Shadow Country (79 page)

“You've already done that, Papa,” I said. If he heard, he gave no sign. “Take the musket, then,” he begged. “Leave me my horse. I reckon I don't amount to much without that horse,” he added, seeking pity.

A shout rose from the square. Someone had recognized the tethered horse. Scared of a mob, Papa was on his feet, his blanket like a hood around his head and shoulders. Having come off the drink the hard way, all alone in his cold cell, he looked puffy and haggard, wheedling piteously, “They aim to hang me, son!”

“Nosir,” I said. “It is me they're after.”

When he realized what I'd said, he loosed a loud whoop of relief; Whatever it was he knew, he'd got away with it. Then he stopped laughing and grew wary. “Don't look at me that bad way, boy. I weren't the one put it on you.”

For the second time that day, the blackness swirled so thick before my eyes that I had to grasp the bars. “The Regulators meant to ride out there and take care of that traitor that scared you,” he confided. But next morning, returning to finish the job, they had heard a shot, seen Watson's boy run out with a musket. They rode away but somebody must have talked. “Ol' Zip, I reckon.”

“I might have gone and murdered that old nigra,” I muttered, as the truth fell into place.

“Tap, you mean? Tap knows?” Slowly he rose and came over to the bars.

“You left him dying. You've implicated me.” He deserves to die, I thought.

“For the love of Jesus, boy! Don't show that devil face to your own father!” Blaming everything on Coulter, he spat up the rest. Coulter had sent Claxton to the Union garrison with word about a shooting out at the old Tilghman place. As the only person in Edgefield District known to frequent Deepwood, young Edgar Watson was the natural suspect, but just to make sure, Claxton reported that the Watson boy, armed with a musket, had been seen out there early that morning. “Can't hardly believe that skunk'd go and do that to me,” my father said. He had lowered his voice, conspiratorial, as if inviting me to help him plot the Terrible Retribution of the Watsons.

Eyes closed, I pressed my forehead to the cold iron of his bars. Until he had confessed it by mistake, I had not even been aware that my life had been put at risk to cover their tracks!

“You're pale, Edgar! Are you all right?” Reaching through the bars, the Coward Watson cupped my nape gently in his big hand. The hand remained too long. I stiffened. Had it occurred to him that I might go fetch his gun and shoot him through the bars? I thought, he aims to break my neck right now while he has his chance.

“You have grown up too fast,” Papa said sadly, letting go.

“Yessir.” My voice broke with despair. “I have grown up very fast.” With all of Edgefield District on my trail—even the jailer was out looking for me—I had risked coming here, not to kill him, not to tell him his family had forsaken him, nor even that I meant to take his horse. After all these years of terror and humiliation, I had come here to see him one last time, hoping to receive his thanks for shouldering the blame for the botched murder of Selden Tilghman.

“You hate me, don't you.” He was whining. “First the mother and the girl and now my only son.” The victim's eyes glistened in self-pity when I nodded. He whispered, “I am forsaken, then.” And I said, “Yes, you are.”

I was at the door when he called after me a last time. “Tap knows what happened? That what you come to tell me?” He gave me an awful smile. “Son? You'll take care of that before you leave?” When I was silent, he said meanly, “Never mind, boy, the men will take care of it. Just you run away after your mama, save your own skin.” How I hated him for that! “Come back and see your poor old Papa someday, will you do that, son? You promise?”

“Yessir. I will be back, I promise. I aim to kill you, Papa.”

Crossing the still courtroom, I heard Lige Watson's howl of woe as the truth of his lost life fell down upon him.

From the courthouse terrace, I stared at my home country—the first time I'd really looked at it since Corporal E. D. Watson of the First Edgefield Volunteers had borne me up these steps in the first year of the War. The terrace was not so high above the square as I remembered, and its noble prospect of blue mountains appeared sadly diminished. The countryside looked commonplace and the world small because my heart and hope had shrunken down to nothing.

The hostler had raised the alarm and people in the square were pointing as I ran down the steps and mounted. Tap was still out in the field. He, too, must have heard I was a fugitive, must imagine now that I was riding out to kill him. Having no place to run, he only straightened as the big horse came down on him. Slowly he laid down his hoe and sack and removed his lumpy hat to await the rider.

“I done jus' like you tole me, Mist' Edguh.” His voice was dull and dead. “I ain't spoked to nobody about nothin, nosuh.” He was trembling.

