Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Even in Reconstruction days, most men of Edgefield would not tolerate a black who failed to make way for them on the plank sidewalks, and Elijah D. Watson, as his status declined, demanded more respect than most. One day as I trailed him home, his careening gait would not permit an elderly black woman to edge out of his way; she was forced off into the deep mud street just as a man in frock coat, shining boots, and long curved sideburns hooked forward at the lower jaw like a peregrine falcon, came swinging his wood leg around the corner. Blood rushed to my face as he extended a gloved hand and handed the old darkie back onto the boards—hauled her back would be closer to the spirit of it—with a distaste impartially extended to all parties. The man ignored her babble and both Watsons, swinging forward on his wooden leg as the woman hurried off in her muddied dress.

  Matthew Calbraith Butler, commanding a cavalry regiment under General J. E. B. Stuart at the battle at Brandy Station in Virginia, had lost a leg leading a charge but returned to his command not long thereafter. When Private Ring-Eye staggered after him, braying that he was not a man to be insulted and further, that Captain Michael Watson had been Butler’s grandfather’s superior officer in Pickens’s Brigade, Calbraith Butler checked the drunkard’s onrush by placing the point of his cane against his chest just hard enough to redirect him off the boards. On his knees in the mud, Private Watson was coldly chastised for imposition on a general officer.

  Because his son had witnessed his humiliation, Elijah Watson, still on his knees, challenged the young general to a duel. General Butler stated with hauteur that Watson was not privileged to fight a duel since he had never been an officer and was no longer a gentleman. What he was, said Butler, was a disgrace to a good family as well as to the filthied uniform which he still wore.

  Shamed beyond endurance, I cried out, “Duel with his son, then, if you are not a coward!” But my voice broke grotesquely in its adolescent croak, and Calbraith Butler permitted himself a narrow smile. “When it comes to dueling with boys,” he told me quietly, “I am indeed faint-hearted, Master Watson.” With a slight bow, he turned and kept on going in strong limping stride and shortly disappeared around the corner.

  As street idlers hooted gleefully, hailing “Ring-Eye” by that name, my mud-footed father bellowed outrage that an unschooled ragged boy should dare to challenge an Edgefield hero. “Call out General Butler? You?” Jeering loudly for his audience, my father swore that this fool boy would be severely flogged for bringing such ignominy upon his family. With that, he seized me roughly by the ear and dragged me homeward, as an infuriating shock of pain tore at my head.

  Aunt Cindy, watering her hens, straightened slowly as we crossed our yard. Young Lalie ran to her and peered from behind her skirts at poor eartwisted Edgar. When Tap came out, they stood as still as oaken figures in that sad spring light as my maddened father roared at them to mind their nigger business. Then the door closed behind and I was slung into the corner, mad with pain. Minnie was bawling. Even Mama cried out in alarm when he seized the heavy hickory behind the door and staggered toward me.

  Slowly I stood. My ear and my wrenched arm fired my rage and in a moment Jack was there. Commanded to lean forward, hands spread wide on the log wall, I turned a little in seeming resignation, then whirled and grasped the wood, twisting it free before he could secure his hold.

  “Here,” he growled, missing my intent. “Give it here.”

  In the kitchen corner my mother stood, hands clasped, as formal as a mourner. “Edgar?” she said. Her query signified, Do you realize he may kill you? The man turned his stare upon his wife as if this unholy insurrection was her doing. I muttered, “Don’t you touch her, Papa.”

  Afraid, I circled out into the center of the room, panting like something cornered. Sensing weakness, he made a sudden rush as Minnie moaned with terror in her cupboard. When I jumped aside, he pitched onto his knees, and I leapt and brought the stick down hard across his shoulders—whack! I struck again with all my might, for my life depended on it—whack!

