Shadow Country

At Pavilion Key the clam boats were gone. Instead of running to throw her arms around my neck, my sweet Pearl fled me, flying across the littered barren where the tents had been. From behind her mother’s shack, she called out in a frightened voice that everyone had left, even young Minnie. “That poor girl run off to Key West to get away from you!” Josie hollered through her canvas door.

I commanded her to pack up quick and board my boat because a bad storm was on the way, but it was her brother who opened the flap and stepped outside to discuss the coming weather: said this storm could never be as bad as the hurricane of 1909, which they’d survived here. “You’re all idiots,” I told him, very angry.

Tant Jenkins was past thirty now, already stooped. He still clung to that comical mustache that when he spoke jumped on his upper lip “like a l’il ol’ hairy toad,” his sister said. Tant wore it anyway, content to conceal his shyness behind his lifelong disguise as a damn fool.

Josie did most of the talking from her bed. “If we’d wanted to leave here, Mister Jack, we’d of left this mornin with the rest of ’em. But I have concluded that this key ain’t goin nowhere so we’re stayin.”

As I have related, this small woman was spry in the head and spry in bed, with plenty of high spirits to go with it, but common sense was quite another matter.

“Well, you and Tant can perish if you want but if that little feller on your teat is mine, the way you’re telling people, I am taking him with me and Pearl, too.”

And Josie said, “You show up at Chokoloskee with your backdoor family, Mister Watson, li’l Mis Big-Butt Preacher’s Daughter gonna kick your ass right out of bed!” I said, “My wife is not your business, missus. And unlike some, she don’t drink hard liquor and knows how to hold her tongue.”

I was sorely tempted to take my daughter by the scruff and throw her aboard the Warrior if I had to but I saw no sign of her. Josie gave me a queer wry look, saying that what with all the awful stories, poor Pearl was scared of her own father. “So you can go to hell, Jack Watson, and take Pearl with you if she’s fool enough, but me’n your sweet baby boy aim to stay put where we’re at, and Stephen, too!”

Stephen S. Jenkins offered a small rueful smile by way of saying that if his sister and her kids had their hearts set on staying, he reckoned he’d stay, too, kind of look out for ’em. This bachelor whom nobody took seriously had always felt responsible for this ragtag bunch he called his family. I told Tant, “If you damned people are so drunk and shiftless you won’t save yourselves, then you better start praying to that God of yours.”

Pearl slipped out from behind a shack and followed me down toward the water, keeping her distance like a half-wild dog. At the dock, gray wind waves slapped along the pilings. Except for Tant’s moored sailing skiff, rising and banging on wind-dirtied whitecaps, the anchorage was empty.

The child watched me haul my anchor, frightened to leave and frightened to be left, frightened of the future altogether. I called, “You sure, Pearl?” and she nodded gravely, leaning back into the wind, pale and tattered as a cornstalk against the dark wall of that weather. “Your daddy loves you, sweetheart!” Because I’d never told her that, not in so many words, I startled her. She glanced back toward the shack, then ran along the shore a little ways, crying something like, Did you do it, Daddy? Is it true? What was she talking about? Then blown sea mist closed over her and she was gone.

This was Sunday, the 15th of October.

Off Rabbit Key, the Warrior passed the last clam boats, on their way north toward Caxambas. Nobody aboard those boats returned my wave.

THE GREAT HURRICANE

Late that afternoon, in Chokoloskee, Bembery Storter’s boy, young Hoad, blew into Smallwood’s all excited and related how bodies had been found in Chatham River near the Watson place and how a nigra had rowed out to Pavilion and reported that a man named Cox, with Mr. Watson absent, had murdered three on Chatham Bend last Monday evening. This nigra claimed that E. J. Watson put Cox up to it but took that back when he was hollered at by Watson’s friends and backdoor family such as Josie Jenkins.

