Bone by Bone by Peter Matthiessen

From the Publisher

In Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen re-created the life of the legendary E.J. Watson, who was gunned down by a posse of fearful neighbors before World War I. In his sequel, Lost Man's River, Matthiessen returned us to the lawless frontier of the Florida Everglades, where Watson's son Lucius sought to untangle the knot of truth and lies surrounding his notorious father and his strange death. And now, in Bone by Bone, the story unfolds in its final form, in the voice of the enigmatic Mister Watson himself. From his early days as an impoverished child of the Reconstruction era, through the unjust loss of his inherited plantation, to his bloody death in front of his loving wife and children, E.J. Watson was capable of vision and ingenuity, mercy and courage, and sudden, astonishing violence. He was an entrepreneurial sugarcane farmer in the uncharted waterways of the Everglades, an exile in the Indian territories, a devoted father, and, allegedly, the killer of numerous men. He was forced to flee home and family time after time. In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen has laid bare the humanity at the heart of a dangerous and controversial figure and, in doing so, has added to our understanding of the abiding mystery of human nature.

Outside Magazine

Bone By Bone is a grand achievement: Matthiessen has created an all-too-human character who struggles mightily with evil, redemption, and haunted regret.

New York Times Book Review - Sven Birkerts

Here is Watson himself, wielding a powerful and laconically lyrical prose, narrating his life....Like a true tragic figure, he knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin. This is a work of genuine dignity. Matthiessen has worked with...patient strokes to accomplish the hard thing. He has shown us what happens when the heart's fine fiber gets twisted at the root, what a world of pain springs forth from that damage.

The Wall Street Journal

Bone by Bone has all the lineaments of greatness...there is much to admire and savor here.

Denver Post

Bone by Bone is Peter Matthiessen's stunning conclusion to the Mister Watson triology. Writing with attention to the details of personalities as well as to an untamed natural backdrop, Matthiessen concludes the body of work with an unexpected show of force...It is a haunting, enveloping work of fiction that breathes with realism. Matthiessen uses a fine brush to create a picture of human struggles against an unforgiving nature in the years leading up to and following the end of the 19th century. A reading of the preceding books in this trilogy can only add to the appreciation of the awesome power of this finale.

St. Peterburg Times

Truly an epic: always interesting, sometimes fascinating, occasionally breathtaking...viewed as part of a trilogy or a single volume...and Bone by Bone stands up very well on its own.. this is remarkable work.

Chicago Tribune

The raw power of this novel comes from the life force of Edgar Watson...out of the sinews of Edgar Watson is constructed a real American anti-hero. Finish it.

Library Journal

It's not quite accurate to say that this novel brings Matthiessen's trilogy on E.J. Watson to a satisfying conclusion, not because the novel is not itself splendid but because its events precede those in Killing Mister Waston and Lost Man's River. In the first two books, Watson looms even after death as a tough, violent, larger-than-life figure whose origins and motivations remain enigmatic. Here, Matthiessen goes back to Watson's beginnings as a young boy growing up in a down-on-its-luck Southern family during and after the war, with a vicious father who failed as a soldier but beats his boy senseless and a mother who scorns her ill-bred spouse but won't protect her son. The roots of Watson's violence aren't just familial but societal, however, which is evident in the first pages of the book as the boy observes a murdered runaway slave with a mix of sorrow and cool indifference. Readers can see how the system of slavery cheapened life for everyone it touched, and in the story that follows, the boy's constant betrayal by those around him is neatly balanced by his own implacable savagery. Matthiessen makes you feel, viscerally, how hate begets hate. A rich, provocative novel, sometimes overwritten, but who cares? -- Barbara Hoffert

Entertainment Weekly

This dense, mesmerizing novel will leaver readers stunned...

The New York Times Book Review - Sven Birkerts

Here is Watson himself, wielding a powerful and laconically lyrical prose, narrating his life....Like a true tragic figure, he knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin. This is a work of genuine dignity. Matthiessen has worked with...patient strokes to accomplish the hard thing. He has shown us what happens when the heart's fine fiber gets twisted at the root, what a world of pain springs forth from that damage.

The Christian Science Monitor - Ron Charles

...[H]is new novel is a work of art....[It] conveys the kind of Shakespearan insight into human nature that outsrips what nonfiction can do....He's captured the nature of a murderer who fully comprehends the horror and waste of his crimes.

Time

A dense, fascinating trilogy...quirky, brilliant, obsessive, panoramic.

