Shadow Country (102 page)

The burial done, we trooped back to the house to toast the dead man with a cup of moonshine. Waller sidled up to speak to me in confidence as I sat quiet in my place in the corner. “Please, Ed, Mr. Watson, sir,” he begged. “I surely never did believe them things that carpenter told about you. I never even
listened
to them dretful stories!”

When his boss leapt up and punched the wall, he sprang back, scaring everybody. I took a deep breath and sat down again and devoted myself to my jug, in ugly humor. After so many years of trials and tribulations, I decided, even the Almighty would concede that his sometime servant Edgar Watson deserved a little solace—young Jane, for instance. But the girl had guessed my line of thought and fled, and though I searched the house, I found neither hide nor hair of her.

In the end, I went crashing and cursing to my bed and there she was. She whispered, “Please now, Mist' Edgar, don't go hurting me.” What she meant was,
Don't go killing me.
She was terrified.

Sighing, I took her in my arms, feeling that old sweet shiver of relief waft over the surface of my skin like frankincense and myrrh, for all I know. Her breath was fresh, she was light and clean, she had no clumsiness in her. I ran my fingertips over her small neck and breasts, over that full silken rump that until this night had played hide-and-seek under thin cottons. I muttered, “Jane, honey, why would I ever hurt you?” Still fearful, she whispered that this was her first time, which made me smile, indulgent. I was mistaken. She was a virgin, the dear creature, although not for long.

That girl slept in my bed the rest of the time that we were in the Islands, and I like to believe that after the first time or two, she was neither unwilling nor unduly horrified that a large puffing male creature was easing his passion on her person, stirring his pine house with rhythmic creakings. I never wished to take advantage of a young girl's fear, but life is hard and it don't relent, so a man would do well to accept such blessings as life puts before him.

NIGGER TO THE BONE

Sometimes, bound homeward from Key West, I stopped at Lost Man's Beach to take some supper with the Hamiltons and Thompsons. Other times I would put in at Wood Key for a good fish dinner. On that narrow islet, the Hardens had nice whitewashed cabins, with coconut trees and bougainvillea and periwinkle flowers all around a white sand yard, which they kept raked clean to discourage serpents and mosquitoes, and a fish house at the end of a skinny dock on that shallow shore. Dried and salted mullet for the Cuba trade during the running season, late autumn and early winter, and in summer went farther offshore for king mackerel, shipped eight or ten barrels of good fish to Key West maybe twice a week. These days gasoline motors, just coming in, permitted run boats to pick up fresh fish and drop off ice in 200-pound chunks.

The youngest Harden daughter, Abbie, who came to my place sometimes to help out, had good manners learned at the Convent of Mary Immaculate in Key West. Abbie would arrange my parties, sometimes for as many as fifteen guests. Her folks and most of the other Island settlers were invited, and of course I'd attend the Harden parties, too. The three Harden boys played musical instruments, and sometimes I'd call for “Streets of Laredo,” an old Oklahoma favorite that made everybody gloomy except me.

Folks expected I would bust out wild, shoot out the lamps, tear up the party, due to wild stories that came back from Key West. I never did. Except in well-lighted public places, I never drank that much. There were always strangers in the Islands, fugitives and drifters, and I never knew when some avenger from the past might gun me down. I took that chance in public places to be sociable, but when outside I stayed back from the firelight and inside, I kept my back into the corner.

The Everglades was a frontier like Oklahoma, with plenty of half-breeds in the mix: if the Hardens wanted to be white, they had as much claim to that label as the next bunch. But in the census, Richard Harden had been listed as “mulatto,” and his family blamed this on the malice of the Bay people, who still resented him for running off with John Weeks's daughter. Eventually he traveled to Fort Myers and signed an affidavit declaring he was Indian because his mother had been full-blood Choctaw (it was his half-Portagee father, Richard said, who accounted for the tight curl in his black hair). Naturally the Bay people paid no attention to his affidavit, which had been his wife's idea: his family cared about his blood far more than he did. Old Man Richard didn't give a damn so long as folks left him alone.

