Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  They met a man on a rainy afternoon near the Cumberland Gap. He was a smiling, pleasant sort, a small fellow with an oversized tricorn, bald head, and a horse hung all around with bright cookware and other packs. The Harpe brothers greeted the man, who cheerfully greeted them back. For the next hour he shared his food with them and laid out his goods for the women to examine—bright baubles such as buttons and shiny sewing needles and even some jewelry handmade with pretty stones. Sally was delighted by all the wares and played with them like a child with new toys while Micajah and Wiley talked to him for several minutes, enjoying his jokes and funny manner. The peddler seemed to have put the men in a good humor, and Sally was thrilled when she heard Micajah say they would gladly trade with him for all his wares, and his horse, too. The peddler beamed in happy surprise, and asked what they had to trade. A belt axe, Micajah replied, and pulled his hatchet free. He smashed it into the peddler’s head once, twice, then cleaned it on the murdered man’s clothing before tucking it back into his belt. Sally watched it all in silence, and felt something inside her die along with the peddler. Before, she had dared hope that her husband’s occasional hints that he and his brother had murdered were nothing but wild stories. Now she knew they were not.

  They took the horse, the little bit of money they found on the man, and what items the other two women wanted. Sally herself had lost her desire for any of the poor peddler’s trinkets. What they didn’t take they left alongside the trail with the peddler’s corpse. They made only the most cursory effort to hide their victim with brush, sticks, and leaves, then went on, crossing the Cumberland River at its famous ford while Micajah and Wiley cheerfully congratulated themselves at having performed a clever crime indeed.

  They headed on up the road. Before long they overtook two other travelers, well-dressed and riding excellent horses, and made themselves known to them in a pleasant manner. The two travelers, initially wary, soon warmed to the jovial conversation. They told the Harpes their names were Paca and Bates and they came from Maryland. They were on their way to Stanford, the former Logan’s Station. Micajah Harpe told them that his party’s destination was the same. Might they travel together? They would be proud to travel in the company of two obviously respectable, well-dressed men, and that night they could all share the same camp for the sake of safety. There were dangerous Indians in this country, folks were saying.

  Paca and Bates accepted the offer, and on they went, conversation gradually wearing away any lingering caution the Marylanders might have. It began to grow dark, and Micajah said they had best find a good campsite. Paca and Bates could help, he suggested, in that he had poor vision at dusk and they might have better fortune at spotting a place.

  Sally knew what would happen and wished she had the courage to warn the pair. But to do so would be to risk death herself, and she held a silence she knew was sinful, but which she dared not break.

  When Paca and Bates moved out ahead of the rest, the Harpes raised their rifles and shot both men at once. Bates took the ball through the head and died instantly, while Paca was hit in the back of the neck and continued to move after he hit the ground. The terrified horses reared and nickered and ran on ahead into the dusk.

  “Run get them horses, Wiley!” Micajah ordered. “I don’t want to lose them!” He turned back toward the women, who were walking some twenty feet behind. “Good shooting, eh? What do you think of your men? Fine shots we are!”

  With Wiley off retrieving the spooked horses, Micajah dismounted—he had been riding Peyton’s horse—and walked casually over to the victims. Bates was dead, but Paca continued to move and seemed to be trying to get up. Micajah kicked him back down, then knelt and rolled him over.

  “Still kicking, are you?” He drew out his belt axe and brought it down, and Paca moved no more.

  Wiley came back, leading the horses. “Dead?”

  “They are now.”

  “Let’s see what’s in their pockets.”

  They found a little gold and silver, along with paper money, continental issue. The paper money was nearly worthless, but the silver and gold was fine booty.

  “Let’s strip off their clothes,” Wiley said. “I believe I could wear this Paca fellow’s duds, and I need ’em. Mine are near tatters.”

  They removed the clothes from the limp bodies, taking care to avoid getting blood on them. Paca’s clothing did fit Wiley, and he pranced about in his new outfit, crowing like a rooster and kicking up his feet. Micajah put on the clothes of Bates, a bigger man than Paca had been, and seemed equally pleased. All the while the women stood by, watching silently, their pregnant bellies bulging under their own ragged dresses.

