Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Then reverie dissolved, leaving cold sweat like a dank swamp mist on my skin. I stared about me at the undiscovered country on both sides of the wild river, a howling waste of dark riverine forest and rank coarse savanna where the eternal seasons passed unchanged. Mourning my sprightly hogs, my sturdy pens, brooding about the weeds and hard sharp briar that all too soon would creep over my farmland, returning it to the oldfield desolation in which I’d found it, I sat stunned by melancholy. When the pain and rage burst from my mouth, my awful squawk silenced every soul on that slow barge.

  Deaf to my cry (out of embarrassment), my mother and sister smiled sweetly; they tatted and chattered. Still ignorant of what had taken place at Edgefield, they were afraid of Edgar’s darkness, and all the while that stern black woman awaited me, confident I would spit up evil when the time came. Unwilling to meet her suspicious eye, I set my jaw and glared fixedly at the forests of the wild Suwannee (Creek Indian for “Echo River,” said the bargeman).

  All up and down the whole Creation

  Sadly I roam

  Still longing for the old plantation

  And for the old folks at home.

  Once I’d hummed it, that song became epidemic on the barge; everyone hummed, whistled, and sang it, and just when it seemed it might die out, I would start over by mistake, unable to drive its plaint out of my head. Oh how I sickened of that song and self-pity, and of grief-rotted Edgar, too, and of foul nightmares about the Owl-Man, who in my dreams never appeared as Cousin Selden.

  Day after day, the strange smells and hidden voices of the passing wilderness, seeking to draw me back into my life, had passed unheeded. And then one day I awoke to find the earth colors returned and “the whole Creation” come alive and clear. As the dark withdrew, the forest stood forth in a light of revelation, and sunrise leaves sparkled and spun, breathing a fresh wind from the west, off the Gulf of Mexico, and I jumped up with a laugh that startled poor Ninny-Minnie. Wasn’t I young and able-bodied, able-minded, too? One day I would go home to reclaim Clouds Creek, but meanwhile a virgin land was opening before me. We should reach our destination, the bargeman said, in time for the spring planting.

  Here and there, rounding a bend, the barge surprised brown-skinned people on the banks, crouched back like wildcats caught out in the open. The Cherokees who were chastised by my ancestors were almost gone from upland Carolina, though a few still lurked in remote regions; these Creeks were the first wild men I had ever seen. The women and young would rush into the reeds or flee through the shadows of the great live oaks which spread their heavy limbs over the clearings, but the grown men and older boys, drifting out of gun range, would pause at the forest edge to watch the intruders over their shoulders, in the way of deer; I was awed by the stillness in them even when they moved. They were set to run, they had to be. The bargeman told us that bored, drunken travelers would pass the time blazing away at every furred and feathered bit of life along the river, and would sometimes shoot close to these people’s feet “to see them redskins dance,” which was why, at the first glint of metal, the wild folk withdrew into the shadows until the intruders were gone around the bend and the forest silences regathered.

  I never greeted them, having learned that lesson when even the smallest child among them refused to acknowledge frantic Minnie, though she waved and waved. “Why don’t they wave back?” she cried, desperately hurt. I said roughly, “They fear and despise us. Why should they wave?” These wild ones came down from those Muskogee Creeks that Ol’ Hickory had chased south out of Georgia, said the bargeman, and most of them were never seen at all, easing down into hiding at the sound of our approach, watching us pass.

  These hinterlands, so distant from the settlements, remained uncultivated and unhunted. The bargeman said that in Spanish times, when a road was opened from St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast to Pensacola on the Gulf, there were still buffalo in these savannas, and also the great jaguar, called tigre, and panthers, bears, and red wolves were still common. Sometimes, at night, shrill screams scared Mama and poor Ninny half to death—not white females being violated by naked savages as they imagined but panthers mating, the bargeman assured Mama, who recoiled from this man’s vulgar liberty. Bull gators coughed and roared back in the swamps, and once there came a lonely howl that he identified as the red wolf. Flocks of huge black fowl in the glades were bronze-backed turkeys, and everywhere, wild ducks jumped from the bulrushes and reeds, shedding bright water. I shot big drakes and gobblers for provisions and pin-hooked all the fresh fish we could eat. Pairs of great woodpeckers larger than crows, with flashing white bills and crimson crests afire in the sun, crossed the river in deep bounding flight, and hurtling flocks of small longtailed parrots, bright green as new leaves in the morning light. The wild things were shining with spring colors and new sap and finally I was, too. I would sink my teeth into this morning land like a fresh peach.