An old Bahama conch named Gilbert Johnson was the only Harden neighbor on Wood Key. Every time Gilbert got drunk, he would rue the day his daughters got hooked up with Earl and Owen Harden instead of staying home and tending to their widowed daddy. Here at the bitter end of life, as Old Man Gilbert liked to say, he was condemned to dwell amongst his mongrel in-laws, and he could endure this cruel situation only by venting his poor opinion of them at every opportunity—in effect, each and every evening out on the verandah at the cabin of his bosom enemy Richard Harden.

Like Richard, this contrary old man had married a half-breed Seminole. Therefore he felt qualified to pass his leisure hours expounding on the various deficiencies of Indians as human beings, as exemplified by various members of their two families. When his wife wasn't listening, Richard thought that most of Gilbert's guff was pretty funny, and Gilbert did, too: he meant no harm by it, he merely liked to rant as they watched the sun go down on the Gulf horizon.

In the old days on Possum Key, Richard had enjoyed long talks with Jean Chevelier, whose view had been that human beings had never evolved from animals as greedy, cruel, and violent in their behavior as they themselves had been right from the start, and here they were, still screwing their wits out, breeding like roaches, and spreading malignancies across the globe, spoiling and killing as they went. Richard struggled to transmit to Gilbert Johnson his understanding of the Frenchman's notion about the Original Race of Man as a gang of bright apes that spread into different continents and climates and evolved into naked races of assorted colors. However, as Chevelier said, due to ever-increasing populations, conquests, and spreading ranges, these races were inevitably interbreeding, ensuring that the species would revert to that old mud-colored
Homo
who started all the trouble in the first place and had made life hell for other creatures ever since.

Sometimes they discussed Charlie Tommie, a mixed-breed Mikasuki and full fledged scavenger who had all or most of the sorry traits of the red, black, and white races, but the feller they mostly talked about was Henry Short, whose color was in the eye of the beholder, according to how you turned him to the light. Richard would say, “Them House boys claim that Henry has some tar in him, but I believe he is Indin and white, the same as me: one thing for sure, he's a lot lighter in his shade than many of them so-called whites at Chokoloskee.”

According to Mr. D. D. House, Henry's mulatto daddy had been one of those smart-talking nigras that the journals used to jeer as “the New Negro.” Not having been born a slave, this New Negro was out to “ravage” white women, not merely screw them, like white men tomcatted around after the darkie girls. But according to Mr. House, whom nobody could call a sentimental man, Henry's daddy loved his white girl truly and she loved him back. And true love between the races being a capital offense when the male is black, that's just how the neighbors handled it.

First time I heard Henry's history, I had gone to House Hammock to hire him away. The old man said, “I reckon he'll be staying with us, Mr. Watson.” But he offered a cup of his good shine, we got to talking, and it came out that he had witnessed Henry's father's awful death back in Redemption days. Those good Christian folks set up a platform, scrawled justice in black charcoal on the planks in front in case anyone wondered what this show was all about and had 'em a barbecue picnic, sweet corn and spareribs, a regular holiday excursion.

Being so light-skinned, blue eyes and brown hair, Henry's daddy could have flat denied his blood, Mr. House believed, and as a U.S. cavalryman who had spilled the blood of hostile Indians for his country, he very likely would have got away with it. But he was proud and angry and dead stubborn. He would not deny that he had served as a buffalo soldier and would not humiliate his regiment, he said, by crawling to a mob, though the girl begged him to save himself and spare their child a lifelong grief and shame. Instead, he shouted that the man they proposed to lynch was an American soldier-citizen with full rights under the U.S. Constitution.

“Rights?” they said, “Boy, your rights just ain't the point here. Are you a nigger that has nigger blood or ain't you?” And that soldier paused, knowing they would have their fun no matter what. He took a deep breath and then he said, “It is my misfortune to resemble all you paleface sonsofabitches, but I'm proud to say I am nigger to the bone.” He bellowed that right at the crowd:
“Nigger to the bone!”

To punish his desecration of the girl, they ripped his pants down to castrate him. They had a special hatred for this white-skinned negro, and being drunk, they made a mess of it. When finally a moan was wrung from his clenched mouth, they laughed, as Old Man House remembered; their lank-haired women did not laugh, just stood there staring hungrily, bare-foot and grim, arms folded on their chests, as they strung him up.

