Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  All the while I was feverish with longing. By early spring, I was visiting Lake City’s colored whores with their big soft mouths and round high rumps and candied tongues. Out of respect for my lost bride and common decency, I never took one from the front, only rode her from behind, slamming against that rubbery hind end, forcing her forward till her back bowed and her neck twisted, her head jammed against the wall. At the end, I rammed with all my strength—a-gain, a-gain, a-gain!—until she yelped in faked abandon or in fear or honest pain, it made no difference. A fleeting spasm, thin as cloud mist crossing a high sun, before I fell off, dull and dirtied, having failed once more to escape into obliteration.

  A shy new wench billed as “Sweet Miss SueBelle Parkins” seemed upset when she was chosen by the grieving widower, in fact insultingly upset: I warned her sharply that I was not so drunk and useless as I might appear, overcoming her reluctance by twisting her arm and pushing her upstairs, where she permitted me to complete my carnal dealings. Passive though she was, inert with terror, she got a hook deep into me, a sick addiction having something to do with the queer contrast between the lacquered whore’s mask and the firm young body and clean skin. But when I came there and selected her again, she burst into tears. She was still weeping when, upstairs, she whispered, “Lo’d fo’give me, Mist’ Edguh, suh! I has knowed you all my life!” Scarcely discernible beneath her brassy wig and crimson rouge and tear-caked powder lay my childhood neighbor, young Lulalie Watson, the sweet-potato daughter of Tap Watson and Aunt Cindy.

  The day Mist’ Edguh had left Edgefield, Lalie wailed, her daddy was shot dead in the field by two white men on horseback. When I demanded to know who those riders were, she was too scared to tell me. Finally she confessed that they were known to black folks as Major Will and Overseer Claxton.

  Lalie had had sense enough to flee, walking the wood edge all night and the next day to reach the Savannah River. Her mother had left a paper with the address in Florida, but having no kin along the way and finding no work in the winter fields, the girl was reduced to selling herself to pay for a journey hundreds of miles south. Two years passed before she reached Lake City. Being ashamed of what she had become, and fearful of the pain she would cause her churchly mother, she had never dared the last few miles to present herself at the plantation. (It had not occurred to the poor thing that Aunt Cindy’s joy at seeing her alive might outweigh her disappointment.) Instead, she took a position, so to speak, at our local cathouse. In tears, Lalie implored me to keep her awful secret. I promised on my honor I would do so, for which I was rewarded with warm tears and a complimentary crack at her sweet person.

  I visited Lalie soon again and then again—homesickness, I suppose. And I needed that generous healing nature that had made her companionship so precious to my sister in our childhood. All true, all true, but it was also true that her mortal form did great honor to her Maker. The seed of hunger for Lulalie Watson, dormant since boyhood, needed small encouragement to sprout—not that it helped me to escape my grief. My groan of deliverance would turn in its very utterance to a moan of woe. I reviled the poor creature for knowing that I wept, for knowing that no matter what, I needed her tenderness as much as her brown person—for knowing, worse, that no matter what, her erstwhile young master was now her slave and would be back for more, no matter how often she begged me to forget the lost Lulalie. At the very least, oh please, sir, I must deal with her by her professional name and please, sir, fuck her under that name, too, is what she meant, as if to avoid additional damnation for some queer kind of incest. I felt slighted but agreed.

  Banging through Sweet SueBelle’s door stupid with drink, needing to shame her because so ashamed myself, I sometimes hollered, Sooee-belle, Sooee-belle, in the voice I used back at Clouds Creek to call my hogs. Pitying me in my coarse grief, she smiled at my tomfoolery. And finally her good simple heart would get me smiling at my own self-pity—before the act, that is, but never after.

  As SueBelle became less fearful, even fond of me, she called me “Wild Man.” You bes’ come on upstairs with yo’ sweet Sooee-belle, cause you my Wil’ Man. Undressed, she lay back like a banquet, breasts smooth and sweet as mangoes, thighs thick and warm and smoky as Virginia hams. But in my soiled grief, I wanted no eyes upon my deed, and would turn her over, hauling her up onto her knees in a surge of anger and taking her like an animal, just as before. She would not join in my abandon, simply endured it.

