Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  One cold morning of late November, I arrived at the greening ring of the old carriage circle and immediately sensed something in the air. The Deepwood manor house, charred and hollowed out by vigilante fire, squatted half-hidden in a copse of oak and juniper. Over the black hole of the doorway, the high dormer was bound in creeper and wild grape, and the shingled roof peak, ragged now, sagged swaybacked in a failing line along the sky. The ruin had the mournful aspect of a harrow left to rust in an oldfield corner or an abandoned stack of dark rain-rotted hay, but on that day as I drew near, its aspect shifted. Though no smoke rose out of its chimney, the gutted habitation hid some form of life.

  In those hungry years, any abandoned roof might shelter thieves or desperate black men without means or destination, and this day I sensed that imbalance in the air that is sign of being watched, even awaited. I passed the house, not breaking step, scanning casually for boot prints or fresh horse dung or anything untoward or out of place. I was prepared. Even so, what I now saw snapped my breath away.

  I kept my head, let my gaze skip past, walking on a ways before slipping my jackknife from my pocket, letting it fall. Turning and stooping to retrieve it, I scanned that little porch under the peak, scanned further as I straightened and kept going. Beneath the wild bees’ nest under the dormer, behind the leafy rail, a dark shape crouched motionless, its eyes burning holes into my back as I walked on. That imbalance in the air was the with-held breath of a living thing too bulky for a human being but not dark enough for a black bear even if a bear would climb up in there. I moaned but seized hold of my panic and did not run and never once looked back, crossing the gullied oldfields over red iron earth where hard brambles and thin poverty grass choked the spent cotton.

  When I returned to run my traps a few days later, the same gray weather lay upon the land, yet there was a lightness in the air, and a clear cold emptiness behind the frost-bronzed vine on that high balcony. The dark shape that had crouched there was gone. What had it been? The mystery frightened me.

  Probably the thing had fled the region, knowing it was seen. But I had scarcely reassured myself when, at the wood edge, I came across a trail of dirtied feathers, not dove or quail killed by a hawk or bobcat but frayed feathers plucked from some old chicken, beckoning sadly from the thorns and twigs in the browning woodland air.

  I stared about me, then moved into the forest, as trees fell in behind, all the while peering through skeins of bare black twigs and branches, in the chill gloom that at this time of year persisted in the deeper woods even in day. Nearing my trap, I sensed some queer vibration, as if a rabbit struggled, and with it, that shift and imbalance in the air. I moved forward in a crouch, then on hands and knees.

  In a hickory hollow where low sunlight fired the shagbark, a rough shape mantled my trap like a huge owl, hunched motionless, transfixed in its deep listening. Slowly, then, a tattered head turned in my direction, crest burning in cold rays of autumn light. When the thing rose soundlessly as smoke, clutching my rabbit, I retreated in horror, fell backwards over a log—Get away! That screech tore the woodland silence, and when it died, the great owl-thing had vanished. I fled the trees and lit out across the open fields toward the Ridge road before summoning outrage and the courage to hook back toward Deepwood, wanting to make sure that old house was the thief ’s lair.

  Though I had no idea what I would do next, I was desperate to get there first. Rather than leave the cover of the woods, the creature was bound to circle the long way around and approach its den through the west wall of the ruin, which was half-fallen and wide open to the weather. Panting from the run, I crept in through shaggy boxwood to the east wall window. Peering and listening, sick with fright—what did I hope to do without a weapon?—I was on the point of flight when the bulky silhouette loomed up in the jagged opening in the west wall, in failing light. Passing through without sound, it sank into the blackness. The frozen rabbit thumped onto a board. A tinder scratched, a small blaze flickered, jumped to life, casting nervous shadows. The fire glinted in the thing’s red eye, lit matted arms and chest and neck and the rough head of stubbled feathers. At the sound of my expelled breath, it rose like a great owl on man’s legs and vanished through the wall.

  Scrambling backwards, slashed by the hard briar, I screamed to fright the creature that even now was circling the outside of the house, rushing through the shadows of dusk to strike me down. Making its kill, it would hunch upon my body as it had my rabbit, shifting bloody talons, the wintry moonrise glinting on its beak.

