Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

To honor her wisdom and redeem my subject’s essential humanity is the task before me.

Lucius Watson rose onto one elbow, ransacking torn dreams for the hard noise that had awakened him-that rattling bang of an old auto striking a pothole in the sandy track through the slash pine wood north of the salt creek. Who could that be? He had no neighbor on Caxambas Creek nor even a mailbox on the old road to Marco, a half mile away, that might betray his whereabouts.

A dry mouth and stiff brain punished him for last night’s whiskey. Licking his lips and squinching his nose to bring life back to his numb skin, he rose softly and peered out through the screen, certain that some vehicle had come in from the paved road and eased to a stop inside the wood edge where the track emerged onto the marsh-the point from where the black hulk of his old cane barge, locked in the shining mud of the ebbed tide, would first loom into the view of whoever had come down along the creek on midnight business.

For a time he saw nothing, heard nothing, only the small cries of earth that formed within the ringing of the great night silence. Tree frogs shrilled from the freshwater slough on the far side of the road, in counterpoint to the relentless nightsong- wip-wip-WEE-too -from the whiskery gape of the gray-brown mothlike bird half hidden by lichens on a dead limb at the swamp edge, cryptic and still as something decomposing.

The Gulf moon carved the pale track and black trees. An intruder would make the last part of his approach on foot- there! A shape had detached itself from the tree shadows. An Indian. How he knew this he could not have said. The figure paused to look and listen then came on again, walking the sand track’s mane of grass in order to leave no sign.

Lucius yanked pants and shirt onto his bony frame. Lifting the shotgun from its rack, he cracked the cabin door, wondering briefly (as he often did) why he would isolate himself way to hell and gone out on this salt creek without neighbor or telephone, or plumbing or electricity, for that matter. Yet simplicity contented him, simplicity was what he needed, as another might crave salt. A cracked cistern and a leaning outhouse near the burned-down shack on shore, a small woodstove and a storm lantern with asbestos filament. Once in a fortnight, he retrieved his negligible mail at Collier’s Marco Store, bought a few stores, then took a meal with a few speakeasy whiskeys at Rusty’s Roadhouse.

Approaching the sheds, the intruder’s silhouette had stopped and turned in a slow half circle, sifting night sounds like an owl before passing behind the outhouse and old boat hull and pausing again at the foot of the spindly walkway over the salt grass. Then he came along the walkway, gliding out over the bog, in silhouette on the cold shine of moonlit mud. Whatever he carried on one arm was glinting.

Breaking the shotgun, Lucius dropped two buckshot loads into the chambers, snapped it to. Though the click of steel was perhaps thirty yards away, the Indian stopped short, his free hand rising in slow supplication. He stared at the black crack of the opened door. Very slowly then, he bent his knees and set his burden down on the split slats with a certain ceremony, as if it were fragile or sacred. When he straightened, his hands were held out to the side, pocked face expressionless. “Rural free delivery,” he told the door crack, trying a smile.

Under the moon, the canister appeared to pulse. Widening the doorway with his shotgun barrels, Lucius stepped outside. He pointed toward the shore. “Move,” he said. “Take that thing with you.”

“It ain’t a bomb or nothin,” the Indian murmured. He was a big man, round-shouldered and short-legged and small-buttocked, long black hair bound in a braid by a red wind band: he wore a candy-striped Seminole blouse, old pants and sandals, with a beaded belt slung below the curve of a hard belly. When the white man only motioned with the gun, he bent and retrieved the canister in one smooth motion and, as Lucius followed, returned over the walkway to dry land. There he squatted on his hunkers on the track, arms loose across his knees. Asked if he had come alone, he nodded. He identified himself as Tommie Jimmie, spiritual leader of the Shark River Mikasuki.

Where the track entered the woods, in the night shadow of the trees, Lucius could barely make out an ancient truck. “You came halfway across the Glades in that old junker to deliver this-”

“Burial urn. White feller sent it. Seen your notice in the paper about Bloody Watson.”

“Mr. E. J. Watson? Planter Watson? That what you meant to say?”

“Okay by me.” The big man shrugged. “Indin people down around Shark River, they always thought a lot of Mister Ed. Give ’em coffee, y’know, somethin to eat, when they come up along the rivers. Good moonshine, too. Killed some white folks and some black ones, what we heard, but he never killed no red ones, not so’s you’d notice.”

Lucius had to laugh, which hurt his head. Feeling stupid clutching the gun, he pointed its barrels at the ground. “This white feller,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Went by the name of Collins when he first showed up couple years back. Course that don’t mean nothin. Them people out at Gator Hook don’t hold so much with rightful names. They call him Chicken on account of he’s so scrawny.”

“So Chicken said, ‘See that Lucius Watson gets this burial urn on the stroke of midnight.’ ”

The Indian nodded. “Stroke of midnight,” he assented slyly. “Them was his very words.”

The urn was a cheap one, ornamented with rude brassy angels. When Lucius stooped to pick it up, the sudden motion smote his temples. “Dammit! You come sneaking in here in the middle of the night-”

“Long way from Shark River.” Tommie Jimmie yawned. “Guess I’ll be gettin along.” Black eyes fastened on the gun, he made a move to rise, thought better of it. “Oh Lord,” Lucius said. He broke the gun and ejected the shells, which he stuffed into his pocket. “Who’s in that thing? How come this Collins didn’t bring it here himself?”

“Down sick. Feller name of Mud come by my camp, told me Chicken wanted to see me cause I had a truck. Claimed Chicken been rottin in his bedroll goin on three days. So I went over there and Chicken told me where you was livin at. Said, ‘This here urn belongs to Lucius Watson, cause they’s bones in there that used to be his brother.’ ”

Lucius sank to his knees in the white sand, laying the shotgun on the grass. He lifted the urn and turned it carefully in both hands as the tears came. To clear his head, he took deep breaths of the night air with its heavy bog smell of low tide. He set the urn down again and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Whoever he was, this Chicken Collins must know what had happened to Rob Watson, being custodian of his remains before his siblings even knew that Rob was dead.

Tommie Jimmie rose, easy as smoke. “Gator Hook,” he said, and went away down the white road. At the wood edge, he looked back but did not wave. Then he vanished into the dark wall, leaving the white man alone with the brass urn under the dying moon.

Perhaps a month after Tommie Jimmie’s visit, Lucius drove his Model T onto the new Tampa-Miami Trail, which forged east across empty savanna and the strands of giant cypress to the vast shallow marshes that the Indians knew as Pa-hay-okee, Grassy Waters. In the Seminole Wars, the Mikasuki had crossed these marshes to isolated hardwood hammocks where tropical forest hid their palm-thatch villages and gardens from the soldiers. Only in this last decade had the sparkling expanses been torn and muddied by steam shovels and drag lines, until wild human inhabitants, like its bears and panthers, could scarcely be imagined anymore. Yet the hidden dangers that had sapped the will of the U.S. Army were still present, Lucius thought with satisfaction, the tall scythes of toothed sawgrass, the quicksand and muck pools and solution holes in the jagged limestone of the ancient sea floor concealed beneath the silt that had torn the soldier boots to pieces: the biting swarms, the leeches and squat moccasins, opening white mouths like deathly blossoms, the coral snakes, the Florida diamondbacks, greatest of all rattlesnakes, whispering across the dry leaves on the hammocks.