syrup?” And Dutchy said, “Ain’t this the back-shootin sonofabitch whose sloppy mouth got you and Frank in so much trouble in north Florida?”
With everything spelled out so quick, they nodded together in acceptance of the duty to put the other one to death as soon as possible.
Dutchy helped himself to a hearty repast and went out into the field. Knowing his job from the year before, he pointedly ignored the foreman’s orders and got his work done any way he pleased, whistling away all afternoon. That whistling was brassy and aggressive, and it got on the foreman’s nerves just as intended. From the very start, Dutchy wanted Les to blow up and attack him, giving him his excuse to cut him down.
The tension gathered like rolled-up barbed wire. The next day was much the same. I was very glad Kate and the children were safe in Chokoloskee and relieved Lucius was gone, although I missed him: I guess he was the only son I ever missed.
I warned Les Cox that Dutchy Melville drew a gun a lot faster than most. “Faster’n Desperader Watson, from the sound of it,” Leslie sneered. He had sniffed out my wariness around Melville. “Hard to take that feller by surprise,” I said.
“I noticed.” Leslie yawned and stretched, not anxious exactly, just flexing his nerves. “But I ain’t noticed any eyes in the back of that boy’s head.” He took my silence for approval.
From the first, their enmity flickered like two snakes’ tongues, silently and without cease. Not wanting war before the crop was in, I forbade them to carry guns. “I need him for the harvest,” I told Dutchy. “Can’t have you using him for target practice.”
Dutchy said, “Mister Ed, I want my job back and he’s in the way.” The damned fool had forgotten all about that ruined syrup. Handing over his shooting irons, he held my eye by way of saying,
Over the years, I have run across outlaws in the Territories and a lot more in Arkansas State Prison who would not hesitate to kill when that seemed necessary, but unless they were young or kind of loco, they never made too much of it-neither claimed it nor excused it. Belle’s son Eddie Reed was one of these, a hellion, arsonist, and robber but no killer until someone tampered with his tight-wound spring. Dutchy Melville was another. In a robbery, Dutchy had murdered a fine lawman, Clarence Till, so I can’t honestly say he was good-hearted, but he had fun in him and folks liked him.
Cox was different. One way or another, he had come by a sick taste for taking life. By this I mean, a need came over him. Major Will Coulter at Edgefield was this same cold breed:
I never saw Les easy around anyone outside his clan. Never curious about others, let alone sympathetic. Never listened and had nothing to tell except on the subject of himself. His concern with people all came down to how much deference they paid him even if he had to scare and bully them to get it, yet he felt left out and did not know how to find his way back in-a very bad feeling, as I remembered from Clouds Creek. Perhaps he dreaded his own isolation, not understanding it, and perhaps it was his loneliness that made him dangerous. Perhaps he had to strike something to feel in touch with life, to make sure that he himself was really there.
After the first or second killing, there is nothing much to stop a man from the third and fourth and fifth. Because it is too late to go back-too late for redemption-one may as well go forward, though the path of one’s lost life grows dim like the passage of an unknown animal through the high reeds. Swamp water fills the disappearing track and scent disintegrates in the tall growth and in a little, the faint smudge of disturbance in the morning dew is gone.
Sometimes I wonder what Will’s boy might have become if circumstances had been different, if something like that random mule hoof had not splayed a nerve, laid bare that streak in him. He might have gone off to the Major Leagues and found the notoriety he needed, reserving his bean-balls for those days when he indulged his deep urge to do harm.
For men of criminal persuasion, notoriety is crucial; ill fame is sought as a dark honor. When we were in Duval County jail, a newspaper reference to “the handsome young murder suspect Leslie Cox” was the only detail that boy gave a damn about. He would snatch away that paper just to see his name in print, read it over and over. In his utter lack of knowledge of himself, he had lost restraint in everything he did, like a rabid dog that has left behind the known traits of its species to become some mad lone creature.
In Arkansas Prison, I knew a backwoods murderer-scraggy feller with gat teeth and a long nose bursting with black hair. This man opined that a first killing was a first taste of manhood, along with that first naked rassle with mother or sister. Had ’em both, he’d cackle in that rooster voice, so I guess he knew what he was talking about.
FAMILY VISIT
In September we had a “family visit” when the mail boat brought young Joe Gunnin from Fort White whose sister Amelia was betrothed to Willie Collins, also his friend Bill Langford of Suwannee County, a kinsman of my son-in-law. Since I was unwelcome in a Langford house and probably any Collins house as well, I resented having to feed these two for a whole week until the mail boat returned.
One evening in passing Gunnin referred to my mother’s death, the news of which Cox had not bothered to share. There had been no room for her in Aunt Tabitha’s pinched, iron-girded plot and no money to pay for a small headstone in the Collins ground at Tustenuggee, where at present she lay in a shallow hole like an old cat. True, I had disliked my little mother. Even so it galled me that her elder child and only son had not been notified in time to contribute to her funeral expenses.
Asked why my sister had sent no word, Gunnin explained nervously that Mrs. Collins, who now resided with Willie and his bride, was no longer aware of very much that was going on around her. The past went storming through my heart and mind, grief hard behind it. I said heedlessly, “That is because she is a morphine addict. Lost such brain as she was born with long ago.”
Offended for my sister, Hannah banged her platter of sweet yams and venison down in front of me. Serving the plates in a silence jarred by the knock and scrape of crockery, I regretted that I’d spoken caustically about poor Minnie, whom I had done my best to protect when we were little. But even then-because she was a tattletale-I’d made her cry. Those big dark eyes had filled with tears at the first whisper of an unkind word.
In recent years, my sister passed most of her waking hours in the chimney corner, where until the evening she slipped safely into death, she might breathe unnoticed, like a moth. Since our days of terror under the roof of Ring- Eye Lige, passing unnoticed was all poor Ninny ever asked of life.
I questioned Gunnin, checking Leslie’s stories. In the long year since Attorney Cone had got him off in the Sam Tolen case, Leslie had hung on at Fort White. He was much offended that his neighbors had not welcomed him, that there was no baseball team to star for, and that the ball clubs at Live Oak and High Springs had not invited him to try out as their pitcher. All over the south county, good folks shied from him. At first he sulked, Joe Gunnin said-that was Les all over-but before long he was making drunken threats against those who’d joined the lynch mob. Finally he was warned to leave the district, being in more danger from scared neighbors than he had ever been from the court of justice. Even his family, “hated out,” had been obliged to move away to Alachua County.
Over time, I gleaned the rest from Leslie himself. His plan had been to run off with May Collins and join a big- league baseball team so he needed a grubstake. Like everyone else, he had heard about Calvin Banks’s hoarded-up money, and Calvin’s son-in-law had mentioned where it might be found. That son-in-law had been no-account from birth, he’d pulled a muscle in his brain or something. Probably never occurred to him that those old folks might be harmed, so during the robbery, he waited for Leslie back along the road, expecting a share of the proceeds-a bad mistake, since finding no proceeds worth sharing, Leslie in ill humor shot him dead. Cox had come to Chatham Bend not to give me half the money but because he had no other place to hide.
I was now so broke that I agreed to sell the best of my Fort White farmland to Jim Delaney Lowe, even though he’d testified against me. Getting wind of that land sale, my lawyers threatened me with forcible arrest and extradition to Columbia County for nonpayment of their fees, hinting that I might be lynched upon arrival. So much