  When I burst in, Papa jumped up, his ring eye crimson. Gold-red locks matted with sweat, his head loomed huge and wild. “Curse you, boy, don’t bang the hinges off my door!” Confused by grog, he would not sit down again to his thin gruel and stale biscuit but swayed beside the table, coughing thickly in the fumes from the oil lamp. He lost his balance, staggered again, bellowed, “What ails you, boy?” into my face. By the stove, Mama made no move to come forward. In her cupboard, Ninny Minnie whined.

  Gruff and sullen, I told Papa that I needed the rifle. He stamped the earth floor like a bee-stung horse. “Banging in here demanding my damn rifle? Show some respect!”

  “Your father is upset, Edgar. He’s been dismissed from Graniteville again.”

  Not now, Mama, not now! How I hated the excitement in her face. Since leaving home, I had never been sure which parent I resented more, the red-faced violent male or this pale vindictive female who teased her spouse as a child picks at a scab, until it bleeds. But this day, my father was sick with failure, rotten with bad moonshine, and merely groaned at his wife’s queer satisfaction in their straits. He sat down hard and blinked and squinched his nose, vented a hacking cough; he drew his knife from his scuffed boot and hacked at the stale bread, gave that up, too. “We ate better on the battlefield.” Elijah Watson glowered at his bowl, as if in the bottom of this cracked clay vessel of insipid soup he might descry every last sad gobbet of a hopeless life.

  “Papa? Please. I need it.”

  Lige Watson heaved around, brow furrowed. “What’s got you so scared, boy? You never been the scairdy kind.”

  Indifferent to my fear as well as his fatherly show of concern, Mama got back to business. “Who is to provide for us this time, Mr. Watson? Should this boy come home as head of his father’s household?”

  “He don’t even live in his father’s household, last I heard.” Papa scowled at the bitter memory of my assault. “I asked a question, boy.”

  I blurted out what I had seen, a strange man-thing, inhabiting Deepwood. A trap-robber. Mama told me I’d imagined things, but the man said, “Godamighty.” He kicked his chair back, lurching to his feet. His illegal musket was dragged down from the beams as its oily sacking fell to the earth floor; he slammed out of the house. The big roan, left saddled, snorted as it wheeled, and the carom of its hooves on frozen clay diminished in the darkness.

  “Deepwood?” she inquired, turning from the door. “Is that where—”

  “No,” I said. “He’ll go first to Major Coulter.”

  “Of course. Where else?” With Papa gone, her eyes had softened and she tried to smile. “How are you, Edgar? How are you getting on?”

  Still standing, I was wolfing Papa’s soup. She told me to sit down while I was eating. I ignored this. A moment later, she chastised me for wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I belched loudly just to see her shudder. Because she did not really care, I did not answer when she asked again how I was faring at Clouds Creek. She feared me a little now, I saw, which gave me no satisfaction, only made me feel more lonesome than before.

  Mama and Minnie and Aunt Cindy were ready to leave for Florida at the first opportunity. Had I changed my mind? When I said I had not, and wished them well, she took my hands across the table and held my gaze long enough to make quite certain that her son had been full witness to a mother’s sorrow. I withdrew my hands. She saw the coldness in my face and straightened up, blew her nose smartly. “Never mind,” she said.
“We’ll do just fine.”

  Toward midnight, Papa came home long enough to wrap his musket in the sacking and return it to the rafters. He appeared clumsy and shaken, his red brow glistening with sickly sweat, red ring-eye pulsing. At the door, he turned, pointing a finger at Mama’s face. “I was home all evening. I slept here. Don’t forget that.” He lurched into the night and rode away.

  THE OWL-MAN

  Retrieving the musket, I set off at daylight with the vague idea of driving the Owl-Man off what was left of my precious rabbit. But turning into Deepwood’s narrow lane, I was racked by dread of what might have taken place the night before and what I might stumble into.

  At the edge of the greening carriage circle, a trail of dark stains led to an old boxwood where something had lain bleeding. Later it had crawled toward the ruin, moving along a shaded wall under an old lilac choked by vines. From the dung and hoof prints, I pieced the rest together. Blowing horses, torches, and wild shots had flushed the surrounded quarry from the ruin. In the dark, they could not track the blood, having rushed here without dogs. When their quarry crawled into the dense boxwood, they had lost him. They had not persisted, being superstitious and afraid.

