“Some say, madam, that the halt was called because they’d killed every last black man, and shooting into the bodies was just wasting ammunition—”
“Personally, I’m proud of our violent reputation,” Aunt Sophia declared, turning her broad raspberry back on this naysayer. “The United States of America, as those Yankees dare to call it, could use a little more of our old Edgefield spirit. This darned country has gone softer than milk toast. Why, all around the world we are accepting any insult, and from any color!”
Perversely I said, “Madam, you appear to be just the person to advise me where to find a man who shared your views; he is the hero Captain Michael Watson’s great-great-grandson.” She cried, “Of course! Which one?” And I said, “Mr. E. D. Watson.” I raised my brows as if puzzled by her consternation. “Otherwise known, so I am told, as ‘Ring-Eye Lige.’ ”
Noticing my stink for the first time, Aunt Sophia recoiled and coughed and put her hand up to her throat. “Sir, this is our archives library, not an almshouse or some low saloon.” And firing a last furious glare that fixed all blame for the presence of this lowlife on the unfortunate Miss Mims, she swept out the door in a great waft of funereal perfume.
Still shaken by her own show of courage, Miss Mims ventured that the Watson file contained no recent record of Elijah D.; indeed, his name was absent from the county census after 1870. “Mr. Watson’s place in the community, you see . . .” Reassured by my smile of encouragement, she fetched a bound transcript entitled “Trial of the Booth and Toney Homicides,” an episode involving Ring-Eye Lige in which four men had died.
On August 12th, 1878, on the two-year anniversary of Redemption Day, with the entire county gathered to hear rousing speeches by Governor Hampton and other dignitaries, a shootout occurred inside and outside Clisby’s Store right down the street. Three men were killed, with several others seriously wounded. According to one account at least, Elijah D. Watson had been in the crowd at Clisby’s and had probably fired, after which he apparently took to his heels.
Burrell Abney called for the defense, sworn and examined by General Butler.
Q: Were you at Edgefield Court House on the 12th of August, 1878?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you see any of the difficulty that occurred there on that day?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Will you please state to the court and jury what you saw that day.
A: I saw Elijah Watson running toward where I was from Clisby’s store with a pistol in his hand.
Q: Had the firing stopped when you saw him running off?
A: It was just before the firing stopped, for I think there were three or four shots fired afterwards.
Had my father been fleeing the fray before it ended? Very likely. Was he a coward, then? Despite all his boasting, I had never been certain of my father’s courage. In any case, he and Will Coulter were among the four men indicted for murder. My father’s attorneys were Gary & Gary and also John L. Addison, my mother’s brother. In his summation, General Gary called these homicides “the most desperately fought combat that ever transpired in this dark and bloody region.” The Bald Eagle of the Confederacy would discount the testimony that placed Elijah Watson at the scene, whereas Ring-Eye’s old nemesis, Calbraith Butler, had passionately argued the reverse. All defendants were acquitted and sent home.
Where home might have been in my father’s case was a good question. The transcript established that within a few years after his family had abandoned him, the fallen Lige had wandered into dissolution, sharing a disreputable roof with the Widow Autrey. Being unacquainted with this lady, Miss Mims had no idea what had become of Mr. Watson. When she’d tried to inquire about him from one of the archive’s founders—and she nodded toward the door through which Aunt Sophia had made her getaway—she was told that in the eyes of his whole clan, Elijah D. was dead. “They just don’t talk about him. They had his name stricken from the census.” Miss Mims shook her head in pity. “He’s what the old folks used to call a ‘shadow cousin.’ ”
Edgefield’s long tradition of violence had actually worsened after 1877, when the new president, a Mr. Hayes, withdrew the Union troops, leaving the “darkies” to the mercies of white vigilantes. Miss Mims produced a contemporary account submitted by a local black attorney to the newspaper. Colored men are daily being hung, shot, and otherwise murdered and ill-treated because of their complexion and politics. While I write, a colored woman comes and tells me her husband was killed last night in her presence and her children burned to death in the house. Such things as these are common occurrences. In the same period, it had been established that only half of the two hundred and eighty-five black convicts in this county contracted out for road-gang labor on the Greenwood-Augusta Railroad had survived the job.
