We dropped Thompson’s ketch at Lost Man’s and the Hardens at Wood Key and Lucius took the Gladiator home. I told Short to come with me on the Warrior, I would take him to House Hammock through the inland bays. Owen Harden said, “You come see us, Henry”-his way of warning me to be good to Short in case I was still upset over that cargo. Henry shook hands with Owen and Webster and got into my boat without a word and put away his rifle. At a sign from me, he took the helm and entered Lost Man’s River. Passing Lost Man’s Key, he did not glance over that way even once.
Where the river narrowed, Short peered around him at the mangrove walls as if seeing the darkness in them for the first time. More and more un-easy, he watched me sip my flask. He said again, “I sure am sorry, Mist’ Watson.” But knowing how the Gladiator yawed when she was overloaded, and knowing Thompson knew that, I had decided that the only man responsible was Erskine, who had turned her over to an inexperienced hand despite the signs of storm. I said, “Well, I know you are, Henry, but you did your best, so never mind about it.”
After a time he gave a little cough, but not until I looked his way did he come out with it. “Sir? How might Miss Jane be gettin on?” I took a swallow of white lightning. “Miss Jane?” And he said, “Yessir.” “The mulatta gal?” He paused. “Yessir. The mulatta gal.”
That was a pause I didn’t care for. I took another swallow, then a draw on my cigar, breathing the smoke into his face. I said, “She is aiming to get married off to a coal-black nigger by the name of Reese.” I saw the blood rise to his cheeks, which goes to show how light this feller was. “Something wrong, Henry?” I said.
Another pause. Then he said, “Nosir. Nothing wrong with it. Please give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”
“Give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”
“Yessir,” he said, scared but stubborn. “Miss Jane Straughter.”
“Give Miss Jane Straughter the respects of Mister Henry Short?”
“Nosir.”
We went inland up Lost Man’s River and north through Alligator Bay. Henry flinched when I swung my gun up kind of sudden to shoot a white ibis passing overhead. I took the helm and he went to the stern to pluck our supper as we went along, and I recall how those white feathers danced and disappeared as the boat turned through the corridors of dusk in those narrow channels. It was a dark evening, overcast, no moon to travel by and dead low water. Twice the Warrior went hard aground before I quit and ran ashore at Possum Key. “We’ll lay over here tonight,” I said.
Jungle vines had crawled over the Frenchman’s grave and the door had blown off the front of the old cabin. Henry found a rusted pan and a bent pot and cooked the ibis. I sat there in the fire smoke to spite the mosquitoes, brooding over my lost cargo and wondering where the capital to put the Bend back into shape was going to come from. Henry watched me polish off that flask as if afraid I might get drunk and take his life.
“Fine eatin bird, suh. Call this ‘Chokoloskee chicken,’ ” Henry said, serving me the breast on a leaf plate. I took my knife out.
“Well, I know that, Henry.”
Squatting down to eat out of the pan, he kept to my right side and behind me, where I’d have to swing against the grain to get a shot off.
More and more irascible, I picked a fight. “What’s this Pentecostal?” I demanded, having heard him mention to the Hardens a new religion out of California that was signing up a lot of local Baptists, Henry included. Politely he tried to explain about Acts 2:4, the Day of the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover-“You some kind of a Jew, Henry?” I interrupted-when a mighty fire wind from Heaven rushed down into Jerusalem and the Apostles filled up with the Holy Spirit and went around speaking in strange tongues in sign of the world’s end-
“That so? Let’s hear some of their jabber.”
“Got to be in the Spirit, Mist’ Edguh, befo’ you kin speak in tongues.”
“In the Spirit. Speak in tongues.” I nodded wisely. “Helps to be dead drunk, too, I reckon.” And I drank off some more, mean and exhilarated. “Might get to be Jesus for a minute, or the Holy Ghost. What’s your opinion, Henry?”
“Nosuh.” Henry’s face had no expression. He scratched the fire-blackened earth with a small stick.
