Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius telephoned Mr. Kinard at once, arranging a visit for two days hence.

  The Columbia County Courthouse, where he went next morning, was a fat pink building overlooking the town pond, called Lake De Soto in commemoration of the great conquistador who had clanked and swatted through these woods on the hard way of empire. In the county clerk’s office he inquired about arrest records and court transcripts pertaining to an E. J. Watson, accused of murdering one Samuel Tolen about 1907. Though he mentioned quickly that this was a historic case that had involved Governor Broward, their sighs protested that official staff had more important matters to attend to than digging out old dusty ledgers and disintegrating dockets.

  The county clerk, flushed from an inner office, was a quick little man, thin-haired and squeaky. “Yessir? What can I do you for today?” Told what the gentleman was seeking, he titillated his staff by winking when he said, “Excuse me, girls, while I go peruse them terrible murders we got stored up for our perusal outside the gentleman’s toilet in the basement.” When eventually he reappeared, he whisked from behind his back a thick file packet stuffed with yellowed papers, presenting it with a small bow and flourish. “We got us a E. J., all right, but the victim was Mr. D. M. Tolen, and it ain’t nineteen ought seven, it’s ought eight. That close enough?”

  On a public bench out in the hall, Lucius entered the old pages with dread and elation. Though the neighbor cited in that Herlong clipping had specified Sam Tolen, the file concerned the murder less than a year later of Sam’s younger brother Mike. Furthermore, E. J. Watson had a codefendant, a black man named Frank Reese.

  He scribbled notes. In the year previous, the circuit court had indicted Reese for the murder of S. Tolen on the basis of a D. M. Tolen affidavit. Why had Mike Tolen accused Reese, not Cox or Watson? Why had he never heard about this man indicted in both Tolen killings? Were black men so bereft of status in those Jim Crow days that even Negro murder suspects went unmentioned?

  Another mystery: on April 10 of 1908, based on the coroner’s inquest in late March, Julian and Willie Collins had been arrested as “accessories after the fact in the murder of D. M. Tolen.” Had his cousins provided testimony that led to the indictment of his father?

  All courtroom testimony had apparently been sealed, but a few scraps from a grand jury hearing in Lake City on April 27 accompanied the court documents. Most intriguing was a cross-examination of one Jasper Cox, who testified on behalf of the defendants. In helping the defense attorney establish the fact that no fair trial could be held in Columbia County, this witness declared that on March 26, three days after the murder of Mike Tolen, he had been approached at the courthouse by a jury member who told him he “was helping to get up a mob to get these men and asked if I didn’t want to assist them, and I told him it was out of my line of business.”

  Q. These defendants here are under indictment for killing Mike Tolen, are they not?

  A. Yes.

  Q. And your nephew is under indictment for killing the other one, the brother of Mike Tolen?

  A. Yes.

  Q. There was no charge against Leslie Cox at that time—

  A. No, sir.

  This exchange—the only mention of Jasper’s nephew in the thick packet—established that Leslie Cox, not Watson, had been arrested for Sam Tolen’s murder, and Watson, not Cox, for the murder of Mike Tolen the following year.

  Included in the sprawling file were contemporary clippings.

  MIKE TOLEN MURDERED ON FARM

  LAKE CITY, MARCH 23. Mike Tolen, a prominent farmer residing between Lake City and Fort White, was murdered by unknown parties on his farm about 8 o’clock this morning.

  News of the murder was immediately brought to the city and a posse, headed by bloodhounds, were soon off to the scene. The authorities suspect certain parties of the murder and it is believed that arrests will be made tonight and the prisoners brought to this city. Sam Tolen, a brother of the dead man, was murdered by unknown parties last summer. The trouble is the outcome of a family feud.

  —Jacksonville Times-Union, March 24, 1908

  The special term of the Circuit Court called for Madison County convened Monday for the trial of a murder case on change of venue from Columbia County, the defendant being E. J. Watson, a white man, and Frank Reese, a negro, indicted for the murder of one Tolen, white, in Columbia County. The case is one which excited the people of Columbia greatly, all the parties concerned being prominent.

