Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  “You got a million drops of white, one drop of black, and you’re supposed to be a nigra, accordin to that old redneck arithmetic. Well, in a century, that one drop can travel a long ways, and these local families are so much intermarried that whatever is true of one is true for all. That one little drop is just a-spreadin all the time, but it stays hid, like a molasses drop in milk. Most of the time you never notice, and then you might get a glimpse of it, one little trace, or one person that’s too dark in a fair-haired family, or might be bad hair. Most likely that family never knew that it was there, so they don’t even recognize it when they see it. Depends how strong your family is in your community. If you are strong enough, it just don’t count. Nobody sees it.

  “Our pastor and his wife was narrow-minded. They would not accept a boy from Marco that their daughter wanted because he weren’t raised up Pentecostal Church of God. Weren’t one thing wrong with that young devil that a bullet wouldn’t cure, it was only he was runnin kind of wild. So that girl done what Abbie Harden done, she run off with a young black feller, to spite ’em. And now them poor worshipful folks got to smile until it hurts, cause that black son-in-law is just as God-lovin as they are, and not only that but a decorated American hero, a veteran of the United States Marines!” Whidden laughed quietly. “If that preacher had a second chance, he’d take and hogtie that wild Marco heathen to his daughter, never mind if they took their vows in jail. But bein a good Christian, he must stand up and be proud that she married this patriotic soldier boy from the black community, this fine upstandin young American that risked his life for freedom and democracy. They got to be happy about that boy—ain’t that a terrible thing? They got to be happy! Whether they like bein happy or they don’t!”

  But in a moment, his jaw set again. “Yep,” he said. “Miss Sally Brown is still burnt up over the old days, and she’s over there at the Historical Society every year, fighting her heart out for our family name. And everyone wishes—Hardens especially—that that pretty little gal would just shut up, because all she is doing is stirring up old gossip.

  “Today Hardens are doin fine all over southwest Florida, ranch homes and new pickups and fair-haired kiddies everywhere you look. They have left most of them old Baptists who looked down on ’em back in the dust. These new Hardens have forgot all that old bitterness, if they even knew about it. Wouldn’t of never doubted they was white people if that darned female Cousin Whidden married didn’t stir up so much sand tryin to prove it.”

  Whidden smiled faintly. “Got this big fight goin against herself, and they ain’t no way she can win, poor little sweetheart. She wants it both ways, same as the rest of us, but can’t admit to it. That’s why you see her strugglin so hard.”

  “And that’s hard on Whidden,” Lucius said.

  “I wanted to think we could heal things some between our families by bein together, bein who we was. Sally agreed with that idea but she don’t cooperate. She’s been to college, takes it real hard about race prejudice, she just despises people for despisin nigras. Sally says over and over that the color of your skin don’t matter, it’s your heart and mind that count. Trouble is, at the same time she is sayin skin don’t matter, she is out to make them old-timers admit that the Hardens weren’t mulattas, but only had some Injun in their blood. She even wants ’em to admit that Henry Short was probably Injun, to show the world that Libby Harden never run off with a colored man.

  “Well, them old-timers ain’t going to admit no such a thing. That generation got their idea about the old-time Hardens and they ain’t goin to change it. And with the world they knew changin so fast, you can’t hardly blame ’em.”

  “You don’t blame them?”

  “Aunt Libby married a brown man, Henry Short, then Aunt Abbie run off with a black one. Can you blame folks for thinking the way they do?”

  “Blame,” Lucius said shortly, tasting that word.

  “I been talking about Sally, ain’t I. But it looks like I am fightin that hook, too.”

  Lucius Watson had helped raise Roark Harden. He knew Wilson, too, since these cousins had been inseparable. Because of Earl’s hostility, he had never been quite comfortable with Wilson, but had always very felt close to Roark, who was nine when they first met, and who, even as a boy, had been generous and dead honest like his father. However, Lucius was also fond of Walker Carr’s son Alden, who had remained friendly throughout that period in the twenties when almost everyone except the Hardens was avoiding him.

