While they waited their turn to lock up, Dolt confided to Morgan that His Whaleship was owned by the wealthy Utica abolitionist Gerrit Smith and was frequently used to carry a cargo of far more importance than the jaws of a dead whale. Currently he was en route to Buffalo with five Underground passengers disguised as crewmen. From there they would be conveyed by steamship across Lake Ontario to Canada. Again Morgan's cousin gave him a look full of meaning. The whale, he said, was merely for flash and dash. Dolton Kinneson an Underground conductor on the canal! Morgan never could have imagined it.
At dusk Morgan hayed the elephant at a town named, elegantly, Mule Fart, then walked on along the towpath under a million wheeling stars, talking to Dolton, while a deckhand manned the tiller. Suggs's City of Buffalo, now crowded with gin-swilling revelers bound for annual Spring Rout in Utica, kept pace two or three hundred yards behind them. The reflections of its red and green running lanterns glimmered in the black canal water as the gin boat crawled through the night under a pale quarter moon.
Dolt too had heard that Pilgrim had gone missing at Gettysburg but scoffed at the reports that he might be dead and buried in a Pennsylvania ditch. "Old Pilgrim's too crafty to be killed, and that's a natural fact," he said. "I know he's alive."
"So do I, cousin. But sometimes doubt creeps in."
"What was it the old reverend at home used to say, Morgie? Faith without a measure of doubt ain't worth a brass farthin'. Doubt be damned, don't you never stop looking for your brother. Never. See here, cousin. Say you was the one missing. Do you think Pilgrim would stop looking for you? I guess he wouldn't. Now here's a hard question that I need to ask a smart person. It's about this war."
"I don't care much about the war, Dolt."
"Well, don't care about it, then. Just answer the question for me. They say the fighting ain't about slavery. Ruther it's about states' rights."
"So I've heard."
"All right, then. You tell me, Morgie. States' rights to do what?"
"Secede, I reckon."
"Secede why? Over what?"
Morgan laughed. "Well, Mr. Grand Inquisitor, over slavery."
"Then why ain't the war about slavery?"
"I suppose it is."
"I suppose it is too," Dolt said. "So don't you never stop looking for Pilgrim!"
Morgan laughed again and shook his head. Philosophizing with Dolt Kinneson, now a canalman and Underground conductor, in the middle of the night in the company of a dead whale and a live elephant. And while Dolt's private algebra eluded Morgan--the x's and y's equating the cause of the war with the imperative to find Pilgrim--the justness of his cousin's sentiments did not. He too believed that he must keep looking for Pilgrim, if only because the looking might sustain his faith that his brother was still alive. As to the war, well, he did not disagree that slavery, the greatest evil mankind had ever devised, was the ultimate issue, but it had long seemed to him that the conflict had acquired a malignant life of its own. Pilgrim had slipped away from it. Morgan wanted no part of it. His sole concern was to stay alive long enough to locate his missing brother.
Later Dolt told him that according to Gerrit Smith, the sign on the boat, , stood for Mannaz, meaning beginnings. The canal, one of the main passages to Canada, was where the new lives of the Whaleship's fugitive passengers truly began.
Morgan was pondering this idea when he noticed, down the waterway in the thin moonlight, that the City of Buffalo had shortened the distance between the two boats by half. The bay horses pulling the barge were coming on at a sweeping trot.
"S UGGS MEANS to pass us up yonder in the Yellow Jack Fens," Dolt said, looking back over his shoulder at the oncoming barge. "He means to cut our towropes with his boat scythes. Can your big boy run, Morgan? Shall we give the old sod a run for his money?"
"He can," Morgan said. "And we shall. Hi, Caliph. Run! Run, boy!"
The elephant broke into a lumbering trot. His Whaleship bounced along behind on the moon-shimmered surface of the canal. Suggs, at the tiller of his gin boat, blew his warning horn, and the hoggee leading the Buffalo's bays leaped onto the back of one of the horses and whipped them up. The chase was on.
As the boats entered the vast swampy region known as the Yellow Jack Fens, the Buffalo continued to gain on them, the revelers on deck howling the bays on. Suggs blared out a ringing charge on his horn, and a blinding orange tongue of fire, accompanied by a terrific crashing report, shot out from the bow. A torrent of flying metal raked the stern and port side of His Whaleship. In the moonlight Morgan could make out the long shining barrel of the Admiral's Chesapeake Bay punt gun jutting off the bow of the City of Buffalo. Furiously reloading the deadly weapon, over which he hunched like a great cloaked bat, his outsized hat as black as a pirate sail, was the clubfooted creature from the wintery bog in Vermont. "Hands high overhead now, niggers and nigger stealers alike," shrieked Doctor Surgeon.
