Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Go slow,” I said, and his eye wavered. He “let a little smile play on his lips,” as dastards did in Kate’s romantic novels, and maybe bastards, too, for all I know. Folding her knitting, my wife got up and left the room.

  OLD FIGHTER

  Before he ran off at the century’s turn, my oldest son would take Lucius to a deep hole upriver where they fished for hours for a huge old snook that Sonborn named Old Fighter. The boys could never land Old Fighter, and finally I doubted that this fish existed outside of Sonborn’s imagination. But Lucius kept on trying in the years after Sonborn left, and one Sunday he persuaded me to go along. We were close that day and he dared wonder where his long-lost brother might be now. As usual, I ignored this question.

  In the charged silence of the next few minutes, Lucius hooked a fish that made a terrific run and broke his line. “Old Fighter, Rob! Got away again!” he cried, triumphant.

  I had told Lucius very little about Leslie and instructed Kate and Frank to do the same. Still hoping to make friends with someone close to his own age, Lucius went after that huge snook Rob called Old Fighter and invited “John Smith” to go along. The following Sunday, when Lucius was off setting net along the coast, Cox made Sip Linsey row him upriver to Old Fighter’s lair. With dynamite left over from the cistern excavation, he killed out every last fish in that hole. Sure enough, one giant snook had white hook scars around the mouth. Old Fighter, Leslie crowed to Lucius. “Sure don’t look like much.”

  I shook my head. No, I told Cox, we call that one Little Fighter. Old Fighter is still out there.

  Lucius knew better. He was upset that Leslie killed Rob’s fish but also by the unfair means used to defeat a legendary creature of his boyhood that he and Rob had never really wanted to destroy.

  With the fading of the Great Comet, a cavernous darkness gathered on hot summer evenings behind the long gaunt running clouds on the Gulf horizon. Fishing offshore, Lucius saw a shadow rising from the depths under the silver sprays of bait fish chopping the water. Since the thing never broke the surface, he could not imagine what it might have been. He stared all about him at the empty sea, then hauled his lines and took off for home. Over several days in that late summer, even in light variable wind, the cane leaves stirred as if seeking to escape, and hearing those small sad scraping sounds that I could not recall from other years, I felt an odd foreboding: hurricane. After the bad storm of 1909, no one expected another quite so soon, but folks were still spooked by that comet in the spring and the weather had been undependable ever since.

  After the harvest, Hannah Smith informed me, she and Green aimed to move on. They had a lot of back pay coming and requested part payment in advance so they could invest it in a hog farm and a little cabin somewhere in the Cypress. Not that they were in a rush, she said, they only thought they should let me know, give me fair warning.

  Hannah was nervous, knowing Green had never pestered me for wages before she came. Because I owed him so much money that he couldn’t leave me, Green was an indentured servant indentured to himself. To pay him off would cripple the year’s earnings, which I had counted on to get us back in business, and Hannah would have ten months coming, too.

  Cox was not bright but he had a nose for trouble. While Hannah was talking, my foreman rolled his eyes a little for my benefit, a bad twist to his mouth. I would recall that cruel expression later. I would also recall mentioning that harsh measures were sometimes required to get the job done. “Not,” I added, “that you need to be more harsh. You’ve got them terrified already.” This was true. The cane crew was so fearful of Cox that they hurried their work dangerously every time he came into the field.

  I was away at Tampa, buying supplies on credit and taking orders from our buyers, when Leslie gave a few gallons of syrup to a passing trader for carrying a sick field hand back to Fort Myers. This man, he told me, was so anxious to leave that he never even waited for his pay. “If that nigger ever comes up in the street askin for money—which I doubt—you can pay him then.” Les was very proud of his fine work. Wasn’t it part of the foreman’s job to keep the payroll just as low as possible?

  That evening, my son let me know that this trader must have turned up on a Sunday when everybody but Leslie and that field hand were off fishing; in fact, Leslie was the only one who ever laid eyes on that trader, since his boat was gone by the time the crew came back.

