Word was out at Chokoloskee Bay that Watson had come back to the Islands and that soon after, a man had died in a strange way at Chatham Bend. Though I was innocent, I could not risk a posse; it was time to leave.
The Russ sons had departed on the mail boat the week previous. No thanks, let alone good-byes, only a bitter demand for their father’s pay. “I can’t oblige you yet,” I told them, “not until our syrup is sold at Tampa Bay.” Those boys rolled their eyes and scowled, very angry and suspicious, but being frightened, they said nothing.
I made a fair profit on my syrup sale at Tampa and continued northward to Fort White, where I went at once to offer my condolences to the Widow Russ. Izma was a female of my own age, dull of hair and dull of eye, due to a resigned spirit or a stupid one. With those dark silky hairs above her mouth and sharp short lines beneath, her lips looked sewn up tight as a bat’s bottom. When I doffed my hat and made a little bow, she closed her door down to a crack, leaving me out there in the rain. Through that slot I was informed in no uncertain terms that Izma and her sons and the Tolens, too, had concluded that Edgar Watson had murdered Mr. Russ for demanding his rightful earnings, which his employer had never intended to pay.
I handed her forthwith the full amount in a brand-new store-bought envelope with posies on it-“to the last penny,” I declared. But I could have worn a high black cowl and carried a scythe across my shoulder for all the thanks that homely woman gave me. I grabbed her cold and bony hand and pressed it to my heart, pleading, “Mrs. Russ, ma’am, Izma dear, your late husband died untimely of a heart attack and that is the God’s truth.” Izma said, “What would a man like you know about God?” and closed the door. That twisted, unforgiving face told me how useless it would be to go among the neighbors pleading my innocence.
Great-Aunt Tabitha had sent a summons. I rode over to the plantation house, rather small behind fake foolish Georgian columns. Frail at the end of her long life, the old lady spent most of what was left of it rotting away under the covers. Swathed in dry white hair and threadbare nightgown, she looked as crumbly and poor as a bit of old bread left out for the jays. The window was tight closed and there was no stink of cigars, which told me her son-in-law’s visits were infrequent if in fact they occurred at all: it was Calvin Banks’s crippled-up old Celia who hobbled over to look after her. However, Aunt Tab was still sharp-eyed and nosy, and without preamble demanded to know if I had murdered her son-in-law’s stepbrother, that man Russ.
“No ma’am, I did not.”
“A liar to boot,” she said. She peered at me as if some vile wart had grown out on my nose since she’d last seen me. “What in the dickens is the matter with you, Edgar?”
“Is something the matter, Aunt?”
“A great deal is the matter. Nothing but trouble around here since you darned people came.” She pointed her bony finger. “I revised my will, you know. Cut you people out of it.”
“Yes ma’am. I’ve heard.”
“Your mother and sister are complaining, are they?” She spoke with satisfaction. “That’s because I left my piano and some silver to your Mandy, who would have appreciated such fine things. Unlike your sister, Mandy came regularly to call in the year she lived here with the children.” She cocked her head. “I don’t suppose you killed Mandy, too?”
“No ma’am. Please don’t say such things.”
“Well, you never deserved a person of such quality, I know that much. Of course she failed me in the end like all the rest of you. Never acknowledged I’d left her my piano, far less thanked me. She might have been dying by that time, of course, for all anyone told me.” The old woman frowned, losing her thread. “Precious little thanks from any of you Watsons, the more I think about it, least of all that wicked little Ellen Addison, pretending to be such a friend to my poor Laura.” Suddenly alarmed by my homicidal presence, she drew the covers to her chin. “What is it this time, Edgar? What do you want here?”
“You sent for me, Aunt Tabitha.”
“Of course I did! I wanted to tell you that you should be horsewhipped!”
“My mother plays the piano, Aunt. I’m sure Mandy would have wanted her to have it.”
“Too old! Too spoiled!” She waved away the very idea. “That Addison girl was rotten spoiled right from the start! Orphaned at ten, married at twenty, lived through the War and Reconstruction, and never even learned to boil an egg!” She masticated a little while, building up saliva for some obscure purpose. “Oh yes, I cut her right out of my will and her fool Minnie along with her. I cannot imagine what my daughter saw in those two fe-males.”
