Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  “But black especially.”

  “But black especially. That sure is right, ma’am.”

  “Because blacks know that in the end your Mr. Big Boy will do what white folks tell Big Boy to do.”

  “Reckon that’s right, too. But you got to start somewheres, I reckon.”

  Sally seethed and brooded, then spoke all in a burst. “I hear you’ve talked to Mister Colonel about Henry Short. I bet you told him Henry Short was a mulatta, and here was a man who was no more mulatta than the Hardens! Robert Harden had some Portuguese blood, and Portuguese people have that tight curly black hair—the so-called kink you people tried to pin on him!”

  “You people?” The blind man raised his thick colorless brows, tugged his red ear. Anxious to be fair but unwilling to retreat, he finally said, “So far as I know, Miss Sally, I never set eyes on a Portagee even in the days I could still see one, so I don’t know much about Portagee hair. But it could be that Henry told the Hardens what they wanted to hear from a brown feller who was aimin to marry up with their pretty daughter.”

  “Oh Lord!” said Sally. “Your family may have left there a long time ago, Mr. House, but you’re still Chokoloskee through and through!”

  The county road south to the Tamiami Trail and the Gulf coast at Everglade, fifty miles away, ran through the flat palmetto scrub of the Big Cypress. The two-lane asphalt, straight and shiny, writhed and shimmered in mirage toward its point of disappearance on the low horizon. Across the white sky, dark-pointed as a weapon, a swallow-tailed kite coursed the savanna for small prey.

  “Cattlemen held a big panther hunt out this way a few years ago—that about finished ’em—but there’s still more panthers here in the Big Cypress than anyplace in Florida except maybe my front yard on Panther Crescent.”

  They rode for a long while in silence without meeting or overtaking other vehicles, as Andy kept track of their southward progress through his own dead reckoning. “Deep Lake,” he said after a while. He pointed off toward the west, where a lone vulture tilted down along the cypress wall. “Ever seen it? Deep small lake in a two-hundred-acre hammock. Seems like I can feel that water back in there. Twenty miles inland from the Gulf but connected some way to salt water. There’s been tarpon in Deep Lake as far back as any old-timer can remember.”

  In the days of Billy Bowlegs, in the Third Seminole War, Lucius told them, the Indians had kept large gardens on that hammock. After the band gave itself up and was shipped away to the Oklahoma Territory, Deep Lake knew a half century of silence before Walter Langford and his northern partners learned of that rich ground and rode over from Fort Myers to plant citrus.

  Andy nodded. “Why do you think Sheriff Tippins put his prison camp way out here at Copeland? Langford paid next to nothing for that convict labor, and Sheriff Frank held back the little that they made, being as how it was against state law for them terrible black criminals to receive payment.” He grunted. “Big businessmen don’t worry much about whose sweat and blood makes all their money—don’t even know about it if they can help it! So maybe Langford knew how Tippins worked things, maybe not. But a lot of sweat and a lot of blood was spilled out in this scrub, I will tell you that.”

  He seemed subdued. “Deep Lake had a bad reputation right from 1913, when they laid that rail line north from Everglade to get the citrus out. Them nigras workin on that line was kept at Weaver’s Camp, and every little while when some run off, they’d take and shoot a few, make an example, and bury ’em in that nice soft fill on the railway spoil bank. Later years, when they was surfacing that old rail bed for this county road, they dug up so many human bones it was embarrassing.”

  “Is it possible,” Lucius said, “that those bones were the source of some of those bad stories about E. J. Watson? About those skeletons supposedly dug up on Chatham Bend?” Sally Brown nodded a little, ready to accept this possibility, but that lake-like gaze in the blind man’s blue eyes was unrelenting. Clearly he thought the question disingenuous.

  “Well, we blame too much on your daddy, that is correct,” Andy said finally. “We forget how much competition that man had, and I’m not talking about common criminals nor backwoods varmints like that feller Cox. I’m talking about ordinary business people who let poor folks get worked to death to make more money. At Deep Lake, them miserable lives was all wrote off to free enterprise. E. J. Watson might of called that progress, and he weren’t the only one, not by a long shot.

