Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  The boy had heard about this mangy bastard and was scared to death. We drifted down around the Bend, keeping our distance. There was a loose palmetto shack on there, and smoke, but when I hailed, no answer came, only soft mullet slap and the whisper of the current, and a scratchy wisp of birdsong from the clearing. The boy slid the skiff along under the bank, put me ashore. I told him to row out beyond gunshot range but stay in sight as a warning to Will Raymond that there was a witness. Not till the skiff was safe away did I call out once or twice, then stick my head above the bank to have a look. Nothing moving, nothing in sight. I rose up slow, keeping my hands well out to the sides, and nervously wasted my best smile on a raggedy young girl who retreated back inside the rotted shack.

  All this while, Will Raymond had me covered. I could feel the iron of his weapon and its hungry muzzle, and my heart felt naked and my chest flimsy and pale beneath my shirt, but I was up there in one piece with my revolver up my sleeve, smiling hard and looking all around to enjoy the view.

  Hearing a hard and sudden cough like a choked dog, I turned to confront an ugly galoot who had stepped out from behind his shack. Unshaven, barefoot, in soiled rags and an old broken hat, he stunk like a dead animal on that river wind. Even after I presented my respects, his coon rifle remained trained on my stomach, his finger twitching on the trigger. I’d seen plenty of this scurvy breed in the backcountry, all the way from Oklahoma east and south, knife-mouthed piney-woods crackers, holloweyed under black hats, and lean-faced females with lank hair like horses and sour-smelling babes in long hard stringy arms. Men go crazy every little while and shoot somebody. Seems Will had done that more’n once in other parts, got the bad habit of it. With his red puffy eyes like sores, Will Raymond looked rotted out by drink but also steady as a stump—a very unsettling combination in a dangerous man.

  The muzzle of a shooting iron at point-blank range looks like a black hole leading straight to Hell but I did my best to keep on smiling. Mr. Raymond, said I, I am here today with an interesting business proposition. Yessir, I said, you are looking at a man ready and willing to pay hard cash for the quit-claim to a likely farm on the high ground—this place, for instance. Two hundred dollars, for instance (a fair offer for squatter’s rights in this cash-poor economy, Erskine had told me).

  Will Raymond wore a wild unlimbered look and his manners were not good. He never so much as introduced me to his females, who kept popping their heads out of their hole like the prairie dogs back in Oklahoma. In fact he made no response at all except to cough and spit in my direction Whatever he dredged up from his racked lungs. However, that mention of cold cash had set him thinking. His squint narrowed. While estimating how much money might be removed from my dead body, he was considering that boy out on the river, who was doing his best to hold his skiff against the current. Will Raymond had reached a place in life where he had very little left to lose.

  He coughed again, that same hard bark. “If you are lookin for a farm at the ass end of Hell, seventy mile by sea from the nearest market, and have a likin for the company of man-eatin miskeeters and nine-foot rattlers and river sharks and panthers and crocky-diles and every kind of creepin varmint ever thunk up by the Lord to bedevil His sinners—well then, this looks like your kind of a place.”

  “That’s right, sir!” I sang out cheerily.

  “No sir, it sure ain’t, cause I am on here first. And next time, sir, you go to trespissin without my say-so, sir, I will blow your fuckin head off. Any questions?”

  “Not a one,” said I in the same carefree tone. I signaled for my boat. While waiting, I ventured to look around a little more, thinking how much my Mandy might enjoy these two big red-blossomed poincianas. “Yessir, a fine day on the river. Makes a man feel good to be alive.”

  He spat his phlegm again.“You got maybe ten more seconds to feel alive in, mister. After that you ain’t goin to feel nothin.”

  Under my coat, the .38 lay along my forearm, set to drop into my hand. To drill this polecat in his tracks would have been a mercy to everyone concerned, especially his poor drag-ass females. Instead I climbed into the skiff and headed downriver. What I needed more than anything right now was a reputation as an upright citizen, so I put aside my motto of “good riddance to bad rubbish” in favor of “every dog must have its day.” This dog had had his day at Chatham Bend and mine would come next or my name wasn’t Jack Watson, which it wasn’t.

