Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey, come on now.”

  “Go stick it in the mud. You stick it into me, by Jesus, you will goddamn well regret it! I’ll tell Owen.”

  “Oh Lord—”

  “And another thing”—she was yelling now—“stop lookin me over like some mutt dog eyin meat! You always done that, since the first day you showed up at Lost Man’s! Think I never noticed? Go find your own damn woman! Find that widder you was mopin about ’stead of trickin young women that’s already spoken for into your tin tooter!” She banged the outside of the car door. “What are you anyway, some kind of a fanatic? That why she give up on you? Cause your daddy’s death is all you care about? The past?”

  She fell back, spent, gasping for breath.

  He held his tongue, drove on in silence; how could he have considered an affair with a friend’s wife, this drug-crazed cracker, when what he really needed was a wise and gentle person such as Nell—but here good sense quit him and he turned to the fray.

  “Miss?”

  “ ‘Mrs.’ Mrs. John Owen Harden to you. Your ol’ buddy’s everlovin little wife, case you forgot.”

  “Wasn’t it my ol’ buddy’s wife who came slipping around to Caxambas to renew acquaintance? Who’s been flirting for the last three hours—”

  “You want me to get out and walk? That what you’re saying? Slow down, Buster!” But moments later, weeping, she subsided. “I’m a mess. I drink too much, Prof. So do you. In fact, come to think of it, this fight is all your fault.” Though she fished out a hankie and blew sniffles, she could not hide her smile. Soon she laid her head against his shoulder and languorously touched his leg, trailed her fingertips along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, the backs of her fingers rested in his lap, light as a kiss.

  In awe of their wordless decision, they drove in silence to Caxambas and made their way in half-embrace out the walkway to the barge, where they drank up the last of his whiskey and made urgent love on the narrow cot, in an intoxicating mix of body smells, grain alcohol breath, and needy lust. By turns shy, rapt, omnipotent, he felt like a man lost and then returned among the living. He heard himself cry out that he loved her, which in that moment was true.

  In the morning, yawning, she rolled languidly away from his attempt to take her in his arms, saying she must first go brush her teeth; she left him to doze, never to return. When he awakened, she was dressed and restless, making coffee. He must take her to Naples right away, she said, to meet with Owen and the lawyer.

  “Today, you mean?” He could not accept the idea of losing her just when he’d found her. Yet he knew his panic was not reasonable and his shock not entirely honest; lying there before desire overtook him, he’d even wondered if an early parting with his old friend’s estranged wife might not be best.

  “Are you sorry, Sarah? You regret what happened?”

  “I’ll never regret it, sweetheart. It was always in our future and I always knew it. But I also know it’s all we’re going to get.” She touched his cheek. “I have to let you go while I still can.” To disguise her real upset, she parodied a country lyric: “Darlin’, ah swore ah wouldn’ . . . nevuh be . . . tore up bah yoo.”

  “Please, listen—”

  She put her hand over his mouth. “Gonna miss me, sweetheart?” Her eyes misted. She said fiercely, “You’re a good man, don’t you know that? Think it’s easy to give you up, a man like you?”

  “Can’t I come see you? We have to talk—” He was routed by her expression. His heart felt open and exposed as a shucked oyster on the half-shell, mantle curling at the first squirt of the lemon.

  ARBIE COLLINS

  Returning home one afternoon of spring, Lucius was met halfway along the walkway by the molasses reek of a cheap stogie. In the tattered hammock on the deck, a thin man in tractor cap and discolored army overcoat lay sifting pages, the bent cigar a-glower between his teeth. On the floor beside him sat a dog-eared satchel and a sagging carton of old papers. Removing the cigar, the man spat bits of tobacco, the better to recite from Lucius’s notes on Leslie Cox.

  “ ‘. . . an old man known by some other name may still squint in the sun, and sniff, and revile his fate.’ Not bad! Same way I write,” Chicken Collins said, his very tone renouncing the Gator Hook derelict in favor of this jaunty new identity. He rested the notes on his belly. “Yep,” he said. “I heard Cox was seen down at Key West and another time in the river park there at Fort Myers. Then this Injun friend of mine who used to be a drunk up around Orlando told me that a feller of Cox’s description had been holed up for years out at the Hook. I was curious so I went out there to look, never made it back.” He resumed reading.

