Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Overcome by what could never be undone, I stifled my protests, sinking onto my knees beside the bed, to pray or clear my heart or be forgiven before it was too late.

  “Is Rob all right? He’s not involved?”

  “Rob was in no way involved. He’s fine.”

  I leaned and kissed her, overcome by an impulse to just quit, to lie down in her arms, lie down and give in to a flood of hopeless weeping—me! Mr. E. J. Mr. Watson, dry-eyed all these years, ached in his need of solace for so many losses. I longed to whine. I could have been the best farmer in south Florida, you know that, Mandy! All my great plans!—disgusting! A disgusting, low, self-pitying temptation to beg pity from a dying woman, especially this one who had never been fooled, who knew too well that for all the harm I had inflicted on myself, I had done far more to others. True, there were reasons, or at least excuses; she must be spared those, too.

  I pulled myself together and sat up straight, tried to make light of it. Gruffly I said, “I don’t believe your Good Lord will forgive me, what do you think, Mandy?”

  “Do you care?” she said. She had not recognized my reference to our Oklahoma days and the tale of that huge and bloody hellion, Old Tom Starr—either that or she was simply unamused. I stood up, kissed her brow in parting, crossed the room. She did not detain me even when I faltered and turned back in the door. She had not forgotten my Tom Starr story. Now she finished it. “No, dear Edgar”—her voice came quietly—“I don’t believe He will.”

  I had skulked behind my poor tin shield of irony and she had pierced it with the hard lance of bare truth. Her cool tone stunned me. I dared to feel betrayed. I longed for the last sad smile of understanding which, after all these years, she now denied me.

  I returned slowly to the bedside. She saw that my agony was real and touched my cheek but quickly withdrew her hand, for she was resolute. She closed her eyes and thought a moment, then opened them and whispered, “I’d like an answer to one question before you take your leave since I don’t think we shall ever meet again.”

  My heart pounded. “You never believed me? Even when you testified in Fort Smith court?” Her flat gaze hushed me.

  “The truth, Edgar. I beg of you. It’s late.”

  So long ago, eleven years, and yet . . . one escapes nothing.

  My silence was all the answer that she needed. “May God forgive you,” she sighed softly. “May God rest her soul.”

  “Do you forgive me? That’s all that matters . . .” My voice trailed off. Mandy took my hand and squeezed it one last time, then pushed it away. Though our gaze held and her eyes softened, she would not speak. I went away bereft and suffocated for want of a coherent way to cry out the love I found no words for while she searched my face.

  In a stiff river wind under hard skies, I crossed the Calusa Hatchee on the Alva ferry and took the horse coach to Punta Gorda, from where the railroad would carry me north to Columbia County. Seen through the window, the sunlight pouring down through green-gold needles of the piney woods was liquefied by damnable soft tears, so late in coming and no longer in my control. I was truly astonished that E. Jack Watson, with his fury and cold nerve, could come apart and weep much as he had when, still a boy, he grieved for the dead slave boy in the swamp. Whom are you mourning, you sad sonofabitch, Mandy or Edgar?

  By the time the news came to Fort White that Mandy had passed away, I knew I’d loved her as entirely as the wood nymph I called Charlie my Darling, and perhaps even more deeply, though I don’t suppose that true love can be reckoned in that way. Sometimes I think we cannot know whom we loved most until all the lovers in our lives are gone forever. Looking back down our long road, our great loves are those summits that rise above the rest, like those far blue Appalachian peaks beyond the Piedmont uplands on that day when Private Elijah Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers lifted his enchanted boy into the sun above the courthouse terrace. The light (so Mama always said) was like an angel’s halo in my hair.

  CHAPTER 5

  AN OBITUARY

  Even before Cousin Laura died, my mother had started scrapping with Aunt Tabitha, and finally she quit that lady’s roof, going to live with Minnie and her Billy. In 1901, when I returned from the Ten Thousand Islands, I went straight over to pay my respects as a good son should.

  “Well, Mother, I’m home.”

  “I don’t recall that I laid eyes on you the last time you were here. How long ago was that, do you suppose? Six years?”

  “Seven, Mother.”

