Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

My friend Nap Broward had made his name by smuggling contraband arms to the Cuban rebels and was urging me to use the Gladiator in this night business. Broward was anxious to avenge his friend Josй Martн, who had been shamed into returning to Cuba by fellow rebels; claiming he did too much talking, not enough fighting, his own men got that little feller killed when he tried to prove them wrong. In the end my ill wife persuaded me to avoid such a reckless venture. After so many long hard years of separation, we should cherish this precious time, she said.

Very weak, Mandy gazed into my eyes in a shy way that told me she knew she would not live much longer and warned me to be careful for the children’s sake. She showed me a Copley print called Watson and the Shark, which portrayed a man fallen out of a longboat who was being seized by a huge shark in Havana Harbor. “I think you’d better stay away from Cuba!” Mandy said. The doomed Watson was a soft, pale, naked fellow, wallowing helplessly in the shark’s jaws and rolling his eyes to the high heavens, and the only crewman trying to save him was the one black man. “Well,” I laughed, “it’s a damned good thing that Watson feller had his nigger with him!”

“I imagine you mean ‘nigra.’ ”

“Yes’m, I do.” And that was true. I did. I had spoken carelessly.

Mandy had never accepted my excuses-that that word’s use was just a careless way of saying “nigra” and that nigras often used it, too. Good black people, she said, used “black folks”: “nigger” was somebody shiftless, “no account,” even disgraceful. I wasn’t so sure, though. I guess I would go along with that most of the time. Some say “coloreds,” ladies preferred “darkies.” If you were black, she reminded me, every last one of these white man names would be insulting, wasn’t that true? They were just dark-skinned human beings. They were people. This whole race business distressed Mandy very much. She felt that Emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction-all of that loss and suffering-had come to nothing, and that our great national disease remained uncured.

In July of 1898, our Carrie would marry Doc Langford’s son, a handsome young fellow who lived in his father’s household and had plenty of opportunities to pull the wool over the eyes of my young daughter. Carrie imagined she loved him, of course, and the Langfords loved Carrie, but I believe their main ambition was to settle Walter down. Because Doc Langford was my business partner or at least a backer, and because that family had been so hospitable to my own, I felt obliged to go along.

Young Langford had worked as a cow hunter in the Big Cypress. Every Saturday his hell-and-high-water bunch rode into town, drank up their pay at the saloon, and rode out again half dead late Sunday; they rounded up scrub cattle the rest of the week to pay for another Saturday of raising hell. Walt decided he was through with those wild Saturdays and would now make something of himself for Carrie’s sake. He still had his bad drinking bouts from time to time, but instead of shooting up the town, he would go down to the Hill House Hotel, turn his gun in, rent a room, and pay the colored man to bring him moonshine. The man would keep him locked up with his jug until he had drunk himself stone stiff and sick and blind. With his craving for liquor worn out of his system, he would crawl home, gagging at the merest whiff of spirits for the next six months.

I had known this young feller for some years and liked him well enough, but I was not delighted by this match, which had been brokered by the Langfords’ friend Jim Cole. At thirteen, Carrie seemed too young, I could not fool myself, so my dealings with Cole and Walter’s family compromised what I thought of as my principles, which were already in trouble. To make myself feel better, I arranged a formal meeting with the bridegroom in which I might lay out a father’s thoughts on honeymoon etiquette.

At Hendry House, we sat down over a brandy. Unfortunately we had two or three before I warned Walt kind of abruptly against getting drunk and taking my thirteen-year-old by force-against taking her at all, in fact, said I, raising my voice, “until she was damn well good and ready, hear me, boy?”

Young Walt took my friendly counsel as an insult to his honor as a Southern gentleman, which had never been questioned before now. Though he struggled to contain his anger, he finally burst out, “Well now, Mr. Watson, sir, if she is too young, then why do you permit this marriage in the first place?” But we both knew why and we both knew better than to speak about it since it was unspeakable. Nevertheless, he was red in the face with brandy and embarrassment, and very much resented the insinuation that he might ravish a young lady with no more control over his lower instincts than one of those black devils excoriated by Pitchfork Ben in the last election.

The young man’s anger in a public place triggered my own. “I am not insinuating, sir,” I interrupted. “I am stating a well-known fact about men’s lust, a fact as plain as the red nose on your face.” To which he retorted hotly that the bride’s father had no right-with all due respect, sir-to instruct another man about how to comport himself with his own wife when her father had approved the marriage for financial considerations: should that father make the bridegroom pay for his own shame?

That was the first time and the last that Walter Langford ever dared to stand up to me in such a way. I let the silence fall until he sobered and had started to apologize, then raised my hand and cut him off rather than witness the underlying weakness in this young man that I’d suspected all along. Also-aware I’d gone too far-I had to get my own outrage under control. True, I resumed after a long pause, I had let my daughter go in deference to fiscal circumstances and had therefore given up my right to dictate terms: I’d only felt obliged to speak out as I had because of the groom’s well-known habit of excessive drink.

I was speaking softly now, inspecting a farmer’s broken fingernails. Walter awaited me, very uneasy. Was I apologizing or was I insulting him again? When I raised my eyes, he shifted in his seat. “But right or no right, boy,” I growled, unreasonably angry of a sudden and letting it all go, “let me say this: you will answer to me and you will regret it dearly if you fail to protect my daughter from all that is coarse and ugly in yourself.”

Walter was licked. In a hushed voice, he swore that he loved his bride-to-be with all his heart and he vowed to be very gentle. Since my first grandchild would not be born until five years later, the young man may have been gentle to a fault.

Despite the cautionary spite of thin-mouthed old Aunt Etta, whose very breath carried a hint of constipation, the Langfords welcomed our lively Carrie and her parents, too, at least at first: once our little frontier family had been fitted with uncomfortable town clothes, we became fashionable by Fort Myers standards, thanks to Mandy’s elegance and quiet manners, and were often included in the Langfords’ social gatherings. One evening we were introduced to “America’s Electrical Wizard,” Thomas Edison, who had built his grand Seminole Lodge on land overlooking the river and would later invite his friend Henry Ford to admire the property. Though her parents never had that privilege, my daughter would meet the great automaker when he visited the Edisons, who also expected a visit any year now from their friend Sam Clemens. “Mark Twain, dear!” Aunt Etta instructed Mandy, who had probably read more of Twain’s damned books than the total of those read by every Langford in the state of Florida. Mandy dearly hoped that she might live long enough to behold her hero, if only from afar, but that was our secret. She forbade me to say any such thing to any body.