Lost Man's River (22 page)

When the car pulled into Kinard's yard, the Deacon sat up and looked around him as if he'd been asleep. The names of the Cox sisters, he announced, had just come back to him—Lillie Mae, Lois, and Lee. Lee had married a Porter, she was still alive: “Let's telephone, find out where she's at, see what that girl has to say about her brother.”

Entering his house, the Deacon went straight to the TV and turned on the ball game, which he monitored closely throughout the remainder of Lucius's visit. Oriole Kinard, eating a soft pale meal at her kitchen table, doubted that Lee Cox was still living, but she remembered whom Lee's daughter had married. The Deacon tracked this daughter down by telephone, saying abruptly, without introductions, “There's a feller here wants to know something about Les Cox.” He shoved the telephone at Lucius. “I never saw Uncle Leslie in my life!” cried the woman's voice. “Aunt Lillie Mae, she always told us that the family sent down to Thousand Islands for the body and never heard one word back about Uncle Les! That's all I know, and everybody in our family will tell you the same!”

“Course she has to
say
that in case we're the law,” Grover Kinard warned. “Comes to murder, Les is still a wanted man.”

The Deacon walked Lucius to his car, making sure this stranger got his money's worth and would not come asking for any of it back. “Couple years after Watson died and Edna went over to Herkie, Edna's new mother-in-law, she took and shot herself. That was Martha Burdett, who was born a Collins. Then Joe Burdett married the widow of a man who was shot by moonshiners down Ichetucknee Swamp, and their daughter married John Collins, I believe, who caught her with another man and shot her dead. There was quite a few shootings in this county, like I told you.”

The old man sighed. “Burdetts moved away and tried to run a store in Columbia City. Don't know what ever happened to 'em after that. Folks have gone off to the cities now, I guess. Just gone away like they were never here at all, and most of their farms are growed over in trees, same as our old place. Fine upstanding house out in the fields and now it's lost, way back in the deep woods.”

Sally and Arbie had made friends at the billiards emporium and pool hall, where the aged pool shark, dangerously overexcited, had his ball cap on backwards and his cigarette pack rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve. He gave Lucius a cool nod, rack-clacking his balls for the young woman's benefit with considerably more flair than expertise.

Sally sat with one hip cocked on the corner of the table, her cerise sneaker dangling and twitching like a fish lure. She handed him the interview with L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., which had appeared that morning in the Lake City
Advertiser
. Fecklessly attributed to Professor Collins was precisely what he had denied—in effect, the reporter's stubborn notion that E. J. Watson, “formerly of this county,” had been “the Bud Tendy of yore,” a mass murderer and maniac unable to establish real relationships with other people.

Furious, he left the place and strode down the street to the newspaper office to demand a retraction, though he knew that a retraction would be useless, and that any chance he might have had of cooperation from the Collins cousins was now gone. But wonderfully enough, irresponsible reportage had triumphed where earnest overtures had failed. Awaiting him was a crisp note hand-delivered to the newspaper which disputed the right of this so-called Professor Collins to his opinions about Edgar Watson:

Outraged that old family detritus had been stirred into view like leaf rot from the bottom of a well, the Collins family had broken its half century of silence. Furthermore—having chastised him and set him straight—Ellen Collins had volunteered to correct his misperceptions. He rang up at once to accept her kind offer and to apologize.

She heard him out. “You say your name is Collins, Professor? Is that true?”

The sharp-voiced question took him aback, and he felt a start of panic, terrified he might lose this precious chance. Stalling, he said, “Yes, well, you see—”

“What was your father's name?” the voice persisted. Clearly the newspaper distortions had made his kinswoman exceptionally suspicious. He would have to establish himself more firmly before confiding who he really was. And so he blurted, “R. B. Collins,” sensing even as he spoke that he might be making a calamitous mistake.

The anticipated outcry—
Cousin Arbie
?—was not forthcoming, only a brief, ominous pause. “R. B.
Collins
, you say?” If R. B. was a Collins, he was a very distant one indeed, her tone made clear. “I don't suppose you mean R. B.
Watson
, whose mother was a Collins?”

“Rob Watson's mother was a Collins? Really? Do you know her name?”

“Well, I used to.” Ellen Collins said she'd been shown the gravestone as a child. Robert Watson's mother had been a second cousin. She was not in their Collins cemetery at Tustenuggee, she was buried in New Bethel churchyard—not the
old
Bethel Cemetery, mind, where the gravestones had been bulldozed down by Yankee developers. “Those Yankees have walked all over us for a hundred years!”

