Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “How about my kind, Ted?”

  “Nor that Cox feller neither.” Smallwood was in no mood to be teased.

  I gazed after Kate, who had gone off with Mamie to see Marie Alderman’s new baby.

  Ted looked alarmed. “Nosir, it weren’t your missus, E. J.! It weren’t Edna told us! Some feller was mentionin Smith’s scar and another feller said, ‘That so-called preacher you are talkin about sounds mighty like a killer name of Leslie Cox.’ ”

  “Alderman,” I said.

  “No, no, E. J.! I never said that! Can’t rightly recall who might of mentioned it, but it weren’t Wilson!” Just when I needed someone I could count on, Smallwood was lying to protect a neighbor.

  From his porch steps, I announced to the small crowd that I never hired fugitives intentionally. Those men had turned up uninvited (Dutchy bowed, ironical: nobody laughed). At harvest time, as folks well knew, a cane planter had to take what he could get; those men would be sent away after the harvest. With my new family and my syrup industry, I was making a fresh start here in the Islands and hoped to remain on the best of terms with my old friends and neighbors. But nobody seemed reassured, and my drunk gunslinger didn’t help much when he cheered my speech by shooting off his weapons, making children screech.

  Kate rejoined me, very close to tears. Like Smallwood, my wife was faltering just when I needed her. She dreaded going back to Chatham and she dreaded staying here where doors were closing. She no longer felt welcome at Marie Alderman’s house. “How about Mrs. Smallwood?” I asked in a low voice. “Oh no, I can’t! We’ve imposed on them so often!” Wigginses? McKinneys? She shook her head. Even here, she feared for our little children, who would not stop crying.

  I went to Aldermans. “Wilson, come on out!” He cracked his door. I snapped, “You listen here, boy. It’s nearly two years since I came back, and I have never said one word to you about how you ran off from north Florida when your help was needed as a witness.” I let that sink in. “And now you’ve told John Smith’s real name to this community. Want me to tell him you did that, Wilson?”

  Alderman tried to talk. Nothing came out. He dared not say what his wife had hinted to my Kate, that he’d fled south before my trials because he thought that I was guilty but was scared to testify against his boss.

  “So I’d be much obliged if you and Marie could take in Kate Edna and the children while I finish up my harvest at the Bend.” Wilson said he’d be happy to have ’em and I said I’d be happy to pay their keep. That’s the way we left it.

  I went back to the boat and told my wife that she and the children could expect a warm welcome at Aldermans. She moaned, in tears, which was not like her. I told her sharply to get hold of herself and not upset the children any further.

  Dutchy helped me lug their stuff. Having no hand free to draw, he stepped along uneasily, turning halfway around every few steps, thrashing his head from side to side like a stepped-on snake.

  Dutchy was sodden by the time we left and I drank with him most of the way home. He looked bewildered, sensing the darkness in my mood. Again and again he turned to look at me, as if to catch an expression on my face that might reveal what I was thinking. He knew I liked him despite everything and he wanted to count on my support in case of ambush. But not knowing what he wished to say and not wanting to beg, he lifted the jug, kind of shy and wistful, just to toast me. “Mister Ed,” he said.

  I ran the boat down the autumn coast, thinking of nothing. Cloud re-flections sailed beneath the surface of the sea like sunken snowy mountains. Ascending Chatham River on a falling tide, the Warrior throbbed hard against the cold weight of the current. Toward dusk, we were in sight of Chatham Bend.

  Splashing water on his face, sobering quickly, Dutchy loosened his guns in their holsters, studying the house and sheds as we drew near, not knowing if and where Cox might be hiding. For all his long sideburns and bravado, he looked like a young boy. He slapped a mosquito, rubbed his neck, touched his gun butts lightly over and over. The walls of silent mangrove, the oncoming night, ate at his nerve: I suppose he was still trying to persuade himself that as long as I was with him, he was safe.

  I eased the boat in, letting the current slow her. Hopping off onto the dock, awaiting the tossed line, he peered about him. Instead of tossing him the line, I let the Warrior drift back clear of the dock, then turned her bow. Next time he looked, the distance was too great to leap.

  “Mister Ed?” he called out softly. “Where you going, Mister Ed?” I wanted to yell at him, Duck down! because from the house in this late light he would be silhouetted on the river. I had never talked to Cox about this, never approved it, but Cox would have heard the boat and would be ready.

