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Lost Man's River(269)

By:Peter Matthiessen




Over the Glades as the skiff moved up the river, the purple sky went the bad yellow color of old bruise. The mangrove delta seemed gray and dead and the current empty, turning and turning with the earth in great slow spirals, wandering ever westward down First Lost Man’s Bay. “Comin off the Gulf, headin upriver, the first bay you would come to”—Lucius imagined this was how, in the old century, this vast, uninhabited mangrove reach had got its name. The lost man, the man lost—who might he have been? What age and color, origin and destination? Indian, Spaniard, castaway, slave—where was his lost voice now? And where his bones?

For the first time in all the years he had inhabited this region, he found himself disturbed by the river’s name. In this gray void of silent water and dark forest, the lonely intuition came that he had strayed into some Land of the Lost where the man lost was the man doomed to apprehend his ultimate solitude on earth as his ordained existence. And again he recalled his father’s fascination with “the Undiscovered Country,” which signified not wilderness, but death.

Perhaps Whidden Harden sensed this dread, perhaps this was why he seemed so sad and shy. Drifting downriver, avoiding Lucius’s eye, he whistled and picked and chirped and trilled, invoking river spirits. He muttered as he rigged the lines, he uttered incantations. “Got to coax ’em on there,” he sang to the river over the soft purl of the outboard. “Got to coax ’em.”

At sunrise, the flood quickened with life, the smooth swift surface of descending current broken now by myriad swirls and slits cut by scaled creatures. Working the current points for sea trout, Whidden coughed softly, sun-up cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

Lucius cast his lure with a quick whisk, dropping it beneath the branch tips. He worked it in an arc across the current, awaiting the strike from hidden depths that might reconnect him to the heart of the world. In sleepless exhaustion, needing an end, he asked Whidden’s opinion of what Speck Daniels had said the night before about “Watson Payday.” Perhaps this was what Whidden had feared coming, for he grunted. In a little while, with no changes of expression, he began speaking.

“Early thirties, now, before the Park come in, a few men was still shootin plume birds for the foreign market. Late as ’35, a seaplane come in and cleaned out the last egrets, Whitewater Bay, and them Audubons was tryin to put a stop to it. Back at that time, a feller name of Charlie Green was Audubon warden up the coast at Duck Rock rookery. Remember Charlie? Pretty good feller, never paid no mind if a man shot a few white ibis for his supper, cause curlews was common. Well, one fine evenin the head Audubon, a Yankee from New York, come with Charlie on the Audubon boat—the old Widgeon, cabins fore and aft, remember her?—to where the fishermen was living on these houseboat lighters back of Turkey Key. They heard somebody shootin in the bayou, and when that man learned how us local boys was takin a few curlews, he cussed out ever’body, Charlie included. So later that night, around the moonrise, them two turned in. And knowin Charlie’s cabin was up forward, some of us boys circled that boat, shot the portholes clean out of the after cabin. And you know somethin? That head Audubon never poked his head out once to tell us ignorant local fellers we done wrong!

“Course them old-time wardens was laid off when the Park took over. Charlie Green was a local man and knew how to act proper, but most of these Park greenhorns is outsiders, like Speck says. One time a couple of that kind come to Turkey Key and told us we had to pay cash for federal licenses to fish commercial ‘in Park waters,’ never mind that back in them days, folks never had no cash money at all. So one of them young Browns sings out, ‘Well, we been here since 1880, and you been here since 1947—now which one do these Everglades belong to?’ Then his brother hollers, ‘How fast will your boat go?’ And when the ranger told him, young Brown says, ‘If you get goin right this minute, that might be about fast enough to haul your dumb ass out of here before it gets shot off’—”

“Whidden? I’m serious. I want to know if the Harden family ever heard or saw any good evidence that E. J. Watson killed his help rather than pay them.”

Risking his teeth, Whidden bit off a rusty knot of linen line and spat the bitter end into the scuppers. “Charlie Green had a young helper on Duck Key, and somebody had lent this boy a contraption to try out—early-type metal detector, not even on the market yet, might been the first one ever made, for all I know. I seen it once, hell of a lookin thing—heavy ol’ black box with tin earphones, wouldn’t hunt down but about two feet.