  The blood trail led around the corner toward the hole in the fallen wall. Creeping forward, picking my way through the winter briars, I struggled to keep the musket barrel disentangled.

  The wounded creature was alive inside its hole, that much I knew. I checked my load, I cleared my throat, I took a mighty breath. “Come out,” I croaked. From behind the wall came the slight scrape of something shifting, followed by a dry ratcheting cough like a raccoon. I forced myself to lean and peer inside.

  On a charred board by the dead fire lay my hoarfrost rabbit, stiff as furred wood. Behind it, taking shape in the cold shadows, stretched a man’s ragged legs and broken boots. The crusted head, tufts twisted askew, and a swollen black hand more like a talon clutched the heavy bloodstain on the stomach, and there was a sinuous dark stain where blood had probed and found a passage back into burned earth. A road walker, I thought—either that or the skin between patches of crust was black with firesmoke and filth. Black or white, the Owl-Man was surely on the point of death. A broken voice grated something like, “The Coward . . . Watson.”

  The Owl-Man watched me through raw slits in a mask. A rude scar showed where the head had been half-scalped, then sealed with boiling tar, then crowned with feathers. The mask had no expression. Nostrils and lips scarcely emerged from the leprous stubble. Then the mouth hole opened slowly, stretching dry strings of slime between dry broken teeth. A choked gasp: “Finish it.”

  The creature’s agony was horrifying, it was unbearable—not bearable! Eons of human agony in millions of cruel acts over the ages had been distilled here in this being, with no hope of relief but the swift mercy of annihilation. But when I raised the musket, put my finger to the trigger, I could not do it. I was blind with tears and only sagged down weakly, trying not to be sick.

  In one thrash, the Owl-Man seized the barrel, twisting it in his black claw with the force of spasm and yanking the muzzle to his throat as I fought to pull away. My wrist was clasped in a hornlike hand, and my yell as I pulled back was obliterated by explosion. Because the gun came free with the recoil, I was thrown backwards through the hole in a roil of smoke. The echo died and the thinning smoke wandered away into the deafened woods.

  Muffled footfalls—inside my head?—pursuing me down the lane toward the highroad were my first memory of jumping up and running. You git away from me! You git away! I heard my boots ring on the frozen earth, echoing off the rigid trees like rifle shots. What did you—I cried, Why did you—I never—never what? Even years later I did not know what my question might have meant, nor if there had been an answer anywhere. Had I cried out to the Owl-Man or to Cousin Selden? Or to the lost life I would never find again?

  Who would come after me? Reloading the musket to defend myself, I stood howling on the county road. To drive the present from my brain, to sink away into the past, into before, I howled to highest heaven but, still deafened by my own musket fire, I could not hear myself.

  Yesterday Edgar Artemas Watson, a promising young farmer, had turned into that lane and wandered from his life into dark dreaming. Awakened, he must hurry to Clouds Creek to feed his hogs, let his lost life return, fall into place. Whatever had just happened—had it happened?—must be banished. What could hallucination mean to young pigs starved for slops? With grunting and harfing?

  Alone on the highroad in the leaden light, I knew my life had lost its purchase. Like a dark bird disappearing over distant woods, the future had flown away into the past. I hurried onward. I longed to run, and run and run and run, all the way home, but burdened with my father’s heavy musket, I soon slowed, unable to run further.

  TAP

  A hard wind searched through roadside trees, cracking cold limbs. Over the rushing of blown leaves, fragments of voice commanded me to halt. When I whirled to defend myself, the rifle’s weight swung me off balance. I fell hard on the frozen road.

  A hard-veined black hand set down a water bucket and retrieved the fallen musket as I groped for it. When I clambered to my knees, Tap Watson backed away a little, brushing earth off the barrel, checking the load. “What you doin wit yo’ daddy’s shootin arn? What you runnin from? What’s dem tears fo’?” The old man squinted in the direction of the ruin. “You knowin somethin ’bout dat shootin over yonder? Las’ evenin, and again dis mornin?”

  I shook my head, reaching out to take the gun. “None of your business, Tap.”

