Shadow Country

This much was to his credit: in refusing to discuss the episode with anyone, not even to defend his name, he had chosen to live with the local opinion that E. J. Watson had been solitary in that dreadful act. He had done his best to spare Rob any consequences-which was only just, Papa explained, since the plan to run those squatters off his claim had been his alone. However, he had not wished them to die, the way people said. And it tortured him to think that his younger son and his dear Kate Edna might suspect that he had murdered them… Unable to finish, he raised his big hard hands and dropped them on his knees, as if to say, I shall go to my grave bearing terrible slanders that will never be put to rest.

Again, his son was silent. What could he say? But in denying his beloved father his filial reassurance, he had wounded him, that much was clear. He had also angered him, set him to brooding, so that when eventually he thanked Papa for easing his mind about Rob’s role, remarking in passing that he’d never thought Rob capable of violence, his father had made that unsettling deep grunt, shifting his boots on the porch floor. “You were pretty young back then, still a schoolboy in Fort Myers,” he had muttered, as if to suggest that Lucius had not really known his brother.

Lucius disliked this insinuation just when he thought Rob’s innocence had been confirmed, and perhaps his quick stare of resentment-Do you mean what you seem to be implying, Papa?-had stung his father, who had given him a long appraising look. “You don’t remember how wild-tempered he was?” he said. “The crazy way he killed his dog that morning?”

Lucius met his eye. “I remember,” Lucius said. But his brother had been wild-hearted, not wild-tempered, and in no way crazy.

It had happened there between the river and the porch at a time when Rob was very dark in spirit, brooding for days over some rough thing Papa had said. On that hot noon, coming from the field, Papa had removed his coat and hung it on a chair before going inside. The revolver butt protruded from the inside pocket. Rob, coming behind him, had taken out the gun and with a queer look on his face placed the muzzle in his mouth to scare his younger brother. It had scared him, of course, not because he imagined Rob might kill himself-Rob had always seemed far more likely to kill Papa-but because Rob might have forgotten that even at Chatham, Papa’s gun was always loaded. That’s who their father was.

“Watch out with that thing, Rob!”

In a peculiar voice, Rob said, “All right.” He kneeled in front of his young bluetick hound, which lay twitching flies in a noon snooze. “Rex? Want to play roulette?” Lucius never forgot the soft thumping of Rex’s tail. His brother picked five of the six rounds out of the chamber, spun it a few times, then put the muzzle to the dog’s head. Shaky, he whispered, “Good luck, Rex, because I sure would miss you, but I aim to fire, so this may be your last day as a dog.” Even as Lucius yelled, Rob pulled the trigger.

That scaring Bang!, the spurting neck, the blood-drenched animal in spasm pushing itself in a half circle on the dirt as if to screw itself into the ground, had shocked Rob so that he jumped up with a screech, hurled the revolver after Papa, and lit out around the house. Headed nowhere, he ran only to escape himself. Round and round and round he went, screeching each time he passed the twitching body of this pup that his kind step-mother had given him. He was trying to run right off the earth.

Papa strode out in a red fury. He stooped and took Rex by the tail and circled once as he ran forward toward the bank and whirled the carcass through the air into the river. Next he intercepted Rob at the house corner, hoisted him with his legs still running, and shouted into his face, “God damn you, Sonborn! What the hell’s the matter with you!” When his son closed his mouth tight over locked teeth, Papa hurled him to the ground, then grabbed his collar, yanked him back up onto his feet, and knocked him sprawling. He stood there panting, staring down at Rob as he got his breath.

Rob lay quiet, watching Papa. Never wiped his face and never spoke a word. “Damn you anyway,” Papa said quietly. Retrieving his revolver, he returned inside.

On their last evening in September, 1910, they were civil when they said good night but there was no healing the disease between them. Next morning when Lucius told him he was leaving, Papa said, “Do what you must,” and turned his back. Not until Lucius was casting off his skiff did his father appear; he stood apart from the others on the riverbank. He had not waved like Hannah Smith and Green and Dutchy and even the hard black man known as “Little Joe,” who offered a grin and a half wave from the kitchen doorway.

