Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Knowing Henry, he most likely thought them half brothers was plain crazy to go up against common prejudice that way. All the same, he was very very grateful. Hummed and whistled, little secret smiles, he glowed for days after they left, couldn’t get over it. We never seen him smile that way in his whole life. Course Henry would never tell us what they talked about and we never tried to work it out of him. Probably thought we might tease him, or to speak about it was some way unlucky and might spoil the only experience of his own blood kin he ever had.

  “One time before his white brothers came to see him, Henry whispered, ‘The onliest thing more no ’count than a dumb nigger mus’ be a white woman that traffics with a nigger.’ But after his brothers come and claimed him, and told him how his mother had sent after him, we never heard him speak that way no more. I believe he was tore up, just sick at heart, that he had talked so cold and hard about his mama.

  “The last time his brothers came to Turner River, we was so glad to see their truck that we waved and hollered, invitin ’em to come on over to the cabin, eat some good hambone stew. But them words hangin in the air sounded all wrong, so we waved at Henry to come ahead, he was invited, too. But a-course we knew he wouldn’t never set and eat with us, all we done was make him more uncomfortable, and when his brothers seen that, they smiled real polite and said, ‘No, thank you, Mr. House,’ and turned right back to Henry’s little fire. The sight of them three brothers down on their hunkers, chucklin and swappin stories while they served each other’s plates like Henry had ate with white men all his life—well, I never forgot that.

  “What them Grahams stood for, so simple and so clear, made me ashamed. It woke me up and turned me right around, changed my whole way of thinkin about nigra people. Yessir, I was mightily impressed, and I am today. I only seen them brothers two-three times over the years and am real sorry I never knew ’em better.”

  On their way north, Lucius was so quiet that his companion grew uneasy, asking him finally how he felt about traveling with a House, and perhaps Bill House especially. Though Lucius reassured him, he soon fell silent again, being worried about where Rob was now and what might become of him.

  Up the road they met a dusty road-gang truck with a plier-faced guard at the wheel; his sunglasses twitched in their direction as they passed like the huge black eyes of a fly. Two black convicts and two white ones stood on the truck bed in pairs. The young whites swayed recklessly in the center of the bed, thumbs hooked in the hip pockets of their jeans, while the two blacks, indifferent, maintained easy balance with one fingertip on the high sideboards. Being unshackled, any of the four could have jumped and run, but apparently they understood that Plier Face was not a man to pass up a free shot at a human target. In the front seat, a hard-eyed white con was wearing the guard’s black cowboy hat. As the truck passed, his tattooed hand, raised above the dented roof, erected a finger in contempt of any values other vehicles might represent.

  “Road gangs used to be very bad all over Florida, all over the South, I reckon,” Bill House said. “Black convict or white never made much difference, not when it come to chains and rawhide whips. Chain gangs was why them outlaws run away to Watson’s—Cox, y’know, and them men Cox killed, and plenty of others, too.”

  In the west, a lonesome turkey vulture tilted down across the wall of a long cypress strand. “Ever seen Deep Lake? Deep small lake over yonder in a two-hundred-acre hammock; that’s where Langford and his partners had them citrus groves. In the dry season, a man can feel that good fresh water.

  “For many years, Frank Tippins sold convict labor to that outfit. That’s why he had his prison camp way to hell and gone out here in the Big cypress. Companies paid next to nothing for his nigras and the sheriff kept every penny them poor devils earned, being as how it was against state law for them terrible criminals to receive payment. Them Deep Lake partners was rich men, never had to think about them human beins that made ’em all their money. Maybe your brother-in-law knew how Tippins worked things, maybe not, but too much blood and tears fell at Deep Lake.

  “Sheriff Tippins learned a live-and-let-live attitude: let him live if his skin ain’t the wrong color. That time he killed a nigra prisoner in his own jail—saved that darned nigra from committin suicide, I reckon—the sheriff called it an escape attempt. Later claimed this man was the only prisoner he ever killed in the line of duty. Must of forgot all them poor sinners that never went home from his labor camp out here.

