Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“Well, he sure tried,” I said.

Tippins turned toward me slow, looked kind of ironical-that’s a lawman’s habit-to let me know he aimed to keep his eye on me. “He sure tried ?” Him and his sidekick exchanged that lawman look that’s supposed to mean something but don’t, cause they don’t know nothing. “Your name House? I heard you was the ringleader.”

“We never had no ringleader. No leader, neither.”

“How come you’re so het up, Mr. House? Ashamed of something?”

“You’re the one looks het up, Sheriff. I ain’t got one damned thing to be ashamed about.”

“I reckon we’ll see about that, won’t we?” said the other lawman. They were trying to make me mad so I’d bust out with something. I was mad lawman because even my own sister had announced how we ought to be ashamed. Said she knew Ed Watson for what he was and never said no different but hated “the way you men licked his boots, then turned on him and shot him like a dog.”

We wasn’t bootlickers, not by no means. We was just ordinary fellers that never knew how to handle this wild hombre till we had him laying face down in the dirt. If ever a man brought perdition on himself, it was Ed Watson, but some way we was blamed for doing exactly what those blamers wanted done. Now that we had him good and dead, some that took part was growing nervous about wiping out a neighbor. Trouble was, he never fit their idea of a outlaw-shifty, dirty, knife scars or pocked skin, maybe an eye patch or a missing ear. Ed Watson never looked much like a criminal. Men might speak of them ice-blue eyes in their dark ring that could fix a feller in his tracks, but them blue eyes was part of his good looks, the women said. Them ones that was suddenly upset by how he died, they got to saying that all the trouble come from rumor and misunderstanding, that the killings at the Watson place only started when Cox come, that it was Cox who give Watson his bad name. That just ain’t true. His troubles started back in the old century.

One thing for sure, folks was very nervous that Leslie Cox might be somewhere on this coast. Chatham Bend is on a big swamp island between rivers and Cox couldn’t swim. And there was no one left to come by and take Cox off because the hurricane had cleaned them islands out. So unless Watson killed him, which nobody believed, Cox was still there. Only thing was, to believe that, you had to believe he set there on the Bend for a good ten days, all through that storm, until Watson finally showed up. And you had to explain what happened then.

A few of us guided the lawmen down to Chatham, found no sign of him. That started a new argument: was Cox watching us from hiding? Or had the man we killed the day before told us the truth?

Canefield, sugar works, boathouse and sheds, good dock, big cistern, strong white-painted house up on its mound-nothing anywheres in the Ten Thousand Islands come close to the Watson place before that storm. His fine plantation was what Ed Watson had to show at the end of his hard road. But now all them outbuildins was gone and his fine house stunk, black blood and flies.

We wasted half an afternoon trying to catch his old roan horse, which wore no halter. That wild-eyed critter might be running down there yet.

Before leaving, the Falcon took aboard four thousand gallons of cane syrup. Four thousand gallons! Lord! The hot hard hours that man must of worked, raking the shell out of forty acres of hard mound in the meanest kind of snake-crawling scrub jungle. Forty acres!

Tippins informed us we were going to Fort Myers for a court hearing. The Falcon picked up the other men at Chok before heading north. Edna Watson would not travel with us. My sister glared at us like we was convicted felons, boarding that ship in chains.

No one ever forgot the Great Hurricane of October 1910, not around here. Everything not torn away was salt-soaked and rotted, trees down everywhere and marly muck. It seemed like our world would never come clean again, nor our souls either. Ted removed most of our drowned chickens but that reek of death came up through the floor a month or more before we could get the store put back together and he had time to crawl back under there, rake out the last of ’em. Mama Ida called it the sulphur stench of Satan coming up from everlasting Hell where you-know-who was suffering the torments of the damned this very minute, her expression said.

Because he had stayed out of it, my Ted was one of the few men with no cause to feel ashamed. Course Daddy and the boys felt no shame either, which explains the hard feelings in our families that’s still festering today.

On October 25th, Frank Tippins finally showed up with the Monroe sheriff. The men informed ’em that the law had come too late. Where they ain’t no law, you got to make your own -I’ll bet those sheriffs heard that one a few times! But Tippins chose to see that as a confession and issued a summons to Lee County Court for the whole darned bunch, Daddy included.

I’d heard a whisper that the feller who shot first was the same man whose bullet killed Ed Watson. I was frightened it was Bill or Daddy. When I asked my brother about this, he just shook his head. “Well, Bill,” I said, “what does that darned headshake tell me, yes or no?” And he said, “Mamie, there ain’t no way to explain. It ain’t a matter of yes or no so just forget about it.”

While those men told how E. J. Watson died, I only grunted, shifting my chaw. Something was missing in their story, I informed them after I had spat; we would have to take them all to court, procure some depositions under oath for a grand jury hearing. Their faces closed. They had agreed on their story, I saw that, and the law could take it or leave it.

Sheriff Clem Jaycox from Key West, taking the hint, whistled in disgust and sucked his teeth. Never mind if Watson had it coming or he didn’t, there was murder perpetated on the shores of Monroe County, Jaycox advised ’em, so someone had to pay. Mr. C. Boggess explained in a big hurry that while he himself had took no part, he could not find it in his heart to blame his neighbors for what they had to perpetate in self-defense. All the men nodded, all but Smallwood, who only shook his head and turned away.

At Chatham Bend we found no sign of Cox nor the dead squaw that nigger had reported. The men suggested that her people must have come and cut her down and taken her away. But how did those Injuns learn that she was dead? Had that nigger lied about that squaw, and if so, why? And if he lied about the squaw, what about Cox? All we had there was that nigger’s story.

On the way back north, we took the witnesses aboard. Though Ted Smallwood disapproved of what they did, these men wanted the postmaster to come to court to testify to their God-fearing characters, him being the closest thing they had to a federal officer. Smallwood had an awful mess to clean out under his store but agreed to go. “All right, Bill?” he asked his brother-in-law, kind of sardonic. The man shrugged. “Up to you,” he said. I had my eye on this House feller, who was short-spoken that day with almost everybody.

House’s daddy, Mr. D. D. House, stood arms folded on his chest, close to the boiling point. The men had made Bill House their spokesman, and House announced he would refuse to testify if the law dragged an old man away like a damn criminal that throughout his life had been too honest for his own good. If his dad was left out of it and his young brothers, too, why, he would give all the testimony we needed. When I agreed, his brothers squawked-they were all slicked up, with shoes on, set to go-but the old man turned and marched ’em home, never looked back.