Lost Man's River (27 page)

“Jailed?”

As the person responsible for introducing this viper to their hearth, Ellie Collins drew herself up to stare him down. The family knew no such thing,
she said, in tones suggesting it could not be true and that in grubbing through court documents, this self-styled Professor Collins had crossed the line into dishonorable behavior.

“Perhaps they were only … detained,” Hettie said carefully.

There had been no question of Collins complicity or guilt, Lucius explained, speaking formally and even pompously in the hope that academic formality might help remove him from his own petard. Indeed, he said, court documents suggested that the state's attorney, learning that Mr. Watson had sought an alibi from the Collins brothers, had had the nephews detained as accessories-after-the-fact until such time as they agreed to testify that they had been wrongfully solicited. Presumably the boys' arrest was only the state's attorney's tactic for eliminating Watson's alibi and extorting damaging testimony for the prosecution. And in the end, the strategy had worked, since both Collins boys had testified against their uncle. Edgar Watson's solicitation of an alibi—tantamount to a confession, claimed the prosecution—turned out to be the most damaging evidence against him.

The ladies stared at him, dumbfounded. Cousin Ellie's expression seemed to say, Is this how you repay me? For Lucius knew—and knew that they knew, too—that in testifying against their uncle, Julian and Willie had transgressed the codes of those fierce Border ancestors who, despising authority, loyal only to the clan, had borne their tattered pennant of archaic honor across the seas from the British Isles into the New World. The past half century of rigid silence, however dignified and proud, had embedded that dark splinter of guilt, like a dim black line under the family skin.

In the sudden stillness of the schoolhouse, he suffered with them the inheritance of shame inflicted on the clan by Uncle Edgar. In the end it mattered little what those boys said. Through no fault or weakness of their own, his cousins had found themselves in an intractable dilemma—to swear falsely to their uncle's alibi in the name of “family honor” or to betray it out of civic duty to the commonweal.

As for that other affidavit signed by Julian Collins which had helped to indict Cox in the Sam Tolen murder, they knew nothing about it. How much Julian had known about that killing, how he had learned of it, and why his knowledge had not come to light until after the killing of Mike Tolen a year later—that information had gone with him to his grave.

In the three photographs which survived in the Collins family, the former Miss Ellen Addison was a wide-eyed little girl in white dress and ribbon bow, a sleepy-eyed young female in formal dress with flowers in her hair, and the elderly woman of small perky smile and wide bright eyes who appeared in
the oval portrait on the wall. Despite her lifelong tribulations, Ellen Watson appeared serene in all three pictures, and indeed, she had been of good cheer to the end. “Couldn't boil an egg—that's what comes of having slaves—but when she sat down to Aunt Tabitha's piano, those delicate hands of hers were light as butterflies,” Ellie Collins said.

In black church bombazine and Sunday bonnet, chin held high, Granny Ellen had made a fine impression at the trials, smiling gaily in proud witness to the fine character of her distinguished son as well as to the probity of her handsome grandsons, who were there to help establish her son's guilt. In the court recess, she beamed upon all three without discrimination, handing around nice mincemeat sandwiches in a napkined basket.

Minnie Collins did not attend her brother's trial. In her last years she was lost in grief over her dear Billy, it was said, although long before her husband's death she had scarcely spoken. In the end, nobody noticed her at all. By all accounts, she had always been a colorless person, with faint life in her, and even more entirely than her brother—who had more life than was good for him—her likeness had vanished from the family record. Indeed, the Collins women said, there were no known photographs of Minnie, as if her countenance had been too tentative to be resolved on film. There was no family memory of what she looked like, thought, or said, nor could anyone offer an anecdote about this voiceless person. The one known attribute was her rare beauty, but what form this beauty might have taken, or how she talked or hummed or smiled, nobody knew.

“It's so hard to imagine how she might have been when she was younger,” Hettie murmured. “Later on, she had this malady that doctors used to call ‘American nervousness.' Then paregoric was prescribed her for a toothache, and paregoric has an opium base. The poor soul was susceptible—”

“ ‘American nervousness'!” April cried. “I'll say! I'd have been pretty nervous, too, if I had Ol' Ring-Eye for a father, not to mention Uncle Edgar as a brother!”

“Neurasthenia was another name for it,” said Ellie. “Dyspepsia, dementia, insomnia, hysteria—if it had an
-ia
at the end, Minnie Collins had it, and a bad case, too!”

After Billy Collins died in early 1907, Granny Ellen and Aunt Minnie, with Willie and May, moved to Uncle Edgar's house, where Julian and Laura were already living. Cousin Ed was there, as well, and with Uncle Edgar showing up from time to time, they were too many, so Julian and Laura built their own small house not far from the school. They wanted to put in a well so that Laura need not come down here to the school and hand-pump her water and tote back heavy pails, but just when they'd scraped a few dollars
together to pay William Kinard to come and dig it was when Julian's mother became hopelessly dependent. Everything they'd saved went for her opiates, and another year went by without their well.