  “Tippins kept up his polite reputation in Fort Myers but didn’t behave right out in this backcountry where nobody weren’t watching. Handcuffed his prisoners, then knocked ’em down, to give ’em a taste of what was comin if they didn’t work all out in this heat until they dropped. Sooner or later, every last one that could still walk tried to run off. All swamp country out here where it ain’t sand and thorn so they never got too far. Miskeeters and the heat took the last fight out of ’em and anyways, he paid Injuns to track ’em. Left sign any Mikasuki could foller blindfolded and walkin backwards. Never had to catch ’em—had to rescue ’em! Hauled ’em back to camp more dead than alive, and the ring leader was usually whipped to death or shot, make an example. They buried ’em in the soft fill on the railway spoil bank. Buildin this road, the county dug up so many bones it was embarrassin.”

  “Think that spoil bank might have been the source of those bad stories about old bones dug up on Chatham Bend? What some called ‘Watson Payday?’ ”

  House remained silent a few seconds too long. “Well, we blame too much on your daddy, that is correct,” he said at last. “We forget how much competition that man had on the frontiers when it come to common killin. And I ain’t talkin only about plume hunters or moonshiners or backwoods varmints such as Killer Cox. I’m talkin about Christian businessmen who work their feller men to death to make more money, I’m talkin about all them miserable lost lives that gets wrote off to overhead. So if Ed Watson killed a few workers like they say, he weren’t the only boss who done that, not by a long shot.”

  Of Tippins’s old Copeland prison camp, little sign was left, only a shadow ruin on white sand back off the roads, grown over by liana and rough thorn. A pileated woodpecker’s loud solitary call rang in the noonday heat, over the dry scrape of palmetto, in the sunny wind.

  The limestone road north from the Trail traversed the marsh and flat palmetto scrub of the Big Cypress. Across the white sky, dark-pointed as a weapon, a swallow-tailed kite coursed the savanna for small prey. “Cattlemen held a big panther hunt out this way a few years ago, tried to shoot ’em out, but there’s still more panthers in the Cypress than anywhere in Florida except maybe my backyard on Panther Crescent,” House said wryly. Lucius hid his grin, still reluctant to acknowledge how much he enjoyed this man who had raised a gun and fired point-blank at his father.

  The sun was high and the road empty, a ghost path of white limestone dust boring ever deeper into swamp and scrub. On the canal bank, a lone alligator lay inert as a log of mud. Long necks of cormorants and snake birds, like water reptiles, parted the black surface, sank away again. A moccasin coiled in a low stump; a bog turtle paused at the road edge, awaiting its next instinct. The white rock road writhed and shimmered in mirage toward its shining point of disappearance miles ahead.

  Southeast of Immokalee, a stringy black man walked the shoulder of the road. Though he had not signaled or broken his stride, Lucius slowed the car. “Pretty hot to be out walking the road,” he murmured, and House said easily, “Give him a lift, then. I rode with plenty of ’em.”

  The car drew up on the road shoulder with a rattle of limestone bits under the fenders; the figure sprang sideways as if startled by a snake. Alarmed that these white men had stopped, he was smiling hard, braced for some loud jape and set to run. When Lucius smiled—“Good morning!”—he doffed a dusty cap. “Yassuh,” he said. “Mornin.” He took out a bandanna and wiped his brow, not quite meeting their gaze.

  “Headed for Immokalee?”

&nb
sp; “Yassuh, dass right, suh.”

  “Get in,” House told him, reaching back to find the door handle.

  Still wary, the man raised a hard-veined gray-brown hand to the bill of his soiled cap. Slow and careful as a lizard, seeking entry without touching anything, he eased into the backseat in a waft of humid heat and hard-earned odors. Closing the door gingerly behind him, he perched on the fore edge of the seat, ready to fly. “You genlemans ain’t slavuhs, is you?” he inquired, daring a little smile when the white men laughed.

  Asked how he liked Immokalee, the man chuckled, cuk-cuk-cuk, like a dusting chicken. “ ’Mokalee.” He nodded, feeling his way. He would not look at them. “Yassuh, dass right. ’Mokalee, now dat is a fine town. Man dat nevuh been a nigguh on Sat’day night in ’Mokalee, dat man doan know nothin about livin, so de nigguhs say.” He chuckled a little more, cuk-cuk-cuk.