  Frantic to disable him, knowing his heavy cavalry coat would dull the blows, I went after the head and neck, the kidneys, the limber wood biting into the thick meat of him—whack!—and another—whack!—another and another. Cursing vilely in pain and disbelief, he dragged his collar up to protect his ears, still on all fours. I was somber, silent, stepping lightly around the yelping hulk, leaping sideways to avoid its lunges, darting in. The beast struggled to flounder to its feet, only to be stunned and struck off balance and crash down again. That hickory whistled as I beat him, beat and beat and beat and beat him, leaning into those blows with every last splinter of old fear and fury. Grunting, teeth grinding, I bent that hard wood with savage cuts—a-gain, a-gain, a-gain!—until at last the beast howled in woe and wrapped its arms around its head and hunched bloody-eared, still cursing, in the corner.

  The little house was swollen with harsh groans and gasping. The mudbooted mound that was the father lay quaking by the wall. Minnie crept forth but remained crouched behind the chair. Across the yard, Aunt Cindy would have covered Lalie’s ears, protecting her from the awful sounds of Mist’ Edgar’s final moments. And my mother? How was it I felt ashamed to face my mother? How could that be? When I lowered the stick, starting to tremble, she said softly, “Oh, how dare you, Edgar.” It was not a question. Quieting her heart, she pressed her fingers to her chest. She was very pale but her eyes fairly glittered. “How dare you,” she said.

  I felt hatred and I felt like weeping. Lightly, I tapped the tip of the extended stick on the floor between us, marking a boundary she was not to cross. She must have been looking straight into Jack’s eyes, and his expression scared her in a way her husband never had, even in violence. “Your own parent,” she finished weakly.

  “ ‘How dare you.’ ” I mimicked her disbelief. “I reckon you think it’s me who deserved that beating.”

  Not once had she tried to intervene. Worse, I had glimpsed her transport, her clenched exultation in my act. I thrust the stick at her. “Your turn,” I told her with a harsh contempt I could no longer hide. She stared at the stick, then at the prostrate man, coughing and moaning. The stick fell to the floor between us.

  I pushed my few things into a sack, shoved his hickory through the knot of this poor bindle, and departed my parents’ house for good. I passed those black folks standing in the yard without a word—instinctively, for their own safety, for I had grown up suddenly in the past hour and knew who my father was. Having heard those blows and cries, they were astonished when I emerged alive, but except for a little cry from Lalie, they kept silent. Only Minnie trailed me, sobbing her plea that I must not forsake her. You always forsook me, I thought, but did not say it. I kept on going down the road. As the last houses fell behind me, I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.

  AMONGST MY DEAD

  I walked all night to reach Clouds Creek, where I slept in a corner of Grandfather Artemas’s abandoned house. That afternoon, I paid a call on Colonel Robert Briggs Watson, the late Elijah Junior’s son and heir. Colonel Robert’s large house with its pecans and magnolias, built early in the century on the east side of the Ridge spring by the Old Squire, was set off from the road and its own fields by a wall of crenellated brick which let a listless breeze pass through in summer. The old wood house was quaking with the hound rumpus inside, so eager were his dogs to challenge strangers.

  R. B. Watson appeared on his vine-shrouded veranda in his shirtsleeves. A man of a comfortable kind of heft, he was less handsome than steadfast in his appearance, being calm and courtly and well-tempered by the weathers. Unlike most men of Edgefield District, he kept his silvered hair cropped short, and his clothes looked fresh even with dirt on them—just the opposite of his first cousin Elijah D., whose clothes revealed the ingrained grime of unclean habits (not to be ousted from his clothes “wid lye ner dynermite,” as Aunt Cindy once complained to her Mis Ellen—as close as Cindy ever came to revealing her disapprova
l of Mis Ellen’s husband).

  Colonel Robert was a decorated soldier who had ridden home from Appomattox Courthouse to manage the family properties around Clouds Creek. Taciturn, he listened as I asked permission to live in the old Artemas house and sharecrop its fallow land. More intent on me than on my question, he nodded vaguely, inviting me inside for a drink of water, asking politely how my mother might be faring. “You remember Edgar, don’t you, Lucy?” he inquired of his wife. “I do,” she answered pleasantly enough although not pleased to see me. What do you want here? her expression said.

  I did not discuss my rupture with my father. I told them about my earnest hope to restore my grandfather’s lineage here in Clouds Creek. He said he would think about it and he did. A day later, he put aside the warnings of his kinsmen and gave “Cousin Ellen’s boy” permission to sharecrop the Artemas tract and occupy his grandfather’s old house, patching it up as best he could.

