Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy
So Leslie got arrested in the Banks case. And sure enough, a mob formed quick and come to get some justice. But a minister was present, and that minister put his arm around that fine-looking young feller, saying, “If you take the life of this young man, you must take mine, too.” Well, nobody had no use for that minister’s life, so some concluded that Leslie Cox was spared by the Lord’s mercy.
Leslie, Leo, Lem, Doc Cox, and Levi. I believe Leslie had three sisters and four brothers. If Leo Cox was your friend, all right, but if he was your enemy, look out! He was like Leslie that way. Sheriff Babe Douglass took Leo as his deputy so’s he wouldn’t be out looking for him all the time, but somebody killed Leo off—one of his own cousins, come to think of it—and darned if somebody don’t come along real quick and kill that cousin! My wife’s brother, who’s related to them Coxes, he claims it was Leslie who came back to revenge Leo, but that might be just my brother-in-law’s idea.
I guess I knew Lem Cox the best. Big likable sort of man. Lem never looked for any trouble, just lived down along the river, built him a shack, bootlegged some whiskey, sold a little fish bait for a living. Worms, y’know. Everything he could lay his hands on he spent up on whiskey. Got by best as he could, then coughed and died. Before he done that, Lem persuaded his daddy into mortgaging his farm, so pretty soon Will lost his land, then he died, too. Later on the youngest, Levi, bought back a few acres, and I reckon he is on there yet today. Got cancer, last I heard. His wife is crippled.
Yep, Levi Cox is still alive in Gilchrist County. And there may be a sister that married a Porter still living back in what old-timers call the Clay Woods. And maybe Les still comes to visit her, is what I heard. Few years ago, his brother Lem told a friend of mine that Leslie were not dead, said Les used to come around there pretty regular. Lem said he knew where his brother was hiding out but would never tell.
After they killed off the Tolens, people wouldn’t hardly mention one without the other, they’d say, Ed Watson and Les Cox, or Cox and Watson. But after Calvin Banks, it was just Cox, he had the blame for Bankses to himself. And because they was nigras, he might of got away with that one, too, except that people was dead certain that this feller had took part in them Tolen killings, so them nigras give ’em a last chance to get some justice. Even Leslie’s friends turned state’s evidence against him. Folks wanted that mean sonofagun out of the way.
Although Will Cox was good friends with the Sheriff from way back in his Lake City days, his boy was convicted for the rest of his natural life. Hearing that, Les got very upset. He told the judge, “You got no call giving no sentence like that to a young feller who can’t tolerate no cooped-up life! I weren’t cut out to make it on no chain gang!” Maybe the judge winked, as some has said, and maybe he didn’t. One thing for sure, the judge give Les the eye. Finally he said, “You’ll be all right, boy.” That judge knew what he was talking about, too.
Les Cox was sent to the penitentiary for life and stayed three months. One day he was on the road gang out of Silver Springs, and it just so happened that Will Cox was there, passing the time of day with his boy’s guard. The gang was shifting railroad cars, and it looked like one got loose some way, rolled down the grade for quite a distance to a place where Les jumped off and run. That’s how they told it. His guard was faced the other way, never even fired.
Leslie Cox kept right on running and never been seen since, not by the law. Les went to his uncle, Old John Fralick, who lived over near Ocala, and John Fralick brought him home one evening after dark. This was before Les went away to the Ten Thousand Islands. John Fralick was brother to Cornelia Cox, and that old woman had a piece of hell in her. Will Cox was calm as he could be, but Cornelia had a terrible darn temper. When the Sheriff came to arrest Leslie for Sam Tolen, they say that old woman reared so high that they had to put handcuffs on her till they got him safe away.
