Shadow Country (3 page)

BOOK ONE

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

—J
ACOB
R
IIS

PROLOGUE: OCTOBER 24, 1910

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.

In the wake of hurricane, the coast lies broken, stunned. Day after day, a brooding wind nags at the mangroves, hurrying the unruly tides that hunt through the flooded islands and dark labyrinthine creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands. Brown spume and matted salt grass, driftwood; a far gray sun picks up dead glints from the windrows of rotted mullet at highwater line.

From the small settlement on the Indian shell mound called Chokoloskee, a baleful sky out toward the Gulf looks ragged as a ghost, unsettled, wandering. The sky is low, withholding rain. Vultures on black-fingered wings tilt back and forth over the broken trees. At the channel edge, where docks and pilings, stove-in boats, uprooted shacks litter the shore, odd pieces torn away from their old places hang askew, strained from the flood by mangrove limbs twisted down into the tide. Thatched roofs are spun onto their poles like old straw brooms; sheds and cabins sag. In the dank air, a sharp fish stink is infused with the corruption of dead animals and overflowed pits from which the privy shacks have washed away. Pots, kettles, crockery, a butter churn, tin tubs, buckets, blackened vegetables, saltslimed boots, soaked horsehair mattresses, a ravished doll are strewn across bare salt-killed ground.

A lone gull picks at reddened mullet cast on shore, a dog barks without heart at so much silence.

A figure in mud-fringed calico stoops to retrieve a Bible. Wiping grime from its caked cover with dulled fingers, she straightens, turns, and stares toward the south. The fingers pause. From the black mangrove forest down the Bay, a boat motor, softened by distance, comes and goes and comes again, bound east through Rabbit Key Pass from the Gulf of Mexico.

“Oh Lord no,” she whispers, half-aloud. “Oh please no, Mister Watson.”

Along toward twilight, Postmaster Smallwood, on his knees under his store, is raking out the last of his drowned chickens. Hearing the oncoming boat, he groans in the putrid heat. Soon one pair of bare feet, then another, pass in silence on their way down to the landing. More men follow. He knows his neighbors by their gait and britches.

Over low voices comes the
pot-pot
of the motor. Three days before, when that boat had headed south, every last man on the island watched it go, but the postmaster had been the only man to wave. He, too, had prayed that this would be the end of it, that the broad figure at the helm, sinking below the tree line into darkness at the far end of the Bay, would disappear forever from the Islands. Said D. D. House that day, “He will be back.”

That old man's Sunday boots descend the Indian mound, then the bare feet of his three sandy, slow-eyed sons. The oldest, Bill House, climbs the steps and enters the store and post office, calling to Smallwood's wife, his sister Mamie. Bill House's feet creak on the pine floor overhead.

In the steaming heat, in an onset of malaria, Smallwood feels sickly weak. When his rump emerges from beneath his house and he attempts to stand, he staggers and bangs heavily against the outside wall, causing Mamie to cry out in the room above. He thinks, This dark day has been coming down forever.

“Lookit what come crawlin out! Ain't that our postmaster?”

“Keep that spade handy, Uncle Ted! Might gone to need it!”

Wincing, Smallwood arches his back, takes a dreadful breath, gags, hawks, expels the sweet taste of chicken rot in his mouth and nostrils. “Got four rifles there, I see,” he says. “Think that's enough?”

The old man pauses to appraise his son-in-law. Daniel David House is silver-bearded. He wears no collar but is otherwise dressed formally, in white shirt, shiny black frock coat, black pants hauled high by galluses. He is crippled. He says, “Where's his missus?”

“Inside with her young'uns. With your daughter and your grandchildren, Mr. House.” When the elder grunts and turns away, Smallwood's voice pursues him. “Them women and children gone to have 'em a good view. That what you want?”

Henry Short has stopped behind the House men, holding his rifle down along his leg. “You, too, Henry? You're making a mistake.”

“Leave Henry be,” says Bill House from the door. House is thirty, a strong, florid man creased hard by sun. He is followed outside by his sister, who is weeping. Mamie Smallwood cries, “Shame on you, William House! Shame on you, Papa!” The old man turns his back upon his daughter. Lloyd House and Young Dan at his heels, he hobbles down the slope toward the water.

In a shift of wind, the
pot-pot-pot
of the oncoming boat comes hard as a pulse. A frantic young woman runs out of the store—“Oh dear God!” She hurries down the steps, calling her little boy.

