Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Shyness had returned when we sat up. On a cowardly and idiotic impulse, I took refuge from our silence in one of Sammy’s jokes. “You know what Woodson Tolen would have said if his son brought you home and told him you were still a virgin?” A bit puzzled, trying to smile, she searched my eyes. Wary then, she freed her arm, reached for her shift and held it to her chest. I should have stopped right there but did not know how. “ ‘ Vir -gin?’ Ol’ Man Tolen would have hollered. ‘ Hell no, boy! Don’t matter how sweet and purty that gal is! No virgins ain’t allowed, not in our Tolen family!’ ” I grinned, desperate to enlist her. “ ‘But Daddy-!’ the boy said. ‘Nope,’ says Tolen. “If that li’l gal ain’t good enough for her own men, she sure ain’t good enough for our’n!”

How could I stoop to such crude mockery of our Christian pieties? How could this innocent creature understand far less forgive such insensitivity at her bravest and most undefended moment? “Turn away, please,” she entreated. Covering my bloodied loins-so suddenly my shame-I turned my back on my beloved. We dressed without a word.

I pled for forgiveness, tried to walk her home. “I know the way,” she said, looking straight ahead. I stopped then, watched her disappear down the woodland lane. But not long after that, Lem Collins reported, when she overheard some Tolen in the store, she had to stifle laughter and would not say why. I knew why and was delighted, and soon thereafter, she accepted my apology.

She was fifteen then, I twenty-one, but she turned sixteen before we wed. Gaily she sang out “Miss Charlie Collins” when giving her name for the marriage record at Lake City. It is there still: November 24 of 1878. Thanksgiving.

Though raised by Mama an Episcopalian, I attended the Methodist services that the Collins clan had started with the Herlongs in a small house on what was now called Herlong Lane. I prayed hard, frowning, right up front where those tale-bearers from Edgefield could behold me and perhaps bear witness in their letters home that Ring-Eye Lige’s son was often to be seen down on his knees seeking redemption. This was not true. I was offering my fervent thanks to the Great Whoever who had blessed my life with such a loving bride.

As the months passed, I would learn Charlie’s heart perhaps better than my own. I still hear her little cries as we escaped mortality in each other’s arms and fell back awed. Who are you, Mister? But I only shook my head, kissing her softly until finally she hushed up and began to touch me.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done,” I’d smile. “Mister is my Darling,” Charlie whispered.

She was not yet eighteen on the day she died, not ten months after we had wed, on the thirteenth day of a windy cold September. Her family came. Her brother Lee had hatred in his face. Her father stood stoic on the door sill. Her mother sobbed, “The poor child was too young.” By this she meant, She was destroyed by this man’s greedy lust. Thrust at me squalling was the murderous red thing expelled by her dear body, our dear body.

Her lips were parted, her gaze fixed. Where had she gone? The black strands of sweat-bedraggled hair spread on the pillow, the mortal scents and stains of my darling’s blood and urine on the coarse moss mattress we had sewn together-our bed of life where this red thing had been created, her bed of death. I would not look at it for fear that cold Jack Watson might seize it up and hurl it to the blood-sniffing dogs outside.

Still on my knees, I took Charlie’s cool hand, rested my brow on her cool wrist.

Edgar? Please? For Ann Mary’s sake? Give this little boy a name. (Mr. Curry Collins, father of the bride.)

Take it away.

The voices hushed me.

All of you go away. Please. Take it with you.

I lay down in my own corpse beside my murdered wife. They watched from the cabin door. Son? Get away from there. Now don’t go acting crazy!

Shouting, I drove them all out of our cabin.

Holding cold hands, we stared upward at the cedar roof where I once patched that faraway blue sky. Together we prayed that I might go wherever she might be going. We did not stir. Night fell. I turned cold beside her. For two days I lay amongst my dead: the Widow Cloud, Cloud’s Creek, South Carolina.

At daybreak, I carved her cross; that same day, I made her coffin. Our own ceremony would be her memorial, and she would lie in our own ground beside our cabin. No. In the end, the families came and shamed me. They whispered at the graying face and melancholy scent. Nobody had closed her eyes nor crossed her arms nor even bathed her. Her stepbrother and minister and my friend J. C. Robarts bent a wayward arm, forcing it to join the rest of her within the coffin. “It’s not a chicken wing,” I growled. His face went mushy with resentment. Edgar, don’t. We loved her, too. Nobody’s trying to hurt Cousin Ann Mary.

Charlie, I said. Ann Mary Collins was the dead girl who went away nailed up in my pine box, under black crepe, to be bounced and thrown about in a black cart. Every jolt hurt me. I ran after them half naked in the cold, yelling at them to go slow and be more careful. I walked a little ways but being barefoot fell behind and finally did not follow.

In a dream her coffin is lowered into a deep pit in the white clay earth of Bethel churchyard. It is left uncovered. I can see inside. The fair skin which shivered at my touch purples and softens. Shadowed eyes sunk back, grayed small teeth on blue-gray lip, dead hair lank over the skull. She no longer knows me.

Cousin Selden drifts among the mourners, feathers rotting. He is rotting, too. I cry, “Why have you come? What do you want of me?”

Night after night, Charlie returns.

Wandering the woods roads under sleepless stars, I walk and walk, heart dead as the white clay.

Charlie my Darling, gone and lost forever. I swear a terrible revenge but upon whom?

I moved unseeing through the ache of days. In the evening, I drank rotgut for the pain until I sank to the dirt floor, only to come to in the dark hours and drink more. I reeled into the day in mighty sickness, doing myself harm in violent labor with sharp careless tools, banging and wrenching, boiling off my poisons. But I was cursed with a mule’s constitution and by nightfall had regained the will to drink.

On the Sabbaths I rode to the crossroads taverns, slapped shoulders, drew a crowd of men and made ’em laugh. Usually I was still laughing when I picked a fight “just for the fun.” Pretty soon, no man would drink with Edgar Watson, and the grog shops drove me out, and I rode too far away from home to return in time for work on Monday morning. All across the northern counties, a man I no longer knew earned a bad name as a crazy-wild mean skunk, quick to pull a knife. When Watson barged into the tavern, the fun was over. More than once, when he refused to leave, he was knocked over the head and dragged into the road and kicked bloody in the public mud.

All the while I was feverish with longing. By early spring, I was visiting Lake City’s colored whores with their big soft mouths and round high rumps and candied tongues. Out of respect for my lost bride and common decency, I never took one from the front, only rode her from behind, slamming against that rubbery hind end, forcing her forward till her back bowed and her neck twisted, her head jammed against the wall. At the end, I rammed with all my strength- a-gain, a-gain, a-gain!- until she yelped in faked abandon or in fear or honest pain, it made no difference. A fleeting spasm, thin as cloud mist crossing a high sun, before I fell off, dull and dirtied, having failed once more to escape into obliteration.