Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

For a dirt-floor redneck, that vow of vengeance was an oath more sacred than six swears on the family Bible. A boy had backed him down and his son had witnessed it and the hands, too. No cracker could set aside that kind of insult far less forgive that dog name I had called him. These Tolens might lie low awhile, but revenge was the age-old way of mountain honor and they would never rest until they got it.

I worked my hoe a little while, to ease my breath and simmer down the field hands while I thought things over. Calvin was the driver on this crew when I was absent, and pretty soon he worked his way up alongside, eager to be seen imparting to the white boy the wisdom of his years at Ichetucknee. “Mist’ Edguh,” he warned, “From dis day on, doan you nevuh turn yo’ back no mo’ on one dem Tolens!”

Because he had brains and got things done, Calvin had been spoiled by William Myers even before he was a freedman. As Aunt Tab said, “Calvin knows his place but attaches too much importance to it.” I didn’t want to punish him for disrespect toward the overseeer because his warning showed loyalty to our family and took courage. Even so, he could not be permitted to disparage whites, even miserable po’ whites like these.

“Calvin,” I growled, “just you mind your business.” The others whooped at the boss nigger’s expense. I wasn’t laughing. I was remembering Clouds Creek and how I’d lost my chance. If I wasn’t very careful-if Jack wasn’t careful?-I might lose it here.

Walking home, I went straight to Great-Aunt Tabitha. Woodson on horseback had arrived there well ahead of me; I caught him slipping off the back stoop like a tomcat, leaving behind him like cat spit-up his twisted tale of how that shirtless boy had cursed him vilely, threatened him with a knife, and called him a dog name for good measure.

When I darkened her doorway, the old lady called out querulously from within, telling me to state my business. I told her I could not work another day with that lowlife cracker and his shiftless sons, who were letting our fine plantation go to rack and ruin.

“ Our plantation?” Her silence lasted longer than I cared for. When she finally came out onto the stoop, I feigned outrage, requesting her permission to leave Ichetucknee and go work for her friend and neighbor Captain Tom Getzen-a bluff, of course, since she prized my unpaid labor much too much to let me go. Or so I thought until this irascible old woman waved me away toward Getzen’s, then sat down in her rocking chair and fanned herself, taking no further notice of me whatsoever.

What a pity, she told Mama later, that such a capable young man should be so hotheaded and insubordinate. “ Like his father is what she meant,” Mama complained, bitterly disappointed that my surly behavior had spoiled all our prospects. Apparently Aunt Tab had mentioned her new plan to make me plantation manager, having heard from Colonel Robert at Clouds Creek that Cousin Edgar was hardworking and resourceful, an exceptional young farmer altogether. The Colonel had said not a single word against me, which put me forever in his debt and reawakened my hope of return. “Ichetucknee is a Watson plantation, Edgar! This could be our plantation and your own great chance!”-that was actually her hope and of course mine, too, until I could reclaim Clouds Creek. Well, said I, if Auntie Tab thinks me so capable, why don’t she take that job away from Tolens, give it to her kin? “Doesn’t,” said Mama, who would never relent in her lifelong ambition to raise her son as a well-spoken young gentleman.

“I’ll work hard for Captain Tom, Mama, make a good name for myself. Then I’ll come back.”

“Is that what you told Colonel Robert, too?” Mama was deathly afraid that Auntie Tab might hear bad stories from “other sources.” Plainly she had heard something herself. New tales, she said, had arrived from Edgefield only lately with the Herlongs, those strict, judgmental Methodists who were clearing woodland south of the plantation. It was Herlong darkies, I suspected, who had brought news of Tap Watson’s fate along with false rumors of my role in it, for Aunt Cindy had not spoken to me since. She looked right through me.

Mama then said that Cindy’s husband had been murdered, and that the Regulators might have had something to do with it; she confessed relief that at the time her spouse had been locked in jail. “Is that true?” I nodded. It was true. However, she persisted, it had been reported that Edgar Watson was the last person seen with Tap in the field where his body was found. “And now there is a rumor that you eliminated him as a witness to some dreadful deed before running away to Florida to escape punishment.” When I jumped up, demanding to know who was spreading such vicious rumors, she only hunched over her needlework, shaking her head. “I’m glad to hear you didn’t murder Tap,” she whispered. “I only hope you haven’t murdered someone else.”

Tap’s killers had taken advantage of my flight to make me the suspect in both deaths, and my own mother begrudged me the benefit of the doubt. Was that because of the scary beating I’d given my father? I don’t think so.

I think she begrudged me a mother’s faith in her son’s innocence for the same perverse reasons she had formerly begrudged me a mother’s protection against her drunken husband. Stoked with bile, I disdained to defend myself by telling my side of the story.

I rode four miles south each day to the Getzen plantation, a tract of good land where I worked hard for Captain Tom, and the following spring he leased me my own piece to sharecrop. He took his croppers, black as well as white, to Frazee’s in Fort White, told Josh Frazee, “Now these boys each get a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries this year.” So Old Man Frazee would set up the page: E. A. Watson for One Year-he’d write it down. Bought only coffee and such things because all our vegetables and grain and meat came from the farm and wild meat and berries from the woods around. The plantation supplied fertilizer and common stores and income would be split halfway.

Fort White was the county’s secondlargest town after Lake City. Phosphate, cotton, and pine timber, and turpentine and resin from the pine sap. The pine gum ran from April to November; after two or three years that tree would be cut for timber. The town had a sawmill, gristmills, cotton gins, and a cottonseed oil mill. Dirt streets and boardwalk, hitching posts and water troughs, kerosene lampposts, well-stocked stores, and a couple of saloons. In the center of town rose three stories’ worth of bright yellow hotel, the Sparkman Hotel, where in years to come, I would go to eat my lunch almost every Saturday, swap jokes and stories, and do most of the talking.

Riding home through the woods by different roads, I rode fast with a pistol in my hand, keeping a sharp eye on the trees. Probably those ridge runners were too smart to bushwhack Edgar Watson, since every man in the south county would know who pulled the trigger, but I could not assume they were that smart when drunk. And drunk they were one autumn day when our paths crossed outside the Collins store at Ichetucknee Springs and Old Man Woodson, swaying in the saddle, pointed his bony finger at my eyes like he was sighting down a musket barrel, reminding me how he aimed to take care of me in his own good time.

Sam Tolen was still more or less my friend, we drank shine and rassled, bird-hunted, went fishing. As for his brothers, Shifty Jim was born two-faced but could act real friendly and Mike was an honest, amiable kid who wanted to believe that his daddy’s threats against me were just fooling. But that morning I informed those boys that the day I decided their old man was serious about his threats-and I gave ’em a hard squint-that day might be his last on earth, maybe theirs, too.