Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  All he required for the moment, Dyer was saying, was power of attorney in order to file for a court injunction against any attempt by park proponents to burn down the house before approval of the park charter became final. In Dyer’s opinion, the Watson claim could not be summarily vacated or dismissed if E. J. Watson’s heirs renewed the claim in time. Well, said Lucius, Rob was unavailable and Carrie and Eddie would want no part of any action that might stir up old scandal. As for the children of the second family, they had been given their new stepfather’s name and might not even know that they were Watsons.

  “Looks like it’s up to you, then,” Dyer interrupted. “You’ll be hearing from me.” He hung up abruptly before anything had been decided, leaving Lucius frustrated and annoyed.

  AFFIDAVIT OF BILL W. HOUSE

  Completing his research for the biography of E. J. Watson, Lucius had placed notices in local newspapers requesting information. These notices attracted the anticipated motley of old Watson anecdotes, but astonishingly, they also produced a copy of the affadavit given by Bill House in the Lee County Courthouse after his father’s death—the document that his brother Eddie had refused to show him.

  My name is Mr. William House residing at Chokoloskee Island, Ten Thousand Islands, Florida.

  Mr. Ed J. Watson was at Chokoloskee when the story come about the Chatham murders. He swore that Leslie Cox had done him wrong and not only him but the three people he murdered. Watson left to fetch the Sheriff and the men thought they’d seen the last of him. This was Sunday evening, October 16, the eve of the Great Hurricane.

  Three days after the storm, Ed Watson come back through. Mr. D. D. House advised he better stay right there until the Sheriff come and Watson said he didn’t need no Sheriff, said he knew his business and would take care of it himself. Aimed to go home to Chatham River “and straighten that skunk out before he got away”—them were his own words. He promised to return with Cox or Cox’s head.

  Watson was red-eyed in his appearance, very wild, and nobody didn’t care to interfere with him. The men there at Smallwood’s landing figured he’d keep right on going, head for the east coast railroad or Key West. This time they’d seen the last of him for sure. But last Monday October 24 toward evening, his motor was heard coming from the south’ard and a bunch of fellers went to the landing to arrest him. Watson seen that crowd of armed men waiting but he come on anyway, he was that kind.

  The hurricane had tore the dock away, weren’t nothing left of her but pilings, so he run his launch aground west of the boat way. He jumped ashore with his shotgun quick and bold, got himself set before one word was spoken. Had his weapon pointed down but hitched, ready to swing. He told the men he had killed Cox but the body fell off his dock into the river and was lost. He drawed a old hat out of his coat, showed the bullet hole from his revolver. Then he shoved his middle finger through that hole and twirled the hat on it and laughed. Some of us seen he was laughing at us. Nobody felt like laughing along with him.

  Mr. D. D. House was not the ringleader, never mind what some has said, but no other man stepped forward so my dad done the talking. I and my next two brothers, Dan Junior and Lloyd, stood alongside him. Mr. D. D. House reminded Watson that a head was promised and a hat weren’t good enough so the men would have to go to Chatham Bend, look for the body. And he notified Mr. Watson he must hand over his weapons in the meantime. That brought hard words. After a short argument, Watson swung his shotgun up at point-blank range. Some has said the man just meant to bluff the crowd back while he escaped: I believe he aimed at us with intent to kill, only his shells misfired. We opened up on him all in a roar and he fell down dead.

  Some has been trying to point fingers, claiming we was laying for him, fixing to gun him down no matter what. Might of been true of some of ’em. Houses never knew nothing about no such thing.

  Others give hints that one man lost his head and fired first and that this man was the only one responsible. I don’t rightly know who fired first and they don’t neither on account of the whole bunch fired together. We took the life of E. J. Watson to defend our own and all present was in on it from start to finish.

