Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  CHAPTER 2

  For a long time thereafter she sat staring at the corpse and experiencing the oddest of sensations. She found it difficult to associate the graying, unmoving form before her with the living man who had been her father. This could not be Trenton Ames, but merely a likeness of him. She felt the impulse to find the real Trenton so he could marvel with her at this remarkable, lifeless image of himself on the cave floor.

  As the daylight grew and spilled into the cave mouth, painting Celinda’s surroundings in ocher and amber, she sank back against the wall, knees drawn up against her bosom, arms wrapped around her knees. She was worried not only over what she would do and where she would go, but also because she didn’t feel the sadness expected at moments of bereavement. In fact she felt little at all. Time had abruptly stopped and life had become mere existence. Like her unfortunate father, Celinda Ames was nothing more than the dead stone around her. Her mind had lost its capacity to think and feel. Not even sadness could quicken in her.

  But an hour passed, then two, and bit by bit a thawing began. In the ice of her emotions something fluttered; a shiver of sadness stirred and she gasped out loud. Her hand moved to her mouth and she whispered secret words. A tear rose and slipped down her cheek, carving a pale rivulet through the grime on her face. “Oh, Pap,” she whispered. “Oh, Pap, you’ve gone and left me alone.”

  Her emotions broke like overstrained wineskins, and she sobbed for several minutes until she felt emptied. For most of the next hour Celinda held a numb silence broken only by occasional new bursts of sobbing. She rose once to retrieve her father’s rifle, powder horn, and shot pouch, but returned to the same spot. There she sat, the rifle across her lap, and stared at her father’s body. As it cooled and settled in the dimly lighted cave, it made occasional sighing, moaning noises that initially gave her a wild hope that he was not dead after all. But he was dead, and she realized she would be best off to accept that as quickly as possible.

  He had told her she would have to be strong. Strong … but how? And to what effort should she apply any strength she might muster? Go on to Natchez, he had instructed. Again, how? She laughed at the dark irony. Was she to walk to Natchez, or float herself downriver on a log, or convey herself magically in a flying washtub, like the shipwrecking witches a seafaring great-uncle fervently claimed he had once seen riding the sky seaward?

  As fear rose, she forced it back and made as cool an assessment as possible of her situation. She had a rifle, some ammunition, and a small supply of food. She was miles from her old home, and even if she returned there by foot, no one remained to befriend or help her. The Ames cabin had been isolated, and what few neighbors the family had were gone, having moved elsewhere over the past three years.

  The sad fact was that Trenton Ames hadn’t been a popular man in his community. He had been bookish in a region where many were illiterate, and a difficult boyhood and introverted personality had retarded his ability to make and sustain friendships. Dark, inexplicable rumors about him had circulated, accusations that his shaded eyes could bring harm to others with no more than a glance. Some had even whispered that the mad fox that had fatally infected Beulahland Ames had been conjured up by Trenton himself. Right alongside those rumors stood others declaring that Trenton’s skepticism about various popular superstitions hinted that he was a heretic, disbeliever, downright infidel. No one but Celinda and Trenton himself had ever seemed to notice the near contradiction of labeling the same man as skeptic and spellcaster, false labels in any case. False or not, the rumors about her father had stuck like pitch and cast their stain onto his family. Celinda herself was mistrusted and disliked by many in her home region. She had once seen a child cry and run away when she walked past. Celinda realized she could not return home. She would be rejected there, little better off than here.

  All her hope lay with her aunt in distant Natchez. She had never been to Natchez and knew nothing of that town except that it stood by the big river and was one of the market towns to which Kentucky farmers shipped their goods. As for her aunt Ida, Celinda hadn’t seen her since she was three, and would not know her if she saw her now. She could not even know certainly whether Aunt Ida would take her in when she finally reached Natchez.

  Her father had told her to find an inn on the river. Then what? She could not book passage to Natchez with no money and no grounds for credit. People tended to believe a man could find some way to repay his debts … but a woman, a mere girl, that was a different tale. She could offer nothing in return for passage except … She shuddered, violently rejecting an unexpected and atrocious thought. Whatever happened, she would not lower herself to that. It would ruin her, body and soul. Nothing was worth that price.

