At a makeshift snack counter in the grocery store, they ordered barbecue ribs with soft rolls and soda pop. They carried their lunch outside to a wood picnic table by the car lot, where three old black men hitched along to one end of the bench, giving the white men the remainder of the table.
They headed north again toward Lake City, passing the old Tolen Plantation and the pasture pond with its red-winged blackbirds where once the Burdetts and Betheas had sharecropped both sides of the Fort White Road. Still agitated by nostalgia, working his toothpick hard, the Deacon scanned the old fields and low woods, patting the pockets of his brain in search of something lost. “Yessir,” he said again, astonished. “First time in twenty years I been back to my hometown, and I don’t live but eleven miles away.”
When the car pulled into Kinard’s yard, the Deacon sat up and looked around him as if he’d been asleep. The names of the Cox sisters, he announced, had just come back to him—Lillie Mae, Lois, and Lee. Lee had married a Porter, she was still alive: “Let’s telephone, find out where she’s at, see what that girl has to say about her brother.”
Entering his house, the Deacon went straight to the TV and turned on the ball game, which he monitored closely throughout the remainder of Lucius’s visit. Oriole Kinard, eating a soft pale meal at her kitchen table, doubted that Lee Cox was still living, but she remembered whom Lee’s daughter had married. The Deacon tracked this daughter down by telephone, saying abruptly, without introductions, “There’s a feller here wants to know something about Les Cox.” He shoved the telephone at Lucius. “I never saw Uncle Leslie in my life!” cried the woman’s voice. “Aunt Lillie Mae, she always told us that the family sent down to Thousand Islands for the body and never heard one word back about Uncle Les! That’s all I know, and everybody in our family will tell you the same!”
“Course she has to say that in case we’re the law,” Grover Kinard warned. “Comes to murder, Les is still a wanted man.”
The Deacon walked Lucius to his car, making sure this stranger got his money’s worth and would not come asking for any of it back. “Couple years after Watson died and Edna went over to Herkie, Edna’s new mother-in-law, she took and shot herself. That was Martha Burdett, who was born a Collins. Then Joe Burdett married the widow of a man who was shot by moonshiners down Ichetucknee Swamp, and their daughter married John Collins, I believe, who caught her with another man and shot her dead. There was quite a few shootings in this county, like I told you.”
The old man sighed. “Burdetts moved away and tried to run a store in Columbia City. Don’t know what ever happened to ’em after that. Folks have gone off to the cities now, I guess. Just gone away like they were never here at all, and most of their farms are growed over in trees, same as our old place. Fine upstanding house out in the fields and now it’s lost, way back in the deep woods.”
The Collins Clan
Sally and Arbie had made friends at the billiards emporium and pool hall, where the aged pool shark, dangerously overexcited, had his ball cap on backwards and his cigarette pack rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve. He gave Lucius a cool nod, rack-clacking his balls for the young woman’s benefit with considerably more flair than expertise.
Sally sat with one hip cocked on the corner of the table, her cerise sneaker dangling and twitching like a fish lure. She handed him the interview with L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., which had appeared that morning in the Lake City Advertiser. Fecklessly attributed to Professor Collins was precisely what he had denied—in effect, the reporter’s stubborn notion that E. J. Watson, “formerly of this county,” had been “the Bud Tendy of yore,” a mass murderer and maniac unable to establish real relationships with other people.
Furious, he left the place and strode down the street to the newspaper office to demand a retraction, though he knew that a retraction would be useless, and that any chance he might have had of cooperation from the Collins cousins was now gone. But wonderfully enough, irresponsible reportage had triumphed where earnest overtures had failed. Awaiting him was a crisp note hand-delivered to the newspaper which disputed the right of this so-called Professor Collins to his opinions about Edgar Watson:
It is very doubtful that you spoke to the Collins family because those who knew of Uncle Edgar are of an older era when family business was just that and was not told to strangers. I am only writing to you to clarify a few things. I have to tell you that I greatly resent Uncle Edgar’s being compared to a mass murderer. While that man in our jail is guilty of murder, as my great-uncle was, he did a great many other things that Uncle Edgar never did. If you’ve done any research at all, you know that my uncle could be a very considerate and courteous neighbor. What I know about Edgar Watson was told me by my mother since my father would never talk about his Uncle Edgar.