Shadow Country (100 page)

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The day after I left Key West, Earl Harden arrived with the report that he and his brothers and Henry Short had found the Tuckers' bodies. The Hamiltons on Lost Man's Beach had heard two shots and later some trapper had seen Watson in his skiff headed upriver; he reported that Watson was alone. Earl did his best to hang it all on Watson but he had no evidence besides his own opinion. Until things cooled down, however, that one opinion might suffice to get me lynched: I decided to head north for a year or two. My friend Will Cox had written recently to say that local folks had mostly forgiven E. J. Watson for that Lem Collins business. Will had grown up in Lake City with the new sheriff, a man named Purvis, who promised to be understanding if Will's friend decided to return.

With some misgivings, I arranged to leave the Bend in charge of a man named Green Waller. He was a drinker but he knew his hogs and could be depended on to stay where he was safe, since he was wanted on three counts of hog theft in Lee County. As for companionship, those pink-assed shoats would probably see him through. Erskine ran me north. By now he'd heard the rumors and was silent and uneasy. I told him he could use the schooner if he helped out at the Bend when a ship was needed to bring in supplies or field hands for the harvest, or pick up my syrup in late winter for delivery to the wholesalers at Tampa Bay.

At Caxambas, Tant was nowhere to be found. His sister Josie said he'd heard about those Tuckers and would never work for me again—her way of conveying her own moral disapproval—but called softly as I went away that she would always love me. Within the week, Sheriff Knight and his deputies would raid the Bend, where Green Waller, in his official capacity as plantation manager, informed him that Mr. E. J. Watson was no longer in residence at this address, being absent on business, whereabouts unknown.

FOREVER AFTER

I stopped over at Fort Myers to pick up my horse and bid good-bye to Mandy and the children. Mandy had moved to the ground floor because she could no longer make it up the stairs. Though it was midday, I found her in bed. Entering the small chamber, I realized that this would be the last time in this life I would set eyes on this creature I first knew as the young schoolteacher Jane Susan Dyal from Deland.

She'd been reading, as usual: her prayer was that her sight would see her to the door. She looked up with that bent shy smile that had enchanted me so many years before. I smiled, too, trying to hide my shock: the woman lying there was dying while still in her thirties. Already death inhabited her eyes and skin—a sharp blow to the solar plexus to see my dearest friend in this condition. How thin she was, how watery her eyes, her hair already lank and dead.

I leaned and drew her forward in my arms, pressing my lips to her yellowed neck to hide my tears. Scenting the death in her, I must have hugged too hard to cover my distress, for I had hurt her and she murmured just a little. When I drew back she looked at me and nodded. Mandy's brain—and eyes and hands and mouth—knew all of Edgar Watson well, I could hide nothing.

I sat on the bedside and took her hands in mine, resisting an image of long years before, our Fort White cabin in early afternoon, the hot moss mattress and this willowy creature, hips soft yet strong astride me, eyes lightly closed and sweet mouth parted, releasing my hands and leaning backwards, twining her arms upwards in the air's embrace, as if her transport must depend on that joyous arching. Even at this somber moment, the remembrance caused a disgraceful twitching in my britches. I did not wish to think about how those hips looked now, grayish and caved in under the covers.

“I'm so happy you have come!” she sighed. Lifting her fingers, I kissed the delicate bones. “Well, Mrs. Watson. And why are you lying about in bed on this fine day?” I rose to open the shutter, thinking sun and air might dispel the cat scent and shuttered heat, but of course it was the husband, not the wife, who needed comfort. Relieved by each other's touch, needing no words, we sat there a good while in the midday quiet, and death sat with us. In a sudden rush of feeling I whispered that I loved her dearly and always would.

“How dearly, Mr. Watson?” she inquired, teasing. She had heard, of course, about the Island women and their children but more likely she was thinking about Charlie Collins, to whom I would have simply said, I love you.

“Edgar? I am failing pretty fast. You knew that.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Good. I'm so weary of all the pussyfooting and jolly bedside manner. Even Doc Winkler puts his finger to his lips to hush me when I ask frank questions. Tells me I must be a good little patient and just rest. Isn't it astonishing? Even the children. They're so brave and tactful I could smack them!”

Smiling a little at that idea, she blew her nose. “Is death so dreadful, Edgar?”

