Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  May Collins’s parents and her grandmother lay in Collins ground a few miles southeast of Fort White in the Methodist cemetery at Tustenuggee, in that bare sadness of lost country churchyards which weather and woods and small wild creatures are silently taking back. The white church was spare and clear in a way that reminded him of Hettie Collins, who was fashioned from the same native heart pine. She had touched his heart, and he would not see her again. Why was he so sure that she was dying, or would soon be dead? One day she would be left behind in this still churchyard at the end of its long lane through the thin woods, in a clay earth as white as powdered bone.

  Near a large cedar, under pale and shining stones which had replaced the leaning wooden crosses, the Collins clan was prominent in the small churchyard. Billy Collins had gone to his reward on February 7, 1907, three months before Sam Tolen went to his. Ellen Watson had died at eighty on June 10 of 1910, four months before her son was slain at Chokoloskee. Safe at last in the narrow grave squeezed in between them lay their Minnie, who had breathed her last on March 14 of 1912.

  In no hurry to confront Rob with their brotherhood, Lucius tarried. A jay’s blue fire crossed the sun from one wall of spring leaves into another. In the stillness, a stray thrush song came in wistful query from the wood, and he stopped and turned and listened. There was nothing. All he heard was time, a moment on the turning earth, a falling twig.

  A churchyard in a woodland at the end of a white road where an infant’s gravestone had Jesus’s little lamb carved on the top. Everything in order and in place, far from the world. Old family cemeteries made him feel … homesick? There it was, that old longing to go home. But as he moved among the graves, an earlier sense of buried roots which grounded him in this Collins clan of Tustenuggee gave way to an instinct—more like dread—that he had not come home after all, that this encounter with his kin could never change the fundamental solitude of his existence. Home was not these upland woods of oak and hickory in the north-central peninsula but the lonely house in the Glades rivers.

  He strayed across the sun-worn grass among the gleaming stones. Solitude among lone oaks and cedars, fingertips tracing the inscriptions, brought him a kind of melancholy peace. He was moved by the pains taken with the lettering—the anonymous hand which had labored in last witness to a life now returned into the earth, to be devoured by minuscule earth demons. Respecting the dead—or perhaps Death—he did not hurry. In his odd mood, he felt humbled by the great age of the granite. Even the dry crust on the stone, touched by his blood-filled finger, was derived from black lichens millions of years old—blind algae and fungi working minutely with wind and rain and sun to obliterate man’s scratchings on this upright rock hewn from granites heaved up into the sun and air by planetary fire. The industries of these lichens, their remorselessness, filled him with longing—longing for what? He supposed he missed what he had never known, the simplicity of churchly life in a small country community, the rooted peace of living day after slow day in communion with one’s forebears, in the great stillness of a Florida frontier of sparkling air and crystalline fresh water, and ending one’s days where one began, where one belonged.

  The loss of simplicity, was that it? Loss of the simple harmonies and truths, the earth’s natural order and abundance? Perhaps that ruin, mourned by the earth itself, was the most profound of all life’s losses, underlying all the rest. Not fear of death, which was fear of a wasted life—that fear he would endure—but deep generic dread of the death of earth as witnessed in the despoliation of the New World, the great forests and rivers of America, the wilderness and the wild creatures, still abundant in his childhood, now fragmented and broken or bound tight by concrete, poisoned everywhere by unnameable pollutions.

  Death, he supposed, was his hope of the simplicity he longed for. Therefore he was drawn to the clarity of churchyards, the solace of old cemeteries—a morbid solace, some would say, though most historians might feel as he did. If nothing else, old names and dates incised in stone were more or less dependable, preserving the critical particulars. The graveyard was the last sanctuary, inviolable, not to be transgressed. And yet Lucius had always known—or known, at least, since October of 1910—that in the end there was no sanctuary except free self-relinquishment into the eternal light of transience and change, leaving no more trace than the blown dust of an old mushroom or the glimmer of a swift minnow in a sunlit sea or the passage of a lone dark bird hurrying across a twilight winter sky.

