Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  For a florid feller, House went a dangerous red. I expected a fight and an arrest and I was spoiling for it. I gave him a last warning.

  “No loitering in the courthouse, Bill, unless you aim to loiter behind bars.”

  He swore and wheeled and followed the rest outside into the sun.

  Sheriff Jaycox said that whoever he was, Leslie Cox had closed the book on Dutchy Melville, the fugitive most wanted in Key West. Green Waller, if that was his real name, had been wanted in Fort Myers as a hog thief; I scratched that name off the books, too. As for Cox, most people believed he was still at large down in the Islands, and nobody could say when or if or where he might show up.

  Trying to piece it all together, I came up with more questions than good answers. The only witness to those murders had fooled the men at Pavilion Key by acting the part of a scared coon after doing his best to implicate Ed Watson. No matter how much I cuffed him in the jailhouse, that hard nigger stuck to his doctored story like stink on a dog. Nosuh, nosuh, Mist’ Edguh nevuh knowed nuthin about it! Ah jes ’cused him cause Mist’ Les done promise he gone kill me if ah don’t!

  But if Watson was innocent, why did his nigger make up that first story, which could only get both of them in trouble? Was he really so scared of Cox he couldn’t think straight? Or had he concluded that his boss had wanted him killed along with all the others, and seeing no hope anyway, took his revenge?

  I had to conclude he told the truth the first time, risking his life to tell it, God knows why. If he hadn’t—if Cannon and his boy had not passed by or if sharks and gators had beat us to the evidence, no one would have ever known the fate of those three people. All we would have had were some more rumors about E. J. Watson.

  Those deaths having occurred in Monroe County, I signed my prisoner over to Sheriff Jaycox for transport to Key West. On the dock, with his suspect standing there in front of him, Clem Jaycox summed up his understanding of the situation: “Yep! Confessed to abettin in the butchery of a white woman. Probable rape and left for nude,” he said, putting his X to the release. “No Monroe jury going to stand for that, not from no damn nigger. Don’t hardly seem fair to ask my voters to waste tax money on no trial when we know the verdict ’fore it starts, ain’t that right, Frank?”

  “The prisoner is now officially in Monroe custody,” I said. “I reckon you’ll do what Monroe thinks is right.” Clem Jaycox winked at me to show he understood, which I don’t believe he did.

  “It’s been a pleasure working with Lee County, Frank,” he said, and darned if he don’t wink at me again!

  Hands cuffed behind, the prisoner stood straight, observing us. He refused to sit down on the cargo crates where I had pointed. Jaycox spoke to him real soft and low, hiking his belt: “What you lookin at, nigger boy?” Risking a blow, the man ignored him. I said, “Your last chance, boy. Did Mr. Watson order Cox to kill those folks or didn’t he?”

  He regarded me like I was dead or like we all were. A very, very dangerous breed of nigger. I weren’t surprised when news came from Key West that he fell overboard and drowned on the way south. Tried to make a getaway on the high seas, I reckon.

  Learning from Eddie that their father’s “gruesome carcass”—Eddie’s words—had been towed out to a sand spit on the Gulf and thrown into a pit without a box, Carrie Langford came over to the courthouse to inquire.

  When she busted out in tears about her Papa’s lonesome fate, I took her by her nice soft shoulders, gave her a quick family kind of hug—first time I ever even touched her. I told her I’d have his remains recovered and brought to Fort Myers for reburial, if she wished, and go along to make sure all was done with respect.

  I took the coroner along. Jim Cole wanted to know why, since nobody had asked for an autopsy. “That’s a sleeping dog we might as well let lie,” Cole said. Everyone wanted to let him lay, even the coroner. There were too many rotted corpses in his line of work, Doc Henderson complained. Doc finally admitted he was leery of the dead Ed Watson glaring up at him out of a hole.

  “They laid him in face down,” I assured him.

  When I told Lucius, “You’re not going, son, and that is that,” he followed us to Ireland’s Dock, came up behind as silent as my shadow. This quiet in Ed Watson’s boy was unsettling to certain people, and so was his determination, which was not what you expected from the look of him. Lucius favored his late mother, very gentle in his ways. That slim young feller could do handsprings in the courtroom and you’d hardly notice while Eddie could peek through the back window and you’d feel his weight all over the damn building. “You’re not going,” I repeated. “One day you’ll thank me.” Lucius doffed his hat politely as he stepped aboard.

