Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  For supper, they fried small jack and mangrove snappers, and two blue catfish, pin-hooked by Andy from the stern. “Better’n ladyfish, I guess,” he said, to disguise his pride in them, “but them sail-fin cat in the deeper channels eat a little better than these blues. Course in the old days, we wouldn’t touch these things. We’d have a good snook or a pompano, maybe trout or grouper. All them good kinds was right here for the takin.”

  Because of mosquitoes, they prepared to sleep aboard. Whidden said, “Sally and me’ll sleep here in the cabin, and you two fellers can lay out on deck in this nice Gulf breeze. I got some mesh, so miskeeters won’t be too bad. We’ll give you a blood transfusion in the mornin.” He put his arms around Sally from behind, but she was still brooding, and was cool with him. “Or maybe I can take turns on deck with you two fellers,” Whidden sighed.

  Sally said she had been told by Sadie Harden that whoever last pillaged the Watson house had stripped out the only built-in cabinets in all the Islands—

  “You sneakin up on those bad ol’ Carrs again?” Whidden was cross. “Dammit, Sally, them young Carrs killed two young Hardens in an argument over some coon skins. We all know that, known it for thirty years! That don’t mean that all that family are no good from here on out!”

  Sheepish, she said in a whiny cracker voice, “Honey, ah ain’t nevuh said all of ’em was bay-yud! Ah jus’ said the mos’ of ’em, is all!”

  “Killed a couple of dirty Hardens, that’s all,” Whidden said.

  “ ‘Dirty Hardens’! That’s exactly how they talked! There was still lynch talk when I was in school!”

  “Even in the thirties, lynching was common all around the South,” Lucius reminded them, “and up north wasn’t much better. And there were massacres.”

  Andy nodded. “I guess we all got our bad story. Cousin of mine was in Tavernier around 1933 when some sports fishermen went in and gunned down an old black man and his family. Didn’t like what the old man charged for bait and didn’t care for the expression on his face when they cussed him out. Went back for him after dark, of course. Drank some shine to get their courage up and found some more brave fellers to help out. The son got away, come running with his baby to get help. They was the only survivors.”

  “And nobody was charged, I don’t suppose.”

  “Well, the Monroe Sheriff done the sensible thing, to keep the peace. He charged that hysterical young nigra with massacring his own family, and nobody bothered their heads no more about it.”

  The blind man stared away into the night, as if awaiting the judgment of the heavens upon Florida. “I ain’t too proud about them days, are you? God Bless America, we say, but I’d hate to think that God would bless the ignoramus gun-crazy Americans that done things like that.” His words were uttered quietly with a terrible finality, as if he had slowly opened up his hands on his stigmata.

  Lucius lay down on the cabin roof with a life jacket under his head and hunted the Southern Cross in the Gulf sky, but fear for his brothers, seeping back into his lungs, made him sit up again. How long could an old man survive, tied and gagged in the suffocating heat and stench inside that house! The image wrenched a small cry from his throat, and beside him, the blind man’s eyes opened wide under the starry heavens.

  Considering the poor alternatives of flight or prison, was an octogenarian such as Rob better off dead? If that old man were killed, he would be grief-stricken—oh God! of course!—but would he also feel that Rob’s end might be a mercy? No! He denounced himself for an unworthy idea which he vowed never to recognize again.

  Above the bank of thunder heads to westward, the Gulf night was clear, and heat lightning flashed across the firmament as if shot from the farthest bright clear stars of deepest heaven. That lightning shimmer would be followed in a day or two by a southwest blow, after which the wind would back around to the northwest. The winds came and went away again, with more wind at certain times of year, more heat and rain, but fundamentally the Island seasons remained monotone, as they must be, Lucius imagined, in the realms of purgatory.

  The Cracker Belle headed south at dawn toward Lost Man’s River. Off to the eastward the sun swelled behind the night wall of coast jungle, and the rim of the coast forest was a band of fire.

  Cryptic fins of porpoise parted a silken sea. The faint smudge of a freighter on the Gulf horizon was the only sign of man. “We’re comin up on Turkey Key,” Harden told Andy in a while. “I heard the clams was startin to come back behind Little Turkey.”

