Uncle Edgar had gone away to Oklahoma, and once he was safe out of the way, Sam Tolen had married poor old Cousin Laura. The widow’s marriage to an ignorant cracker almost thirty years her junior (and well beneath her social station, Ellie noted primly) had seemed to vindicate Colonel Myers’s precaution of bypassing this foolish creature in his will. Sam Tolen proceeded soon thereafter with the construction of the manor house, which was scarcely finished when Laura died in 1894. Upon her death—at Tolen’s urging, they supposed—Tabitha Watson, now an old lady, had transferred her daughter’s “child portion” of the estate to her son-in-law, who wasted no time in selling the whole plantation out from under her.
When Edgar Watson returned from the West in the early nineties, he was a fugitive on horseback, passing through at night on his way south. Before he left, he gave money to the Collinses to send to Arkansas for his wife and children and to take care of them here in Fort White until he got himself established on the southwest coast. Cousin Ed was nine years old when the family came back from Arkansas, which dated their return to 1896. The next year the family left Fort White for the Ten Thousand Islands.
“Right after the turn of the century, Jane Watson died and Uncle Edgar came back here to Columbia County. Aunt Minnie got Granddad to lease him a piece of our Collins tract, where he built his house all by himself.”
“Nothing but brambles and poverty grass when he took over,” Mr. Edmunds said. “He brought them old fields back into production, got his place all bought and paid for, earned himself a real good reputation. Folks were ready to forgive him and forget, even the ones who had heard about Belle Starr.
“Course I lived right around here since a boy, and I seen him build that house up on the hill. Watson was staying with his sister’s family. Billy Collins was grinding cane from some cuttings Watson brought him from Ten Thousand Islands, so us kids would run over at noontime from the school, drink some good cane juice. That’s when I first remember Edgar Watson, must of been about nineteen and oh-four.
“Doc Straughter did odd jobs for Watson when they lived up on the hill. For the rest of his life, that niggera would talk about how Mist’ Edgar worked a revolver, said he never seen anything to beat it. Set on his back porch and pick the acorns off of that red oak—that big tree is up there yet today. Course just about every man back then could work a rifle pretty good, but nobody couldn’t hit nothin with a handgun. E. J. Watson could beat you and your rifle with a damn revolver, which was why they claimed he made his money as a gunfighter out in the Nations.”
“Uncle Edgar was always an amusing talker and great storyteller,” Hettie said. “He was invited everywhere in Fort White, which was much larger and more prosperous than it is today. Board sidewalks and tall kerosene streetlamps, two-seater horse hacks with fringe canopies. There was even three whole stories’ worth of bright yellow hotel, Sparkman Hotel. Uncle Edgar went in there every Saturday to have his lunch, and Bascomb Sparkman always said he never saw a man so educated and well-dressed and mannerly. Said to hear Mr. Watson carry on beat any politician that you ever heard about. It was purely unbelievable, all the things he knew about this country’s history, and not only America but Ancient Greece! Homer and the Iliad. He quoted Shakespeare! His folks couldn’t get Bascomb out of the dining room on Saturdays, that’s how entertained he was by Uncle Edgar!”
“Well, Mama, was he so popular? Or just notorious as the Man Who Killed Belle Starr?”
“Nobody would think such an amiable man had ever killed a woman in his life, that’s what Bascomb said. But if somebody said something smart, and those blue eyes froze, folks knew enough to get out of his way. I asked Bascomb once what that look was, and Bascomb thought awhile, then said, ‘He looked like God and he looked like Satan and he looked like Uncle Sam, all three at once!’ Now isn’t that a strange idea? Young Bascomb had a lot of imagination!”
“Probably looked like those enlistment posters where Uncle Sam is pointing at you off the wall,” April exclaimed. “You call yourself a red-blooded American? Quit skulkin around behind them bleedin-hearts and yeller-bellies! Step right up and sign your X right here!”
“It’s true,” Paul Edmunds was remembering. “Warm, ruddy face and a fine lively smile, but there was a glint in them blue eyes which made most men go quaky in the belly.”
“Did he ever look at you like that?” Letitia whispered, in honest awe of any man fearsome enough to daunt her Paul T. Edmunds. Her husband snorted and stamped crossly at her whispering, as if she were some sort of pesky fly.