Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Is it any wonder that there are so many lawless acts committed by linching offenders when the law is so loosely executed? Let the Law be administered in justice and without fear, favor, or affection and linch law will be done away with. But until that is done we must expect the people to take the execution of the law into their own hands.

  Very Respectfully Yours,

  A. P. Santini

  Dolphus had gotten his revenge and never knew it. That Broward permitted his complaint to be sent to his friend Watson made it clear that I would be unwelcome at the statehouse until I had rebuilt my reputation—in other words, until I was prosperous again, which in this great land of ours amounts to the same thing. And so I was forced to stand by and watch as Florida’s west coast development fell far behind the east. Nap Broward had committed most of the state’s money to his steamboat canals east of Okeechobee, while John D. Rockefeller’s partner Henry Flagler, with flags, fanfare, and fine speechifying, was finishing the last leg of his Florida East Coast Railway, from Homestead south across the keys and channels toward Key West. From his beachside headquarters, Flagler described his railway as “the hardest job I have ever undertaken,” oblivious of the brute labor done by the thousands of unknown men who worked like animals in that humid heat to make his fortune. (One newspaper reported that the num-bers of railway construction deaths in Florida were rivaling those in Panama, where the railroad company helped defray expenses by packing its corpses into brine barrels and selling them to medical schools back in the States.) Nobody wanted to investigate all that dying, least of all the U.S. government, because Flagler was opening up south Florida for development, commerce, and big investors. “The kind of red-blooded American who made this country great”—that’s what the newspapers called Flagler. There was red blood, all right, but it wasn’t his.

  Our field hands were better housed and fed than the immigrants and Caribbean blacks and crackers who perished over there when Flagler’s crews revolted, forcing his thugs to bring in drunks and bums to break the strikes. Not that I opposed strong measures to support progress in this brave new century—on the contrary, I ached to be involved. But it enraged me that a small cane planter on a remote frontier river should be reviled for “Watson Payday” while more powerful men supported by the government were writing off human life as overhead as an everyday matter.

  Lucius would nod politely at my earnest outrage, but next day he might say something quiet that his mother might have said, like, “I’ve been thinking about progress, Papa. Shouldn’t progress in our great nation mean progress for everybody?”

  Those two men on my place had died for the common good because they had obstructed the progress of this region—that’s what I told myself when I thought about it, which I tried not to. Occasionally I came close to discussing those Tuckers with Lucius, who was still sad that he’d never heard from his missing brother, but being shamelessly in need of this boy’s good opinion, I did not dare.

  Our new cane crop came up better than expected in those rain-swept days of spring and early summer when new shoots can grow six to eight inches in a day. But on the eleventh of September, 1909, just before harvest, the worst hurricane in memory flattened my cane to a tangled mat of leaves and twisted stalks. Because the new cane was still green, the storm bent those stalks over without killing the plants, and the damp weight of that green mat threatened the entire harvest. I drove Green Waller off his hogs, sent Kate and Lucius into the field, and we worked like nigras because, being broke, I had no real ones except Sip and Frank. Grabbing and chopping night and day, we salvaged what we could and burned the rest, but the new sugar was watery and the syrup so thin that I would not put my label on the cans. I shipped a single small consignment for the little it would bring at Tampa Bay.

  Jim Howell of Chokoloskee came to work that year, brought along his brother George’s boy to help. Jim was the slowest-working man I ever saw, but something put the fear of God in him because he burned to finish up, get the hell out. Kept stalks coming to the mill from dawn to dusk, kept his nephew working that same frantic way, which was why that same bad accident happened again. Boy got tired, got his apron caught, his hand, then his whole arm, but this time some arm was left above the elbow. We bound a tourniquet as best we could, made him cough some moonshine down to keep his heart going, put shine-soaked linen in his mouth to stop his screaming.

