Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

But if Watson was innocent, why did his nigger make up that first story, which could only get both of them in trouble? Was he really so scared of Cox he couldn’t think straight? Or had he concluded that his boss had wanted him killed along with all the others, and seeing no hope anyway, took his revenge?

I had to conclude he told the truth the first time, risking his life to tell it, God knows why. If he hadn’t-if Cannon and his boy had not passed by or if sharks and gators had beat us to the evidence, no one would have ever known the fate of those three people. All we would have had were some more rumors about E. J. Watson.

Those deaths having occurred in Monroe County, I signed my prisoner over to Sheriff Jaycox for transport to Key West. On the dock, with his suspect standing there in front of him, Clem Jaycox summed up his understanding of the situation: “Yep! Confessed to abettin in the butchery of a white woman. Probable rape and left for nude,” he said, putting his X to the release. “No Monroe jury going to stand for that, not from no damn nigger. Don’t hardly seem fair to ask my voters to waste tax money on no trial when we know the verdict ’fore it starts, ain’t that right, Frank?”

“The prisoner is now officially in Monroe custody,” I said. “I reckon you’ll do what Monroe thinks is right.” Clem Jaycox winked at me to show he understood, which I don’t believe he did.

“It’s been a pleasure working with Lee County, Frank,” he said, and darned if he don’t wink at me again!

Hands cuffed behind, the prisoner stood straight, observing us. He refused to sit down on the cargo crates where I had pointed. Jaycox spoke to him real soft and low, hiking his belt: “What you lookin at, nigger boy?” Risking a blow, the man ignored him. I said, “Your last chance, boy. Did Mr. Watson order Cox to kill those folks or didn’t he?”

He regarded me like I was dead or like we all were. A very, very dangerous breed of nigger. I weren’t surprised when news came from Key West that he fell overboard and drowned on the way south. Tried to make a getaway on the high seas, I reckon.

Learning from Eddie that their father’s “gruesome carcass”-Eddie’s words-had been towed out to a sand spit on the Gulf and thrown into a pit without a box, Carrie Langford came over to the courthouse to inquire.

When she busted out in tears about her Papa’s lonesome fate, I took her by her nice soft shoulders, gave her a quick family kind of hug-first time I ever even touched her. I told her I’d have his remains recovered and brought to Fort Myers for reburial, if she wished, and go along to make sure all was done with respect.

I took the coroner along. Jim Cole wanted to know why, since nobody had asked for an autopsy. “That’s a sleeping dog we might as well let lie,” Cole said. Everyone wanted to let him lay, even the coroner. There were too many rotted corpses in his line of work, Doc Henderson complained. Doc finally admitted he was leery of the dead Ed Watson glaring up at him out of a hole.

“They laid him in face down,” I assured him.

When I told Lucius, “You’re not going, son, and that is that,” he followed us to Ireland’s Dock, came up behind as silent as my shadow. This quiet in Ed Watson’s boy was unsettling to certain people, and so was his determination, which was not what you expected from the look of him. Lucius favored his late mother, very gentle in his ways. That slim young feller could do handsprings in the courtroom and you’d hardly notice while Eddie could peek through the back window and you’d feel his weight all over the damn building. “You’re not going,” I repeated. “One day you’ll thank me.” Lucius doffed his hat politely as he stepped aboard.

At the courthouse the day before, Lucius had arrived too late to protest the family decision not to prosecute, which his brother and sister had approved. He demanded an explanation: was it true that his father’s confessed killers had been let off? Still angry about the so-called “posse,” I said, “Better take it up with your family, son.” Eddie was defensive and aggressive, refusing to show him Bill House’s deposition or even the witness list on the grounds that it was “confidential evidence.”

Since their participation in his father’s death had not been contested by the perpetrators, Lucius insisted that these men go to trial. Though he was furious, intense, he never raised his voice. And he was right, of course. House and the others might have told the truth but it wasn’t the whole truth and I knew it.

• • •

Planter Watson lay beneath two crossways slabs of coral that the hurricane had broken from some reef and heaved ashore. The sight and stench brought a great gasp and moan from Doc’s two diggers, who backed away. Sure enough, he lay face down, ankles bound tight. The gray flesh around the bindings was so swollen that it almost covered over the rough hemp.

I shivered the hard shiver of a horse, took a deep breath, then kneeled by the pit with a short length of rope and hitched it to those bindings; the raw thing was hoisted from the hole and swung onto a canvas tarp brought by the coroner. Within moments, flies mysteriously appeared and small sand fleas hopped all over the body. Doc Henderson, a trim and silver man, stepped forward, saying to Lucius, “Sure you’re ready for this, son?” His voice was muffled by the gauze over his face.

Doc cut the last rags off the body, which was crusted with blood-black sand. He paused to rig a sort of loincloth-very professional, I thought, since there was no way this thing could ever be made decent. His small knife flashed in the white sun and the first lead slug thumped into his coffee can.

When the body was rolled over on its back, Lucius looked away, nose in his neckerchief. I stared at the black-and-blue face. The tanned neck and arms were savagely mutilated, the dead-white farmer’s body already blue-gray. Doc’s hands jittered and he coughed. “Oh Lordy! Lordy!”

Lucius pitched toward the water, puked, and returned very pale. I moved up close behind in case he fainted. I said sharply, “Had enough, boy? Seen what you came to see?”

He began to shake. I took him by the shoulders, spun him, and slapped him three times hard across the face, shouting with each slap, Forget it! Then I turned him again and pushed him back toward the boat. On that still shore, emerald reflections shimmered on the white paint of the hull and gulls yawped mournfully in the smoky autumn sunlight of the last day in that long doomed October. Another Monday.

An hour passed, its silence broken only by those small dull thumps as thirty-three slugs, one by one, clunked into the coffee can. Doc never bothered about buckshot.

Lucius was back. He cleared his throat. “He’s been cut enough,” he said. Doc’s ears turned red and his hands stopped but he did not look up. “I ain’t done,” he said. “They’s more there yet.”

“Your coffee can is full,” said Lucius. “That’s enough.”

I advised the coroner that Lee County was satisfied that the proximate cause of death had been determined. Doc snickered, then reproved himself with a doleful cough like a dog sicking up a piece of bone. “I kind of think of this,” he said, reluctant to say good-bye, “as my own patient.”

“This!” Lucius mourned.

“Doc,” I said. “It’s time to quit.” We all backed off a ways to get a breath. The coroner wiped his thin knives on his cloth. “I heard they fill ’em full of lead out West but I never thought I’d see that in south Florida,” he said.

The diggers wrapped rags around their hands before touching the cadaver, and no amount of threats and shouting stopped their moans and prayers and yelps and nigger racket while they rassled the carcass into Doc’s pine box. Well, you couldn’t blame ’em.