Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Though Lucius had made this argument himself, hearing it from this man’s mouth seemed to cast doubt on it. “It’s conceivable, I guess.”

  “It’s conceivable, you guess. Well, that is how we shall argue if the Park Service maintains that E. J. Watson’s land claim should be forfeit or invalid because of a criminal record or whatever. And I hope that no Watson nor any Watson relative”—he peered at the door through which Arbie had gone—“will contest our argument. Should that occur,” he warned after a pause, cementing his points as neatly and firmly as bricks, “then the Watson house which was to stand as a monument to your father’s pioneering achievement will receive no further protection from the courts and will almost certainly be condemned and destroyed.”

  Dyer spread his napkin as his food arrived. “I have a caretaker watching the place. I’ll file for an injunction against its destruction first thing next week,” he said, over a raised forkful of golden chicken. He spoke no more until he had finished eating, after which he locked his briefcase and stood up, leaving Lucius to pay the bill. He was still “on the road,” he said, “taking care of business,” but in two days he’d be headed home.

  “Where the heart is,” Lucius said, unable to imagine a Mrs. Dyer and the kiddies.

  “Most good Americans have faith in that,” the attorney warned him. However, it was true that he had no wife or children. He didn’t lead that sort of life, he said.

  Lucius found Arbie hunched near comatose in the car, in his lap his small flask of corn whiskey: Okefenokee Moon 100 Proof. Guaranteed Less Than Thirty Days of Age. A rivulet of saliva, descending from a cleft in his grizzled chin, darkened his neckerchief. Lucius helped himself to a jolt of Arbie’s rotgut, then urged him erect and guided him to their room. “ ‘Routine background check!’ ” Arbie bitched as he fell back on the bed. “ ‘Participating individuals!’ ” When Lucius suggested that Dyer might be bluffing, Arbie squinted at him. “You think that sonofabitch is bluffing?” And Lucius said, “No, I don’t.”

  “He’s bad news,” said Arbie. “Stay away from him.”

  Next morning, Arbie lay so still in bed that Lucius was afraid to awaken him in case he couldn’t: he was loath to touch him. His neck was arched and the parched mouth stretched too wide; his bloodless lips were dry on dry small teeth. With his dry hair, he looked as flat and scanty as a run-over rabbit on a summer highway.

  The cadaver sucked up breath and coughed. One eye sagged open, contemplating Lucius, as a spavined hand went palpitating toward the cigarette pack on the bedside table. Lighting up, he growled in phlegmy tones that he had better things to do than waste a day with some gabby old-timer.

  ANN MARY COLLINS WATSON

  New Bethel Church, just off the main road on the way south, had been “built of heart pine back in 1854 and was solid as ever,” said the old sexton in the churchyard gate, shielding his eyes to admire this house of God in the fresh morning light. “Watson? Was she a Collins? Come in here back in the eighties?” He pointed. “You’ll find her over yonder.”

  Lucius hunted the old rows until a flit of sparrows drew his eye to a lone juniper; half hidden by that tree was a tilted headstone with eroded lettering crusted by black lichens. He knelt on the sparse grass to piece it out.

  ANN MARY WATSON

  WIFE OF E. A. WATSON

  AND DAUGHTER OF

  W. C. AND SARAH COLLINS

  BORN APRIL 16, 1862

  DIED AT HER HOME IN

  COLUMBIA CO. FLORIDA

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1879

  Ann Mary, dead at seventeen on that unlucky thirteenth of September. Her headstone was a precious record, all the more so because particulars engraved in stone could be depended on. This one provided not only the name and dates of Papa’s first wife but the earliest record of his original initials Lucius had come across. That middle A was still appearing ten years later on Arbie’s court transcripts relating to Papa’s stay in the Indian Nations; subsequently he had changed it to J, presumably to obscure his identity as a fugitive.