  Lucius took the worn blue canvas chair. “And if you’d found him?”

  Collins lowered the manuscript again. “I’d probably pretend I hadn’t. Make a list or something,” he added meanly.

  “You’ve seen my list?”

  “Rob Watson gave it to me.”

  “I was told Rob never received it. Anyway, it was supposed to be a secret.”

  “Only one who thought it was a secret was the damn fool who wrote those names down in the first place.” He winked at Lucius, blowing smoke.

  “And you’re the one who showed it to Speck Daniels. That’s how he learned about it.”

  Collins shrugged. One evening out at Gator Hook, noticing the name Crockett Daniels on the list, he’d called it to Speck’s attention. “Just for fun, y’know.”

  “Speck think it was funny?”

  “Nosir, he did not. Said you were lucky you never got your head blown off.”

  “I’d like that list back, Mr. Collins.”

  “It’s not yours. Property of the late Robert B. Watson, who left it to yours truly.” Rob Watson, he explained, had died the year before in the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had shipped the remains, together with a few clothes and some papers, to his cousin Arbie. He pointed at himself. “Cousin Arbie, at your service.” Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, Collins scowled at the pointlessness of such a question, and Lucius let it go. “Rob never married?” he inquired. “Never had children?”

  “Nope,” said Collins, adding sourly, “Only mistake that feller never made.”

  For his arrival in Caxambas, the erstwhile Chicken had perked up his worn amorphous clothes with a bright red rag around his throat; Lucius had to admire this flare of color, this small gallantry. Despite his long hair and scraggy beard, Arbie Collins reminded him of his Collins cousins—black hair, fair skin, slight, wiry, and volatile. “Look,” he said, “are we related in some way?”

  “By marriage, I reckon. I’m kin to Rob on his Collins side.” Raising the manuscript, he resumed his careless reading, dropping pages, creasing them, flicking ash on them, until finally Lucius stood up and crossed the deck and snapped his notes off the man’s stomach, exposing the navel hair that sprouted between slack button holes of a soiled thin shirt of discolored plaid.

  “I’m fussy about strangers rooting through my notes without permission—”

  “Found ’em inside,” Arbie explained cheerfully. “Look to me like notes for a damn whitewash. Notes on the Family Skeleton!—how’s that for a title?” He sat up with a grunt, swung his broken boots onto the deck, and dragged his big loose weary carton within Lucius’s reach. “Official Robert Watson archive,” he announced. “Better read it, son. Might learn something.”

  Expecting no surprises, finding none, Lucius leafed politely through the carton. Dog-eared folders full of yellowed clippings mixed with scrawled notes copied from magazines and books—sensational exposés, inventions, lies, and brimstone editorials from the tabloids, dating all the way back to newspaper reports from October 1910—the usual “Bloody Watson” trash, of far less interest than the provenance of this collection.

  Anticipating questions, Collins related how he’d helped Cousin Rob Watson sell his father’s schooner and
escape on a freighter out of Key West after Watson’s murders back in 1901; he was the only relative, he said, with whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch throughout his life.

  “Alleged murders. Nobody was ever charged, far less convicted.”

  “Never charged?!” Collins winged his cigar butt at a swallow coursing the salt grass for mosquitoes. “Is that all that matters to L. Watson Fucking Collins, Ph.D.?!” The man’s dark eyes glowed in repressed fury.

  Lucius persisted. “Did Rob tell you what actually happened that day?”

  “Of course. I know the whole damned story.”

  “Tell me,” Lucius said, after a moment’s hesitation which the other noticed.

  “Maybe. I’ll think about it.” Arbie shifted, irritable. “That was kind of long ago.”

