Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  On those windless days in the long Florida summer, the earth slowed to a crawl and the air died, under a sky as thick and white as a boiled egg. On woodland trees along the white clay roads, the dust-shrouded leaves appeared exhausted. On such a day, out hoeing cotton, I stripped off my wet shirt, as all the fieldhands had the sense to do. And on this day the snooping W. Tolen came along on his woods pony with his second son Sam Frank Tolen up behind him.

  Seeing my torso shining with sweat, Sammy jeered and stuck his tongue out. I ignored this. Determined to get along at Ichetucknee, I tolerated Fat Sammy’s friendship, although he was younger and not much of a friend, having been tutored by his daddy in every little meanness he had not been born with. However, he was the only white boy close to my own age for a mile around, and I must admit that I sometimes enjoyed his comical and very dirty turn of mind. Or was it simply my discovery that I enjoyed laughing?

  Woodson squinted across the fence, grinning that dog grin of his that had no fun in it. In his redneck whine he said, “Ah reckon Miz Ta-bye-a-tha won’t care to hear how her nephy-yew was workin half-naked longside the niggers.” And he pointed his bony finger at my eyes to send me evil luck. (Old-fashioned folk of his mountain breed still wore a little bag around the neck containing a piece of their own shit, to keep evil at bay and decent people, too, but I had no such nostrum to protect me.)

  Deep in this backcountry out of sight of Yankee law, our new black citizens were still treated like niggers, never mind what they might call themselves back in their quarters: Calvin Banks was the one nigra in that field who knew his civil rights under Reconstruction. Hearing Woodson’s words, he stopped his hoe and the rest copied him. Those boys might not know too much about Reconstruction but they sure knew every last damn way there was to leave off working. When Woodson yelled, “Now y’all get back to work!” I hollered, “Mr. Tolen, sir? Why not send your fat kid over here to help out in the cotton ’stead of riding him around and giving stupid orders?”

  That tickled the nigras, set ’em to whimpering, had to turn their backs for fear Woodson would see. I had gone too far and these men knew it and Sam knew it, too. But I will say for Sammy, he tried to help out with a humorous distraction. Shaking his fist at me, he hollered, “Put that shirt on like the overseer told you, Edgar Watson, or I’ll come over there and put it on you!”

  Laughing, I went back hoeing as if the whole thing was a joke, and Calvin and the other boys jumped to do the same, but Woodson was wound much too tight to let it go. Sammy was still giggling so hard at his own wit that he nearly shook his pap out of the saddle, so the overseer yanked that pony’s head around and rode right out from under his own boy, dumping him onto the road like a sack of feed. He hollered at my back, “Just you do like I told you!” He rode on a ways as if that settled it, leaving his boy moping in the dust.

  When his order was ignored, Tolen walked his pony back real slow, reined in, and sat there with one knee propped on the saddle horn. “Jus’ sposin,” he drawled, after a silence, “I was to let on to Miz Ta-bye-a-tha how her nephy-yew never paid her rightful overseer no mind? Sposin I was to tell about them blast-pheemies you spoke, cussin out that self-same overseer while he was overseein?”

  When I paid no attention, went on working, he nodded awhile, then spoke in a hushed voice—the cracker way of letting a man know he’s in bad trouble. “Sposin she was to send you back to Carolina?” Since this was the third time he had threatened that, I was pretty sure he’d come by something from Carolina that he would use against me when the time came, to spoil my hopes of a fresh start at Ichetucknee.

  My sister would whine about that “horrible Edgar mask” I sometimes wore stuck to my face—“like the real Edgar but dead.” At such times Edgar was “beside himself,” Mama once commented, more shrewdly than she knew. Had they glimpsed Jack Watson or merely the “somber hard-faced boy” Great-Aunt Sophia at Clouds Creek had disapproved of? These days, Jack only appeared at times of rage, out of that vertigo which sometimes blackened my brain until I fell. I’d never spoken of him, not to anybody, knowing I’d be called crazy. But I was never crazy and neither was Jack Watson. He was always cool, efficient, knowing just when to appear and when to go; since I couldn’t summon him, far less control him, I, too, dreaded him a little. Good thing there was fifty yards and a split-rail fence between me and Woodson Tolen or Jack might have run and jumped and hauled that cracker out of the saddle and slit his stringy throat, and maybe his frogmouth son right along with him.