  Frank Reese knew the story of that stain in the front room and his expression when we laid young Howell in the boat was clear—You let a black man bleed to death and try to save the white one. There was no time to explain that with a motorboat this boy still had a chance. “Frank,” I warned him, “this is what we are going to do, all right?” Black Frank said nothing. I ran young Howell to Marco and found a faster boat to take him north to the Fort Myers hospital, by which time he had hardly enough blood left to feed a sand flea. They saved his life but he was meant to lose it. A few months later this boy went fishing and perished with his daddy and the younger children, drowned in a sudden squall on Okeechobee.

  That September hurricane of 1909 tore off roofs and blew to pieces most of the Key West waterfront and the cigar factories. Here on the Bend, it took a shed and half the dock, and at high tide the house up on its mound stood in the middle of a thick brown flood that jumped the riverbanks. Kate wailed that we would all be washed away but thanks to Lucius, the kids made an adventure of it. More excited than scared, they came through fine.

  Little Ad was proud of our strong house, which hardly creaked. Their mother had read them “The Three Little Pigs,” and Ad boasted to Everybody who came through how our house stood up to the storm’s huffing and puffing. When he couldn’t stop talking about it even days later, we realized he’d been a lot more frightened than we thought.

  After the hurricane, the family lost all interest in my auto; not once did I take the tarp off after that storm. The waste of money made me wince every time I walked past. Finally we loaded her onto the Gladiator, took her up to Tampa Bay, and sold her cheap in Ybor City, which since the hurricane had replaced Key West as the home of the Cuban cigar.

  On the way home to the Bend, I stopped off at Pavilion Key with intent to trade a gallon of syrup for two bushels of fresh clams procured for me by Mrs. Josie Jenkins Parks Hamilton Johnson, to name but a few of my old friend’s discarded and deceased. Her brother Tant, who had dug the clams, told me they were growing scarce due to Collier’s dredge. That big contraption tore hell out of the bottom, broke the shells, exposed them to the drills and starfish, and generally put those clammy fellers off their feed. I was only thankful it was Captain Bill who was held responsible for the calamity—the “clamanity,” Tant called it—the only mortality in south-west Florida that nobody had tried to blame on E. J. Watson.

  Josie Parks, as she was known that year, looked somewhat the worse for considerable wear but her spirit was lively as ever. She offered me a mug of rum to seal our dealings and we nailed that mug down with another to celebrate the mystery of life. Before I knew it, this agile widow had grown so alluring in my eyes that for the first time since the turn of the century I awoke next morning in her weary bedding. And as her brother used to say, “things went from bed to worst.” I’d hardly snapped my galluses, in fact, before I got Mis Josie in a family way. “Our love child,” Josie marveled. But a love child on its way so soon after Kate told me she was pregnant promised to be a domestic complication that I scarcely needed.

  SPECK

  In the clam camp, my footsteps were dogged by another complication, this one a young feller named Crockett Daniels, who had somehow come by the wrong idea that I might be his daddy. His confusion was understandable, since nobody was even sure which Daniels bunch he sprang from. Like many Florida frontier folk, the Daniels clan was what they call “half full of Injun,” and most of their offspring had black hair straight as a horse tail and a dark copper complexion to go with it. Some had the high cheekbones and big hawk nose, too, and this Crockett kid was one of ’em. Net
ta’s brother had hooked up with an Injun-looking woman and her cousin married the sister, and their kids lived all mixed up together, big loose litters. Not only did this gang look Injun but the families had that Injun custom of raising up stray kids, Crockett included.

  Young Crockett’s mother, a young Daniels, had gone away to other parts to recover her health and reputation. His fatherhood was popularly attributed to Phin Daniels’s son Harvey, who had stumbled drunk out of his boat in pursuit of a raccoon and jammed too much black mangrove mud into his rifle muzzle. “Hell, that don’t mean nothin!” Harvey hollered, waving off a shouted warning. Anxious to get off a shot before that coon slipped away into the reeds, he blew most of the mud out of the barrel, blew the breech up, too, and his head with it. The family agreed at Harvey’s funeral that he was very likely Crockett’s father, which made an orphan of the boy but kept things orderly.

  Young Crockett knew that Pearl and Minnie were E. J. Watson’s children. Since nobody, least of all Harvey, had stepped up to claim him, he had set his heart on me, waving and hollering, tagging along, running small errands that I only gave him to be rid of him. On Pavilion Key, he was never out of sight, like a hard speck in my eye. The men laughed when I explained why I called him “Speck” and that name stuck.