  Lucius set the urn on a white cloth on the small table inside, placing beside it a small pot of red geraniums grown on his cabin roof. He poured two whiskeys and they drank in silence, considering the writhings of the urn in the play of light and water from the creek. That this garish canister enclosed all that was left of handsome Rob filled Lucius with sadness. The family would have to be notified about his death but who would care?

  “Rob came to find me a few years ago but I never saw him,” he muttered finally. “I haven’t laid eyes on my own brother since I was eleven.”

  Collins picked up the urn and turned it in his hands. “Well, you might not care to lay eyes on him now ’cause he don’t look like much.” He shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the canister and shook it. “Hear him rattling in there? People talk about ashes but it’s mostly bits and pieces of brown bone, like busted dog biscuits.” To prove it, he shook the urn again.

  “Don’t do that, dammit!” When Lucius took it and returned it to the table, Arbie Collins cackled. “He won’t mind,” he said. And Lucius said, “I mind. It’s disrespectful.”

  In the next days, Arbie sorted his yellowed scraps. “I been updating Rob’s archives, Professor,” he might say, picking up one of Lucius’s pipes and pointing the pipestem at its owner before clearing his throat and quoting from his clips. “ ‘Bad Man of the Islands.’ ‘Red-bearded Knife Artist.’ How’s that for data?” Slyly he would frown and harrumph, weighing his words in what he supposed was an academic manner. “Speaking strictly as an archivist, L. Watson, that man’s beard was not what a real scholar would call red. It was more auburn, sir, more the color of dried blood.”

  “Color of dried blood, yes, indeed.” The archivist’s colleague frowned judiciously in turn. “Doubtless a consequence of his well-known habit of dipping his beard in the lifeblood of his victims, don’t you agree, sir ?”

  “Precisely, sir. Point well taken, sir.”

  It was soon clear (though they had not spoken of it) that Arbie Collins had quit Gator Hook for good and made the barge his home. For the moment, this was agreeable to his host, who enjoyed his company and was waiting to be told Rob’s account of the Tucker story.

  Arbie Collins was infuriated by any perceived defense of Edgar Watson. In an attempt to soften his savage prejudice (based largely, it seemed, on what Rob must have told him at Key West), Lucius read him a passage from his biography describing the violent circumstances of young Edgar’s upbringing in South Carolina.

  According to his mother, Ellen Addison Watson, the boy had scavenged the family’s food throughout the Civil War while receiving only rudimentary schooling. Even after the War, jobs had been scarce, child labor cheap, and the family poor and desperate. Her son had toiled from dawn to dark at the mercy of a dirt farmer’s stick, an ordeal worsened by the return from the Civil War of his drunken distempered father.

  Lucius raised his gaze to see how his colleague was receiving this. Arbie glowered, silent as a coal, but for once he held his tongue. “ ‘Surely the dark temper of Edgefield District,’ ” the Professor resumed, “ ‘blighted the spirit of an unfortunate boy who had been but six when the War began and reached young manhood in the famine-haunted days of Reconstruction.’ ”

  “Dammit, these are just excuses!” Bristle-browed, hoarse from cigarettes, beset by strangled coughs, Arbie rummaged up a letter clipped from the Florida History page of the Miami Herald: its author, D. M. Herlong, “a pioneer physician in this state, “had known Edgar Watson as a boy in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and had later become a Watson neighbor in Fort White, Florida. After some strenuous throat hydraulics topped off with a salutary spit, Collins launched forth on a dramatic reading, which he shortly abandoned, turning the clip over to Lucius.

  He inherited his savage nature from his father, Elijah Watson, who was widely known as a fighter. In one of these fights he was given a knife wound that almost encircled one eye, and was known thereafter as “Ring-Eye Lige.” At one time Elijah Watson was a warden at the state penitentiary. He married and two children were born to them, Edgar and Minnie. The woman had to leave Watson on account of his brutality and dissolute habits. She moved to Columbia County, Florida, where she had relatives.

  Lucius read this to himself as Arbie, gleeful, watched his face. “Old stuff like that probably won’t interest serious historians like L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., correct?”

