Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“So long as he goes far enough and never comes back.” I pushed past her and sat down on the porch in Billy’s rocker to await her husband.

Darkness seeped in from the woods. Hunched in the cold, I suffered a kind of rigor mortis of the spirit. Billy would not be coming home, not with Job hobbled out there by the road. Maybe his wife had begged him to hide and maybe I was relieved I would not have to take revenge-I was too weary. I only knew that I was destitute as ever, still looking for a place where I might prosper.

I rose and went in to Minnie where she was sniveling amongst the crockery; she snatched her baby Julian from the floor as if fearing I might step on him. I told her to tell my friend Will Cox that he could have my cabin, being the one man I could trust to give it back. Knowing we might never meet again and feeling doomed, I took my frightened sister in my arms and gave her a gentle hug, even kissed her brow-the first time ever. Bursting into tears, she hugged me back and kissed me, too, got my face all wet and sticky with the baby’s clabber, which she had been eating up for her own poor supper.

Minnie’s breath was sour from her frightened hours. “Oh Edgar, please don’t harm my Billy. You are a good man, deep in your heart, and we won’t forget you.”

“Don’t,” I growled, “because I aim to be back.”

I rode on home. Dismounting at a little distance, I circled in through the silent pines, making no sound on the needle ground, eye peeled for any trap. Mandy had the wagon packed and I backed the big roan into the traces, hitching the gray filly to the back of the wagon while she piled the children in under our blankets. Sliding the loaded shotgun under the seat, I climbed up and snapped the reins- Gid ’yap !-and Job the Younger kicked the wagon boards a lick that rang off through the trees. I talked him down into a good fast-farting trot.

Pale-faced Sonborn sat up straight, peering back along the ghostly lanes. As if awakened from a bad dream, he cried, “Where are we going?” Mandy hushed him. My wife looked drawn and fearful, which she was. The poor thing thought she was leaving her life behind her, which she was. She thought that armed men might come after us-quite likely, too-and that our children might be harmed. But never once did she complain, nor ease her nerves by fraying mine with foolish questions. “Miss Jane S. Dyal from Deland,” as she had bravely dubbed herself when we first met, was a very good young woman who forgave her husband, though she knew he had named that pretty filly for his own lost love and was dead broke and on the run with no known destination.

Under the moon, the hooves thumped soft as heartbeats on the white clay track, which flowed like a silver creek through the black pines. So quiet was our passing that surely an owl heard little Carrie’s pretty sighs or Elijah Edward’s greedy suckling at the breast. A solitary light still burned when we passed Herlong’s, where the dogs were barking; the silhouette darkening that window was righteous Dan Herlong who had blackened my name with his tales from South Carolina. I’ll be back, I promised when the figure vanished and the light was snuffed. Had Herlong heard the wagon wheels? Had he sensed something out there in the dark that frightened him?

At the road I turned the wagon north, taking the night roads north and west under frozen stars which shone on the unknown land where we were going.

Toward dawn, I pulled the wagon off into the woods and picketed the horse beside a little branch. We slept all day, taking turns on watch, and at dusk we ate a small pot of cold hominy. That night we crossed the county line and traveled all night past Live Oak and Suwannee Springs. Beyond the Suwannee River was new country, but taking no chances with my evil luck, I moved through darkness by the light of the half moon until the Georgia border was behind us.

From Valdosta, the way west through chilling rains crossed the Flint River and the Chattahoochee and finally the great Mississippi, crossing from Vicksburg on the ferry to Louisiana, and from there north and west again to the Arkansas Territory, where I had heard that a man plagued by the law might catch his breath.

Already the season had turned cold, numbing our spirits. The Indian Nations was no place to arrive as November was setting in, with its promise of cold and hungry misery for little children, and so I was lucky to find harvest work for a horse and wagon on a late cotton crop in Arkansas. There we wintered. I rented a small farm to make a pea crop before heading westward after summer harvest. In early autumn of ’88, I reached Fort Smith and crossed the line into the Indian Nations, Oklahoma Territory.

This hill country of plateaus and river buttes had been assigned to the Cherokees and Creeks, with a few Florida Seminoles thrown in. Some of these Indians still had the slaves they took west with ’em back in the thirties, when Andy Jackson ran these tribes out of the East. Stray blacks had drifted out this way after the War, and a lot more showed up after ’76, when Reconstruction was finally put a stop to. Plenty of Southern cracker boys and some hard Yankees, too, because the local government was Northern even if most folks were Southern-Texas, Missouri, Mississippi. In short, all breeds of the human animal were mingled here in various shades of mud, like the watercolors in my sister’s little paintbox back at Edgefield Court House, and every last man with a cock between his legs considered himself your equal if not better, since any stranger was likely on the dodge or worse. The buffalo soldiers with Comanche scalps strung on their belts were maybe the most arrogant of all. I kept an eye out for my shadow brother, asked a few questions, and these boys told me that Corporal Jack Watson, having taken care of the local white ladies to the best of his abilities, had been mustered out and gone back east, headed for Georgia.

Under the bluffs out of the prairie winds, the Canadian River country had good alluvial soil down in the bottoms. Neither whites nor blacks could own Indian land, but a woman shacked up with an Indian leased me a good field in the Cherokee territory. This female became Mandy’s best friend in the Nations, making a fine show of generosity to our small children when we first arrived and didn’t know a soul amongst our neighbors. I will grant she was big-hearted in her way, with her door wide open to strangers and her person, too.

By her own account, Mrs. Myra Maybelle Reed preferred male company to that of the rough women of the Territory. She made an exception of my Mandy, a well-educated lady whose friendship improved Maybelle’s repute, fallen low due to her bedtime predilection for bad Indians and breeds.

Maybelle’s first husband was Jim Reed, who rode with Quantrill, the James boys, and the Youngers during the bloody Border Wars between Kansas and Missouri. Like a lot of armed riders who passed themselves off as guerrilla fighters, Reed was a killer by inclination and by trade who only joined up with Will Quantrill when those men turned outlaw. After the War, he gambled and raced horses for some years around Fort Smith, joined in armed robberies, shot a bystander while holding up the Austin-San Antonio stage, and generally made a nuisance of himself until the early seventies, when a former partner with an eye to the reward deprived him of his life when he wasn’t looking.

The Younger boys were the wild seed of the richest slaveowner in Jackson County, Missouri, who happened to be a family friend of Maybelle’s daddy, Judge John Shirley. She was never Cole Younger’s lady friend the way she claimed, but later in life, her daughter Rosie Reed took the name Pearl Younger for professional purposes. Her son Eddie remained faithful to his daddy’s name and his outlaw profession, too, and even his early end by bullet, as shall be seen.