Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  Andy said, “Bill House got his fill of Chokoloskee on the same day Colonel’s daddy did, October twenty-fourth of 1910. Just took him a few years more to realize it. All the same, my dad loved that island, loved them people. I do, too. Can’t tell you why, cause a lot of ’em ain’t lovable. I guess Chokoloskee’s in my blood, like my cousin Ned. I just can’t get him out.”

  Lucius nodded. Not willingly, he was fond of those people, too. In his long decades on this coast, he had come to admire a frontier grit, a wry integrity born of endurance, a cranky generosity and hard-grudged decency in the Bay people, including some who had been present in the crowd which killed Ed Watson, and some who harassed the Harden family later on.

  “The Fish Wars was still going strong when me ’n’ Roark was growin up,” Whidden was saying. “One time Old Man Walker Carr come in off Lost Man’s Key and set his nets. He had his gun with him. The very first night, Earl Harden come up on him out of the dark. ‘What’s the matter with you, old man, never seen our sign?’ So Walker said, ‘I thought I’d help you fellers catch a fish.’ Earl hollers out, ‘We don’t allow nobody fishin in this territory! If I was you, I’d head on home right about now!’ Old Man Carr put his gun up in Earl’s face. He said, ‘I come here to make my livin, Mister, mind my own business, and I don’t know of any law which says I can’t fish any damn place I please.’ And Earl said, ‘Look here, Walker, let’s you and me get along!’ I guess Uncle Earl liked that old man’s style, because the Hardens never bothered him no more.” Sally yelled out, “Too bad he didn’t shoot him.” And Harden nodded. “It was Carrs and their Brown kin who give the Hardens so much trouble later on.”

  The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on this empty coast. Passing north of Mormon Key, she neared the stilt-root mangrove islets that camouflaged the broken delta at the mouth of Chatham River. What Papa had liked best about his river was this hidden entrance. The deep and narrow channel sluicing through the islets was all but concealed from the Gulf, so that any stranger unfamiliar with this coast would pass right by the mouth and never see it.

  “Dead reckoning,” Harden muttered, cutting her speed. “Got to go by your old bearings, your old courses, listen to what’s under your propeller. Used to be markers, but I reckon them terrible moonshiners and smugglers ripped ’em out.” He had to grin. “Come in off the Gulf at night, hit this narrow channel at high speed, and any law that tried to follow ’em, lookin for markers, would go buckin aground up on a flat or tear out the bottom of their boat on one them orster bars.”

  “You suppose any of those smugglers might answer to the name of Brown or Daniels?” Sally inquired. “Used to be one by the name of Harden, I know that much.”

  Harden laughed. “Might come across one-two Danielses, Sal, now that you mention it. I don’t know about no Browns unless you would count them few that went to jail.”

  “The cargo changes, but the smuggling sure don’t!” Andy reflected. “It’s been a way of life here on this coast since pirate times, and Spanish times—since white men first showed up on the horizon! My uncle Dan and my uncle Lloyd, they was both rum runners, and Old Man Nick Santini done plenty of night work out of Estero Bay, there at Fort Myers Beach.”

  “Is that the man Mister Colonel’s father—?”

  “His brother,” Lucius told her. He did not feel like explaining. The knifing of Adolphus Santini at Key West had been witnessed by a dozen men and could never be argued away, and it did no good to explain that it was but one of hundreds of near-fatal knifings on this coast, long since forgotten. What he would state in the biography was true, that there was no witness to any killing ever attributed to E. J. Watson, or no known witness, at any rate. He thought unwillingly of that “memoir” in Rob’s satchel. If Rob had died far away and long ago, as his family had supposed, the biography could make that claim without hesitation.

  Inside the delta lay the mangrove archipelago of Storter Bay, where years ago the Storter boys liked to net mullet. In Chatham River, the incoming tide swelled upstream between the gleaming walls of thick-leaved seacoast trees, meeting and turning back upon itself the fresh flow from the Glades, and carrying the brackish mangrove fringe far back inland. By his own reckoning—elapsed time, shifts in boat speed and direction, scents of dry ground vegetation on the air—the blind man navigated the old river of his youth as intently as an eel nosing upstream, tracing the minerals and shifts of current toward the mouth of the home creek from which it first descended to the sea.

