May 1910 was the month of that ghostly white fire in the sky that was seen at first as the Star of Bethlehem but was later feared by the more pious as the Great Tribulation or even the Exterminating Angel of the Book of Exodus, who would spare only those earthly dwellings whose lintels were marked with the Blood of the Lamb. According to the newspapers, that broad luminous streak crossing the heavens every night was Halley’s Comet, which was causing suicides around the world out of man’s terror that this sinful world was coming to an end, but since our third child was delivered at the Key West hospital while that light was still flaring in the heavens, I decided to take that mysterious apparition as a good omen.
Not long after Kate came home with Amy May, I made a business trip to Tampa. Passing through Chokoloskee on my return, I was warned by Ted Smallwood that a stranger was awaiting me at Chatham. “Calls himself John Smith,” Mamie Smallwood said. “Looked like a preacher,” Ted scoffed, impatient. “Never seen a preacher yet with a big ol’ half-moon scar across his cheekbone.” At the mention of that scar, I had to wonder if the Great Comet had been a good omen after all.
Hearing the Brave coming upriver, Kate and her baby were waiting on the dock, and even before I stepped ashore I could see how jittery she was. “He’s here,” she whispered, close to tears. When I took her in my arms to calm her, she wept desperately. “He murdered old Calvin and Aunt Celia Banks and another darkie, too! He boasts about it! He claims you wanted him to do that for revenge on Calvin! He claims you put him up to killing those Tolens!”
I’m ashamed to say that what I was thinking about as my wife spoke was not poor Calvin and his Celia, not at all. I was thinking about the way this bastard had humiliated an innocent young mother when he sent her to my jail cell with that knife. I strode up the mound toward the porch.
Lucius, Waller and Hannah, Sip, Frank Reese, and two young hands were all out working in the field. “John Smith” sat in my chair drinking my whiskey. His boots were sprawled on my pine table, a pistol beside them (though I suspected he’d put boots and pistol on the table when he heard me coming). In his hard-cornered black suit-a would-be riverboat gambler, not a preacher-with his pubic scraggle of a beard and long ducktails of greasy hair on his dirty neck, he looked degenerate. In fact, he stank.
“You don’t smell so good,” I said.
“Howdy, pardner,” says this fool by way of greeting, putting on his best gunslinger squint and dangerous smile. I stood in the doorway considering the boots until he finally removed them, stood, stuck out his hand. Ignoring it, I sat down across the table.
“So you murdered Calvin.”
Cox said, yep, he’d had to. Had to fix that fuckin Calvin for what he done in court to E. J. Watson. No nigger did that to no friend of Les Cox and lived to brag on it. Cox spoke in lean whispery tones out of his respect for his own honor. He had aimed to share up Calvin’s savings, help me pay my legal bills, restore my good name in the community, “hold my head up proud.”
Sickening as this horseshit was, it was horribly sincere; this hayseed had really thought he was saving my good name as he robbed and killed for money, having persuaded himself he was exacting the revenge I would have wanted. But having been present in the courtroom, even Leslie must have known that poor old Calvin meant no harm: he had only done what he was told to do, which was speak the truth.
As if being a dangerous liar and coldblooded killer were not bad enough, Les Cox succumbed easily to self-pity. Assuring me he expected no reward for his act of friendship, he struggled to fight back manly tears; I had to fight back tears myself after hearing what he’d perpetrated on my account.
Leslie had found Calvin Banks pushing his old half-blind Celia on the porch swing. Told to hand over the fabled chest of William Myers’s missing gold, Calvin said, “Nosuh, I ain’t got it.” Warned that Leslie didn’t have all day, Calvin apologized but repeated what he’d said. Fed up with arguing, Cox shot him dead, then put two bullets into the old woman as she toppled off the swing and tried to crawl away. Rooted through everything those darkies had, trying to find their money, even crawled and scratched around under the cabin.
