Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

One morning I’m mending net when I feel something coming. On the riverbank I see my old woman hollering across the wind, her mouth like a black hole, but in a queer shift of light off the river, what I see is not my Mary but a tall bony prophet woman pointing toward the Gulf like she seen a vision in that glaring sky, her scowl half hid under her sunbonnet that looks more like a cowl. Mary Weeks don’t bother to come hunting you, just hollers what she wants from where she’s at. Sometimes I play deaf, pay her no mind, but this day I set down my net needle and went.

A skinny old man has rowed upriver from the Gulf, three miles and more. He is wearing knickers, had a jacket laid across the thwart, looked like a city feller off one of them big steam yachts that been showing up along the Gulf Coast in the winter. Has to row hard against the current, quick jerky little strokes. He rowed strong, too, but by the time he hits the bank, he’s looking pale and peaked. He has thick spectacles that bottle up his wild round eyes, and cheeks so bony that they catch the light, and wet red lips and a thin mustache like a ring around his mouth, and pointy ears the Devil would be proud of.

“How do you are!” he calls, lifting his hat.

“Git off my propitty,” say I, hitching the gun.

“Commaung?” His voice is very sharp and cross, like it’s me who don’t belong on my own land. Takes out a neckerchief and dabs his face, then reaches around for the fancy shotgun he’s got leaning in the bows. He’s only moving it because it’s pointing at my knees, but I never knowed that at the time and couldn’t take no chances, not in them days. “Git the hell back where you come from, Mister.” I hoist my rifle so he’s looking down the barrel to let him know not to try no city tricks.

When he pulls his hand back from his gun, I see he ain’t got all his fingers. “Do not self-excite,” he says. He hops out of his boat, pushes my gun barrel out of his way, and climbs the bank. Seeing my hair and dusty hide, he has mistook me for some kind of half-breed help. “You are vair uppity, my good man,” he says. Hands on hips, he looks around like he’s inspecting his new property, then puts on glasses so’s to study the breed of riffraff he is dealing with-me and the big woman in the doorway of the shack and the boy watching from behind her skirts.

I jab my gun barrel into his back, then wave the barrel toward his boat, and damn if he don’t whip around and wrench that gun away, that’s how quick and strong he is, and crazy. Backs me up, then breaks my gun, picks out my cartridge, tosses it into the river.

Any man would try that trick when the home man has the drop on him has got to be crazy, and this is a feller getting on in years who looks plain puny. Even my Mary ain’t snickering no more and she don’t overlook too many chances. Bein Catholic, she knows a devil when she sees one.

Around about now, young John Owen comes out of the shack lugging my old musket from the War. At six years of age, our youngest boy already knew his business. Not a word, just brings the shooting iron somewhat closer so’s he don’t waste powder, then hoists her up, set to haul back on the trigger. I believe his plan was to shoot this feller, get the story later.

The stranger seen this, too. He forks over my gun in a hurry while Mary runs and grabs her little boy. She don’t care much about me no more, but John Owen is her hope and consolation.

“ Infant shoot visiteur in thees fokink Amerique ?” the stranger yells, pointing at my son. “For why ?” He has come from France to collect bird specimens, he’s hunting egret plumes to make ends meet. Looked like some old specimen hisself, damn if he didn’t-black beady eyes, quills sticking up out of his head, stiff gawky gait-the dry look of a man who has lived too long without a woman, Big Mary said. Looked all set to shit and no mistake. Spent too much time with his feathered friends, I reckon, cause when he got riled, his crest shot up in back, and he screeched as good as them Carolina parrots he was hunting, being very upset to find squatters on a wild river bend that was overgrowed and empty when he passed by here a few years ago. Only last week, he complains, folks at Everglade had told him he could camp at Chatham Bend. “For why nobody knows it you pipple here?”

“They know we’re here.”

He sinks down on a log. “Sacray-doo,” he says. “Holy sheet.”

Because Msyoo Chevelier, as he calls himself, was taking it so hard, I told him he could stay awhile, get to know the place. Never says thanks, just lifts his shoulders, sighs like he wants to die. All the same, we go fetch his gear off a Key West schooner anchored off the river mouth. He is aboard, packed up, and debarked again in about six minutes. The skipper hollers, “When shall we come pick you up?” That rude old man don’t even turn around, that’s how hard he’s pestering me with questions. Don’t wait for answers, neither, just answers himself according to his own ideas all the way upriver.

First time he come to Chatham River, the Frenchman shot the first short-tailed hawk ever collected in North America-something like that. Weren’t much of a claim cause it weren’t much of a hawk-tail too short, I guess. Why he thought that scraggy thing would make him famous I don’t know. He finally seen his Carolina parrots in some freshwater slough way up inland, bright green with red and yeller on the head, but they was shy and he never come up with no specimens.

Them parrots used to be as thick as fleas back in the hammocks, I told him. Us fellers always took a few, out deer hunting. You eat ? Le perroquet? He squawked and slapped his brow. Well, that was a long time ago, I told him, and I ain’t seen one since: somebody told me them pretty birds might of flewed away for good.

“ Sacre Amerique! Keel ever’ foking ting!”

One evening Msyoo Chevelier asks my kids if they would like to help him collect birds, and wild eggs, too. He spells out all the kinds he wants. When he says “swaller-tail hawk,” I smile and say “Tonsabe.” At that he flies right at my face-“Where you hear tonsabe ?” I tell him that is Indin speech for swaller-tail hawk, and he asks real sly, “ Which Indiang?”

“Choctaw,” I says-that’s my mother’s people. He shakes his head; he is grinning like some bad old kind of coon. “ Tonsabe is Calusa, Ree-chard, it ees not?”

He had took me by surprise and my face showed it. That word ain’t Choctaw and it ain’t used by Mikasuki nor Muskogees neither, it come straight down from my Calusa granddaddy, Chief Chekaika, who killed off them white settlers on Indian Key. But Chekaika was a dirty word to white men, so I only shrug, try to look stupid.

He sets down careful on a fish box so we’re knee to knee. “Vair few Calusa words survive,” he says, holding my eye like he wants to read my brain. He’d studied the archives in Seville, Spain, and every big Calusa mound along this coast. Said Calusa warriors in eighteen canoes attacked the first Spaniards, killed Ponce de Leon. Calusas layed low in these rivers to escape the Spanish poxes, which done ’em more harm than all them swords and blunderbusses piled up together. Said Chatham Bend was a Calusa village before Spanish times-that’s why he wanted to dig it up so bad. And somewhere not far from the Bend, well hid from the rivers, there had to be a big burial mound full of sacred objects, built up higher than the village mounds, with white sand canals leading out to open water.

The Frenchman gives me that skull smile of his when I do not answer. “You know where ees it? You tekka me?”