Passage to Natchez

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Passage to Natchez Page 52

by Cameron Judd


  It didn’t matter; Clardy could not leave without knowing what would become of his partner. “Thank you for the invitation,” he said. “But I have a traveling companion here who has been hurt. Whether he will live or die is something I don’t yet know, and until I do, I have to stay where I am.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your companion,” Japheth said. “A relative or a friend?”

  “Neither, really,” Clardy said. “Just a man who knows my brother.”

  “Knows? But I thought your brother was—”

  “I thought the same. But he is alive.”

  “But I was told—”

  “Yes, I know. But he didn’t drown in that lake, Mr. Deerfield. Somehow he came out alive, and I know it’s true because Thias came looking for me himself, though we failed to come together. And the man who’s traveling with me, and who’s inside this hospital, he knows Thias very well, and has worked with him over the past few years. You know him, too. It’s Willie Jones.”

  “Jones!” Japheth’s face filled with such astonishment and interest that for a moment he lost his pallor and seemed as he had been the first time Clardy met him. “Mr. Tyler, do you realize that I petitioned for Jones’s release after we found out your brother was dead … though I suppose from what you’re telling me that we hadn’t really ‘found out’ the true facts of the case. I never even lingered to see what the outcome of my petition was for him.”

  “He was freed, and sir, it helped spark a change in him—from a man who never thought of right and wrong to one who began to care about such things. He’s told me all this himself. He did some bad after he was freed—counterfeiting gold coin with my own brother, for one thing—but he was different, because you took the time to do something good for him. To this day he don’t know why you did it.”

  “Pity, pure and simple. I did it out of pity,” Japheth answered. “I saw that the man was bound to die in that cell, and I petitioned for his release as an act of mercy. I’m glad it had a good effect on him.”

  “Yes.” Clardy’s face grew somber. “But now I fear he’s going to die. He was badly wounded.”

  “I’d like to meet him,” Japheth said.

  “I’d like for you to meet him, too,” Clardy said. “I suggested the same to him, but he rejected the idea. Maybe the idea of meeting you shames him. I reckon he must see you as a saintly figure, too good for him to speak with. That’s the only reason I can figure out.”

  “Japheth, we should be getting home.”

  Remembering now that the Deerfields had a daughter, and assuming that it was the need to return to her that motivated Celinda’s hurry, Clardy asked, “Mrs. Deerfield, how is … Beulahland, I believe her name is?” Clardy asked politely.

  “She is fine, thank you. A strong and healthy young girl now, not the baby she was when you were here before. She has sustained herself quite well under it all.”

  “I’m glad she’s well.” Sustained herself quite well … What was this woman talking about?

  Japheth, who had cast a sharp glance at his wife while she made her final comment, said, “Where will you be staying tonight, Mr. Tyler?”

  “I ain’t give it a thought. Right here, I suppose.”

  “No need for that. If the situation allows you to leave here, you will stay with us.”

  Clardy glanced at Celinda. He saw neither welcome nor rejection in her look. He thought: This is a woman who has learned to hide her feelings very well indeed.

  “Thank you. I might take you up on that. You live in the same place as before?”

  “No, no. We’ve moved farther down the street.” He gave quick instructions. “A more modest place than we had.”

  Clardy didn’t recall the original Deerfield house as anything more than modest. What they lived in now, then, must be quite small. A move down to a lesser house, the look of trials endured on Celinda’s face, her talk of their child having “sustained herself quite well,” the tracks of suffering on her features and Japheth’s—all these things evidenced clearly that difficult times of some sort had been the lot of the Deerfields. Those earlier whispers of unspecified trouble having beset this family must have been true.

  He watched them walk away. Odd, running into them like that. He wouldn’t have expected to encounter them at a hospital. Maybe Japheth had been here because he was sick.

  Clardy smoked three pipefuls of tobacco, then sat down where he had been before. An hour later a woman in a long nurse’s dress came out and fetched him in.

