Les Cox was sent to the penitentiary for life and stayed three months. One day he was on the road gang out of Silver Springs, and it just so happened that Will Cox was there, passing the time of day with his boy’s guard. The gang was shifting railroad cars, and it looked like one got loose some way, rolled down the grade for quite a distance to a place where Les jumped off and run. That’s how they told it. His guard was faced the other way, never even fired.
Leslie Cox kept right on running and never been seen since, not by the law. Les went to his uncle, Old John Fralick, who lived over near Ocala, and John Fralick brought him home one evening after dark. This was before Les went away to the Ten Thousand Islands. John Fralick was brother to Cornelia Cox, and that old woman had a piece of hell in her. Will Cox was calm as he could be, but Cornelia had a terrible darn temper. When the Sheriff came to arrest Leslie for Sam Tolen, they say that old woman reared so high that they had to put handcuffs on her till they got him safe away.
There’s plenty can tell you how Cox came back in later years, hunting revenge. Course there ain’t but a very few of us old-timers left that would know him if they saw him, but he ain’t been forgotten around here, neither. In the family that one of his sisters married into, there was a young boy, and one day him and I were standing around waiting for a funeral over in Jacksonville. When Leslie’s name come up, this boy spoke like he’d seen Leslie not too long before, which give me the idea he was seeing him pretty regular, and not no ghost nor dead man, neither. And a little later, I was setting in the congregation when the family come out of the family room to view the body, and there was one man by himself that looked the size, the build, and the whole style of Leslie Cox. He glanced over the congregation quick, then moved right on through with the three couples. I fully believe it was Les Cox, but I couldn’t swear to it, because it must been close to forty years since I last seen him. But nobody around Columbia County believed Les Cox was killed, and they don’t today.
On the dirt road near the old Banks farm, in a strand of spring woods that parted empty fields, a killdeer performed its broken-wing display to distract their attention from two puffball chicks that fluttered and clambered, trapped in the deep rut. When Lucius smiled, stopping the car and trying to point them out, Grover Kinard stared at him, suspicious, then struggled irritably to shift and peer from the car window, not certain what he should be looking for and not finding it. His frustration seemed to sadden him, or perhaps it was his inability to comprehend why others cared about these inconsequential things that he had let pass unnoticed all his life. At last he sat back bewildered, saying, “They had something pretty close to that, other evening on TV.” He pinched off some loose threads in his sleeve, as if otherwise he might unravel in a blur of synthetic thread.
In silence, in their separate thoughts, they drove back to the paved highway, where they turned south again toward Fort White, then west again on the Old Bellamy Road. “This whole corner here and down to westward, that was Getzens’. Getzens was some kind of kin to Old Lady Tabitha Watson, and I guess they was pretty wealthy people. Called him Captain Getzen, from the War. Captain Tom was a one-legged man with hair as white as snow, and he had a fine two-story house, over yonder under them old oaks. Them falling-down sheds you see, they were his, too, and he had a nice barn that some people claimed Watson set fire to. They say his hair turned white the night that barn burned and he jumped out there on his one leg to fight it. Nobody could imagine how he done that.
“This Bellamy Road goes to Ichetucknee Springs. Used to be all kinds of wild critters come in to that spring to get their water, wolves and bears and buffaloes, I don’t know what. Spaniards killed buffaloes down there three hundred years ago, same thing as bisons out in the Wild West, did you know that? Nowadays young couples take truck tire tubes, go floating on the Ichetucknee, in them two-three miles between the bridges; float along in bunches, bank to bank, drinking beer, y’know, a lot of hollering, make quite a mess.” He gazed at Lucius as if to learn whether Lucius would join in this horseplay, given the chance. “Four miles down, the Ichetucknee flows into the Santa Fe, which goes to the Suwannee and on down to the Gulf coast, Cedar Key. Way down on the Suwannee River. Used to be oh so shady and so quiet, but now it’s all opened up from what I hear, and motorboat racket up and down, morning till night.”
The weathered oak and magnolia groves where the Getzen sheds sank silently into the earth now resembled an abandoned fairground, with faded signs and weed-bound trailers, a fake tepee, shacks, an abandoned bathtub, all of these in loose association with the Ichetucknee Slammer Express Tube Co., and Granny’s Hot Sandwiches and Homemade Candies, and Beer Oysters Food and Game Room: Any Size Tube One Dollar. “Can’t imagine such signs back in the old days, can you? Getting to be modern times even way out here in the backwoods.”