"Look," Sabbati said. "I am traveling the countryside north of here with the Caliph and minding my own business when suddenly I am overtaken by a clubfoot driving a fine sleigh and dressed all in black, with a sable hat. He sees the sign on my cart, raido, and asks what it means, and I make up some gypsy foolishness. He watches me with his snaky black eyes, and I know he does not believe the tale. Then he asks if I have seen a tall boy with fringe jacket and long, light hair."
A chill ran up Morgan's back. "Was this man armed?"
The gypsy shrugged. "Not knowing. Perhaps. His eyes are dead eyes, and I am afraid. So I tell him I am ill and must get to a doctor. That I have a bad tumor inside my stomach, is killing me. And he says is my lucky day, he is doctor. He gets from the carriage a carpetbag. He says he has the right medicine, will cure Sabbati. He presses my stomach and I pretend to shriek in pain. Then he asks me again. Have I seen a boy from Vermont with a musket and another gun around his neck. Or a long-legged black wench. I shake my head and groan as if in pain, and the clubfoot says he will examine my stomach, and out of the bag he whips his doctor's cutting knife and does this to me."
The gypsy pulled back the quilt. With his other hand he was cradling his own intestines, spilling out of a long rent in his stomach. "Look," he cried. "The so-called doctor sliced me open and pulled out my guts and trod on them with his great black iron shoe."
Morgan started and drew back, but the gypsy reached out and seized his hand. "The Caliph is bring me here. To the fort I also call raido. Is wounded?"
Morgan realized that Sabbati was referring to the elephant. "I didn't see that he was. But he's crying."
"Is cry for me, his brother. Elephants have souls, too, like gypsies. They cry tears. They smile with their eyes. They are beloved friends. And like a gypsy, mark me well, they are dreaded enemies who never forget a wrong. Thirty years the Caliph of Baghdad and I are together, peddling our wares and transporting our dark friends. Now this. Killed by a clubfoot who pulls out my guts and stomps them into the ground with a boot like a blacksmith's anvil. He will kill you too if he finds you."
"Not if I find him first, he won't. I'm going to fetch you a doctor."
"No doctor," Sabbati Zebi screeched. "Is doctor who turns me inside out. With his fine sleigh and well-fed horses."
"These horses," Morgan said. "What kind of horses?"
"Horses with four feet and a mane. What other kind is there? Bay-colored."
"Good Jehovah!" Morgan cried out. He was horrified to realize that he had not only led the second gunman from the frozen slang to Sabbati Zebi, but the clubfooted creature with the Yellow Boy had no doubt murdered the kindly priest who'd picked him up as well.
"Bring me a little water," the gypsy said. "A terrible thing it is to die thirsty."
The dying man nodded at a wooden bucket hanging from the tail of the cart. Morgan grabbed the bucket, sprinted to the lake, returned with the water. With his cedar drinking cup he scooped out water for the gypsy, who gulped it down.
Sabbati gave him a cunning look. Then he demanded more water but this time he could not swallow it. The crafty expression never left his face as he said, "How is it, Sabbati, you may say to me, that if you can prophesy future events, you couldn't predict being attacked by the crazy clubfoot?"
No such question had occurred to Morgan, who was certain that no one could predict the future. To Morgan fortunetelling was almost as great a fraud as Sunday school.
The gypsy shook his head. "Predict the future I don't. Only reveal character. Yours I find lacking."
Despite everything--the dying gypsy, the crying elephant, Jesse's death, his seemingly hopeless mission, and with the second killer and perhaps others as well closing in on him--Morgan smiled. "You're right," he said. "Now I'm going for the doctor."
"No. Only watch with me. When I pass, take what you want from the trunk, then set fire to my cart with me inside. Now swear that you will do this and that you will give Caliph to the best-hearted person you know. Swear."
"I'll see that your beast is well cared for," Morgan said. "In the meantime, what do you know about this?"
He got out Jesse's stone and handed it to the gypsy. Sabbati's black eyes snapped. "Where?" he said. "Where do you find this?"
"A black man named Jesse Moses gave it to me."
"Listen. You must throw this stone as far out into the lake as you can throw it. Is dangerous. Now watch with me a little. You owe it to me because I do not reveal your whereabouts to the clubfoot. Yes, I see you coming three days ago. I predict the present as well as the past. Don't fall asleep. I travel soon. Then you and the Caliph must leave here before the crazy returns with his long doctor's knife. And throw the stone in the lake. Do you promise?"
