Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  He was a good shot, quick and wiry: it occurred to me too late that, being Sonborn, he would not shoot Tucker no matter what. Tucker had gasped when I drew my revolver and headed for the shack. He expected me to kill them and I let him think that. But when I heard him begging Sonborn to spare Bet, a coiling in his tone alerted me: I whirled in time to see him lunge and grab the shotgun barrel as Sonborn yelled. Their struggle

  ended when the gun went off and Tucker spun and crumpled like a bird.

  “Oh Papa, NO!”

  Sonborn’s cry shattered the echo of the shot.

  “Ah, SHIT!” I yelled at almost the same instant, and started forward, unable to take in the enormity of what had happened. One moment this man is quick, eyes bright, and the next he lies too shocked even to weep, twitching the last of his life away in his own mess, a carcass, eyes wide, mouth wide, blood already dead.

  Sonborn had dropped the shotgun in the sand, backing away from what he’d done. He was pasty, gagging, he was trembling so hard he seemed to totter.

  Behind me, the girl had run outside, then fled into the sea grape. He hadn’t warned me, and I only glimpsed her, too late. Coldly I told him he would have to finish what he’d started because being lame as well as fat I’d never catch her. When I forced the revolver on him, he dropped it. I picked it up and brushed it off and presented it again. He stuttered hopelessly, Papa, no, he could not do it, please don’t make him do it, Papa, please no, this was crazy.

  I told him that if she got away, he was going to hang right alongside his crazy daddy. “Quick is merciful,” I told him. “Temple or base of the skull. Don’t meet her eye. Don’t say a word. Just do it.” I could scarcely believe that voice was mine, that I was telling him to do this.

  To see such terror in his face was terrible. For a moment I thought, He might shoot me instead. And then his face broke, he burst into tears and gave a little scream and ran off after her, casting a last despairing look over his shoulder. That last look undid me.

  “Rob!” I bellowed. “Wait for me!” I hobbled clumsily to overtake and stop him, my wrenched ankle a club of pain.

  The gun went off as I approached: I stopped, pierced through the heart. In the echo, in that ringing silence, I saw his body on the sand between low bushes. I thought, He has destroyed himself.

  No, for once, he had done just as instructed, done it well and quickly. Then he had fainted. He lay curled like a young boy beside that girl in her white shift whose lifeblood pooled under her head in a darkening halo in the sun and sand. I thought bitterly, Can you hear me, Bet? That loose gate latch on the hog pen? One moment of inattention and two dead.

  When I lifted my son onto his feet, he only sagged. I eased him down. I hoisted the girl’s warm heavy body, carrying it to the water’s edge, then went back for Tucker and grasped him under the arms and dragged him. We could not stay long enough to bury them since the Hamiltons on Lost Man’s Beach might have heard the shots. I moved them out into the slow current where sharks following the blood trace into the delta would nose toward them on the first incoming tide.

  My boy had come to when I returned. He was a bad color and still trembling. He groaned and fought me off—Get away from me! I stood him on his feet and with my fingertips brushed off the skull bits and brains as best I could. He stared at my red hand. Pushed, he stumbled forward, and watching him, I was moved to an emotion far deeper and more devastating than pity, a life regret arising out of love for my firstborn that must have been in my heart all along, shrunk to the point of near extinction. How would I ever let him know that, far less show it? I had called out much too late.

  Get away from me turned out to be the last words Charlie’s son would ever speak to me. Rob Watson, gone and lost forever like my darling Clementine—over and over that old song keened in my brain like some Celtic lament.

  Tucker’s death had been an accident; as to the girl, we were forced to choose between her death and our own. I would try to persuade Rob of his innocence as soon as he felt well enough to listen, having begged his forgiveness for his banishment as Sonborn all those years until today. Anyway, he would never be involved if I could help it. Glimpsing another boat off Lost Man’s Beach, I forced his head below the level of the gunwales lest he be seen with E. J. Watson and associated with crimes that were sure to be attributed to me. Because whether or not sharks or gators found those bodies, evidence of bloody murder was all over Lost Man’s Key and people were certain to suspect Ed Watson.

