Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Now R. B. Watson- Robert Briggs Watson-that’s Cousin Rob, of course,” Hettie said carefully, her eyes pleading with Lucius to absolve himself. “And Rob’s mother was Cousin Ann Mary Collins, as you know-”

September 13, 1879. That date had tattered the corner of his mind since the visit to the New Bethel churchyard early this morning. Ann Mary Watson’s death date was the birthday never mentioned in Papa’s household even when Rob was still a boy. He studied Rob’s letter. Oh God. Of course! The oddly familiar script, with its looping y ’s and g ’s, could have been written by a young, stiff, priggish Arbie, whose hand he knew well from all the margin notes in his “Watson Archive.”

“We can’t find ‘L. Watson Collins,’ either,” Ellie persisted. “If that’s really your name, sir, we have no idea who you might be.”

“No, of course not.” He set Rob’s letter on the table. “ ‘L. Watson Collins’ is a pen name.” He stood up and crossed to the window with loud creakings of the old warped pine floor. With his back to them, he said, “I’m your cousin Lucius. I’ve deceived you. I am truly sorry.”

He turned to face them. Having had no luck with Julian, he explained, he had hesitated to identify himself before he’d learned a little more about his father’s life here in Fort White; he had feared his cousins might be less than candid had they known that he was Uncle Edgar’s son. He had planned, of course, to confess this before leaving-but here he stopped short and raised his hands and dropped them, sickened by his own half-truths and excuses. He moved toward the door.

Speechless, they made no effort to detain him. But he’d seen tears mist in Hettie’s eyes and to her he offered a last plea from the doorway. “It seemed so important to establish the truth-” Unable to bear her wondering gaze, he stopped again. “Please forgive me,” he said.

Cousin Ellie’s unforgiving voice pursued him outside. “The truth seemed so important that you lied!” He closed the door, went to his car. The window was open and Ellie would speak again, and he was not sure that denunciation by these newfound kinswomen he liked so much would be quite bearable.

At the road corner, a woman walking toward the schoolhouse waved him down. “Mist’ Lucius? Don’t remember Jane the cook? From when you was a boy at Chatham Bend?” The woman, handsome, simply dressed, was indeed familiar, and when she smiled, he recognized Jane Straughter, who had accompanied Julian and Laura Collins on a year’s visit to the Bend; he vaguely recalled a crisis over Jane and Henry Short, which Papa had resolved by banishing Henry from the Watson place.

Without preamble, Jane Straughter asked after “Mr. Henry Short,” how he was faring. Where was he living? Lucius could not help her since he did not know. Yet she seemed confident he would see Henry again. “When you see him,” she said, “kindly give that man the warmest wishes of Miss Jane Straughter. Please say it that way, Mist’ Lucius: Miss Jane Straughter. Tell Mr. Short that Miss Jane was asking after him. Inviting him to please come visit one day if he wishes.”

At the Collins cemetery in Fort White, the white church at the end of its long lane through the woods was spare and clean in a way that reminded Lucius of Hettie Collins, who was fashioned from the same native heart pine. They had responded to each other and now, already, she was gone. His emotion was so poignant that for the moment he’d forgotten Arbie- Rob ! He could scarcely believe it. Who could have recognized the prim Rob of that letter in the unshaven and disreputable “Chicken” at Caxambas, stripped by hardship and rough company of all the manners and good grammar taught him by dear Mama in those years of patient tutoring, and disguised further by that cryptic urn said to contain Rob Watson’s bones?

In the wistful melancholy of a country churchyard which time and weather and the woodland creatures were gradually taking back, he wandered among the modest headstones that had lately replaced the wood crosses Hettie had referred to. Here was Uncle Billy Collins, gone to his reward in February of 1907, three months before Sam Tolen. Nearby lay Granny Ellen Watson, dead at eighty in June of 1910, just four months before her son. In a narrow grave between mother and husband lay what was left of timid beautiful Aunt Minnie, safe at last.

The clarity of churchyards: everything extra worn away and what remained in order and in place, sequestered from the tumult of the world, in pristine stillness. He tried to sort his feelings. Old cemeteries made him homesick, wasn’t that it? In the Collins schoolhouse, he imagined he had sensed long-buried roots here in Fort White, yet these uplands of the north-central peninsula were not his home. Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as “homegoing,” a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging. Chatham for him was what Clouds Creek in the Carolina Piedmont had been for Papa.

One day when the sun caught it, he had seen a little pool shining in the heart of an old stump on a Glades hammock, a silver black glitter like a black diamond, filled with exquisite light. Here no wind breath feathered the surface, only perhaps a leaf speck or breast feather, a wild bit of color fixed minutely to this reflection containing all-high wind clouds and eternal sky all mirrored, immanent. That was home, too.

He strayed across the sun-worn grass among old lichened monoliths, touching and tracing the inscriptions. The pains taken with the lettering astonished him-the knowing hands of nameless artisans, themselves long buried, incising stone calligraphies in memory of strangers. The age of these granites, hewn from crusts heaved up into the sun by planetary fire from miles beneath the surface of the earth, stirred him and humbled him. In quest of eternity, the upright stones yearned toward the firmament, even as they too were gnawed minutely by the bloodless fungi and blind algae that worked with the wind and rain to obliterate man’s scratchings.

The slow stone metamorphoses filled him with longing-longing for what? Simplicity? Was simplicity the true nature of homegoing? The simple harmonies, earth order and abundance. In this churchyard in a woodland meadow at the end of a white road, he missed what he had never known, the peace of living one day then another in communion with others of one’s blood and at the end, at the close of one’s works and days, to draw that last breath and come to rest in earth where one’s bones belonged.

Belonging. His encounter with his kin would not change his fundamental isolation from his family-his “lonelihood,” as Henry Short once called it. In a knowing beyond knowing, he knew that lovely Hettie, on a none too distant day, would be left behind here in the silence after the last mourner had departed Tustenuggee. Perhaps her transience, her mortality, explained why, so suddenly and strangely, she had touched his heart.

The sad solace of old cemeteries was a morbid sort of healing, though not to be despised on that account. The country graveyard in the woods was a last sanctuary, inviolable, not to be transgressed-man’s last hope of equity, as Papa might have said, with everyone content in their own bones. Yet even here, the car horns could be heard, searching every distance. In the end there was no escape from the bonds of space and time short of release into the void, leaving no more trace of one’s swift passage than the minnow’s glimmer on the flooded road to Gator Hook or the disintegrating mushrooms become dust in the sunny leaf-bed of this autumn wood or the circles of great raptors gyring high over the Glades in the passing of ancient winds across the sky.