Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Hoad hailed him cheerily and waved him to a seat. “Cap’n Lucius Watson, fish guide! Same old khakis and salt-rotted sneakers!” But Lucius was too restless to sit down, and seeing his exhaustion and the silence in it, Storter gave him time to collect himself while he finished describing to his son how he and Cap’n Watson netted pompano off the Gulf beaches, mostly at night, following the schools from Captiva Island south to the middle Keys. “Wasn’t that something, Lucius? To have your own boat at your own dock and go to work only when the tide was right?” Hoad whistled in amazement. “Mullet schools two miles across, not a mile out of Caxambas!” he told the boy, who was twisting in his seat.

  The boy ran off and Hoad sat back, a little sad. “Way things are going, our children will never see a mullet school as big as that, poor little fellers.” He frowned. “Heck, I have nothing to complain about, I know that. It’s our own darn fault. Sold away our good old river home under the trees for a new house on a new street in Naples with no trees at all. My wife likes it, I guess, but a backyard don’t amount to much compared to riverfront.”

  Hoad fell still, awaiting him. He jumped up when Lucius told him what had happened. “We’ll go look for him.” Hoad’s boat was hauled out upriver by the bridge, she only needed to be launched and refueled. They could leave for Chatham first thing in the morning.

  They walked along under royal palms toward the village circle, then headed north toward the bridge to see to Hoad’s boat, then back along the river. At the far end of every street, the encircling green mangrove lay in wait, as if after dark it might infiltrate and smother the small settlement, reclaiming it as jungle. Already insolent hard weeds were pushing through big cracks in the broken sidewalk.

  Hoping to cheer him, Hoad told him that according to the radio this morning, the E. J. Watson claim on Chatham Bend had been dismissed by the state court. “Looks like the new park is on the way,” Hoad chortled.

  At the lodge, they sat outside gazing across the twilight channel where the sun falling to the Gulf out to the west still fired the highest leaves on the green wall. On other days these common miracles were healing, but this evening, the burning mangrove leaves, the dying light’s faint flashes in the current—the quiet beauty in that transience—stirred only loneliness. Arranging with Hoad to meet early next morning, he excused himself and, picking up his glass, went inside and crossed the lobby to the telephone.

  GONE AND LOST FOREVER

  Startled when he reached Nell at once, Lucius was shy and awkward, stammering remorse for the neglectful way he’d treated her over the years and his unhappiness about the happiness he’d thrown away. But since he’d lawman made this clear at their meeting in the cemetery, she remained silent, awaiting his explanation of why he had chosen this moment to call. finally, he told her about Rob.

  “Oh Lucius, no!” she said. “Oh Rob! When I think how much you missed him all those years—oh Lucius, sweetheart, maybe he’s all right. Will you let me know?”

  Overwhelmed by her warm concern, he said, “Nell? Will you marry me?”

  Her silence scared him. “Nell?”

  “Goodness,” she murmured. “What a strange time to propose.” She asked coolly if he had been drinking. He set his glass down, then denied this, but another silence made it evident that she knew better. He heard a soft clearing of the throat in preparation for some final rejection that would be unbearable. To head that off, he entreated her all in a rush, “I’ve always loved you, Nell, you know that. We could be so happy—”

  Gently she cut him off. “Listen to me. Thank you. But since your father died, you’ve never permitted yourself happiness, so how could we be happy? It wouldn’t work.”

  He said, “It’s quite impossible, I agree.” Then he said, “Come on, Nell. Marry me anyway.”

  He heard her laugh a little as he’d intended. But after a moment, she said that while she was glad she’d seen him after so long and would always consider him her oldest and best friend, she did not think they should meet again anytime soon.

  In panic, he pretended she was testing him although in his heart he knew that she was not. “Please, Nell, listen, don’t hang up. I mean it. I’m asking you to marry. Isn’t that what you wanted?” She had put the phone down.

