Mike’s killers was hid in a big live oak used to stand here at the southwest corner of the crossing. There was an old shack all sagged down, vines crawling in the windows, and one of those fellers might been hiding back in there. Coxes lived not one hundred yards from where we are this minute, but their old cabin is lost today back in that tangle.
They shot Mike Tolen square in the face when he come to his mailbox on this corner. Our mailman Mills Winn from Fort White came down Herlong Lane in his horse and buggy, and he found Mike laying in his own life’s blood right where I’m pointing at. Must been about eleven in the morning. Mike never got to mail his letter, he still had it in his hand, that’s what Mills said.
Down here a little on the west side of the lane is a very old and dark log cabin in a grove of big ol’ oaks—see it yonder? That is Mike Tolen’s place. Them live oaks is the heaviest I know of, around here. Probably them oaks was pretty big when William Myers built this house when he first come down from South Carolina in the War. Then his young widow and her mother lived here, and then Tolens. When the Watson women had the big house built, late 1880s, Sam Tolen had already married the Widow Laura, and he let his brother Mike have this house here. It was us Kinards took it over from Mike’s widow. She was a Myers, I believe, come visiting her uncle, married up with Mike against her family’s wishes, wound up back home in South Carolina with nothing much to show for it besides four little ones.
When we moved here from across the Fort White Road, there was nothing left in Mike Tolen’s cabin but some old broke cedar buckets and bent pots, a couple of cane chairs, and some torn mattresses that the field rats had got into. Them old mattresses was stuffed with Spanish moss right off these oaks, but most people used chicken feather down or straw or cotton, sewed up in their own homespun. Made their own clothes so everything was scratchy, didn’t have none of this slick factory stuff like I got on here today. Wool in winter, cotton in summer—that was all we wore.
My dad burned Mike Tolen’s mattresses, and us kids was glad about it, cause with so much blood on ’em, they drawed the ghosts. There’s blood spots on the wall right now that’s been there since the day they brought Mike home. That’s how bad they shot him up, that’s how much blood there was.
Rat smell everywhere, that’s what I remember. House dead silent and so empty, only bat chitterin and cheep of crickets, and the snap of rats’ teeth in them old mattresses. A house can have bloody rape and murder, or it can have folks who live good churchly lives, but rats don’t pay that no attention, do they? Gnaw a hole in your Bible or your daddy’s body, just depending.
Anyway, Mills Winn drove all around putting the news out, his old horse was overdrove that day. Sam Tolen’s death never stirred folks up, but down deep I reckon we was worried about having them two ambushers in our community. In killing Mike Tolen, they had went too far. Mike was a county commissioner and a well-estimated man, and when word spread, this whole section was buzzing like a swarm of hornets.
Old Man Edmunds, ran the store at Centerville, he was the most religious man we ever knew about, we never heard a cussword from his mouth. But when he heard about Mike’s death, Mr. Edmunds hollered, “All right, boys, let’s lynch them sonsabitches!” And my brother Luther was in the store, and he was so shocked that he turned to young Paul Edmunds, to make sure what Paul’s daddy had just said. And young Paul being so excited hollers, “Sonsabitches! That’s what Pa said, all right! Heard it myself!” And his daddy was so riled to hear that word that he run right over and twisted up Paul’s ear and whapped him one!
So the people gathering, and the men carried their firearms, ready to go. Besides being riled up, they was scared, and I believe they was more a-scared of Leslie than they was of Edgar, because Edgar was good company and a pretty good neighbor till you crossed him, whilst Cox was a lazy kind of feller with a very very ugly disposition. They figured Cox was the real killer, but they also knew Watson’s reputation, and reckoned both had took a part. Cox and Watson weren’t afraid of anything this side of hell. All the same, they bushwhacked them two brothers, shot ’em down like hogs.
The Sheriff’s men knew before they come here that they was after the same fellers that was already suspected in Sam Tolen’s death. Leslie had took off quick as a weasel, no one could find him, but they found hoofprints in the woods, and them bloodhounds went south a mile or so to Watson’s place. And Edgar Watson was at home, he come right to the door, though he surely knew they would be coming for him. Either he was innocent or he had some kind of alibi he thought would hold.