Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius smiled at Ad. “Our father,” he said.

  “Time off between jobs, that’s all,” Ad grumped. “I never really cared about this Watson stuff.”

  “Addison? You took your whole vacation! Went all the way down there by yourself!”

  “That’s none of his damned business!” Burdett lurched to his feet, his big face so menacing that Lucius stood up, too. “Don’t put that in your book! I’ll sue! How do we know what you’re going to write? Why should we trust you?”

  “Please stop shouting. This is Lucius.”

  “ ‘It’s a closed chapter in my life’—that’s what you said, Mother! So for God’s sake, leave it closed!”

  Edna flinched but let his swearing pass. “Lucius is a historian, Ad. And he’s found out your father was not so bad as people made him out. You’re not glad to hear that?”

  “What do I care if the man was bad or good, or what was said about him? I care what people say about our family.” To Lucius he said, “Just leave us out of your damned book, okay?” He was deep dull red in the face, his breathing heavy. “I’m not a Watson, I’m a Burdett. I have a good name and I want to keep it.”

  “Those dark things happened a long time ago,” his mother mourned. “Maybe folks reading Lucius’s book will understand your father in a different way and we won’t have to be so nervous about who we are.”

  “It’s important to establish the truth,” Lucius added quietly, less and less sure of this.

  “The truth! Ruth Ellen was toddling around with the Smallwood kid back in the store, she never saw it. But I ran down to the landing hollering ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ ” Ad gasped up a few breaths before resuming in a stunned low voice. “I fell down in the mud. That crashing of those guns, oh God, I thought the sky was falling down. And dogs! Those dogs were mean and scary, they bit children! They never quit howling and fighting all night long.” His lip was trembling. “I was three years old! Know what I saw? I saw my father fall. I saw the blood. That the kind of truth you’re after here? Professor?”

  “I’m still your brother, Ad. I’m asking you to trust me.”

  Burdett shook him off, frantic to go. Lucius followed him toward the door. “Listen,” he said. “Since you feel this way, why did you let me come?”

  “I was against it. I still am. But she wanted you and I knew from your letter you would find the way sooner or later.” He went out.

  For a little while they sat in silence, giving the house a chance to get its breath. Finally Edna cleared her throat. Ad had gone south a second time but had never said a word about it; she had learned of it in a Christmas letter from the Smallwoods. “And I never questioned him, that’s how scared I was that he’d found out something worse than what we already knew.”

  This explained a nagging mystery, Lucius told her. A few years before, someone had gone to Chatham Bend and given the wind-weathered house a fresh coat of white paint.

  “That’s him. I’m so glad you mentioned it. Oh, he’s a fine housepainter, Lucius! But even as a little boy, he always seemed . . . you know. Troubled.” Edna tried to explain that Ad’s abrupt and hostile manner stemmed from confused feelings. “He even considered changing his name to Watson—”

  “His name is Watson.” Despite his sympathy, Ad had made him cross.

  She shook her head. “Not legally.” She hurried on. “Ad grows lovely vegetables, you know. Spends all his spare time out in his garden.” She stared at the clenched hands in her lap. “He is very very upset today. He will go and drink. His father was a dangerous drinker, as you know.” She looked up. “Lucius? Do you have a good life? Do you have children?” When he shook his head, she flushed and hurried on. “Addison has few friends left: he’s become a loner. He won’t even come to family gatherings. He can’t take a drink but he drinks anyway. He gets aggressive, very very angry. We worry that this violent anger might be dangerous to other people.”

  When Lucius answered, “I’m sure he’ll be all right,” his stepmother nodded doubtfully. “Well. We have lots to be thankful for. I mean, Everybody has to live with something, isn’t that true?”

  Seeing the fear in her face, he took her hand. “I dragged my kids under the store,” she murmured, holding his hand tight. “That’s how scared I was those men were going to kill us. And I worry that it was my fear that scared Ad worse than anything. He still hears those guns in his sleep, wakes up hysterical. He just can’t rid himself of the smell of those drowned chickens.” She pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Me, either. How many years?” Her voice had diminished to a whisper. “I’ll go to my grave with that stench of death, I’m sure.”

