Peter Matthiessen: Shadow Country

Everyone but the Storter boy knew that Watson was right there in the store. One or two glanced over, looked away. Two went out and it was then Bembo’s boy noticed me, standing back against the wall. Being Lucius’s best friend, he was rattled and fell quiet, cast his eyes down. “You were telling how this nigra said he’d mistook himself about Ed Watson,” Smallwood encouraged him. “How he took back what he first said, put it all on Cox.”

“That because they threatened him?” Isaac Yeomans said.

All awaited me in a dead silence as I found my voice. “ Three dead?” The words came out in a low croak like a gigged bullfrog-a dangerous slip, suggesting that Watson had known in advance about at least one victim. But only Hoad seemed to pick this up, cocking his head and looking at me quizzically before he nodded. Melville and Waller, he advised me. Big Mrs. Smith. My look of honest stupefaction may have saved my life.

The negro had said that all three bodies had been anchored in the river downstream from the Bend. Early on Saturday, a party of clammers had gone there to confirm the story, retrieving the bodies and burying them in a common pit across the river maybe a mile below the house. Knowing Cox was still at large and uneasy about the weather, they had hurried back and broken camp on Pavilion Key and headed for Caxambas. The negro had been taken to Fort Myers to be turned over to the sheriff.

As the whole room watched, as the room waited, I sank down on my nail keg, greatly shaken, staring at the floor and trying to think because my life depended on it. I had to get to him before he told his tale to Tippins. My obvious shock upon hearing the evil news-and the fact I had come here and put myself into their hands, which a guilty man would surely not have done-had affirmed my innocence strongly enough to let me leave if I left quickly. Stating grimly that I was off to get the sheriff, I strode out the door before the men could organize to stop me. Aware that I was armed and desperate, no one challenged me or even trailed me to the dock, but when I looked back, the whole bunch was still out on the store porch, gazing after the Warrior as she moved off the shore.

Storm tides had sucked the water from the Bay and even in the channel, the boat churned up a mud wake all the way to Everglade. Because the Warrior was too low on fuel to risk rounding Cape Romano in such weather, I asked Bembo to take me to Key Marco early next morning. Anxious to believe in my innocence, he agreed to do it but his wife, alarmed, retreated to the bedroom. When his boy offered to go as crew, Mrs. Storter from behind her wall cried out in fear. In the morning, though she made us coffee, she would not acknowledge my heartfelt thanks, refusing to look at me at all.

On this dark and ominous Monday morning, the barometer was still falling, with wind gusting hard from all points of the compass. In the dark, the rush of weather thrashing through the palm tops was unnerving. We towed the Warrior up the tidal river and lashed her tight into the trees, then worked our way out through the barrier islands to the Gulf, half-blinded by cold walls of bow spray and hard sweeping rain: in the end, we abandoned speech, just hung on grimly. Near midday, off the south shore of Key Marco, yelling thanks, I jumped off into the shallows in a waist-deep chop and gained the shore.

By now the storm was a whole gale, close to hurricane. Winds thickened by torn leaves and dust drove slashing fits of hard-whipped rain in sheets and torrents. Shielding my eyes from flying vegetation, bent doubled over into the wind and wet and cold, I crossed that broad island to the Marco settlement, from where Dick Sawyer ran me across the swollen channel to the mainland.

I might have respected Sawyer more had he dared refuse me or found the nerve to ask for payment instead of babbling on and on about our dreadful danger. It was true that the bilge slosh, up over our ankles, threatened to tip a fatal wave over the gunwales; even so, I told him to shut up and steer while I kept bailing. My heart was heavy, not with fear for our own safety (the mainland was close and I was confident his boat would make it) but for those brave Storters on the Bertie Lee, who could never have reached Everglade before this storm came roaring in over the Islands.

Following the wood trail, dodging windfall all the way, I arrived soaked through at Naples, as the few inhabitants called the shack cluster at its pier head. Captain Charlie Stewart, known as Pops, was postmaster, and his house had a small spare room used by the circuit preacher, but I never took my boots off or got into bed, unable to sleep with that wind howling at the roof, all but lifting it away. Old hinges had wrenched loose and the door was banging, dealing the house whack after whack. Pops and his wife lay like the dead, listening all night for Watson’s footfalls.

That Monday evening of October seventeenth, one week to the day after the murders at the Bend, Tant Jenkins lashed Josie and her young into the highest mangrove limbs that would support them-not high enough, since the few trees not razed for fuel by the clam colony were small and meager. Tant got a grip on scrawny Pearl while Josie clutched her infant boy under her slicker. Soon storm seas were breaking all across the island. Hour after hour, the battering cold wind and water wore at Josie’s strength. Being slight and small, she could scarcely hang on to her limb, and was shifting for a better grip when a big rogue sea rose through the rain. Tant yelled too late. Torn loose, the baby was borne away without a cry.

On a previous visit, I had asked Josie his name. “What name do you fancy, Mister Jack?” his mother teased me. “Well, if he’s mine, name him Artemas after his great-grandfather.” Josie lifted the baby and gazed into his eyes. “He’s yours for sure and his name is Jack Artemas Watson.”

“Jack Artemas Jenkins,” I corrected her. Josie frowned but made no comment. All the while Jack Artemas observed me with my own blue eyes, shining over the round of Josie’s breast.

When the storm tide diminished, brother and sister hunted among the roots, heartbroken. His servants say that the merciful Lord works in mysterious ways, very few of which strike me as merciful, and my little son was awaiting his mother when the seas receded. Not one hundred yards from where she’d lost him, pale tiny hands protruded like sponge polyps from the sand, grasping for air. Crown just beneath the surface, her infant stood straight upright, set for resurrection. So much for Jack Artemas Jenkins, said the Lord.

Down the southwest coast over that night, the hurricane blew the water from the bays, blew down many shacks and cabins, carried the boats out to sea or far inland. It blew that coast to ragged tatters, destroying last chances, scattering hopes. It sucked the last turquoise from the inshore waters, shrouded the mangrove in caked sandy marl, transformed blue sea and blue sky to a dead gray. It blew the color right out of the world.

By dawn, the woods were twisted into snarls of broken growth which my borrowed horse jumped and clambered through like a huge goat. In my dark mood, the trees all felled in the storm’s direction recalled Cousin Selden’s description of the blue lines of Union infantry at Fredericksburg, struck over backwards by barrage after barrage of our artillery.

On Tuesday evening I reached Punta Rassa from where a man ran me upriver to Fort Myers. Wanting nothing to do with disloyal offspring, I slept in the hayloft at the livery stable, dirt-bearded, smelly, and in dangerous temper. Early next morning, I went to the courthouse, where the court clerk informed me that Sheriff Tippins had left for Chokoloskee two days earlier: he must have reached Marco not long after I left.