  Alachua Prairie

  From Fort White, Lucius followed a thin county road which ran west across old cattle range north of the great Alachua Prairie, a meager scrub which made him wonder how the banished Coxes had even subsisted. Eventually the narrow road passed a graying church set at the scrub edge, and farther on, another mile, a few small dwellings had been patched into the wasteland.

  Levi Cox was winding down his days in a little red shack in a yard full of junked trailers. “Next time you’ll find my grave but you won’t find me,” he sang out cheerily from his shack doorway. He wore a windbreaker and had his hat on, as if this stranger had turned up very late on a visit Levi had awaited for long years. He crossed the yard slowly and got into the backseat uninvited, not inquiring who this might be and paying negligible attention when Lucius introduced himself as L. W. Collins. “Been quite a spell since I seen where I am headed for,” said Levi Cox. “Let’s go on up to the churchyard, have us a look.”

  The small graying church back up the road, a single white room with a derelict piano and small pulpit, turned out to be the Second Adventist Church founded by Will Cox not long after the family came from Ichetucknee. All around the building and the unfenced churchyard, the clay sand lay exposed, so hard and barren that weeds could not obscure the few small graves. No bird call brought the hot scrub wood to life, nor was there any note of color, only the sun-worn petals of the plastic flowers.

  Lucius assisted the failing man out of the car. “Be up here for good before you know it,” Levi Cox declared, gazing about his final resting place with satisfaction. “Yessir, I’ll have me a one-way trip. I am just ate up with cancer, so they tell me.”

  He shuffled forward, removing his old hat, pointing a wavering finger toward two humble stones which marked the place where the clan patriarch and his spouse lay together. The twin stones were ten inches high and barely wide enough to carry the small initials. “W.W.C.—that’s William Wright Cox. And C.F.C., that’s Cornelia Fralick Cox, layin alongside of Pa where she belongs. Loved each other forevermore and died in the same year back in the thirties. Ain’t got the dates wrote on there yet. I been aimin to put a big tombstone to their grave, but I been down sick about twenty years and never got to it.” C.F.C.’s grave was set about with ancient jam jars that had once held flowers, and also an ancient conch shell from the coast. Lucius wondered if that conch had come from the Ten Thousand Islands, and if Leslie lay back there in the still trees in an unmarked grave.

  Leslie’s brother stood there, bony hands folded like a mourner. Turning around in tiny steps, he tottered a little in the sun. Asked if he’d like to sit down in the shade, he paid no attention, pointing out the graves of the two brothers, Lem and Leo, who were here ahead of him. “Course Mama had three brothers and two sisters. All dead, too.” He shook his head. “Poor Mama was just so kindly hearted. Always said she’d rather have a friend than make an enemy but she never spared nobody her true feelins.

  “Our pa was the same, got along real good with people till somebody made him mad, then he meant business. Leslie and Leo was that kind, weren’t scared of nobody. If Leslie couldn’t talk to someone, then something else had to take place. I would of loved to seen my brother Les, but I never did. People been sayin he come back when Mama died, and when Pa died, they seen a stranger at the church.” He gazed around him, still expectant, as if a lone figure might appear, standing at the wood edge by the road. “But I just know if Leslie had come, he would of said something to us youngers, especially a boy named Le
vi that was born after he left. Can’t recall if Les’s wife come to that funeral, but somebody would sure have knowed if he was there, would have knowed him in a minute by the scar, cause Leslie had a scar up by his ear where a mule kicked him. That darn mule laid him out so cold they never thought he would sit up again. So if he had come back, y’see, they’s them that would of seen that scar, they would of knowed him.”

  Levi Cox fell silent for a while, forgetting. He took his hat off, put it on again. “Might’s well ride down to Lucas Carter’s house. He’s got a nicer place than me. Married my sister. Ain’t nobody smarter, not out this way. Ain’t a thing in the world old man Lucas don’t know.”

  Lucas Carter lived in a yellow house trailer with a deep-eyed handsome daughter named Havana and a huge white-and-strawberry ceramic cat. He was lying on the sofa wearing a felt hat. He showed no surprise when Lucius introduced himself, though his daughter said, “You any kin to Fort White Collinses?”

