Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius held his tongue. What he was hearing was disgraceful fabrication, and yet it rang with a certain mythic truth.

  “Some say those poor darkies were killed because Calvin testified against Uncle Edgar at his trial. Calvin was black, and he opened his mouth against a white man—that was enough!”

  “Damn right, boys!” April gave a rebel yell, and her mother had to hide a smile as the others frowned. “If that ain’t Southren honor, I don’t know what is!”

  “See, what Watson done, he got word to Cox how there was one thousand dollars waitin for him if he killed that niggera, and if he found Calvin’s money, they would split it. Course that is hearsay,” Mr. Edmunds went on, with a resentful glare at Lucius. “Can’t put no trust in us local people that has lived in these woods all their lives and knowed every last soul who knowed anything about the truth of it.”

  He allowed a moment for his big barb to sink in before resuming. “The story was that at his trial, Watson made a slit-throat sign to that old niggera, drew his finger crost his throat soon as Calvin first stood up to get sworn in. And Leslie was there—he was already turned loose in the Sam Tolen case—and Leslie seen it, so Calvin was as good as dead already.”

  “From what I heard, Uncle Edgar liked to joke in court, to tease the prosecutor, get the jury on his side,” said Ellie. “But being Leslie, he would take it seriously when everyone else knew it was a joke.”

  “Judge never throwed Cox out of the courtroom, just ordered Calvin not to be scared off. Him and the public persecutor reminded Calvin he weren’t no damn ol’ slave no more, but a bona fide American citizen and a franchised voter, so he better stand up and do his civic duty. And Calvin bein such a proud stubborn old mule, that’s what he done. Well, nobody couldn’t expect a man to let no niggera get away with that!”

  “Uncle Edgar had his good name to think about, right, Professor?” April whispered. But the others raised cries of protest over Mr. Edmunds’s headstrong version of events. “Where would Uncle Edgar get a thousand dollars, Paul? He was dead broke! The whole family was poor! For a half century, we buried our dead with wooden crosses!”

  “Ain’t none of my damn business where he got it! But he always come up with money, we know that much!”

  There was no good evidence for any of this stuff, and Lucius sighed, disheartened. He felt suffocated. He longed to get up and stretch his legs, go out for a long hard walk in the spring woods.

  Letitia Edmunds was marveling aloud that her own mother had attended this Centerville school with Leslie Cox. “They sat right here in this very room, looking out these same ol’ windows!” cried Letitia, who promptly looked out of the windows herself by way of proof. “And Mama told me that Leslie Cox first shaved at the age of twelve!”

  Hushing his wife with one terrible frown, her husband confiscated her sole contribution to Cox lore. Leslie Cox, he informed them, was a full-grown man by the time he was sixteen, and when unshaven, he looked close to thirty.

  “Maybe his body grew too fast for his brain—”

  “He was never nice to anybody, April,” Ellie said. “I never heard one good thing about him, cause he didn’t have a good side, just a bad side.”

  “I never heard about the good side of May Collins, either!”

  “Now, April honey, nobody ever called Aunt May a killer!”

  “Well, this family sure got upset when she ran off with one!”

  Lucius glanced at Hettie Collins. Is that true? his expression said, and Hettie nodded. “After Billy Collins died in 1907, that’s when Leslie started hanging around May. Minnie Collins paid no attention to her children anymore, she let that girl talk to any boy she wanted. May had no supervision from her mother, and meanwhile Granny Ellen was getting feeble, and poor old Cindy was half blind, and May ignored them.”

  According to Hettie’s clippings on the Banks case, the Bankses and Jim Sailor had been slain on Monday the 11th of October, 1909, and the bodies discovered Tuesday morning. As the leading suspect in the “foul and brutal murders of three hardworking peaceable negroes” (Lake City Citizen-Reporter, October 19), Cox was arrested the following day when he went to the courthouse in Lake City for his marriage license. Apprised of the romantic nature of his visit, the authorities “therefore” released the young man on bond, with the understanding that he would return after the wedding in order to be charged with triple murder.

