Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  A man at the center of the group was talking, and Clardy picked up his words in mid-sentence. “… and there he lay, right off the road on the crest of a hill, dead as could be. Seen him myself, just before they carried him off. It was murder, gentlemen. No doubt about it. He had been shot and knifed. Poor man must have died a hard death.”

  “What was his name?” someone asked.

  “Bradbury. Just a simple farmer, far as I know. Nobody saw the killing, as best I’m aware.”

  Clardy touched the elbow of the closest man. “Somebody’s been killed?”

  “That’s right, son. Farmer over in Roane County. Killed on the road, ’cording to that man yonder. He just rode in a while ago, spreading the news.”

  “They know who done it?”

  “Nope. It’s enough to make a man wonder what’s becoming of the world. All them Harpe killings last year, and now here’s another man murdered! Country ain’t safe to live in no more.”

  Clardy turned and walked away, not wanting to hear any more. Murder! He had brushed up against enough of that crime over the past few months. He wanted nothing more to do with it.

  He crossed the street and sat down on the corner of a boardwalk, pulling his pipe from his pocket and filling it, watching the group of men as they talked loudly among themselves, broad hand gestures, intense expressions, and endless fidgeting movements showing their excitement. Big crimes such as murder had a way of stirring up people like nothing else. At the moment all that was stirring inside Clardy, however, was a strong sense of repulsion, and all the bad feelings that went along with his memories of the Harpe murders in Kentucky and the failed efforts to apprehend the culprits.

  Puffing his pipe, he looked up and down the street and thought again about Thias. Maybe today he’ll return. He had run that same thought through his mind ever since his return to his old home region.

  That return had given Clardy quite a jolt. He had come expecting to find his brother and grandfather living on and working the old farm just as before, maybe by then having completed the new cabin and bettered their living situation. Instead he found that his grandfather was dead, the farm was sold to a Knoxville lawyer, Thias had gone off with the inheritance money, looking for him to give him his share. The irony seemed great to him: almost all the time he was in Kentucky, apparently Thias had been there as well, probably not far behind him. But they hadn’t met. Clardy couldn’t help but feel angry at Thias for having launched off on such an impossible chase. Had he really expected to be able to track down his brother in such a vast and wild place as Kentucky?

  Yet Clardy’s first impulse, once the shock of all the new discoveries was past, had been to turn back to Kentucky himself and see if he could find Thias. Common sense had stopped him. Thias hadn’t found him, so how could he expect to do better? He recalled his grandfather’s advice: When a man is lost in the woods, best to sit down and become an unmoving target than to roam around and be nigh impossible to find. The same principle applied here, Clardy decided with some reluctance. The best thing to do was to wait right where he was, anticipating that Thias would eventually give up his own search and come back. Now Clardy had been waiting for well over a month, but Thias hadn’t shown up.

  In the meantime, the now-landless, homeless Clardy had maintained a meager living in assorted ways. He had lodged in secret for a few days in the old homeplace cabin, living off game he hunted, but then had moved out and come to Knoxville, where he worked assorted small jobs—wagon driving, farm labor, carpentry for a merchant expanding his store. He hadn’t made much money that way and had been forced to live in an abandoned old hut just east of town, but he did believe that through his hard and honest labor he was developing a better reputation for himself among the folks who had known him through all his prior years as a reveler and ne’er-do-well. That gave him a good feeling, but he continued to live in a state of unrest, wondering when Thias would return … and if he would return. What if something bad had happened to him in Kentucky? Based on Clardy’s own rather skewed perceptions, it appeared a lot of people had bad things happen to them in the fabled Dark and Bloody Ground. Hearing about this new murder made him worry about Thias all the more.

  He finished his pipe and stood. The day lay stretched before him, empty as a dried-up well. He had finished his last round of work and now was again unemployed. He would try today to scour up a new job, one that would last longer, if he was fortunate. If he couldn’t, he didn’t know what to do except leave and seek better fortune elsewhere, or maybe go on back to Kentucky and search for Thias after all, even if that was a nearly hopeless prospect.