  When the Johnson boy brought word from Tavernier that Alden Carr had made a drunk confession in a bar, the Harden men had loaded up their guns. Even Earl, who took such pride in his Bay friends, was raging around about a raid on Chatham Bend. Lucius went to Lee and offered to go instead. He would talk with Alden, make sure they had the story straight before steps were taken that might get the wrong ones killed. Suspicious, Lee had studied Lucius’s eyes before he nodded.

  By the time Lucius turned up at the Bend, poor Alden was more frightened of his brothers than he was of Hardens, but he took responsibility for what he’d said at Tavernier and did not try to contradict that story. When Lucius confronted the others, both denied it, saying that when Alden was drunk, he sometimes made up crazy stories to get attention to himself, which, alas, was true. Then Old Man Walker, who had been listening behind the door, blew up and came bursting in, yelling at the visitor to ease his nerves. Before his boys could hush him, he hollered out that those damned Hardens had stolen five hundred dollars’ worth of pelts, then threatened his boys when they went to get them back. One of their guns must have gone off, and his sons, afraid they were being shot at, had no choice but to return their fire, “not intendin to hit nobody! It was self-defense!” After firing that one wild volley in the dark, his boys had hurried back to their own camp. So far as they knew, the Harden boys had left Shark Point early the next morning, for their skiff was gone.

  When their father started hollering, Owen and Turner slipped away, but Alden trailed Lucius to the dock. He asked whose side Lucius was on, and Lucius asked how he could take sides without knowing the truth. Alden squinted at him. “What Pa told may not be the God’s truth, Lucius,” Alden said coldly and carefully. “But it’s our Carr truth. This year, anyways.”

  Lucius was already cast off when Old Man Walker roared down to the dock and cuffed poor Alden out of the way and bellowed at Watson’s son across the water. “I was very old friends with your dad! You know it, too! Done my best that day to stop that crowd. So if it comes down to some kind of a showdown, Lucius, are you on your old friends’ side or ain’t you?” Next, he hollered, “Lucius, boy, for ten years now you been wanderin around these islands askin a whole hell of a lot of stupid questions, and it sure looks like you’re doin that again! If it weren’t for me tellin the men you was only a heartbroke poor damn fool that meant no harm, it’s you who might of come up missin, boy, not no damn Hardens!” Red and sweating, Walker Carr turned his back on him and stumped away. Within a day, the Carr family was gone from Chatham River.

  Lucius reported the Carrs’ account in the same words it was told to him, Lee Harden asked if he believed their story, and he admitted he did not. At the same time, he reminded Lee that the Hardens had no evidence whatever, which meant they had no hope at all of seeing the Carr boys prosecuted in a court of law. And if they took the law into their own hands, they would bring a firestorm down on their clan which would destroy it.

  Lee Harden thanked Lucius gruffly, saying that his family would take care of the problem in their own good time. For the moment, all Lee needed to know was what Walker Carr had effectively admitted, that his sons had fired at the Harden boys down at Shark River.

  After Carr moved his family back to Everglade, a silent tension would pervade the settlement whenever the Harden men came north from Lost Man’s River. No one spoke to the Hardens, not one word, as if they were trying to “hate” them out of the region, a traditional remedy in the old Border lands from where most of their clans ha
d come.

  One day Lee Harden ran into the culprits, down the street from Barron Collier’s new courthouse. Though the Carr boys were frightened, they did not run because a small crowd gathered. They stood with eyes down when Harden circled them twice, three times, as if consigning some unpleasant scent to future memory. Abruptly he broke off his circling and walked away.

  In later years, as the tension eased, folks started saying that those Hardens had it coming and that everything had worked out for the best. Owen when drunk would even hint behind his hand that you-know-who had put a stop to those damned mixed-breeds. And young Turner went along with it, confiding that he had fired, too—in fact, how he was probably the one (though he sure felt terrible about it) who had finally put that Roark Harden out of his misery.

  A month after the young Hardens disappeared, Henry Short rowed his skiff down Turner River and on south through the inland bays, coming ashore and walking up the beach as Lee Harden jumped up and went to meet him. Shaking hands, kicking the sand, Henry asked if there was any way that he could help. Even Earl Harden finally agreed to let Henry go, look for the bodies, knowing that Short was the best tracker on the coast.