  Josie Jenkins, hearing my wife was away, got drunk of a Sunday, wished to pay a call, and this boy rowed her over from Pavilion. Lucius liked Josie but was bothered by her presence in Kate’s house so I said she must leave once they’d had a bite to eat. Next day that kid was right back on my dock, having hitched a ride with a Marco man who worked a produce patch on Possum Key to feed the clammers at Pavilion and went up and down the river every day. “I’ll work just for my keep,” Speck said. “You’re trespassing,” I told him, in no mood for palaver. “Mister Ed,” he said coolly, “I ain’t got no boat and anyway I ain’t doin you no harm.” I told him to stay right there on that dock until the Marco man came back downriver in the evening.

  This wild boy had some nerve. He dared to curse me. To teach him a lesson, I fired a pistol shot right past his ear. Quick as a mink, he dove into the river and swam underwater—either that or he drowned, because he disappeared. Sobering quick, I hunted up and down the bank, hollering and calling, fearing something might have grabbed him and knowing there would be hell to pay when Josie heard about it. Too late, I realized that I still had my revolver in my hand—probably why he kept his head down in the reeds and never answered. I put that gun away and shouted more, I even yelled that he could stay here on the Bend, that’s how worried I was that the big croc might get him if he splashed along the riverbank too long. I even drifted down the current in the skiff but saw no sign of him.

  Next morning I went to Pavilion Key with the bad news and the first person I saw on shore was Crockett Daniels. Turned out he had drifted all the way downriver on his back, crawling out every little ways to make sure no shark or gator got a bead on him. Finally he swam and waded out to Mor-mon Key, where a fisherman spotted him and took him home.

  Speck had some spunk so I wanted to tell him I only meant to scare him, not to kill him, but when I drew near to shake his hand and maybe rough his head, he backed away. When I stopped, he stopped, too, regarding me out of greenish eyes as bright and cold as broken glass and nodding his head to indicate he knew my game. Then he turned and walked away. He never followed me again. That year this Crockett kid was no more than thirteen, but he was not one to forget that Watson winged a bullet past his ear, much less forgive it.

  The clammers watched as Josie shrieked how that crazy Jack Watson had shot at a poor homeless boy with intent to kill. She was not to be reasoned with, there was no changing her mind, though I followed her right to her shack. And if Josie Jenkins would not listen to my side of the story, then who would?

  Through the door she said, “You’re dead, Jack Watson, and you don’t even know it. Your heart has died from pure blackness of spirit.” Astonished and moved by these words from her own mouth, Josie opened the door to gauge their effect on the one cursed. Eyes filling up with moonshine tears, she raised her hand to touch my cheek and lips, then let it flutter down like an old leaf onto my trouser buttons. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered.

  “Stop that,” I growled because young Pearl was watching. This tempestuous bitch slammed her door right in my face, and as poor Pearl backed away in fright, I kicked that rickety little slat right off its hinges.

  The clammer families and their mutts fell back as I turned to leave. “Why don’t you go fuck yourselves,” I urged them with as much good-will as I could muster. I returned to my skiff and headed home, feeling so lonely as I entered Chatham River that even the company of Crockett Daniels might have proved welcome.

  Christmas of 1909 was a sad occasion, with no money whatever to spend on presents. In low spirits, I drank too much of our own moonshine, which was free, and concluded I’d made no progress in my life since that starved Christmas in the muddy snow out in the Nations.

  A year had passed since our return to Chatham. That winter Kate grew more remote as she grew large with child and spent more time away. One day after a bad quarrel, I ran her and the children north to Chokoloskee so that we might enjoy a vacation from each other.

  • • •

  In the Fort Myers Press for April fourth of 1910 (next to a society item about Mrs. Walter Langford entertaining the Thursday Afternoon Bridge Club at her gracious home), what should I find but an account of an excursion on the new auto road to “Deep Lake Country” by a festive party that included Mrs. and Mr. W. Langford and Sheriff F. Tippins. Paradise, the writer gushed, was not to be compared with “one of the most magnificent citrus groves in Florida, producing oranges and grapefruits fine as silk. This miraculous fruit was not yet on the market.” In short, Walter’s citrus was still rotting on the ground.