Those Herlongs had told Mama that not long before they left, Lige Watson had found work as a state prison guard. Had he also been a road-gang guard during the building of that railroad? An embittered Confederate veteran who had lost his land and reputation and was prone to drunken violence might have struck the authorities as just the man to oversee black convicts.
I caught Miss Mims observing me to see how much I knew. “Mr. E. D. Watson,” I said tersely. “Any record of illegitimate children?”
She located a handwritten note, dated 1879, in what looked to me like Colonel Robert’s hand.
E. D. Watson: Son Jacob, called “Jack.” Mulatto. U.S. soldier. Deceased ca. age 22 in Georgia, date and place unknown. Daughter Lulalie. Mulatto. Whereabouts unknown.
Aching with peculiar feelings, I went outside into Court House Square and gazed about me. The town seemed uninhabited, not one soul to be seen. At the place where the famous homicides had taken place, the name A. A. Clisby was fading on the sign over the door. Standing there, I could envision my red, sweating father, pistol in hand, reeling across these dusty cobbles on a stifling August afternoon. How many times since his family had fled had he been hauled up those courthouse steps and marched into those cells behind the courtroom?
Before riding onward to the Ridge, I made inquiries about my father at the tavern, where the older clients mostly concurred about Elijah D.
“You mean ol’ Ring-Eye? Lived with the widder, one we called Ol’ Scrap? I heard that feller lost his work gang job a few years back. He was usin up too many niggers buildin track beds for the Greenville railroad. Went through them niggers like goobers, worked ’em straight to death, ol’ Ring-Eye did. They told him, ‘Ring-Eye, dammit all, maybe them monkeys come down out of the trees, but they don’t grow on trees, goddammit, and good green money ain’t the same as leaves.’ And he had him a feud with the Booth boys before that, a real bad fracas right there by the courthouse, three, four men was laying dead by the time them fellers finished.
“Nosir, ol’ Ring-Eye could not stay out of trouble, he was givin his family a bad name. So finally them Watsons come to fetch him, put him to work in their boneyard tendin their dead, cause he sure ain’t welcome around any that’s alive. Ol’ Ring-Eye! Yessiree! Now there’s a feller could tell you a war story or two and never spoil his tale with the real truth of it.”
THE GRAVEDIGGER
I caught up with him over at the Ridge, digging a new grave in our Rock Wall cemetery. He was wheezing in his pit not eighty feet away, spelling himself after every spade of dirt. I sat my horse and watched him for a while to make him nervous. After a few more aimless pokes, he saw me. He leaned the spade into the corner of the grave, put his hands on the brown grass behind, and kicked himself up and back a little so that he was seated on the edge, doffing his soiled hat to the silhouetted horseman on the highroad. “That you, Will? You looking for me, Will? Yessir, you just name it, Will, Lige Watson is your man and proud to help.”
Realizing the rider was not Coulter, he became aggressive. “What you after, mister?” For the moment, I ignored him, let him sweat a little. I dismounted and climbed over the wall, affecting to inspect the headstone of our sainted Captain Michael.
Seeing my poor clothes, he cried, “What do you want here?” I disdained to answer.
Michael Watson’s widow, Martha, had later wed one Jacob Odom, a churlish man of muddy origins who had confirmed the family’s poor opinion of him by making her pay room and board for her four small children. On May 21, 1791, General George Washington had honored the hero’s widow and her children by lodging with them overnight on his journey from Augusta to Columbia. On this occasion, “the odious Odom,” as Aunt Sophia called him, had attempted to charge the first president of the United States for bed and supper. Fittingly, it was young Polly Watson (rather than some Odom offspring) who was taken upon the presidential knee and presented with an enamel snuffbox containing a new twenty-dollar gold piece.
“Private property!” my father bawled in a hoarse whiskey voice. “Family property!”
