Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Papa had raised his quirt but that shout stopped him; he could not bring himself to strike a Confederate officer. “We have no business with traitors, damn you! Stand aside!” Yanking his reins, digging his spurs, he fought violently to ride free, his son clinging like a tree frog to his sweaty back. Tilghman braced against the horse’s neck, letting it lift him. Hand clenching the reins under the bit, talking it down, he brought the wheeling roan under control.

  Heavy in the saddle, shoulders slumped, Papa, too, appeared subdued. So close to my nose, his smell was bitter, rank. “Damned road walkers,” he muttered.

  “Road walkers. And how do you know that, Private? How would you happen to know so much about those murdered boys?”

  “Because if they were home niggers, sir, a Radical Scalawag and traitor like yourself would know his nigger friends by name! Now stand aside!” Whistling like a pigeon’s wing, his quirt struck Tilghman on the temple, knocking him off balance, and still our cousin gripped the reins as the big roan reared and snorted, dancing sideways. A moment later, struck violently again, he fell away. Papa shouted, “Your honorable record in the War is all that stands between you and execution as a traitor!”

  Cousin Selden rose unhurriedly, brushed himself off. His pale face was bleeding. “My honorable record. What would Private Watson know about such matters?” he inquired, looking straight at Watson’s son.

  “Are you challenging my honor?” Papa demanded. “I served four years, Edgefield to Appomattox!” But when I hollered, “Nigger-loving traitor!” at our cousin, my father shot an elbow back, bloodied my nose. “Show respect for an officer of the Confederacy, even this one!” I was astonished by his need to prove to Sissy Selden that Elijah Watson was a guardian of Southern honor.

  Cousin Selden and I wiped bloody noses. When Selden noticed our peculiar bond, he grinned; I had to scowl at him lest I grin back. “Send her cousin’s fond respects to your dear mother, Edgar,” he said quietly, as Papa wheeled, booting his horse into a canter. Hand on the hard-haired dusty rump, I turned for a last look at the figure in the road, and Cousin Selden raised his hand in half salute. “God keep you, Cousin Edgar!”

  “Face around, damn you!” Papa shouted, cocking his elbow. “Face around, I say!” I hugged up close, out of harm’s way. He galloped homeward.

  THE TRAITOR

  Desperate to please Papa, I once referred to Cousin Selden as “a sissy.” Mama boxed my ears, reminding me that he was a decorated hero and that he had given me those books on ancient Greece to compensate for my woeful lack of schooling. To be so ungrateful to a benefactor was a sin! Hearing how concerned he’d been on my behalf upset and shamed me but I could not admit this. “Who cares about those darned old Greeks?” I said.

  “One day, Edgar, you will care,” she retorted. “You are still an ignorant boy but you are not stupid.”

  The day after our ride to Deepwood, the Traitor (as my father now referred to him) appeared at our door in full uniform, hands and face charred like a minstrel’s, gray tunic rent by black and ragged holes. Having long since sold his horse, he had come on foot. On the sill he set down a heavy sack containing the rest of his volumes of Greek literature, saved from his burning house. “For your boy,” he told Mama, who ignored her husband’s edict and implored him to come in. He accepted a cup of water but would not enter the house nor even linger, lest his presence bring trouble down upon us.

  In dread, I trailed him down the road toward the square. Already word had circulated that the cast-out hero would defy the Regulators’ edict that he leave Edgefield District on pain of death; his apparition on the square ignited a wildfire whispering.

  My kinsman hailed the market crowd from the courthouse steps. Off to the east, the black smoke rose from Deepwood. He made no mention of night riders or his half-burned house but simply denounced the murder of three Negro youths on the night before last. The refusal of a lawless few to accept the freedmen as new citizens, he cried, would imperil their own mortal souls and cripple the recovery of South Carolina. “Before the War, our colored folk lived among us and worshipped in our congregations. Most remained loyal during the War and many fought beside us.” He paused, seeking out faces. “Yet today there are those who revile these faithful friends, who treat them as dangerous animals and kill them. Every day black men are terrorized, not by outlaws and criminals but by socalled good Christian men, including some who stand here now before our court of justice!”