  X

  [William W. House: his mark]

  Transcribed and attested: (signed) E. E. Watson, Dep. Court Clerk Lee County Courthouse, Fort Myers, Florida, October 27, 1910

  Oddly, this document had been sent anonymously, without a note, in a coffee-stained envelope mailed from Ochopee, a construction camp post office out along the Trail. What startled Lucius was his brother’s signature as deputy court clerk: he had almost forgotten that Eddie had transcribed the testimony of those men. In his biography-in-progress, Lucius sought the historian’s objective tone:

  While this affidavit is critical as the one firsthand account of E. J. Watson’s death that has come to light, it raises more questions than it answers: its main interest lies in what can be inferred between the lines. House’s statement makes clear that E. J. Watson was killed despite the Negro’s testimony at Pavilion Key that the brutal slayings at Chatham Bend had been committed not by Mr. Watson but by his foreman, Leslie Cox, a convicted killer and fugitive from justice who had turned up at the Watson place a few months earlier.

  As for the murder at Chokoloskee on October 24th, Bill House asserts that killing Mr. Watson was an act of self-defense while conceding that Watson did not open fire on the crowd or otherwise assault or harm any man there. It has been argued that no malice aforethought was involved—that the horrifying murders at Chatham Bend followed so swiftly by the calamity of the Great Hurricane had driven this isolated community to a breaking point of terror and exhaustion which caused those men to meet Watson’s bluff with that fatal barrage. However, widespread rumors in the community suggest that at least a few of the participants had planned the shooting in advance, justifying what amounted to a lynching with the argument that otherwise Watson might have evaded justice “as he had done so often in the past.”

  The House account leaves open another urgent question: did one man execute him with the first shot and the others fire reflexively in the confusion? Though House denies this, the evident need to deny it gives substance to a rumor that the undersigned had dismissed as highly improbable. If there is truth in it, then who was House so anxious to protect?

  In appraising Mr. Watson’s degree of responsibility, one must first determine whether or not Cox killed his three victims on Watson’s orders and whether or not Watson killed Cox when he returned to Chatham Bend after the hurricane. If he did, was he enforcing his own code of retribution, or—as Sheriff Tippins believed—was he eliminating the one witness whose testimony could do him damage in a murder trial, on the not unreasonable assumption that even if the Negro had not retracted his unsupported account of Mr. Watson’s involvement, a black man’s testimony might well have been discounted by a white jury?

  In the climate of fear in the community, almost nobody believed that Leslie Cox had been eliminated by E. J. Watson; to this day, a local dread persists that Cox survived. If so, what became of him? Is he still alive back in the Glades? With the passage of years, it seems ever less likely that we shall learn the fate of that cold-blooded killer who appeared so randomly and wreaked such havoc, only to vanish. Somewhere in the backcountry of America, an old man known in other days as Leslie Cox might still squint in the sun, and spit, and revile his fate.

  In preparing his case for the reinstatement of E. J. Watson’s claim on Chatham Bend, Attorney Dyer had asked to see Lucius’s early draft of his Watson biography. What drew his attention immediately was Hoad Storter’s account of transporting new cane from Chatham River to Moore Haven on Lake Okeechobee, which seemed to establish that Planter Watson’s hardy strain had provided the seed cane for the huge new agriculture in central Florida. Ever scrupulous, Lucius felt obliged to append a footnote: when the bad hurricane of 1926 broke down the Okeechobee dikes and drowned more than a hundred souls around Moore Haven, the devastation was blamed locally on “Emperor” Wat
son, whose “bad seed,” as one newspaper called it, was “steeped in human blood.”

  Excising that fool reminder of those hurricane mortalities, Attorney Dyer had shown the story of E. J. Watson’s cane to United Sugar Associates (“U.S.A. SPELLS AMERICA!”) for whom he served as legal counsel in its ongoing appropriation of huge swaths of public marshland in that region. U.S.A., Dyer predicted, would endorse any worthwhile literature about pioneer sugar plantations and the early prominence of sugarcane in south Florida agriculture and might well subsidize its publication; the published biography, he felt sure, would also lend strength to the Watson land claim.

