Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

The little house was swollen with harsh groans and gasping. The mudbooted mound that was the father lay quaking by the wall. Minnie crept forth but remained crouched behind the chair. Across the yard, Aunt Cindy would have covered Lalie’s ears, protecting her from the awful sounds of Mist’ Edgar’s final moments. And my mother? How was it I felt ashamed to face my mother? How could that be? When I lowered the stick, starting to tremble, she said softly, “Oh, how dare you, Edgar.” It was not a question. Quieting her heart, she pressed her fingers to her chest. She was very pale but her eyes fairly glittered. “How dare you,” she said.

I felt hatred and I felt like weeping. Lightly, I tapped the tip of the extended stick on the floor between us, marking a boundary she was not to cross. She must have been looking straight into Jack’s eyes, and his expression scared her in a way her husband never had, even in violence. “Your own parent,” she finished weakly.

“ ‘How dare you.’ ” I mimicked her disbelief. “I reckon you think it’s me who deserved that beating.”

Not once had she tried to intervene. Worse, I had glimpsed her transport, her clenched exultation in my act. I thrust the stick at her. “Your turn,” I told her with a harsh contempt I could no longer hide. She stared at the stick, then at the prostrate man, coughing and moaning. The stick fell to the floor between us.

I pushed my few things into a sack, shoved his hickory through the knot of this poor bindle, and departed my parents’ house for good. I passed those black folks standing in the yard without a word-instinctively, for their own safety, for I had grown up suddenly in the past hour and knew who my father was. Having heard those blows and cries, they were astonished when I emerged alive, but except for a little cry from Lalie, they kept silent. Only Minnie trailed me, sobbing her plea that I must not forsake her. You always forsook me, I thought, but did not say it. I kept on going down the road. As the last houses fell behind me, I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.

I walked all night to reach Clouds Creek, where I slept in a corner of Grandfather Artemas’s abandoned house. That afternoon, I paid a call on Colonel Robert Briggs Watson, the late Elijah Junior’s son and heir. Colonel Robert’s large house with its pecans and magnolias, built early in the century on the east side of the Ridge spring by the Old Squire, was set off from the road and its own fields by a wall of crenellated brick which let a listless breeze pass through in summer. The old wood house was quaking with the hound rumpus inside, so eager were his dogs to challenge strangers.

R. B. Watson appeared on his vine-shrouded veranda in his shirtsleeves. A man of a comfortable kind of heft, he was less handsome than steadfast in his appearance, being calm and courtly and well-tempered by the weathers. Unlike most men of Edgefield District, he kept his silvered hair cropped short, and his clothes looked fresh even with dirt on them-just the opposite of his first cousin Elijah D., whose clothes revealed the ingrained grime of unclean habits (not to be ousted from his clothes “wid lye ner dynermite,” as Aunt Cindy once complained to her Mis Ellen-as close as Cindy ever came to revealing her disapproval of Mis Ellen’s husband).

Colonel Robert was a decorated soldier who had ridden home from Appomattox Courthouse to manage the family properties around Clouds Creek. Taciturn, he listened as I asked permission to live in the old Artemas house and sharecrop its fallow land. More intent on me than on my question, he nodded vaguely, inviting me inside for a drink of water, asking politely how my mother might be faring. “You remember Edgar, don’t you, Lucy?” he inquired of his wife. “I do,” she answered pleasantly enough although not pleased to see me. What do you want here? her expression said.

I did not discuss my rupture with my father. I told them about my earnest hope to restore my grandfather’s lineage here in Clouds Creek. He said he would think about it and he did. A day later, he put aside the warnings of his kinsmen and gave “Cousin Ellen’s boy” permission to sharecrop the Artemas tract and occupy his grandfather’s old house, patching it up as best he could.

As a Clouds Creek Presbyterian, Colonel Robert had faith that whatever satisfaction might be found in life was of a man’s own making, and that no good would ever come from coddling. On the other hand, he betrayed distress that his father, Elijah Junior, had acquired the Artemas tract through plain hard dealing. While warning me that I would be held to a strict standard, he also looked for small ways to encourage me, bringing old blankets, a new kerosene lantern, basic tools and rough provisions, and a Bible. He invited me to come to Sunday dinner. “After church,” Cousin Lucy called, for church attendance was required to receive the blessing of her fine ham and sweet pudding.

And so, most Sundays after church, I dined at Colonel Robert’s house, where I enjoyed browsing in the Watson Bible with its list of births and deaths, and also in the Carolina histories and the browned warm-smelling pages of the Shakespeare folios brought into the family by my great-grandmother, the former Chloe Wimberley, daughter of James Wimberley, one of George Washington’s generals in the Revolution; the leather volumes, soiled by mold and mice, had turned up in Grandfather Artemas’s falling house.

“Those might be yours one day,” the Colonel said, filling my heart with the rare joy of heritage and belonging. That I might study in the evenings, he kept me supplied with whale oil for my lamp.

The cold dusk of early Piedmont spring-the naked trees, the urgent ringing of spring peepers-hurt my heart; I was lonely all that April in that empty house. Even so, I was resolute, often content. The return to Clouds Creek had bathed and healed my spirit. These fertile meadows, the clear running water and soft loamy air, filled me with well-being, as if the old roots ruptured and exposed in our family’s loss of this plantation had been covered over with good soil and were feeling their way back into the earth. Soon the woodland twigs came into leaf, with redbud and dogwood and

the mountain laurel opening cool blossoms. Then spring birdsong was gone as summer silence descended with the heat, and young redbirds dozed in the thick greens that would shrivel by late summer in the fire colors of the Piedmont autumn. In the old century, the blood red of these swamp maples, the oak russets, the hickory yellows and pale golds had hidden marauding Cherokees. Day after day, working my upland fields, I dwelled in reveries and plans for this home earth, painfully homesick although I had come home.

Somehow I had always imagined that Clouds Creek had been named for its cloud reflections, the soft cumulus passing over on west winds from the Appalachians. Colonel Robert told me that the name came from a trader, Isaac Cloud, whose wife had survived to tell their bloody tale. In May of 1751, she wrote, two Cherokees came to their cabin just at dark. Given supper and tobacco, the Indians engaged the trader in friendly banter until near midnight, when all “dropt into Sleep. And when the Cocks began to Crow, they came to the Bed and shot my Husband through the Head. And a young Man lying upon the Floor was shot in the same Minute. And thinking the Bullet had gone through [my head], one struck me with a Tomahawk… I lying still, they supposed I was dead, and one of them went and killed both my Children; and then they came and took the Blankets from us & plunder’d the House of all that was valuable and went off. And in that bad condition I have lain two days amongst my dead.”