Shadow Country (85 page)

Our Watson ladies at Fort White heard all the gossip thanks to Sam Frank Tolen, who spared 'em no detail, not even those he had made up. However, in my star-crossed mood and ugly disposition, nobody dared ask questions, not even Mandy. Perhaps she didn't care to learn more than she had to. But Great-Aunt Tabitha passed the word to Captain Getzen, who knew no way but to ride straight out and confront me in his field.

Captain Tom was a Confederate war hero, a small, fierce, feisty feller. He did not touch his hat when he rode up but stayed stiff in the saddle, whacking his peg leg smartly with his crop; that crop rapped that hardwood shin like the snap of rifle fire. I rested my hoe, touched my cap, and smiled politely, asking what I could do for him; he cleared his throat and said it might be best if I cleared out of this south county for a while. “Best for whom?” I said. He didn't answer. “Cleared out?” I said. I much disliked the way he'd spoken, as if I were some kind of po' white drifter. I reckon he saw that in my face, for he danced his horse back as I came forward, raising his crop just enough to give me warning. This good old man no longer trusted me not to attack him, and that hurt, too.

“Best for you,” he said.

I bowed my head as if to pray and took a few deep breaths. Then I said that Edgar Watson was the man who should determine what was best for Edgar Watson, who had been driven unjustly from his own plantation in South Carolina and did not intend to be driven out a second time, having done no wrong.

“No wrong, you say.” Tom Getzen shook his head, extracting a money packet from his coat. He refused to give reasons or name my accusers. I dropped his money in the mud and left at once, before Jack Watson could appear to worsen matters.

Confronted, Billy Collins said that “the family” agreed with Captain Tom: I should leave the county. “Which family do you speak for, Billy?” I demanded. “You weren't a Watson, the last time I heard.” He shrugged that off, advising me I could come back when things blew over. “It's not up to you to give me that permission,” I told him. “Anyway, don't act like I'm the only one who has brought trouble to this family.” At this, Minnie fled the room.

“The reason my brother killed a man—if Lem was the killer—was self-defense.” Billy set himself as I swung off my horse, for he was nerved up now or at least felt safer in the proximity of my sister and my little nephews.

“
If?
What are you saying, Billy?”

From the other room, his Minnie screeched, “Tell Edgar you're sorry!”—the boldest thing I ever heard my sister say, which only shows what a terrified creature she was. Billy blurted, “How about Aunt Cindy's man, back in Carolina?” I raised my hand in warning. “Never say that, Collins. It wasn't me.”

“And those knife fights over in Suwannee? One of those men nearly died! And that darkie prostitute? Lake City? What became of her?”

I took out my clasp knife and opened it and tested the fine edge with the ball of my thumb. “You aim to insult me every time you open your damned mouth?” When I raised my eyes to his, his nerve ran out. An opened blade will do that to a man. He said, “You'd even murder your own sister's husband? A man half your size?”

Billy was a Collins, he was proud; I was content to let his own shrill voice and shameful plea ring in his ears. I pared my nails. “As for your brother,” I resumed after a pause, mostly to reassure my sister, “I only advised him to leave this county because otherwise someone might be killed, most likely him.”

It must have been Billy who reported his version of Watson's “confession” to the sheriff, which was all it took to implicate me legally. It wasn't even evidence, it was just hearsay, but the sheriff issued a warrant for the arrest of E. A. Watson as an accessory before the fact in the Hayes murder. Knowing he had no real case, he leaked word of his warrant in the honest hope I might get lynched or flee the county as Collins had done, leave him in peace.

Job, my old strong-hearted roan, was spavined from long months of hard riding. Since it looked like I might need a sound horse in a hurry, I hunted up another roan of the same temperament and gave him that same name. Sam Tolen came to warn me. “Looks like you might be havin you a necktie party,” said pig-eyed Sam, who was all read up on the Wild West, knew all the lingo. “Better light out for the Territory,” he added. Sam's little brain was working fast, I could hear it sizzle. He was after my prime hogs and he wanted 'em cheap with my gratitude thrown in.

