home, doubtless assuming that the Tolens and the Russ boys would attend to him.
Frank and I sat back against my barn and celebrated his triumph over bigotry with a jug of moonshine. Impressed by how sensibly and well my old partner had behaved, I sent for Jane Straughter and reminded her that she owed me a big favor, having caused me so much unjust aggravation over John Russ’s death. Winking, I said I would not hold it against her anymore if she let Frank Reese hold it there instead. Marry him common-law or any way she wanted.
Jane Straughter did not smile. She liked Frank well enough, I guess, but moving in with him was quite another matter. The Robarts-Collins clan would not like it either, she reminded me, and anyway I had no right to coerce her. By the end of it, she was spitting mad. “You’re done with me so you’re handin me along to your coal-black nigger!”
Meanwhile, Kate Edna, scared by her own persistence, was plaguing me for my opinion on who killed Sam Tolen.
“I did not kill Sam Tolen, Kate. How often must I tell you that?”
“Not often,” she said, ambiguous. “Just reassure me.” She crept over in the bed. “Tell me you love me.” “Love!” I exclaimed, pretending astonishment that she would speak of such a thing when discussing murder. “You suspect your husband of coldblooded murder, and then you say, ‘Tell me you love me’?” Frightened, she burst into tears, and I relented and took her in my arms. I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.
Jane Straughter still helped around the house but would scarcely look at me. Seeing Jane and Frank together, I wondered if she ever thought about Henry Short, and one day, drinking in my corner, I asked just for the fun of it if she still missed him. Jane came around on me so fast that I threw my hand up, thinking she might fly straight for my eyes. In her distress, she had gone so pale that the tiny freckles in that delicate skin beneath her eyes stood out in points.
When I give in to that urge to stir up trouble, there comes an even stronger urge to drink more and behave worse. Jane’s fiery ways, so different from Kate Edna’s, hit me almost as hard as in the past, and before I knew it, I had grasped her wrist and told her fervently how pretty she looked and how very much I needed her. Still in my grasp, she gazed out the window at my wife, sailing across the sunshined yard, pinning up washing. “Supposin I was to tell Mis Kate what was done to a young virgin girl at Chatham Bend?” she whispered. “Supposin I told your black man what his boss was up to?”
Releasing her, I banged my chair down hard. “Missy,” I said, “I don’t like threats, remember?”
Jane retreated into nigger talk as quick as our house lizard changes from leaf green to dry stick brown. “I’se sorry, Mist’ Edguh, I sho’ doan mean to go threatnin nothin, nosuh.” And she ran out, sobbing. After that, she stayed mostly out of sight.
A few weeks later, I was cleaning up for supper when Kate Edna sent Jane out to the well with some hot water and a towel. When I asked how she was enjoying married life, she splashed hot water roughly into my blue basin. “Long time ago, back yonder in the Islands, you ast me how a light-skinned gal might feel, passin for white. You kin ast me now how that same gal feels, passin for black.”
COMMISSIONER D. M. TOLEN
When our paths crossed, Mike Tolen looked right past me. Even when I greeted him, he never spoke. Mike understood why others might have wished to kill his brother, and perhaps by now he had lost some of his lust for justice, but sooner or later, Cox’s big mouth would force him toward revenge. In this very dangerous situation, I warned Leslie to shut up. It was too late.
One day in Fort White, in the Terry store, Mike burst out, yes, he knew who had killed his brother, and no, he did not aim to let the matter die. But in truth, what could he do? He knew better than to challenge me in a fair fight and could not pick me off through those high windows of my house even if he got past my dogs. Mike’s only choice was to waylay his suspects, one at a time. And knowing how unlikely it was that those suspects would wait for that to happen, he would have to act as soon as possible, for his own safety, before someone repeated what he’d said in Terry’s store. But of course we had heard already and he knew that, too.
I felt sorry for Mike because he had no way out. He had no experience or skill with arms and was therefore no match for Cox and Watson, separately or together.
Leaving the commissary, I took Mike’s elbow. I had no quarrel with him, I murmured, but because he had made threats, I had to warn him of the consequences of talking dangerously. He said, “I am not talking dangerously. Who gave you that idea?” And I said, “Just about everybody, Mike. You are talking too much and you are painting us into a corner.” “Is that a threat?” he demanded. “You know exactly what it is,” I told him. But he had nowhere to turn, I didn’t either, we were trapped. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’d best leave this county and go home to Georgia.”
He only thrashed like a hooked fish. “
Frank Reese would not throw in with us. “No mo’, Mist’ Jack,” he said. “I done retired.” He flatly refused to work with Cox, who had nearly got him lynched. Anyway, he had his Jane, had his own cabin. He wasn’t a field hand anymore but a tenant farmer, as close as he had ever come in life to being his own man, so he didn’t want to know one thing about this business. He’d be out in his field tomorrow morning, same as always, turning over the Lord’s good ground and getting set to plant his corn and cotton. Said, “I finally come to rest in life, I found a little corner of the earth where I belong, so I’m puttin all them bad ol’ times behind me.” Frank was grateful to me for his new life. I could have coerced him but I didn’t want to.
Leslie bitched, “We got to get that fuckin Reese mixed up in this so’s he won’t talk.” I shook my head. “Unlike you, Frank keeps his mouth shut.” To save face, he challenged me: “Well, this time, Mister Ed, let’s you be first to shoot, case you’re fixin to hang back like you done last time.” I shrugged as if to say, All right, but it was not all right. I had nothing against Mike Tolen. I had assumed Cox would want to be the shooter.
Mike Tolen had his mailbox at the Junction. In the past year, with the slash pine lumbered off, the turpentine works and commissary had closed down and Will Cox, with his lease canceled by Tolens, had moved his family across the county line into Suwannee. The Junction was now an empty corner going back to woods. Near the huge live oak was a sagging shed bound up in vines and creepers. I hid inside while Leslie climbed into the oak and stretched along a heavy limb, ready to take Tolen from another angle. Mike having brought this on himself, I was resigned to it, but I did not like it; I had to draw breaths deep into my belly to stay calm.
Tolen came down the road a little late, his shotgun over his left arm and a letter in the other hand. Nearing the shack, he slowed his step and his eyes crisscrossed the lane, scanning the trees. I set myself, took a last deep breath, and drew a careful bead on his broad forehead; remembering Sam, I wanted to make sure Mike never knew what hit him.
Leslie claimed later that I held my fire too long, same way he did with Sam: in my belief, he fired first out of buck fever and greed, wanting the credit for this killing, too, maybe even wanting to be known as the most dangerous local desperado. Well before Mike Tolen reached his mailbox, Cox threw a double-ought slug into his chest, whacked his shirt red. Mike’s Sears mail-order flittered off as he spun backwards and the echo ricocheted away through the cold March trees. To this day I hear the ringing in my ears and the ugly thump of that man’s head as it struck the ground. I stepped onto the road and that same second I damn near had my head torn off, that’s how close Leslie’s second load rushed past my ear. Knocked to one knee, I hollered in a rage but there was no stopping him, he was already reloading. That kid put two more rounds into the body before he sprang down from his limb, gun barrel smoking.
In the silence, the screams of Sally Tolen at the cabin flew down that road from a quarter mile away, pierced by the shriek of jays and the cries of children.
Blood was welling in Mike Tolen’s mouth. The morning sun was still reflected in those eyes staring past my boots. I bent and closed them, mumbling something, but to pray seemed sickeningly insincere and I could not finish. “That’s
