Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Kate seemed stunned and the rest dispirited: I put them right to work as the only cure. We patched mesh screens and painted them with oil to keep out sand flies, swept out spiders, scraped rust, crust, and vermin from the stove. We burned off and harvested the small neglected crop and brewed a batch of lightning to tide Green over into the next year.

With his growing family, Erskine Thompson stayed mostly at Lost Man’s with the Hamiltons, so Lucius took over the boats. On Sundays he and I went fishing while Kate went crabbing with the children, but without Laura Collins and her gales of sweet laughter, Kate’s fun in life seemed to be gone. Knowing we could never go back to Fort White, she felt banished to a purgatory of humid heat, unrelenting insects, and the endless raining greens of mangrove wilderness, with no end to her loneliness and nothing to look forward to. From her first day back on Chatham Bend, she felt imprisoned, a fate made worse by nagging dread of the calamities that might befall her children-flood or hurricane and drowning, alligators, panthers, poisonous serpents, wild Indians and tropical disease, to name only the fates that scared her most.

These Mikasuki or Cypress Indians, who called themselves At-see-na-hufa, would make camp at Possum Key on their way north from Shark River. When Lucius found a strong freshwater spring right off that island, and tried to be helpful by telling them about it, they heard him out without expression, grunting assent once in a while to keep him going. When he was finished, they laughed for a long time, paying no attention to him anymore We concluded that the At-see-na-hufa had always known about that spring, but having had everything else stolen away from them, they never let on to the white people who lived there, preferring to watch them struggle along with rain gutters and barrels. Sometimes a few Indians stopped by the Bend, and we did our best to put something in their stomachs, if only our bad coffee and hard biscuits. One of the young Osceolas, a leader of their band, was some kind of cousin to Richard Harden’s Mary, who had been born into that family, too.

The animals had now retreated deep into the Glades. The Indians concluded that the land was dying, and the red man, too, so they might as well shoot everything they could get a bead on, using guns where bows and arrows once sufficed. Stripped off the skins, left the carcasses to rot, and headed straight back to the trading posts to trade for liquor. Deer were so scarce that even Tant Jenkins gave up hunting and went out to the clam flats off Pavilion, where even the clams had been thinned out due to the dredging.

As for the plume hunters, the House boys and their Lopez cousins were traveling all the way south to Honduras to find egrets. Those plumes were now contraband, mostly confiscated at Customs. One year Gregorio Lopez came home so sick that his boys lugged him off the boat on his chicken-feather mattress with the Customs men trotting alongside asking hard questions. And Old Man Gregorio rolled his eyes back, croaking, “This here is my deathbed, boys, so don’t go harassin a poor old feller that is givin up the ghost before his time.” Well, Gregorio could have died right there as far as those federals were concerned and it wouldn’t have helped his case even a little, because one of ’em had spotted a white quill sticking out where the old mattress stitching had unraveled: he drew forth a fine egret plume and twirled it in the sun, saying, “If this here is a chicken mattress, like you said, what I got here just has to be the purtiest white leghorn feather in the world.” Gregorio Lopez made a full recovery right before their eyes. Got up off that mattress and stalked away disgusted, giving those Customs men a taste of a proud Spaniard’s scorn.

Wilson Alderman of Chokoloskee had married Gregorio’s daughter in 1906, and because there was no work on the coast, I had taken him north to Fort White to work for me. At the time of my trials, my lawyers tried to subpoena Alderman to testify in defense of his employer, but as Sheriff Dick Will Purvis told the court, this feller “was no longer to be found in the county of Columbia, having returned to his residence in the Ten Thousand Islands.”

Alderman had slunk away as soon as my troubles started. His feeble excuse turned out to be that he had to go home to take care of his pregnant Marie, the apple of old Gregorio’s ferocious eye. That old Spaniard had never abandoned his belief-which I now shared-that any daughter of Gregorio Lopez was much too good for the likes of this young man. To the delight of her friend Kate, who rushed off to help tend her, Marie gave birth to Gregorio’s grandson two months after our return in 1909. For Kate’s sake, I forgave the feckless husband.

I could not forgive my son Eddie and Walter Langford. Carrie had explained in a long letter that as “a civic leader” her husband could not afford the breath of scandal. “He has put his foot down, forbidding me to have you in our house,” wrote Carrie in her tear-blotted missive to her “dearest Daddy.” Like many strong women with weak husbands, my daughter pretended that her spouse’s castle quaked in terror of his wrath, but she knew I knew whose foot carried the real heft in that household.

Kate Edna tried to make excuses for my daughter. Surely the idea of a younger stepmother would take getting used to for someone who so adored her daddy-“You’re talking nonsense, Kate,” I interrupted. Poor Kate went soft as a crushed peony, and Lucius fixed me with that enigmatic look which was as far as he ever went in criticism of his father, though his very restraint let you know his mind. I said to Kate, “Come here, then, girl,” and sat her comfy bottom on my knee to draw the sting from my harsh words.

After that bad welcome at the Langford house, I gave up all ambitions for Deep Lake. Dead tired after months in county jails, I had lost the will to grind my way out of debt on this remote and overgrown plantation. Uselessly I was attracted to a life of enterprise in the great world.

One day in Fort Myers, I ran into Cole and Langford in the saloon across from the courthouse. Both looked puffy from too much time indoors sitting on money and neither had a handle on his drinking. In fact, Big Jim had been forbidden by court order to set foot in a saloon, though Sheriff Tippins chose to overlook this. As for the balding banker, he looked seedy and unshaven, despite his slicked-down strands of hair and three-piece suit.

When I came in, my son-in-law lurched to his feet and left without a greeting. “Don’t let your customers smell that whiskey!” I called after him, intending to be heard by the whole place. Trapped in his booth, Cole waved me to a seat with a poor smile and asked me how my “cane patch” was progressing. I ignored the sneer behind his stupid question, wanting to see the shock on that smug face when I told him coolly that I’d like to buy the Ford auto he had recently replaced with that red Reo.

“What with?” jeered Cole, who knew I was flat broke busted. But he also knew my reputation as a businessman who made good on his debts; he did not doubt that I would restore my syrup operation in short order, and its profits, too. “What’s your collateral, Ed?” he said. I thought he was just matching my bluff, but when he flagged the bartender and paid for two more whiskeys, I realized he was serious.

“An up-and-coming farm in Columbia County,” I said.

“Who’s on there now?”

“My sister’s family and my mother.”

“Supposing you forfeit?” He cocked his head to peer at me. “You fixing to shoot them ladies, Ed, or just run ’em off there?”

I held his eye and he covered his nerves with that curly grin. “I mean, where the hell you aim to drive the damn thing, Ed? Down to your dock and back?”