  He glared about him. “Have not these poor souls suffered enough? What fault of theirs that they were enslaved and then turned free? Was it they who imposed the laws that you protest? Friends, it was not!” He raised both arms toward Heaven. “In taking revenge on innocents for the calamity and holy wrath we brought down upon ourselves, we only worsen a dishonorable lie.” He paused in the deepening silence. “We lost the War not because we were beaten by a greater force of arms. Yes, the North had more soldiers and more guns, more industry, more railways, that is true. But that was also our excuse, as we who fought knew well.” He paused again, lowering his arms slowly in the awful hush. “More than half our eastern armies—and our bravest, too—put down their arms and went home of their own volition. They did that because in their hearts they knew that human bondage could never have the blessing of Him who created man in His different colors.”

  When yells of “Traitor!” started up and the first rock flew, Selden Tilghman raised his hands and voice, desperate to finish. “Our officers will tell you—those who are honest—that we only fought on so that the lives of our bravest young men should not have been sacrificed in vain. Thousands died for some false notion of our Southern honor and to no good purpose, and now our dear land lies ruined on all sides.

  “Where is that honor now? In taking cowardly revenge in acts of terror in the night, do we not dishonor those who lost their lives? Neighbors, hear me, I beseech you! The ‘Great Lost Cause’ was never ‘great,’ as we pretended! It had no greatness in it and no honor! It was merely wrong!” He yelled “Wrong!” again into my father’s face as the Regulators rushed the steps and seized him.

  Dragged down to the square and beaten bloody, our cousin was left in a poor heap in the public dust. I witnessed this. Round and round the crumpled body stalked Will Coulter, hair raked back in black wings beneath his cap, stiff-legged and gawky as a crow. Seeing Claxton leering as he kicked the fallen man, I longed to rush to interfere. Perhaps others did, too, but no one dared invade the emptiness around that thin still form.

  When Selden Tilghman regained consciousness, he lay a while before rolling slowly to his knees. Visage ghostly from the dust, he got up painfully, reeled, and fell. Eventually, he pushed himself onto all fours and crawled all the way across the square to the picket fence in front of the veranda of the United States Hotel where Coulter and his jeering men awaited him. Using the fence to haul himself upright, he pointed a trembling finger at the Regulators. “Cowards!” he cried. “Betrayers of the South!” He repeated this over and over. With each “Cowards!” he brought both fists down hard on the sharp points of the white pickets, and with each blow he howled in agony and despair, until the wet meat sounds of his broken hands caused the onlookers to turn away in horror—until at last Captain Lige Watson of the Regulators strode forth at a sign from Coulter and cracked Tilghman’s jaw with a legendary blow, leaving him inert in the dust.

  Selden Tilghman was slung into a cotton wagon and trundled away on the Augusta Road. In the next fortnight rumors would come that the Traitor was dumped at the gates of the Radical headquarters at Hamburg on the Georgia border, where in 1819, a slave rebellion led by “Coot” or “Coco” had filled Edgefield District with night fears. But nobody really wished to know what had become of him, far less recall what they had witnessed in the Court House Square. When Mama finally confronted him, Papa blustered, “Well, Regulators never killed him, I know that much!”

  One day I awoke to recognize that my great pride in my father was shot through with misgiving. H
oping our cousin might somehow reappear—dreading it, too—I was drawn back to Deepwood over and over. Others in our district avoided it, afraid of “Tilghman’s Ghost,” which was said to come and go in that charred ruin. Wild rose and poverty grass invaded its fields, the woods edged forward, and wild vines entwined it. When the wind stirred, I imagined I could hear an ethereal wailing and sad whispered warning: Cousin Edgar!

  RING-EYE LIGE

  Late in 1868, “the Bad Elijah” (Papa’s nickname at Clouds Creek) sold his share of our Artemas Plantation to “the Good Elijah,” my great-uncle Elijah Junior, an uprooting that worsened the tumult of his disposition and hastened the dissolution of our family.

  For a few years we lived at Edgefield Court House, in a poor section off the Augusta Road. Our neighbors on both sides were freedmen whom Papa scarcely deigned to greet, not even old Tap, whose people had been black Watsons for a hundred years. Though good for nothing much when not on horseback, he felt humiliated because his wife asked Tap to help him find work as a common laborer, then lost this job in a matter of days for the same drunken insubordination which, according to his uncle Tillman, had gotten him in trouble throughout the War.