  THE DEACON

  Turning off the old Fort White road, Lucius followed Grover Kinard’s directions into low dust-filmed woods (“alive with redskins,” according to an 1838 report). At the specified address, he was shown inside by a bespectacled man attired in black trousers, cream-colored jacket, and open-collared shirt. Deacon Grover G. Kinard bade him no welcome and scarcely troubled to introduce him to his wife, a pretty-pink person sitting primly on the front room sofa in a bower of artificial flowers and silver-framed photos of smiling offspring seated with their own smiling offspring; she was listening to a sermon on her radio. “That there’s Oriole,” said the Deacon, passing by without a glance, and Oriole Kinard fluttered timid fingers at the visitor as her husband marched him into her shining kitchen. The churchman offered him no coffee, just sat him at the kitchen table while he hammered out on its linoleum just what was what.

  “Yessir, I knew all them folks,” the Deacon said, drumming his fingers. “I’ll show you where Edgar Watson lived, tell you all about Coxes and Tolens and all the killing down in them old woods.” Kinard jerked his thumb in the direction of the little person on the other side of the pasteboard wall. “She ain’t a Cox exactly but she’s related,” her husband said. Over the churchly exhortations on her radio, Oriole protested, “No, I ain’t never! Leslie’s grandmother’s daddy was my granddaddy’s cousin, but I wouldn’t know that murdering devil if I bumped into him in church!”

  The sight of Lucius’s notebook made the old man suck his teeth. “My information must be worth a lot to you,” he suggested. When Lucius cheerfully agreed, the Deacon coughed, then got it over with. “How much?” he said. “Forty dollars?”

  “Well, to be honest,” said Lucius, taken aback, “most folks like to talk about old times. I guess you’re the first I’ve come across who wanted payment.”

  The Deacon squinted, not shamefaced in the least but ready to dicker. “Thirty, then,” he said. When his visitor forked over the money, he counted the bills twice before getting up and going out back to squirrel them away. Returning, he said, “Guess we can go then, lest you want coffee,” but he never slowed on his way toward the front door.

  “Back later,” he informed his wife. “Next year, maybe.” Outside, he climbed into Lucius’s car. “That old rattler of mine don’t run too good,” he said, once he was settled. The Deacon had a certain grim mean humor, Lucius decided, but a painful hacking was as close as he would come that day to honest mirth.

  The narrow county road shot south across farmland and woodlots, straight as a bullet. Sixteen miles out of Lake City, near a pasture pond on the east side of the road, Kinard tapped Lucius’s arm. “Where you see that grove, that was Burdetts. Old cabin might be in there yet. Many’s the time I been there Sunday visiting, the way us country people done back at that time. And these woods on this side, this was Betheas. Ain’t no cabin there no more. Betheas rented from Sam Tolen, they were sharecroppers, same as Burdetts. Young Herkie Burdett was courting a Bethea daughter, we thought Herkie and Edna would get hitched, but Preacher Bethea was dead set against it. Burdetts was dirt poor, even poorer than Betheas, so he wanted his pretty Edna to marry better.

  “By the time Ed Watson come back to this community, the whole county had heard that Mrs. Billy Collins’s brother was a desperader out of the Wild West, so folks was surprised that Edna’s daddy encouraged her to go to him instead of Herkie. According to gossip, Preacher Bethea figured any outlaw must be rich and he did not intend to let that rich man get away, no matter if he broke his daughter’s heart. Folks mean-mouthed Ed Watson and the Preacher both.”

  The Deacon coughed awhile. “Our house was down yonder where them woods are now—still there, far as I know, grown up in trees. The baseball diamond was right out back of it—that’s gone, too. Herkie Burdett played a pretty good third base but he was shook apart when Edgar Watson took his girl away to them Thousand Islands. Just moped around, he never married, couldn’t hardly p
lay third base no more. And two-three years after that, all hell broke loose.”

  A white clay lane left the county road to enter the forest shade. “Turn there,” his guide commanded. “Herlong Lane. Runs west a few miles to the railroad. We still got Herlongs back in here, you know. Old Man Dan Herlong was the first to come south from Carolina, and he always said the Carolina Watsons was good people, prosperous farmers, all but Edgar’s daddy. Still got Collinses here, too. Live in the old schoolhouse over yonder, far side of the woods.” He pointed south. “Edmunds’s store was over that way, too, but they didn’t have no post office or nothing.” He shifted in his seat. “All along this north side, that’s Myers’s plantation, the old Ichetucknee Plantation from before the Civil War. Twelve hundred acres, one of the biggest around. Once Sam Tolen got hold of it—he married the Widow Myers—he called it Tolen Plantation, and when our post office come in, he got that called Tolen, Florida. But Sam sold off a lot of land, drove Watsons crazy, on account they were kin and seen it as family property.”