I held my tongue. From the window here in the south bedroom, I could see all the way down the long woodland drive to Herlong Lane.
Spent, my great-aunt vented a deep sigh. “Laura was a fool, of course.” A tear came to her eye. “And this old fool rotting in her bed who banished us both to these gloomy evil woods…” She raised her fingers to her collarbone, the gesture wafting sad old smells from beneath the covers. “It’s hard to put your finger on the fool. Have you discovered that in life, you of all people, Nephew, who had such energy and promise? Aren’t you a fool, an accursed fool, to ruin every chance that comes your way?”
Her eyes rose to meet mine, beseeching me. “After you left for Oklahoma, Tom Getzen told me you might have become the leading farmer in this county. Did you set fire to his barn? Oh, never mind that now, he’s dead.” She shook her head. “Look at your mother, still selfish and spoiled! She’s learned nothing from all the hardship in her life. Do people never learn? As for your sister-well, let’s not be unkind. The only one in that whole household who is not a fool is Minnie’s daughter. What did they name her? Maria Antoinett? Where did they ever hear tell of a French queen? Got the name wrong and the spelling, too.”
“May.” I nodded. “A lovely young girl.”
“She is nothing of the sort! She has had no proper upbringing, she has no manners, she is wayward and hard and discontented. I left that child three hundred dollars in my will but from what Mr. Tolen tells me lately, I have a good mind to take it back. She hasn’t been to see me in two years!”
“What else has Mr. Tolen told you, Aunt?” I paused. “That I killed John Russ?”
“It’s not your business what he told me.” Again she cocked her head, fierce as a wren. “What in the dickens is the matter with you, Edgar?” she repeated. “We had such hopes for you. Do you really suppose I would have let poor whites infest this family if you had fulfilled that early promise?”
“Yet you let Cousin Laura marry him.”
“I had no choice. She was always jumping on him, she was shameless. Silly fool got herself with child the first time out. We have only the merciful Lord to thank that she miscarried.” Aunt Tab was weeping. “Oh, Nephew,” she entreated suddenly, “this vulgarian is selling everything! Why did you choose that stepbrother instead?”
She had spat up the unspeakable, this old woman of edged mouth and burning eye. I crossed the room and closed the door, came back. She held my gaze, eyes glittering with retribution. But then, with a jerk stiff as a death throe, she snapped her head away, closing her eyes and waving her fingers to banish such a sinful thought like some fume vented by the family dog.
Taking her wrist, I whispered softly, “It’s all right, Aunt. I understand you.”
Eyes tight closed, she shook her head. “Please, Edgar. I didn’t mean that. I was upset.” She wept and trembled, very agitated. She opened her eyes and we studied each other, knowing she had meant just what she said. She turned her head away. Her face had softened. Into her yellowed pillows, she murmured sadly, “Oh, how I longed to write back to Clouds Creek to tell those stingy Watsons how young Edgar had made good, to tell them…”
“Aunt Tab? Please tell them Cousin Edgar has two farms and a fine syrup company. Tell Colonel Robert-”
“And tomorrow?” She had tired of me and her own hopes, too. “What will you have tomorrow, Edgar? Go away.” As I left, she said, “If you do him harm, I shall testify against you.”
Returning along the white tracks through the woods, I thought everything through. Before faltering, Aunt Tabitha had approved our family right and duty to stop Sam Tolen before he brought utter ruin to our property. Since his brothers and stepbrothers would swarm out like red ants, he would not be ousted easily from an anthill as large and bountiful as this plantation, at least not lawfully and probably not alive. And should harm come to him, Edgar Watson would be the first suspected.
When Sunday came, I rode right up to Sam’s front door and called him out. I did not dismount. Aunt Tab had heard my horse gallop up the drive or had been spying from the window, likely both, for her voice called sharply from upstairs, “Mr. Tolen!”
In his own sweet time, Sam waddled out onto his stoop. To conceal a weapon and more likely two, he was wearing his frock coat from church in this thick midday heat but he stripped off his Sunday collar in his caller’s presence in a gesture of disrespect. Tolen had lost some of his lard and a lot of his jolly manner along with it. He didn’t smell good even at ten paces. His dirty hair was not trimmed neat in side whiskers or beard; it was all black frizzle and the pate shone through, pale as a dog’s belly. After years of sloth and rotgut liquor, he looked like some squat nocturnal varmint poked out into the sunlight with a stick.