One time out there in the Nations-out of gun range, down the river narrows-I saw a panther come off a rock ledge, take a bay foal. That foal was a lot bigger’n the cat was, and the mare right there alongside, big horse teeth bared. These were half-wild Indian ponies, knew how to kick and bite. She could have run that cat back up that rock with no damn trouble. But that foal nickered just once and the mare whinnied, made a little feint, and it was over. Never even laid her ears back, the way horses do when they fight other horses. That mare and her foal, too, they just gave up, like offering the young one to that panther was in their nature. The mare went back to grazing before her foal was dead, not thirty yards from where that cat crouched, feeding.
What I mean, if Henry Short feared I might kill him, he had plenty of opportunity to get the drop on me and stop me. In Henry’s place, ol’ Frank Reese might have drilled me just for baiting him, then covered it up some way, taken his chances, because Frank was an outlaw raised up wild with no respect for whites who did not deserve any. But Henry Short would never raise his hand against a white or his voice either, not even if he thought he could get away with it. It just wasn’t in his nature.
“Henry? You ever hear about that crazy nigger couple years ago who shot up a whole posse of New Orleans police before they tore apart his hide-out in a hail of bullets? All over the South, men were talking about Robert Charles, trying to figure where that boy learned to shoot.”
Henry was guarded. “I heard Mist’ Dan House talkin sump’n about it, Mist’ Edguh. That boy must been dead crazy, like you say.”
This boy I had here was very complicated. Not humble or subservient, not exactly, he kept his dignity to go with his good manners. It was more like he was doing penance and would bow his neck for any punishment that came his way-his own penance, I mean, not one imposed by whites. Not so much shamed as forever damned by his few drops of black blood. Having been raised by white people since a small child, in a community where other black men were rarely seen from one year to the next, the nigra in him was a man he scarcely knew for whom the white man in him took responsibility. In Henry Short, the brother and his keeper were the same and Judgment Day was every day all year. He figured he deserved his cross and he aimed to tote it.
“Henry? You prefer setting back there with the miskeeters?” I pointed at the ground closer to the fire. “Ol’ Massuh ain’ gwine whup you, boy.” I enjoyed talking black to Henry, who talked white, having no nigras at Chokoloskee to teach him his own language. Besides Nig Wiggins at Will Wiggins’s cane farm out at Half Way Creek, the only other nigra was George Storter’s man at Everglade, a stowaway from the Cayman Islands, blacker’n my hat; I don’t think they ran across each other twice a year. As Kate says, “These poor darkies in the Islands must get very lonesome.”
Hearing Henry’s voice, there was no way to tell what color he was, and seeing him, you could hardly tell it either. Henry Short looked a lot more Injun than nigra and a lot more white than Injun, come to think about it. But when I asked about his ancestry-which he knew I knew-he paused, then whispered, “Nigger. Nigger to the bone.”
Was that what Henry thought I wished to hear? I’d heard those words before and so they nagged me. I turned to look at him.
Then I remembered. Before it struck me that I might not want the answer, I inquired, “So your daddy’s name was Short. Mister Short, maybe?”
“Nosuh, Mist’ Watson, suh, ah doan rightly have no name, no suh. Dey gib me de name Sho’t jus’ fo’ de fun, me bein so puny when ah was comin up.”
Henry’s eyes could not hide his alarm. He had retreated into nigger speech and so I knew.
A hoot-owl called deep in the forest. Hoo-hoo, hoo-aw-w.
“I b’lieves dey called him Jack. Somethin like dat.”
I emptied the bottle, hurled it over the black water. It made a small splash at the farthest edge of firelight. “I can’t pay your wages for a while,” I said, unable to look at him.
“Ain’t got nothin comin, nosuh,” Henry murmured. “Ah done sunk yo’ boat.”
Long minutes passed. We watched the flask, which had gone under for a moment. Then the neck popped up like the small head of a terrapin back in the salt creeks, or the tip of a floating mangrove seed that has not yet taken hold on the shallow bottom.