I said, “Hell, no,” to his insulting offer. “Those hogs are the county's best.”

“That's why I'm buyin 'em,” Sam grinned, hauling out his greasy wad. “You're runnin out of time, Ed. Better take it.”

“They say a Tolen will short-change you even when he's cheating you,” I said, counting the money. Sammy guffawed and clapped me on the back. I told him not to laugh too hard, he just might hurt himself, but Sam didn't scare as easy as his daddy. He was always a nervy sonofabitch, from lack of imagination or a fatty brain. In his view, fate had nothing disagreeable in store for such a fine fat feller. “Don't forget to write!” he yelled, breaking wind in a loud carefree manner as he departed.

NIGHT ROADS NORTH AND WEST

Anger and rotgut, burning bad holes in my lungs, made each breath hurt. I slung my farm tools into the wagon. Seeing my expression, even Mandy was alarmed. “Mister Watson,” she cautioned, raising her hands almost in prayer, “we have each other and we have our children. We will make a clean start somewhere else.”

“Clean start!” I turned my back on her. “How many do I have to make?” But remembering how often she'd been patient, and seeing anew the honest goodness in her face, I took my dear wife in my arms. “You don't have to go with me, Mandy,” I whispered. “Oh, I do, dearest, I do.” She hurried off to pack provisions and our few possessions.

I rode over to my sister's house to settle my account with Billy Collins, who had brought this banishment down upon my head by running to the sheriff. He knew I would be coming, too, because his horse was gone. Minnie ran out, fell to her knees. Clutching little Julian, she begged her good, kind brother to have mercy and not harm a little family which loved him dearly and hoped and prayed for his safe journey and deliverance wherever he might go.

“So long as he goes far enough and never comes back.” I pushed past her and sat down on the porch in Billy's rocker to await her husband.

Darkness seeped in from the woods. Hunched in the cold, I suffered a kind of rigor mortis of the spirit. Billy would not be coming home, not with Job hobbled out there by the road. Maybe his wife had begged him to hide and maybe I was relieved I would not have to take revenge—I was too weary. I only knew that I was destitute as ever, still looking for a place where I might prosper.

I rose and went in to Minnie where she was sniveling amongst the crockery; she snatched her baby Julian from the floor as if fearing I might step on him. I told her to tell my friend Will Cox that he could have my cabin, being the one man I could trust to give it back. Knowing we might never meet again and feeling doomed, I took my frightened sister in my arms and gave her a gentle hug, even kissed her brow—the first time ever. Bursting into tears, she hugged me back and kissed me, too, got my face all wet and sticky with the baby's clabber, which she had been eating up for her own poor supper.

Minnie's breath was sour from her frightened hours. “Oh Edgar, please don't harm my Billy. You are a good man, deep in your heart, and we won't forget you.”

“Don't,” I growled, “because I aim to be back.”

I rode on home. Dismounting at a little distance, I circled in through the silent pines, making no sound on the needle ground, eye peeled for any trap. Mandy had the wagon packed and I backed the big roan into the traces, hitching the gray filly to the back of the wagon while she piled the children in under our blankets. Sliding the loaded shotgun under the seat, I climbed up and snapped the reins—
Gid 'yap
!—and Job the Younger kicked the wagon boards a lick that rang off through the trees. I talked him down into a good fast-farting trot.

Pale-faced Sonborn sat up straight, peering back along the ghostly lanes. As if awakened from a bad dream, he cried, “Where are we going?” Mandy hushed him. My wife looked drawn and fearful, which she was. The poor thing thought she was leaving her life behind her, which she was. She thought that armed men might come after us—quite likely, too—and that our children might be harmed. But never once did she complain, nor ease her nerves by fraying mine with foolish questions. “Miss Jane S. Dyal from Deland,” as she had bravely dubbed herself when we first met, was a very good young woman who forgave her husband, though she knew he had named that pretty filly for his own lost love and was dead broke and on the run with no known destination.