  Across the lobby, mounted tarpon leapt in painful arcs on the dark wood walls. The ocean pearliness on the Triassic scales of these huge armored herring had faded to a dirtied yellow and the rigid jaws, stretched forever in pursuit of that fatal lure, were shrouded in the ghostly grays of spiderwebs.

  At Caxambas, exhausted, he lay awake most of the night. He thought about his clumsy proposal, his slurred voice, the hurtful stupidity of saying, Isn’t that what you wanted? He would call back and apologize in the morning. But when morning came, his resolve had unraveled. He sat on the cot edge a long while before coming to and dragging on the other sock. He decided that a discreet interval must pass before he courted his true love again. He must be patient, then draw near carefully so as not to spoil their romantic reunion. Sincerely moved by that prospect, he was also inadmissibly relieved, though he would not face this until weeks later when he realized she was truly gone and lost forever.

  At daybreak he placed the brass urn in a box together with the humble collection of anonymous belt buckles and buttons. Before leaving, he added the manuscript of the biography. His decision to accept the loss of years of work had its seed in Rob’s confession, but only now did he behold it in the light, like a magic toad escaped from his own mouth. He felt no astonishment at his decision nor did he feel overwhelmed by failure—quite the contrary. Like the confrontation with the Daniels gang, it was oddly exhilarating.

  HOMEGOING

  The Cracker Belle was a small fishing boat, formerly white, now driftwood gray. They idled her downcurrent past the rusty fish houses and the leaning bulkhead stacked with sea-greened crab pots. Emerging from the mangrove wall into Chokoloskee Bay, they headed out the north channel to the Gulf and traveled south along the coast, passing Rabbit Key with its lone mangrove clump on the seaward point; it rose ahead, passed on the port side, and fell astern.

  Though Lucius was silent, Hoad knew where his mind was. Hoad was the one friend with whom Lucius would discuss that black autumn evening. “Trouble was, nobody could rest easy with Mister Watson laying out there in the moonlight. That’s why they towed him way out here. I bet every darn kid on the Bay had bad dreams for a month about that cadaver bumping down Rabbit Key Pass on the flood tide.”

  Hoad smiled apologetically at Lucius, who could not smile with him. The seeds of legend, he was thinking, sown in his father’s blood. It was not like Hoad to talk this way: had he forgotten he was talking about his friend’s father and his own father’s best friend? Was Papa in the public domain to be pawed over and patronized now that he was the legendary “Bloody Watson”?

  Hoad had remembered to put a shovel in the boat. Was he uneasy about what might await them at the Bend? Hoad hated violence just as his father had (“Cap’n Bembo couldn’t kill a chicken; his wife had to do it,” Papa said).

  “Course those Chok fellers ran that rope around his neck so the family could locate the body when they came for it,” Hoad was saying.

  Lucius said, “Hoad, I saw no noose and I was there, remember? They probably got that tale about the hanging rope out of the magazines.”

  Hoad apologized. “I’m sorry, Lucius. My point was—”

  “I know what your point was. Let’s forget it.” In the next hour, they did not speak again.

  The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on the empty coast. Far offshore to westward, a tiny freighter smudged the Gulf horizon.

  Traversing the old clam beds east of Pavilion Key, Hoad mentioned that this shallow shelf was now so plagued with sharks that men disliked going overboard to wade for the few clams left, and nobody knew what drew the sharks from the deep water. Some folks said that that plague of sharks foretold that the old ways of Earth were near an end.

  DEAD RECKONIN
G

  In the southern mist rose Mormon Key off the mouth of Chatham River. Farther on, the cries of oystercatchers purled across the bars, rising and falling. Hoad smiled to hear that sound. “I reckon that wild cry was here when the first Calusa came in the old centuries.”

  The Cracker Belle entered the mangrove delta. “These west coast rivers are so low due to Glades drainage that your dad’s schooner would go aground before he ever made it to the Bend,” Hoad said. “Got to go by dead reckoning. Got to listen to your propeller.” He was talking too much because he was worried about what might await his friend upriver. Lucius nodded but remained silent.