“Good Lord, sweetheart! How would I know!” I tried to laugh a little, aware there was something still unsaid, something I was not so sure I wished to hear. To deflect her, I promised I would look after our children, make sure that they got on all right in life.

Oh Papa, NO!

Rob's words jumped to mind just as Mandy turned to peer at me in a queer way. “I beg of you, dearest, don't turn your back on Rob. For her sake as well as your own. And please don't call him Sonborn anymore.”

I winced, shaking my head. “Never again.” She was overjoyed when I said, very embarrassed, “I've discovered that I've loved him all along.”

“Oh! Have you told him so? It's awkward for you, I know that—”

“I think he knows,” I lied. “Lucius knows your condition, I suppose.”

“I didn't need to tell him. Carrie and Eddie know, of course, though Eddie pretends not to. They don't want to deal with it quite yet. Not that Lucius refers to it, either, although sometimes I wish he would.” She seemed wistful. “He reveres you, Edgar. Perhaps you can talk with him a little. He'll be home right after school.”

I was passing through town quickly, I explained. I had to go.

“Goodness! You're in such a rush that you can't wait even an hour?” She stared at me, intent, then closed her eyes, turning her head away. “I see,” she whispered.

“What?” I said, fighting her off. But because her children would have to deal with any rumors, she did not relent.

“Lucius is jeered at brutally at school. He refuses to believe the slanders, gets in dreadful fights.” In a different voice, she said, “Here in town, there is a story that when Mr. Watson goes to Colored Town, the darkies hide from him, that's how scared they are that he might kidnap them.” She paused, hand clutching the coverlet. “They say no darkie ever comes back. They are thrown to the crocodiles.”

Overcome by what could never be undone, I stifled my protests, sinking onto my knees beside the bed, to pray or clear my heart or be forgiven before it was too late.

“Is Rob all right? He's not involved?”

“Rob was in no way involved. He's fine.”

I leaned and kissed her, overcome by an impulse to just quit, to lie down in her arms, lie down and give in to a flood of hopeless weeping—
me!
Mr. E. J. Mr. Watson, dry-eyed all these years, ached in his need of solace for so many losses. I longed to whine.
I could have been the best farmer in south Florida, you know that, Mandy! All my great plans!—
disgusting! A disgusting, low, self-pitying temptation to beg pity from a dying woman, especially this one who had never been fooled, who knew too well that for all the harm I had inflicted on myself, I had done far more to others. True, there were reasons, or at least excuses; she must be spared those, too.

I pulled myself together and sat up straight, tried to make light of it. Gruffly I said, “I don't believe your Good Lord will forgive me, what do you think, Mandy?”

“Do you care?” she said. She had not recognized my reference to our Oklahoma days and the tale of that huge and bloody hellion, Old Tom Starr—either that or she was simply unamused. I stood up, kissed her brow in parting, crossed the room. She did not detain me even when I faltered and turned back in the door. She had not forgotten my Tom Starr story. Now she finished it. “No, dear Edgar”—her voice came quietly—“I don't believe He will.”

I had skulked behind my poor tin shield of irony and she had pierced it with the hard lance of bare truth. Her cool tone stunned me. I dared to feel betrayed. I longed for the last sad smile of understanding which, after all these years, she now denied me.

I returned slowly to the bedside. She saw that my agony was real and touched my cheek but quickly withdrew her hand, for she was resolute. She closed her eyes and thought a moment, then opened them and whispered, “I'd like an answer to one question before you take your leave since I don't think we shall ever meet again.”

My heart pounded. “You never believed me? Even when you testified in Fort Smith court?” Her flat gaze hushed me.

“The truth, Edgar. I beg of you. It's late.”

So long ago, eleven years, and yet . . . one escapes nothing.

My silence was all the answer that she needed. “May God forgive you,” she sighed softly. “May God rest her soul.”

“Do you forgive me? That's all that matters . . .” My voice trailed off. Mandy took my hand and squeezed it one last time, then pushed it away. Though our gaze held and her eyes softened, she would not speak. I went away bereft and suffocated for want of a coherent way to cry out the love I found no words for while she searched my face.

