Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  “He ain’t a pretty thing to see,” he warned, then yanked the blanket away.

  Thias went pale, filled with a combination of horror and relief. It wasn’t Clardy under the blanket, but it was Abel Van Zandt. His body, naked and much decayed, was well-marked by knife slashes and stab marks, and his throat was deeply sliced.

  “Found him in a sinkhole,” the man with the blanket said, almost proudly. “Stinks right bad, don’t he? I do believe that this here is that Van Zandt man what’s been missing for a spell.”

  Thias turned away, his stomach reminding him that it was weak and couldn’t abide gruesomeness. He silently cursed the Harpes. Abel Van Zandt hadn’t deserved such a terrible fate at the hands of men such as they.

  He pondered briefly the fact that he was duty-bound here to speak up and tell that he and Clardy had see the Harpes at the Van Zandt grave the night Abel disappeared. But what was the use? The Harpes were gone. And Thias wasn’t much in the mood for doing his duty at the moment. He wanted merely to go on his way, find his brother, and begin that better life Hiram had talked of.

  Thias went to his horse, mounted, and rode out of town, saying not a word to anyone.

  Thias was many miles away when the people of Knoxville received a second shock with the discovery of another corpse, also murdered. Cale Johnson had died hard, having been hacked on brutally and then shot through the head. Physical evidence indicated the crime had taken place on a road two miles south of Knoxville. His body had then been laid open, filled with stones, and thrown into the Holston River in an apparent attempt to hide the crime, but the current had turned the dead man, dumped out the stones, and he had floated to the surface.

  Johnson was widely known to have been among the Hughes’s tavern’s most frequent customers, and the investigation of the crime soon led to that establishment. The Metcalfe brothers and Hughes himself were suspected of the crime. No one believed their wild claim that the Harpes were the culprits. Why would the Harpes return to a place where they were already wanted and would face the prospect of jail and flogging? No sensible men would do such a thing.

  The Metcalfes and Hughes could only reply that anyone who had known the Harpes would realize that they were anything but sensible men.

  Ultimately, nothing would happen to the Metcalfes, who fled the region at their first chance. But the law-abiding people of the Knoxville region had endured enough of Hughes and his establishment, known to be a “rowdy” place frequented by undesirable types. A band of regulators quickly formed and paid a call on Hughes. He took a severe beating, watched his house and groggery pulled down and burned, and was advised to leave the region. Unlike the Harpes, Hughes was sensible. He obeyed.

  Meanwhile, the Van Zandt family buried the remains of Abel beside Selma Van Zandt’s grave, which he had so vigorously but vainly striven to protect. It seemed the most appropriate thing to do.

  CHAPTER 12

  Cave-in-Rock, on the Ohio River

  Celinda rolled over; a sharp stone beneath her blankets probed into a rib, and she groaned. A hand grasped her shoulder and shook her; she opened her eyes with a gasp.

  The face of Jim Horton, half shadowed, half illuminated by firelight, descended before her. “Hush!” he whispered sharply. “You’re a mute, remember? You want them to hear you making noise?”

  She closed her eyes to make him go away, wondering how long he had been sitting there so close to her, watching her sleep. He did that sometimes—watched her obsessively, closely, as if worried that she would try to run away, or somehow accidentally reveal the truth of her gender. Even now he was lingering—she could feel him there, and smell the alcoholic odor of his liquored breath. When at last he rose and moved away, Celinda was relieved. She opened her eyes again and thought to herself: I am in hell.

  I am in hell. The thought was familiar, an inner lament that arose again and again in her mind like a dirge. She had never known so terrible a place as this, nor such canker-souled raff as the people who inhabited it. Only when she was asleep was she free of this place, but sleep was hard to maintain in a place where the occupants were loud and coarse and often drunk. I am in hell.