Near the shore, Henry Short leans his old lever-action .30-30 into the split in the big fish-fuddle tree that the hurricane has felled across the clearing. The rifle is hidden when he turns, arms folded tight in sign that he is here against his will, that none of this is any of his doing.

The men are gathering. Charlie T. Boggess, ankle twisted in the hurricane, limps past the store. He turns and shouts back at a woman calling, “All right, all
right
!” To Smallwood he complains nervously, “Ain't you the one said he was gone for good?”

“Not me! I
knowed
he would be back!” Isaac Yeomans, fiery with drink, acts cheered by what the others dread. “His kind don't like to be run off. You recall Sam Lewis, Ted? At Lemon City?”

Smallwood nods. “They lynched Sam Lewis, too.”

“This ain't no lynching,” Bill House calls.

“Don't think so, Bill? What if he's just coming to pick up his family, keep on going?”

The men stare away toward the south as the oncoming boat comes into view, a dark burr on the pewter water. Most have worn the same clothes since the hurricane, they are rank as dogs and scared and cranky, they are anxious to enlist Ted Smallwood because the participation of the postmaster might afford some dim official sanction.

If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?

“No hanging back!” shouts Old Dan House, glaring at Smallwood.

Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops a shell in, sets his felt hat. “Best throw in with us, Ted,” he urges his old friend. “We don't care for this no more'n you do.”

“He always pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain't got no fight with him and you fellers don't neither.”

“Hell, Ted, this fight ain't nothin to be scared of! Not with his one against more'n a dozen.”

“Maybe I ain't scared the way you think. Maybe I'm scared of murder in cold blood.”

“
He
ain't scared of cold blood, Ted. Colder the better.”

The twilight gathers. Hurricane refugees from the Lost Man's coast have gathered by the store, fifty yards back of the men down by the water. “You fellers fixin to gun him down?” one hollers. “Thought you was aimin to
arrest
him.”

“Arrest Watson? They tried that the other day.”

The postmaster can no longer make out faces under the old and broken hats. Too tense to slap at the mosquitoes, the figures wait, anonymous as outlaws. Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and singleshot .22s. Shouted at, they retreat and circle back, stealthy as coons.

In his old leaf-colored clothes, in cryptic shadow, Henry Short sifts in against the tree bark like a chuck-will's-widow, shuffling soft wings. Dead still, he is all but invisible.

Not slowing, the oncoming boat winds in among the oyster bars. Her white bow wave glimmers where the dark hull parts the surface, her rifle-fire
pot-pot-pot
too loud and louder. The boatman's broad hat rises in slow silhouette above the line of black horizon to the south.

The wind-stripped trees are hushed, the last birds mute. A razorback grunts abruptly, once. Mosquitoes keen, drawing the silence tight. Behind the rusted screen of Smallwood's door, pale figures loom. Surely, the postmaster thinks, the boatman feels so much suspense, so much hard pounding of so many hearts. The day is late. A life runs swiftly to its end.

In the last light Ted Smallwood sees the missing child crouched in the sea grape, spying on all the grown-up men with guns. In urgent under tones he calls; the amorphous body of armed men turns toward him. He does not call again. He runs and grabs the little boy.

Hurrying the child indoors, he bangs his lantern. His wife raises a finger to her lips as if the man coming might hear. Does she fear denunciation of her husband for attempting to alert the boat? Hadn't they learned that, warned or not, this man would come in anyway? Mamie whispers, “Is Daddy the one behind this, Ted? Bill and Young Dan, too?” He squeezes a mosquito, lifts his fingertips, winces at the blood. “Light that smudge,” he tells his little girl, pointing at the mangrove charcoal in the bucket.

He says, “They're all behind it.” He cannot stop yawning. “They want an end to it.”

The motor dies in a long wash of silence. His daughter whimpers. The postmaster, queerly out of breath, sends her to her mother. He joins the young woman on the porch. “Please, Edna,” he entreats her, “go back inside.”

In the onshore wind out of the south, the boat glides toward a point just west of where the store landing had been lost to storm. Like a shadow, Henry Short crosses behind the men and positions himself off the right hand of Bill House, who waves him farther forward, into knee-deep shallows.

Smallwood's heart kicks as the bow wave slaps ashore: a wash and suck as the wood stem strikes with a violent
crunch!
of dead shell bottom. Bearing his shotgun, the boatman runs forward and leaps. A moan rises with the rising guns.

