Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Altogether, we saw close to twenty men, mostly Chok fellers, with two or three who were there that day from Marco and Fakahatchee, and a few fishermen passing through. Isaac Yeomans, Andrew Wiggins, Saint Demere, Henry Smith—all those men were in on it. Harry McGill, who would marry my sister Maggie Eva, was among the few who fired and never denied it; Charley Johnson was another, and Mr. House and his three older boys would never be ashamed that they took part. Hard to say who else for sure because over the years too many changed their stories. I do know that some who later claimed to be among the men who killed Ed Watson were not even present on the island. Others like Wilson Alderman decided they only went there to arrest him, not to shoot him, so they never fired. A lot of ’em have poor memories, I guess.

  Just lately, a young lady told me that her dad was among the shooters. Well, he wasn’t. He was with me in my skiff. We saw the finish.

  Folks had hung on in the Islands after bad hurricanes in ’73 and ’94 and 1909, but the Great Hurricane of 1910 cleaned ’em right out. Their boats and cabins were all wrecked and their gardens spoiled by four feet of salt water, leaving almost nothing they could work with. The green emptiness of the Everglades for a hundred miles to eastward and the gray emptiness of the Gulf out to the west—the dead silence and the loneliness, along with the knowing that all a man had cleared off, hoed, and built, all the hard labor and discouragement of years and years, could be washed away overnight—that knowledge broke their spirit, that and the scent of human blood back in the rivers. By the time Lucius’s father was shot down a week later, all but the Hardens had cleared out, and not one of those Island clans ever came back, because any stranger glimpsed around some point of river could be Leslie Cox, who might kill you in cold blood. That fear that was always lurking there plain wore ’em out.

  After those murders came that hurricane, then the death of E. J. Watson—all on Mondays, one after the other. And after those three black Mondays came the drought. People forget about the drought. Here we were deep into the rainy season and no rain for weeks and weeks, into December. It was spooky! Such little water as we had turned green and poisonous and cisterns all around the Bay went dry. Had to row way up beyond the tides in Turner River.

  Folks saw all these calamities as signs of the Lord’s wrath. All folks could talk about was Revelation and Apocalypse, bowl of wrath and burning bush. Those first Pentecostals who came to save us were shocked to learn that the doomed sinners on this accursed Bay had no house of God. That called for an emergency Revival. Forty souls were baptized in the Bay, right out there in front of McKinney’s store. And Charley Johnson who was in the Watson posse and never did mind being first and foremost, Charley stepped up and hollered loud and clear how he was a rum-runner doing the Devil’s work. When it came to sinners, nobody came close to Charley G. Johnson, Charley swore. Yessir, he was burning to repent, ol’ Charley was, he aimed to get saved or know the reason why. To prove it, he took his rum boat all the way north to Fort Myers and brought back a cargo of lumber for the new church. When it came to saving souls on Chokoloskee Bay, Mr. McKinney said, the Lord got a helping hand from E. J. Watson and the demon rum.

  Willie Brown likes to recall how he tried to find my uncle George to get a warrant for Ed Watson’s arrest, head off the showdown. Justice of the Peace George Storter was the closest thing to law we had back at the time, but that week Uncle George was away on jury duty in Fort Myers, and C. G. McKinney, too—those two men were right there in the courthouse when the Chokoloskee witnesses were brought in. Sheriff Tippins took some depositions and the court clerk wrote ’em down and that court clerk, so help me God, was Eddie Watson, the dead man’s son, Uncle George told us.

  After leaving the Bend in late September, Lucius had gone gill-netting with me and Claude, provisioning the clam crew at Pavilion Key; in early October, he was fishing with the Roberts boys out of Flamingo. That’s where he was in mid-October when the word came of bloody murders at the Bend, along with the first warnings of the Great Hurricane. He departed next day but was turned back at Cape Sable by the storm. Because his boat got damaged and needed repairs, it was late in the week before he started out again, rounding Cape Sable and camping that night at Shark River. Next morning at Lost Man’s, the Hardens informed him that his father had stopped by two days before the storm, behaving strangely; they could not quite make out why he had come and seemed uneasy.

