Shadow Country (69 page)

DEAD RECKONING

In the southern mist rose Mormon Key off the mouth of Chatham River. Farther on, the cries of oystercatchers purled across the bars, rising and falling. Hoad smiled to hear that sound. “I reckon that wild cry was here when the first Calusa came in the old centuries.”

The
Cracker Belle
entered the mangrove delta. “These west coast rivers are so low due to Glades drainage that your dad's schooner would go aground before he ever made it to the Bend,” Hoad said. “Got to go by dead reckoning. Got to listen to your propeller.” He was talking too much because he was worried about what might await his friend upriver. Lucius nodded but remained silent.

Where storm trees had stranded on a shoal, dead branches dipped and beckoned in the wash of the boat's wake. At Hannah's Point, perhaps a mile below the Bend, was the common grave of Hannah, Green, and Dutchy, never visited and now all but forgotten in the desolate salt scrub as the dark events of that long-ago October passed from local history into myth. “About all us local folks have left is our long memories,” Hoad was saying. “Hurricanes roil things up a little now and then but it's bad deaths that carry our remembrances back, sometimes a hundred years.”

Still visible back of the mangrove fringe along the bank was a square impression about one foot deep, as if a half-buried barn door had been levered up out of the white paste of the marl. “This place really spooks the few who know about it,” Hoad said, “me included. Graves without coffins generally sprout a good strong crop of weeds but nothing grows here.”

“Very strange,” Lucius agreed politely, anxious to keep moving.

“Those poor folks had no families to come after them like Mister Watson. But they were darned lucky to get into the ground before that bad storm carried 'em out to sea. Course they won't stay.”

Hoad pointed to a corner of the grave that was eroding bit by clod into the river.

They listened to the river's
lic-lic-lic
as it curled past. In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, white-pated black pigeons craned and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in columbine lament,
woe-woe-wuk-woe
.

“Come on, Hoad, let's go.” He spoke abruptly.

In a shift of wind the smell came heavy on the air. Waves fled the bow to crash into the banks in the boat's wake as they rushed upriver. The hard pine in the house had blasted pitch into the sky, casting a sepia pall over the thunderheads. Where the Watson place had stood on its high mound was a strange hollowness, a void, thick shimmerings of heat. Behind the house's shadow presence, what foliage remained on the gaunt trees was gray with ash. All around on the blackened ground lay the belly flats of alligators, curled up in crusts.

They called and called. Circling the dying fire, he clenched his heart against the sight of a charred shape in the crack and shudder of the last collapsing timbers, the whisperings of embers and blue hiss of mineral flame.

Face scorched, Lucius turned from the burning at a call from Hoad. Rob's satchel had been left on the bare ground beyond the gator scraps. Lucius approached and picked it up and finally opened it, extracting the unloaded revolver. The note he dreaded was there, too. Clumsy, he dropped it, picked it up again.

He raised his gaze to the brown river, read the note, passed it to Hoad. Hoad read it and looked up, clearing his throat. “Listen,” he began. He stopped. With nothing else to say, they stared away downriver.

Clouds from the Gulf dragged shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands, raising an acrid stream from the brooding fire. He took shelter in the boat cabin with Hoad. In the cramped space, in dense wet heat, among the
Belle
's rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers, Hoad said, “You aim to put all the bad stuff in your book?” This was less a question than a warning. Lucius ignored it.

When the rain stopped, they returned ashore. Lucius buried the box of belt buckles and bullets where the shed had been—the slave quarters, Leslie Cox called it, with that bruising laugh. The urn he took to the leaning poinciana in whose thin shade dear Mama had rested in the long afternoons, watching the passing of the river. Replacing the earth, he remained there on his knees for a few minutes. “Well, Papa,” he whispered finally and stood up.

Thin smoke plumes rose like companies of ghosts. Out to the west where the Gulf sky was clearing, an iron sun loomed through the mist and vanished. From upriver came the hollow knocking of that big black woodpecker. In the river silence, it seemed far away and also near.

Hoad was waiting by the boat.

“We're going,” Lucius said, fetching his manuscript.

His old friend trailed him back to the fire in alarm. “Wait,” Hoad said.