Off to one side, a horseshoe toss away from all the rest, slouched the foreman, hands in his pockets. He did not wave, either. The black faces of the four new harvest hands watched from the field. When Cox turned that way, the four dark heads ducked down behind the shining swords of cane. Not until years later, as Lucius resumed Papa’s biography, would those four cane cutters, never accounted for, rise from the abyss of dream memory as wild petroleum seeps up from the earth crust to form strange rainbows on black marshland pools.

That September day his father’s features were so deep in the deep shadow of his hat that he seemed to be peering out from hiding and his fists were shoved so hard into his black frock coat that his outline bulged. Only at the very last, as the water spread away and his son’s skiff was rounding the bend, on the point of disappearance, the bulky figure might or might not have wrested one hand from his pocket and lifted it halfway as if to take an oath, in dim presentiment, perhaps, that this was their final parting.

On the bank, the figures blackened in the glare before dissolving into the white sunlight. A few weeks later, when he learned that most of them were dead, he would recall those shifting silhouettes, those shades.

A MEMORY OF SHADOWS

Before his trip north to visit his Collins cousins, Lucius had written to his father’s widow, asking if he might pay a call on the way back from Fort White. In affectionate teasing he signed the letter, “Your loving stepson, Lucius.” There had been no answer to that letter nor to a later postcard. To judge from the silence that returned like the echo of a shot across long miles of swamp, red plain, and muddy river, reaching shy Edna was like whistling to an unknown bird hidden in the leaves.

But forwarded to his return address-he had specified General Delivery in Lakeland-was a note scrawled in carpenter’s pencil on lined yellow paper. Its formal tone contrasted oddly with the writing. Mrs. Herkimer Burdett wished to inform him that she could not receive him at this time nor assist in his biographical research. The letter was signed not by Edna but by “A. Burdett.” He had hardly reread it when the phone rang. In a voice gruff and grudging, Mr. A. Burdett announced that Mrs. Edna Burdett would receive his visit after all. He did not explain why she had changed her mind.

“Mrs. Burdett resides in a town that will go unnamed,” the voice added-for the pure love of that phrase, it appeared, since without being privy to her whereabouts, Lucius could not have sent his letter in the first place. Downing his bourbon to calm himself, he said, “So she wants to see me after all?”

“I thought it was you who wanted to see her.”

“And you’ve decided to accommodate me. Why?”

Taken aback, the caller protested, “Now hold on a minute, mister! Are you drunk? My mother is shy about the telephone; she asked me to call!” When Lucius was silent, the voice cried, “I think you’re drunk!”

“Addison? Is that you? We haven’t met since you were four but I’m your brother, remember?” He listened to trapped breathing. “How about tomorrow?” They could meet at his mother’s house, Lucius suggested, making the point that he knew the address and could go there with or without Addison’s permission. More silence. “I wouldn’t want to intrude, of course,” he added quickly. “I have no wish to see her unless she wishes to see me.” Though said to dispel Addison’s wariness, this happened to be true.

“I’ll call back.” The caller hung up, and Lucius groaned. But within minutes, his gruff brother called back. He would meet Lucius next day at noon at the gasoline station in Neamathla.

A. Burdett, checking his watch, turned out to be a husky young man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. He was built much like their father, Lucius noted, but otherwise looked nothing like him. Thin brown hair was plastered back on a big brow; a downturned mouth clamped a tense and worried face. As in much older men, the ears and knobby workman’s hands looked too large for his body; he had the hollow look of a man uncaressed by woman. Without meeting Lucius’s eye, he needlessly identified himself, still using the initial. “A. Burdett,” he said, already at a loss for what he might say next.

“A for Addison, right?” To dispel the clotting atmosphere, Lucius spoke