Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Yessir. I will be back, I promise. I aim to kill you, Papa.”

Crossing the still courtroom, I heard Lige Watson’s howl of woe as the truth of his lost life fell down upon him.

From the courthouse terrace, I stared at my home country-the first time I’d really looked at it since Corporal E. D. Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers had borne me up these steps in the first year of the War. The terrace was not so high above the square as I remembered, and its noble prospect of blue mountains appeared sadly diminished. The countryside looked commonplace and the world small because my heart and hope had shrunken down to nothing.

The hostler had raised the alarm and people in the square were pointing as I ran down the steps and mounted. Tap was still out in the field. He, too, must have heard I was a fugitive, must imagine now that I was riding out to kill him. Having no place to run, he only straightened as the big horse came down on him. Slowly he laid down his hoe and sack and removed his lumpy hat to await the rider.

“I done jus’ like you tole me, Mist’ Edguh.” His voice was dull and dead. “I ain’t spoked to nobody about nothin, nosuh.” He was trembling.

Behind me, a shroud of winter dust arose from the hooves of horses. I said, “All the same, you know too much. They will be coming.” I told him he must find Lulalie, hide till nightfall, then depart. I handed him all the money left in the Colonel’s packet. “Buy a mule,” I said. They should slip away at dark, head for Augusta, catch up with the womenfolk on their way to Fort White, Florida.

Tap refused the money. “Nosuh, Mist’ Edguh. Dis yere Carolina country is mah home. I ain’t done nothin wrong so I ain’t goin. Trus’ in de Lord! Dass what Preacher Simkins tole ’em at our church when dem riders come for him. Dem white men listened, den dey went on home.”

“This kind won’t listen, Tap. They won’t even ask.” But Tap had always known better so he never heard me. He was watching the dust over the town. “I b’lieve dey comin. You bes get goin. Tell dat woman, please, dat Lalie and me be waitin on her when she get ready to come home.”

“God help you, Tap,” I said, turning the horse.

Avoiding the main roads, I headed south and west and forded the Savannah River near the fall line early next morning. When the roan clambered up the Georgia bank, I turned in the saddle to gaze back. I had left my native Carolina, and everywhere ahead was unknown country.

I caught up with the women on the old Woodpecker Trail down west of the Great Okefenokee. Rode up alongside the wagons on a warm afternoon as if joining them had been my plan right from the start. Those poor females looked relieved, Aunt Cindy, too, but seeing that roan horse made them uneasy. Perhaps because I was unsmiling and untalkative, they never asked about Job’s ring-eyed owner and I never offered to explain, not then, not later, having no wish to lay open the wound of my lost life at Clouds Creek, and the great waste of it. On that cold afternoon, I hitched the roan to the tailgate of the wagon and crawled inside amongst their bedding and slept straight through until early the next morning.

Seeing my head poke out, Aunt Cindy whooped; she fixed me a big dish of scraps before pressing me about her little family. How was her sweet Lalie getting on? Had that fool Tap sent word?

I could scarcely look her in the eye. The truth would worry the poor woman to distraction, and in the end, a lie-that Tap and Lulalie were on their way to join us-would be still worse. Finally I said that, living at Clouds Creek, I had scarcely seen them. In my gut I knew that Tap was done for, and as for Lalie, who knew what had become of her? Aunt Cindy soon saw that behind my stiff smile and tough manner, my heart was crippled, and she gave me a queer look, but it was not her place to question me too closely so she didn’t.

On the twelfth of March of 1871, we crossed over into Florida. With two state lines behind me, I was breathing easier. Only now did I introduce myself to my fellow pioneers-Edgar A. Watson, overseer of the Artemas Plantation at Clouds Creek, South Carolina, at your service, sir. Nobody knew quite what to make of this husky youth who was no boy but not a man yet either. What he was, in truth, was a fugitive from his own land and rightful heritage, angry and dangerous as a gut-shot bear.

The last leg of the journey was by slow barge south to Branford Landing on the Suwannee River, “far, far away, that’s where my heart is turning ever, that’s where the old folks stay.” That old song misted my eyes with upwellings of loss. Curled in my nest in the warm tar-smelling hemp hawsers on the bow, I wallowed in tender emotions.

Try as I would to find relief in my escape from the cold rain and mud of Piedmont winter with its meager food and numbing drudgery, nothing seemed to ease the ache of longing. The farther I traveled from where I belonged, the more unjust my exile seemed. I reviled my misbegotten father, reveling in fantasies of a dire patricide. From Cousin Selden’s Iliad I had memorized a passage about the great rage of revenge which “swirls like smoke within our heart, and becomes in our madness a thing more sweet than the dripping of honey.” That fury had not abated, nor the will to vengeance, which chewed like a black rat at my lungs. My one consolation was knowing that justice would be done, that one day “in my madness,” I would deprive my father of his raw red life.

Before my eyes daily as we sailed way down upon the Suwannee River were visions of spring furrows at Clouds Creek, the warmed earth opened up behind the plow; of wildflowered meadows, cool and verdant, and airy open woods along the shaded creeks, winding southeast to the Edisto. That spring landscape turned forever and away in my mind’s eye, changing softly into the gold greens of upland summer in that lost land where I was born, the country of my forefathers, the heart of home. Clouds Creek-my earth-was the wellspring and the source of Edgar Watson, all the Eden he had ever wished or hoped to find.

Then reverie dissolved, leaving cold sweat like a dank swamp mist on my skin. I stared about me at the undiscovered country on both sides of the wild river, a howling waste of dark riverine forest and rank coarse savanna where the eternal seasons passed unchanged. Mourning my sprightly hogs, my sturdy pens, brooding about the weeds and hard sharp briar that all too soon would creep over my farmland, returning it to the oldfield desolation in which I’d found it, I sat stunned by melancholy. When the pain and rage burst from my mouth, my awful squawk silenced every soul on that slow barge.

Deaf to my cry (out of embarrassment), my mother and sister smiled sweetly; they tatted and chattered. Still ignorant of what had taken place at Edgefield, they were afraid of Edgar’s darkness, and all the while that stern black woman awaited me, confident I would spit up evil when the time came. Unwilling to meet her suspicious eye, I set my jaw and glared fixedly at the forests of the wild Suwannee (Creek Indian for “Echo River,” said the bargeman).

All up and down the whole Creation

Sadly I roam

Still longing for the old plantation

And for the old folks at home.

Once I’d hummed it, that song became epidemic on the barge; everyone hummed, whistled, and sang it, and just when it seemed it might die out, I would start over by mistake, unable to drive its plaint out of my head. Oh how I sickened of that song and self-pity, and of grief-rotted Edgar, too, and of foul nightmares about the Owl-Man, who in my dreams never appeared as Cousin Selden.