Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Mr. Watson, I beg of you,” was all Mama said by way of protest. I learned early to expect no help from my mother. As for Minnie, she wet herself at the first hoarse shout, and her panic when the moment came to flee often caused me to be caught and beaten while trying to save her. Worse, she betrayed me to Papa every time we quarreled, complaining that her brother had been mean. Mama, too, used the threat of Papa’s violence to twist me to her will; it was injustice more than burning pain and terror and humiliation which raised tears to my eyes and stoked the rage which made it possible to hide them.

I never let Papa see me weep and never yelped, just set my jaw and bit down hard on pain in the rigid way a dog clamps on another’s throat, forging my will like some fanatic in Hell’s fire until his demons wore out and his arm, too, all the while swearing secret oaths of vengeance.

“Oh, you poor boy! Are you all right?” Mama’s murmured concern always came too late to spare me. When I only gazed at her by way of answer, her eyes got jumpy and veered off. “Please, Edgar,” she might beg, “it scares me when your eyes shiver that way.” The show of derangement was a poor revenge but I knew no other; my voice would have broken if I’d said one word. Eventually I realized that the “crazy” eyes that scared her were the first manifestation of “Jack Watson,” a shadow brother I had conceived out of loneliness after black Joseph’s death, having had neither time nor opportunity for friendship. Though Jack came unbidden, I would know that he was there from the sudden uneasiness of others.

The first time Papa beat me to unconsciousness (perhaps I fainted from the pain), Mama fled across the yard to seek comfort on Aunt Cindy’s bosom rather than offer comfort to her son, who lay on the dirt floor in a dark realm from which all sun and color and all past and future had been struck away. In a dream, my mother’s figure pressed against a wall. Slowly she raised a fingertip to seal her lips, keeping God’s secret, bearing witness to His acts, not intervening.

One day Minnie crept out of her cranny to find her brother, his whole body shaking, hauling himself onto his knees, using the bedpost, intent on the father sprawled upon his mattress. I never noticed her until she whimpered. When I turned, that whimper turned to a whine of fear-not at my bloody face but because crazy-eyed Jack Watson peered out through that grimace. The child cringed back as from an apparition.

Though by no means deficient-she was bright-Minnie’s speech had become crippled by her fears, but like certain blind folk, she could apprehend what commonly escaped others, and she had been first to recognize an alien presence. “Oh Edgar please, I don’t know who you are!” she begged that first time, her voice seeming to call from faraway. Then the black bubble around brow and brain dissolved with a soft pop, and Jack was gone and time and space and sound and colors rushed back in-the thick rufous carcass in its fume of moonshine, the reek of broken dogshit boots, and the little girl shrieking as the body humped up in a great cough and thrash, fell off the bed, rose to all fours and then unsteadily erect.

Elijah D. Watson stared about him like a man emerging from his root cellar after a tornado, wondering if his loved ones have survived. Relieved to see me on my feet, he offered a loose salute and grin. “No man can say Lige Watson’s boy don’t stand up and take his punishment!”

Incredibly his stupid praise was solace. I could not know that one day soon I would vow to my shadow brother that when the time came, I would take his hidden musket from the rafters and blow that red-faced sweaty head clean off its shoulders.

The night that old Tap caught me in his truck-patch, Mama said, “I shall have to tell your father”-though not, as usual, until after she et her fill. She had scarcely spoken when her spouse came barging through the door in soiled silk neckerchief and muddy boots and cavalry greatcoat of soiled gray which stank of booze and horses when it rained. Minnie gave a tiny shriek like a rabbit pierced by the quick teeth of a fox. I shouted, waving her outside. Dark eyes round, the little girl was off her chair and scurrying for the door, which the man had left open despite cold blowing rain. When she faltered, whining at the darkness, I shoved her outside into the weather, and she tumbled and blew across the muddy yard toward Aunt Cindy’s cabin.

Papa was glaring at the door I had slammed closed. When Mama said coldly, “What is it, Mr. Watson?” he stared at his seditious wife in stupefaction. “Please, Mama,” I whispered. But she scarcely saw me, so intent was she upon her quarry.

Mama’s vice, too, had worsened with our fortunes: mean teasing had become cruel baiting. She would poke her husband, nip at him, dance back with a delighted cry of fear when he surged suddenly toward rage, then trip forth once more in trembling suspense, prolonging her delight, as if this were the sole ecstasy that her life with him had left her. No longer able to re-strain herself, she dared too much, exposing us all to a careening din that would leave the cabin shattered, deathly still. And always she insinuated that the young son was the true head of this accursed family, with responsibility to protect it from the rogue father.

“Have some turnips, Mr. Watson.” Mama spooned them up out of the pot and dumped them smartly onto a plate. “All we have to feed your little family, Mr. Watson.” In his life defeat, he scarcely heard her. “Nice fresh turnips from your neighbor’s garden.” she concluded neatly.

Papa lurched to his feet, overturning his chair. “Charity? From niggers?”

She clenched her cotton-pricked hard hands, then folded them beneath her apron-the very picture of sweet Miss Ellen Addison, she of the wasp waist and pretty primrose face and flying fingers. “You see, we are so famished in your household that your son was reduced to theft-” She stopped short. “Run,” she told me.

But Papa had caught hold of my arm. I put my other arm around him, trying to slip in under the blows, hugging the thick trunk of him with all my might, but he swung me so violently, hurling me away, that my boots came off the floor. My head struck a log butt in the wall, and the world was obliterated as my brain exploded. People talk about seeing stars. A single star is all I ever saw, bursting forth in blades of fire that flashed through blackness and oblivion.

Ghost voices, apparitions. Had night come? I did not know who or where I was, or why I lay inert. My brain was fixed in an iron vise of agony. I was unable to clear mist from my eyes or move a muscle lest I vomit.

Hiding behind slack eyelids, I half-watched, half-listened; the shadow figures did not know I had returned. The shrouded woman sat holding a hand. My hand? I felt nothing. I wondered if my brain might not be bleeding. The man, in grainy silhouette, was staring out his small window into darkness. He had scared himself. He spoke: “He is too hard-headed. There is no discipline he will submit to.” The woman did not bother to remind him that if the son was ungovernable, the father was to blame, having stoked a rebellious nature by these beatings. She said none of that. She said, “I see. It was his fault, then.” She put my hand down, having forgotten it. “What a low beast you have become, Elijah Watson. The boy works night and day to support your family, he has never done you harm, no, quite the contrary. It is you who do him harm, time and again.”

Hearing her voice speak up for me at last, my eyes welled; surprised, I had to struggle not to weep. “Are you so depraved with all your grog and fornication,” her voice continued, “that you would risk his life?”