Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  Behind him, the muted voices rose and fell as the wind shifted. Andy was pointing down the river. From here, he was saying, they could probably see that bar off the north bank where some fisherman come across what was left of a dead colored man, in that last summer before all hell broke loose in that black October. “The way Ed Watson used his field hands, people said, was like something out of the old century. Replaced a hand like you replaced a horse.”

  They were all gazing at the house. “Back in the early days,” Whidden told his wife, “an old nigra got his sleeve caught in a cane presser. He lost his arm and he bled and bled, all over everything. Mister Watson couldn’t take the time to run him to Key West, not in the harvest. Anyways, it wouldn’t do no good, he said, that boy is done for. The women took him to the house, laid him down in the front room, but they couldn’t stop it, he just bled to death while he lay there watchin ’em. Couldn’t never get that stain up, couldn’t never paint it out, now ain’t that something? Cause sooner or later that blood rose through the paint. Still there today! You can go through that door and see it for yourself!

  “That nigra blood was like a spell on that old house. After Watson’s death, folks would go ashore and point to it—’See there? That’s a murder victim’s blood!’ Well, it weren’t no such a thing! It were only the lifeblood of that poor feller whose arm got overtook by that machine!”

  My God, Lucius thought, they have heard that tale so often, and still they are reciting it, like myth or scripture—not that the story was untrue. He recalled Sybil Dyer hurrying her Lucy away from the dreadful sight of so much blood, and Papa mopping his brow by the shed, knowing how that dying black man would come back to haunt him.

  “The only way that blood is going to come out is burn it out.” Lucius called this from the bow, to close the story in the traditional way in which local people had always closed it. Not wishing to eavesdrop, he came back astern, inquiring if anyone recalled the name of the black man who had gone to Pavilion Key to report the murders. He vaguely recalled the name “Sip Linsy,” but he needed confirmation.

  “I don’t believe I ever heard his name.” Andy’s fair skin was deep red with chagrin that he and the Hardens had been overheard. “We was told he showed up at Pavilion with the flap of his forehead skin hanging down where a bullet creased his scalp—had to hold that flap out of his eyes. Claimed Cox had shot at him as he took off.”

  Whidden was skeptical. His cousin Weeks Daniels, who had seen the man that day, had always described him as dark and husky, very calm and “cunnin-lookin.” He had not mentioned any wound. Whidden said, “It ain’t so easy to look calm and cunnin with a flap of skin hangin down into your eyes.”

  Whidden’s wife gazed disgustedly from face to face as the men laughed. “You know something?” she said. “There’s something cruel and hateful in the whole male sex.”

  In the years after E. J. Watson’s death, before Lucius came back to the Islands, these rivers had been all but empty. The settlers had been flooded out by the Great Hurricane, all but the Hardens, and none of them ever found the heart to accept such hard loss and discouragement and return to the ruined clearings to rebuild. There was also a dread of Leslie Cox, who might still be lurking somewhere in the Glades, might still come prowling down around the coast, to be glimpsed toward dusk of some fateful day when an unknown craft slipped behind some wooded point, leaving the frightened settler to wonder if that silhouetted figure in the stern might have been Cox, if Cox were stalking him, if Cox were watching at this moment from the mangrove shadows, ready to trail him back to his defenseless family.

  The dread of Cox would fade as years went by, but not the dread of hurricanes in these barrier islands. Many of those who ventured south were not settlers but fugitives and drifters, content with makeshift shelters and hand-to-mouth existence, with no ambition to help them endure the dull humidity and biting insects which made existence here all but unbearable. The only inhabitants who had prevailed year after year, setting out smudge pots for mosquitoes and taking hardship and contentment where they found it, were Robert Harden and his three strong sons and the pioneer women of that family.

  “Course plenty of strangers tried camping in your house, but no one stayed long,” Andy said. “Seen that place in the parlor where somebody had fired off a shotgun. That charge of shot chewed up one corner pretty good, and was always connected to them bloodstains from that black man’s death, which was took to mean that somebody got in the way. Folks wondered was that some of Cox’s work, when he killed them people? Or was that your daddy killing Cox? Cause nobody knew for absolutely sure that he never done that.