  TURNING AND RETURNING

  I rowed east up Lost Man’s River and then north toward home. The tide was against us and the humid air too light for the skiff ’s sail. With my last strength, exhaling deep breaths to drive the iron smell of blood out of my lungs, I hurled my shoulders into every stroke until my hands were blistered and my arms were burning and I almost passed out and even so I could not burn out such great despair. The journey through the string of bays back of the barrier islands took all day, and all this day, curled up in the stern, he watched me, neither asleep nor dead but in a kind of stupor. Two or three times his eyes slid toward the revolver butt protruding from my coat, which was folded on the stern seat. I believe he considered seizing it and slipping it beneath his shirt and finally did so, though whether his plan was to destroy his father or himself I could not know nor did I care. Either choice, the way I felt, might have been a mercy.

  At Possum Key, the Frenchman’s cistern had been fouled by a drowned deer. We had no water. With the heat and exhaustion, I was almost blind, and now a blackness settled, the merciless knowledge of how cruelly I had dealt with him, of how I’d failed him. You have destroyed his life. Even if I could have persuaded him I had loved him all along and rediscovered him, that would never be good enough. I had done this brave wild boy a lifelong harm.

  By the time I turned back toward the coast, down Chatham River, all I could think about was that brown jug. In the confused departure of the night before, I might have drained it to the bottom and left none. I was terrified.

  I could never absolve myself of the great crime of ordering him to act against his every instinct; I had crushed him under a fatal burden that was rightly mine. I had cried out to him too late. Even at that moment, I think, I had been aware that the murder of Rob’s spirit would remain the most heinous of my sins, so dreadful I would never banish it, despite all efforts to pretend that Lost Man’s Key was an evil hallucination from which one day I might awaken.

  Rob would not look at me. He could scarcely climb out of the boat. “Come when you’re ready,” I said. I did not take the pistol away from him. I rushed inside and whimpered in relief that my jug still had a slosh in it.

  Josie and the child were gone. I guessed that Tant had come in this morning and taken them to safety at Caxambas. They had left a half-cooked haunch of venison behind.

  I ran to my fields and set fire to the cane, for we would have to leave before first light. The fire and my running figure frightened Erskine when he came in with the Gladiator toward evening. We ate cold deer meat and I drank and ranted until he went out to piss under the stars. When he came back, he was so scared he could scarcely speak. The schooner was missing, and Rob, too. While we talked, he must have slipped her lines, let her drift away downriver.

  I felt it coming and I could not stop it: with every panting breath my outrage grew. All that sentimental maundering about my son, and look! The fool had run off with my ship just when we had a chance to mend things—mend things? Sonborn and I? On this dark day? Having left two bloody dead at Lost Man’s Key? Have you gone mad, then? Are you going mad? Rage, confusion, fear, love, hate, despair—I felt all these at full force all at once, but who was feeling and toward whom?

  Horribly thwarted, I went shouting through the house. I’d never had the chance to tell him that I had not meant them to die and that what had happened was my responsibility, not his. Tell him my feelings. Let him know he was forgiven—what are you saying? Forgiven for what? Fuck your forgiveness! It was not his
fault!

  I’d had no chance, rather, to beg his forgiveness, to assure him I’d do everything possible to protect him. Unable to speak to him, to seize him, shake him, take him in my arms—that, too!—I felt dangerously stifled. I would have embraced Rob, squeezed his father’s love into his bone and marrow, so fervently that never again would he doubt my feelings. And I would bless him, I would kiss him on the forehead.

  Yes. I would kiss him on the forehead. I would kiss him, my begotten son, born of the writhe of Charlie dying, saved on that black September day from drowning in her blood . . .

  I found no relief. The jug was empty and the son I had failed was gone.

  I took off in the sailing skiff into the river dark, navigating by thin starshine and the wall of trees. By daybreak, I was well offshore, bound for Key West, where Rob’s uncle Lee Collins worked in a shipping office. In my night madness, I had left behind my hat and brought no water, and in late afternoon, when a coasting vessel took me in tow south of Cape Sable, I was sunparched, raving. I no longer recall what I kept yelling, I only know those yells scared hell out of that crew, which was very glad to cast me loose inside the Northwest Channel.

