by Cameron Judd
They left Micajah Harpe’s beheaded corpse where it lay. Not a man there had any interest in giving a decent burial to a man who had lived such an indecent life. As for Wiley, no one had any idea where he had gone. It appeared he had gotten cleanly away.
They took Micajah Harpe’s head with them, forcing Susanna to carry it by the hair. She did so, muttering beneath her breath, over and over again, “Damn the head! Damn the head!”
Clardy was still with the group when they carried the head to a crossroads about a half mile from Robertson’s Lick and impaled it on the sharpened end of a limb that extended out over the road from a large tree. On the tree itself Clardy carved the intials H.H.—for “Harpe’s Head.” There, the blackening trophy remained for long thereafter, gazing open-mouthed down at all who passed on that road, thereafter known as Harpe’s Head Road.
The Harpe women were placed in custody and charged in connection with the deaths of Steigal’s wife and child. No one expected that the charges would hold, in that it appeared the women had been nowhere around the Steigal place at any time.
Clardy waited in the region long enough to see Kirkpatrick recovered from his illness and to watch the trial of the Harpe women. Kirkpatrick, with a farm and home that sorely needed his attention, did not remain for the trials.
All three of the women were acquitted. To Clardy’s pleasure, Sally’s father came up from Knoxville, claimed his daughter after she was cleared and carried her back home with him. With her went Clardy’s prayers. Sally Rice was a young woman who surely would never escape the haunting of a ruined past, but she was young, and Clardy hoped that what life brought her from then on would be as good as it could be.
Clardy left the vicinity financially better off than he had entered it. He possessed a thirty dollar share of a reward given by the governor of Kentucky as payment to the posse that brought down Micajah Harpe, along with twenty dollars more given as a special additional reward to Clardy for his exemplary and extraordinary earlier efforts in tracking and pursuing the Harpes. In addition, both Squire McBee and General Hopkins gave him private gifts of thirty dollars each, enough money to make Clardy feel relatively flush.
With money in hand, Clardy headed for the Ford residence, his refuge in prior months. The brilliant possibility of courting and marrying Dulciana and using his small personal treasury to start them off in housekeeping together had overwhelmed him as soon as he thought of it.
He knew something was different before he reached the cabin. Different … and wrong. He stopped, puzzled, concerned. His eye was drawn to a newly cleared area beside the cabin.
In it stood three gravestones, side by side.
Clardy stayed where he was another minute, gathering his courage, not wanting to see the names on the stones. But he had to, and rode over with his heart rising toward his throat. Dismounting, he knelt by the graves.
Amy Ford, John Ford … Dulciana. Clardy’s eyes filled with tears. He stood and turned away.
A man stood looking at him. It took Clardy a moment to recognize that it was Isaac Ford. He was leaner than ever, his hair longer and grayer, his face lined and old-looking.
“How did it happen, Mr. Ford?”
“Sickness. Fever and ague … all of us took it. I’m the only one who lived.” Ford wiped a tear with the heel of his hand. “Makes no sense. I was the eldest. I was sick the longest … but I lived, and they all died. Buried them myself.”
Clardy said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Ford. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. Me, too. If I could give my life and bring them back … but that don’t happen, does it? A man’s got to live with what happens, good and bad.” Ford looked at the graves sadly, then back at Clardy. “I hear big talk about you. I hear you been hunting the Harpes.”
“Yes. Wiley Harpe got away. Micajah Harpe, he’s dead. His head is posted up in a tree south of Henderson.”
“I’m glad you come by, Clardy. It’s lonely here now.”
“I can’t believe they’re dead. Can’t believe it.”
“Nor can I, son. God knows I wake up nigh every night expecting to hear their breathing, feeling like they ought to be here with me.” He shuddered. “It’s an awful thing when the truth comes back to mind. Makes a man wish he was dead.”
Clardy was looking at Dulciana’s gravestone, but in his mind’s eye he was seeing her face. It was impossible to imagine that as the face of a corpse. Impossible. He turned back to Ford. “What are you doing with yourself now?”
