Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  “How about that colored man the Herlongs claimed he killed in Carolina?” April demanded. “Looks to me like dear old Uncle had gone kind of sour by the time he got here!”

  “Did this family ever think he was really crazy?” Lucius was certain his uneasiness had now betrayed him, for the room fell still, and everybody turned in his direction.

  “Crazy like a fox, we used to say,” Mr. Edmunds told him. “Everything that feller touched turned to pure gold. Anyways, there were plenty like Ed Watson back in frontier days! Robber barons, y’know! Killings all over the damn place! Didn’t stop at nothing!”

  “They say those darn old robber barons made this country great, and made great fortunes, but they never let too much stand in their way.”

  “Human life, for one thing. Uncle Edgar—”

  “Well, not all men who resorted to violence were unscrupulous,” Hettie warned her daughter. “In Reconstruction, the Union soldiers and carpetbaggers and uppity colored people all around made life bitter and miserable, that’s all. There were many men who felt they had no choice but to take the law in their own hands. They weren’t all crazy, April dear!” Hettie went pink in the face. “My own grandfather,” she confessed. “There was this bold darkie who gave insult to his mother. Grandfather killed that man. Furthermore, he would not submit to trial for having done what he thought was right. They promised him the judge would let him off, they warned him he would be worse off as a fugitive than if he stayed. No, he said, what it came down to was his honor. He knew he would get off, of course, but he refused to be put on trial by ‘those damned radical scalawags,’ whom he despised! He came to Florida and changed his name, called himself Ben Scroggins!”

  Cousin Ellie sighed. “No, Uncle Edgar was not the only one who resorted to violence back in those days, no, far from it. He had fine qualities, but because of his bad reputation, he was accused of a lot of things he didn’t do, which made him bitter. Anyway, that’s what came down in the family.”

  Because of his feud with the Tolens, Edgar Watson left the Myers plantation to sharecrop a piece of land for Captain Getzen, but he used the Collins store at Ichetucknee, and was good friends with Lem and Billy Collins. Hettie showed Lucius the yellowed cashbooks salvaged from the store, where Edgar Watson was one of six customers (out of twenty-two) who were identified as “good” prospects to pay their bills. In the late 1870s, his purchases included tobacco, schnapps and bitters, and a pocketknife. On different dates in 1878, he bought ceiling and weather boarding, apparently to patch his cabin on the Junction Road. “Uncle Edgar was fixing that old Robarts cabin for his bride-to-be,” Hettie told Lucius.

  “That same year, Minnie Watson married Billy Collins, and both couples lived there after their marriage,” Ellie added. “We have a courtship letter from Granddad Billy that turned up in her things: ‘Dear Miss Minnie, I would very much like you to accompany me on a buggy ride this Sunday.…’ Then Uncle Edgar married Ann Mary Collins, whose nickname was Charlie. We believe it was Edgar who gave her that odd name. Even on the marriage record, she is Charlie.”

  Lucius glanced quickly through these documents. Papa had used the pet name Mandy for his second wife, Kate for his third, exchanging the staid Ann Mary, Jane, and Edna for more “wanton” names. He considered using this esoteric theory as a deft first step in introducing himself as the long-lost cousin Lucius, but before he could do so, Ellie boasted, “I have already told him about poor Charlie, even where to go to find her grave!” She avoided referring to him as Professor Collins, lest that name prove spurious.

  Hettie said that Great-Grandfather Collins died in the same year as Charlie Watson, and they had his will. Edgar Watson had bought a double-barrel shotgun and a horse from that estate, paying $10.50 for the gun and $55.00 for the horse. She passed a scrawled receipt. “Far as we know, that was the double-barrel he would use till the day he died.”

  “Probably used it on Belle Starr, she was the first one,” Mr. Edmunds said. “I knowed a feller who read all about it in a book.”

  “After his darling Charlie died, Uncle Edgar went hog wild. It was five or six years, at least, before he calmed down and married that young schoolteacher from Deland. Still lived in the log cabin by the Junction, the same one he rented later to his friend Will Cox. That’s where our cousin Carrie was born, and Cousin Ed, who was still a baby when the family left for Oklahoma later that year. We know that was in ’87, because Julian was born to Minnie and Billy just a few months later.”

