Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

One day at Everglade, Green Waller introduced me to Big Hannah Smith, an enormous woman in a long gray old-time dress that covered her right down to her high brogans. Able to outwork most men, Green said, and thrash the rest to huckleberry jelly, she had a fair start on a handlebar mustache and a pair of shoulders that a man could yoke into a team of oxen, but she also had a woman’s generous heart and tender ways. That day she told us all about her childhood on Cowhouse Island in the eastern Okefenokee, where she had three sisters as mighty as herself and three more of the common size for human females.

Out of Green’s hearing, Miss Smith reminded me of another year when I passed through Georgia on my way south from Carolina and stayed on Cowhouse Island with her family. “They called me Little Hannah then, remember? You knowed me in the Biblical way,” she whispered, closing bashful eyes in a face of the brown hue of a large spiced ham.

A few years earlier, Hannah had come to the southwest coast hunting her sister, the Widow Sarah McClain, who had headed for Florida after her husband was hung by mistake in Waycross, Georgia. As the first mortal to cross the Glades driving an ox team, this sister was well known as the Ox-Woman. That had been a few years earlier, in the dry season of 1906. These days she lived near old Fort Denaud on the Calusa Hatchee.

Hannah called the Ox-Woman Big Sis and our name for Hannah was Big Six, her being somewhat more than six foot tall. Hannah first showed up at Carson Gully, near Immokalee, and the Carson family remembered her distinctly. “My mother and me was all alone with our dog Cracker,” one child told me, “and Cracker come from Key West, and he would bite ye. Cracker was barking so we sung out, ‘Who’s there?’ And a voice come back, ‘A lady from the Okefenokee Swamp!’ So we tied up Cracker, lit the lamp, and went on out, and there she stood amongst the cypress snags, had a little black dog on a big rope tied to her belt. I was scared to death of her! ‘Well, can I come in?’ she said, ‘cause I’ve walked all day and ain’t had nothin to eat.’ So she come inside-had to bend half over not to hit the lintel-and we give her some grub and she ate and ate and ate ! We thought she’d bust. Sat back and said, ‘I sure do like to rest after I eat,’ so Mama laid her a big bed of corn shucks in our shed. I was scared she’d break loose and get into my room but she never did.”

Hannah showed us a wedding photo of her sister Lydia, who was every inch as big as Hannah and Sarah and was wearing a whole rosebush for a hat. Sat in a chair with the groom in her lap and his hat only came to her shoulder. She called him Doll Baby. Doll Baby was shortly convicted of murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison, but Lydia, unable to tolerate her lover’s absence, offered financial incentive to the warden to see to his release, then went to the penitentiary, wrote a check, and lugged Doll Baby away under her arm. Soon as she got home she stopped payment on her check, and all that warden could do short of going to jail was shake his head over Miss Lydia’s financial acumen. “Ain’t a man alive who can out-figger me,” Miss Lydia liked to say. “I always said I could make five dollars out of every dollar I could lay my hands on,” and she had laid her hands on plenty, Hannah told us.

These days Miss Smith worked for C. G. McKinney on the farm he called Needhelp up in Turner River, plowing and hoeing, building fences, too. Grew malangas and cabbages, which C. G. rowed down to the Bay and shipped to Key West on the Rosina. In the field as well as other times, Hannah wore her high brogans and gray dress down to the ground and a sunbonnet big enough to hold a bushel of fresh cabbages. She removed her boots to feel the good earth when she plowed, and of an evening loved to sing sad ballads about young country women and their faithless sweet-hearts. She was weary of working Needhelp all alone, she told us, so I invited her to Chatham Bend to try her hand at women’s work, see how she liked it. Green brought her on a visit once or twice and finally installed her there for good.

Green was greatly annoyed that his lady friend had been followed from Turner River by Charlie Tommie, the only Mikasuki in the Glades who had got himself snake-bit by moccasins three different times. The first time he got “sick, sick, sick,” the second time “sick, sick,” and the third time scarcely sick at all. That is the only interesting thing I ever heard about Charlie Tommie. According to Green, this pesky redskin had spied on Miss Smith unstintingly at Needhelp, having fallen in love with this eye-popping damsel who laved her bountiful white body weekly in the river shallows. Sure enough, Charlie showed up at the Bend, camping across the river out of rifle range from where he could keep an eye on Hannah as she came and went and make sure she was treated in the manner she deserved until such time as she realized his true worth and permitted him to lead her off to live happily ever after in the swamps.

In truth he wasn’t much of an admirer. “That Charlie ain’t nobody no more,” Richard Harden told me. By that he meant Charlie might as well be dead, having been banished by his band for trafficking with whites. In Indian terms, he no longer existed in the world even though, to the untrained eye, he still seemed to be running around loose. He was also running out of time, because one of these days, when they got around to it, his people planned to kill him. Charlie accepted this fate without complaint, so I guess you could say those Indians know what they’re doing.

Green Waller never looked like much but he was certainly in love, you never saw such a damn fool in your life. And his adoration had poked up the primordial fires smoldering in his beloved, who took that hog thief to her bed and clung to him for dear life. Since she was ten times stronger, Green explained, he knew it was useless to attempt a struggle.

“Thought you wanted to grow up to be a virgin, Green,” I said. “Why, hell, no!” Green retorted with a dirty grin. “It’s just I was savin it for Betsey!” Betsey was that brindle sow I’d trained up to do tricks for the children. Waller claimed that in his early years, alone here on the Bend, he’d trained her to provide him with some low fulfillment which no selfrespecting human being would care to think about.

Green and Hannah had washed up on the Watson place after hard voyages, and they were tired. They swept out the little Dyer cabin and made it “the first home I ever knew,” as Green said weepily, wiping his long sniffling nose with the back of his hand. There they vowed to love each other the best way they knew how until death parted them.

Poor as we were, we always had plenty to eat, with Hannah’s garden patch back of the cistern, also two milk cows, hogs and chickens, papaws, pears and guavas, coconuts, bananas-all in addition to fresh fish and game. Lucius was sure that in no time at all Watson’s “Island Pride” Syrup would come back strong, and gradually my own hope revived a little. These people trusted me to get back on my feet and I aimed to do it. “Can’t keep a good man down,” Waller would snigger, winking at Hannah. Hearing those words, she would gaze at her man hungrily as she rose like a genie from the table and hurried him off to bed.

May 1910 was the month of that ghostly white fire in the sky that was seen at first as the Star of Bethlehem but was later feared by the more pious as the Great Tribulation or even the Exterminating Angel of the Book of Exodus, who would spare only those earthly dwellings whose lintels were marked with the Blood of the Lamb. According to the newspapers, that broad luminous streak crossing the heavens every night was Halley’s Comet, which was causing suicides around the world out of man’s terror that this sinful world was coming to an end, but since our third child was delivered at the Key West hospital while that light was still flaring in the heavens, I decided to take that mysterious apparition as a good omen.