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”:
6 fat hogs (900 lbs. @ 12¢ gross) 108.00
1 sow and five pigs 18.00
175 bu. corn 175.00
1000 bundles fodder 15.00
14.27 lbs. cotton 206.95
4 sacks guano 16.00
1000 seed corn 15.00
50 bu. potatos 25.00
1 barrel syrup (33 gal. @ 75¢ per gal.) 24.75
20 qts. bottle syrup 4.50
23 head of cattle @ $18.00 per head 414.00
1 saddle 9.00
1 buggy and harness 70.00
1 horse wagon 30.00
plow gear 4.50
farming implements 27.90
1 pr. balance 1.25
1 pot 1.00
2 tubs 1.00
1400 lbs. pork 210.00
1 Mule 55.00
1 Shotgun 10.00
New Bethel
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.
New Bethel Church, by a main highway, was sorely buffeted by diesel winds and the wail of tires. “New Bethel was built out of heart pine in 1854, so she’s solid as ever,” an elder in the churchyard assured them, shielding his eyes to admire his church in the morning light. This old man turned out to be the sexton, there to console any random pilgrim dismayed to see such a House of God beset by so much noisome progress.
While Arbie and the sexton swapped Lake City lore, Lucius and Sally hunted the granite rows for the name Watson. Eventually his eye was led by a flit of sparrows to a tilted headstone set apart by a lone juniper. The stone’s lettering had been eroded by black lichens, wind, and rain, and he knelt upon the grass to piece it out.
ANN M. WATSON
WIFE OF E. A. WATSON
AND DAUGHTER OF
W. C. AND SARAH COLLINS
BORN APRIL 16, 1862
DIED AT HER HOME IN
CO
LUMBIA CO. FLORIDA
SEPTEMBER 13, 1879
Here were fine hard bits of information of the sort so scarce in his father’s history, including the precise identity and dates of Papa’s first wife, as well as what could only be the fatal birthdate of Rob Watson on that unlucky thirteenth of September. He waved excitedly to Arbie, who came and slouched around the grave, hands in his pockets. “Can’t hardly read it,” he complained, seeming more interested in the dark evergreen behind. “Might have planted that ol’ cedar the same year he planted her,” he added roughly, turning abruptly and heading for the gate.
“Arb? This is Rob’s mother, Arb!” Lucius called after him, exasperated by the apathy of the old man, whose interest in their quest seemed to diminish by the day. “I know who it is!” he shouted back.
That headstone inscription was the earliest record of his father’s name which Lucius had yet come across—a gravestone record in a time of family grief, therefore unlikely to be imprecise. And the initial A in E. A. Watson verified those court documents pertaining to the Belle Starr hearing at Fort Smith that until this moment he had thought to be in error. It suggested that A had been the original initial, and that the subsequent change to J had been intended to obscure his identity after his escape from the Arkansas state prison.
Arbie had not waited at the cemetery gate but was headed north on foot along the highway shoulder. When they pulled up alongside, he would not get in the car. The old man hollered that he’d been on the road all his damned life, and had pounded highways and rode rails to hell and gone across the country, so he reckoned he was tough enough to make it back the three miles to Lake City. Close to tears, he would not look at Lucius but kept walking. When Sally urged him not to miss this meeting with those Collins cousins whom he’d said himself he had not seen since he was young, he yelled, “Stop pesterin me!”
The wrongheaded old man meant what he said. Lucius waved and wheeled the car and crossed the double lines and headed south again, but in a few minutes, he turned back, for Sally was worried and had suddenly decided she would wait for the old man at the motel. Passing Arbie, Lucius slowed to give him a chance to change his mind. Arbie ignored him.
Driving south on the Fort White Road, Lucius realized that there was time for a brief visit to the Tolen house before his meeting with the Collinses. At Herlong Lane, he turned off the pavement onto the cool track of white clay which ran due west through the woods for a mile and a half to the plantation’s southwest corner at the vanished railroad crossing. On the north side, the wall of virgin forest was parted by the old carriageway. Here he parked the car and followed the old road, still dimly defined by a woodland emptiness which parted tall spring trees. Burled oaks and hickories of the original Ichetucknee Plantation were entangled with vine-shrouded magnolias and tupelos, rising through long shafts of light to far blue patches of bright morning sky. How fresh this woodland morning air, and how delightful!—cardinal song, sad plaint of titmice, the bell note of a blue jay in resplendent spring.
Deep in the forest, the carriage drive joined a more recent track which came in from the old Junction Road off to the west. Here the fine pale clay was innocent of tire tracks, or even horseshoe prints and dapple of manure, only small heart signs made by deer, rat tail of possum, and thin hand of coon, the flutter marks of dusting quail, the wispy tracings of the quick white-footed mice.
Soon the trees parted and the carriage drive climbed toward a white-columned facade fresh-washed by morning sun, as if the forest had opened out into the lambent sunlight of an older century. The house might have arisen from Aunt Tabitha’s memory of some old Watson plantation at Clouds Creek, for the high white dwelling with its hand-hewn siding was fronted by a broad veranda with square pillars which supported an upper porch and balustrade, and the columned facade faced down the drive, awaiting the gentry who would never arrive in this far country of the Florida frontier. The new house had been larger than any other in the region, but the money for construction had run out, for its grandiose facade seemed out of scale with the makeshift building and small kitchen wing stuck on behind. Its two skinny brick chimneys seemed too narrow, and the rooms upstairs under the eaves had pinched small windows.
