Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  I threw him out but I already knew that this one was going to be back. Sure enough, when that man bled to death, Zachariah accosted me again, demanding better pay and safer work conditions. A young cutter named Ted had caught his fever, helped him organize a strike for the first day of the harvest unless Island Pride met their demands.

  From his new mansion at Palm Beach on the east coast, Mr. Henry Flagler was dealing with foreign syndicates and immigrant labor and all kinds of communistical ideas, but he also had hard overseers to deal with troublemakers and he brought in strikebreakers. These thugs enforced their own idea of law and order on his rail line, up to and including capitalist punishment, as Tant called it, and other big new industries around the country were doing the same: announced they’d never negotiate with commie scum, then nailed ’em hard and quick before the journalists arrived and trouble spread, same way they took care of the strikers in the mines.

  These business leaders we celebrate as great Americans let nothing stand in the way of their own ambitions—that’s the secret of their greatness. Such men are more than willing to invest their workers’ lives so long as they are spared all the unpleasantness. Never have to bloody their soft hands or hear about excessive violence, not if their lieutenants know their work: Go out and play yer golf game, Boss, enjoy yer nice sea air. Soon as the owner is safely off the property, armed men rush the unarmed strikers: Dirty dagos! Want yer wop heads busted? Never wait for an answer, just sail right in with clubs and pistols, smash a few faces, break some arms, and run the rest off the property unpaid. Those men lying on the ground who never stand up again turn out to be the very troublemakers they were after in the first place, and someway there are never consequences, no investigation, because the press is kept away and the law, too. “Hardest fight I ever fought,” Henry Flagler told reporters the next day, this rich sonofabitch who never saw one minute of the fighting. His henchmen spared him all the ugliness and bloodshed.

  If we had gone after Zachariah that same way, the harvest strike at Island Pride would have been over quick. In the rough justice of the American frontier, men who stood in the way of Twentieth Century progress had only themselves to blame. Can’t make coffee without mashing a few beans—ever heard that one?

  Foreman Tucker would not agree that violence or dirty work went with his job. Sonborn would have jumped to take his place if his daddy told him to, but that feller would have been more useless still, being by nature on the poor man’s side. As for Tant, he wanted no responsibility for strike-busting or anything else—wanted no part of it. That’s who Tant was.

  Already my harvest was starting late. The ringleaders had to be dealt with—I could not scare them. I wasn’t a Flagler or a damned Carnegie with hired strike-breakers but only a pioneer farmer in a frontier wilderness where a man had to enforce his own rules quick, live with the consequences. Also, my time was running out. In my late middle age, a fugitive with a long-suffering family and bad reputation. I was fighting desperately for a fresh start in life and my last chance was here on this wild river. I had made good progress with my legal claim on Chatham Bend and also on a smaller tract across the river, anticipating the surge in west coast development that was bound to follow Everglades drainage and the highway across south Florida I’d already discussed with Napoleon Broward, whose election as governor now seemed inevitable. Should all those hard years, all my great plans, go to waste? If I wanted to survive, it was up to me. I couldn’t afford to lose Zachariah but I could afford to keep him even less.

  And so that early Sunday morning I braced my spine with a hard jolt from the jug and drove those two men, still half asleep, out of the bunk room and aboard the boat, hollering real loud so the rest could hear how I was running these damned agitators as far as Marco, dumping ’em off without their pay to compensate the company for the time wasted. Zachariah assured the crew that I was bluffing, they had the Bossman right where they wanted him, he’d have to negotiate or lose the harvest. From the boat, Ted waved cheerily to all his friends.