  At least she was spared from having to speak to them, thanks to the ruse of her muteness. With hair hacked short, face caked in dirt, feminine physique disguised by heavy trousers and coat, Celinda had managed so far to pass for a silent male, Horton’s “cousin.” The others all seemed to accept the deception, for which Celinda was grateful. She hated to imagine what might be done to her by some of these men if they knew the truth about the silent “boy” they knew as George Ames.

  In fact, she didn’t have to imagine. She knew. In the several days she and Horton had been here at this remarkable riverside cavern, she had seen three of the men who apparently lived here—their number seemed to vary from eight to a dozen from day to day—attempt to vent their lusts upon the only other female besides Celinda herself who occupied the cave at the moment: a plump, masculine-looking, powerfully built woman named Queen Fine, who dressed far better than Celinda would have imagined possible in such a setting as this. Queen wore a different dress every day—good dresses, all of them, some of them plain but relatively new, others very fine garments—and fought a constant battle to keep the cave’s clay from sullying her garments and the cave’s men from sullying her virtue … unless, of course, they paid for the privilege.

  Celinda had never to her knowledge actually seen a real, living prostitute, which made Queen all the more intriguing. As Celinda lay there, waiting for sleep to return, she thought back to the previous night, when she had quietly studied Queen for more than an hour—until she noticed that Queen had begun watching her in turn, which was unsettling and had caused her to avert her eyes and watch Queen no more. Shortly after that Queen had left the cave, and had not returned since. Celinda had no idea where she had gone or whether she would come back at all.

  Celinda wondered about Queen’s origins and how she had entered her grim way of life. She did not believe any kind of mental lacking had led to it; behind Queen’s black, piercing eyes Celinda was sure she could detect a sharp and clever mind at work. It was this, in part, that was so intriguing. How could anyone with a keen mind live as Queen did? Had it always been this way for her? Or had she been drawn by some accident into the underbelly of life and found herself trapped there? If so, might she herself be trapped in the same way?

  That was such a terrifying thought that Celinda immediately began searching for a plan of escape. If only Jim Horton wasn’t always so close by! She no longer feared the wilderness like before; she would gladly risk its dangers rather than remain with Jim Horton and his ilk.

  Celinda pulled her dirty blanket up beneath her chin and closed her eyes. She wriggled and found a natural depression in the rock that accommodated the bone of her hip, and comfort immediately and greatly increased. Sleep came, but this time it didn’t bring her the momentary escape from her situation that it usually did. Tonight she dreamed, reliving in surrealistic, distorted detail her arrival with Jim Horton at this place some days ago. She heard again the laughter, jovial swearing, hand-pumping and shoulder-slapping that had heralded his arrival among the human vermin that crawled about this oval-mouthed cavern on the Illinois side of the Ohio. She saw anew the look of joy on Horton’s face as he greeted old friends, and the disappointment he showed when he learned that the Cave-in-Rock denizen he had most wanted to see, his admired friend Sam Mason, had indeed gone on downriver sometime before, as rumored. She felt again the burning knot in her stomach when Horton had introduced her to the others as George Ames, and the utter terror that somehow these cold-eyed men would look right through her disguise and see that in fact she was a female.

  They hadn’t seen. It had astounded Celinda that they couldn’t see through her disguise. She made it a point of keeping her face as filthy as possible, letting the grime serve as a mask, and tried her best to walk and move and spit and scratch like a man. She had also mastered the skill of feigning
utter complacency at the immodesty of the men around her. She had been forced to learn immodesty herself, at least with Jim Horton, because he did not allow her to go off alone, even to perform the most private bodily functions. At such times she was required by him to let him know of her needs with a prearranged hand gesture, and he would lead her off into the woods and remain near until she was ready to return to the cave. It was humiliating beyond anything she had ever experienced, and made her feel like no more than an animal.

  Sometime later Celinda moved, grew uncomfortable again, and awakened. The fire near the mouth of the cave had died away substantially and now consisted more of red coals than flaming wood. It cast a ruby shimmer across the moist glair covering and slickening the cavern floor. Outside the cave rain fell, and the wind was gusting back into the cavern, whirling about in a smoke-lifting gurge, then back out again. The weather had driven the fifteen or so Cave-in-Rock residents back as far as possible in the cave; Celinda found herself lying in the midst of a great wallow of unwashed, snoring humanity.

