Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

He raised his gaze to the brown river, read the note, passed it to Hoad. Hoad read it and looked up, clearing his throat. “Listen,” he began. He stopped. With nothing else to say, they stared away downriver.

Clouds from the Gulf dragged shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands, raising an acrid stream from the brooding fire. He took shelter in the boat cabin with Hoad. In the cramped space, in dense wet heat, among the Belle ’s rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers, Hoad said, “You aim to put all the bad stuff in your book?” This was less a question than a warning. Lucius ignored it.

When the rain stopped, they returned ashore. Lucius buried the box of belt buckles and bullets where the shed had been-the slave quarters, Leslie Cox called it, with that bruising laugh. The urn he took to the leaning poinciana in whose thin shade dear Mama had rested in the long afternoons, watching the passing of the river. Replacing the earth, he remained there on his knees for a few minutes. “Well, Papa,” he whispered finally and stood up.

Thin smoke plumes rose like companies of ghosts. Out to the west where the Gulf sky was clearing, an iron sun loomed through the mist and vanished. From upriver came the hollow knocking of that big black woodpecker. In the river silence, it seemed far away and also near.

Hoad was waiting by the boat.

“We’re going,” Lucius said, fetching his manuscript.

His old friend trailed him back to the fire in alarm. “Wait,” Hoad said.

Out of respect for so much work, he lifted the manuscript to the level of his breast before bending and consigning it to the red embers. In silence they watched the top page brown a little at one corner as the fire took hold. A moment before bursting into flame, it lifted on an updraft, danced, planed down again among the gator scraps.

Hoad jumped to retrieve it before it blew away but when his friend only shook his head, he returned it to the fire.

“Okay? Let’s go,” said Lucius Watson.

Long long ago down the browning decades, in the light of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw, who laughed and listened, smelled and touched, ate, drank, and bred, occupying time and space with his getting and spending in the world. What his biographer will strive to recover is a true sense of this human being, with all his particularity and hope and promise, in the hope that the reader might understand who the grown man might have become had he not known too much of privation, rage, and loss .*

Edgefield Court House, which gave its name to the settlement that grew from a small crossroads east of the Savannah River, is a white-windowed brick edifice upon a hill approached by highroads from the four directions, drawing the landscape all around to a point of harmony and concord. The building is faced with broad stone steps on which those in pursuit of justice may ascend from Court House Square to its brick terrace. White columns serve as portals to the second-story courtroom, and the sunrise window in the arch over the door, filling the room with austere light, permits the elevated magistrate to freshen his perspective by gazing away over the village to the open countryside and the far hills, blue upon blue.

Early in the War, a boy of six, I was borne lightly up those steps on the strong arm of my father. On the courthouse terrace, I gazed with joy at this tall man in Confederate gray who pointed out to his proud son the fine prospect of the Piedmont, bearing away toward the northwest and the Great Smoky Mountains. In those nearer distances lay the Ridge, where a clear spring appeared out of the earth to commence its peaceful slow descent through woodland and plantation to the Edisto River. This tributary was Clouds Creek, where I was born.

On that sunny day on Court House Square my father, Elijah Daniel Watson, rode away to war and childhood ended. As a “Daughter of Edgefield,” his wife Ellen, with me and my little sister, waved prettily from the courthouse steps as the First Edgefield Volunteers mustered on the square. Her handsome Lige, wheeling his big roan and flourishing a crimson pennant on his saber, pranced in formation in the cavalry company formed and captained by his uncle Tillman Watson. On the right hand of Edgefield’s own Governor Andrew Pickens, who saluted the new volunteers from the terrace, stood Mama’s cousin Selden Tilghman, the first volunteer from Edgefield District and its first casualty. Called forth to inspire his townsmen, the young cavalry officer used one crutch to raise and wave the blue-red crisscross flag of the Confederacy.

Governor Pickens thundered, “May the brave boys of Edgefield defend to the death the honor and glory of our beloved South Carolina, first sovereign state to secede from the Yankee Union!” And Cousin Selden, on some mad contrary impulse, dared answer the governor’s exhortation by crying out oddly in high tenor voice, “To those brave boys of Edgefield who will sacrifice their lives for our Southern right to enslave the darker members of our species!”

The cheering faltered, then died swiftly in a low hard groan like an ill wind. Elijah Watson wheeled his horse and pointed his saber at Lieutenant Tilghman as voices cat-called rudely in the autumn silence. Most men gave the wounded lieutenant the benefit of the doubt, concluding he was drunk. He had fought bravely and endured a grievous wound, and all was forgiven when he rode off to war again, half-mended.

When the War was nearly at an end, and many slaves were escaping toward the North, a runaway was slain by Overseer Zebediah Claxton on Tillman Watson’s plantation at Clouds Creek. Word had passed the day before that Dock and Joseph were missing. At the racketing echo of shots from the creek bottoms, yelping in fear for Joseph, I dropped my hoe and lit out across the furrows toward the wood edge, trailing the moaning of the hounds down into swamp shadows and along wet black mud margins, dragged at by thorns and tentacles of old and evil trees.

I saw Dock first-dull stubborn Dock, lashed to a tree-then the overseer whipping back his hounds, then two of my great-uncles, tall and rawboned on rawboned black horses. Behind the boots and milling beasts, the heavy hoof stamp and bit jangle, a lumped thing in earth-colored home-spun sprawled awkwardly among the roots and ferns. The broken shoes, the legs hard-twisted in the bloody pants, the queer gray thing sticking out askew from beneath the chest-how could that gray thing be the warm and limber hand that had offered nuts or berries, caught my mistossed balls, set young “Mast’ Edguh” on his feet after a fall? All in a bunch, the fingers had contracted like the toes of a stunned bird, closing on nothing.