Shadow Country

footfalls.

That Monday evening of October seventeenth, one week to the day after the murders at the Bend, Tant Jenkins lashed Josie and her young into the highest mangrove limbs that would support them-not high enough, since the few trees not razed for fuel by the clam colony were small and meager. Tant got a grip on scrawny Pearl while Josie clutched her infant boy under her slicker. Soon storm seas were breaking all across the island. Hour after hour, the battering cold wind and water wore at Josie’s strength. Being slight and small, she could scarcely hang on to her limb, and was shifting for a better grip when a big rogue sea rose through the rain. Tant yelled too late. Torn loose, the baby was borne away without a cry.

On a previous visit, I had asked Josie his name. “What name do you fancy, Mister Jack?” his mother teased me. “Well, if he’s mine, name him Artemas after his great-grandfather.” Josie lifted the baby and gazed into his eyes. “He’s yours for sure and his name is Jack Artemas Watson.”

“Jack Artemas Jenkins,” I corrected her. Josie frowned but made no comment. All the while Jack Artemas observed me with my own blue eyes, shining over the round of Josie’s breast.

When the storm tide diminished, brother and sister hunted among the roots, heartbroken. His servants say that the merciful Lord works in mysterious ways, very few of which strike me as merciful, and my little son was awaiting his mother when the seas receded. Not one hundred yards from where she’d lost him, pale tiny hands protruded like sponge polyps from the sand, grasping for air. Crown just beneath the surface, her infant stood straight upright, set for resurrection. So much for Jack Artemas Jenkins, said the Lord.

Down the southwest coast over that night, the hurricane blew the water from the bays, blew down many shacks and cabins, carried the boats out to sea or far inland. It blew that coast to ragged tatters, destroying last chances, scattering hopes. It sucked the last turquoise from the inshore waters, shrouded the mangrove in caked sandy marl, transformed blue sea and blue sky to a dead gray. It blew the color right out of the world.

By dawn, the woods were twisted into snarls of broken growth which my borrowed horse jumped and clambered through like a huge goat. In my dark mood, the trees all felled in the storm’s direction recalled Cousin Selden’s description of the blue lines of Union infantry at Fredericksburg, struck over backwards by barrage after barrage of our artillery.

On Tuesday evening I reached Punta Rassa from where a man ran me upriver to Fort Myers. Wanting nothing to do with disloyal offspring, I slept in the hayloft at the livery stable, dirt-bearded, smelly, and in dangerous temper. Early next morning, I went to the courthouse, where the court clerk informed me that Sheriff Tippins had left for Chokoloskee two days earlier: he must have reached Marco not long after I left.

This court clerk in tight high collar, shirt stuffed to overflowing with self-importance, was none other than my own get, E. E. Watson, who had shunned his father after returning from north Florida the year before. Seeing his parent standing before him red-eyed and disreputable, in filthy clothes, this ingrate turned as haughty as he dared, saying, “Sheriff Tippins has interrogated your nigger. He wishes to interrogate you, as well.”

“That’s what you call Frank now? ‘Your nigger’?” Disdaining the Lee County Court spittoon, I spat on his varnished floor. Frank Reese was a nigger, true enough, but all those years when this rufous lout infested my house in Fort White, Frank had looked out for him, cleaned up after his carelessness and plain damned laziness out in the field. “Where is he now?” I said.

“The sheriff left strict instructions that nobody may gain access to this prisoner under any circumstances.” With wrinkled brow, he shuffled his little papers, to show he was much too busy to waste time with me. I could scarcely look at him, that’s how repelled I was by my own flesh and blood. I stripped my belt. Unless he served the public right this minute, I informed him, a certain public servant would be horsewhipped.

“Sir, this is a court of law!” he blustered. But that belt had taken the fight out of this feller-not that I took much satisfaction from it, walleyed as I was with worry and exhaustion. Full to bursting with official disapproval, arms folded high as the law allows upon his chest, E. E. Watson, deputy court clerk, glared the other way as I strode through the rear door marked NO ADMITTANCE.

