Shadow Country (83 page)

At daybreak, I carved her cross; that same day, I made her coffin. Our own ceremony would be her memorial, and she would lie in our own ground beside our cabin. No. In the end, the families came and shamed me. They whispered at the graying face and melancholy scent. Nobody had closed her eyes nor crossed her arms nor even bathed her. Her stepbrother and minister and my friend J. C. Robarts bent a wayward arm, forcing it to join the rest of her within the coffin. “It's not a chicken wing,” I growled. His face went mushy with resentment.
Edgar, don't. We loved her, too. Nobody's trying to hurt Cousin Ann Mary.

Charlie,
I said. Ann Mary Collins was the dead girl who went away nailed up in my pine box, under black crepe, to be bounced and thrown about in a black cart. Every jolt hurt me. I ran after them half naked in the cold, yelling at them to go slow and be more careful. I walked a little ways but being barefoot fell behind and finally did not follow.

In a dream her coffin is lowered into a deep pit in the white clay earth of Bethel churchyard. It is left uncovered. I can see inside. The fair skin which shivered at my touch purples and softens. Shadowed eyes sunk back, grayed small teeth on blue-gray lip, dead hair lank over the skull. She no longer knows me.

Cousin Selden drifts among the mourners, feathers rotting. He is rotting, too. I cry, “Why have you come? What do you want of me?”

Night after night, Charlie returns.

Wandering the woods roads under sleepless stars, I walk and walk, heart dead as the white clay.

Charlie my Darling, gone and lost forever. I swear a terrible revenge but upon whom?

MISS SUEBELLE PARKINS

I moved unseeing through the ache of days. In the evening, I drank rotgut for the pain until I sank to the dirt floor, only to come to in the dark hours and drink more. I reeled into the day in mighty sickness, doing myself harm in violent labor with sharp careless tools, banging and wrenching, boiling off my poisons. But I was cursed with a mule's constitution and by nightfall had regained the will to drink.

On the Sabbaths I rode to the crossroads taverns, slapped shoulders, drew a crowd of men and made 'em laugh. Usually I was still laughing when I picked a fight “just for the fun.” Pretty soon, no man would drink with Edgar Watson, and the grog shops drove me out, and I rode too far away from home to return in time for work on Monday morning. All across the northern counties, a man I no longer knew earned a bad name as a crazy-wild mean skunk, quick to pull a knife. When Watson barged into the tavern, the fun was over. More than once, when he refused to leave, he was knocked over the head and dragged into the road and kicked bloody in the public mud.

All the while I was feverish with longing. By early spring, I was visiting Lake City's colored whores with their big soft mouths and round high rumps and candied tongues. Out of respect for my lost bride and common decency, I never took one from the front, only rode her from behind, slamming against that rubbery hind end, forcing her forward till her back bowed and her neck twisted, her head jammed against the wall. At the end, I rammed with all my strength—
a-gain, a-gain, a-gain!—
until she yelped in faked abandon or in fear or honest pain, it made no difference. A fleeting spasm, thin as cloud mist crossing a high sun, before I fell off, dull and dirtied, having failed once more to escape into obliteration.

A shy new wench billed as “Sweet Miss SueBelle Parkins” seemed upset when she was chosen by the grieving widower, in fact insultingly upset: I warned her sharply that I was not so drunk and useless as I might appear, overcoming her reluctance by twisting her arm and pushing her upstairs, where she permitted me to complete my carnal dealings. Passive though she was, inert with terror, she got a hook deep into me, a sick addiction having something to do with the queer contrast between the lacquered whore's mask and the firm young body and clean skin. But when I came there and selected her again, she burst into tears. She was still weeping when, upstairs, she whispered, “Lo'd fo'give me, Mist' Edguh, suh! I has knowed you all my life!” Scarcely discernible beneath her brassy wig and crimson rouge and tear-caked powder lay my childhood neighbor, young Lulalie Watson, the sweet-potato daughter of Tap Watson and Aunt Cindy.

The day Mist' Edguh had left Edgefield, Lalie wailed, her daddy was shot dead in the field by two white men on horseback. When I demanded to know who those riders were, she was too scared to tell me. Finally she confessed that they were known to black folks as Major Will and Overseer Claxton.