  One night there came hard pounding on the walls. Shut up that crazy racket in there! Ain’t you got no manners? And another displeased customer across the hall, his door flung wide, hollered downstairs at the boss whore, Hear that? How come I ain’t gettin laid as good as that? Mirthful, I increased our uproar, rolling off the bed on purpose in a grand finale, dragging the underdog right down on top of me, until finally one plaintiff, provoked beyond endurance, knocked our door down. I jumped up buck naked and launched a surprise attack, as I had been taught to do at my father’s knee. Knocked down and kicked hard, still on his knees, the mauled intruder, as naked as myself and mopping dolefully at a bloody nose, agreed to apologize to Miss Parkins, that fine specimen of negritude swathed in pink sheets. “Beggin yer pardon, Miss Parkins,” he sniveled. “Doan mine if ah do,” said the demure Miss Parkins. I banged the door behind him and went back for more.

  Hard drinking and hard fucking were my sole forgetting. For all its rewards, mounting Sooee from behind was a lonely business, and rolling off her, spent and sticky, was worse. Awaking vile-breathed, head pounding from bad rotgut, I felt plain rancorous, soul-poisoned. Dragging my stinking carcass into crumpled clothes and lurching toward the stairs, I was reviled by other lowlifes and their black Jezebels for making such a rumpus at that hour. Outside on a Sunday morning, I was struck sightless by the sun like a bear blundering out of a cave. Occasionally my uproar was assailed by slop jars flung from the upper windows by the religious element among the whorehouse clientele, and always, I was scourged in the street by the cold stares of churchgoers offended by my swinish defilement of the Sabbath morn. Filled with a deep slow-seeping rage, I cursed them vilely to offend them further.

  Oh Charlie my Darling, Dearest Charlie, how do you like your filthy Mister now?

  SUWANNEE COUNTY

  Billy C. Collins married our Mary Lucretia that same year and their first child was dubbed Julian Edgar Collins. The “Edgar” honored Billy’s father, but poor Minnie, frantic to please her wayward brother, tried to hint that her sprat was named for me. However, no Methodist Collins would name his firstborn after Edgar Watson, and anyway, her husband much disliked me. Hadn’t his vile brother-in-law sent poor Cousin Ann Mary to an early grave? Had he not insulted her memory by refusing to attend her funeral and letting her parents take responsibility for the child?

  When Lem and Billy’s father died, I paid his estate fifty-five dollars for a beautiful gray filly, long-legged and delicate, with big dark eyes. I named her Charlie. For ten and a half dollars more, I acquired the old man’s .12-gauge double-barrel, which in those days was a fancy gun, not used by common farmers. The right barrel threw a broken pattern but I soon learned to compensate for that. I would use that old firearm all my life and without hearing one complaint.

  That spring, still shaky, I gave up my night wanderings and made a good crop for Captain Getzen, who had been patient, liking the way I worked. With my debts paid, I tried to heal our family by inviting the Collins boys to celebrate. Entreated by my sister, Billy accepted. And so, one Saturday, we rode to the O’Brien tavern in Suwannee County, the only place for thirty miles around that would still serve me. I had promised Minnie I would pick no fights, even in fun, and that evening things went fine. For such good Methodists, Lem and Billy got uproarious, and Lem toasted me over and over, yelling, “See that, Bill? Ed ain’t near so bad as what you thought!” Made me feel so kindly toward my fellow men, even my brother-in-law, that I jumped up on a table to lead all my new friends in a grand old marching song of the Confederacy, to wh
ich every man present knew the rousing chorus:

  Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, Hurrah!

  Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that flies the single star!

  When I sang out the cornet part (buppa-ba-buppa-ba-boo, ba-buppa-ba-buppa ba-buppa ba-boo!), Lem hollered to the crowd that his friend Ed might be the finest kind of farmer but his singing voice was a greav-ious insult to Southern rights and maybe our blue flag, too. He did his best to haul me off that table, with the whole room cat-calling and laughing, the singer included. But when I caught Lem with a boot swipe to the mouth, he grabbed my heel, and my momentum swung me off the table in a whirl of walls and faces, yells and smoke, and the oak floor struck me so hard that I couldn’t place the pain; when I tried to jump up, cursing and laughing, I collapsed and fainted. I was carted home in a wagon, both knees broken.

  THE FARRIER

  For half a year while my fields went to hell, I lay at the mercy of the women, having gone off alcohol the hard way. When I could concentrate, I read a little in my tattered History of Greece, but most of those long days in the cabin I listened to the mice and crickets and suffered the tuneless whistling of Sam Frank Tolen, who never failed to grin in at the door when he happened by.

