Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

At break of day off Mormon Key, an onshore wind was chipping up the surface, a fair breeze for a run south. Passing Lost Man’s, I stared dead away to sea. I still had his revolver, knowing he would come after me: I have it still.

My history in the quarter century since is hardly worth the telling. Too much of it has been spent in prison and the rest mostly in flight-another sort of prison, I’ve discovered.

Luke, I beg you to believe I was not a killer then nor am I now.

Soft mist rose off the salt marsh, thinning in the sun.

Was all this true? Perhaps all Papa had ever intended was to run those people off his claim and burn their shack. As the man who would be vilified and damned, Edgar Watson, too, had been a victim of Tucker’s desperate lunge, and in his despair might have succumbed to the seeming necessity of suppressing that girl’s witness rather than see his last hope of redemption on his new plantation end on the gallows, leaving his penniless family to the mercies of the Islanders. Bet Tucker’s life or his family’s future: that was his terrible choice and he had made it, accepting responsibility for both deaths and unspoken abomination in his community. Hadn’t he concealed his son’s participation, even his presence? Wasn’t that why he had made him lie down in the boat, out of sight below the level of the gunwales? Had Rob realized this? It would not seem so.

Or was he awarding Papa too much benefit of too much doubt? If Papa was guilty of the Tucker deaths, how could that upright and responsible historian, L. Watson Collins, proceed with the “whitewash,” as Rob called it? Had he ignored inconvenient facts and disturbing intuitions because of his love for Papa (and ambitions for his book)? Had he thought he might skim over the Tucker episode without risk of contradiction since the only conceivable witness was the missing Rob?

At least Papa had not lied. Rob’s own account established that Papa had not drawn attention to how panicky or inept or careless Rob might have been as a cause of that first death nor attempted to evade the fundamental blame. Because he’d wished his younger son to know that there were mitigating circumstances (imagining that his oldest son was gone for good, and in any case safe from prosecution) he had hinted that Rob might have shared the guilt.

Look at Papa’s first reaction to Tucker’s death, as recalled by Rob. Couldn’t that “SHIT!” signify tragic dismay? What have you DONE boy ! Yet apparently Papa had stifled his recriminations, for subsequently-Rob’s account again-he had actually attempted to comfort his stricken son, assuring him it was self-defense and not his fault. To protect his son’s feelings-and right from the start-Papa had acted with a certain stoic grace, wasn’t that true? And ever since, he had stoically endured the massive judgment that those deaths had brought upon him.

Though arguing back and forth this way made him feel a little better, he knew he was skirting his father’s apparent willingness to send his son to silence that young woman. And how could an honest biographer account for the execution of those two cane cutters which had brought about the Tucker episode in the first place?

So near its finish after all these years, his life’s work would be utterly invalidated were he to accept Rob’s testimony. “The one surviving witness,” Rob had called himself. How different his biography might have been had that sole surviving witness never reappeared-this was the unwelcome thought he had to banish.

Arriving that evening at the Naples Church Hall, Lucius lingered outside before his talk, prowling the darkness. At noon that day, a radio report had described the attempted shooting of a prominent attorney outside the Gasparilla in Fort Myers. Already in custody was the leading suspect-a “furious negro” who earlier that evening had threatened the victim with a carving knife and terrified other diners in the restaurant. Though relieved for Rob’s sake that Dyer had escaped uninjured, Lucius hated the fact that an innocent man had been unjustly charged, yet saw no way to right this wrong without risking life imprisonment for his brother.

Observing Lucius benignly from the side doorway of the hall was a small slight man with round chipmunk cheeks and a delighted smile. His linen trousers and navy blue shirt, new deck shoes, and a lemon-yellow sweater caped over his shoulders looked tacked on to his wind-burned fisherman’s hide. “Professor Collins, noted Watson authority, or I miss my guess!”

“None other.” Lucius grinned as they shook hands.

“Good thing no Storters got mixed up in that darned shooting,” Hoad Storter said. “Of course Uncle George, after all those years of telling visitors the Ed Watson story, concluded he wouldn’t know so doggone much unless he had taken part in it himself. Lucky thing that week’s newspaper reported that Justice Storter was away on jury duty at Fort Myers or he might have wound up on some old posse list.”

Lucius laughed-“Oh Lord!”-as Hoad patted his shoulder to take any sting out of his teasing, saying, “Storters stayed friends with everybody on both sides of the story and we’re friends today.” Asked what he meant by “both sides of the story,” Hoad said, “Ambush versus self-defense.”

Before Lucius could respond, the program director of the Historical Society rushed forward to identify her speaker and tug him toward the side entrance nearest the podium. “You’re late!” Already offended by his tardy appearance and failure to report at once to the official in charge, namely herself, this female was aghast at his plan to identify himself to her audience as E. J. Watson’s son. She could not permit that, she said. His own son’s view of the notorious Bloody Watson would scarcely inspire trust, she complained, and indeed, she already mistrusted him, having caught him red-handed with grain spirits. “Surely you know,” she hissed, pointing at the glass, “that intoxicants are strictly prohibited in a church hall.”

“Mineral water,” Lucius advised her.

“Don’t you dare bring that inside!” She hurried through the door and up onto the stage, where she introduced “our guest this evening” as Professor Collins. The applause startled him. Before he could compose himself, this awful woman was beckoning him to the podium. Too suddenly, he found himself exposed in public while still clutching the glass he’d neglected to set down. Smiling hard, she tried to snatch it from him as he drew near and they actually tussled for one hate-filled moment before he was sprung free. Turning that murderous smile upon the audience, she rolled her eyes in abdication of any further responsibility for this speaker’s behavior.

In hard, flat light, Lucius found himself confronted by an assembly of Baptist elders fanning the worn-out heat. The ladies wore variants of gloomy dark blue dresses with white polka dots and prim white collars; their consorts-mostly smaller, as in hawks and spiders-favored high black shoes and tieless white shirts buttoned to the throat. From the severe lines of the thin mouths, the asceptic glint of lenses and steel spectacles as the old heads leaned and whispered, he suspected that the identification of this so-called “Professor Collins” as that alcoholic fisherman and lifelong loser Lucius Watson was already epidemic in the hall. (He had decided to cooperate and withhold his real name but acknowledge it at once if he were questioned.)

The back rows were mostly empty. Three shag-haired, sunbaked men lounged in the doorway. One whistled and another clapped, urging the speaker to get on with it. With a start of alarm, he recognized Speck Daniels’s gang from Gator Hook. Owen Harden was there, too, a few rows closer to the front, and Sarah was with him. Sarah made a small wave of greeting, her expression a warning that he read as a plea for discretion. Un-nerved, he drank off his glass and rapped it down smartly on the rostrum: “Evening, folks!” Far from eliciting warm smiles, his forced heartiness caused the oldsters to glance uneasily at one another as if this speaker had turned up in the wrong hall.