Asked about the family in the Fort White area, Ellen Collins said, sardonic, “Oh, there's still a few of 'em down there. Hettie lives in the old Centerville schoolhouse, on the last piece of the original Collins land grant. She hunts up old neighbors and collects old scraps. Knows more about our family than we do ourselves, and she's only an in-law!”

When Lucius suggested he might call on Hettie, she drew back. “I don't
know about that. Probably I have talked too much already,” she added brusquely. But in a while she rang back to say that Cousin Hettie would receive him the next morning on the condition that her dear brother-in-law in Lake City and Cousin Ed Watson in Fort Myers would not be told about it. “I'll be there, too,” Ellen Collins warned him. And she gave directions to New Bethel Cemetery, in case he should care to stop there on his way. “You come across any ‘R. B. Collins' in that place, you let us know,” she added tartly.

Back at the pool hall R. B. Collins, told the exciting news that Lucius had claimed him as his father, was not amused and in fact refused to go with Lucius to Fort White, claiming he had better things to do.

“These are your
relatives
!” Lucius exclaimed.

“I know who they are.” Arbie broke the rack with a furious shot which left him hopelessly behind the eight ball. “Now look what you went and done,” he said, walking around the table to inspect the catastrophe from another angle. “Story of my life,” he said, chalking his cue.

In Lucius's absence, Sally had done important research at the Columbia County Courthouse, having talked her way into a storeroom of old archives. Ransacking the musty stacks, she had found cracked leather volumes of court dockets for May 1, 1906, to June 1, 1908, with each case written out in a spidery hand upon the leaf-brown pages.

County Judge W. M. Ives had presided over the circuit court on June 12, 1907, a few weeks after Samuel Tolen's murder. On that date, the state of Florida had indicted a Frank Reese for the murder of Samuel Tolen on the basis of an affidavit from D. M. Tolen. Lucius found this astonishing. Considering the well-known family feud referred to in the Jacksonville
Times-Union
, why had Mike Tolen accused Reese and not Cox or Watson? If Reese was such a desperate character, capable of murdering a white man, why was he so utterly ignored in the Watson legend? Neither the Herlong clipping nor Grover Kinard had so much as mentioned the one man to be indicted in both Tolen murders. Were black men in those Jim Crow days so bereft of status that even black assassins were discounted?

The defendant having pled not guilty, and the state unable to prove his guilt, it is ordered that Frank Reese be discharged from custody
. That court order was peculiar, too. In those days, a black man charged with murder by a well-established white would be very lucky to live long enough to be indicted, let alone have his case dismissed for want of evidence. Had this man served as a scapegoat, a decoy, until Mike Tolen was ready to act against Cox and Watson?

On March 24, 1908, Judge Ives's first case was
The State of Florida v. Leslie
Cox
, who pled guilty to carrying a pistol without a county license, and was sentenced to twenty dollars and costs, or fifty dollars, or sixty days at hard labor at the county jail. Since this case had been heard on the day following Mike Tolen's murder, Lucius supposed that Cox was already a suspect in that killing, and that this sentence was the court's device for keeping him in custody until formal charges could be brought in the Tolen killings.

On April 10, Judge Ives's court considered the findings of a coroner's hearing in late March on the killing of D. M. Tolen, for which E. J. Watson, J. Porter, and Frank Reese had been duly charged. The plot was thickening, for Watson's nephews had also been arrested:
It is ordered that Julian Collins and Willie Collins each give bond in the sum of one thousand dollars … conditioned to appear and answer at the next term of our Circuit Court the charge of accessories-after-the-fact in the murder of
D. M.
Tolen
.

On April 25, Leslie Cox was formally indicted for the murder of S. Tolen, based on an affidavit furnished on April 10 by Julian Collins. In the same court on the same day,
E. J. Watson et al. were indicted for
D.
M. Tolen's murder on the basis of the coroner's inquest
. Together with other witnesses, the Collins boys had been summoned to appear before the grand jury.

Sally had also come upon the “Estate of D. M. Tolen”:

With Sally's help, Lucius persuaded Arbie to go to Fort White after all, but even as they set out next morning, the old man became jealous once again, squashing in beside Sally in the front rather than permit himself to be relegated to the rear. Poor Sally had been forced to straddle the old-time gearshift with its trembling knob, her left leg brushing the right leg of the driver. Her jeans were so faded, worn so thin, and her flesh so warm and firm, that Lucius fairly shimmered in the glow. “Holy, holy, ho-o-ly!” Sally sang, quite unaccountably, “All the saints ador-ore Thee!” As her leg kept time, bouncing against his, he felt the lilt of his first erection in a month of Sundays.