  The car ran silent on the soft white track under the trees. Spanish moss swayed listless in the air. “It’s kind of spooky how these woods ain’t changed, when most places are growed over so much I can’t hardly recognize where I grew up. Them black-and-white cattle you see in there back of them trees is the same stock Tolen raised, turn of the century, and these white clay tracks ain’t never changed since Watson came along here on his horse. Course there weren’t so much scrub oak back then, we had open woods and great big virgin pines, but all of them big trees got timbered out.”

  He signaled Lucius to pull over. “See where that track is blocked by that deadfall tree? That’s Old Sam’s road. Runs a quarter mile through the woods up to his house. I never seen that road closed off before.” He peered about him. “You want to walk in there, have a look, you go ahead. I don’t want no part of that old place.”

  THE EMPTY MANOR

  The carriageway was still dimly defined by a woodland aisle through the tall trees. Burled oaks and hickories were interspersed with vine-shrouded magnolias and tupelos, rising through long shafts of morning light to fragments of blue sky. In the forest, the old road was innocent of wheel tracks, nicked only by neat heart prints of deer, the flutter marks of dusting quail, rat tail of possum and thin hand of coon, the wispy tracings of white-footed mice. Cardinal song, sweet plaint of titmice, the spring bell note of a jay in the fresh forest air.

  In misty sunlight where the deepwood opened rose a white-columned facade with broad veranda, strangely out of scale with the frame house and the small kitchen wing stuck on behind. Its twin brick chimneys looked too thin, and an upstairs room under the eaves had a pinched small window. Chinked sheds and a dying barn sagged down amongst the live oaks; the worn pasture beyond had given way to ragged woodlots.

  How odd that in this abandoned place, the ground-floor windows were unboarded and the grass all around the house appeared rough-mowed. No junked vehicle or rusted harrow, no litter of neglect, only the bareness of worn paint, only the silence. Everything looked tidied and in place as if the house awaited guests. Strangest of all, the kitchen door stood open. Had the inhabitants fled, hearing him coming?

  He was startled by the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, poised for flight from its nest limb in an oak by the house corner. The nest’s location so close to the building was sign that the house was uninhabited and yet he felt a childish dread of arousing unknown denizens, quick or dead. Something—this heartbreaking spring wind—had swept the intervening years from the veranda where on such a morning Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson might have creaked in her high-backed rocker, gazing without forgiveness at the forest wall from which old friends from Carolina had never arrived for a long visit, hailing her gaily from among the trees.

  After her death, the rich widower Sam Tolen had lived here all alone. In the years since, Kinard had said, others had come but quickly gone away again. All had shunned this high queer manse at the end of its dark path through the forest, this dwelling where the mold of dread could never be aired out.

  Lucius stood still and simply listened. Though drawn toward the door ajar on the back steps, he hesitated to approach, but neither could he turn his back on it, lest the shade of Tolen loom into the opening, threatening to set his hounds on a damned Watson.

  Returning down the shadow drive, he glanced back more than once at the lost house until finally it withdrew behind the trees. In the midmorning heat, birdsong had stilled. The crack of a dead limb, the rush and earth thump of its tearing fall. The doleful groan of cows from the feed barn on the far side of the county road came as relief.

  THE FASTEST FASTBALL IN THE U.S.A.

  “Sam Tolen growed him a big stomach,” the Deacon resumed of his own accord once they were under way. Grover Kinard was busy earning his thirty dollars and any questions would be interruptions. “Besides whiskey and cattle, the only thing Sam cared about was baseball. Sent all the way to St. Louis for The Sporting News. Never played himself, y’know, just got het up over it, mowed off some pasture for a baseball diamond. Might been the one time in his life that feller gave something for nothing.

  “Tolen and the Cox boy was friendly for a while because Sam had the diamond and Les was his star pitcher. America was crazy about baseball then. Every boy aimed to be a professional ballplayer and every community that could scrape up nine young men had ’em a ball club. The Tolen Team would go from place to place and teams came here to play, had games every Saturday all spring and summer. Find some horn players, have a parade out to the field before the game. Played some grand old Confederate marches and some new tunes, too.

