Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  “That might be his nom de plume,” said her aunt severely. Though her brash niece mimicked her—num de ploom!—Ellie Collins saw nothing to laugh at. Plainly she was having second thoughts about permitting this pseudo-Collins to cross their stoop.

  To confess at this point that he was here under false pretenses, that there was no such person as L. Watson Collins—that in fact he was not a Collins after all—would ruin this vital contact with the family before it started. If they mistrusted him, they would tell him nothing. On the other hand, he must declare himself before he was exposed—oh Lord! Every moment that he put it off, the more complicated it was bound to be.

  The ladies awaited him in a stiff row like hard-eyed women of the pioneers, squinting over the hammers of long muskets.

  Clearly the kinsman in Lake City had not passed the word that Cousin Lucius was in town. But this could occur at any time, and he frowned intently at the picture, racking his brain for some way to offset the danger of exposure. “So this is Granny Ellen,” he sighed, to break the silence. “Yes. I’m named for her,” his cousin Ellie said. “And Aunt May’s brothers were my father, Willie, and April’s grandfather, my uncle Julian. Uncle Julian’s son lives in Lake City, but we rarely see him. Anyway, you could cut his tongue out before he’d ever talk about Great-Uncle Edgar.” She shook her head. “The father wouldn’t mention him so the son won’t either. Nor my late father either, nor the grandsons. It’s our male tradition.”

  “Collins honor.” Hettie smiled.

  “Collins honor!” April cried, saluting. “Watson honor, too! If it weren’t for darn old Cousin Ed, down in Fort Myers, our men might have loosened up a little after all this time!”

  “Well, Cousin Ed feels more strongly than anyone, and who can blame him? But Daddy told me that our cousin Lucius felt quite differently. Sometime before World War I, he actually came here just to talk about his father!”

  But I am Cousin Lucius! How he longed to say that!

  “Know anything about Granny Ellen’s husband?” Ellen was testing him.

  “Ol’ Ring-Eye? Yes, indeed!” He managed a cousinly laugh, and the women exchanged glances, reassured.

  Granny Ellen had left them a daguerreotype of Lige Watson in Confederate uniform, Hettie told him, handing it over. As his kinswomen observed him, he studied the brown-spotted picture for a long time, adjusting the face to the apparition of Ring-Eye Lige in his imagination.

  Young Lige, gone for a soldier, had snouty, arrogant good looks, wild upright hair, and that sort of confused tumultuous demeanor that can burst forth in joy or storm with little warning. Even in the photograph, his broad mouth seemed to be shifting from a curling snarl to a grand boyish smile. And his gaze, too, had that hard white crescent beneath the pupil, that bald shine. Though the ring around his eye was still to come, that left eye loomed strangely larger than the right, as if aghast at the spectral knife that was awaiting him.

  The women gossiped about family jewelry which Granny Ellen had brought south from Carolina—how she had hidden jewels in her hair to keep them out of Ring-Eye’s clutches, and how Aunt May had probably grabbed them. Soon they fell still, joining their guest, who had turned again to the huge portrait on the wall.

  Lucius found himself drawn deep into his father’s eyes. A countenance which had seemed serene, without a wrinkle, was stirring, shifting, and resettling into a hard mask swollen with intransigence—an effect, he decided, of that white crescent beneath the pupil, hard as boiled albumen. As he watched, the eyes grew unrestrained, like the glare of a trapped lunatic, peering out through the eye slits of that transfixed face. Lucius took a deep breath, then let go, and the real image snapped back into place, as composed and handsome as the mortal Papa whose memory he had cherished all his life. Yet those eyes unsettled him, stirring unwelcome recollections. In those last years at Chatham Bend, his father had often been less calm than he appeared—not tense but gathered in a deadly quietude, like a cat at a mouse hole.

  Ellen Collins was saying that whenever Ed Watson became angry, he would smile. “My mother was told that all her life: When that man smiled that smile, better watch out! Uncle Edgar could be such a pleasant man, ever so generous and considerate, but never cross him! Oh, he had a violent temper! It’s in the family chemistry, I guess. I have it, too, and my brother has it worse—just an explosive temper! My brother would pick a quarrel with a fence post! Away from the family, he always said, ‘If I had lived in Uncle Edgar’s day, I would have killed those Tolen bastards, too!’ ”

  “If he said that once, he said it a million times,” April said gleefully, winking at Lucius.

