Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

One day coming and going they collided clumsily in his doorway, and his hand, bearing a paper, brushed an erect nipple. Like a demon’s wand, the touch unleashed them; they embraced and kissed with a common moan of joy and consternation. Sarah gasped, “Oh my God!” and fled. Without thought, he rushed after her, calling her name not once but twice before seeing Owen, who was just docking his boat. Lucius halted abruptly and abruptly waved; Owen paused a moment, staring after the disappearing Sarah before waving back.

Called Owen, “She forget her drawers? Or ain’t she wearin any?”

He was joking, of course. Owen enjoyed wryly outrageous jokes. But also he was not joking, and Lucius’s laugh, to his own ears, rang hollow and deceitful. It was time to leave Lost Man’s Beach. His disloyalty to Owen was no longer to be borne and his Island life was no longer enough and he missed his studies and library research. Excited by fresh ideas about how to shape the unfinished history and the roughed-out biography, he had lawman started a new set of notes.

Months before, his common-law kinfolk of the Daniels-Jenkins clan had offered him the use of a small shack built on the deck of an old cane barge run aground at high water in a tidal creek under the high dunes of Marco Island. Rising behind the prehistoric site known to the old-time Indians as Caxambas, “Place of Wells,” these elevations overlooked the white ribbons of surf where the Gulf Coast curved back toward the southeast at Cape Romaine. The great dunes seemed to him a monument, mysterious and moving, to those seagoing Calusa fatally dispersed by the conquistadores. The Spaniards, too, had come and gone away, and the smugglers and pirates and runaway African slaves, and finally the ancestral farmer-fishermen, the pioneers-precisely the atmosphere he wanted for his work.

Like Everglade, eight miles to the southeast through winding island channels, the small settlement on Caxambas Creek was isolated at the far end of a rough track only suitable for large-wheeled oxcarts and all but unnavigable in most seasons by the tin-can autos honking south like geese in the great Florida Land Boom of the Twenties. Acquiring most of Marco Is-land, developers had moved or destroyed the small cabins at Caxambas and burned down the clam cannery while they were at it, leaving the concrete floor to crack in the hot sun, sprouting hard weeds. Even the old store had been boarded up, the better to speed the last inhabitants on their way. The master plan-to level the dunes and clear the scrubby sabal palm and gumbo-limbo to make way for hotels, winter homes, and artificial lawns-would be shelved for decades by the Great Depression, already on the wind.

Lucius struggled to support himself as a fishing and hunting guide for sportsmen lodged in a new resort at Marco, working on his manuscripts in stormy weather. The following year, dead broke and in debt, he sold his boat and accepted an assistant teacher’s post in the history department at the university. There he resumed his graduate studies and completed his doctoral thesis, A History of Southwest Florida and the Everglades Frontier. To his surprise, it was very well received and the university press selected it for publication. For the time being, he kept secret his greater ambition to complete and publish The Undiscovered Country, his objective biography of the pioneer sugarcane planter E. J. Watson.

Between terms at the university, Lucius returned to his barge shack at Caxambas. His friend Hoad Storter, who now lived not far away at Naples and had turned up in Caxambas on a visit, had been delighted by his friend’s decision to leave Lost Man’s and return to his unfinished books, including the Watson biography, which Hoad thought would fulfill his responsibilities to his father and set his heart at rest in a way that darned old posse list could never do. Hoad also thought that E. J. Watson was destined to become famous. Some ten years earlier, he’d been seining mullet with his brother-in-law in the little bays inside the mouth of Chatham River. One day, short of water, they went upriver to the Bend. “The cane fields were all overgrown, looked rough and shaggy, but new sprouts were volunteering through the tangle. We grubbed ’em out, stacked ’em on deck, ran ’em north to the Calusa Hatchee and on up east to Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven, the only camp on Okeechobee at that time. Those cuttings were the start of this whole new sugar industry, did you know that, Lucius?” Hoad shook his head. “After all his hard years, your dad’s fine cane will make fortunes for other men. ‘Great waste and a pity’ as Cap’n Bembery used to say,”

Lucius nodded. Oh, God, how he wished poor Papa could have stood on those high dikes and enjoyed that view.

On the wings of his published history, Lucius submitted his biography proposal to the university press; his vantage point as Mr. Watson’s son, he said, would not blind him to the true nature of his subject’s character.

This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth.

The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one perpetuated by the Islanders themselves, for as Dickens observed after his visit to this country, “These Americans do love a scoundrel.” Because his informants tend to imagine that the darkest interpretation is the one the writer wishes to hear, the popular accounts (until now, there have been no others) are invariably sensational as well as speculative: the hard facts, not to speak of “truth,” are missing. Also, this “Bloody Watson” material relates only to his final years in southwest Florida; one rarely encounters any reference to South Carolina, where Edgar Artemas Watson passed his boyhood, nor to the years in the Indian Country (always excepting his alleged role in the slaying of Belle Starr), nor even to the Fort White district of Columbia County in north Florida where he farmed in early manhood, married all three of his wives, and spent almost half of the fifty-five years of his life.

In Watson’s youth, the Piedmont hinterlands of South Carolina were little more than frontier wilderness, and to judge from my limited correspondence with the last Watsons in that region, our subject’s branch of a strong Carolina clan is all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, his sister’s family maintains a stern vow of silence about “Uncle Edgar,” and locating the scattered elders who might relinquish scraps of problematic information would probably not repay the journey. Even here in southwest Florida, much local lore has disappeared under the earth of cemeteries.

The biographer’s difficulties are inevitably compounded by the immense false record-“the Watson myth”-as well as by the failure to correct that record on the part of Mr. Watson’s family, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character is surely one reason why a dangerous reputation has expanded so grotesquely since his death. In the absence of family affirmation of that humor and generosity for which Edgar Watson was noted even among those who killed him, he has become a kind of mythic monster. The biographer’s aim is to discover the hard truths and reconstitute E. J. Watson and restore him to humankind as a paleontologist might reconstruct some primordial being known only from a few scattered shards of bone. As his second wife, the former Jane Susan Dyal of Deland, observed to her son Lucius not long before her death in 1901, “Your father frightens them not because he is a monster but because he is a man.”