Shadow Country (74 page)

Incredibly his stupid praise was solace. I could not know that one day soon I would vow to my shadow brother that when the time came, I would take his hidden musket from the rafters and blow that red-faced sweaty head clean off its shoulders.

TURNIPS

The night that old Tap caught me in his truck-patch, Mama said, “I shall have to tell your father”—though not, as usual, until after she et her fill. She had scarcely spoken when her spouse came barging through the door in soiled silk neckerchief and muddy boots and cavalry greatcoat of soiled gray which stank of booze and horses when it rained. Minnie gave a tiny shriek like a rabbit pierced by the quick teeth of a fox. I shouted, waving her outside. Dark eyes round, the little girl was off her chair and scurrying for the door, which the man had left open despite cold blowing rain. When she faltered, whining at the darkness, I shoved her outside into the weather, and she tumbled and blew across the muddy yard toward Aunt Cindy's cabin.

Papa was glaring at the door I had slammed closed. When Mama said coldly, “What is it, Mr. Watson?” he stared at his seditious wife in stupefaction. “Please, Mama,” I whispered. But she scarcely saw me, so intent was she upon her quarry.

Mama's vice, too, had worsened with our fortunes: mean teasing had become cruel baiting. She would poke her husband, nip at him, dance back with a delighted cry of fear when he surged suddenly toward rage, then trip forth once more in trembling suspense, prolonging her delight, as if this were the sole ecstasy that her life with him had left her. No longer able to re-strain herself, she dared too much, exposing us all to a careening din that would leave the cabin shattered, deathly still. And always she insinuated that the young son was the true head of this accursed family, with responsibility to protect it from the rogue father.

“Have some turnips, Mr. Watson.” Mama spooned them up out of the pot and dumped them smartly onto a plate. “All we have to feed your little family, Mr. Watson.” In his life defeat, he scarcely heard her. “Nice fresh turnips from your neighbor's garden.” she concluded neatly.

Papa lurched to his feet, overturning his chair. “Charity? From niggers?”

She clenched her cotton-pricked hard hands, then folded them beneath her apron—the very picture of sweet Miss Ellen Addison, she of the wasp waist and pretty primrose face and flying fingers. “You see, we are so famished in your household that your son was reduced to theft—” She stopped short. “Run,” she told me.

But Papa had caught hold of my arm. I put my other arm around him, trying to slip in under the blows, hugging the thick trunk of him with all my might, but he swung me so violently, hurling me away, that my boots came off the floor. My head struck a log butt in the wall, and the world was obliterated as my brain exploded. People talk about seeing stars. A single star is all I ever saw, bursting forth in blades of fire that flashed through blackness and oblivion.

Ghost voices, apparitions. Had night come? I did not know who or where I was, or why I lay inert. My brain was fixed in an iron vise of agony. I was unable to clear mist from my eyes or move a muscle lest I vomit.

Hiding behind slack eyelids, I half-watched, half-listened; the shadow figures did not know I had returned. The shrouded woman sat holding a hand. My hand? I felt nothing. I wondered if my brain might not be bleeding. The man, in grainy silhouette, was staring out his small window into darkness. He had scared himself. He spoke: “He is too hard-headed. There is no discipline he will submit to.” The woman did not bother to remind him that if the son was ungovernable, the father was to blame, having stoked a rebellious nature by these beatings. She said none of that. She said, “I see. It was his fault, then.” She put my hand down, having forgotten it. “What a low beast you have become, Elijah Watson. The boy works night and day to support your family, he has never done you harm, no, quite the contrary. It is you who do him harm, time and again.”

Hearing her voice speak up for me at last, my eyes welled; surprised, I had to struggle not to weep. “Are you so depraved with all your grog and fornication,” her voice continued, “that you would risk his life?”

The man's voice mumbled that it was an accident. He did not know for the life of him why this boy put him in a fury. He was lachrymose, baffled, scared, contrite, but he was also, as I now knew well, quite capable in drink of taking his son's life. I heard a strange voice, dull, slow, and swollen: “If you ever lay hands on me again—on any of us, Papa—I will kill you.”