Behind me, a shroud of winter dust arose from the hooves of horses. I said, “All the same, you know too much. They will be coming.” I told him he must find Lulalie, hide till nightfall, then depart. I handed him all the money left in the Colonel's packet. “Buy a mule,” I said. They should slip away at dark, head for Augusta, catch up with the womenfolk on their way to Fort White, Florida.

Tap refused the money. “Nosuh, Mist' Edguh. Dis yere Carolina country is mah home. I ain't done nothin wrong so I ain't goin. Trus' in de Lord! Dass what Preacher Simkins tole 'em at our church when dem riders come for him. Dem white men listened, den dey went on home.”

“This kind won't listen, Tap. They won't even ask.” But Tap had always known better so he never heard me. He was watching the dust over the town. “I b'lieve dey comin. You bes get goin. Tell dat woman, please, dat Lalie and me be waitin on her when she get ready to come home.”

“God help you, Tap,” I said, turning the horse.

Avoiding the main roads, I headed south and west and forded the Savannah River near the fall line early next morning. When the roan clambered up the Georgia bank, I turned in the saddle to gaze back. I had left my native Carolina, and everywhere ahead was unknown country.

CHAPTER 2

ON ECHO RIVER

I caught up with the women on the old Woodpecker Trail down west of the Great Okefenokee. Rode up alongside the wagons on a warm afternoon as if joining them had been my plan right from the start. Those poor females looked relieved, Aunt Cindy, too, but seeing that roan horse made them uneasy. Perhaps because I was unsmiling and untalkative, they never asked about Job's ring-eyed owner and I never offered to explain, not then, not later, having no wish to lay open the wound of my lost life at Clouds Creek, and the great waste of it. On that cold afternoon, I hitched the roan to the tailgate of the wagon and crawled inside amongst their bedding and slept straight through until early the next morning.

Seeing my head poke out, Aunt Cindy whooped; she fixed me a big dish of scraps before pressing me about her little family. How was her sweet Lalie getting on? Had that fool Tap sent word?

I could scarcely look her in the eye. The truth would worry the poor woman to distraction, and in the end, a lie—that Tap and Lulalie were on their way to join us—would be still worse. Finally I said that, living at Clouds Creek, I had scarcely seen them. In my gut I knew that Tap was done for, and as for Lalie, who knew what had become of her? Aunt Cindy soon saw that behind my stiff smile and tough manner, my heart was crippled, and she gave me a queer look, but it was not her place to question me too closely so she didn't.

On the twelfth of March of 1871, we crossed over into Florida. With two state lines behind me, I was breathing easier. Only now did I introduce myself to my fellow pioneers—Edgar A. Watson, overseer of the Artemas Plantation at Clouds Creek, South Carolina, at your service, sir. Nobody knew quite what to make of this husky youth who was no boy but not a man yet either. What he was, in truth, was a fugitive from his own land and rightful heritage, angry and dangerous as a gut-shot bear.

The last leg of the journey was by slow barge south to Branford Landing on the Suwannee River, “far, far away, that's where my heart is turning ever, that's where the old folks stay.” That old song misted my eyes with upwellings of loss. Curled in my nest in the warm tar-smelling hemp hawsers on the bow, I wallowed in tender emotions.

Try as I would to find relief in my escape from the cold rain and mud of Piedmont winter with its meager food and numbing drudgery, nothing seemed to ease the ache of longing. The farther I traveled from where I belonged, the more unjust my exile seemed. I reviled my misbegotten father, reveling in fantasies of a dire patricide. From Cousin Selden's
Iliad
I had memorized a passage about the great rage of revenge which “swirls like smoke within our heart, and becomes in our madness a thing more sweet than the dripping of honey.” That fury had not abated, nor the will to vengeance, which chewed like a black rat at my lungs. My one consolation was knowing that justice would be done, that one day “in my madness,” I would deprive my father of his raw red life.

Before my eyes daily as we sailed way down upon the Suwannee River were visions of spring furrows at Clouds Creek, the warmed earth opened up behind the plow; of wildflowered meadows, cool and verdant, and airy open woods along the shaded creeks, winding southeast to the Edisto. That spring landscape turned forever and away in my mind's eye, changing softly into the gold greens of upland summer in that lost land where I was born, the country of my forefathers, the heart of home. Clouds Creek—my earth—was the wellspring and the source of Edgar Watson, all the Eden he had ever wished or hoped to find.