  Jack Watson spat his words at Tolen like cold bullets: “You want my shirt on so damn bad, you haul your dirty ass down off that horse and come across that fence and put it on me.” Challenged him real clear and loud so there could be no mistake. “Trouble is, you white trash sonofabitch, you are not man enough to do that.”

  Fat Sam shut off his moaning and picked himself up out of the road, and the fieldhands hurried back to work like bald-eyed demons.

  Tolen climbed down off his pony and yanked his rawhide whip out of its holster. Seeing that plaited whip uncoil across his boots like a blue racer, the pony shied and the niggers moaned real low. Jack was gone. I came clear quick. It was much too late to undo such damage, and the overseer did not aim to miss his chance. Expecting me to beg for mercy, he curled that whip back in a coil and climbed the rail. When he jumped down and moved toward me, I called out, “Hold on now, Mr. Tolen!” But fear had rotted out my voice, and hearing that, he kept on coming with stiff, small steps like a mean hound.

  “Beg him, Mist’ Edguh, beg him!” Calvin whispered.

  Scared sick, I drew my knife out of my boot, turning the blade up to the sun so the man could appreciate that quick glint off the tip. I took a good deep slow long breath, then crouched and circled with my left arm out the way my daddy taught me.

  Tolen was good with that long whip; he could sit in the saddle and snap the raised-up head off of a rattler. Unless I caught hold of it, yanked him off balance, he would strip me to fish bait before I got in close enough to cut him. But maybe this feller had noticed how handy I was with my old Bowie, playing at mumbledy-peg with Sam, and he never got ten yards from the fence before he wavered. “A man don’t knife-fight with no boy,” he gasped—the same thing General Calbraith Butler told me on the square at Edgefield Court House except that out of the overseer’s rat mouth, it had no truth in it. Tolen backed away across that fence and clambered up onto his horse. “This ain’t finished, boy!” he yelled, all out of breath from dragging his fat son up behind him. Sammy looked back at me very upset as they rode away.

  For a dirt-floor redneck, that vow of vengeance was an oath more sacred than six swears on the family Bible. A boy had backed him down and his son had witnessed it and the hands, too. No cracker could set aside that kind of insult far less forgive that dog name I had called him. These Tolens might lie low awhile, but revenge was the age-old way of mountain honor and they would never rest until they got it.

  I worked my hoe a little while, to ease my breath and simmer down the field hands while I thought things over. Calvin was the driver on this crew when I was absent, and pretty soon he worked his way up alongside, eager to be seen imparting to the white boy the wisdom of his years at Ichetucknee. “Mist’ Edguh,” he warned, “From dis day on, doan you nevuh turn yo’ back no mo’ on one dem Tolens!”

  Because he had brains and got things done, Calvin had been spoiled by William Myers even before he was a freedman. As Aunt Tab said, “Calvin knows his place but attaches too much importance to it.” I didn’t want to punish him for disrespect toward the overseeer because his warning showed loyalty to our family and took courage. Even so, he could not be permitted to disparage whites, even miserable po’ whites like these.

  “Calvin,” I growled, “just you mind your business.” The others whooped at the boss nigger’s expense. I wasn’t laughing. I was remembering Clouds Creek and how I’d lost my chance. If I wasn’t very careful—if Jack wasn’t careful?—I might lose it here.
/>   FORT WHITE

  Walking home, I went straight to Great-Aunt Tabitha. Woodson on horseback had arrived there well ahead of me; I caught him slipping off the back stoop like a tomcat, leaving behind him like cat spit-up his twisted tale of how that shirtless boy had cursed him vilely, threatened him with a knife, and called him a dog name for good measure.

  When I darkened her doorway, the old lady called out querulously from within, telling me to state my business. I told her I could not work another day with that lowlife cracker and his shiftless sons, who were letting our fine plantation go to rack and ruin.

  “Our plantation?” Her silence lasted longer than I cared for. When she finally came out onto the stoop, I feigned outrage, requesting her permission to leave Ichetucknee and go work for her friend and neighbor Captain Tom Getzen—a bluff, of course, since she prized my unpaid labor much too much to let me go. Or so I thought until this irascible old woman waved me away toward Getzen’s, then sat down in her rocking chair and fanned herself, taking no further notice of me whatsoever.