“Tending to my horses. Believe I’ll sell them, though. Move on away from here. Can’t live with the memories, you know.”
“Where will you go?”
“It don’t much matter. Maybe down to Tennessee. Along the Cumberland somewheres.”
“Then that’s where we’ll go.”
“We?” Something sparked in Ford’s one good eye. For half a moment a glimmering of his former, lively self came through.
“Yes … if you’ll have me. And if you’re willing to go to knoxville first. I need to go back and see if my brother has turned up there while I been away. If he has, there’ll be inheritance money for me. If he ain’t, then I’m shot if I can go lingering around waiting for him forevermore. Me and you, we’ll go on to Nashville.”
“But the horses …”
“We’ll herd them to Nashville. I reckon they can graze Tennessee grass as good as Kentucky.”
“Well … reckon they could.” Ford nodded resolutely. “Reckon I could, now you mention it.” He grinned. “I’m glad you came back, Clardy. Don’t know what would have happened to me if I had just been here alone for God knows how long. Don’t know at all. You’re a godsend, Clardy. A godsend.”
“Well, I do recollect somebody telling me once that when folks cross paths time and time again, there’s generally a reason for it.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Ain’t you got any proverbs to quote me, Mr. Ford?”
Ford looked at the graves again. “No. No proverbs for now. Someday … but not now. Bring your horse around to the stable, Clardy. I’ll see if I can find us something to eat.”
1803
CHAPTER 31
Nashville, Tennessee, early January
The tall man left through the open front door of the big store and stood on the shade of the porch, watching another man walk down the street, whistling, a parcel of newly bought goods beneath his right arm. That man had just left the store, where he had made his purchases without any evident awareness of the dark observation of the first man, who had skulked among the plowshares, secretly watching.
A third man sat sleeping on a bench on the sunny part of the porch, his hat over his eyes. He was enjoying a rare day of springlike warmth during a generally harsh winter month. Normally Nashvillians bundled about in heavy coats throughout January, but today was shirtsleeve weather, the kind to make a man drowsy in mid-afternoon, the kind to make a sunny porch bench look terribly inviting, particularly so since December had expired with a long stretch of bitter cold.
The tall man nudged the sleeper awake, and the man looked up, lifting his hat, blinking.
“That man walking away yonder—who is he?”
The sleepy man looked, squinted into the sunlight, and watched as the indicated man freed a big, fine horse from a hitch pole and swung into the saddle. “Why, that’s Mr. Tyler.”
“Tyler, eh? So that’s the name he gives?”
“Well, aye, it is, that being his name.”
“That ain’t his name.”
“What are you talking about? Everybody knows Clardy Tyler. He’s one of the best planters and horse traders on the Cumberland. Him and Isaac Ford, they have them a big spread of land. Have for about three years now.”
“You’re telling me this Tyler has been hereabouts for that long?”
“That’s right. Never knowed him to go nowhere else. Not that he comes telling me his business.”
“Well, I’m telling you that man has been elsewhere. I met him myself a y
ear ago, north of Natchez. And his name ain’t Tyler, neither.”
“The devil!”
The tall man nodded, smiling with just the corners of his tight, thin lips. “Well-chose words. Well chose indeed. Tell me, friend, where would I find Mr. Tyler’s house?” He emphasized the name sarcastically.
The other man withdrew a little. “Don’t know I ought to say. What have you got in mind? Mr. Tyler, he’s a fine citizen. Everybody knows that.”
The tall man sighed and dug beneath his lightweight coat. He brought out a coin and dropped it at the seated man’s feet. “Why don’t you leave my business to me, and just tell me where this ‘fine citizen’ lives?”
The seated man looked down at the coin and quietly moved his foot over atop it. “Very well, sir. I’ll tell you. I reckon it ain’t no secret, is it?”
“Reckon not.”
