Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  On Riverside Avenue, I stepped right up and rapped the banker’s new brass knocker. In a moment little Faith was tugging the lace back at the window. Carrie’s daughters were only slightly older than Ruth Ellen and Addison, and I thought our girls might play and get acquainted while Kate washed up and rested for our voyage. When I waggled my fingers, Faith’s pretty face flew open like a flower and then vanished; she was running to the door. I heard Eddie’s voice and after that a silence; her face at the window was the last we were to see of my sweet granddaughter.

  No one else appeared. We stared stupidly at the closed door. Begrimed and hot and cranky from the train, my poor rumpled family waited dumbly in the street while Papa wrestled with his rage. I rapped again, three good hard knocks, and this time the door cracked and a black maidservant stared out as if the Antichrist himself had come to call.

  “Tell your Missus,” I said, “that Mr. Watson—”

  The girl disappeared and Carrie stood there instead. “Well, I do declare!” my daughter cried. Her smile was terrible. She did not come forward and did not invite us in. “Papa,” she whispered. “Walter . . .” She could not finish and she didn’t need to. We had been preceded from north Florida by my son and son-in-law, doubtless bearing word that Mr. E. J. Watson had gotten away with murder.

  “Since when does Walter wear the pants around your house?” I started away before I uttered something worse.

  “Papa? Please, Papa,” Carrie begged.

  I turned on her. “If your husband and brother thought me guilty, why did they testify in my defense?”

  “Oh Papa, what choice—”

  “I’ll have them indicted for perjury.” But my sour joke only frightened my bewildered family. Kate Edna stared wide-eyed from father to daughter, as if discovering for the first time how these Watsons worked.

  The servant girl came down the steps with a tray of milk and cookies, which she held out fearfully toward my children as if feeding wild monkeys through bars. I recognized the rosewood tray I’d given Mandy as a wedding present. Without my say-so, nobody would touch a cookie, and the darkie was so rattled by the children’s hungry staring that she banged the tray down on the stoop before them like a bowl of dog food and ran back inside.

  Carrie stooped, picked up the tray, and offered it again, eyes brimmed with tears. Addison reached first but my eye stopped him. “We came as kin, not beggars. We’ll be going.” I tried in vain to put some warmth into my voice because Carrie was at least trying to be nice, unlike her brother who had not come out to greet us, a discourtesy I was never to forgive.

  “Thank your kind sister for her hospitality,” I told Ruth Ellen, who curtsied. Little Ad did, too. “No, Ad,” I told him. “Gentlemen pay their respects like this.” I put one hand behind my back, lifted my black hat with the other, and bowed to my beautiful Carrie, who burst into tears, knowing her rejection of her father would ensure that in all likelihood, we would never meet again.

  “Oh Papa!” she cried. But we went away with resolution, leaving Carrie in the public street with her tray of milk and cookies. Addison fretted, looking back, but did not say one word.

  “I love you, Papa!” Carrie called, glancing around for neighbors. For that small courage, I almost forgave her.

  I lifted my hat but did not turn. “My daughter loves me,” I told Kate, ironic. My unhappy wife struggled to smile but her dry upper lip had caught on her front teeth so she looked away.

  Poor Kate had had a dismal year, with her husband languishing in county jails under threat of hanging and her Fort White neighbors hostile, all but her faithful Herkimer Burdett, who had come around often, it appeared, to see how his childhood sweetheart might be faring—a little more often (according to the leering Cox) than her husband might have cared for. When I mentioned this, my wife burst out that Herkie had been very kind and that the only one who had hung around “in the wrong way” was Leslie himself. “If I should die, would you go straight to Herkie?” I inquired. Kate colored as if slapped, having no idea how to answer that, much less dissemble.

  At Dancy’s stand at the head of Ireland’s Dock, I consoled my doleful tribe with candy, fruit, and peanuts we could not afford. The last of my money lined the pockets of my attorneys and once again I was faced with gnawing debt.

  Lucius turned up on the run before we sailed. Announcing he was coming with us, he hefted a satchel to show me he meant business.

  “Chatham is my home, Papa, and you’ll find work for me, I know.”

