Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  He recalled right then what his attacker had said this morning. No scar on your jaw … So if Thias was indeed the true robber, he apparently now had a scar. That indicated injury, accidental or otherwise. Or perhaps that the robber really wasn’t Thias at all, despite his apparent similarity to Clardy, and that the James Hiram name was merely coincidental.

  Clardy did not share these thoughts with Ford, not wanting to say anything that might change his inclinations to make the journey. Clardy was entirely willing to go alone, but far better it would be to have good company.

  “We’d best go have a word or two with Sweeney McCracken tomorrow,” Ford said.

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know Sweeney? Lives by the river, makes and sells flatboats. Fine ones. Pilots voyages down the rivers, too. He’s been down the big water more times than most folks have gone to privy. I’m inclined to hire him to pilot us.”

  “You really are serious about all this, ain’t you?”

  “Of course I am. And, hey, there’s more that Sweeney might be able to do for us. He knows the Natchez country up and down, and all the talk among the Kaintucks. If there’s a James Hiram robbing along the road from Natchez, he’ll probably know of him.”

  McCracken was a short and stocky man, broad in the rump and thick in the thighs. He wore a loose, very greasy hunting shirt that was made for a taller man, thick-soled boots, and a mass of tangled, salt and pepper hair that merged into the thickest tangle of whiskers Clardy had ever seen on a human face. Gray whiskers, as gray as the eyes.

  Ford dealt with business first, and with much success. McCracken was just completing what he called the “best bejiggered broad-horn ark ever pieced together by the fangers of a man.” Clardy took note of the fact that the art of flatboat building had taken a toll on McCracken’s “fangers,” in that he had only eight and a half of them, a little finger on his left hand being entirely gone, and the ring finger on his right missing to the first knuckle.

  Ford made arrangements to buy the flatboat, then hired McCracken as pilot on complicated terms involving giving McCracken a percentage of the profits from the sale of the horses and the flatboat itself at Natchez. Clardy paid little attention and hardly cared if Ford simply gave everything away, including his own cut of the proceeds. All he could think or care about was the possibility of actually finding Thias.

  When the business was finished, Clardy asked McCracken if he had ever heard of a criminal names James Hiram operating along the road out of Natchez.

  “Indeed I have, though never have I laid eyes on him,” McCracken replied. “He’s young, from all I hear, and right about your age. Got him a scar across his jaw, and tries to hide it with a beard, but it shows up above his whisker line. He’s robbed a whole passel of Kaintucks over the last year or more.”

  Clardy felt some rising anguish. So Thias—if Thias and this James Hiram were identical—hadn’t just robbed once, under duress or out of desperation, as he had hoped was the case. He had done it often. Ford’s warnings about the way individual behaviors could change suddenly seemed more potentially on the mark than he had wanted to believe.

  It was sobering to realize that even if he found Thias, he might not be finding the Thias he had known before.

  “Has he ever killed any of his victims?” Ford asked, and Clardy gave him a hard look because of the forthrightness of the query. Yet that very question was heavy in his own mind at the moment, though he had been unwilling to ask it.

  “Don’t know. It ain’t Hiram that I’ve heard most about. The worst scoundrel in the Natchee country is a man name of Mason. Mason of the Woods, they call him sometimes. First name is Samuel. He commenced his robbing up at Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio River. You heard of that place? Pirate’s haven. Terrible little bit of hell, right on God’s green earth.

  “Anyways, Sam Mason left his cave some years back and took up his crimes in the Natchee lands. Oh, he’s a devil, he is, maybe as bad a man as them Harpes you’re so famed for having chased, Clardy Tyler. Didn’t know I knowed about that, did you? You’re famous, boy, whether you know it or not.”

  Clardy felt self-conscious. He hadn’t pursued the Harpes for fame, and never had been happy with having his name closely associated with theirs. He steered the subject back on course. “Does this Hiram work with Mason?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Mason has plenty with him, though, so I couldn’t say for certain. Let’s see … there’s a fellow name of Setton, mean as a snake, and another name of May. Plenty more, too. Trouble is that not too many who Mason gets his hands on live to tell many stories about what they’ve seen.”

