Lost Man's River (21 page)

Leslie Cox kept right on running and never been seen since, not by the law. Les went to his uncle, Old John Fralick, who lived over near Ocala, and John Fralick brought him home one evening after dark. This was before Les went away to the Ten Thousand Islands. John Fralick was brother to Cornelia Cox, and that old woman had a piece of hell in her. Will Cox was calm as he could be, but Cornelia had a terrible darn temper. When the Sheriff came to arrest Leslie for Sam Tolen, they say that old woman reared so high that they had to put handcuffs on her till they got him safe away.

There's plenty can tell you how Cox came back in later years, hunting revenge. Course there ain't but a very few of us old-timers left that would know him if they saw him, but he ain't been forgotten around here, neither. In the family that one of his sisters married into, there was a young boy, and one day him and I were standing around waiting for a funeral over in Jacksonville. When Leslie's name come up, this boy spoke like he'd seen Leslie not too long before, which give me the idea he was seeing him pretty regular, and not no ghost nor dead man, neither. And a little later, I was setting in the congregation when the family come out of the family room to view the body, and there was one man by himself that looked the size, the build, and the whole style of Leslie Cox. He glanced over the congregation quick, then moved right on through with the three couples. I fully believe it was Les Cox, but I couldn't swear to it, because it must been close to forty years since I last seen him. But nobody around Columbia County believed Les Cox was killed, and they don't today.

On the dirt road near the old Banks farm, in a strand of spring woods that parted empty fields, a killdeer performed its broken-wing display to distract their attention from two puffball chicks that fluttered and clambered, trapped in the deep rut. When Lucius smiled, stopping the car and trying to point them out, Grover Kinard stared at him, suspicious, then struggled irritably to shift and peer from the car window, not certain what he should be looking for and not finding it. His frustration seemed to sadden him, or perhaps it was his inability to comprehend why others cared about these inconsequential things that he had let pass unnoticed all his life. At last he sat
back bewildered, saying, “They had something pretty close to that, other evening on TV.” He pinched off some loose threads in his sleeve, as if otherwise he might unravel in a blur of synthetic thread.

In silence, in their separate thoughts, they drove back to the paved highway, where they turned south again toward Fort White, then west again on the Old Bellamy Road. “This whole corner here and down to westward, that was Getzens'. Getzens was some kind of kin to Old Lady Tabitha Watson, and I guess they was pretty wealthy people. Called him Captain Getzen, from the War. Captain Tom was a one-legged man with hair as white as snow, and he had a fine two-story house, over yonder under them old oaks. Them falling-down sheds you see, they were his, too, and he had a nice barn that some people claimed Watson set fire to. They say his hair turned white the night that barn burned and he jumped out there on his one leg to fight it. Nobody could imagine how he done that.

“This Bellamy Road goes to Ichetucknee Springs. Used to be all kinds of wild critters come in to that spring to get their water, wolves and bears and buffaloes, I don't know what. Spaniards killed buffaloes down there three hundred years ago, same thing as bisons out in the Wild West, did you know that? Nowadays young couples take truck tire tubes, go floating on the Ichetucknee, in them two-three miles between the bridges; float along in bunches, bank to bank, drinking beer, y'know, a lot of hollering, make quite a mess.” He gazed at Lucius as if to learn whether Lucius would join in this horseplay, given the chance. “Four miles down, the Ichetucknee flows into the Santa Fe, which goes to the Suwannee and on down to the Gulf coast, Cedar Key. Way down on the Suwannee River. Used to be oh so shady and so quiet, but now it's all opened up from what I hear, and motorboat racket up and down, morning till night.”

The weathered oak and magnolia groves where the Getzen sheds sank silently into the earth now resembled an abandoned fairground, with faded signs and weed-bound trailers, a fake tepee, shacks, an abandoned bathtub, all of these in loose association with the Ichetucknee Slammer Express Tube Co., and Granny's Hot Sandwiches and Homemade Candies, and Beer Oysters Food and Game Room: Any Size Tube One Dollar. “Can't imagine such signs back in the old days, can you? Getting to be modern times even way out here in the backwoods.”

Farther west on the Old Bellamy Road, pecan trees and wisteria in the hedgerow commemorated an old homestead now long gone. “I believe Edgar Watson lived in an old cropper's shack right over by them oaks when he worked as a young feller on the Getzen place. Later on he got hold of some good Collins land and built his house, right down this road a ways.”

