Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

That same evening my Model T rode south, lashed to the foredeck of the Gladiator. She was wrapped in tarps against salt water, because with the wind out of the south and that weight forward, we were shipping a hard spray over the bow. At Chatham Bend, Lucius fetched planks and we drove her off onto the bank, hooting the horn in honor of the first automobile ever seen in the Ten Thousand Islands. I had planned that jalopy as a surprise, to lift our spirits, and sure enough, the kids came whooping, piled right in, and jumped around the seats. There was no sign of Kate.

Frank stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel; the way that black man’s head was cocked made clear that he questioned my good sense.

“Got her in a kind of swap,” I told him before he could say anything he might regret.

“What you swap for her? Our pay?” His tone scared everyone. He stepped back inside. Nobody said a word. I stood waiting for him, getting my breath. If he didn’t think better of it and step outside again-

He stepped outside again. “My oh my, that’s sump’n, Boss,” he said, dangerously angry, his grimace fixed hard in a kind of death’s-head smile.

Kate came outside slowly, in a daze. “What on earth can it be for?” she whispered. “And how on earth are we to pay for it?” She burst into tears. “What can you be thinking, Mr. Watson?” Annoyed because she had spoiled the children’s fun, I told her too bluntly that our Fort White farm-her beloved “home on the hill”-was the collateral. “I have something on the stove,” she gasped, and ran inside.

Ruth Ellen had found the car horn- toot-toot-toot! I could not concentrate in such a racket. I yanked her out of the front seat, making her cry. Addison scrambled out of the back and fled around the house. I glared at Lucius- Well? He shrugged and went inside. “Damn!” I yelled, astounded to see how fast the fun had ended. But standing there alone with the new car, I was struck by my utter folly: I was losing hold.

Lucius called, “Papa? Let’s go for a drive. I’ll find the kids.” Out ran Ruth Ellen and Addison, miraculously cured. They sat on Lucius’s lap and shrieked at the fireworks sputter as I cranked the motor, shrieked some more as we backed past the sugar kettles and turned her around in jerks and fits and starts. After a drive of one hundred yards, Ruth Ellen vomited from the thick fumes. The children ran inside, calling for Mama.

Early next morning Lucius and I set to work with Sip and Frank, alias Joe, hacking and clearing a half-mile track around the cane field. Already handy with boat engines, Lucius soon learned all there was to know about our auto, inspecting each movable part to see how it related to the rest. My son and I were never closer than we were that spring, navigating our new car on its road to nowhere.

When the great day came-we waited until May Day-all but Kate Edna piled into the “T” and went for a drive around the circumference of the Watson Plantation, chugging and honking, children screeching and dogs barking. Though all were good sports, the little ones had not traveled very far before they turned greenish from the fumes and jolting. We only completed a single round before we had to stop.

With Frank, I made a second round. Kate watched us from an upper window. How pale she looked up in that window, far away across the field.

In the damp cloudy weather of the spring, we were “in the mosquitoes” all day long, but except at daybreak and in early evening, when biting insects were at their worst, the children played around the water edge and dock and boats. They were never happy very far from water, and I was never quite at ease while they were there. I warned Addison and Ruth Ellen about the swift strong current and gators up to fifteen feet and that huge croc that hauled out from time to time on the far bank. Where one of my coco palms had fallen over into the river, Lucius built an eddy pool walled in by brush: here the kids could splash a little, protected from marauders. Even so, I did my best to put a scare into the children, describing how those monsters cruised the riverbanks hunting unwary animals and wading birds, how they drifted in close and hung there unseen in that silted water. Eye ridges and snout tips might be glimpsed but often not. Gators had snatched more than one dog off our bank; they could lunge and seize a small child in the shallows and disappear with one thrash of that armored tail.

When they weren’t fooling in the boats, the children sailed toy boats across the cistern, which was straight-sided and slippery with green algae.

Lucius rigged a rope ladder, just in case, but knowing a child would panic with the first mouthful of black water, I finally forbade them to go near. Any child who falls in there is a goner!

Sturdy and stubborn, Ruth Ellen disobeyed me. One day I came up behind and grabbed and held her way out over that black tarn. The little girl screamed until she lost her breath. Kate got very upset with me for scaring the child so badly. “Better scared than dead,” I said. We spoke no more about it. After that day, Ruth Ellen dreaded the cistern and would not go near it and would not let Addison anywhere near it, either. She would fly around him yapping like a sheepdog, chivvying our little boy away from such a dreadful fate.

Like all children, they loved to hear about wild creatures, panthers and reptiles especially. Lucius described the big panther scat he’d found in the scrub behind Cape Sable on the hot white sand mound of a croc nest. The scat had been dropped fast in the cat’s escape-Lucius reconstructed the whole event from tracks-when what must have looked like a drift-wood log back in the salt brush turned suddenly into a crocodile, risen on its short quick thick legs to drive the prowler from her nest. Lucius dug up the cache of leathery white eggs to experience the feel of them, then put them back; he described the warmth and firmness and the slow throb of ancient life in those strange oblong shapes.

On another day, east of Flamingo, he had traveled far up Taylor Slough to the hardwood hammocks, where in the airy stories of the huge mahoganies, he had seen a small flock of nine lime-colored parakeets-the beautiful bird so often spoken of by Jean Chevelier, who had sought them in vain along the rivers of our coast.

It pleased my son greatly that America’s last wild Indians lived not far south of us on hammock islands in the Shark River drainage, and that every attempt to open up their last territory with a road had foundered in the muck and broken limestone of this water wilderness. Unlike most, Lucius saw the Glades as beautiful, especially far up beyond the tidal reach where the mangroves were replaced by vast sparkling wet grasslands that stretched away forever to the north and east. “And that damned sawgrass,” I’d protested, “taller than a man, with nothing underfoot but muck and jagged limestone holes that will tear a man’s boots to pieces in a day.”

“And poisonous snakes, even poison trees-all sorts of fascinating things,” he agreed, enthusiastic, which was why the Everglades might yet prevail when all the rest of the wild places in the country had been overrun by roads bringing more people. He never criticized my ideas for west coast development, only the new canals east of Okeechobee: the canal projects were encouraging more talk of a cross-Florida highway which would lay open the Everglades once and for all. My son only hoped that all that dredging in the headwaters, muddying the rivers, would not spoil our paradise on this wild coast.

“Paradise!” cried Kate. “My goodness, Lucius!” Yet Kate loved him because he was so good with the children-an antidote to her old brute of a husband, I suppose. He cheered her and kept her company-they were the same age-and offered the kids whatever time he had to spare, showing them such mysteries as the round and pearly glow of the star spider.