Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Sammy had already moved in. He dined with us that evening, sitting beside that sweet coy fool too old to be his mother. His disgusting table manners made our ladies shrivel; they hardly knew where to look or what to say. “Well, nobody can’t call me no cradle robber!” he guffawed, spraying food. And damned if this manure-flecked feller didn’t wink at me, as if this outrage were the best joke in the world. I’m the Master of Ichetucknee, that wink said. And you? He even offered me a cheap cigar.

  When the ladies protested our cigars, we went outside, where Sam let go a self-congratulatory belch. “Looks like you’re fucked pretty good now, don’t it, Edgar? You and my hot pantaloons old widow.” Sam always enjoyed that ugly way of talking.

  CHARLIE IS MY DARLING

  From the Getzen place, the old Spanish Road led west through Ichetucknee Springs past the Collins trading post. Mr. Collins’s gristmill turned so slow that his boy Lem (Lem said) could top its hoppers full of grain and go home and eat dinner and get back to the mill in good time for a smoke before it finished grinding. Lem was my friend and his brother Billy was courting our Miss Minnie. What Billy Collins saw in that crushed girl I will never know. I suppose my sister was beautiful in her way, but this was said by women more than men because she had no spirit. All her life she would speak in a childlike voice, keeping her head flinched over to one side, her pale underchin pulsing with trepidation; she reminded me of that little tree frog we called “spring peeper” at Clouds Creek.

  One April Sunday afternoon behind the store, Lem and I were hard at work on a half jug of moonshine when a girl I had never seen before happened by with Billy and Minnie. From the first, I could not take my eyes off that clear face. Fair skin, smooth and light and pretty as a petal, small nose, and small white teeth in a dancing smile. But what stole my breath were those large black eyes, like the wondering round eyes of some night creature.

  Yes, I was pierced clean through the heart, love at first sight. So stricken was I that I reeled backwards, throwing my arms wide, crying out senselessly the name of the old song, “Charlie Is My Darling!” Having read so much, I was articulate enough, but my life had been so solitary, with so much silence, that I had no graces. I used that song to cover my confusion: all I really wanted to cry out was Miss, I love you. The girl went pink and turned haughty and Minnie cried, “Oh Edgar, honestly!”

  I flushed but did not falter. I sprang forward on the wings of drink, striking both knees painfully into the dirt, and seized and kissed her hand, which was delicious, cool and warm at the same time. When she snatched it back, I bowed to her little boots, banging my forehead into the dust, astounded by my own oafish behavior. Clearly this Miss Collins thought me crude as well as rude, also swinishly inebriated, which I was. She reproved her cousin Lem for keeping such rough company—though in saying this, she caught my eye and almost smiled. She even tried to assist me off my hook, saying, “You guessed my secret, Mr. Watson, I hate the name Ann Mary. I’m not your darling but by all means call me Charlie if you like.” She thought me a bold idiot, she told me later. I was indeed rough company but also such an overjoyed poor fool that she forgave me.

  I had known nothing of such exaltation! By some miracle—could it be true?—a dark-eyed angel loved this overjoyed poor fool to the same degree. We sat in the grass, leaning back against the sun-warmed slats of the old mill. I described my fine plantation at Clouds Creek to the sound of flowing water. From that first afternoon, we were delightedly in love, smiling and smiling for no reason, lost in each other’s smiling eyes, abiding in the other’s smiling heart. Nothing needed to be said, nothing regretted, all was perfect and complete just as it was.

  From that day forth, while her life lasted, Ann Mary Collins adopted the name Charlie; she called me plain “Mister,” as if that was my given name. This graceful creature had surprised my heart with the first joy it ever knew. I’d been dead and dry as the white clay in the road. My life had been breathed back into me at last.

  She heard the bad stories soon enough. Lem Collins’s parents got them straight from Herlongs, and Lem warned me. Charlie refused to repeat what she’d been told. There’s so much good in you, she whispered. She only hoped that her love for me was so pure and so strong that no matter what I’d done, God would redeem me. “Damn!” I swore, startling her. “How do you know that I’ve done anything? Why don’t you tell me what they said and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “You don’t need to hear their wicked gossip, Mister, and I don’t need to hear your truth. Whoever you are, I believe in you, and that is truth enough for me.”

