Shadow Country (75 page)

AMONGST MY DEAD

I walked all night to reach Clouds Creek, where I slept in a corner of Grandfather Artemas's abandoned house. That afternoon, I paid a call on Colonel Robert Briggs Watson, the late Elijah Junior's son and heir. Colonel Robert's large house with its pecans and magnolias, built early in the century on the east side of the Ridge spring by the Old Squire, was set off from the road and its own fields by a wall of crenellated brick which let a listless breeze pass through in summer. The old wood house was quaking with the hound rumpus inside, so eager were his dogs to challenge strangers.

R. B. Watson appeared on his vine-shrouded veranda in his shirtsleeves. A man of a comfortable kind of heft, he was less handsome than steadfast in his appearance, being calm and courtly and well-tempered by the weathers. Unlike most men of Edgefield District, he kept his silvered hair cropped short, and his clothes looked fresh even with dirt on them—just the opposite of his first cousin Elijah D., whose clothes revealed the ingrained grime of unclean habits (not to be ousted from his clothes “wid lye ner dynermite,” as Aunt Cindy once complained to her Mis Ellen—as close as Cindy ever came to revealing her disapproval of Mis Ellen's husband).

Colonel Robert was a decorated soldier who had ridden home from Appomattox Courthouse to manage the family properties around Clouds Creek. Taciturn, he listened as I asked permission to live in the old Artemas house and sharecrop its fallow land. More intent on me than on my question, he nodded vaguely, inviting me inside for a drink of water, asking politely how my mother might be faring. “You remember Edgar, don't you, Lucy?” he inquired of his wife. “I do,” she answered pleasantly enough although not pleased to see me.
What do you want here?
her expression said.

I did not discuss my rupture with my father. I told them about my earnest hope to restore my grandfather's lineage here in Clouds Creek. He said he would think about it and he did. A day later, he put aside the warnings of his kinsmen and gave “Cousin Ellen's boy” permission to sharecrop the Artemas tract and occupy his grandfather's old house, patching it up as best he could.

As a Clouds Creek Presbyterian, Colonel Robert had faith that whatever satisfaction might be found in life was of a man's own making, and that no good would ever come from coddling. On the other hand, he betrayed distress that his father, Elijah Junior, had acquired the Artemas tract through plain hard dealing. While warning me that I would be held to a strict standard, he also looked for small ways to encourage me, bringing old blankets, a new kerosene lantern, basic tools and rough provisions, and a Bible. He invited me to come to Sunday dinner. “After church,” Cousin Lucy called, for church attendance was required to receive the blessing of her fine ham and sweet pudding.

And so, most Sundays after church, I dined at Colonel Robert's house, where I enjoyed browsing in the Watson Bible with its list of births and deaths, and also in the Carolina histories and the browned warm-smelling pages of the Shakespeare folios brought into the family by my great-grandmother, the former Chloe Wimberley, daughter of James Wimberley, one of George Washington's generals in the Revolution; the leather volumes, soiled by mold and mice, had turned up in Grandfather Artemas's falling house.

“Those might be yours one day,” the Colonel said, filling my heart with the rare joy of heritage and belonging. That I might study in the evenings, he kept me supplied with whale oil for my lamp.

The cold dusk of early Piedmont spring—the naked trees, the urgent ringing of spring peepers—hurt my heart; I was lonely all that April in that empty house. Even so, I was resolute, often content. The return to Clouds Creek had bathed and healed my spirit. These fertile meadows, the clear running water and soft loamy air, filled me with well-being, as if the old roots ruptured and exposed in our family's loss of this plantation had been covered over with good soil and were feeling their way back into the earth. Soon the woodland twigs came into leaf, with redbud and dogwood and

the mountain laurel opening cool blossoms. Then spring birdsong was gone as summer silence descended with the heat, and young redbirds dozed in the thick greens that would shrivel by late summer in the fire colors of the Piedmont autumn. In the old century, the blood red of these swamp maples, the oak russets, the hickory yellows and pale golds had hidden marauding Cherokees. Day after day, working my upland fields, I dwelled in reveries and plans for this home earth, painfully homesick although I had come home.

