Hettie tactfully changed the subject. “I think Leslie must have been some kind of hero worshipper. Here was this handsome, well-dressed man from the Wild West, supposed to be a desperado who had shot it out with famous outlaws in the Indian Nations-”
“And what Uncle Edgar saw was a dull, vicious boy sent straight from Heaven to do his dirty work,” Ellie Collins interrupted, in sudden resentment of Uncle Edgar. “He was smart and Leslie wasn’t-it’s as simple as that.”
“No, Leslie was not well thought of around here,” Hettie agreed wistfully, as if still open to the possibility that the Cox boy might have been held in high esteem in other parts. “He was a sort of rough-and-ready person, you might say.” In her wide-eyed light irony, she smiled innocently at Lucius, who smiled back, happy to be included in the family teasing and even happier that this lovely Hettie seemed to like him.
“Trashy, that’s what my daddy called ’em,” Ellie said grimly. “We always wondered how Great-Aunt Tabitha could permit her daughter to marry a white trash Tolen. But Leslie! Now there was a real son-of-a-bitch, my daddy said.”
“Most of those Coxes were good people and still are,” Hettie reminded her, pale eyebrows raised in mock alarm at Ellie’s sporty language. “Well connected, too.”
“Well connected with the sheriff! Got that skunk turned loose off of the chain gang.” Edmunds’s knobby knee jumped about in agitation. “Everybody in this section knew that Leslie was dead mean, but Watson could be likable from what I seen, tending our store. I talked to the old-timers all about it and never met a one who got crossed up with him.”
April laughed. “Know why? The ones that got crossed up with him were dead.”
“Leslie and I, we were just children! Looking out through these same windows!” Hand at her mouth, Letitia stared out of the windows, marveling that she had actually survived her attendance at this school with a cold-blooded killer. “He had the shadow of a beard at the age of twelve!”
Stilling his wife with a fearful frown, her husband usurped her modest contribution to Cox lore. William Leslie Cox, he informed them, was full-grown by the time he was sixteen and when unshaven, he looked close to thirty. “Come here to the school on muleback, whistled up May Collins through them winders, and eloped with her.”
“May Collins ran off with Cox?” Lucius vaguely recalled having heard this from his father in the summer Leslie lived at Chatham Bend.
Hettie nodded. “After Granddad Billy died, her mother paid her less and less attention. Granny Ellen was getting feeble and Aunt Cindy was half blind so young Miss May talked to any boy she wanted.”
According to Lucius’s notes, the murder of the Banks family occurred on a Monday of early October, 1909: the bodies were discovered Tuesday morning and Leslie Cox was arrested the next day while applying for a marriage license at the Lake City courthouse. Perhaps swayed by his friendship with Leslie’s father, the sheriff thereupon released on bond the only suspect in the “foul and brutal murders of three hardworking peaceable negroes,” as the victims were called in the paper that same morning. However, the groom agreed to turn himself in after his wedding.
Since Leslie could have fled after the killings instead of going to Lake City for that license, then passed up a second chance to flee when granted permission to go get married the next morning, he must have thought the whole thing would blow over. “Figured there wouldn’t be no problem over killing nigger-as,” Paul Edmunds said, “and it looks like the sheriff thought the same. Not only let him out on bail but let him cross the county line to marry.”
“Somebody was sent to invite the bride’s family to a friend’s house in Suwannee County, so May’s brothers knew right where to find ’em,” Ellie recalled. “Uncle Julian decided to stay home, but my daddy rode straight over and warned Leslie that if he tried to make off with his sister, he would kill him.”
“Willie might have had his hands full, Ellie,” Mr. Edmunds reminded her, not unkindly. “Les was a husky six-foot feller and the Collins boys was always pretty skimpy.”
“Justice of the Peace Jim Hodges married ’em.” April recited her fact proudly. “I talked to Justice Jim many’s the time. He said, ‘Miss May, are you aware that on your wedding night, this young man will lay his head down on an iron bunk in the county jail?’ And May Collins answered smartly, ‘No sir, Judge, I ain’t aware of no such of a thing. All I know is I aim to marry up with this here feller so let’s get a move on.’ But when she was told she could not sleep with him in jail, she headed home.”
“Miss May Collins did what she darn pleased no matter what!” Ellie exclaimed.
“The train back to Lake City was flagged down at Herlong Junction and Leslie was arrested,” Hettie told Lucius. “So in the Lord’s eyes-and our Collins eyes, too-that unholy wedlock was never consummated. As the years went by, even Aunt May came to believe she was a virgin.”
“Don’t smile, Hettie Collins! That is the Lord’s truth! When Daddy got there, they were already married, yes, but her brother would not let her board that train. And Leslie didn’t try to fight or Daddy would have killed him!”
In Columbia County Court on December 11, 1909, William Leslie Cox was found guilty of first-degree murder, but the jury begged the mercy of the court in order to spare this fine-looking young man the death sentence. Reading between the lines of these accounts-the release on negligible bond so that he might marry, the jury’s plea for compassion-Lucius doubted that Cox would have been indicted for those negro killings had he not been previously implicated in the death of whites.
“After Leslie was sent away, May went to live with Coxes because this family was so scandalized they wouldn’t have her.” Censorious, Ellie shook her head. “Even after she came home, one of those Coxes would show up once in a while, take her away, and after a few days, she would come home again. This was after he escaped and before he left to go join Uncle Edgar in the Islands. Aunt May would never say she had seen Leslie but we suspected it.”
“When she wasn’t claiming that Uncle Edgar had led her young husband astray,” Hettie told Lucius with delight, “Aunt May would declare that she couldn’t be blamed for running off with Leslie because Leslie had given her a bewitched apple. Once she had eaten that terrible witched apple, she was obliged to obey his least command.” She and Lucius laughed together, enjoying each other very much.
Ellen laughed, too. “Now where d’you suppose that boy found that darned apple? At the Edmunds store?”
Paul Edmunds hooted. “Not unless he paid down most of that Banks gold. We sold witched apples pretty dear, them bony-fidey ones.”
Unnerved by the tension in the room, Letitia Edmunds, frantic to depart, had risen from her chair. Her husband ignored her. Not until his wife had hugged the Collins women and peeped good-bye to the Professor did he get slowly to his feet. “Murdering fool, that Cox boy was,” Paul Edmunds grumbled. “Within six months, he killed three more down in them islands. Counting nigger-as, he killed eight head, and here he was, only nineteen years of age.” From the doorway, he told Lucius, “If Leslie’s dead, he ain’t been dead too many years.” He turned and went outside into the sunlight. “Rotting in some hole out in these woods, wouldn’t surprise me,” his voice came back. “Best place for a mean varmint such as that.”