  Below the Bend, I ran the boat up on the bank, drew my revolver, and ordered ’em ashore. Zachariah said warily, “What’s up, Mist’ Watson?” I brought out the shovel I’d hidden in the cabin, tossed it to the boy; the hatchet I slipped into my belt. Zachariah was looking at the hatchet, no longer so sure I was bluffing and too scared to realize I could not shoot them. We were too close to the Bend. The sound would carry. He said, “I reckon we’s licked, Boss, take us back. We get some cane cut befo’ noon.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. I marched them inland through the marl scrub west of the cane fields. Young Ted yelped as he stumbled along that he aimed to work hard from now on, make no more trouble. When he turned and walked backwards, pleading with me, he tripped and fell, then would not get up, he was in tears. Zachariah stopped, too, but he never turned around. In a guttural thick voice he demanded rudely, “Why we stoppin for?” This man was mule-headed, he would stick to his defiance.

  Finally I stopped. I longed to negotiate, admit that I’d been bluffing. “Dig,” I told them. The boy whimpered, “What we diggin fo’ out’cheah, Mist’ Boss?” Zachariah soothed him. “We’s diggin fo’ gold out’cheah, Ted. Diggin fo’ gold.”

  Zachariah and Ted were both strong workers, among the strongest on my crew. I liked them, for Christ’s sake, and I respected them. I almost babbled some excuse about why I had to do this, how they had given me no choice, claim I didn’t like this any more than they did and express sincere regret; what kept me from offering these weak excuses was rage at Zachariah for getting us into this fix and the triumph I feared would come into his eyes if I let them go.

  At my signal, they stopped digging. Each stood silent in his shallow grave. I motioned to them to turn and face away. “Zach!” the boy cried suddenly, as if awakening. “Nemmine, Ted, you gwine be okay,” the other whispered, hoarse. I told them to be quiet and stand still if they knew what was good for them. Zachariah still hoped that I was bluffing because when I said that, he grunted out a kind of laugh just at that moment when, sucking up my breath, I felled him with a hard blow to the skull, using the hammer end of the big hatchet.

  I shudder like a horse each time I recall it. It’s true. I shudder. The crown of the skull, which I’d always thought was hard, seems to squash under a hammer blow instead of cracking cleanly like an egg. Seeing him fall, the boy cried, “Lo’d God, Zach!” and wet his pants utterly as he sank onto his knees, staring at Zachariah’s kicking feet. Asked if he’d like to pray, he nodded, just to live those extra seconds, and when he bent his head, I felled him. If I’d waited for his prayer, I could not have done it.

  Both were still yanking and kicking. Dropping the pistol, leaning forward, hands on knees, I gulped deep breaths. When at last they lay still, I crossed their arms and covered them with marl, then returned in a halftrot to the boat, already fearful that those graves might not be deep enough to hide what I had done and yet too horrified and too exhausted to go back.

  I scrubbed myself with rough mud at the river edge, lay stunned on the hard deck. When I sat up, I saw the same brown current ever descending between forest walls. I thought, You have just deprived two human beings of their lives. How can this river and this forest look the same?

  At the Bend, I claimed I’d put those cutters on a fishing boat on her way north to Tampa. Unpaid? That’s right. No pay. Any more questions?

  Back in the cane field by late afternoon, I worked as a cutter until dusk. That evening, wishing above all not to think, I resorted to the jug, hit myself hard. There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man’s wrong and each man’s right are different. Just depends, as the old fellers say. Everything depends. What I’d done must have been wrong by my own lights because I’d hated the doing of it and still felt sick to death, no matter how often I insisted to myself that my business and my family’s future and my great plan for developing this southwest coast were simply more important than the loss of two a
nonymous brown lives, which were, by comparison, inconsequential. Sad but true, as even Mandy would agree. Well? Would she agree? You’re not sure, Mister Watson?

  THE TUCKERS

  Toward the century’s end, I was drinking much too much and knew it but I did not stop. To make things worse, my Island neighbors (Richard Harden warned me) had grown leery of Ed Watson, which was mostly my own fault. Having understood right from the start that a man who controlled the few pieces of high ground would control the development of this whole island coast, I had not discouraged the bad rumors about Watson, thinking they might scare settlers away. But now those tales were coming back to haunt me, and everything that happened seemed to make them worse.