  “Well, that’s long enough, wouldn’t you say?”

  Skillfully she dispensed with her incivilities just as I was ready to snipe back, that’s how perverse this little woman was. She did not ask after Mandy’s health, far less inquire about the children, nor did she make the least effort to embrace me. Going unhugged by her twiggy old arms and unpecked by that dry slit of a mouth, I felt oddly out of sorts, I must admit.

  As for Aunt Cindy, fixing supper at the stove, she never looked at me. For the first time in my life, that bony black woman did not come forward to hug me. She took no notice of me, not even enough to sniff and turn her back, but ignored me throughout the few minutes that I stayed. What Aunt Cindy had heard and what she suspected I did not inquire, knowing my account of it would do no good.

  On a second visit, over meager tea, Mama related in detail how Cousin Laura had died in ’94 when Aunt Tabitha’s new manor house was scarcely finished. “She bored herself to death, that’s all,” said Cousin Laura’s lifelong friend, “and darn near took the rest of us off with her.”

  The widower, on the other hand, had fattened up like a prime hog with his good fortune. The former Ichetucknee or Myers Plantation was now known as the Tolen Plantation, and the homesteads all around were called the Tolen Settlement. The Tolen, Florida, post office was located at the turpentine works down by the railroad crossing. All that was missing was the Holy Tolen Church. Meanwhile, Sam had married off his brother Mike to a Myers niece, then moved him into William Myers’s big log cabin to strengthen the Tolen grip on our family property. Sam’s stepbrother John Russ and his four mink-jawed sons infested another Myers cabin on Herlong Lane.

  When I mentioned my reunion with my father in the Ridge Spring cemetery back in ’92, she stared at me. “Wasn’t South Carolina a bit out of your way?”

  “Not for a patricide.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, Edgar!”

  I shrugged. “Let’s just say that the last time I saw him, he was lying in a grave.”

  She waved this off, upset but impatient, rummaging up an 1895 obituary from the newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. “The Myers cousins clipped and sent this.” The clipping related how Captain Elijah D. Watson, aged sixty-one, had succumbed to Bright’s disease in a rooming house in that city. She read aloud: He was a well-to-do farmer in Edgefield County. A gallant soldier during the War Between the States, he distinguished himself on many battlefields for acts of great bravery and daring.

  We did not have to remind each other that the rank of captain, like the deeds of heroism, were obituary courtesies to this man of low rank who returned from war with an impregnable reputation for dereliction of duty, drunkenness, and insubordination.

  Next, she produced a yellowed daguerreotype, pressing it down on the table with a kind of grim finality like a poker winner laying down his hole card. Wild-haired cap-cocked Lige in Confederate uniform looked nothing at all like the handsome soldier I had chosen to recall from the courthouse terrace. Even without his ring eye, he looked truculent and bug-eyed.

  “I never knew you’d treasured his picture all these years.” I set it down.

  “Cindy saved it. For you children. Wasn’t that sweet?” She picked it up. Her hands were shaky now, with liver marks. “You must feel very proud of such a father, dear.” She curtsied minutely and I made a little bow as we sweet-smiled each other, not utterly without amusement and affection. “Oh Lord, Edgar!” She was cross again. “How long will you be here this time?�
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  Aunt Cindy rapped the iron stove with her wood spoon, then turned and left. According to her mistress, she had finally accepted the hard truth that her husband would never be seen again on God’s good earth; she prayed for a reunion of some kind in Heaven’s mansions. Deprived of her family, Aunt Cindy had given herself to ours, devoting her long narrow days to “tending her Miz Ellen’s every whim” (unabashed, Mama said that herself). She also managed the Collins household for our Minnie, who had blighted her family with her “neurasthenia”—that is, hysteria and insomnia, dyspepsia and hypochondria and every other ailment resistant to diagnosis and known cure which had an -ia at the end of it, said Mama. The only clear symptom of her “American nervousness” was a horror of human company even at home.