Afraid that somebody might come along, and resentful of all the trouble and the risk that mulish nigger could have saved him, Cox vented his anger on the son-in-law, who was waiting for him down the road. “He was sposed to get a little money but I never found near enough to share. Kept moanin that he would fry in Hell for getting his old folks killed without so much as one thin dime to show for it”-a threat, Leslie decided, and for once he was probably right. Les, I thought, “he’s a damn witness. You better take and shut this nigger’s mouth. That’s what I did.”
“Naturally,” I said, feeling very tired.
Leslie’s cousin Oscar Sanford and their friend Tom Gay were both in on his plan. Wasn’t much of a plan, of course, but knowing the planners, it probably took all three of ’em to think it up. Once he was indicted, Leslie named the other two as his accomplices, to teach ’em a lesson for running off when he started killing people, then failing to support his alibi. That instinct for revenge led to his downfall because Tom Gay turned state’s evidence against him.
Naturally Sheriff Dick Will Purvis released Les to go off to his own wedding in Suwannee County and was astounded when he actually came back. Men were rarely detained for killing nigras but because of all the Tolen rumors, this Cox boy had to be indicted. Stunned when he was convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his natural life, Leslie complained to the judge that a likely young man such as himself would never survive the ordeal of the chain gang, and the judge said, “Son, you will come out of it just fine.”
That judge knew what he was talking about, too. In February, Will Cox rode to where the gang was laying rail near Silver Springs. The guards had unshackled the gang chain so each man could work, and one guard had uncoupled that last car and Will’s boy was hanging on to the far side when it rolled back down the grade. None of the guards seemed to notice when that convict jumped off and lit out for the woods.
I recalled how Leslie bragged in jail how his daddy was such good friends with Purvis that even if he got convicted the guards would turn their backs and let him go. At the time that sounded like more of his big talk but now it turned out to be true. He went across country to his uncle John Fralick, who took him home under a canvas in his wagon a few days later.
Gay and Sanford were not prosecuted, Les told me, because the one witness who could implicate them had escaped. “Just a pitiful disgrace,” he complained, “that I couldn’t do my bounden duty and go over to the county court and testify on them yeller sonsabitches without gettin arrested for escapin. If that ain’t obstructin of justice, Unc, what’s this country comin to?” Les could say these hilarious things and never crack a smile.
That mention of splitting his loot with his friend Watson was the last I ever heard about his loot. It was not so much he begrudged me Calvin’s savings, it was more his reluctance to admit he had blown three people’s heads off for next to nothing. As Reese observed, “Three human lives for thirty-eight dollars is pretty doggone cheap even for niggers.”
Piece by piece, the whole story came together. The girl Les married was my niece May Collins, which was why this idiot now called me Unc. May’s father was dead and her mother was oblivious, but even so, the marriage caused an uproar in the family. Having defied her brothers by eloping, May went to stay with Coxes. The sheriff was still going through the motions of being on the lookout for the fugitive, who wore his mother’s dress out in the field as a disguise, and that spring the young couple had to hole up in Will’s attic. My virgin niece had been crazy about him, Les complained, but their bower was airless and so hot and humid that he couldn’t get a hold on his nude bride, she got so slippery. Couldn’t hardly tell which end was up, he said. Very serious about this problem, Leslie was offended by my grin, demanding to know what manner of man would dirty-grin about his own fucking niece.
“Breaks a man’s heart to leave his darlin,” Les confided, deeply moved by the bittersweetness of it all. “But I knowed my gal May would sleep a whole heap better once her man had made good his ex-cape and was safe under the roof of her uncle Edgar.”
He cheered up then, cocking his head. “Ever get that knife I sent into the jail with your Kate Edna?” With a sly grin, he kicked back in his chair, lifted his legs, and set his boots back on the table, clasping his hands behind his head.
Containing myself, I glared at his dirty boots. “I’ll find a way to thank you, boy, you can count on that. And I won’t make you wear your dress at Chatham Bend unless you want to.”
“Boy, you said?” Les squinted harder. “Wear my dress?”