  Since Cox could easily have fled after the killings instead of going to Lake City for that license, and since he passed up a second chance when he was granted a day off to get married, he was apparently confident that the whole thing would blow over and his life would go on just as before. “Never thought there’d be no problem over killin nigger as,” Paul Edmunds said, “and his dad’s friend Sheriff Purvis held the same opinion. Not only let him out on bail, they let him go clear across the county line to marry.”

  Early Thursday morning, arriving on muleback at the school, Leslie Cox had made off with Miss May Collins, escorting her straight to her friend Jessie Barr’s house in Suwannee County, where the wedding took place at 3:00 P.M. that afternoon. “The Barrs were kin to us some way, and kin to Coxes, too. Evidently they sent someone to warn the family,” Hettie said, “because the Collins brothers knew right where to find ’em.”

  “Willie Collins went,” Ellie admonished her. “Your father-in-law decided to stay home.” When April rolled her eyes, her mother raised a warning finger. “I don’t know who married ’em,” Ellie continued, “but somebody must have made arrangements. He couldn’t just pick her up at school here and go marry her!”

  “Justice of the Peace Jim Hodges married ’em!” Paul Edmunds cried, reciting his fact proudly. “I talked to Justice Jim many’s the time. He says, ‘Miss May, are you aware that this young man you are about to marry will not sleep in your loving arms tonight? That your newlywed will lay his head on a iron bunk in the Columbia County jail?’ And Miss May says smartly, ‘No, sir, Judge, I ain’t aware of no such of a thing! And anyways, I aim to marry this here feller, so let’s get a move on!’ ”

  “Miss May Collins did what she darn pleased, no matter what!” Ellie exclaimed. “May was willful and May was spoiled, there was only the one way and that was her way. But Willie Collins rode over to the Barr place and warned Leslie Cox that if he tried to take his sister, he would kill him.”

  “Might of had his hands full, Ellie,” Mr. Edmunds warned her, not unkindly. “Leslie was a big strong six-foot feller, and the Collins boys was always pretty skimpy.”

  “Whoever rode over there arrived too late to stop the wedding,” Hettie told Lucius, “but they caught up with the newlyweds at Herlong Junction, where they went to flag the train back to Lake City. As soon as Leslie boarded the train, he was rearrested. When the bride was told she could not sleep in the jail, she decided she might as well go home.” Hettie Collins smiled. “So in the Lord’s eyes, and the Collinses’ eyes, too, that unholy wedlock was never consummated. Even Aunt May came to believe that as the years went by.”

  “Don’t you go smiling, Hettie Collins, because that is the God’s truth! It was my daddy who went after ’em, and when he got there, they were already married—yes, that’s so! But he would not let her board that train, and Leslie didn’t try to fight or Daddy would have killed him!”

  “Aunt Ellie? Who would have killed whom? Maybe Leslie didn’t care to murder his bride’s beloved brother, ever think of that? Might have took some of the fun out of the party!”

  Ellie gazed balefully at her niece. “They never lived together, Miss, as man and wife. Her father was dead but her brother was there, and he would not allow it!”

  “Collins gospel!” April muttered as she left the room.

  In a ruffled silence, Ellie insisted that May Collins was never anything but trouble. “To her last breath, that woman expected folks to wait on her! When she was still able to get up and get around—she went three hundred pounds toward the end—she used to come over to our house and plu
mp herself down and fan her face and wave her fingers. ‘Fix me a glass of water! Peel me an orange!’ Never so much as a please!”

  Hettie was smiling. “When she wasn’t claiming that Bad Uncle Edgar had led her poor young husband astray, Aunt May would tell us she couldn’t be blamed for running off with Leslie Cox, because Leslie had given her a bewitched apple! Once she had eaten that terrible witched apple, she was obliged to obey his least command!”

  Recalling the witched apple, the women hooted.

  “Well, it weren’t witched apples she got fat on later!”

  “Now where d’you suppose that boy found a witched apple?” Hettie pondered. “He might have bought that darn old apple at the Edmunds store, you think so, Paul?”

  Paul Edmunds cackled. “Not unless he paid down most of that Banks gold! We sold them witched apples pretty dear—the bony-fidey ones, I mean!”