There’s plenty can tell you how Cox came back in later years, hunting revenge. Course there ain’t but a very few of us old-timers left that would know him if they saw him, but he ain’t been forgotten around here, neither. In the family that one of his sisters married into, there was a young boy, and one day him and I were standing around waiting for a funeral over in Jacksonville. When Leslie’s name come up, this boy spoke like he’d seen Leslie not too long before, which give me the idea he was seeing him pretty regular, and not no ghost nor dead man, neither. And a little later, I was setting in the congregation when the family come out of the family room to view the body, and there was one man by himself that looked the size, the build, and the whole style of Leslie Cox. He glanced over the congregation quick, then moved right on through with the three couples. I fully believe it was Les Cox, but I couldn’t swear to it, because it must been close to forty years since I last seen him. But nobody around Columbia County believed Les Cox was killed, and they don’t today.
On the dirt road near the old Banks farm, in a strand of spring woods that parted empty fields, a killdeer performed its broken-wing display to distract their attention from two puffball chicks that fluttered and clambered, trapped in the deep rut. When Lucius smiled, stopping the car and trying to point them out, Grover Kinard stared at him, suspicious, then struggled irritably to shift and peer from the car window, not certain what he should be looking for and not finding it. His frustration seemed to sadden him, or perhaps it was his inability to comprehend why others cared about these inconsequential things that he had let pass unnoticed all his life. At last he sat back bewildered, saying, “They had something pretty close to that, other evening on TV.” He pinched off some loose threads in his sleeve, as if otherwise he might unravel in a blur of synthetic thread.
In silence, in their separate thoughts, they drove back to the paved highway, where they turned south again toward Fort White, then west again on the Old Bellamy Road. “This whole corner here and down to westward, that was Getzens’. Getzens was some kind of kin to Old Lady Tabitha Watson, and I guess they was pretty wealthy people. Called him Captain Getzen, from the War. Captain Tom was a one-legged man with hair as white as snow, and he had a fine two-story house, over yonder under them old oaks. Them falling-down sheds you see, they were his, too, and he had a nice barn that some people claimed Watson set fire to. They say his hair turned white the night that barn burned and he jumped out there on his one leg to fight it. Nobody could imagine how he done that.
“This Bellamy Road goes to Ichetucknee Springs. Used to be all kinds of wild critters come in to that spring to get their water, wolves and bears and buffaloes, I don’t know what. Spaniards killed buffaloes down there three hundred years ago, same thing as bisons out in the Wild West, did you know that? Nowadays young couples take truck tire tubes, go floating on the Ichetucknee, in them two-three miles between the bridges; float along in bunches, bank to bank, drinking beer, y’know, a lot of hollering, make quite a mess.” He gazed at Lucius as if to learn whether Lucius would join in this horseplay, given the chance. “Four miles down, the Ichetucknee flows into the Santa Fe, which goes to the Suwannee and on down to the Gulf coast, Cedar Key. Way down on the Suwannee River. Used to be oh so shady and so quiet, but now it’s all opened up from what I hear, and motorboat racket up and down, morning till night.”
The weathered oak and magnolia groves where the Getzen sheds sank silently into the earth now resembled an abandoned fairground, with faded signs and weed-bound trailers, a fake tepee, shacks, an abandoned bathtub, all of these in loose association with the Ichetucknee Slammer Express Tube Co., and Granny’s Hot Sandwiches and Homemade Candies, and Beer Oysters Food and Game Room: Any Size Tube One Dollar. “Can’t imagine such signs back in the old days, can you? Getting to be modern times even way out here in the backwoods.”
Farther west on the Old Bellamy Road, pecan trees and wisteria in the hedgerow commemorated an old homestead now long gone. “I believe Edgar Watson lived in an old cropper’s shack right over by them oaks when he worked as a young feller on the Getzen place. Later on he got hold of so
me good Collins land and built his house, right down this road a ways.”
In a mile or so, they came over a low rise. On a hilltop on the north side of the road stood a yellowing frame house with rust-streaked tin roof, a big dark porch, and a fuel tank on the open ground, under the Spanish moss of a red oak. “Oh, yes,” the Deacon said, “there’s his ol’ pecan trees. That’s where Mr. Joe Burdett served him that warrant.
