Lost Man's River(33)

“The Florida historian!” the eager lady cried. “And Watson kin?” The gentle question from behind his chair took Lucius by surprise, and though he nodded, she had caught his hesitation. He wondered vaguely how many haunted kinsmen had been here before him. His History of Southwest Florida was in her stacks, the librarian was saying, thrilled that a genuine historian was doing genuine research in her “under-utilized facility,” as she described it. Even the custodians of words, Lucius thought sadly, were succumbing to the bloated speech that was driving good English clean out of the country.

While Arbie went off to explore the old part of the town, seeking some lost corner of his boyhood, Lucius spent that soft and warm spring morning ransacking the census records for the names mentioned in the Herlong and Kinard letters. In the 1900 census for Columbia County, there was no Edgar Watson, since Papa had not returned here from south Florida until 1901. But Aunt Minnie was listed as the wife of W.H.C. Collins (Uncle Billy), together with their children, Julian, William, and Maria Antoinett, and this family included Granny Ellen Watson, born in South Carolina in 1832.

In the same census was Samuel Tolen, the man whom (Herlong said) Watson had murdered. By the turn of the century, that peculiar household consisted of Tolen and Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had given shelter to Granny Ellen after her flight south from Carolina. There were plenty of Coxes, with e and without, but no trace of a Leslie Cox under that name.

The librarian referred him to an elderly custodian of local history, who affirmed over the phone that Leslie Cox had been a native of these parts, “as bad as bad could be. Led a bad life and got wore out, that’s all. There wasn’t much left of him by the time he came back here to die, that’s what we heard. Now some of those Coxes were good people, mind, they weren’t all bad. And his kinfolks took care of him later in life, they took him in. That Cox family once lived here in Lake City, so you might find him in our cemetery, if he’s dead.”

Meanwhile the librarian had scuttled away to tip off her friend, the features editor of the newspaper, who came at once in quest of “an exclusive” with the noted historian from the University of Florida who was researching “our famous local crimes.” Together these ladies persuaded Professor Collins that a lively interview in the paper might well smoke out would-be informants.

Since he wanted potential informants to speak freely, Lucius did not tell the reporter that his subject was his father, emphasizing instead his interest in Watson as an emblem of the Florida frontier. No, no, he protested, Ed Watson was nothing like that sick Bud Tendy, now on trial for his life here in Lake City. On the contrary, he was a family man, very much beloved—“What? I beg your pardon? No, ma’am! Not a mass murderer! Not a common criminal in any way!”



Lucius wandered down old grass-grown sidewalks to the ends of narrow lanes where the oaks had not been bulldozed out nor the street widened, where the last of the old houses tumbled down ever so slowly and sedately under the sad whispering Southern trees. He arrived at last at Oak Lawn Cemetery, the town’s last redoubt of the antebellum South. Here on thin and weary grass, amidst black-lichened leaning stones tended by somnolent grave diggers and faded robins, stood a memorial to those brave men of the Confederate Army who had died at Olustee, to the east, in a small victory over union   troops. Not far from the memorial, a dark iron fence enclosed three tombstones.

TABITHA WATSON, 1813–1905

LAURA WATSON TOLEN, 1830–1894

SAMUEL TOLEN, 1858–1907



Sinking down between the dark roots, Lucius contemplated the old stones, stringing new beads of information from their dates. At some point, the former Laura Watson had married the ill-fated Samuel Tolen, born almost thirty years after his bride, and he wondered if this discrepancy in age was not a catalyst in the family feud mentioned by Dr. Herlong. Had Greedy Tolen married Foolish Laura for her Watson money, inciting her Evil Cousin Edgar?

Old Tabitha had survived her daughter by a decade, tussling along into her nineties. Her stone—much the grandest of the three, as if ordered in advance by the incumbent—suggested that this durable old lady had managed the purse strings in the Tolen household after Laura’s death. Presumably it was Aunt Tabitha who bequeathed her piano and some silver to Edgar Watson’s wife, a bequest which Sam Tolen had refused to honor. Had his error of judgment cost Tolen his life?

The Watson headstones were narrow and austere, as Lucius imagined these women might have been, whereas Tolen’s gravestone squatted low in attendance on the ladies. Great-Aunt Tabitha’s haughty monument held no message or instruction for those she had left behind, and her daughter’s read tersely, “We have parted.” Sam Tolen, on the other hand, was “Gone But Not Forgotten”—not forgotten by whom, Lucius wondered, since to judge from the 1900 census, Sam’s wife Laura had been barren, and since both women in his household had preceded him into this earth.