Under the moon, the hooves thumped soft as heartbeats on the white clay track, which flowed like a silver creek through the black pines. So quiet was our passing that surely an owl heard little Carrie's pretty sighs or Elijah Edward's greedy suckling at the breast. A solitary light still burned when we passed Herlong's, where the dogs were barking; the silhouette darkening that window was righteous Dan Herlong who had blackened my name with his tales from South Carolina. I'll be back, I promised when the figure vanished and the light was snuffed. Had Herlong heard the wagon wheels? Had he sensed something out there in the dark that frightened him?

At the road I turned the wagon north, taking the night roads north and west under frozen stars which shone on the unknown land where we were going.

CHAPTER 3

IN THE INDIAN NATIONS

Toward dawn, I pulled the wagon off into the woods and picketed the horse beside a little branch. We slept all day, taking turns on watch, and at dusk we ate a small pot of cold hominy. That night we crossed the county line and traveled all night past Live Oak and Suwannee Springs. Beyond the Suwannee River was new country, but taking no chances with my evil luck, I moved through darkness by the light of the half moon until the Georgia border was behind us.

From Valdosta, the way west through chilling rains crossed the Flint River and the Chattahoochee and finally the great Mississippi, crossing from Vicksburg on the ferry to Louisiana, and from there north and west again to the Arkansas Territory, where I had heard that a man plagued by the law might catch his breath.

Already the season had turned cold, numbing our spirits. The Indian Nations was no place to arrive as November was setting in, with its promise of cold and hungry misery for little children, and so I was lucky to find harvest work for a horse and wagon on a late cotton crop in Arkansas. There we wintered. I rented a small farm to make a pea crop before heading westward after summer harvest. In early autumn of '88, I reached Fort Smith and crossed the line into the Indian Nations, Oklahoma Territory.

This hill country of plateaus and river buttes had been assigned to the Cherokees and Creeks, with a few Florida Seminoles thrown in. Some of these Indians still had the slaves they took west with 'em back in the thirties, when Andy Jackson ran these tribes out of the East. Stray blacks had drifted out this way after the War, and a lot more showed up after '76, when Reconstruction was finally put a stop to. Plenty of Southern cracker boys and some hard Yankees, too, because the local government was Northern even if most folks were Southern—Texas, Missouri, Mississippi. In short, all breeds of the human animal were mingled here in various shades of mud, like the watercolors in my sister's little paintbox back at Edgefield Court House, and every last man with a cock between his legs considered himself your equal if not better, since any stranger was likely on the dodge or worse. The buffalo soldiers with Comanche scalps strung on their belts were maybe the most arrogant of all. I kept an eye out for my shadow brother, asked a few questions, and these boys told me that Corporal Jack Watson, having taken care of the local white ladies to the best of his abilities, had been mustered out and gone back east, headed for Georgia.

YOUNGER'S BEND

Under the bluffs out of the prairie winds, the Canadian River country had good alluvial soil down in the bottoms. Neither whites nor blacks could own Indian land, but a woman shacked up with an Indian leased me a good field in the Cherokee territory. This female became Mandy's best friend in the Nations, making a fine show of generosity to our small children when we first arrived and didn't know a soul amongst our neighbors. I will grant she was big-hearted in her way, with her door wide open to strangers and her person, too.

By her own account, Mrs. Myra Maybelle Reed preferred male company to that of the rough women of the Territory. She made an exception of my Mandy, a well-educated lady whose friendship improved Maybelle's repute, fallen low due to her bedtime predilection for bad Indians and breeds.

Maybelle's first husband was Jim Reed, who rode with Quantrill, the James boys, and the Youngers during the bloody Border Wars between Kansas and Missouri. Like a lot of armed riders who passed themselves off as guerrilla fighters, Reed was a killer by inclination and by trade who only joined up with Will Quantrill when those men turned outlaw. After the War, he gambled and raced horses for some years around Fort Smith, joined in armed robberies, shot a bystander while holding up the Austin–San Antonio stage, and generally made a nuisance of himself until the early seventies, when a former partner with an eye to the reward deprived him of his life when he wasn't looking.