  At the courthouse the day before, Lucius had arrived too late to protest the family decision not to prosecute, which his brother and sister had approved. He demanded an explanation: was it true that his father’s confessed killers had been let off? Still angry about the so-called “posse,” I said, “Better take it up with your family, son.” Eddie was defensive and aggressive, refusing to show him Bill House’s deposition or even the witness list on the grounds that it was “confidential evidence.”

  Since their participation in his father’s death had not been contested by the perpetrators, Lucius insisted that these men go to trial. Though he was furious, intense, he never raised his voice. And he was right, of course. House and the others might have told the truth but it wasn’t the whole truth and I knew it.

  • • •

  Planter Watson lay beneath two crossways slabs of coral that the hurricane had broken from some reef and heaved ashore. The sight and stench brought a great gasp and moan from Doc’s two diggers, who backed away. Sure enough, he lay face down, ankles bound tight. The gray flesh around the bindings was so swollen that it almost covered over the rough hemp.

  I shivered the hard shiver of a horse, took a deep breath, then kneeled by the pit with a short length of rope and hitched it to those bindings; the raw thing was hoisted from the hole and swung onto a canvas tarp brought by the coroner. Within moments, flies mysteriously appeared and small sand fleas hopped all over the body. Doc Henderson, a trim and silver man, stepped forward, saying to Lucius, “Sure you’re ready for this, son?” His voice was muffled by the gauze over his face.

  Doc cut the last rags off the body, which was crusted with blood-black sand. He paused to rig a sort of loincloth—very professional, I thought, since there was no way this thing could ever be made decent. His small knife flashed in the white sun and the first lead slug thumped into his coffee can.

  When the body was rolled over on its back, Lucius looked away, nose in his neckerchief. I stared at the black-and-blue face. The tanned neck and arms were savagely mutilated, the dead-white farmer’s body already blue-gray. Doc’s hands jittered and he coughed. “Oh Lordy! Lordy!”

  Lucius pitched toward the water, puked, and returned very pale. I moved up close behind in case he fainted. I said sharply, “Had enough, boy? Seen what you came to see?”

  He began to shake. I took him by the shoulders, spun him, and slapped him three times hard across the face, shouting with each slap, Forget it! Then I turned him again and pushed him back toward the boat. On that still shore, emerald reflections shimmered on the white paint of the hull and gulls yawped mournfully in the smoky autumn sunlight of the last day in that long doomed October. Another Monday.

  An hour passed, its silence broken only by those small dull thumps as thirty-three slugs, one by one, clunked into the coffee can. Doc never bothered about buckshot.

  Lucius was back. He cleared his throat. “He’s been cut enough,” he said. Doc’s ears turned red and his hands stopped but he did not look up. “I ain’t done,” he said. “They’s more there yet.”

  “Your coffee can is full,” said Lucius. “That’s enough.”

  I advised the coroner that Lee County was satisfied that the proximate cause of death had been determined. Doc snickered, then reproved himself with a doleful
cough like a dog sicking up a piece of bone. “I kind of think of this,” he said, reluctant to say good-bye, “as my own patient.”

  “This!” Lucius mourned.

  “Doc,” I said. “It’s time to quit.” We all backed off a ways to get a breath. The coroner wiped his thin knives on his cloth. “I heard they fill ’em full of lead out West but I never thought I’d see that in south Florida,” he said.

  The diggers wrapped rags around their hands before touching the cadaver, and no amount of threats and shouting stopped their moans and prayers and yelps and nigger racket while they rassled the carcass into Doc’s pine box. Well, you couldn’t blame ’em.

  Lucius knelt. He touched the forehead with his finger. He said, “God be with you, Papa.” He laid the lid, took up the hammer, and did his best to nail that stink in tight, but any man going ashore on Rabbit Key can get a whiff of Mr. Watson yet today.

  CARRIE WATSON

  OCTOBER 26, 1910

  It’s over now. I am sunk down with exhaustion, as if I had fled this day for twenty years.