  The best thing that could happen would be if Thias returned. Life would become considerably brighter then. They would have their common inheritance to share, and together they could go off and find that better life they had always wanted. Maybe they could buy land somewhere, or go into business for themselves. Surely Thias would come back, eventually. But maybe not very soon. Thias would probably keep up a persistent hunt in Kentucky for a long time. He had always kept at his tasks with mulish stubbornness until they were done. Thias was slow to give up, tenacious at completing tasks of duty. It was part of what made him good.

  Clardy stood and walked idly down the street, thinking about Thias, fighting off worry as best he could, and most remarkable of all, missing the grandfather he had always longed to be free of back in days that were not long past at all, but which seemed very distant now.

  Clardy did find work of a sort—a couple of days’ labor on a farm west of town—and forgot all about the Bradbury murder. A couple of days after his work was through, though, that murder was driven back to mind by still another murder, this one far more shocking.

  Eight miles northwest of Knoxville, the body of a boy surnamed Coffey was found. According to the Coffey family, the boy had been out chasing stray cattle and hadn’t come home with his horse. When he was found, he was lying beneath a tree, his shoes missing and his head broken. It appeared that an effort had been made to make the death appear accidental, as if the horse had run its rider hard against a tree limb, but no one was fooled. The horse he’d been riding was old and gentle, and those missing shoes hadn’t vanished without help. The boy had been murdered, no question about it.

  Clardy didn’t like the thought that this news gave him: It’s almost as if the Harpes have come back.

  Then, only two days after that, yet another killing occurred, and this time the body—that of a man named William Ballard—was found in the Holston River. It had been opened and filled with rocks, just like the corpse of Cale Johnson had the year before, and just like the corpse of that fiddle-playing hermit up in Kentucky, as the story had it.

  Disposal of bodies in such gruesome fashion was a distinctive Harpe trademark. Now, far more people than Clardy Tyler began to consider the possibility that the Harpes had returned to East Tennessee.

  But surely not, surely not, others said. The Harpes already had trouble in Knoxville because of their 1798 crimes. No rational men would come back to a place where murder charges already awaited them.

  Clardy Tyler knew the simple answer to that objection: the Harpes weren’t rational men.

  A few days later, while Clardy was finishing up another round of low-paying labor on another farm, more news came that confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that the Harpes were back. Another man had been killed, this incident happening near the Emory River to the west of Knoxville. According to the story as Clardy heard it, what happened was this:

  Two brothers, Robert and James Brassel, had been traveling along a mountain spur, one riding and unarmed, the other walking and carrying a rifle, when they encountered two rough-looking strangers, both mounted, who accosted them in a friendly way and asked them for news of local goings-on. The Brassels told them about the two recent murders and how there were rumors that the “bloody Harpes” who had made their name infamous in the vicinity in the prior year might be behind these latest killings. The two strangers had nodded serio
usly, telling the Brassels that they knew for a fact that the Harpes were indeed guilty and they were out hunting for the villains themselves. A suggestion was made by the smaller of the two strangers that the Brassels join force with them and help them bring in the culprits. The Brassels agreed, but learned the terrible truth moments later when the bigger stranger sneaked up behind James Brassel and stole his rifle. James was immediately clubbed to the ground. Robert Brassel jumped down from his horse to try and grab James’s rifle, but the smaller stranger jumped in and stopped him. Robert turned and fled for his life, with the smaller stranger—Wiley Harpe, he now realized—chasing him. Robert managed to escape, but his brother was not so lucky.

  Robert traveled a full ten miles before encountering a band of travelers on their way toward Knoxville. He told them what had happened, and with only one gun in possession of the entire group, went back to see if they could rescue the captive Brassel. They reached the spot, and found James Brassel’s battered body. His throat had been cut and his rifle smashed to pieces, as if in contempt.

