Lost Man's River(45)

One night when my dad was away, my cousins played a trick on us, prowling around outside our house pretending to be Cox. Luther Kinard grabbed one gun and Brooks the other. Luther dropped down behind the windowsill, he was going to shoot from inside the house, but Brooks run outside, cause he was the kind that if he had to kill a man, he would do it face-to-face. And knowing how brave this boy must be, coming right out after ’em that way, them two trickers got bad scared and lay down on the ground behind the hog pen and went to hollering, “Don’t shoot! We ain’t Leslie at all!” That was a trick that nearly ended up all the wrong way.

A year later, our poor Brooks took sick, died of consumption. I wept in the woodshed for a week. I often told myself for consolation that a boy as honorable as Brooks Kinard was too good for this evil world and would of died or got killed anyway, sooner or later.

That spring there weren’t no Tolen Team, so Les Cox tried to pitch for Columbia City. I was going on fourteen by then, I was there for his last game, and it was just so pitiful that I felt sorry for him. Nobody wanted no part of Les but nobody dared to razz that feller neither. They just sat quiet, watched him fall to pieces. His nerves was gone, he couldn’t throw nothing like the way he used to, the ball hit the ground in front of the plate or flew behind the batter or whistled high over the catcher’s head. He was just dead wild, and nobody wanted to go to bat against him. The worse he pitched, the harder he threw and the more dangerous, and after a while it got so bad that his own team wouldn’t take the field behind him. I can see him yet today, slamming his glove down on the mound, raising the dust. So that give Les his excuse to pick a fight, and he punched some feller bloody till they hauled him off, and still nobody razzed him. He stomped off that field in a dead silence, and he never come back once all that summer.

Les finally seen there was no place for him, not around here. He wanted to go to Watson’s in the Islands but he needed money, and he knew just where to go to get it. I imagine he was still feeling humiliated by the time he got there, and when that feller felt humiliated, someone would pay.

Beyond there—that line of pecan trees?—is where the Banks family had their cabin. Ain’t there no more, but I remember it real good. Two rooms with a small kitchen and the shed in back, same as all the cropper cabins. I seen that old house many’s the time in the days they lived there.

The Bankses, they were black people, they were old people, and they were harmless people. Calvin Banks had been a slave for Col. William Myers, but he had been more fortunate than the average black man. He had a farm, he had about eighty head of cattle, he was a pretty prosperous old man, but still he worked hard cutting ties for the Fort White railroad. He had sense enough to make and save some money but not enough to take it to the bank. Carried his dollars in a little old satchel over his shoulder, and when he bought something, he’d take that satchel out and pay, and they give him the change and he put it back in, and people could see he had money in there, silver dollars and gold twenties and plenty of green paper money, too. Calvin Banks, he reckoned the Lord loved him, so he trusted people.

I heard my dad mention it a time or two: Somebody’s liable to rob Calvin for that money if he don’t look out. Well, somebody did that, robbed him and killed him, and that somebody was Leslie Cox. Killed Calvin and his wife and another nigra named Jim Sailor.

Jim was Old Wash Sailor’s boy and Calvin’s son-in-law, and he was standing on this road passing the time of day with another black feller named May Sumpter. While Leslie was over at the cabin robbing and killing, May heard the shooting and decided he would leave, but Jim stayed where he was, so it sure looks like he might of been mixed up in it. Likely let on to Leslie where the money was or something, and was hanging around there waiting to get his share.

We figured Leslie tried to scare Old Calvin into telling where his money was and Calvin wouldn’t do it, so he shot him. Calvin Banks was maybe sixty, but Aunt Celia was older, well up into her seventies—she was near-blind and she had rheumatism, couldn’t run no more. Might been setting on the stoop warming her bones in that October sun, cause it looked like Les shot her right out of her rocker, but some said she slipped down out of her chair, tried to crawl under the house. Don’t know how folks knew so much unless Leslie bragged on it, which knowing Leslie, I reckon he did. Killed the old man inside, killed the woman outside, killed Jim Sailor out here on this road.

Maybe Les didn’t get enough to make it worth his while to divvy up, or maybe he didn’t want no witnesses. If May Sumpter had stayed, he would of been a dead man, too. Whole rest of his life, that old darkie thanked the Good Lord for His mercy. Folks liked to say that Leslie Cox broke off hard straws out of this field and poked ’em right into Jim’s bullet holes, for fun, but I knew Leslie and I don’t believe that. First of all, he never did know what fun was.