Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

Netta Daniels had led an errant life, working as a tobacco stripper in the Key West cigar factories and marrying often. Despite her trials, she remained a fervent Catholic, never danced nor swore nor slept in the same bed with a man who had been drinking, as I discovered on the night of her arrival.

  “Listen,” I told her the next day, “it’s not seemly for a lady to sleep in the same room with her son. That kind of behavior will not be tolerated on the Bend.” After that, she bunked with me, which is pretty much the way I’d planned it in the first place. She was a few years older than myself, with hazel-green eyes and light brown hair and small cupped ears that made her look kind of crestfallen when she was tired. Still, she was a pretty woman and a willing one. She would clean a little but not much, can our preserves and feed the chickens, do simple cooking and her bounden duty by her master, namely me.

  Erskine mostly ran the boat and slopped the hogs and did a few odd jobs when we could find him. So did Netta’s half brother Stephen, who turned up not long thereafter. Mr. S. S. Jenkins, as he introduced himself, was more commonly called Tant. He was mostly famous for the moonshine or “white lightning” he manufactured from raw sugar and chicken feed (a half sack of corn and a half sack of sugar in a charred oak barrel: that oak barrel, which he lugged everywhere, was his trade secret). Ferment worked quickly in this climate, and the “buck,” as he called it, was ready to distill in about ten days, but Tant was tasting it for flavor long before that. “Comin along real nice, Mister Ed!” he’d whoop, to keep my hopes up, but by the time he got that shine distilled, he had drunk most of it and had to start all over. Sometimes all we got out of the deal were the checkered feed sacks from his corn that Netta saved to make our shirts. Although still a young man, Mr. S. S. Jenkins was twitching like the dickens, he had to fold his arms around his chest just to stay put in his chair.

  Rarely caught in the cane field, Tant fished and hunted our wild food, harvesting wild duck in the creeks and sloughs and sometimes a few of those black pigeons that hurtled up and down the river in the early morning. He was a tall and lanky feller with a small head and a comical tuft for a mustache, and he made me laugh right from the start, distracting my attention from his natural traits of bone laziness and alcohol addiction. Tant understood long before I did that I would tolerate his flaws of character only so long as he kept me amused.

  One day at Chokoloskee, knowing I was watching, this fellow snuck up on Adolphus Santini’s cow pen, causing a regular stampede by poking his head over the fence and ducking down, up and down, over and over, until those critters went crazy with suspense, galumphing around colliding with one another. I got laughing so hard I could hardly find my breath, even when Dolphus ran out hollering. Seeing me there, Old Man Dolphus folded his big arms like an old blue heron folding its big wings. Never said one word.

  Another day we were out shooting white ibis for our supper, back over toward what is now called Watson Prairie. A big gator maybe twelve foot long was crossing some dry palmetto ground between two sloughs, and

  S. S. Jenkins, drunk as usual, yells, “Look here, Mister Ed!” Ran across the clearing and jumped onto that reptile piggyback, threw an arm lock around the jaw, crossed his ankles under the belly, all the while whooping like an Injun. That big gator was so scared it hauled Tant all over the palmettos, you never heard such a racket in your life, and that fool never let go till he hit the water. “That’s the last time I will ever take a bath,” Tant told us when he crawled out on the bank. “Don’t see no sense to it.”

  Tant had always been a bachelor and never so much as considered female companionship except when drunk. One evening he approached his half sister on his hands and knees, said, “Netta, I aim to go get me a bride! All you got to do is recommend me, Netta, and I’ll try to live up to it!” Netta just smiled. She loved Tant the way he was, never tried to change him and never tried to find him a wife, either, knowing how hopeless that would be. Like many a lovable, whimsical feller, Tant Jenkins was a very lonesome man.

