Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  The period in Mr. Watson’s life between January 1888 and March 1889 is relatively well documented, due to the part he was alleged to have played in the death (on February 3, 1889) of Mrs. Maybelle Shirley Reed, whose multicolored legend as Belle Starr, Queen of the Outlaws, has generated endless articles and books, poems, plays, and films, to the present day.

  Hell on the Border, a grim compendium of Indian Country malfeasance published in 1895, was the first book to suggest that Belle Starr’s slayer was a man named Watson; this name appears in the closing pages of most of her numerous biographies, despite widespread dispute as to her real slayer’s identity. Was the culprit one of those shadowy assassins who intervene in famous destinies only to vanish in the long echo of history? Or would the same man reappear as the notorious desperado shot down by his neighbors on the coast of southwest Florida in 1910?

  In the federal archives at Fort Worth, Texas, is a lengthy transcript of the hearings held in U.S. Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late February and early March of 1889, to determine if evidence of his guilt was sufficient to bring one “Edgar A. Watson” before a grand jury on a murder charge. From this transcript, together with reports from the local newspapers and some speculative testimony winnowed from the literature on the life and death of Maybelle Shirley Reed, one may assume that the “E. A. Watson” accused in Oklahoma was none other than the “E. J. Watson” gunned down in Florida two decades later. Whether or not he was guilty of Belle Starr’s death may never be known, but it should be noted that many if not most of her acquaintances disliked the victim and that almost as many were suspected of her death by her various authors.

  What can we conclude about his years on the frontier apart from the widespread allegation that Watson was “the Man Who Killed Belle Starr”? At least three of Mrs. Starr’s biographers declare that after his departure from Oklahoma, Watson was convicted of horse theft in Arkansas and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary and that he was killed while resisting capture after an escape. (Here as elsewhere they follow the lead of Hell on the Border, published within six years of Belle Starr’s death and considerably more accurate than many of the subsequent accounts, despite its premature report of Watson’s end.)

  Watson’s destination after his escape from the Arkansas penitientary remains unknown, though he later related that he headed west to Oregon, where he was set upon by enemies in a night raid on his cabin. Obliged to take a life, possibly two, he fled back east. Another account states that on his way to Oklahoma, Ed Watson passed through Georgia, where he killed three men in a fracas. Like the many false rumors from South Carolina and Florida, these seem to be “tall tales” unsupported by separate testimony or even anecdotes within the family.

  Ed Watson reappears in Florida in the early nineties, in a shooting at Arcadia in DeSoto County in which, by his own account, he slew a “bad actor” named Quinn Bass. In the rough frontier justice of that region, our subject was permitted to pay his way out of his difficulties, according to one of Belle Starr’s hagiographers, who asserts that “a mob stormed the jail, determined to have Watson, but the sheriff beat them off.” In a different account, outlaws Watson and Bass disputed the spoils of a marauding expedition whereupon Bass was shot dead through the neck.

  Though E. J. Watson (as a fugitive, he appears to have changed his middle initial) is rarely identified as an outlaw, it should be noted that in the nineties, range wars, cattle rustling, and general mayhem were rife in De Soto County, and gunmen and bushwhackers from the West found steady work. It is also true that Watson turned up at Chokoloskee Bay not long thereafter with enough cash to buy a schooner, despite his reported recompense to the Bass family for the loss of Quinn. Considering that he was penniless when sent to the penitentiary and without known income or employment after his escape, one can only speculate where that cash might have come from.

  In his first years in southwest Florida, Mr. Watson assaulted Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee in an altercation in a Key West auction house; this knife attack, which did not prove fatal, was also taken care of with a money settlement considered very substantial for that period. Again, our subject’s source of funds after long years as a fugitive remains mysterious. One cannot dismiss the possibility that from the time of his prison escape in Arkansas until he took refuge in the Ten Thousand Islands, E. J. Watson made his living as an outlaw.

