Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “I don’t blame people,” I told him. “I blame you.”

  Will Cox’s oldest rode up alongside while we were talking, husky young feller on a mule. Smelling trouble, he let out a kind of eager snicker. I nodded to Leslie without turning my head. Will Cox had no use for Tolens and his wife Cornelia liked them even less, because Sam’s brother Jim had wronged her sister before hightailing it back to Georgia. No Cox would jump in on the Tolen side against Ed Watson. Anyway, Les was probably unarmed.

  “I am notifying Sam Frank Tolen here and now, with his brother Mike and this Cox boy as my witnesses, that E. J. Watson did not kill John Russ. The next time you contradict that statement or cast doubt on it, you will be calling me a liar. You can try that now”—here I shifted in the saddle, getting set—“or you can say it behind my back. Either way, you won’t survive it.”

  Hearing that kind of dangerous talk, the Cox boy grinned a hungry grin that drew his ears back tight to his head like some sleek water animal. Though I hid my mirth by coughing hard into my kerchief, I was grinning, too. It was just plain fun to talk Wild West to Sam Frank Tolen.

  Sam would never have a better chance to avenge his daddy for that long-ago day when I faced down Woodson Tolen. Because of my problems with the law, I would have to give him the first shot so I could claim self-defense. Also he had two against one: though Mike was not so willing, he was ready. Also, it would gall Sam something fierce to back down in front of his younger brother and the Cox boy. But Sam had seen me shoot too many times and so he simply belched, loud and contemptuous, as Leslie Cox laughed aimlessly out of sheer eagerness. Mike did not laugh, not knowing what I might do.

  I told Sam I would challenge him to shoot it out on the field of honor except for the fact that no Tolen had ever known what honor meant. Both brothers jeered at this and they were right, it was just bluster. Aunt Tabitha’s tremulous support from on high gave them their excuse to groan, disgusted, and return inside. I left there as frustrated as I had come.

  Leslie Cox was the star pitcher on Sam’s baseball team. Like the plantation and the post office and the mud-rut lane that ran north and south along the railroad track, the team was named after its owner-manager, though Sam could hardly throw a ball let alone catch one. The team was mostly young Kinards and Burdetts, but Les Cox was the star, and because Sam spoiled him, he often hung around Sam’s fancy house. Les Cox was a big strong boy who much enjoyed using his fastball to scare and humiliate opposing batters, and, as a rule, my nephews told me, he took what he wanted whether it belonged to him or not. At fifteen, he already had chin stubble and a gruff voice and was solid and hard-muscled as a man. He was handsome, too, so the girls said, despite those ears, which were too small and too tight to his head. He had his mama’s stone-green eyes and dark hair like his pa, with that same horse hank of hair across his brow. On his left cheekbone was a crescent scar left by the hind hoof of a mule that had blanked him out for close to forty hours, scared his folks half to death. Broke the cheekbone and offset it, giving his mouth a little twist, and on that side the eyelid sagged in a kind of squint. Might have shifted his brain, too, to judge from his behavior. Leslie remained childish in some ways. Wore a toy pistol on a holster belt up till age fourteen and never learned to handle himself when things went wrong.

  One day another boy cut himself in a bad fall in the schoolyard and screamed to see so much of his own blood. Leslie ran over not to help but to rage at him to shut his mouth or he would beat him up. He did it, too. A dog will attack another dog that’s hurt and yelping but among our human kind it’s not so common. Even his own folks were troubled at the time.

  Lately my niece May Collins had imagined herself in love with Les. She saw the trouble he got into at the school as something dangerous and romantic, but none of the kids liked him except May and her young friends. He was often a truant and was always picking fights, pushing the smaller boys, even grabbing their food: he was quick to anger and quicker to attack any boy who dared protest. Because he was utterly indifferent to book learning, he was sent back to repeat his grade, at which point, contemptuous of teachers and pupils alike, he gave up his education for good before anyone found out if he was bright or stupid.

