Shadow Country (15 page)

When the law dropped him off on their way back south, Earl was raring to tell every last thing he seen. Evidence in the case was confidential, Deputy Earl advised us, but quick as a goose squirt, it come out: Watson and his son was gone, his house was empty. On the floor they found Wally Tucker's crumped-up message, but not wishing to admit they could not read even big letters printed out with pencil, the deputies never bothered with it. “Handwrit note don't count for nothin in no court of law”—that's what they told Earl. Even so, Earl had the sense to save it.

Sarah read it out loud and got furious before she finished. “Might mean nothing to deputies but it sure is proof that Wally Tucker was the fool who got Bet murdered!”

Hell showed up quicker than poor Wally expected, and high water, too.

ERSKINE THOMPSON

First day of January, 1901, sailin north from Lost Man's Beach, I seen the black smoke of a cane fire from way out in the Gulf, smelled that burned sweetness in the air like roasting corn. That fire was still going strong when I passed Mormon Key and tacked into the river.

At the Bend, the trees was just a-shimmering in that heat, and the hawks and buzzards comin in from as far away as cane smoke can be seen to feed on small varmints killed or flushed from cover.

What was burning was our thirty-acre field. This year we was too broke to hire outside labor for the harvest season, so there was only the Boss and me and Rob, and maybe Tant if we were lucky.
The Boss must of gone crazy
—that's the way I figured. He was firing a cane field we could never harvest.

Tying up, I seen no sign of Rob, let alone Tant. All I seen was Mister Watson on the half run in his field setting fires like he'd heard a shout from Hell; he was drifting over the black ground in a ring of fire like a giant windswirled cinder. Had his shotgun in his other hand, and that made no sense neither, cause he hadn't lit fires on three sides the way we done when we wanted a shot at any critters that might run before the flames. Something was on the prowl here in the hellish air and spooky light where the sun pierced the smoke shadow. I never hollered or went near the house, just waited on the dock.

Toward nightfall, with his fires dying down, he come in from the field, eyes darting everywhere. “Who's aboard that boat?” He was coughing hard, fighting for breath. He went on past, then swung that gun around quick as a cottonmouth, like he meant to wipe me out. I yell out, “Hold on, Mister Ed! I come alone!” but he don't lower the muzzle. Don't like turnin his back to me but minds his back turned to the schooner even more. And damned if he don't go aboard, checking on me over his shoulder, and poke that shotgun into every cranny on that boat, from stem to stern.

Coming out, he growls, “No harvest, boy. I'm broke.” He explains the fire: if the cane is left unharvested, with no burn-off, next year's crop would be choked out. We walked up to the house, me in the front.

Tant and Josie were gone. Rob never come to supper. Me and Mister Watson ate Tant's cold venison, left on the hearth. No bread baked, no greens. No life in that house, just us two men chewing old cold meat not smoked through proper because Tant never banked the cooking fire, just let it die, as usual; damned meat had a purply look and a rank smell to it. I never get none down, that's how dry my mouth was. Mister Watson threw it to the dogs and we et grits. He gets the bottle out, then forgets about it, just sits there panting, staring out over the river. And right then I begun to know that our good old days at Chatham Bend was over and I'd better be thinking about moving on. I was near to twenty and had my eye on young Gert Hamilton at Lost Man's Beach who was boarding at Roe's up to Caxambas while she went to school.

Mister Watson coughs and hacks. He says, I am sorry for the way I acted, Erskine. You are my partner, are you not? Yessir, say I, very serious and proud. Then he tells me he is leaving in the morning and all about what he wants done in his absence. He nods his head awhile, and after that, starts in confiding about his bygone life.

As a young feller in Columbia County, Mister Watson had a good farm leased, made a fine crop, but lost his first wife that was Rob's mama in childbirth, broke his knees in a bad fall, was bedridden while his land went all to hell, drank himself senseless, got in bad trouble. Never said what the trouble was and I never asked him. “Matter of honor,” Mister Watson said. So him and his new wife head west with the kids. Left by night and lit out northward for the Georgia border.

The next spring—this was 1887—they sharecropped a farm in Franklin County, Arkansas. Got his crop in and went on west into the Injun Nations, Oklahoma Territory—the first place he felt real safe, he said, because Injuns figured that any white in trouble with other whites must have some good in him. Plenty of renegade Injuns, too, and the worst of 'em, Mister Watson said, was Old Tom Starr, head of a Cherokee clan on the South Canadian River where the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee Nations come together.

“Tom Starr was a huge man and he killed too many. Got a taste for it, know what I mean, boy?” Mister Watson nodded, kind of sarcastic, when I piped up real eager, “I sure do!” In one feud Tom Starr and his boys set fire to a cabin and a little boy five years old run out and Tom Starr picked him up and tossed him back into the flames. “I don't know that I could do a deed like that, how about you, Erskine?” Mister Watson was frowning like he'd thought hard on this question before deciding.

“Nosir,” I said.

“ ‘Nosir,' he says.”