  “You think Herlong has these details right? I mean, ‘Ring-Eye Lige’?” Just saying his grandfather’s name aloud made Lucius chuckle in astonishment: here was the first document of worth in Rob’s ragtag “archive,” the first real clue to those early years which Papa had scarcely mentioned. From the rest of Herlong’s letter he was able to deduce that Granny Ellen Watson and her two childen must have fled South Carolina not long after the 1870 census, when Edgar was fifteen; if his drunken father had abused his wife, it seemed reasonable to suppose that he’d beaten his son, too. The Florida relative who took them in had been Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had accompanied her married daughter and her son-in-law to the Fort White region a few years earlier. By the mid-eighties, when Herlong’s father left Edgefield and moved south to that Fort White community, Elijah Watson back in South Carolina was already notorious as Ring-Eye Lige. The Herlong reminiscence was wonderfully complementary to an account of Watson’s later life by Papa’s friend Ted Smallwood which had turned up in a recent history of Chokoloskee Bay. These two narratives from different periods and regions were nowhere contradictory, therefore more dependable than any biographical material he had found to date.

  Arbie reached for his clipping, grinning foxily when Lucius appeared loath to give it up. “This Herlong feller knew all about Edgar Watson’s checkered past,” Arbie assured him, “because Herlongs lived less than a mile from Watsons in both Edgefield and Fort White. Got some Herlongs in those Fort White woods even today.” Arbie was transcendent with self-satisfaction, all the more so when Lucius referred to him slyly as “a historian of record” and promised to acknowledge “the Arbie Collins Archive” in his bibliography and notes.

  Intrigued by the Herlong clipping, Lucius wondered if he should not return to Fort White for further research. His chances of finding significant new material by poking through old county records seemed remote, but after all these years of family silence, a kinsman ready to talk about Uncle Edgar might be located, and even perhaps a few old-timers who knew something about the fate of Leslie Cox.

  Unfortunately the university press would underwrite no further research: his teaching salary was negligible, he was nearly broke. However, Watt Dyer soon phoned to say that his client United Sugar Associates stood ready to underwrite the author’s travel and would also sponsor a series of paid lectures to educate the public about Planter E. J. Watson, sugarcane pioneer, controversial frontier figure, and confidant to the late Governor Broward. And because U.S.A. had a powerful lobby in the statehouse, the attorney’s politician clients could be prevailed upon to endorse the Watson land claim and perhaps the preservation of the Watson house as a state monument.

  Although delighted, Lucius was aware of a recent news report that the U.S.A. corporation was notorious for the dreadful living condi
tions and near-slavery of its field workers and also that its massive use of chemical fertilizers was a serious threat to the future of the Everglades. Even so, as a reward to their “Big Sugar” campaign donors, another writer claimed, the federal government was abetting the state in its wasteful draining of the Glades for agriculture and development, including the construction of huge concrete canals to shunt away into the sea the pristine water flowing gradually south from Lake Okeechobee as the Shark River watershed.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Dyer’s derisive mirth had a hard edge of anger. “Can’t we leave all that negative stuff to those left-wing whiners in the papers?” Things were moving! he said. Court hearings on the Watson claim were scheduled for the following week at Homestead, and the first of several public events designed to organize local support would be sponsored by the Historical Society at Naples, which would offer an evening with the distinguished historian Professor L. Watson Collins.

  “That name won’t work in Naples. Sorry,” Lucius said. “Too many people know me on this coast.”

  Emitting that curious hard bark, Dyer simply hung up, leaving the question unresolved.

  MURDER IN THE INDIAN COUNTRY

  Rob Watson’s carton contained notes on his long-ago wanderings to Arkansas and Oklahoma to investigate what lay behind the legend of his father’s career in the Indian Nations. From these, Lucius put together a brief survey of that obscure period in his subject’s life.

  Edgar Watson fled Fort White in north Florida in late 1886 or early 1887 under circumstances still disputed in that community. Although there is no clear record of his movements, it appears that in the spring and summer of 1887, he sharecropped in Franklin County, Arkansas, continuing westward after the crop was in and settling near Whitefield, in the Indian Territory, in early January of 1888.