Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Offshore, I flagged down the Bertie Lee, Captain R. B. Storter, who would carry the Frenchman to Key West: the old man told me to work my keep at Hardens till he got back. Trouble was, I weren’t real easy in their company. That family never got along good with us Bay people, bein too white to fit with Injuns nor nigras but nowhere near fair-skinned enough to suit most whites. Old Man Richard called hisself Choctaw, had Injun features, sure enough, but one look at his boy Webster told you that Choctaw weren’t the whole story by a long shot.

  Times we worked for the old Frenchman, Henry Short and me used to visit with the Hardens, and Henry held a high opinion of that family, but I don’t believe he thought that they was white or he wouldn’t have never felt so much at home. While I was living there, Henry would come visiting, to be sure I was getting along—probably believed that, knowing Henry—but the one he really come to visit was young Liza.

  Liza Harden weren’t a woman yet and she weren’t entirely white, but she was as pretty put together as any critter I ever saw, made me ache to look at her. I would have give up my left ear to see her stepping slow into the river without clothes on, see all that golden honey in the sun. It thickened my blood to think about that, even, and Henry was in the same fix I was, though he’d never dare say it. One look at each other and we’d look away, embarrassed, that’s how jittery and fired up that young girl made us from an early age.

  Henry’s mama was white, his daddy mixed, what some call redbone. High cheekbones, narrow features, looked more white than Injun and more Injun than nigra. One time Old Man Richard was carrying on about his own Injun ancestry, told Henry he looked like he might be Choctaw, too. Henry got more agitated up than I ever seen him, cause being a born stickler for the truth, he would choke telling a lie. Finally he whispered, “I ain’t no Choctaw, Mr. Richard. Chock-full o’ nigger is more like it.” Old Man Richard laughed and laughed. “Well,” he said, “best not let on about that to my Mary, son, cause she got you figured for a white boy with a drop of Indin, same as us.”

  Course Old Man Richard knew as well as I did that Henry might of said chock-full o’ nigger just to show Bill House that eating at the Hardens’ table hadn’t give him no wrong ideas about his place. Or maybe the whole bunch was leading on this white boy, come to think about it. First time in my life I ever felt like the outsider—ever try that? I didn’t care for it.

  In Chokoloskee, when I told the men what Henry Short said to Richard Harden, they laughed somewhat louder than I wanted, and right away they got it twisted all around: “Nigger Henry told that old mulatter, Hell, no, you ain’t Choctaw, Mister Richard! What you are is chock-full o’ nigger, same as me!” “No, no,” I told ’em, “that ain’t what he said!” Trouble was, I got tired of explainin, just grinned and went along with it, which is why they are laughin yet today about chock-full o’ nigger.

  Anyways, when Henry said them words, Earl jumps up so fast he spills his plate. “Well, we ain’t niggers in this family, boy, at least I ain’t, but it sure looks like we got nigger-lovers around here!” Earl was watching me so I got the idea this was a message that Bill House was supposed to take to Chokoloskee: Mr. Earl Harden don’t care to eat with niggers even if the rest of ’em puts up with it. “I would run you off, boy,” Earl told Henry, “but it ain’t my house.” Earl grabs his plate and marches out onto the stoop cause he can’t look his daddy in the eye.

  Richard Harden never liked commotion, and he ain’t figured out yet how to handle this. Watching his brother stomping out, Webster just laughs. From outside Earl hollers, “Go to Hell, Webster!” Hearing that language, his mother comes a-running from the cookhouse and whaps Earl’s ear a terrific lick with her wood ladle. I catch Webster’s eye and wish I hadn’t. He tried to smile, but I seen he was very angry and humiliated.

  Right from a boy, Earl Harden was out to prove something to Bay people, and I guess you could say he finally become friends with one or two families at Chokoloskee—Lopezes, mostly, who weren’t never really trusted, being Spanish. Earl tried to be friendly to me, too, but because he was so ornery with Henry, I could not warm up to him and never did, the whole rest of my life.