The earth turns. Time resumes. The reckoning has been deferred but the postmaster's relief is without elation. An exchange of voices as a few men drift forward. Starting down the slope toward the water, Mamie Smallwood and her friend are overtaken by the little boy, who runs to meet his father.

The shift toward death is hard and sudden. Rising voices are scattered by the whip crack of a shot, two shots together. There is time for an echo, time for a shriek, before the last evening of the old days in the Islands flies apart in a volley of staccato fire and dogs barking.

The young woman stands formally as for a picture, brown dress darkened by the dusk, face pale as salt. Though Mamie Smallwood drags her back, it was Mamie who shrieked and the young woman who takes the sobbing Mamie to her bosom; she regards the postmaster over his wife's shoulder without the mercy of a single blink. He stumbles toward them, stunned and weak, but his wife twists away from him, mouth ugly. In a low, shuddering voice she says, “I am going, Mr. Smallwood. I am leaving this godforsaken place.”

The young woman goes to her little boy, who has tripped and fallen in his wailing flight. Patches of hurricane mud daub his small knees. She pulls the child away from the churning men, who in the dusk are milling on the shore like one great shapeless animal. In a moment, she will crawl under the house, dragging her brood into the chicken slime and darkness.

“No, Lord,” she whispers as the terror overtakes her.

“No, please, no,” she moans.

“Oh Lord God,” she cries. “They are killing Mister Watson!”

ERSKINE THOMPSON

We never had no trouble from Mister Watson, and from what we seen, he never caused none, not amongst his neighbors. All his trouble come to him from the outside.

E. J. Watson turned up at Half Way Creek back in 1892, worked on the produce farms awhile, worked in the cane. Hard worker, too, but it don't seem like he hoed cane for the money, it was more like he wanted a feel for our community. Strong, good-looking feller in his thirties, dark red hair, well made, thick through the shoulders but no fat on him, not in them days. Close to six foot and carried himself well, folks noticed him straight off and no one fooled with him. First time you seen the man you wanted him to like you—he was that kind. Wore a broad black hat and a black frock coat with big pockets, made him look bulky. Times we was cutting buttonwood with ax and hand saw, two-three cords a day—that's hot, hard, humid work, case you ain't done it—Ed Watson never changed that outfit. Kept that coat on over his denim coveralls, he said, cause he never knew when he might expect some company from up north. Might smile a little when he said that but never give no explanation.

Folks didn't know where this stranger come from and nobody asked. You didn't ask a man hard questions, not in the Ten Thousand Islands, not in them days. Folks will tell you different today, but back then there weren't too many in our section that wasn't on the run from someplace else. Who would come to these rain-rotted islands with not hardly enough high ground to build a outhouse, and so many miskeeters plaguing you in the bad summers you thought you'd took the wrong turn straight to Hell?

Old Man William Brown was cutting cane, and he listened to them men opining how this Watson feller was so able and so friendly. Old Man William took him a slow drink of water, give a sigh. Willie Brown said, “Well, now, Papa, is that sigh a warnin?” And his daddy said, “I
feel
somethin, is all. Same way I feel the damp.” They all respected Old Man William, but there weren't one man in the cane that day that took him serious.

All the same, we noticed quick, you drawed too close to E. J. Watson, he eased out sideways like a crab, gave himself room. One time, my half-uncle Tant Jenkins come up on him letting his water, and Mister Watson come around so fast Tant Jenkins thought this feller aimed to piss on him. By the time Tant seen it weren't his pecker he had in his hand, that gun was halfway back into them coveralls, but not so fast he could not be sure of what he seen.

Being brash as well as nervous, Tant says, “Well, now, Mister Watson! Still es-pectin company from the North?” And Watson says, very agreeable, “Any company that shows up unexpected will find me ready with a nice warm welcome.”

Ed Watson had money in his pocket when he come to Half Way Creek, which ain't none of my business, but in all the years I knew him, right up till near the end, he always come up with money when he had to. We never knew till later he was on the dodge, but Half Way Creek was too handy to the lawmen for his liking. Ain't nothing much out there today but a few old cisterns, but Half Way Creek had near a dozen families then, more than Everglade or Chokoloskee. Course back in them days there weren't hardly a hundred souls in that whole hundred mile of coast south to Cape Sable.

Mister Watson weren't at Half Way Creek but a few days when he paid cash money for William Brown's old schooner. Ain't many would buy a sixty-foot schooner that didn't know nothing about boats. Time he was done, Ed Watson was one of the best boatmen on this coast.

