Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  In this great depression year of 1893, Cousin Selden’s cousin Ben Tillman and his rabble-rousers would found their own Populist Party, which jeered at other parties (and the press) for their shameful subservience to the industrialists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians. The Populists joined with factory workers and the small black vote to go after the capitalists, who hogged all the profits and bribed the police to pound on any who protested while permitting the poor to starve in the cause of progress. Pitchfork Ben would go on to win election to the U.S. Senate, taking his safe seat away from Calbraith Butler. But very soon, Ben would revert to the know-nothing nigger-baiting of his snag-toothed faithful, who had barely scraped acquaintance with the English language. Maht not know nuthin but Ah sho’ knows whut Ah know! By that time, he had lost his black supporters. “The negro has been infected with the virus of equality,” he complained.

  Pitchfork Ben would go far in life with his foaming at the mouth about black rapists out to sully the sacred honor of our Southern womanhood. As my fellow fugitive Frank Reese had once observed, only white rapists could be found in prison because black ones never got that far alive.

  Next morning, crossing the Savannah on the ferry, I headed south to Waycross, over east of the Okefenokee. There I hunted in vain for Lemuel Collins, being curious to hear my erstwhile friend explain why he’d shifted the blame for the John Hayes killing onto Edgar Watson. However, I was able to locate that Mr. Smith who had kindly befriended me on my first journey south back in 1870. We went to a tavern for some talk. Remembering my name, he cocked his head to look at me more carefully. Finally he told me that a young feller named Watson had got himself lynched here in this district just a few years back. “Kind of looked like you, is why I mentioned it. Jack Watson. Ever hear of him?”

  “Nosir, I never did.”

  “Ain’t nobody forgot Jack Watson, not around here,” Mr. Smith was still disturbed. “White as you or me to look at but called himself a nigger. ‘Nigger to the bone!’ Had to be crazy as a shithouse rat but he showed plenty of sand there at the last of it.” Eager to relate the whole grim story, he was only restrained by my show of indifference. “Lynchings are all pretty much alike,” I said, “when you get right down to it.”

  Mr. Smith invited me home to wash my feet and meet the daughters. There were four if I counted correctly, and every one a head taller than their guest, huge strong young females twice my weight who ate like stallions and drank me right under the table. Once their daddy had turned in with a loud snoring, those giant girls came down there after me and played hell with the clean duds their dad had lent me while mine got a wash. I never saw such love-starved critters in my life. The biggest lugged me over to her cornshuck mattress to finish up the job and I do believe the others had their way with me before the smoke cleared. I did my best but never got the hang of ’em some way, they just weren’t built right. I was glad to make my getaway next morning, clawed and gnawed up pretty good but in one piece.

  The daughter known as Little Hannah would loom into my life again years later, by which time, with no sisters around to steal her thunder, she was called Big Hannah. By then we couldn’t quite recall just what had taken place under that table, but it made Hannah blush. “You had you a whole heap of young womanhood, for sure,” she giggled, “and done pretty good with it, too.”

  MISS JANE STRAUGHTER

  Crossing into Florida, I headed south along the river road on the west bank of the Suwannee. All the world is sad and dreary everywhere I roam—that’s how that old song really feels to a man way down upon the Suwannee River in swamp forest in dark winter weather, all that Spanish moss like dead gray hair and doleful vultures hunched on the black snags. I sorely missed dear Mandy and the children and worried how they might be getting on. I didn’t even know if Baby Lucius had made it through his first hard winter. For his sake, I kind of hoped he hadn’t.

  Cypress Creek, White Springs on the Suwannee. Next day I crossed the county line into Columbia but waited till night to ride down past Lake City. No one at Fort White was looking for me but I stayed close to the woods, taking no chances. On the books I was a dead man, drowned in the muddy Arkansas, and I meant to keep it that way, because being dead was the only way I’d ever found to stay out of trouble.