  “So people got the shivers from them bloodstains, never liked the feel of the whole place. You didn’t sleep good in that house till you got used to it. I ain’t the only one had nightmares. Mac Johnson’s Dorothy went wild down here, tryin’ to burn that blood out, and Bill Smallwood wouldn’t hardly go ashore, slept in his boat, though he wouldn’t admit that them bloodstains was the reason.” Andy laughed. “Ol’ Bill! Come down here to fish-guide for some northern people who was anchored off Mormon Key on a big yacht. Bill was still in his late teens, but he had him a twenty-six-foot launch with a Model-T Ford marine-converted engine. I recall we took all the snook we wanted over there front of the house, and plenty of small tarpon, too. Best tarpon bait he ever found was a strip of mullet on a green parrot-head feather. ‘I ain’t failed with that ol’ parrot-head too many times,’ Bill used to say. And every time he never failed, we had to hear about it!”

  Andy shook his head in the glow of reminiscence. “Remember that day you come visitin, Colonel? Huntin Henry Short? Good thing you didn’t stay the night, cause there weren’t hardly no place to lay down, weren’t a mattress left. Hunters and moonshiners had took every last one. But some of the heavy crockery was still there, and that big pine table. Sat fourteen, cause your daddy fed a lot of hands at harvest time. My dad took it with us when we left.

  “Hurricane of ’26, the Watson Place rode this wild jungle river like a ship at sea, stood up just fine. Next year, Henry Thompson took over as the caretaker. He wasn’t paid but fifty bucks a month by the Chevelier Corporation, cause developers was losin faith in the Florida Boom. Anyway, we was all loaded in the boat but we couldn’t take off till Thompsons come, cause we wasn’t supposed to leave the place un tended. Left three dogs behind for Thompsons because we had too many, and if I know Henry, he shot one of ’em before he set foot on the dock. Big yeller hound that liked to run them bobcats off the chickens. One day at Chokoloskee, that yeller dog had bit him pretty good, woke that man up a little. I heard him mutter, ‘Dog, I’ll git you one day, see if I don’t.’ Well, I bet he did!

  “As I recall him, Henry Thompson was a tall thin kind of a feller, kind of a far-off person, you might say. Sandy hair bleached whitish by the sun, but his hide would bake brown as a bun, where mine boils up hot red, like a boiled crawfish. I don’t guess him and his Gert Hamilton never bothered nobody, but they didn’t much approve nobody, neither. Not even God!”

  Lucius grinned. “Well, that atheist streak Old Henry had came straight from his old boss! When pretty ladies were around, my dad might get religion, but he never found much use for God at other times.”

  “Henry Thompson never talked too much when he weren’t talking about Watson,” Andy said. “I guess he was the authority on Watson, but toward the end he got tired of what he knew. Drank quite a lot, kept his own company, got skinnier and skinnier like an old white leghorn. When he did speak, he had a way of trailin off, shruggin his shoulders, like havin any opinion about life plain wore him out.

  “Henry Thompson always claimed that Ed Watson had been good to him, he had nothin against the man whatever. Said he never had no reason to be scared of him, and neither did his half-uncle Tant Jenkins, cause Ol’ Ed never hurt a fly that didn’t hurt him first. Only thing was, in later life, Henry needed a little drinkin money, so he give an interview to some magazine writer about all of his
close shaves with Bloody Watson. Got paid cash money for his firsthand knowledge of the cold cold heart of that terrible desperado, might of threw in some gory details he made up, to keep things lively.”

  Intent upon the silent house, the others were content to listen as Andy rambled on. “What d’you reckon happened to your daddy’s schooner?” Andy said after a while, as if to make sure the others were still there. “I been puzzling about that since you mentioned her. She was tied up here at the Bend during the hurricane, then disappeared. People talked about Cox sellin her, and they talked about how Watson’s boy might of helped him get away—”

  Lucius shook his head. “I never took Cox anywhere. That was another rumor, like the hanging rope. And Cox never took the schooner, either. That summer of 1910 was his first time off the farm in Columbia County. He couldn’t swim, much less handle a schooner. He was afraid of the water and plain terrified of crocs and gators, and back then we had both. As for the launch, my dad brought her to Chokoloskee on the day he died, so the last I heard, she was right there at Smallwood’s. Local people must know what happened to her, but by the time I came back—that was nine years later—nobody seemed to recall. Strange, don’t you think? Folks can remember all the lies, like the hanging rope and the gold watch, but nobody recalls what happened to those boats.”