“What I meant was, boy, if you plan to eat while you are here under my roof, you’ll keep your damn boots off my table and go on out and earn your keep like everybody else.” I grabbed those boots and swung his legs so violently that he spun right off his chair onto the floor. “I catch you snooping around my wife again, I’ll kill you,” I advised him.
Slowly Cox picked himself up and retrieved his shooting iron, dragging the metal on the wood-his way of warning me that killers don’t care for that kind of abuse. Taking his time, he shoved his revolver in his belt, then kicked his likker down. In the doorway he paused long enough to say, “You was fixin to shoot and rob that ol’ nigger for yourself, ain’t that it, Unc?” He nodded as if he knew my secret, then went out. He was lying out of bluster. But I had betrayed my jealousy over Kate, which he would find a way to use sooner or later.
Lately, I mistrusted my good sense, not only my memory and judgment but my explanations to myself for my disintegrating spirits. Out beyond all my anger and suspicion, wild space opened where my mind would go careening, and beyond all that lay eternal desolation like the moon’s eclipse.
To keep the peace, I notified Lucius that Cox would now replace him as my foreman. Cox was strong and a good worker, if only because of his need to feel he was the best at everything he put his hand to; more important, he’d been a farm boy all his life and had more experience than anyone but Hannah, who would never be tolerated as foreman by the men.
Lucius raised his eyebrows, then went on about his business. My son was surprised I would give his job to a boy of his own age-that’s how he saw Leslie, not having known him previously and not understanding yet what breed of “boy” we had here. On the other hand, he trusted me. My expression told him I knew something he didn’t, and he was content to let it go until I was ready to explain.
Cox was older than Lucius by only a few months, but from appearances it might have been ten years. Both were tall and both were twenty but that was about all they had in common. Lucius had started out in life ill-fed and frail, his mother told me, while Leslie had been husky by the age of ten. (Will Cox joked that his oldest boy got his baby teeth and dropped his balls on the same night.)
Les missed his bride in bed if nowhere else, and despite my warning, he had his eye on Kate right from the start. Like May and all the other girls, Kate had thought Leslie handsome back in school days, and to judge from the way that he behaved when he thought I wasn’t looking and sometimes even when I was, Les assumed that the Bethea girl never got over him. He liked to talk dangerously in front of Kate, having no idea that his bloody deeds, far from exciting her as they had our fond and foolish May, truly hor-rified this good young woman, to the point where she flinched and went all stiff and held her breath when he drew near.
I surprised Kate by asking her if I horrified her, too. Startled, she gave a quick shake of her head and closed her eyes. Then she opened them and looked straight at me as if to discern something behind my gaze-had I taken part in those Tolen killings, as Leslie claimed? She did not yet dare to ask straight out, fearing the truth. Instead she said, “Why do you let him stay, a man like that? With your small children?” And I said, “Because he’s kin by marriage and because he spoke up for me in court.” Without him, I reminded her, I might have been found guilty by a jury of my peers and hung by the neck until deceased.
Cox took out his restless lust in drink and troublemaking. One evening he told Green and Hannah that sexual activity amongst older people was downright disgusting. “How about killers?” Hannah said. She disliked Cox and would never pretend otherwise and now she whooped and slapped her thigh at the expression on his face, and Green did, too, his own thigh and hers both.
Cox shifted slowly in his chair to look at them; he was getting pretty good at the menacing pause. When Green could not meet that flat-eyed stare, Cox gave me his most knowing wink, and I gave him one right back to keep things lively.
“Who you calling a killer?” he asked Hannah, drawling it out real softly as a desperado should. Having known plenty of hard men, she was not impressed by a boy like this who took “killer” as a compliment. But Hannah did not know him the way we did, and only now did she sense something that made her wary. Though she met his gaze head-on, placid as pudding, she put her hand on Waller’s arm to still him. Seeing this, Cox sneered for Kate Edna’s benefit, on the point of saying something stupid.
“Go slow,” I said, and his eye wavered. He “let a little smile play on his lips,” as dastards did in Kate’s romantic novels, and maybe bastards, too, for all I know. Folding her knitting, my wife got up and left the room.