  “Turkey Key, Plover Key, Wood Key, Hog Key,” Andy said, counting his fingers. “Don’t all of them islands have a high shell beach tossed up by storms? The pioneers chose these windward beaches because the sea wind kept the mosquitoes back in the bushes, and the shell ridge behind was higher ground in time of hurricane. I reckon the Hardens tried out every one!”

  Whidden nodded. “Hardens liked being far away, farther the better, so the Great Hurricane never drove ’em from the Islands, it just scattered ’em. Earl rebuilt on Wood Key near his daddy, and Lee moved our bunch over to South Lost Man’s, and Webster went four miles upriver past First Lost Man’s Bay. After that nobody saw him much. Slim, quiet feller. Stayed up in the river. Made moonshine back in there and done some voodoo.”

  Sally said, “Whidden’s mama told me that Webster lived apart because Earl made him feel bad about his color. She said Webster was dark but had good pointed features and straight hair, and was very handsome. Some men who work all of their lives out in the sun go very dark, that’s all.”

  Andy agreed. “Some men just take the sun that way. My own cousin Harley Wiggins was as dark as Webster Harden, nobody never questioned Harley cause he was a Wiggins!”

  “Back in the old days,” Sally said, “the Hardens gave a square dance once a week, and people came in from all over the Islands. Mr. Watson came, too, and he always sat with his back to the corner—had his place saved for him. If he went outside, he never came into the firelight where somebody might shoot at him out of the dark. That man was wary!”

  Listening to his wife talk about his family, Harden winked at Lucius. “Yep, Harden men all played some kind of music,” he recalled. “Lee Harden called the dances, played the fiddle. He’d put a keg of moonshine on his elbow and throw it down. Uncle Earl picked the guitar but he couldn’t sing, and Uncle Webster played fiddle and mandolin. My pa’s favorite tunes were ‘Sugarfoot Rag’ and ‘That Dear Old Gal of Mine.’

  “Pa burned his linings out so bad on moonshine that in later years he went all numb, didn’t feel a thing. He could take and lift a coffeepot right off the fire and drink black coffee right out of the pot, was famous for it. He never let moonshine get the better of him, the way most did, but he had that temper and he had that Injun in him and he wouldn’t take no nonsense, not from nobody. He was tough, all right, and so was Webster, but them two never turned mean when they was drinkin. I mean, they never killed nobody, not completely.”

  “Not completely, no!” Andy smiled broadly. “Oh my, oh my,” he said with a happy sigh.

  Sally contemplated the three men. “ ‘Oh my, oh my’ is right! This man’s father was supposed to be a famous killer, and this one’s daddy helped to kill him, and the third one’s brother was killed by my cousins—dangerous bunch here!”

  Though her husband laughed, he was quick to change the subject. “My pa knew them men would be layin for Ed Watson because rumors traveled fast even in them days. He aimed to warn him. After the hurricane, Mr. Watson come back south, hunting for Cox, but the Hardens never seen him. If Lee Harden could have got to him first, he might not of gone back there and got shot to pieces.

  “Pa always said that E. J. Watson knew a whole lot better than to return that day to Chokoloskee. He must of got tired of running—either that, or he had a purpose no one knew about. Said E. J. was just too darn smart not to suspect something. Them men was scared of him as well as jealous, and scared men are the most dangerous, and E. J. knew that.”

 
“Well, Mr. Watson never stooped down to their level,” Sally said. “He kept apart and they never forgave it. They were out to revenge that and make their name by killing a famous desperado. That’s why Lee Harden called ’em outlaws. Called ’em the mob.”

  The blind man stifled a red-faced retort. He cleared his throat. “All the same, them fishermen-farmers you call the mob was your family’s neighbors, and good people, too.”

  “Good people? Let their young boys run over there and shoot into that body?”

  “You sure of that?” The blind man grunted. “One of them boys you always mention was eight years older’n me, and I reckon he stayed that way till the day he died. That would make him about six years of age when he was puttin all them bullets in that body. Course he might of had him a durn popgun or something. Might of shot a cork.” Andy turned his sightless gaze in Lucius’s direction, and his heavy sigh was open warning to distrust anything this young woman might say about the Bay people.

