Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  April grinned. “Hold everything they know so tight that nobody knows if they know anything at all!” Hettie and her daughter laughed with that affectionate malice reserved for family folly. They seemed quite willing to air out old closed rooms, since the Collins clan had nothing to be ashamed of, but for the moment, Ellie’s presence kept them in line. “Collins honor,” she reproved them, trying not to smile.

  “Watson honor!” April cried. “If it weren’t for darned old Cousin Ed, this family might have loosened up a little after all this time!”

  RAKING LEAVES BY MOONLIGHT

  The ladies recalled that Uncle Edgar’s four children had returned with their mother from Oklahoma to live in this community while their father was finishing his new house in the Everglades. When these cousins departed, all tears and smiles, they promised to come visit, but the only one who ever did was Eddie.

  “Cousin Ed must have been fifteen when he came back here to help out on his father’s new farm. Like Rob and Carrie, he was born in that old cabin near the Junction but the place he called home was Uncle Edgar’s new house on the hill.

  “Over the years, Cousin Ed never tired of talking about Carrie Langford and her banker and her fine riverside house. He rarely mentioned his brothers, so the Collins memory of Rob and Lucius more or less died out. Ed said he knew little about Robert and Lucius because he only heard from those two when they wanted money. As for Edna’s children, they weren’t Watsons anymore. His stepmother—Ed always said ‘my stepmother,’ although he was older than she was—had changed her name and cut off communication with the family.”

  Hettie sighed. “Ed’s saying that doesn’t make it so, because much as we loved our dear cousin, he mostly saw things in a way that suited his idea of himself. We told him where to get in touch with Edna but he wasn’t really interested and never tried.

  “When Ed got his first auto, he would come through on vacations twice a year and bring his children. They’d stop here coming and they’d stop here going, and every visit without fail, he would tell us about yesteryear, how he went to Fort White school and got beaten with peach switches when he failed his lessons, and all about the meat and biscuits in thick syrup that the kids brought to class in their big lunch pails, and the three brass cuspidors lined up for tobacco-spitting contests at the general store, and the town marshal with a club lashed to his wrist and a big pistol, and the saloon where passersby might see some poor fellow pitched through the swinging doors. There wasn’t one detail of the old days in Fort White that Ed forgot.”

  April laughed. “Year after year, we hoped he would forget. He never did.”

  “Well, Ed had a sincere attachment to these woods,” her mother reflected. “He’d drive into the yard and get out and look around at the oaks and hickories, hands on his hips, y’know, then heave a great big sigh and say, ‘I sure feel like I’ve come home when I come back here.’ We never could figure why these old woods meant so much to him, cause when he got here he hardly took a step outdoors.”

  “After his first wife died, Ed thought nothing of bringing a female friend, might be a week,” Ellie said with disapproval. “One was the weirdest woman we ever saw. Before she sat down to her supper she would take her belt off, put it around her neck!”

  “Didn’t want to constrict her stomach till she et up all our food. And Gussie! Tell about the one he married, Mama.”

  “Augusta was too lady-like to sweat, you know, didn’t even perspire. All us poor country women were worn out and soaking wet from the damp summer heat, hair gone slack and beads of sweat on brow and lip. And here was Augusta perched on the edge of her chair, cool as a daffodil, even though she was buttoned up right to the chin. Him, too. Buttoned up tight.

  “We never saw him without white shirt and tie even when cooking. Oh yes, Ed dearly loved to cook! Before Edna Bethea came into their life, Ed cooked for his daddy in the new house on the hill—Uncle Edgar wouldn’t pay a cook just for the two of them. Ed never tired of telling how hard his daddy worked him, how he raked the yard by moonlight after doing chores all day. And without fail his Gussie would pretend she’d never heard that story. ‘Raked the yard at night?’ She’d turn real slow, hand to her mouth, and stare at him round-eyed, just a-marveling. And Cousin Ed chuckling along to let us know something pretty good was coming our way. Then he’d bust right out with it—‘Well, heck! We never had free time during the day!’

  “Then those two would hee-haw and carry on, just enjoy the heck out of that story right through supper. Couldn’t get over it, y’know. ‘Never had free time during the day!’ Year after year.”

  The women whooped and gasped for breath, falling all over one another with the exploits of Cousin Ed. “Raking leaves by moonlight!” April cried. “They never let that grand old story die!”

  Hettie smiled at her guest to assure him that this family irreverence was all in fun and was not meant unkindly. And though Lucius was laughing, too, he felt disloyal, knowing such stories would never have been told had his cousins known that he was Eddie’s brother. Sensing his discomfort, the ladies had stopped laughing. “As for his father,” Hettie sighed, “Cousin Ed approved the vow of silence, saying his sister Carrie felt the same: only Lucius was still living in the past, Ed used to say.”