  One day that fall I borrowed Aunt Tabitha’s buggy and took her to the Ichetucknee, where we’d met. We left the buggy at the store and walked barefoot down along the edge of the blue springs, beneath a canopy of crimson maples, old gold yellow hickories, russet oaks. Charlie picked watercress for our wild lettuce, and a blueberry with reddish stems: she called it sparkleberry. She led my eye to the woodland birds of fall, knew their brown names—hermit thrush, sparrow, winter wren.

  Charlie gave me her hand as we walked home. Bravely she presented me to her silent family and bravely I came calling every Sunday and helped with chores whether they spoke to me or not. I burned hickory and boiled ash resin for lye soap, worked flax for linen, parched goobers for coffee, ground homespun dyes from sweetgum and red oak, stuffed Spanish moss and feathers into mattress casings. I even helped with the washing, which I’d always hated. Built a fire in the yard, stirred flour for starch into cold rainwater before heating up the tub, then shaved a soap cake into the water. Barefoot, Charlie sorted the wash into white and colored, dirty britches, rags. We rubbed out spots on a rough board, then boiled them. Never boil the dyed things, Mister Watson, Charlie frowned, wagging her finger under my nose and blushing when I caught it in my mouth. The parents watched.

  “Mind you, it’s Sunday, miss,” warned Mr. Curry Collins.

  Fished out with a broom handle, the fresh wash was spread to dry, then the soapy water was applied to the privy bench and floor. I cursed my dirty nature for imagining, God forgive me, my dearly beloved’s bottom, neat as an upright pear on that wood seat. I emptied the tin tubs as she slipped indoors and bathed, and of course I pictured that sweet ceremony, too. She came out in a fresh dress, combing the water from her hair, and brewed some tea. Those eyes over her porcelain cup drew me deep into her soul as her mother came and went just out of earshot. We were lost in each other’s awe. She pressed my hand. “The greatest blessing ever to befall this foolish girl,” she said, “is Mister Watson.”

  As a middle-aged bachelor, William Curry Collins had married the Widow Robarts, one of whose sons was my friend John Calhoun Robarts, called “J. C.” Ann Mary was their late and only daughter. I offered to accompany Mr. Curry down the Santa Fe and the Suwannee all the way to the Gulf at Cedar Key, where we hired two black men and boiled half the Gulf of Mexico for a few barrels of salt. After that hard expedition, Mr. Curry thought the world of me, informing Ann Mary that her beau was an exceptional young man. “Don’t I know it!” cried his happy daughter, that’s what J. C. told me.

  Mama and Minnie adored Charlie, exclaiming over what this girl had wrought in a few seasons with their abrupt and sullen son and surly brother. These days he reeled off Greek quotations and Romantic poetry, bursting into song and spouting nonsense just to make them smile: “Sappy but happy with no pappy!”—that one made Minnie nervous even now. “I thought you’d never learn to smile,” Mama reproved me. I rattled her with a surprise hug just to hug somebody, and Minnie, too. “Our family has never been so happy!” Ninny cried, wailing at the great pity of it all.

  THE VIRGINS

  Charlie is my Darling. Her sweet tenderness had cracked the ugly crust I’d carried south from Edgefield. From the dull clay of melancholic anger she had fashioned an irreverent fellow who loved to tease and banter, tell outrageous stories. Alone, we could talk seriously, and over time I would confide to her most though not all of what had happen
ed in my boyhood. When finally I blurted out my pain and guilt about the awful way the Owl-Man died in that black ruin, she fell silent for a while and my heart pounded. Then she took my hand. “Our Redeemer always forgives a repentant sinner. We need never speak of this again.”

  With my scrimped pay, I leased an old cabin on Robarts land just west of the plantation. The front door was gone and the back door, too. The one window was boarded closed and even those boards were half loose and awry. The roof had rotted under heavy moss and fallen deadwood from the live oak and the tin patches were dark copper red with scaling rust, but it would be our house and so I worked on it every spare hour.

  One day I was mending roof with cedar shakes when Charlie stepped inside and peered up at the big hole under the peak, her elegant small head turned upward like the head of a slender tree snake paused on a sunlit branch. Seeing me silhouetted on the sun, she sang, “My hero! He Who Patches the Blue Sky!” Next came a cry of delight because just at that moment an oriole had flown in one window, out the other. “Did you see it, Mister? Our good omen!” she called.

