Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Once they saw that white house and realized it was ours, the children could not stop hollering. They scarcely listened to my short Indian history of this shell mound nor glanced at my thirty-acre field but leapt off the boat and ran ahead. Walking from the dock toward her house, Mandy dabbed her eyes and sniffled as she smiled; she could scarcely speak.

With shingled roof and walls white-painted inside and out-real oil paint, too, not some old whitewash, I told her-the Watson place was the finest house between Fort Myers and Key West, with hardwood floors and a parlor on the riverfront with a fine view. On the west side were two full bedrooms and a small sewing room that Mandy would be using as a schoolroom; she had a good big indoor kitchen with woodstove in the north side wing. Mounting from the hall was a full staircase with a polished ma-hogany rail-the only full staircase south of Tampa Bay. On the second story, two bedrooms faced the river, and in back were five small children’s rooms and a big linen closet off the stairwell. All the rooms had double beds and the bigger rooms two doubles each.

The white house at Chatham Bend, boasted Planter Watson, was by far the biggest and best built in all the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands. Worried by the expense of my staircase, Mandy ran her hand down the shining rail. “I cannot justify it, my dear wife”-I hugged her happily-“but never again need you fear cold and hunger.”

To keep out bugs, we tacked a cotton fabric over the windows, made palmetto-frond brooms to sweep mosquitoes off anybody coming through the door. The cow was swept, too, as she entered her shed, and a gunnysack door covered that entrance, for otherwise this beast would weaken and die from loss of blood. Mosquitoes were at their worst from June through September, when kerosene smudge pots and wick lamps filled the house with filthy smoke.

At Chatham Bend, we watched out for bad snakes-rattlers and moccasins, sometimes a coral snake-and occasionally we came across the track of bear or panther. These animals were not dangerous, I promised the scared kids, unless surprised in the hog pen or chicken house. The children reserved their most delicious fear for a fire-brown creature the size of my middle finger which our colored hand Sip Linsey called a “scruncher” due to the noise it made, trod underfoot. Sonborn ( Rob, Mandy insisted) and young Lucius went to great pains not to step on them. Despite the ten-year difference in their age, these two were the closest among the four children. (Rob’s mother still came to me in dreams but never spoke. Had time really stopped that day she died or just rolled on without me?)

Even at seven, Lucius was fascinated by wild creatures. He trailed Tant everywhere, unable to learn enough about wild things and wilderness and fishing, always fishing. Sometimes Tant, using the tides, would row the kids downriver to gather oysters, dip-net blue crabs, trap diamondback terrapin in the bays or gill-net pompano off the barrier island beaches. In the sea turtle nesting season, they followed the broad tracks that led out of the Gulf to a place above the tide line where they gathered buried clutches of warm leathery white eggs. Mandy tinned vegetables and jarred wild fruit preserves for her fresh bread, and sometimes we had cake or pie or cookies. After those hard years in Oklahoma, it seemed to my dear folks that such bountiful food was not to be found anywhere on earth. I watched their happy faces, happy, too.

My worry was the children’s love of playing at the water’s edge and paddling in the shallows. Sharks came upriver with the tide, Erskine assured me, and immense alligators, fifteen foot and better, drifted downriver from the Glades in the summer rains. Drawn to commotion, gliding underwater toward the bank, these grim brutes were always on the lookout for unwary creatures along shore. One gigantic specimen of a queer gray-greenish color would haul out on the far bank, where it sometimes lay all day like a dead tree. Often its long jaws would be fixed open, and the boys claimed they could see its teeth glint all the way across our wide bend in the river. Uneasy when that thing was missing, fearing its shadow presence in the current, Mandy kept a close eye on the children and the dogs while reading in her chair beneath the poincianas.

One afternoon over lemonade and cookies, discussing our wilderness with the children, she quoted some opinions of the poets. A Miss Dickinson of New England had concluded that the true nature of Nature was malevolent, whereas the self-infatuated Mr. Whitman of New York found undomesticated Nature merely detestable. What could such people know of Nature, Mandy inquired, pointing at that huge motionless gray-green beast across the river: nature was not malevolent, far less detestable, but simply oblivious, indifferent, and God’s indifference as manifested in such creatures was infinitely more terrifying than literary notions of malevolence could ever be. To regard such an engine of predation without awe, or dare to dismiss it as detestable-wasn’t that to suggest that the Creator might detest His own Creation?

“How about His mosquitoes?” complained Eddie, ever anxious to return indoors.

Lucius led us to a nest of red-winged blackbirds, parting the tall reeds so we could see. Losing its mate after the eggs had hatched to a snake or hawk or owl, the male bird, flashing his flaming shoulders, had simply resumed his endless song about himself (like Mr. Walter Whitman, said Mandy, smiling), by dint of which he won a second female, and now this pair was busily engaged in constructing its new nest on top of the old one-on top, that is, of the live young, which were squeaking and struggling to push their hungry bills up through the twigs. The horrified children longed to rescue the trapped victims, although this meant that the second clutch would be destroyed. Lucius forbade this and his mother nodded. “Even victims are not innocent,” she whispered to no one in particular. “They are simply present. They are simply in the way.”

Instinctively I had to agree, though Lucius and I could never explain to each other just what she meant. Her words made me feel odd. One moment a man bathing in the river celebrates his sparkling life and the next he is seized by the unseen and dragged beneath the surface, which moves on downriver as placid as before. God’s will, Mandy would say. Man’s fate, I agreed. Are they the same? But since long ago I had lost all faith, Mandy knew it was useless to discuss this.

In the winter dry season, when the fresh flow weakened, the gators returned upriver into the Glades; in a real dry year, they would pile up in the few sloughs that still had water in them. Taking a skiffload of coarse salt in 160-pound sacks, I set up camp on a long piney ridge near the head of Lost Man’s Slough. Tant and Erskine were with me, also Lucius, who came along as camp cook out of curiosity. Working ever deeper into the swamps, leaving a trail of gator pools turned muddy red, we clubbed and axed for three weeks without cease, then stayed up late slashing the soft flats off the bellies and rolling them in salt by firelight. Around our camps hung that purple smell of heaped raw carcass; when we came back through, that smell had turned to the stink of putrefaction, as if the earth had rolled over and died. Lucius, thoughtful and subdued, lagged behind as the days passed and no longer nagged me to let him shoot the rifle.

One day we came across a big boar gator, fourteen, fifteen foot, in a little slough under a willow head. Having eaten or driven off the other gators, it did its best to scare us, too, emerging slowly from the water swinging its long head to run these two-legged intruders off its territory. By now we were low on ammunition, wasting no bullets: I jumped to one side and fetched the thing a solid ax blow to the nape. The brute thrashed back into the pool and kept on thrashing till it rolled and shuddered and finally lay still.