  The defendant Watson is a man of fine appearance and his face betokens intelligence in an unusual degree. That a determined fight will be made to establish the innocence of the defendants is evidenced by the imposing array of lawyers employed in their behalf. At this writing a jury is being chosen.

  —Madison Enterprise-Recorder, December 12, 1908

  On December 19, the jury found the defendants not guilty and they were discharged.

  Lucius telephoned Watson Dyer, who was in the state capital on official business but had asked to be kept posted. He was not in the least curious about Frank Reese. “All that matters is, E. J. Watson was found innocent. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’—that’s the American way.”

  “I suppose so. At least when the accused is the right color.”

  Ignoring this quibble, Dyer said, “And if he was proved innocent of killing Samuel Tolen, he may well be innocent of other allegations. In our book we can say—”

  Irritated by that “our book” even before he’d figured out what was objectionable, Lucius interrupted sharply, “Let me repeat. My father was charged with killing D. M. Tolen. Mike. The man indicted for the murder of Sam Tolen was Leslie Cox.”

  “Is that a fact?” Surprise rose slowly in Dyer’s voice like the first thick bubble in a pot of boiling grits.

  “It’s possible, of course, that both were involved in both those murders.”

  “Or that neither killed either. There’s always that nigger, right?” Dyer said he could not talk now, being late for an appointment at the governor’s office. He would be driving south tomorrow and would stop by Lake City for consultation and an early supper.

  The interview with L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., in the newspaper next morning attributed to Professor Collins precisely what he had denied—in effect, the reporter’s notion that E. J. Watson, “formerly of this county,” had been the mass murderer of his era.

  Lucius rushed to the newspaper office to demand a retraction, knowing it would do no good. Any hope of cooperation from his cousins had been blighted. But wonderfully, feckless reportage had pierced Collins defenses where earnest entreaty had failed. A note hand-delivered to the newspaper stiffly disputed the visitor’s observations and opinions.

  Sir: It is very doubtful that you spoke to the Collins family because those who knew of Uncle Edgar are of an older era when family business was just that and was not told to strangers. I am writing to tell you that I greatly resent Uncle Edgar being compared to a mass murderer. If you’ve done any research at all, you would know that my uncle could be a very considerate and courteous neighbor. . . .

  Indignant that old family detritus had been stirred into view like leaf rot from the bottom of a well, a Collins had broken all those years of silence. What’s more, Miss Ellen Collins did not hang up on him when he telephoned to apologize, so determined was she to chastise him. “Is Collins your real name? Or are you passing yourself off as kin just to snoop out scurrilous information?”

  Taken aback, he felt a start of panic. “I am a relative,” he said. Still gun-shy from Julian’s rejection, desperate not to lose this precious chance, he withheld his real name, awaiting a better moment. “And I’ve been talking to another relative,” he added hastily, lest the conversation lapse. “Mr. Arbie Collins.”

  The anticipated outcry—Cousin Arbie!?—was not forthcoming. “R. B., you say?” If this R. B. was a bona fide Collins, he was a distant one indeed, her tone implied. “I don’t suppose you mean R. B. Watson? Whose mother was a Collins?”

 
“Oh Lord, I’d forgotten that! Do you recall her name?”

  His eagerness kept his flapping kite aloft: Ellen Collins was still there.

  “Oh heck, let me think back.” She’d been shown the gravestone as a child. As a second cousin, Rob Watson’s mother had been buried in New Bethel churchyard, south of Lake City, not in the family cemetery at Tustenuggee near Fort White. “There’s still a few of us back in those woods,” she sighed, “on our old land grant or what’s left of it. Uncle Edgar lived there, too.” Then she snapped, “I’ve talked too much already,” and hung up. Shortly she rang back: if he was really a history professor, she had decided, he should know the truth. If he promised that Julian Collins in Lake City and Cousin Ed Watson in Fort Myers would never hear about it—and on the condition that he made no mention of “that Tolen business”—the family in Fort White would meet with him the following day. “I’ll be there, too,” she warned.