  The surgeon was blood-splattered and looked very tired. “He is still alive, but only barely. I don’t believe he will live.”

  Clardy felt wrenched. “May I see him?”

  “Not now. He’s unconscious, anyway. In the morning, if he’s come around again, you can see him. For now he must rest … and you must talk to the law and tell what happened to him. This young bandit you mentioned sounds like a man who shot another person in the same area about a week ago.”

  “I’ll go report it,” Clardy replied.

  He left the hospital, praying that Jones would make it through, and if not, that he would at least grow strong enough to tell Clardy more about where and how to find the woman they were seeking, the woman who would be his best hope for finding Thias.

  Clardy, driving the coffin-bearing wagon, went to the proper authorities and made his report, then walked out onto the street. Should he take up Japheth’s offer for lodging? Part of him felt the impulse to simply take boarding in an inn and not intrude himself further into the life of a family in which ambivalent feelings, at best, were held toward him. Another part, overwhelmed with curiosity about the Deerfields’ obviously difficult recent history, and his own eagerness to tell of his own family and experiences, told him to go ahead and find the Deerfield house.

  The latter part won the argument. Clardy drove the wagon slowly along through the dusk, following Japheth’s earlier directions, until he found a house that seemed to be at the place he’d been directed to go. Yet this house was terribly small, certainly too small to be the residence of even a moderately successful attorney in Natchez, a town famous for being a place where one in every ten residents was embroiled in some kind of lawsuit at any given time and where lawyers therefore thrived. Clardy was about to turn away when the door opened and Japheth thrust his head out. “Mr. Tyler, you’ve found us. I’m glad. Drive your wagon around back and we’ll deal with your horses. You’ve come in time for supper.”

  Celinda and her daughter went to their beds early, but Clardy and Japheth sat up late that night, talking. There was much to tell on both sides. Japheth was very interested in Clardy’s life since they parted ways in New Orleans. He was clearly pleased that Clardy’s situation had improved, that he now had a fine wife and family, a good home, and success in his business. Looking around at the condition of Japheth’s own house, shabby in comparison to Clardy’s big stone dwelling, Clardy thought how remarkably fine it was of the man to be capable of feeling happiness for some other person’s success when his own was obviously so lacking. No wonder he had always tended to think well of Japheth Deerfield, despite those few doubts he felt early on, when he wasn’t sure what Japheth’s motives were for wanting to help him find Thias.

  Clardy’s story told, Japheth told his own. Clardy was intrigued, often shocked, sometimes repelled, and by the time Japheth was through speaking, full of tremendous sympathy for the entire family.

  Japheth told about the incident involving Timothy Rumbolt and his own tragically fated attempt to deal with his attempted blackmail without going through the open venues of the law. The suicide of Timothy, who had been frightened far more thoroughly than Japheth could imagine by all the threatening talk about soldiers, had led to an investigation. Japheth had cooperated fully and told the entire story just as it had happened, and as would be expected, the news filled all of Natchez. Every detail managed to reach the public, from the attempted rape Celinda had been forced to endure to Japheth’s fated visit. Of course, half th
e population, eager for scandal, refused to believe it. There had been talk about Celinda having carried on a love affair with a Natchez-under-the-Hill man, about Japheth having threatened the old woman who lived with Celinda’s lover, about Japheth murdering the man and managing to make it appear to be suicide. Never mind that even the facts as given by Beatrice Sullivan failed to support that wild and slanderous tale; never mind that the official investigation found Japheth innocent of any wrongdoing. What mattered in the public mind, particularly that branch of the public mind embodied in the motley rabble of Natchez-under-the-Hill, was scandal. The story spread, growing ever more distorted, bringing more and more unjustified shame onto the entire Deerfield family. Japheth’s legal practice had suffered, and for the sake of his partners, he resigned the firm and opened an independent, smaller office elsewhere in town. He managed to find enough business to keep food on the table, but not enough to allow them to live even in the modest home they had occupied before. They sold the place and moved to a smaller home, then sold that one, too, and moved to the tiny house they occupied now.

