husband, nip at him, dance back with a delighted cry of fear when he surged suddenly toward rage, then trip forth once more in trembling suspense, prolonging her delight, as if this were the sole ecstasy that her life with him had left her. No longer able to re-strain herself, she dared too much, exposing us all to a careening din that would leave the cabin shattered, deathly still. And always she insinuated that the young son was the true head of this accursed family, with responsibility to protect it from the rogue father.
“Have some turnips, Mr. Watson.” Mama spooned them up out of the pot and dumped them smartly onto a plate. “All we have to feed your little family, Mr. Watson.” In his life defeat, he scarcely heard her. “Nice fresh turnips from your neighbor’s garden.” she concluded neatly.
Papa lurched to his feet, overturning his chair. “Charity? From niggers?”
She clenched her cotton-pricked hard hands, then folded them beneath her apron-the very picture of sweet Miss Ellen Addison, she of the wasp waist and pretty primrose face and flying fingers. “You see, we are so famished in your household that your son was reduced to theft-” She stopped short. “Run,” she told me.
But Papa had caught hold of my arm. I put my other arm around him, trying to slip in under the blows, hugging the thick trunk of him with all my might, but he swung me so violently, hurling me away, that my boots came off the floor. My head struck a log butt in the wall, and the world was obliterated as my brain exploded. People talk about seeing stars. A single star is all I ever saw, bursting forth in blades of fire that flashed through blackness and oblivion.
Ghost voices, apparitions. Had night come? I did not know who or where I was, or why I lay inert. My brain was fixed in an iron vise of agony. I was unable to clear mist from my eyes or move a muscle lest I vomit.
Hiding behind slack eyelids, I half-watched, half-listened; the shadow figures did not know I had returned. The shrouded woman sat holding a hand. My hand? I felt nothing. I wondered if my brain might not be bleeding. The man, in grainy silhouette, was staring out his small window into darkness. He had scared himself. He spoke: “He is too hard-headed. There is no discipline he will submit to.” The woman did not bother to remind him that if the son was ungovernable, the father was to blame, having stoked a rebellious nature by these beatings. She said none of that. She said, “I see. It was his fault, then.” She put my hand down, having forgotten it. “What a low beast you have become, Elijah Watson. The boy works night and day to support your family, he has never done you harm, no, quite the contrary. It is you who do him harm, time and again.”
Hearing her voice speak up for me at last, my eyes welled; surprised, I had to struggle not to weep. “Are you so depraved with all your grog and fornication,” her voice continued, “that you would risk his life?”
The man’s voice mumbled that it was an accident. He did not know for the life of him why this boy put him in a fury. He was lachrymose, baffled, scared, contrite, but he was also, as I now knew well, quite capable in drink of taking his son’s life. I heard a strange voice, dull, slow, and swollen: “If you ever lay hands on me again-on any of us, Papa-I will kill you.”
Her voice: “Merciful goodness! Rest, Edgar. You must rest.” Had I spoken aloud? Had I imagined it? Either way, my threat made my fingers twitch and my saliva flow, it sent strange ecstatic shivers through my neck and arms that caused a bloodburst in my brain and the return of blackness.
For a fortnight, I suffered fainting spells, unholy headaches. I would force my gut hard against my stomach wall to fire my resolve and keep my head from splitting. When Minnie pled that next time I must beg for mercy, I swore I would never stoop to “that low beast,” as Mama had called him, not if he split my noggin like a frozen pumpkin. But of course, by the time I recovered, he was drinking as before, and I was trying to please him as before, being doomed to love him.
When sober enough to sit up in the saddle, Lige Watson rode with the Edgefield Rifle and Sabre Club-a detachment of the Regulators-having earned a reputation as a man who was good with horses and “would do the necessary” to protect the honor of the South and Southern womanhood; he went about his duties with grim fervor. But even Papa, who could be generous and not invariably unkind, had grown disturbed by the fanaticism of his commander. Apparently Sergeant Z. P. Claxton had accused Tap Watson of showing a hostile countenance to a white man. Advised by Captain Watson that this man on Claxton’s list was actually “a pretty good ol’ nigra,” Major Coulter gave him a long look of warning. “Sometimes it gets so us ol’ boys might feel like killing us a nigger,” Coulter told him in a low dead voice. “At them times it don’t matter much if he’s a pretty good ol’ nigger or he ain’t. Whether he done something or didn’t, understand me?”
