Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Took his pay and run off to Key West, I reckon,” Erskine told her. “Prob’ly heard about them Yankee nigger-lovers down that way.” (Erskine never bothered his head about nigger feelings and my brother Bill tells me I’m darned near as bad. Says, “How come you’re so nice to Injuns, Mamie, then turn around and be so mean to coloreds?” “Well, Bill,” I told him, “you just go ask Daddy. Know what he’ll tell you? A nigger is a nigger, boy, and that is that. ”)

One day Erskine told me how two white men showed up at the Bend in a small sloop, claimed they were just out gallivanting from Key West. E. J.

Watson took to brooding, thinking this pair might be deputies out to make their mark at his expense or maybe thieves that had stolen this nice sloop. However, the cane was ready so he put ’em right to work, kept a close eye. Well, one day after harvest when Erskine arrived back from Port Tampa, their little sloop was still tied to the dock but the men were gone. Mr. Watson said he had bought the sloop and paid ’em off, then run ’em up the coast as far as Marco. Erskine never thought a thing about it till he cleaned out that sloop’s little cabin and came across a photo of a woman and small kids in an envelope slipped into a dry slot in the cabin ceiling. He was so surprised something like that would be left behind that he put it away in case they sent for it. They never did. Mr Watson finally sold that sloop, made some good money, too.

This sun-baked feller was E. J.’s old friend and had taken pains to keep it that way so I was surprised to hear any such tale out of his mouth. I asked him what was he really saying-was Mister Watson killing off his help to avoid paying them? Because if Erskine had no such suspicions, how come he was spreading these darned stories-not spreading ’em exactly, just letting ’em drop here and there for folks to sniff at? He backed up fast, got mean-mouthed on me, saying it just goes to show how rumors get their start: gossiping women! Said he never believed any such thing about Mister Watson! Why, that man was like a father to him, always had been! Ask Tant Jenkins, Tant would say the same! When I reminded him that Tant left Chatham Bend after that Tucker business and never went back, he said he had no time for gossip and walked away.

I had known this feller for too many years for him to fool me. (Erskine was mostly loyal to his old boss until later in his life when he needed drinking money, which was all he got for that fool interview about his dangerous youth with “Bloody Watson.”) I wondered if he was spreading stories as a way to ease his worry. And if Ed Watson’s ship captain was worried, so was I.

Henry Short was with the Harden boys that day at Lost Man’s Key. One morning in a funny mood, I asked Henry straight out if he thought Mister E. J. Watson killed those Tuckers.

Henry never said a word, just kept on sorting gator pears in the hot sun. In 1910, cruel punishment would come to any upstart nigger who dared hold dangerous opinions about white folks, and anyway, a careful man like Henry Short would never be caught talking alone with a white female, even chubby me whom he had known since a small baby. I ordered him to give me a hand packing tomatoes and he followed me over toward the produce shed where the men could see us talking but not hear us. “Yes or no, Henry?” I said. “I’ll never tell.”

Henry was looking straight at the tomatoes. Finally he turned his head away. I heard him mutter, “Mist’ Watson always been real good to me, Mis Mamie.” Not denying. That was Henry’s sign.

For a nigger, our Henry was a real good Christian who read his Bible every evening, also a strong hardworking man who could farm, fish, run a boat, mend net, set traps, go hunting deer and never come back without one. Knowing this, Ed Watson was always after him to work at Chatham Bend. Afraid to refuse, he got Daddy to notify Watson that we could not spare him.

One time when Mister Watson was away, Henry made the mistake of sailing Watson’s produce to Key West for Erskine Thompson, who said he was too busy at Lost Man’s but more likely was just feeling lazy. As a ship captain, Henry was not experienced and Erskine knew this: he counted on Henry’s natural ability and good sense and sent him off, persuading him that he would have no difficulties in such fine weather. Henry Short sank E. J. Watson’s ship and cargo in a squall down off Cape Sable and was picked up by a sponge boat headed north. Went straight to Watson and took full responsibility, which is more than most white fellers would have done. As Old Man Gregorio Lopez said, “That nigger must been too damned scared to think if he took news as bad as that to E. J. Watson!”

Mister Watson and those Hardens chased off Key West scavengers, raised his ship, but he never raised his voice to Henry Short, just told him he would take him home. They went alone, camped overnight at Possum Key. Something happened there but neither of ’em would ever talk about it. Anyway, Henry was grateful but never forgot what was done at Lost Man’s Key. Sometimes he seined mullet with the Storter boys, set gill nets down around the mouth of Chatham River. Claude Storter told my brother Bill that whenever they came upriver past the Bend, Henry loaded that old rifle Daddy gave him and kept it handy in the bow, “in case he seen a deer or something,” he would say.

• • •

In that last long summer of 1910, most everybody knew that something bad was brewing on the Watson place, and Edna and her kids mostly stayed with us. One morning she broke down and told us that a chain gang fugitive was working there, a desperado who had killed a lawman in Key West; another man tending the hogs and that hard-faced nigger who came south with them in early 1909 were jailbirds, too. Except for his son Lucius, his only law-abiding help was Hannah Smith.

What brought this whole stew to a boil was a stranger who showed up on Chokoloskee around the time of the Great Comet in the spring. Said he was looking for an E. J. Watson, hawked and spat out the door when he was told that Mister Watson was away in Key West, with his wife expecting. This stranger was a husky young man, scar on his cheekbone but handsome in a hard-set way, with dark brown hair grown long, down to the shoulders, and green eyes set too close under thick brows that met in one heavy line. Had an old-fashioned kind of black frock coat that he wore over his farm clothes, made him look halfway between a gambler and a preacher.

Mr. Smallwood was leery of this stranger from the first minute he came into the store. When he asked “John Smith,” as he called himself, if he might be kin to Miss Hannah Smith at Chatham River, the man shook his head, surly and uninterested. He sat out on our porch while we hunted up someone to run him down to Chatham River. “E. J. may be tickled pink to see this hombre, but I doubt it,” Mr. Smallwood fretted, watching him leave on Isaac Yeomans’s boat. “That frock coat might be hiding a whole arsenal.” And I teased him, saying, “Same style of coat your friend E. J. wears, you notice?”

Ted did not feel like being teased. He reminded me that it was this day in the month before, on April 22nd, that the white wake of the Great Comet was first seen in the east, thirty degrees above the horizon, with its scorpion tail that curled across the heavens like an almighty question mark. That question mark set our preacher a-howling about the eternal War between Good and Evil, and how that scorpion tail was the first sign of Armageddon. The Good Lord had imparted to Brother H. P. Jones His intention to wipe out us poor sinners, leave only the few pure-in-hearts such as Mrs. Ida House still breathing easy. Pure-in-hearts were never plentiful around the Bay, and once the sinners had been packed off to Hell, it might get pretty lonesome around here, I warned her, crying in the wilderness and such as that.