by Cameron Judd
Ford would have to change his ways, Clardy decided, or he might find himself without a partner before long.
He dreamed of Thias, drowning in a pool while he stood fixed on the bank, unable to reach him, his feet grown into the ground like roots. He tried to call Thias’s name, but had no voice, tried to uproot himself, but couldn’t. He was trapped where he was, and Thias was sinking, farther and farther, receding from him.…
Clardy awakened with a jolt and sat up. He knew from the light, and from the internal clock that seldom failed him, that it was mere minutes before dawn. Time to awaken anyway, and that was fine. He didn’t want to sleep again if he was going to have such terrible dreams. This one, though not nearly so gruesome as some of his other recent nightmares about Thias, was the most mentally disturbing. The rooting of his feet—that’s what was so distressing. To be stuck in one place, trapped, immobile, while someone he cared about was in trouble or danger … that would be horrible. Hellish. Clardy shuddered, threw back the covers and swung his feet out of bed, glad to have use of them.
The morning was much cooler than that of the previous day, and he had slept unclothed, so quickly he threw on some trousers and a shirt. Finger-combing his hair, he yawned and stretched and headed out to the outhouse in the back of the cabin. He hadn’t shaved the day before, and two days’ growth of whiskers made his face itch. It was rare for Clardy not to shave every day; over the last couple of years he had become almost obsessive about it, though he had no idea why. Maybe it was part of the new sense of respectability that he had about himself. As he scratched at his chin in the outhouse he grinned, thinking how funny it really was that Clardy Tyler, the “bad” Tyler brother with the criminal ambitions, had turned out to be a respected, honest planter and horse trader, and the “good” brother, Thias, had …
He could not complete that thought. He couldn’t know what Thias had become, or what had become of him. All the factors pointed toward the conclusion Isaac Ford had stated the day before. Hang it all, why was it necessary for him to have to cipher out that grim equation every day of his life? Clardy asked himself. Why could he not simply accept the fact that Thias was gone and forget about it?
Because I don’t know it for a fact. Because maybe he’s alive somewhere, and in trouble, and here I am stuck like a man with feet rooted in the ground, not able to reach him or help him.
He left the outhouse and headed back to the cabin, deep in solemn thought. Thus he was excessively startled to hear the sound of a male voice coming from somewhere behind him.
“Hiram! James Hiram!”
Clardy wheeled about on his bare heels. “Who’s there?”
He detected movement deep among the sassafras trees and dogwoods at the edge of the woods. “James Hiram, now we’ll set things square!” A rifle blasted; a ball sang past his head and smacked into the cabin wall behind him.
And Clardy stood transfixed, just like he had in that dream, so stunned he could not move. Several moments passed before he was able to break free.
He turned and scrambled back to the cabin and literally threw himself through the open door. Rising, he slammed it shut and threw down the bar, then raced to the rear window and closed the shutters. Shutters! What good would those do him? Why hadn’t he fortified this cabin against attack? Why hadn’t he ever considered the possibility that he might have to defend himself here?
Because it hadn’t seemed a possibility. Because the Indians had been defeated in these regions years ago.
But that was no Indian out there. That voice had belonged to a white man. James Hiram? Why had he called him that? Mistaken identity, that had to be it. He was being mistaken for someone else.
Clardy ran to the front of the cabin and took his rifle off its pegs. Thank God he always kept it loaded! He went back to the door and with the butt of the rifle hammered down the wooden patch he had put over a knothole in the rough wood. Peering out, he saw more motion in the woods.
“You there!” he yelled as loudly as he could. “Who are you? Why you shooting at me?”
“I’m here to even the score, Hiram!” the man called back. “I’ll see you pay in blood for all you took from me on the old Chickasaw trail!”