  In the breeding season, in late winter and early spring, we hunted the white egret rookeries, stripping the plumes. These we traded to young Louis and Guy Bradley of Flamingo, who had hunted this coast with the Frenchman back in the ’80s. In October, when the long chill nights would knock down the mosquitoes, Tant baited his old traps, using salt mullet, and set a trapline along creek banks for otter, coon, and possum, which all humped along the shoreline at low tide. The rest of the year, forswearing hard liquor, he’d journey up the creeks into the Glades, as far from honest toil as he could go, returning with wild turkey and deer meat and hides from the hammocks and pine islands. The venison and turkey breasts were salted overnight, then smoked for a few days on palmetto platforms over coals. That smoked meat would keep a good long while before it was soaked to remove the salt, then cooked and eaten. The deer hides were stretched on frames and dried; we sold them for credit at the trading posts, along with his gator hide and coon and otter pelts. Occasionally he brought in a big gopher tortoise or swamp rabbits or other varmints; roasted possum tasted almost like young pig if you tasted hard enough, and the white tail meat of a young gator was fine, too. Tant even ate rattlesnakes he’d skinned out—“Fit for a king!” he’d say. Might have tasted like chicken, as he claimed, but he had that snake meat mostly to himself.

  Netta was always disappointed when Stephen, as she called him, failed to bring the small wild key limes and wild grapes. She doted on wild butter beans from the hammock edges and prickly pears dug out for making pie. Occasionally Tant brought palm hearts from the inland hammocks, also coontie root; this sold well in the trading posts as “Florida arrowroot,” a starch for cakes and puddings. However he detested the insect swatting and hard grubbing in hot windless woods that went into every barrel, and the washing and grinding of the pulp, the soaking, fermenting, and drying. For seven cents a pound, he said, that was too much common labor, and anyway, “I can’t abide the feel of sweat and never could.” So Netta mostly baked her dough using salt and boiling water and her bread came out like a loaf of hardtack cracker. Well, we told her, hardtack was better than the gray bread in C. G. McKinney’s trading post, which C. G. himself sold as “fresh wasp nest.”

  Cash being scarce on the frontier, most trade was barter. I’d swap cane syrup for big oranges, two for a penny, or saltwater oysters, sixty cents a barrel. At Key West or Tampa Bay, such treats as coffee beans and olive oil and chocolate were available, and sacks of onions and potatoes from the North. On the Bend, we ate better and a whole lot more than I had ever eaten in my life, which made me worry about Mandy and the children.

  In April of 1895, a baby daughter was delivered to Henrietta by Richard Harden. Her mother named her Minnie after my sister. Having wanted a son, I was ready to call her “Ninny” and be done with it but Netta would not hear of such a joke.

  For a gentle person, Netta had some courage. One day when my old horse Job the Younger would not pull the plow no matter how hard I switched him, I lost my temper and grabbed up a length of two-by-four to knock some sense into his head. Netta called out through the window, “Mister Watson! Don’t you do that, Mister Watson!” I felt sheepish. “Sometimes I’m a damned fool, Netta,” I told her later. I was sorry she had scared herself so bad that she begged forgiveness.

  CASTING ASPARAGUS ON A MAN’S HONOR

  Netta’s mother had made Catholics out of her children and Netta’s sister had married Tino Santini, a Corsican from a Catholic family who saw no sin in rum-running but had no tolerance for common-law marriage, never mind bastards. That Santini gossip about Minnie’s parentage got started after my scrape with Tino’s brother at a produce auction in Key West. I was drunk, they tell me, and Adolphus, too. I meant to leave him a thin scar as a reminder to be more civil to Ed Watson, but unfortunately my knife blade nicked his jugular, splattered Corsican blood across baskets of asparagus, making me look like a bloodthirsty villain. Scurrilous remarks about my past were what had started it. (“Mr. Santini cast asparagus on
a man’s honor,” said Tant Jenkins.) Dolphus wound up in the hospital with a sore throat while I was obliged to fork over what was left of my Arcadia earnings to settle the matter out of court.

  Having pocketed my nine hundred dollars, Santini wrote to Governor Mitchell complaining that his assailant had never been brought before the bar of justice. I learned this from my drinking companion the U.S. Attorney at Key West, who kept me well-informed in legal matters. (When Dolphus learned that I knew about his letter, he lost his zeal for justice, sold his Chokoloskee house, and sailed away to the east coast at the Miami River.)

