Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

After the harvest, Hannah Smith informed me, she and Green aimed to move on. They had a lot of back pay coming and requested part payment in advance so they could invest it in a hog farm and a little cabin somewhere in the Cypress. Not that they were in a rush, she said, they only thought they should let me know, give me fair warning.

Hannah was nervous, knowing Green had never pestered me for wages before she came. Because I owed him so much money that he couldn’t leave me, Green was an indentured servant indentured to himself. To pay him off would cripple the year’s earnings, which I had counted on to get us back in business, and Hannah would have ten months coming, too.

Cox was not bright but he had a nose for trouble. While Hannah was talking, my foreman rolled his eyes a little for my benefit, a bad twist to his mouth. I would recall that cruel expression later. I would also recall mentioning that harsh measures were sometimes required to get the job done. “Not,” I added, “that you need to be more harsh. You’ve got them terrified already.” This was true. The cane crew was so fearful of Cox that they hurried their work dangerously every time he came into the field.

I was away at Tampa, buying supplies on credit and taking orders from our buyers, when Leslie gave a few gallons of syrup to a passing trader for carrying a sick field hand back to Fort Myers. This man, he told me, was so anxious to leave that he never even waited for his pay. “If that nigger ever comes up in the street askin for money-which I doubt-you can pay him then.” Les was very proud of his fine work. Wasn’t it part of the foreman’s job to keep the payroll just as low as possible?

That evening, my son let me know that this trader must have turned up on a Sunday when everybody but Leslie and that field hand were off fishing; in fact, Leslie was the only one who ever laid eyes on that trader, since his boat was gone by the time the crew came back.

Irritable, I cut him off right there. Having just returned from Tampa, I was tired and distracted: the return on this year’s harvest would scarcely pay our debts, leaving nothing to carry us into next year. Leslie had saved us money. Suspicion about my foreman’s story was the last thing I wanted to hear. I yelled at him, “Now dammit, Lucius, don’t nag me about John Smith! He gets the job done!” And Lucius shouted back, “Why do you still use that name when everyone but me seems to have known that he is an escape d murderer named Leslie Cox?” That was the first time in his life Lucius had ever spoken to me in such heat. I said harshly, “Frank tell you that? Or was it Kate? We will settle this when I get back. Tell Frank the same.” (Because Cox knew Frank’s real name we had mostly given up on “Little Joe.”)

On the way south, cooling off a little, I worried that I’d talked too freely. Telling Cox tall tales about outlaw life in the Old West was one thing, but confiding in a bad actor like that about my financial difficulties and growing desperation might have been a bad mistake. In his zeal to prove himself as foreman, Cox might have scared those hands so badly that they were happy to leave unpaid.

The day after I got back from Key West, Lucius Watson, dammit, left the Bend for good. Everyone loved him, they were all out on the bank waving good-bye. I went outside at the last minute but I did not wave. I was wounded more than I would ever admit to anybody except maybe Hannah. We enjoyed each other, she was my good friend and the only person on the place who called me by my Christian name, but when I went to her for some advice, I got abuse instead.

“Your Lucius is a very good young feller and he loves you dearly and you wouldn’t listen to him, Ed. You don’t want to hear the truth, nor see it, neither.”

“What’s the truth then, woman, since you know so much?”

Hannah burst out in a rush, “Your boy can’t work with that foreman of yours, and me’n Green can’t neither. We done our best to bide our time and see things your way but we sure don’t like what’s going on. We just don’t care to live no more around that feller.” She lowered her voice, looking back over her shoulder. “You know me, Ed, I ain’t what you’d call a scaredy-cat nor superstitious. But lately Green-well, both of us-been kind of hearin somethin.”

“Hearing what ?” I yelled. “Come on now, Hannah!”

Hannah looked more and more upset. “Hearin this kind of hummin on the wind, like somethin very bad is comin down on us.” She was wiping her hands red with her dish towel. “You know us, Ed. We never aimed to let you down. But now we got to leave.”

The thin ax mark of a mouth tight-closed under that mustache showed her determination, and since she was such a level-headed woman, I had to listen.

“What happens on this place ain’t no business of ours,” she whispered. “We never seen nothin and never heard nothin, we ain’t never goin to say a word to nobody, and that’s the truth. It’s just, we got to go.” She was close to tears. “Why don’t you say somethin?” she cried. “You had the use of my man all these years and no complaint. We stuck by you and worked hard to tide you over your hard times, but now we want to go and we need our wages!”

I never thought I’d see this woman near hysterics. I had to shout her down. “Now dammit, Hannah, you know my bad luck! If I have to pay you people off on top of all our debts-”

“Whose fault is that? Them lawyer bills ain’t ours!” She backed away, afraid she’d gone too far. Her red eyes filled, she mopped them with her apron. “You shouldn’t ought to ask no more of us, Ed Watson.”

Hannah fell still because Cox, drawn to the racket, appeared at the corner of the house. He lounged against the wall, picking his teeth, cynical as usual and unabashed. Not until I stared at him would he go away. I then asked Hannah to think it over, urging her to stay just one more year. When she shook her head frantically, unable to consider such a thing, I said, “because if you leave here, you will leave unpaid.”

“Ed, we ain’t young no more! We got nobody and nothin to take care of us except what we got comin.” She stood eyes closed, hands clenched on her apron: I waited for her, feeling all wrong, but I had no choice. “I reckon we will have to wait,” she murmured finally. She shuffled back inside in her home-hewn sandals. Except for the cutters hacking down the cane, Big Hannah Smith was the only person on the place besides myself who did not go barefoot.

Kate and the children went along next time I went to Chokoloskee, and they stayed behind with Kate’s friend Alice McKinney. From there she went to stay with Mamie Smallwood, then Marie Alderman, finding excuses not to come home for weeks. Scared of me now, she did not speak of Cox again but only said that Chatham Bend was too hard on the small children-the hurricane season, the mosquitoes-and too dangerous with all of those rough men. I assumed she’d heard rumors about Josie Jenkins from her female friends but she later admitted it was Leslie who told her.

In the hurricane season of late summer, the heat and humidity were something to fear. Even at midday, mosquitoes hung outside the screens on a miasmal air so moist and sweet that it might have come on a south wind out of the tropics.

That summer we had a young Mikasuki squaw who’d been thrown out by her band for consorting with the moonshiner Ed Brewer. She was not exclusively for his own use, it seems, because he snuck in to the Bend one day, tried to rent her to our coloreds. Sip Linsey was a pious darkie of the old-time religion and Frank Reese was still pining for Jane Straughter, so those two boys had little use for a beat-up aboriginal with advanced alcohol and hygienic problems.