  “Weren’t no Watson sons around to keep an eye on ’em,” Andy reminded him, and Lucius changed the subject.

  “I guess that after they calmed down a little, most folks decided that my father must have killed Cox after all,” Lucius suggested.

  “Is that a fact? Us Hardens never thought so. A few years after your daddy died, the Rice boys claimed they seen Cox on the east coast near Lemon City. They said Cox recognized Leland Rice, slipped away quick. Hardens decided that sonofagun was still holed up someplace back in the rivers, because one day that old cabin we built for Chevelier just disappeared off Possum Key. No fire or nothin, she was just tore down and took away, probably hammered back together someplace else.

  “Course some claimed it was Henry Short done that. Claimed he moved that cabin board by board way back up inside of Gopher Key, where he was kind of hidin out from some of them younger fellers around Chokoloskee. Spent his days diggin for Calusa treasure, which the Frenchman always did believe was there. But some concluded it was Cox who took that cabin. For a little while in the late twenties, when Roark and our cousin Wilson come up missin, there was rumors that Cox had done away with ’em some way. Course Hardens never took that serious, cause we knew who done it.”

  Sally said, “Probably those Carrs spread that rumor about Cox, trying to cover their tracks!”

  Whidden shrugged, still studying the house through his binoculars. “I recollect one time Fonso Lopez was tellin how Desperado Cox was put to death by Mr. Watson. And Mama said, ‘Why, Fonso, you know better than that! That man is living along somewhere just as mean as ever!’ ”

  “Anyway, if Cox cleaned all the stuff out of that house, folks would have heard about it,” Sally declared. “Sadie Harden told us that Mr. Watson had some good silver and crystal, and she always declared it was the Carrs who cleaned him out. Probably claimed that good old E. J. left it all to them!”

  “Well, that’s just gossip, Sally,” Andy said. “Sadie always had it in for the Carr family. It might been anybody who came here after the shooting.”

  “People felt free to lug away all they could carry!” Lucius said. “Why was that, do you suppose? Because of my father’s reputation? Because they thought that he deserved no better?”

  Andy looked impatient. “Because he was dead, and because you Watsons had abandoned the damned place, and because if the first comers didn’t take that stuff, the next bunch would. You take them thieving Houses, now, them people stole Ed Watson’s pine deal table!” Andy’s laughter was infectious. “Course he’d been gone for sixteen years by the time we done it.”

  It was getting late. Harden lowered the binoculars. “Okay?” he said. “We better have a look.” Gunning the engine in reverse, he backed the Cracker Belle into the current, then drummed upstream while letting the current carry her across the river. Wide of the dock, he cut back on the throttle, taking the binoculars from Sally.

  “Nobody home,” she said.

  “Got to be sure.”

  As the boat lost headway, drifting back downstream, he studied the frame house. In its fresh paint, the old building on the mound looked stripped and naked on its cement pillions, which lifted the main floor two feet above ground to permit high storm water to rush beneath. Loose roof shingles lay scattered on bare earth from which most of the vegetation had been scoured by the high salt tides of last year’s hurricane.

  “In the late thirties some Miami sports come over here, used this place hard, remember, Mister Colonel? Huntin and fishin, plenty of booze, and loud blond women. Them men had no respect at all, and the place was pretty much let go. Nobody fixed no broken screens nor windows, let alone rain gutters. All the same, I seen this house after last year’s storm and Parks could of touched her up without no trouble. Storm damage is only their excuse for doin somethin they been itchin to do for years.”

  Whidden eased his boat upstream again, letting the current sweep her in against the leaning skeleton of the old dock and leaving her engine running even after Lucius took a turn around a post. Lucius made no hitch or knot, making sure the line could be slipped quickly.

