Shadow Country (95 page)

“May ben sewer!”
cried Chevelier, who had to recapture control at once or jump out of his skin. Was this not an affirmation of de Crèvecoeur? And he read out a passage that Mandy kindly regurgitatated for my benefit:
What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood you will find in no other country. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men!
The Frenchman cited “the half-a-breed Hardens,” as typical of these new Americans, embodying the tough, enduring qualities of the black, red, and white races. The Hardens, he said, with grudging admiration, represented the essential character of
“thees fokink ray-poo-bleek.”
I interrupted as he glared: the Hardens were by no means the only family on this coast with dark genes that had sifted down through generations, and they may or may not have manifested his new race of men, but they were good people and the best of neighbors in the Lost Man's country.

To gall him, I added what Napoleon Broward had remarked, that it was the destiny of E. J. Watson to develop this southwest coast. The old man scoffed rudely,
Lemper Roo-er! Lemper Roo-er Vot-sawn
! And my wife smiled to chide me for my boasting: I had not heard the last of “Emperor Watson.”

Chevelier was wildly emboldened by her smile. When Mandy suggested that the Ten Thousand Islands, with their myriad channels, evoked the Labyrinth in Greek mythology, he speedily retorted that if the Islands were the Labyrinth, Madame's own
mari
must be the fokink Mee-no-tore. Squeezing my arm to restrain me, Mandy said that the fearsome Minotaur could also be very gentle. “Minotaur Watson?” she would tease me later. “Emperor Watson? Which do you prefer?” (She had never cared for sentimental stale endearments for her husband; she preferred her own pet names, all of them quirky, slightly disrespectful.)

Msyoo le Baron Jean de Chevelier had the gall to be galled by Mandy's fondness for her husband and did not trouble to hide it: he stared at us half-mad, mouth twisting cruelly. (Elderly indigestion, she suggested later.) Plainly this bachelor gentleman had been smitten by an educated lady and was trying to court her with his hard-earned rare knowledge, and when my wife hinted at his real emotion, overtaking him too late in life in this painful way, it seemed absurd to be angered by his insults. Standing up, I reminded him that his bullet-punctured hat still hung on a kitchen peg, to be returned on his first visit to the Bend. Which would be most welcome, Mandy added.

Leaving Mrs. Watson to accept his fond adoos, I bid him good-bye—we did not care to shake hands—and went back to the boat. Mandy thanked him for his kind hospitality, though this old misery hadn't offered us so much as a cup of rainwater.
“Bun shawnce, share Madame! Bella fortuna!”
he called after her (wishing her good luck in two languages, she would explain, to compensate her for the dark fate of her marriage to a minotaur).

All the way home we talked with animation, though I knew my wife had to quell ascending sadness. At the dock she said, “Wait, Edgar, please,” too weak to leave the boat. She was watching the silver mullet down along the bank, leaping skyward as if to escape their natural element, only to fall back with those thin little
smack
s into the darkening water.

“Something's after 'em, that's all. Coming up from underneath.”

“Hush,” she murmured. “Watch.”

Hand on her shoulder, I watched with her, indifferent to this everyday sight but content in our shared sadness. The children, worried, came out on the screened porch. Sensing something, they observed us but they did not call. At last she offered her pale hand and I half lifted her onto the dock. She did not explain her sudden dread and said it was not serious but I knew she'd had some sort of premonition.

Mandy seemed to waste away, perishing from the inside out like a hollow tree. Finally I took her to Fort Myers and put her in the care of Dr. Langford, who lived in a big house near the river between Bay and First Streets. Carrie went along to tend her and the younger boys followed in late summer and stayed on for the school year. The only one left at Chatham Bend was Sonborn.

One gray day, feeling a hollow stillness back in the mangroves, I went ashore at Possum Key to see how that mean old man was getting on. He had not answered when I hailed the cabin and so I was not overly surprised when at the door I was met by the smell of death. Then I saw the long white whiskers in the shadows, the small paws in the air above the chest. The Frenchman lay stiff as a poisoned rat. I removed my hat.