  She gave him the Greek history. “That’s yours now, Lucius.” For his sake, Edna had revisited her life as Mrs. E. J. Watson but now she wanted him to go.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t meet Mr. Burdett and Herkie Junior or see your little sisters.” From her doorway, waving a shy hand, she invited him to visit next time he came through, but probably she knew as well as he did that they would not meet again, which was all right, too. When he turned to wave, she only gazed at him, head cocked ever so slightly. Lucius? Why did you come? What do you want with us?

  SOUTH

  On a green and blue day, Lucius headed south to Arcadia on the Peace River. In his father’s day, as the new capital of Manatee County, Arcadia had claimed such frontier comforts as hard drink, whores, and gambling, knife fights, shootings, and common brawling: according to a local account, as many as four men had been killed in a single fight and fifty fights might occur in a single day. Untended stock on the county’s unfenced range had encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were stolen by the herd, and in 1890, four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. Inevitably the range wars attracted desperadoes from the West, and death by knife and bullet was a commonplace when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to later memoirs by friend Ted Smallwood, slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass:

  Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with his knife and Watson told Bass . . . he had worked on the man enough. And Bass got loose and came towards him and he begin putting the .38 S & W bullets into Bass and shot him down.

  The date of Watson’s arrival in Arcadia, his livelihood and length of stay—Smallwood set down no such details, only that Watson had paid his way out of his scrape before leaving town.

  At the county clerk’s office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, the town’s earliest Criminal Docket Book, exhumed from the basement, made no mention of a Watson. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893—his last appearance in the docket book. Since his surname was otherwise absent from this record of every felony committed in the new county between 1890 and 1905, only LeQuinn could have been the Quinn Bass of Smallwood’s account, yet his demise at the hands of E. J. Watson was nowhere recorded.

  THE DOMESDAY BOOK

  Arriving in Fort Myers the next day, Lucius found a note from Arbie—Rob!—at General Delivery saying that Lucius might find him in late afternoon at the bar of the Gasparilla Inn, where Lucius had arranged a supper meeting with Watt Dyer. In the meantime, he would visit the library and newspaper, noting Watson references and dates.

  A sketch of Sheriff Frank Tippins in a local history attested that Tippins, “who arrested many desperate criminals during his career and acquired a statewide reputation for fearlessness,” had always been frustrated by the “unsolved killing of Ed Watson. Due to the fact that Watson was said to have killed the notorious Belle Starr, his murder attracted national attention and stories about him are still being printed.” Lucius was much encouraged by these references to the “unsolved killing” and “murder” of his father and also the mention of the thirty-three bullets removed from the riddl
ed corpse, which reflected the sheriff ’s skepticism that an armed crowd of twenty or more men shooting a lone man to pieces had acted in self-defense.

  At the Lee County sheriff ’s office, the stiff leaves of old court ledgers long unopened exhaled the breath of desiccation, and the sepia ink was as faint as the blue watermark. In these stained pages, the first name of interest was “Green Waller,” jailed in 1896, 1898, and 1901 for “larceny of hog.” Subsequently this dogged pig thief had found sanctuary at Chatham Bend, where he could commune with these estimable animals to his heart’s content. Waller also appeared in the Monroe County census for May 1910, where he was listed in the E. J. Watson household as servant and farmhand. His mountainous lover Miss Hannah Smith was registered as cook; field hand “John Smith” was the fugitive Leslie Cox. Last on the census list was “Lucius H. Watson, mullet fisherman.” His own name startled him, flying off the faded page like a medieval moth trapped in the Domesday Book.

  As in Arcadia, Lucius was mystified by the dearth of information on his father. Sheriff Tippins’s records for 1910 made no reference whatever to the triple murder at Chatham Bend on October 10, nor to the murder of Ed Watson at Chokoloskee on the 24th, nor even to the court hearing in regard to that death held by Tippins two days later in Lee County Court: how was this possible? That the records were missing was all the more peculiar since these crimes had been prominently covered by the newspapers in Fort Myers and Tampa and both accounts had specified that the unnamed “negro” being held in connection with the Chatham massacre had spent a fortnight in the Fort Myers jail before being turned over to the Monroe County sheriff. Under the circumstances, it seemed incredible that in this official record (in which the miscreant’s race was invariably noted), there was no mention of any black man taken into custody in Lee County in October of 1910, nor any notation in the sheriff ’s fees book, which recorded disbursements for the transport and feeding of each prisoner.