  When the white men grinned, their passenger relaxed a little, sat back a little, hummed a little, peering out at the savannah to evade their white man’s curiosity. Over the pinelands, vultures swirled like cinders on the smoky sky. “Yassuh. Gone be fryin hot t’day.”

  At a corner at the edge of town, the man tapped a gray fingernail on the window, crooning “Thank’ee kin’ly, kin’ly,” soft as a lullaby, “kin’ly, kin’ly,” until the car stopped and he got out. He was recognized at once and cheered by a pair of celebrants brandishing small flat bottles in brown paper bags; he hesitation-stepped in a kind of greeting dance. All smiles, he turned to wave. “I’se in good hands now as you kin see!” he cried. “I thank’ee kin’ly, white folks!”

  “Kin’ly, kin’ly,” Bill House said, amused. “Think they’re laughing at us?”

  “I do, I really do.” Lucius’s heart cheered the man’s mischievous ironies and buoyant spirit, the poignance and dogged love of life that was so moving in people who owned nothing, and also that in-the-bone endurance that in its way was a shaming of the whites and a profound rebuke.

  House asked the men if they might know a man named Henry Short.

  “Deacon Sho’t?”

  They told him that Deacon Short was in the hospital. Torching cane fields for the Okeechobee harvest, he’d been caught in a back burn when the wind shifted, and burned severely over most of his body; he was not recuperating and was not expected to live.

  “I mean, damn it all,” Bill House burst out on the way to the hospital. “Henry’s very experienced and he ain’t a drinker but that don’t mean he should work alone around big fires!” Lucius had never thought to see this man so agitated. “Big Sugar don’t care nothin about workers’ rights or the damn risks so long as they’re rakin in big profits. Know who got convicted on a slavery charge just lately? United Sugar! U.S.A.! Slavery! In the Twentieth damn Century! That what they call progress?”

  They crossed the railroad tracks and headed west on a main street of auto junkyards, body shops, a dealership in bright green farm machinery, a brown whistle-stop saloon: they were nearing the hospital when Lucius said, “Did Henry ever mention finding bones? On Chatham Bend, I mean?”

  “You back on that again? Speck Daniels tell you that or was it Hardens? Either way, don’t pay no attention, Colonel. If Henry ever run across something like that, our family surely would’ve heard about it.”

  THE BURNED MAN

  With no staff around on Sunday to direct them, they had to hunt for the old negro ward, a long room parted by narrow shafts of dusty sunlight. Its sepia cast and weary atmosphere, its creaking fans, its leaning cabinets and streaked stained walls, reminded Lucius of the soldiers’ wards in old daguerreotypes from the Civil War. The discreet slow figures wandering the ward were patients and their visitors—women who had walked here after church, Lucius supposed, since most wore Sunday habits. Perched on small chairs by the door were two white men of middle age with weathered faces. Recognizing Bill House, they smiled shyly and stood up to shake hands, but so upset was House by the sight of the patient across the room that he brushed blindly past.

  On the narrow cot, pinned to the coarse sheets like a plant specimen, the figure lay still as if extinguished by the heat. His worn blue cotton nightshirt was open down the front and his chest was patched with cracked and crusted scabs leaking thin red fluid. From his iron bed rose a peculiar odor of broiled flesh and disinfectant tinged with sweat and urine.

  Peering out from beneath head bandages, Henry Short did not see his visitors until they loomed over his bed, one on each side. Dimly aware of a presence in the light, he muttered, “Them ain’t angels. Them ain’t angels.” The voice emerged so cracked and thin, with scarcely a twitch of the scabbed lips, that his visitors did not realize at first that he had spoken.

  House was stricken speechless by Short’s condition, and in the end it was Lucius who said, “Henry?” He spoke softly so as not to intrude on the hush over the ward. “Can you hear us?” Henry stared out of fiery red eyes. Through broken lips, the burned man whispered, “That you, Mist’ Lucius? How you been keepin? You, Mist’ Bill?”

  Henry had first known Lucius as a boy of eight, down in the rivers, yet it astonished Lucius that a man dying had recognized somebody he had not seen in years and could not have imagined he would ever see again. With his forefinger he pressed an unburned patch of skin on the ropy forearm by way of affirmation and encouragement and Henry responded by raising that arm minutely to press his touch.