I dug his grave in the soft soil of his garden. Putting rags over my hands, I returned into the cabin and lifted the light bundle in its mildewed blanket and carried him like a smelly little bride over the doorsill and out into the sun. Sinking to my knees, I lowered him into the earth, remaining there a few moments out of respect. As an unbeliever, I had no prayer to give, and anyway, no prayer could bless this ferocious God-hater in the hereafter or anywhere else.

“Le Baron Jean de Chevelier.” In that great quiet, with the swamp forest listening, I tried to pronounce his name in French the way Mandy had taught me. I had nothing else to offer by way of earthly witness. I had pitied him a little, yes, toward the end, but I had never liked him much and would not miss him.

Quock!
The tearing squawk of a flared heron overhead startled me badly; I never saw the bird, only its shadow. Msyoo had loved birds better than people: his grim crier had come. In the next moment, on a limb, I saw a young owl, all woolly with astounded eyes, that must have attended the burial; it did not fly off into the wood until I'd finished spading the black soil into the pit. These odd birds spooked me a little, I must admit.

Before some hunter came by and stripped the cabin clean, I poked around for excavated treasures but was able to depart with a clear conscience, having been tempted by nothing in the place. At the boat, I ran afoul of two young Hardens come to clean and feed him; knowing how much that old man had detested E. J. Watson, these boys were shocked to see me. When I told them Msyoo Chevelier was dead, young Earl glanced at his brother, growing scared, and I knew right then that no matter what I said, Ed Watson would be blamed for the Frenchman's death.

THE GREAT CALUSA CLAM BED

In his theory about the great Calusa clam bed, the Frenchman had tried to distract me from whatever he was up to back on Gopher Key. Even so, his guess was correct. Coming up the coast one day at dead low water, I eased myself barefoot over the side. Right away my feet located hard shapes under the sand: upright clam valves in what proved to be a clam bed close to a mile wide—I mapped it out—extending almost six miles north from Pavilion Key. This was exciting. Establishing a clam fishery so close to home where I could keep an eye on things might finance my whole operation. I would stake a claim and form a company as soon as my harvest was finished in late winter.

At this time, young Bill House was working upriver from the Bend on his dad's new plantation at House Hammock. For a year or two, he had collected rare bird eggs for the Frenchman, and old Jean must have mentioned his clam cannery idea to decoy that boy away from Gopher Key, because one day I came by House Hammock and found Bill constructing a crude dredge. What's that for? I inquired. Bird eggs? When he grinned sheepishly but said nothing, I changed the subject quick: knowing this young House for a slow mover, I was not discouraged. I sailed to Marco the next day and confided my great discovery to Bill Collier, inviting him to join me as a partner. This man had been unusually successful in his business enterprises and had the experience and capital I lacked. To my surprise, Collier seemed skeptical of the whole proposition, even when I mentioned my clam-dredge idea. I would have to find a partner or at least a backer among my business acquaintances in Fort Myers.

My friend Nap Broward had made his name by smuggling contraband arms to the Cuban rebels and was urging me to use the
Gladiator
in this night business. Broward was anxious to avenge his friend José Martí, who had been shamed into returning to Cuba by fellow rebels; claiming he did too much talking, not enough fighting, his own men got that little feller killed when he tried to prove them wrong. In the end my ill wife persuaded me to avoid such a reckless venture. After so many long hard years of separation, we should cherish this precious time, she said.

Very weak, Mandy gazed into my eyes in a shy way that told me she knew she would not live much longer and warned me to be careful for the children's sake. She showed me a Copley print called
Watson and the Shark,
which portrayed a man fallen out of a longboat who was being seized by a huge shark in Havana Harbor. “I think you'd better stay away from Cuba!” Mandy said. The doomed Watson was a soft, pale, naked fellow, wallowing helplessly in the shark's jaws and rolling his eyes to the high heavens, and the only crewman trying to save him was the one black man. “Well,” I laughed, “it's a damned good thing that Watson feller had his nigger with him!”

“I imagine you mean ‘nigra.' ”

“Yes'm, I do.” And that was true. I did. I had spoken carelessly.

