into my blue basin. “Long time ago, back yonder in the Islands, you ast me how a light-skinned gal might feel, passin for white. You kin ast me now how that same gal feels, passin for black.”
COMMISSIONER D. M. TOLEN
When our paths crossed, Mike Tolen looked right past me. Even when I greeted him, he never spoke. Mike understood why others might have wished to kill his brother, and perhaps by now he had lost some of his lust for justice, but sooner or later, Cox’s big mouth would force him toward revenge. In this very dangerous situation, I warned Leslie to shut up. It was too late.
One day in Fort White, in the Terry store, Mike burst out, yes, he knew who had killed his brother, and no, he did not aim to let the matter die. But in truth, what could he do? He knew better than to challenge me in a fair fight and could not pick me off through those high windows of my house even if he got past my dogs. Mike’s only choice was to waylay his suspects, one at a time. And knowing how unlikely it was that those suspects would wait for that to happen, he would have to act as soon as possible, for his own safety, before someone repeated what he’d said in Terry’s store. But of course we had heard already and he knew that, too.
I felt sorry for Mike because he had no way out. He had no experience or skill with arms and was therefore no match for Cox and Watson, separately or together.
Leaving the commissary, I took Mike’s elbow. I had no quarrel with him, I murmured, but because he had made threats, I had to warn him of the consequences of talking dangerously. He said, “I am not talking dangerously. Who gave you that idea?” And I said, “Just about everybody, Mike. You are talking too much and you are painting us into a corner.” “Is that a threat?” he demanded. “You know exactly what it is,” I told him. But he had nowhere to turn, I didn’t either, we were trapped. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’d best leave this county and go home to Georgia.”
He only thrashed like a hooked fish. “You leave, Watson!” he protested. I shook my head, he shook his, we turned away. That’s how we left it.
Frank Reese would not throw in with us. “No mo’, Mist’ Jack,” he said. “I done retired.” He flatly refused to work with Cox, who had nearly got him lynched. Anyway, he had his Jane, had his own cabin. He wasn’t a field hand anymore but a tenant farmer, as close as he had ever come in life to being his own man, so he didn’t want to know one thing about this business. He’d be out in his field tomorrow morning, same as always, turning over the Lord’s good ground and getting set to plant his corn and cotton. Said, “I finally come to rest in life, I found a little corner of the earth where I belong, so I’m puttin all them bad ol’ times behind me.” Frank was grateful to me for his new life. I could have coerced him but I didn’t want to.
Leslie bitched, “We got to get that fuckin Reese mixed up in this so’s he won’t talk.” I shook my head. “Unlike you, Frank keeps his mouth shut.” To save face, he challenged me: “Well, this time, Mister Ed, let’s you be first to shoot, case you’re fixin to hang back like you done last time.” I shrugged as if to say, All right, but it was not all right. I had nothing against Mike Tolen. I had assumed Cox would want to be the shooter.
Mike Tolen had his mailbox at the Junction. In the past year, with the slash pine lumbered off, the turpentine works and commissary had closed down and Will Cox, with his lease canceled by Tolens, had moved his family across the county line into Suwannee. The Junction was now an empty corner going back to woods. Near the huge live oak was a sagging shed bound up in vines and creepers. I hid inside while Leslie climbed into the oak and stretched along a heavy limb, ready to take Tolen from another angle. Mike having brought this on himself, I was resigned to it, but I did not like it; I had to draw breaths deep into my belly to stay calm.
Tolen came down the road a little late, his shotgun over his left arm and a letter in the other hand. Nearing the shack, he slowed his step and his eyes crisscrossed the lane, scanning the trees. I set myself, took a last deep breath, and drew a careful bead on his broad forehead; remembering Sam, I wanted to make sure Mike never knew what hit him.
