too small and too tight to his head. He had his mama’s stone-green eyes and dark hair like his pa, with that same horse hank of hair across his brow. On his left cheekbone was a crescent scar left by the hind hoof of a mule that had blanked him out for close to forty hours, scared his folks half to death. Broke the cheekbone and offset it, giving his mouth a little twist, and on that side the eyelid sagged in a kind of squint. Might have shifted his brain, too, to judge from his behavior. Leslie remained childish in some ways. Wore a toy pistol on a holster belt up till age fourteen and never learned to handle himself when things went wrong.
One day another boy cut himself in a bad fall in the schoolyard and screamed to see so much of his own blood. Leslie ran over not to help but to rage at him to shut his mouth or he would beat him up. He did it, too. A dog will attack another dog that’s hurt and yelping but among our human kind it’s not so common. Even his own folks were troubled at the time.
Lately my niece May Collins had imagined herself in love with Les. She saw the trouble he got into at the school as something dangerous and romantic, but none of the kids liked him except May and her young friends. He was often a truant and was always picking fights, pushing the smaller boys, even grabbing their food: he was quick to anger and quicker to attack any boy who dared protest. Because he was utterly indifferent to book learning, he was sent back to repeat his grade, at which point, contemptuous of teachers and pupils alike, he gave up his education for good before anyone found out if he was bright or stupid.
Because I was good friends with his daddy, Les liked to boast of his acquaintance with “Desperader Watson,” and with his education at an end, he started showing up over at my place, asking questions about the Wild West and Belle Starr. Being all read up on the Belle Starr story, he informed me that it was those small footprints that got me into trouble in Oklahoma; he had learned from a dime novel that Jesse James had a small boot size like mine, and because Jesse was Belle Starr’s jealous boyfriend, Leslie said, he might have “slew her” rather than see her go to Edgar Watson. Something like that.
Also, said Les, Belle was shot in the back. It was common knowledge that E. J. Watson would never shoot anybody in the back. “No matter what, my daddy says, the Ed Watson I know would look a man straight in the eye.”
I looked Les straight in the eye just to oblige him.
Les asked if I’d known Jesse James and I said I sure had. I told him Ol’ Jess was mostly talk, it was Frank James I could always count on in tough situations. “Tough situations?” Leslie whispered, those green wildwood eyes of his just smoldering. He positively salivated when I gave him a hard squint and an ironic little smile-the frontier code. He went off practicing his own squint and later on some enigmatic silence. For a while, his folks could hardly get their oldest boy to speak a word.
Sam hated it that his young star admired Edgar Watson. He heeded my warning and shut up about John Russ but he fed Leslie all those Carolina tales he’d got from Herlongs, not knowing they just made this boy admire me all the more, and Leslie, with his gut instinct for stirring up trouble, passed Sam’s slanders right along to me. Pretty sure he’d race right back to Sam with my response, I boasted about how I’d run that yeller-bellied Woodson Tolen right out of the field when I was Les’s age. While I was at it, I confided how I’d dealt with the Queen of the Outlaws and her pack of half-breed Injuns back in Oklahoma and how I took care of a bad actor named Quinn Bass at Arcadia-in short, what you might call the varnished truth.
Sure enough, that Saturday after the ball game, Les drank whiskey with Sam Tolen, told him all about my dangerous adventures. Tolen hollered, “You want to see somethin?” That same evening Sam rode him over to the sawmill at Columbia City, cornered two blacks who had sassed him. Sam had been brooding about those sassy niggers every time he drank, aimed to sting ’em up with a dose of bird shot, teach ’em a lesson.
The lesson Sam Tolen taught ’em was the following: he blasted ’em clean off their mule after halting ’em on the road, waving his shotgun. Being drunk as usual, he had his loads mixed up, used buckshot instead of bird shot, and because his aim was so poor, he shot way too high when the gun kicked, hit ’em in the head instead of the legs. What with all the blood and screeching, Sam’s nerves gave way, so he yelled at Les to jump down off his mule and finish those boys off before their nigger racket brought the whole countryside down on top of them.
“I ain’t never took a life before! Made me feel funny!” Les was overexcited, scared, but also thrilled. “Reason I’m tellin you, Mister Ed, you had experience of killin, but don’t go tellin nobody I done that. Mister Sam is claimin now how all he aimed to do was sting ’em up a little, and what that Cox boy done to ’em after was his own idea.”
Both of them were shooting off their mouths and there was talk. Leslie’s account fit what I had heard so I didn’t doubt that it was mostly true. What troubled me was the way Les told it-the way he tasted every word, licked at it, even-and that bad grin on that arrogant face that hardly grinned from one week to the next. He came over to my house not because he was upset by senseless killings but to brag to Desperado Watson.
“So you didn’t mind…?”
“Who,
The Columbia City shooting was in early winter. Those amateur killers avoided each other until baseball came around again in early spring. Leslie pitched for the Tolen Team but stayed away from Sam, who was blaming their difficulties on Ed Watson’s influence.
One day Sam sent word through Coxes that if Ed would meet him in a public place, namely the J. R. Terry Grocery in Fort White, we could talk things over and patch up our differences. I was leery of the invitation because I happened to be scrapping with the Terrys.
My mother was Episcopalian and Minnie, too. Though Minnie’s three children had been baptized in St. James Episcopal, Lake City, the Collinses were Methodists, all but Billy, who got cranky in the last years of his life. He went over to the Baptist persuasion and attended Elim Baptist, over east of the Fort White Road, taking the kids with him. But pretty soon there was trouble with the Terrys because their mean dogs scared the Collins kids on their way to church. I went over there and warned ’em but they paid no attention, would not chain their dogs. So the following Sunday, I accompanied those kids, took my gun along, and shot those dogs dead as fast as they ran up. Terrys never forgave that, never forgot it. From that day on, I had to watch my back every time I went over to Fort White. Even gave up my Saturday lunch at the Sparkman Hotel, where I’d always enjoyed the lively conversation, mostly because I did most of the talking.
When word came to meet Tolen at the Terry store, I suspected this bunch was in cahoots, so I sent my boy Eddie over there to reconnoiter. Just you duck around the back, I told him, peek in the window. So Eddie snuck around the back and peered in through the spiderwebs and shadows. He could just make out a big old iron safe and the tools and harness hanging from the walls and the potbellied stove. What he didn’t see at first-and it gave him a bad start when he did-was the shape of a heavy man sitting on a nail keg with a shotgun across his lap, facing the door.
When Eddie rode home and reported that the armed man looked like Tolen, I decided Sam wasn’t sitting on a nail keg for the hell of it; he probably had some damn Terry in that room, hid in a corner. I no longer trusted anyone around Fort White and was jumping at shadows every time I rode along those roads. For the time being, I would be safer in the Islands.
1903
In early 1903 I replaced Green Waller as foreman with a man named Dyer whose wife Sybil had befriended me back in ’93 when I first passed through Fort Myers after my long horseback journey across the country.
Sybil worked for the local haberdasher and had made me my new clothes, coming to my room for all the fittings. Not long after that, she married Dyer, and a little boy they called Watson or Watt had come into the world while I was clearing my plantation at Chatham Bend. We renewed acquaintance briefly on my way north in 1903, and when she mentioned that her husband was out of work and was also a good carpenter, I hired him.
Fred Dyer was handy and did most of his work but found too many excuses to go off on the