  I nodded slowly. “This young feller is your brother Addison,” I said. Lucius, who had now turned twenty, shook the hand of little Ad, who sat astride my shoulders: at Addison’s age, in Arkansas, Lucius had no memory of his father nor any idea what he might look like. When Lucius said, “How do you do?” the little boy thrust out a half peanut, which his brother was polite enough to eat from his sticky fingers. “An excellent peanut,” Lucius assured Ad, wishing he hadn’t when Ad unstuck another. I felt a great wave of affection for these boys, all the more poignant because Rob and Eddie were my sons no longer.

  Because Frank Reese still had a record and might be subject to arrest, I introduced him to Lucius by his prison nickname, which was “Joe” or “Little Joe.” No one knew his last name.

  SHARK RIVER MIKASUKI

  We arrived at the Bend on a winter norther and that wind was cold, with iron seas churning the Gulf and swift gray skies. A sweet reek of pig manure was everywhere, even inside the house, which we found in woeful condition. Green Waller mostly emulated the habits of his hogs, which seemed to have the run of Chatham Bend. Since Green was a rough carpenter at best, his rickety hog shed swayed in the faintest breeze, and in recent weeks two prime shoats had been lost to a marauding panther. In his uneasiness Green demanded in the fierce tones of the drunkard that their worth be deducted from his salary—an empty offer in my present straits. Green had gone more or less unpaid for years. He had so little use for money that he had purposely lost count of what I owed him, fearing that if I paid him off, I might get rid of him. This poor old reiver was five years my junior, but due to a sadly misspent life, had overtaken me in our race to the grave and now appeared to be my elder. Green Waller saw the Bend as Paradise, with all the hogs and moonshine a man could ask for.

  Kate seemed stunned and the rest dispirited: I put them right to work as the only cure. We patched mesh screens and painted them with oil to keep out sand flies, swept out spiders, scraped rust, crust, and vermin from the stove. We burned off and harvested the small neglected crop and brewed a batch of lightning to tide Green over into the next year.

  With his growing family, Erskine Thompson stayed mostly at Lost Man’s with the Hamiltons, so Lucius took over the boats. On Sundays he and I went fishing while Kate went crabbing with the children, but without Laura Collins and her gales of sweet laughter, Kate’s fun in life seemed to be gone. Knowing we could never go back to Fort White, she felt banished to a purgatory of humid heat, unrelenting insects, and the endless raining greens of mangrove wilderness, with no end to her loneliness and nothing to look forward to. From her first day back on Chatham Bend, she felt imprisoned, a fate made worse by nagging dread of the calamities that might befall her children—flood or hurricane and drowning, alligators, panthers, poisonous serpents, wild Indians and tropical disease, to name only the fates that scared her most.

  These Mikasuki or Cypress Indians, who called themselves At-see-na-hufa, would make camp at Possum Key on their way north from Shark River. When Lucius found a strong freshwater spring right off that island, and tried to be helpful by telling them about it, they heard him out without expression, grunting assent once in a while to keep him going. When he was finished, they laughed for a long time, paying no attention to him anymore We concluded that the At-see-na-hufa had always known about that spring, but having had everything else stolen away from them, they never let on to the white people who lived there, preferring to watch them struggle along with rain gutters and barrels. Sometimes
a few Indians stopped by the Bend, and we did our best to put something in their stomachs, if only our bad coffee and hard biscuits. One of the young Osceolas, a leader of their band, was some kind of cousin to Richard Harden’s Mary, who had been born into that family, too.

  The animals had now retreated deep into the Glades. The Indians concluded that the land was dying, and the red man, too, so they might as well shoot everything they could get a bead on, using guns where bows and arrows once sufficed. Stripped off the skins, left the carcasses to rot, and headed straight back to the trading posts to trade for liquor. Deer were so scarce that even Tant Jenkins gave up hunting and went out to the clam flats off Pavilion, where even the clams had been thinned out due to the dredging.