The Younger boys were the wild seed of the richest slaveowner in Jackson County, Missouri, who happened to be a family friend of Maybelle's daddy, Judge John Shirley. She was never Cole Younger's lady friend the way she claimed, but later in life, her daughter Rosie Reed took the name Pearl Younger for professional purposes. Her son Eddie remained faithful to his daddy's name and his outlaw profession, too, and even his early end by bullet, as shall be seen.

The Youngers hid out in an old trapper's cabin about six miles west of Briartown, on a rocky bench facing south across the Canadian River. The land was part of a large spread run by Tom Starr, a huge bloodthirsty Cherokee who rustled cattle all the way south to the Red River. Having taken a liking to the Younger boys for no good reason, Tom Starr called this place Younger's Bend. Pretty soon, maybe 1880, the Widow Reed moved in there with Sam Starr, one of Tom's sons, and in no time at all, “boys” on the run were infesting this hideout, including the famous Jesse James, whom she introduced into her social circle as “Mr. Williams from Texas.” Pretty soon, the U.S. marshals got wind of this place, too, but Maybelle—or Belle Starr, as she now called herself—told the newspaper that her hospitality to outlaws had been much exaggerated by “the low-down class of shoddy whites who have made the Indian Territory their home to evade paying taxes on their dogs.” Belle took pride in her fiery reputation and was often obnoxious whether the situation called for it or not. Man and woman, she was the most shameless liar and noisy show-off I ever came across, bar none.

A few years before our arrival, Maybelle and her Injun Sam had been hauled up for horse theft in the Fort Smith federal court and received short sentences from Isaac Parker, the well-known “Hanging Judge.” This was Maybelle's first and last conviction, not because she was hard to apprehend but because she never committed a real crime. Her popular repute as Queen of the Outlaws was born of her own bare-assed lies, since the closest that bitch ever came to the outlaw life was screwing every outlaw she could lay her hands on. When her Sam was shot to death over in Whitefield, Maybelle soon replaced him in her bed with Tom Starr's adopted son, Jim July, tacking Starr onto his name to shore up her claim on Starr property.

Maybelle's haughty airs and gaudy style and even the big pearl-handled .45 shoved pirate-style into her belt did little to distract from her poor appearance. She was a long-nosed thin-mouthed female, hard-pocked and plainer'n stale bread, also wide of waist and slack of buttock from too much time spent on her back with her feet flat to her low ceiling. Her dark skin, leathered by the sun, and the coarse black hair she pinned up under slouch hats when it wasn't down behind like an old horse tail, made her look more halfbreed than her husband. But Mandy decided that this old sack must have some good in her, and needing a woman to confide in, she let it slip to her new friend that her husband had been unjustly accused of murder in the state of Florida and obliged to flee. Since Belle was the widow of two killers and domiciled with a third, the news that I might be a dangerous man only enhanced me in her eyes (despite her devotion to Mandy) and when I ignored her awful wiles and leering blandishments, she became furious. Tearing up my lease and flinging my payment in my face, she claimed she'd been warned by the Indian agent at Muskogee to harbor no more fugitives from justice lest she forfeit her precarious claim on Indian land.

Refusing to pick up the money, I advised her that my lease was duly paid and rode away, leaving her squalling loud and mean as a horny raccoon. A few days later she sent a formal letter stating that her land had been rented to another sharecropper, Joe Tate. That November, I persuaded Tate to have no dealings with this woman, who would only drag him into her own troubles with the law, and once Tate had backed out of his lease, I rode over to Younger's Bend to smooth things over. Before I could even dismount, Belle screeched, “Maybe the U.S. marshals won't come after you but the Florida authorities just might.” Hearing that threat, I felt my shadow brother stir deep in my vitals.

CHEROKEE FUNERAL

In January of 1889, I moved my family into a cabin on the land of Jackson Rowe. Another tenant was Belle's son Eddie Reed, who told me his sister Rosie Lee had seen my hard expression from Belle's doorway and had warned her mother to make no more threats against Ed Watson. On February third, on the eve of her forty-third birthday, one of the many worthy citizens who had it in for Mrs. Starr took care of that troublous bitch once and for all, shooting her out of her saddle on the muddy river road south of my cabin. The burial took place at Younger's Bend at noon on Wednesday. Because of that scrape over the lease, it seemed prudent to attend, and poor worried Mandy insisted upon going with me. We crossed on the ferry and rode up the ridge to Belle's place, where Cherokee relatives and a few outlaw friends were standing silently before the cabin, squinting hard at every rider who appeared. Sure enough, my arrival caused a stir. No one spoke out but Jim Starr stalked me, flaunting his suspicions.