Mandy had never accepted my excuses—that that word's use was just a careless way of saying “nigra” and that nigras often used it, too. Good black people, she said, used “black folks”: “nigger” was somebody shiftless, “no account,” even disgraceful. I wasn't so sure, though. I guess I would go along with that most of the time. Some say “coloreds,” ladies preferred “darkies.” If you were black, she reminded me, every last one of these white man names would be insulting, wasn't that true? They were just dark-skinned human beings. They were
people.
This whole race business distressed Mandy very much. She felt that Emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction—all of that loss and suffering—had come to nothing, and that our great national disease remained uncured.

1898

In July of 1898, our Carrie would marry Doc Langford's son, a handsome young fellow who lived in his father's household and had plenty of opportunities to pull the wool over the eyes of my young daughter. Carrie imagined she loved him, of course, and the Langfords loved Carrie, but I believe their main ambition was to settle Walter down. Because Doc Langford was my business partner or at least a backer, and because that family had been so hospitable to my own, I felt obliged to go along.

Young Langford had worked as a cow hunter in the Big Cypress. Every Saturday his hell-and-high-water bunch rode into town, drank up their pay at the saloon, and rode out again half dead late Sunday; they rounded up scrub cattle the rest of the week to pay for another Saturday of raising hell. Walt decided he was through with those wild Saturdays and would now make something of himself for Carrie's sake. He still had his bad drinking bouts from time to time, but instead of shooting up the town, he would go down to the Hill House Hotel, turn his gun in, rent a room, and pay the colored man to bring him moonshine. The man would keep him locked up with his jug until he had drunk himself stone stiff and sick and blind. With his craving for liquor worn out of his system, he would crawl home, gagging at the merest whiff of spirits for the next six months.

I had known this young feller for some years and liked him well enough, but I was not delighted by this match, which had been brokered by the Langfords' friend Jim Cole. At thirteen, Carrie seemed too young, I could not fool myself, so my dealings with Cole and Walter's family compromised what I thought of as my principles, which were already in trouble. To make myself feel better, I arranged a formal meeting with the bridegroom in which I might lay out a father's thoughts on honeymoon etiquette.

At Hendry House, we sat down over a brandy. Unfortunately we had two or three before I warned Walt kind of abruptly against getting drunk and taking my thirteen-year-old by force—against taking her at all, in fact, said I, raising my voice, “until she was damn well good and ready, hear me, boy?”

Young Walt took my friendly counsel as an insult to his honor as a Southern gentleman, which had never been questioned before now. Though he struggled to contain his anger, he finally burst out, “Well now, Mr. Watson, sir, if she is too young, then why do you permit this marriage in the first place?” But we both knew why and we both knew better than to speak about it since it was unspeakable. Nevertheless, he was red in the face with brandy and embarrassment, and very much resented the insinuation that he might ravish a young lady with no more control over his lower instincts than one of those black devils excoriated by Pitchfork Ben in the last election.

The young man's anger in a public place triggered my own. “I am not insinuating, sir,” I interrupted. “I am stating a well-known fact about men's lust, a fact as plain as the red nose on your face.” To which he retorted hotly that the bride's father had no right—with all due respect, sir—to instruct another man about how to comport himself with his own wife when her father had approved the marriage for financial considerations: should that father make the bridegroom pay for his own shame?

That was the first time and the last that Walter Langford ever dared to stand up to me in such a way. I let the silence fall until he sobered and had started to apologize, then raised my hand and cut him off rather than witness the underlying weakness in this young man that I'd suspected all along. Also—aware I'd gone too far—I had to get my own outrage under control. True, I resumed after a long pause, I had let my daughter go in deference to fiscal circumstances and had therefore given up my right to dictate terms: I'd only felt obliged to speak out as I had because of the groom's well-known habit of excessive drink.

I was speaking softly now, inspecting a farmer's broken fingernails. Walter awaited me, very uneasy. Was I apologizing or was I insulting him again? When I raised my eyes, he shifted in his seat. “But right or no right, boy,” I growled, unreasonably angry of a sudden and letting it all go, “let me say this: you will answer to me and you will regret it dearly if you fail to protect my daughter from all that is coarse and ugly in yourself.”