  At the billiards emporium and pool hall, Lucius found Arbie showing off for a lacquered female of uncertain age who sat with one hip cocked on the corner of the table, her cerise bootie dangling and twitching like a fish lure—the only whore in town, Lucius suspected. The archivist turned pool shark, giving Lucius a cool nod, racked his balls and broke the rack with a ferocious shot that left him square behind the eight ball. “Damn fool shot his own dog,” he muttered, walking around the table to inspect the catastrophe from another angle. “Story of my life.”

  WATSON DYER

  Watson Dyer, seated squarely in the hotel lobby, was a heavyset man but not a fat one, clad in the big suit and damp white shirt favored by politicians. Lucius had only a dim memory of the sullen dark-haired boy at Chatham Bend, yet the adult manifestation was unmistakable. His well-greased hair was slicked back from the high forehead of a moonish face, and white crescents beneath the pupils made his pale blue eyes seem to protrude, though they did not: lacking depth, they appeared to be inset into the skin like stones in hide. Strong brows were hooked down at the corners, hooding those eyes, and the left eyebrow but not the right was lifted quizzically as if in expectation that whoever stood in his way must now get out of it.

  “Mr. Dyer? Lucius Watson. And Mr. Arbie Collins.”

  Creasing his newspaper, Dyer considered this information, as if how such people were to be addressed was for W. Dyer to decide. His eyes seemed to be closing slowly, as in turtles, and when they opened once again, Lucius noticed a rim of darker blue on the pale pupils, and also a delicate shiver on the skin surface around the mouth, as if this man were fairly trembling with inner rage. When Dyer grinned, which he did rarely and as if by accident, those delicate shivers played like mad under his nose.

  “So you’re still calling yourself Watson.” Mustering the meaty good-guy grin of the corporate executive, Watt Dyer pushed himself onto his feet in a waft of shaving lotion, extending a well-manicured hard hand.

  “That’s his name,” Arbie said sharply. Though Arbie had more or less shaved for the occasion, Dyer’s hairline was so crisp that the other, by contrast, appeared disheveled; his red neckerchief, lacking its usual flair, made him look raffish, even seedy.

  Dyer appraised him. “R. B. Collins, you say?” He took Lucius’s elbow and guided him toward the dining room, letting the disgruntled Arbie fall in behind. “Let’s get things straight,” said Dyer. “The noted historian I’m sponsoring at Naples—the objective authority my sugar folks wish to sponsor—is Professor L. Watson Collins, author of A History of Southwest Florida.” He strode a ways while that sank in, then summoned Arbie alongside. “Now, boys, I ask you,” he complained, “if a lecture on a controversial figure by a published Florida historian wouldn’t be more . . . credible? Than a lecture by his own son? Avoid any suspicion that our author might be . . . prejudiced?”

  “Our author?” Arbie sneered. “You don’t even know him.”

  “I know all about him,” Dyer said in a soft voice, leaning in close for a long moment to peer through Arbie’s eyes into his brain, “and all about you, too, sir. Routine background check,” he added, raising both palms to quell Arbie’s protest. “Standard business practice. Before underwriting a project, you first investigate the background of all participating individuals.”

  As for the land claim, Dyer explained that what he required were affidavits from “the Watson boys,” endorsing their father’s title claim to the Chatham property. Meanwhile, the newspaper would cover the Naples meeting where Professor Collins would point out the complete absence of hard evidence that E. J. Watson had ever committed murder. “Next, we encourage petitions to save the historic frontier home of the man who brought the sugarcane industry to Florida—”

  “Oh, Lord.” Lucius shook his head. “I never claimed that.”

  “He won’t be a party to some con game!” Arbie spat this impudence into Dyer’s face. Those eyes that considered Arbie reminded Lucius of a bear hunt with his father as a boy—the morose animal biding its time until the sudden swipe of long curved claws gutted the dog and left it whimpering, confused by the waning of its life.

  Dyer said in an intense cold voice, “Tell me, sir, what is it that you call yourself? R. B.?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  “Incorrect, sir. It is very much my business.” Controlling his anger, Dyer frowned at his watch and whacked his leg hard with his newspaper, startling the hostess; she beckoned them inside. Tossing the paper onto the spittoon for someone else to deal with, Dyer strode ahead.

