Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

This court clerk in tight high collar, shirt stuffed to overflowing with self-importance, was none other than my own get, E. E. Watson, who had shunned his father after returning from north Florida the year before. Seeing his parent standing before him red-eyed and disreputable, in filthy clothes, this ingrate turned as haughty as he dared, saying, “Sheriff Tippins has interrogated your nigger. He wishes to interrogate you, as well.”

“That’s what you call Frank now? ‘Your nigger’ ?” Disdaining the Lee County Court spittoon, I spat on his varnished floor. Frank Reese was a nigger, true enough, but all those years when this rufous lout infested my house in Fort White, Frank had looked out for him, cleaned up after his carelessness and plain damned laziness out in the field. “Where is he now?” I said.

“The sheriff left strict instructions that nobody may gain access to this prisoner under any circumstances.” With wrinkled brow, he shuffled his little papers, to show he was much too busy to waste time with me. I could scarcely look at him, that’s how repelled I was by my own flesh and blood. I stripped my belt. Unless he served the public right this minute, I informed him, a certain public servant would be horsewhipped.

“Sir, this is a court of law !” he blustered. But that belt had taken the fight out of this feller-not that I took much satisfaction from it, walleyed as I was with worry and exhaustion. Full to bursting with official disapproval, arms folded high as the law allows upon his chest, E. E. Watson, deputy court clerk, glared the other way as I strode through the rear door marked NO ADMITTANCE.

At the holding cell, assorted drunks and drifters cat-called raucously at my appearance, claiming I belonged on their side of the bars. Informed that I wanted a word with prisoner Reese, these lowlifes told me how that stupid Tippins had locked that killer in the cellar to keep honest men from cutting his black throat the way they wanted.

I went out a side door into the jailyard, where I knelt beside the ventilation grate for a small window below ground level along the wall. My knee pushed a trickle of dry dirt into the hole. I whispered, “Frank?” No sound came but I heard a listening. “That you, Frank? You all right? Why did you do that?” I pled with that unseen man down in the darkness. Hadn’t I helped him escape back there in Arkansas and given him employment ever since? Hadn’t I given him Jane Straughter? “Answer me, goddammit! Did Cox tell you those killings were my idea?” But nothing came up through the grate except faint urine stink.

On my knees to my damned nigger, entreating my damned nigger, I gave my damned nigger my damned word that I never knew that bastard would go crazy, kill them all. Finally I yelled roughly, “Hear me, boy? You have to trust me!” With Frank, that “boy” was a very bad mistake.

In the grate corner where moisture had collected in a crack grew the very small white flower of a weed. I picked that flower, twiddled it to calm myself. Kneeling this way in the heat, knees chafed by cement bits and limestone turds and broken glass, my throbbing brain hammered holes through at the temples, so incensed was I by the silence of Frank Reese and his intent to do me harm-a man I’d counted on, perhaps the only man I could still count on.

“Frank? Goddammit, what have you told Tippins?” I jumped up, booted the grate, booted the jail, bellowing as stupid as a bull from the sharp pain. “BLACK BASTARD!” I hollered down the hole. “I hope they hang you!”

But with that pain, don’t ask me why, the answer to Reese’s bitterness fell into place. I guess I had known it all along but refused to look at it.

Reese had probably guessed that I’d gone along with Dutchy’s execution: had he also assumed that because I owed them so much pay, I’d had Cox take care of Green and Hannah, too? Had he also thought that I’d risked him ? Perhaps I had. But had he gone to Pavilion and risked his neck by admitting to abetting in those crimes-admitted to handling a white woman’s body, for Christ’s sake-just to tell a lie that might implicate his old partner? (An old partner, dammit all, who in the past had taken his loyalty for granted, and abused it, too.)

Yes. The silent man at the bottom of this hole assumed I’d let Cox kill Dutchy. He must have decided that if I would do that to a man I clearly liked much better than Les Cox, I might not hesitate to sacrifice Green and Hannah, in which case he himself might have been next.

I stared down at the grate. I told Frank quietly he was dead wrong about Green and Hannah, also himself.

My son watched from the door, hands on his hips. His smirk told me he’d heard everything. “So long, Frank. Good luck,” I told the grate. “Go fuck yourself,” I told my son as I limped past.

If I had sense, I told myself, gimping along, I would go to the bank right down the street, mortgage my boats, mortgage everything I had, head north and start a new life somewhere else. Start a new life as a murder suspect and a fugitive, with no prospects and a young family to provide for? No? Too late for that?

At age fifty-five, I was too tired to think, let alone run. I had to cool down, keep my head, avoid any more mistakes. The only witnesses who could implicate me in this mess were Frank and Leslie, a pair of felons whom juries would never trust: the negro witness had already recanted and the killer lacked even the smallest shred of proof. If I swore to my innocence, sidled my way through as I had done so many times before, I would go free. It was not the courts that worried me, only my neighbors.

I caught up with Tippins at Marco late next day. At gunpoint, I told him the best thing he could do was deputize me to arrest Cox, who could neither swim nor run a boat even if he had one and was therefore trapped at Chatham Bend. Since Cox could not know where Reese had gone, much less that the murders had been reported, he would not be suspicious when I showed up. The sheriff was looking at the only man who had a chance of taking him alive.

Tippins suspected that my real aim was to kill Cox and eliminate a witness under cover of the law. He would not deputize me. He said, “I consider myself a good friend of the family, Mr. Watson, and I’d sure like to oblige Mis Carrie’s daddy, but the best favor I could do you now would be to take you into custody for your own protection.”

That same night I headed south.

At Everglade, Bembery described how in the hurricane, on her way back from Caxambas, his Bertie Lee had taken refuge from the storm at Fakahatchee. Before the wind shifted and the Gulf rushed inland just before midnight, the inner bays had emptied out entirely. With no water to float the boat, the Storters did not make it home to their scared family until three days later.

We had to winch and haul the Warrior out of the mangroves. Because she’d sucked marl into her motor when she crossed the shallow Bay and had storm water in her fuel, she started very hard with a bad grinding. I did not reach Chokoloskee until evening.

I moored the boat in a lee cove and walked across to Aldermans, jimmied the door, and crawled in beside Kate, who pretended she had not awakened. Bereft, I had a desperate need to hold her. She was trembling but made no sound. “Kate?” I whispered. “No,” she murmured. “Please, no, Mr. Watson.” Angry, I forced entry but wilted and withdrew, more desolate than ever.

Arms at her sides like a tin soldier, Kate stared straight up at the ceiling.

“You came through here before the storm and never let your family know!” she cried. “We almost drowned!” Chokoloskee was a muddy ruin, with windrows of dead fish, uncovered privy pits, piled storm debris and broken boats, and sea wrack high up in the branches. Every cistern was flooded out with brine, with no rain since the storm and no fresh water. The island stank.