  Will Raymond observed our skiff until we passed behind the trees on the next bend. His figure stood there black and still as a cypress snag out in the swamp, his old Confederate long rifle on his shoulder like the scythe of Death. Out on the coast again, looking back, I noted with approval that the mouth of Chatham River, all broken up by mangrove clumps, would pass unseen by any vessel, even from a quarter mile offshore.

  CAYO HUESO OR BONE KEY OR KEY WEST

  At the end of that week, sailing to Key West, I had my first look at Lost Man’s River, said to be the wild heart of this whole wilderness. In Shark River, farther south, huge dark mangroves rose to eighty and a hundred feet in an unbroken wall: the boy happened to know these were the largest in the world. From Shark River, the mangrove coast continued to Cape Sable, the long white beach where Juan Ponce de León and his conquistadors went ashore in heavy armor and clanked inland in wet and heavy heat to conquer the salt flats and marl scrub and brown brackish reach of a dead bay.

  From Cape Sable our course led offshore along the western edge of great pale banks of sand, with turquoise sand channels and emerald keys on the port side and a thousand-mile blue reach of Gulf to starboard. Erskine pointed when he heard the puff of tarpon as one of these mighty silver fishes leapt clear of the sea: farther offshore, giant black manta rays leapt, too, crashing down in explosions of white water.

  In late afternoon the spars of an armada of great ships rose slowly from the sunny mists in the southern distance. Cayo Hueso or Bone Key. Early in the nineteenth century, Bone Key, now called Key West, had been built up as a naval base to suppress piracy on the high seas, but these days Key West pirates lived on shore as ship’s chandlers, salvagers, and lawyers.

  On a southwest wind, the Veatlis passed the Northwest Light and tacked into the channel. Who would have imagined such a roadstead as the Key West Bight, so far from the mainland at the end of its long archipelago of small salt keys? Or so many masts, so many small craft, so much shout and bustle? New York merchantmen and Havana schooners mixed with old sailing craft from the Cayman Islands, fetching live green turtle to the water pens near Schooner Wharf for delivery to the turtle-canning factory down the shore, Erskine explained. Tacking and luffing, servicing the ships, were whole flotillas of “smackee” sloops with baggy Bahamian mainsails, dropping their canvas as they slipped up alongside—reef fishermen with live fish in the sloop’s well, hawking snappers to the Key West Market and king mackerel to the Havana traders. The sponges drying in open yards ashore were shipped to New York on the Mallory Line, which supplied and victualed this city.

  Having unloaded our cordwood cargo into horse-drawn carts backed down into the shallows, we went ashore. Key West is a port city, with eighteen thousand immigrants and refugees of every color—eighteen times as many human beings as could be found on the entire southwest coast, all the way north two hundred miles to Tampa Bay. The island is seven miles by three, and the town itself, adjoining the old fort, is built on natural lime-stone rock. The white shell streets are potholed, narrow, with broken sidewalks and stagnant rain puddles and small listless mosquitoes. Coco palms lean over the green-shuttered white houses in shady yards of bright flowers and tropical trees. Sweet-blossomed citrus, banyans, date palms, almonds and acacias, tamarind and sapodilla—so an old lady instructed me when I inquired about which trees might do well on a likely plantation farther north in Chatham River.

  While in Key West, I paid a call on the Monroe County sheriff, Richard Knight, in regard to a certain notorious fugitive depicted on the Wanted notice in the post office. The
murderer Will Raymond, I advised him, could be found right up the coast in Chatham River. The sheriff knew this very well and was sorry to be reminded of it. He sighed as he bit off his cigar. My report would oblige him to send out a posse when, like most lawmen, enjoying the modest graft of elected office, he much preferred to defer these thorny matters.

  Taking the chair the sheriff had not offered, I said I sure hated to cause trouble for Mr. Raymond, but as a law-abiding citizen, I knew my duty. Looking up for the first time, Knight said, sardonic, “That mean you won’t be needing the reward?”