  Ellie giggled unwillingly with the rest, but after a moment she relapsed into restless gloom. “In later years, Aunt May would never talk too much about her husband, because she didn’t know too much about her husband, that’s the truth. Maybe it had dawned on her by that time that Leslie Cox was just as no-account and mean as people said.”

  William Leslie Cox was found guilty of first-degree murder in Columbia County Court on December 11, 1909, but the jury begged the mercy of the court in order to spare him the death sentence. Reading between the lines of these accounts—the release on negligible bond so as to marry, the jury’s mercy plea—Lucius doubted that Cox would have been indicted for killing the three blacks had he not been previously implicated in the Tolen murders. His father’s crony Sheriff Purvis must have scratched his head over why this dolt kept returning to Lake City—either that or the Sheriff himself was astounded by a guilty verdict in this case.

  On December 14, Cox was sentenced to prison for the rest of his natural life. “But Leslie broke free right away,” Paul Edmunds said. “The Sheriff fixed it. Come straight home to Ichetucknee, helped his folks with the spring plowing. This would have been late winter, spring of 1910. After that he disappeared, went south to Watson’s. But he come back here from time to time in his older years. Luther Carter, who married Leslie’s sister, he told me one time how he went down fishing on the Ichetucknee, and darned if he don’t see Les Cox watching him from behind a fallen tree across the river. Once Luther seen him, Les lowered himself slow and eased on back into the river woods, same as a panther.”

  “Well, we heard Leslie never bothered to hide. Didn’t see the sense in it, with the Sheriff rooting for him,” April said. “Cox hunted some with Norman Porter the winter he came back here off the chain gang, and Norman claimed that Leslie bragged that he had killed both Tolens, and the darkies, too. Wanted so bad to be a desperado like Ed Watson that he took the credit for all five of ’em, which didn’t hurt Uncle Edgar’s feelings a bit.”

  “After Leslie was convicted and sent off to prison,” Hettie said, “May lived awhile at Coxes because the Collins family was so scandalized that they wouldn’t have her. Even after she came home, the Coxes would show up here once in a while, to fetch her. She would stay away for a few days and then come home again, saying she had visited her in-laws. She would never say that Leslie had come home, but we suspected it.”

  “That’s right,” Ellie said. “Leslie could die of old age in our county hospital and you’d never get those Coxes to admit it. They are a closemouthed bunch, and they always were.” Ellie had talked to a retired police officer who had known Cox when they were little boys in the Lake City school. In the thirties, this man saw a drifter on a bench along the river in Fort Myers, and he always swore that the man was Leslie Cox. And Paul Edmunds added that Leslie had been spotted along about that time at Cornelia Cox’s funeral in Gilchrist County. The friend who’d seen him said that Leslie had grown a beard as a disguise.

  “What did Old Man Kinard tell you about that one?” Paul Edmunds demanded. When Lucius said that Kinard agreed with them that Cox had not been killed by Watson, Edmunds nodded for some time, well-vindicated.

  “Grover Kinard said that? Well, he got some things right!” April was caught mouthing these words by Letitia Edmunds, who stifled a frightened smile. “The kind of person that Cox fellow was,” Letitia cried, to cover her confusion, “who would try to kill him? He might kill you back!” In confusion, she rose from her chair, anxious to go home, but her husband ignored her. Not until Letitia hugged the Collinses and waved good-bye to the Professor did Edmunds grunt and get slowly to his feet. From the doorway, he told Lucius, “If Leslie’s dead, he ain’t been dead too many years. Wherever his grave is at, it ain’t too far.” He turned and went outside into the sunlight. “Probably laying in some hole out here in these old woods,” his voice came back. “Just the place for a wild varmint such as that.”

  Eventually May had gone to live with her aunt Fanny Collins Edwards in O’Brien, in Suwannee County. There she was the postmistress for many years. Upon her aunt’s death, nearly forty years later, she inherited Aunt Fanny’s house, and not long thereafter, concluding she had seen the last of Leslie Cox, she married a Mr. Lee Roy Martin, against the advice of almost everybody. Martin speedily mortgaged the house and property and sold off everything of value. Before departing with the proceeds, he asked May politely for the combination of the post office safe, which he rifled to the last green one-cent stamp. Her brothers were forced to take out loans to replace the money and keep the ex-postmistress out of federal prison, and from that dark day until the day she died, they underwrote her life, then paid to bury her.