  Because I was good friends with his daddy, Les liked to boast of his acquaintance with “Desperader Watson,” and with his education at an end, he started showing up over at my place, asking questions about the Wild West and Belle Starr. Being all read up on the Belle Starr story, he informed me that it was those small footprints that got me into trouble in Oklahoma; he had learned from a dime novel that Jesse James had a small boot size like mine, and because Jesse was Belle Starr’s jealous boyfriend, Leslie said, he might have “slew her” rather than see her go to Edgar Watson. Something like that.

  Also, said Les, Belle was shot in the back. It was common knowledge that E. J. Watson would never shoot anybody in the back. “No matter what, my daddy says, the Ed Watson I know would look a man straight in the eye.”

  I looked Les straight in the eye just to oblige him.

  Les asked if I’d known Jesse James and I said I sure had. I told him Ol’ Jess was mostly talk, it was Frank James I could always count on in tough situations. “Tough situations?” Leslie whispered, those green wildwood eyes of his just smoldering. He positively salivated when I gave him a hard squint and an ironic little smile—the frontier code. He went off practicing his own squint and later on some enigmatic silence. For a while, his folks could hardly get their oldest boy to speak a word.

  Sam hated it that his young star admired Edgar Watson. He heeded my warning and shut up about John Russ but he fed Leslie all those Carolina tales he’d got from Herlongs, not knowing they just made this boy admire me all the more, and Leslie, with his gut instinct for stirring up trouble, passed Sam’s slanders right along to me. Pretty sure he’d race right back to Sam with my response, I boasted about how I’d run that yeller-bellied Woodson Tolen right out of the field when I was Les’s age. While I was at it, I confided how I’d dealt with the Queen of the Outlaws and her pack of half-breed Injuns back in Oklahoma and how I took care of a bad actor named Quinn Bass at Arcadia—in short, what you might call the varnished truth.

  Sure enough, that Saturday after the ball game, Les drank whiskey with Sam Tolen, told him all about my dangerous adventures. Tolen hollered, “You want to see somethin?” That same evening Sam rode him over to the sawmill at Columbia City, cornered two blacks who had sassed him. Sam had been brooding about those sassy niggers every time he drank, aimed to sting ’em up with a dose of bird shot, teach ’em a lesson.

  The lesson Sam Tolen taught ’em was the following: he blasted ’em clean off their mule after halting ’em on the road, waving his shotgun. Being drunk as usual, he had his loads mixed up, used buckshot instead of bird shot, and because his aim was so poor, he shot way too high when the gun kicked, hit ’em in the head instead of the legs. What with all the blood and screeching, Sam’s nerves gave way, so he yelled at Les to jump down off his mule and finish those boys off before their nigger racket brought the whole countryside down on top of them.

  “I ain’t never took a life before! Made me feel funny!” Les was overexcited, scared, but also thrilled. “Reason I’m tellin you, Mister Ed, you had experience of killin, but don’t go tellin nobody I done that. Mister Sam is claimin now how all he aimed to do was sting ’em up a little, and what that Cox boy done to ’em after was his own idea.”

  Both of them were shooting off their mouths and there was talk. Leslie’s account fit what I had heard so I didn’t doubt that it was mostly true. What troubled me was the way Les told it—the way he tasted every word, licked at it, even—and that bad grin on that arrogant face that hardly grinned from one week to the next. He came over to my house not because he was upset by senseless killings but to brag to Desperado Watson.

  “So you didn’t mind . . . ?”

  “Who, me?” he squawked, loud and derisive. “Don’t bother me none at all!” Will’s b
oy had gone wrong, all right, he was stupid, hard, and vicious, but the law never bothered him about those nigras because the witnesses were frightened and anyway the sheriff, Dick Will Purvis, had known Leslie since a boy.

  The Columbia City shooting was in early winter. Those amateur killers avoided each other until baseball came around again in early spring. Leslie pitched for the Tolen Team but stayed away from Sam, who was blaming their difficulties on Ed Watson’s influence.

  One day Sam sent word through Coxes that if Ed would meet him in a public place, namely the J. R. Terry Grocery in Fort White, we could talk things over and patch up our differences. I was leery of the invitation because I happened to be scrapping with the Terrys.