Out of respect for so much work, he lifted the manuscript to the level of his breast before bending and consigning it to the red embers. In silence they watched the top page brown a little at one corner as the fire took hold. A moment before bursting into flame, it lifted on an updraft, danced, planed down again among the gator scraps.

Hoad jumped to retrieve it before it blew away but when his friend only shook his head, he returned it to the fire.

“Okay? Let's go,” said Lucius Watson.

BOOK THREE

—G
OVERNOR
J
OHN
H
AMMOND
OF
S
OUTH
C
AROLINA

—A
LBERT
C
AMUS
,
The Stranger

CHAPTER 1

Oh Mercy, cries the Reader. What? Old Edgefield again? It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!

—P
ARSON
M
ASON
L. W
EEMS

DISTRICT OF DEVILS

Edgefield Court House, which gave its name to the settlement that grew from a small crossroads east of the Savannah River, is a white-windowed brick edifice upon a hill approached by highroads from the four directions, drawing the landscape all around to a point of harmony and concord. The building is faced with broad stone steps on which those in pursuit of justice may ascend from Court House Square to its brick terrace. White columns serve as portals to the second-story courtroom, and the sunrise window in the arch over the door, filling the room with austere light, permits the elevated magistrate to freshen his perspective by gazing away over the village to the open countryside and the far hills, blue upon blue.

Early in the War, a boy of six, I was borne lightly up those steps on the strong arm of my father. On the courthouse terrace, I gazed with joy at this tall man in Confederate gray who pointed out to his proud son the fine prospect of the Piedmont, bearing away toward the northwest and the Great Smoky Mountains. In those nearer distances lay the Ridge, where a clear spring appeared out of the earth to commence its peaceful slow descent through woodland and plantation to the Edisto River. This tributary was Clouds Creek, where I was born.

On that sunny day on Court House Square my father, Elijah Daniel Watson, rode away to war and childhood ended. As a “Daughter of Edgefield,” his wife Ellen, with me and my little sister, waved prettily from the courthouse steps as the First Edgefield Volunteers mustered on the square. Her handsome Lige, wheeling his big roan and flourishing a crimson pennant on his saber, pranced in formation in the cavalry company formed and captained by his uncle Tillman Watson. On the right hand of Edgefield's own Governor Andrew Pickens, who saluted the new volunteers from the terrace, stood Mama's cousin Selden Tilghman, the first volunteer from Edgefield District and its first casualty. Called forth to inspire his townsmen, the young cavalry officer used one crutch to raise and wave the blue-red crisscross flag of the Confederacy.

Governor Pickens thundered, “May the brave boys of Edgefield defend to the death the honor and glory of our beloved South Carolina, first sovereign state to secede from the Yankee Union!” And Cousin Selden, on some mad contrary impulse, dared answer the governor's exhortation by crying out oddly in high tenor voice, “To those brave boys of Edgefield who will sacrifice their lives for our Southern right to enslave the darker members of our species!”

The cheering faltered, then died swiftly in a low hard groan like an ill wind. Elijah Watson wheeled his horse and pointed his saber at Lieutenant Tilghman as voices cat-called rudely in the autumn silence. Most men gave the wounded lieutenant the benefit of the doubt, concluding he was drunk. He had fought bravely and endured a grievous wound, and all was forgiven when he rode off to war again, half-mended.

When the War was nearly at an end, and many slaves were escaping toward the North, a runaway was slain by Overseer Zebediah Claxton on Tillman Watson's plantation at Clouds Creek. Word had passed the day before that Dock and Joseph were missing. At the racketing echo of shots from the creek bottoms, yelping in fear for Joseph, I dropped my hoe and lit out across the furrows toward the wood edge, trailing the moaning of the hounds down into swamp shadows and along wet black mud margins, dragged at by thorns and tentacles of old and evil trees.

I saw Dock first—dull stubborn Dock, lashed to a tree—then the overseer whipping back his hounds, then two of my great-uncles, tall and rawboned on rawboned black horses. Behind the boots and milling beasts, the heavy hoof stamp and bit jangle, a lumped thing in earth-colored home-spun sprawled awkwardly among the roots and ferns. The broken shoes, the legs hard-twisted in the bloody pants, the queer gray thing sticking out askew from beneath the chest—how could that gray thing be the warm and limber hand that had offered nuts or berries, caught my mistossed balls, set young “Mast' Edguh” on his feet after a fall? All in a bunch, the fingers had contracted like the toes of a stunned bird, closing on nothing.