  “Well, a little temper goes a long long way,” gentle Hettie said. “Uncle Edgar never did learn to control it—didn’t have to, I don’t suppose. I do know something dreadful happened in his youth, back in South Carolina. Those rumors came in with the Herlong family, who arrived from Edgefield County after he did. The Collinses would never repeat those Herlong stories because Granny Ellen wished to put Edgefield behind her. Pretty soon, of course, we had our own stories around here to take their place.”

  “It’s told for truth in the Collins family that Uncle Edgar killed a black person in Lake City.” April was checked by a polite cough from her aunt. “I shouldn’t tell him that?”

  “You already did,” her aunt Ellie snapped, taking over her story. “They had wood sidewalks at that time, of course, and the sidewalks were narrow and the streets were muddy, and I guess he figured this darkie should have made way for him, stepped off into the mud. And Uncle Edgar was drunk and there were words, and then he killed him, right there in broad daylight. Now that was in Redemption times when no one paid too much attention if you killed a nigra. But you didn’t go do it in broad daylight! In the public street!”

  “Right in front of church!”

  “April? I don’t remember anything about a church.” Ellie Collins shook her iron head in disapproval, worried anew about their visitor and not concealing it. “The whole thing was probably made up, one of those Watson stories. But Granddad Billy always said that when Uncle Edgar walked Lake City’s streets, the nigras got clear over on the other side!”

  “Well, Aunt Ellie, I would imagine so!”

  This time even Ellie had to giggle.

  “Years ago, somebody read someplace that Uncle Edgar had to move away to Oklahoma because he’d killed his brother-in-law!” Hettie smiled at Lucius with astonished innocence. “Seems funny the victim’s family never heard about it!” she added, smiling happily when Lucius grinned. She had also read somewhere that Edgar Watson killed three men in Georgia on the way to Oklahoma and a couple more in Oregon before he returned east. “You’d think he’d say something about it to his mother or his sister if he’d gone to Oregon!”

  “I suppose you know the one about Belle Starr?” Ellie inquired. “How Uncle Edgar did away with Belle in Oklahoma? When asked, he admitted it was true, but he said he’d had no choice about it. Belle would ride around his place at night, shooting guns and carrying on, spooking his horses, so one night, he said, he just ‘stepped out and took care of it.’ ”

  “Maybe he was only fooling. They say he never boasted much but he sure liked to tease.”

  “Well, Granddad Collins was offended by that story. He told his boys it was dishonorable to shoot a woman, no matter what. Granddad died before the trouble with those Tolens, but he had a pretty good idea about his brother-in-law before he went.”

  “One thing we do know, Uncle Edgar’s favorite song was ‘Streets of Laredo.’ He used to sing it with real feeling. Said it came from an old Celtic lament which tingled up his blood—The iron blood of our Scots Highlands ancestors,’ he used to say.

  “Brought that song back from Oklahoma, along with his black hat. A black slouch hat was the way it was described to us. You didn’t catch him out without that hat on.”

  “Probably going bald,” April suggested. “Wore black most of the time, sang those sad songs. Had a premonition he
would die before his time and was already in mourning for his misspent life.”

  “Oh, what nonsense!” They all hooted in delight.

  According to their old documents, the Collins family had descended from the brothers Charles and William Collins, English immigrants and pioneers. Charles H. B. Collins founded the section near Fort White still known as Tustenuggee. Mary Lucretia or “Minnie” Watson married Charles’s grandson Billy—“that’s our branch of the family”—and Uncle Edgar married William Collins’s granddaughter, Ann Mary.

  Asked why Grandmother Minnie was missing from the oval photo, Cousin Hettie murmured, “We don’t rightly know. We have an idea—”

  “Family business,” Ellie snapped.

  Hettie said, apologetic, “There is a letter in which Grandmother Minnie is described as beautiful!”

  Ellie nodded. “We’ve always heard that, but there’s no known picture. She hated the idea of her own likeness. She died a couple of years after Uncle Edgar—I was just a baby—and those who might recall her face are all gone, too. None of her grandchildren have the slightest recollection what the poor soul looked like!”