  Micajah laughed. “Take a look at me, Susanna! Don’t I look like the handsome gentleman! What do you think of me now?”

  “You look real purty,” Susanna replied. Sally hung her head, letting her hair fall down on either side of her face, hiding her momentarily from a world that was becoming too terrible to accept.

  “Purty I am! And take a look at them horses—we can all ride now. Five good horses, and peddler wares for you women—we’re rich folk!”

  Wiley crowed again in jubilant agreement, and danced a little jig around the corpses.

  The Harpes celebrated their good fortune only a few minutes, then dragged the bodies a short way into the woods and covered them with leaves. Then they returned to the road and all mounted and rode ahead into the darkness until they found a good stream. There they made camp and cooked their supper. Sally did not want to eat, but Wiley forced her.

  She felt her unborn baby kick within her while she filled her stomach with food she could not even taste, and wondered what kind of person this child would be, being conceived by the seed of a Harpe.

  CHAPTER 16

  Clardy Tyler was past sickness by the next afternoon and set about through labor to pay Farris for his aid and lodging. Ironically, the work was one of the tasks Clardy hated most—notching logs. Farris had dragged in a huge pile of straight poplar logs to make the structure, but none were notched. Clardy counted himself lucky that Farris wasn’t interested in hewing and squaring the logs, planning to leave them round and barked and joined with simple saddle notches. Had the building been for human occupancy, he probably would have set higher standards and Clardy would have faced a harder job.

  Clardy grumbled to himself about the work, yet secretly took a certain pleasure in it. It gave him a place and purpose, if only for a brief time. Freedom, he discovered, wasn’t all that enjoyable when it meant freedom from purpose.

  Clardy spent one more night, then another half day at labor, and Farris declared himself satisfied. “You are a fine worker, Clardy, and any debt you had is paid. Where is it you are bound?”

  Clardy was embarrassed to admit he had no real destination. “I’ve got kin up the road a ways,” he lied. “Up about Harrodsburg. They’re expecting me.

  “I may know them. Who are they?”

  Clardy almost panicked. “Uh … they’re more Tylers. John Tyler. Has a wife named Mary.” The names were fictional.

  “Don’t believe I know them.”

  “They keep to themselves.”

  Farris, like Peyton before him, seemed to delight in generosity, and gave Clardy a small supply of food for the road. “Compensation for difficulties,” he explained. Clardy rode off feeling grateful, reflecting that he had been twice blessed to encounter goodness along this road. Goodness … far different than the criminal ambitions he had harbored.

  It gave him something to think about.

  He wished there really were a John and Mary Tyler waiting up the road to give him a home and honest means of making a living. He would drop his criminal ambitions in a moment if that were true. But no one waited, and Farris’s food would last only a little while. After that he would have to find other means of keeping himself fed. He couldn’t forever count on a good-hearted Peyton or Farris showing up at just the right time.

  Reluctantly, Clardy decided that he would
have to try his hand at robbery again, and not lose his nerve as he had with Peyton. Goodness and honesty might work for some folks, but not for him. He was, after all, the “bad” Tyler, the Hiram Tyler grandson everyone always expected to come to a bad end. And a man always had to live up to expectations.

  He passed through Crab Orchard, seeing nothing there to hold him. Ahead lay the old Logan’s Station, renamed Stanford. By now Clardy’s doubts about his criminal plans had been battered into submission by a stern inner lecture. He had reminded himself that a man in no situation to make a living could only take his living. This was no time to suddenly develop a moral code or to get soft and sentimental about goodness and kindness. Maybe taking on a life of crime was an odd dream, but it was his dream, hang it all, and he would not yet throw it aside.

  He made up his mind that before he reached Stanford he would prove to himself once and for all that he could actually go through with a robbery. The earlier failure with Peyton had been a mere case of first-time nervousness. It would be different this time.

