Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  “You touch me again and I’ll—”

  Japheth slapped Timothy across the face. “Don’t dictate to me, you squirming maggot. I’ll touch you, I’ll strike you, I’ll kick you, or I’ll shoot you dead, all at my own whim.” He spun and aimed a finger right at Beatrice Sullivan. “And you, you old fishwife, will stay out of our business. If I see you so much as move, I’ll not take responsibility for what I do.”

  Beatrice Sullivan’s eyes seemed to grow as her body seemed to shrink. She hunched over and held her arms tightly against her body. “Be careful of him, Timothy … he’s a madman!”

  “Madman? Me? Oh no. It’s this fool here”—he slapped Timothy again, not quite as hard—“who is the madman. He believes he can attempt to rape my wife, then try to force me to pay him for it! If that doesn’t define ‘madman,’ nothing does.”

  Timothy quailed back against the wall, putting his hand up to deflect any more slaps and sinking down low to protect himself. Japheth looked at him in contempt, then smiled. “Look at you, Timothy! Cowering like some whipped child! And you thought you had it in you to blackmail me! There’s nothing in you but a black heart and a soul full of worms of vermin.”

  He wheeled about, making Beatrice Sullivan yelp in surprise and begin to tremble. “You want to know why my wife came to this place, old woman? She came to help you. That’s right. To do something good for you, because your sister Queen did good things for her once several years ago.”

  “Queen … she knew my Queen?”

  “Yes, she did. And Queen proved to her that there was far more heart and soul in herself than there is in you, old shrew! She was a hard woman, but she knew what it was to be kind. I wonder what she would have thought to know her own sister would fall so low as to help a worm like this man here try to extort money from a young woman she herself loved very much! I expect Queen wouldn’t be at all proud of you, Beatrice Sullivan.”

  Beatrice began to cry. “Where is my Queen? Can you tell me? I’ve longed to see her!”

  For the first time since beginning this verbal assault, Japheth felt a twinge of regret over what he must say. He did not allow that regret to soften his expression or tone; it was imperative to maintain the advantage here, beginning to end. “Queen is dead. She was murdered on a flatboat by a man of the ilk of your Timothy, here.”

  “Murdered! Oh, merciful God!” The old woman suddenly began to sob.

  Japheth turned to Timothy again. “Listen to me, Timothy. You believe you hold an advantage over me, but the truth is the opposite. I know who you are. I know about the robbery of gold from a Catholic church in New Orleans, and about Willie Smith and Thias Tyler. I know it all, and even things you don’t. And I know that the soldiers there want you, Timothy. The soldiers.” He leaned forward a little as he said that and let his eyes burn into Timothy’s.

  Timothy opened his mouth as if to speak, but only blubbered.

  Japheth stepped forward. “That’s right, Timothy. The soldiers want you. They want to drag you away and hang you. They want to watch you” twitch at the end of a rope until you’re dead. If they find you, that’s what they’ll do to you. And all it takes is a word from me, just a word, and they’ll know where you are. And don’t think you can kill me and silence me. There’s a letter already written and in the hands of a person I trust—not my wife, either—and if anything happens to me, anything at all, it will be sent and the soldiers will come. Do you understand me?” He leaned closer still. His volume had grown while he spoke, so that his last question was nearly a shout.

  “Yes … yes, I understand.”

  “That’s good, Timothy. I’m glad you do. And understand this, too—there’ll be no money for you from me or my wife. Furthermore, you’re going to leave Natchez, you are, and never come back. You’re going to leave this town and go as far away as you can, and if ever I see you, hear of you, even smell you, the soldiers will come and they’ll hang you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never let me see you again, Timothy. Never again. And never again dare to lay your filthy hands on another woman.”

  “I won’t. I won’t!”

  Beatrice Sullivan was still sobbing on the other side of the room. Timothy began to cry, too. “Please, Mr. Deerfield, please … I’m sorry about what I done. Don’t make the soldiers come! Please don’t make them come!”