Then reverie dissolved, leaving cold sweat like a dank swamp mist on my skin. I stared about me at the undiscovered country on both sides of the wild river, a howling waste of dark riverine forest and rank coarse savanna where the eternal seasons passed unchanged. Mourning my sprightly hogs, my sturdy pens, brooding about the weeds and hard sharp briar that all too soon would creep over my farmland, returning it to the oldfield desolation in which I'd found it, I sat stunned by melancholy. When the pain and rage burst from my mouth, my awful squawk silenced every soul on that slow barge.

Deaf to my cry (out of embarrassment), my mother and sister smiled sweetly; they tatted and chattered. Still ignorant of what had taken place at Edgefield, they were afraid of Edgar's darkness, and all the while that stern black woman awaited me, confident I would spit up evil when the time came. Unwilling to meet her suspicious eye, I set my jaw and glared fixedly at the forests of the wild Suwannee (Creek Indian for “Echo River,” said the bargeman).

Once I'd hummed it, that song became epidemic on the barge; everyone hummed, whistled, and sang it, and just when it seemed it might die out, I would start over by mistake, unable to drive its plaint out of my head. Oh how I sickened of that song and self-pity, and of grief-rotted Edgar, too, and of foul nightmares about the Owl-Man, who in my dreams never appeared as Cousin Selden.

Day after day, the strange smells and hidden voices of the passing wilderness, seeking to draw me back into my life, had passed unheeded. And then one day I awoke to find the earth colors returned and “the whole Creation” come alive and clear. As the dark withdrew, the forest stood forth in a light of revelation, and sunrise leaves sparkled and spun, breathing a fresh wind from the west, off the Gulf of Mexico, and I jumped up with a laugh that startled poor Ninny-Minnie. Wasn't I young and able-bodied, able-minded, too? One day I would go home to reclaim Clouds Creek, but meanwhile a virgin land was opening before me. We should reach our destination, the bargeman said, in time for the spring planting.

Here and there, rounding a bend, the barge surprised brown-skinned people on the banks, crouched back like wildcats caught out in the open. The Cherokees who were chastised by my ancestors were almost gone from upland Carolina, though a few still lurked in remote regions; these Creeks were the first wild men I had ever seen. The women and young would rush into the reeds or flee through the shadows of the great live oaks which spread their heavy limbs over the clearings, but the grown men and older boys, drifting out of gun range, would pause at the forest edge to watch the intruders over their shoulders, in the way of deer; I was awed by the stillness in them even when they moved. They were set to run, they had to be. The bargeman told us that bored, drunken travelers would pass the time blazing away at every furred and feathered bit of life along the river, and would sometimes shoot close to these people's feet “to see them redskins dance,” which was why, at the first glint of metal, the wild folk withdrew into the shadows until the intruders were gone around the bend and the forest silences regathered.

I never greeted them, having learned that lesson when even the smallest child among them refused to acknowledge frantic Minnie, though she waved and waved. “Why don't they wave back?” she cried, desperately hurt. I said roughly, “They fear and despise us. Why should they wave?” These wild ones came down from those Muskogee Creeks that Ol' Hickory had chased south out of Georgia, said the bargeman, and most of them were never seen at all, easing down into hiding at the sound of our approach, watching us pass.

These hinterlands, so distant from the settlements, remained uncultivated and unhunted. The bargeman said that in Spanish times, when a road was opened from St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast to Pensacola on the Gulf, there were still buffalo in these savannas, and also the great jaguar, called tigre, and panthers, bears, and red wolves were still common. Sometimes, at night, shrill screams scared Mama and poor Ninny half to death—not white females being violated by naked savages as they imagined but panthers mating, the bargeman assured Mama, who recoiled from this man's vulgar liberty. Bull gators coughed and roared back in the swamps, and once there came a lonely howl that he identified as the red wolf. Flocks of huge black fowl in the glades were bronze-backed turkeys, and everywhere, wild ducks jumped from the bulrushes and reeds, shedding bright water. I shot big drakes and gobblers for provisions and pin-hooked all the fresh fish we could eat. Pairs of great woodpeckers larger than crows, with flashing white bills and crimson crests afire in the sun, crossed the river in deep bounding flight, and hurtling flocks of small longtailed parrots, bright green as new leaves in the morning light. The wild things were shining with spring colors and new sap and finally I was, too. I would sink my teeth into this morning land like a fresh peach.

