Shadow Country

Book on the Lord’s Day whether his people needed it or not.

When everybody laughed, C. G. McKinney frowned. He pulled his long beard and coughed real loud and sudden to warn folks not to joke about Sunday worship. Being our local humorist, Mr. McKinney was never one to encourage jokes from other people: if any jokes were to be cracked, it was

C. G. McKinney who would crack ’em or know the reason why. So C. G. told his trusty story of the first man of God to reach the shores of Chokoloskee Bay. When Reverend Gatewood arrived at Everglade back in ’88, his first sacred duty was to preach last rites over the body of a man slain in a dispute with the skipper during the voyage.

I reckon E. J. Watson knew the Gatewood story but he had the manners to pretend he didn’t. Said he sure hoped that darned boat captain paid dearly for that sin cause what was needed in the Islands was some law and order. Hearing those words from a desperado, Isaac Yeomans whooped and hooted until he heard his own voice in the quiet and fell still.

While Mister Watson was away, a story spread that after he had killed Belle Starr, he “throwed in” with the James and Younger boys who rode with Quantrill in the Border Wars and later became outlaws. Our men could talk of nothing else for weeks. You would have thought those bloody renegades were the greatest Americans since General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert E. Lee. And some way, just for knowing outlaws and getting the credit for killing that outlaw queen, Ed Watson became some kind of a hero, too. If he’d showed up here a few years back with a jug of moonshine and a bugle, yelling, “Come on boys, we’re headed for them Philly-peens to kill us some dirty Spaniards, are you red-blooded Americans or ain’t you?” why, half the fool men on the island would have marched off after him, tears of glory in their eyes, without once asking where or why they might be going, or what was wrong or right in the eyes of God.

E. J. was talking very fierce, pounding his palm. “If the Ten Thousand Islands have a future,” he declared, “then those who place themselves above the law have no place in our peace-loving community!” Everyone stared and he stared back with a great frown like Jehovah. “A-men!” he shouted. Except for Isaac, who would laugh at the Devil Himself, my Ted was about the only one who dared to smile. Then Charlie T. smiled because Ted had smiled, and Isaac whooped again and slapped his thigh, and everybody got to laughing but C. G. McKinney. Naturally our more pious females started hissing about sacrilege but they couldn’t keep it up. Heck, they were thrilled! And the silliest just tittered happily, tee-hee-hee-hee.

I wasn’t smiling, not because of sacrilege but because this man was treating us like ninnies. He saw that I saw this-saw that Mamie House Smallwood and her brother Bill were not folks liable to forget about those Tuckers or forgive either. Knowing what he was up against with our House family, he did not scowl to scare or threaten, he did something worse: he disarmed me with a wink, a reckless confidential wink that made my righteous indignation feel downright foolish, made everything he’d told this crowd a joke, made all our hopes and struggles in this world simply ridiculous for the fundamental reason that our precious human life, for all its joys, was blood-soaked, cruel, and empty, with only sorrow, fear, disease at its dark end, fading to nothingness. Staring back at him, I thought, Was this a society of human beings or some purgatory where folks was condemned to live their lives with a laughing killer loose amongst them like a wolf?

Ted leaned and whispered it was only fitting to put ’em up in our house for the night. A murderer? That was my first reaction, I admit. No, I didn’t want to do it. No? I had to! After all, I told myself, no one else had a spare room. The real truth was, I didn’t want some other household claiming our famous visitor. Hadn’t my Ted called this man his friend before most of these other folks had even met him?

Aunt Lovie Lopez-Penelope Daniels she was, married Gregorio-Aunt Lovie was jealous, and she could not hide it. “You’d shelter a desperado under the same roof as your little children? You ain’t scared?” I was uneasy, yes, I whispered, but my man’s wish was good enough for me. “Wouldn’t be near good enough for me,” Aunt Lovie humphed. Course her Gregorio “come with the bark on,” as the men said, he was rough. A Spaniard with any kind of pride had to act crusty in those patriotic days when we ran ’em out of Cuba and the Philippines. Right from Injun times, the Spaniards been disliked here in south Florida and that won’t change.

