Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

He cheered up then, cocking his head. “Ever get that knife I sent into the jail with your Kate Edna?” With a sly grin, he kicked back in his chair, lifted his legs, and set his boots back on the table, clasping his hands behind his head.

Containing myself, I glared at his dirty boots. “I’ll find a way to thank you, boy, you can count on that. And I won’t make you wear your dress at Chatham Bend unless you want to.”

“ Boy, you said?” Les squinted harder. “Wear my dress?”

“What I meant was, boy, if you plan to eat while you are here under my roof, you’ll keep your damn boots off my table and go on out and earn your keep like everybody else.” I grabbed those boots and swung his legs so violently that he spun right off his chair onto the floor. “I catch you snooping around my wife again, I’ll kill you,” I advised him.

Slowly Cox picked himself up and retrieved his shooting iron, dragging the metal on the wood-his way of warning me that killers don’t care for that kind of abuse. Taking his time, he shoved his revolver in his belt, then kicked his likker down. In the doorway he paused long enough to say, “You was fixin to shoot and rob that ol’ nigger for yourself, ain’t that it, Unc?” He nodded as if he knew my secret, then went out. He was lying out of bluster. But I had betrayed my jealousy over Kate, which he would find a way to use sooner or later.

Lately, I mistrusted my good sense, not only my memory and judgment but my explanations to myself for my disintegrating spirits. Out beyond all my anger and suspicion, wild space opened where my mind would go careening, and beyond all that lay eternal desolation like the moon’s eclipse.

To keep the peace, I notified Lucius that Cox would now replace him as my foreman. Cox was strong and a good worker, if only because of his need to feel he was the best at everything he put his hand to; more important, he’d been a farm boy all his life and had more experience than anyone but Hannah, who would never be tolerated as foreman by the men.

Lucius raised his eyebrows, then went on about his business. My son was surprised I would give his job to a boy of his own age-that’s how he saw Leslie, not having known him previously and not understanding yet what breed of “boy” we had here. On the other hand, he trusted me. My expression told him I knew something he didn’t, and he was content to let it go until I was ready to explain.

Cox was older than Lucius by only a few months, but from appearances it might have been ten years. Both were tall and both were twenty but that was about all they had in common. Lucius had started out in life ill-fed and frail, his mother told me, while Leslie had been husky by the age of ten. (Will Cox joked that his oldest boy got his baby teeth and dropped his balls on the same night.)

Les missed his bride in bed if nowhere else, and despite my warning, he had his eye on Kate right from the start. Like May and all the other girls, Kate had thought Leslie handsome back in school days, and to judge from the way that he behaved when he thought I wasn’t looking and sometimes even when I was, Les assumed that the Bethea girl never got over him. He liked to talk dangerously in front of Kate, having no idea that his bloody deeds, far from exciting her as they had our fond and foolish May, truly hor-rified this good young woman, to the point where she flinched and went all stiff and held her breath when he drew near.

I surprised Kate by asking her if I horrified her, too. Startled, she gave a quick shake of her head and closed her eyes. Then she opened them and looked straight at me as if to discern something behind my gaze-had I taken part in those Tolen killings, as Leslie claimed? She did not yet dare to ask straight out, fearing the truth. Instead she said, “Why do you let him stay, a man like that? With your small children?” And I said, “Because he’s kin by marriage and because he spoke up for me in court.” Without him, I reminded her, I might have been found guilty by a jury of my peers and hung by the neck until deceased.

Cox took out his restless lust in drink and troublemaking. One evening he told Green and Hannah that sexual activity amongst older people was downright disgusting. “How about killers?” Hannah said. She disliked Cox and would never pretend otherwise and now she whooped and slapped her thigh at the expression on his face, and Green did, too, his own thigh and hers both.

Cox shifted slowly in his chair to look at them; he was getting pretty good at the menacing pause. When Green could not meet that flat-eyed stare, Cox gave me his most knowing wink, and I gave him one right back to keep things lively.

“Who you calling a killer?” he asked Hannah, drawling it out real softly as a desperado should. Having known plenty of hard men, she was not impressed by a boy like this who took “killer” as a compliment. But Hannah did not know him the way we did, and only now did she sense something that made her wary. Though she met his gaze head-on, placid as pudding, she put her hand on Waller’s arm to still him. Seeing this, Cox sneered for Kate Edna’s benefit, on the point of saying something stupid.

“Go slow,” I said, and his eye wavered. He “let a little smile play on his lips,” as dastards did in Kate’s romantic novels, and maybe bastards, too, for all I know. Folding her knitting, my wife got up and left the room.

Before he ran off at the century’s turn, my oldest son would take Lucius to a deep hole upriver where they fished for hours for a huge old snook that Sonborn named Old Fighter. The boys could never land Old Fighter, and finally I doubted that this fish existed outside of Sonborn’s imagination. But Lucius kept on trying in the years after Sonborn left, and one Sunday he persuaded me to go along. We were close that day and he dared wonder where his long-lost brother might be now. As usual, I ignored this question.

In the charged silence of the next few minutes, Lucius hooked a fish that made a terrific run and broke his line. “Old Fighter, Rob! Got away again!” he cried, triumphant.

I had told Lucius very little about Leslie and instructed Kate and Frank to do the same. Still hoping to make friends with someone close to his own age, Lucius went after that huge snook Rob called Old Fighter and invited “John Smith” to go along. The following Sunday, when Lucius was off setting net along the coast, Cox made Sip Linsey row him upriver to Old Fighter’s lair. With dynamite left over from the cistern excavation, he killed out every last fish in that hole. Sure enough, one giant snook had white hook scars around the mouth. Old Fighter, Leslie crowed to Lucius. “Sure don’t look like much.”

I shook my head. No, I told Cox, we call that one Little Fighter. Old Fighter is still out there.

Lucius knew better. He was upset that Leslie killed Rob’s fish but also by the unfair means used to defeat a legendary creature of his boyhood that he and Rob had never really wanted to destroy.

With the fading of the Great Comet, a cavernous darkness gathered on hot summer evenings behind the long gaunt running clouds on the Gulf horizon. Fishing offshore, Lucius saw a shadow rising from the depths under the silver sprays of bait fish chopping the water. Since the thing never broke the surface, he could not imagine what it might have been. He stared all about him at the empty sea, then hauled his lines and took off for home. Over several days in that late summer, even in light variable wind, the cane leaves stirred as if seeking to escape, and hearing those small sad scraping sounds that I could not recall from other years, I felt an odd foreboding: hurricane. After the bad storm of 1909, no one expected another quite so soon, but folks were still spooked by that comet in the spring and the weather had been undependable ever since.