Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

At daybreak, weeping, Kate brought Laura’s dead child, wrapped in fresh muslin. The young parents, shattered, thought he was a miscarriage, too early and too small for Christian rites, it seems Laura wanted me to handle it. I took the child from Kate and went outside. Upriver, I dug a little grave and kneeled and laid the bundle in and buried it, haunted by an image of that unborn babe at Lost Man’s Key gasping for life in its mother’s corpse under the current. Still kneeling, I exhumed the bundle, took it up. Lightly brushing off the dirt, I held it a few minutes before finding the resolve to part the muslin and confront the small blind shrunken face. Was this what Bet Tucker’s unborn had looked like? Still on my knees, I lifted him toward daybreak in the eastern sky over the Glades, then bent and kissed the tiny cold blue brow, greeting and parting.

In the winter of 1907, suddenly, Billy Collins died and our guests had to leave. To Kate’s relief-she feared the thought of Chatham Bend without her Laura-we returned to Fort White with them and stayed on for the spring planting.

Laura dreaded moving in with Julian’s family and who could blame her? Granny Ellen was sharp-tongued as ever, and as for my sister, she had shut herself away even before her husband’s death, drifting deeper and deeper into shadow realms, leaving her younger children to Aunt Cindy’s care. Offered a roof at my house, even that tight-wound nephew of mine appeared relieved. Dear Laura hugged me with fond gratitude. “Please try to forgive those awful things I said at Chatham, Uncle Edgar. Please watch out for that Jack Watson,” she whispered. “Oh yes,” I said. “My shadow brother.” I tried to laugh at such a strange idea.

Kate Edna was near term with our second child. Knowing her Laura would be left behind, she missed Fort White even before the time came to leave for Chatham. More and more withdrawn, she barely put up with my attentions, devoting herself entirely to Ruth Ellen. Sometimes we did not touch each other for a fortnight.

When Addison Tilghman Watson came into the world, Mama assumed that the name commemorated Great-Uncle Tillman Watson at Clouds Creek; I did not disabuse her, being unable to explain the need to dedicate this fresh new bit of life to Cousin Selden.

Kate entreated me to let her stay a few months longer at Fort White, and so I returned to Chatham River by myself. In November, I met Kate and her babies at Fort Myers, where we spent Thanksgiving with the Langfords: Walter and his railroad friend, Mr. John Roach, Carrie had written, were still discussing my participation at Deep Lake. At supper, Jim Cole regaled the company with his story about a case in which one black man killed another in cold blood in front of four eyewitnesses. The young defense lawyer assigned by the court worked hard for his first client but it was hopeless, an open-and-shut case. To his astonishment, the judge ignored the jury verdict, set his client free. Congratulated by the prosecutor, he protested, “Are you people crazy? It was coldblooded murder! My client was guilty as all hell!” And the prosecutor took him by the arm and said, “Well, now, Lee Roy, this bein your first case and all, we didn’t want our home boy to come up a loser. Anyways, it was only some ol’ nigger, ain’t that right?”

Jim Cole told a story well and everybody laughed except for Kate, who just looked baffled. Embarrassed by her unworldly ways, I got somewhat drunk and spoiled the evening, picking stupid arguments. When no mention was made of Deep Lake, I grew furious, humiliated, having stooped to getting ourselves invited to this house for the sake of nailing down that job. Cole and Langford would make my crude behavior their excuse to put aside any talk of my participation but the real reason was more gossip and ugly rumors. I could only suppose that one source was my son Eddie in Fort White, who was always the first one with the news, bad news especially.

Carrie and Kate were still awkward with each other, very stiff. My daughter had invited us to stay on for their family Christmas, but Kate said she felt unwelcome at the Langfords. Once at Chatham, however, she could not stop crying at the prospect of a lonely Christmas far from home. “I hate this endless river, these green walls!” she wept. “I hate that awful crocodile! I hate this place! ” The girl had to be near hysteria to berate her husband in that disrespectful way.

All Kate wanted for Christmas was my promise to kill that log-like brute across the river (I tried but it was wary)-either that or take her “home” for a few months after the late winter harvest. Since I wished to go north anyway for the spring planting, I agreed. Kate was delighted, all the more so because her dear Laura would still be living in our house.

When the time came, I had misgivings. Young Wilson Alderman, whom I’d sent to Fort White to help Eddie on the farm, had returned to Chokoloskee to spend Christmas with his family. The Tolens had been defaming me while I was gone, he said, especially the shifty James, who had moved in with Sam at Aunt Tabitha’s house to help keep an eye on the Myers nephews, who were still challenging her will. Alderman warned me that the situation might be dangerous. I told Kate nothing about this, of course. We returned to Fort White in April 1908.

In recent months, the fat widower Sam Tolen had taken bit and bridle off his drinking. He let his fields go, let his livestock run wild through the woods, and vilified all who passed before his eyes. Up there in that big empty house with its bad smells of rat droppings and rotted food, old hogs snuffled down the hall and half-wild chickens squawked and fluttered through the windows, and the Lord of the Manor was in his liquor morning, noon, and night. The summer previous his Tolen Team had told Sam they would quit for good the next time he showed up drunk on his own baseball diamond; his players never could agree on whether their manager behaved worse when they won or when they lost.

These days Sam’s way of keeping in touch with his sharecroppers and neighbors was to accuse them of rustling his cattle. With eight hundred head or more roaming the woods, he never bothered to brand his calves, just ordered his tenants to pen up any strays and let the cows in at dusk to give them suckle. Being poor, Sam’s croppers tried hard to oblige him, but he bullied them anyway, hollering a lot of stupid stuff about hanging rustlers from the nearest tree. Preacher Bethea and Josiah Burdett had both been threatened, also our well digger William Kinard, who was not even his tenant. There were days when Sam’s only activity was to ride around on his big red horse and shout abuse, knowing that young Brother Mike would back him up.

Mike Tolen, now a county commissioner who worked hard to get along with everybody, did his best to pretend that his brother was harmless; he’d even wink at the victim of abuse over Sam’s shoulder. Mike had tasted Sam’s bile, too, but as a Tolen, he backed him no matter what, and any croppers who stood up to Sam were run right off the land.

One day, Sam rode over to the Junction to revile my friend Will Cox, just reined in his big red horse and bawled across the yard, hollering for all to hear how he’d never liked the looks of this horse-haired bastard. Will was a lanky handsome man with a hank of black hair like a horse’s mane across his forehead, always calm, clean-shaven, and polite, but his wife Cornelia was a wilder breed. This day she came out and stood beside her man, arms folded high up on her chest, black eyes like chisels as she glared at this fat and filthy Tolen. Years before, when Jim Tolen got her simple sister in a family way, she notified her big mean brothers in Ocala County. When they came hunting him, Shifty Jim slunk back to Georgia. Now he was back.