  The river barge was warped ashore where a tributary, the Santa Fe, joins the Suwannee—the confluence of the Echo and the Holy Faith, I informed the women. (Spanish Catholics! snapped Mama, worn out by her journey and on the lookout for the smallest cause to be indignant.) De Soto and his men, more exhausted and discouraged by the heat and insects than by Indian attacks, had called it the River of Discord, whereas to the Indians, the river was sacred mystery, vanishing quite suddenly into the earth—no suck or swirl, just gone away under the ground. Perhaps because the red-skinned devils had made life Hell for the first settlers, those folks imagined they had found the source of the River Styx, deep in the Underworld, and few had persevered long enough to learn that the current surfaced a few miles downstream as a beautiful blue spring in the forest.

  While the barge continued on to Branford Landing, I chose to explore the country before meeting the women at Ichetucknee Plantation. Hollering good-bye to all to insure attention, I rode my big roan off that barge as she touched shore—a staccato clatter sharp as rifle fire as the horse balked, then a mighty gathering of haunches and great leap and splash and upward heave onto the bank. These heroics, alas, were spoiled by the hydraulics of my stallion, which lowered its nozzle to release a stream of piss even while it rid itself of gas, hightailing off in a grand salute of horse farts and manure as the women’s cries of admiration turned to giggles, but finally all cheered as grim young Edgar was actually seen to laugh. Minutes later, in my own company at last, I could not stop grinning, feeling nearidiotic with anticipation.

  The river trail ran north along the “Santa Fee” (as backcountry Floridians still call it), which descends from a dry sandy land of piney woods and scrub oak to the cypress sink where it is drawn beneath the earth. Farther upriver, the trail turned off along the Ichetucknee, a crystal stream with blue water so clear that streaming underwater weeds like turquoise eels swim endlessly over white sand.

  ICHETUCKNEE

  The Ichetucknee post office and trading post (also the blacksmith shop and gristmill) was six miles up this woodland stream, on the east bank of the Mill Pond spring and only a few miles from Fort White, in Columbia County. The proprietor, a small quick man named Collins, was eager to relate how Fort White had been built back in ’37, during the Second Seminole War, only to be abandoned to the savages a few years later. The first of his name had come as pioneers in ’42, twenty years before the Third Seminole War. Soon after came the War Between the States, when this worthy blacksmith-trader-postmaster had rushed over to Lake City—known as Alligator in those days—eager to join the Columbia Rifles and go fight the Yanks. (I did not ask if he’d got his wish, since if he had, I would never have escaped the smallest detail of that wartime saga.)

  In a few years, this lively Edgar Collins would become my sister’s father-in-law, and because we shared a detestation of our given name, we got on fine. After his wife had packed me some good grub, Mr. Collins pointed me northeast through the woods toward the plantation, but not before warning me to watch my step around the foreman and his boys, a pack of Georgia ridge runners named
Tolen.

  I remounted and rode on, anxious to reach the plantation before nightfall. Back home in Carolina our roads were iron red, but here in the forests of north Florida the trails were cool white clay, wandering off like ghost paths through the trees. I dismounted and rubbed some of this stuff between my fingers: poor soil for farming. In this spring damp the road clay, beaten hard by wagon wheels and hooves, felt smooth and fine as bone-meal; in summer it would powder to fine dust. Peering about these silent woods with no idea what lay ahead, my high spirits were overtaken and dragged down by a claw of that morbid despair which I thought I’d left behind me.

