by Cameron Judd
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Passage to Natchez
Cameron Judd
This novel is dedicated to Tom Beer
“If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause … my son, walk not in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path.”
FROM THE BOOK OF PROVERBS
“It is a good thing to be shiftless in a new country.”
OLD FRONTIER MOTTO
1798
CHAPTER 1
On the Ohio River, early autumn
She could not bear to look into his face, and so kept her eyes fixed on the misty and receding line that marked the river’s far shore. Even without looking at him she felt his eyes upon her, studying her intently, trying to brand her features into his mind while he was still able to do so. It made her feel exposed and oddly endangered, as if it were she who was sick and doomed rather than he.
The sorrow in his face was what made her unable to look back at him. Her mother’s face had displayed that same fated, lachrymose look two months ago, when the truth of her fate had at last broken through after days of denial and the peculiar, distinctive effects of her disease had begun to eat at her mind. Death came mere days later, after fierce suffering. Beulahland Ames had died choking and struggling as her daughter watched in terror from the corner of the one-room cabin, dreading the arrival of death, yet also eager for it to come and end her mother’s ordeal.
Now her father appeared destined for a similar fate. He and Celinda both knew it, as did the flatboatmen who had just evicted them from their craft. Surviving this hellish illness was rare. When Trenton was gone, Celinda would be alone in the world. Alone. The thought overwhelmed. She sat in the prow of the skiff, her back toward the nearing Kentucky shore, trying to comprehend it all.
A foggy haze overhung the water and a piercing drizzle grayed the air. Her face felt chilled and pale. Water lapped at the sides of the skiff and whipped against her cheek in a fine, stinging spray driven up by a stout wind. No one spoke. A single rower powered the shore-bound skiff, the task forced upon him by the drawing of straws among the boatmen. He kept his face as expressionless as that of a corpse, but his eagerness to be done with this business was evidenced by his posture and hurried motions. Behind him and facing the prow, Trenton Ames sat straight-spined, eyes ever fixed on his daughter’s face, his hand sometimes creeping to his throat for soft, evaluative touches.
The barrel-laden flatboat from which the Ameses had been expelled was already almost lost in the fog, carried swiftly away on a river made high and swift by two days of autumn rain. The skiff rower would have to work hard to catch up to the racing flatboat once he had unloaded his two solemn passengers, their meager baggage, and the food the crew had packed for them in a sack that Celinda now held in her lap. It came to her that she would share little of this fare with her father. He would not feel much hunger at the beginning, and before long he would be unable to swallow even if he did want to eat. His continual touching of his neck showed that he was already anticipating the first hints of the muscular spasms of the throat that were one of the most terrible symptoms of his malady.
Beulahland Ames’s infection had come after the bite of a fox whose madness was evidenced by the congealed saliva that had clotted its jaws, and by its tormented, aggressive behavior. The fox had come upon her unexpectedly from a thicket of dried-out blackberry vines along the south side of the dirt yard of the Ames cabin. It tore her ankle badly before Trenton could fetch his rifle and kill the beast. Even though her bleeding leg was thoroughly infused with the contaminated spittle of the fox, Beulahland had initially denied with fervor that she would become sick. She was still denying it when the first symptoms came. Only when she lost the ability to abide even the thought of a drink of water because of the pain and muscular spasms swallowing brought on, did she finally accept the truth. Three days after that, she was dead.
Trenton had cared for his wife with saintly conscientiousness throughout her mortal suffering. It had not been easy. At times she had convulsed violently, and eventually her mind failed her, leaving her bereft of rationality and feral in manner. Once she even lunged at Trenton, declaring insanely that he was responsible for her having the illness, actually cursing him to die in the same manner.
Celinda wondered if a curse could account for her father’s infection. She had her doubts, being less superstitious than most of the folk of her native Kentucky backwoods. Her father was literate and self-educated, and had shared his learning with his only child. Celinda suspected that her father had somehow picked up his hydrophobia from the diseased fox itself when he carried it off for burning. Or perhaps he had absorbed some sort of sickly miasma during the care of his wife. Maybe in one of her more violent and hateful moments, Beulahland had actually bitten him, and he hadn’t told. Celinda could not know.
For fear of the disease, Trenton had not allowed Celinda to come near her mother during the last two days of her life. Celinda had judiciously obeyed, silently grateful for the prohibition. It wasn’t without reason that those unfortunate enough to contract this disease were usually cut off from others and abandoned to their fate, just as the flatboat crew was even now abandoning Trenton Ames.
Forgetting how she herself had feared her own dying mother, Celinda thought the flatboatmen devilishly cruel for what they were doing. She despised the cold, frightened stares they had aimed at her father, their whispered, conspiratorial conversations, their unwillingness to touch or even come near him, and most of all their readiness to condemn a good man to die alone for the sake of their own precious well-being. They had told her she could remain with them if she wanted and go on to Natchez—as long as no sign of the disease exhibited itself in her. Trenton had encouraged her to go along, but she refused bitterly. Where her father was, she would be. As you wish, the boatmen had replied, and ejected them both.
