Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“The judge had no business sending Leslie to prison for killing that black family-that the way the sheriff saw it?”

Cox squinted at him hard. “That’s the way ever ’body seen it, mister.” He set his hat straight. “Anyways, Les got sick of hidin, wearin women’s clothes out in the field and all like that. Stayed to help with spring plantin, then told us all good-bye for now, take care of May, he’d see us soon. Went on south to Thousand Islands and that was the last he was ever knowed about exceptin hearsays.

“Feller who generly told the truth claimed he run across Les down around the coast, said ‘I’m your cousin.’ Said Les told him, ‘Well, that don’t mean that if you ever say you seen me, I won’t shoot you.’ ”

Will Cox squinted. “Some said it was Watson done for Les. I said, ‘You talkin about E. J. Watson? Shit, no!’ I said. ‘E. J. was my good old friend, he never done no such of a thing.’ ”

Will Cox toed the clay soil with his broken shoe. “We heard it was a nigger man killed Watson. Heard Ed’s own boys never raised a hand to set that right.” He studied Lucius. “Which boy was you?”

“I’m Lucius, Mr. Cox.”

“Times must of changed when I weren’t lookin, Lucius.” Will Cox spat tobacco juice, turned back toward the road. “Me’n my younger boys, we was fixin to go south to Watson’s, find out what they done with Les, hunt up that nigger, too, while we was at it. But like I say, I been down sick and never got to it.” He spread his hands in the hot sun and both men watched them shake. “Don’t look like I’m ever goin to get there, what do you think?”

“Nosir,” Lucius murmured gently, “I don’t think you are.”

Baleful, Cox regarded him. “Don’t think so, huh?” Both grinned and Lucius took him home.

Lucius’s instinct was to take Will Cox’s word that after his son’s departure in the spring of 1910, his family never laid eyes on him again. Either Leslie had lived out his bad life in other parts or Papa had shot him dead at Chatham Bend just as he’d claimed.

Lucius remembered Leslie’s mule kick scar-“pretty good scar upside his head,” Grover Kinard had called it. Coldness and detachment, fits of violence, indifference to the suffering of others-weren’t those known symptoms of brain damage?

To judge from Will Cox’s pride in him, his family seemed well satisfied that Leslie had killed both Tolens-another argument in Papa’s defense. In north Florida as well as south, it was turning out that the murders behind much of the Watson myth had been committed by another. Yet he felt uneasy. Had Papa encouraged hero worship in the unsophisticated Leslie and then exploited him, prying wide a dangerous fissure in his brain?

And what of “Uncle Edgar” ’s brain? Yet Papa had never beaten his children nor appeared deranged even in drink, at least at home. For forty years after leaving South Carolina, he had farmed and traded, maintained neighborly relations, and remained beloved of his family, always excepting the one nicknamed Sonborn-the prodigal son, the long-lost brother, Robert Briggs Watson. R. B. Arbie. Rob.

After supper on his last evening at Chatham Bend, Lucius had joined his father on the river porch. Papa awaited him in his rocking chair, placed in the darkest corner. He seemed to know that this would be a showdown over Cox.

In his power, Papa’s foreman had grown so intimidating that the field hands would fall mute the instant he appeared, shuffling about their work with eyes cast down, reduced in moments to drones of the human animal, stripped of every trait of voice and movement that each man might have shown without Cox present. They moved like penitent dull beasts rather than draw the smallest attention to themselves. Cox’s utter indifference to their welfare, their very humanity, had made them indifferent to it, too: he moved them about like checkers on a board he might knock over on a whim at any moment, scattering these lives into the grass. In other years it had pleased Papa to tease the hands, cajole them into acceptance of their hard and dangerous labor. Now he scarcely noticed, and when Lucius protested Cox’s cruelties, roughly waved his son away, not wanting to know what the foreman was up to so long as the work got done.

Lucius’s outrage and frustration drove him to challenge his father on another matter. Declaring his intention to find Rob, he asked if his father knew what had become of him, and this time he did not back off when Papa sighed, his eyes half shut, sinking heavily into that iron silence. “Papa? He’s my brother. I have a right to know.”

Through the window, the porch was dimly lit by the kerosene lantern on the supper table inside but he was unable to make out the expression of the figure in the shadows. Lucius said, “If you don’t know, please say so. Maybe I can locate that Collins cousin he knew in Key West.”

His father sat up in a sudden rage, upbraiding him for resurrecting ugly stories. Lucius heard him out, then protested mildly, “Papa? I’m only asking about Rob.”

Papa seemed to sense that this time his son meant business-that he might in fact be on the point of losing the last of his older children from whom he was not estranged and the one, further, whose assistance was critical for that autumn’s harvest. He rose and slammed inside. Lucius thought he’d gone for good. Instead he lit a fresh cigar at the table lantern, came back out, and resumed his seat. While he smoked, the tobacco ember glowed. He cleared his throat.

For years, he said, he’d been sad to see the fear behind the feigned warmth in his neighbors’ faces. Fairly or unfairly, his reputation was torn beyond repair, and since he was already fifty-five, that situation was unlikely to change. Though he’d never been unduly bothered by public opinion, he explained, he hated the idea that because of rumors, he might be thought a cruel killer in his own family, and in particular by the son who would inherit this plantation and the syrup business. (In the near dark the cigar ember described a sweeping arc to include the boats, outbuildings, house, and fields.) Kate Edna and her kids, he said, would have to be con-tent with the Fort White farm. Not once did he mention his three older children.

Waiting out this preamble, Lucius said nothing. Annoyed by his silence, his father said that Lucius could believe any rumor he wished: the truth was something else. Here he stopped to grind out his cigar, as if to bring this degrading discussion to an end, but in a moment, he said, “There’s no evidence. Two sets of tracks reported by some mixed-blood fishermen. Who took them seriously? People would have forgotten the whole business a long time ago if your brother hadn’t lost his head and run away.”

“Was Rob guilty, Papa?”

“The whole thing was an accident.”

“Both deaths.”

His father nodded. And because Rob had fled, he added, it had seemed sensible to remove himself, too, to avoid questioning. When he returned a few years later, he was never challenged. Before this evening, in fact, he had never mentioned that day to anyone except Lucius’s mother. “You are the first person to confront me, boy.”

“If it was an accident, why would he leave so suddenly? Taking your ship?”

His father leaned back into the shadows. “He was afraid, I reckon.”

“Of his own father?”

“That, too. Of being arrested and accused…” His voice trailed off.

Lucius took a great big breath. “Papa? Are you saying-you seem to be saying-”

“I’m saying I take sole responsibility for what happened at Lost Man’s Key. Satisfied? Now leave me the hell alone.”

Lucius followed him inside and back out again. “How come we can’t ever mention Rob? Why did you call him Sonborn? He hated that!”