  What these women knew of the years of family shame had come mostly from Laura Hawkins Collins, whose husband, Julian, with his brother, Willie, had harbored such tormented feelings about Uncle Edgar. Laura had been Edna Bethea’s dearest friend, and had spent six months with her in the Ten Thousand Islands after Edna’s marriage to Edgar Watson. When Laura died, her daughter-in-law Hettie had taken over her research into the family, poking into shelves and crannies, satchels and letter packets, stirring up the crusty reminiscences of ancient neighbors.

  “Oh yes, our in-laws care more about our family history than we do ourselves,” said Ellie, with an undisguised edge to her voice that made Hettie raise her brows. “For the blood relatives, you see, the scandals are still too painful, too close to the bone.”

  “All those deaths and tragedies and bitter conflicts in the family,” Hettie agreed. “And then Aunt May eloping with that murderer”—“We didn’t tell him that part!” Ellie warned her—“and Uncle Edgar’s evil reputation and his grisly death. And we had a drug addict in poor Grandmother Minnie, and we had a suicide—that was our cousin Martha Collins Burdett, whose son Herkie was to marry Edna Watson. And all these tragedies befell our family in the space of a few years! The family was in shock!”

  Lucius inspected the photos of Billy Collins and the two sons, Julian and Willie—“Willie Collins was my daddy,” Ellie reminded him. Like their father, the two Collins boys had been small and slight, with black hair and thin beards and handsome faces. What he recalled of them from his visit years ago was the pensive quality in their dark eyes, as if their young manhood had been saddened by their father’s early death, their uncle’s infamy, their mother’s utter failure of the spirit. Like their father, they had tired early and died young.

  “No one can blame our Collins men and Cousin Ed for wanting everybody to hush up about it,” Hettie murmured. “My brother-in-law never laid eyes on him, but he won’t mention Uncle Edgar to this day.”

  “No indeed! His daddy wouldn’t talk about it, so my uncle knows only a little bit, but he guards that little bit extremely closely,” April said. “So closely we don’t even know if he knows anything!”

  The women laughed with the affectionate malice of close families. All three seemed festive in this chance to dust and air the old closed rooms of the family past. The Collins clan, their manner said, had no reason to hang its head, even if its men were hopelessly old-fashioned.

  Paul Edmunds, whose family had owned the general store in Centerville, had been invited by the Collins women to meet their guest. Mr. Edmunds wore his blue serge Sunday suit and high black shoes and a denim shirt without a tie. The shirt was buttoned to the top, pinching his gullet. Behind him his wife Letitia, in fussed-up hair and glinty glasses and dust-colored woolens, came in out of the sunlight like a large timorous moth.

  “Your store is still out there in the woods,” young April shouted, aiming her voice at his hearing aid. “I bet I could still find it for you, Mr. Edmunds!” Paul waved her aside and kept on coming. He wanted to get down to business, which for him signified men’s business, and men only.

  “Well, now, Mister,” he began, “we hear you are some kind of a damn historian. These ladies and me have talked for years with all the old folks around here who still remember anything, and we think we’ve got the history down as good as you are going to get it.” He bent a bushy eyebrow toward the upstart, to show he meant to brook no opposition, then cleared his throat to give himself some speaking room.

  Mr. Edmunds related how Col. William Myers had come here with his slaves during the War, being scared that he might lose ’em to the Yankees. He had left his wife, the former Miss Laura Watson, back in Athens, Georgia, because this Suwannee country was still wild and life uncertain.

  “Grover Kinard gave him some history, Paul. Showed him all around the old community.”

  “Grover Kinard? He never lived in Centerville in his whole life!” Indignant, the old man blew his nose, trumpeting for silence. “Now Colonel Myers was struck and killed by lightning. He was standing under a big tree between his log house and the old Russ cabin off southeast of it. We know that happened in 1869, cause we seen the will. The Widow Laura and her mother came down here to see to the estate, they were too grand to live in that log cabin so they stayed over at Live Oak. We found ’em there in the 1870 census.”

  “Colonel Myers left that whole plantation to his mother-in-law!” Ellie Collins was still incredulous over this outrage. “And when the old lady died, it was supposed to go to his darn nephews instead of to the Watsons! That’s where the trouble started!”