  “I was ready many times to give up and leave Natchez,” Japheth told Clardy. “But Celinda would hear none of it. She kept repeating a thing her own father had told her right at the end of his life: ‘You must learn to be strong.’” He chuckled. “‘Learn to be strong.’ God knows that she is strong. She carried me through it all, kept me fighting for my own good name when I was ready to give up. She declared we had done nothing wrong, that maybe I was guilty of bad judgment in trying to deal with Timothy’s extortion directly, instead of going through the proper legal channels, but that if my judgment was bad, it had been motivated out of love for her and the desire to avoid exposing my family to scandal.” He paused and shuddered. “God knows I failed in that. Failed miserably. When I frightened that poor man into putting that pistol into his mouth—and I swear to you, Mr. Tyler, I had no intention of that happening—I brought more scandal on my family than most people ever endure. I almost ruined our happiness here. And the strain of it cost us much. Especially Celinda.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We lost a child. Another girl. She lived not even a day past her birth, which came too early. The strain of all that had happened to us—I don’t doubt that is what did it. And though we still have our Beulahland, Celinda has felt the loss of that baby like a great wound that won’t heal. You can see in her face how it has aged her.” His eyes misted. “She dreams of that baby. Almost every night. Dreams and wakes up in tears.”

  “I’m truly sorry.”

  “Yes. Thank you. It’s been difficult for Celinda, and watching her suffer so hasn’t been good for my health. My spirit is growing a bit weak, you see. Occasionally I have spells of pain and weakness from it and have to seek a physician’s help.”

  “Was that why you were at the hospital tonight?”

  “Yes. Fortunately, the Lord’s good grace was with me tonight and the pain went away, so here I am at home again.” He forced a bright face. “And with a welcome guest I hadn’t expected to see! So everything isn’t dark and grim in the life of Japheth Deerfield, eh?”

  “No,” Clardy replied, smiling around the stem of his pipe. “Though I am regretful you are suffering poor health.” He frowned in silent contemplation a few moments. “You know what you should do, Japheth?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You should leave this town. Get away from this river air, and all the memories. Move elsewhere and start again. I’ll wager your heart would be the stronger for it and your wife all the happier.”

  Japheth looked into the fire. “It sounds wonderfully good, Clardy. Odd that you should say it, too. Celinda said as much to me two days ago, and then again tonight, when my chest was hurting. ‘Japheth,’ she said, ‘we’ve fought it out as best we could. Now we can leave with our pride still in place.’ And you know, she’s right. I honestly believe I’ve managed over the past year to regain most of my reputation. Even my business is improving. Before long we’d be able to move into a better house … but neither one of us feel happy about that idea. Celinda says she wants to go home.”

  “Meaning where?”

  “Kentucky.”

  “That would be a fine move for you. A fine one. Kentucky is growing. There’s plenty of places a good lawyer could make his living. There, you’d have no memories of scandals and struggles. You could start fresh. And that fine Kentucky air, that’s as pure and healing an air as a man could breathe. It would be good for you, Japheth.” And then Clardy made Japheth an offer that the lawyer took with him to his bed, to think about in the night and discuss with his wife in the morning.

  At breakfast the next day, his answer was ready. “We will accept your offer, Clardy,” Japheth said. “And we thank you for it.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Clardy said. “And like Sweeney McCracken would have said, don’t it seem providential that I’ll be coming up past Natchez on a sailing vessel anyway! I’ll be hanged before I’d wheel that coffin all the way back to Kentucky by land. It’ll be no trouble at all to make room for three more and a bit of luggage.”

  “There’s one thing that troubles me,” Celinda said. It had not been common for her to inject herself into conversations between Clardy and her husband either now or in Clardy’s prior time in Natchez, so her intrusion now startled both men.

  “What’s that, dear?” Japheth asked.

  “There may be a man on that boat who once held you at the point of a gun and robbed you,” she said.