The skiff reached the bank. The rower drew in his oars and waded into the water to the shore. He tied off the boat, hesitated, then put out his hand to help Celinda out. She shook her head, and he withdrew his hand with an expression of relief. She realized that he feared her, too, and she hated him all the more. If only her father hadn’t been so honest about his ailment! He might have lied about the nature of the illness and been allowed to remain on the flatboat. But Trenton would have nothing of lies. At the first sign of sickness, he had confessed the truth. Perhaps it was for the best, Celinda thought wearily. A riverborne flatboat would be no place in which to suffer through an illness that would eventually make even the sound of rushing water intolerable.
She made it clumsily out of the boat with her packs and her father’s, soaking and chilling her feet in the lapping shallows at the river’s edge. Turning, she watched her father rise slowly, a gaunt, sallow scarecrow of a man. Using his Pennsylvania rifle like a walking stick to steady himself, he stumbled up to the prow, almost falling as the skiff rocked beneath him, then stepped into the water and up onto the shore. Watching, the boatman stood with his sweat-stained, woven cap of wool in his hand in a display of odd-seeming obeisance and awe at the presence of a man who in his mind was already as good as dead.
“I can pitch a shelter for you back in the trees yonder, if you want,” the boatman said, putting his cap back on his head. The mumbled words were spoken as if out of obligation, the speaker having turned a longing gaze downriver after the flat-boat.
“I’ll find our own shelter,” Celinda replied tautly. She paused, anger rising. “If you had cared whether we have shelter, you would have at least thrown us off where there is an inn or cabin. You’
re as good as murdering us as it is, scoundrel!”
Celinda was a shy girl, and never before in sixteen years of life had she dared insult another person to his face. She found doing so surprisingly cathartic. The boatman’s solemn demeanor did not change. Without looking at either her or her father again, he swiftly freed the skiff, climbed back in, and rowed out into the river, oars creaking.
Only after the fog had begun to close around him did he speak. “God’s mercy be with you!” he called feebly.
“Who are you to speak of mercy or God? Off with you!” Celinda shouted the words into the murk. No reply returned. The skiff receded and vanished into gray.
Trenton Ames sank onto his haunches, then sat down on the muddy bank. “You shouldn’t speak so to that man,” he weakly remonstrated. “He and the others on that boat, they’re doomed souls, needing our prayers far more than our curses.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Did you not see, Celinda? On the flatboat, when he was first rowing us away? There was a death angel there, right amongst them. I saw the same standing by your mother’s bed before she choked her last. Perceived him both times as clear as I do you now. Those men are bound to die. Doomed souls, bound to die on that boat.”
Celinda was sure now her father’s mind was already being touched by his disease. She had seldom heard him say anything even vaguely superstitious. And even if death angels were real and her father had seen one, surely it had come not for the boatmen, but for him. It was as obvious as it was dreadful, but there was no reason to speak it, and she held her peace.
For a while they remained together on the shore, listening sorrowfully to the fading creak of the skiff rower’s oars, until finally it was lost in the distance and there was no sound but the dull roar of the swift river and the caw of a jay somewhere back in the leafless forest.
“We’d best go, Celinda,” Trenton said. “We need to find shelter. I don’t want to die under the open sky.”
“You’ll not die, Pap,” she said. “You’ll get better.”
She had felt obliged to say it, but she and Trenton knew it wasn’t true, and it brought no comfort.
They took shelter an hour later in one of the caves in a bluff nearly a mile back from the river. Settling in, they ate some of the food, Trenton forcing down his meager portion. Then they built a fire near the mouth of the cave and simply sat, awaiting the onset of the symptoms that would mark the man’s last days. While they waited, Trenton talked, telling Celinda that she was the greatest treasure he had ever possessed, but that now she would have to make her way in the world alone. He gave her instruction on what to do when he was gone, and urged her again and again to be strong. What little money he had he gave to her, and told her that she should find an inn along the river and lodge there until she could find new passage to Natchez. There, he said, she should seek out her aunt, Ida Post, just as they had planned to do together. Ida would help her find a new life, and better. Ida had her gruff side, as her father had warned Celinda before, but at heart she was a good woman and would see that Celinda was housed and fed until she could find a way to make it on her own.
“And it’s on your own you’ll be in a way that you never have been before,” he told her. “You’ve sometimes been a weak girl, Celinda, but you can no longer be weak. Learn to be strong, and never let another be stronger than you. Your aunt Ida, she’s a weak woman, too, and you won’t be able to rely on her for long. In the end you’ll have only yourself and God above to rely on. Trust in your feelings, and count on God to guide them. Do you understand me, Celinda? Will you do that?”
“Yes, I understand. And I will.”
“And will you be strong, dear girl? No matter what comes, will you be strong?”
“I’ll be strong.” But she didn’t feel strong at all.
Before long, sorrow and an imprecise, nervous fear began to afflict Trenton, true to the usual progression of hydrophobia. He struggled to maintain a brave mien, but it did not last. He paced in the cave and just outside it, looking around with wild eyes, wringing his hands, staying in constant motion. He began talking again, but not calmly and coherently as before. He chattered on about every subject that came to mind, his speech gradually taking on an oddly clipped quality very different than his usual drawl. Celinda remembered that the same thing had happened to her mother when the disease began to worsen.
