Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Lucius received word of Walter Langford’s death too late to reach Fort Myers for the funeral. When he turned up next day at his sister’s house, Carrie assured him she had understood his absence but it was plain she could not quite forgive him. “Nobody seriously expected you,” Eddie said sourly. With customary spite, he informed his younger brother that the president of the First National Bank had died of drink and liver failure, having neglected to provide properly for their sister.

Nell Dyer was present. They greeted and chatted painfully, hurried apart.

While Lucius was absent in Fort Myers, the Warrior was rammed and sunk at Everglade, where she had been tied up at the fish dock. Though shaken, he would not retreat, dreading the lurking danger less than what he saw as a crippled life of cowardice or weakness. The Storter trading post had been enlarged as a new lodge for sportsmen, and Hoad had moved to Naples; it was the Hardens-the last friends he could trust-who finally prevailed on him to leave the Islands; he headed south around Cape Sable to fish out of Flamingo until things cooled down.

Returning to Lost Man’s some months later, Lucius learned that in his absence, a stranger had come looking for him in a rented skiff, having rowed south twenty miles from Everglade. “Feller with straight black hair and a thin beard, spoke short and crusty,” Owen said. “Knew what he was doin in a boat and seemed to know this coast. Got too much sun and his hands was raw, all blistered up, but he was tough, never complained. I said, ‘You off a ship someplace?’ and he said, ‘No, I rowed from Everglade.’ I reckon that was far enough for a man whose hands ain’t callused up from pullin oars. ‘What can we do for ye?’ I said. From the start, we thought he looked some way familiar.

“This feller told us his name was John Tucker. Claimed to be Wally Tucker’s nephew, said he wanted to pay respects where his kinfolks was buried. I took him over to the Key, showed him where we buried ’em that day in 1901. He went all pale and sweaty, could not hide it. When he asked the whereabouts of Lucius Watson, we guessed he had a feud to settle, so I told him that the last we heard, Lucius Watson had left for parts unknown. That stranger give me a hard eye, very dissatisfied and cross. He said, ‘That’s what they told me in Chokoloskee, too.’ And I said, ‘Well, for once they told some truth.’ ”

“From his questions we figured he knew more than he should about the Tuckers, considering there weren’t no witnesses that could have told him,” Sarah said. “Finally it come to us why he looked familiar, beard or no beard. ‘John Tucker’ weren’t nobody else but E. J. Watson’s oldest, that wild Rob that run off to Key West, taking his schooner.”

Owen said, “He never believed our story that you went away. He seemed convinced that Island people, maybe us, might of killed his brother, hid the body in the mangroves. That’s why he left here angry and dissatisfied.”

“I wrapped his blisters in greasy rags before he rowed away, headed back north,” Sarah told Lucius. “Didn’t hardly say thanks.”

While in Flamingo, Lucius had decided to rid himself of his incriminating list. He cursed the hours had he wasted revising and refining it, down to the smallest detail, in his hunger to get closer to some “truth” that might free him from the past. Far from easing the old pain in his heart, its existence had become a burden and reproach, reminding him of the great folly of years wasted in self-exile-years that might have been spent in the company of Nell, raising pretty children, finishing his education and his books.

Though he knew the thing by heart and was sick of looking at it, he could not bring himself to burn so many years of work in a few moments-work that might eventually be used in the biography. To eliminate the risk of loss or discovery, he sent the list to Nell Dyer for safekeeping; in the same packet he included a note for Rob in the hope that his brother might turn up again. But in the course of changing households, Nell would misplace the packet, as she confessed in the same letter that brought word of her impending marriage to the senior Mr. Summerlin. So stunned was Lucius by her abandonment that he scarcely reacted to the news of the lost list.

At Lost Man’s, he resumed a hard sparse life as a commercial fisherman, and over time, the Island men got used to him, as talk died down and the list that nobody had ever seen reverted to vague rumor. Without hope of Nell, however, he had lost heart for Island life, yet had no other. Only an idiot would have assumed, he mourned, that despite his years of folly and neglect, his first love would wait in limbo while he solved his life so that they could travel on together into a golden future, having never aged.

Despite his sorrow over the loss of Nell, Lucius was plagued in this time of loneliness-plagued disgracefully, in his opinion-by a desperate attraction to Owen Harden’s wife. Sarah loved her husband, he felt sure: she was mainly upset because Owen had been eking out poor fishing seasons by working part-time with Crockett Daniels, who had now acquired a local reputation as “the last of the plume hunters”; Speck Daniels shot egrets wherever he could find the scarce and scattered birds and smuggled the plumes to foreign markets by way of Cuba.

Because Lucius had prevailed on Owen to give up plume hunting, Sarah made him her confidante in her campaign to return her husband to a lawful life. Almost daily, she sought his counsel, wandering barefoot down the beach to his bachelor’s shack with fresh fish or spare greens and once a week a small basket of his laundry. She also provided endless anecdotal information on the Island families, all the more useful now that he had resumed bad-weather work on his two books.

By her own account, Sarah had married Owen in rebellion against the prejudice in her own family, in particular those kinsmen on Chokoloskee Bay who made life disagreeable for the Hardens. Sarah’s outspoken disdain of redneck ignorance-“They ain’t just red neck, they are no -neck!”-had stirred a lot of old-time meanness back to the surface, until finally his own family chided Owen for not bridling his wife’s sharp tongue. This had led to quarrels with her husband, confessed Sarah, unrepentant, even gleeful.

Though Sarah made no secret of her admiration for Owen’s educated friend-and certainly no effort to hide her visits-the fact that she turned up mostly in the daytime when her husband was off somewhere in his boat made Lucius uncomfortable: Lucius, not Sarah, was the guilty one because he, not she, hid an impure heart that leapt every time he saw her coming, this slim small-breasted girlish woman, in her thirties now, flaxen hair bound up in braids with deerhide thongs, small brown feet skipping light as fishes in the tide shine at the water’s edge.

Sarah Harden was inquisitive and indiscreet, thin-skinned, scrappy, blunt, yet easily hurt or angered. Her unhappiness about Owen’s associates led her to nag her quiet husband, comparing his prospects as an “outlaw” with those of his educated neighbor down the beach. Owen’s resentment had already seeded vague suspicions and having foreseen this, Lucius tried hard to avoid those moments when through door or window of their cabin he’d glimpse Sarah naked or half-dressed-a crisis that was ever pending, since the unself-conscious Sarah wore little in the humid heat except soft faded overalls gone slack in the front or light cotton smocks with nothing underneath, at least so far as he was able to determine from his unwilling and unstinting study of her curves and shadows. In Sarah’s mind, she had no neighbors, therefore no peepers, only the harmless bachelor a hundred yards away, who in fact had longed to peep on her from the first day she had leaned into his window to ask how his work was going and he saw nestled between the loose blue straps of her overalls those untethered and confiding small brown breasts as warm as fresh-laid eggs.