Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Jungle vines had crawled over the Frenchman’s grave and the door had blown off the front of the old cabin. Henry found a rusted pan and a bent pot and cooked the ibis. I sat there in the fire smoke to spite the mosquitoes, brooding over my lost cargo and wondering where the capital to put the Bend back into shape was going to come from. Henry watched me polish off that flask as if afraid I might get drunk and take his life.

  “Fine eatin bird, suh. Call this ‘Chokoloskee chicken,’ ” Henry said, serving me the breast on a leaf plate. I took my knife out.

  “Well, I know that, Henry.”

  Squatting down to eat out of the pan, he kept to my right side and behind me, where I’d have to swing against the grain to get a shot off.

  More and more irascible, I picked a fight. “What’s this Pentecostal?” I demanded, having heard him mention to the Hardens a new religion out of California that was signing up a lot of local Baptists, Henry included. Politely he tried to explain about Acts 2:4, the Day of the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover—“You some kind of a Jew, Henry?” I interrupted—when a mighty fire wind from Heaven rushed down into Jerusalem and the Apostles filled up with the Holy Spirit and went around speaking in strange tongues in sign of the world’s end—

  “That so? Let’s hear some of their jabber.”

  “Got to be in the Spirit, Mist’ Edguh, befo’ you kin speak in tongues.”

  “In the Spirit. Speak in tongues.” I nodded wisely. “Helps to be dead drunk, too, I reckon.” And I drank off some more, mean and exhilarated. “Might get to be Jesus for a minute, or the Holy Ghost. What’s your opinion, Henry?”

  “Nosuh.” Henry’s face had no expression. He scratched the fire-blackened earth with a small stick.

  One time out there in the Nations—out of gun range, down the river narrows—I saw a panther come off a rock ledge, take a bay foal. That foal was a lot bigger’n the cat was, and the mare right there alongside, big horse teeth bared. These were half-wild Indian ponies, knew how to kick and bite. She could have run that cat back up that rock with no damn trouble. But that foal nickered just once and the mare whinnied, made a little feint, and it was over. Never even laid her ears back, the way horses do when they fight other horses. That mare and her foal, too, they just gave up, like offering the young one to that panther was in their nature. The mare went back to grazing before her foal was dead, not thirty yards from where that cat crouched, feeding.

  What I mean, if Henry Short feared I might kill him, he had plenty of opportunity to get the drop on me and stop me. In Henry’s place, ol’ Frank Reese might have drilled me just for baiting him, then covered it up some way, taken his chances, because Frank was an outlaw raised up wild with no respect for whites who did not deserve any. But Henry Short would never raise his hand against a white or his voice either, not even if he thought he could get away with it. It just wasn’t in his nature.

  “Henry? You ever hear about that crazy nigger couple years ago who shot up a whole posse of New Orleans police before they tore apart his hide-out in a hail of bullets? All over the South, men were talking about Robert Charles, trying to figure where that boy learned to shoot.”

  Henry was guarded. “I heard Mist’ Dan House talkin sump’n about it, Mist’ Edguh. That boy must been dead crazy, like you say.”

  This boy I had here was very complicated. Not humble or subservient, not exactly, he kept his dignity to go with his good manners. It was more like he was doing penance and would bow his neck for any punishment that came his way—his own penance, I mean, not one imposed by whites. Not so much shamed as forever damned by his few drops of black blood. Having been raised by white people since a small child, in a community where other black men were rarely seen from one year to the next, the nigra in him was a man he scarcely knew for whom the white man in him took responsibility. In Henry Short, the brother and his keeper were the same and Judgment Day was every day all year. He figured he deserved his cross and he aimed to tote it.

  “Henry? You prefer setting back there with the miskeeters?” I pointed at the ground closer to the fire. “Ol’ Massuh ain’ gwine whup you, boy.” I enjoyed talking black to Henry, who talked white, having no nigras at Chokoloskee to teach him his own language. Besides Nig Wiggins at Will Wiggins’s cane farm out at Half Way Creek, the only other nigra was George Storter’s man at Everglade, a stowaway from the Cayman Islands, blacker’n my hat; I don’t think they ran across each other twice a year. As Kate says, “These poor darkies in the Islands must get very lonesome.”

