Shadow Country (115 page)

When Cory paused to get a breath, his sly wink said,
How's that, Ed? Still want to make that not-guilty plea and go up against a ripsnorter like me in the public try-bunal?

“Now that don't mean friend Ed deserves to live. Howsomever, may I remind you,
Mis
-ter Tolen, that no judgment has been pronounced and that in this great democracy of ours, E. J. Watson is innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers. So tell the press whatever you damn please and I'll expose you for a reckless liar and take you to court for obstruction of justice,
Mis
-ter Tolen!”

Larabee was having sport with this poor dolled-up Tolen but mainly he was sucking up to the defendant, knowing that Broward might return a favor to a smart young state's attorney with political ambitions who had obliged him with some lenience and discretion. Even were he to lose this trial, its notoriety might lend some color to such a thin gray feller, which he would need when hustling votes on down the line.

Buddy came galumphing back like a big woolly dog. “Dammit, Guard, where have you been?” Call-me-Cory hollers. But Buddy is wheezing and he merely grunts, fiddling his keys. This big boy sees 'em come and sees 'em go on both sides of the bars. “Had me a good bowel movement, Mr. State's Attorney,” he confided, in better humor now that he felt comfortable again. But noticing Tolen, he frowned deeply, grasping the man's scrawny upper arm. “How'd
you
get in here?”

Cory signaled to Buddy to let Tolen go. Feeling magnanimous now that he was safe, he winked at friend Ed through the bars. All the while, Jim Tolen had been eyeing him with that sliding look of the mean dog sneaking around behind for a good bite, and damned if he didn't spit his brown tobacco chaw toward Cory's boots, in a loud wet squirt that would fire a clan feud back where he came from.

Old Cory went stomping off after the guard, having had about enough of our rough company, and Tolen took advantage of this opportunity to ease up to the bars. Since the last time I'd seen him so close up, there was no improvement. Jim Tolen was the bitter end of centuries of Appalachian incest, with bad weak teeth, big bony ears, and thick black brows that curved right down around the eye sockets. He gave off a dank chill of revenge and death like the cold breath of an autumn wind down his home ravines.

“Yeller Ed.” His voice was hoarse.

“For a little shit who's been looking up a mule's ass all his life, you're dressed up pretty smart there, Jim. Looks like you might know a thing or two about stolen property.”

“Yer bein tried just for the one, Ed Watson, but you was in on both them hee-nus murders,” Tolen yelled, hoping the prosecutor could still hear him, “and they ain't a man in the south county as don't know that!” He turned back to me. “Yeller Ed the backshooter. Ain't goin to parlay your way out of this one, you shitty bastrid. Gone to hang you high. And they's men waitin on you in Fort White as will take care of it in case this jury don't.”

What the hell kind of a jail was this, I wondered, where the prisoner had no protection—where some degenerate like this could stroll right in and shoot an inmate through the bars? But of course any jail so easily entered might be just as readily departed. This Jasper jail would be a whole lot easier than Arkansas State Prison.

I put that idea aside for just a minute. Buddy's shoe slaps were pounding down on us, our meeting was coming to a close. I put my face close to the bars and fixed Jim's eye and muttered fast and cold, “If I were you—and by that I mean a thieving white-trash Tolen—I would clear out of Fort White, because folks who have already had enough of your ratfuck family might just want to finish up the job.”

To talk in that disgusting way once in a while does the heart good.

Tolen cocked his head back like a musket hammer and snapped it forward, shooting his chaw into my face. My hand darted through the bars and grabbed his stripy shirt, and the cheap cloth tore as the guard spun him away, exposing a chicken chest so white under his red neck that a man might almost imagine he had bathed.

“Naw!”
Jim howled. He was clawing at that tear like he'd been scalded. “That's my new shirt!” I cackled just to rub it in, reeling back and rolling off my wall, making the most of it. But life is peculiar and the truth is I felt bad about Tolen's cheap shirt. I wanted to tear his rodent head off but tearing a poor man's Sunday shirt was something else.