  And poor Lulalie. Mama sighed. Her mother feared the worst. Such a warm busty young girl, did I recall her? Mama frowned and switched the subject, not wishing to dwell on warm brown bosoms under the bald eye of her Elijah, the celebrated bosom connoisseur in the daguerreotype. (Guessing at her mind’s quick turns, I saw a light mulatta girl, the young house wench who became Jacob Watson’s mother.) Mama offered me my father’s likeness with an enigmatic smile. “I’m sure you’ll want this as a keepsake.”

  I shook my head, kept my arms folded. I rose to go. Leaning on my arm, Mama accompanied me outside, still clutching the picture. To my surprise, her face actually softened as she related what Private Watson had confided on his return from war. Sleepless and exhausted, he had finally broken down and wept, confessing his terror of being bayoneted and his horror of the battlefield at dark, when the musket fire died to the last solitary shots and the dreadful cries of the maimed thousands left on the battlefield, Yanks or Johnny Rebs no longer, simply thirsting boys calling for their mamas in their long hard dying—those cries that rose in a moaning wind from the blood-damp night earth of Virginia. All no-man’s land writhed under the moon, one huge tormented creature, all across the waste to the Union lines.

  In the dawn of one dreaded day of battle, Lige Watson had broken out in a soaking sweat and come apart, shaken violently by his own unraveling like a muskrat shaken by a dog. Then his gut let go and he soiled his only clothes without any means or hope of restoration. With nowhere to hide his shame and tears, he fled. It was Will Coulter who came after him, who pulled him down behind a wall and slapped him hard, who ordered him to return into the lines or he would shoot him then and there where he lay stinking. And after the War in their Regulator years, that man with the crow-wing of hard black hair across his brow had used his knowledge of Private Watson’s terror to ensure his loyalty in night activities.

  My mother’s eyes pled with me to relent, to forgive my family. “It’s not too late,” she begged. I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.

  The following year, a letter to Mama lately arrived from Colonel R. B. Watson at Clouds Creek inquired after her son Edgar, wondering what had become of him and how he might be faring. His interest moved me more than I cared to reveal, though I feigned indifference. In his letter, Colonel Robert regretfully described the moaning frightened dying of her late husband Elijah, afflicted with big sores on his legs that would not heal, smelling just awful. Before he died, the wretched sinner, all purple bony knees and puffy belly, had howled for light, more light, all the night through, in his terror of oncoming darkness.

  In his last coma, my father had raved and muttered about Selden Tilghman; the Colonel’s letter asked “Cousin Ellen” if she could explain this, suggesting that she might ask Edgar about it. Mama looked hard into my face. Though startled to hear Cousin Selden’s name, I shook my head. Mama shrugged, too. “I’m not surprised your father was afraid to meet his Maker. And of course he always hated Cousin Selden.” Again she scrutinized me but dared go no further.

  BURNT HAM

  For a time I lived with my friend Will Cox, who farmed a piece of Tolen land and occupied my old cabin near the Junction. I was building a house on the highest rise in this flat country, the former site of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission destroyed by the British when they came to north Florida from Charleston at the start of the eighteenth century and butchered every Spaniard and Indian they could lay their hands on. When the wind shuffled the leaves of the ancient red oak on that hilltop, I could hear a whisper of that old sad history.

  I planted pecans right down to the road, also a fig tree. Built a work shed, horse and cow stalls, chicken coop, sugar mill, syrup shed, corncrib, beehives, and a fine muscadine arbor. William Kinard dug me a well, and my new friend and devoted admirer John Porter got me started with some hardware. (John liked me well enough, I guess, but mainly he was anxious to be known as the confidant and friend of the Man Who Killed Belle Starr.)

  Sam’s stepbrother John Russ was a fair carpenter, and together we got my house done in a hurry, using heart pine lath and tongue-and-groove pine siding. My roof of cedar shakes clear of the smallest knothole was the talk of the south county because most men begrudged the time and craft required to make them. Folks were going over to tin roofs, which turn a house into an oven in the summer: the tin starts popping toward midday, and in late afternoon, as the house cools off, she pops some more.