  “Lost Man’s River,” I said, feeling all wrong about everything.

  “Tonight? You never said nothin about Lost Man’s!” Notched high, his voice stabbed me. I lifted my hand, good-bye, good luck, and gunned the boat into her turn. His wild curse wandered on the river.

  Knowing that on that dock he was a dead man, Dutchy Melville bounded in swift zigzags toward the boat shed, seeking cover. I did not turn to see that—he had no choice.

  A voice—was that Reese?—yelled out a warning. I fixed my gaze dead ahead, gunning the motor to increase the noise, but could not escape: when the shot rang out, I heard it. A second shot scattered the echo of the first.

  In the lee of Mormon Key, phosphorus glimmered where the anchor gouged the water. In memory of Herbie Melville, I drank off what remained in Dutchy’s jug.

  Mister Ed? Where you going, Mister Ed? The first tears in many years came to my eyes.

  That was the tenth of October, 1910, a Monday. At first light next day, I went south to Key West. Entering by the back door, I remained three days at Eddie’s Bar, left for dead by unknown companions who hauled my carcass somewhere out of the way. Crawling out into noon light, clothes caked with beer spill and rank sawdust and piss (not all of it my own), I returned to my boat and left that town without any clear idea where I might be headed.

  This was my story: I dropped Dutchy at the Bend on my way to Key West. That much was true. If there was a shooting after that, I was not responsible, and if Green and Hannah doubted me, I could not help it. As for Frank Reese, who understood that what Dutchy had done could never be forgiven—yet at the same time hating Cox, hoped I would forgive him—I might have to order him to keep his opinions to himself.

  On the way north across the Banks, the Gulf sky to the west looked blotched, peculiar. I stopped at Lost Man’s to make sure I was seen by the Hamiltons or Hardens on my return journey. This was a Saturday. With her men off somewhere in the Glades, Mrs. Harden seemed leery of me and behaved queerly, never offering so much as a bite to eat. The Hardens were troubled by the weather. The heavy stillness made everybody irritable and restless. And pretty quick I sensed that somebody behind that window had a bead on me.

  I anchored off Mormon Key again and at daybreak I headed for the Bend. I dreaded facing Hannah most of all.

  The Bend was empty. No one came out onto the porch. The fields were empty and the house was silent and it was near noon. Perhaps they had learned of the oncoming storm and gone off with the mail boat or some fisherman. I called and shouted. There was no echo, yet I heard my own voice coming back.

  Taking the shotgun, I approached the house and peered in through the windows at the unwashed pots and mildewed food left on the stove and table. At one end of the room, an overturned chair lay in a thickened blackish pool that looked like molasses or spilled oil. I did not go in.

  At the boat shed, Dutchy’s coveralls hanging from their nail gave me a turn: he might lie closer than I wished to know. In broken light, the west wind rattled the dry cane stalks stacked beside the boiler, feeling out the Watson place for the coming storm.

  Again I called but there was nobody—nobody, at least, who wished to answer. That silence crept around behind me. I did not call again.

  At Pavilion Key the clam boats were gone.
Instead of running to throw her arms around my neck, my sweet Pearl fled me, flying across the littered barren where the tents had been. From behind her mother’s shack, she called out in a frightened voice that everyone had left, even young Minnie. “That poor girl run off to Key West to get away from you !” Josie hollered through her canvas door.

  I commanded her to pack up quick and board my boat because a bad storm was on the way, but it was her brother who opened the flap and stepped outside to discuss the coming weather: said this storm could never be as bad as the hurricane of 1909, which they’d survived here. “You’re all idiots,” I told him, very angry.

  Tant Jenkins was past thirty now, already stooped. He still clung to that comical mustache that when he spoke jumped on his upper lip “like a l’il ol’ hairy toad,” his sister said. Tant wore it anyway, content to conceal his shyness behind his lifelong disguise as a damn fool.

  Josie did most of the talking from her bed. “If we’d wanted to leave here, Mister Jack, we’d of left this mornin with the rest of ’em. But I have concluded that this key ain’t goin nowhere so we’re stayin.”

