Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Mister Ed?” he called out softly. “Where you going, Mister Ed?” I wanted to yell at him, Duck down! because from the house in this late light he would be silhouetted on the river. I had never talked to Cox about this, never approved it, but Cox would have heard the boat and would be ready.

“Lost Man’s River,” I said, feeling all wrong about everything.

“Tonight? You never said nothin about Lost Man’s!” Notched high, his voice stabbed me. I lifted my hand, good-bye, good luck, and gunned the boat into her turn. His wild curse wandered on the river.

Knowing that on that dock he was a dead man, Dutchy Melville bounded in swift zigzags toward the boat shed, seeking cover. I did not turn to see that-he had no choice.

A voice-was that Reese?-yelled out a warning. I fixed my gaze dead ahead, gunning the motor to increase the noise, but could not escape: when the shot rang out, I heard it. A second shot scattered the echo of the first.

In the lee of Mormon Key, phosphorus glimmered where the anchor gouged the water. In memory of Herbie Melville, I drank off what remained in Dutchy’s jug.

Mister Ed? Where you going, Mister Ed? The first tears in many years came to my eyes.

That was the tenth of October, 1910, a Monday. At first light next day, I went south to Key West. Entering by the back door, I remained three days at Eddie’s Bar, left for dead by unknown companions who hauled my carcass somewhere out of the way. Crawling out into noon light, clothes caked with beer spill and rank sawdust and piss (not all of it my own), I returned to my boat and left that town without any clear idea where I might be headed.

This was my story: I dropped Dutchy at the Bend on my way to Key West. That much was true. If there was a shooting after that, I was not responsible, and if Green and Hannah doubted me, I could not help it. As for Frank Reese, who understood that what Dutchy had done could never be forgiven-yet at the same time hating Cox, hoped I would forgive him-I might have to order him to keep his opinions to himself.

On the way north across the Banks, the Gulf sky to the west looked blotched, peculiar. I stopped at Lost Man’s to make sure I was seen by the Hamiltons or Hardens on my return journey. This was a Saturday. With her men off somewhere in the Glades, Mrs. Harden seemed leery of me and behaved queerly, never offering so much as a bite to eat. The Hardens were troubled by the weather. The heavy stillness made everybody irritable and restless. And pretty quick I sensed that somebody behind that window had a bead on me.

I anchored off Mormon Key again and at daybreak I headed for the Bend. I dreaded facing Hannah most of all.

The Bend was empty. No one came out onto the porch. The fields were empty and the house was silent and it was near noon. Perhaps they had learned of the oncoming storm and gone off with the mail boat or some fisherman. I called and shouted. There was no echo, yet I heard my own voice coming back.

Taking the shotgun, I approached the house and peered in through the windows at the unwashed pots and mildewed food left on the stove and table. At one end of the room, an overturned chair lay in a thickened blackish pool that looked like molasses or spilled oil. I did not go in.

At the boat shed, Dutchy’s coveralls hanging from their nail gave me a turn: he might lie closer than I wished to know. In broken light, the west wind rattled the dry cane stalks stacked beside the boiler, feeling out the Watson place for the coming storm.

Again I called but there was nobody-nobody, at least, who wished to answer. That silence crept around behind me. I did not call again.

At Pavilion Key the clam boats were gone. Instead of running to throw her arms around my neck, my sweet Pearl fled me, flying across the littered barren where the tents had been. From behind her mother’s shack, she called out in a frightened voice that everyone had left, even young Minnie. “That poor girl run off to Key West to get away from you!” Josie hollered through her canvas door.

I commanded her to pack up quick and board my boat because a bad storm was on the way, but it was her brother who opened the flap and stepped outside to discuss the coming weather: said this storm could never be as bad as the hurricane of 1909, which they’d survived here. “You’re all idiots,” I told him, very angry.

Tant Jenkins was past thirty now, already stooped. He still clung to that comical mustache that when he spoke jumped on his upper lip “like a l’il ol’ hairy toad,” his sister said. Tant wore it anyway, content to conceal his shyness behind his lifelong disguise as a damn fool.

Josie did most of the talking from her bed. “If we’d wanted to leave here, Mister Jack, we’d of left this mornin with the rest of ’em. But I have concluded that this key ain’t goin nowhere so we’re stayin.”

As I have related, this small woman was spry in the head and spry in bed, with plenty of high spirits to go with it, but common sense was quite another matter.

“Well, you and Tant can perish if you want but if that little feller on your teat is mine, the way you’re telling people, I am taking him with me and Pearl, too.”

And Josie said, “You show up at Chokoloskee with your backdoor family, Mister Watson, li’l Mis Big-Butt Preacher’s Daughter gonna kick your ass right out of bed!” I said, “My wife is not your business, missus. And unlike some, she don’t drink hard liquor and knows how to hold her tongue.”

I was sorely tempted to take my daughter by the scruff and throw her aboard the Warrior if I had to but I saw no sign of her. Josie gave me a queer wry look, saying that what with all the awful stories, poor Pearl was scared of her own father. “So you can go to hell, Jack Watson, and take Pearl with you if she’s fool enough, but me’n your sweet baby boy aim to stay put where we’re at, and Stephen, too!”

Stephen S. Jenkins offered a small rueful smile by way of saying that if his sister and her kids had their hearts set on staying, he reckoned he’d stay, too, kind of look out for ’em. This bachelor whom nobody took seriously had always felt responsible for this ragtag bunch he called his family. I told Tant, “If you damned people are so drunk and shiftless you won’t save yourselves, then you better start praying to that God of yours.”

Pearl slipped out from behind a shack and followed me down toward the water, keeping her distance like a half-wild dog. At the dock, gray wind waves slapped along the pilings. Except for Tant’s moored sailing skiff, rising and banging on wind-dirtied whitecaps, the anchorage was empty.

The child watched me haul my anchor, frightened to leave and frightened to be left, frightened of the future altogether. I called, “You sure, Pearl?” and she nodded gravely, leaning back into the wind, pale and tattered as a cornstalk against the dark wall of that weather. “Your daddy loves you, sweetheart!” Because I’d never told her that, not in so many words, I startled her. She glanced back toward the shack, then ran along the shore a little ways, crying something like, Did you do it, Daddy? Is it true? What was she talking about? Then blown sea mist closed over her and she was gone.

This was Sunday, the 15th of October.

Off Rabbit Key, the Warrior passed the last clam boats, on their way north toward Caxambas. Nobody aboard those boats returned my wave.

Late that afternoon, in Chokoloskee, Bembery Storter’s boy, young Hoad, blew into Smallwood’s all excited and related how bodies had been found in Chatham River near the Watson place and how a nigra had rowed out to Pavilion and reported that a man named Cox, with Mr. Watson absent, had murdered three on Chatham Bend last Monday evening. This nigra claimed that E. J. Watson put Cox up to it but took that back when he was hollered at by Watson’s friends and backdoor family such as Josie Jenkins.