"I'll wait with you," Morgan said, then instantly wished he hadn't. How at this rate would he ever find Pilgrim? But having failed to keep his word to deliver Jesse Moses safely to the railway station, he was determined to watch with the gypsy.
"If he comes for you--I mean the doctor," Sabbati said, "go to Big Eva. She will protect you, at the sign of Laguz, on Henry Hudson's River, in the Mountains of the Bark Eaters. See? Here on the stone, not far south of my sign, Raido."
"What does it mean? Raido?"
"Sojourner. As all gypsies are. I am now about to make yet another journey, one we each make only once. Tell the Caliph farewell from Sabbati Zebi."
"Sabbati," Morgan said, tracing his rune, , on the back of the dying man's hand with his finger. "What is this called?"
"Nauthiz," the gypsy said.
"What does it mean?"
"Ask Big Eva in the Mountains of the Bark Eaters," the gypsy told him, and then he closed his eyes and did not speak again.
A LL NIGHT Morgan waited with Sabbati Zebi until, toward dawn, he fell asleep. When he woke, the hand he held was cold. The sky was growing lighter. Soon day would arrive and with it, perhaps, the deranged doctor. He must leave the fort as soon as possible.
Morgan began to sort through the gypsy's belongings. A coal-oil lamp half full of oil, which he lighted. Some pots and pans and a brazier. Some glass jewelry. A bag of counterfeit brass coins. A few colored hair ribbons and combs. The trunk inscribed with the genie contained a small framed picture of Jesus delivering his sermon on the mountain, another of Moses gazing on the Promised Land, yet another of Jacob wrestling with his angel. Several miniature bottles containing a yellowish liquid labeled Sea of Galilee Water. A packet of St. Peter's writing styluses, a fragment of St. Paul's singed robe, and a splinter from the cross of the thief crucified beside Christ. Finally, a box of blue-tipped sulfur matches and a wicked-looking foot-and-a-half-long dagger with a round cork handle, a silver band around the top. The dagger was all Morgan wanted.
He looked out at the elephant, who was weeping again. "I know," he said, placing his hand on the rough, dusty folds of the animal's leg. "I know, Mr. Caliph."
Morgan sprinkled the oil from the coal lamp over the gypsy and the contents of the cart. He struck one of the sulfur matches on the barrel of Hunter and tossed the flaming match inside the cart, which ignited in a heartbreaking whoosh. Then, with the Caliph walking beside him, he headed south from Fort Blunder on the pike along the lake.
The sun rose behind the mountains across the water. Ahead a gigantic glittering bird, as huge as Sinbad's roc, was perched in the lower limbs of a lakeside willow tree budded out red for the spring. The fiery rays of the rising sun sparkled off the bird's multicolored feathers so that it hurt Morgan's eyes to look at it. The elephant let out a trumpeting bellow and began to shy away from the mythical bird in the willow tree, which was no bird at all but the Admiral of the North, his hundreds of bright buttons shining in the crimson sunrise, pinned to the willow by the throat with his own trident. His unmoored wooden boat drifted on the lake nearby. The Chesapeake Bay punt gun with which the Admiral had taken Fort Sumter afresh each day was gone.
S INCE LEAVING FORT BLUNDER THREE days ago Morgan had eaten nothing but a porcupine he
'd clubbed in the road and a red squirrel clipping end twigs off a maple tree to suck on the rising sap. He'd killed the squirrel with Ludi's scattershot, but there hadn't been enough meat to get onto the tine of a fork. Twice he'd fed the elephant, once at a rundown farm where a man sold him a hundredweight of damp, smutty hay and again at a lumber camp, where the hay turned out to be mostly straw with all the nutritional value of sawdust. In the mountain hamlets he passed through, consisting mainly of a sawmill, a dozen or so battened dwellings, and maybe a log schoolhouse, he asked directions to the headwaters of Henry Hudson's River. People would point vaguely toward a jumble of snowy peaks off to the south. No one seemed to have heard of Big Eva or to have glimpsed any sign of the horrible box-footed creature in black, but Morgan could not shake the sense that he was not far away, perhaps toying with him, cat-and-mousing him for some fell purpose of his own. Surely, back at the fort, it would have been as simple for the vivisectionist to kill him as to kill the Admiral.