  As a Clouds Creek Presbyterian, Colonel Robert had faith that whatever satisfaction might be found in life was of a man’s own making, and that no good would ever come from coddling. On the other hand, he betrayed distress that his father, Elijah Junior, had acquired the Artemas tract through plain hard dealing. While warning me that I would be held to a strict standard, he also looked for small ways to encourage me, bringing old blankets, a new kerosene lantern, basic tools and rough provisions, and a Bible. He invited me to come to Sunday dinner. “After church,” Cousin Lucy called, for church attendance was required to receive the blessing of her fine ham and sweet pudding.

  And so, most Sundays after church, I dined at Colonel Robert’s house, where I enjoyed browsing in the Watson Bible with its list of births and deaths, and also in the Carolina histories and the browned warm-smelling pages of the Shakespeare folios brought into the family by my great-grandmother, the former Chloe Wimberley, daughter of James Wimberley, one of George Washington’s generals in the Revolution; the leather volumes, soiled by mold and mice, had turned up in Grandfather Artemas’s falling house.

  “Those might be yours one day,” the Colonel said, filling my heart with the rare joy of heritage and belonging. That I might study in the evenings, he kept me supplied with whale oil for my lamp.

  The cold dusk of early Piedmont spring—the naked trees, the urgent ringing of spring peepers—hurt my heart; I was lonely all that April in that empty house. Even so, I was resolute, often content. The return to Clouds Creek had bathed and healed my spirit. These fertile meadows, the clear running water and soft loamy air, filled me with well-being, as if the old roots ruptured and exposed in our family’s loss of this plantation had been covered over with good soil and were feeling their way back into the earth. Soon the woodland twigs came into leaf, with redbud and dogwood and

  the mountain laurel opening cool blossoms. Then spring birdsong was gone as summer silence descended with the heat, and young redbirds dozed in the thick greens that would shrivel by late summer in the fire colors of the Piedmont autumn. In the old century, the blood red of these swamp maples, the oak russets, the hickory yellows and pale golds had hidden marauding Cherokees. Day after day, working my upland fields, I dwelled in reveries and plans for this home earth, painfully homesick although I had come home.

  Somehow I had always imagined that Clouds Creek had been named for its cloud reflections, the soft cumulus passing over on west winds from the Appalachians. Colonel Robert told me that the name came from a trader, Isaac Cloud, whose wife had survived to tell their bloody tale. In May of 1751, she wrote, two Cherokees came to their cabin just at dark. Given supper and tobacco, the Indians engaged the trader in friendly banter until near midnight, when all “dropt into Sleep. And when the Cocks began to Crow, they came to the Bed and shot my Husband through the Head. And a young Man lying upon the Floor was shot in the same Minute. And thinking the Bullet had gone through [my head], one struck me with a Tomahawk. . . . I lying still, they supposed I was dead, and one of them went and killed both my Children; and then they came and took the Blankets from us & plunder’d the House of all that was valuable and went off. And in that bad condition I have lain two days amongst my dead.”

  Amongst my dead—those words would ever haunt me.

  HOGS

  Squire Robert B. Watson was a modern farmer who had outgrown the sorceries of our Border ancestors, the potions, charms, and incantations for good crops. He taught me theories and methods of breeding livestock (some of them used formerly in breeding slaves, he commented, without further remark), having succeeded with hogs and cattle, horses, mules—everything, in fact, but sheep, which the Piedmont settlers had detested since old drover days when their immigrant Highlands ancestors moved south along the Appalachians. With the canny brain of the wild sheep long since bred out of them, these dim creatures had fallen prey to wolves and panthers and even to the berry-grubbing bears; suffocating in their dirty wool, they died prodigiously in the damp heat of Carolina summer before their husbandry was finally abandoned.

