Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  Wiley grinned slowly, his narrow mouth a mere crack between hollowed cheeks, his teeth yellowed and worn down. “The voices, they’re yet a-singing. Singing for me this time, and oh, it’s the prettiest music!”

  Clardy had no idea what the man was speaking of, but it was unnerving, repellent. Suddenly disgusted even to be in the presence of such a loathsome creature, he turned his back and walked off, losing himself in an alley, where he knelt and cried, overwhelmed by the shock of all that had happened, and grieving for a friend who had been very nearly a father and whose face he would see never again.

  A hand touched him. He started, turned. It was Japheth Deerfield.

  “Mr. Tyler, are you all right?”

  “Isaac Ford is dead, murdered by Wiley Harpe,” Clardy replied. “McCracken just told me.”

  “I’m very sorry. I wish I had known him better.”

  “Please, Mr. Deerfield, just leave me be right now. I am shamed to shed tears before another man.”

  “I want to invite you to my home,” Deerfield said. “You and McCracken, too. I want to extend a hand of friendship to you both at a time I believe you need it.”

  “I don’t believe your wife would want me about, sir,” Clardy said. “I happen to know she doesn’t like me.”

  “Nonsense. It’s only her manner.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I won’t come. I’ll be well enough. All I want right now is some whiskey. All the whiskey I can pour down my throat.”

  Japheth put out a hand and touched Clardy’s arm. “Please, Mr. Tyler, don’t do that. Getting drunk will only—”

  Clardy jerked away and stumbled off, very overwrought and emotional, and headed toward Natchez-under-the-Hill. The severed head of Samuel Mason, lying on the courthouse step, stared blindly after him as flies buzzed in the hollows of its eyes. Someone kicked it over, unnoticed, and it rolled out onto the street, causing a child to scream and a curious dog to come running over to investigate.

  Clardy found his whiskey and drank until he passed out. When he came around, he drank again. Nothing felt like it mattered anymore now that Isaac Ford was dead. He hardly cared even about finding Thias at the moment. And that Wiley Harpe had finally been captured seemed meaningful only to the extent that it would allow him the satisfaction of seeing justice doled out to the man who killed his finest friend.

  Three days after that remarkable and jumbled morning when Samuel Mason’s head came to Natchez in the prow of Wiley Harpe’s canoe, Clardy put aside his whiskey and sobered himself up enough to talk more to McCracken about what had happened to Ford. McCracken’s story was simple, and this time told without his usual storyteller’s flourish. There was no pleasure to be taken in this tale.

  After selling his horses and the flatboat in New Orleans, McCracken and Ford had journeyed in and about the town, partly for pleasure, partly for Ford to see if he liked New Orleans well enough to buy land nearby. He did, and began looking. At last he found property north of town that caught his fancy. He hesitated too long, though, and the land was bought out from under his nose just when he was on the brink of making an offer for it. Disappointed, he stayed in New Orleans even longer so he could look for other property, and also to begin inquiring around about Clardy’s brother. McCracken had helped with the latter. Neither quest bore fruit, and in September he and McCracken began the ride back to Natchez, Ford eager to see Clardy again and find out if he had enjoyed any success in his quest. In the region of Bayou Pierre, the same area in which Elisha Winters had been robbed, they were beset upon by the criminals who turned out to be May and Harpe. Ford resisted, and Harpe shot him. May then drew two pistols and dispatched McCracken’s slaves, solely out of meanness. McCracken would have been shot, too, had not all the robbers’ weapons now been emptied, allowing him time to flee and hide.

  When the robbers were gone, McCracken reemerged, found Ford still alive but badly wounded, and managed to catch Ford’s horse, which had spooked and strayed after Ford was shot out of the saddle. He carried Ford back to New Orleans and obtained the best medical help he could find for him, but to no avail. Ford had died, his final word being a whisper of his late wife’s name.