In one wretched assortment of hovels, children and loafers had pelted him and the Caliph with mud and snow, pinecones, stinking potatoes, frozen horse and ox dung. The grieving elephant walked on with its head down, oblivious to these missiles. The steep mountainsides were covered with felled trunks of hemlock trees, stripped of their bark and strewn about all higgledy-piggledy like the colossal white bones of some extinct race of giants annihilated in long-ago warfare amongst themselves. Yet these Adirondacks, or Mountains of the Bark Eaters as the gypsy had called them, were the mountains of Morgan's great hero John Brown, who from this fastness had helped many an Underground passenger move on to Canada and safety. Thinking of Brown gave the boy courage as he moved deeper into the forbidding peaks, hoping to elude the killer who had eviscerated the gypsy and, Morgan had no doubt, impaled the poor Admiral of the North with his own trident. Morgan's father had told him that by taking the law into his own hands in Kansas, removing fathers and husbands from their homes and hacking them to pieces, Brown had violated the most sacred commandment of the God he claimed to serve. Morgan could scarcely disagree. Yet he thought that later, at Harpers Ferry, Brown's error had been in his strategy, not in his principles. Tarnished though he was, John Brown was still the public figure Morgan most admired. Given a chance, he'd have gone to Harpers Ferry with him. For a certainty Brown would have known how to deal with the clubfooted demon who was pursuing him and the Caliph.
I T WAS SNOWING AGAIN, with sleet and freezing drizzle mixed in. Ice formed on the elephant's head and sides and on Morgan's slouch hat. The day before he had taken a chill, which had turned into a hard ague. First fever, then shivering. Coughing steadily, he walked on into the Mountains of the Bark Eaters beside the elephant. From time to time the animal paused and looked back the way they had come with red and weepy eyes. Morgan thought that the gypsy must have had considerable goodness in him. Why else would the Caliph mourn him so?
That night Morgan heard wolves howling and a scream that could have been a cat o' the mountains, a great yellow painter. The elephant paid little attention to the wolves, but the painter's scream angered him, and he trumpeted back as if to keep this tiger of the north woods at bay. Toward morning Morgan dreamed that he heard his name being called out over the dark forest. "Morrr-gaaan. Give up the stone, Morrr-gaaan. Give up the nigger gal."
He sat bolt upright. Was it in fact a dream? From far off in the woods came a high, eerie threnody:
Young Morgan's body is a-moldering in the dust,
Young Morgan's musket's red with bloodspots turned to rust,
Doctor Surgeon's scalpel has made its last inquiring thrust,
A.D. goes marching on.
There could be no doubt. The apparition called Doctor Surgeon was sporting with him. Terrified though he was, Morgan resolved to sell his life as dearly as possible. The doctor might kill him, but not without mortal cost to himself.
Dawn, and racked by bloody coughing. The Caliph knelt in the snow trail, speckled with brown evergreen needles, and beckoned with his trunk. Morgan stepped carefully onto the animal's bent brow and then onto its back. For the rest of that day he rode on the elephant. Like the migrating geese overhead, he knew north instinctively so, putting his back to Canada, he and Caliph proceeded south along the lumber track through the snowy woods. How could runaways from the South who had never seen snow make their way through this boreal fastness? With a conductor like John Brown, he supposed. Morgan had been a conductor himself. Now he was a soldier. He was his own private, captain, and general, his own sutler, though a poor one, because both he and the elephant were near starving. He was his own outrider and his own artillery, his own pickets, his own rolling army of one. He was guilt-ridden and sick and in full retreat from an evil he did not understand. Very possibly he was dying.
A T FIRST Morgan thought that an avalanche had let loose from the upper slopes of the mountain ahead. The low rumbling rose to a steady growl as the woods road he was following crested a rise. Ahead he saw thousands of logs rushing down the whitewater rapids of a brawling river. Grinding together and creating a tremendous thunder, they sluiced downstream between looming black boulders.
Morgan jolted along on the elephant until he came to a place where all hell seemed to have let out for a holiday. In a bend just downstream, logs scrubbed clean of every shred of bark were piled thirty feet high. More logs were augmenting the jam every second, piling up against a black cliff that plunged directly down to the water on the far side of the river. The jam rose higher and higher up the sheer stone wall, though some few logs were still being guided through a narrow corridor of rushing water by red-shirted black men with pick poles.