  Two weeks later Jean Chevelier showed up again with Captain Eben Carey, who aimed to go partners with us in the plume trade. With E. J. Watson not a half mile down the river, Chevelier wanted company, and to make sure he got it, he had promised Captain Carey a share of Calusa treasure. He was getting too old to dig all day in hot white shell mound with them bad snakes, heat, and wasps, but being a miser, he refused my help for fear I might let on at Chokoloskee if he found something.

  It was Cap’n Ebe who told us what took place at Key West in Bartlum’s produce auction room, how Ed Watson come in somewhat drunk and asked Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee for advice about filing a land claim on both banks of Chatham River. Surveys would be needed because almost all of southwest Florida was “swamp and overflowed,” turned over to the state back in 1850; the state had give most all that territory to the railroad companies. But the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands were still wilderness, and nobody really knew what was where nor who owned what.

  Dolphus Santini was one of the first settlers on Chokoloskee and its leading landowner and farmer. Along about 1877, Santinis filed a claim to “160 acres more or less on Chokoloskee Island among the Ten Thousand Islands of Florida.” That’s mostly less, cause there ain’t hardly one hundred fifty acres on our whole island. Except for Storters in Everglade, who was somewhat educated, people made do with quit-claim rights—pay me to quit my claim, get the heck off, that’s all it was, and maybe a handshake thrown in: Ed Watson wanted a real paper claim like Santinis and Storters. We figured later what he aimed to do was tie up as much high ground as he could from Chatham Bend to Lost Man’s River, then file a claim the way Santini done, but bad rumors about E. J. Watson had commenced to wander, so he figured he needed an upstanding citizen to back him up.

  Santini had heard a lot more than he cared to about this feller Watson down on Chatham River, how Watson raised the finest hogs, “how Watson could grow tomatoes on a orster bar, grow damn near anything and a lot of it.” He also heard rumors that Watson was an outlaw and a fugitive. Santini advised Watson that the State of Florida would never grant a land claim to any man “who has not paid his debt to society,” so Watson better tend to his own business.

  According to Ebe Carey, both men were drunk. Watson never spoke a word, just kind of nodded, like what the man was saying made good sense. But while he nodded, he was moving toward Santini, and the whole crowd skittered to the side like baby ducklings, that’s how fast they made that man some room. And this was before they knew what they know now about Ed Watson.

  It was the look on Watson’s face that scared ’em, Ebe opined. Mister Watson could cuss him a blue streak when he got aggravated, but the louder he cussed, the easier you felt, knowing he’d end up yelling something so outrageous that he’d bust out laughing. When he was truly angry, his face went tight. That day them blue eyes never blinked but once, Cap’n Carey swore, and that one blink was very, very slow.

  The auction room fell still. Watson hadn’t touched Santini but he stood too close, having slowly backed him up against a counter. Maybe he hadn’t heard too good, he whispered, but it sure sounded like some dirty guinea slander. Would Mr. Santini care to make his meaning plain? Watson’s soft voice should of been his warning, but Dolphus was too puffed up to hear the quiet and he probably thought he had this feller buffaloed. He winked at the onlookers and said, “Nosir, our great sovereign State of Florida don’t welcome desperaders, Mr. Watson.”

  Watson’s knife was at his throat before he’d hardly finished. Watson told Santini to get down on his knees and beg his pardon. Santini kneeled but was too scared to speak. Hearing no apology, Watson shrugged, then drew that blade along under his jaw just deep enough to spatter blood onto the cucumbers. Looked calm and careful as a man slitting a melon. But when they grabbed his arms, he just about went crazy, and
he was so strong it took four or five men to rassle him to the floor. By the time they got his knife away, the man was giggling. “Dammit all, I’m ticklish!” he told ’em.

  Somebody run quick and fetched a doctor, and it was known Santini would survive by the time the news got back to Chokoloskee, though he carried that thick purple scar for life. Later on, Dolphus told his boy that Watson reached around him from behind and cut his throat without no warning. Might be true but that ain’t the way Ebe Carey told it.

