Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

By now Sheriff Tippins had overheard us. Trying to smooth things after Lucius moved away, Frank Tippins said, “Lucius is taking this real hard, Miss Carrie. At Rabbit Key-” I cut him off, indicating that Caxambas delegation. “He’s not the only one, it seems.”

Poor Frank was embarrassed. “Well no, ma’am. I mean-” “My father was no saint,” I murmured, to let him off the hook. “No, ma’am,” he said. “That pale child is my half sister, isn’t she?” I said after a pause. “I reckon so, Miss Carrie.” I thanked him for his candor and he tipped his hat. “That the same old hat you bathed in?” I said, hating my own mood. He took it off and looked at it. “Yes, ma’am. Same old hat.” Like Lucius, he soon moved away and who could blame him?

Sun came, sun went. The clay earth of the grave was yellow-orange, dead, unwelcoming. Who could rest in peace in such poor soil? But I was glad of this cold norther because even in the wind, the odor of that box was shocking, truly. Driven back, the circle of Baptist faces looked stuffed tight, sipping their breaths, and women coughed, resorting to their hankies. I was grateful to those brave few who still pretended that they noticed nothing, but surely, they, too, were horrified by that frightful stench and the very thought of the putrefying corpse inside.

The only one who dragged out his big kerchief and held it to his nose, the only one who hawked and spat, was Mr. Cole, who drove up late in his new red Reo, scared he might miss some mean little moment he could chortle over later. Jim Cole hated Papa for not hiding his contempt: he had no business here among the mourners. Unable to hide my resentment, I turned away from him.

Knowing how shallow and vain I was, I prayed that all these Baptist folks considered such a ghastly stench some sort of satanic emanation, not the remains of Carrie Langford’s parent, the source of her own flesh and blood. Oh, Lord, I thought, when my time comes, please hurry me into the ground before anyone can even imagine worms or the dank gray hair and spidery fingernails that are said to grow like fungus in the grave. Pray they remember that rose-scented young virgin, Carrie Watson.

My good Walter supposed that I was grieving and put his arm around my shoulders. Eddie stood off to one side, stiff as a wooden Indian, as if trying to remember how to breathe. Lucius, unable to stand still, had wandered away from our stricken party to rejoin Papa’s woman and the frail half sister I had never set eyes upon before today, then crossed the cemetery to greet Sybil Dyer’s adolescent daughter-all by herself at a burial, imagine!

In the first days of 1901, when Papa came north through Fort Myers, poor dying Mama guessed that he was on the run. Knowing this meeting would likely be their last, she asked him what might have become of that poor Rob. “What has become of him?” Papa said coldly. “If God knows, He has said nothing to me.” Relating this, Mama looked unhappy and bewildered, as if wondering if she’d known her husband after all.

In her last hours of consciousness, Mama lay with her hands flat on the coverlet, those fine hands with their long sensitive fingers that would have the same cool ivory hue in death as in her life. She was mustering up strength, I think, for composing a final message to her children.

There is a great wound in your poor father I could never heal, and may the Good Lord who gave him life have mercy and forgive him at the last, and give him rest. Because Papa, too, is made in our Lord’s image. He is a man, a human being, whose violence is the dark side of him never redeemed. Yes, he is accursed when in his drink, hard, cynical, and tragically self-destructive, and I fear for his immortal soul. But as you well know, having seen it, he can be kind and generous, too, and does not stint, and he is manly. That side of him is loving, humorous, courageous, aflame with energy and enterprise. That is the side I loved and you must cherish, knowing that, for all his grievous faults, your unfortunate father loves you children very dearly.

Though the family had decided there would be no eulogy, I had copied that passage from Mama’s scrawled ungainly note. I summoned up nerve and read it out aloud at Papa’s graveside, in the hope that his true mourners might take comfort. Lucius wept silently, tears glistening. As for Eddie, I prayed that Mama’s words would ease his anger and permit him grief, but how could her words affect a son who was striving to pretend his heart was absent, somewhere else entirely?

I suppose Eddie was lucky to be sure of how he felt. Here was the grieving daughter at the grave, still torn about her father’s guilt or innocence and hopelessly confused about what her own feelings should be. What seems simplest is to go along with Eddie and Walter and never speak his name after today; I would tell my children not to mention Grandpa because it upset Mommie.

Lucius feels no such obligation. In a way I am touched by his loyalty to his father, but refusal to abide by our family decision is a lot easier for a young footloose brother who can always escape than for me and Eddie, both married with small children, who are stuck in Fort Myers probably for life and must suffer all the stares and whispers.

Mama and Papa lie just near the Langford plot, which shelters my own little John Roach Langford, 1906-1906, and Infant Langford, stillborn in 1907. Two little stones. Whichever family I am put in with at the end, I will be near them.

For Papa, Lucius had ordered a simple small white headstone with no epitaph, just the bare name and dates. At the sight of it, my tears came quietly, at last, at last.

When my Faith asked in her sweet clear voice what the J. stood for, the mourners looked startled. Nobody knew. All these years he had been E. J. Watson; it took a child to ask about that J ! Mama once told us that his given name was E. A. Watson: why he changed the A to J she did not know.

Papa’s woman from Caxambas turned when she heard Faith’s question. In a whiskey voice, more like a croak, she called out “Jack!” Lucius hurried her along, but she tottered sideways, seeking my eye, and called again: “E. Jack Watson!” Lucius would confirm that she had called him “Jack,” though why he could not say. “What does it matter?” Lucius said.

Leaving the cemetery, Walter’s aunt Poke, the deaf one with all the rings, asked Walter loud enough for all to hear if Eddie Watson had considered using his middle name- if he actually intends to remain here, is what she meant. Calling himself “Elijah” might spare the poor boy (as she called him) future embarrassment.

I suppose we’d all thought about “Ed Watson Junior” but no one before Aunt Poke had said a word. And we all knew she was speaking for the Langfords. Eddie restrained himself from bursting out with anything unseemly in a cemetery but Lucius stopped and turned. “Are you afraid your family will be shamed if he doesn’t change his name? Because our family will be shamed if he does. ” And he gave that old lady a fierce look that challenged not only Aunt Poke but all the Langfords.

That ringed hand flew towards her throat but she made no sound. It was only afterwards, as we filed through the gate, that she whispered to Walter, “That boy has something of the father in him, don’t you agree?”

In early November, I went north with Captain Bembery to pay our respects at the burial of his friend E. J. Watson. But all I could think about was Lucius, who had boarded with my family in Everglade when we were ten or eleven, gone to school with me and got some tutoring from Mama, who adored him. I bet he read every darned book we had. He was my best friend and I thanked the Lord he had not been a witness on that shore at Chokoloskee. He would have done his utmost to protect his father and might have gotten himself killed right along with him.