Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  The cheering faltered, then died swiftly in a low hard groan like an ill wind. Elijah Watson wheeled his horse and pointed his saber at Lieutenant Tilghman as voices cat-called rudely in the autumn silence. Most men gave the wounded lieutenant the benefit of the doubt, concluding he was drunk. He had fought bravely and endured a grievous wound, and all was forgiven when he rode off to war again, half-mended.

  When the War was nearly at an end, and many slaves were escaping toward the North, a runaway was slain by Overseer Zebediah Claxton on Tillman Watson’s plantation at Clouds Creek. Word had passed the day before that Dock and Joseph were missing. At the racketing echo of shots from the creek bottoms, yelping in fear for Joseph, I dropped my hoe and lit out across the furrows toward the wood edge, trailing the moaning of the hounds down into swamp shadows and along wet black mud margins, dragged at by thorns and tentacles of old and evil trees.

  I saw Dock first—dull stubborn Dock, lashed to a tree—then the overseer whipping back his hounds, then two of my great-uncles, tall and rawboned on rawboned black horses. Behind the boots and milling beasts, the heavy hoof stamp and bit jangle, a lumped thing in earth-colored home-spun sprawled awkwardly among the roots and ferns. The broken shoes, the legs hard-twisted in the bloody pants, the queer gray thing sticking out askew from beneath the chest—how could that gray thing be the warm and limber hand that had offered nuts or berries, caught my mistossed balls, set young “Mast’ Edguh” on his feet after a fall? All in a bunch, the fingers had contracted like the toes of a stunned bird, closing on nothing.

  On long-gone Sabbath mornings of those years before the War, I ran with the black children to our games in the bare-earth yards back of the quarters, scattering dusty pigs and scraggy roosters. In cramped fetid cabins I was hugged with all the rest and fed molasses biscuits, fatback, hominy, wild greens. And always, it seemed, this sweet-voiced Joseph made the white child welcome. Yes, Joseph was guilty and our laws were strict. Alive, he would be cruelly flogged by Overseer Claxton, just as Dock would be tomorrow. Yet in my fear, I wept for poor, gentle Joseph, and pitied myself, too, in this loss greater than I knew.

  CLAXTON

  At daybreak Mr. Claxton, on the lookout, had seen a small smoke rising from a corner of the swamp and rode on down there with his shotgun and his dogs. The slaves had fled, obliging him to shoot and wound them both—so went his story. He was marching them home when this damned Joseph sagged down like a croker sack and would not get up. “Too bad it weren’t this other’n, seein he was the one behind it. I told him, ‘Shut up your damn moanin.’ Told him, ‘Stand that son-bitch on his feet, I ain’t got all day.’ Done my duty, Major, but it weren’t no use.”

  Major Tillman Watson and his brother sat their big horses, chewing on the overseer’s story. The dead boy’s homespun was patched dark and stuck with dirt, and a faint piss stink mixed with hound smell and the sweet musk of horses. “Wet hisself,” the overseer repeated to no one in particular. He was a small, closed-face man, as hard as wire.

  Uncle Elijah Junior complained angrily about “the waste of a perfectly good nigger” but his older brother, home from war, seemed more disturbed by Claxton’s viciousness. “Dammit, Z. P., you telling us these boys was aiming to outrun them hounds of yours?” Major Tillman was backing his big horse, reining its head away toward home. “Close his eyes, dammit!” He was utterly fed up. “Well? Lay him across your saddle, then! You can damn well walk him in.”

  “I reckon he’ll keep till mornin,” Claxton muttered, sullen.

  “You have no business here,” I was admonished by Uncle Elijah Junior—not because I was too young to witness bloody death nor because night was coming on but because I was certainly neglecting whichever chore I had abandoned without leave. Major Tillman, half-turned in the saddle, frowned down on me in somber temper. “You’re not afraid out here all by yourself?”

  “Yessir. I mean, nosir.”

  “Nosir.” The major grunted. “You get on home so you don’t go worryin your poor Mama.” Trailed by his brother, who would never be a horseman, the old soldier rode away through the dark trees.

  “ ‘Walk him in!’ ” the overseer squawked, once the brothers were out of earshot. “They want him that bad, let’m send the niggers with a wagon.” Ignoring the dead boy’s staring eyes, he stepped across the body to strip his bonds from the wounded Dock, who yelped with every jerk of the rough hemp.