  Grandpa Billy’s brother Lem had killed a man in the Collins blacksmith shop behind the store. It seemed this man was angry because Lem Collins had been fooling with his wife. The Collins family put up hundreds of acres for a $4000 bond posted mainly by Laura Myers, and when Lem jumped his bond and ran away to Georgia, the family sold off most of its land to repay the debt. There was a Sheriff’s sale of more Collins property in 1886, but Laura Myers never recouped her loan, and the fortunes of the Collins clan never recovered. Grandpa Billy always said that Uncle Edgar had been a bad influence on Lem and might even have been involved in the killing, and other people were suspicious, too.

  Uncle Edgar had gone away to Oklahoma, and once he was safe out of the way, Sam Tolen had married poor old Cousin Laura. The widow’s marriage to an ignorant cracker almost thirty years her junior (and well beneath her social station, Ellie noted primly) had seemed to vindicate Colonel Myers’s precaution of bypassing this foolish creature in his will. Sam Tolen proceeded soon thereafter with the construction of the manor house, which was scarcely finished when Laura died in 1894. Upon her death—at Tolen’s urging, they supposed—Tabitha Watson, now an old lady, had transferred her daughter’s “child portion” of the estate to her son-in-law, who wasted no time in selling the whole plantation out from under her.

  When Edgar Watson returned from the West in the early nineties, he was a fugitive on horseback, passing through at night on his way south. Before he left, he gave money to the Collinses to send to Arkansas for his wife and children and to take care of them here in Fort White until he got himself established on the southwest coast. Cousin Ed was nine years old when the family came back from Arkansas, which dated their return to 1896. The next year the family left Fort White for the Ten Thousand Islands.

  “Right after the turn of the century, Jane Watson died and Uncle Edgar came back here to Columbia County. Aunt Minnie got Granddad to lease him a piece of our Collins tract, where he built his house all by himself.”

  “Nothing but brambles and poverty grass when he took over,” Mr. Edmunds said. “He brought them old fields back into production, got his place all bought and paid for, earned himself a real good reputation. Folks were ready to forgive him and forget, even the ones who had heard about Belle Starr.

  “Course I lived right around here since a boy, and I seen him build that house up on the hill. Watson was staying with his sister’s family. Billy Collins was grinding cane from some cuttings Watson brought him from Ten Thousand Islands, so us kids would run over at noontime from the school, drink some good cane juice. That’s when I first remember Edgar Watson, must of been about nineteen and oh-four.

  “Doc Straughter did odd jobs for Watson when they lived up on the hill. For the rest of his life, that niggera would talk about how Mist’ Edgar worked a revolver, said he never seen anything to beat it. Set on his back porch and pick the acorns off of that red oak—that big tree is up there yet today. Course just about every man back then could work a rifle pretty good, but nobody couldn’t hit nothin with a handgun. E. J. Watson could beat you and your rifle with a damn revolver, which was why they claimed he made his money as a gunfighter out in the Nations.”

  “Uncle Edgar was always an amusing talker and great storyteller,” Hettie said. “He was invited everywhere in Fort White, which was much larger and more prosperous than it is today. Board sidewalks and tall kerosene streetlamps, two-seater horse hacks with fringe canopies. There was even three whole stories’ worth of bright yellow hotel
, Sparkman Hotel. Uncle Edgar went in there every Saturday to have his lunch, and Bascomb Sparkman always said he never saw a man so educated and well-dressed and mannerly. Said to hear Mr. Watson carry on beat any politician that you ever heard about. It was purely unbelievable, all the things he knew about this country’s history, and not only America but Ancient Greece! Homer and the Iliad. He quoted Shakespeare! His folks couldn’t get Bascomb out of the dining room on Saturdays, that’s how entertained he was by Uncle Edgar!”

  “Well, Mama, was he so popular? Or just notorious as the Man Who Killed Belle Starr?”