  Japheth was quite worked up from his tirade, and the thought of this wretched man before him having attempted to molest his wife was enough to make him boil in rage, but at this moment Timothy seemed so utterly pitiful that he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Japheth wasn’t used to treating people so harshly. Timothy’s fear of soldiers was obviously the result of a damaged mind, and Japheth realized it was cruel to play on that fear. Yet it was also essential. This job could not be done halfway. He had to leave here tonight assured that neither Timothy nor Beatrice Sullivan would ever dare try to harm him or Celinda again.

  “I won’t make them come … if you’ll leave this town and not come back! And if you never make another threat against me or my wife again!” He reached out and grabbed Timothy by the collar. “By heaven, man, you’d best be grateful that I’m in a forgiving kind of spirit. For what you did to my wife, and what you would have done had you not been oaf enough to run yourself onto a blade, I could have you locked away until you couldn’t bear to see the light of day even if you had the chance.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Just don’t send the soldiers.”

  “Good-bye, Timothy. And this is a final good-bye. We’ll never lay eyes on one another again. Correct?”

  Timothy blubbered and nodded. “But please, sir, can’t I stay in Natchez? I’m afraid to leave here. The soldiers, they’re out there, and—”

  “You will leave here. Otherwise I’ll put you in their hands myself.”

  Timothy squeezed his eyes shut and quietly began to sob. Japheth pushed him away contemptuously. Then he removed Timothy’s pistol from his own belt, turned the screw and freed the flint, which he pocketed, shook the powder out of the pan and laid the pistol back on the table. He wasn’t about to risk a pistol ball in the back as he left this stinking room.

  He could still hear both of them crying when he descended the stairs. His heart was pounding, and once he was on the street he realized how afraid he felt. What he had done had been a true gamble with his own safety, but he was confident it had worked. Timothy was scared through and through; he would not dare stir up trouble again. And without Timothy’s prodding, Japheth doubted that Beatrice Sullivan would create any further problems, either. She had seemed to be no more than Timothy’s mouthpiece.

  “Mr. Deerfield …”

  He turned, surprised to see Beatrice Sullivan behind him. She had descended the stairs and followed him onto the street.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know more about Queen. Who killed her? Why would anybody kill her? She was always good to other folks, Queen was.”

  Japheth felt pity for the old woman. Life had not been easy on her. “Ma’am, I don’t know much to tell you except that your sister was stabbed by a man named McKee, who was paid to do it by a man named Horton. The reason it happened was—”

  The sound of a single shot from above made him cut off. He looked up; Beatrice Sullivan did the same. The shot had come from inside the upstairs room.

  Japheth felt a shudder of horror. He must have had a spare flint.

  Beatrice put her hand to her mouth. “Timothy …”

  She turned away and headed to the stairs, which she climbed as fast as she could, with much grunting and wheezing and repetition of Timothy’s name. Japheth couldn’t seem to move at all. He stood frozen, knowing but not wanting to acknowledge what that single shot meant.

  Others began to gather. “Heard shooting! What happened?” “Don’t know.” “It came from above …”

  A loud wail was heard from the upper room. It was the voice of Beatrice Sullivan, heavy with grief. “H
e’s dead! Oh, help me, Jesus, he’s dead!”

  I didn’t mean to scare him that much.… God in heaven, you know I didn’t mean for him to shoot himself.

  Japheth stood where he was as others mounted the stairs, climbed up to the room, and general hubbub grew. Out of his growing sense of horror sprang a new and terrible realization: I am ruined here.

  The window overlooking the street had always been kept closed and covered by Timothy, but now it was opened. A man stuck out his head. “Somebody out there!” he called out. “Go find a constable! There’s a man shot the top of his own head off up here!”

  I am ruined. A man is dead, and I am ruined.

  There would be questions asked, investigations made. Talk. Whispers. Evil speculations, growing in the telling. Beatrice Sullivan would tell the whole story, and Japheth Deerfield would become known throughout Natchez as the man who scared another man into killing himself. The man of the law who opted to deal with a private matter outside the law, and pushed a man to suicide in so doing.

  The crowd grew around Japheth. Men pushed past him and ran up the stairs. Death was common in Natchez-under-the-Hill, but seldom was it self-inflicted. Like the way he had lived his life, Timothy’s final act had been unusual, and as such, would gain all the more attention.

