Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  “I can run anyplace I please. To the devil with all this. I’m’ going to Hughes’s tavern and get myself something to drink. Then I believe I’ll just light up on my horse and ride out of this country once and for all. If I don’t see you again for a good spell, Thias, you take care of yourself. Kick Grandpap right swuft in the fundament and tell him that’s from me.” Clardy grabbed his rifle, which had been leaned up against a nearby rail fence, and began walking toward the cabin.

  “Clardy, come back here!”

  “Good-bye, brother. I hope you’ll enjoy your life here alone with Grandpap. Me, I’ll be off on the old Boone road getting rich and famous as a highway robber.”

  “You’re scared, that’s what it is! You know who it was there at that grave, and you’re scared to say!”

  “Anybody but you said that, Thias, and I’d free him of his teeth,” Clardy yelled back.

  Clardy reached the cabin and went inside. Thias stood watching. Within two minutes Clardy was back out, carrying his rifle, pouch, horn, and a well-stuffed saddlebag. Without looking at Thias, he headed over to the stock pen, saddled his horse, and rode out. He lifted his right hand and waved across his shoulder without looking back.

  Thias almost charged after him, but held back. There was no point. He could run Clardy down, drag him off that horse and back to the cabin, even beat him half senseless, and none of it would make Clardy name the men whose faces they both saw in the lantern light if he didn’t want to. Nor would it keep him from leaving if he was set on it.

  Thias wondered what kind of men they could be, to have done such foul things as desecrating the corpse of an old woman and murdering a man who tried to stop it all.…

  Suddenly, Thias was overwhelmed with the realization that he and Clardy, now riding out of sight around the bend, could be endangered by all this, should it ever get out that they had seen the faces of the men at the Van Zandt grave. Probably Clardy had realized that, too. Maybe that’s what was prompting him to make his long-promised exodus so abruptly.

  Thias was torn. Maybe he should go try to persuade his brother to come back to the cabin. Maybe he should go on with him, to protect him.

  Or maybe …

  Or maybe he should even do the very thing Clardy had been advocating for so long. Maybe he, too, should simply leave. At his brother’s side he could ride out of the very region and find a new life somewhere else. Run off … just declare his freedom and go.

  The thought generated an unexpectedly strong pang of longing. To ride away, to simply leave behind not only this dilemma, but this whole mundane life—the notion had an overwhelming appeal all at once. For a few moments Thias understood his younger brother a little better. This, he thought, must be the feeling that stirred him to talk so much about getting away from this place.

  Thias didn’t go after Clardy. It was as if he couldn’t, and that worried him.

  He stood there for a long time at the unfinished cabin, looking down the road. He still felt fearful, not only for Clardy now, but in another way, for himself, too. Was Clardy the wiser brother for once? Sure, he was reckless, clung to the romanticized idea that becoming a thief would be a grand thing—a notion he should have outgrown several years before—and seemed to lack any drive to become a settled, decent citizen. Yet in the end it was Clardy who would probably escape this farm, become free and happy … while Thias himself would remain bound to the land, to his sense of duty, to a life that held no color or promise. He would grow old and tired and sour, just like his grandfather. Standing there at that moment, the whole scenario loomed vividly in his mind: sad, fated, inescapable.

  He looked down the empty road and wondered if Clardy really was leaving for good. Surely not. Surely he would come back tonight, drunk and primed for a fight with Grandpap, and affairs at the Tyler house would take on their usual miserable turn.

  But what if he doesn’t come back? What if he doesn’t?

  Thias felt a hot, wet surging in his eyes. The feeling of distress over the probable murder of Abel Van Zandt, horror at the gruesome thing done to the corpse of an old woman, the guilty feeling that maybe he and Clardy could have stopped it all from happening … all these together felt like a mountain’s weight on his shoulders.

  Don’t leave, Clardy. Whatever I’ve said to you, please don’t leave me alone here.

  He longed to go after his brother, but instead he merely turned and went back to work, while from down at the creek Hiram Tyler’s thin voice came riding in the wind, singing some old tune that for some reason only made Thias feel all the worse.