“Same old Sam,” I said.
“Yep. Only richer.” With hoggish leer, he tossed his head back toward the house. Sam enjoyed baiting me so much that he clean forgot how outraged he was over my alleged murder of his stepbrother. I don’t believe he would have cared too much whether I’d killed Russ or I hadn’t if it gave him an advantage either way.
Mike Tolen, in the door behind him, was thickset like Sam but his paunch was small. Mike looked scrubbed up, sober as Sunday, while his brother looked like very late Saturday night. From the day he was born until the day he died, Sam Tolen would look soiled inside and out.
I nodded at Mike but did not let him distract me, though I kept him in the corner of my eye. What I had to say was between me and his brother, I told him. This was true, I had no quarrel against Mike Tolen. Everybody but my friend John Porter, who lost out to Mike when they ran for the County Commission, had a good opinion of this younger brother, who could not be blamed for the name Tolen but only for blind loyalty to his rodent kin.
Out of respect for the memory of John Russ, Mike Tolen spat half-heartedly, though acting unfriendly and impolite came hard to him. To gauge his nerve, I skittered my horse out to the side, watching his boots. From where he placed ’em when he shifted with me, I knew he was armed, too. They’d been expecting me. I caught Aunt Tab ducking back behind the curtain in the upper window and gave her a little yoo-hoo kind of wave.
From his big grin when I did that, a stranger might have thought Sam Tolen was glad to see me, and in his way he was. Because I’d let him hang around when we were younger, this fat feller still looked up to me, he even liked me. But being afraid, he would pull his gun the first time he had me dead to rights, especially with his brother there behind him. The old woman up there behind her blowing curtain might try to intervene but I couldn’t count on that.
Not that I needed her. Sam could not shoot a nickel’s worth, not even with a rifle. With a revolver, very few farmers could hit their own front door even when, like Sam, they were standing on the stoop. I doubt if either of these two knew how to draw. They’d be dead before they dragged their hardware free of their Sunday suits.
That’s what was going through my mind. Mike was worried, Sam was grinning. I wiped that damned smirk off his face real quick. “Nope, you haven’t changed a bit,” I told him. “You still stink like a skunk because that’s what you are. You’ve been selling off our Watson property after stealing it and you have been telling lies behind my back.”
“Lies, you say?” His half glance warned his brother to be ready. “You told Izma and that old lady upstairs that you never killed John Russ. If that ain’t a lie, me’n Mike here never heard one, right, Mike?”
Mike Tolen grunted but said nothing, knowing that Sam’s drunken nerve might fray. Sam started blustering. “When all you was doin was murderin your help on payday in them Thousand Islands, that’s your business, but when my stepbrother goes with you and you owin him money and he don’t come back? Come on now, Ed!” he complained. “How can you blame people?”
“I don’t blame people,” I told him. “I blame you.”
Will Cox’s oldest rode up alongside while we were talking, husky young feller on a mule. Smelling trouble, he let out a kind of eager snicker. I nodded to Leslie without turning my head. Will Cox had no use for Tolens and his wife Cornelia liked them even less, because Sam’s brother Jim had wronged her sister before hightailing it back to Georgia. No Cox would jump in on the Tolen side against Ed Watson. Anyway, Les was probably unarmed.
“I am notifying Sam Frank Tolen here and now, with his brother Mike and this Cox boy as my witnesses, that E. J. Watson did not kill John Russ. The next time you contradict that statement or cast doubt on it, you will be calling me a liar. You can try that now”-here I shifted in the saddle, getting set-“or you can say it behind my back. Either way, you won’t survive it.”
Hearing that kind of dangerous talk, the Cox boy grinned a hungry grin that drew his ears back tight to his head like some sleek water animal. Though I hid my mirth by coughing hard into my kerchief, I was grinning, too. It was just plain fun to talk Wild West to Sam Frank Tolen.