  I could not bear so much feeling any longer. I climbed down and took both her hands, asked her to marry. Those black eyes widened. Fearing I’d been too abrupt, I implored her to forgive me. “Give it some thought, at least,” I begged when tears came to her eyes. She raised a finger to my lips.

  “I have given it far too much thought already. I shall marry you,” she whispered, kissing my cheek.

  We dined in the oak shade out of her napkined basket. Afterward we lay together and we kissed, as we had done on so many desperate occasions, debating old spidery ideas of sin. This day we stopped without a word and turned our backs and clambered out of our cumbersome farm clothes. When I said “One-two-three,” we turned, not looking, starting to laugh. I stuck my hands out and when she took them we kneeled naked, facing, on the sun-warmed linen. Excepting the burned copper of our arms and faces, we were milky white. I drew her close and at once felt mysteriously complete.

  We were brave virgins, shy and clumsy, but we trusted each other with all our hearts. Trembling, I laid her down and held her tight for a long while before kissing her cheek and her warm throat under her ears and at last her lips. But very soon my monkey hand wandered the small breasts and taut nipples, the silken skin of her inner thigh. When it touched her wetness, she gasped and closed her eyes. Her thigh slid over mine and I eased her over on her back and lay between her legs for near a minute, feeling blessed. When I realized that, awaiting me, the poor thing held her breath, I ran my hands under her hips and raised her gently, and she bent her knees as her legs rose. With a groan of relief, I entered that pearly glisten.

  I was awkward and too urgent and I hurt her. Pain was the reason she cried out. A moment later, I cried out, too, as scent, touch, birdsong, Indian summer night were stitched into delirium by a magic insect walking the sun-warmed skin of my bare bottom. Afterward I lay astonished, home at last.

  Shyness had returned when we sat up. On a cowardly and idiotic impulse, I took refuge from our silence in one of Sammy’s jokes. “You know what Woodson Tolen would have said if his son brought you home and told him you were still a virgin?” A bit puzzled, trying to smile, she searched my eyes. Wary then, she freed her arm, reached for her shift and held it to her chest. I should have stopped right there but did not know how. “ ‘Vir-gin?’ Ol’ Man Tolen would have hollered. ‘Hell no, boy! Don’t matter how sweet and purty that gal is! No virgins ain’t allowed, not in our Tolen family!’ ” I grinned, desperate to enlist her. “ ‘But Daddy—!’ the boy said. ‘Nope,’ says Tolen. “If that li’l gal ain’t good enough for her own men, she sure ain’t good enough for our’n!”

  How could I stoop to such crude mockery of our Christian pieties? How could this innocent creature understand far less forgive such insensitivity at her bravest and most undefended moment? “Turn away, please,” she entreated. Covering my bloodied loins—so suddenly my shame—I turned my back on my beloved. We dressed without a word.

  I pled for forgiveness, tried to walk her home. “I know the way,” she said, looking straight ahead. I stopped then, watched her disappear down the woodland lane. But not long after that, Lem Collins reported, when she overheard some Tolen in the store, she had to stifle laughter and would not say why. I knew why and was delighted, and soon thereafter, she accepted my apology.

  She was fifteen then, I twenty-one, but she turned sixteen before we wed. Gaily she sang out “Miss Charlie Collins” when giving her name for the marriage record at Lake City. It is there still: November 24 of 1878. Thanksgiving.

  Though raised by Mama an Episcopalian, I attended the Methodist services that the Collins clan had started with the Herlongs in a small house on what was now called Herlong Lane. I prayed hard, frowning, right up front where those tale-bearers from Edgefield could behold me and perhaps bear witness in their letters home that Ring-Eye Lige’s son was often to be seen down on his knees seeking redemption. This was not true. I was offering my fervent thanks to the Great Whoever who had blessed my life with such a loving bride.

  As the months passed, I would learn Charlie’s heart perhaps better than my own. I still hear her little cries as we escaped mortality in each other’s arms and fell back awed. Who are you, Mister? But I only shook my head, kissing her softly until finally she hushed up and began to touch me.