  BLACK MOON MIRRORS

  In the next days, inviting his guest along on research visits to Fort White, Fort Myers, perhaps Chatham Bend, Lucius was taken aback by the vehemence of Arbie’s refusal. “To hell with that damned place!” he yelled in regard to Chatham Bend. “Burn it to the ground, burn that damned stain out!” When Lucius stared at him, he yelled some more. “Don’t look at me! Rob told me about that bloodstain on the floor—black blood, he told me! Said the only way to get it out was burn it out!”

  Arbie had tried to dissuade Lucius from making these research expeditions, but in the end, he decided to go along. Was this curiosity about his Collins kinsmen in Fort White or real interest in his new role as researcher? Unwillingness to be left behind on a remote salt creek or—conceivably—the fun of his host’s company? For even their bickering and hard teasing was good fun. Lucius concluded it was all of these. “Free food,” grumped Arbie.

  Driving north to Lake City, where Columbia County records might be found, Arbie picked through Lucius’s research notes, fuming crossly over phrases. Flicking the pages with nicotined fingers, he rolled his eyes and whistled in derision—to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus orchards and broad cattle country that replaced the subtropical growth of the lower peninsula at the Peace River.

  “ ‘E. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the most ambitious and innovative farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands’—that’s what he’s known for?” Arbie slapped the notes down on his knees. His eyes glittered and his tongue flew, hell-bent on outrage. His long black hair and rakish sideburns with their dangerous swerve toward the corners of his mouth gave this taut, irascible man the wild aspect of a peregrine, Lucius noticed. At the same time, he was aware of something brittle, something fractured; he was careful not to feed the instability that flickered like heat lightning in Collins’s eyes.

  Perversely then—unwillingly amused by his own indignation—Arbie let a boyish smile suffuse his face, but when Lucius smiled with him, he scowled at once, as if his privacy had been invaded. “L. Watson Collins, P-H-D!” he jeered, fending off any sign of his host’s affection. Behind his abrasiveness, Lucius guessed, was self-dislike, or even detestation of a man who, by his own description, was nothing but “a damn-fool drunk and lifelong drifter.” From the deep pallor, wary eyes, and side-of-the-mouth speech, Lucius was coming to suspect that a good part of Arbie’s life had been spent in prison, which might explain why he had holed up for so long at Gator Hook.

  “If this new Everglades park comes through,” Lucius mused, “our attorney Watt Dyer—”

  “Watson Dyer? What’s that guy want with you?”

  “You know him?”

  “Speck caretakes for him at Chatham Bend. Speck can tell you all about that skunk. Big real estate lawyer, made a killing on the land boom. Represents the bunch that’s trying to stop that park.”

  “Can’t be. Not if he’s trying to help the Watson claim.”

  “Probably working both sides of the street like all the rest of ’em.”

  “Don’t you trust anybody? Dyer thinks we might even petition for maintenance of the Watson place as a historic monument.”

  Arbie stiffened like a dog on point, and his burnsides fairly bristled. “Historic monument? How about a murder monument? First monument to bloody murder in the whole U.S. and A.! Massacre museum! Gobbet bar! Nice ketchup specialties! Red rubber skeletons!” Unable to maintain the huff and pomp of indignation, Arbie hooted, but within moments he was scowling again. “You really hope to make that house a monument to Pioneer Ed? That’s already a m
onument to dark and bloody deeds? Dammit, I’m not joking!” He was pointing his finger into Lucius’s face. “Have you ever seen somebody murdered? And heard it, oh my God, and smelled it? It’s terrible and scary. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t. That’s why you can write about a killer as some kind of hero.”

  That German soldier with his pants down. Yes, I have seen somebody murdered. Yes. I murdered him.

  Arbie had tossed the notes onto the dashboard. Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a loose page wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased his paper down as Arbie poked his head out. “You’re twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! I know how much you loved him, Lucius, and I’m sorry, but there’s no way you can write your way around a murderer!”

  Out of breath, Lucius got back behind the wheel. “Don’t toss my work around like that, all right?”

