Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  “Brother! I see it now. That’s why you have his look!” He dabbed at his bleeding chest again, then wiped his fingers on his trousers. Bowman, meanwhile, had taken advantage of the moment to prudently slip away.

  Thias pressed his question. “I asked you if you knew my brother. I’m looking for him.”

  “I’m right keen to find him myself. He was in my house last night.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I’d surely like to get my hands on him. He’s a liar and a Judas, your brother is. He don’t do what he promises he’ll do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never you mind. You see him, though, you tell him to watch himself. You tell him the Harpes had best not see him if he knows what’s good for him. Tell him the Harpes don’t stand for folks betraying their word to them. You tell him. He’ll know what I’m talking of and what will come of what he done. He’ll know.”

  Thias was losing his temper. “You tell me what you’re talking of! If you know something about my brother, if you’re threatening him—”

  A hand gripped Thias’s shoulder firmly. He turned, startled.

  “Leave it be, Thias. Leave it be.” It was Peabody Swett, his expression very somber, his gray eyes intense. “Don’t anger that man. He’s one you don’t want to anger.”

  The seriousness of Swett’s warning couldn’t be ignored. Thias nodded, turned again to the man with the hatchet. The weaselly fellow now wore a cold smile.

  Wiley Harpe said, “You find your brother, you tell him the Harpes will have their eyes peeled. He’d best not show himself.”

  Thias felt a wild urge to attack the man. Hearing threats against his own brother infuriated him—especially considering that this man’s face was the same one Thias had seen by lantern light in the burial ground.

  The comprehension hit him like a blow: This man probably killed Abel Van Zandt.

  And now he was threatening Clardy, for reasons Thias didn’t know. Did he say that Clardy had been in his house? Why in the name of heaven would Clardy have gone there? Had he been forced?

  “Come away from here,” Peabody urged quietly. “Come away with me, and let’s you and me talk.”

  Thias, eyes fixed on Wiley Harpe’s face, nodded. “Very well.” Then to Harpe he said, “If any harm comes to my brother, I’ll find you. Whoever you are, wherever you may be, I’ll find you.”

  Wiley Harpe laughed, smeared his hand through the blood on his chest, then flipped his hand and flung red drops toward Thias. They struck his face, warm and repellent. Wiley Harpe cackled, turned, and loped away, disappearing around a cabin.

  “God! Who is he?” Thias asked.

  “He’s Wiley Harpe,” Peabody Swett replied, “and Wiley Harpe is a devil in the flesh. Him and his brother both, devils in the flesh. Come with me to my house, Thias. I’ll tell you all I know about them.”

  “He talked like Clardy has betrayed him some way, called him a Judas.…”

  “If Clardy’s betrayed the Harpes, then God help him. That’s all I can say. God help him.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Swett’s home, such as it was, stood nearby. It looked like a station camp shelter a hunter might build in the woods, a cross between a lean-to and a hut, rough and crude even by the standards of a rough and crude town. Entering, Thias had to duck. He wondered if Swett shared this slope-roofed hovel with Toad, but saw no evidence that more than one person lived here.

  He sat down in the corner on a pile of rags while Swett perched himself on a log-section stool and Toad took a place in the opposite corner. The ceiling on Swett’s end was low, but Swett was a short and stooped man and required little vertical space.

  “Let me tell you what I know of the Harpes,” he said. “And all I tell you is fact, straight from the mouth of Micajah Harpe himself. I took up cups with the man one time, and when he was good and drunk he talked free. Then when he was good and drunker, he took to fighting, and I made my leave of him.”

  “They appear to be dangerous men,” Thias said.

  “The ‘dangerous’ I’ll grant you, the ‘men’ I have my doubts about. Them two are demons who’ve took on fleshly form, in my opinion. If all Big Harpe told me is the truth, them two have earned theirselves a place of honor in the deepest hole of hell.”

  Thias thought about Abel Van Zandt. “You know them to have ever murdered anybody?”