Kirkus Reviews

The concluding volume of Matthiessen's Florida trilogy (Killing Mister Watson,1990; Lost Man's River, 1997) brings stunningly alive sugarcane farmer, patriarch, and multiple murderer E.J. Watson, whose life and crimes have been detailed by his contemporaries and descendants, including his estranged son Lucius. This time, Watson himself tells the story, beginning in South Carolina in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edgar grows up among a tense family dominated by his brutal and drunken father Elijah ("Lige"), an unregenerate racist, and fragmented by its mixed opinion about his abolitionist Uncle Selden ("The Traitor"), whose idealism exacts a heavy toll. Violently rejecting his father's tyranny, Edgar leaves home, works on a Watson family plantation in Georgia, moves west (where he earns a reputation as "fugitive and frontier desperado" and as the probable murderer of Belle Starr), before returning to the South to build an empire near Key West as a prosperous cane merchant. This is Matthiessen's Absalom, Absalom!: a richly imagined, compulsively readable chronicle of the progress and hard times of its powerfully imagined central figure. In strikingly cadenced prose (at times reminiscent of Robert Penn Warren's long stately sentences), Watson—an intense autodidact who "loved to talk elaborately in the elegant English found in books, and loved to tell stories"—emerges as a fascinating bundle of contradictions: a much-married husband and father hellbent on shaping a world fit for his kin to inhabit; a ruthless predator indifferent to the fragile ecology of Florida's pristine Everglades; a child of his culture's racial divisions forever shadowed by the "darker brother" whocontains both his hidden and better selves; and a perpetrator of violence whose "outlaw" legend far outstrips the actual evil he commits. A brilliant character study, and a provocative commentary on the "capitalist energies" that built modern America.

What People Are Saying

Joseph Heller
Bone by Bone is a superb novel, one that succeeds dramatically on every level. I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be in my hungry impatience to find out more, and more.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0375701818
  
• ISBN-13: 9780375701818
• Format: Paperback, 432pp
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: July 2000
• Sales Rank: 207,741
• Series: International Series

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

"Where is that honor now? In taking a dishonorable revenge in cowardly acts of terror in the night, do we not dishonor those who died? Neighbors, hear me, I beseech you. Our ÔGreat Lost Cause' was never Ôgreat,' as we pretended. It had no greatness and no honor in it, no nobility. It was merely wrong!"

He yelled this into my father's face as the Regulators seized him. He was dragged down the steps and beaten bloody and left in a poor heap in the public dust. There Major Coulter, hair raked back in black wings beneath his cap, stalked round and round him, stiff-legged and gawky as a crow. I had an impulse to rush out, perhaps others did, too, but nobody dared to breach the emptiness and isolation which had formed around him.

When Selden Tilghman regained consciousness, he lay a minute, then rolled over very slowly. Visage ghostly from the dust, he got up painfully, reeled, and fell. Next, he pushed himself onto all fours and crawled on hands and knees all the way across the square to the picket fence in front of the veranda of the United States Hotel, as Coulter and his men, jeering, watched him come. He used the fence to haul himself upright. Swaying, he blinked and then he shouted, "You are cowards! Betrayers of the South! You are cowards! Betrayers of the South!" With each cowards! he brought both fists down hard on the sharp points of the white pickets, and with each blow he howled in agony and despair, until the wet meat sounds of his broken hands caused the onlookers to turn away in horror. Even Z. P. Claxton had stopped grinning. It was my father, Captain Elijah D. Watson of the Regulators, who strode forth on a sign from Coulter and cracked ourkinsman's jaw with one legendary blow, leaving him crumpled in the dust.

Cousin Selden's body was slung into a cotton wagon and trundled away on the Augusta Road. In the next fortnight rumors would come that the traitor had been dumped off at the gates of the Radical headquarters at Hamburg, but nobody could say what had become of him. The District heard no more of Selden Tilghman. When Mama finally confronted him about it, Papa blustered, "If the traitor is dead, the Regulators never killed him, that is all I know."

My pride in my father's prominence that day was edged with deep confusion and misgiving. Hoping and dreading Cousin Selden might reappear, I was drawn back to Deepwood over and over. Others in our district felt uneasy about "Tilghman's Ghost," which was said to come and go in that black ruin, and so had Deepwood to myself, a private domain for hunting and trapping. Wild rose thorn and poverty grass returned to the fields and the woods edged forward, even as vines entwined the blackened house. God keep you, Cousin Edgar! When wind stirred the leaves, I imagined that I heard my kinsman's voice and its sad whispered warning.

In a voice pitched toward her husband, outside on the stoop, Mama said that before the War, his own family had belittled Cousin Selden. In adopting the New Light Baptist faith, he had disgraced his Anglican upbringing. The New Lights had not only advocated Abolition but had sought-and here she smiled-"a more liberal attitude toward the rights of women. These days, Negro men are allowed to vote, but not white women."

"Nor white men either," bawled her husband from the porch. "Not those who fought."