  DANGER. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.

  BY ORDER OF SUPT.

  U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

  Near the official notice, nailed to a stake jammed into the bank, was an unofficial sign painted in rude black letters on a driftwood board:

  KEEP OUT!! THIS MEANS YOU!!

  “That sign weren’t put up by no damn Park Service and it ain’t meant for tourists,” Whidden said, “cause nobody never seen no tourist back in here.” He cut the engine. In the wash of silence came that hard licking at the bank as the brown current searched along under the branches, in the whisper of leaning trees in the river wind, and the boat’s exhaust stink was replaced by the musk of humus and that scent of hot wild lime in the dry foliage which stirred Lucius Watson’s heart and brought him home.

  Lucius went forward to rig a bow line, and Whidden jumped ashore, running a stern line to a mangrove. In the noon silence, the only answer to their shouts and calls was the dry, insistent song of a small bird from the wood edge. A heavy odor came and went on the shifting wind. “That ain’t the housepainter, if that is what you’re thinkin. That is gators. Might of shot one or two of ’em myself.” Whidden whispered this in Lucius’s ear, keeping a wary eye on Sally, who had guided Andy onto the bank, and led him toward the house. “Gator hides!” he yelled when they stopped short and turned and looked back, uneasy.

  Whidden had been with the Daniels gang when it first came to the Watson Place, which Speck liked to refer to as “my huntin camp.” Because a tight roof and dry ground-floor rooms with solid floors were needed for heavy storage, they had boarded up and nailed the windows and installed big chains and padlocks on the doors. On the south side of the house, facing the poincianas and the river, was a screened porch from which the screens were missing. Whidden went up onto the porch and checked the padlocked door. He knocked and hollered, “Anybody home?” He spat away the bad taste of the stench. “I never thought they’d cure them hides as poor as that!”

  When Speck was around, the hides had been cured properly, said Whidden, but his men had let things go after he left. They knew little about the Watson Place and had no curiosity about its history, and they had used it in the same hard way as the Miami men, ripping off porch steps and posts and the old storm shutters for their cooking fires. Meanwhile, they ranged out into the Glades country, killing every last gator they came across, big and small. “Course gator poachin was only part of it. Speck’s distillery ain’t a hundred yards back in the bushes. Ran his barrels of shine by airboat far as Gator Hook, and from there by truck east to Miami. He found cu
stomers as fast as he could brew it, never stored a pint. Never got caught neither. Same thing for the gator hides while there was a market.”

  Circling the house, checking the ground-floor windows in search of some way to get in, they paused to see if the cistern still held water. Whidden hoisted the corner of its green tarpaper roof, which was splatted white with bird droppings and scattered with dry leaves and twigs, red-seeded coon scat, bright coral bean in long hard pods, owl pellets, spiderwebs, a bobcat feces woolly green with mold.

  “This cistern is twenty-four foot by sixteen—pretty fair size for the Islands,” Lucius said proudly. “We dug her down into the ground, the way she should be—that’s why there’s water in there now.”

  “That ol’ water must be pretty rank. Ain’t nobody has fixed them gutterins in years.” Harden pointed at the rotted rain gutters, split and half fallen. “They tell me the brackish-water mosquitoes which breeds in this here cistern are the worst in all the Ten Thousand Islands.

  “At Lost Man’s, after Parks took over, a real big gator got into our cistern. Found him there when we went back to visit, couldn’t get him out. Still there, I reckon. And there was a drowned deer in the one at Possum Key, still had his hide on. Parks claims they want things back the way they was, and burnin our old homes was kind of fun, but I notice they never get around to digging out old cisterns or coverin ’em or fillin ’em—might be hard work!” He shook his head. “Don’t have to fill ’em! Just knock a hole into one side so’s a wild thing can go get his water, climb back out again.”

  When Lucius looked up, Harden was watching him. “The man who built this cistern was Fred Dyer,” Lucius said vaguely, struggling to recover the feel of the lost conversation. For some reason, he had been daydreaming about Lucy, wondering if they would find each other before it was too late. “His daughter married a Summerlin, but she’s a widow. I believe she is still living at Fort Myers.”