Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  He waited until the musician drew near to the beaver lodge. Waited until he raised his rifle and cut loose with a thunderous volley. Waited until he had discharged both barrels of the scattershot into the lodge as well. Then Morgan fired, and the rifleman sat down in the snow, holding his side.

  "Y OU'VE KILT OLD LUDI DEAD, Yankee boy," Ludi Too said, pressing his blood-soaked hand against his side. "Deader'n pork. And smashed my instrument to boot, damn your cold gray eyes."

  "You killed Jesse Moses," Morgan said. He didn't like it that Ludi had noticed the color of his eyes. He reached out and lifted the strange pistol with two barrels over Ludi's big head.

  "I'm paunch-shot," Ludi said. "Hand me back over that double horse cock of mine so's I can finish it."

  Morgan kicked the big pistol over to Ludi. The killer picked it up, cocked both hammers, called Morgan a misbegotten bushwacking bastard, pointed the gun at him, and pulled the triggers.

  The hammers clicked on empty chambers, as Morgan had known they would. He'd seen and heard Ludi fire at the beaver lodge with both barrels. Even so, it was terrifying to have a man cut down on him with a mortal weapon from six feet away.

  "They goddamn!" Ludi shouted, and hurled the gun feebly at Morgan. It fell at his feet, and the boy picked it up and hung it around his neck by its lanyard.

  "Well, then," Ludi said. "I've played out my hand. End it, old son. Put a ball in my head. For I don't care to bleed out here in this arctic fastness. Hark. I'll sing me a hymn to pass over on."

  Ludi reached into his bear coat pocket and brought out his poplar mallet, and on the shattered dulcimer he played a bar of "Rock of Ages."

  "Let me hide myself in thee," warbled the minstrel. "Come, boy, join in. We'll make a duet of it.

  "For the sake of Jesus seated at the right hand of Jehovah, put a ball in my breast, lad. I'm begging you. Put a ball in my breast and take my instrument and sing in a ballad that I died game. Finish me, man. Only tell me first. Where be the nigger's stone? Does the gal have it?"

  Morgan stared at him.

  "Never mind," Ludi said. "Anno Domini will get it. One way or another, old A.D. will come at it when he finds the wench."

  It was clouding over again in the west beyond the mountaintop. Big flakes of snow were dropping out of the sky.

  Morgan said, "Toss me your ammunition belt."

  "Eh?"

  "Your ammunition."

  Slowly, Ludi unbuckled the two bandoliers crossed over his chest under his bear coat and heaved them in Morgan's direction. He was bleeding harder now.

  Morgan fetched the Yellow Boy, half buried in the snow nearby, and reloaded it with one bullet from Ludi's belt. He set the rifle upright against a cedar tree, training his musket on Ludi lest he snatch up the loaded rifle and turn it Morgan's way. "I'm leaving you your gun with one shell in the chamber to do with as you see fit," he said.

  "How do you propose that I pull the trigger?"

  Morgan knelt at the musician's feet and pulled off Ludi's right boot and stocking.

  "Wigwag your toe."

  "What?"

  "Wigwag your great toe. Do you have life in it?"

  Ludi moved his toe, as black as his boot.

  "That's how," Morgan said and began backing away toward the cedar island, the musket in his hands pointed at Ludi.

  "A curse on your yallow head, boy. Unto the seventh generation."

  Morgan faded into the cedar trees on the island, trotted to the other side, and began to run toward the foot of the mountain. The snowflakes were as big as the palm of his hand and coming faster. A minute later he heard a muffled shot from behind him.

  Quartering with the northwest wind on his left cheek, he reached the shelter of the woods at the foot of the mountain. He wanted to return to the cabin and deal with the second man, whose tracks he'd seen going over the mountain with Ludi's the night before, but his wet feet and legs were freezing. He had no choice but to stop and pull some loose bark from a yellow birch and break off dead limbs close to the trunk of a skunk spruce, make a brush pile, and build a fire. Otherwise he'd freeze his feet, and that he could not risk. If there was one part of him that Morgan Kinneson knew he would need over the coming weeks, it was his feet.