“Ed Watson farmed several hundred acres, and he was a pretty good farmer, far as I know. If he’d of been a bad one, we’d of heard about it. One time I was up there with my dad, William Kinard, I don’t recall whether we was driving him a well or fixing his pump, but I do recall that my dad was not too comfortable when Watson asked him to come. I wasn’t old enough to do much work, I’d fetch the tools, but I remember Watson, I sure do, never forgot him. Husky kind of man, thick through the shoulders. Later Dad told me that E. J. Watson was very very strong—unusual strong. He was pretty close to six foot tall, big pork chop whiskers, ruddy hair and complexion. Rode a horse and had a fine red buggy, too. Good-looking man, but not so handsome as Les Cox. Course he was older.”
Yes, Papa had been very strong and somewhat vain about it. Past fifty, with his son full-grown, he could lift Lucius off the ground with one hand placed under one armpit—“You get smart with your Papa, Master Lucius, you might just find yourself chucked into the river!” He could almost recall Papa’s body smell, the redolence of fine Tampa cigars and shaving lotions, the charcoal in the bourbon on his breath—all rose, mysterious, from the well of memory, light as the fleeting scent of rain on sunbaked stone.
“I don’t rightly know who farmed this land after Watson left,” Kinard was saying. “The paper company took over most of the old fields in this section. Grew pines for pulpwood.”
Capt. Thomas Getzen had been deacon of the Elim Baptist Church, which they visited on their way to Fort White. The old church had been replaced and the Getzen name had vanished from the region, but the Captain and his wife and those children born in the first years after the Civil War remained the most prominent citizens in the graying churchyard. The Deacon’s parents, William and Ludia, were buried near the Getzens, and so was his sister Eva and his beloved brother Brooks, who had perished at the age of twenty-three.
The lettering on the Kinard gravestones had been blurred over the years by moss and algae, and the stones had shaggy grass around the base. “My people ain’t had a visit in a good long while,” the Deacon mourned, scratching the dry wrinkles of his cheek. He scraped at the moss disconsolately with a small penknife. “Been too long,” he said, giving it up. Without a word, he headed back toward the car.
The solitary Tolen in the cemetery was D. M. Tolen, 1872–1908. His gravestone read “How Desolate Our Home Bereft of Thee”—a shard of funerary irony, Lucius thought, which Arbie would no doubt enjoy, since Mike’s widow and children had returned to South Carolina right after his death.
He turned toward the car. In the car window, in spring light, Mr. Kinard’s bald head shone like a skull.
They went south a few miles to Fort White, where the county road narrowed to a shady village street set about with high frame houses in old weedy yards.
“I’m happy to see Fort White, you know. Born right here in town.” Kinard pointed through the rolled-up window. “That’s Mills Winn’s house—the postman who found Mike Tolen’s body. Dr. Wilson had that house before him. Dr. Wilson drove his horse out our way every day for weeks after Brooks took sick, but Brooks died all the same. That was in the month of May, in 1910.” The Deacon sighed. “That spring, we saw that great white fire in the sky. Some thought poor Brooks had took sick from that comet, but I guess he didn’t.”
Kinard gazed about him at the passing street. “I ain’t been as far as here in years, and it ain’t like I lived so far away, you know. Eleven miles, is all! Never seen my own family graves since they was put in there! Too busy watching that TV, is what it is. Just goes to show you how life leaks away, now don’t it? One day you look up, look around, and it’s all empty, cause the real life’s gone. You’re setting there like you always done, but your hands are empty, there ain’t no color left to life, and you ain’t got no more hope of nothing—cept the Lord, of course.” He turned from the car window to glare at Lucius, outraged, inconsolable, waving Lucius away in case he might try to comfort him.
At a makeshift snack counter in the grocery store, they ordered barbecue ribs with soft rolls and soda pop. They carried their lunch outside to a wood picnic table by the car lot, where three old black men hitched along to one end of the bench, giving the white men the remainder of the table.
They headed north again toward Lake City, passing the old Tolen Plantation and the pasture pond with its red-winged blackbirds where once the Burdetts and Betheas had sharecropped both sides of the Fort White Road. Still agitated by nostalgia, working his toothpick hard, the Deacon scanned the old fields and low woods, patting the pockets of his brain in search of something lost. “Yessir,” he said again, astonished. “First time in twenty years I been back to my hometown, and I don’t live but eleven miles away.”
