Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Returning to Fort Myers weak and ill, in a deep pit of melancholy, Lucius went directly to the Langford household to accept responsibility and blame for his disgrace. His sister gasped at his haggard demeanor. “Oh, it’s such a waste!” she mourned: she was not referring to the lost tuition fees, though Lucius heard it that way. Lucius’s morbid clinging to the past, his refusal to grow up, his brother Eddie informed him, were what caused him to drink too much and fail to finish everything he tried.

A minor officer at Walter Langford’s bank, Eddie Watson was already well settled as a married man with children, a churchman and sober citizen who shared most if not all of his brother-in-law’s conservative opinions. Sprawled in an armchair, one leg over the arm, he shook his head over his brother’s chronic folly while deploring his ingratitude to their generous host, whose vision and hard work had paid for that wasted tuition. Embarrassed, Walter frowned judiciously, rapping out his pipe. Whether he frowned over the waste of money or the waste of Lucius’s education or in simple deference to the onset of his evening haze, brought on by whiskey, was not clear, but that frown intensified Lucius’s regret that he had accepted family assistance in the first place.

Because he’d never lived in Fort Myers long enough to make good friends and had not felt much like making any after his father’s death, Lucius became a loner. Absurd as it seemed even to him, a young girl, Nell Dyer, had become his only confidante, hearing him out on those rare occasions when he felt like ranting and encouraging him to eat something when he felt well enough.

Lucius had first laid eyes on Nell in early 1903, not long after his father, passing through Fort Myers on his flight north, hired her parents to manage Chatham in his absence. Fred Dyer was handsome, black curly locks and wiry, with too much energy for his own good. Though acting as foreman, he worked mostly as a carpenter, building a new cistern and the boat shed and the small cabin for his family a hundred yards downriver that a few years later would be occupied by Miss Hannah Smith and the hog fancier Green Waller. Fred’s wife was Sybil and they had two children, a secretive, sullen ten-year-old named Watt, or “Wattie,” who lived with relatives in Fort Myers, disliked Chatham and only visited on school holidays, and a sprightly five-year-old named Nell whose bowl haircut, trimmed high over the ears to deter fleas, was permitted to fountain on top, then fall over her face, half blinding her. Nell wore odd garments sewn by Sybil from checkered flour sacks and toddled around on tubular small legs lacking visible knees.

The occasional clear day with wind was what Sybil called “the Mosquito Sabbath,” when those demons rested and she walked out in the sun and played along the river with her little daughter. Those bugs were God’s Own Malediction, sighed Mis Sybil. Her little girl’s nostrils were black with oily smoke from the kerosene rags burned in the smudge pots, and she had to rig netting to Nell’s bonnet and wrap old newsprint around her legs every time the child went outdoors to the privy: in wet weather, the ink came off the paper and turned her legs a dark bruised blue. Day in, day out, they remained shut up indoors, which in those dark months was damp and stifling, with air so heavy that the lungs grew weary hauling it in. No child was allowed out of doors at night because of bugs or for fear of bears or panthers, not to mention the cottonmouth moccasins that collected on the mound in time of flood. Everyone used chamber pots-“chambers,” the child called them.

In those first years of the new century when his boss was mostly in Columbia County, the new foreman often accompanied Erskine Thompson on the Watson schooner, trading cane syrup, gator hides, and plumes for dry goods, hardware, and materials. According to Erskine, Dyer prowled the cathouses everywhere he went, drinking more than he could handle and running up debts that harmed the Island Syrup Corporation’s reputation. He persisted in these reckless habits even after his employer had returned from northern Florida.

Sybil Dyer made most of their clothes. She was fair-haired, rather delicate, and in E. J. Watson’s fond opinion, “pretty as a primrose.” As a widower, he had been lonely, and around Sybil, this hard-minded man, chuckling and blushing, would turn warm and soft as buttered hominy. In quest of her good opinion, the heretofore godless Papa held Bible readings every Sunday morning, leading his makeshift and indifferent congregation in spirited renditions of “Jesus Loves Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “The Little Brown Church in the Dell.”

As time went on, especially when drinking, Papa would confide in the foreman’s wife the saga of his shadowed childhood and the loss of the family plantation in Clouds Creek, South Carolina. Inevitably his unsophisticated seamstress would conclude that she alone was privy to the heart of Planter Watson, so generous and kind despite his ill repute; doubtless she imagined, like so many, that the love of a good woman could heal his soul and redeem his sinful ways.

Years later, it occurred to Lucius that while Papa might shout disgustedly when his foreman passed out or turned up late on the job, he actually encouraged Dyer’s absences and lapses, the better to remove him from the path of conquest. Even when Fred was present, Papa acted possessive about Sybil and enjoyed teasing her husband, and Dyer had laughed along too loudly because, for all his lip and strut, he was afraid. In his coast travels, the foreman had heard tales concerning the young Key Westers killed at Lost Man’s Key, and in the summer of 1905, when the Audubon warden was murdered at Flamingo, his nerve succumbed to the false rumor that Ed Watson had killed Guy Bradley in a plume dispute. The Dyer family had departed on the next mail boat, and the only one Lucius truly missed was the child Nell.

Except for a brief encounter at his father’s burial, Lucius did not see Nell again for years: she was fourteen by the time he came across her next in a Sunday crowd on the Fort Myers pier. Feeling compelled to turn around, he found her watching him. The girl was still dressed artlessly, almost randomly, with only a slight modification of that haircut (it no longer looked clownish, merely quirky), yet her appearance startled him, like a figure emerged from a dream upon awaking and beheld in sunlight and fresh air for the first time.

Though the day was cloudy, the girl’s face shone like a wild lily in a sunshine between rains. He saw in the first instant that this face had been dear to him forever, she had always touched him, stirring happiness. In that instant, for want of words, he longed to kiss the freshness of her teeth and lips, but since this was unthinkable in public, he teased her about how peculiarly pretty she’d become-“ ‘Peculiar’ is right!” she laughed. Then they fell quiet, searching each other’s gaze, smiling and smiling, until simultaneously they looked down, putting away their delightful secret without a word. At Dancy’s Candy Stand, Mr. Lucius H. Watson treated Miss N. Dyer to the chocolate ice cream that she’d been about to pay for out of her clutched cigar box of old pennies.

They perched together on the pier end, swinging their shoes over the current, recalling Chatham. The tar and rope smells of the splintery dock timbers brought back fine memories of the sailing schooners and the southward voyage on the Gladiator . She offered a turn at licking her ice cream cone. She said, “I have missed you.” In that moment, chocolate mouth and all, the girl struck him as delightful in her Nell-ness, perfect and complete just as she was. In his inexperience, undone by strange emotions, he had not yet recognized first love. The following day when they met again and wandered along the river holding hands, Nell swung their arms up toward the sun as a way of working off her happy tumult and high spirits, summoning up a disgraceful twitch in her companion’s trousers.