Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Oh Lord, Papa.” They sat a while. “Why didn’t you explain to people that the whole thing was an accident?”

  “Who would have believed that, for Christ’s sake? You don’t believe it even now and you’re my son.”

  “I do believe you, Papa.” This was true. As far as it went, he trusted his father’s account, and for the moment, he was even grateful for its ambiguity. As Papa had probably intuited, he didn’t wish to know any details that might oblige him to condemn father or brother, though it was mostly his unwillingness to entwine his father in a lie that had kept him from resuming his inquisition. Two young people had been shot. Somebody had shot them. Was it really possible that both had died in the same “accident”? The girl, Papa? Why was she killed?

  That evening, he had had no wish to crowd him further. His father had exonerated Rob—that had to be enough. Yet clearing Rob of responsibility fell short of saying that Rob had not taken part. His father had specified that the full responsibility was his alone. Was this tantamount to an admission that he’d killed those people? That accidentally or otherwise, he had been the shooter?

  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 bei
ng 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 enthusiastically. “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa’s dock at Chatham.”

  Ad Burdett looked wary. “Papa,” he muttered. “That’s what us kids call Mr. Herkie.” He stared in gloomy resignation at his paint-splotched shoes. “Might as well get going, then,” he said. In his poky auto, he led his older brother into the village.

  In sycamore shade of a quiet street of modest houses, Edna Burdett awaited Lucius, standing on her stoop. At the sight of him, she slipped inside and awaited him anew, holding up his History of Southwest Florida like a hymnal. “Would you be kind enough to sign your book, Professor Collins?” Only then did she offer a small smile. She was a bit thicker through the waist than he remembered, otherwise much the same—not quite pretty and yet handsome, with long honey-colored hair pinned up behind. Kate Edna Bethea Watson Burdett. Had she dropped the “Watson”? Papa had been the only one who called her Kate.

  On the upright piano in the sitting room perched her wedding portrait with Herkimer Burdett and framed photographs of Addison and his sisters at various young ages, also a tinted photograph of a new child, Herkie Junior, who was off at school, she said. Lucius inquired about all of them before taking a seat.

  Edna had backed herself into a stuffed chair under a lamp. From this redoubt, having smoothed her feathers, she permitted herself a better look at him. What do you want with us? her scared eyes said.

  Addison stood awkward in the doorway, hat in hand. “Addison, do please sit down,” his mother said, as if he were a pupil standing up at his school desk for no good reason. When Lucius tried to include him in his questions about their family, Ad said gloomily, “How long does he aim to stay? I have to get back to work.”

  His mother said, “You’re not expected back today, you know that, dear.” To Lucius, she said, “Addison is a housepainter like Mr. Burdett.”

  The spring day ticked past on a big loose alarm clock in another room. She showed Lucius an old schoolbook, The History of Ancient Greece, that Papa had cherished and read over and over all his life. Lucius was touched that Edna had thought to take it when she fled.

  “Your father was always good to me and kind and loving with his children; you do know that, don’t you, Lucius? When my sister came to visit in Fort White, she could not get over how much time that busy man would spend with his little children—very unusual for any man back in those days.” She passed him a faded photo of dim figures grouped on the porch steps at the Bend, and Lucius recognized the husky man in black suit and black hat whose features were lost in the dark of the hat shadow. “That’s all we have—that shadowed face. A memory of shadows!” She took a great deep breath. Edna could not bring herself to use his name, not even “Mr. Watson.” When Lucius mentioned him, she tweaked her blue blouse, crisscrossed her ankles. But neither did she betray resentment or shame or regret: his father’s actions had nothing to do with her, her manner said, nor alter the truth, that she had been a faithful God-fearing wife.

  “Those bad things happened when us kids were small,” Ad complained suddenly. “Horrible crimes that none of her neighbors know about. But for her, they are not safely in the past.” His voice was rising and his color, too. “What would folks think of us if they knew?—that’s what scares her.”