  I had hardly recovered and resumed work at Getzen’s when Lem Collins shot the farrier in the blacksmith shop in back of his late daddy’s store at Ichetucknee. This man Hayes thought Lem was fooling with his wife and he was right. When the culprit fled out the window, the blacksmith hollered after him that he would tear his head off, and Lem being somewhat slightly built like most Collins men, it stood to reason that a feller twice his size who could rassle any plowhorse to a standstill would fulfill that vow with no trouble at all.

  I knew John Hayes. John Hayes meant business. I said, “Lem, you’d better leave this county.” “Hell, no!” said Lem. “I love her, Ed!” “Well then,” said I, “you haven’t got much choice.” “Gosh,” Lem said, “you mean that I should kill him?” “No, no, Lem! I only meant you might start thinking along the lines of self-defense, because John Hayes has sworn he means to kill you so he’d have only himself to blame if you took precautions.” I never meant to stoke Lem up, only to cool his passions for his own good: the Lem I knew was not cut out for mayhem.

  Unfortunately, the drunken Lem who pulled me off the table at O’Brien, the horny Lem who had fallen so hard for this little Mrs. Hayes—this Lem flat refused to give her up. Anticipating her blessing in his deed, he screwed up his courage with hard drink and swiped my shotgun and went over to Hayes’s place, where he hollered from the yard that he’d come to speak with “the lady of the house.” When the man of the house kicked his chair back and came roaring out, he was met as he came off his stoop by a fatal charge of buckshot from Lem Collins—a clear case of self-defense except to those who did not see it quite that way.

  Lem’s beloved, Mrs. Prudence Hayes, told the grand jury she had no idea why Lemuel P. Collins would wish to murder her dear departed John. If the jurors wanted her opinion, sobbed the little widow, looking the accused straight in the eye, what this man deserved was a good hanging. Repeated those cruel words with her hand on the Bible and her sweet little honeypot keeping its own counsel under her widow’s weeds. “I aim to see justice done,” she cried, “and who can blame me?” In need of just a little more of that nice limelight, his sweet Prue pointed a trembling finger at poor Lem. Hadn’t this same drunken brute come through her window on previous occasions, bent on God knows what? My goodness, woman! When? Why, sir, only last week, may it please Yer Honor!

  Sweet Prue having overplayed her hand, the grand jury was tempted to indict two lovebirds for the price of one. But even knowing that his darling had betrayed him, Lem remained a stiff and starchy Collins, too well brought up to testify against a tiny widow. The jury being generally agreed that there was understandable emotion behind the death threat made by the deceased, my friend was indicted for murder in the first degree.

  As cash poor as most families in our section, the Collinses gave up hundreds of acres of good land plus a large loan from Cousin Laura to make the $20,000 bond for Lem’s release. Having no case worthy of the name, Lem jumped bail and lit out for Georgia. Some of the debt was eventually paid off by the sheriff ’s auction sale of Collins land, but Laura Myers would never recover a penny. Kind Laura forgave this cheerfully enough but her husband and mother did not, and the situation created difficulties in the family which were very hard on the newlyweds, Billy and Minnie.

  In short, Lem Collins brought about a fatal downturn in his family’s fortunes. Naturally anxious to ease his guilt by transferring responsibility, he wrote a letter to his brother Billy concerning the murder weapon he claimed Edgar had given him, along with some very bad advice. I don’t know just what Lem said or what Billy repeated, but pretty soon the death of Hayes was blamed on E. A. Watson. There was even a rumor that Ed Watson went along with Lem and did his shooting for him.

  Though my neighbors gave me funny looks, only Fat Sam had the gall to bring it up. “Some fellers been tellin me lately, Ed, how it might been you behind the killin of our farrier. Course I told ’em straight off you was clean as a baby’s bottom. ‘Why hell, no, boys!’ says I. ‘There weren’t no money in it! Ed never had no damn motive at all!’ ” Sam gave me that big dirty wink of his but stopped chuckling quick when he saw my expression. “Only jokin, Ed,” said Sammy Tolen.

  Only joking, Ed. As the saying goes, it’s a damned good thing there’s enough bad luck to go around because otherwise I’d have had no luck at all. Here I was, still in my twenties, and for the second time in my young life, my reputation was buried deep in mud, and my prospects, too.