  It was true, though Clardy hadn’t thought about it from that angle. If he succeeded in finding Thias, he hoped to talk him into coming back with him to Kentucky. For him to be on the same vessel as Japheth and Celinda could make for some clumsy personal frictions.

  “Don’t let that worry you, Celinda,” Japheth said. “I’m an attorney. I’m accustomed to tense situations. Heaven knows, with what this family has endured, we’re all accustomed to that by now. If Thias Tyler is on that boat when Clardy sails it in, then so be it. There comes a time when the past must be forgotten.” He lifted his coffee cup. “To Kentucky, and a new world for the Deerfield family, thanks to the generous offer of Clardy Tyler.”

  Clardy thought: Willie Jones sees a world ending, Japheth sees one beginning. Who will be right? I can’t yet know.

  They raised their assorted cups—Beulahland hefting up a glass of milk—and drank. Clardy glanced at Celinda and tried to find her feelings in her face. He could not. She was as impossible for him to read as a new river to a novice boatman. An intriguing woman she was, and very full of mystery.

  CHAPTER 45

  Celinda walked beside Japheth, arm in arm with him, her left hand holding her daughter’s. To her husband’s right was Clardy Tyler, tense and solemn. They were going toward the Natchez Hospital, there to find out the fate of Clardy’s injured partner. Clardy had already said that he was braced to be informed that the man had died in the night.

  Celinda hoped the man hadn’t died, mostly for Japheth’s sake. He was interested in meeting this man, and she was glad. It wasn’t that she cared so much about the meeting itself, but that her husband’s enthusiastic curiosity and interest in life was a characteristic that had slowly declined under the onslaught of the difficult times they had known, and it was good to see it returning. For that she had to credit Clardy Tyler, and she did not miss the irony of it. Clardy Tyler was a man she once had felt was going to bring bad fortune to her family, and for a time she had, with rather convoluted logic, faulted him for the scandal that had descended upon her husband and herself. The passing years had matured and changed that viewpoint, however. Now she knew that it wasn’t Clardy Tyler at fault. In one sense there was no one to blame; the whole sorry affair had simply been borne to them on the unpredictable currents of circumstances. Her own actions had been the stimulus that set off the chain of events, and Japheth’s well-motivated but misguided attempt to cut off the problem before it grew had set the stage for all the rest. Clar
dy Tyler’s involvement had been all but nil, and quite indirect. She could not justly blame him.

  Celinda had not known until the day before the story of how her husband had petitioned for the release of the former New Orleans prisoner they were now going to see. He simply hadn’t mentioned it to her. That was typical of him, and endearing. Japheth had always been a kind and caring man, particularly toward those in bad situations. It was just like him to take the time to do something good for a stranger who was in no position to benefit him in turn.

  Celinda was as curious as her husband was about Willie Jones, though she really didn’t know why. She hoped they would find the man improved enough that maybe he would voice his gratitude to Japheth. Such a gesture would mean a lot to her husband, who had suffered so many unjustified slams against his reputation after the scandal descended upon them. It seemed a long time since anyone had thanked Japheth for anything.

  They reached the hospital. Clardy turned to them. “I should tell you that if Jones is alive, bringing you in to see him will be a violation of his wishes. He was firm about not wanting to see you, Japheth. I believe maybe it was shame making him say that; he just could not bear the thought of having to face a man who had done such a kind thing for him.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t go …”

  Clardy said, “No, I want you to. I believe it’s proper that you see him, and that you thank him. But if you like, I’ll ask him first if he’s willing to see you.”

  “Yes,” Japheth said. “That would be best.”

  Clardy paused. “Besides, I have a feeling all this is just talk in the air, anyhow. I doubt he survived the night.”

  But to the surprise of them all, Jones had survived, and was moving in and out of consciousness. “He has a strong will, and is fighting to live,” a nurse told them. “But his prospects are still poor. His wound was bad, and there are signs it is beginning to fester. You must be prepared for him to die.”

 

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