  “My brother Brooks was catcher for Les Cox and when them two played we wasn’t beat too often. Les could throw the hardest ball I ever heard of and he never minded throwing at your head. Batters was scared to stand close to the plate: just poked at the pitch as it flew by, got no real cut at it, he’d strike ’em out as fast as they come up. We figured Leslie had the fastest fastball in the U.S.A. and I guess Les thought so, too. Sam Tolen said them Major League scouts was bound to hear about this boy, come get him, pay him a hundred dollars every month just to play baseball. Might of went to his head cause he grew kind of overbearing, and he had him a hard and raspy tongue would scrape the warts off you. Made some noise, he jeered a lot, but he never had too much of a sense of humor. Local hero when we won and when we lost, he blamed his team. Took razzing all wrong, wanted to fight, same as Ty Cobb on the Pirates. No matter what, Les always figured he weren’t getting a fair deal and that give him a real ugly disposition. Folks pretended to like him because he was a baseball star but in their hearts nobody liked him much. I imagine Les was kind of lonely but maybe he wasn’t—very hard to tell.

  “As I remember Les at age nineteen, he was five foot and eleven, maybe six, not extra tall but husky for his age and looked much older. They say he had some Injun from his mother’s side, dark straight hair and them high cheekbones, and maybe his revengeful streak come from the breed in him. My sister’s best friend, May Collins, was crazy about Les but her daddy thought Coxes was po’ white, wouldn’t allow him in the house. Pretty soon Billy Collins died—this was before all the bad trouble started—and with May’s mama sick most of the time, Les hung around the Collins place, which is probably how he got to know Ed Watson.

  “Sam Tolen drank heavy, and when that man was drinking, he had no friends. One day Sam cussed out Les’s daddy. Will Cox was one of his sharecroppers, had a log house right there at the southwest corner of this crossing where I’m pointing at. Hearing Tolen talk rough to his dad, Leslie went inside and got Will’s rifle, come back out on the stoop without a word: he was fixing to shoot Sam Tolen dead and might of done it if Will hadn’t knocked away the barrel. Seeing that rifle, Sam wheeled his horse, he just departed. But he hated being run off by a boy because folks heard about it and they laughed, and after that, Sam was spoiling for a showdown, never mind that this young feller was star pitcher on his team.


  “Freight train came south from Lake City in the morning, went back north in the afternoon: see that old railbed shadow through them trees where these two lanes meet? There was crossties piled there. Les was setting on them ties a few days later when Tolen rode up drunk, threatened to kill him, which ain’t a good idea around backcountry people.

  “Sam never lived long after that. He was waylaid along the road—growed over now—that used to cut back through these woods to Ichetucknee Springs. Rumor was that Edgar Watson might of been involved but there weren’t no evidence and no one looked for none. These old woods kept their secret,” the Deacon said, peering about him.

  “That was the finish of Sam Tolen and our Tolen Team. Sam loved baseball more’n he loved people. His brother Mike had trouble with him, too, but in those days, with our kind of folks, you might not like your brother but you stood behind your family all the same. At Sam’s funeral up in Lake City, Mike declared over the grave that he knew who killed his brother and he would take care of it—very bad mistake! Course the killers couldn’t act too quick without drawing suspicion so they laid low till March of the next year. Mike was ambushed right here at this crossing.

  “Down here on the west side of the lane is a big old log cabin in a oak grove—see there yonder? That was Mike’s place. Kinards took it over from Mike’s widow. When our family moved here, there was nothing left inside but some old broke cane chairs, cedar buckets, a bent pot. Dead silence. Bat chitterin and cheep of crickets and the snap of rats’ teeth in old mattresses stuffed with graybeard moss right off these oaks. Our dad burned them mattresses and us kids was glad, cause with so much blood on ’em, they drawed the ghosts. There’s stains on the wall in there right now from the day they brought Mike home, that’s how much blood there was. Rat musk everywhere, I can still smell it. A house can have bloody rape and murder or shelter folks who live good churchly lives—either way don’t mean nothing to them rats. Gnaw a hole in your body or your Bible, just depending.