  This leaden ache of loss and sorrow, made much worse by shame: His daughter turned her father from her door. Shame that is never to relent, that is the awful knowing.

  Oh Mama, our Lord seems far away. I open my torn heart to you, knowing you know how much I loved him, praying that wherever you have gone, you might hear me and forgive me.

  It’s for the best—that’s all Walter can offer me in solace. It’s for the best, says Eddie, who sounds as pompous when he copies Walter as Walter sounds when he copies Mr. Cole.

  Mama, I need you to hug me! Because I’m glad it’s over. Do you forgive me, Mama? I grieve with all my heart yet I am glad. I repent but I am glad. May God forgive me, I am glad. I’m glad! And yet I am ashamed.

  OCTOBER 27, 1910

  I can’t imagine what goes through Eddie’s head. I love my brother dearly and it hurts to see his nature so congested, yet I long to kick him. As a boy he was still open to life, but when he returned here after Papa’s trials in north Florida, something had thickened, he had lost all curiosity. He talks too much, he drones, he blusters, he is conceited about his clerk’s job at the courthouse though everyone knows it was invented for him by Frank Tippins. He flaunts his small official post like a loud necktie.

  When I commiserated with him about how terrible it must have felt to commit to paper the lies told at the hearing by those awful men, he sighed, shrugging philosophically. “They are not awful men, dear sister, they are merely men.” Good grief! But that’s the kind of wearisome stale thing he says these days. He affects a brier pipe, which doesn’t suit him, only encourages him to weigh his words (which have no real weight so far as I can tell!).

  Eddie goes deaf when Papa’s name comes up. He was living with Papa at Fort White when all that trouble came, but he won’t discuss it with Lucius or me, just frowns and mutters about some “family code of silence” with our Collins cousins. We’re your brother and sister, I cried, we’re his children, too! And Papa was found innocent, isn’t that true? Wasn’t he found innocent? And finally he grumped, “The defendant was acquitted, which is not the same.” The defendant!

  Because of this unspeakable hurt we share, we are estranged. Is it possible to love your brother but detest him?

  Lucius seems less bitter about the slayers than about Papa’s so-called friends, men like Erskine Thompson who looked on but failed to intervene. Lucius went straight to Eddie for the list of men brought to the courthouse but Eddie told him it would be improper for the deputy court clerk to reveal the names of prospective witnesses. Lucius retorted that the deputy court clerk seemed less concerned about his father’s murder than his own official title, which wasn’t nearly as important as he imagined. They had this ugly argument in public, nearly came to blows. Oh, what can folks think of our poor ruined family!

  To lose his head and shout that way is so unlike our Lucius, who is taking Papa’s death harder than anyone: he can’t seem to deal with it without great anger (though I’m not sure he knows what makes him angry unless it’s the fact that Papa died for Cox’s crimes). Lucius lived mostly at Chatham Bend and was friends with those poor wretches who were murdered—that’s part of it, of course. He refuses to believe that his jolly generous Papa was the killer people talk about now that he’s dead.

  When Lucius demanded a copy of the W. House deposition from Sheriff Tippins, Frank was sympathetic but refused him, saying his investigation of Mr. Watson’s death was not yet over. Meanwhile, Lucius has talked to someone who claims to have witnessed the whole terrible business; he has actually started a list of those involved! He is too intense about this; I am really worried. Even Eddie says he is concerned about his “little brother’s” safety. Yesterday evening Eddie warned him to “leave bad enough alone.” Eddie’s words showed disrespect for Papa, according to Lucius, who jumped up and demanded that Eddie take them back or step outside.

  Leave well enough alone, then, said Eddie, winking at Walter, who just rattled his paper unhappily, trying not to notice. And Lucius said bitterly, “What’s well enough for you may not be well enough for me.” I saw Eddie’s fists clench but he controlled himself and merely sneered, as if nothing his younger brother might say should be taken seriously. His attitude enraged Lucius all the more, and Walter had to walk him out of doors.

  When Walter came back inside, he said, “That list of names is just his way of making sense of all his grief. He won’t hurt anybody.” I snapped, “Of course not, Walter! Can you imagine Lucius hurting somebody?” Walter sat down and picked at his paper, saying, “Eddie’s right. He’d better not go questioning those men.”

