Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Of Tippins’s old Copeland prison camp, little sign was left, only a shadow ruin on white sand back off the roads, grown over by liana and rough thorn. A pileated woodpecker’s loud solitary call rang in the noonday heat, over the dry scrape of palmetto, in the sunny wind.

The limestone road north from the Trail traversed the marsh and flat palmetto scrub of the Big Cypress. Across the white sky, dark-pointed as a weapon, a swallow-tailed kite coursed the savanna for small prey. “Cattlemen held a big panther hunt out this way a few years ago, tried to shoot ’em out, but there’s still more panthers in the Cypress than anywhere in Florida except maybe my backyard on Panther Crescent,” House said wryly. Lucius hid his grin, still reluctant to acknowledge how much he enjoyed this man who had raised a gun and fired point-blank at his father.

The sun was high and the road empty, a ghost path of white limestone dust boring ever deeper into swamp and scrub. On the canal bank, a lone alligator lay inert as a log of mud. Long necks of cormorants and snake birds, like water reptiles, parted the black surface, sank away again. A moccasin coiled in a low stump; a bog turtle paused at the road edge, awaiting its next instinct. The white rock road writhed and shimmered in mirage toward its shining point of disappearance miles ahead.

Southeast of Immokalee, a stringy black man walked the shoulder of the road. Though he had not signaled or broken his stride, Lucius slowed the car. “Pretty hot to be out walking the road,” he murmured, and House said easily, “Give him a lift, then. I rode with plenty of ’em.”

The car drew up on the road shoulder with a rattle of limestone bits under the fenders; the figure sprang sideways as if startled by a snake. Alarmed that these white men had stopped, he was smiling hard, braced for some loud jape and set to run. When Lucius smiled-“Good morning!”-he doffed a dusty cap. “Yassuh,” he said. “Mornin.” He took out a bandanna and wiped his brow, not quite meeting their gaze.

“Headed for Immokalee?”

“Yassuh, dass right, suh.”

“Get in,” House told him, reaching back to find the door handle.

Still wary, the man raised a hard-veined gray-brown hand to the bill of his soiled cap. Slow and careful as a lizard, seeking entry without touching anything, he eased into the backseat in a waft of humid heat and hard-earned odors. Closing the door gingerly behind him, he perched on the fore edge of the seat, ready to fly. “You genlemans ain’t slavuhs, is you?” he inquired, daring a little smile when the white men laughed.

Asked how he liked Immokalee, the man chuckled, cuk-cuk-cuk, like a dusting chicken. “ ’Mokalee.” He nodded, feeling his way. He would not look at them. “Yassuh, dass right. ’Mokalee, now dat is a fine town. Man dat nevuh been a nigguh on Sat’day night in ’Mokalee, dat man doan know nothin about livin, so de nigguhs say.” He chuckled a little more, cuk-cuk-cuk.

When the white men grinned, their passenger relaxed a little, sat back a little, hummed a little, peering out at the savannah to evade their white man’s curiosity. Over the pinelands, vultures swirled like cinders on the smoky sky. “Yassuh. Gone be fryin hot t’day.”

At a corner at the edge of town, the man tapped a gray fingernail on the window, crooning “Thank’ee kin’ly, kin’ly,” soft as a lullaby, “kin’ly, kin’ly,” until the car stopped and he got out. He was recognized at once and cheered by a pair of celebrants brandishing small flat bottles in brown paper bags; he hesitation-stepped in a kind of greeting dance. All smiles, he turned to wave. “I’se in good hands now as you kin see!” he cried. “I thank’ee kin’ly, white folks!”

“Kin’ly, kin’ly,” Bill House said, amused. “Think they’re laughing at us?”

“I do, I really do.” Lucius’s heart cheered the man’s mischievous ironies and buoyant spirit, the poignance and dogged love of life that was so moving in people who owned nothing, and also that in-the-bone endurance that in its way was a shaming of the whites and a profound rebuke.

House asked the men if they might know a man named Henry Short.

“ Deacon Sho’t?”

They told him that Deacon Short was in the hospital. Torching cane fields for the Okeechobee harvest, he’d been caught in a back burn when the wind shifted, and burned severely over most of his body; he was not recuperating and was not expected to live.

“I mean, damn it all,” Bill House burst out on the way to the hospital. “Henry’s very experienced and he ain’t a drinker but that don’t mean he should work alone around big fires!” Lucius had never thought to see this man so agitated. “Big Sugar don’t care nothin about workers’ rights or the damn risks so long as they’re rakin in big profits. Know who got convicted on a slavery charge just lately? United Sugar! U.S.A.! Slavery! In the Twentieth damn Century! That what they call progress?”

They crossed the railroad tracks and headed west on a main street of auto junkyards, body shops, a dealership in bright green farm machinery, a brown whistle-stop saloon: they were nearing the hospital when Lucius said, “Did Henry ever mention finding bones? On Chatham Bend, I mean?”

“You back on that again? Speck Daniels tell you that or was it Hardens? Either way, don’t pay no attention, Colonel. If Henry ever run across something like that, our family surely would’ve heard about it.”

With no staff around on Sunday to direct them, they had to hunt for the old negro ward, a long room parted by narrow shafts of dusty sunlight. Its sepia cast and weary atmosphere, its creaking fans, its leaning cabinets and streaked stained walls, reminded Lucius of the soldiers’ wards in old daguerreotypes from the Civil War. The discreet slow figures wandering the ward were patients and their visitors-women who had walked here after church, Lucius supposed, since most wore Sunday habits. Perched on small chairs by the door were two white men of middle age with weathered faces. Recognizing Bill House, they smiled shyly and stood up to shake hands, but so upset was House by the sight of the patient across the room that he brushed blindly past.

On the narrow cot, pinned to the coarse sheets like a plant specimen, the figure lay still as if extinguished by the heat. His worn blue cotton nightshirt was open down the front and his chest was patched with cracked and crusted scabs leaking thin red fluid. From his iron bed rose a peculiar odor of broiled flesh and disinfectant tinged with sweat and urine.

Peering out from beneath head bandages, Henry Short did not see his visitors until they loomed over his bed, one on each side. Dimly aware of a presence in the light, he muttered, “Them ain’t angels. Them ain’t angels.” The voice emerged so cracked and thin, with scarcely a twitch of the scabbed lips, that his visitors did not realize at first that he had spoken.

House was stricken speechless by Short’s condition, and in the end it was Lucius who said, “Henry?” He spoke softly so as not to intrude on the hush over the ward. “Can you hear us?” Henry stared out of fiery red eyes. Through broken lips, the burned man whispered, “That you, Mist’ Lucius? How you been keepin? You, Mist’ Bill?”

Henry had first known Lucius as a boy of eight, down in the rivers, yet it astonished Lucius that a man dying had recognized somebody he had not seen in years and could not have imagined he would ever see again. With his forefinger he pressed an unburned patch of skin on the ropy forearm by way of affirmation and encouragement and Henry responded by raising that arm minutely to press his touch.