Flinging his musket to Dolt and calling out to the Caliph to run, run, run, Morgan broke into a sprint, heading directly back toward the City of Buffalo and straight into the maw of the Chesapeake punt gun now swiveling his way. As Doctor Surgeon thumbed back the gooseneck hammer, Morgan whipped the cord of Ludi's two-barreled scattershot over his head. He leaped over the mouth of the punt gun just as it exploded again, clearing the flying death-charge of shot by scant inches. He landed on the foredeck of the Buffalo and threw down on Doctor Surgeon with the scattershot. The terrified horses shied, causing the bow of the boat to crash into the side of the berm. A barrel of high-proof gin flew off the roof of the cabin, emptying its volatile contents over the deck. Morgan was flung across the deck by the collision. He fired one barrel of the scattershot wildly into the night, striking a running lantern, which shattered and fell onto the deck, torching the spreading pool of gin.
From around the corner of the low cabin came Suggs, his ten-foot-long fending pole raised above his head. Morgan dodged aside and Suggs slipped and fell onto the flaming deck and instantly took fire, as if the tons of gin he had consumed over his lifetime had ignited to consume him. As the blazing captain leaped into the canal, Morgan sprang off the boat. Casks of gin in the hold were now exploding like barrels of gunpowder. One of the bay horses was missing, as was the creature in black. The revelers had fled back down the berm.
Another barrel of gin burst and another and yet a third, as the City of Buffalo burned to the waterline. Soon all that could be heard was the jingling chorus of spring peeping frogs and one lone late-flying snipe, winnowing through the night sky high overhead.
Then, coming from nowhere and everywhere, a trilling ululation. "Morrr-gaaan. Morrr-gaaan. The girl, Morrr-gaaan. Where is the girrrl?" Followed by curdling laughter. Followed by silence.
D AWN WAS an enraged red streak in the northeastern sky. Black clouds scudded low overhead as Morgan and the elephant plodded west along the berm while Dolt manned the tiller of the showboat, its skeletal jaws pointing the way, its elegant blue-and-white gingerbread trim riddled to scrapwood. Two of the Underground passengers had been killed in the battle the night before by flying shrapnel from the punt gun. Two others, badly injured, had been taken on ahead to Utica for medical attention by the driver of a passing lumber wagon. Dolt, who had never before lost a fugitive passenger, was close to distraction. Morgan blamed himself. He was the one who had led the mad killer straight to His Whaleship and the runaways. It seemed that wheresoever he went he brought nothing but death and destruction to all who would help him.
Ahead on the towpath a goose girl was driving to market a score of gray Toulouse honkers and several dozen turkeys, and the path was beslimed with the birds' copious phlegm-green leavings. As Morgan passed the girl, who was long-legged and saucy and as sharp as the little end of nothing, she beckoned to him lewdly and broke into wild gales of laughter. She wore a shift of goose feathers and down glued to a potato sack, and her legs were as brown from the sun as the muddy canal water; her feet and ankles were the green of weathered copper from the droppin
gs of the geese and turkeys, which kept up a din you could hear half a mile away, a constant lunatic honking and gabbling and gobbling. And as she harried them along, the little hoyden gabbled back at them in a strange and uncanny approximation of their own peculiar tongue.
U TICA. AT THE JUNCTION of the Great Western Canal and the River Tug, which ran out of the dank spruces and hemlocks of an area called the Limberlost, the sun came streaming forth on the wharves of the town. The streets were thronged with country folk and townspeople gathered for the Ute Spring Rout, a species of licensed saturnalia where a sober man, or woman either, was a rare spectacle. The docks were crowded with every manner of line boat, freight craft, and pleasure packet. Drunken wagoneers whipped their teams down the muddy main street between high warehouses, clerks' offices, and whore-cribs. From the wharf where he unhitched the Caliph from His Whaleship, Morgan counted three separate fisticuff brawls in progress. Fishwives screeched from makeshift stalls, farmers had set up impromptu pens crowded with bleating spring lambs and grunching pigs. Bare-breasted women were hanging out of the upper windows of a canal-side doggery with a swinging sign upon which someone had painted in staggering scarlet letters MOTHER HUBBARDS FRESH GIRLS AND FINE SPIRITS.
