Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  “ ‘It’s a closed chapter in my life’—that’s what Mama always said! Let’s leave it closed!”

  “Lucius is a historian, Ad! And he doesn’t think Mr. Watson was so bad as a lot of people have made out. Aren’t you glad to hear that?”

  Distressed by her distress, Ad frowned, bewildered. “What do I care if the man was bad or good, or what was said about him? I care what people say about our family!” To Lucius he said, “You leave us out of your damned Watson Claim, and your book, too!” He had gone brick red in the face, with heavy breathing. “I told that lawyer I won’t sign the petition! I have no interest whatsoever in what becomes of that old property! I’m not a Watson, I am a Burdett. I made a good name in my profession! I want it kept that way!”

  “Those dark things happened a long time ago,” Ruth Ellen mourned. “If Lucius is correct—if that house can be made into some kind of a monument—folks are bound to look at Mr. Watson in a different way! We won’t have to hide him anymore, Ad! We can hold our heads up!”

  “It’s important to seek out the truth,” Lucius told Ad. “You said so yourself.”

  “The truth!” Burdett said bitterly. He pointed at his sister. “She was toddling around with the Smallwood girls over in the store, she never saw it! But I ran down to the boat landing to meet him! I was three years old, hollering ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ ” Addison’s eyes widened and he waved his arms. “Know what I saw? I saw my own daddy shot to pieces!”

  His sister gave a little cry, longing to mother him.

  Ad gasped a few breaths before resuming in a dull and quiet voice. “All I remember is that crash of guns, I thought the sky was falling down on top of me. And the dogs. Those dogs were mean and scary, they bit children. Those dogs never stopped barking all night long.” His lip was trembling. “That the kind of truth you’re after, Mister?”

  “I’m your brother, Ad, remember?”

  Burdett scowled, shaking him off. He leaned over to peck his sister’s head, frantic to go.

  Lucius followed him toward the door, where they spoke quietly.

  “Why did you let me come here if you didn’t trust me?”

  “I was dead against it. I still am. But I knew you would find the way sooner or later.” Burdett was calm again. He shook Lucius’s hand, saying brusquely, “Maybe I’ll think about your damn petition.”

  For a little while, they sat in silence, giving the house a chance to get its breath back. Finally Ruth Ellen cleared her throat. “Mama dragged us underneath the store, that’s how scared she was those men would kill us, and her fear scared Ad, too, he was hysterical. He still wakes up smelling the dreadful odor of those dead chickens under there, drowned in the hurricane!” Involuntarily she pinched at the bridge of her nose. “I’ll go to my grave with that odor in my nostrils!” She tried to smile, tried to explain how much of Ad’s hostile manner stemmed from confused feelings. At one time he had actually considered changing his name to Watson—

  “His name is Watson,” Lucius reminded her.

  She hurried on. “Addison is such a wonderful gardener, he grows lovely vegetables,” she said brightly. “He spends almost all of his spare time out in his garden.” She stared at the clenched hands in her lap before she wept. “He spoke more today than he has spoken in the last ten years together. He is very very upset, I’m not sure why.” She dabbed her eyes. “He’s really a very gentle man, and his life has been so sad. He was a bad sleepwalker throughout childhood, and small wonder! Then he quit school in the eighth grade. We couldn’t get him to go back, finish his education. He worked as a housepainter awhile, got married, moved away. Nobody heard from him for years, not even an answer to a registered letter that we sent when Mama almost died. He only came back a while ago, after his daughter was killed in a car accident.” Only now did she look up at Lucius. “Mr. Watson was a hard drinker, I have heard. Do you suppose there’s a curse of alcohol on the Watson men?”

  “I drink too much myself,” Lucius admitted, in answer to the unspoken question, “or so I’ve been told.”

  “Lucius? Have you had a happy life? Do you have children?” She flushed and hurried on. “Addison had a few friends in the old days, but since his wife died, he has been a loner. He won’t even come to family gatherings. He can’t take a drink but he drinks anyway. He gets aggressive, very very angry. And we have to ask ourselves if that violent anger is something that came down from his father, and how dangerous it might be to other people.” When Lucius nodded sympathetically but made no comment, she murmured, “Well. We have lots to be thankful for. I mean, everybody has to live with something, I suppose.”