  Henry Short knew plenty of reasons why it was a poor idea for him to go. He owed a lot to the Harden family, but he also knew how dangerous it was for him to get mixed up in this at all. “Lordy, Lordy,” he kept saying, tugging on his earlobe. Lee decided it was not fair to ask him, but Henry decided that he had no choice.

  At Shark Point, Henry located a rain-rotted pelt salted and stretched in the painstaking way that Henry had taught those Harden boys himself. Another camp not far away had been abandoned in a hurry. He poled upriver, checking the mangroves on both banks for any small sign of disturbance. He poked and prowled and pried and peered till he found overhanging willow branches, bent and broken, in a small hidden creek on the east side of Shark Lake. All alone, far back up in the Glades, he pushed upstream.

  At the head of the creek the Harden skiff, charred by a hasty attempt at burning, lay half-sunk and half-hidden beneath hacked-off branches. Taking his shovel and a length of rope, rigging his shirt over his nose and mouth, he followed the mud smear of the gator’s belly and great tail, matting the saw grass. Vultures flapped aloft as he drew closer.

  The bodies lay on the open savanna, bloated so badly and so torn that he could scarcely tell which boy was which. He buried what was left of the boys’ bodies. Then he said a prayer under the sun and returned to the main river. On his way north, anticipating what Lee Harden would do, and fearing the certain retribution which any such action would bring down upon the Hardens—and knowing, finally, how often black men had been put to death for the mere witnessing of evil acts they had no part in—he decided that no good could come from telling the Harden clan what he had found.

  Arriving at Lost Man’s after dark, Henry stopped at Lucius Watson’s cabin. Asked about that second camp he had located at Shark Point, he would only say that three trappers had used that place and that they had broken their camp in a hurry, and that their prints were also present in the Harden Camp. He did not identify the Carrs by name. Lucius agreed with Henry’s instinct not to tell what he had found, because that would leave the Hardens with no choice but to load their guns and take the law into their own hands.

  Keeping their secret from this family which had been so good to both of them became one of their uncommon bonds. By the time Alden Carr blurted out the truth a few years later, Earl had renewed his Chokoloskee friendships and his invitation to maintain them. Even Lee resigned himself to the fact that there was no way to avenge his son and nephew without inviting the annihilation of the Harden clan.

  At Lost Man’s Key

  Toward sundown an ancient cabin boat came down the river. Though the estuary tide was low, she made her way at near full speed, her wash carving the oyster bars as she circled up into the current with a grumpy gurgling. With her engine cut, her bow coasted ashore on the sand point with a hard crunching scrape.

  A loud hoarse voice hailed the men around the fire. “You fellers seen any fish around this river that might like a ride in this old boat?”

  “Oh Lord.” Sally rose and moved away toward the point.

  “Heck, I know that feller,” Andy said, surprised. Whidden was yelling, “Well now, old-timer, are you lost or what? Maybe your eyesight ain’t so good no more. This here’s Miami!”

  “That a fact?” The boatman heaved out a stern anchor—ker-plunk—then put his hands upon his hips, looking around him with proprietary satisfaction at the evening river. “Well, if I am lost, which ain’t too likely, I found the right place to be lost in, looks like to me!”

  “Well, come ashore, then! Got good fish to eat!”

  The boatman kicked old sneakers off and rolled up baggy coveralls on scrawny legs, which contrasted oddly with the thick brown arms matted with hair. “Sure it’s safe for a old feller over there? Don’t that ol’ scow belong to one them Hardens? What you damn fellers doin this far south? You fixin to run some of that marijuana dope?” He sat on the gunwale and swung over, lowering himself carefully into the water. “Be in over my diddley here before I know it. Don’t want to hurt my pride and joy, y’know.” He sloshed ashore, handing Harden his bow line, and pointed at a driftwood tree worn silver by coast weather. “Case you boys don’t know it, that snag is private property. There’d be hell to pay if I was to find your line hitched onto it!”

  Under stained brown galluses, Speck Daniels wore a long-sleeved undershirt of soiled white cotton. On his head was a broken Panama with a tropical green feather that Lucius supposed had been scavenged from a parrot until he saw that it was painted on. Daniels gave Lucius a cold nod and shook hands with Whidden without looking either in the eye, but a grin split his face as he went to Andy House, who was grinning, too. “That you, Speck?” he called. “You making all that noise all by yourself?” And Speck yelled back, “God struck you so damn blind you don’t know who the hell I am no more? Well, that is pitiful!”

