Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Young Crockett’s mother, a young Daniels, had gone away to other parts to recover her health and reputation. His fatherhood was popularly attributed to Phin Daniels’s son Harvey, who had stumbled drunk out of his boat in pursuit of a raccoon and jammed too much black mangrove mud into his rifle muzzle. “Hell, that don’t mean nothin!” Harvey hollered, waving off a shouted warning. Anxious to get off a shot before that coon slipped away into the reeds, he blew most of the mud out of the barrel, blew the breech up, too, and his head with it. The family agreed at Harvey’s funeral that he was very likely Crockett’s father, which made an orphan of the boy but kept things orderly.

Young Crockett knew that Pearl and Minnie were E. J. Watson’s children. Since nobody, least of all Harvey, had stepped up to claim him, he had set his heart on me, waving and hollering, tagging along, running small errands that I only gave him to be rid of him. On Pavilion Key, he was never out of sight, like a hard speck in my eye. The men laughed when I explained why I called him “Speck” and that name stuck.

Josie Jenkins, hearing my wife was away, got drunk of a Sunday, wished to pay a call, and this boy rowed her over from Pavilion. Lucius liked Josie but was bothered by her presence in Kate’s house so I said she must leave once they’d had a bite to eat. Next day that kid was right back on my dock, having hitched a ride with a Marco man who worked a produce patch on Possum Key to feed the clammers at Pavilion and went up and down the river every day. “I’ll work just for my keep,” Speck said. “You’re trespassing,” I told him, in no mood for palaver. “Mister Ed,” he said coolly, “I ain’t got no boat and anyway I ain’t doin you no harm.” I told him to stay right there on that dock until the Marco man came back downriver in the evening.

This wild boy had some nerve. He dared to curse me. To teach him a lesson, I fired a pistol shot right past his ear. Quick as a mink, he dove into the river and swam underwater-either that or he drowned, because he disappeared. Sobering quick, I hunted up and down the bank, hollering and calling, fearing something might have grabbed him and knowing there would be hell to pay when Josie heard about it. Too late, I realized that I still had my revolver in my hand-probably why he kept his head down in the reeds and never answered. I put that gun away and shouted more, I even yelled that he could stay here on the Bend, that’s how worried I was that the big croc might get him if he splashed along the riverbank too long. I even drifted down the current in the skiff but saw no sign of him.

Next morning I went to Pavilion Key with the bad news and the first person I saw on shore was Crockett Daniels. Turned out he had drifted all the way downriver on his back, crawling out every little ways to make sure no shark or gator got a bead on him. Finally he swam and waded out to Mor-mon Key, where a fisherman spotted him and took him home.

Speck had some spunk so I wanted to tell him I only meant to scare him, not to kill him, but when I drew near to shake his hand and maybe rough his head, he backed away. When I stopped, he stopped, too, regarding me out of greenish eyes as bright and cold as broken glass and nodding his head to indicate he knew my game. Then he turned and walked away. He never followed me again. That year this Crockett kid was no more than thirteen, but he was not one to forget that Watson winged a bullet past his ear, much less forgive it.

The clammers watched as Josie shrieked how that crazy Jack Watson had shot at a poor homeless boy with intent to kill. She was not to be reasoned with, there was no changing her mind, though I followed her right to her shack. And if Josie Jenkins would not listen to my side of the story, then who would?

Through the door she said, “You’re dead, Jack Watson, and you don’t even know it. Your heart has died from pure blackness of spirit.” Astonished and moved by these words from her own mouth, Josie opened the door to gauge their effect on the one cursed. Eyes filling up with moonshine tears, she raised her hand to touch my cheek and lips, then let it flutter down like an old leaf onto my trouser buttons. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered.

“Stop that,” I growled because young Pearl was watching. This tempestuous bitch slammed her door right in my face, and as poor Pearl backed away in fright, I kicked that rickety little slat right off its hinges.

The clammer families and their mutts fell back as I turned to leave. “Why don’t you go fuck yourselves,” I urged them with as much good-will as I could muster. I returned to my skiff and headed home, feeling so lonely as I entered Chatham River that even the company of Crockett Daniels might have proved welcome.

Christmas of 1909 was a sad occasion, with no money whatever to spend on presents. In low spirits, I drank too much of our own moonshine, which was free, and concluded I’d made no progress in my life since that starved Christmas in the muddy snow out in the Nations.

A year had passed since our return to Chatham. That winter Kate grew more remote as she grew large with child and spent more time away. One day after a bad quarrel, I ran her and the children north to Chokoloskee so that we might enjoy a vacation from each other.

• • •

In the Fort Myers Press for April fourth of 1910 (next to a society item about Mrs. Walter Langford entertaining the Thursday Afternoon Bridge Club at her gracious home), what should I find but an account of an excursion on the new auto road to “Deep Lake Country” by a festive party that included Mrs. and Mr. W. Langford and Sheriff F. Tippins. Paradise, the writer gushed, was not to be compared with “one of the most magnificent citrus groves in Florida, producing oranges and grapefruits fine as silk. This miraculous fruit was not yet on the market.” In short, Walter’s citrus was still rotting on the ground.

I swallowed my pride and wrote a letter to my son-in-law offering my services one last time: after one year as overseer, if I had not solved Deep Lake’s problems, I would quit. I didn’t have to tell him I would work like hell: he knew that. Among other contributions, I would survey and stake out the small-gauge railway I had mentioned, to transport his produce south to Everglade for travel by fast coastal shipping to the markets.

As the man who brought the railroad to Fort Myers, Banker Langford could have hired his father-in-law at little risk: the job would banish E. J. Watson some fifty miles southeast to wild country where even Watson could cause him no embarrassment. But Walter had his reputation as a stuffed shirt to keep up, and not having the guts to refuse me out-right, he sent word that he would have to think about it. He was a slow thinker, I knew that much, and perhaps he is thinking about it still. No letter came. Instead I got word, later in the summer, about Langford’s new “citrus express,” a small-gauge rail line from Deep Lake to Everglade. Already his crew was pushing through the coastal mangroves, building a railbed by digging that black muck with shovels and heaving it up onto a broad embankment. Also, Langford had arranged with Tippins to lease black convicts for his labor just as I had recommended years before. From what we heard, his road bosses were chewing up those prisoners like goobers and covering the bodies in the spoil bank where they fell.

So what would I have done out there as manager? Turned a blind eye? Made sure our banker knew the human cost? At any rate, this bitter news convinced me I was justified in eliminating those two agitators at the century’s turn. It had come down to a matter of survival, it was them or us. All the trouble came because Bet Tucker left that pen gate open and turned loose my hogs-that was the tragedy.