  Lucius rushed north. Finding nobody at Chatham Bend, he came to our house in Everglade, where we broke the awful news. He went out on the dock and watched the river for a while; Lucius was always beloved in our family, and as Mother said, it was a blessing that he was with good friends at such a time. We talked all night and he left for Fort Myers at dawn. because he had refueled at our dock, he did not stop at Marco, where he might have learned that his father had crossed paths with the sheriff before heading south to deal with Cox at Chatham Bend. What actually happened there will always be disputed and it seems unlikely we will ever know.

  BILL HOUSE

  If Watson’s gun had not misfired, Daddy House would of been dead—Daddy knew that, too. He turned his back on all the racket and just walked away looking real old and rickety because some way he had busted his one gallus and was holding his pants up with a forearm across his belly. Walked stiff and slow like he had a bad gut.

  His sons was pretty twisted up about how it ended. All the blood and them damned dogs and kids running around. Young Lloyd, follering his daddy home, was so mad he was in tears but never could figure out what he was mad at. For days us boys tried to talk it out, but our dad would never join in. What happened there at Smallwood’s had went bad in him and turned him sour. I reckon that was his first day as an old man.

  When the crowd drifted off into the dark and the dogs forgot why they was barking, Charlie Boggess fetched a lantern, helped Ted turn him over. Ted tried to fold the arms across the chest, but on account of rigger mortis, them arms opened out again like the claws on a blue crab speared through the back. Or that’s how Charlie Boggess told it, because Charlie T. made up for his short size with his tall stories. He was spooked by them slow arms much worse than by that one bloody blue eye—that’s what he related to visitors in later years after everyone had put away the truth, Charlie T. included. Seems Ted had tried to close that eye but come too late. The lid was stiff, it just peeled back off the eyeball. Hunting around amongst the hurricane scraps spread through the bushes, them two come up with a toy flag from the Fourth of July, spread that over the eyes. (D. D. House had rode for a soldier in the War Between the States and never had no use for the stars and stripes, but he concluded that a Yankee flag was good enough for the man that tried to kill him.)

  Even his friends knew Watson’s time had come, that’s why them Lost Man’s fellers stood back there by the store and watched him killed. From the way he brought his boat ashore in the face of all them guns, I got to believe Ed Watson knew it, too.

  The men agreed there would be no burial on Chokoloskee. Even dead, that body scared the women. At sun-up, we would take him out to Rabbit Key. But leaving a man I knew most of my life lay out all night alone by the cold water, that bothered me. I couldn’t sleep. Toward dawn I went back over there to pay respect or something. Dogs had snatched that bloody flag and one-eyed Ed lay staring at the stars, arms wide. One boot was stripped off, the other shot away, and those dead feet with cracked old toenails looked like lumps of dough.

  I never sucked up to Watson and I never had no regrets, that day or later. We done what we had to do. But I will admit I was ashamed of how some kept shooting after he was dead, like they was trying to wipe him off the face of the good earth and their own guilt with him. Some shot until their guns was empty, and more’n one reloaded, shot some more. One wild boy Crockett Daniels run in afterwards, put his .22 to the back of the dead man’s head. I believe it was them boys robbed the corpse for souvenirs, cause his tooled big-buckled cowhide belt was missing, also his black felt hat from Arkansas. Watson wer
en’t often caught out in the sun without that hat on, and now that white skin under his hairline made him look naked.

  In the lantern shine, the one bald eye glared out through the black tracks of dry blood down across his forehead, but the dust-caked bloodied mouth in them stiff whiskers was the worst of it: front teeth all busted out, lips tore and stretched, but still a little twist to ’em, a little grin. He sure looked like he could use a glass of water. Well, Mister Ed, I whispered, hoarse, I come to say good-bye. It ain’t that I’m sorry about what was done but only that your neighbors had to do it, men like me that weren’t never cut out to be killers.