Sam would never have a better chance to avenge his daddy for that long-ago day when I faced down Woodson Tolen. Because of my problems with the law, I would have to give him the first shot so I could claim self-defense. Also he had two against one: though Mike was not so willing, he was ready. Also, it would gall Sam something fierce to back down in front of his younger brother and the Cox boy. But Sam had seen me shoot too many times and so he simply belched, loud and contemptuous, as Leslie Cox laughed aimlessly out of sheer eagerness. Mike did not laugh, not knowing what I might do.
I told Sam I would challenge him to shoot it out on the field of honor except for the fact that no Tolen had ever known what honor meant. Both brothers jeered at this and they were right, it was just bluster. Aunt Tabitha’s tremulous support from on high gave them their excuse to groan, disgusted, and return inside. I left there as frustrated as I had come.
Leslie Cox was the star pitcher on Sam’s baseball team. Like the plantation and the post office and the mud-rut lane that ran north and south along the railroad track, the team was named after its owner-manager, though Sam could hardly throw a ball let alone catch one. The team was mostly young Kinards and Burdetts, but Les Cox was the star, and because Sam spoiled him, he often hung around Sam’s fancy house. Les Cox was a big strong boy who much enjoyed using his fastball to scare and humiliate opposing batters, and, as a rule, my nephews told me, he took what he wanted whether it belonged to him or not. At fifteen, he already had chin stubble and a gruff voice and was solid and hard-muscled as a man. He was handsome, too, so the girls said, despite those ears, which were too small and too tight to his head. He had his mama’s stone-green eyes and dark hair like his pa, with that same horse hank of hair across his brow. On his left cheekbone was a crescent scar left by the hind hoof of a mule that had blanked him out for close to forty hours, scared his folks half to death. Broke the cheekbone and offset it, giving his mouth a little twist, and on that side the eyelid sagged in a kind of squint. Might have shifted his brain, too, to judge from his behavior. Leslie remained childish in some ways. Wore a toy pistol on a holster belt up till age fourteen and never learned to handle himself when things went wrong.
One day another boy cut himself in a bad fall in the schoolyard and screamed to see so much of his own blood. Leslie ran over not to help but to rage at him to shut his mouth or he would beat him up. He did it, too. A dog will attack another dog that’s hurt and yelping but among our human kind it’s not so common. Even his own folks were troubled at the time.
Lately my niece May Collins had imagined herself in love with Les. She saw the trouble he got into at the school as something dangerous and romantic, but none of the kids liked him except May and her young friends. He was often a truant and was always picking fights, pushing the smaller boys, even grabbing their food: he was quick to anger and quicker to attack any boy who dared protest. Because he was utterly indifferent to book learning, he was sent back to repeat his grade, at which point, contemptuous of teachers and pupils alike, he gave up his education for good before anyone found out if he was bright or stupid.
Because I was good friends with his daddy, Les liked to boast of his acquaintance with “Desperader Watson,” and with his education at an end, he started showing up over at my place, asking questions about the Wild West and Belle Starr. Being all read up on the Belle Starr story, he informed me that it was those small footprints that got me into trouble in Oklahoma; he had learned from a dime novel that Jesse James had a small boot size like mine, and because Jesse was Belle Starr’s jealous boyfriend, Leslie said, he might have “slew her” rather than see her go to Edgar Watson. Something like that.
Also, said Les, Belle was shot in the back. It was common knowledge that E. J. Watson would never shoot anybody in the back. “No matter what, my daddy says, the Ed Watson I know would look a man straight in the eye.”
I looked Les straight in the eye just to oblige him.
Les asked if I’d known Jesse James and I said I sure had. I told him Ol’ Jess was mostly talk, it was Frank James I could always count on in tough situations. “Tough situations?” Leslie whispered, those green wildwood eyes of his just smoldering. He positively salivated when I gave him a hard squint and an ironic little smile-the frontier code. He went off practicing his own squint and later on some enigmatic silence. For a while, his folks could hardly get their oldest boy to speak a word.
Sam hated it that his young star admired Edgar Watson. He heeded my warning and shut up about John Russ but he fed Leslie all those Carolina tales he’d got from Herlongs, not knowing they just made this boy admire me all the more, and Leslie, with his gut instinct for stirring up trouble, passed Sam’s slanders right along to me. Pretty sure he’d race right back to Sam with my response, I boasted about how I’d run that yeller-bellied Woodson Tolen right out of the field when I was Les’s age. While I was at it, I confided how I’d dealt with the Queen of the Outlaws and her pack of half-breed Injuns back in Oklahoma and how I took care of a bad actor named Quinn Bass at Arcadia-in short, what you might call the varnished truth.
