Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  A feebleminded boy of twenty was indentured out to work in a fulling mill. Several homeless girls in their teens were assigned as washerwomen or cookees on the canal boats. Then the master of ceremonies motioned for Birdcall to join him on the wagon tail. The goose girl hopped lightly up, signaling Morgan by running her finger down the side of her nose. Her feet were green from the goose leavings, and her eyes were as hard as green glass. Her hair was the color of barn paint. "Here's a mere slip of a thing just coming into her womanly own. With a mite of correction, a mite of stripping and whipping, she'll make a fine below-stairs serving gal. She was on the canal last summer with the Niagara Queen, and she can hoggee mules, sniggle-snaggle eels, serve breakfast hot, and warm your bed. She only wants a little correcting. Off we go, hi ho, hi ho, who'll take her for five dollars?"

  "There'll be no bidders," an elderly hoggee with a hook for a hand told Morgan in a confiding voice. "She has a ruputation, young as she is. No respectable householder will tech her."

  "I'll take her for a dollar and she'll have all the correction she needs," Mother Hubbard said. She shouldered her way up to the wagon and reached out and ran her hand up Birdcall's bare leg as if appraising a cut of meat at the market. Fast as a bull mastiff, Birdcall grabbed the matron's wrist and sank her sharp little white incisors deep into her thumb.

  Mother screamed and danced a jig and held up her bleeding thumb, roaring out that she'd take the bitch back for nothing.

  "Mr. Auctioneer," Morgan called out. "I'll pay you two dollars for her."

  "What? What are you, boy, a millionaire-man?" With a well-aimed kick, the auctioneer booted Birdcall off the wagon. "Take her then and be damned," he said cheerily, snatching Morgan's money out of his hand.

  "You and the hellcat are both tripe, boy," Mother Hubbard snarled at Morgan. "You are both dead as tripe. See if you ain't."

  Morgan motioned for the elephant to kneel and told Birdcall to climb up on the animal's back. Then he led the Caliph, with the girl atop it hurling scurrilous epithets at the harridan and the laughing throng, back toward the town.

  As they headed along the berm Morgan once again considered his situation. He needed to swing south toward Elmira to see his uncle John, who had been in the great battle at Gettysburg, in order to learn more of Pilgrim's disappearance. His uncle might also be able to tell him more about the killers who had escaped from the Union prison, particularly the clubfooted doctor. His cousin Dolton needed, above all, not to go south. Then there was the wilding, young Birdcall, who had attached herself to him like a canal leech, and the matter of what to do with the Caliph. Barring an unforeseen encounter with the doctor, his plan was nearly ready.

  A S DUSK SETTLED IN, the Spring Rout was in full swing between the wharf where His Whaleship was tethered and Mother Hubbard's whore-cribs and tavern at the far end of Canal Street. There were beer tents and open-air eateries serving ribs braised with maple syrup, Hudson River oysters on the half shell, and hot cross buns. There were ring-toss and coin-toss booths, guess-your-weight-and-age charlatans, tinkers, and pack peddlers hawking yard goods and scissors and genuine silver spoons with the brass showing through. There were dancers on stilts. And in the quagmire in front of Mother Hubbard's, near a swing-bridge over the canal, a party of maskers accoutered in feather boas, cloaks of many colors, and sashes glowing vividly in the flaring gas street lamps. Some of Mother's whores pranced in the mud attired in top hats, eye masks like highwaymen, and not one stitch else. Their gentleman escorts wore gossamer gowns in pastel hues. A gigantic butler in snow-white livery made a stately promenade along the street pouring a viscous, bright emerald liqueur from a retort with a long pipe neck into crystal goblets held high by the masked bacchanals. Some of the celebrants wore crowns of gilded paper, and all were miming the most clownish extravagancies that men and women deep in drink and debauchery are capable of. No one seemed to think Morgan's elephant extraordinary in the least. In fine, the spectacle reminded Morgan of nothing so much as a scene from a collection of passing strange tales by a writer named E. A. Poe that Pilgrim had sent him for his birthday two years ago.

  Dolt was sitting on a bench outside a beer tent with a supremely foolish grin on his face, toward which he was ever so carefully advancing, with both hands, a flagon of amber ale a good two feet high. "Morgie," he shouted. "Have you seen the Spanish Mute? The knife thrower? You won't believe what the fella can do. Why, he can pick a bluebottle fly off a fat man's arse blindfolded from thirty foot away."