  As for the plume hunters, the House boys and their Lopez cousins were traveling all the way south to Honduras to find egrets. Those plumes were now contraband, mostly confiscated at Customs. One year Gregorio Lopez came home so sick that his boys lugged him off the boat on his chicken-feather mattress with the Customs men trotting alongside asking hard questions. And Old Man Gregorio rolled his eyes back, croaking, “This here is my deathbed, boys, so don’t go harassin a poor old feller that is givin up the ghost before his time.” Well, Gregorio could have died right there as far as those federals were concerned and it wouldn’t have helped his case even a little, because one of ’em had spotted a white quill sticking out where the old mattress stitching had unraveled: he drew forth a fine egret plume and twirled it in the sun, saying, “If this here is a chicken mattress, like you said, what I got here just has to be the purtiest white leghorn feather in the world.” Gregorio Lopez made a full recovery right before their eyes. Got up off that mattress and stalked away disgusted, giving those Customs men a taste of a proud Spaniard’s scorn.

  Wilson Alderman of Chokoloskee had married Gregorio’s daughter in 1906, and because there was no work on the coast, I had taken him north to Fort White to work for me. At the time of my trials, my lawyers tried to subpoena Alderman to testify in defense of his employer, but as Sheriff Dick Will Purvis told the court, this feller “was no longer to be found in the county of Columbia, having returned to his residence in the Ten Thousand Islands.”

  Alderman had slunk away as soon as my troubles started. His feeble excuse turned out to be that he had to go home to take care of his pregnant Marie, the apple of old Gregorio’s ferocious eye. That old Spaniard had never abandoned his belief—which I now shared—that any daughter of Gregorio Lopez was much too good for the likes of this young man. To the delight of her friend Kate, who rushed off to help tend her, Marie gave birth to Gregorio’s grandson two months after our return in 1909. For Kate’s sake, I forgave the feckless husband.

  I could not forgive my son Eddie and Walter Langford. Carrie had explained in a long letter that as “a civic leader” her husband could not afford the breath of scandal. “He has put his foot down, forbidding me to have you in our house,” wrote Carrie in her tear-blotted missive to her “dearest Daddy.” Like many strong women with weak husbands, my daughter pretended that her spouse’s castle quaked in terror of his wrath, but she knew I knew whose foot carried the real heft in that household.

  Kate Edna tried to make excuses for my daughter. Surely the idea of a younger stepmother would take getting used to for someone who so adored her daddy—“You’re talking nonsense, Kate,” I interrupted. Poor Kate went soft as a crushed peony, and Lucius fixed me with that enigmatic look which was as far as he ever went in criticism of his father, though his very restraint let you know his mind. I said to Kate, “Come here, then, girl,” and sat her comfy bottom on my knee to draw the sting from my harsh words.

  THE FIRST AUTO IN THE ISLANDS

  After that bad welcome at the Langford house, I gave up all ambitions for Deep Lake. Dead tired after months in county jails, I had lost the will to grind my way out of debt on this remote and overgrown plantation. Uselessly I was attracted to a life of enterprise in the great world.

  One day in Fort Myers, I ran into Cole and Langford in the saloon across from the courthouse. Both looked puffy from too much time indoors sitting on money and neither had a handle on his drinking. In fact, Big Jim had been forbidden by court order to set foot in a saloon, though Sheriff Tippins chose to overlook this. As for the balding banker, he looked seedy and unshaven, despite his slicked-down strands of hair and three-piece suit.

  When I came in, my son-in-law lurched to his feet and left without a greeting. “Don’t let your customers smell that whiskey!” I called after him, intending to be heard by the whole place. Trapped in his booth, Cole waved me to a seat with a poor smile and asked me how my “cane patch” was progressing. I ignored the sneer behind his stupid question, wanting to see the shock on that smug face when I told him coolly that I’d like to buy the Ford auto he had recently replaced with that red Reo.

  “What with?” jeered Cole, who knew I was flat broke busted. But he also knew my reputation as a businessman who made good on his debts; he did not doubt that I would restore my syrup operation in short order, and its profits, too. “What’s your collateral, Ed?” he said. I thought he was just matching my bluff, but when he flagged the bartender and paid for two more whiskeys, I realized he was serious.

  “An up-and-coming farm in Columbia County,” I said.

  “Who’s on there now?”