  The merry hogs, on the other hand, took joyfully to the land, rooting through the woodlands as if born to it. Escaped hogs resisted predators, reverting quickly to the razorbacked pugnacity of the wild boar; they grew huge, black, and hard-bristled, with curled tusks. “Some of our ‘po’ whites’ turn feral, too.” The Colonel winked, aware of my hard feelings about Z. P. Claxton and the death of Joseph. But unlike feral humans, he continued, wild hogs could be baited in and tamed in pens, rounding off their rangy lines in a few generations and turning pink beneath their bristles, until only the snouts and curly tails and squinty little eyes remained the same.

  That first year, when a sow farrowed toward Christmas, I helped the Colonel with the deliveries, tugging each piglet by the shoulders to work it free, and he showed me how to clean off the shining membranes which enclosed the heads, then pump the slimy little legs to get them going. Finally the sow would heave a sigh and push her runt out in a bloody blurt of afterbirth. Since he did not trust this sow not to eat her litter, he promised me a half dozen shoats if I would rear the lot. “For a while you’ll have to cook their feed,” he said, “raise them by hand.”

  “If I can catch them!” Idiotically I laughed aloud, startling us both with my new happiness. Seeing my overjoyed face, the Colonel grinned. “First time I’ve ever seen you smile.” The Colonel chuckled kindly along with me. He had almost forgotten, he said, how much he had enjoyed pigs as a boy. “You don’t ‘catch’ a pig, Edgar. You ‘fetch’ it.” As he spoke, Colonel Robert petted the six shoats. Without affection, he explained, they grew poorly and became sluggish, and their curly tails would droop like dying flowers. In a few weeks, if cared for properly, my gang of shoats should be racing around with grunts and squeals, playing tag and mauling one another, much like puppies. “Plenty of water helps ’em gobble up their food so they can grow.” He smiled. “No pig under one hundred pounds can call itself a hog, so they’re in a hurry.” I was in a hurry, too, though for what I did not know. I could hardly wait!

  In response to all my earnest questions, Colonel Robert spoke to a young cousin as one farmer to another, evoking great antebellum days when even rich Tidewater planters had been attracted to the short-staple cotton agriculture here in the Piedmont; before the War, Edgefield had shipped more cotton bales than any district in the state. But erosion had leached out the clay soil, and problems had grown with fluctuations in the cotton prices and rising competition from the states along the southern Mississippi. With the onset of the War and the loss of plentiful unpaid labor, “King Cotton” was deposed for good.

  These days, despite Reconstruction, said the Colonel, Clouds Creek was stirring back to life. Like his father and grandfather before him, he sold off timber from his wooded lands, grew tobacco, corn, and rice, and was trying grain crops—oats, wheat, rye, and barley. In fact, he said, the Watsons were planting all their former crops except for cotton. He had also made a reputation for fine hogs and cattle, and in this year of my return was putting in small orchards; he h
oped to become the first Carolina planter ever to ship peaches outside the state. Listening proudly to my kinsman, I dared hope that my own luck had turned, that the worst of my life was behind me, that there was a future at Clouds Creek for Edgar Artemas Watson.

  I started simply with a few chicks and ducklings, borrowing a horse to plow a single meadow in which I planted corn by hand, gold kernel after kernel, row after precious row. Thin fresh green lines, weak and broken at first, came forth mysteriously and rose in a green haze; for a while, I cherished each and every plant among the hundreds, even the weak ones I would later weed away. I felt ingrown in this dark soil, as the Artemas Plantation’s heir, putting down soft tendrils like a native plant of our old land. I grew to love the Clouds Creek earth, and in summer I made strange love to it in the soft evenings, lying down upon it naked as the soil gave off the gathered heat of the long day.

  Not until I knew the Colonel better did I inquire about my father’s career as a soldier. Aware that I needed the truth, the Colonel did not dodge the question but gave me a terse answer, reporting precisely what his uncle Tillman had told him—that Elijah D. had never hesitated to seek privilege or favor from higher-ranking kin and never failed to shun responsibility of every kind, including combat. Early in the War, Uncle Tillman had dismissed him from the Edgefield Volunteers, and within that year, Selden Tilghman had him transferred from the Nineteenth Cavalry to an infantry company of half-trained soldiers, due to general dereliction of his duties. The alternative had been courts martial and imprisonment.