  “Right up to the twenties, the Sheriff supplied convict labor to them Deep Lake partners—bankers, railroad men, and such. When convicts tried to run away, they paid Injuns to track ’em. All swampy country out here then, so them runaways never got too far in chains. Left tracks or sign that any Injun could follow blindfolded, and miskeeters and thorns and heat and snakes just took the heart out of ’em. Time they was finished, they was beggin to be caught—hell, they got rescued!

  “When we was farming down this way at Turner River, Dad would get deputized sometimes to catch them runaways. He took that work tracking for Tippins cause we needed the money, but he never liked it. Tippins kept up his friendly reputation in Fort Myers, same way your daddy did, but he didn’t behave right at Deep Lake, where nobody was watchin. He’d handcuff them prisoners, knock ’em around, give ’em a taste of what was waitin for ’em if they didn’t go out and work in that swelterin heat until they dropped. And finally Dad swore out loud and said, ‘You goin to abuse a handcuffed man that ain’t done nothin wrong, you better find some other stupid feller to do your trackin for you.’ But then Dad would go broke again, and he’d come back.

  “Course the Sheriff was never friendly with my dad on account of what Bill House told him in Fort Myers Courthouse back in 1910—that the men who killed Watson were not criminals, and that he wanted a grand jury hearing to clear his name. Tippins likely agreed with him, cause he never cared for nobody coming in to meddle with the law, not in his early days. But he had pressure from Langford and his friends to let the case slide beneath the surface—that was that. Pretty soon, he become a real politician, he wanted to get reelected worse than he wanted to be honest, and after a while, he got the habit of sellin his public service to the highest bidder, same as the rest of ’em.

  “When the Florida Boom collapsed, the Deep Lake plantation went down with it, but the Collier Corporation took over that convict labor, making logging roads to lumber out the Cypress. The prison camp weren’t but four miles from our farm, so they made me captain of the road gang when they was shorthanded. Them nigras never run off on me, neither, seein how nervous I was—scared my gun might go off, kill somebody by mistake!

  “The bookkeeper was bragging all the time about how much work they got out of those convicts, how every week they’d flog a man whether he deserved it or he didn’t, to improve the attitude among the rest. Course road gangs was very bad all over Florida. Black convict or white, it made no difference, not when it come to chains and rawhide whips. Road gangs was why so many outlaws run away to Watson’s—Leslie Cox, y’know, and Waller and Dutchy that was killed by Cox, and plenty of others, too, from what we heard.

  “No, we never thought much of the Sheriff’s Department. Dad only let himself get deputized to do the dirty work cause we was poor. One time he went after a man who had killed a mess of people, brought him in meek as a lamb, because Dad was amiable but he was also a dead shot, so nobody wanted to trade bullets with him. A lot of men thought Bill House was the feller who put the first bullet into Watson, but Dad always left that claim to my uncle Dan. Said he didn’t want to make a liar out of his own brother.

  “In them years our Sheriff made his peace with Prohibition, and him and Dad’s bootlegger brothers got together, cause a man can’t go far in the bootlegging trade without some friendly understanding from the law. Frank Tippins learned a live-and-let-live attitude, long as the man’s skin were the right color.

  “One time Tippins killed a prisoner in his own cell. Might of saved that unfortunate nigra from c
ommittin suicide, but he called it an escape attempt, as I recall. Claimed this man was the only prisoner he ever killed in the line of duty. Never thought to count all them poor devils that never went home from his labor camp here in the Cypress.

  “Yessir, when it come to nigras, Collier County was very hard, Lee County, too. A free black man down here in south Florida would of been far better off being a slave. Right up until recent times, any black man not attached to a white family, the way Henry was, he’d get grabbed right off the street and charged with loitering or vagrancy and sentenced to farm labor or the chain gang. A nigra that belonged somewhere weren’t never bothered, not even when he done something pretty serious, because folks won’t stand for messin with private property, not in this part of the country. No fool lawman who tried that could get reelected. So if you was black with white people behind you, you could murder your wife if you didn’t make a racket, and the Sheriff might look the other way. After all, he weren’t never elected to go spendin up the taxpayers’ money for nothin.