  Hearing Henry’s voice, there was no way to tell what color he was, and seeing him, you could hardly tell it either. Henry Short looked a lot more Injun than nigra and a lot more white than Injun, come to think about it. But when I asked about his ancestry—which he knew I knew—he paused, then whispered, “Nigger. Nigger to the bone.”

  Was that what Henry thought I wished to hear? I’d heard those words before and so they nagged me. I turned to look at him.

  Then I remembered. Before it struck me that I might not want the answer, I inquired, “So your daddy’s name was Short. Mister Short, maybe?”

  “Nosuh, Mist’ Watson, suh, ah doan rightly have no name, no suh. Dey gib me de name Sho’t jus’ fo’ de fun, me bein so puny when ah was comin up.”

  Henry’s eyes could not hide his alarm. He had retreated into nigger speech and so I knew.

  A hoot-owl called deep in the forest. Hoo-hoo, hoo—aw-w.

  “I b’lieves dey called him Jack. Somethin like dat.”

  I emptied the bottle, hurled it over the black water. It made a small splash at the farthest edge of firelight. “I can’t pay your wages for a while,” I said, unable to look at him.

  “Ain’t got nothin comin, nosuh,” Henry murmured. “Ah done sunk yo’ boat.”

  Long minutes passed. We watched the flask, which had gone under for a moment. Then the neck popped up like the small head of a terrapin back in the salt creeks, or the tip of a floating mangrove seed that has not yet taken hold on the shallow bottom.

  “Tell you what.” I picked up his Winchester, which looked like the first model ever made. “We’ll shoot for it. Double or nothing.” Despite all that Chokoloskee talk about Short’s marksmanship, black men generally shoot poorly, not being mechanical of mind. I figured he might shoot better than most local men but nowhere near as well as E. J. Watson.

  “Ain’t got nuffin comin, Mist’ Edguh, nosuh, ah sho’ ain’t.” Henry was scared. For this selfrespecting man, trying to speak like an ignorant field hand, I thought, was like a dog rolling over on its back to bare its throat. Disliking this, I fired fast to shut him up. My first bullet came so close that the bottle nose went under for a moment. “Your turn,” I said.

  “Nosuh! Ain’no need! Yo nex’ shot take care of it, Mist’ Edguh!”

  “Shoot.” I tossed the gun.

  He shot and missed. I shot again. Over and over I sank that goddamned thing but it would not stay down, and the wavelet made by every bullet washed it a little farther back under the mangroves.

  Henry, too, kept missing, barely. It was only after it drifted out of sight and he claimed I’d sunk it that it came to me how he’d missed each time in exactly the same spot.

  “Maybe your sight is out of line,” I said. “You’re always two inches to the right.”

  “Yassuh, dass ’bout it. Two inches.”

  But even if his sight was out of line, a sharpshooter would compensate after a round or two. If that spot just to the right had been a bull’s-eye, Henry Short would have drilled it every time.

  He had outshot me and I knew he knew it. I muttered some excuse about too much liquor, which only made me angrier. “Who taught you to shoot?” I said after a while.

  “Ol’ Massuh Dan House now, he gib Henry dis ol’ shootin arn, and Mist’ Bill, he slip me a few ca’tridges, lemme use his mold so’s to make mah own. Taughts mah own se’f but nevuh learnt too good, doan look like, cuz heah I gone and los’ my wages on account I could
n’t hit dat bottle—”

  “HENRY!”

  He peered about at the black trees as if uncertain where that shout had come from. “Dammit, boy! Don’t you try to flimflam me with nigger talk!” But when I turned to point a warning finger at his face, the man was gone.

  He must have had me in his rifle sights, against the firelight. I turned back slowly, saying, “Shoot, then. Or come out where I can see you.”

  Blackness surrounding. Tree frogs shrilling. A chunking thrash across the channel—tarpon or gator. The water was dead still. On its silver skin was a single small dark mole—that Christly bottle.

  “Miss Jane!” I roared. “You want her, Mis-ter Short? You want her?” I waited. “She ever tell you about me, Mis-ter Short? How I had her all that summer?”