At the holding cell, assorted drunks and drifters cat-called raucously at my appearance, claiming I belonged on their side of the bars. Informed that I wanted a word with prisoner Reese, these lowlifes told me how that stupid Tippins had locked that killer in the cellar to keep honest men from cutting his black throat the way they wanted.

I went out a side door into the jailyard, where I knelt beside the ventilation grate for a small window below ground level along the wall. My knee pushed a trickle of dry dirt into the hole. I whispered, “Frank?” No sound came but I heard a listening. “That you, Frank? You all right? Why did you do that?” I pled with that unseen man down in the darkness. Hadn’t I helped him escape back there in Arkansas and given him employment ever since? Hadn’t I given him Jane Straughter? “Answer me, goddammit! Did Cox tell you those killings were my idea?” But nothing came up through the grate except faint urine stink.

On my knees to my damned nigger, entreating my damned nigger, I gave my damned nigger my damned word that I never knew that bastard would go crazy, kill them all. Finally I yelled roughly, “Hear me, boy? You have to trust me!” With Frank, that “boy” was a very bad mistake.

In the grate corner where moisture had collected in a crack grew the very small white flower of a weed. I picked that flower, twiddled it to calm myself. Kneeling this way in the heat, knees chafed by cement bits and limestone turds and broken glass, my throbbing brain hammered holes through at the temples, so incensed was I by the silence of Frank Reese and his intent to do me harm-a man I’d counted on, perhaps the only man I could still count on.

“Frank? Goddammit, what have you told Tippins?” I jumped up, booted the grate, booted the jail, bellowing as stupid as a bull from the sharp pain. “BLACK BASTARD!” I hollered down the hole. “I hope they hang you!”

But with that pain, don’t ask me why, the answer to Reese’s bitterness fell into place. I guess I had known it all along but refused to look at it.

Reese had probably guessed that I’d gone along with Dutchy’s execution: had he also assumed that because I owed them so much pay, I’d had Cox take care of Green and Hannah, too? Had he also thought that I’d risked him? Perhaps I had. But had he gone to Pavilion and risked his neck by admitting to abetting in those crimes-admitted to handling a white woman’s body, for Christ’s sake-just to tell a lie that might implicate his old partner? (An old partner, dammit all, who in the past had taken his loyalty for granted, and abused it, too.)

Yes. The silent man at the bottom of this hole assumed I’d let Cox kill Dutchy. He must have decided that if I would do that to a man I clearly liked much better than Les Cox, I might not hesitate to sacrifice Green and Hannah, in which case he himself might have been next.

I stared down at the grate. I told Frank quietly he was dead wrong about Green and Hannah, also himself.

My son watched from the door, hands on his hips. His smirk told me he’d heard everything. “So long, Frank. Good luck,” I told the grate. “Go fuck yourself,” I told my son as I limped past.

If I had sense, I told myself, gimping along, I would go to the bank right down the street, mortgage my boats, mortgage everything I had, head north and start a new life somewhere else. Start a new life as a murder suspect and a fugitive, with no prospects and a young family to provide for? No? Too late for that?

At age fifty-five, I was too tired to think, let alone run. I had to cool down, keep my head, avoid any more mistakes. The only witnesses who could implicate me in this mess were Frank and Leslie, a pair of felons whom juries would never trust: the negro witness had already recanted and the killer lacked even the smallest shred of proof. If I swore to my innocence, sidled my way through as I had done so many times before, I would go free. It was not the courts that worried me, only my neighbors.

I caught up with Tippins at Marco late next day. At gunpoint, I told him the best thing he could do was deputize me to arrest Cox, who could neither swim nor run a boat even if he had one and was therefore trapped at Chatham Bend. Since Cox could not know where Reese had gone, much less that the murders had been reported, he would not be suspicious when I showed up. The sheriff was looking at the only man who had a chance of taking him alive.

Tippins suspected that my real aim was to kill Cox and eliminate a witness under cover of the law. He would not deputize me. He said, “I consider myself a good friend of the family, Mr. Watson, and I’d sure like to oblige Mis Carrie’s daddy, but the best favor I could do you now would be to take you into custody for your own protection.”

That same night I headed south.

At Everglade, Bembery described how in the hurricane, on her way back from Caxambas, his Bertie