Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

When Watson swung that shotgun up, my guts clenched tight to meet the burning lead. I knew we was done for, Pap did, too, because we was looking down both barrels and we seen them jump, that’s how hard Watson pulled his triggers. To fit storm-swollen shells into the breech, he’d peeled ’em down too much, the paper didn’t hold, that was the theory: when them barrels tipped, the buckshot rolled right out the muzzles. I ain’t saying I seen them pellets but some claim they did.

I don’t recall swinging my rifle up or squeezing the trigger but I do know I fired. After that, all them guns let go together.

Ed Watson was spun half around but didn’t fall. I reckon he died before his shotgun hit the ground, but his legs kicked back some way and drove his body on, pitching him forward against that roar and fire. His coat and shirt jumped, whacked by lead, the sound of his hard life being whacked out of him. Some say they seen his gun stock splinter, seen his revolver spin away. Me, I seen his mouth yank, seen blood jump where his left eye burst. Christ. And still he came.

Hell, we all seen it, ain’t one man won’t say the same: with all that lead in him, Ed Watson kept on coming, that’s how headstrong that man was even in death-that was the demon in him, Mama Ida House would say for long years after, cause only a demon could scare folks as bad as that after they exercised him. He never crumpled but fell slow as a felled tree.

Seeing him come ahead that way, the men yelled and crowded backward. Then the evening broke apart, the line surged forward, near to knocked me down. It was purely uproar, hollering and cussing. They were a damn mob now for sure, with young boys running up and down snapping their slingshots at the body, yapping like dogs, and every dog on that dark island howling.

Our neighbor lay face down on the bloody ground like he wanted to peer into the darkness all the way down to the center of the earth. The broad back in the black coat had no breath to swell it. Never jerked nor spasmed, never groaned nor gargled. Them fire-colored curls on his sun-creased neck was all that twitched even a little in the evening wind.

Fallen angel, Mama Ida said, and it was true. Laying so still at our feet, Mister Watson looked like he had fell all the way from Heaven. You never seen a man so dead in all your life.

In Everglade the cisterns were four-five feet below the ground, two above, and the water generally stayed cool and clear, but after the Great Hurricane they were flooded out with brine and mud and after that we had more’n a month of wind and a hard drought. The heavens were gray as old torn rags wrung dry.

On October 24, late afternoon, my brother and I had rowed across to Chokoloskee, hunting fresh water. We were rounding the point west of Smallwood’s store when a loud racketing of guns broke out; it was just dark enough to see the muzzle fire. For a few moments, silence fell over that island like a blow, and out of that silence for just one brief moment rose the voice of a night bird, over and over, so loud and clear I had to wonder if that bird had sung right through the shooting and continued on through the dog and human outcry we heard next.

Mister Watson had run his Warrior right up on shore. His body lay on the bank just off her bow, circled by sniffing dogs. No man stood near him. We went ashore with our water jugs, trying to keep out of the way. Watching from a little distance we could see that while some men were yelling angrily, others were crowing in relief, passing a jug. Some seemed to wander around shocked, avoiding talk with anyone at all; other ones could not stop talking-not listening, you know, just talking, the way crazy people do-and these ones swore it was nobody’s fault, the dead man tried to attack the crowd, kept coming after he was shot to death three or four times over. And all this while, over the excited voices, that night bird came and went, over and over and over, wip, wip, WEE-too !

What I never forgot was the shock of silence after the shock of noise. First thing I heard out of that silence was a woman’s high clear voice- Oh God! Oh God! They are killing Mister Watson! By the time Edna Watson realized what had happened, her husband was dead and on his way to Hell.

Watson’s young family was sunk down on the store steps in a sobbing heap. Poor Edna was plain terrified, my sister said, that this “mob,” having tasted blood, might turn on the dead man’s widow and his little children. I hate to admit this but she weren’t all wrong. Their fear made these men vengeful, and the most dangerous was the very ones who had looked the other way for all them years-the ones claimed Watson never killed a soul, only one-two riffraff on his place that had it coming. Same ones who was so angry he had scared ’em all them years that they pumped bullets into the dead body. These same brave fellers scared his widow so bad that she grabbed her kids and crawled on hands and knees under the store, even cheered and jeered the fine round of her hip when her frock tore as she crawled into the dark, then dirty-joked about Old Man Watson mounting his young mare. If that man laying there had could of heard how them men terrified his wife and little children, he’d of flew straight back from Hell like an avenging angel.

I hollered, tried to shame ’em off like I’d caught ’em peeping at some lady in the bushes, then quit because I weren’t no better. I peeped, too.

Mortified, I called under the store, “Come on out, Mis Edna! Ain’t nothing to be feared of!” (To say something that stupid with my rifle barrel still warm and her dead husband, too? That poor widow must of thought I lost my mind!) All that come back was little squeaks and whimpering. Poor things was huddled in there amongst them putrefied chickens for damn near an hour, laying still as rabbits, though the skeeters was whining something terrible and that stink was sickening, just awful.

My sister done her best to soothe ’em, murmuring down between her storm-warped floorboards like she might talk to a scaredy-cat or something. When finally the last men was gone and she could coax ’em out, them poor souls stunk so bad that the family where they was lodging wouldn’t take ’em back. That stink was only the excuse for what them people was aiming to do anyway. They had a new baby and was scared Cox might come prowling after Edna like he done up in north Florida, was the excuse. Told that little family they weren’t welcome because they had the stench of Hell on ’em. Pushed her stuff at Edna through the door crack. Didn’t want no truck with outcasts, not with armed drunks wandering around, not with Cox still on the loose. And here Wilson Alderman who was supposed to be Ed Watson’s friend was right there alongside of us down at the landing, though of course he would claim he never pulled his trigger. Didn’t want either side to think the less of him, I reckon.

So here it was black moonless night and the mother crazed by her own fear and them broken kids bewailing that queer mound down by the water that had been their daddy.

Mamie took Edna and her kids into her tore-up house. My sister has ugly ideas when it comes to nigras, but she has grit and a big heart. Lots of our Chokoloskee folks are that same way. Mule-head ignorant, suspicious of everyone except their own, but good, tough, honest, God-fearing Americans that lives out a hard poor life and don’t complain.

We never got home to Everglade till bedtime. We told our family all we’d seen and heard, and still they pestered us with questions, trying to figure out what they should feel as their dead friend’s friends. I told ’em what we had been told (the official story, as Dad called it, kind of bitter), how Mr. Watson tried to murder Mr. D. D. House but his damp shells misfired, by which time the posse was already shooting.