  “It certainly looked like Colonel Myers married poor Cousin Laura for her money, and later on Sam Tolen did the same,” Hettie Collins said. “Cousin Laura was very kind and generous, but rather simple-hearted when it came to property—”

  “Simpleminded,” April said. “Retarded, probably.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Paul Edmunds warned the women, harrumphing a little in impatience, fingers working like big inchworms on his chair arms.

  “There’s no proof of that, April dear. That’s just your own idea.”

  “You have a better one? Why did Myers leave the whole thing to his mother-in-law, with instructions to pass it straight along to his own nephews?”

  “Probably the Colonel just wanted to make sure that our Watson property stayed in the Myers family,” Cousin Ellie said tartly, and the women laughed.

  “ ‘We don’t know about all that,’ ” April said to Lucius, mimicking Old Paul, who could not hear her. When her elders stifled smiles and frowned, this lawless person grinned at her new relative, inviting him to giggle along with them. He felt an upwelling of happiness, a return into his family, which he had not known since before his father’s death.

  Wishing to make some sort of contribution, he pointed out that those Myers nephews were Watsons on their mother’s side. Cousin Ellie frowned at him severely. The family didn’t look at it that way. It was not only his information they resisted, but the idea that it should come from an outsider, he decided later. He was not yet accepted by the family, since none of them were quite sure who he might be.

  In 1870, the year after Colonel Myers’s death, Ellen Watson and her children came from South Carolina. Granny Ellen and the Widow Laura, who were nearly the same age, had been childhood friends. “We don’t know if they corresponded, or if Aunt Tabitha invited her, or if Granny Ellen just appeared and they took her in.”

  “Herlongs always used to say that before Edgar left Carolina, a freed nigger told him he weren’t plantin the peas in a straight row, and was fixin to let on to his daddy. Well, somebody went and killed that doggone nigger.” Noticing his wife fluttering at his side, Paul Edmunds scowled. “And they never knew whether Edgar shut him up out of fear of punishment over them peas or because that nigger had
spoke up too smart for his own good.”

  “Folks say ‘nigra’ these days, honey,” his wife coaxed him.

  “Niggera?” Old Paul glared suspiciously about him. “Well now, I reckon there was some question how that niggera died—at least, that’s all Edgar was ever heard to say about it. Couldn’t very well deny it, knowing the Herlongs come from that same section.” The old man shrugged. “Never had no regrets that Herlongs knew about.” He winked at Lucius, whispering harshly behind his hand. “I doubt he give that sonofabitch a second thought, how about you?”

  “Maybe the whole story was just rumor in the first place,” Lucius said shortly.

  “Well, darkies aren’t treated that way anymore, not around here.” Distressed by Paul Edmunds’s way of speaking, Hettie seemed anxious to believe what she’d just said, and her pained smile entreated Lucius not to believe that this community was still mired in such bigotry. “Oh, there’s a social difference, yes, but as far as mistreatment, or not taking care of a neighbor because he’s black—no, not at all! The Collinses aren’t like that, and they never were!”

  “Not all of ’em, anyways.” Paul Edmunds snorted, shrugging off all this darn folderol as pure irrelevance.

  “In the old days, folks hurt black people and got away with it because nobody thought a thing about it,” Ellie said. “And maybe Uncle Edgar learned that evil lesson from his father and never unlearned it.”

  “Old Ring-Eye conked our uncle once too often, knocked his brain askew,” April told Lucius, tapping her temple as her elders hushed her. Ellie cried, “Now, April, you’re not suggesting he was crazy? Nobody ever thought any such thing! Hotheaded, yes! Violent, yes! But crazy?”

  “At least that’s some kind of excuse! Anyway, there is all kinds of ‘crazy.’ He went crazy when he drank too much, we sure know that!”

  Hettie Collins said carefully, “We always talked about the two reasons he went wrong. First, because his father was so mean to him. Granny Ellen said that Uncle Edgar started out in life just fine, but you take a good dog and you keep whipping him, he will turn bad. Another thing, he was very young when he tried to take care of his family in the War. Those were hard years of want and famine, and after the War came dreadful anarchy and violence, and those young men on the frontier had to take the law into their own hands just to survive. So perhaps he was not naturally bad, not in his young years, he just went sour after poor Ann Mary died in childbirth.”