  Sheriff Knight and I understood each other right from the first, and our understanding was this: we did not like each other. But a few days later, a sheriff ’s posse laid off the river mouth until three in the morning, then drifted upriver with the tide (as I’d advised them), and had four men ashore before they hollered to Will Raymond to come out with his hands up. Will yelled he’d be damned if he’d go peaceable, and whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it, but he was peaceable as he could be by the time the smoke cleared. They flung his carcass in the boat and offered his widow their regrets along with a kind invitation to accompany the deceased on a nice boat ride to Key West, and the widow said, “Why, thankee, boys, I don’t mind if I do.”

  On my next visit, when I went to the sheriff ’s office to offer my congratulations, I happened to mention the information which brought justice to Will Raymond. Wincing, he slid open a drawer and forked over $250 in hard cash reward without a word.

  I never kept a penny of that money. I went straight over to Peg’s boardinghouse on White Street and offered it to the Widow Raymond as a consolation in her time of bereavement. By now, the Widow was looking a lot better or at least a good deal cleaner. Perky, she said, “Mr. Stranger, this sure is my lucky day and you sure are my savior, bless your heart!” She offered corn spirits and a simple repast, then took me straight to bed, out of pure gratitude and the milk of human kindness.

  Buttoning up, I mentioned the late Mr. Raymond’s quit-claim, and she implored me to accept it with her compliments, declaring her sincere and fervent hope that she would never set eyes on that cursed place again. Altogether, a touching story with a happy ending. I strode away to the docks with a lilting heart, confident at last that my path in life had made a turning in the right direction.

  On my next voyage to Key West, I encountered Captain N. N. Penny, a fine, fierce fellow with a cigar thrusting from the very center of his mouth who had made his mark hauling freed slaves to Liberia after the Civil War; However, his clipper ship would arrive in port somewhere up the coast only a few days later without its cargo; also missing was the heavy anchor chain he was rumored to replace after each voyage. Even today Cap’n Penny was renowned as a practical man who would march his cargo overboard rather than risk capture by a federal vessel. We exchanged but a few words before he recognized me as another man who meant to get ahead in life and entrusted me with the information that the commerce in human beings which had made our nation great was by no means dead. Chinese coolies and other illegal immigrants would gladly pay enterprising captains to set them ashore in Florida, where most wound up as indentured labor for the new railroad companies, resort hotels, large-scale drainage schemes, and development enterprises seeking to bring both of Florida’s wild coasts into the modern world. It made his red blood tingle and his pockets jingle, quoth this jolly patriot, to contribute prime “Chinks” to Florida’s exciting future.

  Captain Penny and I were especially convivial since we shared a liking for hard drink and dark humor; he suggested that we might “do some business.” However, I had already perceived that Penny was only a small cog (a very large small cog) in the great engine of our nation’s progress. The very next day, introduced by Penny at the Catherine Street mansion of the cigar tycoon Teodoro Pérez, I made the acquaintance of Napoleon Broward, Esq., who was already preparing for the dashing role in Cuban liberation which would get him elected governor of Florida a few years later. With Mr. Broward was the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, a pale small man, very thin and tense, with more hair in his long sad moustachios than on his pate: José Martí’s financial support in the fight for Cuban independence came mostly from these rich cigar manufacturers in Key West and Tampa.

  Napoleon Broward was a bold sanguinary man of direct action, in the mold of Gould and Astor, Carnegie and Frick—in short, a man who could be counted on not to be squeamish about how the nation’s progress was achieved while never losing sight of his private interests, whether in politics or in industry and business. To the sweet chortling of redbirds, which our cultivated Spanish host displayed in small wicker cages like crimson canaries, Broward spoke admiringly of Hamilton Disston, who had pioneered the shipping canal connecting Lake Okeechobee to the Calusa Hatchee River and the Gulf, and I made bold to mention some of my own ideas about the drainage of the Everglades for large-scale agriculture and also the eventual development of the virgin southwest coast and the Ten Thousand Islands. Here Broward raised his beetled brows: “Hold on there, my friend.” Mistaking our host, Señor Pérez, for the butler, he snapped his fingers and commanded him to fetch Mr. Watson and himself another round of brandy and cigars.

