Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Henry? You prefer setting back there with the miskeeters?” I pointed at the ground closer to the fire. “Ol’ Massuh ain’ gwine whup you, boy.” I enjoyed talking black to Henry, who talked white, having no nigras at Chokoloskee to teach him his own language. Besides Nig Wiggins at Will Wiggins’s cane farm out at Half Way Creek, the only other nigra was George Storter’s man at Everglade, a stowaway from the Cayman Islands, blacker’n my hat; I don’t think they ran across each other twice a year. As Kate says, “These poor darkies in the Islands must get very lonesome.”

Hearing Henry’s voice, there was no way to tell what color he was, and seeing him, you could hardly tell it either. Henry Short looked a lot more Injun than nigra and a lot more white than Injun, come to think about it. But when I asked about his ancestry-which he knew I knew-he paused, then whispered, “Nigger. Nigger to the bone.”

Was that what Henry thought I wished to hear? I’d heard those words before and so they nagged me. I turned to look at him.

Then I remembered. Before it struck me that I might not want the answer, I inquired, “So your daddy’s name was Short. Mister Short, maybe?”

“Nosuh, Mist’ Watson, suh, ah doan rightly have no name, no suh. Dey gib me de name Sho’t jus’ fo’ de fun, me bein so puny when ah was comin up.”

Henry’s eyes could not hide his alarm. He had retreated into nigger speech and so I knew.

A hoot-owl called deep in the forest. Hoo-hoo, hoo-aw-w.

“I b’lieves dey called him Jack. Somethin like dat.”

I emptied the bottle, hurled it over the black water. It made a small splash at the farthest edge of firelight. “I can’t pay your wages for a while,” I said, unable to look at him.

“Ain’t got nothin comin, nosuh,” Henry murmured. “Ah done sunk yo’ boat.”

Long minutes passed. We watched the flask, which had gone under for a moment. Then the neck popped up like the small head of a terrapin back in the salt creeks, or the tip of a floating mangrove seed that has not yet taken hold on the shallow bottom.

“Tell you what.” I picked up his Winchester, which looked like the first model ever made. “We’ll shoot for it. Double or nothing.” Despite all that Chokoloskee talk about Short’s marksmanship, black men generally shoot poorly, not being mechanical of mind. I figured he might shoot better than most local men but nowhere near as well as E. J. Watson.

“Ain’t got nuffin comin, Mist’ Edguh, nosuh, ah sho’ ain’t.” Henry was scared. For this selfrespecting man, trying to speak like an ignorant field hand, I thought, was like a dog rolling over on its back to bare its throat. Disliking this, I fired fast to shut him up. My first bullet came so close that the bottle nose went under for a moment. “Your turn,” I said.

“Nosuh! Ain’no need! Yo nex’ shot take care of it, Mist’ Edguh!”

“Shoot.” I tossed the gun.

He shot and missed. I shot again. Over and over I sank that goddamned thing but it would not stay down, and the wavelet made by every bullet washed it a little farther back under the mangroves.

Henry, too, kept missing, barely. It was only after it drifted out of sight and he claimed I’d sunk it that it came to me how he’d missed each time in exactly the same spot.

“Maybe your sight is out of line,” I said. “You’re always two inches to the right.”

“Yassuh, dass ’bout it. Two inches.”

But even if his sight was out of line, a sharpshooter would compensate after a round or two. If that spot just to the right had been a bull’s-eye, Henry Short would have drilled it every time.

He had outshot me and I knew he knew it. I muttered some excuse about too much liquor, which only made me angrier. “Who taught you to shoot?” I said after a while.

“Ol’ Massuh Dan House now, he gib Henry dis ol’ shootin arn, and Mist’ Bill, he slip me a few ca’tridges, lemme use his mold so’s to make mah own. Taughts mah own se’f but nevuh learnt too good, doan look like, cuz heah I gone and los’ my wages on account I couldn’t hit dat bottle-”

“HENRY!”

He peered about at the black trees as if uncertain where that shout had come from. “Dammit, boy! Don’t you try to flimflam me with nigger talk!” But when I turned to point a warning finger at his face, the man was gone.

He must have had me in his rifle sights, against the firelight. I turned back slowly, saying, “Shoot, then. Or come out where I can see you.”

Blackness surrounding. Tree frogs shrilling. A chunking thrash across the channel-tarpon or gator. The water was dead still. On its silver skin was a single small dark mole-that Christly bottle.

“Miss Jane!” I roared. “You want her, Mis -ter Short? You want her?” I waited. “She ever tell you about me, Mis -ter Short? How I had her all that summer?”

I could feel his finger on the trigger. I was in his sights. Exhilarated, I forced my breath against the inside of my chest to steel my hide against the burning fire of his bullet. When nothing happened, I gasped, “Come on! Finish it!’

Not a whisper. The black jungle masses all around had fallen still. Behind me, staring upward through the black shell dirt of his garden, the Frenchman’s skull was a witness for the dead.

“FINISH IT!” I roared.

At the shot, the floating bottle popped and vanished from the surface. In its place a small circle blossomed for one moment only to vanish, too.

I awoke with a deep headache. He was there, making the fire. Moving stiffly in the iron calm of profound anger, we did not speak. An hour later when I let him off on the narrow walkway through the flooded forest guarding House Hammock, I wondered what I had asked of him, last night under the moon. What I had awaited. What I had wanted finished.

“Next time I tell you, finish it ! You damn well finish it,” I said. Neither of us knew what the hell I meant. He only nodded.

Near the walkway, a mangrove water snake, leaving no trace on the surface, crossed the sunlit ambers of the dead leaves on the creek bottom. Under red stilt roots blotched with white where coons had pried off oysters, the noses of feeding mullet pushed the surface. Henry touched his hat, I raised my hand halfway, but we remained silent, knowing we would never speak of this again.

In the Glades, the drought of 1906 crowded the gators into the last pools and the slaughter was awful. “We have killed out that whole country back in there”-that’s what Tant told Lucius at Caxambas. But in the spring rains, when the water level was unusually high, Bembery Storter’s brother George accompanied some Yankees and their Indian guide on a three-week expedition, traveling by dugout from the headwaters of Shark River east to the Miami River, lugging along a two-thousand-pound manatee in a pine box. What they wanted with that huge dismal creature and whatever became of it I never learned, but that expedition was probably the last to cross the Florida peninsula on the old Indian water trails through Pa-hay-okee, which means “grassy river.”

Napoleon Broward was the new governor, and his plan to conquer the Everglades for the future of Florida agriculture and development got under way with the christening of two dredges for the New River Canal, which would drain the lands south and east of Lake Okeechobee and extend the Calusa Hatchee ship canal to the east coast. With the band music, flags, and patriotic oratory so dear to the simple hearts of politicians, canal construction was begun on Independence Day, which Broward dedicated to the creation of rich farmland where only sawgrass swamp had lain before, including the auspicious planting of an Australian gum tree guaranteed to spread with miraculous speed across the swamps, sucking up water and transpiring it back into the air.