  Seeing this, House reached across the cot to touch the arm where Lucius had touched it but hesitated and withdrew his hand just as Henry lifted his forearm in response—too high to bear, it seemed, for he clenched his jaw not to cry out. The pain turned his gaze murky. He closed his eyes and gasped out, “Lo’d A’mighty!” Hearing those words, an old woman two beds away called on his visitors to witness that Deacon Short was a true man of God; if he had ever sinned, none could recall it. “Praise de Lo’d!” the woman cried. A shy chorus of assent rose from the ward. The ambulatory patients and their visitors walked past like mourners in a slow procession, crooning warm harmonies. “Hear them angels?” Henry whispered. “Think they comin after me?” Henry Short produced a stillborn smile as his visitors tried to smile back, sick at heart.

  Bill House looked around the ancient ward. “Well, now, Henry, these folks treatin you okay?” Short’s red eyes watched Lucius. “As best black folks knows how, Mist’ Bill.” As a dying man in dreadful pain, he did not bother to conceal his sarcasm. House stared at him, shocked that this man he’d known so well could speak so bitterly. He tried to jolly him: how could an old hand like Henry get caught in a back burn? Short had no time for this. Urgently, he said, “Mist’ Bill? You member when that man come huntin me? Ochopee?” That same man had come for him again, he told them. He’d seen him assembling a weapon on the dike road. Then he came toward him down the rows, in and out of the molasses smoke of burning cane.

  Henry dropped his fire rake and ran, dodging in and out amongst the cane. The smoke that obscured him from his pursuer shrouded the ditch, too; peering back over his shoulder, he had pitched right into it and fallen hard, hitting his head. Lying there stunned, he only came to when the burn overtook him and he woke up choking on the smoke, clothes singed by fire. Afraid to holler out for help, he rolled and crawled along the ditch to the mud puddle where he was found toward twilight. Since the local clinic lacked a ward for coloreds, he’d been shipped here.

  Lucius said, “Can you tell us what he looked like?”

  “Too much smoke. Seen the big bulk of him, is all. Seen how he walk back on his heels, toes out—”

  “That’s him!” House cried. “That’s the same man we saw in Ochopee!”

  “Yessuh. Scairt me so bad I never watched where I was runnin.”

  Leaving House at the bedside, Lucius crossed the floor and introduced himself to the two men sitting by the door. They had come as soon as they were notified, they said. Their name was Graham. A few years ago, their brother Henry had spoken kindly of Lucius Watson and they thanked him for coming. The Grahams we
re worried that today was Sunday, with nobody on duty to give Henry something for his pain—not that it mattered, since he was refusing his pain medication. As best they could fathom his fierce code, uncomplaining acceptance of his agony signified some sort of penance, though what he should feel penitent about they could not imagine. They had to leave him every little while to recover from the sight of such hard suffering.

  At Henry’s bedside, told who those men were, House turned to look. “Them fellers knowed me when they seen me?” Overjoyed, he went to meet the Grahams, who rose and sat him down between them.

  Through torn screens in the high windows came the caw of crows in the listless stillness of hot summer woods. Small bits of life crawled and flew about the ward on ancient business. Lucius awaited Henry Short’s return. Henry’s mouth had fixed itself in a grim semblance of a smile but the broken eyes, discolored red and yellow, had gone glassy with withheld tears. “You’re a tough old gator, Henry, you are going to make it,” Lucius said, taking the rickety chair beside the bed. “Doan go wishin that on me, Mist’ Lucius,” Henry gritted, as tears escaped onto his caved-in cheeks. “I done with life. I had my fill.”

  “All right. Just rest.”

  With the testiness of pain, Short said, “You ain’t come all this way to Immokalee to tell this nigger to just rest, Mist’ Lucius. I believe you still huntin fo’ yo’ daddy.” Henry was altogether present and intent on his visitor’s expression as if to make certain that he wished to hear the truth. “That day you come to see me? Chatham Bend? I lied that day.” Short was gasping. “Been tellin lies about that autumn evenin all of my whole life.” He sounded more resentful than remorseful. “White folks ever stop to think how they make black men lie? Good Christian nigras? Lie and lie then lie some more, just to get by in life? Just to get by?”