  Determined to get things straight with Billy Collins, I went to his house first. Little Julian Edgar, close to my Eddie’s age, was already a fine young feller, four years old, and we went hand-in-hand to find his mama. A second boy was toddling around the stove and an infant was toiling at my sister’s breast, keeping an eye on me over the tit. With the baby fussing, Minnie did not notice our delegation in the cookhouse door, being pleasured in her nursing in a way that is rarely hidden by that innocent air of milky sweet selfsatisfaction peculiar to young mothers, who imagine themselves and their yowling stinky bundle on a golden cloud at the heart of all Creation. But standing back to consider my sister after these years away, I had to acknowledge that other men might admire this scared creature. With her alabaster skin and full red lips, Minnie was pretty, even beautiful, but to me her flesh looked spiritless as ever, with no more spring in it than suet.

  “Company for supper, Nin,” I whispered.

  She gasped, backing away. Deathly afraid for her dear Billy, her eyes implored me even as she babbled how overjoyed she was to see her long-lost brother. If she stayed out of the way while I finished up my business with him, everything would probably come out all right, I told her. Not knowing what “probably” might mean, she started crying.

  When Collins came, I was sitting on his porch, in the exact same spot I had sat five years before. He stopped short at the gate. Seeing little Julian on my knee, he mustered up some courage, came ahead. “Well, Edgar,” he started, kind of gruff, “this sure is a pleasant surprise.”

  “So I imagine.”

  Minnie came rushing out to greet her husband before her brother had a chance to do away with him. She told us both how thrilled she was that I was making such good friends with little Julian. I waved her back inside, wishing to query her husband in peace about local attitudes toward Edgar Watson. Was it safe to come back here, send for my family? I demanded an honest answer, granting him a little time to think that over.

  A lovely girl with a shadow in her skin brought a pail of milk, waved cheerily, and went away again. “Who’s that?” I said. “Depends,” said Billy, “but she is called Jane Straughter.” Our eavesdropping Minnie giggled from inside, and Billy said, “Her daddy might be your old friend J. C. Robarts.” I thought about Jane Straughter all that evening. She had made me very, very restless. I wondered later if I knew right then that I meant to have her.

  At supper I told most of my news, how a son Lucius had been born in Arkansas, how I had paid a call on our male parent. Minnie said, “O Lord, Edgar, you didn’t—” She could not speak it and I did not explain. Minnie would never believe the truth, not even if I’d shot her father with six bullets and nailed him tight into his coffin, to end her dread that Ring-Eye Lige might one day track her south to Florida. She would be rapturous with re-lief at first, then flail herself because she hadn’t grieved. My poor sister was condemned by her badly broken nature to find torment in every circumstance while seeking in all directions for forgiveness.

  Having stolen Cousin Laura’s foolish heart, Sam Frank Tolen was hot after her money and had already renamed our place Tolen Plantation. Sam had made such a mess of the family cabin that Auntie Tab had gone ahead with the construction of the two-story plantation house that William Myers had been planning when he died. Meanwhile dear Mama, Minnie said, had been made to feel unwelcome under the Tolen roof and was anxious to come live in this small house, help take care of her grandchildren. “Unless she brings Aunt Cindy, she’ll be no help at all,” Minnie complained. “We’ll be sure to give her your respects,” she added nervously as if I were just leaving.

  I wasn’t figuring on going anyplace, I said, I wanted to come home and settle down. I turned to B
illy, who frowned deeply, weighing his words. “If I were you, Edgar, I would not come home just yet,” he said, all in a breath. This community still figured that somebody should pay for the Hayes killing. I was sure to be arrested. And even if I escaped conviction I was a

  wanted man in Arkansas where I would be returned in chains.

  “Wanted in Arkansas? And how do you know that?”

  Billy was ready. “Sheriff ’s office in Lake City was notified by telegraph to be on the lookout for an E. A. Watson.”

  “That was the first news we had that you might be alive!” cried my pale sister, as her babe suckled, watching me sideways out of shining eyes.

  “Also,” Billy continued, “Will Cox has been taking good care of your cabin so you won’t have to worry about that.”