  “Murdered several, most likely. Big Harpe told me for a fact only of one killing, but hinted at others. They are cruel men, hard men, men who’ve done things to turn a redskin pale. It was among the redskins, matter of fact, that they honed their cruel ways, though I doubt there’s an Indian so cruel as them. And back in the rebellion, they was Tories. They lived and fought and killed their own kind, right alongside the Chickamaugas. Lived right at Nickajack Town itself!”

  Nickajack! Thias knew some about that town, one of the Five Lower Towns of the Chickamaugas on the Tennessee River. A kind of conglomerate tribe composed largely of Cherokees and Creeks, the Chickamaugas had taken the hardest line against white encroachment onto what had been Indian lands only a score or so of years back. Led by such noted warriors as the dreaded Dragging Canoe, they had killed many settlers and river travelers in incursions. Their raiding parties had struck again and again, as far away as Nashville in the Cumberland country. Dragging Canoe, though, had finally died a natural death—no white warrior had ever been able to kill him—and Nickajack had since been destroyed by an army.

  “Micajah Harpe murdered a white man right near Nickajack, not long before the town was burned. A man name of Doss, I believe, who had been a friend of theirs but had took to dallying with one of the Harpe women. The Harpes shared two women betwixt theirselves at the time, though now they’re sharing three. It’s the God’s truth I’m telling you. Savages, they are, and heathens of the worst sort.

  “It seems this Doss fellow had come to think that since the Harpe brothers share their women betwixt theirselves, they’d share them with him, too. Ain’t so. All that kind of sharing stays in the family. When Micajah caught Doss with one of the women, he killed him. And oh, how he killed-him! Told me all about it with a big grin on his face. He knifed poor Doss till he couldn’t run, then knifed him some more, in ways there ain’t no decency in speaking of here. They took care not to let him die very quick, and when the man finally did die, there wasn’t much of him left to do the dying. It was a good day, Micajah said. A good day—making a man die so bad! Micajah Harpe loves suffering like it was honey on bread. His brother Wiley, the one you met out there, is no better.”

  “They are devils in the flesh, just like Peabody says,” Toad contributed. “Know how you can tell it? There’s a mark on Little Harpe. Two of his toes is growed together like one. Mark of Satan, that is.”

  “Have nary to do with them, Mr. Tyler,” Swett said.

  Thias felt sick at heart. “It appears my brother already has something to do with them, Mr. Swett. You heard what Harpe was saying out yonder. He said Clardy was in his house last night. He threatened him.”

  “I heard. And all I can tell you is that you’d best pray that your brother has taken on to other parts, for if the Harpes are after his blood, he’ll not be long for this world if he remains here.”

  Thias spent several more hours searching for Clardy, but did not find him, nor anyone who knew anything of him beyond what Thias had already learned: that Clardy had been seen at the Hughes tavern with Cale Johnson. Thias rode on to the. Hughes place and questioned Hughes himself, who gave him only a cold stare in response. Hughes didn’t inform on his patrons, and Thias soon gave up talking to him and rode toward home in frustration and with a mounting concern about his brother.

  He found his grandfather waiting for him in the yard, leaning on his crutches. The sun was setting, stretching the old man’s shadow far across the packed dirt.

  “Clardy came after you were gone,” Hiram announced, sounding very weary and sad
.

  “He’s here?” Thias leaped off his horse eagerly.

  “No more. He went on. I couldn’t stop him. He said it hadn’t been his first notion to come here at all, but he figured he might not be seeing us again for a long time, and he was in need of food and such besides, so he did come.”

  “Grandpap, Clardy’s in bad trouble. There’s some bad men, name of Harpe, who are after him.”

  “Aye, the Harpes,” Hiram said. “Clardy told me all about them. The whole tale, beginning to end. You were right about him recognizing them in the graveyard. He knew them to be the Harpes, and was afraid to speak up ’bout it because he feared them. Then, when I told you boys about Abel going missing, he was even more scared, and that’s why he left. Aimed to run off from home without coming back, but he made him a mistake along the way. Met Cale Johnson and drank with him at the Hughes groggery. It winds up that Johnson has been in league with the Harpes, stealing hogs and such with them, and talked Clardy into going with him to meet them so he could join in the stealing. Clardy was drunk, didn’t have his good sense about him, and went along. Went right to the cabin of the very ones he was so fearful of! He knows now it was foolish, says he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been drunk.”