Dolton had already begun his showboat spiel. In a singsong voice, standing on the whale's lower jawbone, he called out through his polished brass speaking horn, "Ladies and gentlemen of the metropolis of Utica, flower of the Great Western Canal and upper York State, for two dollars you may have your likeness made seated in His Whaleship's great jaws. Come all you York State Jonahs! Whilst you sit for your daguerreotype, Professor Dolton Kinneson, that's yours truly, will instruct you in the nomenclature of whales, of which there be Right, Sperm, Finback, Blue, and many another curious variety. You are invited to examine His Whaleship as close as you wish. If you find he be not a true and honest whale, your money will be cheerfully returned and you will keep your photograph as well."
Someone was pulling at the fringed sleeve of Morgan's jacket. Expecting another surprise attack from his assailant of the night before, Morgan spun around, already reaching for the gypsy's dagger at his belt. It was the little goose girl. "If you'll bargain for me cheap this afternoon at the poorhouse vendue, mister elephant boy, I'll do you each night and again each morning. But come. First I'll show you something amusing."
The girl, whose name was Birdcall, led him and the elephant toward a spanking white wooden bandstand on a broad greensward. Thirty or forty young men were crowded around the stand listening to a war recruiter in a blue silk hat harangue them about the sovereign delights of going south for a soldier. The recruiter had a speaking trumpet and an insinuating lisp, and he rampaged back and forth on the bandstand bellowing like a man possessed. "Who'll sign on, gentlemen, for the lark of a lifetime? Yes! The North Country Sharpshooters' Regiment consists of none but gentlemanly men. It is a beautiful chance for those wishing to see something of this life away from home, boys. Yes! Our summer uniform is green, the color of God's good grass, and miller's gray for winter. Our vittles none but the choicest, our officers princes among men." The recruiter pointed the small end of his horn at Morgan. "Will you sign on for the lark of a lifetime, boy?"
Morgan shook his head, though several other young men surged forward to sign up at a table beside the bandstand, where three ensigns in uniform sat enlisting recruits. One recruiter was missing his legs and conducted his affairs from a large wicker basket like a sitting hen. Another seemed in the course of his soldiering to have misplaced an eye and an ear. The third had but one arm, having evidently left the other behind on his holiday in the South.
Dolton, in the meantime, had hired a trap and driver to take him to Mr. Gerrit Smith, to report to the fabled philanthropist and Underground conductor the attack on his showboat the night before. Morgan agreed to meet Dolt that evening at a canal-side tavern called the Robber's Roost, then he and Birdcall, with the elephant lumbering along at their side, made their way to the poorhouse where the spring vendue was to be held. Fleetingly, Morgan wondered if Birdcall might be the girl the killers were pursuing. But no, they were looking for an older girl, a negro fugitive, and pretty besides. The previous day, when he'd inquired of Dolt about the pretty runaway, his cousin had teased him quite mercilessly, but in the end, he had to admit that he hadn't seen such a girl, with or without a little boy. To Morgan she remained a phantom. A pretty phantom.
N EAR LOCK NUMBER FIFTY-FOUR, a mile west of town, stood a sooty stone building overlooking a field as stark as a brickyard, which had long served as Utica's poor farm, a catchall for every kind of hapless indigent. Elderly paupers with no family to care for them, waifs like Birdcall, disabled soldiers, the feebleminded hoi polloi, whole destitute clans with not one place else to go in the wide world. Each spring the less infirm on the poor-farm roster were lent out to farmers and petty tradesmen in the surrounding rural precincts to be boarded for the duration of the good weather in exchange for a few dollars and whatever light work the residents might be able to perform, which often consisted of no more than standing in fields and flapping their arms to keep away blackbirds. The annual vendue of paupers was conducted much like an auction, with one notable difference. The poor-farm clientele was considered so entirely feckless and, by virtue of their noxious existence, so bothersome, that instead of renting their services, the good-hearted authorities paid local squires and householders a small stipend to take them off the town for a few months, with the prized rentees going not to the highest bidder but to the lowest.
"Why don't you just run away?" Morgan asked Birdcall. "You and your geese were ten miles down the canal this morning. Who'd have known or cared if you'd hopped a boat east and never looked back?"