  The most notorious murder case in Tippins’s long career had been wiped from the record or it had never been transcribed. Either way, the culprit could only have been the deputy court clerk, Mr. E. E. Watson: was Eddie also responsible for his father’s absence from the criminal dockets in Arcadia?

  To bulwark his request for old court records, Lucius had laid a copy of his History on the counter. The deputy had picked at the thick book as if fingering strange fruit, then closed it in unconcealed relief that he need not read it. “Got a man restin his bad bones back in our cells who might know quite a lot about that case. Him and Tippins loved to swap old yarns about Ed Watson so what he’d tell might have some truth to it if he’s feelin truthful.” The deputy chuckled as he led the way down the back hall. “The feds asked us to hold this feller but it ain’t nothin but harassment. County, state, and federal law knows all about him but none of ’em can nail him, he skitters out from under every time. Can’t even jail him on his income tax cause he don’t show no income on his books—ain’t got no books! Got all his money in old feed sacks someplace, wouldn’t surprise me. Yesterday he beat the charges same as always, he can walk out any time he wants, but he likes livin off the taxpayers while he’s up to town.”

  The deputy had made no effort to keep his voice down, and approaching the cell door, he pitched it louder for the inmate’s benefit. “When this feller was booked, I told him, ‘Man, you are in real bad trouble this time. You are goin straight to prison to pay for all them felonious activities.’ And he says, ‘Nosir, I sure ain’t, cause they know I’d take half the elected idiots in south Florida to the pen with me.’ ” The deputy laughed loudly as he fiddled with his keys, shaking his head in admiration. “Ol’ Speck! He’ll be back out in the Glades in two days’ time, moonshinin and bootleggin, shootin the livin shit out of the gators.”

  Lucius stopped short—“Speck?” But it was too late, the deputy had banged open the cell door. “Yessir. How many Specks y’all acquainted with? This Speck you’re lookin at is Crockett Daniels, that right, Speck?”

  CROCKETT DANIELS

  Crockett Daniels, sitting on the bunk edge, had been bent over tying up the laces on his sneakers, in feral instinct to be ready for whatever was coming at him down the hall. When the iron door swung open, he withdrew beneath the upper bunk in a kind of coiling, reminding Lucius of a cottonmouth’s sidewinding retreat among the buttress roots of a swamp cypress before coming to rest half hidden in the shadows.

  “Goddammit, Depitty, you pat him down good? This crazy sumbitch been threatenin my life!” When the deputy just laughed and slammed the door, Daniels cursed him. Eyes fixed on Lucius, he emerged slowly and perched on the bunk edge in the bad light from the fly-specked bulb high overhead. “That smart-mouth peckerhead is goin on report. Prisoners’ rights ain’t only just the rules, they’re the damn law!” He glowered at his visitor, hard face fringed with dirty stubble. “God A-mighty! What do you want? Ain’t laid eyes on you in years, then all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out to the Hook, and next thing I know, you track me right into my cell in the county jail.” He raised his voice to shout after the deputy, “Stupid bastard! Locks me in with a damn Watson and don’t even frisk him!”

  Lucius turned and spread his arms, palms to the wall. “Go ahead,” he offered, baiting Speck’s nervousness. He regretted this when Daniels sprang and collared him and banged his chest violently against the wall before pat-ting him down, then gave him a contemptuous hard shove before returning to the bunk, where he stretched out in the shadow, watching his visitor from beneath the arm flung across his eyes. “I’m waitin on you, boy. If you ain’t here to shoot me, you better remember pretty quick why the fuck you come.”

  Lucius said he’d heard that a man back in the holding cells might tell him something about Sheriff Tippins’s final conclusions on the Watson case.