So Old Tom Starr asked a white Christian acquaintance if the white man's God would ever forgive him for that black deed he done, and this Christian said, “Nosir, Chief, I don't reckon He would.” Mister Watson's queer laugh come all the way up from his boots, and that laugh taught me once and for all this man's hard lesson, that our human free-for-all on God's sweet earth never meant no more'n a hatch of insects in the thin smoke of their millions rising and falling in the river twilight.

Right away he was looking grim again. “I'm not so sure I'd want to give that answer to a black-hearted devil like Tom Starr. What's your opinion on that question, Erskine?”

“Nosir,” I said.

“Nosir is right.” He was peering into my face, shaking his head. “Looks like I will have to do the laughing for us both,” he muttered.

A woman named Myra Maybelle Reed lived with Tom Starr's son. Mister Watson was there only a year when somebody put a load of buckshot into Maybelle, shot her out of the saddle on a raw cold day of February '89 and give her another charge of turkey shot in the face and neck right where she was laying in the muddy road.

At her funeral, Jim Starr accused Mister Watson of murdering his woman. They tied his hands and rode him over to federal court in Arkansas but after two weeks he was released for want of evidence. Went on home, got framed by friends of Belle, jailed for a horse thief but escaped from prison, headed back east. That's how he wound up in southwest Florida, which was about the last place left where a man could farm in peace and quiet, and no questions asked. Only thing, going through Arcadia, a killer named Quinn Bass pulled a knife in a saloon. “Gave me no choice. I had to stop him.”

Mister Watson cocked his head to see how I was taking his life story. He never said who killed Belle Starr nor what “stopped” meant for Bass.

“Any questions, boy?” Them blue eyes dared me.

“I was only wonderin if that Quinn Bass feller died.”

“Well, death was the coroner's conclusion.”

Mister Watson never talked no more that evening. For a long while, he sat leaning forward with his hands on his knees like he aimed to jump right up and leave only couldn't remember where he had to go. But what he'd told gave me plenty to think about while me n' him set at his table in the lamplight, waiting for Rob to come and get his supper. He never come.

I went outside for a moonlight leak, feeling small and lost under cold stars like I had awoke in that night country where I will go alone like Mister Watson, knowin him and me won't get no help from God.

I stared again. The schooner was gone, drifted away, like I had forgot to tie her up. I backed away, wanting to run, but there was nowhere but them blackened fields to run to. The earth was ringing in a silver light, the stars gone wild.

FRANK B. TIPPINS

In the first days of 1901, a young feller from the telegraph came by my office with a request from the Monroe County sheriff that Lee County detain an E. A. or E. J. Watson as the leading suspect in the murder of two Key West runaways at Lost Man's River.

In order to locate Mr. Watson, the first place I would have to go was his own house. To console myself after Carrie's marriage—to pick the scab, said sly Jim Cole, who saw right through me—I'd continued paying calls on Mrs. Watson after she and the boys moved to Anderson Avenue because Carrie came to visit every day. Ashamed of myself, I observed young Mrs. Langford for signs of discontent with Walter while listening carefully for any stray word that might feed my nagging curiosity about her father. At that time, I had glimpsed that man just once and from behind, a broadbacked figure in a black Western hat and well-cut suit, walking down First Street to the dock one early morning.

Ordinarily I walked unarmed around Fort Myers. That day I strapped a pistol underneath my coat. With Miss Carrie's mother failing fast, it seemed wrong to intrude on that sad family, and halfway there, I decided it made more sense to find Walt Langford and see what information he could give me, accepting the risk that he might warn his father-in-law. Circling back toward Langford & Hendry, I wondered if I was afraid, then caught myself brooding yet again about how a bad drinker like Walt Langford might abuse a girl—a woman—who was no more than a child. This rumination made me shift my wad and spit my old regret into the dust, making old Mrs. Summerlin—
Good morning, ma'am!
—hop sideways on the boardwalk, pretending I was out to soil her shoe.

Like all of our town's small emporiums, Langford & Hendry down on First Street was a frame building, slapped up quick on a mud street in a weedy line of ramshackle storefronts, livery stables, and blacksmith sheds—downtown in a cow town, as Cole said. Outside the door which led to the upstairs offices hunched Billie Conapatchie, a Mikasuki Creek raised up and educated by the Hendry family. Billie wore a bowler hat instead of the traditional bright turban; his puff-sleeve calico Injun shirt with bright red and yellow ribbons had been stuffed into old britches which stopped well short of his scarred ankles and scuffed feet. Squatting at favored lookout points, he spied on white-man life while awaiting the next public meeting or church service, or funeral or theatrical or wedding. Despite faithful attendance at these functions, he understood scarcely a word—or so he pretended, having come close to execution by his people for learning his mite of English at Fort Myers School. What passed through Billie Conapatchie's head was a great mystery, but I suspected that, even as an outcast, he served his people as sentinel crow, alert for some dangerous shift in course these white men might be making. At the same time, he had never lost his deep indifference to our ways and so he only grunted at my greeting, keeping an eye on the thickset curly man now crossing the mud street who was fixing us in place with a pointed finger.