In a stiff river wind under hard skies, I crossed the Calusa Hatchee on the Alva ferry and took the horse coach to Punta Gorda, from where the railroad would carry me north to Columbia County. Seen through the window, the sunlight pouring down through green-gold needles of the piney woods was liquefied by damnable soft tears, so late in coming and no longer in my control. I was truly astonished that E. Jack Watson, with his fury and cold nerve, could come apart and weep much as he had when, still a boy, he grieved for the dead slave boy in the swamp. Whom are you mourning, you sad sonofabitch, Mandy or Edgar?

By the time the news came to Fort White that Mandy had passed away, I knew I'd loved her as entirely as the wood nymph I called Charlie my Darling, and perhaps even more deeply, though I don't suppose that true love can be reckoned in that way. Sometimes I think we cannot know whom we loved most until all the lovers in our lives are gone forever. Looking back down our long road, our great loves are those summits that rise above the rest, like those far blue Appalachian peaks beyond the Piedmont uplands on that day when Private Elijah Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers lifted his enchanted boy into the sun above the courthouse terrace. The light (so Mama always said) was like an angel's halo in my hair.

CHAPTER 5

AN OBITUARY

Even before Cousin Laura died, my mother had started scrapping with Aunt Tabitha, and finally she quit that lady's roof, going to live with Minnie and her Billy. In 1901, when I returned from the Ten Thousand Islands, I went straight over to pay my respects as a good son should.

“Well, Mother, I'm home.”

“I don't recall that I laid eyes on you the last time you were here. How long ago was that, do you suppose? Six years?”

“Seven, Mother.”

“Well, that's long enough, wouldn't you say?”

Skillfully she dispensed with her incivilities just as I was ready to snipe back, that's how perverse this little woman was. She did not ask after Mandy's health, far less inquire about the children, nor did she make the least effort to embrace me. Going unhugged by her twiggy old arms and unpecked by that dry slit of a mouth, I felt oddly out of sorts, I must admit.

As for Aunt Cindy, fixing supper at the stove, she never looked at me. For the first time in my life, that bony black woman did not come forward to hug me. She took no notice of me, not even enough to sniff and turn her back, but ignored me throughout the few minutes that I stayed. What Aunt Cindy had heard and what she suspected I did not inquire, knowing my account of it would do no good.

On a second visit, over meager tea, Mama related in detail how Cousin Laura had died in '94 when Aunt Tabitha's new manor house was scarcely finished. “She bored herself to death, that's all,” said Cousin Laura's lifelong friend, “and darn near took the rest of us off with her.”

The widower, on the other hand, had fattened up like a prime hog with his good fortune. The former Ichetucknee or Myers Plantation was now known as the Tolen Plantation, and the homesteads all around were called the Tolen Settlement. The Tolen, Florida, post office was located at the turpentine works down by the railroad crossing. All that was missing was the Holy Tolen Church. Meanwhile, Sam had married off his brother Mike to a Myers niece, then moved him into William Myers's big log cabin to strengthen the Tolen grip on our family property. Sam's stepbrother John Russ and his four mink-jawed sons infested another Myers cabin on Herlong Lane.

When I mentioned my reunion with my father in the Ridge Spring cemetery back in '92, she stared at me. “Wasn't South Carolina a bit out of your way?”

“Not for a patricide.”

“You wouldn't do that, Edgar!”

I shrugged. “Let's just say that the last time I saw him, he was lying in a grave.”

She waved this off, upset but impatient, rummaging up an 1895 obituary from the newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. “The Myers cousins clipped and sent this.” The clipping related how Captain Elijah D. Watson, aged sixty-one, had succumbed to Bright's disease in a rooming house in that city. She read aloud:
He was a well-to-do farmer in Edgefield County. A gallant soldier during the War Between the States, he distinguished himself on many battlefields for acts of great bravery and daring.

We did not have to remind each other that the rank of captain, like the deeds of heroism, were obituary courtesies to this man of low rank who returned from war with an impregnable reputation for dereliction of duty, drunkenness, and insubordination.

Next, she produced a yellowed daguerreotype, pressing it down on the table with a kind of grim finality like a poker winner laying down his hole card. Wild-haired cap-cocked Lige in Confederate uniform looked nothing at all like the handsome soldier I had chosen to recall from the courthouse terrace. Even without his ring eye, he looked truculent and bug-eyed.

“I never knew you'd treasured his picture all these years.” I set it down.