Lalie had had sense enough to flee, walking the wood edge all night and the next day to reach the Savannah River. Her mother had left a paper with the address in Florida, but having no kin along the way and finding no work in the winter fields, the girl was reduced to selling herself to pay for a journey hundreds of miles south. Two years passed before she reached Lake City. Being ashamed of what she had become, and fearful of the pain she would cause her churchly mother, she had never dared the last few miles to present herself at the plantation. (It had not occurred to the poor thing that Aunt Cindy's joy at seeing her alive might outweigh her disappointment.) Instead, she took a position, so to speak, at our local cathouse. In tears, Lalie implored me to keep her awful secret. I promised on my honor I would do so, for which I was rewarded with warm tears and a complimentary crack at her sweet person.

I visited Lalie soon again and then again—homesickness, I suppose. And I needed that generous healing nature that had made her companionship so precious to my sister in our childhood. All true, all true, but it was also true that her mortal form did great honor to her Maker. The seed of hunger for Lulalie Watson, dormant since boyhood, needed small encouragement to sprout—not that it helped me to escape my grief. My groan of deliverance would turn in its very utterance to a moan of woe. I reviled the poor creature for knowing that I wept, for knowing that no matter what, I needed her tenderness as much as her brown person—for knowing, worse, that no matter what, her erstwhile young master was now her slave and would be back for more, no matter how often she begged me to forget the lost Lulalie. At the very least,
oh please, sir,
I must deal with her by her professional name and
please, sir,
fuck her under that name, too, is what she meant, as if to avoid additional damnation for some queer kind of incest. I felt slighted but agreed.

Banging through Sweet SueBelle's door stupid with drink, needing to shame her because so ashamed myself, I sometimes hollered,
Sooee-belle, Sooee-belle,
in the voice I used back at Clouds Creek to call my hogs. Pitying me in my coarse grief, she smiled at my tomfoolery. And finally her good simple heart would get me smiling at my own self-pity—before the act, that is, but never after.

As SueBelle became less fearful, even fond of me, she called me “Wild Man.”
You bes' come on upstairs with yo' sweet Sooee-belle, cause you my Wil' Man.
Undressed, she lay back like a banquet, breasts smooth and sweet as mangoes, thighs thick and warm and smoky as Virginia hams. But in my soiled grief, I wanted no eyes upon my deed, and would turn her over, hauling her up onto her knees in a surge of anger and taking her like an animal, just as before. She would not join in my abandon, simply endured it.

One night there came hard pounding on the walls.
Shut up that crazy racket in there! Ain't you got no manners?
And another displeased customer across the hall, his door flung wide, hollered downstairs at the boss whore,
Hear that? How come I ain't gettin laid as good as that?
Mirthful, I increased our uproar, rolling off the bed on purpose in a grand finale, dragging the underdog right down on top of me, until finally one plaintiff, provoked beyond endurance, knocked our door down. I jumped up buck naked and launched a surprise attack, as I had been taught to do at my father's knee. Knocked down and kicked hard, still on his knees, the mauled intruder, as naked as myself and mopping dolefully at a bloody nose, agreed to apologize to Miss Parkins, that fine specimen of negritude swathed in pink sheets. “Beggin yer pardon, Miss Parkins,” he sniveled. “Doan mine if ah do,” said the demure Miss Parkins. I banged the door behind him and went back for more.

Hard drinking and hard fucking were my sole forgetting. For all its rewards, mounting Sooee from behind was a lonely business, and rolling off her, spent and sticky, was worse. Awaking vile-breathed, head pounding from bad rotgut, I felt plain rancorous, soul-poisoned. Dragging my stinking carcass into crumpled clothes and lurching toward the stairs, I was reviled by other lowlifes and their black Jezebels for making such a rumpus at that hour. Outside on a Sunday morning, I was struck sightless by the sun like a bear blundering out of a cave. Occasionally my uproar was assailed by slop jars flung from the upper windows by the religious element among the whorehouse clientele, and always, I was scourged in the street by the cold stares of churchgoers offended by my swinish defilement of the Sabbath morn. Filled with a deep slow-seeping rage, I cursed them vilely to offend them further.

Oh Charlie my Darling, Dearest Charlie, how do you like your filthy Mister now?