  First there were those accidents. Second, there was low morale due to my drinking. Next, there was trouble with my foreman. Wally Tucker was an inexperienced young man on the run from angry creditors in Key West; he had brought along a young woman of good family, having gone and gotten the girl pregnant. This damned fool waited until harvest to let me know that the field labor was too heavy for his Bet (the same nitwit who’d brought that dying man into my house to stain my floor). Because I would not excuse her from the field—we were already short-handed—he grew sullen, then quit, demanding their back pay. As foreman, he knew that the crew was never paid until after harvest, to make sure no one quit at this crucial time, and anyway, I had no money in the bank until a consignment of our syrup could be sold.

  I must have been uneasy about shallow graves, for one night I dreamed I was walking barefoot over squishy whitish marl. Sure enough, within the fortnight, with our dispute still unsettled, young Bet Tucker, slopping hogs at evening, left the gate latch open. All night my animals went rooting through the cane fields and beyond. By the time the Tuckers ran them down next day, they had snuffled out those shallow graves in the woods west of the fields. The corpse whose blue shirt and tin belt buckle the Tuckers recognized was the fired crew boss Zachariah and the second man was his work partner Ted.

  Badly frightened, those Tuckers soon convinced themselves that coming on those bodies after threatening to quit had made life very dangerous for them, too. Telling Sonborn they feared for their lives, they had fled in their sloop, after Tucker came in and demanded their money, then backed down.

  Sonborn was still trying to defend them. “They were out calling the hogs—”

  “Out screwing in the woods!” I roared, jumping up and kicking the chair against the wall. “Whose damn fault was it those hogs got loose in the first place?” Scared and unhappy, Sonborn agreed to forget the whole damn business, never mention it.

  Needing food and water, those people got no farther than Richard Harden’s place near Lost Man’s River. The Hardens felt sorry for ’em, helped ’em build a shack on the island in the river mouth, as I discovered a month later when I made an offer for the quit-claim to that key to the Atwells up in Rodgers River. I told Winky Atwell to run those damn conchs off my property but Tucker refused to go without their salaries. I suspected that Tucker was already spreading tales about Ed Watson, since he muttered to Winky that he had a good mind to report me to Key West, so his response enraged me.

  Whenever someone threatens to tell tales on me, get me in trouble, a taste of iron comes into my mouth and my hand hardens in a rage that spins up from the oldest corner of my brain. “Go away,” I told Josie Jenkins, spying through the door. “Just stay away from me.”

  Through the window—he did not venture inside—that son of mine was pestering me. He would not let it go: Atwells sold that key right out from under ’em, he protested, with Bet having her baby any day now. “Settle with him, Papa! Maybe he’ll keep quiet!”

  “What? Keep quiet about what?”

  Sonborn never did know when to stop for his own good. “Why do you act like it’s all Wally’s fault? You think he killed Ted and Zachariah?” He was half outraged and half scared to death, but in the end, he needed my approval. And for some damned reason I believe that he also wanted to protect me, when the one he should have protected, as I was still too blind to see, was not his maddened father but himself.

  Too much had gone wrong and too much was at stake but instead of acting I kept drinking. Sometime after that, I must have fallen.

  Who was speaking? Who was I and where? I could not rise, could not even roll over, being bound up in hard pain by molten chains.

  A late afternoon sun shaft scorching my temple. A silhouette in the river window. Sonborn watching. Sonborn waiting. Sonborn plaguing me with his life loss. Son Born, go fuck yourself, I lost her, too, I told the silhouette. You are my nemesis, you know what that is, Sonborn? And the silhouette screeched, Papa, don’t call me that again or I will kill you!

  Threatening his father upset him worse than it did me. He said, “Forgive me,” said he loved me—used that word! A man twenty years old! “Get out of my sight,” I said. Get out of my damned life is what I meant.

  He must have hated me for hating him. Was that why he took the Tuckers’ side? For all I knew, he had put them up to leaving and never awakened me in time to stop them.

  Josie’s baby girl—mine, she insists—was yawling in the kitchen. Josie whispered at the door, “It’s New Year’s Eve.” I drank. “Stay away,” I said.