  Soon after the Park took over, in the late forties, Ad had gone south to Chokoloskee, and Mr. Bill Smallwood had taken him to Chatham Bend—the first time since 1910 that any of her family had returned there. She had learned of his trip in a Christmas letter from Ernestine Smallwood, because Ad never said a word about it even after he returned.

  Of course, Lucius thought. That explained a nagging mystery. “In 1947 or ’48,” he told her, “right after the Park announced its plan to burn all the houses and old cabins, someone went to Chatham River and gave that old house a fresh coat of white paint.” He shrugged. “It might have worked, because the Watson Place is the only one still there.”

  “Ad never told me he’d done that! But of course I never questioned him about his trip. If he didn’t want to talk about it, then probably he’d found out something awful. I was scared to death that what he told me might be even worse than the truth I dreaded all my life!” Yet a few years later, Ruth Ellen had made her own pilgrimage to Chokoloskee and was taken to the Watson Place by one of the Smallwood daughters and her husband.

  Ruth Ellen sighed, still brooding about Ad. “He would never go see Mama in the rest home, and he was the apple of her eye! Poor Mama was nearly blind, you know, all she had was a darned old parrot to keep her company, but Ad said it made him feel too bad to see her looking so decrepit. He never thought about how Mama might feel, or how much he hurt her.

  “Herkie Junior is close to his half sisters, and he tried to look out for poor Ad, too, but even Herkie gave up on Ad after a while—couldn’t get close to him!

  “Ad used to be such a big man, you know, and very strong—he took after his father in that way. He seems much smaller now. He was always quiet, always a loner, as I said. Even as a little boy, he never had very much to say, he was always quiet and reserved, always a little troubled. But he wasn’t always off in his own head, the way he is today.”

  Her voice had diminished as she spoke. Soon she fell still. They listened to the ancient clock in the other room. When she looked up, she smiled at him politely, and he knew that after her brother’s admonitions, she would speak no more about their father. Perhaps she had told what little she knew and perhaps she hadn’t, but now she wanted him to go.

  Standing in her doorway, Ruth Ellen invited him to stop by and say hello the next time he came through Neamathla, though her kind smile told him that she knew he wouldn’t, which was all right, too. And still she looked at him, head cocked ever so slightly—What do you want with us?

  South

  On a green and blue day, headed south with Sally Brown beside him, Lucius reveled in a rare sense of new life, and showed off boyishly in his excitement. Crossing the Alachua Prairie, he told Sally that even in his father’s day this was still a trackless country of red wolves, bear, and panthers. Half-wild cattle had wandered through this scrub since the time of the first Spaniards, who had more than thirty ranchos in north Florida by the end of the sixteenth century. Then the British came from Charleston, that was 1704, and killed every last Spaniard and every Indian they could lay bloody hands on, women and children, too—seven thousand Indians was a fair estimate. They slaughtered their fellow men like sheep.

  “Fellow men,” the young woman agreed, nodding sagaciously. “Like sheep.”

  Sally was smoking one of her “funny smokes,” and now she proffered it, raising it t
o his lips with warm, light fingers. At her instruction, he drew deeply, holding the smoke deep in his lungs before swallowing, suffusing it upwards to his temples. When he exhaled at last, the smoke seemed to drift out through his ears. His brain was warming and his mouth slid toward a grin.

  Because she had been his history student, the Professor could hold forth on Florida history to his heart’s content, spilling a whole lifetime of study into her sweet ears. Yet her interest was real and her teasing of him affectionate, and in his own intoxication and plain happiness, he was delighted to babble on and on about the fugitive siminoli and the escaped black slaves who taught them how to grow tropical crops, and the strong alliance of these peoples against the white men who came to recapture the slaves and kill the Indians—

  “Like sheep,” she repeated, still back there in his earlier discourse. And now this soft, unbridled person draped herself languidly on his arm and shoulder, peering around his chin in comic awe, her shining eyes scarcely an inch from his, her lips brushing the corner of his own, until he could scarcely see the road.