  “Nigras was free men but they belonged to you, right up into the thirties and the forties. The only black in Everglade was known as Storters’ nigger, same way Henry Short was Houses’ nigger to some people. Sounds awful, don’t it? But that’s the way it was around the Bay. And you know something? Them boys was glad about it! Any nigra that wanted protection, wanted to get along, he was very very glad that he belonged to somebody.”

  Of the old prison camp at Copeland, little sign was left but overgrown rough thorn and lianas, and shadow ruins on white limestone sand back off the roads. A pileated woodpecker’s loud solitary call rang strangely in the high noon heat, over the dead scrape of palmetto, in the sunny wind. The Copeland settlement, named for the Trail engineer, had become field headquarters for Lee Tidewater Cypress, which in recent years had been logging out the last of the great strands. Copeland’s journals, which contained a brief account of E. J. Watson’s death, described the group which confronted him on that October evening as D. D. House and Charley Johnson and three transient fishermen. “When D. D. House told him to hand over his gun, Watson raised the gun, growling, ‘I’ll give you my gun,’ and pulled the trigger.” Paraphrasing this passage, Lucius turned to watch Andy’s expression. “Where did Graham Copeland get that stuff? Is that how your dad told it?”

  “Mr. Copeland was particular about his facts, that was his training, and what he wrote was accurate, far as it goes. Course it don’t go far enough. The names, I mean. He only mentioned Charley’s name because Charley wanted his name mentioned. Charley used to boast how he took part.”

  “Any idea who those transient fishermen might have been?”

  “Ain’t got your list on you?” Disliking his own sarcasm, Andy frowned. “Course there was always drifters down around the Islands, but I believe Dad told me them three fishermen was Frank and Leland Rice, who showed up most years in the mullet season, and Horace Alderman from Marco, who was over visiting his brother Walter.

  “Before he was done, Horace Alderman made his name as ‘the Gulf Stream Pirate,’ smuggling bootlegged liquor and Chinese. Them Orientals was kind of a nice sideline, cause the new railroads needed ’em for coolie labor. Took all their savings, up to five hundred dollars a head, to smuggle ’em in from Cuba or someplace. Unload ’em off ships, sneak ’em ashore a few head at a time. Sometimes they ran ’em right up Taylor Slough, dumped ’em off in the Glades and pointed ’em northeast, told ’em Miami was just up the road, if they could find a road. But Immigration was keepin a sharp eye on the east coast and the Key West railroad, so Horace might come in off Cape Sable, scan the shore for any sign of trouble, then land his cargo at Middle Cape and move ’em over the old Homestead trail to the east coast.

  “As a businessman, Horace Alderman was prudent, out of respect for the law. If he seen something wrong, he’d holler a order to transfer the cargo to a smaller boat, then knock each yeller man over the head as he come on deck, relieve him of his valuables, and slide him overboard. Other times, they might chain the whole string to a heavy anchor, and if the federals was gainin on ’em, they’d destroy the evidence, let ’em go rattlin over the side. Might waste a cargo if they dumped ’em too quick, but better safe than sorry, that was Horace’s motto. Anyways, he had their money, so it weren’t what you would call a total loss. So Horace was doin pretty good in that line of business until that night the Coast Guards come up alongside. Bein after him for bootleggin, they only found them Chinese when they searched his boat. Horace said, ‘There must be some mistake.’ He had a weapon hid under his mattress, and he come out shootin. Killed two Coast Guards and a Secret Service man and commandeered their vessel, but later one of his own men lost his nerve and they got captured.

  “Horace’s mother always said her poor boy was a real nice feller till he married up with a greedy woman and went for the fast money. The Law hung Horace in Fort Lauderdale around 1925. Before he went, Horace wrote up his life story, explained all about it, but maybe his mama never got around to readin it. That old body puzzled and prayed but never did conclude where her boy went wrong.

  “And the Rices? Wasn’t there something about a bank robbery, and a shooting on Chokoloskee—?” Lucius stopped short, glancing at Sally, as Andy frowned and cleared his throat.

  “—and Speck Daniels?” Sally finished.

  “The Rice boys come to a bad end, too. I reckon God is done with them three now, so mentionin their names ain’t goin to hurt nothin.”

