Shadow Country (49 page)

Cousin Ellie's unforgiving voice pursued him outside. “The truth seemed so important that you lied!” He closed the door, went to his car. The window was open and Ellie would speak again, and he was not sure that denunciation by these newfound kinswomen he liked so much would be quite bearable.

At the road corner, a woman walking toward the schoolhouse waved him down. “Mist' Lucius? Don't remember Jane the cook? From when you was a boy at Chatham Bend?” The woman, handsome, simply dressed, was indeed familiar, and when she smiled, he recognized Jane Straughter, who had accompanied Julian and Laura Collins on a year's visit to the Bend; he vaguely recalled a crisis over Jane and Henry Short, which Papa had resolved by banishing Henry from the Watson place.

Without preamble, Jane Straughter asked after “Mr. Henry Short,” how he was faring. Where was he living? Lucius could not help her since he did not know. Yet she seemed confident he would see Henry again. “When you see him,” she said, “kindly give that man the warmest wishes of Miss Jane Straughter. Please say it that way, Mist' Lucius:
Miss
Jane Straughter. Tell Mr. Short that Miss Jane was asking after him. Inviting him to please come visit one day if he wishes.”

THE CLARITY OF CHURCHYARDS

At the Collins cemetery in Fort White, the white church at the end of its long lane through the woods was spare and clean in a way that reminded Lucius of Hettie Collins, who was fashioned from the same native heart pine. They had responded to each other and now, already, she was gone. His emotion was so poignant that for the moment he'd forgotten Arbie—
Rob
! He could scarcely believe it. Who could have recognized the prim Rob of that letter in the unshaven and disreputable “Chicken” at Caxambas, stripped by hardship and rough company of all the manners and good grammar taught him by dear Mama in those years of patient tutoring, and disguised further by that cryptic urn said to contain Rob Watson's bones?

In the wistful melancholy of a country churchyard which time and weather and the woodland creatures were gradually taking back, he wandered among the modest headstones that had lately replaced the wood crosses Hettie had referred to. Here was Uncle Billy Collins, gone to his reward in February of 1907, three months before Sam Tolen. Nearby lay Granny Ellen Watson, dead at eighty in June of 1910, just four months before her son. In a narrow grave between mother and husband lay what was left of timid beautiful Aunt Minnie, safe at last.

The clarity of churchyards: everything extra worn away and what remained in order and in place, sequestered from the tumult of the world, in pristine stillness. He tried to sort his feelings. Old cemeteries made him homesick, wasn't that it? In the Collins schoolhouse, he imagined he had sensed long-buried roots here in Fort White, yet these uplands of the north-central peninsula were not his home. Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as “homegoing,” a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging. Chatham for him was what Clouds Creek in the Carolina Piedmont had been for Papa.

One day when the sun caught it, he had seen a little pool shining in the heart of an old stump on a Glades hammock, a silver black glitter like a black diamond, filled with exquisite light. Here no wind breath feathered the surface, only perhaps a leaf speck or breast feather, a wild bit of color fixed minutely to this reflection containing all—high wind clouds and eternal sky all mirrored, immanent. That was home, too.

He strayed across the sun-worn grass among old lichened monoliths, touching and tracing the inscriptions. The pains taken with the lettering astonished him—the knowing hands of nameless artisans, themselves long buried, incising stone calligraphies in memory of strangers. The age of these granites, hewn from crusts heaved up into the sun by planetary fire from miles beneath the surface of the earth, stirred him and humbled him. In quest of eternity, the upright stones yearned toward the firmament, even as they too were gnawed minutely by the bloodless fungi and blind algae that worked with the wind and rain to obliterate man's scratchings.

The slow stone metamorphoses filled him with longing—longing for what? Simplicity? Was simplicity the true nature of homegoing? The simple harmonies, earth order and abundance. In this churchyard in a woodland meadow at the end of a white road, he missed what he had never known, the peace of living one day then another in communion with others of one's blood and at the end, at the close of one's works and days, to draw that last breath and come to rest in earth where one's bones belonged.

Belonging. His encounter with his kin would not change his fundamental isolation from his family—his “lonelihood,” as Henry Short once called it. In a knowing beyond knowing, he knew that lovely Hettie, on a none too distant day, would be left behind here in the silence after the last mourner had departed Tustenuggee. Perhaps her transience, her mortality, explained why, so suddenly and strangely, she had touched his heart.