The river barge was warped ashore where a tributary, the Santa Fe, joins the Suwannee—the confluence of the Echo and the Holy Faith, I informed the women. (Spanish Catholics! snapped Mama, worn out by her journey and on the lookout for the smallest cause to be indignant.) De Soto and his men, more exhausted and discouraged by the heat and insects than by Indian attacks, had called it the River of Discord, whereas to the Indians, the river was sacred mystery, vanishing quite suddenly into the earth—no suck or swirl, just gone away under the ground. Perhaps because the red-skinned devils had made life Hell for the first settlers, those folks imagined they had found the source of the River Styx, deep in the Underworld, and few had persevered long enough to learn that the current surfaced a few miles downstream as a beautiful blue spring in the forest.

While the barge continued on to Branford Landing, I chose to explore the country before meeting the women at Ichetucknee Plantation. Hollering good-bye to all to insure attention, I rode my big roan off that barge as she touched shore—a staccato clatter sharp as rifle fire as the horse balked, then a mighty gathering of haunches and great leap and splash and upward heave onto the bank. These heroics, alas, were spoiled by the hydraulics of my stallion, which lowered its nozzle to release a stream of piss even while it rid itself of gas, hightailing off in a grand salute of horse farts and manure as the women's cries of admiration turned to giggles, but finally all cheered as grim young Edgar was actually seen to laugh. Minutes later, in my own company at last, I could not stop grinning, feeling nearidiotic with anticipation.

The river trail ran north along the “Santa Fee” (as backcountry Floridians still call it), which descends from a dry sandy land of piney woods and scrub oak to the cypress sink where it is drawn beneath the earth. Farther upriver, the trail turned off along the Ichetucknee, a crystal stream with blue water so clear that streaming underwater weeds like turquoise eels swim endlessly over white sand.

ICHETUCKNEE

The Ichetucknee post office and trading post (also the blacksmith shop and gristmill) was six miles up this woodland stream, on the east bank of the Mill Pond spring and only a few miles from Fort White, in Columbia County. The proprietor, a small quick man named Collins, was eager to relate how Fort White had been built back in '37, during the Second Seminole War, only to be abandoned to the savages a few years later. The first of his name had come as pioneers in '42, twenty years before the Third Seminole War. Soon after came the War Between the States, when this worthy blacksmith-trader-postmaster had rushed over to Lake City—known as Alligator in those days—eager to join the Columbia Rifles and go fight the Yanks. (I did not ask if he'd got his wish, since if he had, I would never have escaped the smallest detail of that wartime saga.)

In a few years, this lively Edgar Collins would become my sister's father-in-law, and because we shared a detestation of our given name, we got on fine. After his wife had packed me some good grub, Mr. Collins pointed me northeast through the woods toward the plantation, but not before warning me to watch my step around the foreman and his boys, a pack of Georgia ridge runners named Tolen.

I remounted and rode on, anxious to reach the plantation before nightfall. Back home in Carolina our roads were iron red, but here in the forests of north Florida the trails were cool white clay, wandering off like ghost paths through the trees. I dismounted and rubbed some of this stuff between my fingers: poor soil for farming. In this spring damp the road clay, beaten hard by wagon wheels and hooves, felt smooth and fine as bone-meal; in summer it would powder to fine dust. Peering about these silent woods with no idea what lay ahead, my high spirits were overtaken and dragged down by a claw of that morbid despair which I thought I'd left behind me.

Aunt Tabitha Watson and her daughter Laura lived in “the plantation house,” which was nothing at all like a plantation house in Edgefield. The grand manor that Mama had set her heart on was no more than a big log cabin with two rooms on either side of a center passage. The outside was framed over with rough pine boards with the bark on, and a stoop was tacked onto each end of the dim corridor. Except in size, it scarcely differed from what the old folks called a dog-trot cabin because any hound—or hog, coon, rooster, or inquisitive bear—could travel through from one stoop to the other without so much as a how-d'ye-do to the inhabitants. Yet it was the biggest cabin in the county, well situated on the rich soil of a former cow pen, now a fenced-in grove of bearing pecan trees and black walnut and persimmon.