  Sheriff Knight wanted to hold me in the Key West jail while he looked into Santini’s story that E. J. Watson was a desperado, wanted by the law somewhere out West. With his bald eye and sour nature, Knight had been after me ever since he coughed up the reward in the Will Raymond case. This time he sent away on his new telegraph to find out what he could but I left Key West before word came. The governor’s office sent a query to Sheriff Knight who sent a deputy to bring me in for questioning. Because this deputy, Clarence Till, planned to run for sheriff in the next election, he struck Knight as just the man to travel a hundred miles by sea to a wild river to arrest a dangerous fugitive single-handed. I got the drop on Clarence, took his guns away, and put him straight to work out in the cane. Had more guts than brains but a real nice young feller all the same. After two hard weeks I told him, “Clarence, let that be your lesson.” I put him back into his boat and waved good-bye. Deputy Till thought the world of me and waved back with a big grin. Disgusted with the sheriff, who had made no effort to send after him, he returned to Key West singing my praises as the only man of progress in that wilderness. In later years, Clarence did his best to look the other way when I cut up rough while seek-ing recreation in his city.

  According to a comical card sent by Sam Tolen, the Santini episode had made headline news in the Lake City paper, the culprit Watson being locally well known as a dangerous drunk and an alleged accomplice in the killing of John Hayes. My Mandy, who had arrived in Fort White with the children, made no mention of those lies in her affectionate letter, which simply inquired if my family might come join me. After all her poverty and suffering—and five long years in the Indian nations with no word from her wandering husband—this excellent woman held no bitterness. She had always known the dark side of my nature and deplored it—she would not pretend—but for some reason she still had faith in me and I was grateful.

  As for the children, I missed my pretty Carrie and young Eddie and was somewhat curious to see how baby Lucius had turned out. “He favors me a little, more’s the pity,” Mandy had written. I chuckled, imagining her shy smile as she wrote that, but a moment later, that innocent sweet memory was ousted by a vision of the warm pink muffin of her rump, which stirred my dog loins all the way from Columbia County.

  Netta smelled trouble. I told her straight she would have to make room for my lawfully wedded wife and legal children. “Make room?” Her tone annoyed me. Come to think of it, I said, she’d better clear out down to the last hairpin and take her little Min right along with her. “Clear out, you said? My little Min?” She stood right up to me. “Mis-ter Desperado Watson! Huh!” First time I ever saw this woman truly angry. She called me a liar for persuading her that common law was binding and for never mentioning my “awful lawful wife,” as Tant would call her. Her phony husband having turned out to be some kind of dirty Mormon, she was only too happy to depart forever, never to return, and many other words to that effect.

  I was sad for I loved Netta in her way, but my past had overtaken us and that was that. I left the Bend that afternoon so as not to have to listen to her any further. Stopping briefly at Caxambas, I notified Captain Jim Daniels that his sister needed fetching at the Bend. From there I went on to Fort Myers to talk business with Dr. T. E. Langford and a Mr. Cole who wished to invest in Island Pride, my cane syrup operation.

  Since the Santini story had arrived ahead of me, I was astonished that two such upright citizens would entrust me with their dollars. Seems they were much less interested in Santini’s throat than impressed by what Capt. Bill Collier had told them about how fast that feller Watson got his cane plantation up and running, said Ed had enough brains and ambition to develop the Ten Thousand Islands single-handed. Only thing, Bill warned ’em, that man has a hot temper and never lets too much stand in his way. Jim Cole just grinned. For a good businessman, Cole observed, there were few better recommendations than a nose for opportunity and the nerve to see it through.

  Jim Cole was a big man in cattle and shipping who became one of the first county commissioners. He had married into the Summerlin family which owned the cattle yards at Punta Rassa and was engaged in various enterprises with the Hendrys, who owned half the town. Because he had political ambitions, Cole was noisily civic-minded, claimed he aimed to drag Fort Myers into the Twentieth Century whether folks liked it or not. A few years later, he paved over the white seashell streets for his new auto, the first such contraption folks had ever seen. I associate concrete with Jim Cole—he loved that stuff.

  To ensure their support, Cole put people in his debt. I took his money to build up my syrup business but instead of feeling grateful, I resented it. I reckon he knew that—I never tried to hide it—but as a politician, he could not tolerate unfriendliness and never understood why I disliked having my back slapped by such a big loud jokey feller when most men got along with him just fine.

  Jim Cole was out to win Ed Watson to his side or know the reason why. Hearing that the Key West sheriff was still nagging me about Santini, Cole sent Knight a wire saying, “Friend Watson rode in out of the Wild West, he’s one of that freewheeling breed that made this country great.” Knight wired back, “Freebooting, you mean? Don’t tell a lawman not to do his job.” Cole thought this exchange was pretty funny. He looked rattled when I didn’t smile.