  Aunt Tabitha Watson and her daughter Laura lived in “the plantation house,” which was nothing at all like a plantation house in Edgefield. The grand manor that Mama had set her heart on was no more than a big log cabin with two rooms on either side of a center passage. The outside was framed over with rough pine boards with the bark on, and a stoop was tacked onto each end of the dim corridor. Except in size, it scarcely differed from what the old folks called a dog-trot cabin because any hound—or hog, coon, rooster, or inquisitive bear—could travel through from one stoop to the other without so much as a how-d’ye-do to the inhabitants. Yet it was the biggest cabin in the county, well situated on the rich soil of a former cow pen, now a fenced-in grove of bearing pecan trees and black walnut and persimmon.

  Great-Aunt Tabitha (for reasons best known to herself, she had decreed that her name was to be spoken as Ta-bye-a-tha) was creeping up on sixty years of age. In her appearance, her daughter Laura, though still short of forty, wasn’t far behind. Cousin Laura habitually stood one step behind her mother, where both of them (this was clear instantly) thought she belonged. Both were horse-faced females in high collars and white aprons, neither plain nor pretty, but the daughter was only a dim copy of the mother, who had saved for herself every last dab of brains and character. Cousin Laura, Mama had warned us, was kindhearted but not bright. With her large eyes and soft brown hair and creamy skin, she had once passed for pretty, but that wide mouth (as Mama remarked with her customary charity) “lacked the firm jaw needed to control those flying teeth.”

  “Aunt,” I said, holding my hat over my heart in sign of piety and respect, “I am your great-nephew E. A. Watson, at your service.”

  “A for Artemas.” The old lady smiled. “Such a kind good man, for all his foibles. We called him ‘Bird’ because he sang with such sweet voice.”

  “If you please, ma’am, it is Addison. Edgar Addison Watson.”

  “Artemas,” she admonished me. “After your grandfather. That is Watson family custom, that is the name assigned you in our family Bible, and that is that.” My tart mama and this haughty personage were doomed to tangle, I saw that much, but I held my tongue.

  Black Calvin Banks (as old “Cobber” had dubbed himself once he’d become a full-fledged citizen of the republic) told me all there was to know about the plantation, which consisted of four square miles of flat arable land. Originally called Ichetucknee, it had been bought by William Myers of Columbia, South Carolina, who had fled south in the first year of the War to start all over in north Florida, having boarded his ladies in Atlanta until he could provide them a few primitive comforts. Upon arrival, Colonel Myers set his men to girdling the trees to kill the encircling pine forest, and eventually three square miles had been cleared and fenced. By the time I came there, in the spring of ’71, five hundred acres had been planted in corn—“twenty-five acres per nigger and mule” was the way they figured, Calvin said—and three hundred and fifty in Sea Island cotton, which had been the cash crop in north Florida since the War.

  “What corn we grow, dass mostly for hog and home. Bale up de shucks fo’ winter fodder, keep de niggers in cornmeal and hominy. Hog food, corn bread, hominy, sometimes sourins. Folks know about sourins in Carolina? Turn cornmeal sour by sun-cookin it? Pretty good to eat with chicken. Gopher, too. You folks like gopher?” Calvin hummed a little, his mouth working, savoring those tortoise feeds of yore.

  Cousin Laura’s husband had returned each year to his family home in South Carolina, leaving the management of his plantation to his overseer, one Woodson Tolen. Most of his slaves had stayed on here as freedmen, having neither the wherewithal nor the ambition to find their way back home. Calvin Banks had served as Myers’s coachman and remained loyal to the family, knowing freedom was dangerous. During the War, when a Yankee detachment reached Olustee, thirty miles to the northeast, Colonel Myers had buried his gold in a secret place back in the woods. A few months later, just when he was drawing up his plans for the first real manor house in Columbia County, he was struck dead by lightning while standing beneath an oak during a rainstorm. After his employer’s death, the former Cobber bought a hundred-acre piece from Cousin Laura, paying $450 in cash. After the War, this land would go for $6 an acre, so he got it cheap, but even so, nobody could figure how that darn nigra had saved up so much money. Naturally the rumors spread that his coachman had been with Myers when the Colonel buried his gold out in the woods and that this black rascal had gone back after his death and dug it up. Aunt Tabitha believed that Calvin was a thief, Cousin Laura did not, which was typical of the differences between them.