  She thought of rising and walking out of the cave. Walking and walking some more, spiteful of storm and lightning, leaving this awful cavern of criminals behind. It was an idle thought … but as she played it through her mind a couple of times more it suddenly didn’t seem idle anymore. She really could do it, really could be free! She could walk out, lose herself in the storm, and go on until she found a settlement, and there be safe. The thought drove sleepiness away and made her thrill with excitement. She could do it … by heaven, she would do it!

  She sat up, looking all around her. In the dim red light from the fire, she picked out the sleeping form of Jim Horton. He was sprawled out from beneath his blanket, snoring loudly, his hand still wrapped around a whiskey bottle he had been pulling from earlier. All the other assorted human vermin of Cave-in-Rock lay all around the cave floor, some on makeshift beds of evergreen boughs, others curled up in blankets or beneath peltries, anyplace they could find.

  You must be strong. Celinda closed her eyes a moment, said a little prayer, and called up the mental image of her father’s face to strengthen her. She took her first step and began to tremble badly. Her breathing grew tight and difficult, and she felt for all the world like she was doing something wrong. This same physical and mental stress had gripped her on two prior occasions she had considered trying to escape, and she hadn’t managed to overcome it any more than she could understand it. This time, however, her determination was stronger.

  She held fast a few moments, waiting for the paralyzing feeling to pass. When it didn’t, she decided to go ahead in spite of it, though she wasn’t certain she could. Maybe there was some curse on this place, some demonic inhabitant that made those who entered unable to leave, even though they wanted to. Maybe that was how Queen had been trapped. This was an evil place, after all, and it was just possible that …

  She gave herself a shake. Celinda Ames would not fall victim to superstitious thinking! Her father would be ashamed of her. The demons in this place wore human flesh. She would not remain among them any longer.

  She put a foot forward and was filled with a thrill of joy that wiped away her fear. She was really going to escape! Quietly she moved through the cave, heading toward the great arched mouth of it. The floor was slick; she walked with great care, feeling with mounting excitement like she was sneaking out of a great, swallowing crypt. Crypt … an apt word to describe this place, in Celinda’s opinion. Her thought upon first glimpsing the limestone cavern through veiling trees on the day that she and Horton had rafted across to the cheers of Horton’s old friends in this place, was that Cave-in-Rock looked like a crypt. Or perhaps a gaping mouth, dark and hungry. Even so, she realized that her own sad situation was probably coloring her perceptions. In fact the cave and its surroundings had a remarkable natural beauty, even in this barren season. Crowning the bluff above it were oaks and cedars in abundance, and the cave itself possessed as much of the quality of a cathedral as a crypt. It was her inability to associate Cave-in-Rock with anything holy that had caused Celinda to seize upon the latter association.

  Some fifty feet wide at the mouth, the generally oval-shaped cave bored its length back about 150 feet or more into the stone bluff. It was level back some half the distance from the entrance, sloping upward from there, with shelves or benches of rock protruding from both sides. There were various cracks, crevices, and chimneys in the center roof of the cave and also at the rear, leading to a smaller upper chamber, and, in the cave’s back, to the base of a sinkhole that drained water from the land above and kept the cave at least slightly damp almost all the time. The sinkhole was large enough to accommodate a person, but at the moment the opening was crossed with a series of ropes upon which empty bottles had been hung in a way to make them clink together and give an alarm should anyone try to enter that way. Of course, it also prevented anyone from exiting silently, too, to Celinda’s displeasure.

  It was the cave’s unique setting and surroundings that made it handy for the low purposes to which it was being put, namely, the piracy of river vessels. The cave and the bluff into which it pierced afforded a good view of the broad river, with the trees in front of the cave mouth simultaneously keeping the cavern itself out of view of river travelers until they were close enough to have been long before detected by any cave-based sentinels. Celinda didn’t know exactly how the river pirates operated, in that since she had been here only one boat had passed, and had been left unmolested. Naturally inquisitive, she had wanted to ask about the system of piracy and about what had happened to the people on the pirated boats, but she could not, since she was purporting to be mute.