  “He’s hurt!” I protested. Claxton glared as if seeing me for the first time. “Hurt? What you know about it? What you wantin with these niggers anyways?” He climbed gracelessly onto his horse, cracked his hide whip. In single file through the black trees, the two figures moved away along the moon-silvered water into enshrouding dusk, the black man pitched forward, the lumpish rider and lean hounds behind.

  In dread of swamps and labyrinths, of dusk, of death—the shadow places—I called after the overseer, my voice gone shrill. “You fixing to leave him out here?” Out in the dark swamp all night by himself? With the owls and varmints?—that’s what I meant. The man snorted because he dared not curse a Watson, even a Watson as young and poor as me. “Niggers’ll come fetch him or they won’t,” his voice came back.

  In the dusk, the forest gathered and drew close. I stood transfixed. In its great loneliness, the body lay in wait. I wanted to go close his eyes, but alone with a corpse at nightfall, I was too frightened. Already that shining face with its stopped blood had thickened like a mask, and bloodied humus crusted its smooth cheek. At last I ran and knelt by Joseph’s side, tried to pull him straight, free his gray hand, fold the arms across the chest.

  The dead are heavy, as I learned that day, and balky, too. He would not lie the way I wanted. I stared at him frantic, out of breath. The forehead, drained, resembled the cool and heavy skin of a huge toadstool. The brown eyes, wide in the alarm of dying, were dull glazed, dry. Trying to draw the eyelids down, my finger flinched, so startled was it by how delicate these lids were and how naturally they closed, as if he were drifting into sleep, but also by the hardness of the orbs beneath their petals. Who could have imagined that the human eye would be so hard! When one lid rose a little, slowly, in a kind of squint, I jumped and fled.

  The overseer saw that I was barefoot and in tears. He did not offer to swing me up behind. He said, “I allus tole ’em they is such a thing as too much nigger spirit.” Not knowing what such words might mean, I stared back at the lump that had been Joseph; it was ceding all shape and semblance to the dark, subsiding like humus among roots and ferns. Z. P. Claxton, I knew, would be laid to rest in higher ground, in sunny grasses, in the light of Heaven.

  The dead I had seen before but not the killed. Cousin Selden, home from war, had confided that the corpse of a human slain in violence and left staring where it fell looked like some being hurled down wide-eyed out of Heaven—nothing at all like the prim cadaver of the beloved in sedate sleep, plugged, scrubbed, perfumed, and suited up in Sunday best for the great occasion, hands crossed pious on its breast. Those who touched their lips to the cool forehead in farewell held a breath so as not to know that faint odor of cold meat. Or so said Cousin Selden, who composed dark poetry and liked to speak in that peculiar manner. Not that a darkie had been my “beloved,” but Joseph had been kind to me, he had been kind, and I had no other friends. How I would miss him! I was still young and could not help my unmanly feelings.

  My grandfather Artemas Watson died in 1841 at the age of forty. His second wife Lucretia Daniel had predeceased him at the age of thirty, and his son Elijah Daniel Watson, born in 1834, was thus an orphan at an early age. Grandfather Artemas’s properties included sixty-eight slaves, with like numbers distributed to Great-Uncle Tillman and their several brothers. In 1850, my father inherited real estate and property in the amount of $15,000, by no means a negligible sum, but according to Mama he’d squandered most of it on gambling and horses by the time they were married five years later.

  The marriage of a Clouds Creek Watson was duly rec
orded in the Edgefield marriage records: Elijah D. Watson and Ellen C. Addison, daughter of the late John A. Addison, January 25, 1855. Colonel Addison had commissioned the construction of the courthouse from which the crossroads village took its name (and in which his son-in-law, in years to come, would appear regularly as a defendant). Ellen’s mother had died at age twenty-five, but Ellen, as a ward in a rich household, was given her own slave girl and piano lessons until the day she was married off to young Elijah, with whom her one bond might have been that both had been orphaned when their fathers died in 1841.

  THE CLOUDS CREEK WATSONS

  Four years after his bugled glory on Court House Square, Private Lige Watson, having lost his horse, walked home from war. He told his family of the sack and burning of Columbia by the ruthless General Sherman, describing the capital’s lone chimneys, the blackened skeletons of noble oaks. “You folks at home know nothing of real war,” he said, astonished that Clouds Creek and Edgefield Court House had survived untouched.