The Chickasaw trail … one old name for the narrow war and trade route that ran from the Cumberland down through the Indian country to the southwest. Also called the Natchez Road, the Choctaw Road, the Boatman’s Trail, or any of several other names, it was now used most often as a return route for boatmen who took wares down the river to Natchez and New Orleans, and came back by land to Nashville and from thence to their various homes. “Kaintucks,” such were coming to be called, regardless of whether they came from Kentucky or elsewhere. But Clardy had never been on any part of the Chickasaw trail other than its northernmost portion, and certainly he had taken nothing from anyone there or anywhere else.
“You’ve mistook me for somebody else!” Clardy yelled. “My name’s Tyler!”
“What name you go by means naught to me! I’ll not forget the face of the man who took a year’s worth of money from me!” Then the rifle fired again, a heavy charge this time, the ball ripping right through the door and barely missing Clardy. He pitched down to the floor, still holding his rifle, and yelled in pure fright.
The man outside yelled something else. This time Clardy couldn’t make out the words. He rose and went to the window, preparing to thrust the rifle through and shoot back—but before he could there was another call, this one from some distance away, and the voice familiar. It was Isaac Ford! Clardy grinned. Ford must have heard the shots and come from his own place.
Clardy pushed open the shutters in time to see Ford ride in, half dressed and mounted on a bare-backed horse, his rifle gripped in his right hand. He slid down off the horse with easy grace and darted into the woods. The sound of scrambling told Clardy that his attacker had suddenly gone on the run.
He went to the door, threw off the bar, and swung it open. He ran out and joined the chase. By now Ford was through the dogwoods and into the woods. Clardy ran as hard as he could, following. He could see his attacker well ahead of Ford, a tall, lean figure racing hard through the stubbly undergrowth. By heaven, the tables were turned now! Clardy pushed himself harder, ignoring the pain of running on tender bare feet, and began to close in on Ford, who meanwhile was closing in on the first man.
The chase continued another five minutes before Ford finally reached the man and brought him down. He was firmly atop the panting, panicked fellow when Clardy reached them. Clardy thrust the muzzle of his rifle right into the struggling man’s face.
“Lie still!” he commanded. “You move, and I’ll shoot you!”
“I—I won’t move! I’ll lie still! I will!”
Ford, sweating and heaving for breath, rolled off the man, lay panting on his back a few moments, sending up white gusts with each gasp, and then stood. He picked up his rifle, which he evidently had dropped when he dived for his quarry, then snatched up the first man’s rifle as well.
“Look at me,” Clardy said. “Look in my face. You see now I ain’t the man you think I am, whoever the bloody devil James Hiram might be!”
The man, face blanched and mouth wet with saliva he had exuded during his hard run, gaped at Clardy and went more pale than before. “Oh, God,” he said. “You got no scar! No scar on your jaw!”
“That’s right. No scar. And this Hiram fellow had one, right?”
“Aye … oh, God, I’m sorry, mister. I’m sorry. I knowed you was him, I just knowed it! You look nigh the image of him, but for the scar!”
“I ain’t him. I’m Clardy Tyler, and you came near to killing an innocent man! What’s your name?”
“Uh … Smith. Jim Smith. I live up in Kentucky. I was robbed north of Natchez by a man name of James Hiram. I swear, you look just like him, Mr. Tyler! If you’d have seen him, you’d know how I made such a mistake!”
“Next time you want to revengerate yourself against somebody, you’d best make sure you h
ave the right man,” Ford said. He had only just then regained enough breath to speak.
“Well, Mr. Jim Smith, or whatever your name really is, I’m inclined to haul you off to Nashville and turn you over to the jailer,” Clardy said.
“Oh, no sir, no—please don’t! I’ll go away, I swear it! I’ll plague you no more. I admit it was a mistake, a bad one, and I’m grateful to you for being men of mercy. You are men of mercy, ain’t you? You won’t do me harm, will you?”
“You whine like a whupped schoolyard boy,” Ford said.
Clardy stood considering, then waved his rifle. “Up with you. Take your rifle and get out of here. Don’t let me lay eyes on you again.”
“Clardy, you reckon you ought to let him go?” Ford asked.
“Why not? All I want of a troublemaker is to be shut of him. Let him go.”