  TWO

  RAIDO

  T he second snowstorm was a full-fledged blizzard. It lasted almost twenty-four hours, pinning down all living things on the mountain. All Morgan could do was wait it out for a day and a night while maintaining an economical fire from the dead limbs of the softwoods along the edge of the bog at the foot of the mountain.

  During this interlude Morgan thought about Dogood, the schoolmaster. A year ago, at a Saturday-night spelldown at the schoolhouse, Morgan and Dogood were the last spellers standing. The word was "vengeance."

  Dogood, tall, rawboned, a brawler and a bully, had been hired not for his knowledge but because he could keep order with his fists. It was rumored that he had paid a cousin from New Hampshire two hundred and forty dollars to go to war in his place, preferring to lord it over a schoolroom of children than fight to preserve the Union. Dogood went first. "Vengeance. V-E-N-J-A-N-C-E. Vengeance."

  "Nay," said Quaker Meeting Kinneson, who was serving as spell-master. He looked at Morgan. "Vengeance. As in 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord."

  "Vengeance," said Morgan, who, though he detested every minute of his life spent in school and away from his beloved woods, had a memory like glue. "V-E-N-G-E-A-N-C-E."

  "Correct," Quaker Meeting said. "And vengeance belongs to?"

  "The Lord," Morgan said, but Dogood, publicly humiliated by one of his own scholars, evidently thought differently. The schoolmaster bided his time, and soon enough that time arrived. One evening when Quaker Meeting was off doing chores for a sick neighbor, Morgan did his father's barn work as well as his own and thus failed to complete his lessons for the next day. When he arrived at school unprepared, Dogood drew a small circle on the slate behind his desk and ordered the boy to stand bent over with his nose in the circle while he beat him with his ironwood pointer. After the beating, a dozen hard licks, Morgan turned around and challenged the teacher to bare-knuckles fisticuffs that Friday night at the schoolhouse. Then he walked out the door.

  Word spread like brushfire that Master Dogood and the young firebrand Morgan Kinneson were to square off at the schoolhouse. Every ne'er-do-well in Kingdom County was on hand to see Dogood, stripped to the waist, his suspenders hanging from his worn serge trousers, lift his fists against his pupil. Morgan had asked his cousin Dolton to second for him. The schoolmaster had no cornerman but he assumed a formidable attitude with his fists turned up, his elbows down, his long, cruel horse face tucked between his rugged shoulders.

  "No head-butting, no gouging, no biting, go in and fight to win," roared old man Kittredge, and Morgan rushed the teacher with a haymaker that would have felled a stallion.

  Dogood slipped the blow and flicked out a looping jab that stung Morgan's left eye like a bumblebee. He knocked the boy on the forehead with his right hand, then delivered a crunching blow to the breastbone that lifted Morgan off his feet and dropped him like the kick of a workhorse.

  "Put your boots to the little bastard, Teach," someone yelled.

  Spittle white as table salt glazed Dogood's lips as he drew back his boot. Before he could cave in the boy's ribs, Dolt Kinneson had him in a bear hug. "I reckon that's enough for tonight, Mr. Schoolmaster," Dolt said, lifting the thrashing pedagogue right off the schoolroom floor.

  Dolt set the teacher down, went to the vestibule, and returned with the wooden drinking bucket. He dashed the full contents over the face of Morgan Kinneson, who came sputtering to his knees. Dolt grinned. "That's good for tonight, cousin. Sometimes a fella has to take a whopping to give a whopping. You're halfway there."

  Now Morgan was alone in a blowdown, with the wind howling through the forest on all sides, Jesse Moses hanging from the rowanberry tree outside the cabin high on the mountain, the mad musician no doubt sitting
dead as a stump in the bog, and another man, likely a killer himself, at large on the land nearby. For the first time in his life, he was the hunted rather than the hunter, a terrifying thought. Yet he knew that his life depended on his keeping a clear mind.