  His family had known something of real war, of course, having had to scour bare sustenance from our remnant of the Artemas Plantation. The rest had been bought or otherwise acquired by Uncle Elijah Junior, who early in the War had assumed our mortgage, extending but meager help thereafter to the absent soldier’s wife and children. As a precaution against his nephew’s well-known temper, Mama said, he let us remain in the dilapidated house and raise such food and cotton as we might; even so, my mother, burdened with little Minnie, could not manage alone, not even with my nine-year-old hard labor. Uncle Elijah Junior sent us the hardheaded Dock, knowing Dock would run off again at the first chance, which he did, this time for good. Next, he sent old Tap Watson because Tap, the father of the slain Joseph, no longer worked well under Z. P. Claxton. Ol’ Zip had been too quick on the trigger, sighed Great-Uncle Tillman, but he scares some work out of ’em, we got to give him that.

  A small blue-black man of taciturn, even truculent disposition, Tap had not forgotten the kindnesses received from the late Master Artemas, that vague and lenient planter who had owned Tap’s parents and who remembered on his deathbed to set this stern man free. Unlike his son, Tap preferred orderly bondage to the unknown dangers of “freedom” and had cashed in his emancipation by selling himself to Elijah Junior for cold coin. “This way, I has my job, somethin to eat.” Slave or freedman, Tap had never missed a day of work—that was his pride.

  Told that his son lay dead in the swamp, he had set his jaw and turned his back on Claxton. “He’s your’n, ain’t he? Go get him,” Claxton barked. Facing him then, Tap Watson fixed the overseer with a baleful eye, not turning away even when Claxton pointed at the black man’s yellowed eyes and lifted his whip by way of warning. Great-Uncle Tillman ordered him to leave that black man be, and Tap finished slopping the hogs before hitching a mule to the wagon to go fetch the body. Never again would he acknowledge the overseer’s order, voice, or presence, which explained why Elijah Junior had been happy to be rid of him. Also, Tap had fornicated with Mama’s slave girl, Cinderella, now the tall young woman whom we called Aunt Cindy, and when he came to us, Mama ordered them to marry.

  When I told Papa, home from the War, how Z. P. Claxton had killed Joseph, Papa said roughly, “Runaway? Damn well deserved it.” Impoverished, now past thirty, Papa had to start all over as a poor relation of stern prosperous kin who prided themselves on self-sufficiency and independence. A tenant farmer on the Artemas plantation, he was paying a third of all crops raised to his uncle Elijah Junior, and in the lean aftermath of war, struggling to make a cotton crop with his wife and children, he slid into heavy debt to his own clan. As a war veteran, broke and disenfranchised, he would rail against the injustice of his fate, yet he would not tolerate Mama’s criticisms of Elijah Junior. Indeed he acclaimed his uncle’s “Watson thrift” even when this dour trait caused his own household to go hungry. (It was all very well about Watson thrift, Mama would say, but how did such thrift differ from hard-hearted stinginess?) With gallant optimism, my father pledged that one day, with God on his right hand and his strong son on his left, he would reclaim his family land, restoring the line of Artemas Watson to Clouds Creek. Carried away, he roughed my head with vigor. Though my eyes watered, I wished my brave soldier daddy to be proud and did not flinch.

  For a time “Elijah D.” enjoyed oratorical support from his aunt Sophia Boatright, a big top-heavy woman with a baying voice whose favorite topic—indeed, her only topic, Mama would whisper—was the Watson clan, all the way back to the English Watsons (or Welsh or Scots or perhaps Ulstermen, sniffed Mama), those staunch landowners and men of means who had sailed in the sixteenth century to New York City, then traveled on to Olde Virginia to claim their tract of free and fertile land. The first New World patriarch was Lucius Watson Esquire of Amelia County in Virginia, whose sons moved on to South Carolina as early as 1735. Their land grants were registered at Charleston, Aunt Sophia assured us, well before the arrival of those Edgefield clans which gave themselves airs today.

  A worthy son of those forefathers was Michael Watson, a fabled Indian-fighter who chastised the Cherokees and later led a citizens’ militia against highwaymen and outlaws, the foul murderers of his father and a brother. Meanwhile, he acquired a tract of six thousand acres on Clouds Creek, which was consolidated as clan property when he married Martha Watson, his first cousin. (Here Mama dared roll her eyes for her children’s benefit, screwing her forefinger into her temple in sign of inbred lunacy and sending our little Min into terrified giggles.)

