Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Ted leaned and whispered it was only fitting to put ’em up in our house for the night. A murderer? That was my first reaction, I admit. No, I didn’t want to do it. No? I had to! After all, I told myself, no one else had a spare room. The real truth was, I didn’t want some other household claiming our famous visitor. Hadn’t my Ted called this man his friend before most of these other folks had even met him?

Aunt Lovie Lopez-Penelope Daniels she was, married Gregorio-Aunt Lovie was jealous, and she could not hide it. “You’d shelter a desperado under the same roof as your little children? You ain’t scared?” I was uneasy, yes, I whispered, but my man’s wish was good enough for me. “Wouldn’t be near good enough for me,” Aunt Lovie humphed. Course her Gregorio “come with the bark on,” as the men said, he was rough. A Spaniard with any kind of pride had to act crusty in those patriotic days when we ran ’em out of Cuba and the Philippines. Right from Injun times, the Spaniards been disliked here in south Florida and that won’t change.

That evening E. J. gave Ted news of Columbia County where the Smallwoods came from. In the kitchen, young wide-eyed Mrs. Watson described the new house her husband had built north of Fort White and how his hard work got that land producing after years of erosion and ruin. Yes, she confided, she knew all about the blame laid on her Edgar in his youth due to his hellfire temper, as she called it, but if she’d heard anything of his reputation in the Islands, she did not let on. She was out to redeem him, it was plain to see, she’d made that her holy mission in this life, she got all breathless just whispering about it. Mister Watson called her Kate but all the rest of us who came to love her called her Edna.

“E. J.’s got a bad feud brewing in Columbia County,” Ted whispered when he came to bed.

“That why he’s suddenly so homesick for Lee County?”

Ted reached across and put his hand over my mouth, lest our guests hear me from the other side of a slat wall. I was irked that my husband seemed so proud of having a killer for a friend. Saying nothing, I just lay there in the dark. I felt an intrusion in my heart, like a poison tendril twitching through the wall from the spare room. Ted was puffing, he was dreading my sharp tongue, yet just as eager as the rest of ’em to be first with his Watson news. Finally he muttered, “Family trouble over land. He come back south till things cool off. Didn’t care to shoot nobody in self-defense.”

There was something hungry in his voice I didn’t want to hear, something I picked up every time he told his tales of the bloody mayhem he had witnessed up around Arcadia or over on the east coast, Lemon City. Being a peaceable good man who hated fighting, he was bewitched by men of violence, of which we had more than we could use down around south Florida. Most of our Chok neighbors were just as bad, yet under their patched shirts and scraggy beards, they were gentle fellers, same as he was. For all their big talk, they were boys and pretty childish.

I kept after him. “That man Quinn Bass that Daddy knew up in Arcadia-didn’t your ‘friend’ call that self-defense, too? If your friend is such a peaceable feller, how come all these men try to attack him?”

“Mamie, his wife believes in him, you seen that for yourself, and she was up there with him in Columbia and knows his family a lot better’n we do. Heck, she’s a preacher’s daughter. If she believes in him, we got no reason not to.”

“Maybe those kinfolk are in his way like those poor Tucker people. One day your family might get in his way, too, ever think of that?”

My husband said, “It just ain’t fair to talk like that. We know he cut Santini but that’s all we know for sure . All the rest is rumors. There ain’t no proof he ever killed a single soul.”

My Ted has a fine head of hair, big black mustache, and a big deep voice he only has to raise to clear the drunks and drifters from the store. Generally “his wish is my command,” as Grandma Ida likes to say about her feisty husband, Mr. D. D. House. This was different. E. J. Watson had Ted Smallwood in his pocket, others, too, and no good could come of it. Ted fought off my questions, getting angry, but our little kids were right under this roof with Mister Watson. I would see this through.

“How come he dusted out of here so fast after that Tucker business? And again two years ago when his carpenter just happened to die, too?”

“Weren’t his fault that feller’s heart quit! E. J. knew the blame would be laid on him, and by golly, it was. When Guy Bradley got murdered a hundred miles away, who was the first man they laid it on? He might of been lynched! He’s scared of men taking the law in their own hands and you can’t blame him.”

“I don’t believe he was ever scared our men might lynch him. He’s too hardened by his sins to be scared of anything.” Thinking about that wink of his, I got upset all over. “Does what he pleases, then laughs at us, dares us to stop him.”

Ted’s big hand covered my mouth again; he pointed toward the wall. And suddenly I was so frightened that I wept and trembled. He took me in his arms. “E. J. is a fine farmer,” he murmured, starting in on the little speech that most all the women got to hear that night in every shack on our scared little island. “A real hard worker with a good head for business, always ready to help his neighbors. They ain’t a family in the Islands won’t say the same.”

But this time the old refrain of his same old song left him still restless. “All right, sweetheart,” he whispered. “But maybe this new family will steady him down. He opened an account this evening, paid down two hundred dollars in advance. I got no choice but to give that man a chance.”

“It’s your friendship he has paid for, Mr. Smallwood. Paid in advance. He thinks if he’s got the postmaster on his side and the House clan, too, Chokoloskee won’t give him any trouble. Well, he hasn’t got the House clan. He hasn’t got Daddy nor my brother Bill, nor young Dan neither, only Mr. Smallwood.”

“And Smallwood’s wife? You always liked him, Mamie.”

Ted rolled over with his back to me when I didn’t answer. We lay awake for quite a while. I wanted to holler in his ear. “Where does his money come from? You said yourself, If E. J. had no money, he’d be on the chain gang to this day for the attempted murder of Adolphus Santini.” But Ted would assume that E. J. had made money on his farm crop in north Florida and tell me to hush up and go to sleep.

Ted’s esteem for E. J. was sincere, of course. Even Daddy House admired the man’s enterprise and plain hard work. And because folks liked him, our local families were all set to give him the benefit of any doubt. “E. J. Watson ain’t the only one who makes his own law in south Florida,” Ted always said. “Those plume hunters and moonshiners will take and shoot at anyone who messes near their territory! Look what they done to young Bradley!”

It was Gene Roberts visiting from Flamingo who notified our community all about that murder. The Florida frontier is far behind the nation’s progress, Mr. Roberts said, because men continue to settle their accounts with knives and pistols. But when I asked Ted if that included his friend Watson, who was suspected in the Bradley case, Ted rolled away again with that big sigh that said, There’s no sense talking no sense to a woman.

With Ed Watson’s return, folks would be waiting to see what my menfolk would do. Ted and Daddy were leaders in our community and my brother Bill was thought to have good sense. If these three men made up their minds to give Ed Watson a fresh start, the rest would go along. Charlie Boggess, Wigginses, and Willie Browns were already on E. J.’s side, and that was close to half the Island families.