Somehow I had always imagined that Clouds Creek had been named for its cloud reflections, the soft cumulus passing over on west winds from the Appalachians. Colonel Robert told me that the name came from a trader, Isaac Cloud, whose wife had survived to tell their bloody tale. In May of 1751, she wrote, two Cherokees came to their cabin just at dark. Given supper and tobacco, the Indians engaged the trader in friendly banter until near midnight, when all “dropt into Sleep. And when the Cocks began to Crow, they came to the Bed and shot my Husband through the Head. And a young Man lying upon the Floor was shot in the same Minute. And thinking the Bullet had gone through [my head], one struck me with a Tomahawk. . . . I lying still, they supposed I was dead, and one of them went and killed both my Children; and then they came and took the Blankets from us & plunder'd the House of all that was valuable and went off. And in that bad condition I have lain two days amongst my dead.”

Amongst my dead
—those words would ever haunt me.

HOGS

Squire Robert B. Watson was a modern farmer who had outgrown the sorceries of our Border ancestors, the potions, charms, and incantations for good crops. He taught me theories and methods of breeding livestock (some of them used formerly in breeding slaves, he commented, without further remark), having succeeded with hogs and cattle, horses, mules—everything, in fact, but sheep, which the Piedmont settlers had detested since old drover days when their immigrant Highlands ancestors moved south along the Appalachians. With the canny brain of the wild sheep long since bred out of them, these dim creatures had fallen prey to wolves and panthers and even to the berry-grubbing bears; suffocating in their dirty wool, they died prodigiously in the damp heat of Carolina summer before their husbandry was finally abandoned.

The merry hogs, on the other hand, took joyfully to the land, rooting through the woodlands as if born to it. Escaped hogs resisted predators, reverting quickly to the razorbacked pugnacity of the wild boar; they grew huge, black, and hard-bristled, with curled tusks. “Some of our ‘po' whites' turn feral, too.” The Colonel winked, aware of my hard feelings about Z. P. Claxton and the death of Joseph. But unlike feral humans, he continued, wild hogs could be baited in and tamed in pens, rounding off their rangy lines in a few generations and turning pink beneath their bristles, until only the snouts and curly tails and squinty little eyes remained the same.

That first year, when a sow farrowed toward Christmas, I helped the Colonel with the deliveries, tugging each piglet by the shoulders to work it free, and he showed me how to clean off the shining membranes which enclosed the heads, then pump the slimy little legs to get them going. Finally the sow would heave a sigh and push her runt out in a bloody blurt of afterbirth. Since he did not trust this sow not to eat her litter, he promised me a half dozen shoats if I would rear the lot. “For a while you'll have to cook their feed,” he said, “raise them by hand.”

“If I can catch them!” Idiotically I laughed aloud, startling us both with my new happiness. Seeing my overjoyed face, the Colonel grinned. “First time I've ever seen you smile.” The Colonel chuckled kindly along with me. He had almost forgotten, he said, how much he had enjoyed pigs as a boy. “You don't ‘catch' a pig, Edgar. You ‘fetch' it.” As he spoke, Colonel Robert petted the six shoats. Without affection, he explained, they grew poorly and became sluggish, and their curly tails would droop like dying flowers. In a few weeks, if cared for properly, my gang of shoats should be racing around with grunts and squeals, playing tag and mauling one another, much like puppies. “Plenty of water helps 'em gobble up their food so they can grow.” He smiled. “No pig under one hundred pounds can call itself a hog, so they're in a hurry.” I was in a hurry, too, though for what I did not know. I could hardly wait!

In response to all my earnest questions, Colonel Robert spoke to a young cousin as one farmer to another, evoking great antebellum days when even rich Tidewater planters had been attracted to the short-staple cotton agriculture here in the Piedmont; before the War, Edgefield had shipped more cotton bales than any district in the state. But erosion had leached out the clay soil, and problems had grown with fluctuations in the cotton prices and rising competition from the states along the southern Mississippi. With the onset of the War and the loss of plentiful unpaid labor, “King Cotton” was deposed for good.

These days, despite Reconstruction, said the Colonel, Clouds Creek was stirring back to life. Like his father and grandfather before him, he sold off timber from his wooded lands, grew tobacco, corn, and rice, and was trying grain crops—oats, wheat, rye, and barley. In fact, he said, the Watsons were planting all their former crops except for cotton. He had also made a reputation for fine hogs and cattle, and in this year of my return was putting in small orchards; he hoped to become the first Carolina planter ever to ship peaches outside the state. Listening proudly to my kinsman, I dared hope that my own luck had turned, that the worst of my life was behind me, that there was a future at Clouds Creek for Edgar Artemas Watson.