  Broward remarked that we had common interests and must by all means stay in touch. By the time we met again in the year following, I had studied all the Everglades reports, all the way back to the visionary schemes of Buckingham Smith, who had written the first drainage recommendation in the days of the Seminole Wars; I also furnished him the details of that 1850 Act of Congress which had patented this entire “swamp-and-overflowed wilderness” to the state of Florida. As early as the 1860s, a colonel of the Army Engineers had estimated that if Lake Okeechobee’s water level could be lowered by six feet, nine inches—the approximate fall from the lake to the Atlantic—the vast wetlands from the Kissimmee River south could be settled and cultivated without fear of annual overflow and flood.

  “By God, Watson, you intrigue me!” Flushed and fulsome, Broward vowed that if he were ever to be elected governor as was his ambition, E. J. Watson would be summoned to the state capital at once to help set Glades development in motion. “You’re an up-and-coming feller, Ed,” Nap said warmly as we parted. “If I am elected, you can write your own damn ticket.” By God, I thought, it’s happening! I’m on my way!

  ON CHATHAM BEND

  Taking a Key West nigra and a mule, I went straight home to Chatham Bend. With some half-ass help from Erskine Thompson, who placed little value on hard labor, I got that high ground in production in a hurry since there was no real forest to contend with. The Calusa who had a village here before the Seminole Wars had kept the jungle down, and since then, a fisherman, Richard Harden, then the old plume hunter Jean Chevelier—the last occupant before the late Will Raymond—had burned it over every year to discourage jungle scrub. What settlers wanted around any dwelling was nice bare ground that provided no cover for bad snakes, not to mention the no-see-ums and mosquitoes. In regard to discomfort and disease, the most dangerous creature in the Glades by far was the mosquito, which had driven men cast away or stranded on this coast to madness, even death.

  With the rains in spring and fall, the river became a broad and burly flood, sandy brown and heavy with Glades silt, leaving thick crusts on the marl behind the mangrove fringes. Because the river was brackish from the tides, what we drank (before my rain gutters and a cistern were put in) was dead water from a rain barrel, and very glad to have that, too, in this salt country. That first year I built a palmetto log house with palm thatch roof—two big rooms and an outside kitchen. Next came a small dock, then a big shed, then a pasture with limb fenceposts cut from the red gumbo-limbo tree, which will take root when stuck into the ground. By the end of the year, my horse Job, a mule, a milk cow, and five hogs cohabited the old Raymond shack—more livestock than any settler south of Chokoloskee. All that was missing now was Mandy and the children.

  Clearing off that second growth was hot and wearisome,
and turning over the black soil, packed hard with shell, was worse. That shell had to be chipped out with a pickax, though once it was reduced to soil, it was black and fertile. I started out with tomatoes and peppers, then peas, beets, radishes, and turnips. All sprouted fine, but by the time we got our produce to Key West, it looked old and limp, half-spoiled. We grew our kitchen vegetables, of course, and planted fruit trees—bananas, mangoes, guavas, papayas, citrus.

  Chatham Bend was the first good ground I ever worked on my own behalf rather than leasing or sharecropping for someone else, but truck farming would never make my fortune in the Islands. The following year we cleared more ground and grew a crop of sugarcane on about ten acres. Cane is a cast-iron plant that can survive flood, fire, and brief freezing and does not spoil in the shipping like fresh produce. As a perennial, it yields four or five crops before new cuttings must be planted: I worked out how to double-crop with cow peas to restore the soil and planned to rest each section every few years, leaving it fallow. Learning quickly that cane stalks were too bulky to ship economically to a market eighty miles away, I increased crop acreage, brought a crew in for the harvest, and switched to the manufacture of cane syrup—the first planter in the Islands ever to try it. (I had already replaced the small Veatlis with a sixty-eight-foot schooner called the Gladiator.)

  The cane harvest extended till late winter, early spring, when I got rid of all my crew except Erskine and my new housekeeper, Henrietta Daniels, Erskine’s mother. Though glad to have a roof over her head, Netta was terrified of the wild people, and hid back in the house at the first glimpse of a dugout—very strange, since many of her Daniels kin had Injun blood.