  “A murderer, is he?”

  “Aye. Preys on Kaintucks like a wolf on sheep. Loves them full pockets and pouches that go up along the road toward Nashville.”

  Clardy was beginning to feel depressed. The prospect of finding Thias seemed less real now. He couldn’t picture his upright brother being part of the dark criminal world that McCracken was describing.

  “Why you asking so much about this Hiram, anyways? You afraid of him?”

  “I heard he looked a lot like me,” Clardy replied. “Made me curious, you see.” He wasn’t in a spirit to tell more than that at the moment.

  “Looks like you? Well then, you’d best beware about Natchee town! Some gent who’s been robbed by Hiram might make him a mistake about who you are.”

  “I’m right aware of that already,” Clardy said.

  McCracken squinted one eye. “There something going on here I don’t know about? Something maybe I should know about?”

  “Not a thing that will involve you, Sweeney,” Ford replied. “We’ll tell you all about it later on, once we commence.”

  They sold some of their horses in Nashville, rented out their grazing lands and fields for the remainder of the year, and drove the best of their herd to the waterfront to be loaded on McCracken’s big flatboat. Whenever he had time to mull on it, Clardy was astonished that mere days after having first learned that Thias could be alive, he was actually on his way to Natchez. The timing of it all couldn’t have worked out better had he planned it. He hardly dared hope that things would continue to go so well.

  Clardy did tell McCracken his full story, and about his reason for being so inquisitive about the outlaw James Hiram. McCracken, a man who appreciated a good bit of drama, loved to tell stories even more than he loved to voyage on the rivers, declared Clardy’s quest would make a “prime good rip of a tale,” and that he was glad to be firsthand witness to seeing it played out. “By gawl, we’ll find that bother of yourn, if we can,” he said. “Won’t that make for a yarn to spin, eh? I’ll be mighty eager to see the ending of it. By gawl, I hope it’s a good one!”

  One good thing already was evident to Clardy. Isaac Ford was in better spirits than he had been since his family died. The labor and excitement of a big river voyage, the drastic change of lifestyle and locales that were inherent in it—all these were boons to his mental health. His eyes became bright again, his posture sturdy and erect, and his lips dripped proverbs until Clardy could hardly stand to hear them.

  McCracken owned two slaves, Tate and Dewey, who worked expertly as his crewmen, aided by Clardy and Ford. The bulk of the work, however, fell on the first three in that they were true rivermen and knew the secrets of flatboat navigation. It seemed to Clardy that Dewey in particular could read the river almost mystically. He seemed to know in advance where the currents were dangerous, where sawyers and planters were likely to be, and even what the next day’s weather would be by the look of the sky and water. Clardy soon learned that at best he was hardly more than a glorified passenger, able to contribute little more than muscle to this enterprise. As days passed, he became familiar with the river in a superficial way, but in a deeper sense it remained a stranger whose back was turned to him while it whispered its deepest secrets into the ears of McCracken, Tate, and Dewey.

  It hardly mattered; Clardy had no ambition to become a riverman. Of more interest to
him than what he could learn of river navigation was what he could learn of the Natchez country from the abundant talk of McCracken. Seldom did McCracken’s verbosity dispense outright history. Mostly he told stories, anecdotes, experiences of his own and experiences he had heard of from others. Clardy began to develop a mental picture of the town he was soon to see, a town built from a mix of French, Spanish, Indian, and American culture. It was also a town divided into two segments. The upper portion sat high atop a bluff, overlooking the river. There, stood fine houses, churches, respectable edifices of every kind. Below, on the flats beside the river itself, was Natchez-under-the-Hill, a most unrespectable place, full of saloons and gaming houses and places where women came cheap and smelled of cheap perfumes and sweat. There, many a Kaintuck lost his year’s income within a few days, spending it on drink, gambling it off, putting it in the hands of women in return for crude favors.

  There was a time when such a place would have held strong appeal for Clardy. But he was different now. His sole interest was in finding Thias, if he was there to be found.