  Morgan couldn't help laughing as, with the painstaking deliberation of a very drunken man, the Dolter tilted his tankard--in the process sloshing half of the beer over his jacket--toward a motley knot of equally intoxicated fairgoers just up the street. They were gathered around a man in a flowing black cape and a death's-head mask standing a little beyond the last street lamp. He had provided his own illumination with a flambeau made of lighted rags soaked in coal oil and wrapped on an upright spear with a razor-sharp flanged point, thrust handle-first into the mud. Leaning against the flaming projectile was a wooden spear extender, an ancient device Morgan recognized from a travel book Pilgrim had sent him, known as an atlatl. The blazing rags were bound just below the spear-point.

  As Morgan and Birdcall approached with the elephant in tow, the Spaniard in the death's head tossed, high above his head, three shiny blades that gleamed in the torchlight, and as each spinning, glittering blade descended, he plucked it neatly out of the air and hurled it with deadly accuracy into the blood-red bull's-eye of a target painted on the door of Mother Hubbard's outhouse.

  "Huzzah!" cried the masked onlookers. "Hurrah for Sir Skull and Crossbones."

  "Do it again, dumb Fernando," called out a creature in red tights, a red doublet, and a goat's mask surmounted by two red horns. "Do it once more and there's a double eagle in it for you."

  The mute shook his satanical head as if he disdained to repeat any part of his repertoire. But he pointed at the gypsy's cork-handled dagger in Morgan's belt sheath. Curious to see what the thrower might do next, Morgan passed him the blade handle first. With no more ado than a housewife throwing salt, the Spaniard hurled the dagger backward over his shoulder into the three tight-clustered silver throwing knives in the bull's-eye.

  The crowd clapped and showered the performer with jingling coins. But as Morgan approached the target to retrieve his knife, the mute suddenly cried out, "Tarry, young sir. There's money in this for you. Just tell me where be the nigger gal?"

  Whereupon Doctor Surgeon ripped off the death mask and reached into his carpetbag for his floppy-brimmed warlock's hat, which he clapped on his head even as Morgan grasped the butt of the scattershot hanging from his neck. As Morgan lifted the gun over his head, the killer snatched from his bag the long surgical knife with which he had sliced out many a poor soldier's heart and hurled it with a wicked sidelong motion, pinning Morgan's gun hand to the outhouse door by the fringed sleeve of his deer jacket.

  Doctor Surgeon seized the blazing spear, inserted it in his atlatl, and flung it too at Morgan. The boy ducked, but as the deadly missile sped past him, it nicked his earlobe and fastened his head to the door by his long hair. "How now, my young Absalom?" screamed the doctor, as Morgan tried to pull away from the flaming spearhead. "Do you render up the nigger's stone?"

  Morgan, pinioned to the wall by sleeve and hair, struggled to reach his scattershot with his left hand. Once more Doctor Surgeon dived into his bag, this time producing a battle-ax of his own devising, which he called his separation hatchet, because with it, prowling the battlefields in his bloody surgical gown, he had separated dozens of wounded Union and Confederate soldiers from their own heads. He threw the hatchet high into the air, caught it neatly by the handle in its spinning downward arc, drew back his throwing arm, and shrieked, "I'll see you in hell, Morgan Kinneson!"

  "Caliph!" Morgan shouted. Before the doctor could loose the hatchet, the looming bulk of the elephant towered over him on its massive hind legs then dropped all o
f his tremendous weight and force to trample the murderer underfoot. Again the animal rose. Again he came crashing down, like the ramparts of old Jericho, on the writhing remains of the vivisectionist. Emitting an enraged scream unlike any earthly sound heard before or since in the wretched canal town, the elephant reared and plunged onto his victim yet a third time.

  Later, when he had time to reflect on the death of Doctor Surgeon, Morgan recalled the gypsy's warning. "Elephants are dreaded enemies who never forget a wrong." He could only conjecture that the Caliph recognized the voice of the monster who had eviscerated his master. Even after grinding the doctor into a paste scarcely identifiable as the remains of a human being, if human he ever was, the elephant continued to trumpet. Morgan yanked his pinioned sleeve away from the outhouse door and ripped his head free from the flaming spear, leaving a singed hank of his dark gold hair fixed to the target.

  As the maskers scattered, Birdcall clung shrieking to Morgan. Someone fired off a shot, and Dolton came running. In the pandemonium, Morgan grabbed his cousin by the shoulders. "The elephant's yours to take care of, Dolt. He'll pull your boat, and I know you'll treat him well."

