Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

On the bank, the figures blackened in the glare before dissolving into the white sunlight. A few weeks later, when he learned that most of them were dead, he would recall those shifting silhouettes, those shades.

Before his trip north to visit his Collins cousins, Lucius had written to his father’s widow, asking if he might pay a call on the way back from Fort White. In affectionate teasing he signed the letter, “Your loving stepson, Lucius.” There had been no answer to that letter nor to a later postcard. To judge from the silence that returned like the echo of a shot across long miles of swamp, red plain, and muddy river, reaching shy Edna was like whistling to an unknown bird hidden in the leaves.

But forwarded to his return address-he had specified General Delivery in Lakeland-was a note scrawled in carpenter’s pencil on lined yellow paper. Its formal tone contrasted oddly with the writing. Mrs. Herkimer Burdett wished to inform him that she could not receive him at this time nor assist in his biographical research. The letter was signed not by Edna but by “A. Burdett.” He had hardly reread it when the phone rang. In a voice gruff and grudging, Mr. A. Burdett announced that Mrs. Edna Burdett would receive his visit after all. He did not explain why she had changed her mind.

“Mrs. Burdett resides in a town that will go unnamed,” the voice added-for the pure love of that phrase, it appeared, since without being privy to her whereabouts, Lucius could not have sent his letter in the first place. Downing his bourbon to calm himself, he said, “So she wants to see me after all?”

“I thought it was you who wanted to see her. ”

“And you’ve decided to accommodate me. Why?”

Taken aback, the caller protested, “Now hold on a minute, mister! Are you drunk? My mother is shy about the telephone; she asked me to call!” When Lucius was silent, the voice cried, “I think you’re drunk!”

“Addison? Is that you? We haven’t met since you were four but I’m your brother, remember?” He listened to trapped breathing. “How about tomorrow?” They could meet at his mother’s house, Lucius suggested, making the point that he knew the address and could go there with or without Addison’s permission. More silence. “I wouldn’t want to intrude, of course,” he added quickly. “I have no wish to see her unless she wishes to see me.” Though said to dispel Addison’s wariness, this happened to be true.

“I’ll call back.” The caller hung up, and Lucius groaned. But within minutes, his gruff brother called back. He would meet Lucius next day at noon at the gasoline station in Neamathla.

A. Burdett, checking his watch, turned out to be a husky young man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. He was built much like their father, Lucius noted, but otherwise looked nothing like him. Thin brown hair was plastered back on a big brow; a downturned mouth clamped a tense and worried face. As in much older men, the ears and knobby workman’s hands looked too large for his body; he had the hollow look of a man uncaressed by woman. Without meeting Lucius’s eye, he needlessly identified himself, still using the initial. “A. Burdett,” he said, already at a loss for what he might say next.

“ A for Addison, right?” To dispel the clotting atmosphere, Lucius spoke enthusiastically. “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa’s dock at Chatham.”

Ad Burdett looked wary. “Papa,” he muttered. “That’s what us kids call Mr. Herkie.” He stared in gloomy resignation at his paint-splotched shoes. “Might as well get going, then,” he said. In his poky auto, he led his older brother into the village.

In sycamore shade of a quiet street of modest houses, Edna Burdett awaited Lucius, standing on her stoop. At the sight of him, she slipped inside and awaited him anew, holding up his History of Southwest Florida like a hymnal. “Would you be kind enough to sign your book, Professor Collins?” Only then did she offer a small smile. She was a bit thicker through the waist than he remembered, otherwise much the same-not quite pretty and yet handsome, with long honey-colored hair pinned up behind. Kate Edna Bethea Watson Burdett. Had she dropped the “Watson”? Papa had been the only one who called her Kate.

On the upright piano in the sitting room perched her wedding portrait with Herkimer Burdett and framed photographs of Addison and his sisters at various young ages, also a tinted photograph of a new child, Herkie Junior, who was off at school, she said. Lucius inquired about all of them before taking a seat.

Edna had backed herself into a stuffed chair under a lamp. From this redoubt, having smoothed her feathers, she permitted herself a better look at him. What do you want with us? her scared eyes said.

Addison stood awkward in the doorway, hat in hand. “Addison, do please sit down,” his mother said, as if he were a pupil standing up at his school desk for no good reason. When Lucius tried to include him in his questions about their family, Ad said gloomily, “How long does he aim to stay? I have to get back to work.”

His mother said, “You’re not expected back today, you know that, dear.” To Lucius, she said, “Addison is a housepainter like Mr. Burdett.”

The spring day ticked past on a big loose alarm clock in another room. She showed Lucius an old schoolbook, The History of Ancient Greece, that Papa had cherished and read over and over all his life. Lucius was touched that Edna had thought to take it when she fled.

“Your father was always good to me and kind and loving with his children; you do know that, don’t you, Lucius? When my sister came to visit in Fort White, she could not get over how much time that busy man would spend with his little children-very unusual for any man back in those days.” She passed him a faded photo of dim figures grouped on the porch steps at the Bend, and Lucius recognized the husky man in black suit and black hat whose features were lost in the dark of the hat shadow. “That’s all we have-that shadowed face. A memory of shadows!” She took a great deep breath. Edna could not bring herself to use his name, not even “Mr. Watson.” When Lucius mentioned him, she tweaked her blue blouse, crisscrossed her ankles. But neither did she betray resentment or shame or regret: his father’s actions had nothing to do with her, her manner said, nor alter the truth, that she had been a faithful God-fearing wife.

“Those bad things happened when us kids were small,” Ad complained suddenly. “Horrible crimes that none of her neighbors know about. But for her, they are not safely in the past.” His voice was rising and his color, too. “ What would folks think of us if they knew?- that’s what scares her.”

“Addison? Please, dear.” Edna’s glance assured Lucius that Ad was voicing his own trepidations and not hers. “Poor Amy was only five months at that time. She never knew her father and was never told what happened. One day, a woman whose uncle was in that mob told her dreadful tales. I suppose this person wished to justify what those men did, but for poor Amy, it was terrifying. To this day, the poor thing cannot bear to hear one word about her father. If anyone asks, she says she knows nothing about him except that he died long ago of a heart attack.”

“My mother and her sister can’t even mention him,” Ad grumbled, “and you intend to write about him.”

Edna sighed. “Amy was only a babe in arms when that storm struck Chokoloskee. I’ve been deathly afraid of rough weather ever since. And when your father perished in that very place just a week later, that hellish noise terrified us all over.” She put her hand over her heart. “Lucius? That day was my twenty-first birthday. That’s why he came back.”