  What a pity, she told Mama later, that such a capable young man should be so hotheaded and insubordinate. “Like his father is what she meant,” Mama complained, bitterly disappointed that my surly behavior had spoiled all our prospects. Apparently Aunt Tab had mentioned her new plan to make me plantation manager, having heard from Colonel Robert at Clouds Creek that Cousin Edgar was hardworking and resourceful, an exceptional young farmer altogether. The Colonel had said not a single word against me, which put me forever in his debt and reawakened my hope of return. “Ichetucknee is a Watson plantation, Edgar! This could be our plantation and your own great chance!”—that was actually her hope and of course mine, too, until I could reclaim Clouds Creek. Well, said I, if Auntie Tab thinks me so capable, why don’t she take that job away from Tolens, give it to her kin? “Doesn’t,” said Mama, who would never relent in her lifelong ambition to raise her son as a well-spoken young gentleman.

  “I’ll work hard for Captain Tom, Mama, make a good name for myself. Then I’ll come back.”

  “Is that what you told Colonel Robert, too?” Mama was deathly afraid that Auntie Tab might hear bad stories from “other sources.” Plainly she had heard something herself. New tales, she said, had arrived from Edgefield only lately with the Herlongs, those strict, judgmental Methodists who were clearing woodland south of the plantation. It was Herlong darkies, I suspected, who had brought news of Tap Watson’s fate along with false rumors of my role in it, for Aunt Cindy had not spoken to me since. She looked right through me.

  Mama then said that Cindy’s husband had been murdered, and that the Regulators might have had something to do with it; she confessed relief that at the time her spouse had been locked in jail. “Is that true?” I nodded. It was true. However, she persisted, it had been reported that Edgar Watson was the last person seen with Tap in the field where his body was found. “And now there is a rumor that you eliminated him as a witness to some dreadful deed before running away to Florida to escape punishment.” When I jumped up, demanding to know who was spreading such vicious rumors, she only hunched over her needlework, shaking her head. “I’m glad to hear you didn’t murder Tap,” she whispered. “I only hope you haven’t murdered someone else.”

  Tap’s killers had taken advantage of my flight to make me the suspect in both deaths, and my own mother begrudged me the benefit of the doubt. Was that because of the scary beating I’d given my father? I don’t think so.

  I think she begrudged me a mother’s faith in her son’s innocence for the same perverse reasons she had formerly begrudged me a mother’s protection against her drunken husband. Stoked with bile, I disdained to defend myself by telling my side of the story.

  I rode four miles south each day to the Getzen plantation, a tract of good land where I worked hard for Captain Tom, and the following spring he leased me my own piece to sharecrop. He took his croppers, black as well as white, to Frazee’s in Fort White, told Josh Frazee, “Now these boys each get a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries this year.” So Old Man Frazee would set up the page: E. A. Watson for One Year—he’d write it down. Bought only coffee and such things because all our vegetables and grain and meat came from the farm and wild meat and berries from the woods around. The plantation supplied fertilizer and common stores and income would be split halfway.

  Fort White was the county’s secondlargest town after Lake City. Phosphate, cotton, and pine timber, and turpentine and resin from the pine sap. The pine gum ran from April to November; after two or three years that tree would be cut for timber. The town had a sawmill, gristmills, cotton gins, and a cottonseed oil mill. Dirt streets and boardwalk, hitching posts and water troughs, kerosene lampposts, well-stocked stores, and a couple of saloons. In the center of town rose three stories’ worth of bright yellow hotel, the Sparkman Hotel, where in years to come, I would go to eat my lunch almost every Saturday, swap jokes and stories, and do most of the talking.

  THE TOLEN BOYS

  Riding home through the woods by different roads, I rode fast with a pistol in my hand, keeping a sharp eye on the trees. Probably those ridge runners were too smart to bushwhack Edgar Watson, since every man in the south county would know who pulled the trigger, but I could not assume they were that smart when drunk. And drunk they were one autumn day when our paths crossed outside the Collins store at Ichetucknee Springs and Old Man Woodson, swaying in the saddle, pointed his bony finger at my eyes like he was sighting down a musket barrel, reminding me how he aimed to take care of me in his own good time.