That evening E. J. gave Ted news of Columbia County where the Smallwoods came from. In the kitchen, young wide-eyed Mrs. Watson described the new house her husband had built north of Fort White and how his hard work got that land producing after years of erosion and ruin. Yes, she confided, she knew all about the blame laid on her Edgar in his youth due to his hellfire temper, as she called it, but if she’d heard anything of his reputation in the Islands, she did not let on. She was out to redeem him, it was plain to see, she’d made that her holy mission in this life, she got all breathless just whispering about it. Mister Watson called her Kate but all the rest of us who came to love her called her Edna.

“E. J.’s got a bad feud brewing in Columbia County,” Ted whispered when he came to bed.

“That why he’s suddenly so homesick for Lee County?”

Ted reached across and put his hand over my mouth, lest our guests hear me from the other side of a slat wall. I was irked that my husband seemed so proud of having a killer for a friend. Saying nothing, I just lay there in the dark. I felt an intrusion in my heart, like a poison tendril twitching through the wall from the spare room. Ted was puffing, he was dreading my sharp tongue, yet just as eager as the rest of ’em to be first with his Watson news. Finally he muttered, “Family trouble over land. He come back south till things cool off. Didn’t care to shoot nobody in self-defense.”

There was something hungry in his voice I didn’t want to hear, something I picked up every time he told his tales of the bloody mayhem he had witnessed up around Arcadia or over on the east coast, Lemon City. Being a peaceable good man who hated fighting, he was bewitched by men of violence, of which we had more than we could use down around south Florida. Most of our Chok neighbors were just as bad, yet under their patched shirts and scraggy beards, they were gentle fellers, same as he was. For all their big talk, they were boys and pretty childish.

I kept after him. “That man Quinn Bass that Daddy knew up in Arcadia-didn’t your ‘friend’ call that self-defense, too? If your friend is such a peaceable feller, how come all these men try to attack him?”

“Mamie, his wife believes in him, you seen that for yourself, and she was up there with him in Columbia and knows his family a lot better’n we do. Heck, she’s a preacher’s daughter. If she believes in him, we got no reason not to.”

“Maybe those kinfolk are in his way like those poor Tucker people. One day your family might get in his way, too, ever think of that?”

My husband said, “It just ain’t fair to talk like that. We know he cut Santini but that’s all we know for sure. All the rest is rumors. There ain’t no proof he ever killed a single soul.”

My Ted has a fine head of hair, big black mustache, and a big deep voice he only has to raise to clear the drunks and drifters from the store. Generally “his wish is my command,” as Grandma Ida likes to say about her feisty husband, Mr. D. D. House. This was different. E. J. Watson had Ted Smallwood in his pocket, others, too, and no good could come of it. Ted fought off my questions, getting angry, but our little kids were right under this roof with Mister Watson. I would see this through.

“How come he dusted out of here so fast after that Tucker business? And again two years ago when his carpenter just happened to die, too?”

“Weren’t his fault that feller’s heart quit! E. J. knew the blame would be laid on him, and by golly, it was. When Guy Bradley got murdered a hundred miles away, who was the first man they laid it on? He might of been lynched! He’s scared of men taking the law in their own hands and you can’t blame him.”

“I don’t believe he was ever scared our men might lynch him. He’s too hardened by his sins to be scared of anything.” Thinking about that wink of his, I got upset all over. “Does what he pleases, then laughs at us, dares us to stop him.”

Ted’s big hand covered my mouth again; he pointed toward the wall. And suddenly I was so frightened that I wept and trembled. He took me in his arms. “E. J. is a fine farmer,” he murmured, starting in on the little speech that most all the women got to hear that night in every shack on our scared little island. “A real hard worker with a good head for business, always ready to help his neighbors. They ain’t a family in the Islands won’t say the same.”

But this time the old refrain of his same old song left him still restless. “All right, sweetheart,” he whispered. “But maybe this new family will steady him down. He opened an account this evening, paid down two hundred