The man came up, fell on his knees and thanked Clardy profusely. Ford grunted with disdain and Clardy shook his head. Then the man rose, took his rifle, and ran off into the woods, stumbling and scared, making strange, whimpering noises.
“There goes a man who’s a waste of the skin God gave him to wear,” Ford said. “Look at him run, and nobody even after him. ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’”
Clardy, though still nervous and upset by all that had happened, felt a flicker of relief just then. Ford had just quoted a proverb—a good sign. When he was depressed, the continual proverb-spouting was the first of his usual traits to vanish. When they returned, it evidenced a shifting back to his old, healthy-minded self.
“Sure glad you came when you did,” Clardy said.
“I heard that first shot and knew something was wrong,” he said. “I ain’t never scrambled so fast. It like to have killed me, though. I’m wore out. Too old to flax myself this hard.”
“He almost killed me,” Clardy said. “If that first shot had hit me, he’d have found out his mistake too late.”
“The Lord has watched over you,” Ford said. “He’s protected you, and that means there’s still important things for you to do.”
Clardy grinned. “You always twist everything around to find some kind of purpose in it, don’t you?”
“This old world’s way too a mysteriosity for there not to be a purpose in things, Clardy. The real mysteriosity would be if there warn’t.”
Clardy was glad to hear Ford talking that way. He seemed a brighter and happier man than he had the day before.
“Lord have mercy, I’m shaking like a leaf,” Clardy said. “Let’s get back indoors. It’s going to take me some time to get the scare out of me, I believe.”
They walked back to Clardy’s cabin side by side.
CHAPTER 32
Shaking off the case of nerves roused by the morning encounter took Clardy most of the remainder of the day. Like the realization of bereavement, the full shock of almost having been murdered didn’t come until past the actual event. He developed a case of trembling so bad that he was no good for work and soon gave up any notion of pursuing labor this day. He sat in his cabin, trying to calm himself, trying to quit shaking, and that only seemed to make the shaking worse.
Ford suggested he might do better away from his own cabin, where the shredded rifle ball hole through the rear door served as a constant reminder of the morning’s terror. So they went to Ford’s house, and Clardy did begin to calm down some, and managed to eat. He was embarrassed by his nervousness and hoped that Ford wasn’t thinking badly of him for it. If he was, Ford didn’t let it show, and at length Clardy noticed that Ford seemed quite visibly nervous himself, and was spewing out one proverb after another. It had been a frightening event for both of them. Clardy hadn’t felt so scared since the time he had stared into the ugly face of Micajah Harpe back on Beaver Creek and listened to Harpe’s command that he murder Cale Johnson.
By afternoon Clardy felt much better and was beginning to think about what had happened in broader terms. He felt very strong affection toward Ford for what he had done. He detected that, despite his nervousness, Ford had taken on more of a fatherly bearing and attitude than he had shown since those first days after Clardy came to the Ford cabin in Kentucky. Clardy wondered if the act of saving his life had given Ford a renewed sense of his own usefulness and purpose. He saw reason to believe so.
Clardy and Ford were at their supper when the realization came. It swept over Clardy in an overwhelming rush, causing him to drop his fork. Ford, alarmed, stood and almost knocked over the table. “What’s wrong?”
“Mr. Ford, it just came to me. Why didn’t I see it before? And why did I let that man go before I found out more! God help me, I’ve been blind!”
“What are you babbling about?”
“Don’t you see it? A robber, named James Hiram, who looks almost like me—James Hiram, the Christian names of my own grandfather! James Hiram Tyler, though he always went by Hiram alone.…”
Ford looked bewildered. “What does your grandfather have to do with this?”
“Nothing, directly. But there’s only one other person I can think of who looks enough like me that folks have confused us before, that’s my brother Thias. And the James Hiram name only makes that seem all the more possible.”
“Thias! So you think … by jiminy, Clardy, could it be?”
“It could be indeed.”