Her voice: “Merciful goodness! Rest, Edgar. You must rest.” Had I spoken aloud? Had I imagined it? Either way, my threat made my fingers twitch and my saliva flow, it sent strange ecstatic shivers through my neck and arms that caused a bloodburst in my brain and the return of blackness.

For a fortnight, I suffered fainting spells, unholy headaches. I would force my gut hard against my stomach wall to fire my resolve and keep my head from splitting. When Minnie pled that next time I must beg for mercy, I swore I would never stoop to “that low beast,” as Mama had called him, not if he split my noggin like a frozen pumpkin. But of course, by the time I recovered, he was drinking as before, and I was trying to please him as before, being doomed to love him.

When sober enough to sit up in the saddle, Lige Watson rode with the Edgefield Rifle and Sabre Club—a detachment of the Regulators—having earned a reputation as a man who was good with horses and “would do the necessary” to protect the honor of the South and Southern womanhood; he went about his duties with grim fervor. But even Papa, who could be generous and not invariably unkind, had grown disturbed by the fanaticism of his commander. Apparently Sergeant Z. P. Claxton had accused Tap Watson of showing a hostile countenance to a white man. Advised by Captain Watson that this man on Claxton's list was actually “a pretty good ol' nigra,” Major Coulter gave him a long look of warning. “Sometimes it gets so us ol' boys might feel like killing us a nigger,” Coulter told him in a low dead voice. “At them times it don't matter much if he's a pretty good ol' nigger or he ain't. Whether he done something or didn't, understand me?”

Papa boasted to his family that thanks to his efforts, Tap was spared without ever knowing he had been in danger. Papa hoped his son was proud of his good deed. The trouble was that unlike him, I understood—or at least Jack Watson understood—what Major Coulter meant. Us ol' boys might
feel
like killing—wasn't that the point? Feel like it. Major Coulter's remark gnawed at my heart, less because it sounded so coldblooded than because it prized out from its seam something unnatural in my own nature—or something worse, a self I feared without knowing who it was, a hidden countenance of profound ire as cold as that chill breath on the wind that is a harbinger of weather change and storm.

Even in Reconstruction days, most men of Edgefield would not tolerate a black who failed to make way for them on the plank sidewalks, and Elijah D. Watson, as his status declined, demanded more respect than most. One day as I trailed him home, his careening gait would not permit an elderly black woman to edge out of his way; she was forced off into the deep mud street just as a man in frock coat, shining boots, and long curved sideburns hooked forward at the lower jaw like a peregrine falcon, came swinging his wood leg around the corner. Blood rushed to my face as he extended a gloved hand and handed the old darkie back onto the boards—hauled her back would be closer to the spirit of it—with a distaste impartially extended to all parties. The man ignored her babble and both Watsons, swinging forward on his wooden leg as the woman hurried off in her muddied dress.

Matthew Calbraith Butler, commanding a cavalry regiment under General J. E. B. Stuart at the battle at Brandy Station in Virginia, had lost a leg leading a charge but returned to his command not long thereafter. When Private Ring-Eye staggered after him, braying that he was not a man to be insulted and further, that Captain Michael Watson had been Butler's grandfather's superior officer in Pickens's Brigade, Calbraith Butler checked the drunkard's onrush by placing the point of his cane against his chest just hard enough to redirect him off the boards. On his knees in the mud, Private Watson was coldly chastised for imposition on a general officer.

Because his son had witnessed his humiliation, Elijah Watson, still on his knees, challenged the young general to a duel. General Butler stated with hauteur that Watson was not privileged to fight a duel since he had never been an officer and was no longer a gentleman. What he was, said Butler, was a disgrace to a good family as well as to the filthied uniform which he still wore.

Shamed beyond endurance, I cried out, “Duel with his son, then, if you are not a coward!” But my voice broke grotesquely in its adolescent croak, and Calbraith Butler permitted himself a narrow smile. “When it comes to dueling with boys,” he told me quietly, “I am indeed faint-hearted, Master Watson.” With a slight bow, he turned and kept on going in strong limping stride and shortly disappeared around the corner.

