Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“When they were detained as witnesses, Julian and Willie refused to take the stand and tell lies under oath-that was their upbringing as honorable young Christian men,” murmured poor Hettie. “And Julian’s Laura had no choice but to support her husband, though it broke her heart. She had always adored kind Uncle Edgar.”

“But what was their testimony?” Lucius said.

“We were never told,” Ellie said shortly.

In the stillness of the old schoolhouse, he suffered with them the weight of shame inflicted on this family by Papa. In the end it mattered little what those young men had said. Through no fault of their own, his cousins had found themselves in an intractable dilemma. No wonder they had clung so fiercely to that vow never to discuss or mention Edgar Watson. But these years of silence, so dignified in the family legend, had only embedded that painful splinter of ambiguity and guilt, that ineradicable black line under clear skin.

In her black bombazine and Sunday bonnet, chin held high, Granny Ellen had made a fine impression at the trial, smiling in proud witness to the innocence of her distinguished son as well as to the honor of her handsome grandsons, there to attest to her son’s guilt. In the court recess, she bestowed thin smiles without discrimination, handing around nice mincemeat sandwiches in a napkined basket.

Minnie Collins had not attended her brother’s trial. Even before her Billy’s death, they told him, she had sunk away into a long slow dying, passing the remainder of her days all but unnoticed. By all accounts, she had always been a colorless person, with faint life in her, and her likeness was utterly absent from the family record. As if her countenance had been too tentative to be caught on film, no known photograph existed, nor was there a family memory of what she had looked like, thought, or said. Minnie’s one known attribute was her rare beauty, but what form her beauty might have taken, none could recall.

“Minnie Collins hated the idea of her own likeness, no one knows why,” said Ellie. She had died in 1912, two years after her brother, and even her children had only a vague memory of what she looked like.

“In later life, she had this malady that doctors used to call ‘American nervousness,’ ” Hettie added. “Paregoric was prescribed which contains opium and it seems she was susceptible.” Hettie supposed it was her drug addiction that caused her family to turn its back on the poor soul. It seemed more merciful to help her pretend she wasn’t there than to struggle to include her in her household life. After a time, they scarcely saw the spectral figure creeping past, still gently tended by her mother’s former slave. Only Aunt Cindy had been present when Minnie Collins, still in her fifties, died of pure failure of the spirit on a cold March day. She sat unnoticed in her corner until the tall black woman tried to rouse her for her evening gruel.

“Aunt Cindy saw to everything,” Hettie said. “Cinderella Myers was born a slave, an old-fashioned slave of good strong character who stood by her young mistress after she was freed. She even left her own new family to go south with her Miss Ellen, knowing how unfit she was to manage on her own.”

Lucius suggested the young slave girl might have come from the Myers Plantation in Columbia, South Carolina, perhaps as a wedding present to Ellen Addison, since according to the census, they were approximately the same age. But of course such facts told nothing about who Cindy really was, a young woman with her own desires who had endured her long travail on earth so far from home and family. “How lonely the poor thing must have been,” he said.

That an outsider should be so concerned about their servant’s feelings struck his cousins as perverse. Chagrined by how little they knew of her themselves, they could not answer his upsetting questions. No, there was no known picture of Aunt Cindy, either. After Granny Ellen and her daughter died, the old woman had persevered without complaint in her shack behind the house, tottering about her chores and chickens even after she started to go blind, until finally, in reward for her half century of faithful service, she was sent home. Her little satchel had been packed for weeks when a “Miss L. Watson,” her “baby daughter” of long, long ago, came to fetch her back to those Carolina uplands her old eyes would never see and her mind could scarcely imagine anymore.

“Nobody was home the day Aunt Cindy left, that’s what my daddy told me,” Cousin Ellie said. “Isn’t that awful? Daddy never forgave himself. Not a sign of her, not even a note, because in all those years no one took the time to teach her how to read and write.”

“The poor old thing just vanished,” Hettie agreed. “Aunt Cindy gave this family her life, and no one was home to thank her for her life or even say good-bye.”

Hettie rummaged from her box a letter postmarked Somerville, Massachusetts, January 14, 1910. It carried two green one-cent stamps bearing the profile of Ben Franklin and was addressed to Mr. Julian Edgar Collins, R.D. #2, Fort White, Florida.

Dear Julian,

Your very nice and interesting letter reached me yesterday and as usual I was delighted to hear from you. Glad to hear that all the folks are well. As to May, I have not heard from her. I am very sorry that she blames me for my opinion of Leslie, but I am sure that I have not wronged him and that he himself is to blame for the opinion held of him by all good people… If I understand his case correctly, robbery was his motive, therefore making it a most dastardly crime. I doubt very much if Leslie cares for May as such people are not capable of true affection.

Hope that eventually I will be able to come back and settle down and marry some fair southern maid. I have no time to bother with the girls now as I have to work Sundays and holidays. Hoping that you will grow more prosperous as you grow older and with my very best wishes to Laura and babies I remain,

Sincerely, Rob

“We think that can only be Rob Watson. But he never came back or Julian would have said something about it.”

The last time Lucius had seen him, Rob was a tense dark-eyed young man of “poetic” appearance, with straight black hair worn nearly to his shoulders. What did he look like now? I have no time to bother with the girls. Had he had time in the years since? Rob’s lonely moralizing letter made him sad.

“That’s the last letter?”

“That’s the only letter. Rob makes it sound like a regular correspondence but it wasn’t. We can’t even imagine how he found out what he seems to know. Clearly he needed to feel closer to the family, being homesick and lonely but afraid of coming home.” Hettie looked distressed. “Long ago, you see, Rob took his father’s ship and sold it at Key West with the help of a young Collins, at least that’s what Uncle Edgar told this family.”

Lucius nodded. “That was Arbie Collins,” he reminded Ellie. “The cousin I told you about.”

The women glanced at one another. Ellie spoke sharply, “Sir, we can’t imagine who this cousin of yours might be.”

“Well,” Lucius said, “he almost came with me today,” as if this explained things. He resisted the intuition now fighting its way to the forefront of his brain.

“You see, Professor”-Hettie was almost whispering in her distress-“our cousin Lee told us years ago that he was the Collins who helped Rob sell that schooner.”

“There’s no R. B. Collins in this family,” Ellie declared flatly. “I tried to tell you that over the telephone but you didn’t want to hear it for some reason.” She pointed at Hettie’s lineage sheets, spread on the table. “We rechecked every name before you came this morning, just to be sure.”