Shadow Country (43 page)

From bare spring twilight came the ringing call of a Carolina wren, and the urgency of its existence on the earth filled him with restlessness. He could not dispel, or not entirely, Arbie's denunciations of his father nor his dread that if those charges were correct, he had wandered far from his own life in a useless search for vindication of a man whose reputation was beyond redemption.

“Morbidly obsessive”—that's what Eddie called him. Was it obsession because his father's life enthralled him far more than his own? The ongoing search for the “truth” of E. J. Watson that provided a dim purpose to his days—was that to be his recompense for a life of solitude and slow diminishment? With the death last year of Mr. Summerlin, he had thought with longing about young Widow Nell: would she ever be open to him again? Would he always be too late?

The scent of charcoal in his whiskey evoked the warm and woody smells of Papa's fine cigars. Rueful, he toasted the great emptiness and silence all around.
Papa? I miss you,

Startled by those words spoken aloud, feeling himself observed, Lucius turned to confront the scowling visage in the cabin window. Arbie Collins had watched him talking to himself, watched him raise his empty glass to the black moon mirrors.

IN COLUMBIA COUNTY

In the early days of the Florida frontier, what was now Lake City was a piney-woods outpost known as Alligator Town, after the “Alligator Chieftain,” Halpatter Tustenuggee, Lucius told Arbie, and Tustenuggee was the name of the old Methodist community founded by their Collins kin, who had fought the Indians as pioneers. “And?” Arbie said. After a long road journey of three days, Arbie had grown so irritable that Lucius was sorry he'd encouraged him to come. They took a room at a traveler's inn at the edge of town.

Over the telephone, a wary Julian Collins welcomed “Cousin Lucius” back to Columbia County, but when Lucius mentioned the purpose of his visit, his kinsman informed him that Uncle Edgar remained a forbidden topic in the family. Trying to soften his own stiffness with a nervous laugh, Julian added, “I guess he's what the old folks call a ‘shadow cousin.' ”

“A shadow cousin? Julian, I'm his son—”

“So's Cousin Ed. You've never discussed this with your brother?”

“Eddie was living here back then. Went along with your family on that vow of silence. Wouldn't talk about Papa even to me or to my sister.”

“Best for everybody.”

“But there's so much I need to know. My father lived and farmed here, met all three of his wives and had four of his six children in this county. Can't we discuss his domestic life, at least? His farm? I want his biography to be accurate—”

“Our family can't help you, I'm afraid.”

“Can't or won't?” Lucius said, exasperated.

“Good day, Cousin Lucius. Enjoy your stay.”

“Wait, Julian. Listen—” But Julian Collins had hung up.

Arriving early at the library next morning, they peered into the empty rooms through bare windows that skewed their reflection: a lanky figure in the worn green corduroy jacket of the old-fashioned academic and a bearded drifter in faded red baseball cap and olive army coat much too heavy for this warming day.

Inside, they waited at a shiny maple table while the librarian fetched the documents requested. Mr. A. Collins, archivist, impatient at the delay, reared around like an inchworm every few moments to stare after her, such was his zeal to begin a rigorous inspection of the material. As it turned out, the librarian had tarried to ring up her friend the features editor at the newspaper, who came speedily to meet the southwest Florida historian, Professor Collins. Together, these ladies managed to persuade him that a newspaper interview might unearth one or two informants. Still irked by Julian Collins's attitude (and ignoring the eye-rolling of his colleague), Lucius emphasized that Planter Watson had been a pioneer entrepreneur and beloved family man—“I beg your pardon?
No,
ma'am! He was acquitted! He was not some common criminal!”—upon which Arbie snorted, kicked his chair back, rose, and left.

Lucius spent that soft spring morning ransacking the census records for the names mentioned by Herlong. Edgar Watson was missing from the 1900 census for Columbia County, having returned here from south Florida in early 1901: the rest of the Watson-Collins clan were present as were two households of Tolens, the clan detested by his father. However, the several Cox households listed no Leslie, or not under that name—very disappointing, since the solution of the mystery around this man was critical to the biography. If Cox was alive, had he ever returned to this county? Was he a shadow cousin, too?

In the afternoon, at the librarian's suggestion, he wandered down old grass-grown sidewalks to the ends of narrow lanes where the giant oaks had not been cleared nor the street paved, where the last of the old houses greened and sagged beneath sad Southern trees, arriving at last at Oak Lawn Cemetery. Here on thin and weary grass amidst black-lichened stones tended by somnolent gravediggers and faded robins stood a memorial to those brave boys of the Confederacy who died at Olustee, to the east, in a long-forgotten victory over Union troops.