  I think it must have been about this time that my whole outlook began to change. I was learning the hard way that I had to make my own luck in this life if I aimed to survive. And so, having no choice about it, I grew hard, as a shrub battered by wind grows gnarled and woody.

  SONBORN

  I was twenty-nine when, in 1884, I married a schoolteacher, Jane Susan Dyal. Jane was a lady even by my mother’s standards, well-educated and softspoken and pleasant in appearance, though no longer young. If not a creature of passion like my lost Charlie, she was a kind, sensible person, glad of my attentions and not offended by coarse, manly needs, having missed a maiden lady’s fate by a cunt whisker.

  Goodwife Jane (I called her Mandy) would soon present me with a lovely baby girl. We named her Carrie. Two years later came a boy, named Edward Elijah for good luck after the rich Old Squire at Clouds Creek. As if her own little smellers weren’t enough, Mandy worried about Sonborn, as I referred to Charlie’s child on those rare occasions when I felt obliged to acknowledge his existence. Since I had refused to ride eight miles to Lake City simply to name him, he remained “Son Born” in the county register and legally, perhaps, did not exist at all; in truth I had not laid eyes on him since the bloody hour of his birth eight years before. I knew, of course, that his mother’s parents had taken him, and I also knew because Mandy told me that those folks were old and pretty well worn out. Lately Charlie’s mother had been poorly, Mandy added, and Old Man Curry had trouble enough tending his wife and chickens without taking care of a young grandson, too.

  My wife meant well but Sonborn was not her business; I notified her she was not to speak of him again. But in the safety of the dark, on our night pillow, she would murmur in my ear, stroking my head and whispering how wonderful it might be, not only for the little boy but for his father. From Minnie she knew something of our family past, and she dared to hint that turning my back on my firstborn might have reopened an old wound inflicted by those long dark years of boyhood. I shouted at her to bluff her back before she said what she said next, that my refusal to acknowledge Charlie’s child could only breed guilt and regret. Naturally I became furious, since what she said was true.

  When I stopped shouting and fell quiet, Mandy continued, with that gentle resolve that I would come to dread: if the first Mrs. Watson h
ad been the angel I extolled so often to the second Mrs. Watson—I sensed Mandy’s fond ironic smile even in the dark—then she surely watched over her loved ones from on high and was grieving that her innocent child had been abandoned. (That idea gave me a start, and not because of Sonborn: if Charlie and the Lord were in cahoots on high, they might have witnessed all my dirty doings with Miss SueBelle Parkins.)

  And so on a Sunday I rode over to the house of Mr. Curry Collins, who was whittling a wood toy out on his stoop. As I entered the yard, Ring-Eye’s ancient roan, half warhorse and half mule, gave me a walleyed look and stamped and snorted, moving sideways and in circles.

  “Been a bear around,” Old Man Curry advised me—not much of a greeting. I informed him I had come there for my son, having heard that Mrs. Collins was feeling poorly: no doubt a growing boy could be a burden, and anyway, it was high time he came home.

  “Home?” Mr. Collins stood up slowly but did not come down the steps, and he never invited me into his house. “This is the only home he’s ever had.”

  I never even swung down off my horse, which chose this moment to drop a steaming load right in the dooryard. “No sir,” said I. “This is not his home and it’s not up to him. You tell him to pack up and come out here quick unless you want me to go in there and fetch him.” At these words, Charlie’s brother Lee came out and looked me over with dislike, hands in hip pockets, then returned inside without a word.

  They believed all the bad stories, that was plain. Mr. Curry was concerned for his grandson and never tried to hide it. “We tended little Elton these eight years while you forgot about him. That entitles us to some say in the matter, Edgar.”

  “Nosir, it does not,” I said. “You are entitled to my thanks for your hospitality to your own grandson and you have it. Now let’s get a move on.”

  Already I was talking past him to the small boy in the doorway, who held my eye with a cool and steady gaze. You weedy little shit, I thought, you’re not much to show for the unholy joy that went into your creation. In a moment, he ran back inside, but the brief glimpse shook me, for he had his young mama’s full black eyes and pale rose-pointed skin. With one look I knew that this child would stir up squalls of that hard grief which I so dearly hoped were at last behind me.