In a mile or so, they came over a low rise. On a hilltop on the north side of
the road stood a yellowing frame house with rust-streaked tin roof, a big dark porch, and a fuel tank on the open ground, under the Spanish moss of a red oak. “Oh, yes,” the Deacon said, “there's his ol' pecan trees. That's where Mr. Joe Burdett served him that warrant.

“Ed Watson farmed several hundred acres, and he was a pretty good farmer, far as I know. If he'd of been a bad one, we'd of heard about it. One time I was up there with my dad, William Kinard, I don't recall whether we was driving him a well or fixing his pump, but I do recall that my dad was not too comfortable when Watson asked him to come. I wasn't old enough to do much work, I'd fetch the tools, but I remember Watson, I sure do, never forgot him. Husky kind of man, thick through the shoulders. Later Dad told me that E. J. Watson was very very strong—
unusual
strong. He was pretty close to six foot tall, big pork chop whiskers, ruddy hair and complexion. Rode a horse and had a fine red buggy, too. Good-looking man, but not so handsome as Les Cox. Course he was older.”

Yes, Papa had been very strong and somewhat vain about it. Past fifty, with his son full-grown, he could lift Lucius off the ground with one hand placed under one armpit—“You get smart with your Papa, Master Lucius, you might just find yourself chucked into the river!” He could almost recall Papa's body smell, the redolence of fine Tampa cigars and shaving lotions, the charcoal in the bourbon on his breath—all rose, mysterious, from the well of memory, light as the fleeting scent of rain on sunbaked stone.

“I don't rightly know who farmed this land after Watson left,” Kinard was saying. “The paper company took over most of the old fields in this section. Grew pines for pulpwood.”

Capt. Thomas Getzen had been deacon of the Elim Baptist Church, which they visited on their way to Fort White. The old church had been replaced and the Getzen name had vanished from the region, but the Captain and his wife and those children born in the first years after the Civil War remained the most prominent citizens in the graying churchyard. The Deacon's parents, William and Ludia, were buried near the Getzens, and so was his sister Eva and his beloved brother Brooks, who had perished at the age of twenty-three.

The lettering on the Kinard gravestones had been blurred over the years by moss and algae, and the stones had shaggy grass around the base. “My people ain't had a visit in a good long while,” the Deacon mourned, scratching the dry wrinkles of his cheek. He scraped at the moss disconsolately with a small penknife. “Been too long,” he said, giving it up. Without a word, he headed back toward the car.

The solitary Tolen in the cemetery was D. M. Tolen, 1872–1908. His gravestone read “How Desolate Our Home Bereft of Thee”—a shard of funerary irony, Lucius thought, which Arbie would no doubt enjoy, since Mike's widow and children had returned to South Carolina right after his death.

He turned toward the car. In the car window, in spring light, Mr. Kinard's bald head shone like a skull.

They went south a few miles to Fort White, where the county road narrowed to a shady village street set about with high frame houses in old weedy yards.

“I'm happy to see Fort White, you know. Born right here in town.” Kinard pointed through the rolled-up window. “That's Mills Winn's house—the postman who found Mike Tolen's body. Dr. Wilson had that house before him. Dr. Wilson drove his horse out our way every day for weeks after Brooks took sick, but Brooks died all the same. That was in the month of May, in 1910.” The Deacon sighed. “That spring, we saw that great white fire in the sky. Some thought poor Brooks had took sick from that comet, but I guess he didn't.”

Kinard gazed about him at the passing street. “I ain't been as far as here in years, and it ain't like I lived so far away, you know. Eleven miles, is all! Never seen my own family graves since they was put in there! Too busy watching that TV, is what it is. Just goes to show you how life leaks away, now don't it? One day you look up, look around, and it's all empty, cause the real life's gone. You're setting there like you always done, but your hands are empty, there ain't no color left to life, and you ain't got no more hope of nothing—cept the Lord, of course.” He turned from the car window to glare at Lucius, outraged, inconsolable, waving Lucius away in case he might try to comfort him.

At a makeshift snack counter in the grocery store, they ordered barbecue ribs with soft rolls and soda pop. They carried their lunch outside to a wood picnic table by the car lot, where three old black men hitched along to one end of the bench, giving the white men the remainder of the table.

They headed north again toward Lake City, passing the old Tolen Plantation and the pasture pond with its red-winged blackbirds where once the Burdetts and Betheas had sharecropped both sides of the Fort White Road. Still agitated by nostalgia, working his toothpick hard, the Deacon scanned the old fields and low woods, patting the pockets of his brain in search of something lost. “Yessir,” he said again, astonished. “First time in twenty
years I been back to my hometown, and I don't live but eleven miles away.”