Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Across the Fort White Road was Elim Baptist Church which Grover Kinard wished to visit. Though the church had been replaced, his parents awaited him in the old churchyard, also his sister and his brother Brooks. “See his dates? May 1910, same month we seen the Great White Fire in the sky. Some thought poor Brooks had took sick from that comet but I reckon he died of his consumption.” The lettering on the Kinard headstones was blurred by moss and lichens and the stones had shaggy grass around the base. “My folks ain’t hardly had a visit since the day they come here,” mourned the Deacon, scraping the lichens uselessly with a weak penknife.

Not far from the Kinards lay D. M. Tolen, 1872-1908. His gravestone read, “How Desolate Our Home Bereft of Thee”-a graveyard irony, Lucius thought, since according to Kinard, Mike Tolen’s widow had fled that bloodied cabin and gone straight back to her Myers family in South Carolina.

Nearing Fort White, the county road narrowed to a shady village street of gaunt frame houses in old weedy yards. At a counter in the grocery store, they bought barbecue ribs with soft rolls and soda pop, then carried their lunch outside to a wood picnic table where three old black men hitched along to the far end of the bench, ceding most of their space to the white men.

Working his toothpick, the Deacon frowned and muttered, patting the pockets of memory for something lost. “Born right here in this ol’ town and I ain’t been back in years,” he sighed, “and it ain’t like I live so far away. Eleven miles! Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain’t paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain’t no color left to life.” outraged, he glared at Lucius. “Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain’t none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.”

Following Kinard’s directions to the Collins house, Lucius traveled south through the old woods on a clay track as white as bonemeal, with dust so fine that the tires made no sound. He passed no cabin, heard no dog. Then the wood opened and the old schoolhouse rose on a knoll under great oaks.

Already in the door was Ellen Collins, a rather thickset person who looked cross. Over her shoulder, gazing at him from the wall across the room, were three figures in a large old-fashioned photo in an oval frame. A young girl in a white dress, full-mouthed, not quite pouting, stood behind a pert, quizzical old lady in a black dress with white scarf and brooch who was seated beside an imposing man in a dark suit, white embroidered shirt, and black bow tie. The man’s gaze was forthright and his brow clear. His hair was plastered to his head after the fashion of the time, and a heavy mustache flowed down into bushy sideburns that extended to the corners of his jaw.

“Great-Uncle Edgar, about 1904.” Ellen Collins swept her arm in introduction, having missed his start of consternation at this unexpected confrontation: why was a portrait of unmentionable Uncle Edgar hanging on the wall of a Collins house? “With Great-Grandmother Ellen Watson and my aunt May Collins as a girl,” Ellen Collins was saying. She introduced Cousin Hettie Collins and her daughter April before pointing him to a chair.

When pretty Hettie welcomed him with a warm peck on the cheek, her daughter teased her. “Mama? Are we ‘kissin’ cousins’?” April Collins, not yet twenty, had taffy hair hacked short-by herself, from the look of it-and the same bald gaze as the great-uncle on the wall, the same white crescent underneath the pupil. “Yep,” she laughed. “I got ’em, too. ‘Crazy Watson Eyes.’ ”

Lucius saw nothing crazy in his father’s eyes, only that fixed gaze, as if he had never blinked in all his life. But as he watched, Papa’s likeness seemed to shift and resettle into a visage swollen with intransigence-a change effected by that crescent, white and hard as boiled albumen, as if a trapped madman were glaring out through the eye slits of a mask.

From their hard settee, the silent ladies watched him, mystified by his intense absorption in the portrait. He took a deep breath and let the vision go. On the wall, a serene Papa resumed his place between his mother and his niece.

“That’s the first photograph I’ve ever seen,” he explained, finding his voice.

“That’s the only photograph: how could you have seen it?” Cousin Ellen sat stiffly, arms folded on her chest, ready to bar his admission to this household. “If I hadn’t told you, how would you even know that that was him?”

“He’s kin, Aunt Ellie! L. Watson Collins? Got to be kin!”

“For all we know, that’s an alias,” said her aunt severely. Plainly she was having second thoughts about permitting this self-styled Collins to cross their sill. “If Julian ever got wind of this, or Cousin Ed-”

Lucius cut her off by asking boldly if, in the opinion of this Collins family, Great-Uncle Edgar had really been a cold-blooded killer. Startled, his cousins deflected the question. April jumped in. “When that man smiled, watch out! Uncle Edgar-”

Ellen Collins cut her off. “Uncle Edgar could be ever so pleasant and considerate, but nobody dared cross him. Oh, just a violent temper! My brother has that explosive temper, too. He’d pick a quarrel with a fence post. More than once, I’ve heard him say, ‘If I had lived in Uncle Edgar’s day, I’d have killed those Tolens, too.’ ”

“Uncle Edgar was acquitted, Ellie,” Hettie reproved her. “But he never learned to control his temper, that is true. We know something dreadful happened in his youth in Carolina. That story arrived with the Herlongs, who came south from Edgefield County after Granny Ellen, but the grownups would never repeat it.”

Ellie inquired, “I suppose you know about Belle Starr? That was a story he never quite denied. He always said he’d had no choice because she’d ride around his place, shooting her pearl-handled six-guns, spooking his horses, so one day, he just stepped out and took care of it.”

“Probably fooling,” Hettie said. “Everybody said he liked to tease.”

“Granddad Billy Collins was very offended by that Belle Starr story. He told his boys it was dishonorable to shoot a woman, even an outlaw queen. Granddad died young, before the Tolen trouble, but he’d made up his mind about his brother-in-law before he went.”

“One thing we heard, Uncle Edgar sang ‘The Streets of Laredo’ with real feeling. Claimed it came from an old Celtic lament which had tingled up the iron blood of his Highlands ancestors, but we think he brought that song from Oklahoma along with his black hat. You never caught him out without that hat on.”

“Probably going bald,” April suggested. “Wore black hats and sang sad songs because he knew he would die before his time and was remorseful for his misspent life.”

“Oh, what nonsense, girl!” The ladies tittered.

Lucius liked these new cousins very much, especially Hettie, who was pretty in her old-fashioned brown dress, though slight and fragile as if ill. He knew he should confess right now that he was Cousin Lucius but this would make them instantly suspicious- Why are you masquerading as a Collins? Once they mistrusted him, they would tell him nothing. On the other hand, the telephone could ring at any moment-strait-laced Julian warning them that nosy Cousin Lucius was in town.

His kin awaited him in a stiff row like frontier women squinting over the hammers of long muskets. Mind racing, he frowned intently at the picture. “I’m named for Granny Ellen,” Ellie Collins said. “And that’s Aunt May at about fourteen. Her brothers are my daddy, known as Willie, and my uncle Julian, who won’t so much as mention their late uncle.”