  When Ford was laid to rest, McCracken headed back toward Natchez alone, dreading the prospect of telling Clardy the bad news about his partner. That he had arrived to see the very men who put Ford in his grave standing on the courthouse steps had astonished him—more providence at work, perhaps.

  “If there’s providence, then I wish it could have provided for Mr. Ford to have lived,” Clardy responded bitterly. “I don’t know that I believe in providence any more. I had a more sensible notion of what life is back when I was younger: do what you want to do, when you want to, and because you want to, and to hell with everything else.”

  “Young Clardy, that’s the very thinking that moves men like Samuel Mason and Wiley Harpe,” McCracken replied. “Don’t let grief make you speak foolishness. Don’t turn sour and sorry. Don’t throw aside all the purpose in your life.”

  “I ain’t. There’s one purpose I know I have to fulfill, even if I can’t find Thias. I need to see Mr. Ford buried where he wanted. He told me that he wanted to lie in Kentucky, beside his family.”

  “He’s laid now in a sepulcher outside a little chapel on the edge of New Orleans. I saw him laid away there myself.”

  “Tell me how to find it, then. Write it down for me. Don’t know when I’ll be able to do it, but I intend to see him buried where he wanted to be.”

  Clardy made no effort to follow McCracken’s advice about not turning “sour and sorry.” After giving a statement to the court at Natchez to verify the identity of Wiley Harpe, he went back to his drinking again, shutting himself off from McCracken and everyone else. Though he didn’t consciously think it out to himself, it was his full intention to drink himself to death.

  What saved him from doing that was an ironic throwback to his Kentucky days: Wiley Harpe escaped the Natchez jail, May with him. Nobody knew quite how they pulled it off, but when Clardy heard about it, he threw his whiskey bottle against the wall and smashed it, furious. Was there no confinement that the weasely Harpe couldn’t find a way out of? He had escaped the Danville jail. Held under his John Setton alias on the boat at Pointe Coupee, he had escaped there, too. Now he had found some way to slip out of captivity yet again.

  Clardy had thrown off the mantle of “Harpe hunter” after the death of Micajah Harpe. Now he took it up once more and joined the massive sweep for the escapees. That Wiley Harpe would again escape the justice that was so overdue to him was more than Clardy would stand for.

  Clardy was disappointed not to be among those who actually found the escapees, hiding near Greenville, but he was happy they were recaptured. He vowed to McCracken, who also had joined the search, that he would not venture far away until his own eyes saw the dead and swinging form of a hanged Wiley Harpe. Not so for him, McCracken replied. He had seen a hanging once before, and did not care to witness another.

  Harpe and May were locked up in the Greenville jail this time, chained and watched closely to ensure there was no chance of another escape. There was a new spirit in the air, an eagerness on the part of law-abiding folk to see an end brought to the law-scoffing devils who had haunted travelers on river and trail for so many years. The worst of them, Micajah Harpe and Samuel Mason, were already dead. Soon, heaven willing, James May and the despised Wiley Harpe would be, too.

  1804

  CHAPTER 37

  A grand jury indicted Wiley Harpe and James May near the beginning of January, and almost immediately trials began, leading to quick convictions despite the best wranglings of their lawyers. In February, in a courtroom packed with people, including Clardy, the sentence came down: “On Wednesday the eighth day of the present month, the prisoners will be taken to the place of execution and there hung up by the neck, between the hours of ten o’clock in the forenoon and four in the afternoon, until they are dead, dead, dead.”

  Clardy was
there again when the prisoners were hauled out to a level field near the Boatman’s Trail. True to what McCracken had said, he was absent; he had headed back to Nashville. Clardy’s feelings were the opposite of McCracken’s. He was eager to see this particular execution. He had seen far more of Wiley Harpe’s wickedness than had McCracken. Seeing the man finally pay for his crimes would, he hoped, bring a sense of closure in his own mind to one of the ugliest portions of his own experience.