  I could feel his finger on the trigger. I was in his sights. Exhilarated, I forced my breath against the inside of my chest to steel my hide against the burning fire of his bullet. When nothing happened, I gasped, “Come on! Finish it!’

  Not a whisper. The black jungle masses all around had fallen still. Behind me, staring upward through the black shell dirt of his garden, the Frenchman’s skull was a witness for the dead.

  “FINISH IT!” I roared.

  At the shot, the floating bottle popped and vanished from the surface. In its place a small circle blossomed for one moment only to vanish, too.

  I awoke with a deep headache. He was there, making the fire. Moving stiffly in the iron calm of profound anger, we did not speak. An hour later when I let him off on the narrow walkway through the flooded forest guarding House Hammock, I wondered what I had asked of him, last night under the moon. What I had awaited. What I had wanted finished.

  “Next time I tell you, finish it! You damn well finish it,” I said. Neither of us knew what the hell I meant. He only nodded.

  Near the walkway, a mangrove water snake, leaving no trace on the surface, crossed the sunlit ambers of the dead leaves on the creek bottom. Under red stilt roots blotched with white where coons had pried off oysters, the noses of feeding mullet pushed the surface. Henry touched his hat, I raised my hand halfway, but we remained silent, knowing we would never speak of this again.

  GOVERNOR BROWARD

  In the Glades, the drought of 1906 crowded the gators into the last pools and the slaughter was awful. “We have killed out that whole country back in there”—that’s what Tant told Lucius at Caxambas. But in the spring rains, when the water level was unusually high, Bembery Storter’s brother George accompanied some Yankees and their Indian guide on a three-week expedition, traveling by dugout from the headwaters of Shark River east to the Miami River, lugging along a two-thousand-pound manatee in a pine box. What they wanted with that huge dismal creature and whatever became of it I never learned, but that expedition was probably the last to cross the Florida peninsula on the old Indian water trails through Pa-hay-okee, which means “grassy river.”

  Napoleon Broward was the new governor, and his plan to conquer the Everglades for the future of Florida agriculture and development got under way with the christening of two dredges for the New River Canal, which would drain the lands south and east of Lake Okeechobee and extend the Calusa Hatchee ship canal to the east coast. With the band music, flags, and patriotic oratory so dear to the simple hearts of politicians, canal construction was begun on Independence Day, which Broward dedicated to the creation of rich farmland where only sawgrass swamp had lain before, including the auspicious planting of an Australian gum tree guaranteed to spread with miraculous speed across the swamps, sucking up water and transpiring it back into the air.

  Our southwest coast was next in line for the blessings of modern progress, with the governor’s good friend Watson taking the lead. My invitation to the statehouse in Tallahassee could show up in the mail almost any day. Meanwhile, I had months to wait for income on my harvest. Being in debt again, with little cash left for supplies and none for wages, I fired all hands except Sip Linsey and the hog fancier G. Waller; the rest were told to get their stuff and board the boat. At Fort Myers, with a loan from Hendrys, I paid half their wages and gave IOUs for the balance, which I hoped they would never dare come ask for.

  On the way home, I stopped off at Pavilion Key to visit Netta’s Minnie and Josie’s little Pearl, which I did every chance I got, but brief visits were never enough for those two girls. “Daddy, how come you go away again each time you come back?” my red-haired Minnie said. I was happy she had forgiven me for that mistake two years before when I got drunk and took her home with me because I felt so lonesome. She never stopped wailing for her mama so I brought her back.

  That summer, we took Sundays off to give our folks some rest. I near went mad waiting for Monday but kept myself busy with repairs, mended some tools. Lucius showed Kate and Laura how to fish for blue crabs off the dock, using a scoop net and old chicken necks rigged to a string. These spiky creatures with quick claws scared sweet little Ruth Ellen, who would turn to me, screeching, “Dada!” in delighted terror. Sometimes Jane Straughter would join in, and those three young females would spend hours at it; every crab caused a great shriek and commotion. Crabbing was done on laundry day. The bushel basketful was emptied into the big boiling cauldron after the clean clothes were fished out.