  He kissed her then. “Back off,” he said, backing off himself. “You’ll get us killed.” The male voice was apart from him, not quite his own.

  She whispered breathily, across great distances, “Just a-hangin on my darlin’s ever’ word, is all.”

  Alarmed, he struggled to be serious again. “The Indians had rounded up wild horses and cattle. Alachua Seminoles, they called ’em in this part of the country, ran their cattle down here on Paynes Prairie … biggest cattle raisers in all Florida …” But he was feeling neither here nor there, he was getting mixed signals, he was driving very fast, or so it seemed. Did this edible wild girl want to make love? The creature laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear, whispering softly, “You slow down a little, hear me, darlin?”

  He nodded, stirred by the fine sweet smell of her hair. The can of frosted beer between his legs moistened his jeans. “You, too,” he said in a blurred voice. Realizing these words made no sense, he began to laugh.

  Their road passed through Silver Springs, where Leslie Cox had escaped the prison road gang. Silver Springs was formerly Fort King, the historic site of one of the great episodes of the Indian Wars. On December twenty-eighth of 1835, Osceola had led forty Mikasuki in the destruction of Fort King, while on the same day, east of Tampa Bay, the war chief Alligator—Halpatter Tustenuggee—led his Muskogee in a direful ambush, destroying Major Dade’s detachment of more than one hundred men. Three days later, the war chiefs joined forces in an attack on the troops of Gen. Duncan Clinch, and the Seminole Wars were under way. “Clinch is the Clinch of the Clinch River Nuclear Reactor in Tennessee, and Dade is the Dade of Dade County, Florida, drug, vice, and murder capital of America,” he informed her.

  “Clinch is the Clinch and Dade is the daid.” Relapsing comfortably into her cracker accent, Sally took another drag and passed the smoke. “Clinch is the Clinch and I don’t care who knows it! Couldn’t wipe them redskins out with powder and ball, so his paleface spirit has come back, fixin to nuke ’em!”

  “How come you’re speaking in the cracker tongue, Mis Sally?”

  “Because under my glitterin veneer of international sophistication, a plain ol’ cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.”

  “And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your licentious behavior and rough language?”

  “It sickens ’em. Just purely sickens ’em. They feel like pukin.” Oddly Sally’s scowl was real, her mind was in a twist, she looked as if she might up and puke on purpose. Rolling another cigarette on the faded denim of her knee, licking the paper, she said quietly, “I do know something about Osceola which you whiteboy historians don’t put in the books. Learned it from Whidden, whose grandma was descended. Osceola was a breed named Billy Powell who was ashamed of his white blood. These days there’s plenty of mixed people would be better off with Osceola’s attitude—ashamed of the white blood, not the dark—but that is neither here nor is it there. Osceola claimed to be pure Creek, claimed he didn’t speak English, but his daddy was a white man, he was stuck with it. And later on, he took black wives along with a few red ones, probably had children on every doggone one. Most of his warriors were black Seminoles, what they called maroons, which might account for the mixed-up bunch that’s running around backcountry Florida today.” She cocked her head slyly. “I bet you damned historians never knew that!”

  “Oh, we knew that. Some of us, anyway.” He reminded her that mixing of the races had been widespread since colonial times—in fact, the first soldier to die in the American Revolution was a black-Indian.

  “Heck, I seen Injuns got a nap so thick you couldn’t put a bullet through it! And ‘white’ men, too!” Her hoarse smoker’s laugh had a deep rue in it, and he laughed with her. He couldn’t help it, her quirkiness delighted him, he loved her. Their mirth eased the erotic tension, and they set each other off again, over and over and over, down the road. “It’s so nice to see this ol’ gloom-ball professor laugh this way!” Sally cried happily.

  But saying so put merriment to death, and she scowled crossly, banging his knee with her own. “Anyway, folks weren’t particular in frontier days. Some of those people around Chokoloskee Bay who are so darn mean about the black people better not go poking too hard at their own woodpiles. Might be some red boys in there at the very least!” She socked his leg. “Don’t laugh at me! I know what I’m talking about! Better’n you!”