  My mother was Episcopalian and Minnie, too. Though Minnie’s three children had been baptized in St. James Episcopal, Lake City, the Collinses were Methodists, all but Billy, who got cranky in the last years of his life. He went over to the Baptist persuasion and attended Elim Baptist, over east of the Fort White Road, taking the kids with him. But pretty soon there was trouble with the Terrys because their mean dogs scared the Collins kids on their way to church. I went over there and warned ’em but they paid no attention, would not chain their dogs. So the following Sunday, I accompanied those kids, took my gun along, and shot those dogs dead as fast as they ran up. Terrys never forgave that, never forgot it. From that day on, I had to watch my back every time I went over to Fort White. Even gave up my Saturday lunch at the Sparkman Hotel, where I’d always enjoyed the lively conversation, mostly because I did most of the talking.

  When word came to meet Tolen at the Terry store, I suspected this bunch was in cahoots, so I sent my boy Eddie over there to reconnoiter. Just you duck around the back, I told him, peek in the window. So Eddie snuck around the back and peered in through the spiderwebs and shadows. He could just make out a big old iron safe and the tools and harness hanging from the walls and the potbellied stove. What he didn’t see at first—and it gave him a bad start when he did—was the shape of a heavy man sitting on a nail keg with a shotgun across his lap, facing the door.

  When Eddie rode home and reported that the armed man looked like Tolen, I decided Sam wasn’t sitting on a nail keg for the hell of it; he probably had some damn Terry in that room, hid in a corner. I no longer trusted anyone around Fort White and was jumping at shadows every time I rode along those roads. For the time being, I would be safer in the Islands.

  1903

  In early 1903 I replaced Green Waller as foreman with a man named Dyer whose wife Sybil had befriended me back in ’93 when I first passed through Fort Myers after my long horseback journey across the country.

  Sybil worked for the local haberdasher and had made me my new clothes, coming to my room for all the fittings. Not long after that, she married Dyer, and a little boy they called Watson or Watt had come into the world while I was clearing my plantation at Chatham Bend. We renewed acquaintance briefly on my way north in 1903, and when she mentioned that her husband was out of work and was also a good carpenter, I hired him.

  Fred Dyer was handy and did most of his work but found too many excuses to go off on the Gladiator. He drank a lot, he was gone a lot, and there were women. I learned this from my mean-mouthed skipper Erskine Thompson who did not wish anyone to get away with anything. Sometimes Fred failed to show up on the dock for the trip home, and his family might not know his whereabouts for the next fortnight. Even after my return, he went off with the schooner every chance he got, claiming we needed various stores and supplies, and I let him go because it suited me to have him elsewhere. Mis Sybil seemed to welcome the change as well.

  Often we two sat on the screened porch on those long river evenings. Lucius was off at Everglade, in school, I missed Mandy and was lonely, so pretty Sybil was indeed a comfort. At Christmas, I brought her children presents from Key West. I brought Sybil some small things, too, but she said that as a married woman, she could not accept them. Finally I persuaded her that my gifts were not presents but practical things for household use. With the sewing machine, for example, she would soon be making all our clothes and sewing mosquito bars for every bed.

  When Lucius returned to Chatham for his Christmas holiday, I embarrassed him. One evening, exasperated by the general torpor of the table conversation, I made a drunken declaration that Mis Sybil was the only soul worth talking to on the whole place. I think I needed her too much. I realize it probably wasn’t so, but at the time it seemed to me I was in love with Mrs. Dyer.

  Anxious to mend my reputation, I did not want scandal any more than she did. Yet I couldn’t trust myself when drinking, which meant she couldn’t trust me either, so I bought her a small silver revolver for her own protection. After teaching her how to target-shoot (standing too close behind, I fear, while supporting her trembling arm at the elbow as she aimed), I urged her to bar her door to Edgar Watson even if he was out there hollering that her cabin was on fire. She laughed in protest at any such idea but I was serious, commanding her to shoot right through the door if I made any attempt to break it down.

  Mis Sybil was horrified, thought I’d gone mad. She cried out, “Oh pshaw, Mr. Watson, I couldn’t even shoot a snake!” And I said, “Well, ma’am, you had better learn, and the sooner the better.”