“Cindy saved it. For you children. Wasn't that sweet?” She picked it up. Her hands were shaky now, with liver marks. “You must feel very proud of such a father, dear.” She curtsied minutely and I made a little bow as we sweet-smiled each other, not utterly without amusement and affection. “Oh Lord, Edgar!” She was cross again. “How long will you be here
this
time?”

Aunt Cindy rapped the iron stove with her wood spoon, then turned and left. According to her mistress, she had finally accepted the hard truth that her husband would never be seen again on God's good earth; she prayed for a reunion of some kind in Heaven's mansions. Deprived of her family, Aunt Cindy had given herself to ours, devoting her long narrow days to “tending her Miz Ellen's every whim” (unabashed, Mama said that herself). She also managed the Collins household for our Minnie, who had blighted her family with her “neurasthenia”—that is, hysteria and insomnia, dyspepsia and hypochondria and every other ailment resistant to diagnosis and known cure which had an -ia at the end of it, said Mama. The only clear symptom of her “American nervousness” was a horror of human company even at home.

And poor Lulalie. Mama sighed. Her mother feared the worst. Such a warm busty young girl, did I recall her? Mama frowned and switched the subject, not wishing to dwell on warm brown bosoms under the bald eye of her Elijah, the celebrated bosom connoisseur in the daguerreotype. (Guessing at her mind's quick turns, I saw a light mulatta girl, the young house wench who became Jacob Watson's mother.) Mama offered me my father's likeness with an enigmatic smile. “I'm sure you'll want this as a keepsake.”

I shook my head, kept my arms folded. I rose to go. Leaning on my arm, Mama accompanied me outside, still clutching the picture. To my surprise, her face actually softened as she related what Private Watson had confided on his return from war. Sleepless and exhausted, he had finally broken down and wept, confessing his terror of being bayoneted and his horror of the battlefield at dark, when the musket fire died to the last solitary shots and the dreadful cries of the maimed thousands left on the battlefield, Yanks or Johnny Rebs no longer, simply thirsting boys calling for their mamas in their long hard dying—those cries that rose in a moaning wind from the blood-damp night earth of Virginia. All no-man's land writhed under the moon, one huge tormented creature, all across the waste to the Union lines.

In the dawn of one dreaded day of battle, Lige Watson had broken out in a soaking sweat and come apart, shaken violently by his own unraveling like a muskrat shaken by a dog. Then his gut let go and he soiled his only clothes without any means or hope of restoration. With nowhere to hide his shame and tears, he fled. It was Will Coulter who came after him, who pulled him down behind a wall and slapped him hard, who ordered him to return into the lines or he would shoot him then and there where he lay stinking. And after the War in their Regulator years, that man with the crow-wing of hard black hair across his brow had used his knowledge of Private Watson's terror to ensure his loyalty in night activities.

My mother's eyes pled with me to relent, to forgive my family. “It's not too late,” she begged. I shook my head. “It doesn't matter anymore,” I said.

The following year, a letter to Mama lately arrived from Colonel R. B. Watson at Clouds Creek inquired after her son Edgar, wondering what had become of him and how he might be faring. His interest moved me more than I cared to reveal, though I feigned indifference. In his letter, Colonel Robert regretfully described the moaning frightened dying of her late husband Elijah, afflicted with big sores on his legs that would not heal, smelling just awful. Before he died, the wretched sinner, all purple bony knees and puffy belly, had howled for light, more light, all the night through, in his terror of oncoming darkness.

In his last coma, my father had raved and muttered about Selden Tilghman; the Colonel's letter asked “Cousin Ellen” if she could explain this, suggesting that she might ask Edgar about it. Mama looked hard into my face. Though startled to hear Cousin Selden's name, I shook my head. Mama shrugged, too. “I'm not surprised your father was afraid to meet his Maker. And of course he always hated Cousin Selden.” Again she scrutinized me but dared go no further.

BURNT HAM

For a time I lived with my friend Will Cox, who farmed a piece of Tolen land and occupied my old cabin near the Junction. I was building a house on the highest rise in this flat country, the former site of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission destroyed by the British when they came to north Florida from Charleston at the start of the eighteenth century and butchered every Spaniard and Indian they could lay their hands on. When the wind shuffled the leaves of the ancient red oak on that hilltop, I could hear a whisper of that old sad history.