More lumberjacks, also black, were using a yoke of oxen hitched to a long cable to try to free a mammoth debarked log, the butt end of a monstrous white pine. Branded on the side of each ox Morgan noticed the rune . The animals' eyes bulged as they strained to free the pine log from the jam. A gigantic coal-black jack in a red shirt, a slouch hat as big as a five-gallon bucket, and voluminous trousers was urging the oxen on. From time to time the mountainous jam gave a groan and shifted. But it refused to give. The pine butt had it locked fast in the narrows below the cliff.
The huge black drover exhorting the oxen glanced up at Morgan and said, "This exactly what we need. I was just saying, what we need now, complete this bedlam, is an elephant show come by."
Morgan realized that the jack in the slouch hat was not a man but a tall, broad-shouldered black woman. "We're mired right down to Chiny," she announced with satisfaction. "The drive be hung on Big Eva's Crotch. The boys can't budge it and ain't no-body pleased with the walking boss, which is me. Big Eva. Tell you the truth, I ain't overly pleased with her myself. What you doing with old Sabbati's hefferlump, boy? Where at's Sab?"
In a few words Morgan told her of Sabbati's fate. Eva put her hand to her head. "I ain't surprised," she said, though it was obvious that she was. "In such parlous times as these, they entire Republic at war with itself, I can't say that anything surprise Big Eva. Except good news. I sorry to hear about Sab. He a fine man for all he gypsy nonsensicalness. Help one big slew of passengers over the line to Canady."
Morgan was studying the jam. "Here's some good news," he said. "I believe I can help you free up your logs."
"Not unless you got a crate of dyne-a-mite, you can't. We already tried every other method known to mortal man or woman. Every stick of dyne-a-mite in the North Country been sent south so we can blow up the other fella's bridge and railway so he can blow up ours. Blow up a great multitude of each other in the bargain. Without dyne-a-mite there no breaking loose God's Toothpick."
"God's Toothpick?"
"What I call that kingpin pine log fasten in all the others. God's Toothpick. River ain't big enough up here to float out a log like that."
Still coughing, Morgan watched the men and oxen straining to free the key log. Now they were hooking the chain wound around the log to a heavy wire from a drum windlass on a sled chained to a tree. Big Eva's
lumberjacks cranked the wire taut, and it stood quivering in the hazy spring sunlight, flinging off sparkling drops of river water. God's Toothpick didn't budge.
"That steady pressure won't answer," Morgan said. "You'll have to jerk the key log free. You've got to snap him out the way he went in."
"I very glad to know it. Glad to go to school to a yalla-hair boy. We had enough dyne-a-mite, we could jolt free the whole riverbed. Where you ever get such a croup, boy? You don't take care of that bloody flux, you be as dead as poor Mr. Brown. What you big idea, bust out the jam?"
Morgan led the Caliph down the bank to the windlass. The wire was juddering with tension. As he'd suspected, the winching pressure was only wedging the mammoth log tighter into the jam.
"You need to pull it at an angle upriver, the way it went in," Morgan told the gray-haired black man turning the capstan winch.
"I see we got a new walking boss," the man said to Big Eva. "That the good part. Bad part, they new boss all of about twelve years old. Boy Jesusa at the temple, I reckon. Young Master Jesusa, 'structing they moss-backed old Pharisees."
"A steady pull won't do here," Morgan said. "It needs to be more of a jerk and a heave. To overcome inertia. My brother explained it to me."
"Oh, I sees," the gray-head replied. "He a big engineer, you brother."
"Maybe more of a conductor," Morgan said. "His name was--is--Pilgrim Kinneson." Out of the tail of his eye he saw Big Eva cut a glance toward him and just as quickly look away.
"Be my guest, by all means," the drive foreman said as Morgan cranked the winch backward and loosened the wire.
"We need to get the physics right," Morgan said, citing Pilgrim, who had studied physics at Harvard. But Eva said, "I physic you, boy, with a double dose of salts, you grand idea don't work out."
Morgan grinned. He liked this big, good-looking woman with a loud and ready reply for everything. He would not be surprised if she could tell him something about Pilgrim or about the girl--the pretty girl--the killers were after. When there was slack enough in the cable, he walked the elephant knee-deep into the river. He unclipped the wire hooked to the end of the chain around the log, then he fastened the chain to the ring bolt of the elephant's pulling harness and guided the Caliph a few paces up the fast current. The chain tightened.
Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Page 5