  THE DEATH OF BRADLEY

  Back in that summer of 1905, our friend Guy Bradley was murdered at Flamingo. By the time I heard the details from Gene Roberts, the story that

  E. J. Watson was the killer had already spread, even though Guy had been my friend, and even though I was in Tampa on the day he died. As soon as folks heard I had been absent from the Bend, they concluded I was in Flamingo, where I murdered Bradley because he’d threatened to arrest me for plume hunting next time he saw me. This was nonsense, too. With so few birds left to hunt, I had not shot an egret in years.

  Gene Roberts was the man who found Guy’s body in his boat, washed up on shore. Before Gene left for Chokoloskee the next morning, I sat him down with Lucius, made him tell my son the whole true story so that Lucius would know his Papa was innocent. Lucius said that he knew that already, and I said, “Well, son, I sure appreciate your attitude, but you’d better listen to Mr. Gene here all the same.” Here’s how Gene tells that story:

  “Guy Bradley had a quarter mile of shore west of Flamingo, and us Robertses was the next section west, toward Sawfish Hole. We still had fair numbers of plume birds in our swamps but every place else, them birds was slaughtered out and the competition for ’em had grew deadly. The reddish and blues and blue-and-whites, they wasn’t worth much, but the white plumes brought thirty-two dollars an ounce, more than pure gold, and the rosy spoonbills brung good money, too.

  “Before the rest of us, Guy seen there weren’t no future for the plume birds, said them white aigrets was bound to disappear same as them flamingos that give our Filly-mingo settlement that name.

  “Them Audi-bones up in New York, they give Guy the idea to be the warden, said they would pay his salary. Guy took the job kind of reluctant. Told us more’n once, ‘Some riled-up sonofabitch is goin to take and shoot me.’ But Guy decided he would do it anyway, he was that kind. And he figured if he was supposed to be the warden, he would give it hell. Never had no uniform or nothin, just stuck a badge on his ol’ mattresstickin shirt and hitched his galluses and went right to it, makin life miserable for all his neighbors. Bein Guy, he never cared if you was friend or stranger; if he’d of caught his brother Lew, he’d of pinched him, too.

  “Course these arrests never come to nothin, cause he couldn’t prove nothin, not in Monroe County. Judge at Key West would be plain crazy to jail a man for doin what our people always done—what it was our God-given right to do, the way we look at it. Who was here first, us huntin families or them Audi-bones from New York City? Judge figured the plumers was punished enough, what with all that huntin time was lost sailin seventy miles down to Key West and back, missin day after day in the best part of the season, knowin that soon as the warden was gon
e, their neighbors had went right back to the rookeries and finished off what few white birds was left.

  “Spring of nineteen and ought-four, aigrets was farther in between than ever and prospects was lookin very very poor. Before the next breedin season come around, Cap’n Walt Smith, a sponge fisherman out of Key West who kept a huntin camp on the mainland at Flamingo, done his best to take away Guy’s job. Smith spread the word that if the hunters would vote for him instead of Bradley, they could go on huntin to their hearts’ content.

  “Before Guy got to be the warden, him and Smith was huntin partners. All the same, Guy told him to stay out of them rookeries or he’d take ’em to court. And Walt Smith said, ‘Now lookit here goddammit, Guy, I been shootin out here years and years and you right next to me so don’t you go to messin with me now!’ But Guy just went ahead, done what he said he’d do, and before the year was out, he arrested Smith’s boy twice. Tom was sixteen. Smith had a fit. He said, ‘By God, you interfere with my boy again and I will kill you.’

  “Now our Flamingo folks, they always liked Guy Bradley, leastways before he went over to wardenin. Even them few that didn’t care for him no more and called him too upstandin, they liked him a whole lot better than they liked Smith, cause Smith was a mean skunk and his sons took after him. His boys was about the only ones as voted for him.

  “When Smith lost out on takin Bradley’s job, he come to see this as insult and injury. Hollered to anybody who would listen that he had swallered all he meant to take: said no man could shit upon Smith family honor and live to tell the tale. That was the first us Filly-mingo folks had ever heard about Smith family honor. As my dad said, a feller’d have to hunt long and hard to come up with enough of that to shit upon.”