  Rummaging in his jacket pocket, he felt something smooth and hard. He drew out an oval, grayish stone, about as large as his palm. It was attached, through a small hole drilled through the top, to a leather necklace. Etched into the surface on one side were the words Jesse's stone. Below the writing a jagged line of what appeared to be mountain peaks ran from north to south, interrupted at intervals by a dozen or so curious miniature drawings. A ruined fortress. A little ship perched high in a tree. What might be the entrance to a cave. Also a pillared manse on a hilltop, a windmill and waterwheel, and a field of flowers. Each drawing was accompanied by a symbol similar to the runes on the Balancing Boulder. The other side of the stone seemed, at first, to be smooth. But when he examined it closely, Morgan could discern, very faintly, many of those same symbols, rubbed nearly indecipherable like the words on an ancient coin.

  Morgan continued to look at the carved images until they all started to run together. He could not imagine how the strange stone had gotten into his jacket pocket unless Jesse had tucked it there back at the cabin. The killer in the bear coat had referred to a stone--the "nigger's stone." Might this be it? What did it signify? And what about the girl the killer had mentioned? The voice inside the cabin had alluded to a wench, and Jesse had inquired about a runaway girl, Morgan's age and pretty as a picture. Who might she be? If only he had stayed at the camp with Jesse, listened to what the old man had wanted to tell him.

  He slipped the rawhide loop attached to the mystery stone over his head and around his neck, then built up the fire again. All night Morgan fed the fire and considered his options. By dawn the blizzard had stopped. He counted the money in his wallet. Six dollars, the proceeds from his winter trapline. The time for his odyssey, months in the planning, was at hand. First, though, he must return to the cabin to finish the task he'd begun two nights ago when he'd wounded Ludi.

  As he started to stand, Morgan glimpsed, proceeding at a halting pace down the snowy mountainside, a figure in a black cape wearing a great black hat with a sweeping brim like a wizard's of old. The man dragged his left foot, which was enclosed in a large black box, and carried a carbine with a yellow breech like Ludi's Yellow Boy. He was angling away from the brush pile where Morgan was hidden, already out of musket range. A terrifying thought crossed Morgan's mind. What if the limping creature with the rifle circled back to the home place?

  Realizing that he must lure the gunman deeper into the woods, away from his family, Morgan shouted out for the man to stop and drop his rifle. Instantly the black-garbed figure dodged behind a spruce tree and fired a shot toward the brush pile. Though he had no chance of hitting him with his ancient musket, Morgan fired back. Then he began running in a northerly direction. Bullets whined through the air around him, clipping off evergreen branches. Morgan screamed as if hit, whipped out his buckhorn knife, shoved up the sleeve of his fringed jacket, and made two long, swift, shallow slices across his bare forearm, which immediately began to drip blood onto the snow. He screamed again. Behind him his pursuer had stopped to reload. When the shots began again Morgan sprinted up the mountainside.

  P RESSING NORTH INTO Canada leaving a blood trail, in time Morgan emerged onto a tote road that had been packed down by a snowroller. There he met a country priest in a handsome cutter pulled by two bay horses.

  "Where do you go, my son?" the man of God asked Morgan.

  Morgan looked up at the priest, an elderly man with a kind face and inquisitive, friendly eyes. A patch of his clerical collar showed snowy white against his heavy black cassock.

  "You're hurt," the priest said. "What did you do to your arm?"

  "A scratch," Morgan said. "A small accident in the woods, nothing."

  "Come up, come up, that must be looked at," the priest said, nodding at the seat beside him. Morgan climbed aboard, and they glided on north in silence behind the two big bays. From time to time Morgan looked back the way they had come. Not a soul was in sight in the wintery landscape.

  "Who do you look for?" the priest said. "The devil?"

  "Quite possibly," Morgan said.

  "Well, he's as apt to be ahead of us. But if so, we'll say, 'Satan--'"

  "'Get behind us,'" Morgan said.

  "Ah," said the priest. "You know your scripture. But tell me, in all seriousness, where do you go with all your weapons? To the American war? You're headed in the wrong direction, I must tell you."

  Morgan looked at the cleric. "I expect I'm going straight to hell," he said.

