Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

And poor Lulalie. Mama sighed. Her mother feared the worst. Such a warm busty young girl, did I recall her? Mama frowned and switched the subject, not wishing to dwell on warm brown bosoms under the bald eye of her Elijah, the celebrated bosom connoisseur in the daguerreotype. (Guessing at her mind’s quick turns, I saw a light mulatta girl, the young house wench who became Jacob Watson’s mother.) Mama offered me my father’s likeness with an enigmatic smile. “I’m sure you’ll want this as a keepsake.”

I shook my head, kept my arms folded. I rose to go. Leaning on my arm, Mama accompanied me outside, still clutching the picture. To my surprise, her face actually softened as she related what Private Watson had confided on his return from war. Sleepless and exhausted, he had finally broken down and wept, confessing his terror of being bayoneted and his horror of the battlefield at dark, when the musket fire died to the last solitary shots and the dreadful cries of the maimed thousands left on the battlefield, Yanks or Johnny Rebs no longer, simply thirsting boys calling for their mamas in their long hard dying-those cries that rose in a moaning wind from the blood-damp night earth of Virginia. All no-man’s land writhed under the moon, one huge tormented creature, all across the waste to the Union lines.

In the dawn of one dreaded day of battle, Lige Watson had broken out in a soaking sweat and come apart, shaken violently by his own unraveling like a muskrat shaken by a dog. Then his gut let go and he soiled his only clothes without any means or hope of restoration. With nowhere to hide his shame and tears, he fled. It was Will Coulter who came after him, who pulled him down behind a wall and slapped him hard, who ordered him to return into the lines or he would shoot him then and there where he lay stinking. And after the War in their Regulator years, that man with the crow-wing of hard black hair across his brow had used his knowledge of Private Watson’s terror to ensure his loyalty in night activities.

My mother’s eyes pled with me to relent, to forgive my family. “It’s not too late,” she begged. I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.

The following year, a letter to Mama lately arrived from Colonel R. B. Watson at Clouds Creek inquired after her son Edgar, wondering what had become of him and how he might be faring. His interest moved me more than I cared to reveal, though I feigned indifference. In his letter, Colonel Robert regretfully described the moaning frightened dying of her late husband Elijah, afflicted with big sores on his legs that would not heal, smelling just awful. Before he died, the wretched sinner, all purple bony knees and puffy belly, had howled for light, more light, all the night through, in his terror of oncoming darkness.

In his last coma, my father had raved and muttered about Selden Tilghman; the Colonel’s letter asked “Cousin Ellen” if she could explain this, suggesting that she might ask Edgar about it. Mama looked hard into my face. Though startled to hear Cousin Selden’s name, I shook my head. Mama shrugged, too. “I’m not surprised your father was afraid to meet his Maker. And of course he always hated Cousin Selden.” Again she scrutinized me but dared go no further.

For a time I lived with my friend Will Cox, who farmed a piece of Tolen land and occupied my old cabin near the Junction. I was building a house on the highest rise in this flat country, the former site of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission destroyed by the British when they came to north Florida from Charleston at the start of the eighteenth century and butchered every Spaniard and Indian they could lay their hands on. When the wind shuffled the leaves of the ancient red oak on that hilltop, I could hear a whisper of that old sad history.

I planted pecans right down to the road, also a fig tree. Built a work shed, horse and cow stalls, chicken coop, sugar mill, syrup shed, corncrib, beehives, and a fine muscadine arbor. William Kinard dug me a well, and my new friend and devoted admirer John Porter got me started with some hardware. (John liked me well enough, I guess, but mainly he was anxious to be known as the confidant and friend of the Man Who Killed Belle Starr.)

Sam’s stepbrother John Russ was a fair carpenter, and together we got my house done in a hurry, using heart pine lath and tongue-and-groove pine siding. My roof of cedar shakes clear of the smallest knothole was the talk of the south county because most men begrudged the time and craft required to make them. Folks were going over to tin roofs, which turn a house into an oven in the summer: the tin starts popping toward midday, and in late afternoon, as the house cools off, she pops some more.

Inside, I dispensed with a parlor in favor of three bedrooms and a large dining room with a kind of window counter through which food could be passed when it came in from the kitchen-my own innovation, built originally for the house at Chatham Bend. The new house had no second story, only a garret with end windows to vent the summer heat. With the lumber saved, I built a broad airy veranda with split-cane rockers where social occasions, such as they were, mostly took place. The porch had a hand-carved railing that became almost as celebrated in our district as my carved railing on the stair at Chatham Bend, and the house was set upon brick pilings to let cool breeze pass beneath the floor and offer summer shade to my hogs and chickens. As for the windows, they were cut high on the walls so that no night rider could draw a bead on the inhabitant-a modern improvement, picked up in Arcadia, that I never troubled to explain here in Fort White.

Black Frank Reese from Arkansas had turned up at Will Cox’s place while I was in the Islands, and I gave him some rough work moving materials. Frank had tracked down that faithless Memphis woman he had sworn to kill but because she had grown fat and ugly, he belted her hard across the head and let it go at that. From this I knew he had matured somewhat since I last saw him.

Will Cox, who had been sharecropping for Tolen, could take no more of Sam’s abuse and came over to farm with me instead. Sam still owed me for those hogs he’d all but stolen when I left for Oklahoma but he had to be threatened with arson or worse before he came up with some razor-backed runts, thin and uncared for. “Ain’t goin to thank me, Ed?” With a rough boot, he drove them off the tailgate of his wagon into my new pen.

“My hogs were fine animals,” I reminded him, “not scrags like these.”

Fat Sammy laughed. “Fine animals make fine eatin.’ ” He winked. “Got fine money for ’em, too.” I mentioned that better men than Tolen had been hung for hog theft back in the old century. “That a fact?” he said. “Yessir,” I said, “that is a fact, and here’s another: a dispute over a pair of hogs caused the famous feud between Hatfields and McCoys. More than twenty came up dead before the smoke cleared.”

“You threatenin me, Ed? I’d go easy on them threats if I was you. Folks here ain’t forgotten who you are and ain’t all of ’em has forgiven, neither.”

I looked him over, saying nothing. In Arkansas, I had been sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor for boarding stolen horses. Anywhere in the backcountry, a man would be punished more severely for stealing a horse than for exterminating this fat human varmint. True, I’d eased up on my drinking and put my gun away for good-I meant it, too-but Sammy Tolen didn’t need to know that.

It was Carrie who sent word from Fort Myers that her mother had passed away; she had taken the two boys into her house. When I wrote back seeking to comfort her, I told her to send Eddie north to help on the new farm; he had been born here in Fort White and still thought of it as home. As for Lucius, he would go to Everglade and board with our friends the Storters while he finished school. All that young feller cared about was Chatham Bend.