The casket lay inside the one-room cabin, attended by stone-faced Indian women sitting in tight rows. There was no service and no chanting, only the suspense of unfinished business.

Armed men carried the coffin from the cabin and set it down near the rough grave. When the lid was removed, the Starr clan and other Cherokees dropped ceremonial corn bread on Belle's tight-lipped remains, after which the box was lowered into the pit. I stepped forward to help Jim Cates (who had built the coffin) bank the grave, but I had hardly touched the shovel when Starr and his sidekick Charley Acton drew their guns and yelled at me to put my hands up. Starr pointed his weapon at my eyes, accusing me of murdering his woman, as his Indians grunted beady-eyed assent, without expression.

Unsurprised, I remained steady and my wife did, too, despite the likelihood that her husband would be gunned down before her eyes. I did not trust Starr, who was very drunk, to keep his head, so instead of raising my hands as ordered, I grabbed hold of Cates and yanked him between me and the guns. Cates implored me to raise my hands or else we'd both be killed, and I finally did so, but not before saying to Jim Starr, “If you kill me, Jim, you will be killing the wrong man.” Mandy thought it was my calm demeanor that persuaded those Indians I deserved a hearing, and eventually Starr, growling, put his gun away.

That evening, however, Starr came to my house with other Indians and put me under citizen's arrest, intending to take me to the U.S. District Court at Fort Smith. He finally agreed to my demand that Jackson Rowe and others be permitted to accompany our party as witnesses. We left for Fort Smith that very evening, stopping for the night at a farm along the way. Next day, February 8, I was marched before the Commissioner in the U.S. District Court for a preliminary hearing. Starr filed a formal affidavit “that Edgar A. Watson, did in the Indian Country . . . feloniously, willfully, premeditatedly and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Belle Starr, against the peace and dignity of the United States.” Deputized, he was given two weeks to assemble witnesses and evidence for a second hearing to determine whether the defendant Watson should go to trial. And so I sat cooling my heels in jail with my lease still unsettled and spring planting near. Crop or no crop, that was fine by me. I felt a lot safer behind bars than waiting for the murderous Tom Starr in the Cherokee Nation.

“I know nothing about the murder and will have no trouble establishing my innocence,” I told the publisher of the Van Buren (Arkansas)
Press-Argus
, who quoted me from an interview in the jail. “I know very little of Belle Starr, though she for some reason, I know not what, has been prejudiced against me. I am thirty-three years old and have a wife who is living with me. I have never had trouble with anyone and have no idea who killed her.” Quoted in the same edition, Jim Starr said: “I knew enough to satisfy me that Watson was the murderer. We buried Belle at Younger's Bend and I went after Watson and got him. He showed no fight or I would have killed him”—lies, of course.

On the twenty-first, Starr returned to Fort Smith with Belle's two offspring and ten other witnesses; the hearing commenced on February 22 and ended the next day. Some of my neighbors gave depositions, mentioned a quarrel, said Watson lived close by the murder scene. But Farmer Watson, who had a good reputation with the merchants as a man who paid his bills, made a better impression than Horse Thief Starr. The
Argus
de-scribed the accused as a man of “fair complexion, light sunburnt whiskers, and blue eyes” who was “decidedly good-looking and talked well.” Furthermore, he appeared to be “the very opposite of a man who would be supposed to commit such a crime.”

Jim Starr's socalled evidence being deemed circumstantial, he was granted an extension while he sought more witnesses, but very little new evidence was forthcoming. On March 4, the plaintiff 's case was judged too weak to merit the indictment of an honest white American—“a quiet, hard-working man whose local reputation is good,” said the Fort Smith
Era
next day. Even so, I had spent two weeks in jail before the Hanging Judge threw out the case.