  Where storm trees had stranded on a shoal, dead branches dipped and beckoned in the wash of the boat’s wake. At Hannah’s Point, perhaps a mile below the Bend, was the common grave of Hannah, Green, and Dutchy, never visited and now all but forgotten in the desolate salt scrub as the dark events of that long-ago October passed from local history into myth. “About all us local folks have left is our long memories,” Hoad was saying. “Hurricanes roil things up a little now and then but it’s bad deaths that carry our remembrances back, sometimes a hundred years.”

  Still visible back of the mangrove fringe along the bank was a square impression about one foot deep, as if a half-buried barn door had been levered up out of the white paste of the marl. “This place really spooks the few who know about it,” Hoad said, “me included. Graves without coffins generally sprout a good strong crop of weeds but nothing grows here.”

  “Very strange,” Lucius agreed politely, anxious to keep moving.

  “Those poor folks had no families to come after them like Mister Watson. But they were darned lucky to get into the ground before that bad storm carried ’em out to sea. Course they won’t stay.”

  Hoad pointed to a corner of the grave that was eroding bit by clod into the river.

  They listened to the river’s lic-lic-lic as it curled past. In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, white-pated black pigeons craned and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe.

  “Come on, Hoad, let’s go.” He spoke abruptly.

  In a shift of wind the smell came heavy on the air. Waves fled the bow to crash into the banks in the boat’s wake as they rushed upriver. The hard pine in the house had blasted pitch into the sky, casting a sepia pall over the thunderheads. Where the Watson place had stood on its high mound was a strange hollowness, a void, thick shimmerings of heat. Behind the house’s shadow presence, what foliage remained on the gaunt trees was gray with ash. All around on the blackened ground lay the belly flats of alligators, curled up in crusts.

  They called and called. Circling the dying fire, he clenched his heart against the sight of a charred shape in the crack and shudder of the last collapsing timbers, the whisperings of embers and blue hiss of mineral flame.

  Face scorched, Lucius turned from the burning at a call from Hoad. Rob’s satchel had been left on the bare ground beyond the gator scraps. Lucius approached and picked it up and finally opened it, extracting the unloaded revolver. The note he dreaded was there, too. Clumsy, he dropped it, picked it up again.

  Dear Luke,

  Thanks for coming. Sorry about the house. I don’t ask your forgiveness. A keepsake—our old family heirloom. I know you wonder why I kept it all those years. I think I needed it. I think I needed this steel thing and the cold precision of its parts to hold reality together. In some way I don’t claim to understand, that red day at Lost Man’s was the last reality I ever knew.

  So long. No need to wait, no need to worry. Yr ever-lovin brother, R.B. Watson

  He raised his gaze to the brown river, read the note, passed it to Hoad. Hoad read it and looked up, clearing his throat. “Listen,” he began. He stopped. With nothing else to say, they stared away downriver.

  Clouds from the Gulf dragged shrouds of ocean rain across the mangrove islands, raising an acrid stream from the brooding fire. He took shelter in the boat cabin with Hoad. In the cramped space, in dense wet heat, among the Belle’s rust-rotted life jackets and moldy slickers, Hoad said, “You aim to put all the bad stuff in your book?” This was less a question than a warning. Lucius ignored it.

  When the rain stopped, they returned ashore. Lucius buried the box of belt buckles and bullets where the shed had been—the slave quarters, Leslie Cox called it, with that bruising laugh. The urn he took to the leaning poinciana in whose thin shade dear Mama had rested in the long afternoons, watching the passing of the river. Replacing the earth, he remained there on his knees for a few minutes. “Well, Papa,” he whispered finally and stood up.

  Thin smoke plumes rose like companies of ghosts. Out to the west where the Gulf sky was clearing, an iron sun loomed through the mist and vanished. From upriver came the hollow knocking of that big black woodpecker. In the river silence, it seemed far away and also near.