  But when he found himself crouched by the roadway, hidden among the trees, hearing the approach of a rider along the road, the situation didn’t feel any different. It had been just like this when he waited for Peyton, the same posture, the same nervous, jittery feeling, the same dryness of mouth.

  All the same, he would give it his best try. Licking his lips, he readied himself. The rider was drawing closer, closer … now!

  Clardy lunged out of the brush, ready to thrust his rifle into the face of the horseman and demand that he halt or die. In fast motion he saw everything in a rush—the startled rider, the rearing horse, the long barrel of his rifle probing out before him—then the ground rushed up and slammed him so hard the wind was knocked out of his lungs and refused to be drawn in again.

  He lay there, trying to regain his breath, trying to comprehend the absurd, humiliating fact that he had just tripped over a root and fallen flat on the ground before the man he intended to rob.

  The rider settled his frightened horse. “Boy, what the devil are you doing down there?”

  Clardy rolled over and tried to gasp in air, but still it wouldn’t come. He felt childish, idiotic, and now the natural panic that comes with the inability to breathe began to grip him. He pushed up to his feet and suddenly found his breath again. He inhaled in a loud, painful gasp.

  “Answer me, boy: What is this all about?”

  Clardy looked up at the man and found himself eye-to-eye with the dark muzzle hole of a flintlock pistol. The man, a tall, lean, sun-browned, gray-haired frontiersman with a fringed hunting coat, a dully gleaming dead left eye, and a long scar down the left side of his face, was squinting his single good eye and looking very dangerous.

  “I’m … I’m …” Clardy couldn’t continue until he had gasped some more. “I’m … sorry … didn’t mean to … spook you.”

  “Then why the devil are you hiding in the brush and leaping out with a rifle?”

  “I was …” Clardy took advantage of the gaps brought on by his labored breathing to try to drum up a story. “I was … robbed on back up the road. I … run ahead through the woods up to here … and thought you was the man who robbed me. I was just … trying to get back what was took from me.”

  The man didn’t lower the pistol. “So you thought I was your thief, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t pause long enough even to take a look at the man you was a-pouncing, to make sure you had the right one?”

  “I’m sorry. I was worked up.”

  Clardy had never before seen one eye give such an intense, scrutinizing stare. He wondered what would happen next.

  He was relieved when the man lowered the pistol. “What was took from you?” he asked.

  “All my money. And a pistol I had.”

  “What about your horse?”

  “It’s back yonder in the trees.”

  “So this thief, he didn’t take your horse, nor your rifle. Right peculiarish robber, seems to me.”

  Clardy clamped his mouth shut and hoped he didn’t look too scared. His tale hadn’t been so clever after all.

  The man simply looked at Clardy a few moments, brows slightly knit. “Young man, the truth is I believe that the only man among us who’s faced a thief today is me. Am I right?”

  Clardy’s heart beat faster. “No sir. If you’re trying to say … no sir. That ain’t right.”

  “If you was robbed by this here thief so short a spell ago that you just now run through the woods to get here, it seems peculiarish that I didn’t run ’cross the very event while it was happening. Or maybe even get robbed myself.”

  “Well … I reckon odd things happen.”

  “World’s full of them, son. Full of them. Tell you what—don’t think I don’t trust you or nothing, but I’m feeling a mite aversional to riding on and leaving my back turned toward you with you having that rifle in hand. Step up here closer a moment, boy.”

  Clardy obeyed reflexively. This man possessed the kind of dominating, confident air that put him at the top of the situation almost from the outset.

  “Hold up that rifle where I can see it good.”

  Again Clardy obeyed, feeling very distressed. His career as a highway robber was off to the worst of starts. Two failures, the second worse than the first!

  The man’s hand flashed out, grasped the rifle by the barrel, and with a twist and pull yanked it from Clardy’s grip. It happened so quickly that all Clardy could do was stand gaping in surprise.

  “Now you’ll get to stretch your legs a mite,” the man said. “Get to walking, right in front of my horse here. You veer to one side or the other or try to run off, I’ll shoot you dead with your own rifle—providing you had the sense to load it right, and I ain’t at all sure you would.”