  • • •

  With Lee Collins’s help, my son had shipped out on a New York freighter but not before using my schooner as collateral against a loan from this hostile kinsman I had not seen since that day in Fort White when I took Rob away and left for Oklahoma. I accused Collins of exploiting his nephew with some scheme to broker my stolen vessel at an easy profit; that was my excuse to knock him down in front of the new bank on Duval Street where he’d imagined that it might be safe to meet me.

  From the look Collins gave me as he picked himself up off the cobbles, I feared Rob might have told this man too much. “All right,” I said, “how much do you intend to make me pay for my own schooner?” “Two hundred dollars,” Collins said quietly, pulling out a receipt from Rob in that amount. I snatched that paper, tore it up, before counting out his dollars. “How about my revolver?” I said.

  “You’ll have to ask your son about your revolver,” he said, coldly, defiantly, from which I knew he knew something. I did not dare challenge him.

  “You deserve to be jailed for brokering stolen ships,” I told him to save face. “If you weren’t Charlie’s brother, I would get the law on you.” And Lee Collins said, “Edgar? I would not go near the law if I were you.”

  We stood a moment, some distance apart. “I am sorry I assulted you,” I said. “I was worried and upset. I just hope my son is going to be all right.” Lee Collins considered me in disbelief. “Sonborn, you mean? You’re crazier’n hell, you know that, Edgar?” And he walked away.

  Winky Atwell had spread the tale of my dispute with Tuckers, as I learned from Dick Sawyer when I stopped by Eddie’s Bar for a badly needed constitutional. I wanted to pay a call on Winky but Sawyer advised me to leave town before the sheriff sent his deputy around to ask some questions.

  “About what?” I challenged him loudly so that anyone who’d heard the rumors would know that Ed Watson had nothing to hide. But in a little while, Deputy Till showed up. I followed him outside. Clarence warned me that the sheriff was still looking for a way to get me extradited back to Arkansas. “Better sail tonight,” he said.

  • • •

  The day after I left Key West, Earl Harden arrived with the report that he and his brothers and Henry Short had found the Tuckers’ bodies. The Hamiltons on Lost Man’s Beach had heard two shots and later some trapper had seen Watson in his skiff headed upriver; he reported that Watson was alone. Earl did his best to hang it all on Watson but he had no evidence besides his own opinion. Until things cooled down, however, that one opinion might suffice to get me lynched: I decided to head north for a year or two. My friend Will Cox had written recently to say that local folks had mostly forgiven E. J. Watson for that Lem Collins business. Will had grown up in Lake City with the new sheriff, a man named Purvis, who promised to be understanding if Will’s friend decided to return.

  With some misgivings, I arranged to leave the Bend in charge of a man named Green Waller. He was a drinker but he knew his hogs and could be depended on to stay where he was safe, since he was wanted on three counts of hog theft in Lee County. As for companionship, those pink-assed shoats would probably see him through. Erskine ran me north. By now he’d heard the rumors and was silent and uneasy. I told him he could use the schooner if he helped out at the Bend when a ship was needed to bring in supplies or field hands for the harvest, or pick up my syrup in late winter for delivery to the wholesalers at Tampa Bay.

  At Caxambas, Tant was nowhere to be found. His sister Josie said he’d heard about those Tuckers and would never work for me again—her way of conveying her own moral disapproval—but called softly as I went away that she would always love me. Within the week, Sheriff Knight and his deputies would raid the Bend, where Green Waller, in his official capacity as plantation manager, informed him that Mr. E. J. Watson was no longer in residence at this address, being absent on business, whereabouts unknown.

  FOREVER AFTER

  I stopped over at Fort Myers to pick up my horse and bid good-bye to Mandy and the children. Mandy had moved to the ground floor because she could no longer make it up the stairs. Though it was midday, I found her in bed. Entering the small chamber, I realized that this would be the last time in this life I would set eyes on this creature I first knew as the young schoolteacher Jane Susan Dyal from Deland.

