Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

In the end, I went crashing and cursing to my bed and there she was. She whispered, “Please now, Mist’ Edgar, don’t go hurting me.” What she meant was, Don’t go killing me. She was terrified.

Sighing, I took her in my arms, feeling that old sweet shiver of relief waft over the surface of my skin like frankincense and myrrh, for all I know. Her breath was fresh, she was light and clean, she had no clumsiness in her. I ran my fingertips over her small neck and breasts, over that full silken rump that until this night had played hide-and-seek under thin cottons. I muttered, “Jane, honey, why would I ever hurt you?” Still fearful, she whispered that this was her first time, which made me smile, indulgent. I was mistaken. She was a virgin, the dear creature, although not for long.

That girl slept in my bed the rest of the time that we were in the Islands, and I like to believe that after the first time or two, she was neither unwilling nor unduly horrified that a large puffing male creature was easing his passion on her person, stirring his pine house with rhythmic creakings. I never wished to take advantage of a young girl’s fear, but life is hard and it don’t relent, so a man would do well to accept such blessings as life puts before him.

Sometimes, bound homeward from Key West, I stopped at Lost Man’s Beach to take some supper with the Hamiltons and Thompsons. Other times I would put in at Wood Key for a good fish dinner. On that narrow islet, the Hardens had nice whitewashed cabins, with coconut trees and bougainvillea and periwinkle flowers all around a white sand yard, which they kept raked clean to discourage serpents and mosquitoes, and a fish house at the end of a skinny dock on that shallow shore. Dried and salted mullet for the Cuba trade during the running season, late autumn and early winter, and in summer went farther offshore for king mackerel, shipped eight or ten barrels of good fish to Key West maybe twice a week. These days gasoline motors, just coming in, permitted run boats to pick up fresh fish and drop off ice in 200-pound chunks.

The youngest Harden daughter, Abbie, who came to my place sometimes to help out, had good manners learned at the Convent of Mary Immaculate in Key West. Abbie would arrange my parties, sometimes for as many as fifteen guests. Her folks and most of the other Island settlers were invited, and of course I’d attend the Harden parties, too. The three Harden boys played musical instruments, and sometimes I’d call for “Streets of Laredo,” an old Oklahoma favorite that made everybody gloomy except me.

Folks expected I would bust out wild, shoot out the lamps, tear up the party, due to wild stories that came back from Key West. I never did. Except in well-lighted public places, I never drank that much. There were always strangers in the Islands, fugitives and drifters, and I never knew when some avenger from the past might gun me down. I took that chance in public places to be sociable, but when outside I stayed back from the firelight and inside, I kept my back into the corner.

The Everglades was a frontier like Oklahoma, with plenty of half-breeds in the mix: if the Hardens wanted to be white, they had as much claim to that label as the next bunch. But in the census, Richard Harden had been listed as “mulatto,” and his family blamed this on the malice of the Bay people, who still resented him for running off with John Weeks’s daughter. Eventually he traveled to Fort Myers and signed an affidavit declaring he was Indian because his mother had been full-blood Choctaw (it was his half-Portagee father, Richard said, who accounted for the tight curl in his black hair). Naturally the Bay people paid no attention to his affidavit, which had been his wife’s idea: his family cared about his blood far more than he did. Old Man Richard didn’t give a damn so long as folks left him alone.

An old Bahama conch named Gilbert Johnson was the only Harden neighbor on Wood Key. Every time Gilbert got drunk, he would rue the day his daughters got hooked up with Earl and Owen Harden instead of staying home and tending to their widowed daddy. Here at the bitter end of life, as Old Man Gilbert liked to say, he was condemned to dwell amongst his mongrel in-laws, and he could endure this cruel situation only by venting his poor opinion of them at every opportunity-in effect, each and every evening out on the verandah at the cabin of his bosom enemy Richard Harden.

Like Richard, this contrary old man had married a half-breed Seminole. Therefore he felt qualified to pass his leisure hours expounding on the various deficiencies of Indians as human beings, as exemplified by various members of their two families. When his wife wasn’t listening, Richard thought that most of Gilbert’s guff was pretty funny, and Gilbert did, too: he meant no harm by it, he merely liked to rant as they watched the sun go down on the Gulf horizon.

In the old days on Possum Key, Richard had enjoyed long talks with Jean Chevelier, whose view had been that human beings had never evolved from animals as greedy, cruel, and violent in their behavior as they themselves had been right from the start, and here they were, still screwing their wits out, breeding like roaches, and spreading malignancies across the globe, spoiling and killing as they went. Richard struggled to transmit to Gilbert Johnson his understanding of the Frenchman’s notion about the Original Race of Man as a gang of bright apes that spread into different continents and climates and evolved into naked races of assorted colors. However, as Chevelier said, due to ever-increasing populations, conquests, and spreading ranges, these races were inevitably interbreeding, ensuring that the species would revert to that old mud-colored Homo who started all the trouble in the first place and had made life hell for other creatures ever since.

Sometimes they discussed Charlie Tommie, a mixed-breed Mikasuki and full fledged scavenger who had all or most of the sorry traits of the red, black, and white races, but the feller they mostly talked about was Henry Short, whose color was in the eye of the beholder, according to how you turned him to the light. Richard would say, “Them House boys claim that Henry has some tar in him, but I believe he is Indin and white, the same as me: one thing for sure, he’s a lot lighter in his shade than many of them so-called whites at Chokoloskee.”

According to Mr. D. D. House, Henry’s mulatto daddy had been one of those smart-talking nigras that the journals used to jeer as “the New Negro.” Not having been born a slave, this New Negro was out to “ravage” white women, not merely screw them, like white men tomcatted around after the darkie girls. But according to Mr. House, whom nobody could call a sentimental man, Henry’s daddy loved his white girl truly and she loved him back. And true love between the races being a capital offense when the male is black, that’s just how the neighbors handled it.

First time I heard Henry’s history, I had gone to House Hammock to hire him away. The old man said, “I reckon he’ll be staying with us, Mr. Watson.” But he offered a cup of his good shine, we got to talking, and it came out that he had witnessed Henry’s father’s awful death back in Redemption days. Those good Christian folks set up a platform, scrawled justice in black charcoal on the planks in front in case anyone wondered what this show was all about and had ’em a barbecue picnic, sweet corn and spareribs, a regular holiday excursion.

Being so light-skinned, blue eyes and brown hair, Henry’s daddy could have flat denied his blood, Mr. House believed, and as a U.S. cavalryman who had spilled the blood of hostile Indians for his country, he very likely would have got away with it. But he was proud and angry and dead stubborn. He would not deny that he had served as a buffalo soldier and would not humiliate his regiment, he said, by crawling to a mob, though the girl begged him to save himself and spare their child a lifelong grief and shame. Instead, he shouted that the man they proposed to lynch was an American soldier-citizen with full rights under the U.S. Constitution.