Leslie claimed later that I held my fire too long, same way he did with Sam: in my belief, he fired first out of buck fever and greed, wanting the credit for this killing, too, maybe even wanting to be known as the most dangerous local desperado. Well before Mike Tolen reached his mailbox, Cox threw a double-ought slug into his chest, whacked his shirt red. Mike’s Sears mail-order flittered off as he spun backwards and the echo ricocheted away through the cold March trees. To this day I hear the ringing in my ears and the ugly thump of that man’s head as it struck the ground. I stepped onto the road and that same second I damn near had my head torn off, that’s how close Leslie’s second load rushed past my ear. Knocked to one knee, I hollered in a rage but there was no stopping him, he was already reloading. That kid put two more rounds into the body before he sprang down from his limb, gun barrel smoking.
In the silence, the screams of Sally Tolen at the cabin flew down that road from a quarter mile away, pierced by the shriek of jays and the cries of children.
Blood was welling in Mike Tolen’s mouth. The morning sun was still reflected in those eyes staring past my boots. I bent and closed them, mumbling something, but to pray seemed sickeningly insincere and I could not finish. “That’s one sumbitch ain’t goin to back-shoot us,” said Leslie’s voice, thick with strong feelings. He was wildly excited, trying not to show it. “Shoots pretty good,” he told me with his lip-curl grin, slapping his gun stock. In his own weird ceremony of triumph, he rose on his toes, up and down in a slow prance, circling the body.
“The Ichetucknee Kid,” I said, despising this awful pride in a point-blank shot.
Beyond Mike’s cabin, out toward the Banks place, light flashed and shimmered on the turning wheels of a farm wagon coming south down the white road. Under tall hardwoods of the forest edge, the flashing danced from sunlight into shade, sunlight again. Whoever drove that wagon—probably Calvin Banks—was not close enough to identify the killers, but he would be shortly, and Mills Winn, the mailman, might show up at any time.
“ ‘Leslie the Kid’—that what you said?” Cox was still grinning. “Go home,” I said. “Keep your damned mouth shut this time.” Taking back my shotgun, slipping the unused revolver back into my coat, I ran for the woodlot where my horse was tethered and jammed the shotgun back into its scabbard. Staying well clear of the roads, I galloped through the pine-woods: on the thick needle bed, the horse left scarcely a trace.
I felt weak as a runny egg, older than dirt. Knowing I had not pulled the trigger was no comfort. I had taken aim and intended to fire and was ready to finish him with the revolver, too, had that been necessary. There was no way to absolve myself of this one, not if I lived for another hundred years, and yet it was true: he had brought it on himself.
The revolver. Sensing the absence of its weight, I grabbed at my belt and pockets. My heart dropped to my guts, needles of fear raked at my temples. It was too late to hunt back along the trail. By now the postman would have come along and found Mike’s body. I left the woods, headed out across Reese’s field at a flat gallop.
That morning Jane had sent Frank out with a fresh shirt, sky blue against the dark brown of the loam. He had surely heard those shots over toward the Junction and he knew whose horse was pounding down on him right now. He never slowed or looked around but gazed fixedly at his mule’s bony rump as it shifted along between the traces.
He refused to see me. Not until something thumped into the furrow right behind him did he stop the mule—Whoa up dar!
“Throw some dirt over that gun,” I called, cantering past. “Mark the place and keep on going.” Still he stared straight ahead. But over my shoulder, I saw him kick clods of earth over the weapon. Then he took up his reins and slapped the mule’s rump hard—Giddyap!—and kept on coming, man and beast, alone on the bare brown landscape. I even remember the spring robins drawing worms from his new furrows, and the chirrups the birds made as they took flight across the field toward the woods.
• • •
At my sister’s house, Julian and Willie and Jim Delaney Lowe were butchering a hog out by the smokehouse. I rode right up on ’em, scattering the dogs. “If anyone comes asking questions, boys,” I said, “I was right here in this yard since early morning, showing you the best way to dress that hog. I left for home just a short while ago, that clear?” I had been helping Billy Collins’s family since he died in the previous winter so this all made sense.
“We heard shots over yonder,” Julian said. My nephews were scared and unhappy, knowing I had come from that direction. Julian was looking at the empty scabbard. I pointed at his face. “Is that clear, Julian? I was here dressing that hog when you heard those shots. That is all you boys need to know or say to anybody.”