  Hettie talked awhile about her father-in-law’s first cousin, E. E. Watson, known throughout the Collins clan as Cousin Ed.

  “Three of Edgar Watson’s first four children were born here in Fort White, and all four returned from Oklahoma to live in this community while their father got established in southwest Florida. Then they left, in tears and smiles, all waving and calling that they would write soon, they would come visit. Well, they never did. The Collins clan never saw Rob again, nor Carrie either. Except for that one mournful visit from poor Lucius after his father’s death, Cousin Ed was the only Watson who ever came back here after he was grown.

  “Cousin Ed was ten when he had left here for the Islands and fifteen when he returned about 1902 to help out on his father’s new farm. Both Carrie and Ed were born in that old Robarts cabin near the Junction, but the place Cousin Ed always called home was ‘the house on the hill’ that his father built on one hundred six acres at the south end of this Collins property. Uncle Edgar was doing very well, and by 1906 he had paid for the Fort White farm, we still have the deed. Even Grandpa Billy, who had never felt easy around his wife’s brother, and never doubted that he was a dangerous killer, had to admit that E. J. Watson was a fine farmer, very fair and efficient in his dealings.

  “After Uncle Edgar’s death, Cousin Ed would never speak about his father. He went right along with his Collins cousins, agreeing that family silence was the best policy, and assuring them that his sister in Fort Myers felt the same way. It was only his younger brother Lucius who still lived in the past, he used to say. However, Ed mentioned that after his father’s death, he had gone to Chatham Bend and searched the house in case his father had hidden some money, saying that money rightfully belonged to the eldest son. I suppose he intended to turn it over to Rob!” When Lucius raised his brows, Hettie smiled that winsome smile. “Not that he found any money, or none that he let on about—he only said those Island crackers probably took it. ‘You take my word for it,’ he’d exclaim, ‘it’s down there yet!’

  “Over the years, Ed rarely spoke about his brothers, but he couldn’t stop talking about Carrie Langford and her fine new house, he bragged on Carrie all the time. Ed brought pictures of Carrie and her little girls, so we were kind of up-to-date on the Fort Myers kin, but our family memory of Rob and Lucius more or less died out with Granny Ellen. One time when Julian’s Laura questioned Ed about his brothers, he confessed that,
truth be told, he knew very little about Lucius or Robert—that was the first and only time we ever heard poor Rob called Robert—because he only heard from those two when they wanted money. As for Edna’s children, well, they weren’t real Watsons anymore because his stepmother—he always said ‘my stepmother,’ although Edna was several years younger than he was—had changed their names and cut off all communication with the family.

  “Now Cousin Ed’s saying such a thing doesn’t make it true, because much as we loved our dear old cousin, he mostly saw things in a way that suited his own idea of himself. It never occurred to him that Edna and her children were family, too, far less that he might get in touch with her. We told him where to reach her but he wasn’t interested.

  “Cousin Ed would visit every year on his vacations. As his insurance business prospered in the early twenties, he would come through on his driving trips two and three times in a year, and for many, many years he brought his children. They’d stop here going and they’d stop here coming. And every single visit he would tell all about yesteryear, how he went to Fort White school back in the nineties with his arithmetic, reader, and speller, and how he got beaten with peach switches when he didn’t know his lessons, and all about the meat and biscuits in thick syrup that the kids brought to school in their big lunch pails, and the three brass cuspidors lined up for spitting exhibitions at John McKinney’s post office and general store, and the town marshal with a club lashed to his wrist and a big pistol, and the saloon on Jordan Street where passersby might see luckless men pitched through the swinging doors. From one year to the next, there wasn’t one detail of the old days that Cousin Ed forgot, not even one! And he drilled his stories into us so hard that to this day, we can’t forget them either!”

  Hearing her mother’s wry account of Cousin Ed, April laughed hoarsely, snubbing her cigarette. “ ‘Year after year, we keep on hoping,’ Daddy used to say, ‘but Cousin Ed is like the elephant, he never forgets, not even the smallest thing!’ ”