  “Oh Lawd, Mist’ Edguh.” He took his hat off, bent his head, but would not return the gun. “O Lawdy Lawdy!” Tears shone on his cheekbones, which looked like dark wet wood in the cold sunrise. “Been leavin dese few greens in dat place over yonder. You folks needin any?” He tossed his nearlimp croker sack against my chest. Astonished, I made no attempt to catch it. It flopped onto the frozen dust between us.

  Tap raised the musket, waving the muzzle in the direction of the ruin. “We’s goin back up yonder. Got to look.”

  “You threatening me, Tap?” I picked up the sack he had dared toss at my chest.

  “Nosuh. I b’lieve you is threatin me, Mist’ Edguh.” He waved the gun again. “Get on now. I gots to tell dem at de Co’t House. Gunfire late last evenin, den another shot dis mornin. Gots to tell ’em how I seen dis boy Mist’ Edguh Watson runnin off from dere just now totin his daddy’s shootin iron, which his daddy ain’t allowed to haves back in de firs’ place.”

  I went ahead of him up the red road. “A black man’s word won’t mean much against mine. Just get you in bad trouble, Tap.”

  “Barrel still warm, Mist’ Edguh. Sposin I telled ’em dat?”

  “It won’t be warm by the time you get there. Anyway, it’s very dangerous, messing into white men’s business.” No answer came, only a slowing of the scuff of boots on the frozen clay. What would the Regulators do to any nigger who raised a weapon to a white man? I asked next. A nigger who slung greens at that white man’s chest like he would toss slops to a hog? And threatened to report him to the bluecoats? If Major Coulter got wind of this, Tap Watson would be a stone dead nigger before nightfall.

  But of course Tap’s story would be told before the Regulators could shut him up. A loyal nigra, a “good home nigger,” a church deacon swearing on the Bible—who would doubt him? Who would believe Ring-Eye’s stinky son even if he told the truth, that a traitor long ago given up for dead had been caught stealing from his trapline? That Colonel Robert Briggs Watson’s nephew had only gone to get his rabbit back, taking a weapon in case the thief attacked, finding instead the traitor Tilghman, wounded mortally the night before. He had grabbed the gun barrel and the old gun went off. It was an accident.

  Wounded mortally? Hold on right there, boy! How you figger it was mortal? You a doctor, boy? Wounded by who? You’d best get your story straight, young feller!

  Colonel Robert would deliver a ha
rsh judgment. Was a pilfered rabbit reason enough to kill a starving kinsman? An Edgefieldian, a Confederate officer, a battle hero? Colonel Robert would call it murder.

  Oh, I warned you!—I could hear Aunt Sophia now. At Clouds Creek, those “sky-crazed Celts” (Cousin Selden’s term) were sure to seize on this excuse to cast out Ring-Eye’s lineage for good. In the imminence of such injustice came a pounding ache so violent and a vertigo so sudden that I never even realized I was falling.

  A black face inset in the gray heavens, mouth working without sound. Darkness came and darkness went. Jack Watson awakened, in grim humor. Panic had given way to a resolve as clear as that still point when, with the wind’s dying, the shattered moonlight on the surface of rough water regathers its shards into one bright gleaming blade. How terrible that blade. How pure and simple.

  No one lived near. I rolled up onto my feet so easily and swiftly that the black man stepped back in alarm. Leading the only witness back into Deepwood, I felt strength surge into my step, and every breath renewed me with wild power. I even teased Tap over my shoulder. Hadn’t he only wanted me along because black folks were scared to be alone with corpses? With his contempt for darkie superstitions, Tap would normally be caustic in response. Today he remained silent, and when I turned, he stopped short in the road, then relinquished the musket.

  “Dis sho’ly ain’t no nigguh business, nosuh, it sho ain’t.” Mumbling, he took out a bandanna, wiping his neck in the frozen air as he might have done in the hot fields of midsummer. “You too young to be mixed up in dis, Mist’ Edguh.”

  “I’m not mixed up in this. Unless you mix me.”

  “Ain’t fixin to mix nobody, Mist’ Edguh.”

  But it was really me who needed company. When I waved him toward the hole in the west wall he went ahead, then slowed. After a few more steps, he went no further. Having glimpsed what lay inside, he placed his hands over his eyes—“Oh Lawdamercy!”—and fell to his knees as I forced myself to look.