  Sam Tolen was still more or less my friend, we drank shine and rassled, bird-hunted, went fishing. As for his brothers, Shifty Jim was born two-faced but could act real friendly and Mike was an honest, amiable kid who wanted to believe that his daddy’s threats against me were just fooling. But that morning I informed those boys that the day I decided their old man was serious about his threats—and I gave ’em a hard squint—that day might be his last on earth, maybe theirs, too.

  Jim Tolen had cockeyed ears and a rodent mouth way up under high nostrils, and he had a sniffing manner to go with it, as if he were scenting some nice rotted food. Jim sniffed, then spat. “Pa ain’t gone to bother his head about no damn bullshit such as that.” Mikey tried spitting, too, and Fat Sam spat extra noisily to mock his brothers. “Your turn, Edgar,” he told me with a wink. I winked back, then cleared my throat and hawked the contents very near Jim’s boot. He jumped like a mink in slit-eyed fury, pointing at my eyes the way his daddy had; he scowled and left.

  Fat Sam said, worried, “This mess ain’t none of my doin, Edgar. Got nothin in the world to do with Sam Frank Tolen.” Nosir, we were bosom friends so far as Sam Frank Tolen was concerned. But from the day I’d backed his daddy down, we could never be true friends and we both knew it.

  Not long after that, Woodson’s wife moved out in order to move in with a widower, John Russ, who had four boys of his own. Old Man Woodson slunk on home to Georgia, so the tension around those woods eased up a little. Shifty Jim ran the plantation, making a worse job of it than his old man, and Sammy and I fooled around some as before. I enjoyed teasing him and he enjoyed being teased, that was about it. Never let me forget that the Tolen boys, not Edgar Watson, were running the plantation, and where they were running it, I advised him, was straight into the ground. But mostly I ignored Sam or just played along, convinced it was only a matter of time before Aunt Tab got fed up with these corn rats and begged me to take over. Before that happened, Jim Tolen left for Georgia, scooting out on a shotgun wedding. He left Fat Sammy as the overseer and Sam got drunk, to celebrate. “Too bad you ain’t smarter, Ed. Might get you a good job overseein, same as I got.” I grinned right back. “You never know, Sam, I may get there yet.” And he said, “Over my dead body!” and we both guffawed.

  According to age, experience, and bone ability, not to mention the blood ties of kin, his job should have been mine, but on account of my “checkered reputation,” Aun
t Tab would not lift her little finger.

  UNHOLY WEDLOCK

  One evening, Minnie was waiting in the road when I came home. She raised her arms and I swooped her up and sat her astride behind me on old Job; she held my shoulders. As we cantered home, she giggled with the rocking motion in that elation of young girls who don’t know what to do with their new juices, disguising her pleasure by simpering her news into my ear.

  For some time now, she confided, that darned Sammy Tolen had overlooked no chance to tickle her. I explained that this was his loutish way of reconnoitering a young girl’s person. Well, she squeaked, Cousin Laura, though twenty-nine years Sam’s senior, had seemed very happy to be tickled, and at one point had become, well, overexcited. “Oh, you horrid boy!” she shrieked, rassling Sammy to the ground and seating herself on what would have been his lap if he’d sat up. Two nights later, Ninny said (daring this topic only because she rode behind me where I couldn’t see her face), investigating a racket in the barn, Aunt Tab had caught the Widow Laura seated astride Sammy with her nightshirt up and naked as a lily the rest of the way down, and this morning she had whipped those cringing sinners into the buggy and bounced them eight miles to Lake City, where they were united in “unholy wedlock,” as our mama called it.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” I burst out, incensed. Thrilled, my sister cried, “Edgar, that’s blasphemy!” I brooded the rest of the way home. “Shifty Jim’s plan,” I concluded finally. “Sammy had made a rumpus, got caught screwing that old simpleton, knowing Aunt Tab would act just as she did. Tolens want some kind of claim on our plantation, don’t you see that, Ninny?” Shocked by that angry language, the girl protested that Aunt Laura was not a simpleton, she loved dear sweet Aunt Laura very, very much and I was being vile as well as most unkind, and anyway, it wasn’t “our” plantation! Minnie had understood nothing, as usual. At the gate, I swung her roughly off the horse and she ran inside in tears.