  On a peaceful evening when the flatboat was moored along the left bank of the Mississippi River beneath an unusually bright moon, McCracken told a story of Natchez that happened to stick more firmly in Clardy’s mind than any of his other tales, partly because it was so unusual but mostly because it gave him a hard-to-explain sense of hope about his own quest for a missing brother.

  McCracken told the story with a smoking clay pipe stuck between his yellow teeth. “There’s a certain young woman in Natchee town—I’ve seen her with my own eyes—and she’s known through the whole town because of the torments she went through to get there. She’s a Kentucky girl, seventeen year old or so when she first reached the town, that being back in ’ninety-nine. I heard her story from a Natchee town lawyer who is in a prime place to know this particular gal’s story well, as you’ll soon enough know.

  “Her name was Celinda Ames. She was a frail sort of critter who back in the fall of ’ninety-eight had set out down the Ohio on a flatboat with her pappy after her mammy died a hard death. Mad dog or fox or such had bit the poor woman, you see. Her pappy decided it was best if he and his girl head on to Natchee town, where he thunk at the time that his sister was living, and they took passage on a boat full of goods. When her pappy took sick the same way his wife did, the boatmen shoved them both off on the Kentucky shore, fearful of catching the plague theirselves. Sure enough, the pappy died, dancing hisself to death trying to sweat out the poison of his illness, and soon after, the girl was come upon by a fellow who claimed to be a preacher name of Deerfield, on his way to Natchee town to start up a church. She thought at first that she was surely saved, being found by a preacher, but before long she learned different. This fellow was no preacher, but a no-account scoundrel name of Junebug Horton, fairly well-knowed up and down the Ohio and Mississippi among your lower breed of folk. I’ve seen him myself two, three times, up on the Ohio. The real preacher Deerfield, you see, had took sick unto dying in an inn back up the river where Junebug happened to be, and he’d just up and took that preacher’s place, figuring on getting his hands into the church till in Natchee town.”

  McCracken went on with the story, telling it with the kind of detail that revealed both a sharp, retentive mind, a nearly firsthand source of information, and the natural storytelling skill he loved to exercise. Clardy was both appalled and entranced to learn of all the girl named Celinda had endured. A time of captivity at Cave-in-Rock, further captivity among the outlaw crew of a pirated flatboat, and finally a narrow escape from the man who had enslaved her, who, during her very flight in a riverborne skiff, was embroiled on the dark shore in a battle with a betrayed boatman he had used to bring her back into his clutches.

  “It was an amazing thing, though, how that poor gal’s fortunes changed after she broke free of Junebug Horton. I reckon the hand of the Lord was on her, for there was surely a miracle in it all. She asked for a sign from above, you see, and right after that found passage on a big horse-powered boat heading down the river. And who would be on that very boat but a man named Deerfield, younger brother to the very preacher whose place Junebug Horton had took.”

  “So she had her ‘sign from above,’ eh?” interjected Ford.

  “Aye, so she saw it, and though I ain’t the most devoted and wise where it comes to religion, I’m hard-pressed to see it different myself. In any case, this new Deerfield fellow was a lawyer, and bound for Natchee town hisself, aiming to set up a law practice there and be near his brother, who was his only remaining kin. Or he thought he was remaining until Celinda told him her tale. That was the first he had heard of his brother having died. It shook him bad, but at the same time he also seen it as providence that this here girl had turned up when she did. And if you’ve got a mind toward doubting my story here, I’ll have you know I heard every word of it from Japheth Deerfield hisself. I’ve come to know the man, and think highly of him.”

  “Did this Junebug fellow live through his fight with the boatman?” Clardy asked.

  “Well, Celinda heard them fighting, then Junebug’s voice calling her name over the water whilst she rowed away, but after that no one can say what become of him. He never showed hisself in Natchee town, never went through with his false preacher scheme. Maybe he was hurt in the fight and died there by the river after hollering for her. Maybe he just went on his way somewheres else. No one knows.”

  “That’s a deuce of a tale, McCracken,” Clardy said. “What’s become of Celinda now?”