  Where broken trees had stranded on a shoal, the thin bare branches dipped and beckoned, slapped by brown froth in the curl of the boat’s wake. Two miles above the river mouth, they neared the bar off the north bank where the bodies of the two men killed by Cox had nudged aground. The rotted cadavers had been too loose to take into the boats, so the clammers from Pavilion Key had rigged soft hitches to the remains of Green and Dutchy and towed them slowly out across the river. “Buried what was left of ’em up here a little ways on the south bank, longside of Hannah Smith,” the blind man finished. Asked how he knew where that place was, Andy supposed his father had shown him Hannah’s grave when the House family was living on the Bend, but he looked surprised by the questions, as if he had always known the answer in his sinew. Like fish and tides, human deaths and burials were in the grain of local knowledge—signs to mark the passing years and commemorate those corners of this silent landscape where old-time people had left small scars in the green and gone away again.

  “About all us local people got is our long memories, along with the history that come down in our families,” Whidden agreed. “Bad hurricanes and feuds and shootings might roil things up now and again, but otherwise our seasons stay mostly the same. That’s why we remember deaths and the old stories, and carry that remembrance back a hundred years. And that’s why the Watson Place is so important, Mister Colonel, even to the younger ones who never seen it.”

  The burial place lay close to Hannah’s Point, which was downstream and across the river from the Bend. Maybe thirty feet back from the bank, the blind man said, was a square dent in the ground about one foot deep, “as if you had crowbarred a half-buried barn door out of the ground.”

  “You mean you can still see it?” Sally wrinkled up her nose.

  “I imagine so. That’s one of the things still spooks people about this place. Burial ground will generally sprout up in heavy weeds, but nothing has growed over that square patch in fifty years. Them three sinners is still there unless the river took ’em.”

  “No coffin?”

  “No time for coffins. This weren’t hardly two days before the hurricane, and the sky was very strange and murky, in the darkest October ever recollected, so them men was certain a bad storm was on the way. Another thing, that nigra who helped Cox sink the bodies had escaped to Pavilion Key, so they knew that Cox was still there at the Watson Place, not a mile upriver from this grave. Them men was clam diggers, they was unarmed, and they didn’t want to mess with Cox without the Sheriff.

  “Anyways, the poor lost souls that was fished out of the river never had no family to come after ’em, nobody who cared enough to build a coffin or mark the place where they had died. But the burial party kind of hated to throw earth on their bare faces, so they laid a scrap of canvas down, then let the dirt fly fast as they could, holding their breaths so’s they wouldn’t puke into the grave.

  “Course them victims was lucky they got into the ground at all, let alone stayed there. If they was still in the water, their bodies would been lost after that storm. I was on this river in the Hurricane of ’26, and the Gulf rose up and washed way back inland, and when that rush of water come back down out of the Glades on the next tide, it sounded like thunder rolling past the Bend. Nothin could of stayed put in this river! But the Watson Place stood up to bad hurricanes in 1909 and 1910, and again in ’26 and ’35, remember, Colonel? And she done just fine!”

  A snakebird fled from a low snag, brushing the surface before beating away over the w
ater. At a rounded point on the south bank where buttonwood and gumbo-limbo rose from higher ground, they eased ashore and tied up to the mangroves. Leaving Andy in the boat, they hunted along the riverbank through broken thicket until they found a rectangular indentation in the marly soil. Already one corner of the common grave was eroding bit by clod into the river.

  “Won’t last too much longer,” Andy whispered, when they described it. “That grave is closer to the water than it was.” In the heat and silence, he listened intently to the flood as it curled past, a lic-lic-lic along the waterline, a relict sound of those ancient far millenniums when briny rivers poured from the wave-washed limestone of the great peninsula as it inched upward, upward, parting the surface of the silent seas.