  I sat silent, thinking my life over. Life was great and life was terrible and life could not be one without the other, that I knew, which don’t mean I understood this or approved it. Doesn’t. I was saddle sore and weary and begrimed by life, and mortally homesick for a home I had never had unless it was across these woods in my old cabin with Charlie. I couldn’t go home to Clouds Creek and I couldn’t come home to Fort White. I would have to start all over someplace else.

  Seeing my grim expression, my kin were sick with dread, looking away like they’d been whipped across the mouth. The Collins clan, not to mention the Watson women at the plantation—the whole damned bunch, in short—would be greatly relieved if Edgar Watson would make himself scarce for a few more years if not the remainder of his life. Billy was too eager to tell me about the Smallwood and McKinney families who had moved south to Fort Ogden and Arcadia. “Man could do a heck of a lot worse than a fresh start down in that new country, that’s what they wrote back to their kinfolks.” He frowned to show how much honest cogitation he’d put into this matter. “Yessir, Ed, a hell of a lot worse!” That was the first time I ever heard a Collins swear in the presence of a woman. I winced and shifted as if mortally offended, to see if Minnie would squeal “Bill-lee!” which of course she did.

  Sprawled in the old rocker while Nin scurried to find bedding, I told him, “I will head on south, send for my family when I find a place.” Ninny fetched me Mandy’s address at Broken Bow in the Indian Territory, so relieved I would be gone by daybreak that she promised the family would send to Arkansas for my wife and children and take good care of them until they could rejoin me. They also promised they would tell Will Cox to keep an eye out for a nigra named Frank Reese, give him some work despite his hard appearance.

  Those Collinses were greatly relieved to see the dawn. “You haven’t seen hide nor hair of me,” I reminded Billy, who came outside as I swung up into the saddle. The moon was going down behind the pinelands. “Last you heard, Ed Watson is dead in Arkansas.”

  “Watson is dead,” he nodded earnestly.

  ARCADIA

  I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling—why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do.

  Bear and panther sign were everywhere in this wild country. Plenty of deer and wild boar, too, and scrub cattle spooked on their dim trails through the palmetto. I tended south and east along what one old bush rat called the Yeehaw Marshes, from the yee and haw of the wagon harness of the pioneers moving south down the peninsula. In the Peace River country, I met a man planting wild oranges. He had high hopes that citrus would do well here and invited me to throw in with him; I thanked him but said no. I aimed to clear my own piece of the backcountry. Next morning I rode down along the river and on into Arcadia that afternoon.

  As far away as the Arkansas prison, the word was out that a closemouthed man easy with horse and gun could make good money a lot faster in De Soto County, Florida, than anywhere west of the Mississippi. Unlike most prison rumors, this one turned out to be true. For a few years in the early nineties, the range wars around Arcadia beat anything the Wild West had to offer. The ranchers were advertising for more gunslingers as far off as St. Louis and every outfit had its own gang of riders. With so many rough men in the saloons, a man could get his fill of fighting any time he wanted and be lulled to sleep at night by the pop of gunfire. A lot of these brawls might start with fists but every man was quick to use a weapon before the other feller beat him to it. Fifty bloody fights a day were not uncommon, it was claimed; four men were killed in one shootout alone. The year before, a new brick jail had to be built to hold the overflow, and as it turned out, that new jail saved my life.

  A rancher with the wherewithal could hire new riders any day at the nearest saloon, but Arcadia House was where you met all the best people, and a stranger could lean back on the bar and wait there like a whore to be looked over. I had hardly started on my second whiskey when a big man, Durrance, bought my third. Will Durrance spoke of the hard feelings over the rangeland on Myakka Prairie and the cattle rustling all across the county—not just one steer shot to eat by some mangy cracker in the piney woods but whole damn herds up to a hundred head. Most of that range was unfenced and choked with dry palmetto thicket. A steer could wander halfway across Florida, get lost for two years before it wandered out again, and never be missed. Plenty of calves were dropped in the deep scrub and went unbranded, so naturally, an enterprising man burned his own brand as fast as he could get a rope on ’em, figuring the next man along would do the same. Local hospitality for any stranger in the bush was to hang him from the nearest oak for peace of mind. “Better safe than sorry” was a popular expression. A lone rider who wanted to arrive some place picked his own route across cattle country, telling no one.