  CHAPTER 7

  Clardy Tyler rode slowly along the road, eyes staring straight ahead. Now that he was away from Thias, he gave full vent to the horror aroused by his grandfather’s story. He was sure that Abel was dead, and that they had killed him. And the mutilation of the buried woman’s body … that fit in perfectly with what he knew of the character of the brothers named Harpe. He had seen the Harpe brothers a total of three times, once on the street in Knoxville, another time in the Hughes tavern he frequented—and a third time at the grave of Selma Van Zandt, by lantern light.

  He knew little about the Harpes. What he did know, picked up mostly from his frequent drinking partner, Cale Johnson, was enough to make him very fearful of ever getting on the wrong side of the pair. Johnson knew a lot about the Harpes, enough that Clardy suspected he was an occasional partner-in-crime of the two.

  The Harpes lived as brothers, though no one could say for sure that they were. Johnson had said he suspected they shared a common mother or common father, not necessarily both. They generally claimed to be from Georgia, but Johnson declared firmly that they had come from North Carolina. They were free-roaming souls and had moved about frequently. Johnson didn’t know all the places they had lived, but one of the few he did know about was chilling: the country of the Chickamaugas. The Chickamaugas were a conglomerate tribe of Indians, mostly Cherokee and Creek by birth, who had taken the hardest and most violent line against the relentless encroachment of white settlers onto their lands over the past twenty or so years. They had become legends of fear across the frontier, with good reason—and any white man who dared live among them had to be more Indian than white in his thinking and devotions, and probably have a bent toward violence.

  Based on what Clardy had heard from Johnson, this was certainly true of both Harpes. Johnson had become friendly with the brothers on terms Clardy didn’t fully know and which Johnson declined to talk about much, even though he seemed proud to know so rough a pair, and told with relish grim stories of terrible deeds the Harpes had purportedly done in their past. Clardy struggled to remember the details of those stories, but couldn’t recall most of them. He had heard them all filtered through hazes of drunkenness, and few specifics managed to pass through. He dimly recalled disturbing mentions of terrible fights, mutilations, killings, rapes. All this gave Clardy an ingrained, almost instinctive fear of the Harpes. That was why he had gasped when the lantern light struck their faces by Selma Van Zandt’s grave.

  What should I do?

  The question rang in his mind, unwelcome but persistent. He knew that everything Thias had said was right, and that he did hold in his hands the key to the apparent murder of Abel Van Zandt. Murder … the very word gave him a bad taste in his throat. Though he almost never prayed—to Clardy Tyler, God was a being far too terrifying to be thought about, much less talked to—he prayed now. Lord, let Abel still be alive, please, even though I feel right sure that he ain’t. Let him show up and be well, and then I won’t have to feel guilty for not telling what I know. Much obliged to you, and amen.

  It was a feeble prayer at best. The odds of Abel being alive were slim. The thing to do if he were a good person, like Thias, would be to reveal what he had seen and help bring the Harpes to justice. But, God help him, what if the Harpes couldn’t be found, discovered he had revealed them, and decided to avenge that offense? All those vaguely remembered tales of cruelty told by Cale Johnson made
for a powerful deterrent.

  He stopped his horse and dismounted, carrying his rifle in his right hand and leading the horse with his left. Reaching a familiar shaded spot under some thick willows, he filled his pipe, lit it with flint, steel, and tinder, then settled down to rest both body and nerves. He was tired from his early morning labors on the cabin, and his muscles ached. He had once heard it said that work was a curse upon mankind for its evil ways, and he believed it. He had no use for farmwork, for sweat and aching muscles and bone-weariness that even a good night’s rest couldn’t fully take away. There had to be a better life than being a slave to labor and Hiram Tyler.

