Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Her eyes rose to meet mine, beseeching me. “After you left for Oklahoma, Tom Getzen told me you might have become the leading farmer in this county. Did you set fire to his barn? Oh, never mind that now, he’s dead.” She shook her head. “Look at your mother, still selfish and spoiled! She’s learned nothing from all the hardship in her life. Do people never learn? As for your sister-well, let’s not be unkind. The only one in that whole household who is not a fool is Minnie’s daughter. What did they name her? Maria Antoinett? Where did they ever hear tell of a French queen? Got the name wrong and the spelling, too.”

“May.” I nodded. “A lovely young girl.”

“She is nothing of the sort! She has had no proper upbringing, she has no manners, she is wayward and hard and discontented. I left that child three hundred dollars in my will but from what Mr. Tolen tells me lately, I have a good mind to take it back. She hasn’t been to see me in two years!”

“What else has Mr. Tolen told you, Aunt?” I paused. “That I killed John Russ?”

“It’s not your business what he told me.” Again she cocked her head, fierce as a wren. “What in the dickens is the matter with you, Edgar?” she repeated. “We had such hopes for you. Do you really suppose I would have let poor whites infest this family if you had fulfilled that early promise?”

“Yet you let Cousin Laura marry him.”

“I had no choice. She was always jumping on him, she was shameless. Silly fool got herself with child the first time out. We have only the merciful Lord to thank that she miscarried.” Aunt Tab was weeping. “Oh, Nephew,” she entreated suddenly, “this vulgarian is selling everything ! Why did you choose that stepbrother instead?”

She had spat up the unspeakable, this old woman of edged mouth and burning eye. I crossed the room and closed the door, came back. She held my gaze, eyes glittering with retribution. But then, with a jerk stiff as a death throe, she snapped her head away, closing her eyes and waving her fingers to banish such a sinful thought like some fume vented by the family dog.

Taking her wrist, I whispered softly, “It’s all right, Aunt. I understand you.”

Eyes tight closed, she shook her head. “Please, Edgar. I didn’t mean that. I was upset.” She wept and trembled, very agitated. She opened her eyes and we studied each other, knowing she had meant just what she said. She turned her head away. Her face had softened. Into her yellowed pillows, she murmured sadly, “Oh, how I longed to write back to Clouds Creek to tell those stingy Watsons how young Edgar had made good, to tell them…”

“Aunt Tab? Please tell them Cousin Edgar has two farms and a fine syrup company. Tell Colonel Robert-”

“And tomorrow?” She had tired of me and her own hopes, too. “What will you have tomorrow, Edgar? Go away.” As I left, she said, “If you do him harm, I shall testify against you.”

Returning along the white tracks through the woods, I thought everything through. Before faltering, Aunt Tabitha had approved our family right and duty to stop Sam Tolen before he brought utter ruin to our property. Since his brothers and stepbrothers would swarm out like red ants, he would not be ousted easily from an anthill as large and bountiful as this plantation, at least not lawfully and probably not alive. And should harm come to him, Edgar Watson would be the first suspected.

When Sunday came, I rode right up to Sam’s front door and called him out. I did not dismount. Aunt Tab had heard my horse gallop up the drive or had been spying from the window, likely both, for her voice called sharply from upstairs, “Mr. Tolen!”

In his own sweet time, Sam waddled out onto his stoop. To conceal a weapon and more likely two, he was wearing his frock coat from church in this thick midday heat but he stripped off his Sunday collar in his caller’s presence in a gesture of disrespect. Tolen had lost some of his lard and a lot of his jolly manner along with it. He didn’t smell good even at ten paces. His dirty hair was not trimmed neat in side whiskers or beard; it was all black frizzle and the pate shone through, pale as a dog’s belly. After years of sloth and rotgut liquor, he looked like some squat nocturnal varmint poked out into the sunlight with a stick.

“Same old Sam,” I said.

“Yep. Only richer.” With hoggish leer, he tossed his head back toward the house. Sam enjoyed baiting me so much that he clean forgot how outraged he was over my alleged murder of his stepbrother. I don’t believe he would have cared too much whether I’d killed Russ or I hadn’t if it gave him an advantage either way.

Mike Tolen, in the door behind him, was thickset like Sam but his paunch was small. Mike looked scrubbed up, sober as Sunday, while his brother looked like very late Saturday night. From the day he was born until the day he died, Sam Tolen would look soiled inside and out.

I nodded at Mike but did not let him distract me, though I kept him in the corner of my eye. What I had to say was between me and his brother, I told him. This was true, I had no quarrel against Mike Tolen. Everybody but my friend John Porter, who lost out to Mike when they ran for the County Commission, had a good opinion of this younger brother, who could not be blamed for the name Tolen but only for blind loyalty to his rodent kin.

Out of respect for the memory of John Russ, Mike Tolen spat half-heartedly, though acting unfriendly and impolite came hard to him. To gauge his nerve, I skittered my horse out to the side, watching his boots. From where he placed ’em when he shifted with me, I knew he was armed, too. They’d been expecting me. I caught Aunt Tab ducking back behind the curtain in the upper window and gave her a little yoo-hoo kind of wave.

From his big grin when I did that, a stranger might have thought Sam Tolen was glad to see me, and in his way he was. Because I’d let him hang around when we were younger, this fat feller still looked up to me, he even liked me. But being afraid, he would pull his gun the first time he had me dead to rights, especially with his brother there behind him. The old woman up there behind her blowing curtain might try to intervene but I couldn’t count on that.

Not that I needed her. Sam could not shoot a nickel’s worth, not even with a rifle. With a revolver, very few farmers could hit their own front door even when, like Sam, they were standing on the stoop. I doubt if either of these two knew how to draw. They’d be dead before they dragged their hardware free of their Sunday suits.

That’s what was going through my mind. Mike was worried, Sam was grinning. I wiped that damned smirk off his face real quick. “Nope, you haven’t changed a bit,” I told him. “You still stink like a skunk because that’s what you are. You’ve been selling off our Watson property after stealing it and you have been telling lies behind my back.”

“Lies, you say?” His half glance warned his brother to be ready. “You told Izma and that old lady upstairs that you never killed John Russ. If that ain’t a lie, me’n Mike here never heard one, right, Mike?”

Mike Tolen grunted but said nothing, knowing that Sam’s drunken nerve might fray. Sam started blustering. “When all you was doin was murderin your help on payday in them Thousand Islands, that’s your business, but when my stepbrother goes with you and you owin him money and he don’t come back? Come on now, Ed!” he complained. “How can you blame people?”

“I don’t blame people,” I told him. “I blame you.”

Will Cox’s oldest rode up alongside while we were talking, husky young feller on a mule. Smelling trouble, he let out a kind of eager snicker. I nodded to Leslie without turning my head. Will Cox had no use for Tolens and his wife Cornelia liked them even less, because Sam’s brother Jim had wronged her sister before hightailing it back to Georgia. No Cox would jump in on the Tolen side against Ed Watson. Anyway, Les was probably unarmed.