  No one doubted now that, incredible as it seemed, the Harpes had returned to Tennessee. The last anyone had heard, the brothers had broken out of jail in Danville, gone on a murderous spree over a wide territory, then vanished somewhere along the Ohio River. Apparently they had floated down the Ohio River, traveled up the Tennessee from its mouth, then headed eastward by a combination of river and land travel.

  Robert Brassel and the party who had found his brother’s body followed the tracks of the Harpes for some distance, Clardy learned. Then they met the unexpected sight of the Harpes coming back toward them, this time with their women and babies in tow and terrible, harsh expressions on their faces.

  Robert Brassel had pleaded with his companions to halt the Harpes, but an odd, paralyzing fear gripped them all. They allowed the Harpes to pass them by, with not a word spoken. Robert Brassel had wept afterward, declaring he couldn’t comprehend such cowardice.

  Clardy Tyler could comprehend it. He recalled his own throat-tightening fear the time he and the rest of the Skaggs party allowed the Harpes to pass them by in just such a fashion. He recalled also the terrible events that had happened afterward. It was a lingering, haunting awareness of his that had the Harpes been stopped that day near the Rolling Fork headwaters, several subsequent murders would have been avoided.

  It made Clardy feel terribly guilty, and this time he couldn’t shrug off guilt like he used to do so easily.

  He also felt afraid, and he had more reason than most to fear the Harpes. Would he never be free of them? It was as if the Harpes were following him, anywhere he went. But that couldn’t be literally true. The Harpes could not have known he had returned to Tennessee, and he doubted they would consider him game worthy of chasing, anyway. So it was coincidence that for a third time they were occupying a common region … or maybe it was fate.

  Fate. Something he had never thought much about, or believed in. What was it, though, that Isaac Ford had told him? Something about how there might be a purpose in it when folks are thrown together repeatedly, without design of their own making.

  But what purpose could there be in his life and that of the Harpes being thrown together? He could see no sense in it, any more than he could see sense in the seemingly random movements and meanderings of the Harpes themselves. These men, if men they were and not incarnate devils, seemed to have no purpose in their own lives but the meaningless destruction of others. They seemed to go where the wind blew them, moving about without any particular goal or reason.

  Clardy thought about it very hard. Maybe there was a pattern after all. He recalled a comment Micajah Harpe had made while jailed in Danville, a complaint that at some point or another he had been arrested and briefly detained in Knoxville for some theft he hadn’t committed, and how that angered him and helped spur him to commit some thefts that truly were his own. “I done it in pure spite,” he had said.

  Might it be “pure spite” that brought the Harpes back here? Could it be that they were killing about the Knoxville region precisely because this region had given them trouble and difficulty before? Here, posses had been raised to find them, hard words had been said about them, and men had sought to have them punished for horse theft. Maybe they had come here to inflict some punishment of their own in recompense.

  It made more sense than any other explanation Clardy could think of. The Harpes had returned to the Holston and French Broad country as punishers. Since they couldn’t without insurmountable difficulty avenge themselves upon the specific people who had troubled them here, they were contenting themselves to take vengeance upon anyone and everyone.

  That was a dreadful thought. It meant that no one was safe. If the Harpes’ purpose was the general punishment of an entire populace, one life was as cheap in their eyes as any other.

  Clardy was living in his abandoned hut and down to subsisting on scavenged wild greens and hunted game again. He was almost out of money, and what little he had left, he was reluctant to spend on food. He was more inclined to spend it on gunpowder, of which his supply was almost depleted from hunting.

  He would need gunpowder if he was to hunt more. But he was thinking now not of hunting more game, but hunting Harpes.

  It was a wild notion, but he couldn’t shake it put of his mind. It all went back to Isaac Ford’s talk about fate, purpose, and human lives that are repeatedly thrown together. Could it be that one of the purposes laid out for Clardy Tyler’s life was to help rid the world of Micajah and Wiley Harpe?