  So much the worse for Japheth Deerfield, and so much the worse for Celinda. Sinking into despair, Japheth lurched off, hid himself in an alley and cried like a child.

  1811

  CHAPTER 42

  In a field near Danville, Kentucky

  He put on an exaggerated expression of tense excitement as the yellow-haired little girl ran across the meadow toward him, chubby arms churning as fast as her legs. He held his watch in his left hand, making a show of time-keeping. The child reached him, racing past in a blond-topped streak, then pounded to a stop. Clardy Tyler pointed at the face of the pocket watch. “Less than a minute! Jenny, you’ve run the whole big meadow in less than a minute! Fastest you’ve ever gone, sweet girl!”

  The child, about four years old, came puffing back to her father. “Papa, I can run it faster.”

  “Maybe you can, but not today you won’t. Three times is plenty for one afternoon.”

  Jenny Tyler looked disappointed but made no complaint. Clardy chuckled to himself as he hefted Jenny up into the saddle of his horse, then swung up behind her. He wished he still had the energy of a child. At age thirty, he remained strong and vigorous—more so, in fact, than he had been in his idle youth—but his elder daughter’s vigor went beyond anything he had felt in years. She was a strong, active, healthy child, and he was proud she was his own. Just as he was proud of her younger sister, Mary, and their mother, Faith.

  He had met Faith by chance in the tavern her parents operated near Nashville. The meeting occurred several months after he made his sad parting with Japheth Deerfield in New Orleans. A harder stretch of time he had never known. The effect of losing first his old friend and partner Isaac Ford, then losing all hope of ever seeing Thias in this world again, had given Clardy a thorough emotional lashing, and as he was now fond of punning, it had “taken Faith” to get him through it.

  For the first six months after parting from Deerfield, he had remained in New Orleans, living a dissolute life he wasn’t proud to look back on afterward. He had neglected to keep contact with the renters of his Tennessee land, had spent his money as if it were in boundless supply, and had not looked beyond the next hour, much less the next day.

  Eventually that life grew tiring and sad, and he put New Orleans behind him and headed back up to Natchez. He went mere solely because it happened to be the southern terminus of the Boatman’s Trail, not because Natchez held any attraction in itself. Quite the opposite was true; he held that town in mental association with sorrow and disappointment, and desired nothing more to do with the place. Nevertheless, while he was there, he decided to pay a brief call on the Deerfields, mostly to let Japheth know that he was still alive and well, and to thank him again for what he’d tried to do for him in New Orleans.

  The visit was never made. Clardy heard reference to some “trouble” being experienced by the Deerfields, stemming from an incident that had occurred in Natchez-under-the-Hill. Remembering Celinda Deerfield’s negative attitude toward him, and not wanting to insert himself into the middle of someone else’s bad situation, Clardy abandoned the notion of visiting them and went on his way. He took up with a party of Kaintucks and traveled the nearly five-hundred-mile Boatman’s Trail through the Indian country, finally reaching Nashville after about a month of travel. There, at a new inn he stopped at, seeking no more than a meal to quell his hunger until he reached his own home not many miles distant, he met the woman who he would make his wife a few months later.

  They were married in a small church beside the Cumberland River, in the section of town that had initially been known as French Lick in the earliest days of settlement. It was no exaggeration to say that the former Faith Wheeler had changed Clardy Tyler’s life drastically, and for the better.

  He reclaimed his Nashville land from his renters, worked through the legalities of claiming the inheritance left him by Ford, and moved into Ford’s old house. At that time, Clardy expected they would remain on the Cumberland River for the rest of their days. Life was good there; since Ford’s death, Clardy’s holdings of land and stock were high enough to make him one of Nashville’s best-known and successful planters and stockmen. He began planning a larger, finer house, and listened with some bemusement as various important people from Nashville and its environs sought to persuade him toward politics.