“But that man said he was robbed, and you always declared that your brother was an upstanding and moral fellow. He wouldn’t be the kind to rob folks on the trails.”
“I know. It don’t match up to what I know of Thias. But maybe there was misunderstanding. Or maybe he was forced to do it. I was nigh forced into committing a murder once myself, so I know such things can happen. And if for some reason or another Thias did commit a crime, it makes sense he’d use another name to throw off any who might go after him, or to cover up his own shame. And he might just use the first names of his grandpap. They’d be quick to come to mind, and do as well as any other.”
Ford stood there with a look of awe, letting it sink in. “It could be, Clardy. It really could be.”
“I’ve dreamed lately of Thias being in trouble. I’ve never been one to put stock in signs and such truck, but who can say?”
“I stand and marvel. I do indeed.”
“I wish I hadn’t let that man go. I’d like to know more about this fellow who robbed him, and just where and when it was he saw him.”
Clardy quit talking and began pacing the room. He was breathless, shaking again, but this time with excitement instead of fear. For his part, Ford merely stood there, apparently awed by the amazing but utterly plausible possibility revealing itself before them.
Clardy stopped pacing abruptly. “Mr. Ford, I’ve got to go to the Natchez country. I’ve got to see if Thias is there.”
“Yes, you do. I was ponderating that very thought myself.”
“And I’ve got to know if he’s in trouble. And he’s bound to be. Otherwise he would have found me, and gotten that inheritance rightly divided. He’s the kind who’d never rest until everything was set right.”
Ford, about to delve into a subject that had generated hard feelings before, looked solemn and said, “He was the kind, you should say. You ain’t seen him for years now. You don’t know what he might be like now.”
“Thias would never change.”
“I don’t know about that, Clardy. You changed.”
Clardy couldn’t deny that. The point left him unresponsive for a moment or two, and then, as always in such conversations, he grew irritated. “Don’t you go trying to persuade me that Thias could turn dishonest. He’d never do anything he knew was wrong.”
“You yourself have been voicing the notion that he was the one who robbed that fellow near Natchez. Robbery ain’t what I’d call honest.”
“No … but anyone might be tempted into it in a time of need or trouble.”
“So they might. But it wouldn’t be honest. Wouldn’t be no excuses for it.”
“Why do you always have such
a preachy way about you?”
“I ain’t preachy. Just forthright.”
“You are that, yes sir.” Clardy was stirred by a spontaneous burst of animating excitement. “Think of it! My brother might be alive, Mr. Ford! I’ve longed to have hope of that for the longest time!”
“Aye, yes. It’s a good hope.” Ford coughed, cleared his throat, and adopted a serious tone. “Clardy, I must say more of the thing you ain’t liking to hear. I’ll try not to anger you, but let me tell you from the base of having lived a few years more than you have that sometimes folks can turn different on you. You need to be aware of that in case you do find Thias. You made a change toward the good. If your brother has met him a hard row to hoe or had some great trouble in his life, he might have changed toward the bad. That would account for why he would rob a man.” He paused before delving into a far more personal area. “And maybe even why he never divided that inheritance with you.”
Clardy had to restrain himself from anger. He knew that Ford was merely trying to give him the wisest counsel he could. “I understand why you think that way, Mr. Ford. But like I’ve said before, you don’t know Thias like I do. I really don’t believe he’d change. And maybe he did try to find me to share the inheritance, and couldn’t. Maybe he thinks I’m dead.”
“Maybe. Only one way to find out, and that’s to go see if we can find this here ‘James Hiram’ and see if he might be Thias.”
“We can find? So you’d go, too?”
“You’re deuced right I will. I need a change of scene. Tired of sitting and moping under my thinking tree. I mulled it all last night. Decided that maybe what I ought to do, if I want to avoid blowing out my own brains, is to make me a journey. Maybe go down and sell some horses down the river. It ’pears providentialized that this news come along when it did.”
Clardy might have laughed. A voyage to Natchez … there, Ford could sell their horses, and he could scout about for Thias, if Thias was there to be found.