“Nailing down the Injun vote there, Sheriff?” In his dread of silence, hurrying from one encounter to another, this man would shout some jovial insult to get attention to himself, taking over every conversation even before he waddled in to join it. When I pretended not to notice the big pink hand already thrust in my direction, it fell to yanking at the crotch of his big trousers. Undaunted, Jim Cole yelled at Billie, “Who gets to vote first? Injuns or women?” Cole jeered his silence. “How'd that go, Chief? Don't go talking our ear off, Chief!” He coughed up a short laugh at his own wit and followed me into the building, heaving himself up the narrow stair behind me.

Like all our cattlemen, Cole had invested his war profits in a big new house, but unlike the Summerlins and Hendrys, and the Langfords, too, this man had no love for the land nor any feel for cattle. Despite all his coarse cowboy talk, as old Jake Summerlin used to say, Cole sat a horse with all the style of a big sack of horse shit.

Banging open Langford's door, he boomed, “Well, lookee who's settin in his daddy's seat, and poor ol' Doc not cold yet!” He shouted his raucous laugh to the whole thin building. Grinning, Walt waved his guest into the one comfortable chair, where Cole sprawled back like an old whore and slapped his hands down on the leather arms. “How's the child-wife, you damn cradle robber? How come we ain't seen no sign of kiddies?”

I ignored Cole's wink, ashamed because I'd wondered the same thing, and sorry that poor Walt felt obliged to snicker. No longer ruddy from his years out in the pinelands, Langford was red-streaked near the nose from the whiskey he sipped to kill long hours in his father's office.

“Got some business with you, Walt,” I said. Cole grumped, “Well, spit it out then, we ain't got all day,” and Langford said, “No use trying to keep a secret from Cap'n Jim, ain't that right, Jim?”

“Isn't,”
Cole said, mopping his neck. “Ain't Carrie told you about
isn't
? You ain't out hunting cows no more, young feller, you're a damn cattle king! If I'm putting you up for county commissioner, you got to talk good American, same as the rest of us iggerant sumbitches.”

There was something shrewd and humorous about Jim Cole, something honest in his cynicism and lack of tact. All the same, I found it hard to smile. To Walt, I said, “I heard your father-in-law might be in town.”

Langford moved behind his desk and waved me to a chair. “That so?” he said.

I took my hat off but remained standing, gazing out the narrow window at the storefront gallery across the street where on election day a Tippins crowd had been scattered by gunfire and the whine of bullets from the general direction of the saloon owned by Taff O. Langford, the incumbent's cousin. I stayed where I was until a few regathered, then spoke the lines that won me the election:
They have the Winchesters, gentlemen. You have the votes.
Sheriff Tom Langford was turned out of office the next day.

“Goddammit, Frank, don't stand there looming just cause you're so tall.” Cole's smile looked pinned onto his jowls. The eyes in his soft face were hard—the opposite of Langford, whose eyes were gentle in a face still more or less lean. Cole had a long curlicue mouth and nostrils cocked a little high like pink and hairy holes, snuffling and yearning for ripe odors. “First you take ol' T. W.'s job and now you're doggin Carrie's daddy who ain't even in your jurisdiction. And here Walt's daddy ain't been dead a year and Carrie's mama fadin down right before our eyes. That's what Walt here has to tend to every morning, noon, and night. And even so, you come banging in here—”

“Easy, Jim.” Langford was smiling, holding both hands high. “Frank and me rode together in the Cypress, we're good friends. He's always welcome.”

Jim Cole had been hollering so loud that folks had stopped out on the street under the window. What Cole was really angriest about was my refusal to support his alibi when, three months earlier, a revenue cutter impounded his ship at Punta Rassa. On her regular run, the
Lily White
had delivered cattle to the Key West slaughterhouse, and rather than make the return run with her holds empty, she had met a Cuban vessel off the Marquesas to take on a rum cargo on which no duty had been paid. Cole testified that his rascally captain had taken on that contraband without his knowledge. No one believed this and some wondered at the greed that drove prosperous businessmen to skirt the laws of the democracy they claimed to be so proud of, steal from their own government by overcharging for their beef while paying their lawyers to cheat it of its taxes.

I said to Langford, “Trouble in the Islands.”

“I know that, Frank.”

“He's in town, then?”

“No.” Walt raised his hands as if I'd said,
This is a stickup.
“I never saw him and I don't know where he's headed so don't ask me.”

“Dammit, Walt, he's got no
right
to ask you!” Cole exploded. “Got no jurisdiction!”

Langford accompanied me onto the landing. “He's the only suspect, then?”

“So far.” I shrugged. “No known witnesses, no good evidence, and not much doubt.” I started down the stairs.

“Don't upset Carrie, all right, Frank? She never saw him. He stopped only long enough to say his last good-byes to Mrs. Watson. Admitted there'd been trouble. She told Carrie.” Langford awaited me. “That's the truth. He's gone. Which don't mean I will let you know if he comes back.”

Jim Cole boomed out, “If he comes back, I'm running that man for sheriff!” Langford guffawed briefly. “Ol' Jim,” Walt sighed, pumping out another laugh, as if unable to get over such a comical person. I shook my head over ol' Jim, too, to help Walt out. That old Indian watched us.