  A wildness had come into her eye which he sought to deflect before she blurted something angry they might both regret. “Remember those nineteenth-century edicts?” he asked her. “ ‘Eminent domain’? ‘Manifest Destiny’? Pretending to legalize the seizure of Indian lands when we knew those seizures were gross violations of our Constitution? Even today, good jurists understand that this was lawlessness, a dangerous flaw in the very foundation of our nation’s history, but no one talks about it, not even historians, it’s just too dangerous—” He stopped short, for her slight smile was mocking him.

  “Dangerous, huh? You some kind of troublemaker, boy? Some kind of a damn ol’ Commie faggot?”

  She sat up straight, trying to look bigoted, but after a moment she lay her head back and went pealing off into laughter so gleeful that she brought her knees up to her chest and kicked her cerise sneakers. She did not intend to be provocative, but that heart-shaped round of her bottom in tight jeans, the denim cleft, glimpsed on a curve, caused him to roll two wheels onto the shoulder. Since the ground was soft, he came so close to running the car into the ditch that an egret sprang skyward with a strangled squawk.

  Sally took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology, but her mood had swerved toward something bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. After a while, she said in a gritty voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right, Pop? You’re getting your old balls in an uproar.”

  He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey listen—”

  “Student-fucker,” she said quietly. “Don’t you try fucking me. Don’t even try it.”

  “Oh Lord—”

  “And another thing”—she was yelling now—“I hated the way you abandoned that poor old man back in Lake City! That was the most heartless thing I ever saw! What are you, some kind of a fanatic, with all your fucking notes, your fucking boneyards! Is that all you care about? The past?”

  Injured and furious, he drove in silence, disgusted with himself for even considering anything so grotesque as a romantic liaison with this dope-warped young woman. What he needed was a wise and gentle person closer to his own age, a lovely widow such as Lucy Summerlin or even Hettie Collins—Hettie was no blood relation, after all. He turned to his erstwhile admirer with as much hauteur as he could muster.

  “Miss?”

  “ ‘Mrs.’ to you, Pop. I’m another man’s wife, in case you were forgetting.”

  “I notice, Mrs., that you jumped into my car. You’re not bac
k in Lake City tending to that poor old man unless I’m much mistaken.”

  “You want me to get out, hitch a ride back? That what you’re saying? Slow down, Buster!” But a moment later, weeping and snarling, she subsided. “Sorry. I’m a dope fiend. Reefer madness, Prof. I’m really sorry. I’m a mess.” She fished out a pink tissue to blow sniffles.

  Soon she lay her head against his shoulder. After a while, she let her fingertips trail from his knee along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, into her own seat, the backs of her fingers were resting in his lap, light as a kiss.

  They drove in silence to Arcadia, on the Peace River. That night they drank whiskey, and bad wine at supper, and made love too urgently in the farthest motel cabin from the road. Lucius had thought himself long past this grand old mix of cigarettes and whiskey and intoxicating body smells and rough wild noisy carnal entertainment, and even now, he could scarcely believe that he was back among the living. He felt rapt, shy, and omnipotent, miraculously returned into his body. He felt enchanted.

  Afterwards he lay unraveled in the glow and light sweet smell of her, wondering if his desperate devouring had offended her, and knowing it hadn’t when after a time she awakened gently and rolled onto her knees and bent and kissed him as he had kissed her, letting her long hair fall over her face to shroud the act because she was shy about letting him see her do what (she confessed) she had never done before.

  “Well, here goes,” the lovely naked creature warned him fearfully from behind the fall of hair, in a comic innocence which touched him so that he laughed joyfully, bouncing her head a little on his belly. He whispered, “Oh I love you so.” Gently he caressed the crown of the small earnest head to give her the courage of her own generous desire, crying out as he dissolved in flowers of delight and earthly gratitude.

  In time she crawled back up into his arms and their skins melted one into the other and they lay quiet, listening to the dawn come to Arcadia. Although more happy than he could ever remember—as if he had caught up with his real life at last—his self-doubt was seeping back, he felt himself too old to be her lover. He flinched away, deciding he had better go and brush his teeth. Still half-asleep, she sighed, detaining him, hand straying as if tracking a dropped earring. And he surprised them both with a response—“Oh-fro!” she murmured.