Then it hit me like a mule kick: Jim Tolen was not a poor man, not anymore. His dirty pockets were stuffed with money that rightfully belonged to Watsons and he was still selling off our land. The blood rush to my temples nearly felled me. “You and your brothers stole our plantation and you will pay for that the same way they did.” Those words escaped my tongue beyond recapture and my desperate laugh to divert attention clattered like an empty bean can on the concrete floor.

I pressed my forehead hard to the cold steel. My foe stood dim and ghostly, making no sound. The prosecutor's shadow neared, the guard behind like Death's attendant, as if all listened to the echo of those dire words, as if the People of the State of Florida stood in judgment on this caged human being. I felt not lonely but cut off from humankind.

Then time resumed, the morning fell back into place, the redbird sang anew outside my cell window, the prosecutor smiled thinly. “
The same way they did
? Guard? You heard what the prisoner said, correct?”

“I ain't deaf.” Buddy gave me a reproachful look, shrugging his shoulders.

“Remember his words carefully, Guard. You'll be called to testify.”

“How about
me
?” Tolen complained. “I sure ain't likely to forget them devil's words!” When Buddy grumbled, “Can't write nothin except only my
X,
” Tolen instantly produced a scrap of paper and a pencil stub and started scrawling, to prove that he suffered no such limitation.

The prosecutor tipped his hat. “Three witnesses to an unsolicited admission of a deadly motive. I am confident, Ed, that the jury will see it that way, too. I advise you to accept the State's generous offer—”

“Generous offer?” Jim shrilled in alarm. “Goin to turn that killer loose? He'll hunt me down and shoot me in cold blood like he done my brothers!” But thin Jim wasn't afraid of that, not really. When the guard dragged him away, he wore a twisty grin, hard as a quirt.

Bad as it looked, I concluded that Ed Watson would not hang. For all his bluster, this state's attorney was a stupid man. His political career was the carrot rigged in front of the donkey, it was all he saw. In his effort to cajole me, he had lunged after that carrot, scared of losing.

I got a whiff of what was in the wind from Carrie's note as well as from Walter and Eddie: better a jailed father than a hanged one. They were dead scared of the scandal of a public execution. The guilty plea they wanted me to make would cut their losses, get the black sheep locked away. I could make the mistake of pleading guilty only if I was so greedy for survival that I would accept a life of being caged and fed and watered behind bars like a wild animal. I was not that greedy, or at least not yet. If I kept my head, I was going to be acquitted, because none of my family had the guts to see me hung.

THE KNIFE

Ladies sometimes ask why such an amiable man so often finds himself in so much trouble. And I say, “Ma'am, I never
look
for trouble”—here I let my voice go soft, lower my eyes a little, tragic and mysterious—“but when trouble comes to me, why, I take care of it.”

Les Cox loves that kind of guff as much as my Kate fears and despises it. It's not entirely nonsense, and even when it is, it can be useful. But behind bars in that torrid summer of 1908, I faced the fact that I had not always taken care of trouble the right way. I had never admitted, for example, that a lot of it was of my own manufacture.

Grandfather Artemas's gentleness and weakness had undermined our Carolina plantation; the bad character and weakness of his ring-eyed son had completed the loss and driven the grandson into exile. But was I weak too, in some other way? Plainly my ruinous start in life had forced me to desperate measures in my struggle to restore our Clouds Creek name—all in vain, it seemed, for here I was, past fifty years of age, jailed and disgraced, with my neighbors howling to see me hung and all my savings pissed away to pay the lawyers.

“Darn it, Ed,” as Bembery once said, “this ain't the first time and it ain't the second, neither, so you better think about mending your ways.” Hell, all my life I have tried to mend my ways and I always believed that next time I would make it and I still believe that.

Some would say that Edgar Watson is a bad man by nature. Ed Watson is the man I was created. If I was created evil, somebody better hustle off to church, take it up with God. I don't believe a man is born with a bad nature. I enjoy folks, most of 'em. But it's true I drink too much in my black moods, see only threats and enmity on every side. And in that darkness I strike too fast, and by the time I come clear, trouble has caught up with me again.

