Shadow Country Read Free

lynching,” Bill House calls.
    â€œDon’t think so, Bill? What if he’s just coming to pick up his family, keep on going?”
    The men stare away toward the south as the oncoming boat comes into view, a dark burr on the pewter water. Most have worn the same clothes since the hurricane, they are rank as dogs and scared and cranky, they are anxious to enlist Ted Smallwood because the participation of the postmaster might afford some dim official sanction.
    If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?
    â€œNo hanging back!” shouts Old Dan House, glaring at Smallwood.
    Isaac Yeomans breaks his shotgun and sights down the barrels, pops a shell in, sets his felt hat. “Best throw in with us, Ted,” he urges his old friend. “We don’t care for this no more’n you do.”
    â€œHe always pays his bills, plays fair with me. I ain’t got no fight with him and you fellers don’t neither.”
    â€œHell, Ted, this fight ain’t nothin to be scared of! Not with his one against more’n a dozen.”
    â€œMaybe I ain’t scared the way you think. Maybe I’m scared of murder in cold blood.”
    â€œ
He
ain’t scared of cold blood, Ted. Colder the better.”
    The twilight gathers. Hurricane refugees from the Lost Man’s coast have gathered by the store, fifty yards back of the men down by the water. “You fellers fixin to gun him down?” one hollers. “Thought you was aimin to
arrest
him.”
    â€œArrest Watson? They tried that the other day.”
    The postmaster can no longer make out faces under the old and broken hats. Too tense to slap at the mosquitoes, the figures wait, anonymous as outlaws. Behind the men skulk ragged boys with slingshots and singleshot .22s. Shouted at, they retreat and circle back, stealthy as coons.
    In his old leaf-colored clothes, in cryptic shadow, Henry Short sifts in against the tree bark like a chuck-will’s-widow, shuffling soft wings. Dead still, he is all but invisible.

    Not slowing, the oncoming boat winds in among the oyster bars. Her white bow wave glimmers where the dark hull parts the surface, her rifle-fire
pot-pot-pot
too loud and louder. The boatman’s broad hat rises in slow silhouette above the line of black horizon to the south.
    The wind-stripped trees are hushed, the last birds mute. A razorback grunts abruptly, once. Mosquitoes keen, drawing the silence tight. Behind the rusted screen of Smallwood’s door, pale figures loom. Surely, the postmaster thinks, the boatman feels so much suspense, so much hard pounding of so many hearts. The day is late. A life runs swiftly to its end.
    In the last light Ted Smallwood sees the missing child crouched in the sea grape, spying on all the grown-up men with guns. In urgent under tones he calls; the amorphous body of armed men turns toward him. He does not call again. He runs and grabs the little boy.
    Hurrying the child indoors, he bangs his lantern. His wife raises a finger to her lips as if the man coming might hear. Does she fear denunciation of her husband for attempting to alert the boat? Hadn’t they learned that, warned or not, this man would come in anyway? Mamie whispers, “Is Daddy the one behind this, Ted? Bill and Young Dan, too?” He squeezes a mosquito, lifts his fingertips, winces at the blood. “Light that smudge,” he tells his little girl, pointing at the mangrove charcoal in the bucket.
    He says, “They’re all behind it.” He cannot stop yawning. “They want an end to it.”
    The motor dies in a long wash of silence. His daughter whimpers. The postmaster, queerly out of breath, sends her to her mother. He joins the young woman on the porch. “Please, Edna,” he entreats her, “go back inside.”
    In the onshore wind out of the south, the boat glides toward a point just west of where the store landing had been lost to storm. Like a shadow, Henry Short crosses behind the