Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Knowing Walt Langford, I feared the marriage was inevitable. Her father’s dark past made Carrie Watson all the more attractive to rambunctious Walt. When her engagement was suddenly announced, a rumor spread that “the desperado’s daughter” was in a family way. Hearing loose talk about a shotgun wedding, I spoke up, furious, although I’d hardly met her, defending her chastity so passionately that folks began to look at me in a queer way.

Walt and Carrie were married in July. At the wedding, stricken by her big deer eyes, I mourned for my lost bride, this creature so different from the horse-haired women of the backcountry. When the minister asked if anybody present knew why Carrie and Walter should not be united in holy matrimony, my heart cried, Yes! Because she is too young! But what I meant was, Yes! Because I love her!

Love, love, love. Who knows a thing about it? Not me, not me. I never got over Carrie Watson skipping rope at age thirteen, that’s all I know. I only put myself through the ordeal of her wedding for the chance to see what her father might look like, but the notorious Mr. E. J. Watson never appeared.

What took the fight out of the Frenchman was the news that come from Marco Key in the spring of ’95. Bill Collier was digging swamp muck for his tomato vines when his spade hit what turned out to be Calusa war clubs, cordage, and a conch-shell dipper, also some kind of wood carving. Cap’n Bill just had the luck to stumble on what Old Jean had searched for all his life.

Collier weren’t much interested in old Calusa stuff but he showed his find to some tarpon-fishing Yankees. Next thing you know, them sports was in there shoveling for fun and what they didn’t bust they took for souvenirs. Folks up in Philadelphia heard about it, and a famous bone digger Frank H. Cushing made two expeditions paid for by that Mr. Disston whose money paid for dredging the Calusa Hatchee. Collected bone jewelry and shell cups, wood masks and ladles, a deer head, a carved fish with bits of turtle shell stuck into it for scales, then lugged all this stuff north to Pennsylvania. Them Yankees had went and stole the Frenchman’s glory.

What really twisted Jean Chevelier was a wood carving of a cat kneeled like a man. A drawing of that cat made the front page of the Fort Myers paper. When Eben Carey brought that paper to Possum Key, Msyoo give it one look and begun to weep. He never went back to Gopher Key, he just give up on life. He didn’t last the year.

I always liked that cantankerous old devil. He spoke too sharp but he knew some things and give me a education. Jean Chevelier was the first to see that E. J. Watson would mean trouble and begged us to shoot him like a dog first chance we got.

Bill House had been gone awhile from Possum Key and Eben Carey only came and went. Toward the end, as lonely as he was, the old man got tired of Cap’n Carey. “I am alone,” he would complain, “no matter he speak or not. Silence is better.”

Ebe Carey was a man who needed talk, he couldn’t put up with no damn solitude. He was getting so crazy back in the scrub jungle that he could hear the sun roar in the day and the trees moan in the night, is what he told us. He was listening to his Creator as any redskin could have told him and what he heard put a bad scare in him. Besides that he was always scared that Watson might recall him from that Brewer posse and come put a stop to him.

When Chevelier never answered him, only glared up at the sun, Ebe Carey gave fine speeches to the wild men hid in those green walls. Red devils was spying on him night and day, they was up to no good, in the captain’s estimation. Got so he’d feel ’em, whip around, and see ’em standing there. Tried to laugh real loud and friendly like they’d played a joke to fool him, but they never give him back so much as a blink. Swapped their plumes and pelts for his cheap trade trash and some moonshine, went away as deaf as ghosts.

When he got desperate, Cap’n Ebe would call on Hardens, still hurt because that mean old foreign feller wouldn’t talk to him. We didn’t have nothing to say to that, and anyway nobody spoke much in the Islands. Nothing to talk about. That river silence closed over empty words like rain filling a fresh coon print in the mud. We simmered him down with fish or grits but he would not go home. He’d want to stay up talking half the night even though he was uneasy in our company.

One morning he heaved up from the table and kept right on going, headed south. Left some money but not much, waved good-bye like his life depended on it, that’s how afeared he was we might think poorly of him, which I guess we did, knowing this was the last old Jean would see of Eben Carey. His big cabin on Possum Key, that’s all thorned over now and windows broke. Varmints slinking in and stinkin up the corners, vines pushin through the chinks.

Msyoo was old and poorly, rotting in his death bed, with just my boy John Owen and our young Liza to tend him. They would set him outside while they cleaned the cabin. “I am home sick,” he would tell my children, to explain his tears. “How you say it? Sick of home?” Called ’em his godchildren, kind of let on how he would leave ’em his property to repay their kindness. And my boy Owen was happy about that, cause Possum Key was our old home. But toward the end the old man never noticed ’em, showed no interest in his feed, just set there staring deep into the sun till it struck him blind. “Earth star,” he sighed. Never let them bath him any more, just waved ’em off so’s not to be interrupted while communing with that burning star in his own head.

One day Owen took his brother Earl to Possum because Liza was putting up preserves with my old woman. Owen was maybe nine years at the time, Earl two years older. Going upriver with the tide, the boys passed the Watson place and never seen a soul but when they got to Possum Key, first thing they see was Mister Watson. Earl was all for turning tail and heading home but his brother said, Nosir, not till we give Msyoo Jean his fish and vegetables.

Watson watched them beach the skiff. He never moved. They was kind of sidewinding to walk past him before he said, “Good morning, boys. You want something?” When Owen told him they had vittles for the Frenchman, Watson said, “He won’t be needin ’em. He has died off of old age.”

My boys was speechless. One day old Jean was snapping like a mean old turtle and the next day he was gone! Finally Owen gets up his nerve. “Msyoo Jean never left no paper? About me’n Liza?” Watson shakes his head. Tells ’em he owns the quit-claim now and that is all he knows about it, period. Owen blurts out, “Msyoo Jean was lookin pretty good, day before yesterday!” Hearing his suspicion, Watson points at the fresh mound of earth where he has buried him. “Well, Msyoo don’t look so good today,” he said. Earl give a moan and lit out for the boat, his brother close behind.

Not wanting to scare ’em, I had never told my kids too much about our neighbor. Owen knew that heartbroke old man would probably die sometime that week without no help from Mister Watson, and they admitted Ed never said nothing to fright ’em. Must of been shock that the old man was dead or maybe the mystery of how Watson come to be there. Anyways, they took off for home as fast as they could row.

Naturally the Frenchman’s death was laid on the man from the West who was known to have his eye on Possum Key. Ed Watson was riled by the bad stories but we noticed he never quite denied them. His reputation as a fast gun and willing to use it kept invaders out of his territory and helped him lay claim to abandoned cabins, which was pretty common on the rivers by the time he finished.