  “What was unforgivable,” she persisted, “was putting the blame on Henry Short for shooting Mr. Watson. Henry Short, who never raised his gun!”

  Like a manatee breaking the surface, Andy emitted a short emphatic puff. Even her husband protested, “Honey, you don’t know that! Not for sure!”

  “Well, that’s what Henry told your father, who told me. Henry swore on his Bible that he never raised his gun.”

  Andy leaned back with his hands behind his head. “You’re sayin Henry swore that on the Bible? You pretty sure of that?”

  “No, I’m not!” she blurted, close to tears.

  “Because Henry was standing right beside my dad,” Andy said carefully, “and my dad told me he seen that rifle comin up, longside of his own.”

  Lucius peered at the blind face for some sign of ambiguity. “Why would he raise his gun unless he meant to fire,” he said carefully.

  “Maybe he meant to bluff your dad,” Andy said gloomily, looking out to sea. “I never asked him.” He shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, Colonel, then quit askin!” He closed his eyes.

  Whidden was eager to show Sally his home coast. Taking advantage of fair weather, they continued south to Lost Man’s River. The water of the Gulf was cloudy green, and its long slow swells swept inshore from distant storms of the Antilles.

  A low island rising dead ahead stood out a little from the shore, in the middle of the Lost Man’s River delta. “My dad bought the claim to Lost Man’s Key but built his house south of the river mouth on Lost Man’s Beach,” Whidden told Sally. “Built again after the ’26 Hurricane, built again after the tornado, 1940. He farmed his corn and peas there where I’m pointin at. That little cove back over there was full of fish, so he called it Sadie’s Hole, after my ma.”

  “The Carrs called it the same thing,” she said, “because any Carr who tried to sneak in there to fish was asking for a bullet hole from Sadie Harden!”

  “Well, after 1929, you might be right, Sal. Course I ain’t no authority on my own family.”

  Bougainvillea was resurgent in its red-lavender bowers over the charcoal shadows of Lee Harden’s cabin. There was no trace of Lucius’s small shack, only coast undergrowth. Behind the white ridge of storm-washed shell and sea grape rose the black columns of the coco palms burned by the Park.

  “Pioneer families might have no news for many months, the world went past them,” Sally said solemnly. “But those folks knew every shift of wind and turn of current, they could see and smell and listen, and they knew.” She looked from one man to the other, misty-eyed in her evocations of the old traditions. “They just knew.”

  “Knew what?” Lucius could not hide his impatience. Yet seeing her so moved by this wild coast, and so embattled by her demons, he stifled his annoyance at her tendency to instruct them in a place and way of life that all three men had known before she was born. Sally was principled and gallant, but her need to right old Island wrongs had killed the fun in her—the tart observations and the goofiness and whimsy which had so delighted him on their journey south.

  Whidden was pointing out old landmarks. “See that little stretch of sand nearest the creek mouth? That’s where the Tuckers farmed, and my family, too. Call it Little Creek, had a freshwater spring that Mr. Watson had his eye on. That’s where Tuckers had their garden and that’s where my folks had their farm after 1910.”

  “Jim Daniels and his family were living down this beach because his daughter was married to Frank Hamilton,” Lucius reminded them. “His son recalls that the Tuckers were living here on a little sloop. James remembers hearing shots, at least he thinks he does. He says the killer put the bodies aboard Tucker’s little sloop, set her afire, drifted her out to sea. James told me once he’d seen that burning boat himself, he’d seen the smoke of her, offshore.”

  Harden shook his head. “Easterly wind might of drifted off their sloop, but my dad and his brothers found the bodies in the shallers off the Key. That’s where Tuckers had their palm-thatch hut, in the Gulf breeze.”

  Andy said, “I sure do like James Daniels, and I always did. But James weren’t but a little feller then, and he might recall most of it all right and still be wrong about the bodies. Nobody wrote nothin down about it, only Ted Smallwood, who weren’t here, and Uncle Ted had to think back a half century by the time he done that. There weren’t no hearing, nothing in the papers. Two dark stains fading down into the sand was about all them young folks left behind to show they ever walked upon God’s earth.”