  She rose and walked to her father’s body. Leaning on the rifle, she looked down at him. Though it was autumn and cool, decay was already setting in. His dead face was lean and hollow, his eyes beginning to sink. She wished she could bury him, but would not touch him. She had no way to dig a grave, anyway. He would have to lie where he was.

  She turned away and went to the mouth of the cave. Since the morning, clouds had blown in from the west. A soft rain pattered down, but she ignored it and strode out into the forest. A walk was what she needed, a chance to escape the constricting, dark cave, and to think. Maybe she would find something to shoot for food in the meantime. By tomorrow night, at best, she would be out of the meager supply the flatboat crew had left her.

  Weary, growing cold and sodden in the drizzle, she trudged off into the woodlands, the rifle heavy in her right hand.

  A good saddle, this one. Best he had ever used, much less owned. Oblivious to the light rain, he shifted his rump in the curved leather seat and gave a grunt of satisfaction. Comfortable as a well-stuffed chair, this saddle. Clearing his throat, he sat up straighter and raised his right hand to the sky, brows lowering, chin thrusting out.

  “Dear beloved folk, we gather this evening to sing heavenly praises.…” He stopped, shook his head, and started over in a much deeper timbre. “Beloved of heaven, we gather here beneath heaven to sing heavenly praises and to hear the heavenly word of the heavenly Father.” He stopped again, unsatisfied. Something sounded wrong with that last sentence, out of balance, inauthentic. He couldn’t have that. He had to sound convincing if he was to succeed at exploiting this wonderful opportunity that lay spread before him, so wonderful he would believe it a gift of heaven itself, if heaven gave gifts to such men as he.

  Heaven … there was the problem! Too many heavens and heavenlies in that last sentence. Louder now, and even deeper, he intoned: “Dearly beloved, we gather here this evening to sing heavenly … holy praises and hear the glorious word of our heavenly … of our divine Father above.” He grinned. “Nailed her down tight, by jingo!” He had liked the sound of that much better. He could imagine such words echoing sonorously across a crowded meeting ground, stirring the faithful to service and generosity. Yes indeed. Marvelous, blessed, heavenly generosity.

  He plunged anew into his practice sermon. “Let us now turn to the Book of Revelations, wrote by Saint John the Baptist upon the banks of the Jordan River, where Noah built the ark of the covenant.” He smiled again. He suspected that the content of his words was so much jabber, riddled with errors and misstatements, but he doubted it mattered. The kind of folk who responded to sermons seemed to him to be rather unthinking anyway, swayed more by sound and spirit than by content. He had watched such people a time or two at camp meetings, singing and hand-swaying and cracking their bodies like whips in the bizarre religious affliction called the jerks. Folks like that would be easy to fool. A few vague religious words spoken in a deep, conviction-filled voice, a few well-placed pious expressions and judiciously shed tears, and the Reverend John Deerfield would have the gullible righteous shouting and donating freely to his holy cause.

  The happy thought brought a burst of exuberance. “Hallelujah, brethren!” he shouted to his imaginary listeners. “Hallelujah! Come with your tithes and y
our offerings! Come give to the Lord by giving to His servant! Glory hallelujah, glory be, and hop for heaven! Roll for righteousness! Sling salvation far and wide! Glory! Glory, glory, glory be upon us!”

  A rumble of thunder suddenly rolled across the sky, and for a moment he actually wondered if … no, no. He chuckled softly. It had been cloudy all day, building up for a storm. He doubted the Lord would go to all the trouble of scrounging up a special thunderbolt just for the likes of one false backcountry preacher.

  He turned his attention toward his immediate situation. Night would fall soon, and rain, too. He would need a dry place to sleep. He knew this part of the river country a little and realized he would find no inn within reach tonight. He would have to camp, but there was no time to build a dry shelter, and he didn’t want to have to fool with it in any case. Halting his horse, he rubbed his lightly bearded chin thoughtfully, then said, “The caves. That’s where we’ll go, horse.”