  “Stop him, then!” I cried. But Walter doesn’t care to interfere in Watson family matters, never has and never will. He hid behind his paper. “That boy is stubborn,” his voice said. “If he has his mind made up, there ain’t nobody can stop him.”

  “Isn’t!” I cried, jumping up and snatching his paper away to make him face me. “Isn’t nobody can stop him,” Walter said, taking his paper back. “If I know Lucius, he’ll be asking himself hard questions all his life.”

  OCTOBER 30, 1910

  My stepmother is four years my junior. I paid a call on her at Hendry House (where they are kind Walter’s guests). She has a glazed look, a dull morbid manner. How changed is poor young Widow Watson from the girl Papa brought south only four years ago! Miss Kate Edna Bethea, as I still think of her, lacked our mama’s elegance and education. Papa truly admired those qualities in Mama, but I suspect that Kate Edna’s girlish spirit, her high bust and full haunches, her prattle about farmyard doings back in Fort White, suited his coarser tastes and needs better than Mama’s indoor virtues ever had.

  Oh, she was his young mare, all right! I don’t care to think about it! Papa walked and spoke like a young man again, he fairly strutted, and this only four years ago. He had stopped drinking—well, not quite, but he had regained control—and he was full to bursting with great plans for the Islands, full of life!

  At the hotel, Kate Edna tried her best to be polite but she can scarcely bring herself to talk. Isn’t it peculiar? The matronly daughter wept and sniffled while the young widow never shed a tear, just sat there stunned and scared, breaking her biscuit without eating it, scarcely sipping her tea. Edna won’t go to her people in Fort White but to her sister in west Florida where no one knows her. She wants to get clean away, says she, so she can think. What her simple brain wishes to think about I cannot imagine.

  Edna’s clothes are nice (Papa saw to that) but she was wearing them all wrong, as usual, and of course they looked like she had slept in them, which no doubt she had. I urged my darling girls to play with their little “aunt” Ruth Ellen, but Papa’s second batch of kids are muted desperate creatures and no fun at all. The boy Addison pulls and nags at Edna—When is Daddy coming? Where is Daddy?—and Amy’s big eyes stare out in alarm even when she’s nursing. Five months into human life, poor little thing, and scared already.
<
br />   But Edna scarcely notices, she cannot hear them, just soothes her brood gently as if tending them in dream. In normal times she must be a doting mother, since she is so easy with them even now when she is homeless, with no idea of what awaits them and no money to tide them over. Papa had only a quit-claim on Chatham Bend because his legal claim had not yet been approved: technically, he never owned his own fine house, Walter has learned. It’s so unfair!

  Edna has given Walter power of attorney to sell the last shipment of cane syrup—she would have given it to anyone who asked. Walter tried to explain to her that Papa’s huge legal expenses of two years ago had put him deep in debt but she scarcely listened, didn’t seem to care. Nor did she find words to thank him when he advanced her money for her journey, promising to send after her whatever might be salvaged from “the estate”—Papa’s boats and livestock, farm equipment, odds and ends.

  When I told her we would rescue Papa from that lonesome sand spit on the Gulf and give him a decent burial here in Fort Myers, she said simply, “Next to Mrs. Watson?” She meant dear Mama! And she didn’t say that with the least resentment but only to be polite, in the tone in which she might have said, “How nice!” After six years of marriage, three young children, and her shocking widowhood, she has never really seen herself as his honest-to-God wife.

  Like Walter and Eddie, my stepmother believes that the less we speak of the whole tragedy the better. The important thing is to protect the children from malicious tongues, which will of course be much much easier for her than it is for us. We cannot flee as she can to north Florida, leaving everything behind. She won’t even stay long enough to see her husband buried, having convinced herself that her little family is in danger. For that I will never quite forgive Edna Bethea.

  Well, that’s not true, I hope you know that, Mama. I forgive her with all my heart. To think what the poor soul has been through! Her voice is numb and her gaze faraway, and her stunned manner shows how terrified she was, how frantic she is to put all that behind her. Even my girls noticed the way she steals glances back over her shoulder as if that lynch mob, as Lucius calls it, might still catch her!