Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

I pulled myself together and sat up straight, tried to make light of it. Gruffly I said, “I don’t believe your Good Lord will forgive me, what do you think, Mandy?”

“Do you care?” she said. She had not recognized my reference to our Oklahoma days and the tale of that huge and bloody hellion, Old Tom Starr-either that or she was simply unamused. I stood up, kissed her brow in parting, crossed the room. She did not detain me even when I faltered and turned back in the door. She had not forgotten my Tom Starr story. Now she finished it. “No, dear Edgar”-her voice came quietly-“I don’t believe He will.”

I had skulked behind my poor tin shield of irony and she had pierced it with the hard lance of bare truth. Her cool tone stunned me. I dared to feel betrayed. I longed for the last sad smile of understanding which, after all these years, she now denied me.

I returned slowly to the bedside. She saw that my agony was real and touched my cheek but quickly withdrew her hand, for she was resolute. She closed her eyes and thought a moment, then opened them and whispered, “I’d like an answer to one question before you take your leave since I don’t think we shall ever meet again.”

My heart pounded. “You never believed me? Even when you testified in Fort Smith court?” Her flat gaze hushed me.

“The truth, Edgar. I beg of you. It’s late.”

So long ago, eleven years, and yet… one escapes nothing.

My silence was all the answer that she needed. “May God forgive you,” she sighed softly. “May God rest her soul.”

“Do you forgive me? That’s all that matters…” My voice trailed off. Mandy took my hand and squeezed it one last time, then pushed it away. Though our gaze held and her eyes softened, she would not speak. I went away bereft and suffocated for want of a coherent way to cry out the love I found no words for while she searched my face.

In a stiff river wind under hard skies, I crossed the Calusa Hatchee on the Alva ferry and took the horse coach to Punta Gorda, from where the railroad would carry me north to Columbia County. Seen through the window, the sunlight pouring down through green-gold needles of the piney woods was liquefied by damnable soft tears, so late in coming and no longer in my control. I was truly astonished that E. Jack Watson, with his fury and cold nerve, could come apart and weep much as he had when, still a boy, he grieved for the dead slave boy in the swamp. Whom are you mourning, you sad sonofabitch, Mandy or Edgar?

By the time the news came to Fort White that Mandy had passed away, I knew I’d loved her as entirely as the wood nymph I called Charlie my Darling, and perhaps even more deeply, though I don’t suppose that true love can be reckoned in that way. Sometimes I think we cannot know whom we loved most until all the lovers in our lives are gone forever. Looking back down our long road, our great loves are those summits that rise above the rest, like those far blue Appalachian peaks beyond the Piedmont uplands on that day when Private Elijah Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers lifted his enchanted boy into the sun above the courthouse terrace. The light (so Mama always said) was like an angel’s halo in my hair.

Even before Cousin Laura died, my mother had started scrapping with Aunt Tabitha, and finally she quit that lady’s roof, going to live with Minnie and her Billy. In 1901, when I returned from the Ten Thousand Islands, I went straight over to pay my respects as a good son should.

“Well, Mother, I’m home.”

“I don’t recall that I laid eyes on you the last time you were here. How long ago was that, do you suppose? Six years?”

“Seven, Mother.”

“Well, that’s long enough, wouldn’t you say?”

Skillfully she dispensed with her incivilities just as I was ready to snipe back, that’s how perverse this little woman was. She did not ask after Mandy’s health, far less inquire about the children, nor did she make the least effort to embrace me. Going unhugged by her twiggy old arms and unpecked by that dry slit of a mouth, I felt oddly out of sorts, I must admit.

As for Aunt Cindy, fixing supper at the stove, she never looked at me. For the first time in my life, that bony black woman did not come forward to hug me. She took no notice of me, not even enough to sniff and turn her back, but ignored me throughout the few minutes that I stayed. What Aunt Cindy had heard and what she suspected I did not inquire, knowing my account of it would do no good.

On a second visit, over meager tea, Mama related in detail how Cousin Laura had died in ’94 when Aunt Tabitha’s new manor house was scarcely finished. “She bored herself to death, that’s all,” said Cousin Laura’s lifelong friend, “and darn near took the rest of us off with her.”

The widower, on the other hand, had fattened up like a prime hog with his good fortune. The former Ichetucknee or Myers Plantation was now known as the Tolen Plantation, and the homesteads all around were called the Tolen Settlement. The Tolen, Florida, post office was located at the turpentine works down by the railroad crossing. All that was missing was the Holy Tolen Church. Meanwhile, Sam had married off his brother Mike to a Myers niece, then moved him into William Myers’s big log cabin to strengthen the Tolen grip on our family property. Sam’s stepbrother John Russ and his four mink-jawed sons infested another Myers cabin on Herlong Lane.

When I mentioned my reunion with my father in the Ridge Spring cemetery back in ’92, she stared at me. “Wasn’t South Carolina a bit out of your way?”

“Not for a patricide.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Edgar!”

I shrugged. “Let’s just say that the last time I saw him, he was lying in a grave.”

She waved this off, upset but impatient, rummaging up an 1895 obituary from the newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. “The Myers cousins clipped and sent this.” The clipping related how Captain Elijah D. Watson, aged sixty-one, had succumbed to Bright’s disease in a rooming house in that city. She read aloud: He was a well-to-do farmer in Edgefield County. A gallant soldier during the War Between the States, he distinguished himself on many battlefields for acts of great bravery and daring.

We did not have to remind each other that the rank of captain, like the deeds of heroism, were obituary courtesies to this man of low rank who returned from war with an impregnable reputation for dereliction of duty, drunkenness, and insubordination.

Next, she produced a yellowed daguerreotype, pressing it down on the table with a kind of grim finality like a poker winner laying down his hole card. Wild-haired cap-cocked Lige in Confederate uniform looked nothing at all like the handsome soldier I had chosen to recall from the courthouse terrace. Even without his ring eye, he looked truculent and bug-eyed.

“I never knew you’d treasured his picture all these years.” I set it down.

“Cindy saved it. For you children. Wasn’t that sweet?” She picked it up. Her hands were shaky now, with liver marks. “You must feel very proud of such a father, dear.” She curtsied minutely and I made a little bow as we sweet-smiled each other, not utterly without amusement and affection. “Oh Lord, Edgar!” She was cross again. “How long will you be here this time?”

Aunt Cindy rapped the iron stove with her wood spoon, then turned and left. According to her mistress, she had finally accepted the hard truth that her husband would never be seen again on God’s good earth; she prayed for a reunion of some kind in Heaven’s mansions. Deprived of her family, Aunt Cindy had given herself to ours, devoting her long narrow days to “tending her Miz Ellen’s every whim” (unabashed, Mama said that herself). She also managed the Collins household for our Minnie, who had blighted her family with her “neurasthenia”-that is, hysteria and insomnia, dyspepsia and hypochondria and every other ailment resistant to diagnosis and known cure which had an -ia at the end of it, said Mama. The only clear symptom of her “American nervousness” was a horror of human company even at home.