Sure enough, that Saturday after the ball game, Les drank whiskey with Sam Tolen, told him all about my dangerous adventures. Tolen hollered, “You want to see somethin?” That same evening Sam rode him over to the sawmill at Columbia City, cornered two blacks who had sassed him. Sam had been brooding about those sassy niggers every time he drank, aimed to sting ’em up with a dose of bird shot, teach ’em a lesson.
The lesson Sam Tolen taught ’em was the following: he blasted ’em clean off their mule after halting ’em on the road, waving his shotgun. Being drunk as usual, he had his loads mixed up, used buckshot instead of bird shot, and because his aim was so poor, he shot way too high when the gun kicked, hit ’em in the head instead of the legs. What with all the blood and screeching, Sam’s nerves gave way, so he yelled at Les to jump down off his mule and finish those boys off before their nigger racket brought the whole countryside down on top of them.
“I ain’t never took a life before! Made me feel funny!” Les was overexcited, scared, but also thrilled. “Reason I’m tellin you, Mister Ed, you had experience of killin, but don’t go tellin nobody I done that. Mister Sam is claimin now how all he aimed to do was sting ’em up a little, and what that Cox boy done to ’em after was his own idea.”
Both of them were shooting off their mouths and there was talk. Leslie’s account fit what I had heard so I didn’t doubt that it was mostly true. What troubled me was the way Les told it-the way he tasted every word, licked at it, even-and that bad grin on that arrogant face that hardly grinned from one week to the next. He came over to my house not because he was upset by senseless killings but to brag to Desperado Watson.
“So you didn’t mind…?”
“Who, me?” he squawked, loud and derisive. “Don’t bother me none at all!” Will’s boy had gone wrong, all right, he was stupid, hard, and vicious, but the law never bothered him about those nigras because the witnesses were frightened and anyway the sheriff, Dick Will Purvis, had known Leslie since a boy.
The Columbia City shooting was in early winter. Those amateur killers avoided each other until baseball came around again in early spring. Leslie pitched for the Tolen Team but stayed away from Sam, who was blaming their difficulties on Ed Watson’s influence.
One day Sam sent word through Coxes that if Ed would meet him in a public place, namely the J. R. Terry Grocery in Fort White, we could talk things over and patch up our differences. I was leery of the invitation because I happened to be scrapping with the Terrys.
My mother was Episcopalian and Minnie, too. Though Minnie’s three children had been baptized in St. James Episcopal, Lake City, the Collinses were Methodists, all but Billy, who got cranky in the last years of his life. He went over to the Baptist persuasion and attended Elim Baptist, over east of the Fort White Road, taking the kids with him. But pretty soon there was trouble with the Terrys because their mean dogs scared the Collins kids on their way to church. I went over there and warned ’em but they paid no attention, would not chain their dogs. So the following Sunday, I accompanied those kids, took my gun along, and shot those dogs dead as fast as they ran up. Terrys never forgave that, never forgot it. From that day on, I had to watch my back every time I went over to Fort White. Even gave up my Saturday lunch at the Sparkman Hotel, where I’d always enjoyed the lively conversation, mostly because I did most of the talking.
When word came to meet Tolen at the Terry store, I suspected this bunch was in cahoots, so I sent my boy Eddie over there to reconnoiter. Just you duck around the back, I told him, peek in the window. So Eddie snuck around the back and peered in through the spiderwebs and shadows. He could just make out a big old iron safe and the tools and harness hanging from the walls and the potbellied stove. What he didn’t see at first-and it gave him a bad start when he did-was the shape of a heavy man sitting on a nail keg with a shotgun across his lap, facing the door.
When Eddie rode home and reported that the armed man looked like Tolen, I decided Sam wasn’t sitting on a nail keg for the hell of it; he probably had some damn Terry in that room, hid in a corner. I no longer trusted anyone around Fort White and was jumping at shadows every time I rode along those roads. For the time being, I would be safer in the Islands.