  Lucius was delighted to show off the attractions of the Bend to our new family: it thrilled him as much as it did them when he pointed out our giant crocodile. Unlike Eddie, he had no use for Fort Myers and little interest in the Fort White farm. Lucius loved boats and the water, fresh and salt, river and sea. How it tickled me to see him grown so strong, this quiet boy who had started out in life so sickly that he very nearly died in the Indian Nations.

  My son was reading all about old Florida history and the Calusa relics that Bill Collier had dug up at Marco. He was out to explore every piece of high ground in the Islands: he already knew he would like to be a historian or naturalist. Though he hunted and fished for the table, he refused to shoot the scattered plume birds or trap otter, no matter how often it was pointed out that others would take them if he did not. But raccoons were common and in cooler weather he would hunt them at night the way Tant taught him, using his new Bullseye headlamp for his torch.

  Lucius was still dueling with Old Fighter, the giant snook Rob had hooked but lost in an oxbow up toward Possum Key. Out of loyalty, Lucius would claim that Old Fighter was still waiting for Rob back in the shadows, tending to the small fishes in the current that swept along under the mangroves. One day his bait would come drifting past, turning and glistening in that amber light, and—whop! In some way he felt that the triumph over Old Fighter would be Rob’s vindication.

  Sometimes at evening, sitting in the dark watching the moonlight on the river, we sang grand old songs—“Old Folks at Home” and “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” also “Lorena” and “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Because everyone else thought it too gloomy, I would wait until all had gone to bed before I sang “Streets of Laredo.” What I lamented all alone, I did not know. I had learned that old dirge in the Indian Nations, is what I told anybody who inquired, though the truth was I had picked it up in prison. Once it came into my head, I might be stuck with it for weeks.

  One evening Kate asked if that old Texas song reminded me of my “cow-boy days” out West. Knowing I had never been a cowboy, Lucius flushed and looked away, aware that his Papa had told a few tall tales to enhance his courtship of this girl of his own age. Even white lies made my son uncomfortable. He did not judge me, but his forbearance was a judgment, even so.

  For the moment, Kate seemed happy at the Bend, forever giggling with her dear Laura, heads bent over some discovery or other. Yet she was so raddled and exhausted by the child that she had lost interest in our loving, falling asleep before I was half started—not that that stopped me. Manfully I would clamber on and toil away, feeling grotesque and lonely in my struggle. Sometimes her old fire got poked up and she came with me but more often not.

  STILLBORN BABY


  Nephew Julian had promised a year’s work on the plantation, but after his experience at sea, he never really trusted me again. Perhaps he had heard some local stories, though I can’t be sure, and perhaps he had alarmed his wife, for Laura would miscarry her first baby three months into term. In the midnight hours just before that happened, I sat up with her while Kate and Julian got some rest. There was high wind that night, the whole house sighed and rattled.

  Not wishing to impose on this young woman (who had railed at me only a few weeks before), I asked if she might not prefer to be left alone. Too exhausted to spit up anything but the plain truth, she shook her head. “Mr. Watson, I’m ever so grateful for your company,” she said. “Why I’m so afraid of darkness I cannot imagine. But I’m less afraid on these windy nights than on the still ones when everything seems suffocated and the only sound is the mosquitoes whining at the screens. That’s when I fear there is something else out there, something that’s waiting.” She paused. “Something that will come for us, sooner or later.”

  “Well, my dear, something will come for us one day, that is quite true.”

  “Is it only death I fear? Because of my baby?” She seemed desperate. “I don’t really know what I’m afraid of. I’m just scared.”

  “Not of me, I hope.” I was doing my best to seem benign and reassuring.

  Laura studied me, a little feverish. “Uncle Edgar, you make everyone feel lively, that’s the ginger in you. But when you laugh, you sometimes seem to be laughing at our expense.” She waited. “Does everything strike you as absurd?”

  “Not everything.”

  Afraid she’d gone too far, she closed her eyes, perhaps to recoup her strength. I went to the window and peered out at the reflections of cold moonlight shattered by small wind waves on the river.

  From behind me her voice came in a rush, “I’m frightened of a man who wears a gun under his coat in his own house out in the wilderness.” When I said nothing, she continued bravely, “I come down sometimes when I can’t sleep and there you are, still sitting in your corner on the porch, and all I can see is the glow of your cigar. Who are you waiting for?”