  She reached the mouth of the cave. Through the line of trees outside she saw the nighttime river, fast-moving, vitric, mysterious. She remembered that there were two or three skiffs hidden down below, and wondered if she should take one of them, or make her escape on foot. The decision loomed before her, as vast as the river itself, and she struggled to think through her options. The rain hammered down; little rivulets of water passed around her feet. Her hesitation reemerged. Could she really do this? Horton would come after her, probably. If he found her, she dreaded to think how he might punish her for trying to escape.

  Yes, she would take one of the skiffs. She would have a better chance of escaping undetected by water, and Horton probably would not be as willing to pursue her if it required a river chase. She would head down the river a few miles, then take to the south bank and head inland.

  “George? Is that you?”

  The whispering voice made her jump. She turned and almost fell. Looming behind her was a tall, broad figure that after a half moment she recognized as a young man called Lumpkin. She didn’t know if that was his true name, or a nickname derived from the rounded, lumpy appearance of his head, which seemed to have been severely injured at some time past.

  “Uhnnnn,” she said, trying to make a sound like a mute. She was terrified now, and deeply disappointed. This event might well rob her of her chance for escape.

  “You couldn’t sleep neither, huh? Same for me.”

  Why? Why did he have to be sleepless tonight, of all nights? Will I ever have so good a chance as this one? Distress filled her.

  “I ain’t never been able to sleep during a storm. I seen a man hit by lightning once when I was just a little fellow, and I been scared of storms ever since.”

  “Uhhnn.”

  “You too, huh? Wish you could talk, George. I like talking.”

  Celinda had suspected before that Lumpkin was simple-minded, and his way of talking now tended to confirm the suspicion. She figured his condition was probably owing to whatever head injury had misshapen his skull. She felt grateful at least that it was he who had detected her, not one of the more savvy members of the Cave-in-Rock delegation of scoundrels. Her impression from prior observation was that Lumpkin had a more gentle soul in him than the others.

  “I had me a brother named George. Did you know that? He was olde
r than me, and mighty nice. He took care of me sometimes. He’s dead now. I wish he wasn’t.”

  Celinda was afraid she might cry out of sheer disappointment. She wanted to run from the cave and find a skiff, but was afraid Lumpkin might yell after her and waken others.

  “When it would storm, George would sit by me till I went to sleep. He made me feel safe. You think you could sit by me, George?”

  Celinda knew she was trapped. Lumpkin was taking away her chance for escape. She cast one last, longing look out toward the river, then turned back to him and nodded.

  She spent the rest of the night seated cross-legged beside Lumpkin’s sleeping place, her mind filled with a dreamlike sense of unreality as she listened to him talk softly, seemingly without end. The storm continued apace, actually worsening terribly before finally settling to a steady rain, and she tried to comfort herself with the idea that maybe it was best she wasn’t out on the river with lightning searing down. But there was no true comfort for her. She would have risked the lightning gladly if only she could have had a chance for freedom. As for Lumpkin, he never fully went to sleep, though he did seem calmed by her presence and referred to her several times as “brother.” She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, living among such vermin without even the benefit of a clear mind. Then again, maybe a cloudy mind was a good thing to have in the midst of this company.

  By the time dawn lit the sky outside and the men of Cave-in-Rock began to waken, Celinda had come to some peace with her situation. At the very least she had proven to herself that she could push past her fears and hesitations and actually try to get away. That counted for something. Almost from the time Horton had set his hook into her, she had been too frightened to really try to escape. She had been afraid that courage would evade her forevermore. Now she knew that wasn’t true.

  Having slept little, Celinda was exhausted, and made her way back to her sleeping place. She settled down, pulled the blanket over her, and drifted off into sleep before Horton awakened.