Arbie wasn’t altogether wrong, but neither was he relevant, and Lucius wished he’d left him back at the motel. The women’s affection for young Myrtle might be patronizing, but it was real. When one of them asked if she could help them, and Arbie snapped, “I doubt it,” the young black woman said coldly, “That the way you were brought up to talk to ladies, sir?”
And Arbie said, “That the way you were brought up to talk to white men, girl?” Surprised and stung by her disdain, he had struck back before he thought, and was instantly afire with chagrin. But when red spots jumped out on his pale cheeks, what the young black woman saw was rage, as bleak and unregenerate as Old Jim Crow, and she rolled her eyes on her way through the door to her own office. Arbie started to call after her, then stopped. A little hunched, he turned away and shuffled out into the corridor.
“Well!” one of the women said. The others glared, offended that the old reprobate’s confederate had the gall to remain standing at the counter.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that Mr. Collins—” He stopped. It was no use. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Taking a breath, Lucius inquired about documents pertaining to the murder trial of a man named Watson, back toward the turn of the century. The women informed him in no uncertain terms that deputy county clerks had more important matters to attend to than private research on some darn old jailbird. Why should they nasty up their fingernails and perms (their tossed hairdos seemed to say), digging out old dusty ledgers and disintegrating dockets on behalf of rude out-of-county people who hadn’t bothered to find out the precise dates? Were these people aware, one complained to another, how busy the county clerk’s office must be with the case of the real live honest-to-goodness up-to-date and otherwise outstanding mass murderer Mr. Bud Tendy, who had best-selling books and TV appearances and the Lord knows what all to his credit, and was on trial for his horrible life right here in Columbia County Court this very morning?
Madison County
E. J. Watson’s trial, Herlong had written, had been transferred to other counties, due to the threat of “a necktie party” in Columbia. Sally stayed behind to do some further research in the library while Lucius and Arbie drove northwest across the Suwannee River to the Hamilton County capital at Jasper. The grim three-story brick courthouse with its high clock tower where Lucius’s father had been tried for murder had burned down in 1929, but the old brick jail near the brick cotton gin beside the railroad tracks was dark, high, and forbidding. Part of its facade was a closed shaft like a chimney which plunged from the eave gutters to the ground—an old-time hanging shaft, Arbie explained. “Kept the hangman in out of the rain, I guess.”
“Today they’d call that a ‘departure facility,’ ” Lucius said, thinking about that “under-utilized facility” at the library where even now sweet Sally Brown sat hunched over the archives.
Arbie laughed. “I bet that ol’ departure facility gave your daddy food for thought on his way to and from the courtroom!” But chastened by Lucius’s bleak expression, he turned away.
Finding no old records in the new one-story courthouse, they continued west over the Suwannee into Madison County, crossing flat cattle country of small blue pasture ponds under live oaks, abandoned phosphate mines, hog farms with old corncribs and silos, and small clear black rivers winding southward from the hardwood foothills of the Georgia mountains to the marshes of Apalachee and Dead Man’s Bay.
In Watson’s day, the Florida Manufacturing Company at Madison had processed more Sea Island cotton than any place on earth. Today, laid low by the boll weevil, the county capital was a tranquil backwater of empty streets. The old jail where his father had been incarcerated was now the Suwannee River Regional Library, across from the Baptist Church. Presumably the trial witnesses had been lodged at the Manor House, a pink brick edifice with white columns which faced on the small park in the town square where oaks as thick as twenty men bound in a sheaf cast a soft shade. In the park stood a blockhouse from the Seminole Wars, and across from the blockhouse stood the two-story brick courthouse where in December of 1908, his lawyers had argued on behalf of E. J. Watson’s life.
The county clerk, summoned forth from an inner office, was a small quick man, thin-haired, squeaky. “Yessir? What can I do you for today?” Lucius Watson explained that they were looking for court transcripts of the trial of a man named E. J. Watson, accused of the murder of a man named Samuel Tolen—a historic case which had involved Governor Broward, he mentioned quickly.