Lost Man's River (16 page)

Lucius wandered down old grass-grown sidewalks to the ends of narrow lanes where the oaks had not been bulldozed out nor the street widened,
where the last of the old houses tumbled down ever so slowly and sedately under the sad whispering Southern trees. He arrived at last at Oak Lawn Cemetery, the town's last redoubt of the antebellum South. Here on thin and weary grass, amidst black-lichened leaning stones tended by somnolent grave diggers and faded robins, stood a memorial to those brave men of the Confederate Army who had died at Olustee, to the east, in a small victory over Union troops. Not far from the memorial, a dark iron fence enclosed three tombstones.

Sinking down between the dark roots, Lucius contemplated the old stones, stringing new beads of information from their dates. At some point, the former Laura Watson had married the ill-fated Samuel Tolen, born almost thirty years after his bride, and he wondered if this discrepancy in age was not a catalyst in the family feud mentioned by Dr. Herlong. Had Greedy Tolen married Foolish Laura for her Watson money, inciting her Evil Cousin Edgar?

Old Tabitha had survived her daughter by a decade, tussling along into her nineties. Her stone—much the grandest of the three, as if ordered in advance by the incumbent—suggested that this durable old lady had managed the purse strings in the Tolen household after Laura's death. Presumably it was Aunt Tabitha who bequeathed her piano and some silver to Edgar Watson's wife, a bequest which Sam Tolen had refused to honor. Had his error of judgment cost Tolen his life?

The Watson headstones were narrow and austere, as Lucius imagined these women might have been, whereas Tolen's gravestone squatted low in attendance on the ladies. Great-Aunt Tabitha's haughty monument held no message or instruction for those she had left behind, and her daughter's read tersely, “We have parted.” Sam Tolen, on the other hand, was “Gone But Not Forgotten”—not forgotten by whom, Lucius wondered, since to judge from the 1900 census, Sam's wife Laura had been barren, and since both women in his household had preceded him into this earth.

Had Mike Tolen ordered that inscription as a warning to his brother's killer? And had he suspected the enigmatic Edgar, who presumably stood among the mourners gathered here beneath these ancient oaks?

So rapt was he that he scarcely noticed when Sally Brown in a blue cotton dress kneeled down in the grass beside him. When he looked up, she smiled and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him softly on the mouth for the first time ever. Startled—as if a rare small bird had just flown
in—he wanted to ask why she had done that. Instead he grinned a foolish grin and asked how she was faring, and also how she had arrived and where she might be staying, and how she had managed to track him to the cemetery—

“Professor?” She raised a finger to his lips. Open-mouthed, eyes quick and bright, long blond hair straying on her face, she was open and delightful as a summer peach. Unabashed, she took his hand in both of hers and snuggled this bonding of their flesh in her warm lap. The gesture seemed innocent and simple, yet feeling his hand against the airy dress, amidst the welling thighs, he fairly trembled at its implications. A cavernous groan escaped him, and she smiled. Her green eyes had gone demure and soft, and under his gaze, she blushed and bent her head as if awaiting some seigneurial decision.

Enchanted but anxious lest he scare away the shy bird of her undefended feelings, he dared to ask, “Do you suppose you will ever call me Lucius?” But realizing how feeble this must sound, he blurted abruptly, “Did the library send you? Did you see Arbie?” She opened her eyes to gauge him, then released his hand.

“I didn't come here to see Arbie,” she said shortly, rolling easily to her feet and brushing the dead grass off her backside. “I can't think
why
I came,” she added, tossing her hair.

“Hey,” he said. “Sit down!” But when she turned toward him, he did not dare touch her, or know what to say.
Excuse me, Miss, may I brush that naughty grass off your sweet bottom?
He laughed out of pure joy and nerves.
Yes, Your Royal Heinie, it is I, L
.
Watson Collins, Ph.D.! Your revered teacher!
Aloud, he said, “Phooey,” and got up awkwardly and brushed off his own inconsequential ass instead. He could use a drink.

“Phooey on yooey,” Sally said, still cross. “You miserable ol' fart.” Then she laughed, too, she had forgiven him. A moment later, she astonished him anew with her odd mix of eroticism and innocence. “These old-time people, “she said wonderingly, waving at the gravestones. “You think they did it the way we do? Oral sex and all?” Though gratified to be sought out as a person knowledgeable in these matters, he was sorry she was so casual about such a rite. He frowned judiciously, saying, “Absolutely.” Laughing at him, she took his arm and squeezed his hand, and he felt an unseemly twinge in his hollow loins as they returned down the old broken sidewalks, in spring dusk. Letting go his hand, she skipped ahead over the cracks in the cement. He shifted his trousers, yearning after the fine firm bounce of her behind.

Love-besmirched, he followed the young Mrs. Harden down old broken sidewalks, in the cruel spring dusk.

In the little park beside the pond, they found the old man dozing on a
bench. A rivulet of saliva, descending from a cleft in his grizzled chin, darkened his neckerchief, and in his lap was a small flask of corn whiskey—O
KEFENOKEE
M
OON
100 Proof. Guaranteed Less Than Thirty Days of Age
. It was no good chastising Arbie, who would only yell that he had “paid his dues in life” and could therefore drink wherever and whenever and whatever—and with
whom
ever!—he damn pleased. Live hard, love hard, and die drunk—that was the boyish motto he'd proclaimed in a roadhouse bar on the way north, in a transport of jukebox sadness and vainglory.