  In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, black pigeons with sepulchral white pates bobbed, craned, and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in mournful columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe. “This stretch of river can still spook me,” Andy murmured, when his friends came back aboard. “Poor Hannah’s bones are right there in that marl, along with Waller and young Dutchy. Won’t do no harm to give ’em a nice prayer, in case that burial party was in too much of a hurry.”

  Woe-woe-wuk-woe.

  Bending their heads, they joined the blind man’s meditation. “Hear us, O Lord. One of these years, this river will take these poor lost souls and carry their poor bones down to the Gulf. And we pray You will have Mercy, Lord, and lift them from the Bosom of the Deep and give them rest.” The words were intoned slowly and mindfully—the one prayer ever offered on behalf of Hannah Smith, Green Waller, and young Herbert Melville, alias Dutchy.

  “Amen,” they murmured.

  The Watson Place lay on the point of a large island between rivers, a higher ground where the mangrove along the river edge gave way to subtropical forest and salt prairie. Perhaps the Calusa had built up this ground on the shoal of silt which would have formed on this big bend. Upriver at the eastern end of the great island was House Hammock Bay, where Andy’s family had grown sugarcane for many years. “I sure come up this river enough times,” Andy explained when Sally complimented him on his close knowledge of the river after years away. His face turned a gold red like a rare apple in his gratification that this thorny young woman whose face he could not see had offered a conciliatory word. “I’m sure tickled you folks let me come along,” he blurted, heaving his canvas chair around to smile toward the khaki haze which was Lucius Watson.

  “Now Henry Short was working at House Hammock while we was living on the Watson Place, remember? Raised fine tomatoes, and a world of bananas to go with ’em. Slept in Granddad’s old shack, cracks in the walls, plenty of snakes and spiders. That Hurricane of ’26 had blowed the roof right off the cistern, and this moonlit night he was awoke by somethin out there, lappin at the water. Peekin through the cracks, he seen this real big panther, and he got so excited by the size that he raised up his rifle and fired without thinkin, shot it through one ear and out the other. Made a bad job because the blood spoiled the cistern, you’d of thought the lifeblood of every panther in the Glades was in that water.

  “Henry hoisted that big cat out of the cistern and rowed him around to Chatham Bend. Laid straight, he went eleven feet counting tail and whiskers. Henry and Dad skinned him out, they got twenty-five dollars for that hide. Should have got more, but as usual, my dad was took because he couldn’t read.

  “Oh, that was a beautiful animal! I never in my life seen a cat that size, and I never heard about one like it since. Course back in them days, panthers was still common in the Islands, swam from island to island same way deer will, used to catch ’em in a bear trap baited with fish. Sometimes one’d kill a hog or take some chickens. Kill a dog, too, if they got the chance. Panthers will eat a dog, all but the head. They’ll bury that dog head but they won’t come back for it.

  “Them big cats is all but gone out of the Everglades, gone out of Florida, and the bears is close behind. What bothers me today is all them ones we wasted. Shot ’em on sight, never give it a thought, cause folks was poor and their stock was precious, and they naturally thought that them beautiful things was only varmints.”

  Lucius tried to envision “the Watson Place” as seen in his first impression as a child—the roof peak of “Papa’s new house in the jungle,” rising out of the green river walls as the small schooner called the Gladiator rounded the broad bend, then the white beacon of the house itself, miraculous and bright as any castle.

  The year was 1896, when the new house prepared for the family’s arrival was barely finished. They had sailed down the green and silver coast from the railroad terminus at Punta Gorda and tacked up Chatham River with the tide. Like Mama and the other children, he had never seen the sea and became seasick, but the shining waves sweeping past the bow had been magnificent, and the children cried out at the bronze porpoises gleaming in the sea under the bowsprit, and the swift white birds dancing upward from the whitecaps. Papa and his young crewman Henry Thompson had rigged troll lines, and the children caught silver fishes—kingfish or Spanish mackerel, Lucius remembered, and barracuda.