  Beset by debt, Papa found work at the factory owned by Captain Gregg, whose father, in the first half of the century, had imported Europe’s industrial revolution to the Carolinas, constructing textile mills at Vaucluse and Graniteville, southwest of Edgefield. In these dark times when so many needed work, Papa took such pride as he could summon in his new employment, which favored veterans from Captain Gregg’s old regiment and was “closed to niggers.” At Graniteville he earned nineteen dollars a month, spent mostly in support of his own drinking habit and the brothels of Augusta. Or so his scrimping wife suspected, outraged by the pittance he brought home when he happened to turn up of a Sunday morning.

  Papa would remind me how lucky I was to be working out in the fresh air and not in those “dark, Satanic mills” (Mama, quoting Milton) where children as young as eight or nine worked fourteen-hour days beside the adults. He described the pervasive darkness in that deep Horse Creek ravine, the cold, grim aspect that had scarcely changed since the time of the eighteenth-century outlaws and highwaymen who had murdered pioneer Watsons before the Revolution and were finally destroyed by our illustrious ancestor—

  “Oh for pity’s sake, let us hear no more of Colonel Michael!”

  For the fabled Captain Michael of the American Revolution, Mama had perversely substituted that inconsequential colonel whose widow Tabitha had hustled the virginal Ellen Addison into the clumsy embrace of young Lige Watson. In their early days, as a kind of wry flirtation, it had amused my parents to blame their fractious marriage on Aunt Tabitha, and it would be Mama’s lifelong view that Auntie Tab with her intolerable meddling had ruined a young girl’s life. She would state this grievance as plain fact, not in self-pity, and also as a torment to her husband, whom she pursued with sharp pecks on the head like a redwing harrying a crow. When not bruised blue from his latest drunken beating, I almost pitied him.

  As his fortunes diminished and his reputation ebbed, Papa’s need for conviviality increased. Wild-eyed and boisterous, he laughed ever more loudly, even as his face betrayed his deepening confusion and anxiety. On Sundays he wandered the still town, invading church meetings and even funerals, in flight from solitude. At the crossroad tavern, he held forth loudly on such topics as fine horseflesh, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, insolent niggers, weapons, Southern honor, our beautiful Southern ladies, and the Great Lost Cause. Vaingloriously would he extol the warrior society of Edgefield, boasting of those Edgefieldians of yore who fought in the Indian Wars and the American Revolution, not to mention the gallant volunteers, Watsons among them, who rode away to the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, and the War with Mexico. Modestly might he venture to mention their obedient servant Captain Elijah D. Watson, and also Major Tillman Watson and Colonel Robert Briggs Watson of Clouds Creek, whose gallant service in the War of Northern Aggression had done such honor to the Watson clan and to the great sovereign state of South Carolina.

  On occasion, Papa’s oratory was challenged by veterans with different memories of his war years—ill-natured men who refused to recall his field commission and sneered at his Regulator captaincy, asserting that Watson was better known for dereliction and courts martial than for deeds of battle. A willing brawler, at least when in his cups, my father dealt forcefully with naysayers until that saloon evening when he was parted from his wits by a well-wielded horseshoe and left groaning in the sawdust, though not before a Bowie knife had carved a ring around his right eye. The raw livid scar made him look bug-eyed, glaring out of a red bull’s-eye at impending doom. “Ring-Eye Lige,” his sobriquet forever after, became the badge of final disrepute for our forlorn family.

  When Papa was absent and then only—for the smallest reflection on his tender honor would propel him into fury—our household was modestly assisted by Mama’s brother, who served as an attorney at the courthouse. Uncle John Addison arranged part-time employment for his sister as a clerk and also paid the school fees for her children: for a brief period, I was actually enrolled in Edgefield’s Male Academy, from which, however, I was shortly dismissed for backing the frightened pedant into a corner. “Menacing the schoolmaster” was the formal charge. This episode was brought about by the plaintiff ’s snide reference to “Ring-Eye Lige,” which his student, in an “ominous and silent manner,” had warned him never to repeat. Far from flogging me, Papa hooted in triumph, having perceived John Addison’s assistance with our schooling as a personal insult. “Pity you didn’t cane him, boy, like Brooks caned Sumner on the Senate floor!” (He was only deterred by his wife’s blighted expression from visiting his favorite story yet again.) Welcoming his son back to the ranks of honest workingmen, Papa ridiculed Mama’s despair that I had ruined my best hope of an education. Not until he discovered that the humiliated teacher was a Butler kinsman did he strip off his belt and flog me unmercifully as a young ruffian who had spoiled our family’s chance of regaining its place in the society of Edgefield Court House.

