Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Most of those Coxes were good people and still are,” Hettie reminded her, pale eyebrows raised in mock alarm at Ellie’s sporty language. “Well connected, too.”

“Well connected with the sheriff! Got that skunk turned loose off of the chain gang.” Edmunds’s knobby knee jumped about in agitation. “Everybody in this section knew that Leslie was dead mean, but Watson could be likable from what I seen, tending our store. I talked to the old-timers all about it and never met a one who got crossed up with him.”

April laughed. “Know why? The ones that got crossed up with him were dead.”

“Leslie and I, we were just children ! Looking out through these same windows!” Hand at her mouth, Letitia stared out of the windows, marveling that she had actually survived her attendance at this school with a cold-blooded killer. “He had the shadow of a beard at the age of twelve!”

Stilling his wife with a fearful frown, her husband usurped her modest contribution to Cox lore. William Leslie Cox, he informed them, was full-grown by the time he was sixteen and when unshaven, he looked close to thirty. “Come here to the school on muleback, whistled up May Collins through them winders, and eloped with her.”

“May Collins ran off with Cox?” Lucius vaguely recalled having heard this from his father in the summer Leslie lived at Chatham Bend.

Hettie nodded. “After Granddad Billy died, her mother paid her less and less attention. Granny Ellen was getting feeble and Aunt Cindy was half blind so young Miss May talked to any boy she wanted.”

According to Lucius’s notes, the murder of the Banks family occurred on a Monday of early October, 1909: the bodies were discovered Tuesday morning and Leslie Cox was arrested the next day while applying for a marriage license at the Lake City courthouse. Perhaps swayed by his friendship with Leslie’s father, the sheriff thereupon released on bond the only suspect in the “foul and brutal murders of three hardworking peaceable negroes,” as the victims were called in the paper that same morning. However, the groom agreed to turn himself in after his wedding.

Since Leslie could have fled after the killings instead of going to Lake City for that license, then passed up a second chance to flee when granted permission to go get married the next morning, he must have thought the whole thing would blow over. “Figured there wouldn’t be no problem over killing nigger-as,” Paul Edmunds said, “and it looks like the sheriff thought the same. Not only let him out on bail but let him cross the county line to marry.”

“Somebody was sent to invite the bride’s family to a friend’s house in Suwannee County, so May’s brothers knew right where to find ’em,” Ellie recalled. “Uncle Julian decided to stay home, but my daddy rode straight over and warned Leslie that if he tried to make off with his sister, he would kill him.”

“Willie might have had his hands full, Ellie,” Mr. Edmunds reminded her, not unkindly. “Les was a husky six-foot feller and the Collins boys was always pretty skimpy.”

“Justice of the Peace Jim Hodges married ’em.” April recited her fact proudly. “I talked to Justice Jim many’s the time. He said, ‘Miss May, are you aware that on your wedding night, this young man will lay his head down on an iron bunk in the county jail?’ And May Collins answered smartly, ‘No sir, Judge, I ain’t aware of no such of a thing. All I know is I aim to marry up with this here feller so let’s get a move on.’ But when she was told she could not sleep with him in jail, she headed home.”

“Miss May Collins did what she darn pleased no matter what!” Ellie exclaimed.

“The train back to Lake City was flagged down at Herlong Junction and Leslie was arrested,” Hettie told Lucius. “So in the Lord’s eyes-and our Collins eyes, too-that unholy wedlock was never consummated. As the years went by, even Aunt May came to believe she was a virgin.”

“Don’t smile, Hettie Collins! That is the Lord’s truth! When Daddy got there, they were already married, yes, but her brother would not let her board that train. And Leslie didn’t try to fight or Daddy would have killed him!”

In Columbia County Court on December 11, 1909, William Leslie Cox was found guilty of first-degree murder, but the jury begged the mercy of the court in order to spare this fine-looking young man the death sentence. Reading between the lines of these accounts-the release on negligible bond so that he might marry, the jury’s plea for compassion-Lucius doubted that Cox would have been indicted for those negro killings had he not been previously implicated in the death of whites.

“After Leslie was sent away, May went to live with Coxes because this family was so scandalized they wouldn’t have her.” Censorious, Ellie shook her head. “Even after she came home, one of those Coxes would show up once in a while, take her away, and after a few days, she would come home again. This was after he escaped and before he left to go join Uncle Edgar in the Islands. Aunt May would never say she had seen Leslie but we suspected it.”

“When she wasn’t claiming that Uncle Edgar had led her young husband astray,” Hettie told Lucius with delight, “Aunt May would declare that she couldn’t be blamed for running off with Leslie because Leslie had given her a bewitched apple. Once she had eaten that terrible witched apple, she was obliged to obey his least command.” She and Lucius laughed together, enjoying each other very much.

Ellen laughed, too. “Now where d’you suppose that boy found that darned apple? At the Edmunds store?”

Paul Edmunds hooted. “Not unless he paid down most of that Banks gold. We sold witched apples pretty dear, them bony-fidey ones.”

Unnerved by the tension in the room, Letitia Edmunds, frantic to depart, had risen from her chair. Her husband ignored her. Not until his wife had hugged the Collins women and peeped good-bye to the Professor did he get slowly to his feet. “Murdering fool, that Cox boy was,” Paul Edmunds grumbled. “Within six months, he killed three more down in them islands. Counting nigger-as, he killed eight head, and here he was, only nineteen years of age.” From the doorway, he told Lucius, “If Leslie’s dead, he ain’t been dead too many years.” He turned and went outside into the sunlight. “Rotting in some hole out in these woods, wouldn’t surprise me,” his voice came back. “Best place for a mean varmint such as that.”

While his kin said good-bye to their guests, Lucius inspected the framed photos of Billy Collins and his sons. Like their father, Julian and Willie had been slight, with curly black hair, fair skins, and refined faces, and a pensive quality in their dark eyes like a foreboding. Anxious to pursue his questions before a phone call from Lake City ended the interview, he asked how the family had reacted when Julian and Willie were arrested as accessories after the fact in the Mike Tolen case and jailed on one thousand dollars bail. He assumed the family knew of this since it was on the record at the courthouse.

Agitation entered the room like a wild bird through the window, thumping and fluttering behind the curtain. The ladies stared at him.

“Jailed?” Ellie Collins drew herself up to stare him down: her baked expression seemed to say, Is this how you repay me ? The family knew no such thing, she told him in a tone suggesting it could not be true and that, in grubbing through court documents, this self-styled “Professor” had indulged in unprofessional and dishonorable behavior.

“Detained, perhaps?” Hettie ventured carefully.

“Detained, I mean.” Lucius hastened to say there had been no question of Collins complicity or guilt; he spoke formally and a bit pompously, hoping that an officious tone might dignify his indiscretion. But of course he knew-and knew that they knew, too-that if the brothers had testified against an uncle of their blood, they had transgressed the oldest code of those Celtic ancestors who, despising all authority, loyal only to the clan, had borne their tattered pennant of archaic honor across the seas into the New World.