  Even now, his grandfather was probably raging around on his crutches, furious because his wayward grandson had vanished when there was so much work remaining. Picturing the old man’s face, Clardy tried to remember when he had last felt affection for the man. A long time. Any love he had known for Hiram Tyler had been cussed and beaten out of him well before he reached adult stature. It seemed a bad thing to not care for the man who had been the closest thing to a father he had known. But a man couldn’t help how he felt.

  Clardy puffed his pipe lazily, beginning to relax. Here beneath the willows he would not be noticeable from the road because of a gentle swell of the land, but he retained a decent view of the road himself. Right now it was empty, but he found himself hoping he would see Thias come riding along, looking for him to tell him he had changed his mind and they could ride away together. If that happened, Clardy knew he would really be able to leave. If not, he wasn’t so sure, despite all the big claims he had made to Thias. It would take courage to make the final break between himself and his family, himself and the only place in the world he had known; and courage, like most virtues, didn’t come easily to Clardy Tyler.

  Through a fog of pipe smoke, Clardy examined the land about him. His dislike of the region had nothing to do with the countryside, which he had always thought beautiful. A land of valleys and ridges, it was well-drained by countless creeks that, like Beaver Creek, spilled into the French Broad or otherwise into the Holston. It was a country molded by and in the stone that lay below the surface of the soil. Where limestone and shales had eroded away, great valleys had developed, lying between ridges generally bearing from northeast to southwest.

  The countryside was so forested that in earlier days a man could walk for hours without leaving the shade. In those days, only from the mountain balds, or in the great expanses cleared by forest fires set by lightning or early Indian farmers, could a man see the sky without branches and trunks intervening. The forest remained vast even now, but clearings were more frequent, created by settlers who girdled the trees, waited for them to die, then felled and burned them, thus opening the land for agriculture.

  Even such a halfhearted farmer as Clardy Tyler had learned much from the land. He knew how to judge the soil by the trees that grew upon it. The great hardwoods stood where the land was richest and deepest. On the poorer soils grew smaller, softer-wooded trees, such as pines, and scrubbier hardwoods, like post oaks. The forests were rich with maples of several varieties, hickory trees that provided one of Clardy’s favorite meaty nuts, and with beeches, dogwoods, poplars, elms, willows, chestnuts. Clardy could sweep a ridge with a glance and immediately name off most of the varieties of trees growing there, determine whether the ground was rocky, poor, or rich, and what kind of creatures were most likely lurking there. None of that mattered much to him, though; he disliked hunting as much as he disliked farming. There was little in life that he liked, in fact, other than drinking and gambling and women.

  He finished his pipe and emerged from the shaded little enclave. The time for a decision had come. He had talked a long time about leaving home, but had never found the courage to do so. There was security in familiarity, even a despised familiarity.

  Could he go? He thought about Abel Van Zandt, the Harpes, and the eternal pressure that Thias would bring upon him to tell what he knew. He couldn’t do that. He did not dare risk informing on the Harpes.

  So it really was time to go, at last.

  That decision made, he drew in a deep breath and said, “I will do it. I’ll leave.”

  Something rattled in the trees behind him. Frowning, he turned. Silence. Confused, he turned toward the road again, and something flew close by his head and struck a tree trunk nearby. A rock … someone had thrown a rock at him!

  “So you’re going to leave, are you? Where you going?”

  Clardy grinned and yelled, “Cale Johnson, you old dog, what kind of scoundrel heaves rocks at his friends?”

  “Just trying to break you from talking to yourself, boy.” Cale Johnson came walking down from the road. He was grinning, broad-faced, with thinning black hair and an unusually pointed nose. Clardy couldn’t have said how old Johnson was, but he surely wasn’t as old as he looked. Johnson lived hard, and had drunk enough grog in his time to drown lesser men. Such a life left tracks on a man’s face.

  “Where you heading, Cale?” Clardy asked.

  “Hughes’s tavern. You want to come along?”

  “Aye. I was aiming to go there anyways.”

  “What was that you said about leaving?”

  “I’ve made a decision, Cale. I ain’t going back home again. I’ve broke away for good.”

  “I’ve heard you talk so before. You mean it this time?”