  “Well, she’s done right well for herself, it seems. That aunt she was looking for in Natchee, she was dead and gone even before Celinda and her pappy left their homeplace. They didn’t know it, of course. But the lawyer Deerfield, he seen to her care. I reckon he must have took quite a shine to her. They was married not five, six months after they reached Natchee. And by the by, the last time I seen Celinda Deerfield, she was moving right on toward giving birth to their first little one.” McCracken puffed his pipe and cast a gleaming eye at Clardy. “So you can see, Clardy, that sometimes matters work out just prime good for folks who come to Natchee. It all depends on whether the hand of providence is upon them, the way I see it. Maybe it will be that way for you.”

  “I hope so,” Clardy said.

  “You’ll just have to see how things work theirselves out once’t we get there,” McCracken said, knocking the ashes from his pipe. “One never can figure such ahead of time. Sometimes the right happens, sometimes it don’t, and all you can do is take it as it’s dealt.”

  Pointe Coupee, one hundred miles below Natchez

  The guard, seated on the deck of the sailing vessel, was nearly asleep. Though the men he had been placed in charge of guarding were said to be violent folk, they had shown no inclination toward attempting escape at any point since they were hustled on board at New Orleans, and he’d grown complacent. At the moment he was also quite content, happy that he had escaped the much harder duty of cutting a tree on the bank and preparing it to replace the mast of the ship, which had broken two days earlier. The rest of the crew had been put on repair duty this morning, and he was posted as the day’s sentinel by Captain Robert McCoy, the militia commander to whom had been given the duty of transporting these prisoners from New Orleans to Natchez for trial. McCoy himself was neither laboring on the shore nor helping stand guard, but lodged in his cabin on the ship. Probably taking a rest himself, the guard figured. And if the captain wasn’t worried about the prisoners, well, he wouldn’t worry either. They were all in chains, anyway. They couldn’t escape if they wanted to, and they didn’t seem to want to.

  The look and manner of the prisoners themselves contributed to his lack of concern. The main prisoner, a big, fine-looking Virginian and alleged former Cave-in-Rock pirate named Samuel Mason, struck him more as some well-off, distinguished planter than the murderous robber baron folks claimed he was. He had come to actually like Mason during the journey up from New Orleans. Giving an equal
ly calming impression were Mason’s four sons, who were also prisoners. One of those sons, John, had a wife and three children with him, and seemed quite the peaceable family man. And the other sons were young, seeming more like boys than men. No one to be all that concerned about.

  Only one of the prisoners seemed in any way worrisome, that being the small-framed man named John Setton. Setton, purported to be a confederate in crime with Samuel Mason, was kept away from the other prisoners by orders of Captain McCoy. Though sometimes Setton’s cold glares could be unsettling, even he seemed a calm, quiet man. The story was, he had given evidence against Mason at the hearing following his recent arrest up in New Madrid, and was going to turn state’s evidence against the others in the actual trial in Natchez. Thus it was only natural that he not be held where the others could get their hands on him—just in case they weren’t as peaceable as they seemed.

  His thoughts were just beginning to take on the random, non-rational quality of dreams when he felt a sudden jolt. Jerking awake, he tightened his hands to grip his rifle, and found no rifle in them. Alarmed, he lifted his head, stood, and found himself face-to-face with the grinning person of John Setton.

  His chains were gone. It was impossible! The guard gaped, disbelieving. “How did you—” He never had time even to finish his question, much less find the answer to how Setton had slipped his chains. Setton raised the rifle, aimed it at the guard, and fired. The guard fell, struck the deck, and passed out in great pain.

  Captain McCoy emerged from his cabin in time to see an unchained John Setton yanking a pistol free from the belt of his guard, who lay in a pool of spreading blood. McCoy jerked to a halt and saw that Mason himself had also just appeared from somewhere. He, too, was no longer chained. McCoy stood confused as Setton flipped the pistol to Mason, who, with a smile, raised it and fired. McCoy felt a sharp sting in his chest and staggered back, groping for his own pistol.

  He was dying even as he fired it.