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.
While not in sympathy with Tilghman’s New Light heresies, Colonel Robert respected the integrity and courage of that God-stunned man. “Your mother’s cousin was abominated because he warned the public-publicly-about what had become monstrous in all of us.” He flushed. “To enrich ourselves, we Christians sanctioned human bondage, so what can we say now in our own defense? My God! The enslavement of our fellow men even after they were redeemed as our fellow Christians! How did our churchmen defend this for so long?” He shook his head. “My father owned a thousand slaves, Uncle Tillman, too, and Aunt Sophia, Uncle Artemas-all the siblings. We were large slaveholders until the end, saw nothing wrong with it. We went to war for it. And many thousands of our best young men would lose their lives for this great sin and grievous wound to the republic that made a travesty and lie of our Constitution.”
I was astonished by these heartbroken words from a Southern officer, wounded at Fraser’s Farm and Gettysburg and decorated for gallantry in the Great Lost Cause.
While they were small, my frisky shoats kept me company inside my empty house. I constructed a snug pen in a side room which I bedded with dry straw and mucked out faithfully. Rejoicing in their progress, I hauled slops and mash and gallons of fresh water to this roisterous bunch, talking back to them in their squeal language, with suitable chuffs and a few explosive harfs of false alarm. I even moved my bedding to a place beside the pen where I could share in their well-fed contentment. They nudged my boots in greeting, seeking treats out of my pocket or a good rub of the bristle tuft between those pale blue eyes. Listening to this gang of mine, in their eartwitching sleep, I would find myself smiling in the dark, even laughing quietly, drawing forth sweet giggles of pig mirth.
When spring came, I built an outside pen, and on Sunday afternoons, I led my sturdy band across the country. They would hurtle off in all directions, farther and farther in their forays, until they tired and came trotting in, heeding my call and following close behind all the way home. SooEEEEEEE! Pig, pig, pig! I sang across the meadows to celebrate my calling as a pig man. Colonel Robert warned me that hearing young Cousin Edgar in the distance and taking his mournful calls for cries of solitude was sorely troubling to certain Watsons on the lands around, and perhaps this good man, despite my reassurances, was the most troubled of all.