  Because of the favorable reception of his History, Lucius had been offered a small advance on the Watson biography by the university press. At the last minute, however, the press had stipulated the use of a pen name for the biography lest the author appear less than objective. Refusing to hide behind a pseudonym, Lucius threatened to withdraw the book, whereupon Attorney Dyer fired off a furious letter, reminding him of his responsibilities: without the enhancement of E. J. Watson’s reputation in “our book”. said Dyer, there was little hope that the Chatham land claim would survive on its merits in court.

  SARAH HARDEN

  The person who persuaded Lucius to cooperate was Sarah Harden, who came by one day to inspect his “houseboat,” walking all the way from the county road. The twin braids of long cornsilk hair were gone and the worn overalls but she looked wonderful in a red blouse and gray skirt. Told of his dilemma, Sarah reminded him of how important it had always been to mend his father’s reputation: a pen name was certainly preferable to wasting so much work. Having fun, they devised a composite “family” name, “L. Watson Collins.” Smiling happily, delighted to see him again, she celebrated his new name with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  Before he could ask after Owen, Sarah told him what he’d already suspected, that she’d left her husband. Despite all her warnings, threats, and pleas, he had given up fishing to work with Crockett Daniels. “Rum-running, moonshine, poaching gators, any ol’ darn thing to make a buck! And hemp—you ever smoked a reefer? Anywhere there’s smuggling involved, you’ll find Speck Daniels, and he never gets caught. Owen says he pays off Sheriff Tippins.

  “Owen couldn’t feed us—no fish, no work, no money. He’s too proud to live like that. Owen is a good kind man who works with redneck criminals. He’s not one of them and if it comes to trouble, it’s Owen who’ll wind up in the state pen. He kind of knows that but he’s stuck in his old code, some old Island way of thinking. Except for the money, he has no use for those men, and no respect, because they’re dead ignorant and lazy. Too bad you don’t know that well enough to quit, I said, cause you don’t respect Owen Harden, neither, or you wouldn’t work with ’em. And he thought a minute and then he said that he reckoned he respected himself well enough, it was his wife who disrespected him. That wasn’t true—he only said that because he got jealous of you at Lost Man’s—but I thought it might be good for him to think that way, at least for a while, so I shut up. Then Speck branched out into running guns south to the Spanish countries, and Owen started to feel guilty, but even then, he didn’t give it up, just went to drinking—well, that finished it. I didn’t aim to live with a damned drunk who made his money peddling deadly weapons. I warned him I would leave and I finally did.”

  When Lucius said he was truly sorry and hoped things would work out, she only shrugged. “I’m sorry, too, I reckon. I sure tried.” Though she said nothing more, she raised her eyes and returned his gaze for one dangerous second too long. Both nodded then, smiling a little as they cast their eyes down. Not sure what all this meant—or if it meant anything at all—he was careful not to touch her. As Nell had said, Lucius Watson knew little about women’s ways, and since he tended to agree, he was afraid that if he took this high-strung Sarah in his arms at the wrong moment, she might fly to pieces.

  She stood up, straightened her dress, brushed off her bottom. He said, “Miss? May I help with that?” and laughed out of jangled joy and nerves. “Not today, thank you,” she answered flatly, without the flirtatious inflection he’d expected. Love-besmirched, he dusted off his own inconsequential ass before taking her home to her cousin’s house in Naples.

  Weeks later, having thought about little else, he went to find her. Forgetting what he’d come to say—and knowing how feeble this must sound—he cried, “How are you?” She led him into the front room and sat down beside him on the thin settee before answering sadly, “I don’t think I know.”

  To comfort her, he took her hand and she took his in both her own and settled the three hands in her lap. Her impulse seemed innocent enough, yet feeling her warm lap through the light cotton—God have mercy! His hand was a mere inch from what his father, in affectionate reference to Josie Jenkins, had once referred to as “milady’s honeypot.” His fevered brain must have sent these rude vibrations, for Sarah abruptly tossed his hand into the air as if freeing a wild bird. She lifted her arms to pin her hair, releasing a light captivating scent of perspiration. Edgy, she said, “Let’s go somewhere.” They had not mentioned Owen.