  As I have related, this small woman was spry in the head and spry in bed, with plenty of high spirits to go with it, but common sense was quite another matter.

  “Well, you and Tant can perish if you want but if that little feller on your teat is mine, the way you’re telling people, I am taking him with me and Pearl, too.”

  And Josie said, “You show up at Chokoloskee with your backdoor family, Mister Watson, li’l Mis Big-Butt Preacher’s Daughter gonna kick your ass right out of bed!” I said, “My wife is not your business, missus. And unlike some, she don’t drink hard liquor and knows how to hold her tongue.”

  I was sorely tempted to take my daughter by the scruff and throw her aboard the Warrior if I had to but I saw no sign of her. Josie gave me a queer wry look, saying that what with all the awful stories, poor Pearl was scared of her own father. “So you can go to hell, Jack Watson, and take Pearl with you if she’s fool enough, but me’n your sweet baby boy aim to stay put where we’re at, and Stephen, too!”

  Stephen S. Jenkins offered a small rueful smile by way of saying that if his sister and her kids had their hearts set on staying, he reckoned he’d stay, too, kind of look out for ’em. This bachelor whom nobody took seriously had always felt responsible for this ragtag bunch he called his family. I told Tant, “If you damned people are so drunk and shiftless you won’t save yourselves, then you better start praying to that God of yours.”

  Pearl slipped out from behind a shack and followed me down toward the water, keeping her distance like a half-wild dog. At the dock, gray wind waves slapped along the pilings. Except for Tant’s moored sailing skiff, rising and banging on wind-dirtied whitecaps, the anchorage was empty.

  The child watched me haul my anchor, frightened to leave and frightened to be left, frightened of the future altogether. I called, “You sure, Pearl?” and she nodded gravely, leaning back into the wind, pale and tattered as a cornstalk against the dark wall of that weather. “Your daddy loves you, sweetheart!” Because I’d never told her that, not in so many words, I startled her. She glanced back toward the shack, then ran along the shore a little ways, crying something like, Did you do it, Daddy? Is it true? What was she talking about? Then blown sea mist closed over her and she was gone.

  This was Sunday, the 15th of October.

  Off Rabbit Key, the Warrior passed the last clam boats, on their way north toward Caxambas. Nobody aboard those boats returned my wave.

  THE GREAT HURRICANE

  Late that afternoon, in Chokoloskee, Bembery Storter’s boy, young Hoad, blew into Smallwood’s all excited and related how bodies had been found in Chatham River near the Watson place and how a nigra had rowed out to Pavilion and reported that a man named Cox, with Mr. Watson absent, had murdered three on Chatham Bend last Monday evening. This nigra claimed that E. J. Watson put Cox up to it but took that back when he was hollered at by Watson’s friends and backdoor family such as Josie Jenkins.

  Everyone but the Storter boy knew that Watson was right there in the store. One or two glanced over, looked away. Two went out and it was then Bembo’s boy noticed me, standing back against the wall. Being Lucius’s best friend, he was rattled and fell quiet, cast his eyes down. “You were telling how this nigra said he’d mistook himself about Ed Watson,” Smallwood encouraged him. “How he took back what he first said, put it all on Cox.”

  “That because they threatened him?” Isaac Yeomans said.

  All awaited me in a dead silence as I found my voice. “Three dead?” The words came out in a low croak like a gigged bullfrog—a dangerous slip, suggesting that Watson had known in advance about at least one victim. But only Hoad seemed to pick this up, cocking his head and looking at me quizzically before he nodded. Melville and Waller, he advised me. Big Mrs. Smith. My look of honest stupefaction may have saved my life.

  The negro had said that all three bodies had been anchored in the river downstream from the Bend. Early on Saturday, a party of clammers had gone there to confirm the story, retrieving the bodies and burying them in a common pit across the river maybe a mile below the house. Knowing Cox was still at large and uneasy about the weather, they had hurried back and broken camp on Pavilion Key and headed for Caxambas. The negro had been taken to Fort Myers to be turned over to the sheriff.

