Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“ ‘Son Born’ was the only notation in the Columbia County register in Lake City because I turned my back on him from the first hour and never bothered to go there and record a name.” Blurting this out, his father was gasping in distress.

“Did you ever love him, Papa?”

“No. Yes. Much too late. I never realized it until that day at Lost Man’s. After I’d harmed him.”

“Did you let him see it?”

“He was probably too stunned to see it, and he fled before I found a way to reach him. After that, I didn’t want to think about him. I couldn’t-I still can’t-handle it. Not man enough, I guess.” Papa had always been caustic about his own weaknesses, the drinking, women, and propensity to violence that had led to his worst missteps; he seemed to take a perverse satisfaction in catching himself out on even the smallest evasions. But this remark bared a weary self-disdain that his son had never thought to see.

“Oh Lord, Papa.” They sat a while. “Why didn’t you explain to people that the whole thing was an accident?”

“Who would have believed that, for Christ’s sake? You don’t believe it even now and you’re my son.”

“I do believe you, Papa.” This was true. As far as it went, he trusted his father’s account, and for the moment, he was even grateful for its ambiguity. As Papa had probably intuited, he didn’t wish to know any details that might oblige him to condemn father or brother, though it was mostly his unwillingness to entwine his father in a lie that had kept him from resuming his inquisition. Two young people had been shot. Somebody had shot them. Was it really possible that both had died in the same “accident”? The girl, Papa? Why was she killed?

That evening, he had had no wish to crowd him further. His father had exonerated Rob-that had to be enough. Yet clearing Rob of responsibility fell short of saying that Rob had not taken part. His father had specified that the full responsibility was his alone. Was this tantamount to an admission that he’d killed those people? That accidentally or otherwise, he had been the shooter?

This much was to his credit: in refusing to discuss the episode with anyone, not even to defend his name, he had chosen to live with the local opinion that E. J. Watson had been solitary in that dreadful act. He had done his best to spare Rob any consequences-which was only just, Papa explained, since the plan to run those squatters off his claim had been his alone. However, he had not wished them to die, the way people said. And it tortured him to think that his younger son and his dear Kate Edna might suspect that he had murdered them… Unable to finish, he raised his big hard hands and dropped them on his knees, as if to say, I shall go to my grave bearing terrible slanders that will never be put to rest.

Again, his son was silent. What could he say? But in denying his beloved father his filial reassurance, he had wounded him, that much was clear. He had also angered him, set him to brooding, so that when eventually he thanked Papa for easing his mind about Rob’s role, remarking in passing that he’d never thought Rob capable of violence, his father had made that unsettling deep grunt, shifting his boots on the porch floor. “You were pretty young back then, still a schoolboy in Fort Myers,” he had muttered, as if to suggest that Lucius had not really known his brother.

Lucius disliked this insinuation just when he thought Rob’s innocence had been confirmed, and perhaps his quick stare of resentment- Do you mean what you seem to be implying, Papa?- had stung his father, who had given him a long appraising look. “You don’t remember how wild-tempered he was?” he said. “The crazy way he killed his dog that morning?”

Lucius met his eye. “I remember,” Lucius said. But his brother had been wild-hearted, not wild-tempered, and in no way crazy.

It had happened there between the river and the porch at a time when Rob was very dark in spirit, brooding for days over some rough thing Papa had said. On that hot noon, coming from the field, Papa had removed his coat and hung it on a chair before going inside. The revolver butt protruded from the inside pocket. Rob, coming behind him, had taken out the gun and with a queer look on his face placed the muzzle in his mouth to scare his younger brother. It had scared him, of course, not because he imagined Rob might kill himself-Rob had always seemed far more likely to kill Papa-but because Rob might have forgotten that even at Chatham, Papa’s gun was always loaded. That’s who their father was.

“Watch out with that thing, Rob!”

In a peculiar voice, Rob said, “All right.” He kneeled in front of his young bluetick hound, which lay twitching flies in a noon snooze. “Rex? Want to play roulette?” Lucius never forgot the soft thumping of Rex’s tail. His brother picked five of the six rounds out of the chamber, spun it a few times, then put the muzzle to the dog’s head. Shaky, he whispered, “Good luck, Rex, because I sure would miss you, but I aim to fire, so this may be your last day as a dog.” Even as Lucius yelled, Rob pulled the trigger.

That scaring Bang!, the spurting neck, the blood-drenched animal in spasm pushing itself in a half circle on the dirt as if to screw itself into the ground, had shocked Rob so that he jumped up with a screech, hurled the revolver after Papa, and lit out around the house. Headed nowhere, he ran only to escape himself. Round and round and round he went, screeching each time he passed the twitching body of this pup that his kind step-mother had given him. He was trying to run right off the earth.

Papa strode out in a red fury. He stooped and took Rex by the tail and circled once as he ran forward toward the bank and whirled the carcass through the air into the river. Next he intercepted Rob at the house corner, hoisted him with his legs still running, and shouted into his face, “God damn you, Sonborn! What the hell’s the matter with you!” When his son closed his mouth tight over locked teeth, Papa hurled him to the ground, then grabbed his collar, yanked him back up onto his feet, and knocked him sprawling. He stood there panting, staring down at Rob as he got his breath.

Rob lay quiet, watching Papa. Never wiped his face and never spoke a word. “Damn you anyway,” Papa said quietly. Retrieving his revolver, he returned inside.

On their last evening in September, 1910, they were civil when they said good night but there was no healing the disease between them. Next morning when Lucius told him he was leaving, Papa said, “Do what you must,” and turned his back. Not until Lucius was casting off his skiff did his father appear; he stood apart from the others on the riverbank. He had not waved like Hannah Smith and Green and Dutchy and even the hard black man known as “Little Joe,” who offered a grin and a half wave from the kitchen doorway.

Off to one side, a horseshoe toss away from all the rest, slouched the foreman, hands in his pockets. He did not wave, either. The black faces of the four new harvest hands watched from the field. When Cox turned that way, the four dark heads ducked down behind the shining swords of cane. Not until years later, as Lucius resumed Papa’s biography, would those four cane cutters, never accounted for, rise from the abyss of dream memory as wild petroleum seeps up from the earth crust to form strange rainbows on black marshland pools.

That September day his father’s features were so deep in the deep shadow of his hat that he seemed to be peering out from hiding and his fists were shoved so hard into his black frock coat that his outline bulged. Only at the very last, as the water spread away and his son’s skiff was rounding the bend, on the point of disappearance, the bulky figure might or might not have wrested one hand from his pocket and lifted it halfway as if to take an oath, in dim presentiment, perhaps, that this was their final parting.