Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

By her own account, Nell had wept for weeks after her family left Chatham, so heartsick had she been for her lost Lucius. A year later, after her mother died, she would confide that Sybil Dyer had sobbed without restraint when the news reached Fort Myers of his father’s death. It seemed that Mr. Edgar Watson had declared his love for his sweet seamstress, and yes! she, Sybil, had loved him in return! Mr. Edgar Watson had the most glorious blue eyes she ever saw! Recounting this, Nell laughed affectionately at her simple-hearted parent. And there was more. Increasingly over the years, despite his black hair and pasty skin, her brother Watt had reminded Fred Dyer of E. J. Watson, until finally he’d confronted his wife on the evidence of her unseemly grief at the time of Watson’s death. Accusing him of being drunk, she expressed hurt and astonishment that her husband dared abuse her after all his well-known infidelities.

Nonetheless, his suspicions rose from day to day, and his voice, too, and in the end, driven to distraction by his hounding, her mother abruptly conceded, out of her outrage and exhaustion, that in the early nineties, a stranger named Watson, arriving in Fort Myers after a journey on horseback to southern Florida from Arkansas by way of South Carolina, might have taken advantage of an unwary young woman kneeling before him while painstakingly engaged in taking pant leg measurements for his new suit.

Nell parodied the parental exchange to make it less embarrassing to relate: her ear for her parents’ accents was so good that he had to struggle not to laugh aloud at this distressing tale-

“Weren’t that right before you signed me up to marry, woman? My lands, Frederick, Mr. Dyer dear, I suppose it was! And weren’t that why you was in such a rush after tellin me no for close onto a year? Well, I don’t think -Never mind thinkin! Answer me! Weren’t that damned kid already in the oven when we wed? I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Frederick- Jesus Christ! You got the guts to stand there and admit this? My lands, Mr. Dyer! No need to raise your fist and scare these children -Answer me!”

It was finally agreed that E. J. Watson might have been Watt’s parent and furthermore that he and Sybil had renewed acquaintance, so to speak, after Mr. Watson, hearing that her husband was out of work, offered employment at Chatham Bend a few years later. Was it her fault that one afternoon when Frederick was absent as usual and her children off in the skiff somewhere with Lucius, Mr. Watson had forced his way into Mr. Dyer’s cabin-

“Forced his way into Dyer’s wife, ain’t that it?” Dyer raged. “How come you never told your own damn husband you was raped?!” And she cried out, “For the same reason you didn’t want to know! You would have had to act and he might have killed you! “

In the end, unconsoled by moonshine, her father had collapsed across the table, weeping in shame and rage, unable to decide whether his wife had confessed the truth or was exacting some perverse revenge for all his gadding. With no strong brain but keen instincts for survival, Sybil had emerged as the injured party: indeed, she had transcended the entire matter, saying, “Mr. Dyer, let us never speak of this again.”

“My God,” Lucius said in awe.

For some months, Nell’s parents chewed on their hard situation. But one day her father grew so incensed at the sight of surly Watt that he drove him barefoot from the cabin, throwing his boots after him. Discovering this too late to call Walt back, her mother, whose dressmaking paid the rent, ordered her husband to pack up and be gone. He departed penniless, fatally bitter, and was not invited to return. In the years since, Nell’s unfortunate father would swallow his pride down with his liquor and rant about his wife’s affair in the saloons: “No, no, boys, weren’t no damn rape about it! If it were rape like the way she claimed, how come she never used the gun he give her to run him off when he was drinkin? How come that bitch give her bastrid kid that name? Nosir, boys, I would of kilt that sonofabitch if them Chuckerluskee fellers hadn’t beat me to it!”

It was true that in his all-embracing way, Papa had been courtly with the ladies, unusually attentive and considerate, and that he had bought Sybil that small, silver revolver as a protection against his drunken self, though of course this gesture had been drunken, too. But in a man so wrong-headed when rampant, love alone might not have deterred him from a tender rape. When Ed Watson drank, the whole coast agreed, he was a buccaneer and an unholy terror. At the palm-thatch whore shack on Black Betsy Key, south of Flamingo, he’d once declaimed in festive spirit, “When I fuck ’em, they stay fucked!” Their “Jack” took all he wanted when he wanted and the way he wanted, too, his Caxambas ladies would attest, with shy smiles that looked oddly askew.

Lucius’s river walk with the Dyer girl had been observed, Eddie complained that evening, creating gossip that their family could ill afford at such a time. “Oh Lord, Eddie! She’s a schoolgirl! Scarcely fourteen!” Lucius was offended, knowing that Eddie was snobbish about Nell because her mother was the seamstress and the father a disintegrating drunk and the brother Watt a runaway to God knows where. Carrie would agree, he knew, that Eddie was exaggerating, but she only snapped crossly with a glance at Walter, “At fourteen I’d been married for a year.”

One day in 1917, Lucius vanished without warning. Fifteen months would pass before his family learned that he had enlisted in the Army and gone off to the Great War in Europe. He wrote to no one, not his sister, not his lovelorn Nell.

Carrie Langford invited Nell to tea at the Royal Palm Yacht Club. “He was always our best hope for this family,” Carrie mourned, “and now we’ve lost him.” Very upset, she commanded Nell to banish any notion of a future with a man who could only be counted on to hurt the ones who loved him most. “You’ve lost him, too, so accept that, girl, and get on with your life. Because if that fool doesn’t get himself shot over in France, he’ll find some way to get the job done here at home, even if he has to shoot himself to do it.” She took Nell in her arms. “I don’t mean that, sweetheart. I say those hard things to shield myself, in case.”

Only Lucius despised Lucius, Nell observed: the contempt he saw in the eyes of others was only the reflection of his poor opinion of himself.

As a practiced hunter and a dead-eye shot, Private L. H. Watson had been proud at first to be made a sniper, only to discover once in combat that he detested what he had to do. In growing alarm, he observed himself moving like a wind-up toy through the mechanical routine of checking his weapon and its ammunition, selecting vantage points, aligning sights, and firing at some distant figure or more often just the head-a pop-up soldier silhouette, never seen up close as a human being. It became routine, a target practice, so long as he closed down thought, grew numb, so long as he shut off all discussion of it with other soldiers; he hid his mind behind an iron wall of cold and mechanical inhumanity, accepting his assignment as his patriotic duty. In the grinding attrition of trench warfare, executing anonymous “enemies” became a job as mundane as any other, and that illusion, for a time, sheltered his sanity.

One early morning close to the front lines, Private Watson became separated from his patrol when the small group fanned out under fire and was overtaken by a heavy winter fog. In this no man’s land, moving in any direction might be fatal: he crouched down in a gully, in hopes that the drifting fog might lift enough to reveal the whereabouts of friend or foe and better determine his position.