  Then Faith’s father died. Six months after that, her mother announced that she had been asked by a Kentucky farmer to remarry and move with him back to Kentucky. This created a crisis in the Tyler household. Faith was unusually close to her mother and did not want to be separated from her. She made a very substantial request of her husband, and it was evidence of the strength of his love for his wife that Clardy resisted only a little while before giving in. He sold his Nashville land, bought acreage near Danville, and moved up to Kentucky, where Faith could still live close to her mother.

  Now, as he rode with his daughter nestled in the saddle before him, Clardy reflected on how he hadn’t wanted to come to Kentucky at the beginning. He had done it entirely for Faith’s benefit, with a lot of secret reluctance and an even more secret touch of outright resentment. No more. All that had changed. Clardy was happier here in Kentucky than he had been at any other phase of his life. Much of it had to do with the birth of his daughters, who thrived in this beautiful, rich countryside. He was a happy man. Happy to be alive, in this place, with these people.

  “Where will the big meeting be, Papa?” Jenny asked.

  “Right where we were just now, honey,” Clardy answered.

  “In the big meadow?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where will the people sit?”

  “On the ground, on blankets, on their wagons. Anywhere they want.”

  “Where will the preachers be?”

  “There’ll be a platform built in the midst of the field. Folks can gather all around that way, you see.”

  “Why are you letting them do the camp meeting here, Papa?”

  “Because the preacher Coffman asked me, and I wanted to help him. He’s a good man.”

  “How’d he get blind, Papa?”

  “He was in a big battle, years and years ago, when he was a young man. A place called King’s Mountain. He was struck across the eyes with a saber.”

  “Why would anybody hurt the preacher Coffman?”

  “It was a battle, honey. People hurt each other in battles. It’s sad, but the truth. It’s a lot better for people to come together peacefully, like they’ll be doing here when the preacher Coffman holds his meeting.”

  “Are we going to be at the meetings, Papa?”

  “You and your mother and sister might be. Me, I’ll be out of town. Way off down the river.”


  “Why?”

  “There’s an old friend of mine who passed on a few years ago. Mr. Ford—I’ve told you about him. He always wanted to be buried near his kin here in Kentucky, and I promised him I’d see it done. It’s been a big span of years, and I ain’t fulfilled that promise yet. But I’ve been making ready to do it lately, and about the time the big camp meeting commences, I’ll be off to New Orleans to see the job done.”

  “Why did Mr. Ford care where he was once he was dead?”

  “It’s a natural thing to want to be buried in land you loved, near folks you loved. Like me. I’ll want to be buried beside your mama once my time comes.”

  “Papa, you won’t die for a long, long time!” She said it forcefully, and he caught the glint of worry in her eyes and chided himself for having brought up a matter not easy for a child to deal with.

  “That’s right, honey. I aim to be around for years and years to come, and your mother, too,” he said with deliberate brightness. “Why, I wouldn’t want to miss out on watching you grow up and have children of your own.”

  She hugged him, then, with the abrupt manner of children, dropped the entire subject and began to sing at the top of her voice. Clardy smiled, shook his head, and felt he was surely the most fortunate man alive.

  As he rode along, listening to his daughter’s high voice, he thought about the big camp meeting, to be led within a few weeks by the Reverend Israel Coffman, on the very big field where Jenny had just been running. The blind Coffman, a beloved clergyman all through Kentucky, had personally requested use of the site from Clardy, and Clardy gave his permission. Though he himself had been raised in a largely irreligious household and was yet to be comfortable with religious matters, he held great admiration for the gentle Coffman, and for that reason alone was glad to lend his support.

  Camp meetings had been a big part of Kentucky life for the past decade, and had infused a great devotion to Christianity into much of the populace. At the center of much of it had been Israel Coffman, who had migrated up from Tennessee in 1783 with an entire congregation of Presbyterians. Coffman had been involved in the ministry since his younger days, when he entered what was then the pre-Tennessee frontier to establish a church at the behest of an ambitious but ill-fated empire builder named Peter Haverly. Now Coffman was a near neighbor of the Tylers and had become a close friend of the family. Clardy still retained some of his early nervous ambivalence about religion, but Coffman was doing a good job of wearing that away a little at a time, to his own pleasure and Clardy’s occasional discomfort.