  That Arbie had witnessed violent death was plain, yet Lucius did not feel he could question him about his past, not yet. Already this tightly wound man had turned away from him, taking refuge in a few loose notes on Lucius’s discussions with the attorney. “By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed,” he said, “folks’ll roll their eyes to the high heavens thanking their Merciful Redeemer for that kindly farmer whose magical seed cane put our sovereign state of Florida where she’s at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent all their mean tales about Bloody Ed. So maybe Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol’ Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First U.S. president to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol’ redneck breed that made this country great!”

  They spent that evening at a tourist camp on the Withlacoochee. While Arbie slept off his long day, Lucius drank his bourbon in the shadow of the porch, contemplating the reflections of the giant cypress in the still moon water of the swamp. The gallinule’s eerie whistling, the ancient hootings of barred owls in duet, the horn notes of limpkins and far sandhill cranes from beyond the moss-draped walls, were primordial rumorings as quintessentially in place as the lichens and shelf fungi fastened to the hoary bark of the great trees. And he considered how the Watson children, and especially the sons, had been bent by the great weight of the dead father—pale saplings yearning for the light twisting up and around the fallen tree, drawing last minerals from the punky wood and straining toward the sun even as the huge log crumbles in a feast for beetles.

  From bare spring twilight came the ringing call of a Carolina wren, and the urgency of its existence on the earth filled him with restlessness. He could not dispel, or not entirely, Arbie’s denunciations of his father nor his dread that if those charges were correct, he had wandered far from his own life in a useless search for vindication of a man whose reputation was beyond redemption.

  “Morbidly obsessive”—that’s what Eddie called him. Was it obsession because his father’s life enthralled him far more than his own? The ongoing search for the “truth” of E. J. Watson that provided a dim purpose to his days—was that to be his recompense for a life of solitude and slow diminishment? With the death last year of Mr. Summerlin, he had thought with longing about young Widow Nell: would she ever be open to him again? Would he always be too late?

  The scent of charcoal in his whiskey evoked the warm and woody smells of Papa’s fine cigars. Rueful, he toasted the great emptiness and silence all around. Papa? I miss you,

  Startled by those words spoken aloud, feeling himself observed, Lucius turned to confront the scowling visage in the cabin window. Arbie Collins had watched him talking to himself, watched him raise his empty glass to the black moon mirrors.

  IN COLUMBIA COUNTY

  In the early days of the Florida frontier, what was now Lake City was a piney-woods outpost known as Alligator Town, after the “Alligator Chieftain,” Halpatter Tustenuggee, Lucius told Arbie, and Tustenuggee was the name of the old Methodist community founded by their Collins kin, who had fought the Indians as pioneers. “And?” Arbie said. After a long road journey of three days, Arbie had grown so irritable that Lucius was sorry he’d encouraged him to come. They took a room at a traveler’s inn at the edge of town.

  Over the telephone, a wary Julian Collins welcomed “Cousin Lucius” back to Columbia County, but when Lucius mentioned the purpose of his visit, his kinsman informed him that Uncle Edgar remained a forbidden topic in the family. Trying to soften his own stiffness with a nervous laugh, Julian added, “I guess he’s what the old folks call a ‘shadow cousin.’ ”

  “A shadow cousin? Julian, I’m his son—”

  “So’s Cousin Ed. You’ve never discussed this with your brother?”

  “Eddie was living here back then. Went along with your family on that vow of silence. Wouldn’t talk about Papa even to me or to my sister.”

  “Best for everybody.”

  “But there’s so much I need to know. My father lived and farmed here, met all three of his wives and had four of his six children in this county. Can’t we discuss his domestic life, at least? His farm? I want his biography to be accurate—”

  “Our family can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Lucius said, exasperated.

  “Good day, Cousin Lucius. Enjoy your stay.”

  “Wait, Julian. Listen—” But Julian Collins had hung up.

  Arriving early at the library next morning, they peered into the empty rooms through bare windows that skewed their reflection: a lanky figure in the worn green corduroy jacket of the old-fashioned academic and a bearded drifter in faded red baseball cap and olive army coat much too heavy for this warming day.

