Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Rights?” they said, “Boy, your rights just ain’t the point here. Are you a nigger that has nigger blood or ain’t you?” And that soldier paused, knowing they would have their fun no matter what. He took a deep breath and then he said, “It is my misfortune to resemble all you paleface sonsofabitches, but I’m proud to say I am nigger to the bone.” He bellowed that right at the crowd: “Nigger to the bone!”

To punish his desecration of the girl, they ripped his pants down to castrate him. They had a special hatred for this white-skinned negro, and being drunk, they made a mess of it. When finally a moan was wrung from his clenched mouth, they laughed, as Old Man House remembered; their lank-haired women did not laugh, just stood there staring hungrily, bare-foot and grim, arms folded on their chests, as they strung him up.

With such a fine turnout for the barbecue, folks got into a festive spirit and prolonged their sport, lowering the rope so that his bare feet touched the ground. They gave him enough slack to gasp up enough breath to scream or beg, and when he did neither, they yanked him up again and watched his face turn blue. His eyes bugged out and his mouth opened and closed until finally, skewed sideways, it fell open for good. Being born ornery, he would not come back to life, showing no response to the torches and sharp sticks. Disappointed, they turned him over to the crowd. Folks stepped up beside him, got their pictures taken, maybe holding a nice buttered corn cob, and Mom and the kiddies, only two bits each. Finished up by hacking off ear and finger souvenirs, enjoyed some target practice. Man and boy, they whacked him with so many rounds that the body spun slowly in the summer heat. By the end, the sport was Keep that nigger turnin!

Old Man Dan had seen that battered corpse himself, strung from an oak limb. “Looked like a white man. Course you’d never know what color he was, not after them Georgia boys got done with him.” D. D. House declared he’d been a witness and he sure had all the details, but I couldn’t make out if this lynching was his own experience or a story known to all Americans in those days when lynchings were so common all across the country.

In Tennessee, on my long ride from Arkansas to Carolina, I came across a thing like that, and I don’t care if I never see another. It brought back the Owl-Man, gut-shot and dying in the Deepwood shadows. It wore out my soul. Mr. House felt disgusted that same way, probably the only thing that old man and I ever agreed on. I forgot to ask if Henry Short was told this story, but Old Man House being so flinty, I reckoned he probably was.

Word was out at Chokoloskee Bay that Watson had come back to the Islands and that soon after, a man had died in a strange way at Chatham Bend. Though I was innocent, I could not risk a posse; it was time to leave.

The Russ sons had departed on the mail boat the week previous. No thanks, let alone good-byes, only a bitter demand for their father’s pay. “I can’t oblige you yet,” I told them, “not until our syrup is sold at Tampa Bay.” Those boys rolled their eyes and scowled, very angry and suspicious, but being frightened, they said nothing.

I made a fair profit on my syrup sale at Tampa and continued northward to Fort White, where I went at once to offer my condolences to the Widow Russ. Izma was a female of my own age, dull of hair and dull of eye, due to a resigned spirit or a stupid one. With those dark silky hairs above her mouth and sharp short lines beneath, her lips looked sewn up tight as a bat’s bottom. When I doffed my hat and made a little bow, she closed her door down to a crack, leaving me out there in the rain. Through that slot I was informed in no uncertain terms that Izma and her sons and the Tolens, too, had concluded that Edgar Watson had murdered Mr. Russ for demanding his rightful earnings, which his employer had never intended to pay.

I handed her forthwith the full amount in a brand-new store-bought envelope with posies on it-“to the last penny,” I declared. But I could have worn a high black cowl and carried a scythe across my shoulder for all the thanks that homely woman gave me. I grabbed her cold and bony hand and pressed it to my heart, pleading, “Mrs. Russ, ma’am, Izma dear, your late husband died untimely of a heart attack and that is the God’s truth.” Izma said, “What would a man like you know about God?” and closed the door. That twisted, unforgiving face told me how useless it would be to go among the neighbors pleading my innocence.

Great-Aunt Tabitha had sent a summons. I rode over to the plantation house, rather small behind fake foolish Georgian columns. Frail at the end of her long life, the old lady spent most of what was left of it rotting away under the covers. Swathed in dry white hair and threadbare nightgown, she looked as crumbly and poor as a bit of old bread left out for the jays. The window was tight closed and there was no stink of cigars, which told me her son-in-law’s visits were infrequent if in fact they occurred at all: it was Calvin Banks’s crippled-up old Celia who hobbled over to look after her. However, Aunt Tab was still sharp-eyed and nosy, and without preamble demanded to know if I had murdered her son-in-law’s stepbrother, that man Russ.

“No ma’am, I did not.”

“A liar to boot,” she said. She peered at me as if some vile wart had grown out on my nose since she’d last seen me. “What in the dickens is the matter with you, Edgar?”

“Is something the matter, Aunt?”

“A great deal is the matter. Nothing but trouble around here since you darned people came.” She pointed her bony finger. “I revised my will, you know. Cut you people out of it.”

“Yes ma’am. I’ve heard.”

“Your mother and sister are complaining, are they?” She spoke with satisfaction. “That’s because I left my piano and some silver to your Mandy, who would have appreciated such fine things. Unlike your sister, Mandy came regularly to call in the year she lived here with the children.” She cocked her head. “I don’t suppose you killed Mandy, too?”

“No ma’am. Please don’t say such things.”

“Well, you never deserved a person of such quality, I know that much. Of course she failed me in the end like all the rest of you. Never acknowledged I’d left her my piano, far less thanked me. She might have been dying by that time, of course, for all anyone told me.” The old woman frowned, losing her thread. “Precious little thanks from any of you Watsons, the more I think about it, least of all that wicked little Ellen Addison, pretending to be such a friend to my poor Laura.” Suddenly alarmed by my homicidal presence, she drew the covers to her chin. “What is it this time, Edgar? What do you want here?”

“You sent for me, Aunt Tabitha.”

“Of course I did! I wanted to tell you that you should be horsewhipped!”

“My mother plays the piano, Aunt. I’m sure Mandy would have wanted her to have it.”

“Too old! Too spoiled !” She waved away the very idea. “That Addison girl was rotten spoiled right from the start! Orphaned at ten, married at twenty, lived through the War and Reconstruction, and never even learned to boil an egg!” She masticated a little while, building up saliva for some obscure purpose. “Oh yes, I cut her right out of my will and her fool Minnie along with her. I cannot imagine what my daughter saw in those two fe-males.”

I held my tongue. From the window here in the south bedroom, I could see all the way down the long woodland drive to Herlong Lane.

Spent, my great-aunt vented a deep sigh. “Laura was a fool, of course.” A tear came to her eye. “And this old fool rotting in her bed who banished us both to these gloomy evil woods…” She raised her fingers to her collarbone, the gesture wafting sad old smells from beneath the covers. “It’s hard to put your finger on the fool. Have you discovered that in life, you of all people, Nephew, who had such energy and promise? Aren’t you a fool, an accursed fool, to ruin every chance that comes your way?”