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.