Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, Hurrah!

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that flies the single star!

When I sang out the cornet part ( buppa-ba-buppa-ba-boo, ba-buppa-ba-buppa ba-buppa ba-boo! ), Lem hollered to the crowd that his friend Ed might be the finest kind of farmer but his singing voice was a greav-ious insult to Southern rights and maybe our blue flag, too. He did his best to haul me off that table, with the whole room cat-calling and laughing, the singer included. But when I caught Lem with a boot swipe to the mouth, he grabbed my heel, and my momentum swung me off the table in a whirl of walls and faces, yells and smoke, and the oak floor struck me so hard that I couldn’t place the pain; when I tried to jump up, cursing and laughing, I collapsed and fainted. I was carted home in a wagon, both knees broken.

For half a year while my fields went to hell, I lay at the mercy of the women, having gone off alcohol the hard way. When I could concentrate, I read a little in my tattered History of Greece, but most of those long days in the cabin I listened to the mice and crickets and suffered the tuneless whistling of Sam Frank Tolen, who never failed to grin in at the door when he happened by.

I had hardly recovered and resumed work at Getzen’s when Lem Collins shot the farrier in the blacksmith shop in back of his late daddy’s store at Ichetucknee. This man Hayes thought Lem was fooling with his wife and he was right. When the culprit fled out the window, the blacksmith hollered after him that he would tear his head off, and Lem being somewhat slightly built like most Collins men, it stood to reason that a feller twice his size who could rassle any plowhorse to a standstill would fulfill that vow with no trouble at all.

I knew John Hayes. John Hayes meant business. I said, “Lem, you’d better leave this county.” “Hell, no!” said Lem. “I love her, Ed!” “Well then,” said I, “you haven’t got much choice.” “Gosh,” Lem said, “you mean that I should kill him?” “No, no, Lem! I only meant you might start thinking along the lines of self-defense, because John Hayes has sworn he means to kill you so he’d have only himself to blame if you took precautions.” I never meant to stoke Lem up, only to cool his passions for his own good: the Lem I knew was not cut out for mayhem.

Unfortunately, the drunken Lem who pulled me off the table at O’Brien, the horny Lem who had fallen so hard for this little Mrs. Hayes-this Lem flat refused to give her up. Anticipating her blessing in his deed, he screwed up his courage with hard drink and swiped my shotgun and went over to Hayes’s place, where he hollered from the yard that he’d come to speak with “the lady of the house.” When the man of the house kicked his chair back and came roaring out, he was met as he came off his stoop by a fatal charge of buckshot from Lem Collins-a clear case of self-defense except to those who did not see it quite that way.

Lem’s beloved, Mrs. Prudence Hayes, told the grand jury she had no idea why Lemuel P. Collins would wish to murder her dear departed John. If the jurors wanted her opinion, sobbed the little widow, looking the accused straight in the eye, what this man deserved was a good hanging. Repeated those cruel words with her hand on the Bible and her sweet little honeypot keeping its own counsel under her widow’s weeds. “I aim to see justice done,” she cried, “and who can blame me?” In need of just a little more of that nice limelight, his sweet Prue pointed a trembling finger at poor Lem. Hadn’t this same drunken brute come through her window on previous occasions, bent on God knows what? My goodness, woman! When? Why, sir, only last week, may it please Yer Honor!

Sweet Prue having overplayed her hand, the grand jury was tempted to indict two lovebirds for the price of one. But even knowing that his darling had betrayed him, Lem remained a stiff and starchy Collins, too well brought up to testify against a tiny widow. The jury being generally agreed that there was understandable emotion behind the death threat made by the deceased, my friend was indicted for murder in the first degree.

As cash poor as most families in our section, the Collinses gave up hundreds of acres of good land plus a large loan from Cousin Laura to make the $20,000 bond for Lem’s release. Having no case worthy of the name, Lem jumped bail and lit out for Georgia. Some of the debt was eventually paid off by the sheriff ’s auction sale of Collins land, but Laura Myers would never recover a penny. Kind Laura forgave this cheerfully enough but her husband and mother did not, and the situation created difficulties in the family which were very hard on the newlyweds, Billy and Minnie.

In short, Lem Collins brought about a fatal downturn in his family’s fortunes. Naturally anxious to ease his guilt by transferring responsibility, he wrote a letter to his brother Billy concerning the murder weapon he claimed Edgar had given him, along with some very bad advice. I don’t know just what Lem said or what Billy repeated, but pretty soon the death of Hayes was blamed on E. A. Watson. There was even a rumor that Ed Watson went along with Lem and did his shooting for him.

Though my neighbors gave me funny looks, only Fat Sam had the gall to bring it up. “Some fellers been tellin me lately, Ed, how it might been you behind the killin of our farrier. Course I told ’em straight off you was clean as a baby’s bottom. ‘Why hell, no, boys!’ says I. ‘There weren’t no money in it! Ed never had no damn motive at all!’ ” Sam gave me that big dirty wink of his but stopped chuckling quick when he saw my expression. “Only jokin, Ed,” said Sammy Tolen.

Only joking, Ed. As the saying goes, it’s a damned good thing there’s enough bad luck to go around because otherwise I’d have had no luck at all. Here I was, still in my twenties, and for the second time in my young life, my reputation was buried deep in mud, and my prospects, too.

I think it must have been about this time that my whole outlook began to change. I was learning the hard way that I had to make my own luck in this life if I aimed to survive. And so, having no choice about it, I grew hard, as a shrub battered by wind grows gnarled and woody.

I was twenty-nine when, in 1884, I married a schoolteacher, Jane Susan Dyal. Jane was a lady even by my mother’s standards, well-educated and softspoken and pleasant in appearance, though no longer young. If not a creature of passion like my lost Charlie, she was a kind, sensible person, glad of my attentions and not offended by coarse, manly needs, having missed a maiden lady’s fate by a cunt whisker.

Goodwife Jane (I called her Mandy) would soon present me with a lovely baby girl. We named her Carrie. Two years later came a boy, named Edward Elijah for good luck after the rich Old Squire at Clouds Creek. As if her own little smellers weren’t enough, Mandy worried about Sonborn, as I referred to Charlie’s child on those rare occasions when I felt obliged to acknowledge his existence. Since I had refused to ride eight miles to Lake City simply to name him, he remained “Son Born” in the county register and legally, perhaps, did not exist at all; in truth I had not laid eyes on him since the bloody hour of his birth eight years before. I knew, of course, that his mother’s parents had taken him, and I also knew because Mandy told me that those folks were old and pretty well worn out. Lately Charlie’s mother had been poorly, Mandy added, and Old Man Curry had trouble enough tending his wife and chickens without taking care of a young grandson, too.

My wife meant well but Sonborn was not her business; I notified her she was not to speak of him again. But in the safety of the dark, on our night pillow, she would murmur in my ear, stroking my head and whispering how wonderful it might be, not only for the little boy but for his father. From Minnie she knew something of our family past, and she dared to hint that turning my back on my firstborn might have reopened an old wound inflicted by those long dark years of boyhood. I shouted at her to bluff her back before she said what she said next, that my refusal to acknowledge Charlie’s child could only breed guilt and regret. Naturally I became furious, since what she said was true.