  At the table, Lucius produced his synopsis of Arbie’s notes on the Belle Starr case. Dyer skimmed the entire document while the waitress stood there awaiting their order with poised pencil; he sat hunched forward over the table, mantling the papers like a raptor. “A hearing in Arkansas federal court. No indictment. Won’t hurt us a bit.” He slipped the document into his briefcase. “All the same, we have to scrutinize any material in our book that might cast a bad light on our subject.”

  Arbie sat arms folded on his chest as if trying to clamp down on chronic twitches. In a silence, he demanded, “What’s in this thing for you?”

  “I mean, it must be a lot of work,” Lucius added tactfully. Though annoyed again by that “our book,” he was more annoyed that Arbie was asking questions he should have asked himself.

  “Not a blessed thing.” Dyer sat back in his chair to beckon the waitress. “Call it nostalgia for the old family place, call it my sense of fair play.” He spiked the next question before Arbie could ask it. “No fee, no commission. The family won’t owe me one red cent.”

  “Well, thank you! That calls for a drink.” Lucius waved the waitress to the table.

  “No liquor served here,” Dyer said with satisfaction. “Fine old-fashioned fundamentalist family. ‘God is our Senior Partner’—got that right there on the menu.” He smiled at the bill of fare. “The cheapest dinners are the best. Deep-fried chicken, deep-fried catfish, crispy and golden—they do it up real nice.”

  “Crispy and golden it is,” Lucius muttered, cross about his drink. But just as the waitress fluttered in, Arbie stood up. When Dyer said equably, “Might’s well get your order in,” he stopped short, cocking his head. “You talking to me?” The attorney nodded. That Watt Dyer was so calm in the teeth of the other’s unreasonable hostility was impressive, Lucius thought, and a little scary. “Make mine the Cheap Golden Dinner,” Arbie told the waitress. He moved away among the diners, shoulders strangely high and stiff as if set to ward off a blow.

  Lighting a cigar, Dyer shuffled through more pages. “You establish here that Cox was responsible for those last murders. Unlike Cox, E. J. Watson was a solid citizen. . . .”

  “Yes, in his way—”

  “You doubt that? You don’t mean what you say here?” He snapped open a page and read aloud: ‘The great majority of these Watson tales are rumors unsupported by real evidence.’ In all your interviews, all your research, you never learned of a single witness to even one of his alleged murders, isn’t that correct?”

&n
bsp; “All true. But it’s not so simple—” Lucius stopped because Arbie had come back. “Hell yes, there was a witness,” he told Dyer. “His own son.”

  Dyer watched Arbie produce a pint bottle and dose two water glasses under the table. “I understand from the Professor’s notes,” he began quietly, “that you claim to have encountered Robert B. Watson at Key West when Robert B. Watson turned up there with his father’s schooner?” He paused until Arbie assented. “And you now assert that Robert Watson told you some wild story about how his father murdered somebody named Tucker?”

  “Wild story? Hell, no—”

  “And you further assert that you aided and abetted Robert B. Watson in the illegal sale of his father’s stolen ship and his flight from Key West on a steamer?” Dyer fired his questions at increasing speed, maintaining a dangerous, neutral tone. “Is that your story, sir?”

  Lucius protested, “Hold on, Dyer—”

  “Is that or is that not your story? Yes or no?”

  “You calling me a liar, mister?”

  “Not yet.” Dyer wrote some notes. “And after Robert B. Watson had escaped, you spread his wild tale about the alleged murder of these Tucker people. Is that correct?”

  Arbie stood up in disgust and left the room.

  “Why all this lawyerly bullying?” Lucius demanded. “What reason do you have to doubt his story?”

  “None.” Dyer squashed out his cigar. “I have no reason to accept it, either. Anyway, hearsay evidence is worthless. So if, as you say, there were no known witnesses to the other alleged killings, then it’s plausible that E. J. Watson never killed anybody, isn’t that true?”