A few weeks before she died, Great-Aunt Tabitha had summoned me to her bedside, where the smell of decay already rose from her yellowed linen. She seized my wrist in a birdy grip and whispered in weak sulfurous gasps that she wanted her silver to remain in the Watson family and that therefore it should go to my new bride.
Possibly her son-in-law had hurried her along before she could get that last wish down on paper, because on a soft hazy day that spring, she suddenly gave up the ghost. Her mortal coil was boxed and trundled up the highroad to Lake City, where she was laid in next to Cousin Laura under that tall haughty stone that she had ordered for herself right after her daughter’s death ten years before. We have parted-whom could she have meant with that inscription? Surely not her son-in-law, Mr. S. Tolen, who did not attend the funeral, being drunk in celebration of his strengthened claim to our plantation.
Paying a call on the bereaved, I mentioned the Watson silver that kind Aunt Tab had left to my new bride. Sam chuckled, “I wouldn’t know nothin about that, Ed. That new bride that you are speakin about has got to be the one who died on you a few years back down at Fort Myers cause there ain’t one word about old silver and new brides in the last will.” Comfortably, he contemplated his big house, as if to say, I reckon I got it all now, ain’t I, Ed?
I spoke each word carefully to make sure he heard. “That silver, like this property, belongs in the Watson family.”
“That a warning, Ed? Or is that a threat? Cause a feud ain’t goin to help you Watsons none. Even if you was crazy enough to shoot me, my brothers are in line for the whole thing. I know the law on this real good cause I done the papers with the lawyers. And next in line after Tolens come them Myers nephews. So you Watsons are way into the back, suckin hind tit.”
In 1903, the two Myers nephews, contesting Sam Tolen’s flouting of their uncle’s will, had acquired by tax deed nearly half of the mismanaged plantation and had filed a suit to claim the rest. Incredibly, that suit had been invalidated by the last will and testament of Tabitha Watson, who had bequeathed everything to Samuel Tolen. Since her act was incomprehensible, our family had assumed that, all alone and undefended in her house, at the mercy of this son-in-law who stood leering at me now, the old lady had been starved, terrorized, and otherwise coerced to do his bidding.
A man lacking shame can go far in life, especially one who feels no need for friends. Tolen had been all ready for those nephews, he’d had his shyster on the case for years. As a precaution, he had sold much of the land before the case could be adjudicated, so that even if he lost, much of the loot had been salted away, probably in Georgia. This great plantation that could have been the pride of northern Florida was being chewed apart by rats before my eyes, and my hopes with it. Suffocating, I walked out to my horse without a word.