  All the same, it was Jim Cole who lined up the local business interests to capitalize my operation and advance me credit, and Dr. T. E. Langford went along. In financial matters, the Langford family did what Cole told them. Before anything could occur to change their mind, I placed an order with Bill Collier for a cargo of Dade County pine, then hired two carpenters to come to Chatham Bend and help me build a good big house, a better dock, a boat shed and attached dormitory for harvest workers, with down payment in advance and the balance billed to the account of the Watson Syrup Company, Chatham River, c/o Chokoloskee, Florida, U.S.A.

  WORKS AND DAYS

  The great day came when I sailed north with Erskine Thompson to meet my family at the new railroad terminus at Punta Gorda. For the first time since he was one month old, I gazed upon Lucius Hampton Watson, a fair-haired handsome quiet little boy, aged seven. Squealing, my sweet Carrie ran to jump and hug me—Papa! Papa!—while Edward Elijah Watson frowned at his sister and furrowed his brow before stepping up and shaking hands in a stern manly fashion. “Good day, Father,” this young fellow said. “I am very happy to renew our acquaintance.” And finally Mandy shyly took my hand, bending her forehead to my chest to hide her tears. Only Sonborn—I might have known—stood to one side, spoiling for a showdown. I was struck afresh by his resemblance to his mother, the pallid, almost pretty face with the vivid red spots on the cheeks and what Mandy called a poet’s long black lock of hair over his eyes.

  I led my poor exhausted troupe to a dinner at the Hotel Punta Gorda, an immense pile of masonry with corner turrets and big central tower, thrown together a few years before when this Gulf fishing camp became the southern terminus of the west coast railroad. The hotel contained over five hundred empty rooms, more than enough to bed every human being on this southwest coast. As Eddie rolled his eyes for his father’s benefit, Carrie ran wild down the corridors with Lucius hard behind, although both were near tears with fatigue from their long journey.

  At supper, my rambunctious daughter declared for the whole dining room to hear, “I bet they wouldn’t never dare to serve us beets!” T
hen the waiter arrived, and he says, “Folks, if there’s one item on our menu you just better try, that’s our fresh beets.” And Carrie sings out, “Well, Mister Waiter, if I was you, I’d just hold back on them beets. If it looks like a beet or tastes like a beet, let alone stinks like a beet, don’t you dare bring it to our Watson table.”

  The boys seized this excuse to whoop, we were all laughing, even Rob, although Mandy pretended to be shocked by her daughter’s “wild deportment, uncouth speech, and frontier grammar.” Even Erskine Thompson, who was to sour at an early age, smiled a smile as thin as a hairline crack in glass.

  Sailing south next day, we stopped off for the night at Panther Key to let my inland family hear sea stories told by old Juan Gomez, famous ex-pirate and world champion liar who came to an end a few years later when he tangled his foot in his old cast net and threw himself overboard and drowned at his official age of one hundred twenty-three. Next morning we trolled fish lines south, had good fishing all the way to Chatham River. Infected by old Gomez with the ambition to be pirates, the boys shouted in excitement as the schooner came in off the Gulf and negotiated the river’s hidden entrance. I pointed out the tropic hardwood forest rising behind the mangrove walls as we tacked upstream, and the red gumbo-limbos found on Indian mounds and in swamp country near high water which were always sign of high ground and good soil. “Gumber-limber,” Lucius laughed, enjoying those funny words, as Eddie shook his head in pity.

  Once they saw that white house and realized it was ours, the children could not stop hollering. They scarcely listened to my short Indian history of this shell mound nor glanced at my thirty-acre field but leapt off the boat and ran ahead. Walking from the dock toward her house, Mandy dabbed her eyes and sniffled as she smiled; she could scarcely speak.

  With shingled roof and walls white-painted inside and out—real oil paint, too, not some old whitewash, I told her—the Watson place was the finest house between Fort Myers and Key West, with hardwood floors and a parlor on the riverfront with a fine view. On the west side were two full bedrooms and a small sewing room that Mandy would be using as a schoolroom; she had a good big indoor kitchen with woodstove in the north side wing. Mounting from the hall was a full staircase with a polished ma-hogany rail—the only full staircase south of Tampa Bay. On the second story, two bedrooms faced the river, and in back were five small children’s rooms and a big linen closet off the stairwell. All the rooms had double beds and the bigger rooms two doubles each.