  In a booth at Rusty’s, his spilled-beer-and-sawdust roadhouse on the Marco road, Lucius repeated his staid hope that his old friends might find their way back together. Sarah looked away when she raised her glass to acknowledge his kind wishes. Unspoken was the shameful knowing on both sides that he coveted that old friend’s wife, and that she, too, was confused by mixed emotions, confessing now that she and Owen were negotiating her return; he understood that she was not yet ready for another man. Saddened but perhaps also relieved, they consoled themselves with Sarah’s flask and the unhappy rewards of love virtuously relinquished.

  “Here’s something you white-boy historians don’t generally put in books,” she teased him, wisely detouring their thoughts onto a safer path. “Learned this from Owen, whose grandma was descended. Chief Osceola was a breed named Billy Powell ashamed of his own blood, only he was ashamed of the white blood, not the other—not like some! Most of his warriors were black Seminoles, what they called maroons, and later on, he took black wives along with a few red ones, had offsprings on every doggone one, which accounts for the mixed-up bunch that’s running around south Florida today. Some of our so-called Injuns got a nap so thick you couldn’t put a bullet through it!” Her hoarse smoker’s laugh had a deep rue in it, and he laughed with her, she delighted him. Her barefoot toes, seeking his foot under the table, shot small honeyed arrows into his groin.

  “It’s mighty fine to see ol’ Lucius laugh this way!” Sarah cried happily. But pointing out laughter put it to death, and she looked cross. “Course folks weren’t too particular in frontier days. Some of my kin at Chokoloskee who are so mean about nigras better not go poking around too much in their own woodpiles. Might be some red boys in there at the very least.” Her bare foot kicked his calf under the table. “Don’t laugh. I know what I’m talking about. Better’n you.”

  In the car again, she smoked one of her “funny smokes.” When she proffered a second, raising it to his lips—“Come with me!” she breathed, comically mysterious—he held on to her warm fingers and drew on his first reefer. At her whispered instruction, he held the smoke a long time in his lungs, then swallowed on it, suffusing it all the way up to his temples. When he exhaled at last, the smoke seemed to drift out through his ears. His brain swam and his mouth slid toward a grin. “Reefer madness,” she laughed, her mouth so close to his that he longed to fall into it and close it after him.

  Right beside him sat the lovely Sarah Harden of Lost Man’s River—how had this happened? Why was Sarah sitting so close to Lucius in his old Model T, smiling at him in this soft, beguiling way? He cleared his throat, determined to counsel Owen’s sweetheart against leaving a fine man: was she really so sure it was all over? Couldn’t they patch it up? However, no voice came.

  He was feeling at rest in the present, neither here nor there. “Where to?” his voice said, though he’d
already turned toward home. Did this wild creature want him to make love to her? She laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear. “Can I lay low on your old barge if I stay out of your way and don’t cause trouble?”

  “Lay low,” he heard his voice agree. And now this strangely languid and unbridled person draped herself across his arm and shoulder. Cocking her head, she peered close around his chin in comic awe until her lips brushed the corner of his own.

  “Better back off.” He kissed her hard without slowing the car, stirred by the sweet smell of her hair.

  “Just a-hangin on my darlin’s every word, is all it is.”

  “Stay away from bad girls, Mama tole me—”

  She hushed his mouth with another fulsome kiss. “Oh, I ain’t so bad,” she murmured huskily, surfacing again. “Under my glitterin ve-neer, a plain ol’ cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.” She lay her head back and went pealing off into some private laughter.

  “And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your sinful tendencies?”

  “Sickens ’em. Just purely sickens ’em. They feel like pukin.” Suddenly her smile was gone, her scowl was real, she looked as if she might well puke on purpose. Something anarchic surfaced in her eye which he tried to deflect before she blurted something they might both regret, and in his distraction, on a curve, he rolled two wheels onto the shoulder, coming too close to running the car into the roadside canal.

  Sarah took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology. In guilt, her mood had turned bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. Then she said in a peculiar voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right? You’re getting your balls in a uproar.”