  “Nobody would think such an amiable man had ever killed a woman in his life, that’s what Bascomb said. But if somebody said something smart, and those blue eyes froze, folks knew enough to get out of his way. I asked Bascomb once what that look was, and Bascomb thought awhile, then said, ‘He looked like God and he looked like Satan and he looked like Uncle Sam, all three at once!’ Now isn’t that a strange idea? Young Bascomb had a lot of imagination!”

  “Probably looked like those enlistment posters where Uncle Sam is pointing at you off the wall,” April exclaimed. “You call yourself a red-blooded American? Quit skulkin around behind them bleedin-hearts and yeller-bellies! Step right up and sign your X right here!”

  “It’s true,” Paul Edmunds was remembering. “Warm, ruddy face and a fine lively smile, but there was a glint in them blue eyes which made most men go quaky in the belly.”

  “Did he ever look at you like that?” Letitia whispered, in honest awe of any man fearsome enough to daunt her Paul T. Edmunds. Her husband snorted and stamped crossly at her whispering, as if she were some sort of pesky fly.

  “Well, most people don’t recall anything like that!” Lucius protested.

  “Julian Collins would tell about one night when he was going down Herlong Lane with his uncle Edgar in the horse and buggy,” Hettie said. “Uncle Edgar never went anywhere without a weapon, and he would rein in before every clump of woods and peer and listen, using the moonlight to silhouette the trees, hunting for bushwhackers before whipping the horse past. That was just after the turn of the century, when he first came back here from the Islands! Someone must have been gunning for him even then.”

  “Could have been Tolens,” Edmunds said. “Sam was starting to sell off the plantation, and maybe Edgar got riled up and said something about Watson land that made Sam think Edgar might kill him if Tolens didn’t kill him first. That made for a very dangerous situation.”

  After a few years in Fort White, Edgar Watson paid occasional visits to the Islands to maintain his sugarcane plantation, which in his absence had gone back to jungle. The women recalled that in 1906, when Julian Collins was twenty, he and his Laura had accompanied Uncle Edgar to the Islands. Lucius, who was seventeen that summer, remembered his cousins rather vaguely, but he recalled that Papa had forbidden them to swim in Chatham River, saying that inland people did not swim well. Winking at Lucius, he would exaggerate the dangers of big sharks hunting upriver on the tide and the huge alligators which came downstream from the Glades during the summer rains, and the great solitary crocodile that hauled out on the bank across the river.

  “In their six months in the Islands, those young Collinses heard some ugly stories about how Uncle Edgar hired loners for the harvest, people with nobody waiting for ’em back home—darkies mostly, but some outlaws, too, and drunks and drifters—and how these people would just disappear when payday came. It was true, they told us, that some of his harvest hands were drunks and drifters, but the Collinses noticed nothing wrong about how those harvest workers were paid off. They didn’t know what to make of all those rumors.”

  “Oh, rumors went around, all right,” Lucius admitted, “but I have never come across one bit of evidence that he killed his help.”

  Hettie Collins was silent a few moments, gazing down at her clenched hands. “My father-in-law was close to Uncle Edgar in those days,” she said finally. “He would not have passed along such awful gossip.”

  As Lucius recalled, Julian’s young wife had liked Papa very much. Laura always said he was the kindest man she ever met, kind to his own family and oh so hospitable to his young relatives at Chatham Bend. And Hettie remembered how grateful Laura was that Uncle Edgar had sat all night at her bedside when she miscarried her baby boy down in the Islands. Papa and Lucius buried the child because Julian was simply too upset. Lucius remembered that when Papa wasn’t looking, he had said good-bye to that little boy by touching two fingers to the cool blue forehead. Poor Laura had been so small and frail—a dark-haired pretty little thing, with such sad eyes!

  “When they came back to Fort White in early 1907, Julian and Laura moved into Uncle Edgar’s house, so it doesn’t look like they learned anything too terrible. They were hardly home when Grandpa Billy died, that was February of 1907, and Edgar and Edna came back north to be with the family. Edna’s little Addison and Laura’s little boy, who became my husband, were born in Uncle Edgar’s house that same October, so those dear friends had their babies right together.”