Sullen, they stood mute. Their friend Jim Delaney Lowe stared at his boots. Granny Ellen came to the kitchen door, then young May was in the window, waving, and Minnie’s pale face appeared over her shoulder. Seeing her brother talking with her sons, Minnie waved, too, but my bright-eyed little mother only watched me. “Tell them what I said,” I told the boys. I rode toward home.
Carrying fresh bread in a basket, Julian’s Laura left my house as I rode up. Her nervous glance in the direction of the Junction told me those shots had been heard here, too. Though surprised to see me at this time of day, Laura’s instinct told her not to inquire. Scarcely waving, she kept right on going.
CHAPTER 8
THE TRIALS
Sheriff Purvis in Lake City had been notified and a local crowd soon gathered at the Junction. When the law arrived that afternoon, bloodhounds were turned loose all around the mailbox. The early spring weather being cold and dry, the dogs lost my scent where I swung into the saddle, but Deputy R. T. Radford, fooling along a ways tracking the hoof prints, saw the glint on the woodland floor of what turned out to be a .38 revolver, fully loaded, not two hundred yards from the crime scene. Very few new Smith & Wessons had found their way into the backcountry, and it was known I had one. What Radford yelled back to the posse was, “I got Watson’s pistol!” So much for the presumption of innocence until found guilty.
“Where’s Watson’s nigger and the Cox boy?” others said. “Weren’t them two supposed to been in on it the last time?” So Purvis went to Sanfords’ place across the county line where the Coxes were now living with their kin, and Will Cox told him, “My boy Les been plowin yonder by them woods all day. We heard some shootin over east so Les reckoned he’d better go investigate.” Asked where Les might be right now, his father said he didn’t rightly know. And his old crony Sheriff Purvis said, “Don’t make no difference, Will, your word is good enough for me.” That being all the defense Les needed, he was never charged in the death of D. M. Tolen.
On the way to my place, the posse saw Reese working in the field and four of ’em rode over there to pick him up. This bunch was under Dr. Nance, who had always hung around the law and later took over Purvis’s job as sheriff. By pure bad luck, one of their horses stumbled in the furrows when its iron shoe struck metal, and the man dismounted and dug out the loaded gun. Nance ordered Frank to walk on over with his hands behind his head. Shown the shotgun, Frank said, “Please suh, us’ns got us a buck deer been usin in that field edge yonder—”
“That why you buried it?” Nance cuffed him. “Ain’t that Watson’s gun?” They marched him over to the road, hands high.
At my place, “Mr. Watson met them in good humor,” according to what I read next day in the Lake City paper. If that meant I was amiable, I guess I was, not knowing they already had both of my weapons. Kate and I stood on our porch as armed men lined up along my fence down on the road. Everything would be all right, I told her, hushing her questions.
Soon Josiah Burdett came up the hill, young Brooks Kinard behind him. Joe Burdett said, “Mornin, Edna,” but he never glanced her way, that’s how close he watched me. “Let’s go,” he said.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Joe,” I said, holding my temper. The boy’s knuckles clenched white on his gun. However, Burdett meant business and would shoot me if he had to, though he’d never shot a man in all his life. As for the Kinard kid, he would do whatever Joe did, and he had good instincts. Without being told, he moved back and to the side where he had a clear shot in case I tried something.
The posse took me to the same back room in Terry’s store where the late Sam Tolen had invited me to meet so he could shoot me. Reese sat on the floor against the wall. Hands cuffed behind and a murderous expression.
The Terrys were among the few folks in this section who’d been friends with Tolens so I was hooted by that dogless family when the deputies stood me on my feet and handcuffed me to my field hand for the train ride. I spoke right up, declaring that our great republic was in mortal peril when our own lawmen became lawbreakers, arresting citizens without warrants. By God, I would file a formal protest with my friend Governor Broward! Also, Jim Crow law had been Florida law for at least three years now, so how could they ride me handcuffed to a nigger when our trains were segregated?
