Even before Cousin Laura died, my mother had started scrapping with Aunt Tabitha, and finally she quit that lady’s roof, going to live with Minnie and her Billy. In 1901, when I returned from the Ten Thousand Islands, I went straight over to pay my respects as a good son should.
“Well, Mother, I’m home.”
“I don’t recall that I laid eyes on you the last time you were here. How long ago was that, do you suppose? Six years?”
“Seven, Mother.”
“Well, that’s long enough, wouldn’t you say?”
Skillfully she dispensed with her incivilities just as I was ready to snipe back, that’s how perverse this little woman was. She did not ask after Mandy’s health, far less inquire about the children, nor did she make the least effort to embrace me. Going unhugged by her twiggy old arms and unpecked by that dry slit of a mouth, I felt oddly out of sorts, I must admit.
As for Aunt Cindy, fixing supper at the stove, she never looked at me. For the first time in my life, that bony black woman did not come forward to hug me. She took no notice of me, not even enough to sniff and turn her back, but ignored me throughout the few minutes that I stayed. What Aunt Cindy had heard and what she suspected I did not inquire, knowing my account of it would do no good.
On a second visit, over meager tea, Mama related in detail how Cousin Laura had died in ’94 when Aunt Tabitha’s new manor house was scarcely finished. “She bored herself to death, that’s all,” said Cousin Laura’s lifelong friend, “and darn near took the rest of us off with her.”
The widower, on the other hand, had fattened up like a prime hog with his good fortune. The former Ichetucknee or Myers Plantation was now known as the Tolen Plantation, and the homesteads all around were called the Tolen Settlement. The Tolen, Florida, post office was located at the turpentine works down by the railroad crossing. All that was missing was the Holy Tolen Church. Meanwhile, Sam had married off his brother Mike to a Myers niece, then moved him into William Myers’s big log cabin to strengthen the Tolen grip on our family property. Sam’s stepbrother John Russ and his four mink-jawed sons infested another Myers cabin on Herlong Lane.
When I mentioned my reunion with my father in the Ridge Spring cemetery back in ’92, she stared at me. “Wasn’t South Carolina a bit out of your way?”
“Not for a patricide.”
“You wouldn’t do that, Edgar!”
I shrugged. “Let’s just say that the last time I saw him, he was lying in a grave.”
She waved this off, upset but impatient, rummaging up an 1895 obituary from the newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. “The Myers cousins clipped and sent this.” The clipping related how Captain Elijah D. Watson, aged sixty-one, had succumbed to Bright’s disease in a rooming house in that city. She read aloud: He was a well-to-do farmer in Edgefield County. A gallant soldier during the War Between the States, he distinguished himself on many battlefields for acts of great bravery and daring.
We did not have to remind each other that the rank of captain, like the deeds of heroism, were obituary courtesies to this man of low rank who returned from war with an impregnable reputation for dereliction of duty, drunkenness, and insubordination.
Next, she produced a yellowed daguerreotype, pressing it down on the table with a kind of grim finality like a poker winner laying down his hole card. Wild-haired cap-cocked Lige in Confederate uniform looked nothing at all like the handsome soldier I had chosen to recall from the courthouse terrace. Even without his ring eye, he looked truculent and bug-eyed.
“I never knew you’d treasured his picture all these years.” I set it down.
“Cindy saved it. For you children. Wasn’t that sweet?” She picked it up. Her hands were shaky now, with liver marks. “You must feel very proud of such a father, dear.” She curtsied minutely and I made a little bow as we sweet-smiled each other, not utterly without amusement and affection. “Oh Lord, Edgar!” She was cross again. “How long will you be here this time?”
Aunt Cindy rapped the iron stove with her wood spoon, then turned and left. According to her mistress, she had finally accepted the hard truth that her husband would never be seen again on God’s good earth; she prayed for a reunion of some kind in Heaven’s mansions. Deprived of her family, Aunt Cindy had given herself to ours, devoting her long narrow days to “tending her Miz Ellen’s every whim” (unabashed, Mama said that herself). She also managed the Collins household for our Minnie, who had blighted her family with her “neurasthenia”-that is, hysteria and insomnia, dyspepsia and hypochondria and every other ailment resistant to diagnosis and known cure which had an -ia at the end of it, said Mama. The only clear symptom of her “American nervousness” was a horror of human company even at home.
And poor Lulalie. Mama sighed. Her mother feared the worst. Such a warm busty young girl, did I recall her? Mama frowned and switched the subject, not wishing to dwell on warm brown bosoms under the bald eye of her Elijah, the celebrated bosom connoisseur in the daguerreotype. (Guessing at her mind’s quick turns, I saw a light mulatta girl, the young house wench who became Jacob Watson’s mother.) Mama offered me my father’s likeness with an enigmatic smile. “I’m sure you’ll want this as a keepsake.”
I shook my head, kept my arms folded. I rose to go. Leaning on my arm, Mama accompanied me outside, still clutching the picture. To my surprise, her face actually softened as she related what Private Watson had confided on his return from war. Sleepless and exhausted, he had finally broken down and wept, confessing his terror of being bayoneted and his horror of the battlefield at dark, when the musket fire died to the last solitary shots and the dreadful cries of the maimed thousands left on the battlefield, Yanks or Johnny Rebs no longer, simply thirsting boys calling for their mamas in their long hard dying-those cries that rose in a moaning wind from the blood-damp night earth of Virginia. All no-man’s land writhed under the moon, one huge tormented creature, all across the waste to the Union lines.
In the dawn of one dreaded day of battle, Lige Watson had broken out in a soaking sweat and come apart, shaken violently by his own unraveling like a muskrat shaken by a dog. Then his gut let go and he soiled his only clothes without any means or hope of restoration. With nowhere to hide his shame and tears, he fled. It was Will Coulter who came after him, who pulled him down behind a wall and slapped him hard, who ordered him to return into the lines or he would shoot him then and there where he lay stinking. And after the War in their Regulator years, that man with the crow-wing of hard black hair across his brow had used his knowledge of Private Watson’s terror to ensure his loyalty in night activities.
My mother’s eyes pled with me to relent, to forgive my family. “It’s not too late,” she begged. I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.
The following year, a letter to Mama lately arrived from Colonel R. B. Watson at Clouds Creek inquired after her son Edgar, wondering what had become of him and how he might be faring. His interest moved me more than I cared to reveal, though I feigned indifference. In his letter, Colonel Robert regretfully described the moaning frightened dying of her late husband Elijah, afflicted with big sores on his legs that would not heal, smelling just awful. Before he died, the wretched sinner, all purple bony knees and puffy belly, had howled for light, more light, all the night through, in his terror of oncoming darkness.
In his last coma, my father had raved and muttered about Selden Tilghman; the Colonel’s letter asked “Cousin Ellen” if she could explain this, suggesting that she might ask Edgar about it. Mama looked hard into my face. Though startled to hear Cousin Selden’s name, I shook my head. Mama shrugged, too. “I’m not surprised your father was afraid to meet his Maker. And of course he always hated Cousin Selden.” Again she scrutinized me but dared go no further.