  Andy, who had gotten to his feet, was tapping his sunburned nose. “Don’t need no eyes! I’d know you anywhere! Lord A-mighty, Speck! I sure would hate to smell as bad as you!” Laughing outright, he hung on to Speck’s hand with both his own.

  “Well, for an older feller, I still smell pretty sweet, I reckon!” Speck took a long pleased sniff under his own arm.

  “I want to talk with you,” Lucius said in a cold voice.

  Daniels hawked and spat but otherwise ignored him. “Know somethin, boys? The goddamn Park is try in to run me off of my own territory! Damn helio-copter come racketin down on me this mornin—first helio-copter I ever seen over the Park! Told me I got to have a permit to come on this here public property! Never thought they’d pick on a poor taxpayer just livin his life away back in the rivers.

  “Then it come to me! Parks don’t have no helio-copter! This damn thing was military, what my boys call a gunship. Had some kind of a Marine officer settin up there alongside of the pilot, ribbons all acrost his heart, looked just like eagle shit, and two Parks greenhorns settin in the back. This officer tosses me this stupid-ass salute, two fingers to the brow, y’know, and I says to myself, Don’t you know this fancy skunk from some damn place? I says, Speck boy, it’s goin to come to you, just in a minute, soon’s this sonofabitch opens his mouth. Well, maybe he figured out my thinkin, cause he never spoke! Turned away while them greenhorns searched my boat, like he had more important stuff to think about than old swamp riffraff.

  “Naturally, they come up empty-handed, so they got ugly with me. Wanted to know what I was doin in the Park. I told ’em I was out here in the great outdoors enjoyin our great American damn Park on the advice of my personal physician: ‘You’re dead within the year, Speck Daniels, lest you don’t stop drinkin’! Better go back out in the swamp if that’s what it’s gone to take to make you quit! ‘Well, men’—this is still me talkin to ’em—‘Well, men, that is exactly what I’m doin! Follerin Doc’s orders! Cause if
I go back to humankind, I get just a terrible ringin in my ears, and I got to drink up every last drop I can find, just to drown it out!’

  “Well, they wasn’t used to smooth talk such as that, not from a swamp rat, it was pretty plain they was startin to come around to my way of thinkin. All but one, dang foreign-lookin cuss, might could been some kind of a dang Jew from New York City. This Jew says, ‘See here, old feller, what’s all these orchids and damn ligs doin in your boat?’ ” Speck fished a striped tree snail from his pocket. “Liguus—sounds dirty, don’t it? That’s what my customers call this purty thing, don’t ask me why. So anyways, he’s hollerin, ‘Don’t you know them ligs is federal property, old feller, property of the American darn people? Ain’t never heard how them darn things is gettin more rare by the minute, just on account of darn rascals like you?!’

  “ ‘Nosir,’ says I, ‘I never knew no such a thing! Why, hellamighty, if I’da knowed ligs was so scarce, I’d of searched them hammocks top to bottom, stole every Christly one I could lay my hands on, make me some money!’ Well, none of ’em thought that was so comical, so I frowned at ’em, real serious. ‘Nosir,’ says I, ‘What I am doing is observin lig behavior!’ Didn’t want ’em to think they was dealin with some dumb cracker. And what they was messin with, I told ’em, was a famous lig o-thority, and a leadin orchid fancier to boot!

  “ ‘Nosir,’ this Parks greenhorn says, ‘what you are is a liar, cause ligs ain’t got no dang behavior! Ligs just sets there mindin their own business! What you are is a scallywag by the name of Daniels!’ Called me a scallywag! Dirtiest name that you could call a man, back in my granddad’s time! I told that Jew I aimed to take him into court, jail him for slander, but it didn’t do no good. They stole my ligs, they stole ever’ damn orchid, and after that, they run me off with a last warnin. Didn’t care to look foolish draggin a crippled-up old alky into court, is what it was. Ligs and orchids ain’t the same as guns or gator flats, not when you aim to persecute in court. Them greenhorn sonsabitches seen right off that Old Man Speck had given ’em the slip! Done it again!”