  He had been following the river, but now reined his mount to the left, back inland. Soon he saw a dark line of bluffs that rose like massive crenellations against the sky, pockmarked with holes and caverns. He had spent many a night in those caves; tonight they would host him again.

  He was within five or six minutes of his destination when he heard a rifle crack back in the forest. Maybe a half mile away, he estimated. Halting, he frowned in concern. Maybe somebody was already lodging in one of the caves, and considering that this was river country, the odds were good that any such person would possess a character more odorous than fragrant. Those who haunted the river were generally of the lowest ilk.

  He considered moving on to caves farther down the river. Those would be less likely to be occupied, if only for the fact they were shallow and wet on the floor, while the closer ones were deep and only mildly damp. He grew stubbornly determined not to go farther. Why pass up a dry cave for a wet one? Perhaps whoever fired that shot wasn’t staying in the caves, anyway.

  He went on, but more slowly, listening and watching. When he reached the closest and largest of the caves, he had grown reasonably sure no one else was about, and was glad he hadn’t gone farther downriver.

  The thick clouds had brought on night more quickly than he’d anticipated, so he had to fumble about in darkness. He stripped his horse of its tack gear, bags, and blanket, and carried it all into the cave, tossing the load back into the blackness. Heading back, he fetched his rifle and brought it inside, too, leaning it against the wall.

  After hobbling the horse, he sent it out into a clearing where some grass remaining from the summer still grew. After the horse had grazed, he would stable it in the next cavern over and give it a few oats from the feed sack that had been slung from the rear of the saddle.

  He walked back toward the cave, gathering sticks, barks, scraps of dead wood as he went.

  The thunder was louder and more frequent by the time he reached the cave, but so far no lightning was striking nearby and the rain was still only a drizzle. He felt along the dark cave interior, nudging with his toe, and found the saddlebags he had dropped. With the firewood under one arm and the saddlebags occupying the other, he left his rifle where it was, near the mouth of the cave. He spoke aloud: “Now, let’s see what kind of fire we can get burning, eh, Preacher Deerfield?”

  He reached into one of the saddlebags and drew out flint, steel, and a little tin of charred cotton cloth. Feeling about on the cave floor, he found a few scraps of charcoal and dried wood from some previous occupant’s fire. He gathered all this together at the back of the cave, put some of the cotton in the midst of the pile, and struck fire to it with the flint and steel. The charred cloth caught flame quickly. He bent over, cupping his hand behind the spark and gently blowing it to flame. He heaped scraps of the charred wood on the little flame until it caught and grew, then added larger pieces he had gathered. In some cases he had to peel back damp bark to expose dry wood beneath.

  Within minutes he had a nice, hearty fire burning. He smiled, content and growing warmer, feeling both calmed and invigorated by the pleasures of fire and shelter. Delving back into his saddlebags, he brought out a couple of squirrels he had shot and skinned earlier in the day. He had wrapped them in their own skins and stowed them away for supper. Packed beside them in a piece of oiled cloth was half a loaf of bread he had filched from the last inn he stayed in. What an inn! He would long relish the memory of it. He had come away from there with far more than a mere half loaf of bread. Fate had smiled on him at that inn, and given him a gift he could exploit to no end of profit for God only knew how many months, even years, to come.

  He stoked the fire further. It cast a cherry light against the cave walls and provided a delicious heat. He began to whistle, and rose to go outside and fetch a green stick upon which to spit the squirrels for cooking, and to stable the hobbled horse before the storm grew bad. He looked toward the mouth of the cave for the first time since he had gotten the fire blazing, and immediately let out a yell and stumbled back, almost into the fire.

  He stared in horror at the last image he would have expected: a man, stretched out on the floor and looking very dead indeed, and beyond him, a dimly visible human figure, clad in a rain-dripping, bulky coat, standing in the mouth of the cave and looking back at him down the long barrel of a rifle.

  Celinda raised the rifle another couple of inches as the man at the back of the cave gaped at her. “I don’t know who you are, sir, but I’ll kill you right here if you cause trouble.”

