Shadow Country

moonshine and rotted blood, its filthied floors, streaked walls, stained mattresses-the Watson place no longer, only a grim solitary presence, squatted on the bank of a lost river.

I slept in the boat.

By morning, the wind had changed. It bore the scent. I found the shovel. In the salt scrub east of the cane fields, the four corpses lay in a loose row, shot in the back of the head, maybe brained by a hammer. The humbled cutters must have huddled in a group, necks bent, awaiting death. No longer men, those poor devils would have touched torn hats and dug their own graves without complaint if Cox had thought their burial worth the delay.

Kerchief bandit-style over nose and mouth, I set to work in the thick heat. Driving myself in fury, never resting, I had them covered in a shallow pit by noon. I straightened up, mumbled Amen, and stumbled off, emptied by exhaustion and the heat. That afternoon, for the first time, I slept.

Awakening toward dark, I wandered my torn, matted cane in the thin light of a crescent moon. And in this moonlight, in this vast river silence, I was overtaken by feelings about Rob I could outrun no longer. I thought about that girl, his mother, killed bloodily in childbirth: I thought about his boyhood years when in cruel mindlessness I called him Sonborn. I walked faster and faster until I was trotting, almost running, in hopeless flight to escape my brain, my heart, my filthied hide and misbegotten life.

By lantern light, I scraped in vain at the spilled blood that fouled my house until I could scrape no more. I sat in darkness, hour after hour. I fled back to the boat. In fitful sleep I dreamed that the great crocodile had crossed the river and now lay stranded on the bank like a dead tree. I took fright at the size of it, the long heavy head implanted in the mud like a rough slab of pig iron, the jutting teeth outside the curl of jaw under the old stone eye, the pale claws and spread toes of the small greedy forefeet. On the dorsal scales grew dark green algae from lost ancient epochs as if this armored brute had lain here since the first emergence of the land.

In a thrash of its heavy tail, the thing was gone. The mud exhaled the smell and weight of it with a hard thuck, and the brown water opened like a wound and slowly closed, leaving strange viscous bubbles. Where it had lain sat a fossil defecation, a white sphere smooth as clay or burnished stone.

The river remained turgid under rainless heavens in a pewter light. Wind gusts of autumn raked the turning circles of the current and dark tips of broken trees, revolving slowly, parted the surface and were drowned again on their way downriver to the Gulf. On my last day, thinking I must eat, I shot a doe that the cistern’s scent had drawn from the salt prairie. I re-moved the gall, dressed out the carcass, but I’d seen too much blood: the flesh smell seeped into my sinuses and made me gag.

I hung the doe to cool. Toward dusk I tried to carve her. The cold cave smell of her meat, still fresh, was sickening. I consigned her to the river. What would Lucius say about such a waste? Where was he tonight when his father needed him? I sat in darkness in the boat, listening to unknown cries from the black walls of river forest.

GOODBYE TO CHATHAM BEND

Monday, October twenty-fourth. Kate’s birthday. At dawn, I committed my fate to Chokoloskee. Hadn’t I promised my wife I would be with her and given my word to my neighbors that I would return? I would offer Cox’s weapons and his hat as evidence that the murderer was dead. Could they doubt the word of a man returning of his own free will when he could have fled? In Key West, large ships weighed anchor every day, I would exclaim. The east coast railroad had already reached Long Key. With these alterna-tives, only an honest man would put himself at a crowd’s mercy.

They would not believe the truth. As for the lie, that bullet-holed hat would never be enough.

In that last noon, I torched my fields, running like a madman down the wind. The cane ignited quickly with a low thunderous booming, creating a column of thick oily smoke. I did this only for my own sense of completion. There was no crew to harvest the blackened stalks.

Flames still leapt and darted, rekindled by the wind, when in late afternoon I left the Bend and went away downriver. In this way, in the light of fire, I forsook my white house in the wilderness and the voices of those generous spirits who had lived here with me, all those souls so sadly bruised by my headlong passage on this earth, every life changed and not one for the better. In the smoke shadow, as the house withdrew into the forest, the cinder spirits vanished skyward and were gone. Then the Watson place was gone, the Bend, the future, lost and gone. Ahead was the falling of the river to the sea and the lone green islets in the salt estuary and the horizon where dark high clouds of drought prowled the battered coast.

Clear of the delta, I drifted for a time in a gray mist, awaiting some last sign; I heard faint fish slap and soft blow of porpoise, parting the sea with cryptic fins in their soft breathings. “No!” I shouted, startling myself. What I was about to do was lunacy. Sell the Warrior at Long Key, board the train, find a new frontier: hell, yes! I turned her bow, fled south toward the Keys.

The Warrior plowed the leaden Gulf. I howled, cursed foully, ground my teeth. As the pale strand of Lost Man’s Beach formed in the mist, I howled one last time, spun the helm, and headed north again in the direction of Kate Edna and the children. What was left of my life could have no other destination.

Off Wood Key, I suffered a sentimental urge to pay a final visit to the Hardens, but when I slowed and turned inshore, a choking fuel exhaust swept forward on the following wind, and my plan was obliterated by a sudden metallic clatter, then a faltering of the pop-pop of the motor. If I truly wished to reach Chokoloskee before dark, I was already late. I resumed my course, shouting at my ricocheting wits to clear my careening brain, make room for reason. To die half mad with fear and doubt-my God!

All of us must die. Why make a fuss about it? Achilles to Hector.

You die in your own arms, as the old people say.

I roared at the world all the way north along that coast. When this purge was over, I was cold-soaked in evil- smelling sweat but I was clear. I let the boat glide to a stop. I stripped, leaned overboard, and splashed my body, gasping in the cool October air. Cleaned at last, perched naked on the stern to dry, I tried to imagine what awaited me.

The men would hear Watson’s motor twenty minutes in advance, they would be ready. Unless they planned an ambush, shooting in a volley as the boat came within range, they would try to take me into custody.

If you are captured, having failed to prove that Cox is dead, will they lynch you in front of your young wife and kids? This I could not permit.

Stuffed in my pocket was that hat with the fresh bullet hole burned through. I also had Leslie’s.22 revolver and the matched Colts he had stripped from Dutchy’s body. I loaded the shotgun, peeling the outer paper off Smallwood’s swollen shells and jamming them into the chambers of both barrels, just in case-just in case what? Are you prepared to shoot? I checked the rounds in my own revolver, returned the weapon to my inside coat pocket, then laid the loaded six-guns under a rope coil near the helm, keeping them handy, just in case-just in case what? Old habit. Even with these weapons added to my own, I could never shoot it out with twelve or twenty nervous men: the moment I raised a weapon, I would be gunned down all in a volley.

Shooting one or two men would be pointless. Things would only go harder for my family, and anyway, taking another life was out of the question. I could argue and harangue, try to bully my way free, but I would not kill for it. Why did you load up, then? Or I might fire these guns to scatter the crowd once I got my family safely aboard. No boat on the Bay could catch the Warrior, which carried two oil drums of spare fuel, enough to take her to Long Key and the railroad-too late now, Mister Watson.

Would a bluff work? I bluffed them last time and the time before. These men were truck farmers and fishermen, unlikely to challenge a well-armed desperado grown strangely indifferent to whether he lived or died.

You men must know that Leslie Cox would never have given up these weapons of his own accord.

All true. Would the truth satisfy my neighbors? It would not. In a time of fear, my so-called evidence would not have satisfied me, either. Something more was needed. If they won’t believe the truth, I thought, they will damn well believe blood.

Where white terns dove on sprays of bait near Rabbit Key, I slowed the boat and circled the breaking fish,