Behind the kitchen, chinked sheds and a poor barn sagged amongst the oaks, and beyond, a worn pasture was surrounded by ragged woodlots opened up by cattle. From the distance came the groan of cows, at the feed barn on the far side of the Fort White Road.
How odd that in an abandoned place, no eave window was broken, and no stoop overgrown. The ground-floor windows were unboarded, and the grass all around appeared rough-mowed. There was no junked truck or rusted harrow, no litter of neglect, only a bareness which extended to the worn-out paint, only the silence. Everything looked tidied in the morning light, as if the house were awaiting his arrival. An unlawful occupant might be peering out at him this very moment.
Stranger still, the kitchen door stood wide, as if the inhabitants had run away, hearing him coming. Someone or something—perhaps the heartbreaking spring wind—had swept the veranda where on such a morning Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson might have creaked in her high-backed rocker, gazing without hope at the ancient forest from which those longed-for friends from home had never come.
After her death, Sam Tolen had lived here alone. In the decades since, others had come and gone away again, and now, Grover Kinard had said, the house stood empty. It was as if, after all these years, the dank mold of the common dread of Cox and Watson had never been aired out of this countryside, where even the local people shunned this place at the far end of the dark path through the forest.
For a long time, in a silence like an echo, he stood listening. Though drawn toward that open door, he did not approach—an unreasonable fear, but there it was, of something secret, even sinister, a secret he longed not to know. So disturbed had he become that he dared not cry out, in dread of awakening the warders of the place, whether quick or dead.
Circling the house, keeping his distance, he was startled by the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, poised for flight from its nest limb in a big live oak by the house corner. So close to the building, the nest was a sure sign that the house was uninhabited, yet he could not put his uneasiness aside. That door ajar on the back steps—he scarcely dared to turn his back on it! He imagined the specter of gaunt Tabitha or even brutal Tolen looming through that opening, wiping ham fat from his mouth with hairy knuckles, demanding to know who the stranger was, what the hell he wanted, and why he should not be set upon by dogs.
Lucius walked quickly down the shadow drive toward Herlong Lane, glancing back at the lost house until it disappeared into the trees. The birdsong had stilled in the midmorning heat, there were only the dry caws of crows, the burring flight of unseen quail, a dead limb cracking, and the rush and earth thump of its tearing fall.
The Collins Farm
From Herlong Lane, he traveled south on a nameless clay track as white as bonemeal, so soft that the car tires made no sound. He passed no house, no farm, he heard no dog. The settlement called Centerville had long ago withdrawn into the woods.
In a mile or so he came to the old schoolhouse, on a knoll under great oaks in a clearing. The door was opened by a composed, iron-haired woman who introduced herself as Ellen Collins. Gazing over her shoulder from across the room were three figures in a huge dark oval photograph in a massive frame. In the portrait, between her seated elders, stood a young girl in a white dress, full-mouthed, innocent, and knowing. To her left sat a pert, quizzical old lady in white scarf and cameo brooch. On her right was a handsome and imposing man in black suit, embroidered white shirt, and black bow tie. His hair was plastered to his head after the fashion of the time, and a heavy mustache flowed sideways into heavy sideburns. His gaze was forthright and unequivocal and his brow clear.
“Great-Uncle Edgar,” said Ellen Collins primly, as if introducing them, for she had missed his consternation in this sudden confrontation with his father. “With Great-Grandmother Watson and
my aunt May Collins as a girl.” As he recalled, May Collins had been born around 1891. Since she was a near adolescent here, the photograph had presumably been taken about 1904, before his father’s marriage to Edna Bethea.
He turned as Ellen introduced two women who had now entered the room. Cousin Hettie Collins, silver-haired, had the freshness of a younger woman in the mouth and eyes. When she offered a spontaneous welcome with a warm peck on his cheek, her daughter teased her—“Are we kissin cousins?” April Collins was handsome, about twenty, with taffy hair hacked short in a no-nonsense manner, and she had the bald unswerving gaze of her great-uncle Edgar on the wall, with that crescent of white beneath the pupil shared by Watson Dyer and also Carrie Langford. When Lucius glanced back at the photograph, the young woman laughed. “Yup,” she said cheerfully, “those ‘Crazy Watson eyes.’ Still in our family.”
Ellen Collins was pointing at a chair. From the sofa, the three women watched him. “This is the first photograph of Mr. Watson I have ever seen,” he explained, finding his voice at last. He searched for something “crazy” in his father’s face, but there was no sign of aberration unless it was that transfixed gaze, as if E. J. Watson had never blinked in all his life.
He thought about the Watson sons, and “the blood of a killer” seeping through their veins. Perhaps his brothers, in their very different natures, shared his dread that one day, in the eruption of a gene, they might go “crazy.” Or perhaps they had no wish to face that, far less understand it. Perhaps he was truly alien to all the others.
“It’s the one known photograph,” Ellen was saying. “How could you possibly have seen it?” She sat back stiffly, folding her arms to bar his way into the bosom of the family.
“He’s kin, Aunt Ellie! L. Watson Collins? Got to be kin!”
“That might be his nom de plume,” said her aunt severely. Though her brash niece mimicked her—num de ploom!—Ellie Collins saw nothing to laugh at. Plainly she was having second thoughts about permitting this pseudo-Collins to cross their stoop.
Lost Man's River Page 15
