Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

I had climbed the bank after him on a weak impulse of pity but having caught up I made no protest. That rifle was still aimed at me; they weren’t going to change their minds.

“Unc?” Leslie looked bewildered. “Where we goin, Unc?”

At the wood edge, the last Indian turned, making sure I would not follow. He met my gaze without expression, then dropped the revolver and followed the others into the river wood, bound eastward and inland into the Glades.

My neighbors would never accept a truth so strange-that the wild Shark River Mikasuki had come for Cox with the probable intent of putting him to death. I knew this was so but had no evidence whatever.

Chevelier’s hat had spun away into the shallows when Cox leapt. It was still there, caught on a mangrove sprout. My old black-ringed bullet hole through the peak was matched now by a second hole in the paler felt where the hatband had once been: that hole would have to be my evidence that Cox was dead. My story of a wounded Cox fallen off the dock and drowned was very weak but it was better than capture by wild Indians, and might be strengthened if I claimed that Leslie Cox alive would never have relinquished this old hat, a precious keepsake from his daddy.

Wet and cold, hunched into myself, I squatted by the river, arms wrapped tight around my knees, trying to think. Staring into the shallows, I was almost frightened by the apparition of two ugly lumps, pasty and yellow-clawed, so different from the tanned clear feet of boyhood. The destruction of the body, dissolution of the spirit: I felt death in me like an inner semblance, mute and numb, that had usurped my limbs and trunk, an inert Edgar of dead matter lacking nerves and blood.

Crouched there under its blind windows, I suffered a great horror of my house, with its reek of spilled moonshine and rotted blood, its filthied floors, streaked walls, stained mattresses-the Watson place no longer, only a grim solitary presence, squatted on the bank of a lost river.

I slept in the boat.

By morning, the wind had changed. It bore the scent. I found the shovel. In the salt scrub east of the cane fields, the four corpses lay in a loose row, shot in the back of the head, maybe brained by a hammer. The humbled cutters must have huddled in a group, necks bent, awaiting death. No longer men, those poor devils would have touched torn hats and dug their own graves without complaint if Cox had thought their burial worth the delay.

Kerchief bandit-style over nose and mouth, I set to work in the thick heat. Driving myself in fury, never resting, I had them covered in a shallow pit by noon. I straightened up, mumbled Amen, and stumbled off, emptied by exhaustion and the heat. That afternoon, for the first time, I slept.

Awakening toward dark, I wandered my torn, matted cane in the thin light of a crescent moon. And in this moonlight, in this vast river silence, I was overtaken by feelings about Rob I could outrun no longer. I thought about that girl, his mother, killed bloodily in childbirth: I thought about his boyhood years when in cruel mindlessness I called him Sonborn. I walked faster and faster until I was trotting, almost running, in hopeless flight to escape my brain, my heart, my filthied hide and misbegotten life.

By lantern light, I scraped in vain at the spilled blood that fouled my house until I could scrape no more. I sat in darkness, hour after hour. I fled back to the boat. In fitful sleep I dreamed that the great crocodile had crossed the river and now lay stranded on the bank like a dead tree. I took fright at the size of it, the long heavy head implanted in the mud like a rough slab of pig iron, the jutting teeth outside the curl of jaw under the old stone eye, the pale claws and spread toes of the small greedy forefeet. On the dorsal scales grew dark green algae from lost ancient epochs as if this armored brute had lain here since the first emergence of the land.

In a thrash of its heavy tail, the thing was gone. The mud exhaled the smell and weight of it with a hard thuck, and the brown water opened like a wound and slowly closed, leaving strange viscous bubbles. Where it had lain sat a fossil defecation, a white sphere smooth as clay or burnished stone.

The river remained turgid under rainless heavens in a pewter light. Wind gusts of autumn raked the turning circles of the current and dark tips of broken trees, revolving slowly, parted the surface and were drowned again on their way downriver to the Gulf. On my last day, thinking I must eat, I shot a doe that the cistern’s scent had drawn from the salt prairie. I re-moved the gall, dressed out the carcass, but I’d seen too much blood: the flesh smell seeped into my sinuses and made me gag.

I hung the doe to cool. Toward dusk I tried to carve her. The cold cave smell of her meat, still fresh, was sickening. I consigned her to the river. What would Lucius say about such a waste? Where was he tonight when his father needed him? I sat in darkness in the boat, listening to unknown cries from the black walls of river forest.

Monday, October twenty-fourth. Kate’s birthday. At dawn, I committed my fate to Chokoloskee. Hadn’t I promised my wife I would be with her and given my word to my neighbors that I would return? I would offer Cox’s weapons and his hat as evidence that the murderer was dead. Could they doubt the word of a man returning of his own free will when he could have fled? In Key West, large ships weighed anchor every day, I would exclaim. The east coast railroad had already reached Long Key. With these alterna-tives, only an honest man would put himself at a crowd’s mercy.

They would not believe the truth. As for the lie, that bullet-holed hat would never be enough.

In that last noon, I torched my fields, running like a madman down the wind. The cane ignited quickly with a low thunderous booming, creating a column of thick oily smoke. I did this only for my own sense of completion. There was no crew to harvest the blackened stalks.

Flames still leapt and darted, rekindled by the wind, when in late afternoon I left the Bend and went away downriver. In this way, in the light of fire, I forsook my white house in the wilderness and the voices of those generous spirits who had lived here with me, all those souls so sadly bruised by my headlong passage on this earth, every life changed and not one for the better. In the smoke shadow, as the house withdrew into the forest, the cinder spirits vanished skyward and were gone. Then the Watson place was gone, the Bend, the future, lost and gone. Ahead was the falling of the river to the sea and the lone green islets in the salt estuary and the horizon where dark high clouds of drought prowled the battered coast.

Clear of the delta, I drifted for a time in a gray mist, awaiting some last sign; I heard faint fish slap and soft blow of porpoise, parting the sea with cryptic fins in their soft breathings. “No!” I shouted, startling myself. What I was about to do was lunacy. Sell the Warrior at Long Key, board the train, find a new frontier: hell, yes ! I turned her bow, fled south toward the Keys.

The Warrior plowed the leaden Gulf. I howled, cursed foully, ground my teeth. As the pale strand of Lost Man’s Beach formed in the mist, I howled one last time, spun the helm, and headed north again in the direction of Kate Edna and the children. What was left of my life could have no other destination.

Off Wood Key, I suffered a sentimental urge to pay a final visit to the Hardens, but when I slowed and turned inshore, a choking fuel exhaust swept forward on the following wind, and my plan was obliterated by a sudden metallic clatter, then a faltering of the pop-pop of the motor. If I truly wished to reach Chokoloskee before dark, I was already late. I resumed my course, shouting at my ricocheting wits to clear my careening brain, make room for reason. To die half mad with fear and doubt-my God!