As street idlers hooted gleefully, hailing “Ring-Eye” by that name, my mud-footed father bellowed outrage that an unschooled ragged boy should dare to challenge an Edgefield hero. “Call out General Butler?
You
?” Jeering loudly for his audience, my father swore that this fool boy would be severely flogged for bringing such ignominy upon his family. With that, he seized me roughly by the ear and dragged me homeward, as an infuriating shock of pain tore at my head.

Aunt Cindy, watering her hens, straightened slowly as we crossed our yard. Young Lalie ran to her and peered from behind her skirts at poor eartwisted Edgar. When Tap came out, they stood as still as oaken figures in that sad spring light as my maddened father roared at them to mind their nigger business. Then the door closed behind and I was slung into the corner, mad with pain. Minnie was bawling. Even Mama cried out in alarm when he seized the heavy hickory behind the door and staggered toward me.

Slowly I stood. My ear and my wrenched arm fired my rage and in a moment Jack was there. Commanded to lean forward, hands spread wide on the log wall, I turned a little in seeming resignation, then whirled and grasped the wood, twisting it free before he could secure his hold.

“Here,” he growled, missing my intent. “Give it here.”

In the kitchen corner my mother stood, hands clasped, as formal as a mourner. “Edgar?” she said. Her query signified,
Do you realize he may kill you?
The man turned his stare upon his wife as if this unholy insurrection was her doing. I muttered, “Don't you touch her, Papa.”

Afraid, I circled out into the center of the room, panting like something cornered. Sensing weakness, he made a sudden rush as Minnie moaned with terror in her cupboard. When I jumped aside, he pitched onto his knees, and I leapt and brought the stick down hard across his shoulders—
whack!
I struck again with all my might, for my life depended on it—
whack!

Frantic to disable him, knowing his heavy cavalry coat would dull the blows, I went after the head and neck, the kidneys, the limber wood biting into the thick meat of him—
whack!
—and another—
whack!
—another and another. Cursing vilely in pain and disbelief, he dragged his collar up to protect his ears, still on all fours. I was somber, silent, stepping lightly around the yelping hulk, leaping sideways to avoid its lunges, darting in. The beast struggled to flounder to its feet, only to be stunned and struck off balance and crash down again. That hickory whistled as I beat him, beat and beat and beat and beat him, leaning into those blows with every last splinter of old fear and fury. Grunting, teeth grinding, I bent that hard wood with savage cuts—
a-gain, a-gain, a-gain!
—until at last the beast howled in woe and wrapped its arms around its head and hunched bloody-eared, still cursing, in the corner.

The little house was swollen with harsh groans and gasping. The mudbooted mound that was the father lay quaking by the wall. Minnie crept forth but remained crouched behind the chair. Across the yard, Aunt Cindy would have covered Lalie's ears, protecting her from the awful sounds of Mist' Edgar's final moments. And my mother? How was it I felt ashamed to face my mother? How could that be? When I lowered the stick, starting to tremble, she said softly, “Oh, how dare you, Edgar.” It was not a question. Quieting her heart, she pressed her fingers to her chest. She was very pale but her eyes fairly glittered. “How dare you,” she said.

I felt hatred and I felt like weeping. Lightly, I tapped the tip of the extended stick on the floor between us, marking a boundary she was not to cross. She must have been looking straight into Jack's eyes, and his expression scared her in a way her husband never had, even in violence. “Your own parent,” she finished weakly.

“ ‘How dare you.' ” I mimicked her disbelief. “I reckon you think it's me who deserved that beating.”

Not once had she tried to intervene. Worse, I had glimpsed her transport, her clenched exultation in my act. I thrust the stick at her. “Your turn,” I told her with a harsh contempt I could no longer hide. She stared at the stick, then at the prostrate man, coughing and moaning. The stick fell to the floor between us.

I pushed my few things into a sack, shoved his hickory through the knot of this poor bindle, and departed my parents' house for good. I passed those black folks standing in the yard without a word—instinctively, for their own safety, for I had grown up suddenly in the past hour and knew who my father was. Having heard those blows and cries, they were astonished when I emerged alive, but except for a little cry from Lalie, they kept silent. Only Minnie trailed me, sobbing her plea that I must not forsake her. You always forsook
me,
I thought, but did not say it. I kept on going down the road. As the last houses fell behind me, I was overtaken by a dread of utter solitude in the great turning world.