Near the war memorial, an iron fence enclosed three tombstones tilted by the oak roots:

TABITHA WATSON, 1813–1905
LAURA WATSON TOLEN, 1830–1894
SAMUEL TOLEN, 1858–1907

The Watson headstones were tall, narrow, and austere, as Lucius imagined these Episcopalian women might have been. Great-Aunt Tabitha had survived her daughter by a decade, tussling along into her nineties: her haughty monument held no cautionary message for those left behind. Her daughter's stone bore the terse inscription
We Have Parted,
while Tolen's marker, squatted low in attendance on the ladies, read
Gone But Not Forgotten
—not forgotten by whom, Lucius wondered, since to judge from the 1900 census, his wife had been barren and both women had preceded him into this earth. Samuel Tolen had been born almost thirty years after his bride, and Lucius wondered if this discrepancy in age had not been a catalyst in the fatal family feud: had Greedy Sam infuriated Dangerous Edgar by marrying Aging Laura for her Watson property? Had the Tolens ordered Sam's inscription as a warning to his killer that this business wasn't finished? In this silent place, he could envision Sam Tolen's embittered brothers in stiff ill-fitting black suits: did they already suspect blue-eyed Edgar Watson, standing there expressionless among the mourners?

At the newspaper, his classified notice requesting information on E. J. Watson had failed to smoke out a response from the Collins family. However, there was a small note in smudged pencil:

Leslie Cox!
At last! Not Leslie Cox, cold-blooded Killer, but Leslie Cox, Greatest Pitcher in the World, whiffling fastballs past thunderstruck yokels on bygone summer afternoons in those distant days before World War I when every town across the country had a sandlot ball club, when Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Smoky Joe Wood were the nation's heroes—Leslie Cox, grimy pockets stuffed with chewing gum, jackknife, and one-penny nails, scaring more batters than Iron Man Joe McGinnity himself. The broken-voiced hoarse yells of boys and shrills of girls at each crack of the bat, all oblivious of the workings of the brain behind this young pitcher's squinted eyes, in the shadow of the small-brimmed cap that was all most country teams afforded in the way of uniform.

Lucius telephoned Mr. Kinard at once, arranging a visit for two days hence.

The Columbia County Courthouse, where he went next morning, was a fat pink building overlooking the town pond, called Lake De Soto in commemoration of the great conquistador who had clanked and swatted through these woods on the hard way of empire. In the county clerk's office he inquired about arrest records and court transcripts pertaining to an E. J. Watson, accused of murdering one Samuel Tolen about 1907. Though he mentioned quickly that this was a historic case that had involved Governor Broward, their sighs protested that official staff had more important matters to attend to than digging out old dusty ledgers and disintegrating dockets.

The county clerk, flushed from an inner office, was a quick little man, thin-haired and squeaky. “Yessir? What can I do you for today?” Told what the gentleman was seeking, he titillated his staff by winking when he said, “Excuse me, girls, while I go peruse them terrible murders we got stored up for our perusal outside the gentleman's toilet in the basement.” When eventually he reappeared, he whisked from behind his back a thick file packet stuffed with yellowed papers, presenting it with a small bow and flourish. “We got us a E. J., all right, but the victim was Mr.
D. M.
Tolen, and it ain't nineteen ought seven, it's ought eight. That close enough?”

On a public bench out in the hall, Lucius entered the old pages with dread and elation. Though the neighbor cited in that Herlong clipping had specified Sam Tolen, the file concerned the murder less than a year later of Sam's younger brother Mike. Furthermore, E. J. Watson had a codefendant, a black man named Frank Reese.

He scribbled notes. In the year previous, the circuit court had indicted Reese for the murder of S. Tolen on the basis of a D. M. Tolen affidavit. Why had Mike Tolen accused Reese, not Cox or Watson? Why had he never heard about this man indicted in both Tolen killings? Were black men so bereft of status in those Jim Crow days that even Negro murder suspects went unmentioned?

Another mystery: on April 10 of 1908, based on the coroner's inquest in late March, Julian and Willie Collins had been arrested as “accessories after the fact in the murder of D. M. Tolen.” Had his cousins provided testimony that led to the indictment of his father?

All courtroom testimony had apparently been sealed, but a few scraps from a grand jury hearing in Lake City on April 27 accompanied the court documents. Most intriguing was a cross-examination of one Jasper Cox, who testified on behalf of the defendants. In helping the defense attorney establish the fact that no fair trial could be held in Columbia County, this witness declared that on March 26, three days after the murder of Mike Tolen, he had been approached at the courthouse by a jury member who told him he “was helping to get up a mob to get these men and asked if I didn't want to assist them, and I told him it was out of my line of business.”

This exchange—the only mention of Jasper's nephew in the thick packet—established that Leslie Cox, not Watson, had been arrested for Sam Tolen's murder, and Watson, not Cox, for the murder of Mike Tolen the following year.

Included in the sprawling file were contemporary clippings.

MIKE TOLEN MURDERED ON FARM

On December 19, the jury found the defendants not guilty and they were discharged.

Lucius telephoned Watson Dyer, who was in the state capital on official business but had asked to be kept posted. He was not in the least curious about Frank Reese. “All that matters is, E. J. Watson was found innocent. ‘Innocent until proven guilty'—that's the American way.”

“I suppose so. At least when the accused is the right color.”

Ignoring this quibble, Dyer said, “And if he was proved innocent of killing Samuel Tolen, he may well be innocent of other allegations. In our book we can say—”

Irritated by that “our book” even before he'd figured out what was objectionable, Lucius interrupted sharply, “Let me repeat. My father was charged with killing D. M. Tolen. Mike. The man indicted for the murder of Sam Tolen was Leslie Cox.”