  “I had those names already. I was just confirming.”

  “Just confirmin. You got your list all learned by heart, wouldn’t surprise me.” The blind man’s smile had an edge like a broken knife. “I sure hope there ain’t nobody named House on there.”

  “I’m not gunning for anybody,” Lucius said crossly.

  “Well, Bill House never thought you was real serious about it, neither, but having young children, he couldn’t take no chances.”

  Lucius appraised Andy’s expression in the rearview mirror. “Bill could never be sure, though, could he, Andy?”

  “Nosir. You was a Watson. He never could be one hundred percent sure.”

  The sun was high and the hot noon road empty, boring ever farther south into the swamp country. On the spoil bank of the black canal that paralled the road, a thick gator lay inert, like a log of mud. Gallinules cackled in primordial woe, and long-necked cormorants and snakebirds, like aquatic reptiles, rose in the canal and sank away again. A cottonmouth lay coiled in a rotted stump along the water edge across the canal, and farther on, a bog turtle had climbed to the pavement edge to point its snout at the howl of passing tires.

  Across an old railroad-tie bridge, the wall of liana, vine, and thorn was broken by a sagging roadhouse, in a yard inlaid with broken glass and bottle caps and flattened beer cans, motor oil, lube buckets, tires, defunct batteries. Big-finned autos and rangy motorcycles baked in the Sunday heat, and men in dark glasses and motorcycle boots, attended by scraggy kids and hounds and dragged-out women, leaned back on their elbows, watching strangers pass.

  Among the decrepit vehicles were two big swamp trucks, one red, the other black. When Lucius braked, Sally said tersely, “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even slow down.”

  At the crossroads, they turned left onto the Tamiami Trail, passing the few cabins at Ochopee and continuing on a little distance to the low shaded bridge where the Trail crossed the headwaters of Turner River. Here Capt. Richard Turner had guided a punitive expedition against Chief Billy Bowlegs at Deep Lake; here Big Hannah Smith had farmed awhile before traveling down to Chatham Bend to meet her Maker; here the House family and Henry Short had raised tomatoes for the Chevelier Corporation; here the Mikasuki Seminole, protesting this highway which had split the Everglades wide open like a watermelon, had made their last desperate plea to the encroaching white men. Pohaan chekish, the Indians had said. “Leave us alone.” The Trail engineers had commemorated this historic death song with a nice roadside picnic tab
le and a sign.

  When Sally read the sign aloud, the blind man nodded. “Yes, ma’am. ‘Leave us alone!’ ” He told them how the Indians had spied on the House family when it pioneered out this way during the Depression, how they had felt those black eyes watching from way back in the trees, or peering through the grass tips from a dugout—how they might get that feeling ten or twenty times for every Indian seen, until they realized that everywhere they went, the Indians watched them. Lucius remarked that Indian scouts had tracked white strangers day and night since the first Spaniards came ashore on this peninsula. “ ‘We are your shadow’—that’s what Indians say.”

  “Course the red man favored black men over white men, least in the old days,” Andy said. “The red men—I ain’t never seen a red one yet, have you?—they give shelter to runaway slaves and also white fugitives and outlaws who hid out in the swamp. Any man the white people was after deserved help—that’s how the Injuns always seen it. That is why folks around here thought Leslie Cox might of gone over to the Injuns.

  “Them Government Injuns ain’t so sure of who they are no more, so they look down on black people because the whites do. That way they might feel a little better about being nobody in their own land—land of the free and home of the brave but NO INDIANS AND DOGS ALLOWED. Might still run across that sign back in this country.”

  Lucius led Andy to an opening in the trees. At Andy’s request, he described the southern prospect out across the blowing grasses and sun-glittered waters which under the broad Atlantic light slid slowly, slowly south toward Shark River. White egrets in breeding plumage lifted airy crests to the Gulf wind, and white ibis crossed the sky over Roberts Lake, where Bill House and Ted Smallwood and their partners, Andy said, had killed the thousand alligators that paid for most of Smallwood’s land on Chokoloskee. “I still see this place! Still got our Turner River shack in my mind’s eye!”