Once Aunt Minnie became dependent on those drugs, the family worked harder than ever in order to afford her medication. It seems she cared for nothing else. Hettie supposed it was her opium addiction which caused her family to turn its back on her, until finally it was easier to pretend that this spectral creature wasn't there than to try to include her in their daily life. By now she had withdrawn into herself entirely, drifting through her days, leaving no trace, and in her last years, they scarcely saw the figure who crept so uncertainly toward kitchen or outhouse, gently tended by old black Aunt Cindy. Only Cindy was present when she died of a failure of the spirit on a cold March day of 1912, and even her passing went unnoticed until Cindy tried to feed her a little soup.

“Aunt Cindy took care of Granny Ellen in her childhood, then took care of her household and her child rearing—she saw to everything,” Hettie said. “Cinderella Myers was a good old-fashioned slave girl who stuck by her owner even after she was freed. And when Ellen and her children fled to Florida, Aunt Cindy left her own new family to come south with them, knowing that her little Miss Ellen could not take care of her life by herself.”

Lucius supposed the young slave girl might have come from the Myers Plantation at Columbia, South Carolina, perhaps as a wedding present to Miss Ellen. She was about the same age as Granny Ellen, according to the census. Yet such facts told nothing about who she was, this enduring young woman with her own soft form and bittersweet desires who had used up her one life on earth so faraway from her own home and family.

It struck his cousins as perverse that Lucius should wish to know so much about Aunt Cindy. Chagrined by how little they knew themselves, they could not answer his upsetting questions. No, there was no known picture of her. After Miss Ellen and her children died—all within two years of one another—the old woman had persevered without complaint in her shack behind the house, tottering about her chores and chickens even after she started to go blind, until finally, in reward for her half century of faithful service, she was sent home. Her satchel had been packed for weeks when a stranger who had been her baby daughter long ago turned up to fetch her back to that red Piedmont country she could scarcely imagine anymore, to take such solace as she could from the voices of grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose parents she had scarcely known and whose faces she would never see.

“Nobody was home the day Aunt Cindy left, that's what my daddy told me,” Cousin Ellie said. “Isn't that awful? Not a sign of her anywhere, not
even a note, because she had never been taught to read or write. The poor old thing just picked up and went. As Daddy said, Aunt Cindy gave our family her whole life, and no one was there to thank her for her life or say good-bye.”

“Well, they never arrested Cox in the Mike Tolen killing,” Paul Edmunds said, compelling a change of subject. “If Grover Kinard told you that, he got it right. But Calvin Banks, he must of knowed something, cause they had that old niggera up there to the trial. Watson's revolver was the one piece of hard evidence, and it wasn't on Watson when they found it. They arrested John Porter at the start because he had quarreled with Mike, but there never was no evidence that John was in on it.”

“And Frank Reese?” Lucius said. “No one recalls him?”

“ ‘Pin it on the nigger,' that's all that was,” April said. Hettie and Ellie frowned and shook their heads, resisting the younger generation's view of Southern justice, but so far as Paul Edmunds was concerned, the time-honored remedy mentioned by the girl needed no defense. To recapture the floor, he stuck his hand up as he must have done a half century earlier in this same room—a fresh-faced scholar in knee britches, kicking mud off high black shoes of the same clodhopper style he wore today.

“Maybe that niggera was arrested, too, but if he ever spent a day in jail, I never heard about it. Course he's pretty well forgotten now around these parts—probably ain't a soul but me could recollect him.” Mr. Edmunds peered about him fiercely, to discourage any further interruptions. “Now Cox and Watson had Fred Cone for their attorney, who later become the governor of Florida. Lawyer Cone had the reputation of never losing a case, and darned if he didn't get 'em off, though every man in these five counties knowed them two was guilty.”

With Cox already on the loose, the family could scarcely celebrate Uncle Edgar's acquittal, so fearful were they for the lives of Minnie's sons. When Uncle Edgar was set free at Madison on Christmas Eve of 1908, the family figured he would come back through Fort White, and, sure enough, someone saw him at dusk on a back road across the county line, looking like a man who planned revenge. Another night, the Collins dogs barked violently into the darkness, and Julian and Willie were certain he was there. For weeks thereafter, they went into hiding, until word came that Uncle Edgar had gone back south to the Ten Thousand Islands. But not until late 1909, when Leslie Cox was convicted in the Banks murder case and sent to prison, did the community enjoy a good night's sleep.

A year later, when the Widow Watson passed through this community on
her way to her sister in north Florida, she confided to her dear friend Laura Collins that her husband and a friend had planned his escape in case the Madison trial came out the wrong way. Who that friend was she did not reveal, but the family always supposed that it was Cox.

Edna Watson would never say whether or not her husband had acknowledged either killing. Yet he had been frank about it to Joe Gunnin, his young neighbor on the Bellamy Road whose sister Amelia would marry Willie Collins less than a fortnight after Uncle Edgar's death. Gunnin and one of the young Langfords had been visiting at Chatham Bend when Leslie Cox showed up in the spring of 1910, and had been terrified the whole time they were there for fear Cox might kill them in order to keep them quiet about his whereabouts. When they got home, they were still excited. They told the family about those three poor souls whom Cox was to murder just a few months later.

“I guess they saw it coming,” Hettie said.

“I guess so,” Ellie said, “if you believe my uncle Joe. Not many did.”

“ ‘Lawyer Fred P. Cone and his assistants took every last penny that we had.' That's what Uncle Edgar told poor Edna, who confided it to her dear Laura Collins,” Hettie said.