"Addisons being Episcopalians like most of our good families, I had no real acquaintance with the New Light Church, nor with your father's Baptist congregation, for that matter." Rising above the growls and spitting out of doors, she invited us to pity those poor women whose husbands were not God-fearing citizens-steadfast men who would abstain from the grog shops and gambling and sinful license to which the weak seemed so addicted, to the great suffering and deprivation of their families. Her tone was now edged with such contempt that Papa appeared in the door, though he held his tongue. "And throwing away their wages on mulatta women. Of course harlots have never been tolerated in Edgefield District. It is the bordellos across the Georgia line which beckon our local sinners to Damnation."

Mama bent to her knitting with the martyred smile of the good churchwoman whose mission on earth was to purify the immortal soul of her crude lump of a man and keep him from the Devil's handiwork. "In our church, of course, a man may be excommunicated for wife beating, or even," she added, brightly, "for adultery. With white or black. Or perhaps," she inquired directly of her husband, "you Baptists feel that mulatta women don't count?"

And still he held his tongue, mouth open, breathing like a man with a stuffed-up nose. As always, the son would reap the whipping, not the mother, and my heart sank slowly as a stone into wet mud. "Please, Mama," I whispered. "Oh please, Mama." And this time, with her quiver empty and her arrows all well-placed, our mama nodded. "Yes, Mr. Watson, we are still your slaves," she sighed, offering her children a sweet rueful smile. " ÔWives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the Church.' " Braving his glare, she added cheerfully, "Ephesians, dear."

Ellen Addison blamed nothing on cruel providence. She kept up her merciless good cheer in the worst of circumstances, as if aware that otherwise our wretched family must go under.

"Precisely because our soldiers cannot vote, South Carolina remains prostrate, at the mercy of damn Scalawags and their pet niggers!" Papa shouted. "That's Radical Reconstruction for you! Just what your mother's precious cousin wanted! And do you know who forced Reconstruction through the U.S. Senate? Charles Sumner of Massachusetts! And do you know why?"
"Oh we do, indeed we do," sighed Mama. "And since we know the story well, then surely our Merciful Savior will spare us another recounting-"
"Yes, boy! Because Congressman Preston Brooks of Edgefield caned Sumner on the Senate floor for having insulted Brooks's kinsman Andrew Pickens Butler! And Senator Butler-do you hear me, boy?-was the son of that same Billy Butler to whom your great-great-grandfather turned over the command of his brigade when fatally wounded by the Tories near Clouds Creek!"
Mama lured him off the subject of our Watson hero. "Now which Mr. Brooks shot that black legislator the other day, dear? While he knelt in prayer?"
"No Brooks shot that damned Coker, but Nat Butler."

"Well, Congressman Brooks was my father's commanding officer," she reflected. "In the Mexican War, children. Unlike Clouds Creek, Edgefield Court House was strongly represented in that Mexican War." Before Papa could protest, she exclaimed, "Think of it, children! The Brooks house has four acres of flowers! In the front!"

But Papa was not to be deterred. The caning of Sumner had occurred on May 22 of 1856, in the year after my own birth, and once again he brandished the event to imbue his son with the fierce and forthright spirit of Southern honor. He also invoked President Jackson's vice-president, John C. Calhoun, grandson of Squire Calhoun of Long Cane Creek, whose family lost twenty-three members to Indian massacres in a single year. "One day I saw the great Calhoun right here in Edgefield. Had the same lean leather face and deep hawk eyes as Old Hickory, Andy Jackson, and he was that same breed of fearless leader, unrelenting towards his enemies."

"Cruelty and vengeance. Are these the virtues you would inspire in your son?"
Papa, in full cry, paid her no attention. Before the War, said he, patriotic Carolinians had served in the Patrol, and in these dark days of Yankee Reconstruction, the Patrol's place had been taken by that honorable company of men known as the Regulators, among whom he himself was proud to ride.
"Honorable company!" Mama rolled her eyes over her knitting, the needles speeding with an incensed clicking noise, like feeding insects. Behind his broad back, she shook her head. Her lips said, No. She slapped her knitting down. "Is it considered honorable in this company of men to terrify and harm defenseless darkies?" Braving his glare, she quoted Cousin Selden's opinion that the vigilantes who terrorized the freedmen were mostly those weak vessels cracked by war. And she dared to cite Papa's "superior officer," Major Coulter, who kept the cropped ears of lynched black men in his saddlebags. "No act perpetrated by that man, however barbarous and vile, seems to shake your father's high opinion of him," Mama sighed.

I caught the nice distinction Mama made here-the implication that her husband, not being warped or cracked like Major Coulter, had been weak to start with. She would even hint that he had joined the vigilantes less because of his own convictions than because he knew no better way to be accepted or at least tolerated by the night riders.