  The priest smiled. "That's a crooked path, not a straight one," he said. "Tell me. What causes you to say such a thing as that?"

  Morgan stared bleakly out across the snowy fields, then glanced back over his shoulder. The road was as empty as the moon.

  "My friend?" the priest said.

  "Have you seen a Negro girl?" Morgan said. "Possibly with a little boy?"

  The priest shook his head. He glanced at Morgan, and for a moment the old and the young man looked into each other's eyes.

  "Mon dieu," the priest said softly, and after that they did not speak again. At dusk the priest dropped him off at the tiny railway depot in Magog, then headed off toward a dark stone church with a soaring steeple sheathed in tin, on the north edge of town.

  At the depot Morgan borrowed pen, ink, and paper from the stationmaster and wrote the following letter:

  Dearest Parents,

  I am pained to write that on Tuesday last, a crazed and heartless killer murdered the passenger on the Underground named Jesse Moses, entrusted to my care, whom I had heedlessly abandoned. I came upon the scene of the murder too late to be of any assistance. I was able however to track down the killer and lure him into an ambush. I assure you that he will kill no more, though this is but meager consolation for the loss of Jesse.

  As for the second part of my message, for some time I have been determined to go south to find my dear brother, Pilgrim. I have the utmost faith he is still alive, though where he may be and why we have not yet heard from him I cannot say. Know that I am now and always will remain,

  Your loving son,

  Morgan Kinneson

  Morgan handed the letter to the stationmaster along with a shilling to frank and post it. "A man attired all in outlandish black with a hideous black box for a left boot will be along shortly," he said. "He is not a good man. Kindly tell him that I boarded the evening train for Halifax."

  The stationmaster looked at Morgan for a moment, then nodded.

  T WO DAYS LATER--TWO DAYS of hard walking through the rough backcountry farms and isolated hamlets of the borderlands, snatching an hour or two of uneasy sleep in a hayrick here, an empty schoolhouse there--Morgan continued to drive himself brutally, punishing his body to relieve his mind of the guilt he felt for abandoning Jesse. He had seen no evidence of a runaway slave girl with a little boy or of the limping specter in black, but he knew that the cloaked man with the flop-brimmed hat and the dragging foot might be lurking with his Yellow Boy behind any corncrib or outhouse. And who was the man Ludi had referred to as Anno Domini? Morgan believed he might be connected with the killers who had lately escaped from the Union prison at Elmira.

  On the third evening of his trek a freezing rain set in. What had Pilgrim told him years ago? "Remember, brother, no matter how cold and wet you are, with flint, steel, and tinder you're always warm and dry." Near a hollowed-out maple tree on the bank of a large, north-running river that he had no means of crossing, Morgan gathered some wet boards from a collapsed horse hovel and built a fire to warm by. He had neither food nor the appetite to eat, nor was he sure that he had the strength or courage to continue for one more day. Huddled inside the rotted old tree trunk, desperately homesick, he feared that his resolve was flagging, that he might be undone not by the like
s of Ludi Too and the clubfoot in wizard's garb but by his own terrible loneliness. Yet how could he return home without Pilgrim? He had given his word, not just to his parents but to himself, that he would find his brother. And what choice did he have? Where else could he go? As the warmth from the fire seeped into his bones, a thousand wild notions, each more fantastical than the last, ran through his head. He would run away to sea. He would lie about his age and enlist. Strike north to the great unbroken forests of the Hudson's Bay territory and run a trapline. He thought about the pretty fugitive girl and wondered if the little boy might be her own. Hunkered down in the hollow tree, he fell asleep to the crackle of his fire and the rush of the river.

  En roulant ma boule, ma boule.

  En roulant ma boule.

  Out of the dawn mist on the river, putting in toward a gravelly bar just below the shattered old maple where Morgan had spent the night, came a long freighter canoe manned by half a dozen colorfully dressed men singing in French. The bowman, who wore a blue wool shirt, a yellow tuque, bright red leggings, beaded moccasins, and a bold green sash, splashed out of the canoe and drew it up onto the bar.