Mister Watson and me cut buttonwood all around Bay Sunday, run it over to Key West, three dollars a cord. I seen straight off that Ed J. Watson meant to go someplace, I seen my chance, so I signed on to guide him down around the Islands. I was just back from a year down there, plume hunting for Chevelier; I turned that Frenchman over to Bill House. We was just young fellers then, a scant fourteen. No school on Chokoloskee so you went to work.

Folks ask, “Would you have worked for Watson if you knowed about him what you know today?” Well, hell, I don't
know
what I know today and they don't neither. With so many stories growed up around that feller, who is to say which ones was true? What I seen were a able-bodied man, mostly quiet, easy in his ways, who acted according to our ideas of a gentleman. And that was all we had, ideas, cause we had never seen one in this section, unless you would count Preacher Gatewood, who brought the Lord to Everglade back in 1888 and took Him away again when he departed, the men said. Some kind of a joke, wouldn't surprise me.

Most of our old Glades pioneers was drifters and deserters from the War Between the States who never got the word that we was licked. Moonshiners and plume hunters, the most of 'em. Thatch lean-tos and a skiff and pot and rifle, maybe a jug of homemade lightning for fighting off the skeeters in the evening. Had earth in a tub, made their fire in the skiff, had coffee going morning, noon, and night.

Man on the run who used the name Will Raymond was camped with a woman and her daughter in a palmetta shack on that big bend in Chatham River, living along on grits and mullet, taking some gator hides and egret plumes, selling bad moonshine to the Injuns. We seen plenty like Will Raymond in the Islands, knife-mouthed piney-woods crackers, holloweyed under wool hats, and them bony-cheeked tall women with lank black hair like horse mane. Go crazy every little while, shoot some feller through the heart. Will done that more'n once in other parts, we heard, and got that habit. Seems the law wanted him bad—dead or alive, as you might say. When deputies come a-hunting him out of Key West, Will said nosir, he'd be damned if he'd go peaceable, and he whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it, but he was peaceable as the law allows by the time the smoke cleared. The law invited the Widder Raymond to accompany his mangy carcass on a free boat ride to Key West, and she said, “Thankee, boys, I don't mind if I do.”

Old Man Richard Harden, then the Frenchman, was on Chatham Bend before him, and the Injuns before that; biggest Injun mound south of Chokoloskee Island. Most of the Bend was overgrowed cause none of 'em weren't farmers, and Mister Watson would cuss Will Raymond every time we went downriver, saying how pitiful it was to see that good ground going to waste. One day Mister Watson went ashore, made an offer for the quit-claim, and Raymond come out with a old musket, run him off. Fortnight later, a posse come a hundred mile north from Key West and killed that pesky feller, and next thing you know, Ed Watson tracked the widder down and bought the quit-claim, two hundred fifty dollars. That was a pile of cash in them days, but what he got was forty acres of good soil, protected on three sides by mangrove tangle: anybody who come huntin E. J. Watson would have to come straight at him, off the river.

E. J. Watson had grand plans, about the only feller down there as ever did. Used to talk about dredging out the mouth of Chatham River, make a harbor for that wild southwest coast. Meantime, he sunk buttonwood posts to frame up a new cabin, had wood shutters and canvas flaps on the front windows, brought in a woodstove and a kerosene lamp and a galvanized tub for anyone might care to bath. We ate good, too, fish and wild meat, sowbelly and grits, had a big iron skillet and made johnnycakes: put some lard to his good flour, cooked 'em up dry. I remembered them big johnnycakes all my whole life.

Will Raymond's shack weren't fit for hogs, Mister Watson said, had to patch it up before he put his hogs in it. We had two cows, and chickens, too, but that man had a real feel for hogs. He loved hogs and hogs loved him, come to his call from all over the Bend, I can hear him calling down them river evenings to this day. Brought 'em in at night cause of the panthers, fed 'em garden trash and table slops and such so they wouldn't get no fishy taste like them old razorbacks at Hardens that fed on crabs and lowlife when the tide was out. Kept a old roan horse to pull his plow, break that hard shell ground, and sometimes he'd ride around his farm like it was his old family plantation back in South Carolina.