  • • •

  By the time we went for him at sunrise, to run him out to Rabbit Key in his own boat, Watson had lost his good eye to some night varmint, maybe a poked stick. His clothes was mostly rags, black-caked with blood. Shirt ripped, hairy belly button. Them mean red spots was pellets deep under the skin. In the hard light of day it was plain he was shot to pieces, mostly buckshot rash but plenty of bullet holes, too, and flies already humming. A few men scared themselves all over again, telling how Watson, grinning like a skull, come after the posse through that hail of fire. (They was calling theirselves a “posse”; nobody cared to be a member of no “mob.”) I warned Mamie what the dead man looked like and she headed off his widow before she went down to visit with the deceased. “Give us a hand,” I told the men, and Tant Jenkins who had took no part was first to step forward and grab the ankles. Straining to hoist, Tant puffed out the opinion that dead men are unnatural heavy cause their bodies pull down like dowsing sticks, yearning for eternal rest under in the ground. “Well, that could be,” I told him, “but being full of lead might make a difference.”

  “It ain’t no joking proposition, Bill,” sighed Tant, who most days would joke his way right through a funeral. Tant was tearful, might of had some drink, but there ain’t no doubt that except for Tuckers he truly loved Ed Watson. Later he told me my remark upset him because it was just what Watson might have said with a straight face about his own damn death. Watson loved them sour kind of jokes, which I enjoyed myself. I mean, ain’t life some kind of a sour joke? Might’s well laugh, that’s the way him and me seen it, whether nice folks seen the joke or not. One time when Watson caught me grinning along with him, he give a wink and lifted up his hat.

  A angry moan come from the burial party when we swung that bloody carcass onto the transom. A couple of men flat refused to help us lay him in the cockpit, nor even touch him, as if even one drop of this devil’s blood was curtains. We had to listen to this horseshit right while we was struggling to heft him, and sure enough he got away from us, slid off the transom, flopped into the shallers. I was outraged and I spoke too rough and later some would use that anger to show how Houses always hated E. J. Watson.

  “Come on!” I yelled. “Stop screwing around! Let’s get it over with!” I grabbed some line, bound up his ankles, run a hitch under the arms and worked it snug, then rigged a bridle off the stern cleats. Went aboard, cranked up his motor while them others clambered in, and snaked him off that shore like a dead gator, as yelling kids run out into the shallows, kicking water splashes after the body. Might been Billy Brown or Raleigh Wiggins who was wearing Watson’s hat, or maybe that tough Caxambas kid he nicknamed “Speck.”

  “Get away!” My own voice sounded cracked, half kind of crazy. Where were their families, who claimed to be Watson’s friends? How come they let their kids behave no better than camp dogs? Were they too scared of us ones who done the shooting? But when I calmed down, I was angry at myself for hauling him off the shore as rough as that, which only encouraged the other men to act rough, too.

  We towed him all the way to Rabbit Key. Sometimes he come twisting to the surface, causing a yell of fear; other times that grisly head was thumping on the bottom, I could feel the thrumming when I took in on the bridle—damn! It turned my guts. In the main channel, he towed pretty good, but a boat motor in them days had more pop than power, and his dead weight dragged as bad as a sea anchor. In one place he got drawed across a orster bar, got tore up worse, and by the time we pulled him out on Rabbit Key, his clothes was all but gone, ears and nose, too. With limbs bound tight and no face to speak of, he looked less like a human man than some deep ocean monster thrown up by that storm.

  They buried him face down—“Give that red devil a good look at Hell!” yelled Isaac—then toppled two big coral slabs on top, one across the legs and the other across the back, to make sure he would not rise at dusk and come hunting in the night for thems that slew him. One feller hitched a noose around the neck, run the bitter end to a big old wind-twist mangrove on the point, the only tree left standing by the storm.

  By the water, Tant Jenkins was weepin about how good he was treated all them years by Mister Ed but even when he seen ’em lead that hanging rope out of the grave he just stayed out of it. That’s Tant. I stomped over there, got hot about it, told ’em to take that noose off his damn neck cause he were as dead as the law allowed already.

  “Ain’t no sense gettin lathered, Bill. We rigged that rope so’s them cattle kings can find the body case they send for it.”

  “Around the neck?” I said.

