Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

In their wondrous capacity of knowing the Lord’s mind, churchly folks will tell you that He would purely hate to hear such dirty talk. My idea is, He wouldn’t mind it half so much as they would have us think, because even according to their own queer creed, we are God’s handiwork, created in His image, lust, piss, shit, and all. Without that magnificent Almighty lust that we mere mortals dare to call a sin, there wouldn’t be any mere mortals, and God’s grand design for the human race, if He exists and if He ever had one, would turn to dust, and dust unto dust, forever and amen. Other creatures would step up and take over, realizing that man was too weak and foolish to properly reproduce himself. I nominate hogs to inherit the Earth, because hogs love to eat any old damned thing God sets in front of them, and they’re ever so grateful for God’s green earth even when it’s all rain and mud, and they just plain adore to feed and fuck and frolic and fulfill God’s holy plan. For all we know, it’s hogs which are created in God’s image, who’s to say?

So while church folks might judge that Edgar J. should be cast into damnation for longing to become one with His creation, Catherine Edna, the dirty-minded one (in God’s own eye) might be this man of the cloth who had whistled the girl’s sharp-eyed stepmother onto the porch while he took her sister to the railroad to protect his investment and make damned sure that this Watson feller didn’t finger the merchandise or get something for nothing.

Soon we were joined out on the porch by young brother Clarence, who claimed to be the first in these parts to work a camera and wanted to show a picture he had taken single-handed of this very porch on which we sat. When the womenfolk went back inside, I picked the boy’s slim brain about his family background, in hope of some clue to his sister’s expectations. The obliging youth provided in one blurt the history of the Bethea tribe as best he understood it, which to judge from his first sentence was not well at all: “Columbus,” he said, “thought the world was round but the queen told him it was square so he ended up at the Little Peedee River.

“First Betheas was Hoogen-knots and signers of Secession where we split off from the damn-Yankee Union,” he continued. “Life got too crowded in the Tidewater so Granddaddy William P. Bethea Sr. hitched his ox team to a covered wagon and he come ahead, driving his stock south by the old Cherokee Trail to Cow Ford, where it’s Jacksonville today. But the St. John’s River was too high, stock couldn’t swim it, so he headed ’em off west to Little Bird, crossed over at a tradin post that had a moonshine still and a brush arbor with no roof where them first Florida Baptists worshipped before churches was put up. Went on south and homesteaded down yonder on the Santa Fee, which flows over west to the Suwannee.

“My daddy, W. P. Junior, was ordained a minister at age twenty-one. He had thirteen head by Miss Josephine Sweat, who died of it all back at the century’s turn; we was seven head that was still under his roof when he done it again with the Widder Jessie Taggart. Oldest still amongst us is Catherine Edna, borned in eighty-nine. Youngest is Bill P. the Third, showed up last year.

“Now Daddy don’t hardly make a livin preachin, he got to raise his cows and chickens, got to sharecrop, too. Corn, peanuts, common greens, also velvet beans for fodder. New Ma Jess got her a crank churn, turns out three, four gallons of good cream every other day. Daddy goes up to town on Sat’days, peddles eggs and butter…”

Clarence’s voice was dying down at last. The poor boy had lost interest in our talk because he saw that I had, too. Catherine Edna was born the same year as my son Lucius, I informed him-that’s all I could think of to contribute. “Is that a fact,” he said politely. Neither of us gave the other the least encouragement to continue.

Kate Edna spared us any worse by bringing lemonade. As I was to learn, the girl had taken good care of her daddy after Lola married, and when New Ma Jess showed up, it was hard to turn him over to a stranger; she and her stepmother just got in each other’s way. Plainly she felt unwelcome in this house and was all set to run away with a boy who shortly rode up on a mule, likely young feller with black hair cut with a bowl. This was Herkie Burdett, son of Josiah Burdett from across the Fort White Road. When Kate Edna came out, he went rooster red and tripped over his boots coming up the steps, couldn’t make his big feet work at all: I had to grin when she said he played third base for the Tolen Team. Kate Edna had blushed at the sight of him, but whether she blushed out of young love or embarrassment for her tangle-footed beau, she was too kind and discreet to let me see.

Right in front of the guest, the erstwhile Widder Taggart reprimanded Kate Edna as if her young admirer wasn’t there, carping that Kate knew perfectly well that Herkimer had been told to stay away. Seeing Kate’s cheer die in her face, I knew it was high time I left, too, so that this girl would not blame the guest for being the cause of Herkimer’s humiliation.

As it turned out, William Leslie Cox had his eye on Kate Edna. One day he let drop a sly hint that he might know her somewhat better than an honorable feller should reveal. Without acknowledging he’d ever noticed her, he managed to hint that the Bethea girl had been trailing around after him at school, panting for the smallest crumb of his attention; it had got to the point where this poor scholar was so plagued and distracted from his studies that he was obliged to abandon them altogether-that’s what he said, though he’d told me earlier that he had quit rather than repeat that stupid grade.

Besides being ridiculous, this boy’s lying conceit was annoying and it stung, reminding me that I was nearing fifty while Kate Edna was not yet sixteen. And maybe she did love Leslie, just a little, because if she didn’t, she was the only adolescent female with that much sense for miles around. My niece Maria Antoinett Collins, her best friend Eva Kinard, and that whole flock of linsey-woolsey damsels at the Centerville School were all aflutter over the star pitcher on the baseball team. They blushed and gushed over his husky voice and that cheekbone scar inflicted in a duel. According to May (whose poetical nature was encouraged by her grandmother), this young swain’s hair “filled with light in summer and turned gold.” She loved the strong and graceful way he moved and ran and threw, doubtless imagining how all that rampant youth might feel entwined by a maiden’s arms and legs. No, it was not Kate Edna but May Collins who tagged after the star pitcher every chance she got, at least when her daddy wasn’t looking.

“That young man’s scar is the mortal imperfection that makes immortal the beauty of his face,” pronounced Granny Ellen, as my mother was called by Minnie’s children. (Granny Ellen still got her fanciest ideas from her old book of English poems, brought south from Edgefield.) But later on, when his zeal for taking life twisted that scar and hollowed out his face, our church folk would recognize the mark of Cain.

I told Les sharply to watch his tongue when referring to Miss Kate Edna Bethea. He cocked his head with a knowing leer, trying out a frontier drawl: “I never figured Desperader Watson would fuss hisself so bad over no filly.” I guess what he meant by this gobbledegook was that no true gunman from the West would let himself get hot and bothered over some fool girl. In my experience, sad to say, so-called desperados-like most individuals of perilous and uncertain occupation-got hot and bothered only rarely about anything else, but not wishing to spoil a young person’s illusions, I did not impart that information to Les Cox.