  Hoad was waiting by the boat.

  “We’re going,” Lucius said, fetching his manuscript.

  His old friend trailed him back to the fire in alarm. “Wait,” Hoad said.

  Out of respect for so much work, he lifted the manuscript to the level of his breast before bending and consigning it to the red embers. In silence they watched the top page brown a little at one corner as the fire took hold. A moment before bursting into flame, it lifted on an updraft, danced, planed down again among the gator scraps.

  Hoad jumped to retrieve it before it blew away but when his friend only shook his head, he returned it to the fire.

  “Okay? Let’s go,” said Lucius Watson.

  Long long ago down the browning decades, in the light of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw, who laughed and listened, smelled and touched, ate, drank, and bred, occupying time and space with his getting and spending in the world. What his biographer will strive to recover is a true sense of this human being, with all his particularity and hope and promise, in the hope that the reader might understand who the grown man might have become had he not known too much of privation, rage, and loss.*

  BOOK THREE

  There is a pain—so utter—

  It swallows substance up—

  Then covers the Abyss with Trance

  So Memory can step

  Around—across—upon it

  As one within a Swoon—

  goes safely—where an open eye—

  Would drop Him—Bone by Bone

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Sir, what is it that constitutes character, popularity, and power in the United States? Sir, it is property, and that only!

  —GOVERNOR JOHN HAMMOND OF SOUTH CAROLINA

  For the final consummation, that I might feel less lonely, it was my final wish that as I climbed the scaffold, I would be greeted with cries of execration.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, The Stranger

  CHAPTER 1

  Oh Mercy, cries the Reader. What? Old Edgefield again? It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!

  —PARSON MASON L. WEEMS

  DISTRICT OF DEVILS

  Edgefield Court House, which gave its name to the settlement that grew from a small crossroads east of the Savannah River, is a white-windowed brick edifice upon a hill approached by highroads from the four directions, drawing the landscape all around to a point of harmony and concord. The building is faced with broad stone steps on which those in pursuit of justice may ascend from Court House Square to its brick terrace. White columns serve as portals to the second-story courtroom, and the sunrise window in the arch over the door, filling the room with austere light, permits the elevated magistrate to freshen his perspective by gazing away over the village to the open countryside and the far hills, blue upon blue.

  Early in the War, a boy of six, I was borne lightly up those steps on the strong arm of my father. On the courthouse terrace, I gazed with joy at this tall man in Confederate gray who pointed out to his proud son the fine p
rospect of the Piedmont, bearing away toward the northwest and the Great Smoky Mountains. In those nearer distances lay the Ridge, where a clear spring appeared out of the earth to commence its peaceful slow descent through woodland and plantation to the Edisto River. This tributary was Clouds Creek, where I was born.

  On that sunny day on Court House Square my father, Elijah Daniel Watson, rode away to war and childhood ended. As a “Daughter of Edgefield,” his wife Ellen, with me and my little sister, waved prettily from the courthouse steps as the First Edgefield Volunteers mustered on the square. Her handsome Lige, wheeling his big roan and flourishing a crimson pennant on his saber, pranced in formation in the cavalry company formed and captained by his uncle Tillman Watson. On the right hand of Edgefield’s own Governor Andrew Pickens, who saluted the new volunteers from the terrace, stood Mama’s cousin Selden Tilghman, the first volunteer from Edgefield District and its first casualty. Called forth to inspire his townsmen, the young cavalry officer used one crutch to raise and wave the blue-red crisscross flag of the Confederacy.

  Governor Pickens thundered, “May the brave boys of Edgefield defend to the death the honor and glory of our beloved South Carolina, first sovereign state to secede from the Yankee Union!” And Cousin Selden, on some mad contrary impulse, dared answer the governor’s exhortation by crying out oddly in high tenor voice, “To those brave boys of Edgefield who will sacrifice their lives for our Southern right to enslave the darker members of our species!”