Shadow Country

AT LOST MAN’S KEY

The skiff slipped south through the labyrinth of islands under a full moon. At Onion Key, while waiting for the tide to turn, I greased the thole pins to deaden the creak of oars. And still he pled with me, he wept, he begged me not to harm them. There was no need. I had sobered some and come back to my senses. Those people were no threat. In Key West, Tucker was a wanted man, he would go to jail if he went there to report me, and anyway he had no proof because Sonborn and I had disposed of the last trace. I would simply respond that this ne’er-do-well had made up vicious slanders out of spite after his pay had been withheld for breach of contract. Besides, the sheriff would ignore complaints about two murdered blacks when so many were worked to death on chain gang labor.

A half mile upriver from the Key I took the oars and, facing the bow, used quick small strokes to guide the skiff into the inland shore at the back of Lost Man’s Key. I took the shotgun. “Stay with the boat,” I said. “You were never here.” I almost promised him I would not shoot Wally Tucker, I’d only scare him, run him off, but out of my damned perversity I did not do so.

Trailing after me through the scrub toward the Gulf shore, Sonborn made too much noise. I turned to scowl at him, pointing back toward the skiff, and in doing so, stumbled, wrenched my ankle painfully. I cursed him. He kept coming.

Tucker was perched on a silver driftwood tree down by the water. He was mending his cast net, rifle leaning on the wood beside him; he’d lift his head to look and listen, bend to his needle. Behind him, the sun that rose out of the Glades, touching the treetops, turned the morning leaves as bright as metal.

I made no sound on that soft sand and yet he sensed me. He whirled and stared. “You people are finished here,” I said. I told Sonborn to go flush out the woman. When he protested again, I swore at him in disgust, gave him the shotgun, ordered him to keep Tucker covered.

He was a good shot, quick and wiry: it occurred to me too late that, being Sonborn, he would not shoot Tucker no matter what. Tucker had gasped when I drew my revolver and headed for the shack. He expected me to kill them and I let him think that. But when I heard him begging Sonborn to spare Bet, a coiling in his tone alerted me: I whirled in time to see him lunge and grab the shotgun barrel as Sonborn yelled. Their struggle

ended when the gun went off and Tucker spun and crumpled like a bird.

“Oh Papa, NO!”

Sonborn’s cry shattered the echo of the shot.

“Ah, SHIT!” I yelled at almost the same instant, and started forward, unable to take in the enormity of what had happened. One moment this man is quick, eyes bright, and the next he lies too shocked even to weep, twitching the last of his life away in his own mess, a carcass, eyes wide, mouth wide, blood already dead.

Sonborn had dropped the shotgun in the sand, backing away from what he’d done. He was pasty, gagging, he was trembling so hard he seemed to totter.

Behind me, the girl had run outside, then fled into the sea grape. He hadn’t warned me, and I only glimpsed her, too late. Coldly I told him he would have to finish what he’d started because being lame as well as fat I’d never catch her. When I forced the revolver on him, he dropped it. I picked it up and brushed it off and presented it again. He stuttered hopelessly, Papa, no, he could not do it, please don’t make him do it, Papa, please no, this was crazy.

I told him that if she got away, he was going to hang right alongside his crazy daddy. “Quick is merciful,” I told him. “Temple or base of the skull. Don’t meet her eye. Don’t say a word. Just do it.” I could scarcely believe that voice was mine, that I was telling him to do this.

To see such terror in his face was terrible. For a moment I thought, He might shoot me instead. And then his face broke, he burst into tears and gave a little scream and ran off after her, casting a last despairing look over his shoulder. That last look undid me.

“Rob!” I bellowed. “Wait for me!” I hobbled clumsily to overtake and stop him, my wrenched ankle a club of pain.

The gun went off as I approached: I stopped, pierced through the heart. In the echo, in that ringing silence, I saw his body on the sand between low bushes. I thought, He has destroyed himself.

No, for once, he had done just as instructed, done it well and quickly. Then he had fainted. He lay curled like a young boy beside that girl in her white shift whose lifeblood pooled under her head in a darkening halo in the sun and sand. I thought bitterly, Can you hear me, Bet? That loose gate latch on the hog pen? One moment of inattention and two dead.

When I lifted my son onto his feet, he only sagged. I eased him down. I hoisted the girl’s warm heavy body, carrying it to the water’s edge, then went back for Tucker and grasped him under the arms and dragged him. We could not stay long enough to bury them since the Hamiltons on Lost Man’s Beach might have heard the shots. I moved them out into the slow current where sharks following the blood trace into the delta would nose toward them on the first incoming tide.

My boy had come to when I returned. He was a bad color and still trembling. He groaned and fought me off- Get away from me! I stood him on his feet and with my fingertips brushed off the skull bits and brains as best I could. He stared at my red hand. Pushed, he stumbled forward, and watching him, I was moved to an emotion far deeper and more devastating than pity, a life regret arising out of love for my firstborn that must have been in my heart all along, shrunk to the point of near extinction. How would I ever let him know that, far less show it? I had called out much too late.

Get away from me turned out to be the last words Charlie’s son would ever speak to me. Rob Watson, gone and lost forever like my darling Clementine-over and over that old song keened in my brain like some Celtic lament.

Tucker’s death had been an accident; as to the girl, we were forced to choose between her death and our own. I would try to persuade Rob of his innocence as soon as he felt well enough to listen, having begged his forgiveness for his banishment as Sonborn all those years until today. Anyway, he would never be involved if I could help it. Glimpsing another boat off Lost Man’s Beach, I forced his head below the level of the gunwales lest he be seen with E. J. Watson and associated with crimes that were sure to be attributed to me. Because whether or not sharks or gators found those bodies, evidence of bloody murder was all over Lost Man’s Key and people were certain to suspect Ed Watson.

TURNING AND RETURNING

I rowed east up Lost Man’s River and then north toward home. The tide was against us and the humid air too light for the skiff ’s sail. With my last strength, exhaling deep breaths to drive the iron smell of blood out of my lungs, I hurled my shoulders into every stroke until my hands were blistered and my arms were burning and I almost passed out and even so I could not burn out such great despair. The journey through the string of bays back of the barrier islands took all day, and all this day, curled up in the stern, he watched me, neither asleep nor dead but in a kind of stupor. Two or three times his eyes slid toward the revolver butt protruding from my coat, which was folded on the stern seat. I believe he considered seizing it and slipping it beneath his shirt and finally did so, though whether his plan was to destroy his father or himself I could not know nor did I care. Either choice, the way I felt, might have been a mercy.

At Possum Key, the Frenchman’s cistern had been fouled by a drowned deer. We had no water. With the heat and exhaustion, I was almost blind, and now a blackness settled, the merciless knowledge of how cruelly I had dealt with him, of how I’d failed him. You have destroyed his life. Even if I could have persuaded him I had loved him all along and rediscovered him, that would never be good enough. I had done this brave wild boy a lifelong harm.

By the time I turned back toward the coast, down Chatham River, all I could think about was that brown jug. In the confused departure of the night before, I might have drained it to the bottom and left none. I was terrified.

I could never absolve myself of the great crime of ordering him to act against his every instinct; I had crushed