  He had never forgotten the Watson Place as it was on that first arrival, the red blossoms of the twin poincianas between the white house and the river, planted years before by the old Frenchman, and the smell of fresh paint which scoured his nostrils in the hot small children’s rooms upstairs. He was seven then, rushing pell-mell into boyhood, and a great new passion for small boats and fishing would sweep his dimming memories of Oklahoma and north Florida into the past.

  He had wept that day they were taken from the Bend to be put into the day school at Fort Myers—all but Rob, who stayed behind to help on the plantation, only to disappear for good a few years later. After his mama’s death in 1901, Eddie had gone north to Columbia County to help his father while Lucius returned to live here in the Islands. The only house ever built on Chatham River was also his first real and beloved home.

  A half mile above Hannah’s Point, a roof peak emerged slowly from the ragged tree line, sinking away again as the river turned, then reappearing. Below wind-warped shingles like saw teeth on the roofline, the house was a brilliant white against the trees behind. Whidden burst out, “I’ll be damned!” as Sally cried, “It’s beautiful!” But to Lucius, his old home looked stunned, as if blinded by the sun, like a senile person dressed too festively and trotted out uncomprehending for an anniversary.

  All by itself, stark on its mound, the Watson Place was eerily identical to the house first beheld in 1896. Only gradually, as the Belle drew closer, did he see that fresh paint could not disguise the sag of old wood weariness along the peak. The windows without glass or shutters were gaunt naked holes, as black as if burned through the white facade.

  Between the river and the house, the two great twisted royal poincianas, thick roots exposed by decades of erosion, were the last of the old trees planted by the Frenchman. And soon these, too, would lean away and follow the old sheds and docks and the last of Papa’s coco palms into the current.

  Whidden slowed the boat to scan the banks. Nobody had appeared out of the house. Lucius had told them about Addison Burdett, and now they saw across the river an old skiff with a scabby outboard motor tied up to the mangroves, which formed a thin wall between the current and the salt prairie of white marl muck, hard scrub, and bitter grasses. They crossed the river and eased the Belle up alongside. Except for bilge water and empty paint cans, the boat was empty, yet all agreed that Burdett had not gone ashore. There was no destination here, nothing but wasteland of salt prairie and dead marl.

  Harden rerigged the skiff’s bow line to the branches. “Whoever tied her up as poor as this never cared whether she drifted off or not. This boat was towed across the river so nobody could escape off of the Bend.” Grumpy with uneasiness, he straightened, the line still in his hand, and gazed back across the water at the silent house. “Maybe like they took him someplace else,” he said.

  Lucius th
ought, Or he is in the river. Whidden must have considered this, too, for he added quietly, “Well, I reckon they ain’t harmed him, Mister Colonel, or they wouldn’t leave his boat where somebody who came lookin for him would see her.” Whidden’s instinct was to wait awhile for someone to appear before they went ashore across the river. “If them boys catch us snoopin at the house, they might shoot first and ask their questions after, especially if they been drinkin.” He looked around some more. “I want to sniff things out a little, keep my distance, till I get the feel of it.” When Sally asked him what that meant, Whidden was unable to explain, but Lucius thought he knew. He felt the same.

  Lucius sat cross-legged on the bow, staring at the shining house across broad soft swirls of current. At one time he had known every eddy and hole in this stretch of the river, on those long-ago slow summer days when a deft hook might land half a hundred fish of a half dozen species in an afternoon, more than enough to feed the field hands in the harvest. In later years, as a commercial fisherman, he and his partner—usually Hoad Storter, sometimes Lee Harden—might come upriver to draw fresh water from the cistern, which Fred Dyer had built to hold 10,000 gallons. They would scour the overgrowth for the last guavas and alligator pears and slip through the old cane fields to the salt ground known as Watson Prairie to shoot one or two young ibis for their supper. The grass was low and sparse on that marl ground, which held fresh puddles where the wild creatures could come get their water. Papa had burned his prairie every year to keep its small ponds open for the ducks and rails, ibis and deer. Occasionally they took a black bear or a panther.