  “Which means they were all in Uncle Edgar’s house when Sam Tolen was killed right down the road,” Lucius said, checking his own notes. “Would they have stayed if they suspected him?”

  “Oh, I imagine they were worried,” Hettie murmured. “I mean, there was so much talk all around the county! But Uncle Edgar was close family, so they would not believe anything said against him. At one time Julian had deeply admired his uncle, and in later years he always made Cousin Ed feel welcome. But Julian was straitlaced even then, and detested loose talk that might harm the family name. Eventually, of course, he and his brother felt obliged to repudiate their uncle for disgracing our good reputation, and they cast him out. Julian Collins is dead, and his son, too, but my brother-in-law is still adamant, up in Lake City. I wouldn’t dare let on to him what we’re discussing!”

  “Certainly not!” Ellie’s grave frown affirmed the Collins Code, as if she herself, against all odds, were its last defender. Hettie and Lucius exchanged a delicious smile.

  “Julian Collins was always pretty quiet,” Mr. Edmunds recalled. “You never caught Julian in too much of a conversation, he never used two words where one would do. When anybody got to talking about E. J. Watson, neither of those Collins boys would say one word.”

  Asked what the Collins boys had testified at their uncle’s trial, the women made clear by their silence that this newcomer of doubtful antecedents was not entitled to such knowledge. But his question had caused discomfort in the room, like a woodland bird flown in through the window and fluttering distractingly behind the curtains. To put him in his place, Ellie changed the subject, reminding everyone that Samuel Tolen had lived alone with the aging Aunt Tabitha for at least ten years. “He terrorized that poor old soul! Alone in the house with that dirty brute, dependent on him for her very food and water. He might have forced her to rewrite the will, then starved her to death to get his hands on the property a little quicker.”

  Had Great-Aunt Tabitha, in a last-minute gesture to keep the peace, promised Edna and Edgar that wedding present of the piano and silver mentioned by Dr. Herlong, which apparently Sam Tolen had withheld?

  “We heard there was some problem over cows.” Ellie scowled when her niece laughed aloud at this cow theory.

  “There was bad blood long before them cows,” Edmunds said darkly.

  “Sam Tolen kept those presents for himself? That would cause trouble!”

  “Might cause trouble but not murder,” Edmunds said. “It’s land that causes murder in this part of the country—land and women. What caused the killings was Sam Tolen selling off what Watson thought was rightfully Watson land.”

  Lucius had to agree. A plantation owned by an elderly Watson aunt who had no heirs had seemed to Papa his great chance to restore the family fortunes. To see it usurped, mismanaged, and exploited by the Tolens could only have maddened him beyond all sense, all the more so after the bitter loss of his fami
ly property at Clouds Creek, in Carolina.

  “My mama liked to recollect the day Sam Tolen died,” Paul Edmunds said. “She remembered it good because them shots rung out off to the northwest of our store, on that old road that run from Tolen’s through the woods and on out across the back of Watson’s fields. That road’s all growed over now, ain’t nothing down along that way no more at all.”

  “Except your store,” said April. “I told you I could take you to it any time you wanted. Got a nice tree growing right up through the roof.”

  “That’s cause you know I’m too darned old to go.” The old man kept his gaze fastened on Lucius.

  “After Mike Tolen’s death,” Ellie said, “Uncle Edgar went straight to the Collins boys and asked them to back him up with a good alibi, and he also tried that on their friend, Jim Delaney Lowe. Well, those young men knew he must be guilty if he was so anxious for an alibi, and they refused to stand up and tell lies when he went to trial. And Julian’s Laura, though fond of Uncle Edgar, had no choice but to stand beside her husband.”

  Lucius mentioned that another man besides Edgar Watson had been indicted for Mike Tolen’s murder. When they turned toward him in disbelief, he told them that a black man named Frank Reese had been arrested in both Tolen cases. “That never came down in our family,” Ellie warned him. Paul Edmunds agitated in impatience as if a black man didn’t count, not even a black man charged with murder. Then Lucius said he supposed they knew that Julian and Willie Collins had been charged as accessories-after-the-fact in the Mike Tolen case and jailed on one thousand dollars bail.