Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Three miles inland from the open Gulf, between the Islands and the mainland, Chokoloskee Bay was a broad shallow flat almost nine miles long and up to two miles wide. At low tide, it was so shallow that herons walked like Jesus on the pewter shine a half mile from shore, and all around looked like the end of nowhere-mudbanks and islets gathered into walls of mangrove jungle, with strange stilt roots growing in salt water and leaves which stayed that leathery hard green all year around. For a man from the North, used to the hardwood seasons and their colors, this tide-flooded and inhospitable tangle that never changed was going to take a lot of getting used to.

That professor at last year’s World Fair in Chicago who told the country it had no more frontiers had sure as hell never heard about the Everglades: in all south Florida, there was no road nor even a rough track, only faint Injun water trails across the swamps to the far hammocks. This southwest coast, called the Ten Thousand Islands, was like a giant jigsaw puzzle pulled apart, the pieces separated by wild rivers, lonesome bays, and estuaries where lost creeks and alligator sloughs, tobacco-colored from the tannin, continued westward through the mangrove islands to the Gulf as brackish tidal rivers swollen with rain and mud, carving broad channels.

Early in 1894, the Falcon set me on the dock at Everglade, a trading post on a tidal creek called Storter River. George Storter Junior ran the trading post and his brother ran its trading schooner. Captain Bembery Storter, who became my good friend, shipped farm produce, sugarcane and syrup, charcoal, otter furs, and alligator hides, bringing back trade goods and supplies for the three small settlements-Everglade, Half Way Creek, and Chokoloskee Island-that perched along the eastern shore of Chokoloskee Bay.

Smallwoods and McKinneys from Columbia County had joined the few families on Chokoloskee, a high Indian mound of 150 acres at the south end of the Bay. Both men farmed and set up trading posts, and C. G. McKinney was learning from a book how to pull teeth or babies, all depending. Both were smart self-educated men, among the few on this long coast who knew how to read. Smallwood had even poked around in the Greek literature, swapping books with an old French hermit down the coast named Chevelier, who had scraped acquaintance with every field of knowledge, said McKinney, except how to get on with other human beings.

I took some rough work cutting sugarcane for Storters, who had their plantation down the Bay at Half Way Creek (halfway between Everglade and Chokoloskee). Cutting cane was mean hard labor for drifters, drunks, and nigras, but I never was a man afraid of sweat, and any old job suited me fine while I figured out how a man might work this country. I saw straight off that these palmetto shack communities, backed up against dense mangrove, were no place for a wanted man without a boat who never knew when some lawman from the North might come here hunting him.

Mr. William Brown at Half Way Creek liked the way I went about my business. He accepted a down payment on a worn-out schooner, the Veatlis, and a Chokoloskee boy named Erskine Thompson signed on to teach me the sea rudiments. As soon as we got our stores aboard, we headed south into the Islands, cutting cordwood to sell down at Key West and shooting a few plume birds where we found them. It was Erskine who showed me the great bend of Chatham River which became my home.

In all of the Ten Thousand Islands, Chatham Bend was the largest Indian mound after Chokoloskee, forty acres of rich black soil disappearing under jungle because the squatter on there with his wife and daughter would not farm it; they were mostly plume bird hunters, living along on grits and mullet. Like more than one Island inhabitant, Will Raymond Esq. was a fugitive and killer, glowering from Wanted posters all the way from Tampa to Key West. He liked the Bend because it was surrounded by a million miles of mangrove, giving the lawmen no way to come at him except off the river.

The boy had heard about this mangy bastard and was scared to death. We drifted down around the Bend, keeping our distance. There was a loose palmetto shack on there, and smoke, but when I hailed, no answer came, only soft mullet slap and the whisper of the current, and a scratchy wisp of birdsong from the clearing. The boy slid the skiff along under the bank, put me ashore. I told him to row out beyond gunshot range but stay in sight as a warning to Will Raymond that there was a witness. Not till the skiff was safe away did I call out once or twice, then stick my head above the bank to have a look. Nothing moving, nothing in sight. I rose up slow, keeping my hands well out to the sides, and nervously wasted my best smile on a raggedy young girl who retreated back inside the rotted shack.

All this while, Will Raymond had me covered. I could feel the iron of his weapon and its hungry muzzle, and my heart felt naked and my chest flimsy and pale beneath my shirt, but I was up there in one piece with my revolver up my sleeve, smiling hard and looking all around to enjoy the view.

Hearing a hard and sudden cough like a choked dog, I turned to confront an ugly galoot who had stepped out from behind his shack. Unshaven, barefoot, in soiled rags and an old broken hat, he stunk like a dead animal on that river wind. Even after I presented my respects, his coon rifle remained trained on my stomach, his finger twitching on the trigger. I’d seen plenty of this scurvy breed in the backcountry, all the way from Oklahoma east and south, knife-mouthed piney-woods crackers, holloweyed under black hats, and lean-faced females with lank hair like horses and sour-smelling babes in long hard stringy arms. Men go crazy every little while and shoot somebody. Seems Will had done that more’n once in other parts, got the bad habit of it. With his red puffy eyes like sores, Will Raymond looked rotted out by drink but also steady as a stump-a very unsettling combination in a dangerous man.

The muzzle of a shooting iron at point-blank range looks like a black hole leading straight to Hell but I did my best to keep on smiling. Mr. Raymond, said I, I am here today with an interesting business proposition. Yessir, I said, you are looking at a man ready and willing to pay hard cash for the quit-claim to a likely farm on the high ground-this place, for instance. Two hundred dollars, for instance (a fair offer for squatter’s rights in this cash-poor economy, Erskine had told me).

Will Raymond wore a wild unlimbered look and his manners were not good. He never so much as introduced me to his females, who kept popping their heads out of their hole like the prairie dogs back in Oklahoma. In fact he made no response at all except to cough and spit in my direction Whatever he dredged up from his racked lungs. However, that mention of cold cash had set him thinking. His squint narrowed. While estimating how much money might be removed from my dead body, he was considering that boy out on the river, who was doing his best to hold his skiff against the current. Will Raymond had reached a place in life where he had very little left to lose.

He coughed again, that same hard bark. “If you are lookin for a farm at the ass end of Hell, seventy mile by sea from the nearest market, and have a likin for the company of man-eatin miskeeters and nine-foot rattlers and river sharks and panthers and crocky-diles and every kind of creepin varmint ever thunk up by the Lord to bedevil His sinners-well then, this looks like your kind of a place.”

“That’s right, sir!” I sang out cheerily.