Clardy was in a fine mood. In terms of weather, the day was perfect, far too fine for dismal January, which vied with February for the status of being Clardy’s least favorite month. Good riding weather. Good weather for a jaunt into nearby Nashville and back again. In fact it was more the weather than actual necessity that had prompted Clardy to make the trip. A touch of his old, nearly forgotten irresponsible nature coming through again, he figured, but that was all right. Every now and then a man needed to forget work and commerce and enjoy the simple pleasures of life, such as a good ride in the fresh air of a clear day.
He was about to make the turn toward his own small cabin when his eye caught something that made him come to a halt. There was Isaac Ford, seated beneath that same old big oak he always took to when he was feeling low. His “thinking tree,” he called it. Clardy knew that in fact it was more a place for grieving than for thinking. Grieving over the family that had been taken from him. A place for sinking into the familiar sorrow that loomed up from Ford’s past.
Clardy sighed and slumped lower in the saddle. His good mood died in seconds. He had hoped that Isaac Ford’s sorrowful periods would begin coming less frequently. So far they hadn’t. Over the past year he had taken to his “thinking tree” more and more often. Odd, it seemed, how the death of Ford’s family seemed to haunt him more now, nearly four years after, than at the beginning, when he and Clardy had left Kentucky and its bad memories and started their new life here.
They had gone to Knoxville first, and lingered for a while, waiting for Thias to show up. He didn’t. At length Clardy had given up and concluded that his brother was gone, perhaps forever. Something must have happened to Thias during that time he was out searching, trying to find him and give him the inheritance money he was due. The lawyer Branford in Knoxville had said that Thias had taken the money with him, in cash. That was a dangerous thing. Probably Thias had been robbed by some Kentucky road bandit and killed. Maybe the Harpes themselves had done it, and hidden the body well enough that it was never found.
With that depressing thought in mind, Clardy turned his horse toward the place Isaac Ford sat. Beyond stood the big house Ford had built for himself at the time he was courting a woman he had met in Knoxville, a woman who had managed to turn him again into the bright, proverb-quoting fellow he had been when Clardy first met him. Ford had planned to marry her; it was that which prompted the building of the big house. Clardy had remained in the small, original cabin they had built when he and Ford first bought this Cumberland River land early in 1800. Clardy’s own part of the investment had been quite small, in that he had very little money at the time, but Ford sold his horses and Kentucky land for a decent sum, and that set him and his younger partner up quite nicely in this new place. With a successful horse farm and planter operation working, and marriage looming, Ford had been a happy man. Then the woman had balked, unexpectedly. The engagement had been broken.
And Isaac Ford had promptly begun taking to his thinking tree. It was a sad thing to Clardy, seeing the change that had come over his partner. He had hoped that Ford would have rebounded by now. He hadn’t.
On top of that, Clardy himself was becoming prone to brood, and to think about Thias. And dream about him. Bad dreams, nightmarish images of terrible things happening to his lost brother. Dreams that made him awaken in a sweat, startled by his own outcries.
He rode in under the spreading branches of the big oak and dismounted, leaving his horse to graze at whatever winter grass it could find. “Howdy, Mr. Ford.” Despite their partnership and long acquaintance, Isaac Ford still remained “Mr. Ford” to Clardy, and probably always would. It seemed the natural thing to call him, though its formal overtones belied the depth of their friendship.
“Clardy. Pretty day, ain’t it?”
“Yes. I took me a ride. Went into Nashville and picked up some flour and lard. You’re welcome to share it, if you need any.”
“Got plenty.” Though the pair farmed together, they had begun maintaining separate kitchens in their respective dwellings, and generally shared only a midday meal.
Clardy sat down on the ground beside Ford. Though the atmosphere was pleasantly warm, the earth retained the cold of winter. “Thinking again?”
“Aye.”
“About your family, I reckon?”
A pause. “Aye.”
Clardy pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them and rested his chin atop them. He said nothing.
“You don’t think I ought to be mulling them so much, do you? You think it’s bad for me, grieving this long after they left me.” Ford seldom made direct reference to death when talking about his family. They had “left” him, in his usual terminology.