  Irritable, I cut him off right there. Having just returned from Tampa, I was tired and distracted: the return on this year’s harvest would scarcely pay our debts, leaving nothing to carry us into next year. Leslie had saved us money. Suspicion about my foreman’s story was the last thing I wanted to hear. I yelled at him, “Now dammit, Lucius, don’t nag me about John Smith! He gets the job done!” And Lucius shouted back, “Why do you still use that name when everyone but me seems to have known that he is an escape d murderer named Leslie Cox?” That was the first time in his life Lucius had ever spoken to me in such heat. I said harshly, “Frank tell you that? Or was it Kate? We will settle this when I get back. Tell Frank the same.” (Because Cox knew Frank’s real name we had mostly given up on “Little Joe.”)

  On the way south, cooling off a little, I worried that I’d talked too freely. Telling Cox tall tales about outlaw life in the Old West was one thing, but confiding in a bad actor like that about my financial difficulties and growing desperation might have been a bad mistake. In his zeal to prove himself as foreman, Cox might have scared those hands so badly that they were happy to leave unpaid.

  The day after I got back from Key West, Lucius Watson, dammit, left the Bend for good. Everyone loved him, they were all out on the bank waving good-bye. I went outside at the last minute but I did not wave. I was wounded more than I would ever admit to anybody except maybe Hannah. We enjoyed each other, she was my good friend and the only person on the place who called me by my Christian name, but when I went to her for some advice, I got abuse instead.

  “Your Lucius is a very good young feller and he loves you dearly and you wouldn’t listen to him, Ed. You don’t want to hear the truth, nor see it, neither.”

  “What’s the truth then, woman, since you know so much?”

  Hannah burst out in a rush, “Your boy can’t work with that foreman of yours, and me’n Green can’t neither. We done our best to bide our time and see things your way but we sure don’t like what’s going on. We just don’t care to live no more around that feller.” She lowered her voice, looking back over her shoulder. “You know me, Ed, I ain’t what you’d call a scaredy-cat nor superstitious. But lately Green—well, both of us—been kind of hearin somethin.”

  “Hearing what?” I yelled. “Come on now, Hannah!”

  Hannah looked more and more upset. “Hearin this kind of hummin on the wind, like somethin very bad is comin down on us.” She was wiping her hands red with her dish towel. “You know us, Ed. We never aimed to let you down. But now we got to leave.”

  The thin ax mark of a mouth tight-closed under that mustache showed her determination, and since she was such a level-headed woman, I had to listen.

  “What happens on this place ain’t no business of ours,” she whispered. “We never seen nothin and never heard nothin, we ain’t never goin to say a word to nobody, and that’s the truth. It’s just, we got to go.” She was close to tears. “Why don’t you say somethin?” she cried. “You had the use of my man all these years and no complaint. We stuck by you and worked hard to tide you over your hard times, but now we want to go and we need our wages!”

  I never thought I’d see this woman near hysterics. I had to shout her down. “Now dammit, Hannah, you know my bad luck! If I have to pay you people off on top of all our debts—”

  “Whose fault is that? Them lawyer bills ain’t ours!” She backed away, afraid she’d gone too far. Her red eyes filled, she mopped them with her apron. “You shouldn’t ought to ask no more of us, Ed Watson.”

  Hannah fell still because Cox, drawn to the racket, appeared at th
e corner of the house. He lounged against the wall, picking his teeth, cynical as usual and unabashed. Not until I stared at him would he go away. I then asked Hannah to think it over, urging her to stay just one more year. When she shook her head frantically, unable to consider such a thing, I said, “because if you leave here, you will leave unpaid.”

  “Ed, we ain’t young no more! We got nobody and nothin to take care of us except what we got comin.” She stood eyes closed, hands clenched on her apron: I waited for her, feeling all wrong, but I had no choice. “I reckon we will have to wait,” she murmured finally. She shuffled back inside in her home-hewn sandals. Except for the cutters hacking down the cane, Big Hannah Smith was the only person on the place besides myself who did not go barefoot.

