Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

That’s how we settled it. Rigged a block and tackle amidships and more lines fore and aft, raised her inch by inch between the boats like a drowned whale. Took till noon before her gunwales surfaced, that’s how slow and hard that winching was. Then all hands bailed till her deck came up out of the water, and she wallowed.

A ship rose on the horizon after midday, drew near in early afternoon. I sat back in the stern where I could cover all three boats with my gun sticking up where all could see it. I was well known at Key West. There wasn’t one man on that other boat who wanted trouble.

By now a little breeze was picking up. At high tide, we towed the Gladiator eastward, ran her aground on a bar. We careened her six hours later when the tide was down, long about midnight. The hull came out undamaged but her cargo was a total loss, a mess of busted eggs and slimy vegetables, waterlogged chickens, a drowned milk cow, swollen hogs.

The Smith crew refused to help us clean her out. “Where’s our money?” Walt Smith said. The sea salt crusted on his glasses made this old wharf rat look more vicious than before. I said he’d have to wait till the next time we sold a cargo in Key West. He cursed vilely. “Don’t go drinkin it all up before we get what’s owed us,” Walt Smith said.

Six hours after that, the tide floated her again. She was riding as high as a white gull next morning when the sun came up like a fireball over the Keys.

We dropped Thompson’s ketch at Lost Man’s and the Hardens at Wood Key and Lucius took the Gladiator home. I told Short to come with me on the Warrior, I would take him to House Hammock through the inland bays. Owen Harden said, “You come see us, Henry”-his way of warning me to be good to Short in case I was still upset over that cargo. Henry shook hands with Owen and Webster and got into my boat without a word and put away his rifle. At a sign from me, he took the helm and entered Lost Man’s River. Passing Lost Man’s Key, he did not glance over that way even once.

Where the river narrowed, Short peered around him at the mangrove walls as if seeing the darkness in them for the first time. More and more un-easy, he watched me sip my flask. He said again, “I sure am sorry, Mist’ Watson.” But knowing how the Gladiator yawed when she was overloaded, and knowing Thompson knew that, I had decided that the only man responsible was Erskine, who had turned her over to an inexperienced hand despite the signs of storm. I said, “Well, I know you are, Henry, but you did your best, so never mind about it.”

After a time he gave a little cough, but not until I looked his way did he come out with it. “Sir? How might Miss Jane be gettin on?” I took a swallow of white lightning. “ Miss Jane?” And he said, “Yessir.” “The mulatta gal?” He paused. “Yessir. The mulatta gal.”

That was a pause I didn’t care for. I took another swallow, then a draw on my cigar, breathing the smoke into his face. I said, “She is aiming to get married off to a coal-black nigger by the name of Reese.” I saw the blood rise to his cheeks, which goes to show how light this feller was. “Something wrong, Henry?” I said.

Another pause. Then he said, “Nosir. Nothing wrong with it. Please give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”

“Give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”

“Yessir,” he said, scared but stubborn. “Miss Jane Straughter.”

“Give Miss Jane Straughter the respects of Mister Henry Short?”

“Nosir.”

We went inland up Lost Man’s River and north through Alligator Bay. Henry flinched when I swung my gun up kind of sudden to shoot a white ibis passing overhead. I took the helm and he went to the stern to pluck our supper as we went along, and I recall how those white feathers danced and disappeared as the boat turned through the corridors of dusk in those narrow channels. It was a dark evening, overcast, no moon to travel by and dead low water. Twice the Warrior went hard aground before I quit and ran ashore at Possum Key. “We’ll lay over here tonight,” I said.

Jungle vines had crawled over the Frenchman’s grave and the door had blown off the front of the old cabin. Henry found a rusted pan and a bent pot and cooked the ibis. I sat there in the fire smoke to spite the mosquitoes, brooding over my lost cargo and wondering where the capital to put the Bend back into shape was going to come from. Henry watched me polish off that flask as if afraid I might get drunk and take his life.

“Fine eatin bird, suh. Call this ‘Chokoloskee chicken,’ ” Henry said, serving me the breast on a leaf plate. I took my knife out.

“Well, I know that, Henry.”

Squatting down to eat out of the pan, he kept to my right side and behind me, where I’d have to swing against the grain to get a shot off.

More and more irascible, I picked a fight. “What’s this Pentecostal?” I demanded, having heard him mention to the Hardens a new religion out of California that was signing up a lot of local Baptists, Henry included. Politely he tried to explain about Acts 2:4, the Day of the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover-“You some kind of a Jew, Henry?” I interrupted-when a mighty fire wind from Heaven rushed down into Jerusalem and the Apostles filled up with the Holy Spirit and went around speaking in strange tongues in sign of the world’s end-

“That so? Let’s hear some of their jabber.”

“Got to be in the Spirit, Mist’ Edguh, befo’ you kin speak in tongues.”

“In the Spirit. Speak in tongues.” I nodded wisely. “Helps to be dead drunk, too, I reckon.” And I drank off some more, mean and exhilarated. “Might get to be Jesus for a minute, or the Holy Ghost. What’s your opinion, Henry?”

“Nosuh.” Henry’s face had no expression. He scratched the fire-blackened earth with a small stick.

One time out there in the Nations-out of gun range, down the river narrows-I saw a panther come off a rock ledge, take a bay foal. That foal was a lot bigger’n the cat was, and the mare right there alongside, big horse teeth bared. These were half-wild Indian ponies, knew how to kick and bite. She could have run that cat back up that rock with no damn trouble. But that foal nickered just once and the mare whinnied, made a little feint, and it was over. Never even laid her ears back, the way horses do when they fight other horses. That mare and her foal, too, they just gave up, like offering the young one to that panther was in their nature. The mare went back to grazing before her foal was dead, not thirty yards from where that cat crouched, feeding.

What I mean, if Henry Short feared I might kill him, he had plenty of opportunity to get the drop on me and stop me. In Henry’s place, ol’ Frank Reese might have drilled me just for baiting him, then covered it up some way, taken his chances, because Frank was an outlaw raised up wild with no respect for whites who did not deserve any. But Henry Short would never raise his hand against a white or his voice either, not even if he thought he could get away with it. It just wasn’t in his nature.

“Henry? You ever hear about that crazy nigger couple years ago who shot up a whole posse of New Orleans police before they tore apart his hide-out in a hail of bullets? All over the South, men were talking about Robert Charles, trying to figure where that boy learned to shoot.”

Henry was guarded. “I heard Mist’ Dan House talkin sump’n about it, Mist’ Edguh. That boy must been dead crazy, like you say.”

This boy I had here was very complicated. Not humble or subservient, not exactly, he kept his dignity to go with his good manners. It was more like he was doing penance and would bow his neck for any punishment that came his way-his own penance, I mean, not one imposed by whites. Not so much shamed as forever damned by his few drops of black blood. Having been raised by white people since a small child, in a community where other black men were rarely seen from one year to the next, the nigra in him was a man he scarcely knew for whom the white man in him took responsibility. In Henry Short, the brother and his keeper were the same and Judgment Day was every day all year. He figured he deserved his cross and he aimed to tote it.