When Martha died in 1817, her remains, contaminated by Odom’s name, were forbidden interment in this cemetery. When one of her two children by Odom was installed here surreptitiously, Aunt Polly—the keeper of the gold piece—had raised an immemorial rumpus. An Odom has snuck himself inside the Rock Wall. I want him out! Exhumed forthwith, the half-decayed half brother had passed long dusty days beside the highroad before the disgruntled Odoms came to collect him.
Our Watson stones were of white marble set on brick foundations. Captain Michael’s son Elijah (the Old Squire) was present, as well as Elijah Junior (the Young Squire) and his brother Artemas, my grandfather. And here was my father’s youngest sister, late wife of Robert Myers of Columbia and my great-aunt Ann Watson Myers, dead at twenty-two:
A MYSTERIOUS PROVIDENCE VERY SUDDENLY REMOVED THIS WIFE AND MOTHER OF THREE SMALL CHILDREN FROM THE RESPONSIBILITY OF TIME TO THE AWARDS OF ETERNITY.
Great-Aunt Ann’s Robert was the brother of Colonel William Myers who had married Laura Watson, and the “three small children,” somewhat older than myself, included the two nephews in William Myers’s will who were supposed to inherit Ichetucknee but would only do so over Sam Tolen’s dead body.
• • •
“Hold on, mister! This is Watson property!” Wary of the stranger’s silence, my father had clambered up out of his grave; when I turned toward him, he took up his shovel. Behind him, in the corner of the wall, brown leaves swirled like winter sparrows in the cold wind eddies. I let the revolver slide into my hand, hoping he might make my mission easier by using force in an attempt to drive me out. I’m sure he was considering this as he sidled forward but something gave him pause. “E. D. Watson, at your service, sir!” Nervous now, he tried to laugh, indicating the fresh grave. “Looks snug enough to curl right up in, don’t it? Got half a mind to have a snooze in there myself.”
“Do it,” I said.
Disconcerted, my father laughed too loudly and too long, in that drunkard’s conviviality that so easily turned nasty. He was already squinting in suspicion, trying to make out the man behind the beard.
Lige Watson had changed, too, not for the better. He was shiny-skinned, unshaven, with a pulpy nose and thinning greasy hair with yellowed gray hanks down to the shoulders. When he saw the revolver in my hand, his eyes narrowed and his nostrils dilated in a kind of snarl and his grip shifted on his spade. The scar circling that popped eye of his was livid.
Ring-Eye straightened kind of slow while he figured his next move. “Old soldier,” he blustered, pointing at his eye. “A poor man like yourself.” A moment later, his eyes widened and he forced a garish smile, spreading his bony arms for an embrace. “Edgar,” he gargled. And he shook his hoary head in awe of that Mysterious Providence which had returned the long-lost prodigal to the pining father. Shortly he abandoned this farce, too, crouching a little, hefting the shovel, undecided whether to charge right now or work his way in closer.
An impatient sideways gesture of the revolver barrel persuaded him to drop the shovel. He looked me over, nodding. “Never come to much, I see, no more’n I did.” His old pants snapped in the wind, his wheeze was rapid, his eyes darted. He could not fathom why I remained silent. “Your mother and sister,” he pled next. “They’re getting by all right?”
I waved the revolver toward the open grave. “Do it,” I repeated.
“Come to kill me, Edgar? In cold blood?” Sneering, he lifted his filthy coat, pulled out his empty pockets. The sneer was for his own rags, not just mine. He hiked his pants, exposing begrimed shins and broken boots—he had no stockings—to show me how paltry my revenge would be. Then he dropped his pant legs and stood straight, took a deep breath, and composed himself, looking around the little cemetery at the poor monuments to our departed kin before sinking to his knees at the grave edge. “Still need revenge, boy? After twenty years?” His grin was brief, more like a wince, but it was genuine enough. “Might be the one way I’ll get into this damn place.” Frowning, he brushed dirt off his dirty knees before climbing in. Looking around him one last time, seeing no hope, he lay down in the fresh grave with a desultory groan, folding big liver-marked hands upon his chest. “Give that sainted bitch, your mother, my respects,” he sighed, “and shoot straight like I taught you.” His voice was a little shaky. Though he would not beg, he could not stop talking, eyes clenched tight.