  A loud bang on the door announced Paul Edmunds, whose family had owned the local store. Mr. Edmunds wore a blue serge Sunday suit, white socks, and high black shoes; his denim shirt, buttoned to the top, pinched his jumpy gullet. Behind him, his long-limbed Letitia in dust-colored woolens much too hot for such warm weather crept in out of the sunlight like a large timorous moth.

  “Your store’s still standing out there in the woods,” April Collins called by way of greeting. “I bet I could still find it for you, Mr. Edmunds.”

  Sent word last evening that a real historian was coming to research Edgar Watson’s years here in Fort White, Mr. Edmunds was eager to get down to business, which signified men only. “Well, now, mister,” he began, “me’n Hettie here has talked for years with every last soul in these parts that might remember anything, and we think we’ve got the history down as good as you are going to get it.” Bending a bushy eyebrow on the interloper in sign that he would brook no opposition, he cleared his throat at exhaustive length to ensure himself ample speaking room.

  “Colonel William Myers, who married Edgar’s cousin, came here with his slaves during the War for fear he might lose ’em to the Yankees. He left his bride and her mother in Athens, Georgia, because this Suwannee country was still wild and life uncertain. Sure enough, Myers was killed by lightning in 1869 and his widow and her mother came to see to the estate.”

  “Colonel Myers willed that huge plantation to his mother-in-law,” Ellie Collins informed Lucius, still indignant.

  “Well,” Hettie said mildly, “Cousin Laura was very kind and generous but perhaps a bit simple-hearted, apt to give too much away—”

  “Simple-minded, you mean. Probably retarded.”

  “There’s no reason to assume that, April dear. That’s just your idea.”

  “You have a better explanation, Mama? Why else would Colonel Myers leave the whole thing to her mother with instructions to pass it straight along to his Myers nephews?”

  When Lucius said he understood that those Myers nephews were Watsons on their mother’s side, Ellie’s expression made it clear she resented the idea that an outsider should be privy to such information.

  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.”

  SHINING ON UNSEEN BENEATH THE PINES

  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.

  WITCHED APPLES

  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.”

  “Most of those Coxes were good people and still are,” Hettie reminded her, pale eyebrows raised in mock alarm at Ellie’s sporty language. “Well connected, too.”

  “Well connected with the sheriff! Got that skunk turned loose off of the chain gang.” Edmunds’s knobby knee jumped about in agitation. “Everybody in this section knew that Leslie was dead mean, but Watson could be likable from what I seen, tending our store. I talked to the old-timers all about it and never met a one who got crossed up with him.”

  April laughed. “Know why? The ones that got crossed up with him were dead.”

  “Leslie and I, we were just children! Looking out through these same windows!” Hand at her mouth, Letitia stared out of the windows, marveling that she had actually survived her attendance at this school with a cold-blooded killer. “He had the shadow of a beard at the age of twelve!”

  Stilling his wife with a fearful frown, her husband usurped her modest contribution to Cox lore. William Leslie Cox, he informed them, was full-grown b
y the time he was sixteen and when unshaven, he looked close to thirty. “Come here to the school on muleback, whistled up May Collins through them winders, and eloped with her.”

  “May Collins ran off with Cox?” Lucius vaguely recalled having heard this from his father in the summer Leslie lived at Chatham Bend.

  Hettie nodded. “After Granddad Billy died, her mother paid her less and less attention. Granny Ellen was getting feeble and Aunt Cindy was half blind so young Miss May talked to any boy she wanted.”

  According to Lucius’s notes, the murder of the Banks family occurred on a Monday of early October, 1909: the bodies were discovered Tuesday morning and Leslie Cox was arrested the next day while applying for a marriage license at the Lake City courthouse. Perhaps swayed by his friendship with Leslie’s father, the sheriff thereupon released on bond the only suspect in the “foul and brutal murders of three hardworking peaceable negroes,” as the victims were called in the paper that same morning. However, the groom agreed to turn himself in after his wedding.

  Since Leslie could have fled after the killings instead of going to Lake City for that license, then passed up a second chance to flee when granted permission to go get married the next morning, he must have thought the whole thing would blow over. “Figured there wouldn’t be no problem over killing nigger-as,” Paul Edmunds said, “and it looks like the sheriff thought the same. Not only let him out on bail but let him cross the county line to marry.”

  “Somebody was sent to invite the bride’s family to a friend’s house in Suwannee County, so May’s brothers knew right where to find ’em,” Ellie recalled. “Uncle Julian decided to stay home, but my daddy rode straight over and warned Leslie that if he tried to make off with his sister, he would kill him.”

  “Willie might have had his hands full, Ellie,” Mr. Edmunds reminded her, not unkindly. “Les was a husky six-foot feller and the Collins boys was always pretty skimpy.”