  She’d been reading, as usual: her prayer was that her sight would see her to the door. She looked up with that bent shy smile that had enchanted me so many years before. I smiled, too, trying to hide my shock: the woman lying there was dying while still in her thirties. Already death inhabited her eyes and skin—a sharp blow to the solar plexus to see my dearest friend in this condition. How thin she was, how watery her eyes, her hair already lank and dead.

  I leaned and drew her forward in my arms, pressing my lips to her yellowed neck to hide my tears. Scenting the death in her, I must have hugged too hard to cover my distress, for I had hurt her and she murmured just a little. When I drew back she looked at me and nodded. Mandy’s brain—and eyes and hands and mouth—knew all of Edgar Watson well, I could hide nothing.

  I sat on the bedside and took her hands in mine, resisting an image of long years before, our Fort White cabin in early afternoon, the hot moss mattress and this willowy creature, hips soft yet strong astride me, eyes lightly closed and sweet mouth parted, releasing my hands and leaning backwards, twining her arms upwards in the air’s embrace, as if her transport must depend on that joyous arching. Even at this somber moment, the remembrance caused a disgraceful twitching in my britches. I did not wish to think about how those hips looked now, grayish and caved in under the covers.

  “I’m so happy you have come!” she sighed. Lifting her fingers, I kissed the delicate bones. “Well, Mrs. Watson. And why are you lying about in bed on this fine day?” I rose to open the shutter, thinking sun and air might dispel the cat scent and shuttered heat, but of course it was the husband, not the wife, who needed comfort. Relieved by each other’s touch, needing no words, we sat there a good while in the midday quiet, and death sat with us. In a sudden rush of feeling I whispered that I loved her dearly and always would.

  “How dearly, Mr. Watson?” she inquired, teasing. She had heard, of course, about the Island women and their children but more likely she was thinking about Charlie Collins, to whom I would have simply said, I love you.

  “Edgar? I am failing pretty fast. You knew that.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Good. I’m so weary of all the pussyfooting and jolly bedside manner. Even Doc Winkler puts his finger to his lips to hush me when I ask frank questions. Tells me I must be a good little patient and just rest. Isn’t it astonishing? Even the children. They’re so brave and tactful I could smack them!”

  Smiling a little at that idea, she blew her nose. “Is death so dreadful, Edgar?”
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br />   “Good Lord, sweetheart! How would I know!” I tried to laugh a little, aware there was something still unsaid, something I was not so sure I wished to hear. To deflect her, I promised I would look after our children, make sure that they got on all right in life.

  Oh Papa, NO!

  Rob’s words jumped to mind just as Mandy turned to peer at me in a queer way. “I beg of you, dearest, don’t turn your back on Rob. For her sake as well as your own. And please don’t call him Sonborn anymore.”

  I winced, shaking my head. “Never again.” She was overjoyed when I said, very embarrassed, “I’ve discovered that I’ve loved him all along.”

  “Oh! Have you told him so? It’s awkward for you, I know that—”

  “I think he knows,” I lied. “Lucius knows your condition, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t need to tell him. Carrie and Eddie know, of course, though Eddie pretends not to. They don’t want to deal with it quite yet. Not that Lucius refers to it, either, although sometimes I wish he would.” She seemed wistful. “He reveres you, Edgar. Perhaps you can talk with him a little. He’ll be home right after school.”

  I was passing through town quickly, I explained. I had to go.

  “Goodness! You’re in such a rush that you can’t wait even an hour?” She stared at me, intent, then closed her eyes, turning her head away. “I see,” she whispered.

  “What?” I said, fighting her off. But because her children would have to deal with any rumors, she did not relent.

  “Lucius is jeered at brutally at school. He refuses to believe the slanders, gets in dreadful fights.” In a different voice, she said, “Here in town, there is a story that when Mr. Watson goes to Colored Town, the darkies hide from him, that’s how scared they are that he might kidnap them.” She paused, hand clutching the coverlet. “They say no darkie ever comes back. They are thrown to the crocodiles.”