“Principle of the damn thing. Nothing personal,” I whispered to my companion, who was still brooding over my role in his arrest.
“Mus’ be dat ’Merican justice you was speakin about.”
“I have my good name to think about. Law’s the law, you know.”
“That’s what she is, okay. Leastways for white folks.” His sulk was easing by that time, he seemed resigned. I tried to cheer him: we had come through worse than this in Arkansas. But in truth the law worried me less than the cold attitudes of these neighbors. The men scarcely glanced at us—not a good sign, because when men decide to hang someone, they can be shy about looking the doomed man in the eye. This is not true of their females. The Fort White women peering in through Terry’s dirty windows looked inquisitive and mean as broody hens.
By the time we were shoved aboard the Lake City train, it was plain these local folks had their own plan. Even the deputies were irritable and nervous. Sure enough, a crowd awaited us at Herlong Junction. My window was just opposite those mailboxes where Mike Tolen died and people were walking all around the dark blot on the dusty road where he had lain. What my neighbors were after was a good old-fashioned hanging from that live oak limb where Leslie Cox had lain. To behold a mob thronged with the gargoyle faces of your erstwhile friends, brandishing weapons and crying for your head, is enough to sadden any man, give him indigestion, too. A metal taste coated my mouth and my guts quaked and loosened. I was able to hide my fear from Frank as long as I didn’t speak, but I didn’t feel like joking anymore. He didn’t, either. He had closed his eyes because like me he was praying every second for that train lurch that might carry us safe away.
None too soon, Sheriff Dick Will Purvis was backing up the steps: we heard him hollering, “Now come on, boys! Don’t go takin my prisoners here at the whistle stop, makin a damn monkey out of your sheriff! We’ll see you fellers up the track a little ways!” At that, my fear seized me so violently that I felt sick. The train creaked and jolted, stopped again for no good reason. Finally it overtook the crowd, which was streaming along the track, whooping and hollering, and click-clacked ahead a little ways to the wood rack there at Herlong, where the fireman would pile split logs on the caboose for the wood-burning engine. That was the wood stacked up by Calvin Banks, the same stack Cox had perched upon that day when Sam Tolen threatened to kill hi
m—the very place where this whole business got started in the first place and was about to end.
We didn’t fool ourselves. “Dammit, Frank,” I said. “I did you a bad turn and I am sorry.” The black man nodded, saying quietly, “Yessuh. We got us some bad luck dis time, dass fo’ sure.”
But Purvis was yelling at the engineer to keep on going. With a long whistle and a lonesome wail like a falling angel, the train lurched forward. Dreadful howls arose, rocks whacked the cars, a deputy yanked me down away from the cracked window.
Once the train was in the clear, I managed a smile, congratulating Sheriff Purvis on reestablishing law and order and safeguarding the rights of prisoners by thwarting illegitimate mob rule. And the sheriff grinned right back. “We don’t need no mob,” he said, “cause we got all the evidence we need to hang you legal.” The sheriff confessed that his sympathies were with the crowd but he’d felt obliged to stick to his sworn duty because Will Cox was my friend and I was paid up in my taxes.
“Also, you just might have heard that E. J. Watson has a good friend in the statehouse.”
The sheriff nodded wisely. “That could be.”
Not a word was mentioned then or later about Leslie. Purvis never even brought him in for questioning.
The train stopped at Columbia City to pick up two deputies and a third suspect, John Porter, arrested on suspicion due to some dispute with the late commissioner. Pushed aboard in handcuffs, Porter gasped and moaned. Over by the crossing stood John’s weeping wife blowing her nose and holding the hand of their poor dim-witted Duzzie, brightly garbed in a red Christmas dress.
Porter and I were cuffed together on one bench with Reese shackled to the bench leg opposite, forced to ride on the plank floor. The rough roadbed jolted his spine hard, until finally he groaned in torment. To comfort him, I pointed out how fortunate he was to ride with white men in the coach car in defiance of Florida law. “Praise de Lawd,” he said.