"That's been tried afore. They have to account for us to the board of overseers in Ute. Otherwise, they'd starve us orphlingers off and say we went runagate. If we does run, they send the beadles after us and chain us up in our kennels and feed us naught but bread and water."
"How did you come to be an orphan?" Morgan asked the child. "Have you no family at all?"
"None in the world," said girl, trilling her "world" in an Irisher's brogue. "Me mother and father and infant brother Joshua Jonathan perished of the bloody flux that they calls the cholera on the way over the great salt sea from Dublin town. That was two years back, and I've been on me own since. 'Bout six months ago I was taken up by two bully boys and sold into service at Mother Hubbard's as a crib gal. Mr. Gerrit Smith rescued me out of bondage at Mother's and placed me in the poorhouse, but that's little improvement. You must buy me, honey man. You won't regret it. Otherwise I'll be sold back into service to Mother Hubbard, the vile old whore. Hoy! They're running up the red flag. The vendue's about to commence."
Morgan was all but weeping with frustration. First an elephant with a sense of humor to care for. Then an orphan child from over the ocean. Not to mention the clubfooted killer who might, even now, from the upper story of some leaning beehive of a tenement or the roof of a warehouse, be sighting in with his Yellow Boy midway between Morgan's shoulders. He was desperate to be on his way to Gettysburg, but there seemed to be some maddening delay at every turn in the way. Still, a plan had been forming in his mind. If locating Pilgrim was indeed a kind of military campaign, one that might well necessitate going behind enemy lines, then he must travel as light as possible, unencumbered by elephants and foundlings. And he must be ready to recalibrate his tactics at a moment's notice. With luck, he'd be able to help little Birdcall and at the same time fulfill his promise to the gypsy to find a good home for the Caliph. Then there would be only the killer to deal with. And dealing with killers was a line of work that the soldier Morgan Kinneson was becoming proficient in.
Above the Utica almshouse a crimson pennant snapped in the spring breeze. The auctioneer wore a bottle-green coat and a tall velvet hat and emerald boots rolled at the top. He stood on the tail of a wagon, his addlepated indigents and almshouse dregs crowded around him, cowering together or standin
g singly and staring away into nowhere. A knot of hard-looking farmers and their hard-looking wives, canal boat captains, tightfisted shop owners, and know-all tradesmen coolly assessed the pickings. Morgan stood near the back of the crowd.
"Hi ho and away we go," cried the auctioneer. "Who'll take three dollars to board this beauty for the summer?"
He gestured toward a blind crone lashed into a bent-hickory rocker with filthy strips of linen, rocking vigorously away in the back of the wagon and gazing up with her sightless eyes at the sun. "She's an easy keeper, good people, and the chair goes with her. Set her rocking on a Sunday eventide and wind her up again in a fortnight like a two-week clock. Her head follows the sun, you can tell the hour by its angle. She's more accurate than a garden dial. Milly the human timepiece, we call her. A little fried mush every three days and a kick to remind her she's still alive will do very nicely for her. Who'll take three dollars to provender her till fall, and if she don't summer over, why, you pocket what's left. She victuals easy, boys."
"What can the hag do?" demanded a broad woman in a sun hat broader yet. "Crippled up as she is and blind as a bat besides?"
"Why, Mother Hubbard," the auctioneer said, "she can knit two and purl one without a dropped stitch, mumble a winter's tale in a chimney corner to chill your blood, run a dasher, and live on less than a little. Set her out in your kitchen garden and she'd keep off the devil himself."
"Why don't you just stone us all and be done with it?" the old woman in the rocker suddenly croaked out.
"I'll take her for six dollars, not a penny less," the woman in the sun hat said, and "Done!" said the auctioneer.
Next a soft-headed old man with a purple goiter the size of a rutabaga dangling from his chin was fobbed off on a farmer for seven dollars. Then a family was sold, a mother, a spratling of ten or eleven, and a sucking infant. The mother and infant went to a farm wife, but the sprat was seized upon for two dollars by an ancient in a black wig who wanted a replacement for his recently deceased goat to run a treadmill churn. The child screamed at being separated from his mother, who shrieked and lamented most grievously, but the auctioneer told them to be grateful they weren't black Africans on the block in Charleston, where a far worse fate would certainly await them and the infant itself would no doubt have been torn from its mother's breast.
Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Page 7