Everyone but the Storter boy knew that Watson was right there in the store. One or two glanced over, looked away. Two went out and it was then Bembo’s boy noticed me, standing back against the wall. Being Lucius’s best friend, he was rattled and fell quiet, cast his eyes down. “You were telling how this nigra said he’d mistook himself about Ed Watson,” Smallwood encouraged him. “How he took back what he first said, put it all on Cox.”

“That because they threatened him?” Isaac Yeomans said.

All awaited me in a dead silence as I found my voice. “Three dead?” The words came out in a low croak like a gigged bullfrog-a dangerous slip, suggesting that Watson had known in advance about at least one victim. But only Hoad seemed to pick this up, cocking his head and looking at me quizzically before he nodded. Melville and Waller, he advised me. Big Mrs. Smith. My look of honest stupefaction may have saved my life.

The negro had said that all three bodies had been anchored in the river downstream from the Bend. Early on Saturday, a party of clammers had gone there to confirm the story, retrieving the bodies and burying them in a common pit across the river maybe a mile below the house. Knowing Cox was still at large and uneasy about the weather, they had hurried back and broken camp on Pavilion Key and headed for Caxambas. The negro had been taken to Fort Myers to be turned over to the sheriff.

As the whole room watched, as the room waited, I sank down on my nail keg, greatly shaken, staring at the floor and trying to think because my life depended on it. I had to get to him before he told his tale to Tippins. My obvious shock upon hearing the evil news-and the fact I had come here and put myself into their hands, which a guilty man would surely not have done-had affirmed my innocence strongly enough to let me leave if I left quickly. Stating grimly that I was off to get the sheriff, I strode out the door before the men could organize to stop me. Aware that I was armed and desperate, no one challenged me or even trailed me to the dock, but when I looked back, the whole bunch was still out on the store porch, gazing after the Warrior as she moved off the shore.

Storm tides had sucked the water from the Bay and even in the channel, the boat churned up a mud wake all the way to Everglade. Because the Warrior was too low on fuel to risk rounding Cape Romano in such weather, I asked Bembo to take me to Key Marco early next morning. Anxious to believe in my innocence, he agreed to do it but his wife, alarmed, retreated to the bedroom. When his boy offered to go as crew, Mrs. Storter from behind her wall cried out in fear. In the morning, though she made us coffee, she would not acknowledge my heartfelt thanks, refusing to look at me at all.

On this dark and ominous Monday morning, the barometer was still falling, with wind gusting hard from all points of the compass. In the dark, the rush of weather thrashing through the palm tops was unnerving. We towed the Warrior up the tidal river and lashed her tight into the trees, then worked our way out through the barrier islands to the Gulf, half-blinded by cold walls of bow spray and hard sweeping rain: in the end, we abandoned speech, just hung on grimly. Near midday, off the south shore of Key Marco, yelling thanks, I jumped off into the shallows in a waist-deep chop and gained the shore.

By now the storm was a whole gale, close to hurricane. Winds thickened by torn leaves and dust drove slashing fits of hard-whipped rain in sheets and torrents. Shielding my eyes from flying vegetation, bent doubled over into the wind and wet and cold, I crossed that broad island to the Marco settlement, from where Dick Sawyer ran me across the swollen channel to the mainland.

I might have respected Sawyer more had he dared refuse me or found the nerve to ask for payment instead of babbling on and on about our dreadful danger. It was true that the bilge slosh, up over our ankles, threatened to tip a fatal wave over the gunwales; even so, I told him to shut up and steer while I kept bailing. My heart was heavy, not with fear for our own safety (the mainland was close and I was confident his boat would make it) but for those brave Storters on the Bertie Lee, who could never have reached Everglade before this storm came roaring in over the Islands.

Following the wood trail, dodging windfall all the way, I arrived soaked through at Naples, as the few inhabitants called the shack cluster at its pier head. Captain Charlie Stewart, known as Pops, was postmaster, and his house had a small spare room used by the circuit preacher, but I never took my boots off or got into bed, unable to sleep with that wind howling at the roof, all but lifting it away. Old hinges had wrenched loose and the door was banging, dealing the house whack after whack. Pops and his wife lay like the dead, listening all night for Watson’s