  At the hearing Watson raised up his right hand, swore on the Bible that he never meant to kill Mr. Santini because otherwise it stands to reason that he would have done it. Said this so innocent and so sincere, them blue eyes wide, that the crowd had to laugh to see the indignant Dolphus strangling with rage inside them bandages. Mister Watson paid Santini nine hundred dollars in hard cash not to take the case to court and that was that. But the Monroe County sheriff weren’t so sure that justice had been done, so he used his new telegraph machine to see if this man had a record. An Edgar A. Watson was the only man taken to court for the murder of Belle Starr, “Queen of the Outlaws,” in Oklahoma Territory, back in ’89, but Edgar A. was killed a few years later in an escape from Arkansas federal prison. However, an Edgar J. had been suspected in a slaying in Arcadia just a few months before Mr. E. J. Watson first turned up in Monroe County. By the time word come to arrest him, ship him back to the Arkansas penitentiary, he was safe at home in Chatham River.

  The man killed in Arcadia was named Quinn Bass. Our House family homesteaded in Arcadia a while before we drifted south to Turner River and my pap had knowed the dead man as a boy. From the point of view of his community, he said, that feller might be better off deceased. De Soto County sheriff must of thought so, too, cause he let Ed Watson pay his way into the clear, same as he done in Key West with Santini. Only difference was, Quinn Bass never sat up to count his money.

  That’s how word got out on the southwest coast that E. J. Watson was a wanted man, which explained why he come to the Islands in the first place. And even though plenty of other men was known to have come to the Everglades frontier for the same reason, folks begun to worry. We felt more at home with common ol’ backcountry killers than with some well-dressed desperader out of the Wild West.

  Not that anybody put hard questions to this feller. If lawmen was hunting him across four states, that was not our business. His life was his own responsibility and he took it. If any man could of used a change of name, it was Ed Watson, but except for changing “A” to “J,” he was always exactly who he said he was, never denied it and was not ashamed. You had to respect that. He was a hard worker and a generous neighbor, and for many years we done our best to live with him.

  Ted Smallwood knowed Ed Watson from their days at Half Way Creek, they was always friendly. Both come here from Columbia County, in the Suwannee River country of north Florida. Ted worked for my dad up Turner River for a while, married our Mamie in ’97, bought a small property from Santinis when he went to Chokoloskee that same year. About the only settlers on the island then was Santinis, Browns, Yeomans, and McKinneys. A half dozen families was at Half Way Creek, another half dozen at Everglade, with a few more perched on such high ground as could be found down through the Islands.

  C. G. McKinney started out by farming them old Injun mounds back in Turner River. Wonderful black soil but once it was cleared, the full sun killed that land. Burn off another mound, make a fine crop, and the next year it wouldn’t grow an onion. McKinney come on to Chokoloskee, built a house and store, got in his supplies from Storters’ trading post in Everglade. His billhead said, “No Borrowing, no Loaning, I Must Have Cash to Buy More Hash.” Sold extra-stale bread that he called “wasp nest.” Set up a sawmill and a gristmill, founded the post office, tried his hand at common doctoring without no license, done some dentistry, delivered babies; the kids all thought he brought them babies in that big black satchel.

  Mr. McKinney was a educated man who didn’t hold with plume hunting. The Frenchman used to rant and rave about plume bird rivals such as Watson but he hollered “Eepo-creet!” about McKinney, who went on just one egret hunt, then give it up for good. C. G. seen all them crows and buzzards picking on the nestlings, figured what they’d went and done was not God’s will.

  Ted felt the same way about plume hunting but he had a blank spot in his heart when it come to gators. The year after he married our Mamie was the great drought year of ’98 when a man could take a ox cart across country. Every alligator in the Glades was piled up in the last water holes, and one day out plume hunting, I come on a whole heap of ’em near the head of Turner River. Got wagons and a load of salt, got a gang together and went after ’em. Me’n Ted and a couple others, we took forty-five hundred gators in three weeks from them three holes that join up to make Roberts Lake in rainy season. They was packed so close we didn’t waste no bullets, we used axes. Don’t reckon them buzzards got them carcasses cleaned up even today. Skinned off the belly skins, what we call flats, floated our flats down Turner River to George Storter’s trading post at Everglade and got good money. That year Cap’n Bembery Storter’s Bertie Lee carried ten thousand flats up to Fort Myers out of that one hole, and after that, it was war against the gators. Hides was coming from all over, deer and otter, too. Trader Bill Brown from Immokalee, he brung in one hundred eight otter on one trip, got a thousand dollars for ’em, along with gator flats by the oxwagon load. Another trip he hauled twelve hundred seventy flats into Fort Myers after selling eight hundred there not three weeks before. Said he’d brain every last gator in the Glades before he’d see one wasted. Thousands of God’s creatures was laying out there skinned and rotting before we seen that even gators can’t stand up to massacres. The gator trade was pretty close to finished.