  “I do.”

  Johnson’s eyes gleamed, “And do you mean the things you’ve said before, ’bout all them things you aim to do?”

  Clardy had told Cale Johnson many times about his belief that a livelihood must surely be all the better when it is taken by brass and stealth rather than earned by labor and sweat. Big talk … now it was time to make it more than talk, as Johnson had often urged. He nodded. “I do mean it.”

  Johnson grinned and nodded. “It’s surely fate that’s brung us together today, Clardy. Surely it is. I been waiting for the day when you’d come to your senses and break off from that farm. Come on. Let’s get on to the groggery. If it’s a sweet life outside the law that you want, then we’ve got much to talk about, me and you.”

  Clardy Tyler took a careful sip of whiskey from a cracked crockery cup held in a hand just beginning to tremble. The sip of powerful liquor passed across his lips, and he savored the taste, swirling the liquor over his tongue and swallowing slowly, aware his throat and belly would begin to rebel if he drank too heavily, too fast, of the strong whiskey sold at Hughes’s tavern. He was not nearly good enough at holding his liquor to balance his inordinate love for the stuff. He was eating as he drank—greasy pork and stale bread in a trencher—in hopes of avoiding the sickness that Hughes’s powerful liquor sometimes brought on.

  The Hughes tavern was of lowest reputation, as was old Hughes himself, who at the moment held his usual position behind a sturdy wicker screen covering an entire corner of the log-walled room. The screen’s lower portion was woven so tightly as to make a veritable wall, and the top portion, of a much looser weave, was nevertheless sufficient to deflect any flying bottle or thrown cup that might come his way. It was broken only by a small window at waist level, through which Hughes could collect money and hand out drinks in return. Hughes put much stock in his screen, which had saved him injury many a time. During business hours he seldom ventured out from behind its protection.

  Cale Johnson sat across from Clardy, talking in a steady stream. He had started as soon as they had seated themselves and hadn’t stopped since. And all he had to say had told Clardy much about the increase in stock theft that had been taking place for miles around Knoxville of late.

  Johnson’s eyes were red from drinking, his lips glistening with drool. Those lips curled into a very hungry smile as he leaned forward to speak to Clardy in private tones. “You can be a part of it, too, Clardy. Me and my partners, we’re making ourselves a decent living, and so far ain’t a soul caught us. We don’t aim to be caught, neither.”

  “They do catch you, you’ll hang,” C
lardy said. His words were growing slurred.

  “There’s risks in everything a man does,” Johnson replied. “This is worth the risk.”

  “Cale, tell me: Are you a partner of the Harpes?”

  Johnson glanced from side to side and leaned forward. “Yep. I am.”

  Clardy drew back, silent, somber, his mind’s eye seeing two lantern-lit faces in a graveyard, and he recalled his grandfather’s talk about beheaded corpses, blood on the soil.…

  Johnson frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. Just don’t know what to think of the Harpes.”

  “What? You afraid of them?”

  “To be right honest, I am … considering all the stories you’ve told.”

  Johnson laughed. “No reason to fear them, long as you don’t do nothing to hurt them or make them mad.” He chuckled. “There’s some good things that come from being close in with the Harpe brothers. And I ain’t just talking money, neither.” He winked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Women, boy, women.”

  “What women?”

  “Their women. One of them in particular. Sally. Oh, my, what a woman she is!”

  “You’re messing with one of the Harpe women?”

  “Not yet … but I will be soon enough. She’s got an eye for me. I can tell it.”

  Clardy was too drunk to think clearly, but he knew Johnson was talking dangerous talk right now. Cale had always been unsensible about women, often taking absurd risks to pursue his passion for them.

  “Tell me more … about the Harpes,” Clardy said.

  “They’re men who know their place in this world—men you want to be on the good side of,” Johnson said. “I help them, they help me.”

  “They surely ain’t going to like you sniffing about their women.”

  “I don’t know about that. The Harpes, they like me ’cause I help them. Those that help them, they won’t hurt.”