  Kate and the children went along next time I went to Chokoloskee, and they stayed behind with Kate’s friend Alice McKinney. From there she went to stay with Mamie Smallwood, then Marie Alderman, finding excuses not to come home for weeks. Scared of me now, she did not speak of Cox again but only said that Chatham Bend was too hard on the small children—the hurricane season, the mosquitoes—and too dangerous with all of those rough men. I assumed she’d heard rumors about Josie Jenkins from her female friends but she later admitted it was Leslie who told her.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE FEUD

  In the hurricane season of late summer, the heat and humidity were something to fear. Even at midday, mosquitoes hung outside the screens on a miasmal air so moist and sweet that it might have come on a south wind out of the tropics.

  That summer we had a young Mikasuki squaw who’d been thrown out by her band for consorting with the moonshiner Ed Brewer. She was not exclusively for his own use, it seems, because he snuck in to the Bend one day, tried to rent her to our coloreds. Sip Linsey was a pious darkie of the old-time religion and Frank Reese was still pining for Jane Straughter, so those two boys had little use for a beat-up aboriginal with advanced alcohol and hygienic problems.

  When Hannah got wind of what was going on, she grabbed Brewer by one arm and swung him off the dock into the current. “Flung that sumbitch clean off the Bend!” Green boasted. “Cut his boat loose, too, while she was at it. Never so much as ast if he could swim!” And Hannah said, “Well, that is correct, I never give enough thought to his future. If that croc got to him, he might not of had one.” But Green had seen him grab hold of his skiff, and probably he’d dragged himself ashore farther downriver.

  Hannah gave that wild girl a good wash and named her Susie. She taught her a few chores to pay her feed, along with as much Baptist instruction as a redskin knowing nothing of our tongue might get a handle on. But seeing her slip into the outhouse must have set Cox thinking about certain details of what was taking place behind that door because he was awaiting her when she came out. The way he told it at the table—he thought it was pretty comical—he grasped her wrists in one hand and with the other yanked up her old rag of a shift. Held her squirming up against him until the mosquitoes swarming her bare bottom made her weep, and pretty soon she gave up and lay down for him. “Couldn’t resist me,” Leslie said. Hannah said, “She ain’t nothin but a child and you ain’t nothin but a raper. Hang your head in shame.”

  That afternoon Earl Harden showed up in his new launch. Never hailed the house, just dropped someone off quick without tying up. By the time I reached the porch, he was back out in mid-river idling his motor, greedy to see what might take place when E. J. Watson realized who that stranger was. Ever since he went to Key West to accuse me in that Tucker business, Earl would only look me in the eye when he could not avoid it, then smile so hard that when he turned, the smile got left behind. I honestly believe that if that feller hadn’t been so scared of me, he would have waylaid me and shot me in the back.

  Earl was jolly as could be with white men, he worked hard at it, but teasing him about his bad attitude toward Henry Short was putting raw salt on a leech. I liked to tease him: he had niggers on the brain. I used that word, too, of course, used it casually like most men, Henry Short included. But men who hated blacks like Earl twisted a sneer into it, a stink, the way a cat twists out its crap, leaving that nasty little point at the back end.

  Awaiting me, the figure on the dock stood still, arms folded on his chest. His silhouette was black against the river shine but I knew him at once. Those big gun butts jutted upward from his hips like horns.

  Waller came to the door behind me, napkin tucked into his collar. “Jesus,” he whispered. Hannah, huffing up behind, stared from one face to another for a clue. In the kitchen, Frank rose from his beans and went out the back door and came around to the corner of the house, then stepped back quick, out of the line of fire. Still watching the front, the figure on the dock raised one hand toward the black man in a kind of greeting.

  I knew much better than to draw my gun. I worked it up out of its shoulder holster, let it slide down into my coat sleeve, having practiced that trick often enough to know how to do it undetected.

  “Drop it,” he said. This pistolero had drawn on me so quick that I had no choice. At the dangerous clatter of a loaded weapon on the pinewood porch, everyone jumped.