  “Addison? Please, dear.” Edna’s glance assured Lucius that Ad was voicing his own trepidations and not hers. “Poor Amy was only five months at that time. She never knew her father and was never told what happened. One day, a woman whose uncle was in that mob told her dreadful tales. I suppose this person wished to justify what those men did, but for poor Amy, it was terrifying. To this day, the poor thing cannot bear to hear one word about her father. If anyone asks, she says she knows nothing about him except that he died long ago of a heart attack.”

  “My mother and her sister can’t even mention him,” Ad grumbled, “and you intend to write about him.”

  Edna sighed. “Amy was only a babe in arms when that storm struck Chokoloskee. I’ve been deathly afraid of rough weather ever since. And when your father perished in that very place just a week later, that hellish noise terrified us all over.” She put her hand over her heart. “Lucius? That day was my twenty-first birthday. That’s why he came back.”

  “You’re still one week older than I am,” he said, trying to lighten things; she scarcely heard him. “Before your father left Chokoloskee that last time, I begged him not to risk his life by coming back for us. I knew the evil feeling on that island. He must get away to Key West while he had the chance, I told him, and send for us later if he wished. But he was a bold and willful man, and he just smiled and kissed me, saying, ‘A twenty-first birthday is important, Kate, and a promise is a promise.’ Your father was killed because he kept his promise, did you know that?”

  “She still forbids any celebration of her birthday,” Addison complained.

  Widow and children had traveled to Neamathla to stay with her sister Lola. “Mr. Burdett came to visit. He stayed on and we married. He gave my children his name.”

  “We felt lost,” Addison muttered, avoiding Lucius’s gaze. “I said, ‘Well, Mama, who are we, then?’ We felt like nobody at all. Then kids in school found out our real name.”

  Lucius nodded. “Someone always finds a way to let you know what you don’t need to hear.”

  “For years after we left Chokoloskee, I exchanged letters with Mamie Smallwood, who took us in that day and was so kind. A few years ago my Ruth Ellen went there for a visit. Wilma Smallwood—she never married—was running the store by then. Wilma showed that poor girl these dreadful clippings—terrible things that had been written about her father. She didn’t ask to see them, Wilma just showed them. Ruth Ellen was horrified. When she came home, she asked if it was true that Papa had murdered our dear Hannah and those men, and I said, ‘No, honey, it was his foreman.’ ”

  Upset by her own reference to Leslie Cox, Edna rose abruptly, then busied herself at the piano, straightening the photos.

  Because “John Smith” was not only a fugitive but a kinsman by marriage to whom he was indebted, his father had instructed Edna to keep his real name secret. Luc
ius himself had never been told much more about John Smith than he had picked up in the first five minutes. He could have used a friend of his own age to hunt and fish with but Leslie Cox had no idea how to be a friend, let alone have fun. All he cared about was killing more game than anybody else and getting the credit for bringing back more meat. He stayed mostly half drunk, he terrorized the workers, he made mean remarks, poking up trouble.

  Edna looked around as if hearing someone slip into the house, then lowered her voice to a near whisper, confessing that Leslie slipped in close every time her husband turned his back. Complaining that “a man needed a woman,” he would whisper that her husband was betraying her with those Daniels sisters on Pavilion Key. But after all the trouble at Fort White, she was so scared of more violence that she dared not tell her husband she was being harassed. In those last weeks of that long hot summer, afraid for her children in the deadly atmosphere at Chatham Bend, she had mostly stayed with friends in Chokoloskee.

  Lucius nodded. “I left, too. And three weeks later, all hell broke loose, just as you feared.” He turned to Addison. “Your mother is right, Ad. Those killings were Cox’s doing and so were the killings at Fort White. Your dad was not to blame.” But saying this, he felt obliged to add, “As far as I know.”

  “Or want to know, right?” Ad said unpleasantly.

  “Lucius? Remember when your father hitched our dog Beans to a little red wagon and trained him to pull Addison? And the wagon tipped over, rolling our little boy down the riverbank, and Little Ad so scared of that awful crocodile that he could not stop crying? I can still hear him, across all these years!” She gazed fondly at her son, who was glaring at the wall. “ ‘Little Ad’ is what Mr. Burdett called him before Ad got so big! And Ad was the first one who went south to seek the truth about what happened to your father.”