  During the Revolutionary War, Captain Michael Watson had served as a field captain of Pickens’s Brigade, a mounted company armed with muskets for the deadly fight against the “King-Lovers” or Tories. At one point, he was captured and imprisoned at Columbia, where according to one reputable account—which Aunt Sophia enjoyed reading aloud at family gatherings—Martha Watson Watson, who was “small and beautiful, with wonderfully thick long hair . . . wound a rope around her body and carried files in her hair for the use of Captain Watson, [who] made his escape.” (Here my mother might pretend to struggle desperately with her own hair, risking what she called “the Great Wrath of the Watsons” with whispered parody: Captain Michael, darlin? Mah handsome hee-ro? Here’s a nice li’l ol’ file so’s you can saw those bars in twain and make good your escape! Just hold your horses, Captain dear, whilst I unsnarl this pesky thing from mah gloerious hay-uh!)

  In an early history of South Carolina, our famous ancestor had been described as “a determined and resentful man who consulted too much the counsels which these feelings suggested.” Freed from Tory gaol, the choleric Captain rushed straight into battle, only to receive a fatal wound in the forest swamps of the south Edisto. Having turned over his command to Lieutenant Billy Butler, our ancestor composed himself and “died for Liberty.”

  “Those Edgefield families prate about their ‘aristocracy’!” Sophia Boatright scoffed. “How about our Clouds Creek aristocracy? Our Watson forebears held royal grants for two decades before Andrew Pickens came down out of the hills, and they owned more land besides!”

  (“Even so,” Mama might murmur to my flustered father, who could not forcefully suppress her on a family occasion, “it was called Pickens’s Brigade, not Watson’s Brigade, isn’t that true, dear? And that handsome young lieutenant who replaced Captain Watson became General Butler, father of General Matthew Calbraith Butler, who married the exquisite Maria Pickens, whose father, come to think of it, was a general, too. Has there ever been a General Watson, dear?” Such whispers were just loud enough to stiffen the black whiskers of Great-Aunt Sophia.)

  Captain Michael’s only son, Elijah Julian, would become the landed patriarch of the Watson clan. Through industry and force of character, the “Old Squire” acquired eleven plantations, one for each of his children, among whom “his favorite was always his first little daughter, Sophia,” said Aunt Sophia. In the presence of her brothers, Aunt Sophia referred to the late patriarch as “the ramrod of this
family”; a shuffle and shift of bombazine and feathers would signal the onset of another anecdote establishing her own ascendancy as the rightful claimant to that title. One day when the Yankees ordered their black militia to drill on her broad lawn, the Ramrod’s gallant elder daughter strode forth shouting, “Now you monkeys just stop all that darn foolishness and go on home!” which naturally they did.

  We are no Eire-ish nor Sco-atch, nor are we Enga-lish—thus would the Old Squire tease his proud Sophia whenever she put on English airs, according to the recollections of her siblings. With Border folk, he would point out, who could determine who came from where, since none had agreed for seven hundred years where their domains lay? No, the Old Squire had declared, we are proud Borderers, the sons of Watt, and nothing more.

  Mama’s cousin Selden Tilghman, the young cavalry officer, war hero, and classics scholar, lived alone on his family plantation, known as Deepwood. Detesting the notorious history of violence in his Tillman clan, attributing their uproar to inbreeding and prideful ignorance, Cousin Selden had reverted to the ancestral spelling in order to separate himself from “those amongst my kinsmen who have grown so contemptuous of learning that they no longer know the correct spelling of their own name.”

  In Selden’s opinion, Mama told us, the early Watsons had probably arrived in the port of Philadelphia in the shiploads of Highland refugees from seven centuries of war and famine in the Border counties. These clannish and unruly Celts, as he portrayed them, had horrified the Quakers with outlandish speech and uncouth disrespect for all authority. Their women were notorious for short-cropped skirts, bare legs, and loose bodices, while the men mixed unabashed poverty and filth with a furious pride that hastened to avenge the smallest denigration or perceived injustice. Worse, they did this in the name of “honor,” a virtue which more mannerly colonials would never concede to such rough persons. Inevitably the Borderers were urged westward toward the backcountry of the Pennsylvania Colony, in the fervent hope that indigenous peoples even more primitive than themselves might do away with them.