  Them others backed that feller, feeling ugly, they was spoiling for a fight. Mister Watson didn’t scare ’em, not no more. They felt free to punish that sorry red carcass for all the fear they felt when this thing was alive. I walked away. I was relieved that he was dead, the same as they were, but I have buried my share of men that had a lot less spine than Ed J. Watson.

  Sheriff Tippins was there with the Monroe County law when we got back to Smallwood’s about noon. The men had agreed not to mention Henry Short because around Frank Tippins, things went hard with nigras. We never did learn what become of Watson’s black man that Tippins handed over to this Monroe sheriff. Can’t even recall his name if they ever give him one.

  The men notified the law that nobody lynched nor murdered E. J. Watson, it was self-defense. “This death don’t smell like self-defense,” Tippins advised. “Smells more like lynching.” Right from the start, the sheriff seemed crisscrossed about this case, he couldn’t stand still for a minute, he was fuming. “You men all claiming he shot first?” he says, rough and suspicious. They scratched their heads, looking around for somebody who might recall something.

  “Well, he sure tried,” I said.

  Tippins turned toward me slow, looked kind of ironical—that’s a lawman’s habit—to let me know he aimed to keep his eye on me. “He sure tried?” Him and his sidekick exchanged that lawman look that’s supposed to mean something but don’t, cause they don’t know nothing. “Your name House? I heard you was the ringleader.”

  “We never had no ringleader. No leader, neither.”

  “How come you’re so het up, Mr. House? Ashamed of something?”

  “You’re the one looks het up, Sheriff. I ain’t got one damned thing to be ashamed about.”

  “I reckon we’ll see about that, won’t we?” said the other lawman. They were trying to make me mad so I’d bust out with something. I was mad lawman because even my own sister had announced how we ought to be ashamed. Said she knew Ed Watson for what he was and never said no different but hated “the way you men licked his boots, then turned on him and shot him like a dog.”

  We wasn’t bootlickers, not by no means. We was just ordinary fellers that never knew how to handle this wild hombre till we had him laying face down in the dirt. If ever a man brought perdition on himself, it was Ed Watson, but some way we was blamed for doing exactly what those blamers wanted done. Now that we had him good and dead, some that took part was growing nervous about wiping out a neighbor. Trouble was, he never fit their idea of a outlaw—shifty, dirty, knife scars or pocked skin, maybe an eye patch or a missing ear. Ed Watson never looked much like a criminal. Men might speak of them ice-blue eyes in their dark ring that could fix a feller in his tracks, but them blue eyes was part of his good looks, the women said. Them one
s that was suddenly upset by how he died, they got to saying that all the trouble come from rumor and misunderstanding, that the killings at the Watson place only started when Cox come, that it was Cox who give Watson his bad name. That just ain’t true. His troubles started back in the old century.

  One thing for sure, folks was very nervous that Leslie Cox might be somewhere on this coast. Chatham Bend is on a big swamp island between rivers and Cox couldn’t swim. And there was no one left to come by and take Cox off because the hurricane had cleaned them islands out. So unless Watson killed him, which nobody believed, Cox was still there. Only thing was, to believe that, you had to believe he set there on the Bend for a good ten days, all through that storm, until Watson finally showed up. And you had to explain what happened then.

  A few of us guided the lawmen down to Chatham, found no sign of him. That started a new argument: was Cox watching us from hiding? Or had the man we killed the day before told us the truth?

  Canefield, sugar works, boathouse and sheds, good dock, big cistern, strong white-painted house up on its mound—nothing anywheres in the Ten Thousand Islands come close to the Watson place before that storm. His fine plantation was what Ed Watson had to show at the end of his hard road. But now all them outbuildins was gone and his fine house stunk, black blood and flies.

  We wasted half an afternoon trying to catch his old roan horse, which wore no halter. That wild-eyed critter might be running down there yet.

  Before leaving, the Falcon took aboard four thousand gallons of cane syrup. Four thousand gallons! Lord! The hot hard hours that man must of worked, raking the shell out of forty acres of hard mound in the meanest kind of snake-crawling scrub jungle. Forty acres!