“Tell you what.” I picked up his Winchester, which looked like the first model ever made. “We’ll shoot for it. Double or nothing.” Despite all that Chokoloskee talk about Short’s marksmanship, black men generally shoot poorly, not being mechanical of mind. I figured he might shoot better than most local men but nowhere near as well as E. J. Watson.
“Ain’t got nuffin comin, Mist’ Edguh, nosuh, ah sho’ ain’t.” Henry was scared. For this selfrespecting man, trying to speak like an ignorant field hand, I thought, was like a dog rolling over on its back to bare its throat. Disliking this, I fired fast to shut him up. My first bullet came so close that the bottle nose went under for a moment. “Your turn,” I said.
“Nosuh! Ain’no need! Yo nex’ shot take care of it, Mist’ Edguh!”
“Shoot.” I tossed the gun.
He shot and missed. I shot again. Over and over I sank that goddamned thing but it would not stay down, and the wavelet made by every bullet washed it a little farther back under the mangroves.
Henry, too, kept missing, barely. It was only after it drifted out of sight and he claimed I’d sunk it that it came to me how he’d missed each time in exactly the same spot.
“Maybe your sight is out of line,” I said. “You’re always two inches to the right.”
“Yassuh, dass ’bout it. Two inches.”
But even if his sight was out of line, a sharpshooter would compensate after a round or two. If that spot just to the right had been a bull’s-eye, Henry Short would have drilled it every time.
He had outshot me and I knew he knew it. I muttered some excuse about too much liquor, which only made me angrier. “Who taught you to shoot?” I said after a while.
“Ol’ Massuh Dan House now, he gib Henry dis ol’ shootin arn, and Mist’ Bill, he slip me a few ca’tridges, lemme use his mold so’s to make mah own. Taughts mah own se’f but nevuh learnt too good, doan look like, cuz heah I gone and los’ my wages on account I couldn’t hit dat bottle-”
“HENRY!”
He peered about at the black trees as if uncertain where that shout had come from. “Dammit, boy! Don’t you try to flimflam me with nigger talk!” But when I turned to point a warning finger at his face, the man was gone.
He must have had me in his rifle sights, against the firelight. I turned back slowly, saying, “Shoot, then. Or come out where I can see you.”
Blackness surrounding. Tree frogs shrilling. A chunking thrash across the channel-tarpon or gator. The water was dead still. On its silver skin was a single small dark mole-that Christly bottle.
“Miss Jane!” I roared. “You want her, Mis-ter Short? You want her?” I waited. “She ever tell you about me, Mis-ter Short? How I had her all that summer?”
I could feel his finger on the trigger. I was in his sights. Exhilarated, I forced my breath against the inside of my chest to steel my hide against the burning fire of his bullet. When nothing happened, I gasped, “Come on! Finish it!’
Not a whisper. The black jungle masses all around had fallen still. Behind me, staring upward through the black shell dirt of his garden, the Frenchman’s skull was a witness for the dead.
“FINISH IT!” I roared.
At the shot, the floating bottle popped and vanished from the surface. In its place a small circle blossomed for one moment only to vanish, too.
I awoke with a deep headache. He was there, making the fire. Moving stiffly in the iron calm of profound anger, we did not speak. An hour later when I let him off on the narrow walkway through the flooded forest guarding House Hammock, I wondered what I had asked of him, last night under the moon. What I had awaited. What I had wanted finished.
“Next time I tell you, finish it! You damn well finish it,” I said. Neither of us knew what the hell I meant. He only nodded.
Near the walkway, a mangrove water snake, leaving no trace on the surface, crossed the sunlit ambers of the dead leaves on the creek bottom. Under red stilt roots blotched with white where coons had pried off oysters, the noses of feeding mullet pushed the surface. Henry touched his hat, I raised my hand halfway, but we remained silent, knowing we would never speak of this again.