I started simply with a few chicks and ducklings, borrowing a horse to plow a single meadow in which I planted corn by hand, gold kernel after kernel, row after precious row. Thin fresh green lines, weak and broken at first, came forth mysteriously and rose in a green haze; for a while, I cherished each and every plant among the hundreds, even the weak ones I would later weed away. I felt ingrown in this dark soil, as the Artemas Plantation's heir, putting down soft tendrils like a native plant of our old land. I grew to love the Clouds Creek earth, and in summer I made strange love to it in the soft evenings, lying down upon it naked as the soil gave off the gathered heat of the long day.

Not until I knew the Colonel better did I inquire about my father's career as a soldier. Aware that I needed the truth, the Colonel did not dodge the question but gave me a terse answer, reporting precisely what his uncle Tillman had told him—that Elijah D. had never hesitated to seek privilege or favor from higher-ranking kin and never failed to shun responsibility of every kind, including combat. Early in the War, Uncle Tillman had dismissed him from the Edgefield Volunteers, and within that year, Selden Tilghman had him transferred from the Nineteenth Cavalry to an infantry company of half-trained soldiers, due to general dereliction of his duties. The alternative had been courts martial and imprisonment.

ROGUE'S MARCH

The Honorable Tillman Watson (although illiterate, Mama said) was now a state senator and a vice president of the Edgefield Agricultural Society. Like Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun, he was an old Borderer in his appearance, being tall and rangy, with an imposing forehead and fierce deepset eyes sunk back beneath heavy black brows in a long bony face. Though he had been kind enough during my childhood, Great-Uncle Tillman shunned me now to spare himself the effort of concealing his dislike of my father. As a prosperous man, it pained him, too, to see a ragged boy working his late brother's plantation all alone in the forlorn hope that he might one day earn it back.

As for the other Clouds Creek kin, they were civil but not hospitable, being similarly at pains to separate themselves from “the Bad Elijah.” Though I never complained about my solitude, the Colonel worried that living alone in that damp and decrepit house, young Cousin Edgar might sicken or go mad. I was too proud to tell him how much I preferred solitude to the terror of existence under my father's roof.

“I wish you had known your grandfather,” Colonel Robert was saying, avoiding my eye so as not to embarrass us both. “A kind and gentle man and well-respected planter until whiskey took him.” Though he made no mention of my father, his keen glance was a warning that alcoholic spirits might be the ruin of my lineage. “I shall assist you if you deserve that, Edgar, and not otherwise.” He said this harshly. No thanks being expected, I kept still.

Another day, I asked him if he knew what had become of Selden Tilghman. He considered the hands clasped on his knee before muttering what he had heard, that “ruffians without civil authority” had given Colonel Tilghman one hundred strokes of the lash, then tarred and feathered him. In a hoary medieval clamor of tin pots, cat-calls, and chaotic drumming, he'd been ridden backwards on a pole in an old-fashioned “rogue's march,” after which he'd been dumped into a hog wallow at Hamburg, the despised Republican settlement on the Savannah River across from Augusta, Georgia. Tilghman had regained consciousness before hogs found him and had crawled away—all that was rumor. Nothing had been heard about him since.

“He is dead, then?”

“I pray that he is dead.” Even if the man survived, he would be hunted down and killed should he return to Edgefield District, not because his punishment had been insufficient but because of the bad conscience of his neighbors, to whom he remained a specter of reproach.

Colonel Robert's repudiation of the martyrdom inflicted on a Confederate hero by “that half-mad Coulter and his gang” had been evident since the day he'd fired Claxton. (Again he avoided mention of my father.) “They cannot dignify unlawful violence by calling themselves ‘Regulators.' ‘Regulation' occurred a century ago when your great-great-grandfather led the citizens' militia. These night riders of today are not patriots but vigilantes, and the cruelties they perpetrate would be villainous even in time of war.” He had agreed with Selden Tilghman that renegade violence kept the old wounds open, and that such actions would isolate the South as a polluted backwater of the republic.