  Hiram went on, relating secondhand to Thias the details of Clardy’s bizarre experience in the Harpe cabin, about Micajah Harpe’s command to kill Cale Johnson, and Clardy’s evasive escape. Now Clardy was in fear of his life, running for Kentucky in terror that the Harpes would murder him for not having killed Johnson, as he had promised.

  “They would murder him,” Thias said. “I chanced to run into one of the Harpes in Knoxville today, and he took me to be Clardy at first. He said that Clardy had best get himself gone or he would be a dead man. From what I’ve seen and heard of the Harpes, I can tell you that’s a threat not to be ignored.”

  “Clardy ain’t ignoring it. He’s a mighty scared young fellow,” Hiram said. His voice lowered slightly. “You know what Clardy did, Thias? He put his arm ’round my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. Told me that for years he’s nigh hated me, wanted to get away from me, but now that he has to go, he wishes he didn’t. Said he wishes everything was like it was before.” Hiram turned away. “Said he loved me, Thias. Clardy said he loved me.”

  Thias could hardly hold back tears when he heard that. “Come on, Grandpap,” he said. “Let’s go into the house. I’ll put away my horse, and then me and you are going to talk about what we need to do next.”

  They did talk, but found no answers. Thias wanted to go after Clardy and bring him home, but Hiram discouraged the idea, and Thias had to concur in the end because of the danger of the Harpes.

  He then broached the idea of informing on the Harpes himself, revealing them as the ones who had desecrated the grave and corpse of Selma Van Zandt, but Hiram opposed that idea even more strongly than the prior one. Thias would bring the wrath of the Harpes down on him if he spoke out. Having just lost one grandson, Hiram did not wish to lose another. He argued further that Thias really had little to tell against the Harpes in any case. Abel Van Zandt’s body had never been found, so there was no proof he was dead. And Thias and Clardy hadn’t actually seen them desecrate the grave or corpse; all they had seen was an attempt to dig it up, and even that had been foiled when Abel intervened. What had happened after that, the Tyler brothers had no eyewitness knowledge of. It was even possible that someone besides the Harpes had come along later, dug up and decapitated the body, and done away with Abel Van Zandt. Thias couldn’t prove the Harpes guilty of anything by the standards of a court of law.

  Thias was in a mood to be persuaded. He had no real desire to take on the Harpes and risk bringing down their vengeance upon himself or his grandfather. So he relented. By the time he and his grandfather retired to their beds that night, no course of action had been decided. For now, all would simply stand as it was.

  Thias rolled over, voiced a quiet, inner prayer for his fleeing brother out there on the trail somewhere, and fell asleep. He dreamed only once that night, a terrible nightmare of Clardy lying dead and mutilated like that Doss fellow who Swett had told about, and woke up in a sweat. He lay awake another hour, very disturbed, then went to sleep again and dreamed no more.

  The next morning he found Hiram moaning in his bed, very sick. The old man declared his head ached terribly, “like a bad tooth, but right up beneath the peak of my noggin,” as he put it.

  Hiram stayed in bed for three days thereafter, Thias tending to him, forgetting all else. Hiram’s headache declined but did not go away. Thias considered riding into Knoxville to see if he could find some sort of medical help, but he was afraid to leave Hiram alone, and Hiram staunchly refused to go to Knoxville himself. Thias was pretty well confined to the farm as long as his grandfather was down.

  He was chopping wood in the yard the day that Edward Tiel rode by. Tiel was a well-known, respected farmer of the Knoxville area, but he had never visited the Tylers before. Thias put aside his axe and walked up to greet Tiel with a sense of concern, feeling instinctively that something was wrong.

  Tiel’s mission proved to be similar to the one that had brought Elijah McKee to the cabin days before. “I’m wondering if you’ve suffered the loss of stock,” Tiel said. “The problem has grown fearsome bad in this area.”

