Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Across the lobby, mounted tarpon leapt in painful arcs on the dark wood walls. The ocean pearliness on the Triassic scales of these huge armored herring had faded to a dirtied yellow and the rigid jaws, stretched forever in pursuit of that fatal lure, were shrouded in the ghostly grays of spiderwebs.

At Caxambas, exhausted, he lay awake most of the night. He thought about his clumsy proposal, his slurred voice, the hurtful stupidity of saying, Isn’t that what you wanted? He would call back and apologize in the morning. But when morning came, his resolve had unraveled. He sat on the cot edge a long while before coming to and dragging on the other sock. He decided that a discreet interval must pass before he courted his true love again. He must be patient, then draw near carefully so as not to spoil their romantic reunion. Sincerely moved by that prospect, he was also inadmissibly relieved, though he would not face this until weeks later when he realized she was truly gone and lost forever.

At daybreak he placed the brass urn in a box together with the humble collection of anonymous belt buckles and buttons. Before leaving, he added the manuscript of the biography. His decision to accept the loss of years of work had its seed in Rob’s confession, but only now did he behold it in the light, like a magic toad escaped from his own mouth. He felt no astonishment at his decision nor did he feel overwhelmed by failure-quite the contrary. Like the confrontation with the Daniels gang, it was oddly exhilarating.

The Cracker Belle was a small fishing boat, formerly white, now driftwood gray. They idled her downcurrent past the rusty fish houses and the leaning bulkhead stacked with sea-greened crab pots. Emerging from the mangrove wall into Chokoloskee Bay, they headed out the north channel to the Gulf and traveled south along the coast, passing Rabbit Key with its lone mangrove clump on the seaward point; it rose ahead, passed on the port side, and fell astern.

Though Lucius was silent, Hoad knew where his mind was. Hoad was the one friend with whom Lucius would discuss that black autumn evening. “Trouble was, nobody could rest easy with Mister Watson laying out there in the moonlight. That’s why they towed him way out here. I bet every darn kid on the Bay had bad dreams for a month about that cadaver bumping down Rabbit Key Pass on the flood tide.”

Hoad smiled apologetically at Lucius, who could not smile with him. The seeds of legend, he was thinking, sown in his father’s blood. It was not like Hoad to talk this way: had he forgotten he was talking about his friend’s father and his own father’s best friend? Was Papa in the public domain to be pawed over and patronized now that he was the legendary “Bloody Watson”?

Hoad had remembered to put a shovel in the boat. Was he uneasy about what might await them at the Bend? Hoad hated violence just as his father had (“Cap’n Bembo couldn’t kill a chicken; his wife had to do it,” Papa said).

“Course those Chok fellers ran that rope around his neck so the family could locate the body when they came for it,” Hoad was saying.

Lucius said, “Hoad, I saw no noose and I was there, remember? They probably got that tale about the hanging rope out of the magazines.”

Hoad apologized. “I’m sorry, Lucius. My point was-”

“I know what your point was. Let’s forget it.” In the next hour, they did not speak again.

The Cracker Belle was the lone boat on the empty coast. Far offshore to westward, a tiny freighter smudged the Gulf horizon.

Traversing the old clam beds east of Pavilion Key, Hoad mentioned that this shallow shelf was now so plagued with sharks that men disliked going overboard to wade for the few clams left, and nobody knew what drew the sharks from the deep water. Some folks said that that plague of sharks foretold that the old ways of Earth were near an end.

In the southern mist rose Mormon Key off the mouth of Chatham River. Farther on, the cries of oystercatchers purled across the bars, rising and falling. Hoad smiled to hear that sound. “I reckon that wild cry was here when the first Calusa came in the old centuries.”

The Cracker Belle entered the mangrove delta. “These west coast rivers are so low due to Glades drainage that your dad’s schooner would go aground before he ever made it to the Bend,” Hoad said. “Got to go by dead reckoning. Got to listen to your propeller.” He was talking too much because he was worried about what might await his friend upriver. Lucius nodded but remained silent.

Where storm trees had stranded on a shoal, dead branches dipped and beckoned in the wash of the boat’s wake. At Hannah’s Point, perhaps a mile below the Bend, was the common grave of Hannah, Green, and Dutchy, never visited and now all but forgotten in the desolate salt scrub as the dark events of that long-ago October passed from local history into myth. “About all us local folks have left is our long memories,” Hoad was saying. “Hurricanes roil things up a little now and then but it’s bad deaths that carry our remembrances back, sometimes a hundred years.”

Still visible back of the mangrove fringe along the bank was a square impression about one foot deep, as if a half-buried barn door had been levered up out of the white paste of the marl. “This place really spooks the few who know about it,” Hoad said, “me included. Graves without coffins generally sprout a good strong crop of weeds but nothing grows here.”

“Very strange,” Lucius agreed politely, anxious to keep moving.

“Those poor folks had no families to come after them like Mister Watson. But they were darned lucky to get into the ground before that bad storm carried ’em out to sea. Course they won’t stay.”

Hoad pointed to a corner of the grave that was eroding bit by clod into the river.

They listened to the river’s lic-lic-lic as it curled past. In sun-tossed branches, in the river wind, white-pated black pigeons craned and peered like anxious spirits. From upriver, others called in columbine lament, woe-woe-wuk-woe .

“Come on, Hoad, let’s go.” He spoke abruptly.

In a shift of wind the smell came heavy on the air. Waves fled the bow to crash into the banks in the boat’s wake as they rushed upriver. The hard pine in the house had blasted pitch into the sky, casting a sepia pall over the thunderheads. Where the Watson place had stood on its high mound was a strange hollowness, a void, thick shimmerings of heat. Behind the house’s shadow presence, what foliage remained on the gaunt trees was gray with ash. All around on the blackened ground lay the belly flats of alligators, curled up in crusts.

They called and called. Circling the dying fire, he clenched his heart against the sight of a charred shape in the crack and shudder of the last collapsing timbers, the whisperings of embers and blue hiss of mineral flame.

Face scorched, Lucius turned from the burning at a call from Hoad. Rob’s satchel had been left on the bare ground beyond the gator scraps. Lucius approached and picked it up and finally opened it, extracting the unloaded revolver. The note he dreaded was there, too. Clumsy, he dropped it, picked it up again.

Dear Luke,

Thanks for coming. Sorry about the house. I don’t ask your forgiveness. A keepsake-our old family heirloom. I know you wonder why I kept it all those years. I think I needed it. I think I needed this steel thing and the cold precision of its parts to hold reality together. In some way I don’t claim to understand, that red day at Lost Man’s was the last reality I ever knew.

So long. No need to wait, no need to worry. Yr ever-lovin brother, R.B. Watson