  In the hanging field a strong beam had been laid between the forks of two trees, and noosed ropes strung to them. Clardy watched as ladders were leaned against the trees that supported the hanging beam. With much prodding from the authorities in charge of the hanging, both men were forced to climb the ladders. May was in tears; Harpe had a cold, scared look, but showed no strong emotion.

  Both men were given the chance to make final statements. May spoke first, weeping and bemoaning his sentence, declaring he was innocent of any crimes worthy of death, admitting that he had been a Mason confederate over past years, but declaring that in killing Mason he had done an act to atone for any wrong he had done. The crowd listened, but sympathy was lacking. Clardy had overheard enough conversations to know why. The prevailing opinion was that even in the act of killing Mason, May had proved the depth of his own treachery. He had worked with Mason, after all, had been his cohort and friend, yet had murdered the man—not out of righteousness or in atonement for his own past crimes, but solely for the sake of the reward on Mason’s head.

  Harpe spoke next, giving a broad and rambling confession that included the names of various individuals who had secretly aided him, May, and Mason in crimes through the past several years. Clardy detected a rising discomfort in the crowd, some of whose members might have feared their own names would be among those Harpe reeled off. Clardy thought that was a little bit funny until he realized that Harpe might just happen to mention that at one time, none other than “Harpe hunter” Clardy Tyler himself had associated with the Harpe brothers, even agreeing to kill a man named Cale Johnson for them. Never mind that the agreement had been made falsely and under duress; Wiley Harpe was well-situated to create a very harmful false perception about Clardy if he chose to do it.

  He didn’t, to Clardy’s relief. When the final statements were finished, the executions took place very unceremoniously. The ladders that held the men were simply kicked away, and both bodies swung down and out together, making the beam creak. The drop was insufficient to break their necks, so death came slowly and dreadfully, with strangling noises, horrible twitches and convulsions, the voiding of bladders and bowels.

  And then they were dead. Clardy stood staring at Wiley Harpe’s limp body, thinking back on the fateful ways his life had decussated that of the Harpe brothers, finding it hard to fathom that now it truly was all over. The Harpes were dead, and the world was a cleaner and safer place for it.

  Clardy took no part in the ugliness that followed the removal of the bodies from the makeshift gibbet, though he observed it without any feeling of objection. The crowd vented its hatred for the executed men by cutting off their heads and thrusting them down onto poles. These trophies would be displayed along the Boatman’s Trail near Greenville, ugly reminders to other such criminals of the fate that often came to those who flaunted the laws of God and man. Clardy believed that if ever any man deserved to have his remains dishonored in such a way, it was Harpe.

  Wiley Harpe’s corpse did receive one honor his brother’s had not: he was buried in a cemetery, along with May. Then even that bit of humane treatment was nullified when the families of other deceased folk buried in that cemetery disinterred their departed relatives and reburied them elsewhere, so that they would not have to lie in the same ground as the piece of human vermin who had been Wiley Harpe.

  Clardy returned to Natchez after the execution of Harpe and May, and that night wandered down to the levee to hear the music of a band of some twenty Indians, comprised of members of the Natchez, Choctaw, and Muskogee tribes, who had come into town during his absence to perform for incoming flatboats. A big broad horn from Kentucky had arrived that afternoon, laden with barrels of whiskey, beef, and pork, and the entertainment-hungry crew was putting on as much of a show as the Indians, who performed their strange music on handmade instruments of cane that had been split and cut in various ways. Some of the instruments were played like great flutes, while others were stalks filled with pebbles that were shaken in time with the music. A couple of the Indians sang in their own language—altering their voices to make an eerie but pleasant sound that Clardy thought was intriguing and soothing.

  The newly arrived flatboatmen certainly didn’t seem soothed, however. They danced like drunkards at a log-rolling, turning and reeling, whooping, and singing along so loudly that often the music of the Indians was all but drowned out.