  I was here to put a stake together for a new start in life and had vowed to avoid trouble but Arcadia was no place to say any such thing, not if you wanted a good job. I told Durrance Jack Watson was his man.

  “Well, now, Jack, I reckon you know how to ride?”

  “Well, now, Will, I rode here from Arkansas by way of Carolina and never split my ass in two, not so’s you’d notice, so I reckon I’ll make it ten miles out to Myakka Prairie.” Durrance paid down cash for my drinks, supper, and bed, also the first real bath since I swam the Arkansas, and he threw in a week’s pay in advance.

  Next morning I bought me a shave and a new blue denim shirt and rode out to the ranch. Will Durrance lived in a cleared-off pinewood lot fenced with barbed wire. His two-story house had windows high up on the outside wall—too high for assassins to shoot through even from horseback, Durrance explained. He set out a tobacco can and gave me and two other hands new Winchester repeating rifles, saying, “All right, boys, let’s see how good you can shoot these Winnies.” The other two shot well enough when they lined up each shot, and Durrance nodded: they slid their new repeaters into saddle scabbards, grinning. To buy these new-model Winnies would cost ’em two months’ pay. Come my turn, I danced that can all the way across the cowpen about as fast as I could pull the trigger, till Durrance hollers, “That’s enough, Jack, for Chrissakes! Don’t go wastin them good bullets!”

  His cow hunters, as they call ’em here in Florida, looked me over sideways, rolling smokes. Two backwoods brothers by the name of Granger, tall bony fellers with single thick black brows over long noses, looked like T’s. I knew this breed, knew that easing by in life was their ambition: Durrance must have signed them on to keep ’em from rustling his stray beefs. The frowns on those T faces told me they were worried this man Watson might set a bad example, make ’em earn their keep. This Jack was no sodbuster, not the way he handled that repeater: this feller had gunslinger written all over him, and trouble, too.

&
nbsp; Will Durrance confided that his life was threatened by a feller named Quinn Bass, the bad news in a big cattle clan around Kissimmee. Young Quinn liked to play with gun or knife “with any man at any time on any terms and on any provocation”—that was his boast. Quinn had escaped from the new jail where he was held in the killing of a nigra and what he did was go straight over and kill that nigra’s friend who’d been arm-twisted to testify against him, and now he was walking around town acting untouchable. Because the citizenry was naturally upset by the expense and failure of their new jail, not to speak of the failure to arrest an escaped criminal charged with two murders, the sheriff had posted a reward of one thousand dollars for the capture of Quinn Bass, dead or alive.

  Having lost faith in the law and having seen me shoot, Durrance made me a financial proposition: he’d add $500.00 bounty to the sheriff ’s reward if for some reason Quinn was brought in dead.

  I was a Carolina Watson and a farmer, not a hired gun, but I guess you could say I’d become a desperado, if that word means a man driven to desperation by ill fortune. At thirty-six, after a hard year in prison and a hard escape, I had no prospects—nothing to show for those long years of toil and deprivation but an undeserved criminal record and a forsaken family, pining away in the rough hinterlands beyond the Mississippi. I was deter-mined to make a fresh start in southwest Florida and avoid any more trouble and equally determined to succeed here in Arcadia in what might well be my last chance to seize hold of my life and take it back. If money was what was needed, a man could not be squeamish about the means, and anyway, I would be doing a good deed. Arcadia’s citizens were tired of Quinn Bass, who was a menace to society, even this one; the time had come to put a stop to him. Yet no matter how often I told myself this young killer was better off dead, I had no right to deprive him of his life as a business proposition.