  “But my horse—it’s back there in the woods. I don’t want to leave it.”

  “We all have to do things in life we don’t want to do, boy. I reckon you’d have took my horse without a blink. ‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein, and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.’ What’s your name, anyhow?”

  “Clardy Tyler.” He winced, feeling foolish for having given his real name and ashamed that this man had him so cowed.

  “Get them feet a-stepping, Mr. Tyler. I’ll be right behind.”

  “I don’t want to lose that horse!”

  “‘So shall poverty come as one that traveleth, and thy want as an armed man.’ The armed man now being me. Now get them legs to churning.”

  Wearily Clardy trudged on, making sure his steps were precisely straight and that he looked directly in front of him. He feared that otherwise the man on the horse would shoot him. The time or two that he had made even the slightest move that might look like an attempt to run, the man had whistled through his teeth at him in dire warning.

  They rounded a curve and Clardy tripped over a rock, almost falling. The man laughed. “You’re the clumsiest one bum-stumble I ever did see, Mr. Tyler.”

  Clardy blushed and was happy his back was turned so his captor couldn’t see it. He grew so angry at himself for the mess he had made of all this, and at his captor for making him abandon his horse and goods, that he couldn’t restrain his tongue. “It was just a rock or something. I didn’t see it. Could have happened to anybody.”

  “‘The way of the wicked is as darkness; they know not at what they stumble.’ That’s you, boy—the wicked. That’s why you’re stumbling. Me, I’m a good man. I don’t go robbing folks on the public roadways. I’m righteous. You don’t see me stumbling down the road with a rifle at my back, do you? I’m upright here in the saddle. ‘For the upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it.’ You see? It’s all right there in the Proverbs.”

  “Don’t go spewing Bible at me,” Clardy said. “I want to get preached at, I’ll go to meeting.”

  “Somebody needs to preach at you, boy. ’Pears to me the task has been neglected, or e
lse you wouldn’t be out robbing on the highways … or trying to, at least. ‘My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother.’ Didn’t your folks raise you right?”

  “I got no folks but a meal-mouthed old grandpap who raised me at the end of a hickory stick after my folks died.”

  “Didn’t your grandpap tell you it ain’t right to steal whilst he was using that hickory stick?”

  “I didn’t steal nothing. It was me who was stole from! I told you: a robber took some of my things, and I thought you was him, and that’s the only reason I came at you out of the woods.”

  “You’re a liar, boy, a liar if ever I seen one! ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight.’”

  “Who are you, anyway? You some kind of preacher or something?”

  “My name, son, is Isaac Ford, and I am no preacher, no sir. Just a man with an ear inclined toward wisdom and a heart toward righteousness. And I don’t take well to bum-stumbles trying to rob me of what’s mine.”

  “You ain’t said yet what you’re going to do with me.”

  “When we reach Stanford, I might turn you over to the authorities of the law. Or I might let you go free so you can head back and fetch that horse you’re so deuced worried about. Or I might shoot you.”

  “Shoot me? You don’t mean that, do you?”

  The man laughed.

  “You don’t mean it—you tell me you don’t mean it!”

  “Don’t be getting your hackles up, boy! Whatever I do to you, it’ll be the righteous thing.”

  “You shoot me, that’ll make you a murderer.”

  “That’s right. It’ll be an awful thing, being a murderer. It’ll be hard for me to live with. But not nearly so hard as it’d be for you, having to live with being dead.” He laughed loudly. Clardy didn’t think it was funny at all.

  Stanford had sprung up around one of the older settlements of Kentucky, established as a frontier station by Colonel Ben Logan. In its earlier days it had seen its share of Indian troubles, deprivation, and struggles to exist, but now the place had an established, civilized look to it. There was law and order here, with a jail and courthouse, and when Clardy caught sight of the village, he had the odd hope that he would have the chance to become familiar with the jail, the apparent alternative being death at the hands of this proverb-spouting character named Isaac Ford.