When the car pulled into Kinard’s yard, the Deacon sat up and looked around him as if he’d been asleep. The names of the Cox sisters, he announced, had just come back to him—Lillie Mae, Lois, and Lee. Lee had married a Porter, she was still alive: “Let’s telephone, find out where she’s at, see what that girl has to say about her brother.”
Entering his house, the Deacon went straight to the TV and turned on the ball game, which he monitored closely throughout the remainder of Lucius’s visit. Oriole Kinard, eating a soft pale meal at her kitchen table, doubted that Lee Cox was still living, but she remembered whom Lee’s daughter had married. The Deacon tracked this daughter down by telephone, saying abruptly, without introductions, “There’s a feller here wants to know something about Les Cox.” He shoved the telephone at Lucius. “I never saw Uncle Leslie in my life!” cried the woman’s voice. “Aunt Lillie Mae, she always told us that the family sent down to Thousand Islands for the body and never heard one word back about Uncle Les! That’s all I know, and everybody in our family will tell you the same!”
“Course she has to say that in case we’re the law,” Grover Kinard warned. “Comes to murder, Les is still a wanted man.”
The Deacon walked Lucius to his car, making sure this stranger got his money’s worth and would not come asking for any of it back. “Couple years after Watson died and Edna went over to Herkie, Edna’s new mother-in-law, she took and shot herself. That was Martha Burdett, who was born a Collins. Then Joe Burdett married the widow of a man who was shot by moonshiners down Ichetucknee Swamp, and their daughter married John Collins, I believe, who caught her with another man and shot her dead. There was quite a few shootings in this county, like I told you.”
The old man sighed. “Burdetts moved away and tried to run a store in Columbia City. Don’t know what ever happened to ’em after that. Folks have gone off to the cities now, I guess. Just gone away like they were never here at all, and most of their farms are growed over in trees, same as our old place. Fine upstanding house out in the fields and now it’s lost, way back in the deep woods.”
The Collins Clan
Sally and Arbie had made friends at the billiards emporium and pool hall, where the aged pool shark, dangerously overexcited, had his ball cap on backwards and his cigarette pack rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve. He gave Lucius a cool nod, rack-clacking his balls for the young woman’s benefit with considerably more flair than expertise.
Sally sat with one hip cocked on the corner of the table, her cerise sneaker dangling and twitching like a fish lure. She handed him the interview with L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., which had appeared that morning in the Lake City Advertiser. Fecklessly attributed to Professor Collins was precisely what he had denied—in effect, the reporter’s stubborn notion that E. J. Watson, “formerly of this county,” had been “the Bud Tendy of yore,” a mass murderer a
nd maniac unable to establish real relationships with other people.
Furious, he left the place and strode down the street to the newspaper office to demand a retraction, though he knew that a retraction would be useless, and that any chance he might have had of cooperation from the Collins cousins was now gone. But wonderfully enough, irresponsible reportage had triumphed where earnest overtures had failed. Awaiting him was a crisp note hand-delivered to the newspaper which disputed the right of this so-called Professor Collins to his opinions about Edgar Watson:
It is very doubtful that you spoke to the Collins family because those who knew of Uncle Edgar are of an older era when family business was just that and was not told to strangers. I am only writing to you to clarify a few things. I have to tell you that I greatly resent Uncle Edgar’s being compared to a mass murderer. While that man in our jail is guilty of murder, as my great-uncle was, he did a great many other things that Uncle Edgar never did. If you’ve done any research at all, you know that my uncle could be a very considerate and courteous neighbor. What I know about Edgar Watson was told me by my mother since my father would never talk about his Uncle Edgar.
Outraged that old family detritus had been stirred into view like leaf rot from the bottom of a well, the Collins family had broken its half century of silence. Furthermore—having chastised him and set him straight—Ellen Collins had volunteered to correct his misperceptions. He rang up at once to accept her kind offer and to apologize.