Papa boasted to his family that thanks to his efforts, Tap was spared without ever knowing he had been in danger. Papa hoped his son was proud of his good deed. The trouble was that unlike him, I understood-or at least Jack Watson understood-what Major Coulter meant. Us ol’ boys might
Even in Reconstruction days, most men of Edgefield would not tolerate a black who failed to make way for them on the plank sidewalks, and Elijah D. Watson, as his status declined, demanded more respect than most. One day as I trailed him home, his careening gait would not permit an elderly black woman to edge out of his way; she was forced off into the deep mud street just as a man in frock coat, shining boots, and long curved sideburns hooked forward at the lower jaw like a peregrine falcon, came swinging his wood leg around the corner. Blood rushed to my face as he extended a gloved hand and handed the old darkie back onto the boards-hauled her back would be closer to the spirit of it-with a distaste impartially extended to all parties. The man ignored her babble and both Watsons, swinging forward on his wooden leg as the woman hurried off in her muddied dress.
Matthew Calbraith Butler, commanding a cavalry regiment under General J. E. B. Stuart at the battle at Brandy Station in Virginia, had lost a leg leading a charge but returned to his command not long thereafter. When Private Ring-Eye staggered after him, braying that he was not a man to be insulted and further, that Captain Michael Watson had been Butler’s grandfather’s superior officer in Pickens’s Brigade, Calbraith Butler checked the drunkard’s onrush by placing the point of his cane against his chest just hard enough to redirect him off the boards. On his knees in the mud, Private Watson was coldly chastised for imposition on a general officer.
Because his son had witnessed his humiliation, Elijah Watson, still on his knees, challenged the young general to a duel. General Butler stated with hauteur that Watson was not privileged to fight a duel since he had never been an officer and was no longer a gentleman. What he was, said Butler, was a disgrace to a good family as well as to the filthied uniform which he still wore.
Shamed beyond endurance, I cried out, “Duel with his son, then, if you are not a coward!” But my voice broke grotesquely in its adolescent croak, and Calbraith Butler permitted himself a narrow smile. “When it comes to dueling with boys,” he told me quietly, “I am indeed faint-hearted, Master Watson.” With a slight bow, he turned and kept on going in strong limping stride and shortly disappeared around the corner.
As street idlers hooted gleefully, hailing “Ring-Eye” by that name, my mud-footed father bellowed outrage that an unschooled ragged boy should dare to challenge an Edgefield hero. “Call out General Butler?
Aunt Cindy, watering her hens, straightened slowly as we crossed our yard. Young Lalie ran to her and peered from behind her skirts at poor eartwisted Edgar. When Tap came out, they stood as still as oaken figures in that sad spring light as my maddened father roared at them to mind their nigger business. Then the door closed behind and I was slung into the corner, mad with pain. Minnie was bawling. Even Mama cried out in alarm when he seized the heavy hickory behind the door and staggered toward me.
Slowly I stood. My ear and my wrenched arm fired my rage and in a moment Jack was there. Commanded to lean forward, hands spread wide on the log wall, I turned a little in seeming resignation, then whirled and grasped the wood, twisting it free before he could secure his hold.
“Here,” he growled, missing my intent. “Give it here.”
In the kitchen corner my mother stood, hands clasped, as formal as a mourner. “Edgar?” she said. Her query signified,
Afraid, I circled out into the center of the room, panting like something cornered. Sensing weakness, he made a sudden rush as Minnie moaned with terror in her cupboard. When I jumped aside, he pitched onto his knees, and I leapt and brought the stick down hard across his shoulders-