Ring-Eye Lige was not a steadfast man and in a moment would be choking on his terror. “Cold-eyed son of a cold-hearted bitch!” he yelled, to keep his nerve up. “Finish it!” But standing there over his grave, I no longer cared whether this man lived or died. My mortal vow of twenty years had blown away like a bad smell. I’d come all the way across America for nothing.
His eyes were still clenched as I backed away. He thought I was still there. From the damp hole his voice rose in despair. “Shoot straight, damn you!” When he dared open his eyes, in two minutes or ten, all he would see was the grave mouth, a rectangular window on the void of the gray firmament, broken only by the clouds out of the north and the dark wind-borne autumn birds, leaving no trace of their passage down the sky.
At the Artemas Plantation, the black ruin, bound in creeper vine, seemed smaller, all drawn in upon itself. My fields, descending to Clouds Creek, had been hacked into ragged plots by transient sharecroppers and gullied in long scars of raw red clay. Disheartened, I did not dismount but rode directly to Colonel Robert’s house. What could I hope for after twenty years? I hoped that I hoped for nothing.
At the racket of his dogs, he came outside before I reached the steps, drove the dogs off me. A quiet in the house that drifted out the door behind him told me that his wife had passed away.
Robert Briggs Watson looked heavier and grayer. Unlike my father, he knew me at once despite my heavy beard and begrimed appearance, which told him everything the Watson clan might care to know about how the Bad Elijah’s son had fared in the great world. He would even know that my fine horse must be stolen. His expression was unsurprised, neither cold nor warm.
“Sir, I shall always be grateful you had faith in me,” I whispered. “I named my firstborn in your honor.” Awkwardly, I offered my hand, as one day long ago in this same place he had offered his. He did not refuse it, simply would not see it. Edgar Watson, like his father, was a shadow cousin. Gazing past me toward the road was his way of saying he had never seen this fugitive and that if I left at once and kept on going, he would not betray me. In a moment he would return inside and close the door.
I remounted and rode away, bruised to the heart. Yet Colonel Robert had rekindled a small hope. Without once meeting my gaze, he had uttered two words before turning back inside. “Not yet,” he said. Had I imagined this?
THE ROAD TO GEORGIA
On my way west to Edgefield Court House and the road to Georgia, seeking some sort of empty absolution, I rode into the old carriageway at Deepwood. The old house had fallen. All but vanished, it lay beneath a blanket of wisteria and creeper and dark ivy. The ancient sheds leaned away into the weeds, seeking the earth. I sat my horse, not daring to dismount, in dread of spirits. Since the Owl-Man’s death, I had dreamt of Deepwood many t
imes, a nightmare involving a buried body sure to be discovered. The grave, too shallow, quaked underfoot, as if the cadaver was on the point of emerging from the earth. Unable to flee, I was often awakened by my own sharp cry.
Riding hard, I arrived toward dark at Hamburg on the Savannah River. A few years after Selden Tilghman’s torture in this small, sad, sorry town, half of it had been burned to the ground as a “nest of Radical Republicans” and the rest rechristened North Augusta, Georgia.
An old hostler who shared his bad cold food confirmed the story that Hamburg was the place where a war hero turned traitor had been tarred and feathered as a lesson to the Republican inhabitants and their detachment of black militia. “Them Regulators whipped that feller to strips! He was just a-beggin ’em to kill him!” He also related the details of the celebrated massacre, just four days after Independence Day of 1876, when the unarmed black militiamen had been taught their lesson. The old man had seen both events with his own eyes. When I asked if a big rufous man with a red ring around his eye had taken part, the man gave me a queer look. “Damn!” he said. “Know something? He sure did!”
For all their talk, the Northerners never knew black people and never really liked ’em. Our home nigras learned that truth real quick when they were sold out by the Yankees, who turned their backs overnight on their black friends. The quiet ones were living along as best they could but many were treated no better than those smart-mouths who were paid off for their swagger with the rope and bullet. Slavery was gone according to the law, but with the Black Codes and the KKK and then Jim Crow, life hadn’t changed much for the black man. A hell of a lot more burning and lynching was still going on than anybody could remember back before the War.
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