  As the whole room watched, as the room waited, I sank down on my nail keg, greatly shaken, staring at the floor and trying to think because my life depended on it. I had to get to him before he told his tale to Tippins. My obvious shock upon hearing the evil news—and the fact I had come here and put myself into their hands, which a guilty man would surely not have done—had affirmed my innocence strongly enough to let me leave if I left quickly. Stating grimly that I was off to get the sheriff, I strode out the door before the men could organize to stop me. Aware that I was armed and desperate, no one challenged me or even trailed me to the dock, but when I looked back, the whole bunch was still out on the store porch, gazing after the Warrior as she moved off the shore.

  Storm tides had sucked the water from the Bay and even in the channel, the boat churned up a mud wake all the way to Everglade. Because the Warrior was too low on fuel to risk rounding Cape Romano in such weather, I asked Bembo to take me to Key Marco early next morning. Anxious to believe in my innocence, he agreed to do it but his wife, alarmed, retreated to the bedroom. When his boy offered to go as crew, Mrs. Storter from behind her wall cried out in fear. In the morning, though she made us coffee, she would not acknowledge my heartfelt thanks, refusing to look at me at all.

  On this dark and ominous Monday morning, the barometer was still falling, with wind gusting hard from all points of the compass. In the dark, the rush of weather thrashing through the palm tops was unnerving. We towed the Warrior up the tidal river and lashed her tight into the trees, then worked our way out through the barrier islands to the Gulf, half-blinded by cold walls of bow spray and hard sweeping rain: in the end, we abandoned speech, just hung on grimly. Near midday, off the south shore of Key Marco, yelling thanks, I jumped off into the shallows in a waist-deep chop and gained the shore.

  By now the storm was a whole gale, close to hurricane. Winds thickened by torn leaves and dust drove slashing fits of hard-whipped rain in sheets and torrents. Shielding my eyes from flying vegetation, bent doubled over into the wind and wet and cold, I crossed that broad island to the Marco settlement, from where Dick Sawyer ran me across the swollen channel to the mainland.

  I might have respected Sawyer more had he dared refuse me or found the nerve to ask for payment instead of babbling on and on about our dreadful danger. It was true that the bilge slosh, up over our ankles, threatened to tip a fatal wave over the gunwales; even so, I told him to shut up and steer while I kept bailing. My heart was heavy, not with fear for our own safety (the mainland was close and I was confident his boat would make it) but for those brave Storters on the Bertie Lee, who
could never have reached Everglade before this storm came roaring in over the Islands.

  Following the wood trail, dodging windfall all the way, I arrived soaked through at Naples, as the few inhabitants called the shack cluster at its pier head. Captain Charlie Stewart, known as Pops, was postmaster, and his house had a small spare room used by the circuit preacher, but I never took my boots off or got into bed, unable to sleep with that wind howling at the roof, all but lifting it away. Old hinges had wrenched loose and the door was banging, dealing the house whack after whack. Pops and his wife lay like the dead, listening all night for Watson’s footfalls.

  That Monday evening of October seventeenth, one week to the day after the murders at the Bend, Tant Jenkins lashed Josie and her young into the highest mangrove limbs that would support them—not high enough, since the few trees not razed for fuel by the clam colony were small and meager. Tant got a grip on scrawny Pearl while Josie clutched her infant boy under her slicker. Soon storm seas were breaking all across the island. Hour after hour, the battering cold wind and water wore at Josie’s strength. Being slight and small, she could scarcely hang on to her limb, and was shifting for a better grip when a big rogue sea rose through the rain. Tant yelled too late. Torn loose, the baby was borne away without a cry.

  On a previous visit, I had asked Josie his name. “What name do you fancy, Mister Jack?” his mother teased me. “Well, if he’s mine, name him Artemas after his great-grandfather.” Josie lifted the baby and gazed into his eyes. “He’s yours for sure and his name is Jack Artemas Watson.”

  “Jack Artemas Jenkins,” I corrected her. Josie frowned but made no comment. All the while Jack Artemas observed me with my own blue eyes, shining over the round of Josie’s breast.

  When the storm tide diminished, brother and sister hunted among the roots, heartbroken. His servants say that the merciful Lord works in mysterious ways, very few of which strike me as merciful, and my little son was awaiting his mother when the seas receded. Not one hundred yards from where she’d lost him, pale tiny hands protruded like sponge polyps from the sand, grasping for air. Crown just beneath the surface, her infant stood straight upright, set for resurrection. So much for Jack Artemas Jenkins, said the Lord.