  He didn’t like to think so, but the idea had its own kind of sense and persistence.

  Sleep was slow to come with such momentous thought in his mind. For three nights he had hardly rested at all, tossing back and forth, thinking about Thias, himself, about Isaac Ford and the lovely Dulciana, and about all those who had died at the hands of the criminals he and his fellow Kentucky regulators had failed to bring in when they had the chance.

  He owed it to those victims to make up for that mistake. They had lost their lives because of a failure in which he had played a part. It was only fair that he should risk losing his to set things right again.

  No. No! Only a fool would take such a chance. I can’t hunt the Harpes. All I would do was get myself killed, all for nothing. Let the good folk of the world take care of the Harpes. I’m Clardy Tyler, the “bad” Tyler brother. I ain’t eager to sacrifice myself for the sake of righteousness.

  He voiced such protests in his mind again and again, but the words rang hollow, and the feeling that pursuit of the Harpes was in some unique way his job would not go away.

  He thought: I believe I’m turning into Thias. Getting holy and bound to the high moral law. And I ain’t sure I like it.

  Clardy was in Knoxville the day the latest news of the Harpes reached town. He stood in the midst of a crowd that gathered on the street and heard the grim word.

  The Harpes had murdered again, this time up toward Kentucky, the victim being a man named Tully, whose body had been found hidden beneath a log. This particular murder was slightly different than most of the prior Harpe killings, which had no evident motive beyond bloodthirst. Tully was believed to have been an associate of the Harpes at one time or another. Maybe he had betrayed them, or refused to give them aid this time out. Whatever his offense, he had paid for it with his life.

  Clardy, though generally shy about speaking up before crowds, stepped up and asked the man a question. “How is it you know about this murder?”

  “Because I was with Robert Brassel and some others in the area at the time the dead man was found, that’s why.”

  “Brassel? Brother of the Brassel killed at the Emory?”

  “That’s right. He seen it his duty to go after the Harpes and see them brought in. Me and some others are helping him out. It ain’t nothing to be proud of that the Harpes were allowed to pass freely after Jim Brassel was murdered so brutal. Robert Brassel is still pursuing the Harpes, but he sent me back here to see
if there was yet a man in Knoxville with enough iron in his backbone to come give us a hand.” The man, a stocky, square-jawed fellow of about thirty years of age, wearing a battered old Revolutionary War–vintage tricorn hat, looked over the mostly male crowd. “Well? Is there a man here willing to ride out with me and answer Robert Brassel’s call? Is there any here willing to hunt the Harpes?”

  Hunt the Harpes. Those words struck close to home. Clardy fidgeted like a sinner under conviction at a camp meeting. He backed a little farther into the crowd and hid himself from the speaker.

  An elderly man raised his voice. “Son, what’s your name?”

  “I’m Totty Kirkpatrick,” the man said. “I come from the Holston country, and I back down before no one, even the devil Harpes.”

  “Well then, you’re a fool!” another voice called, and everyone turned to see if they could determine who had spoken.

  “Maybe I am, but I’m a fool who does his duty!” Kirkpatrick replied. “Show your courage, men! Is this the mettle of Knoxville folk? Half you men at least have fought Indians. Are you to hide for fear of two murdering scoundrels?”

  “Better a hundred Indians than two Harpes!” a man called.

  “That’s right!” someone else shouted. “If the Harpes are heading into Kentucky, I say good riddance to them! I’ll be shot if I’m going to risk my life chasing murderers who are leaving on their own.”

  A murmur of agreement passed through the crowd. Clardy’s voice had no part in it. He slumped over as if to hide himself better.

  “Don’t believe you’re going to find nobody eager to go Harpe-hunting!” someone yelled at Kirkpatrick. “If you’re bound to do it, do it alone! There’s no merit in foolishness! Don’t you know the Harpes can’t be killed? They got the evil eye, both of them, and they use it! How else you think they make armed men turn away and leave them be?”