  Another person danced nearby, too. Clardy watched her closely. She was an elderly woman he had often seen along the riverfront. He didn’t know her name. He had often noted her sad eyes and the weary expression always on her lined face. This was a woman who had lived a hard life and had been ill-used; he could read that clearly in her bearing and looks. Clardy had always felt sympathetic toward her, but never had he spoken to her.

  Tonight she didn’t look so unhappy. She danced fluidly, in a state that was nearly trancelike, as if she had just gone through some mystical experience, but which Clardy knew was more likely the result of drunkenness. He was in a philosophical mood that evening, and pondered how this old woman was a kind of living symbol of thousands of wasted, struggling lives lived out along the great river. Who was she? Where had she come from? What dreams had once stirred her in childhood, only to fade away? Would he himself wind up as sad and lonely as she? He certainly felt very alone tonight, missing Isaac Ford, missing Thias, even missing his long-gone old grandfather and the life he had so failed to appreciate back on Beaver Creek.

  Clardy had no intention of approaching the dancing old woman, but when one of the drunken flatboatman, doing a wild, high-kicking improvised reel, happened to bump into her very hard and knock her down, he went forward impulsively to help pick her up.

  “Ma’am, let me help you,” he said, reaching down to take her arm.

  She rose, looking at him with a surprised, pleased expression. She smiled then, revealing gums mostly toothless. “Thank you, young man,” she said. “You are a gentleman.”

  Clardy wondered how long it had been since any man had done an act of kindness for this woman. It was a sad thought. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No, no. I don’t think so.”

  He touched his hat and told her good evening, then turned away.

  “Sir,” she said, “are you the man who was the Harpe hunter?”

  He was surprised by the question. Though during his time in Natchez he had come to be fairly well known along the riverfront, he hadn’t expected that such a lost old woman would have even noticed, his existence, much less learned who he was. “Some have called me that. My name is Clardy Tyler.”

  “You have been looking for James Hiram? You believe he is your brother?”

  Clardy was surprised anew. “You seem to have heard a right smart lot about me.”

  “Yes. It is true?”

  “About James Hiram? Yes, ma’am. I am looking for him.”

  Abruptly she reached out and touched his face. He was startled, and experienced a feeling of vague repulsion at the thought that she was about to try and seduce him for money. Probably she had sold herself to men many a time, maybe still did. “You are such a fine-looking young man, and so kind,” she said. “I’ll repay your kindness by—”

  “Ma’am, please …”

  “By helping you find your brother.”

  Clardy wished he hadn’t encountered this old woman. Her, help him find Thias? It was absurd.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know how you could help.”

  “I can. I can take you to someone who knows where James Hiram is.”


  That hit Clardy like a jolt. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I have a friend, a young man like yourself. He knows where James Hiram is. Since you have been a gentleman to me, I’ll take you to him and he will tell you.”

  Clardy hardly dared hope it was true. “Ma’am, if you could do that, I would be beholden to you more than you can know.”

  “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll take you to him now.”

  “Who are you, ma’am?”

  She threw back her chin and spoke in a voice of pride worthy of a monarch. “My name is Mrs. Sullivan. Mrs. Beatrice Fine Sullivan. Now come with me, Mr. Tyler, and meet the man who can help you.”

  She told him her story as they walked together through the darkness, and it made him both sad for her and less hopeful that she would really be able to give him the help she had promised. She was waiting for the return of Mr. Sullivan from New Orleans, she said. He left her in Natchez while he made a journey to New Orleans, but promised he would return, and “Mr. Sullivan is a man who can be trusted, a man of substance and importance.” Clardy asked her how long she had been waiting. Ten years, she replied.

  Ten years. Clardy felt a deep pity for her. Abandoned for ten years, yet she still clung to the promised return of a man who probably was either now dead or had forgotten her altogether. This woman would die here, lost in her liquor and her absurd hope, clinging to a promise that was as worthless as a continental dollar.

  She took him to a ramshackle boardinghouse and up a rickety flight of exterior stairs. At the top she rapped gently on an unpainted, warped pine door. “Timothy? Are you awake?”