Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Amongst my dead -those words would ever haunt me.

Squire Robert B. Watson was a modern farmer who had outgrown the sorceries of our Border ancestors, the potions, charms, and incantations for good crops. He taught me theories and methods of breeding livestock (some of them used formerly in breeding slaves, he commented, without further remark), having succeeded with hogs and cattle, horses, mules-everything, in fact, but sheep, which the Piedmont settlers had detested since old drover days when their immigrant Highlands ancestors moved south along the Appalachians. With the canny brain of the wild sheep long since bred out of them, these dim creatures had fallen prey to wolves and panthers and even to the berry-grubbing bears; suffocating in their dirty wool, they died prodigiously in the damp heat of Carolina summer before their husbandry was finally abandoned.

The merry hogs, on the other hand, took joyfully to the land, rooting through the woodlands as if born to it. Escaped hogs resisted predators, reverting quickly to the razorbacked pugnacity of the wild boar; they grew huge, black, and hard-bristled, with curled tusks. “Some of our ‘po’ whites’ turn feral, too.” The Colonel winked, aware of my hard feelings about Z. P. Claxton and the death of Joseph. But unlike feral humans, he continued, wild hogs could be baited in and tamed in pens, rounding off their rangy lines in a few generations and turning pink beneath their bristles, until only the snouts and curly tails and squinty little eyes remained the same.

That first year, when a sow farrowed toward Christmas, I helped the Colonel with the deliveries, tugging each piglet by the shoulders to work it free, and he showed me how to clean off the shining membranes which enclosed the heads, then pump the slimy little legs to get them going. Finally the sow would heave a sigh and push her runt out in a bloody blurt of afterbirth. Since he did not trust this sow not to eat her litter, he promised me a half dozen shoats if I would rear the lot. “For a while you’ll have to cook their feed,” he said, “raise them by hand.”

“If I can catch them!” Idiotically I laughed aloud, startling us both with my new happiness. Seeing my overjoyed face, the Colonel grinned. “First time I’ve ever seen you smile.” The Colonel chuckled kindly along with me. He had almost forgotten, he said, how much he had enjoyed pigs as a boy. “You don’t ‘catch’ a pig, Edgar. You ‘fetch’ it.” As he spoke, Colonel Robert petted the six shoats. Without affection, he explained, they grew poorly and became sluggish, and their curly tails would droop like dying flowers. In a few weeks, if cared for properly, my gang of shoats should be racing around with grunts and squeals, playing tag and mauling one another, much like puppies. “Plenty of water helps ’em gobble up their food so they can grow.” He smiled. “No pig under one hundred pounds can call itself a hog, so they’re in a hurry.” I was in a hurry, too, though for what I did not know. I could hardly wait!

In response to all my earnest questions, Colonel Robert spoke to a young cousin as one farmer to another, evoking great antebellum days when even rich Tidewater planters had been attracted to the short-staple cotton agriculture here in the Piedmont; before the War, Edgefield had shipped more cotton bales than any district in the state. But erosion had leached out the clay soil, and problems had grown with fluctuations in the cotton prices and rising competition from the states along the southern Mississippi. With the onset of the War and the loss of plentiful unpaid labor, “King Cotton” was deposed for good.

These days, despite Reconstruction, said the Colonel, Clouds Creek was stirring back to life. Like his father and grandfather before him, he sold off timber from his wooded lands, grew tobacco, corn, and rice, and was trying grain crops-oats, wheat, rye, and barley. In fact, he said, the Watsons were planting all their former crops except for cotton. He had also made a reputation for fine hogs and cattle, and in this year of my return was putting in small orchards; he hoped to become the first Carolina planter ever to ship peaches outside the state. Listening proudly to my kinsman, I dared hope that my own luck had turned, that the worst of my life was behind me, that there was a future at Clouds Creek for Edgar Artemas Watson.

I started simply with a few chicks and ducklings, borrowing a horse to plow a single meadow in which I planted corn by hand, gold kernel after kernel, row after precious row. Thin fresh green lines, weak and broken at first, came forth mysteriously and rose in a green haze; for a while, I cherished each and every plant among the hundreds, even the weak ones I would later weed away. I felt ingrown in this dark soil, as the Artemas Plantation’s heir, putting down soft tendrils like a native plant of our old land. I grew to love the Clouds Creek earth, and in summer I made strange love to it in the soft evenings, lying down upon it naked as the soil gave off the gathered heat of the long day.

Not until I knew the Colonel better did I inquire about my father’s career as a soldier. Aware that I needed the truth, the Colonel did not dodge the question but gave me a terse answer, reporting precisely what his uncle Tillman had told him-that Elijah D. had never hesitated to seek privilege or favor from higher-ranking kin and never failed to shun responsibility of every kind, including combat. Early in the War, Uncle Tillman had dismissed him from the Edgefield Volunteers, and within that year, Selden Tilghman had him transferred from the Nineteenth Cavalry to an infantry company of half-trained soldiers, due to general dereliction of his duties. The alternative had been courts martial and imprisonment.

The Honorable Tillman Watson (although illiterate, Mama said) was now a state senator and a vice president of the Edgefield Agricultural Society. Like Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun, he was an old Borderer in his appearance, being tall and rangy, with an imposing forehead and fierce deepset eyes sunk back beneath heavy black brows in a long bony face. Though he had been kind enough during my childhood, Great-Uncle Tillman shunned me now to spare himself the effort of concealing his dislike of my father. As a prosperous man, it pained him, too, to see a ragged boy working his late brother’s plantation all alone in the forlorn hope that he might one day earn it back.

As for the other Clouds Creek kin, they were civil but not hospitable, being similarly at pains to separate themselves from “the Bad Elijah.” Though I never complained about my solitude, the Colonel worried that living alone in that damp and decrepit house, young Cousin Edgar might sicken or go mad. I was too proud to tell him how much I preferred solitude to the terror of existence under my father’s roof.

“I wish you had known your grandfather,” Colonel Robert was saying, avoiding my eye so as not to embarrass us both. “A kind and gentle man and well-respected planter until whiskey took him.” Though he made no mention of my father, his keen glance was a warning that alcoholic spirits might be the ruin of my lineage. “I shall assist you if you deserve that, Edgar, and not otherwise.” He said this harshly. No thanks being expected, I kept still.

Another day, I asked him if he knew what had become of Selden Tilghman. He considered the hands clasped on his knee before muttering what he had heard, that “ruffians without civil authority” had given Colonel Tilghman one hundred strokes of the lash, then tarred and feathered him. In a hoary medieval clamor of tin pots, cat-calls, and chaotic drumming, he’d been ridden backwards on a pole in an old-fashioned “rogue’s march,” after which he’d been dumped into a hog wallow at Hamburg, the despised Republican settlement on the Savannah River across from Augusta, Georgia. Tilghman had regained consciousness before hogs found him and had crawled away-all that was rumor. Nothing had been heard about him since.