The sad solace of old cemeteries was a morbid sort of healing, though not to be despised on that account. The country graveyard in the woods was a last sanctuary, inviolable, not to be transgressed—man's last hope of equity, as Papa might have said, with everyone content in their own bones. Yet even here, the car horns could be heard, searching every distance. In the end there was no escape from the bonds of space and time short of release into the void, leaving no more trace of one's swift passage than the minnow's glimmer on the flooded road to Gator Hook or the disintegrating mushrooms become dust in the sunny leaf-bed of this autumn wood or the circles of great raptors gyring high over the Glades in the passing of ancient winds across the sky.

A jay's blue fire crossed the sun from one wall of spring leaves into another. In the stillness, a stray thrush song came in wistful query from the wood. He turned to listen. Nothing. Only the fall of a lone acorn, a small point of sound on the surface of the silence, a point of emptiness in the great roar of the turning earth.

At the hotel, he found an unsigned note. “Fort White was a bad idea. Look for message at Gen. Delivery, Fort Myers.” Fear of exposure at Fort White explained Rob's resistance to coming, Lucius decided, but why had he changed his name? Was he a fugitive?

He telegraphed Rob in care of General Delivery and sent him money, assuring him that his brother was neither angry nor upset but only looked forward to finding out who the hell was in that urn.

Before checking out, Lucius rang Hettie to apologize and say good-bye. She seemed relieved to hear from him, saying she quite understood why he might have wished to conceal his identity; she'd worried about him ever since he'd left, realizing how shocked he must have been by the sudden resurrection of his long lost brother. “Please tell Rob how happy we would be to welcome him back into the Collins family. And Lucius, too,” she added, her soft smiling voice warming his heart. He asked if one day he might pay another visit and she told him that she dearly hoped he would. “Come soon,” she said, by which he knew she shared his premonition. He said, “I will, Hettie, I will,” and put the phone down.

Catching his own sappy smile in the lobby mirror, he thought of Nell and reviled his inconstant heart. His despair was sincere and yet he was still smiling.

ALACHUA PRAIRIE

South of Fort White, Lucius followed the old county road across the worn-out cattle range of the Alachua Prairie. The potholed road passed a humble church then a few poor habitations patched into the scrub edge.

Will Cox, winding down his days in a blue shack surrounded by junked autos, stood in his narrow doorway with his hat on. “Next time you might find my grave but you won't find me,” he sang out cheerfully, as if this stranger had turned up late on a long-awaited visit. Paying no heed when Lucius got out and introduced himself, he crossed the yard with bony steps and climbed into the backseat. “Been a while since I seen where I am headed for,” Mr. Cox said. “Let's go have us a look.”

The little church back up the road had been founded by Will Cox after his family had been “hated out” of the Fort White district. He mentioned the exile without bitterness, far less self-pity.

Lucius helped the failing man out of the car. His Second Adventist church consisted of one white room with a cheap upright piano and small narrow pulpit; the unfenced yard was bare hard clay haired lightly by sparse weeds. No bird call brought the hot scrub wood to life, no color refreshed the petals of the artificial flowers in the rusted wire holders at the graves. “Be here for good before you know it,” Will Cox declared, gazing about with satisfaction. “I am just ate up with cancer, so they tell me.”

Cox shuffled forward, removing his old felt, and pointed a proud trembling finger at twin stones ten inches high and barely wide enough to carry the small initials. “W. W. C. That's William W. Cox only I ain't in there yet. And C. F. C., that's Cornelia Fralick Cox. She's down there now, bless her heart! Before she knows it, she'll be layin beside her darlin same as she always done.” Will Cox contemplated his wife's grave. A toppled jam jar lay behind the stone. “Been aimin to get me and Ma a big ol' tombstone but I been down sick about ten years and never got to it.”