I planted pecans right down to the road, also a fig tree. Built a work shed, horse and cow stalls, chicken coop, sugar mill, syrup shed, corncrib, beehives, and a fine muscadine arbor. William Kinard dug me a well, and my new friend and devoted admirer John Porter got me started with some hardware. (John liked me well enough, I guess, but mainly he was anxious to be known as the confidant and friend of the Man Who Killed Belle Starr.)

Sam's stepbrother John Russ was a fair carpenter, and together we got my house done in a hurry, using heart pine lath and tongue-and-groove pine siding. My roof of cedar shakes clear of the smallest knothole was the talk of the south county because most men begrudged the time and craft required to make them. Folks were going over to tin roofs, which turn a house into an oven in the summer: the tin starts popping toward midday, and in late afternoon, as the house cools off, she pops some more.

Inside, I dispensed with a parlor in favor of three bedrooms and a large dining room with a kind of window counter through which food could be passed when it came in from the kitchen—my own innovation, built originally for the house at Chatham Bend. The new house had no second story, only a garret with end windows to vent the summer heat. With the lumber saved, I built a broad airy veranda with split-cane rockers where social occasions, such as they were, mostly took place. The porch had a hand-carved railing that became almost as celebrated in our district as my carved railing on the stair at Chatham Bend, and the house was set upon brick pilings to let cool breeze pass beneath the floor and offer summer shade to my hogs and chickens. As for the windows, they were cut high on the walls so that no night rider could draw a bead on the inhabitant—a modern improvement, picked up in Arcadia, that I never troubled to explain here in Fort White.

Black Frank Reese from Arkansas had turned up at Will Cox's place while I was in the Islands, and I gave him some rough work moving materials. Frank had tracked down that faithless Memphis woman he had sworn to kill but because she had grown fat and ugly, he belted her hard across the head and let it go at that. From this I knew he had matured somewhat since I last saw him.

Will Cox, who had been sharecropping for Tolen, could take no more of Sam's abuse and came over to farm with me instead. Sam still owed me for those hogs he'd all but stolen when I left for Oklahoma but he had to be threatened with arson or worse before he came up with some razor-backed runts, thin and uncared for. “Ain't goin to thank me, Ed?” With a rough boot, he drove them off the tailgate of his wagon into my new pen.

“My hogs were fine animals,” I reminded him, “not scrags like these.”

Fat Sammy laughed. “Fine animals make fine eatin.' ” He winked. “Got fine money for 'em, too.” I mentioned that better men than Tolen had been hung for hog theft back in the old century. “That a fact?” he said. “Yessir,” I said, “that is a fact, and here's another: a dispute over a pair of hogs caused the famous feud between Hatfields and McCoys. More than twenty came up dead before the smoke cleared.”

“You threatenin me, Ed? I'd go easy on them threats if I was you. Folks here ain't forgotten who you are and ain't all of 'em has forgiven, neither.”

I looked him over, saying nothing. In Arkansas, I had been sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor for boarding stolen horses. Anywhere in the backcountry, a man would be punished more severely for stealing a horse than for exterminating this fat human varmint. True, I'd eased up on my drinking and put my gun away for good—I meant it, too—but Sammy Tolen didn't need to know that.

It was Carrie who sent word from Fort Myers that her mother had passed away; she had taken the two boys into her house. When I wrote back seeking to comfort her, I told her to send Eddie north to help on the new farm; he had been born here in Fort White and still thought of it as home. As for Lucius, he would go to Everglade and board with our friends the Storters while he finished school. All that young feller cared about was Chatham Bend.

Unlike Lucius, Eddie was not handy out of doors, so a nigra named Doc Straughter, who usually showed up, taught him how to do the yard chores, tend the animals. Doc was stepbrother to that girl they called Jane Straughter, who was so light-skinned that anywhere else she would be taken for a white, and so desirable that half the men in the south county, black, white, or polka dots, were sniffing around her like wild tomcats, including that distinguished widower Mr. E. J. Watson and his hired man, Frank Reese. Jane was not yet twenty, very smart and well-spoken for a darkie, which of course she wasn't, having been got upon the light-skinned Fannie Straughter by my friend John Calhoun Robarts. The Robarts clan never denied young Jane. They called on her and hugged and talked to her as one of their own, and being close kin to Robartses, the Collinses regarded her as family, too. All the same, Jane knew her place and tended to the household chores at my place, where I could keep an eye on her, so to speak.