Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

The Widow Watson and her children were all packed and ready, but when she came down to the shore, she saw that dark stain, like a shadow, where they let her husband lay all the night before. This upset her badly. Seeing the suspects watching from the Falcon ’s deck, she started to tremble, then fled back to the store. Mrs. Smallwood advised me she would tend to Mrs. Watson and the children and put them on the mail boat in a few days’ time. She was furious. She flew down to the boat and hollered, “Which one of you brave fellers stole his watch?” Nobody answered. Those men were angry, too. Whole coast was angry.

I said quick and hard, to startle them, “I heard there was a gang of boys around the body.” For a second there, nobody said a word. Then one said, “Might could been that Daniels kid took his gold watch. Crockett. One they call ‘Speck.’ ” And another snapped, “Takes a damn fool to say a name when he got no proof.”

Rabbit Key was four miles west of Chokoloskee, on the Gulf, and the Monroe County line passed through it, west and east. Captain Collier sailed out Rabbit Key Pass so I could see just where the grave was. Man named Yeomans sang out, “We run that devil clean out of Lee County, planted him over on the Monroe side!” Charley Johnson crowed, “Wrapped him nice and tight, ready to box and ship!” They gazed away when I asked why they hog-tied a corpse. Then some man muttered that with bound limbs, the body towed better. “Superstitious, that’s why,” Smallwood commented. “Scared that otherwise he might rise up in the night, walk on water back to Chokoloskee.” And why, I asked, had they towed the body in the first place instead of wrapping it in canvas and laying it in the stern? “Treating him like a dead animal,” Smallwood said, “made E. J. seem more guilty and them less.”

Bill House kept his mouth shut till he’d thought that over. Then he said, “Ted? How come you claim to know how we was feeling when you don’t hardly know how you felt yourself?” And Smallwood said, “You and me ain’t going to settle that one, Bill. Not today and not tomorrow. Maybe never.”

Smallwood took his hat off as the Falcon passed the grave, but the others only stared away till that lone mangrove fell astern, and even then, they stayed quiet a good while, looking out to sea.

On the voyage north, one man drawed near while I pissed over the rail, tried to whisper away his own role in the killing. Pled self-defense asking a lawman to believe that Mr. Watson had made a felonious assault on twenty or more armed men. (Turned out all twenty had fired at the exact same instant, making it impossible to say who fired first.) Anyway, this feller recollected that he had missed the victim on purpose, out of his great respect for human life.

By now, the rest had learned what he was up to and were crowding around to make their own excuses. Bill House was the only man who did not try to explain and the only one, as I had already guessed, who would give me trouble.

These men weren’t killers. They were honest settlers, fishermen and farmers, most had wives and children; they had built a schoolhouse (lost in the storm) and sent away for a teacher and they held prayer meetings whenever they could find a circuit preacher. Yet when twenty men slay one, some responsibility must be taken. Were they protecting somebody? Maybe House’s tough old daddy? Even if they’d been telling us the truth, it wasn’t the whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth a court of justice would demand. That truth would have to be scared out of them when they were under oath at a court hearing.

Thinking about that night at Marco when the victim sat across from me at this very same table, I was already impatient with their story. I can’t say I made friends with Mr. Watson but I had to respect him. I had wanted to believe him. Maybe that’s why I tended to believe he had killed Cox after all, just as he’d said.

• • •

Bill House kept himself apart, in heavy humor. When I told him all he had to do was give his best recollection of the shooting, give an affidavit, he said he disliked being arrested like a criminal when no crime had been committed. Like these men said, they all fired in self-defense. Was I questioning their word?

“Just doing my job,” I said. “Did Mr. Watson inflict injury on any man before you killed him?”

The men swapped quick uneasy glances. Jaycox pretended to make a note. House glared straight past me.

The Falcon sailed north, putting in for water at Caxambas. But Caxambas had no water to spare: not a drop of rain, folks told us, in the fortnight since the storm, and no sun either. In this dead gray weather, that settlement looked like broken pieces of some godforsaken outpost that the hurricane had flung onto this coast, ripping off the clam factory roof, smashing in the store; kids were diving for canned food in the channel. These refugee families huddled every night in Mrs. Barfield’s lodging house, known as the Barfield Heights Hotel because it sat high on the big Indian mound here at south Marco.

A small wild woman from Pavilion Key led a young girl down to the dock to screech, “Lookit these here yeller dogs that massacreed your daddy! Took this whole pack to pull one good man down!” She wore her hair loose like she’d just come from bed, though this was considered trashy and her child seemed to know it. Maybe ten years old and skinny, the child had fair thin hair and a scared face that looked worried about what might become of her, while the woman tossed that hair around and cussed out my witnesses so vilely that I had to warn her against causing a drunken disturbance. “A lady has prescribed herself a draft of spirits for a broken heart,” she wailed. “Is that a sin?”

All the men knew that Tant Jenkins’s sister had lost her infant son at Pavilion Key during the storm. The woman hollered that her baby had been taken by the hand of the Almighty so Charley Johnson hollered back (as most of the men laughed) that she sure was right because her baby was the spawn of that bloody-handed devil who had brought the Almighty’s wrath down on this coast back in the first place. “The child of deviltry and mortal sin”-that’s what Mr. Johnson called that little perished boy.

• • •

At Fort Myers, I led the men straight to the courthouse, where Eddie Watson, dropping papers at the sight of his father’s slayers, claimed he’d stayed late to finish up some work. One man knew him by sight and the rest learned in a hurry who he was. Bill House exclaimed, “For Chrissake, Sheriff, how about giving that young feller the day off?” I didn’t like his tone but he was right. I told Eddie he could go, I’d find someone else to record the depositions. Nosir, Eddie answered loudly, he weren’t brought up to cut and run from a gang of lynchers: this was his job as deputy court clerk of Lee County and he aimed to do it. He took up his pad and sat himself stiff as a stick in the clerk’s chair as I struggled to control my aggravation.

In his reddish looks, Eddie took after his daddy, with the same kind of husky mulishness about him; what was missing was the fire in his color. He put me in mind of a strong tree dead at the heart.

Bill House nodded at Eddie before beginning his account, which would turn out to be the official Chokoloskee version of the Death of Watson; having little to add, the others mainly testified that they agreed. Being uneasy around Watson’s son, some frowned real fierce to justify what they had done while others only looked a little sad, as if to hint that their experience of shedding blood might have wounded them somewhat worse than it had his father. One or two tried a friendly smile, to show that all that unpleasantness was in the past or anyway nothing personal. Eddie ignored them. That young feller took it all down in his notebook, he could have been reporting the church supper. When the men were finished, he rapped the notebook down and slapped it shut, to show his contempt for the false witness of a lynch mob.