  Inside, I dispensed with a parlor in favor of three bedrooms and a large dining room with a kind of window counter through which food could be passed when it came in from the kitchen—my own innovation, built originally for the house at Chatham Bend. The new house had no second story, only a garret with end windows to vent the summer heat. With the lumber saved, I built a broad airy veranda with split-cane rockers where social occasions, such as they were, mostly took place. The porch had a hand-carved railing that became almost as celebrated in our district as my carved railing on the stair at Chatham Bend, and the house was set upon brick pilings to let cool breeze pass beneath the floor and offer summer shade to my hogs and chickens. As for the windows, they were cut high on the walls so that no night rider could draw a bead on the inhabitant—a modern improvement, picked up in Arcadia, that I never troubled to explain here in Fort White.

  Black Frank Reese from Arkansas had turned up at Will Cox’s place while I was in the Islands, and I gave him some rough work moving materials. Frank had tracked down that faithless Memphis woman he had sworn to kill but because she had grown fat and ugly, he belted her hard across the head and let it go at that. From this I knew he had matured somewhat since I last saw him.

  Will Cox, who had been sharecropping for Tolen, could take no more of Sam’s abuse and came over to farm with me instead. Sam still owed me for those hogs he’d all but stolen when I left for Oklahoma but he had to be threatened with arson or worse before he came up with some razor-backed runts, thin and uncared for. “Ain’t goin to thank me, Ed?” With a rough boot, he drove them off the tailgate of his wagon into my new pen.

  “My hogs were fine animals,” I reminded him, “not scrags like these.”

  Fat Sammy laughed. “Fine animals make fine eatin.’ ” He winked. “Got fine money for ’em, too.” I mentioned that better men than Tolen had been hung for hog theft back in the old century. “That a fact?” he said. “Yessir,” I said, “that is a fact, and here’s another: a dispute over a pair of hogs caused the famous feud between Hatfields and McCoys. More than twenty came up dead before the smoke cleared.”

  “You threatenin me, Ed? I’d go easy on them threats if I was you. Folks here ain’t forgotten who you are and ain’t all of ’em has forgiven, neither.”

  I looked him over, saying nothing. In Arkansas, I had been sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor for boarding stolen horses. Anywhere in the backcountry, a man would be punished more severely for stealing a horse than for exterminating this fat human varmint. True, I’d eased up on my drinking and put my gun away for good—I meant it, too—but Sammy Tolen didn’t need to know that.

  It was Carrie who sent word from Fort Myers that her mother had passed away; she had taken the two boys into her house. When I wrote back seeking to comfor
t her, I told her to send Eddie north to help on the new farm; he had been born here in Fort White and still thought of it as home. As for Lucius, he would go to Everglade and board with our friends the Storters while he finished school. All that young feller cared about was Chatham Bend.

  Unlike Lucius, Eddie was not handy out of doors, so a nigra named Doc Straughter, who usually showed up, taught him how to do the yard chores, tend the animals. Doc was stepbrother to that girl they called Jane Straughter, who was so light-skinned that anywhere else she would be taken for a white, and so desirable that half the men in the south county, black, white, or polka dots, were sniffing around her like wild tomcats, including that distinguished widower Mr. E. J. Watson and his hired man, Frank Reese. Jane was not yet twenty, very smart and well-spoken for a darkie, which of course she wasn’t, having been got upon the light-skinned Fannie Straughter by my friend John Calhoun Robarts. The Robarts clan never denied young Jane. They called on her and hugged and talked to her as one of their own, and being close kin to Robartses, the Collinses regarded her as family, too. All the same, Jane knew her place and tended to the household chores at my place, where I could keep an eye on her, so to speak.

  I told Frank to forget about Jane Straughter, they looked too much like chocolate and vanilla. Made a joke of that, the way we used to, riding out of Arkansas, but this was different, my old partner was rankled. He dared to say, “They say just one black drop makes a man a nigger. That go for pretty women, too?”

  And I said, “Oh, she’s got that drop in her, no doubt about it, but she is family all the same, so if a nigra with as many drops as Black Frank Reese was to go messing with her, he might be hunting up more trouble than he’d care to handle.”

  Frank very much disliked my tone and did not hide it, knowing that when it came to Jane, only one of us got to tease and that was me. Sucking his teeth as if tasting a hard truth, he gave me that flat kind of look that a tough nigra might get away with in the Indian Country but could get himself shot for anywhere else.