  “Tell you somethin? Sumbitch who put my name on a damn death list? I won’t tell you fuck-all about nothin!” But when Lucius mentioned the queer absence of any reference to E. J. Watson in the sheriff ’s records, Daniels grew curious despite himself. Frowning upward at the old straw and broken springs that thrust down from the bottom slats of the upper bunk, he rubbed one temple with a scarred brown knuckle to summon up old talks with Tippins that might hold a clue.

  “That day the sheriff brought that bunch here to the courthouse? Them men hollerin self-defense when every last damn one admitted they had went to Smallwood’s with guns loaded, set to shoot? Malice aforemost, just like Tippins said. And after he seen how much lead tore up that body, he could never believe their Chokoloskee story. He’d get to fumin like a big ol’ bear with a stung snoot and no honey to show for it. Ten years later he’d still holler, ‘Dammit, Speck, you was right there, boy, you seen it. Them men must of emptied out every last load. Thirty-three slugs, not countin buckshot! Filled a damn coffee can! If thirty-three struck home, how many missed? And they’re tryin to tell a lawman that was self-defense?’

  “Sheriff always aimed to summon a grand jury and reopen up the case but the family was dead set against it and anyway he never could figure how to prosecute, not with his whole posse confessin they took part. Not your common prosecution case at all! Still and all, he couldn’t let it go cause by now he’d heard some crazy story how a nigger was first man to fire at Ed Watson. Now that would eat at Frank P. Tippins, I can tell you! Sheriff got on pretty good with Injuns but niggers was another breed entirely. This snitch told Tippins he had swore a oath he would never reveal that nigger’s name and he never had to, cause there weren’t but the one colored man on Chokoloskee.

  “Now Henry Short were known to be a purty good ol’ nigger, but Frank Tippins could not tolerate that any colored man would think to raise a gun against a white man, and when the white man in the case was E. J. Watson, who had every coon in southwest Florida scared up a tree, he flat refused to believe it, especially when none of his damn suspects would confirm that story. Said they never needed no damn nigger to take care of their business. And from the hard way they
said this, Tippins concluded that some of these fellers if not all of ’em knew what that day’s business was before Watson’s boat ever come in and struck ashore.

  “All of the same, that rumor ate at him. For years Frank was huntin an excuse to take that black boy into custody and work some truth out of him. Only thing, he couldn’t come up with him. Short was gun-shy and kept movin cause Tippins weren’t the only man was huntin him. Somebody else was gunnin for him, I always heard. Maybe still is.

  “When Prohibition come along and me and the sheriff done some business, he was still bothered. Asked me straight out, ‘Dammit, Speck, did that darn nigger shoot at Ed or didn’t he?’ Well, I never seen it if he did, that’s what I told him, not carin to admit I was so far in the back I couldn’t see nothin at all. By the time I got my chance to fire, your daddy was already down, deader’n dirt.”

  “But you fired anyway. Snuck in there and fired a .22 into his head, is what I heard.”

  Speck raised his hand. “Now don’t go barkin up all them wrong trees: we’re talkin about niggers, ain’t we? That other colored in the case? One you was askin about that ain’t on the sheriff ’s books? I always heard he drowned some way on the trip south to Key West but Tippins heard they got him there, then let him off. Give him a new shirt and sent him home, up Columbia County. Sheriff Frank was just a-boilin mad. ‘That’s Key West jusstice for you, Speck! Nigger-lovin Yankees, all them foreigners! I mean, God a’mighty, Speck! That boy confessed how he had his black hands all over that big lady!’ ” Speck shook his head. “Feller was tellin me the other day how two different niggers in Key West was claimin to be the one escaped off of the Watson place after them killins. And I told him, ‘Why, goddammit to hell, we got another one up to Fort Myers claims the same damn thing!’

  “Anyways, Tippins believed till the day he left here for Miami that us fellers took and lynched Ed Watson, concluded we was waitin on the shore to gun him down. Said, ‘Maybe you held your fire till he raised his gun, maybe you didn’t.’ Said Bill House was sincere, all right, believed the hell out of his own story, but somethin was missin all the same. Sheriff called your daddy’s death an unsolved crime where most wouldn’t call it no damn crime at all.