Asked if he'd seen Leslie in recent years, Mr. Cox said, “My boy Leslie Cox weren't a-scared of
nobody.
” He glanced behind him in case Les might have turned up at last out on the road. When Lucius pressed him—had his son ever returned?—he shook his head. “If Les ever come back, folks would of knowed him, cause Les had a scar right to his ear where that mule kicked him, laid him out stone cold. We thought that boy would never sit up again. And when he did, his momma seen into his eyes, then whispered, kind of funny, “ ‘This here ain't the same boy no more as we have knew.' ” Out of respect for his loved ones, he took his hat off, put it on again, and stood a while, hands folded simply on his breast. “Had a big picture of Les up on the wall before our neighbors burned us out and we come here. Him and his wife May, they was both on there. Burned down to nothin.

“Les weren't never a bad boy the way they say. Went to church regular and done his lessons, got to be star pitcher on the ball club. Folks thought the world of Les. Never had no trouble before Watson come.” Saying this, the old man gave his visitor a hard sharp look. “You're a Watson, I reckon.” When Lucius nodded, he did, too. “Yessir. We been waitin on you.” When he did not explain this, Lucius caught a fleeting scent of backwoods menace, like the quick sharp musk of mink on a night road. “Let me know if you get tired, Mr. Cox,” he said.

“I
stay
tired,” the old man said, holding his eye. But in a moment, his attention wandered. “Now that is a thing I wouldn't hardly know,” he muttered, responding to some inquiry in his own head. “That was way back yonder, long, long time ago. Ed Watson warned me. ‘Listen, Will, these Tolen skunks raise hell with croppers so you got to go along with 'em somewhat.' And I says, ‘Nosir, Ed, I don't got to go along with
nobody
if they don't do right.'

“Along about that time, Sam Tolen showed up at our fence, told me what I could do and could not do, carried on like he founded the damn county. Our rent was settled but Tolen claimed there was more land than he figured so he needed more money. I told him, ‘Mister, have it surveyed out, and if I owe more money, I will find it some way.' ” Cox shook his head. “Nosir, we wasn't lookin for no trouble but Tolens brought it and my boy Les took care of it.

“Where it started, Jim Tolen done Ma's sister wrong so Ma swore a feud against all Tolens. Knowin I don't hold with blood feuds and the Fralick boys bein all killed off or in the pen, she went and mentioned to her oldest how he had to revenge poor Sister's honor, bein as how she was fresh out of brothers. My boy went to Watson for advice. About that time Jim Tolen slunk off home to Georgia, so maybe Watson advised Les to make do with the next one.” He gazed admiringly anew at the small C. F. C. stone in the sand. “Cornelia Fralick had a piece of Hell in her, y'know. When them deputies come to arrest Leslie for Sam Tolen, she reared so high they had to put the cuffs on her till they got him away.”

Was Mr. Cox saying that his son dealt with
both
those Tolens? Will Cox lifted his felt hat to scratch his scalp before he nodded. “I reckon. I reckon it might been Les who done 'em both.” The direct question had not bothered him, since unlike the Collins clan, so proud and prim, the Coxes were unashamed and unequivocal: whatever Leslie might have done, he was their blood and, for better or worse, had stood up for his family.

Had he never believed Ed Watson was involved?

The old man frowned. “I thought a lot of E. J. Watson, had a very high opinion of that man, but I never heard Les say Watson was in on it.” He pulled his ear. “Judge sent my boy to jail for life after that nigger trouble. Had to run off from the rail gang.”

“Guards never tried to catch him?”

“Nosir, not so's you'd notice.” Will Cox almost smiled. “Our boy come home, worked in our field the same as always. His wife was livin with us, too, on account of her own people didn't want her. Our family thought the world of Miss May Collins! Then some fool seen Leslie in the field, told Will Dick Purvis, ‘That boy is up to Coxes, Sheriff, best go git him.' So Les hid up under the roof when Purvis come. Will Dick never tried to hunt him, he just sung out, ‘Well, if I was Les, I'd sure head out for other parts, cause if he gets caught in
this
neck of the woods, folks just might hang him.' ”

“The judge had no business sending Leslie to prison for killing that black family—that the way the sheriff saw it?”

Cox squinted at him hard. “That's the way
ever
'body seen it, mister.” He set his hat straight. “Anyways, Les got sick of hidin, wearin women's clothes out in the field and all like that. Stayed to help with spring plantin, then told us all good-bye for now, take care of May, he'd see us soon. Went on south to Thousand Islands and that was the last he was ever knowed about exceptin hearsays.