  Inside, they waited at a shiny maple table while the librarian fetched the documents requested. Mr. A. Collins, archivist, impatient at the delay, reared around like an inchworm every few moments to stare after her, such was his zeal to begin a rigorous inspection of the material. As it turned out, the librarian had tarried to ring up her friend the features editor at the newspaper, who came speedily to meet the southwest Florida historian, Professor Collins. Together, these ladies managed to persuade him that a newspaper interview might unearth one or two informants. Still irked by Julian Collins’s attitude (and ignoring the eye-rolling of his colleague), Lucius emphasized that Planter Watson had been a pioneer entrepreneur and beloved family man—“I beg your pardon? No, ma’am! He was acquitted! He was not some common criminal!”—upon which Arbie snorted, kicked his chair back, rose, and left.

  Lucius spent that soft spring morning ransacking the census records for the names mentioned by Herlong. Edgar Watson was missing from the 1900 census for Columbia County, having returned here from south Florida in early 1901: the rest of the Watson-Collins clan were present as were two households of Tolens, the clan detested by his father. However, the several Cox households listed no Leslie, or not under that name—very disappointing, since the solution of the mystery around this man was critical to the biography. If Cox was alive, had he ever returned to this county? Was he a shadow cousin, too?

  In the afternoon, at the librarian’s suggestion, he wandered down old grass-grown sidewalks to the ends of narrow lanes where the giant oaks had not been cleared nor the street paved, where the last of the old houses greened and sagged beneath sad Southern trees, arriving at last at Oak Lawn Cemetery. Here on thin and weary grass amidst black-lichened stones tended by somnolent gravediggers and faded robins stood a memorial to those brave boys of the Confederacy who died at Olustee, to the east, in a long-forgotten victory over Union troops.

  Near the war memorial, an iron fence enclosed three tombstones tilted by the oak roots:

  TABITHA WATSON, 1813–1905

  LAURA WATSON TOLEN, 1830–1894

  SAMUEL TOLEN, 1858–1907

  The Watson headstones were tall, narrow, and austere, as Lucius imagined these Episcopalian women might have been. Great-Aunt Tabitha had survived her daughter by a decade, tussling along into her nineties: her haughty monument held no cautionary message for th
ose left behind. Her daughter’s stone bore the terse inscription We Have Parted, while Tolen’s marker, squatted low in attendance on the ladies, read Gone But Not Forgotten—not forgotten by whom, Lucius wondered, since to judge from the 1900 census, his wife had been barren and both women had preceded him into this earth. Samuel Tolen had been born almost thirty years after his bride, and Lucius wondered if this discrepancy in age had not been a catalyst in the fatal family feud: had Greedy Sam infuriated Dangerous Edgar by marrying Aging Laura for her Watson property? Had the Tolens ordered Sam’s inscription as a warning to his killer that this business wasn’t finished? In this silent place, he could envision Sam Tolen’s embittered brothers in stiff ill-fitting black suits: did they already suspect blue-eyed Edgar Watson, standing there expressionless among the mourners?

  At the newspaper, his classified notice requesting information on E. J. Watson had failed to smoke out a response from the Collins family. However, there was a small note in smudged pencil:

  Sir: I suppose I am one of the few people still living in this area that knew Edgar Watson, having been raised in the same community near Fort White. I was too small to play on the old Tolen Team our country baseball club. I thought Leslie Cox was the greatest pitcher in the world. My brother Brooks was the catcher. They played such teams as Fort White and High Springs and most always won if Leslie was pitching. The Coxs were our friends until the trouble started.

  Grover Kinard

  Leslie Cox! At last! Not Leslie Cox, cold-blooded Killer, but Leslie Cox, Greatest Pitcher in the World, whiffling fastballs past thunderstruck yokels on bygone summer afternoons in those distant days before World War I when every town across the country had a sandlot ball club, when Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Smoky Joe Wood were the nation’s heroes—Leslie Cox, grimy pockets stuffed with chewing gum, jackknife, and one-penny nails, scaring more batters than Iron Man Joe McGinnity himself. The broken-voiced hoarse yells of boys and shrills of girls at each crack of the bat, all oblivious of the workings of the brain behind this young pitcher’s squinted eyes, in the shadow of the small-brimmed cap that was all most country teams afforded in the way of uniform.