  I swallowed my pride and wrote a letter to my son-in-law offering my services one last time: after one year as overseer, if I had not solved Deep Lake’s problems, I would quit. I didn’t have to tell him I would work like hell: he knew that. Among other contributions, I would survey and stake out the small-gauge railway I had mentioned, to transport his produce south to Everglade for travel by fast coastal shipping to the markets.

  As the man who brought the railroad to Fort Myers, Banker Langford could have hired his father-in-law at little risk: the job would banish E. J. Watson some fifty miles southeast to wild country where even Watson could cause him no embarrassment. But Walter had his reputation as a stuffed shirt to keep up, and not having the guts to refuse me out-right, he sent word that he would have to think about it. He was a slow thinker, I knew that much, and perhaps he is thinking about it still. No letter came. Instead I got word, later in the summer, about Langford’s new “citrus express,” a small-gauge rail line from Deep Lake to Everglade. Already his crew was pushing through the coastal mangroves, building a railbed by digging that black muck with shovels and heaving it up onto a broad embankment. Also, Langford had arranged with Tippins to lease black convicts for his labor just as I had recommended years before. From what we heard, his road bosses were chewing up those prisoners like goobers and covering the bodies in the spoil bank where they fell.

  So what would I have done out there as manager? Turned a blind eye? Made sure our banker knew the human cost? At any rate, this bitter news convinced me I was justified in eliminating those two agitators at the century’s turn. It had come down to a matter of survival, it was them or us. All the trouble came because Bet Tucker left that pen gate open and turned loose my hogs—that was the tragedy.

  BIG HANNAH

  One day at Everglade, Green Waller introduced me to Big Hannah Smith, an enormous woman in a long gray old-time dress that covered her right down to her high brogans. Able to outwork most men, Green said, and thrash the rest to huckleberry jelly, she had a fair start on a handlebar mustache and a pair of shoulders that a man could yoke into a team of oxen, but she also had a woman’s generous heart and tender way
s. That day she told us all about her childhood on Cowhouse Island in the eastern Okefenokee, where she had three sisters as mighty as herself and three more of the common size for human females.

  Out of Green’s hearing, Miss Smith reminded me of another year when I passed through Georgia on my way south from Carolina and stayed on Cowhouse Island with her family. “They called me Little Hannah then, remember? You knowed me in the Biblical way,” she whispered, closing bashful eyes in a face of the brown hue of a large spiced ham.

  A few years earlier, Hannah had come to the southwest coast hunting her sister, the Widow Sarah McClain, who had headed for Florida after her husband was hung by mistake in Waycross, Georgia. As the first mortal to cross the Glades driving an ox team, this sister was well known as the Ox-Woman. That had been a few years earlier, in the dry season of 1906. These days she lived near old Fort Denaud on the Calusa Hatchee.

  Hannah called the Ox-Woman Big Sis and our name for Hannah was Big Six, her being somewhat more than six foot tall. Hannah first showed up at Carson Gully, near Immokalee, and the Carson family remembered her distinctly. “My mother and me was all alone with our dog Cracker,” one child told me, “and Cracker come from Key West, and he would bite ye. Cracker was barking so we sung out, ‘Who’s there?’ And a voice come back, ‘A lady from the Okefenokee Swamp!’ So we tied up Cracker, lit the lamp, and went on out, and there she stood amongst the cypress snags, had a little black dog on a big rope tied to her belt. I was scared to death of her! ‘Well, can I come in?’ she said, ‘cause I’ve walked all day and ain’t had nothin to eat.’ So she come inside—had to bend half over not to hit the lintel—and we give her some grub and she ate and ate and ate! We thought she’d bust. Sat back and said, ‘I sure do like to rest after I eat,’ so Mama laid her a big bed of corn shucks in our shed. I was scared she’d break loose and get into my room but she never did.”