“I didn’t say nothing, did I?”
“Not this time. But you’ve said it before.”
“Mr. Ford, if you want me to go and leave you alone, I will. I just saw you here and thought it would be good to—”
“Aw, hush, Clardy. I don’t mind you being here. And the fact is, I know it ain’t good for me to sit and grieve. I just can’t help it, that’s all. Seems these days I think more about them than I have for months and months past.”
“I understand that.” Clardy paused, then revealed something he hadn’t yet mentioned to Ford. “The truth is, I’ve been thinking on Thias more than before, too. Can’t seem to help it. I dream about him quite a lot. Bad dreams. Ugly ones.”
Ford looked at him with interest. “Is that right? You never said.”
“I just wonder what happened to him, that’s all. Reckon he must be dead.”
Ford nodded. “I believe he probably is, Clardy, though I hate to say that to you. From all you’ve told me of him, he don’t seem the kind to stay away from his only living kin on purpose.”
Clardy bristled a little. This topic had been touched upon many times before, and always brought him offense. “You mean, and keep all that inheritance money for himself? Have you been thinking Thias might do something like that? Because if you do, then—”
Ford bristled in turn, defensively, and cut him off. “Now Clardy, you keep in mind I don’t know your brother. If I did, and if he’s as fine a fellow as you always say, I’d probably never have one suspicion. You say he’s a good young man, then I believe you. But that does force a man to conclusionize that something ill must have befell him, or otherwise you would have heard from him by now.”
Indeed that was true. After coming to Nashville, Clardy had promptly sent a letter to Branford in Knoxville, informing him of where he could be found should Thias show up, looking for him. Branford had sent his own letter in response, assuring Clardy that he would certainly send Thias directly to him should he appear. That had been months upon months ago, and no Thias.
“He is dead, then,” Clardy said, drawing again the conclusion that his musing always led him to. “He has to be dead.”
Ford turned away. He picked up a pebble and began fingering it. “I despise death. It takes the good things from a man, the people he loves, and leaves him with nothing.”
Clardy looked around at the broad, rolling river land, beautiful even when the
trees were leafless and the fields were brown. “Well, you’ve got all this. A good farm, a good livelihood. A good name in your community.”
To his surprise, Ford suddenly choked up. His eyes, both seeing and blind, grew red and wet. “It’s nothing. Naught at all. None of it means a thing without my wife, my children.”
“You life ain’t over, Mr. Ford. You’ll marry again. You’ll have a new family.”
“I’m getting old, Clardy. Ain’t no woman that will marry me. We know that already, don’t we? I’m doomed to be alone the rest of my days. Alone and lonely, setting on my backside under this tree, looking around at land lots of folks would give their left arm to own, and knowing it all really ain’t worth having.” He tossed the pebble away. “Sometimes I wish that I’d caught that same fever and died with my family. I believe that’s what was meant to be, and somehow I messed up the plan of providence and managed to live when I should have been dead.”
“Don’t talk that way, Mr. Ford.” Clardy hated it when Ford talked about death as if it were something desirable. It made him worry that one morning he might go to meet Ford at his home, as usual, and find that he had put a pistol ball through his head, or a rope around his neck.
“I can’t help but talk that way, Clardy. Just can’t help it.”
Clardy remained only awhile longer. He tried to think of something comforting to say, but couldn’t. He could feel Ford slipping ever deeper into his brood. Helpless and growing more depressed himself, Clardy rose. “I’m going to my cabin.” Ford did not respond, didn’t even grunt. Clardy went to his horse, which had strayed a good distance off by now, mounted, and rode home with Ford still beneath his tree, his eyes staring into the distance and his mind lost in a past he could not return to.
Clardy felt a strong resentment toward Ford the rest of the day. He felt bad for it, but couldn’t help it. Ford’s brooding was turning what had been a good situation into something sorrowful for both of them. Sure, the man had lost his loved ones, but hadn’t many others?