On long-gone Sabbath mornings of those years before the War, I ran with the black children to our games in the bare-earth yards back of the quarters, scattering dusty pigs and scraggy roosters. In cramped fetid cabins I was hugged with all the rest and fed molasses biscuits, fatback, hominy, wild greens. And always, it seemed, this sweet-voiced Joseph made the white child welcome. Yes, Joseph was guilty and our laws were strict. Alive, he would be cruelly flogged by Overseer Claxton, just as Dock would be tomorrow. Yet in my fear, I wept for poor, gentle Joseph, and pitied myself, too, in this loss greater than I knew.

CLAXTON

At daybreak Mr. Claxton, on the lookout, had seen a small smoke rising from a corner of the swamp and rode on down there with his shotgun and his dogs. The slaves had fled, obliging him to shoot and wound them both—so went his story. He was marching them home when this damned Joseph sagged down like a croker sack and would not get up. “Too bad it weren't this other'n, seein he was the one behind it. I told him, ‘Shut up your damn moanin.' Told him, ‘Stand that son-bitch on his feet, I ain't got all day.' Done my duty, Major, but it weren't no use.”

Major Tillman Watson and his brother sat their big horses, chewing on the overseer's story. The dead boy's homespun was patched dark and stuck with dirt, and a faint piss stink mixed with hound smell and the sweet musk of horses. “Wet hisself,” the overseer repeated to no one in particular. He was a small, closed-face man, as hard as wire.

Uncle Elijah Junior complained angrily about “the waste of a perfectly good nigger” but his older brother, home from war, seemed more disturbed by Claxton's viciousness. “Dammit, Z. P., you telling us these boys was aiming to outrun them hounds of yours?” Major Tillman was backing his big horse, reining its head away toward home. “Close his eyes, dammit!” He was utterly fed up. “Well? Lay him across your saddle, then! You can damn well walk him in.”

“I reckon he'll keep till mornin,” Claxton muttered, sullen.

“You have no business here,” I was admonished by Uncle Elijah Junior—not because I was too young to witness bloody death nor because night was coming on but because I was certainly neglecting whichever chore I had abandoned without leave. Major Tillman, half-turned in the saddle, frowned down on me in somber temper. “You're not afraid out here all by yourself?”

“Yessir. I mean, nosir.”

“Nosir.” The major grunted. “You get on home so you don't go worryin your poor Mama.” Trailed by his brother, who would never be a horseman, the old soldier rode away through the dark trees.

“ ‘
Walk
him in!' ” the overseer squawked, once the brothers were out of earshot. “They want him that bad, let'm send the niggers with a wagon.” Ignoring the dead boy's staring eyes, he stepped across the body to strip his bonds from the wounded Dock, who yelped with every jerk of the rough hemp.

“He's hurt!” I protested. Claxton glared as if seeing me for the first time. “Hurt? What
you
know about it? What you wantin with these niggers anyways?” He climbed gracelessly onto his horse, cracked his hide whip. In single file through the black trees, the two figures moved away along the moon-silvered water into enshrouding dusk, the black man pitched forward, the lumpish rider and lean hounds behind.

In dread of swamps and labyrinths, of dusk, of death—the shadow places—I called after the overseer, my voice gone shrill. “You fixing to leave him out here?”
Out in the dark swamp all night by himself? With the owls and varmints?
—that's what I meant. The man snorted because he dared not curse a Watson, even a Watson as young and poor as me. “Niggers'll come fetch him or they won't,” his voice came back.

In the dusk, the forest gathered and drew close. I stood transfixed. In its great loneliness, the body lay in wait. I wanted to go close his eyes, but alone with a corpse at nightfall, I was too frightened. Already that shining face with its stopped blood had thickened like a mask, and bloodied humus crusted its smooth cheek. At last I ran and knelt by Joseph's side, tried to pull him straight, free his gray hand, fold the arms across the chest.