  “Now look what you’ve gone and done,” I’d smile. “Mister is my Darling,” Charlie whispered.

  GONE AND LOST FOREVER

  She was not yet eighteen on the day she died, not ten months after we had wed, on the thirteenth day of a windy cold September. Her family came. Her brother Lee had hatred in his face. Her father stood stoic on the door sill. Her mother sobbed, “The poor child was too young.” By this she meant, She was destroyed by this man’s greedy lust. Thrust at me squalling was the murderous red thing expelled by her dear body, our dear body.

  Her lips were parted, her gaze fixed. Where had she gone? The black strands of sweat-bedraggled hair spread on the pillow, the mortal scents and stains of my darling’s blood and urine on the coarse moss mattress we had sewn together—our bed of life where this red thing had been created, her bed of death. I would not look at it for fear that cold Jack Watson might seize it up and hurl it to the blood-sniffing dogs outside.

  Still on my knees, I took Charlie’s cool hand, rested my brow on her cool wrist.

  Edgar? Please? For Ann Mary’s sake? Give this little boy a name. (Mr. Curry Collins, father of the bride.)

  Take it away.

  The voices hushed me.

  All of you go away. Please. Take it with you.

  I lay down in my own corpse beside my murdered wife. They watched from the cabin door. Son? Get away from there. Now don’t go acting crazy!

  Shouting, I drove them all out of our cabin.

  Holding cold hands, we stared upward at the cedar roof where I once patched that faraway blue sky. Together we prayed that I might go wherever she might be going. We did not stir. Night fell. I turned cold beside her. For two days I lay amongst my dead: the Widow Cloud, Cloud’s Creek, South Carolina.

  At daybreak, I carved her cross; that same day, I made her coffin. Our own ceremony would be her memorial, and she would lie in our own ground beside our cabin. No. In the end, the families came and shamed me. They whispered at the graying face and melancholy scent. Nobody had closed her eyes nor crossed her arms nor even bathed her. Her stepbrother and minister and my friend J. C. Robarts bent a wayward arm, forcing it to join the rest of her within the coffin. “It’s not a chicken wing,” I growled. His face went mushy with resentment. Edgar, don’t. We loved her, too. Nobody’s trying to hurt Cousin Ann Mary.

  Charlie, I said. Ann Mary Collins was the dead girl who went away nailed up in my pine box, under black crepe, to be bounced and thrown about in a black cart. Every jolt hurt me. I ran after them half naked in the cold, yelling at them to go slow and be more careful. I walked a little ways but being baref
oot fell behind and finally did not follow.

  In a dream her coffin is lowered into a deep pit in the white clay earth of Bethel churchyard. It is left uncovered. I can see inside. The fair skin which shivered at my touch purples and softens. Shadowed eyes sunk back, grayed small teeth on blue-gray lip, dead hair lank over the skull. She no longer knows me.

  Cousin Selden drifts among the mourners, feathers rotting. He is rotting, too. I cry, “Why have you come? What do you want of me?”

  Night after night, Charlie returns.

  Wandering the woods roads under sleepless stars, I walk and walk, heart dead as the white clay.

  Charlie my Darling, gone and lost forever. I swear a terrible revenge but upon whom?

  MISS SUEBELLE PARKINS

  I moved unseeing through the ache of days. In the evening, I drank rotgut for the pain until I sank to the dirt floor, only to come to in the dark hours and drink more. I reeled into the day in mighty sickness, doing myself harm in violent labor with sharp careless tools, banging and wrenching, boiling off my poisons. But I was cursed with a mule’s constitution and by nightfall had regained the will to drink.

  On the Sabbaths I rode to the crossroads taverns, slapped shoulders, drew a crowd of men and made ’em laugh. Usually I was still laughing when I picked a fight “just for the fun.” Pretty soon, no man would drink with Edgar Watson, and the grog shops drove me out, and I rode too far away from home to return in time for work on Monday morning. All across the northern counties, a man I no longer knew earned a bad name as a crazy-wild mean skunk, quick to pull a knife. When Watson barged into the tavern, the fun was over. More than once, when he refused to leave, he was knocked over the head and dragged into the road and kicked bloody in the public mud.