  Them wilder Injuns up the southwest rivers was close to finished, too, though they didn’t know it. Injuns, now, they never had good guns nor traps, and bein lazy and not greedy, they only took enough to trade for what they needed. They never killed ’em out, not the way we done.

  Ted Smallwood never cared to say if all that slaughter was in God’s service or not, but he sure had some nice cash set aside, cause pretty soon he bought the whole Santini claim on Chokoloskee. Santinis being one of our pioneer families, some folks was surprised to see ’em pull up stakes. Dolphus’s brother’s wife’s sister was Netta Daniels who had a child by Watson, and maybe that time at Key West, Dolphus said something ugly about Watson’s morals that he wished he hadn’t. Anyway he sold his place, sailed around to the east coast at the Miami River, about as far from E. J. Watson as he could get.

  ERSKINE THOMPSON

  Mister Watson had a wife and children but never said too much about ’em in front of my mother, Henrietta Daniels, who come to keep house for us at the Bend the year before. I thought they must be crazy to get into the same bed the way they done first night she got there but she said she loved him and she went ahead and had his child. Also she brought along Tant Jenkins, her half brother, skinny as a fish pole with black curly hair. That day Mister Watson come home so excited, Tant was off hunting in the Glades. He snuck upriver every time Mister Watson went away, left the chores to me.

  Henrietta—he called her Netta—was setting there on the front stoop, her little Min hitched to her bosom, and I’m down at the dock helping with the lines. Mister Watson ain’t hardly tossed the bow line before he hollers, “Netta honey, you best start thinking about packing up, I have my people coming!” And he laughed out loud about the happy turn his life had taken.

  Mister Watson was so overjoyed that he clean forgot about our feelings. I didn’t know where to look, that’s how shamed I was for me and my mother both. After two years, Chatham Bend was home, the first real family home I ever knew. I seen Mister Watson kind of as my dad and he let me think so, that’s how kind he treated me.

  My mother was good-hearted, never mind her loose bosom and blowsy ways. When she first come to Chatham Bend, I already been on my o
wn for a few years, so she seemed more like an older sister. With her and Min and Tant and Mister Watson, we made a regular family at the table, we got to feeling we belonged someplace. And here he was fixing to toss her out like some ol’ shiftless nigger woman and his own baby daughter along with her. Me’n Tant’d have to start all over with no place to go.

  I felt all thick and funny. When he swung that crate of stores up off the boat deck and across to me, I banged it down onto the dock so hard that a slat busted. That bang was somewhat louder than I wanted and the noise surprised him cause his hand shot for his pocket. Then he straightened slow, picked up another crate, carried it off the boat hisself, and set it carefully on the dock longside the other.

  “Swallowed a frog, boy? Spit it out.”

  I set my hat forward on my head and spit too close to them Western boots he wore when he went up to town. Scared myself so bad I couldn’t talk knowing my voice would come out pinched or all gummed up; I give him a dirty look and stacked the crates, to let him know Erskine R. Thompson was here to do his work and didn’t have no time for palaver.

  He was waiting. Stone eyes, no expression. Put me in mind of a big ol’ bear I seen with Tant one early evening back of Deer Island, raring up out of the salt prairie to stare. It’s like Tant says, a bear’s face is stiff as wood. He never looks mean or riled, not till his ears go back, he just looks bear down to the bone, that’s how intent he is on his bear business. Mister Watson had that bear-faced way which let you know he had said his piece and weren’t going to repeat it and didn’t aim to take no silence for no answer.