The dead are heavy, as I learned that day, and balky, too. He would not lie the way I wanted. I stared at him frantic, out of breath. The forehead, drained, resembled the cool and heavy skin of a huge toadstool. The brown eyes, wide in the alarm of dying, were dull glazed, dry. Trying to draw the eyelids down, my finger flinched, so startled was it by how delicate these lids were and how naturally they closed, as if he were drifting into sleep, but also by the hardness of the orbs beneath their petals. Who could have imagined that the human eye would be so hard! When one lid rose a little, slowly, in a kind of squint, I jumped and fled.

The overseer saw that I was barefoot and in tears. He did not offer to swing me up behind. He said, “I allus tole 'em they is such a thing as too much nigger spirit.” Not knowing what such words might mean, I stared back at the lump that had been Joseph; it was ceding all shape and semblance to the dark, subsiding like humus among roots and ferns. Z. P. Claxton, I knew, would be laid to rest in higher ground, in sunny grasses, in the light of Heaven.

The dead I had seen before but not the killed. Cousin Selden, home from war, had confided that the corpse of a human slain in violence and left staring where it fell looked like some being hurled down wide-eyed out of Heaven—nothing at all like the prim cadaver of the beloved in sedate sleep, plugged, scrubbed, perfumed, and suited up in Sunday best for the great occasion, hands crossed pious on its breast. Those who touched their lips to the cool forehead in farewell held a breath so as not to know that faint odor of cold meat. Or so said Cousin Selden, who composed dark poetry and liked to speak in that peculiar manner. Not that a darkie had been my “beloved,” but Joseph had been kind to me, he had been kind, and I had no other friends. How I would miss him! I was still young and could not help my unmanly feelings.

My grandfather Artemas Watson died in 1841 at the age of forty. His second wife Lucretia Daniel had predeceased him at the age of thirty, and his son Elijah Daniel Watson, born in 1834, was thus an orphan at an early age. Grandfather Artemas's properties included sixty-eight slaves, with like numbers distributed to Great-Uncle Tillman and their several brothers. In 1850, my father inherited real estate and property in the amount of $15,000, by no means a negligible sum, but according to Mama he'd squandered most of it on gambling and horses by the time they were married five years later.

The marriage of a Clouds Creek Watson was duly recorded in the Edgefield marriage records: Elijah D. Watson and Ellen C. Addison, daughter of the late John A. Addison, January 25, 1855. Colonel Addison had commissioned the construction of the courthouse from which the crossroads village took its name (and in which his son-in-law, in years to come, would appear regularly as a defendant). Ellen's mother had died at age twenty-five, but Ellen, as a ward in a rich household, was given her own slave girl and piano lessons until the day she was married off to young Elijah, with whom her one bond might have been that both had been orphaned when their fathers died in 1841.

THE CLOUDS CREEK WATSONS

Four years after his bugled glory on Court House Square, Private Lige Watson, having lost his horse, walked home from war. He told his family of the sack and burning of Columbia by the ruthless General Sherman, describing the capital's lone chimneys, the blackened skeletons of noble oaks. “You folks at home know nothing of real war,” he said, astonished that Clouds Creek and Edgefield Court House had survived untouched.

His family had known something of real war, of course, having had to scour bare sustenance from our remnant of the Artemas Plantation. The rest had been bought or otherwise acquired by Uncle Elijah Junior, who early in the War had assumed our mortgage, extending but meager help thereafter to the absent soldier's wife and children. As a precaution against his nephew's well-known temper, Mama said, he let us remain in the dilapidated house and raise such food and cotton as we might; even so, my mother, burdened with little Minnie, could not manage alone, not even with my nine-year-old hard labor. Uncle Elijah Junior sent us the hardheaded Dock, knowing Dock would run off again at the first chance, which he did, this time for good. Next, he sent old Tap Watson because Tap, the father of the slain Joseph, no longer worked well under Z. P. Claxton. Ol' Zip had been too quick on the trigger, sighed Great-Uncle Tillman, but he scares some work out of 'em, we got to give him that.

A small blue-black man of taciturn, even truculent disposition, Tap had not forgotten the kindnesses received from the late Master Artemas, that vague and lenient planter who had owned Tap's parents and who remembered on his deathbed to set this stern man free. Unlike his son, Tap preferred orderly bondage to the unknown dangers of “freedom” and had cashed in his emancipation by selling himself to Elijah Junior for cold coin. “This way, I has my job, somethin to eat.” Slave or freedman, Tap had never missed a day of work—that was his pride.