  He looked back at her silently, as if trying to comprehend what was going on.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Why are you in here?”

  He said, “You’re a woman—maybe not even a woman. Just a girl!”

  “That’s right—but I’ll shoot you if I have to!”

  “Did you shoot that man there on the ground?”

  “No. That’s my father. He died and left me—” She started to say the word “alone,” but faltered.

  The man’s voice became the faintest bit smoother, taking on a slightly cunning quality. His trapped-rat expression metamorphosed to one of openhearted placidity. “You’d shoot a preacher, would you, young lady?”

  Celinda lowered the rifle a bit. “A preacher?”

  “That’s right. My name is Deerfield. The Reverend John Deerfield. A man of the clergy, bound for Natchez to be pastor of a new church there. I stopped in this cave for shelter … I didn’t know you had already occupied it. I’m sorry. I meant no harm.”

  Celinda’s mind was spinning. She felt so weary it was difficult to hold the heavy rifle level. Her afternoon’s walk had yielded no inspirations about how to deal with her situation, and the forests provided no better game than a crow. She had shot it, figuring to eat it if she could stomach it. Finding a man already building a fire inside the cave had taken her aback and scared her. She still felt scared even though she noticed that his rifle was leaning against the wall near her and well away from him. He might be one of the thieves or killers known to haunt the river. But if he really was a preacher, perhaps all was well. Bound for Natchez, he had said. Down in her weary soul, hope flickered despite her fear.

  “You’re truly a preacher?”

  “I am.”

  “Truly going to Natchez?”

  “Indeed. I’m on my way now to take passage on a boat I’ll meet farther down the river. Please, would you lower that rifle? I’ll do you no injury, I swear to heaven. I’m not a harmful kind of man. It’s my place in life to do good for folks.”

  She assessed him. He looked like he could be a preacher, though he was somewhat poorly groomed. His smooth voice made her tend to trust him. He sounded like a preacher, at least. But the fact he had calmly made himself at home in a cave containing a dead man troubled her. It didn’t seem normal. The possibility he hadn’t been aware of the corpse’s presence until he turned and saw her had not occurred to her.

  “I’ll lower the rifle if you’ll tell me why you came into a cave with a dead man in it.”


  “I didn’t know he was there. I passed him in the dark and didn’t see him until the same moment I saw you.”

  It was plausible. Celinda lowered the rifle but did not move nor lay it aside. She was trembling badly, longing to sit down but too wary to do so.

  “How did your father die?” the man asked.

  “My mother was bit by a mad beast. She died. He caught the same ailment.”

  Though he was several feet away from the corpse, the man backed off a couple of steps. “Great God a’mighty! He died of that?”

  Celinda raised the rifle again. “You ain’t no preacher.”

  “Indeed I am!”

  “You said ‘Great God a’mighty.’ Real preachers don’t use God’s name for an oath.”

  There was a pause, then he said, “You are right, young woman. That was a bit of my old and evil self coming through again. I was so surprised by what you said that I didn’t mind my language. Even a man of God can backslide, you know. I was once a wicked man, swearing all the time, and sometimes the old ways show theirselves.”

  Celinda didn’t know what to believe. She was so tired, weak, and empty that she was beginning to feel ill. She wanted to slump to the floor right there, but held up. Her thoughts, though disoriented, were clear enough to make her realize that if she showed this man any sign she felt poorly, he would suspect she had the same illness that had killed her father. He would shun her and leave her here alone—and even though he was a stranger, he was at least another living human and a possible source of aid, and represented hope. He was bound for Natchez, the very place she needed to go! In her present state it was easy to believe that it was no coincidence he had happened to come to this very cave. Maybe he was a literal godsend, a good and holy man, come to protect and aid her.

  She lowered the rifle. “I won’t shoot you. I’ll trust you.”

  He looked very relieved. “Good, good. Now let’s move to the next cave. It’s unhealthy to stay where a corpse lies, breathing that dead air and such. I’ll build a new fire, and cook this meat I’ve got. You’re welcome to share it, Miss …”