The Columbia County Courthouse, where they went next morning, turned out to be a fat pink building overlooking the town pond, called Lake De Soto in commemoration of the great conquistador. In the county clerk's office, three female staffers were chaffing a young black secretary who had brought in papers from another room. “Where'd you get that new bracelet, Myrtle? You being a good girl, Myrtle?” And the young woman swung a hip and chuckled saucily at her colleagues' benevolent envy of her love life.

Awaiting these ladies' attention at the counter, Lucius enjoyed the titillated banter, which he liked to think was an auspicious symptom of improved race relations in the South. But Arbie in his saw-toothed whisper bitched into his ear that the young black woman was being patronized whether she realized it or not, that all “those three harpies” were demonstrating was that old white fear of black sexuality—“of what they used to call ‘hard-fuckin niggers,' ” Arbie said, not quietly enough, because the young woman winced as at a whiff of some bad smell.

Arbie wasn't altogether wrong, but neither was he relevant, and Lucius wished he'd left him back at the motel. The women's affection for young Myrtle might be patronizing, but it was real. When one of them asked if she could help them, and Arbie snapped, “I doubt it,” the young black woman said coldly, “That the way you were brought up to talk to ladies, sir?”

And Arbie said, “That the way
you
were brought up to talk to white men, girl?” Surprised and stung by her disdain, he had struck back before he thought, and was instantly afire with chagrin. But when red spots jumped out on his pale cheeks, what the young black woman saw was rage, as bleak and unregenerate as Old Jim Crow, and she rolled her eyes on her way through the door to her own office. Arbie started to call after her, then stopped. A little hunched, he turned away and shuffled out into the corridor.

“Well!”
one of the women said. The others glared, offended that the old reprobate's confederate had the gall to remain standing at the counter.

“I'm sorry. It's just that Mr. Collins—” He stopped. It was no use. “I'm sorry,” he repeated.

Taking a breath, Lucius inquired about documents pertaining to the murder trial of a man named Watson, back toward the turn of the century. The women informed him in no uncertain terms that deputy county clerks had more important matters to attend to than private research on some darn old jailbird. Why should they nasty up their fingernails and perms (their tossed hairdos seemed to say), digging out old dusty ledgers and disintegrating dockets on behalf of rude out-of-county people who hadn't bothered to find out the precise dates? Were these people aware, one complained to another, how busy the county clerk's office must be with the case of the real live honest-to-goodness up-to-date and otherwise outstanding mass murderer Mr. Bud Tendy, who had best-selling books and TV appearances and the Lord knows what all to his credit, and was on trial for his horrible life right here in Columbia County Court
this very morning
?

E. J. Watson's trial, Herlong had written, had been transferred to other counties, due to the threat of “a necktie party” in Columbia. Sally stayed behind to do some further research in the library while Lucius and Arbie drove northwest across the Suwannee River to the Hamilton County capital at Jasper. The grim three-story brick courthouse with its high clock tower where Lucius's father had been tried for murder had burned down in 1929, but the old brick jail near the brick cotton gin beside the railroad tracks was dark, high, and forbidding. Part of its facade was a closed shaft like a chimney which plunged from the eave gutters to the ground—an old-time hanging shaft, Arbie explained. “Kept the hangman in out of the rain, I guess.”

“Today they'd call that a ‘departure facility,' ” Lucius said, thinking about that “under-utilized facility” at the library where even now sweet Sally Brown sat hunched over the archives.

Arbie laughed. “I bet that ol' departure facility gave your daddy food for thought on his way to and from the courtroom!” But chastened by Lucius's bleak expression, he turned away.

Finding no old records in the new one-story courthouse, they continued west over the Suwannee into Madison County, crossing flat cattle country of small blue pasture ponds under live oaks, abandoned phosphate mines, hog farms with old corncribs and silos, and small clear black rivers winding southward from the hardwood foothills of the Georgia mountains to the marshes of Apalachee and Dead Man's Bay.

In Watson's day, the Florida Manufacturing Company at Madison had processed more Sea Island cotton than any place on earth. Today, laid low by
the boll weevil, the county capital was a tranquil backwater of empty streets. The old jail where his father had been incarcerated was now the Suwannee River Regional Library, across from the Baptist Church. Presumably the trial witnesses had been lodged at the Manor House, a pink brick edifice with white columns which faced on the small park in the town square where oaks as thick as twenty men bound in a sheaf cast a soft shade. In the park stood a blockhouse from the Seminole Wars, and across from the blockhouse stood the two-story brick courthouse where in December of 1908, his lawyers had argued on behalf of E. J. Watson's life.

The county clerk, summoned forth from an inner office, was a small quick man, thin-haired, squeaky. “Yessir? What can I do you for today?” Lucius Watson explained that they were looking for court transcripts of the trial of a man named E. J. Watson, accused of the murder of a man named Samuel Tolen—a historic case which had involved Governor Broward, he mentioned quickly.

“How historical would this gentleman be talking about, girls? Older'n me?” The county clerk threw a wink over his shoulder at his middle-aged staff, and the girls laughed. “1907? Nineteen-ought-
seven
? Well, sir, I was pretty young back at that time! My daddy hadn't hardly thought me
up
yet!” Hearing no giggle, he hastened on. “Excuse me, girls, while I go peruse them terrible murders we got stored up for our perusal right outside the men's room in the basement!” Mollified by a titillated titter from the office ladies, the county clerk went whistling off, not to reappear for three quarters of an hour, by which time that ancient archivist, Mr. Arbie Collins, had nodded off on a park bench that had somehow come to rest in the outer office.