  When Papa left to go to work in Graniteville, I took his place as a field hand in the cotton, intensifying Mama’s bitterness toward her husband. She redoubled her efforts to tutor her young Edgar, whom the school had judged “intelligent and industrious” shortly before pointing at the door. “You were born into this cruel world in the same year that dear Charlotte Brontë was taken from us,” she lamented, stuffing my brain with the English literature she so loved as well as the doom-ridden Greek classics left to me by Cousin Selden, the last remnant of his Deepwood library. Much too young to do the chores at dawn and dusk as well as field labor all day, then apply myself to the classics in the evening, I fell asleep in Ancient Greece night after night.

  Mama, although not yet forty, was looking pinched and aged from overwork. Even so, she made time to play with my baby sister Mary Lucretia, known as Minnie, in the slave-made wooden toy box in which she herself had rummaged as a little girl. Humming songs of childhood, sorting tops and marbles, she recalled for her daughter her own antebellum memories of village fairs and berry-picking parties, birthdays and spelling bees, of fine silver service and the Addison piano and family china fired from our fine-grained Edgefield clay by an English visitor, Mr. Josiah Wedgwood. On the backrest of her last good chair she had embroidered: Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (“Now surely, Mr. Watson, you have no quarrel with John Keats?”) She invited “the head of the household” to be first to use the chair, watching his wary seating of himself with that half-hidden hilarity that her uneasy children could not fathom, having no acquaintance with hysteria.

  Mama was adept with the floral patterns of embroidery but knew nothing about mending, far less cooking meals or keeping house. For these tasks she depended on Cinderella Myers, the tall Indian-boned black woman in the next cabin, who had been her house slave and was now her neighbor and
unrecognized true friend. Aunt Cindy, as we’d come to call her, brought sorghum, boiled potatoes, corn bread, sometimes greens or peas. In summer she made sarsaparilla and in winter parched-corn coffee. In the evenings, when flax was to be had, she wove homespun for both families, linens in summer, linsey-woolsey in the winter. Throughout the War, she had helped her Miss Ellen faithfully, and Tap Watson, in his distempered way, had continued to look out for Marse Artemas’s descendants when the War was over. For all his grumbling, he accompanied his wife and little girl when they followed Miss Ellen to Edgefield Court House, where, being handy and dependable, he soon found a job. The daughter, young nut-hued Lulalie, helped out, too.

  Though this child was scarcely ten, her innocent touch tingled my skin and a certain provocative aroma made her wholly edible as a baked candied yam. Fortunately she never noticed my adolescent interest in her person, my yearning to caress her. In truth, young Lalie loved another, namely Minnie, whom she strove mightily to bring to life with her own glad spirits, dragging my pale and shrinking sister out into the sun, then racing back inside to fetch the toys. “Gone be back with mo’ fun in a minute now, Mis Minnie!” she would promise, already having fun enough for both of them. Blithely Lalie would create fanciful bonnets they might play in, using small thorns to pin bright leaves into their frocks and hair. But out of doors, my sickly dark-haired sister was forever fretting, peering fearfully over her shoulder. Trailing Lalie through the whortleberry patch, Minnie wept woefully over what Aunt Cindy called “brambledy fingers.” She soiled her Sunday dress while gathering vegetables and suffered a spurring by our rooster while trying to help her well-wisher feed the chickens. Yet timid Min did well at the Female Academy and soon became what the teachers called “a happy little scholar.” “Happy because unpreyed upon,” Mama observed, in reference to Papa’s habit of baring Minnie’s pale behind over his knee and gazing upon it one moment too long before clearing his throat and spanking it rose pink.