Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Paul Edmunds stuck his hand up as he must have done in this same room as a boy scholar in knee britches, kicking clay off high black shoes of the same country style he wore today. “I don’t know about all that,” he harrumphed in impatience. “Herlongs claimed that before Edgar left Carolina, some nigger threatened to let on to his daddy that Edgar was planting peas in a crooked row. Well, somebody went and killed that doggone nigger.”

He scowled at his wife, who was fluttering for his attention: “Church folks say ‘nigra’ these days, dear.”

“ Nigger -a?” Old Paul glared about, suspicious.

“Perhaps that Herlong story was mistaken,” Lucius said shortly. “I’ve always heard that Edgar Watson got on fine with black folks, much better than most men of that period.”

“Well, darkies were never treated cruelly around here.” Hettie’s pained gaze begged the Professor to believe that this community was no longer mired in crude bigotry. “Oh, there’s a social difference, yes, but as far as mistreatment, or not taking care of a black neighbor-no, no. Folks in Fort White aren’t like that.”

“Not all of ’em, anyway,” scoffed Paul Edmunds, for whom all this darn folderol was pure irrelevance.

“Granny Ellen used to confide that his daddy whapped Uncle Edgar once too often, knocked his brain askew.” April tapped her temple.

“Nobody thought Uncle Edgar was crazy, miss. Hotheaded, yes. Violent, yes. But crazy ? No! He was exceptionally intelligent and able-”

“Aunt Ellie? He went crazy when he drank, we sure know that !”

“There were plenty of bad drinkers back in those days,” Mr. Edmunds said. “Nothing else for the men to do once the sun went down.”

“Well, in frontier days, not all men who resorted to violence were crazy or unscrupulous,” said Hettie. “No, far from it. But because of his bad reputation, Uncle Edgar was thought guilty of many things he didn’t do, which made him bitter. Granny Ellen would say her son started out fine but his father came home from war a brutal drunkard who beat his son unmercifully. You keep whipping a good dog, he will turn bad.”

When Edgar Watson returned here from the West in the early nineties, he was a fugitive on horseback, passing through at night, Mr. Edmunds said. After his wife died at the turn of the century, he came back, stayed several years. “Leased a good piece of this Collins tract. Nothing but bramble and poverty grass when he took over but he brought these oldfields back. Built his own house, too-I seen him buildin it. Used to hear him target-practice up there on his hill. Doc Straughter did odd jobs for Watson, and the rest of his life, that old nigger-a would talk about how his boss man worked a revolver. Set out on his back porch, pick acorns off that big red oak that’s up there yet today. Most every man back then could work a rifle pretty good but they couldn’t hit their own barn with a handgun. Ed Watson could beat your rifle with his damn revolver.”

“Do you remember what he looked like, Paul?” Letitia inquired dutifully.

“A-course I do! That silver glint in them blue eyes made a man go quaky in the belly.”

“Did he ever look at you like that?” she whispered, awed by any man scary enough to have such an effect on Paul T. Edmunds. But her husband only snorted and stamped as if she were some sort of pesky fly.

“When Billy Collins died in February 1907, Uncle Edgar and Edna came back north to be with the family. That was when the whole Collins clan moved in with him.”

“Which means they were all living in his house when Sam Tolen was killed a few months later,” Lucius said. “Would Julian and Laura have stayed under his roof if they thought he was a killer?”

“I do know they worried,” Hettie murmured, looking worried, too. “There was so much talk up and down the county even before the Tolen trouble. But they could hardly turn against this generous uncle who took care of the whole family after Granddad Billy died.”

“Well, Calvin Banks must of knowed something,” Mr. Edmunds said, “cause they had that old nigger-a up there to Edgar’s trial.”

“Do you recall the other black man in the case? Frank Reese? I found his name in the court records as a defendant in both Tolen murders.”

All turned toward the visitor in disbelief. “Nobody in our family recalls any such name,” said Ellie in a tone of warning.

“ ‘Pin it on the nigger,’ that’s all that was,” April said. “Nigra, I mean.” The women deplored her cynical view of Southern justice but Paul Edmunds nodded; her time-honored remedy needed no defense.

“Calvin Banks was Colonel Myers’s coachman,” Edmunds resumed. “Knew the location of his buried gold. Kept the secret from the Watson women for fear the Tolens might get wind of it. That secret was lost with Calvin so that gold is out there right this minute.” Mr. Edmunds jerked his thumb toward the window.

“Shining on unseen beneath the pines,” Letitia said. April opened her eyes wide and the ladies giggled.

“Mr. Edmunds? Do you think that story’s true?” Lucius tried not to sound skeptical.

The indignant old man blew his nose. “Take it or leave it, mister. Don’t make a goddamn bit of difference to us home people.”

“Now, now, Paul,” Letitia murmured, patting his old knee, which twitched in fury.

“When Watson was in jail, he got word to Cox that a thousand dollars was waiting for him if he killed that witness. If Les found Calvin’s gold, why, they would split it,” Edmunds cackled. “Cox come back here all his life hunting that money, having gone and killed the only man who could tell him where it was!”

Lucius held his tongue, resigned. Just when he thought he was getting things sorted out, local rumor had turned things murky yet again. But the legend of the buried gold rang with a mythic truth and would prevail.

“Course that is hearsays,” Mr. Edmunds snarled. “Can’t put no trust in us local folks that has lived in these woods all their lives and talked with every last living soul who might of knowed something.”

But even the ladies were protesting. “Where would Uncle Edgar get a thousand dollars, Paul? After all his legal expenses, he was poor. The whole family was poor. We were burying our dead with little wooden crosses.”

“None of my damn business where he got it. But he always come up with money, we know that much.”

There was no good evidence for any of this stuff, Lucius thought, disheartened.

Hettie tactfully changed the subject. “I think Leslie must have been some kind of hero worshipper. Here was this handsome, well-dressed man from the Wild West, supposed to be a desperado who had shot it out with famous outlaws in the Indian Nations-”

“And what Uncle Edgar saw was a dull, vicious boy sent straight from Heaven to do his dirty work,” Ellie Collins interrupted, in sudden resentment of Uncle Edgar. “He was smart and Leslie wasn’t-it’s as simple as that.”

“No, Leslie was not well thought of around here,” Hettie agreed wistfully, as if still open to the possibility that the Cox boy might have been held in high esteem in other parts. “He was a sort of rough-and-ready person, you might say.” In her wide-eyed light irony, she smiled innocently at Lucius, who smiled back, happy to be included in the family teasing and even happier that this lovely Hettie seemed to like him.

“Trashy, that’s what my daddy called ’em,” Ellie said grimly. “We always wondered how Great-Aunt Tabitha could permit her daughter to marry a white trash Tolen. But Leslie ! Now there was a real son-of-a-bitch, my daddy said.”