Turning off the old Fort White road, Lucius followed Grover Kinard’s directions into low dust-filmed woods (“alive with redskins,” according to an 1838 report). At the specified address, he was shown inside by a bespectacled man attired in black trousers, cream-colored jacket, and open-collared shirt. Deacon Grover G. Kinard bade him no welcome and scarcely troubled to introduce him to his wife, a pretty-pink person sitting primly on the front room sofa in a bower of artificial flowers and silver-framed photos of smiling offspring seated with their own smiling offspring; she was listening to a sermon on her radio. “That there’s Oriole,” said the Deacon, passing by without a glance, and Oriole Kinard fluttered timid fingers at the visitor as her husband marched him into her shining kitchen. The churchman offered him no coffee, just sat him at the kitchen table while he hammered out on its linoleum just what was what.
“Yessir, I knew all them folks,” the Deacon said, drumming his fingers. “I’ll show you where Edgar Watson lived, tell you all about Coxes and Tolens and all the killing down in them old woods.” Kinard jerked his thumb in the direction of the little person on the other side of the pasteboard wall. “She ain’t a Cox exactly but she’s related,” her husband said. Over the churchly exhortations on her radio, Oriole protested, “No, I ain’t never! Leslie’s grandmother’s daddy was my granddaddy’s cousin, but I wouldn’t know that murdering devil if I bumped into him in church!”
The sight of Lucius’s notebook made the old man suck his teeth. “My information must be worth a lot to you,” he suggested. When Lucius cheerfully agreed, the Deacon coughed, then got it over with. “How much?” he said. “Forty dollars?”
“Well, to be honest,” said Lucius, taken aback, “most folks like to talk about old times. I guess you’re the first I’ve come across who wanted payment.”
The Deacon squinted, not shamefaced in the least but ready to dicker. “Thirty, then,” he said. When his visitor forked over the money, he counted the bills twice before getting up and going out back to squirrel them away. Returning, he said, “Guess we can go then, lest you want coffee,” but he never slowed on his way toward the front door.
“Back later,” he informed his wife. “Next year, maybe.” Outside, he climbed into Lucius’s car. “That old rattler of mine don’t run too good,” he said, once he was settled. The Deacon had a certain grim mean humor, Lucius decided, but a painful hacking was as close as he would come that day to honest mirth.
The narrow county road shot south across farmland and woodlots, straight as a bullet. Sixteen miles out of Lake City, near a pasture pond on the east side of the road, Kinard tapped Lucius’s arm. “Where you see that grove, that was Burdetts. Old cabin might be in there yet. Many’s the time I been there Sunday visiting, the way us country people done back at that time. And these woods on this side, this was Betheas. Ain’t no cabin there no more. Betheas rented from Sam Tolen, they were sharecroppers, same as Burdetts. Young Herkie Burdett was courting a Bethea daughter, we thought Herkie and Edna would get hitched, but Preacher Bethea was dead set against it. Burdetts was dirt poor, even poorer than Betheas, so he wanted his pretty Edna to marry better.
“By the time Ed Watson come back to this community, the whole county had heard that Mrs. Billy Collins’s brother was a desperader out of the Wild West, so folks was surprised that Edna’s daddy encouraged her to go to him instead of Herkie. According to gossip, Preacher Bethea figured any outlaw must be rich and he did not intend to let that rich man get away, no matter if he broke his daughter’s heart. Folks mean-mouthed Ed Watson and the Preacher both.”
The Deacon coughed awhile. “Our house was down yonder where them woods are now-still there, far as I know, grown up in trees. The baseball diamond was right out back of it-that’s gone, too. Herkie Burdett played a pretty good third base but he was shook apart when Edgar Watson took his girl away to them Thousand Islands. Just moped around, he never married, couldn’t hardly play third base no more. And two-three years after that, all hell broke loose.”
A white clay lane left the county road to enter the forest shade. “Turn there,” his guide commanded. “Herlong Lane. Runs west a few miles to the railroad. We still got Herlongs back in here, you know. Old Man Dan Herlong was the first to come south from Carolina, and he always said the Carolina Watsons was good people, prosperous farmers, all but Edgar’s daddy. Still got Collinses here, too. Live in the old schoolhouse over yonder, far side of the woods.” He pointed south. “Edmunds’s store was over that way, too, but they didn’t have no post office or nothing.” He shifted in his seat. “All along this north side, that’s Myers’s plantation, the old Ichetucknee Plantation from before the Civil War. Twelve hundred acres, one of the biggest around. Once Sam Tolen got hold of it-he married the Widow Myers-he called it Tolen Plantation, and when our post office come in, he got that called Tolen, Florida. But Sam sold off a lot of land, drove Watsons crazy, on account they were kin and seen it as family property.”
The car ran silent on the soft white track under the trees. Spanish moss swayed listless in the air. “It’s kind of spooky how these woods ain’t changed, when most places are growed over so much I can’t hardly recognize where I grew up. Them black-and-white cattle you see in there back of them trees is the same stock Tolen raised, turn of the century, and these white clay tracks ain’t never changed since Watson came along here on his horse. Course there weren’t so much scrub oak back then, we had open woods and great big virgin pines, but all of them big trees got timbered out.”
He signaled Lucius to pull over. “See where that track is blocked by that deadfall tree? That’s Old Sam’s road. Runs a quarter mile through the woods up to his house. I never seen that road closed off before.” He peered about him. “You want to walk in there, have a look, you go ahead. I don’t want no part of that old place.”