  Most times when I drink, like any man, I flirt with trouble. Might pick a fight, shoot out the lights, smash something up out of the energy of life, just for the hell of it—just for the fun of breaking! The fucking glee of it! Or not so much glee as some queer ecstasy that releases itself in senselessness, ever feel that? Some union with this life through destruction that whirls a man free of his doomed puny self like the force that drove those mullet upward through the river surface on that evening at the Bend, and Mandy so moved by those silver shapes skipping aloft for that one hopeless instant, only to fall back with that tiny slap into the cold jaws of that dark water.

  The glee of it. The ecstasy of It. I can’t speak about this It because I know no word. It is just there, It is always there, like death in life. In this instant I know that something terrible is rising that must be seized and turned back upon itself before it twists outward into violence. But that knowing always comes too late, a wild unraveling is under way and I am already caught up in it, like a coyote seen late one afternoon in an Arkansas tornado—a toy dog spinning skyward, struck white by a ray of sun against black clouds, then black, then white, then gone and lost forever.

  The wind dies. A dead stillness. Mirror water. That ecstasy that shivered every nerve replaced by the precise knowing that what this self has perpetrated is as much a part of the universal will as erupting lava that subsides once more into the inner earth.

  That New Year’s Eve I drank to knock my heart down, get my breath, but I was too sick with weeks of drinking to think clearly. Afraid of the Owl-Man come in nightmare, and the young slave Joseph at Clouds Creek drawn down into swamp humus, and scantly buried bodies in a dead white marl squashing out sideways underfoot, I sat up in my chair.

  In the window, Sonborn’s silhouette, still pleading. I interrupted him. “I am going there to settle this and you are staying. That is that.” Josie Jenkins was afraid who was ordinarily afraid of almost nothing. Clutching Baby Pearl, she said, “Where are you going, Jack? It’s late.” I waved her off. I told her, “Get the hell out of my way.” When I raised my fist, she ran outside but then screeched back, “Why are you taking the boy with you?” For he was trailing me. Again, I ordered him to stay.

  She ran forward and hugged Sonborn, tried to walk him back into the house, but halfway to the dock, I heard his steps behind. I said, “Stay out of it.”

  He went past me and climbed down into the boat. I almost fell down getting in.

  “Row, then,” I said. “Upriver.”

  AT LOST MAN’S KEY

  The skiff slipped south through the labyrinth of islands under a full moon. At Onion Key, while waiting for the tide to turn, I greased the thole pins to deaden the creak of oars. And still he pled with m
e, he wept, he begged me not to harm them. There was no need. I had sobered some and come back to my senses. Those people were no threat. In Key West, Tucker was a wanted man, he would go to jail if he went there to report me, and anyway he had no proof because Sonborn and I had disposed of the last trace. I would simply respond that this ne’er-do-well had made up vicious slanders out of spite after his pay had been withheld for breach of contract. Besides, the sheriff would ignore complaints about two murdered blacks when so many were worked to death on chain gang labor.

  A half mile upriver from the Key I took the oars and, facing the bow, used quick small strokes to guide the skiff into the inland shore at the back of Lost Man’s Key. I took the shotgun. “Stay with the boat,” I said. “You were never here.” I almost promised him I would not shoot Wally Tucker, I’d only scare him, run him off, but out of my damned perversity I did not do so.

  Trailing after me through the scrub toward the Gulf shore, Sonborn made too much noise. I turned to scowl at him, pointing back toward the skiff, and in doing so, stumbled, wrenched my ankle painfully. I cursed him. He kept coming.

  Tucker was perched on a silver driftwood tree down by the water. He was mending his cast net, rifle leaning on the wood beside him; he’d lift his head to look and listen, bend to his needle. Behind him, the sun that rose out of the Glades, touching the treetops, turned the morning leaves as bright as metal.

  I made no sound on that soft sand and yet he sensed me. He whirled and stared. “You people are finished here,” I said. I told Sonborn to go flush out the woman. When he protested again, I swore at him in disgust, gave him the shotgun, ordered him to keep Tucker covered.