  Dutchy was grinning and I grinned right back, lest he imagine I was paralyzed by those big guns of his. And there and then, out of bone craziness or love of life, he flipped both six-guns and sprang into the air in a backwards somersault, landing in time to catch his weapons neatly on the spin, all set to shoot. One barrel was pointed at my heart, the other covered the dropped revolver on the porch in case it had occurred to me to grab it up, which it had not.

  Laughing, he dropped his guns loosely in their holsters and came forward. The others backed and filled like cattle in the doorway. Retrieving my weapon, he dumped the cartridges into his pocket, tossed it back to me. “Damn if it don’t feel dandy to be back. Home is where the heart is, that right, Frank?”

  Reese had been grinning right along, Green Waller, too. These fools were tickled to death to see this swarthy little criminal who had cost us so much wasted work and a year’s pay, and they caught their fool Boss, who had sworn to take his life, kind of smiling, too.

  “Glad to see me, Mister Ed? Aim to invite me in?”

  “There’s no free food for gunslingers around here,” I barked. “You aim to stay, you better change those fancy duds, start working off that thousand gallons of good syrup you still owe us.”

  “Same ol’ Mister Ed! Talkin rough to a sensitive young feller that might take a mind to spoil another thousand.” Still grinning, he ambled over to the bunkhouse, hunted up his old coveralls. He put them on over his holster belt and reappeared, delighted.

  Dutchy gave me all that time to get the drop on him. I didn’t do it, and a good thing, too. He’d put away one of his guns, but the other, although hidden, was rigged butt forward on his left side, ready to be drawn by his right hand, as I knew from the fact that his left gallus hung loose and the left flap of his coveralls, too. This boy knew I knew and grinned. “Same ol’ Mister Ed!” said Dutchy Melville.

  “There’s a law against concealed weapons in this country,” I reminded him. “Might have to make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “Well, I know that, Mister Ed, bless your kind heart!” He glanced around the place, wary of ambush. “Who’s that in the house?”

  “That’s the foreman, finishing his dinner.” Hannah Smith was awed by his keen hearing.

  Lifting his hat, Dutchy greeted Hannah with a dandy bow—the first she had ever received without a doubt. Next, he saluted her hog reiver—“How do, Mr. Waller!” Green waved and smiled, nudging his woman, proud to be singled out by name. “And Frank, too!” That hard man raised both hands high and shook them in a single fist like that black champion Jack Johnson, who had whipped America’s “Great White Hope” back in July.

  Standing there on his bandy legs in the hot sun of September, young Dutchy was set for anything that came his way. “Ol’ place lookin kind of run down, Mister Ed. But I reckon it’s as clos
e to a good home as a poor outlaw boy could hope for so I sure am grateful for your hospitality.”

  “You abused my hospitality. Don’t forget that because I won’t.” I had sworn a solemn oath this boy would die the next time he crossed my path, yet it seemed a great waste in a time of labor shortage to kill a man so full of ginger.

  “Mister Ed, I won’t forget it and I don’t regret it cause you had it comin,” he answered cheerfully. “So I’ll just take my old job back as the foreman.”

  I was dumbfounded. To feel so confident he would be welcomed! And in a way, of course, he was quite right; he had slipped past my guard. Maybe he knew that too much time had passed, that I had no real heart for revenge.

  All this while, my foreman kept on with his eating, to demonstrate indifference to the visitor. When we came in, he looked up, sullen, interrupted in his chewing, and from the start, disdaining the other, he spoke only to me. Threatened by Melville’s dangerous glee, he instinctively disliked and feared him, while Melville understood in that same instant why the foreman had stayed inside. Each shifted his gaze slightly to one side, as dogs do, to avoid a tangle before everything was ready—before, that is, one had the other dead to rights.

  Both dogs ignored my introduction, as if their acquaintance would be too short-lived to waste breath on civilities. In fact, Leslie belched when told the other’s name. “Ain’t this the little piece of shit that messed up all that syrup?” And Dutchy said, “Ain’t this the back-shootin sonofabitch whose sloppy mouth got you and Frank in so much trouble in north Florida?”