  Havana said she had been told she looked like Uncle Leslie. “Had a great big picture of him on the wall till the old house burned. Uncle Les and his wife Aunt May, they were both in it. Uncle Les had gray-green eyes, they said. Sure looked older than his twenty years of age, but that is all the age he was when he left home for good.”

  “Grew up in a hurry, Leslie did. Ever’body thought the world of Les.” Saying this, Carter gazed wryly at Lucius. “His mama and daddy used to say he was a good boy back in Lake City days, went to church regular and done his lessons. Nosir, he weren’t a bad boy at all, only mischievous. Where he got in trouble was mixin in with E. J. Watson there to Herlong Station.” He gave his visitor a sharp look. “You are some kind of a Watson kin, I reckon.”

  Lucius nodded, glancing at the woman, whose face had closed to him. He caught a scent of backwoods menace, like the fleeting musk of an animal on the night highway.

  “We been waitin on you,” Lucas Carter said.

  “Told me he was a Collins!” Levi complained.

  The daughter said, “Feelin tired, Daddy?”

  “I stay tired,” Lucas Carter said, holding Lucius’s eye.

  “Now that is a thing I wouldn’t hardly know,” Levi was murmuring, in answer to some inquiry in his own head, as the woman gave Lucius a hard look, then went away into the kitchen. “It would have to be way back yonder. Long, long time ago.” He gazed at Lucius and smiled, back on the track again. “But I do know Les was living there at Tolen when he got in trouble. If I understood my daddy right, Edgar Watson warned him. Edgar says, ‘Now listen, Will, these Tolen boys are pretty rough, and you got to go along with it or they’ll make your life pure hell around this section.’ And Pa told Edgar, ‘Nosir, Edgar, I don’t got to go along with nobody.’ ”

  “Sure enough, them Tolens showed up just like Watson said, come to the gate and told our pa what he could do and what he couldn’t. Carried on like they founded the county, and every man who come in there had to look up to ’em.”

  “Will Cox leased his land from Sam Tolen,” Carter said. “They had the rent settled, then Tolen come back, said there was more land than he figured, said Coxes better give him some more money. Will Cox told him to have it surveyed out, and if he owed him more, why, he would pay it. Said, ‘We didn’t move here lookin for no trouble, Mr. Tolen.’ They weren’t lookin for it but Tolens brought it to ’em, and Les took care of it, looks like to me.”

  “And Leslie killed them both?” In this house, Lucius’s question did not seem to him indiscreet, since unlike the Watson-Collins clan, the Cox family was not ashamed of its errant uncle. Whatever William Leslie Cox had done, they seemed confident that it was for the best. They remembered him with pride, and fondly, too.

  Levi nodded. “My pa never did declare that Les done the younger brother, not exactly. All he said was, ‘From the looks of things, it might been Les’—that’s what he told me when I got up big enough.”

  Had they ever heard that E. J. Watson was involved?

  “Dog if I know if they was other fellers in on it.” Levi frowned. “Our pa thought a right smart of Mr. Watson, I know that much. Had a very, very high opinion of that man. But I never heard him say Watson was in on it, nosir, I didn’t.”

  “Les went ahead and killed some nigras, that’s what got him,” Carter said. “Funny, ain’t it? Killed ’em for their money but he never got none.”

  For the first time, Levi Cox looked a bit perturbed. “Thing was, on account of rumors, folks got so unsociable about our family that our pa moved away to Ichetucknee Springs, rented a common farm. But Pa said that he always knowed that his boy Les would stand by his pa long as he ever lived, and he would stand by him. Pa went down around Silver Springs to where they had him on the road gang, and he got word to Les to get out of the way soon’s the guard’s back was turned. That’s what he done, and after that, he come on home, worked for our pa same as he always done.