SUWANNEE COUNTY

Billy C. Collins married our Mary Lucretia that same year and their first child was dubbed Julian Edgar Collins. The “Edgar” honored Billy's father, but poor Minnie, frantic to please her wayward brother, tried to hint that her sprat was named for me. However, no Methodist Collins would name his firstborn after Edgar Watson, and anyway, her husband much disliked me. Hadn't his vile brother-in-law sent poor Cousin Ann Mary to an early grave? Had he not insulted her memory by refusing to attend her funeral and letting her parents take responsibility for the child?

When Lem and Billy's father died, I paid his estate fifty-five dollars for a beautiful gray filly, long-legged and delicate, with big dark eyes. I named her Charlie. For ten and a half dollars more, I acquired the old man's .12-gauge double-barrel, which in those days was a fancy gun, not used by common farmers. The right barrel threw a broken pattern but I soon learned to compensate for that. I would use that old firearm all my life and without hearing one complaint.

That spring, still shaky, I gave up my night wanderings and made a good crop for Captain Getzen, who had been patient, liking the way I worked. With my debts paid, I tried to heal our family by inviting the Collins boys to celebrate. Entreated by my sister, Billy accepted. And so, one Saturday, we rode to the O'Brien tavern in Suwannee County, the only place for thirty miles around that would still serve me. I had promised Minnie I would pick no fights, even in fun, and that evening things went fine. For such good Methodists, Lem and Billy got uproarious, and Lem toasted me over and over, yelling, “See that, Bill? Ed ain't near so bad as what you thought!” Made me feel so kindly toward my fellow men, even my brother-in-law, that I jumped up on a table to lead all my new friends in a grand old marching song of the Confederacy, to which every man present knew the rousing chorus:

When I sang out the cornet part (
buppa-ba-buppa-ba-boo, ba-buppa-ba-buppa ba-buppa ba-boo!
), Lem hollered to the crowd that his friend Ed might be the finest kind of farmer but his singing voice was a greav-ious insult to Southern rights and maybe our blue flag, too. He did his best to haul me off that table, with the whole room cat-calling and laughing, the singer included. But when I caught Lem with a boot swipe to the mouth, he grabbed my heel, and my momentum swung me off the table in a whirl of walls and faces, yells and smoke, and the oak floor struck me so hard that I couldn't place the pain; when I tried to jump up, cursing and laughing, I collapsed and fainted. I was carted home in a wagon, both knees broken.

THE FARRIER

For half a year while my fields went to hell, I lay at the mercy of the women, having gone off alcohol the hard way. When I could concentrate, I read a little in my tattered
History of Greece,
but most of those long days in the cabin I listened to the mice and crickets and suffered the tuneless whistling of Sam Frank Tolen, who never failed to grin in at the door when he happened by.

I had hardly recovered and resumed work at Getzen's when Lem Collins shot the farrier in the blacksmith shop in back of his late daddy's store at Ichetucknee. This man Hayes thought Lem was fooling with his wife and he was right. When the culprit fled out the window, the blacksmith hollered after him that he would tear his head off, and Lem being somewhat slightly built like most Collins men, it stood to reason that a feller twice his size who could rassle any plowhorse to a standstill would fulfill that vow with no trouble at all.

I knew John Hayes. John Hayes meant business. I said, “Lem, you'd better leave this county.” “Hell, no!” said Lem. “I
love
her, Ed!” “Well then,” said I, “you haven't got much choice.” “Gosh,” Lem said, “you mean that I should kill him?” “No, no, Lem! I only meant you might start thinking along the lines of self-defense, because John Hayes has sworn he means to kill you so he'd have only himself to blame if you took precautions.” I never meant to stoke Lem up, only to cool his passions for his own good: the Lem I knew was not cut out for mayhem.

Unfortunately, the drunken Lem who pulled me off the table at O'Brien, the horny Lem who had fallen so hard for this little Mrs. Hayes—this Lem flat refused to give her up. Anticipating her blessing in his deed, he screwed up his courage with hard drink and swiped my shotgun and went over to Hayes's place, where he hollered from the yard that he'd come to speak with “the lady of the house.” When the man of the house kicked his chair back and came roaring out, he was met as he came off his stoop by a fatal charge of buckshot from Lem Collins—a clear case of self-defense except to those who did not see it quite that way.