  No matter what the circumstances of the killings, these could only seem inconsequential when set against the horror of the act itself. Yet Lucius disliked this discussion very much, and his own part in it seemed to him dishonest. He had encouraged objective discussion of his father, trying to learn something—to remain equable and simply listen—but his companions were talking more freely than he liked about E. J. Watson, as if his own feelings were beside the point, as if Papa were no longer his father but a figure of legend, therefore in the public domain. On the other hand, any comment by the son appeared self-serving and beside the point, no matter what that point happened to be.

  Having defended the Kind Parent, the Good Neighbor, the Inspired Farmer for so long, he was feeling tremors of unhappy dread and self-deception. Even those well-disposed toward his father seemed in agreement on the menace of him, and the pall that his violence had cast over this coast. As the beloved younger son, safe under Papa’s roof, what could he know of the long nights and days—and months and years—which others had spent in this lonesome mangrove wilderness in the shadow of a man allegedly involved in cold-blooded murders in at least three states?

  “Them bodies with their eyes wide open underwater give Uncle Earl a fright he never got over,” Harden was saying. “Once he made sure Watson had gone north, he went to Key West and give an affidavit. Swore on his oath that the three men and one nigra who found them murdered had recognized the keel mark made by Watson’s boat. Uncle Earl claimed his whole family had read Tucker’s note defyin Watson that was found on the kitchen table at the Bend. Well, where was that note now? the Sheriff asked him. How could he show a grand jury an underwater sand track nearly one month old, off of Lost Man’s Key, forty miles north? Anyway, no self-respectin jury in the sovereign state of Florida would accept a Harden’s testimony against a white man.

  “ ‘You sayin I ain’t white?’ Uncle Earl yelled, as if this was the first time he’d ever heard about it. And them lawmen said, ‘We know who you are, boy. Now go on home.’ So Earl went home humiliated, and dead cold furious at everybody.

  “Earl Harden hated the prejudice against his family, but not as bad as he hated his family for lettin Henry Short eat at their table. He hated nigras so darn bad that some of the Bay folks took a shine to him, decided he must be a white man after all. He was good friends with Browns and Thompsons, and with Fonso Lopez, too. Them families liked him somewhat better than his own did.” Whidden sighed, avoiding his wife’s glare. “Uncle Earl weren’t all bad by no me
ans, and I felt sorry for him—got to be sorry for any man who don’t feel easy in his skin.

  “Ed Watson had been good to us, and very generous, and nobody but Uncle Earl would act against him. They give Earl credit for sticking to his guns, but they knew he done it more out of his fear of Watson than in public duty. And after that year, Earl was more afraid than ever, in case that man might come back to the Islands and get wind of what Earl Harden told the law.

  “Once Watson was dead, Uncle Earl got drunk and started hollerin about how he wished he’d been at Chokoloskee, how he would of been first man in line to shoot that sonofabitch, and all like that. Kind of surprised people, I reckon, because while Mr. Watson was alive, he never talked that way. And he was still talkin that way when Mister Colonel come back to the Islands a few years later.”

  “Couldn’t shake that habit, I guess.” Lucius tried to smile. “Earl made sly remarks where I could hear ’em, and when he was drinking, he got abusive to my face. In all the years I lived at Lost Man’s, I never went near him if I could help it. If he was at one of the Harden parties, I just stayed away.”

  “Well, after he heard about your list, Uncle Earl stopped shootin off his mouth about Ed Watson. He got over all them kind of speeches!”

  Lost Man’s Key lay straight across the mouth of Lost Man’s River, hiding the broad shallow bay inside. Whidden said with a shy pride, “Lee Harden came here after the Hurricane of 1910, and he swore that nobody would ever run him off. Well, Pa was wrong. But it took pretty close to forty years and it took the federal government to do it.”

  The boat approached the river mouth by the south channel. Black skimmers lilted over the swift eddies that ran between the gold-brown oyster bars and channeled into the Gulf on the ebb tide. The purling cries of oyster catchers came and went across the bars, rising and falling.