  Because Laura had no head for business (nor for much else, observed her loyal old friend, my mother) the young widow had been left out of her husband’s will. The Colonel had specified that Aunt Tabitha would inherit his plantation, which upon her death would be turned over to his Myers nephews, who were our first cousins on their mother’s side. (Aunt Cindy was almost “family,” too, since it had been the Myers relatives who had given her to Ellen Addison as a wedding present.) After Cousin William’s death in 1869, his ladies had traveled here seeking to break the will, and because wartime conditions were uncertain, Aunt Tabitha decided to stay on in Florida and manage this remote plantation which nobody in Reconstruction times could afford to buy.

  Aunt Tabitha had soon discovered that cultivated or even educated people were very uncommon in this frontier county, and she and her daughter came to hate their isolation. Since Mama had been Laura’s friend and schoolmate (and since Aunt Tabitha was embarrassed—faintly—by her own role in Mama’s failed marriage), her plea for refuge in Florida had been granted. “The family at Clouds Creek informs me that you have done all you could to save the soul of my afflicted nephew,” read Aunt Tab’s letter, which Mama had shown us on those days on the Suwannee, “and suffered no end of abuse and sorrow for your pains. Forsake him, then, as God is your witness, and take shelter with us in Florida, for your children’s sake as well as for your own.” And for Aunt Tab’s sake, too, Mama was quick to point out. The plantation would need all the help that strong young Edgar could provide, not to speak of Cinderella Myers’s contributions in the kitchen.

  Calvin Banks fetched our family from the river landing in a wagon. How threadbare the poor things looked when they arrived! I glanced at Aunt Tabitha, who shared this impression and did not trouble to hide it. I was glad of what Mama had confided, that she had hidden her jewelry from her husband from the very first day of her marriage, and had brought along her few small diamonds “to start us out in Florida.” She had always worn her hair in a big old rat’s nest suitable for hiding diamond rings—two beautiful rings, according to our Ninny, “not just little chips stuck onto something.”

  WOODSON TOLEN

  On my first day, I jumped right in and labored mightily in the spring planting to show I was no mere poor relation but an able farmer, and that just because we had accepted Aunt Tab’s hospitality did not mean we sought her charity. Excited by the possibilities of this plantation and eager to understand its economics, I was up early and rode till late, helping out wherever I could learn something. Within months I felt confident that I could run this place as overseer, though it might take a year or so to prove it.

  On Sundays, out hunting and exploring, I rode all over the south county. The forests were fairly trembling with deer and turkey, an almost uni
maginable abundance after long years in the worn-out woods of home. As for robins, redbirds, orioles—those larger songbirds which I snared for our poor table in the War years—their peaceful choruses arose each morning from the oak trees near the house, intermingled with the ring of axes or the hammers banging on some new construction. Every shack had roosters crowing and hogs grunting and fieldhand families laughing and crooning in the evening, sounds which made Mama homesick for “the good old days,” by which she meant the antebellum days of cotton wealth and slavery. All that was lacking here, she whispered, with a wry glance at our benefactors, was amusing company. Oh how she missed her poor lost Selden, Mama sighed, still in hopes that one day her witty, educated cousin might reappear.

  As a kinsman of the owners, I was disliked from the start by the overseer, Woodson Tolen, originally hired to keep the place running profitably in those months when Colonel Myers was away; almost certainly this man’s designs on the plantation were born on the very day Myers was killed. He knew the old woman could not live forever no matter how hard she might try, and once sharp-eyed Aunt Tabitha was out of the way, Cousin Laura would cheerfully sign almost any piece of paper a conniving skunk like Woodson Tolen might set in front of her. He was already training his oldest boy, thin shifty James, to replace him at the trough when he retired.

  A redneck from the Flint River country in the Georgia hills, this man Woodson—a man of the same ingrown breed as Z. P. Claxton—was a wiry small weasel with mean red eyes pinched too close to his nose and traces of ancient grime in every seam. From his vantage point, nose to the ground, this feller spied on my hard work, which he perceived as a sinister attempt to thwart his ambitions for his clan, and he never ever missed a chance to make me look as bad as possible in the eyes of Auntie Tab.