  “Man who ran a little commissary at the Head of Ichetucknee, he told the Sheriff, ‘Les is up to Coxes, you go git him!’ Sheriff went up there, he had no choice about it. Later he’d say with a big grin, ‘I do believe I could of hunted up Les Cox if I’d put my mind to it.’ Cause he knowed by the smell that somebody been smokin a cigar, and he also knowed our pa couldn’t afford ’em. See, my brother was up in the top of the house, they had fixed him a place where he could go up in there when somebody was a-comin. Sheriff never bothered to track down that cigar smell, but he liked a joke. He hollers out, ‘Well, if I was your boy Les, I would sure head out for other parts, cause if he shows up in this neck of the woods, folks might just hang him!’

  “Anyways, Les got disgusted from always hidin out. He went on down to Watson’s, Thousand Islands.”

  “The Sheriff let him go, you mean. Never tried to catch him.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” Carter grunted.

  “Because killing black people didn’t count—that the way the Sheriff saw it?”

  “Yessir, he sure did.” Carter cocked his head for a better look at Lucius. “Ever’body seen it that same way, so bein Sheriff didn’t make a bit of difference, ain’t that right?” He set his hat straight. “Course there was family friendship in it, too.”

  “Les left his wife home with our ma,” said Levi Cox, “on account of her own people didn’t want her, and she was there when Leslie come back off the road gang. My family thought the world of Miss May Collins—well, I mean! Someone lookin to get my pa riled up, or Mama, only had to let on how they didn’t care none for their daughter-in-law! Oh, she was a fine woman, I can tell you, I seen her myself more’n one time. Later she moved over to O’Brien to run the post office for the U.S. gov’ment. Like Havana says, we used to have May’s picture on the wall. May and Leslie, the both of ’em was on there! Our whole gang was on there ceptin me, cause I wasn’t borned yet.”

  Lucas Carter said, “Yep, Leslie stayed at Ichetucknee for spring planting, worked his keep, and then he went to Watson in the Islands. We never knowed another thing about him ceptin hearsays. He never come back to these counties that I heard about. I had a half brother Orbert Carter who usually told the truth, and Orbert claimed he run across him down the coast. Orbert told him, ‘Since you been home, my brother Lucas married your sister.’ And Leslie said, ‘Well, that don’t mean if you ever say you seen me, I won’t kill you.’

  “Another time, that same half brother showed up sayin Leslie wanted me to come where he was at, but the family said, ‘Why, Lucas ain’t no kind of Cox at all! He might let on about it!’ That was along about nineteen and thirteen. Others has said Les been back here since that time, and some will say they seen him at his daddy’s funeral up here at the church, back in the thirties. Well, they didn’t.”

  Levi said, “I sure am sorry I never got to see my oldest brother. When Leslie bid ’em all good-bye at the head of the river, Ichetucknee Springs, he told ’em he aimed to see ’em all again someday. He went down to Thousand Islands and that was the last that he was ever knowed about. Some said his
friend Watson took and killed him, but our pa said, ‘E. J. Watson? Heck, I knowed E. J. Watson! Knowed him all my life! Ed Watson never done no such a thing!’ ”

  Lucas Carter took his hat off. “We heard it was a nigger man killed Watson—any truth to that?” He turned on his side and put the hat back on, closing his eyes. “Heard nobody never raised a hand to set that right.” He opened one eye a little bit to squint at Lucius. “Not even his own boys,” Carter said, shutting the eye again. “Times must of changed here while I wasn’t lookin.”

  Levi Cox looked eagerly from one man to the other. “Well, I don’t know about the Watson boys, but us Cox boys was fixin to go south, get over there to Watson’s island, hunt up that nigger, find out what become of Leslie or the reason why. But now my brothers are all gone, and I been down sick, and it don’t look like I’m ever goin to get there, do it, Lucas?”

  The man in the felt hat turned to consider Levi, then turned back again, face to the wall.

  “Nosir, it sure don’t,” Lucas Carter said.

  Lucius returned slowly to Lake City, sorting out what he had learned of Leslie Cox. Despite all the local speculation that Cox had been seen from time to time here in north Florida, his instinct was to accept the family’s word for it that after his departure, they never laid eyes on “Uncle Les” again. Either he had lived out his bad life in other parts or he had been executed in October of 1910, as Papa claimed.