I have taken life. For that, I can only be sorry. But excepting that one time in Arcadia, I have never done it for financial gain. Starting way back with those shipowners and merchants who trade in human beings and destroyed thousands of lives, how many founders of our great industries and family fortunes can say the same?

For my edification while in jail, Carrie sent along her mother's Twain books—a do-gooder I could not abide and yet read furiously.

The new trial started on July 10 and testimony concluded on August 3 when the hung jury, unable to agree upon a verdict, was dismissed. In September, Cone won another change of venue and in October Judge Palmer moved the trial to Madison County. If I lost at Madison, I decided, I would break out of jail, run for the Islands.

(When I told Reese about my plan, he whispered gleefully, “We is fixin to ex-cape, just like old times!” Remembering how we crossed the Arkansas, a lilt came into Black Frank's voice, almost as if he hoped we would be convicted. Only once and only briefly had this man reproached me for dumping that shotgun in his furrow, even though that heedless act might cost his life. For his forbearance, I sincerely thanked him, assuring him he was a credit to his people whether white folks strung him up or not.)

Our third round took place in Madison County in mid-December. Getting nerved up three separate times for the same trial was like building up three times for the same act of love. Naturally there was a letdown, but the defense was off to a promising start in the local paper: “The defendant Watson is a man of fine appearance, and his face betokens intelligence in an unusual degree. That a determined fight will be made to establish the innocence of the defendants is evidenced in the imposing array of lawyers employed in their behalf.”

That array, in fact, was so imposing that we had to sell off some Fort White land to pay their fees. I was deeply in debt to my son-in-law and Kate was warning me that we were broke: we could not afford to have the bread-winner go to prison (although having him hung, as I told Frank, might be somewhat worse).

Jim Cole bent every ear in the state capital, cajoling them to talk sense to the judge. After that, he came to Madison, helped pick the jury. By trial time, Fred Cone had six assistants who kept themselves busy running up my bills in heroic efforts to suborn witnesses. Meanwhile, the prosecution's “jailhouse confession by Defendant Watson” was not panning out as Larabee had hoped, the defense having led the jury without difficulty to mistrust Jim Tolen.

Nonetheless, this trial might go badly. I asked Kate to get word to Leslie. Being afraid of him, she was upset, but I hushed her protests. Cox came in and looked over the jail and we soon agreed on the details. Shaking hands on it, he squinted man to man, and I squinted right back for old times' sake—the frontier code. I owed him that much.

On her next visit, Kate seemed strangely distressed: when I took her in my arms, she confessed that she felt sick. She entreated me to turn away while she tended to her person—modestly preparing, as I thought, to perform her wifely duty. Instead, she produced a clothbound packet containing a small sheath knife in light deerskin, which Cox had told her I had ordered for the escape. She was to conceal it “in her person”—saying this, that vicious boy had winked at her. Mortified, Kate wept, she could scarcely look at me. When she did not understand, he grinned and whispered that she was “to stick it up her you-know-where, and kind of squeeze it, hold it snug there” till she was safely in my cell and could remove it. “He said those were your instructions,” my wife whispered.

I roared with rage. When the guard came running at my din, I bribed him to step out for a long smoke. Made shy by our necessary haste, Kate removed her undergarments and knelt astride me as I sat on the thin cot. I raised her skirts and settled her warm sweet hips onto my lap, gently rocking her, then not so gently. She murmured into my ear that she still hurt from the knife, but it was too late then, it had been too long, I had to have her.

Afterward I sat her beside me and took her hand and warned her I was not a man to tolerate a hanging far less labor my life out on the chain gang. If I was convicted, I intended to escape back to the Islands. I would send for her once I was sure that all was well.

“All will never be well, Mister Watson,” poor Kate mourned. “Not in the Islands.” I had never seen her look so stricken. What had made Chatham almost bearable for Kate had been her dear Laura Collins, whose husband was now estranged from us due to the bitter feelings in our family. Kate said hurriedly that what she meant was that year-round exposure to fever-ridden climate might be bad for children. When I said she need not return permanently but could spend more time at Fort White, she cried out, “How can I stay at Fort White? You can't imagine how those people look at me!”