  “We’ve been spared, glad to say,” Thias replied. The subject was uncomfortable, reminding him of the Harpes.

  “Count yourself blessed, then,” Tiel replied. “Many of us haven’t been so fortunate.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “I believe, though, that we know the rascals behind this,” Tiel said.

  “Aye? Who?”

  “Have you heard of the Harpes?”

  “Yes.” Thias would have denied it had not his encounter with Wiley Harpe in Knoxville been seen by several people. Tiel might already have heard about the encounter and be deliberately plying Thias to see if he would deny it.

  “John Miller has been of the view for a spell now that the Harpes are scoundrels and thieves.” Thias knew Miller, a merchant in Knoxville who sold, among other things, butchered meats. “He’s been speaking free about the Harpes lately, saying he believes that some of the very meat he’s bought from them has been took from stolen hogs. The Harpes have lately heard that he’s been saying such things—and two nights back some of Miller’s stables were burned down. A couple of houses standing near were burned, too. He suspects the Harpes did it to punish him for speaking ill about them. I suspect the same.”

  “They sound like mighty vengeful men.”

  “I would say they are. The stories spreading about that pair are enough to turn any man’s ear. Did you know, by the way, that Abel Van Zandt has been missing for days now, and that it appears he was spirited off by someone who dug into old Selma Van Zandt’s grave? Her body was cut upon. Terrible thing.”

  “I’ve heard about that.” Thias hoped he didn’t sound or look as tense as he felt.

  “The suspicion is that Abel was killed. And the Harpes were known to have talked in the groggeries about that tale of the jewel in the old woman’s grave. I believe it was them who dug up the grave and killed Abel. There is no proof, sorry to say. We can’t even find Abel’s body.”

  Thias wondered if Tiel was playing ignorant, maybe knowing more already than his questions implied. Did he know or suspect that the Tylers knew something about what had happened in the burial ground the night Abel vanished? Thias felt the start of panic, but managed to squelch it. How could Tiel know any such thing? No one knew that he and Clardy had even been in the burial ground that night, except for Hiram … and Abel, of course. Abel had not had a chance to tell anyone he had seen the Tyler brothers—but no, Thias realized, that wasn’t true. Supposedly, Abel had gone back briefly to the Van Zandt house after running off the Harpes the first time. He might have mentioned to his kin that he had met the Tylers there.…

  Take hold of yourself. You’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t be feel
ing and acting guilty when you ain’t. Thias straightened and looked Tiel squarely in the eye. “Do the Van Zandts have any notion of who might have gotten Abel?”

  “A notion, but no more. They suspect the Harpes.”

  Thias was relieved. Suspicions were turning in the right direction on their own, without involving the Tyler brothers.

  Tiel went on. “Abel was guarding the grave that night—you know how he would do that—and came back to the house only once, according to his brother Michael. He said he had run a pair of men off from the grave and was going back again to guard some more as soon as he fetched more powder. One of the men was big, the other little.”

  “That’s all the men he mentioned meeting? Just them two at the grave?”

  “Yes. Why? Do you think there might have been others?”

  “No, no. Just wondering if there might be witnesses or some such, you know.”

  “As best we can tell, it was only the two at the grave who he had seen. At any rate, he fetched his powder and went back out in case the pair returned. About two hours later Michael felt worried about Abel being there alone, and went down to join him. He found the grave dug up and Abel gone. The poor fellow blames himself for not having gone down with Abel right off.”

  “Hard for him. Bound to be.”

  “Aye. Well, good day to you, Thias. Where’s your brother and grandpap?”

  “Clardy’s away for now,” Thias said as casually as possible. “And Grandpap is sick. I’ve been tending to him for a few days now.”

  “Sick? I hope he’s well soon.”

  “I believe he’ll be up and about in a week or so.”

  “That’s good. Thias—should ever the need arise to gather men to bring in the Harpes, would you join us?”

  Thias disliked that idea. He didn’t want the Harpes seeing his face among any gang of captors. They might talk when they saw him, say things about Clardy, bring trouble on the Tylers. But he couldn’t decline. “If I can, I’ll do it. If it goes that far.”