  “My sister’s family and my mother.”

  “Supposing you forfeit?” He cocked his head to peer at me. “You fixing to shoot them ladies, Ed, or just run ’em off there?”

  I held his eye and he covered his nerves with that curly grin. “I mean, where the hell you aim to drive the damn thing, Ed? Down to your dock and back?”

  That same evening my Model T rode south, lashed to the foredeck of the Gladiator. She was wrapped in tarps against salt water, because with the wind out of the south and that weight forward, we were shipping a hard spray over the bow. At Chatham Bend, Lucius fetched planks and we drove her off onto the bank, hooting the horn in honor of the first automobile ever seen in the Ten Thousand Islands. I had planned that jalopy as a surprise, to lift our spirits, and sure enough, the kids came whooping, piled right in, and jumped around the seats. There was no sign of Kate.

  Frank stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel; the way that black man’s head was cocked made clear that he questioned my good sense.

  “Got her in a kind of swap,” I told him before he could say anything he might regret.

  “What you swap for her? Our pay?” His tone scared everyone. He stepped back inside. Nobody said a word. I stood waiting for him, getting my breath. If he didn’t think better of it and step outside again—

  He stepped outside again. “My oh my, that’s sump’n, Boss,” he said, dangerously angry, his grimace fixed hard in a kind of death’s-head smile.

  Kate came outside slowly, in a daze. “What on earth can it be for?” she whispered. “And how on earth are we to pay for it?” She burst into tears. “What can you be thinking, Mr. Watson?” Annoyed because she had spoiled the children’s fun, I told her too bluntly that our Fort White farm—her beloved “home on the hill”—was the collateral. “I have something on the stove,” she gasped, and ran inside.

  Ruth Ellen had found the car horn—toot-toot-toot! I could not concentrate in such a racket. I yanked her out of the front seat, making her cry. Addison scrambled out of the back and fled around the house. I glared at Lucius—Well? He shrugged and went inside. “Damn!” I yelled, astounded to see how fast the fun had ended. But standing there alone with the new car, I was struck by my utter folly: I was losing hold.

  Lucius called, “Papa? Let’s go for a drive. I’ll find the kids.” Out ran Ruth Ellen and Addison, miraculously cured. They sat on Lucius’s lap and shrieked at the fireworks sputter as I cranked the motor, shrieked some more as we backed past the sugar kettles and turned her around in jerks and fits and starts. After a drive of one hundred yards, Ruth Ellen vomited from the thick fumes. The children ran
inside, calling for Mama.

  Early next morning Lucius and I set to work with Sip and Frank, alias Joe, hacking and clearing a half-mile track around the cane field. Already handy with boat engines, Lucius soon learned all there was to know about our auto, inspecting each movable part to see how it related to the rest. My son and I were never closer than we were that spring, navigating our new car on its road to nowhere.

  When the great day came—we waited until May Day—all but Kate Edna piled into the “T” and went for a drive around the circumference of the Watson Plantation, chugging and honking, children screeching and dogs barking. Though all were good sports, the little ones had not traveled very far before they turned greenish from the fumes and jolting. We only completed a single round before we had to stop.

  With Frank, I made a second round. Kate watched us from an upper window. How pale she looked up in that window, far away across the field.

  WILDLIFE

  In the damp cloudy weather of the spring, we were “in the mosquitoes” all day long, but except at daybreak and in early evening, when biting insects were at their worst, the children played around the water edge and dock and boats. They were never happy very far from water, and I was never quite at ease while they were there. I warned Addison and Ruth Ellen about the swift strong current and gators up to fifteen feet and that huge croc that hauled out from time to time on the far bank. Where one of my coco palms had fallen over into the river, Lucius built an eddy pool walled in by brush: here the kids could splash a little, protected from marauders. Even so, I did my best to put a scare into the children, describing how those monsters cruised the riverbanks hunting unwary animals and wading birds, how they drifted in close and hung there unseen in that silted water. Eye ridges and snout tips might be glimpsed but often not. Gators had snatched more than one dog off our bank; they could lunge and seize a small child in the shallows and disappear with one thrash of that armored tail.