With such a fine turnout for the barbecue, folks got into a festive spirit and prolonged their sport, lowering the rope so that his bare feet touched the ground. They gave him enough slack to gasp up enough breath to scream or beg, and when he did neither, they yanked him up again and watched his face turn blue. His eyes bugged out and his mouth opened and closed until finally, skewed sideways, it fell open for good. Being born ornery, he would not come back to life, showing no response to the torches and sharp sticks. Disappointed, they turned him over to the crowd. Folks stepped up beside him, got their pictures taken, maybe holding a nice buttered corn cob, and Mom and the kiddies, only two bits each. Finished up by hacking off ear and finger souvenirs, enjoyed some target practice. Man and boy, they whacked him with so many rounds that the body spun slowly in the summer heat. By the end, the sport was
Keep that nigger turnin!

Old Man Dan had seen that battered corpse himself, strung from an oak limb. “Looked like a white man. Course you'd never know
what
color he was, not after them Georgia boys got done with him.” D. D. House declared he'd been a witness and he sure had all the details, but I couldn't make out if this lynching was his own experience or a story known to all Americans in those days when lynchings were so common all across the country.

In Tennessee, on my long ride from Arkansas to Carolina, I came across a thing like that, and I don't care if I never see another. It brought back the Owl-Man, gut-shot and dying in the Deepwood shadows. It wore out my soul. Mr. House felt disgusted that same way, probably the only thing that old man and I ever agreed on. I forgot to ask if Henry Short was told this story, but Old Man House being so flinty, I reckoned he probably was.

DANGEROUS TALK

Word was out at Chokoloskee Bay that Watson had come back to the Islands and that soon after, a man had died in a strange way at Chatham Bend. Though I was innocent, I could not risk a posse; it was time to leave.

The Russ sons had departed on the mail boat the week previous. No thanks, let alone good-byes, only a bitter demand for their father's pay. “I can't oblige you yet,” I told them, “not until our syrup is sold at Tampa Bay.” Those boys rolled their eyes and scowled, very angry and suspicious, but being frightened, they said nothing.

I made a fair profit on my syrup sale at Tampa and continued northward to Fort White, where I went at once to offer my condolences to the Widow Russ. Izma was a female of my own age, dull of hair and dull of eye, due to a resigned spirit or a stupid one. With those dark silky hairs above her mouth and sharp short lines beneath, her lips looked sewn up tight as a bat's bottom. When I doffed my hat and made a little bow, she closed her door down to a crack, leaving me out there in the rain. Through that slot I was informed in no uncertain terms that Izma and her sons and the Tolens, too, had concluded that Edgar Watson had murdered Mr. Russ for demanding his rightful earnings, which his employer had never intended to pay.

I handed her forthwith the full amount in a brand-new store-bought envelope with posies on it—“to the last penny,” I declared. But I could have worn a high black cowl and carried a scythe across my shoulder for all the thanks that homely woman gave me. I grabbed her cold and bony hand and pressed it to my heart, pleading, “Mrs. Russ, ma'am, Izma dear, your late husband died untimely of a heart attack and that is the God's truth.” Izma said, “What would a man like you know about God?” and closed the door. That twisted, unforgiving face told me how useless it would be to go among the neighbors pleading my innocence.

Great-Aunt Tabitha had sent a summons. I rode over to the plantation house, rather small behind fake foolish Georgian columns. Frail at the end of her long life, the old lady spent most of what was left of it rotting away under the covers. Swathed in dry white hair and threadbare nightgown, she looked as crumbly and poor as a bit of old bread left out for the jays. The window was tight closed and there was no stink of cigars, which told me her son-in-law's visits were infrequent if in fact they occurred at all: it was Calvin Banks's crippled-up old Celia who hobbled over to look after her. However, Aunt Tab was still sharp-eyed and nosy, and without preamble demanded to know if I had murdered her son-in-law's stepbrother, that man Russ.

“No ma'am, I did not.”

“A liar to boot,” she said. She peered at me as if some vile wart had grown out on my nose since she'd last seen me. “What in the dickens is the matter with you, Edgar?”