Mister Watson experimented with all kinds of vegetables and tobacco. Only victuals we traded for was salt and coffee: bought hard green coffee beans, wrapped 'em in burlap. hammered 'em to powder with a mallet. Made our own grits and sugar and cane spirits—what we called white lightning. Seasons when vegetables done poor, we'd pole inland up the creeks and out across the Glades to the piney ridges, get Injun greens and coontie root for starch and flour, cut some cabbage-palm tops in the hammocks. Worked his crew like niggers and worked like a nigger alongside of us. Brung in regular niggers from Fort Myers, and
they
worked hard, too—that man knew how to get work from his help! Them boys was scared to death of him, he could be rough. But they sure liked to listen to his stories, least when he weren't drinking. Told 'em nigger jokes that set 'em giggling for hours—nerves, maybe. I never did get them fool jokes. Me'n niggers just don't think the same.

Ed Watson was the first man since the Injuns to hack down all that thorn on Chatham Bend. Dug out palmetta roots thick as his leg, raked the shell out of that black soil and made a farm. Grew all kinds of vegetables, grew cane for syrup, and tomatoes and then alligator pears. Chok folks hooted when he tried seed potatoes, but Mister Watson shipped them things for three-four years and almost made 'em pay, and never failed to raise a few for our own table.

We got good money for our produce but too much spoiled before it reached Key West, so pretty quick, we give up on common vegetables and stuck to sugarcane. Next he figured that making cane syrup right there on the Bend made a lot more sense than shipping heavy stalks, because syrup could be stored till he got his price. First planter in south Florida to let his cane tassel before harvest so the syrup would boil down stronger without sugaring. Burned off his field before harvest, too, figuring the work would go much faster once the leaves and cane tops was burned away: nothing but clean stalks to deal with, not much sugar lost, and a smaller crew. And he learned not to wait too long: he's the one discovered that cane sugar don't extract good from the stalks even a few days after the burn.

Locally we sold every jar of syrup we produced so we invested in a bigger schooner that he called the
Gladiator,
packed our syrup in screw-top gallon cans, six to the case, shipped 'em to Port Tampa and Key West.
Island Pride!
Our brand grew to be famous. Them fellers at Half Way Creek and Turner River made good syrup but our Island Pride had left 'em in the dust.

All this while we shot gators and egrets when they was handy. Up them inland creeks past Alligator Bay, white egrets was thick, pink curlew, too, and we never failed to take a deer for venison, sometimes a turkey. Trapped coons and otters, shot a bear or panther every little while. Mister Watson was a deadeye shot. I could shoot pretty good, too, but the only man in southwest Florida could shoot as quick and clean as E. J. Watson was Nigger Short.

When D. D. House moved his cane plantation from Half Way Creek down to a big hammock north of Chatham Bend, he took Short with him. Sundays, that boy might visit with Bill House at Possum Key or go to Hardens. Henry and me got on all right, I never held nothin against him, but them damn Hardens let that nigger eat right at their table.

Besides me and Mister Watson, the only man hunting plume birds in our section was the Frenchman. One day we seen Chevelier's skiff come out Sim's Creek that's back of Gopher Key. Sometimes that old man had Injuns with him, and this day I seen a dugout slide out of sight into the greenery.

Mister Watson never paid them Injuns no attention, only the skiff; he made me a sign to ship my oars, drift quiet. When Chevelier lifted his straw hat to mop his head, he shot it right out of his hand, just spun it away into the water. That old man yelped and grabbed his oars and skedaddled like a duck into the mangroves. “Stay off my territory!” shouts Watson. Picking up the floating hat with that new hole in it, he was grinning, kind of sheepish. Never a whisper from the mangroves and nothing to be seen but them red stilt roots, water glitter, and green air. “You'll find your hat at Chatham Bend!” he yells.

I told Mister Watson how Chevelier was collecting rare birds for museums, used small-gauge bird shot so as not to spoil the skins. The Frenchman had all kinds of books, knew all about Injuns, spoke some of their lingo; he had wild men visiting at Possum Key that would never go nowhere near Chokoloskee Bay. Traded their hides and furs through Richard Harden, who claimed to be Choctaw or some such, though nobody never paid that no attention. The Frenchman was always close to Hardens, and probably it was Old Man Richard who brought them Injuns to him in the first place.

All the while I was talking, Mister Watson watched me. That feller would look at you dead on for a long minute, then blink just once, real slow, like a chewing turtle, keeping his eyes closed for a moment as if resting 'em up from such a dretful sight. That's how I first noticed his fire color, that dark red hair the color of old embers or dried blood, and the ruddy skin and sunburned whiskers with a little gold to 'em, like he glowed inside. Then them blue eyes fixed me again, out of the shadow of that black felt hat. Only hat in the Ten Thousand Islands, I imagine, that had a label into it from Fort Smith, Arkansas. I took to whistling.