He ate a little and even drank some water at first, but soon fever came and he lost his appetite. He complained of headache and pain in the eyes, and soon Celinda noticed a marked change in how he breathed. His breaths became long sighs, each one exhaled in a burst like a gasp or sob. It troubled her to hear it, but when she tried to approach him to offer comfort, he violently waved her away.
“I ain’t going to let you get ill, too!” he said, each word a sharp, gaspy eruction. “You stay away from me, you hear? You stay away! And when I’m dead, don’t you bury me! Just leave me here, and don’t touch my corpse.”
By the third day it was even more terrible for Trenton. The melancholy and vague fearfulness that had characterized him up until now yielded to authentic terror. Wrenching spasms of the throat set in. He raged with thirst, but every attempt to drink brought intense pain and choking, so that soon water grew intolerable. They were far enough from the river that its sound didn’t reach them, but a dripping little rivulet in the rear of the cave brought torment. Only by laying her shawl beneath the drip to muffle its noise was Celinda able to lessen her father’s suffering.
Other tortures, however, rose in hideous compensation. The sky had remained overcast, but even the murky light of cloud-filtered sun became hard for Trenton’s eyes to bear without pain. The hydrophobia had seemingly heightened his hearing as well, or at least his sensitivity to what he heard, so that every sound or unexpected motion caused him to react. Occasionally he would start so badly that it set off tormenting muscle spasms that made his entire body rigid. Celinda learned to avoid sudden movements and to tread lightly. She didn’t let it show when his company became disgusting because of the thick, phleghmy mouth secretions that began to afflict him, causing him to spit frequently, out of fear of swallowing.
About sunset on the fourth day, as a heavy storm built in the west, Trenton sat up suddenly and laughed. “I’ll dance it out!” he declared. “Why didn’t I remember it before, girl? I don’t have to die at all! I’ll dance the poison out of me, dance till the sweat purges me clean! I’ll not die!”
Celinda was stung. Of course he was going to die. Any hope he felt at this point could only be generated by the cruel effects of the disease itself on his mind.
“Pap, sit down and rest yourself,” she said. “You can’t dance out this sickness.”
“Yes I can, girl, yes I can—my own pappy told me about it years and years ago, for he knew a man who done it and lived. I’d plumb forgot it until now. Oh, Celinda, I wish I’d have remembered it while your mother was yet living. It would have saved her.”
Celinda said nothing. Seated on the floor of the cave, the light fading outside as clouds thickened in the sky, she felt numb horror. The idea of a dying, babbling man dancing in the impossible hope of saving himself was tragic and ludicrous at the same time. She drew up her knees before her and buried her face in her skirt.
The storm hit just as he began to dance. Lightning seared through the sky, silhouetting his absurd form against the open mouth of the cave as he flailed weakly, his motions obviously causing him pain. “Stop it, Pap!” she called, fighting tears. “It’s too late for that!”
“I’ll live, girl! I’ll live! You watch and see if I don’t live!”
She refused to watch. Turning her back, she sat out the storm as he continued his convulsive, painful thrashing. A time or two she heard him fall and cry out, but each time he rose and danced again. The sound of the rain was surely bringing him misery, yet his will was amazingly strong. He was still dancing when she fell asleep.
She awakened in pitch-blackness. Sitting up, she s
hivered. Her clothing was soaked with cave moisture and smeared with greasy clay.
“Pap?”
She heard nothing. Rising, she moved toward the mouth of the cave, feeling her way along the wall. “Pap, where are you?”
Her foot nudged against his form, lying still on the cave floor. “Oh, Pap …” She knelt and touched his chest—and found he was still breathing. Breathing! And this time without the sighing, sobbing noises that had accompanied respiration after the advent of his most severe symptoms.
He was merely asleep, his breath coming slowly and evenly. Astounded, incredulous, she knelt in the dark beside him as his chest made her hand rise and fall. She smiled as tears flowed down her face, and despite the dank cold of the moist cave, she felt warm and well.
He had done it! He had actually danced out a disease that should have killed him! Celinda felt the awe of having witnessed a miracle. She bit her lip as hot tears coursed down her grimy face.
Trenton had doffed his coat at some point in his cavorting. Celinda found it and laid it across him. Moving to the mouth of the cave, she sat down and waited out the night. The storm was long over and all was peaceful. The world was beautiful and good. Her father had survived, and she would not have to be alone after all.
When the first light of dawn brightened the wet landscape and lifted the shadows in the cave, Celinda rose and went back to her father. He was lying as he had before, seemingly having not moved at all. His coat still lay across his chest just as she had placed it.
Kneeling, she touched him. He was cold and unmoving, his face nearly the color of the gray rock beneath him. He had died sometime in the night.
All the happiness and hope that had revived in her earlier drained away, and the closest thing she could find to comfort her was the thought that at least he hadn’t died as his wife had, choking and struggling in pain. At least he had been given the mercy of dying in his sleep.