  "Morgie!" Dolt said, clasping Morgan's hand.

  "I'll see you when I see you, cousin," Morgan said, and started across the swing-bridge with Birdcall scampering by his side. He was sorry to part with the Caliph but certain that he had left him, as he'd promised the gypsy, with the best-hearted person he knew.

  Morgan looked back once. The awful iron box encasing the doctor's clubfoot sat in the street in front of Mother Hubbard's, as innocent as a boot in a cobbler's window. Otherwise nothing remained of the creature that could not be scraped into the canal the next morning on the blade of a coal shovel.

  Tally two, Morgan thought as he walked into the night with Birdcall clinging to his arm. He wondered what would become of the outsized black shoe. He wondered what would become of himself, adrift in a world compared to which the most fantastical depictions in E. A. Poe's stories seemed ordinary. He began to count his steps, hoping thereby to tether himself to what he could remember of his life at home in Vermont, where counting tallied hen's eggs and pounds of butter, not killers eliminated. He could not seem to get past two. First Ludi. Now the doctor. Tally two.

  It occurred to him that after Gettysburg Pilgrim might have fled north to Canada. Or returned to Glasgow to study with Lister. No matter. Morgan could not have turned back now if he'd wanted to. He kept walking.

  FOUR

  PERTH

  D awn broke over the desolate countryside, a forlorn study in browns and grays, muted tones for muted times when color, like hope itself, seemed to have been drained out of the land. Elsewhere in upper York State it was springtime, with bold new shoots of grass and nodding daffodils and spun-gold buds on the trees heralding the new season. In the hinterlands between Utica and Elmira all seemed dreary and diminished. The hills were not high enough to be called mountains, the streams too slow and narrow for true rivers, the kine in the farmyards as lean as those in Pharaoh's dream. The Hardscrabble, as this region was called, was not a war-torn land but for all the world looked to be, with its played-out fields grown up to thorn apple and river birch and juniper and barberry, its dilapidated houses and sagging barns with crumbling sandstone foundations, its dispiriting four-corner country stores reeking of coal oil and moldy cheese, horse liniment and manure. Poverty Ridge. Fool Hill. Second Coming. The River Styx. The names scrawled on the crooked signposts Morgan passed told well the tale of the Hardscrabble. Hollow-eyed women, widowed by the war at twenty, gaunt and aged at thirty, watched him and Birdcall from their dooryards. The children looked worm-ridden and rickety. The wind whistled out of the north. Morgan's musket and the scattershot hanging from his neck grew heavier with each mile, and he could not stop thinking of the war.

  Some of the recruits clamoring to enlist in Utica were scarcely older than he was. Soon enough they would see combat so bloody that his encounters with Ludi and Doctor Surgeon would seem like schoolyard scuffles. Yet from the moment they donned their blue uniforms, their thinking would all be done for them, often in faraway citadels by gray-bearded men who, when they came to die, would do so in their own beds surrounded by loving kin. No one could do a soldier's dying for him, or his killing, either. When it came to that, the killing, Morgan believed he was at a moral disadvantage, because he could never claim he was under anyone's orders but his own. Still, he had not been in a stand-up battle against an opposing army. He doubted his mettle in such a situation and wondered if other soldiers, however fervent in their cause, doubted theirs. All he knew for sure was that he had not yet been truly battle-tested and that when and if he was, he had no idea how he would conduct himself. In many of the books he had read, men's journeys led to self-knowledge. Thus far his sojourn had resulted only in more and greater uncertainties.

  Birdcall was an adept thief, stealing hens, ducks, eggs, wash off clotheslines. The child had no more concept of ownership than a cat. One afternoon she slipped up on a sitting goose and wrung its long neck. Flinging the goose over her back, she took to her heels as fast as a bounding fox. By the time the pursuing gander raised the hue and cry with its anguished honks, she was over the next hilltop, and that night they feasted on roast goose for supper. She could hook a steaming pie-plant pie off a farm wife's windowsill, coax a sucking lamb away from a ewe. They had a capital lamb dinner one evening near a town where a very foolish writer, in Morgan's estimation, had spun all kinds of yarns about Indians, scouts, frontiersmen, and an imagined way of life and fighting that never had existed, though in truth Morgan had greedily devoured every book Fenimore Cooper ever wrote. When he tried to tell the story of The Deerslayer aloud, Birdcall cut him off and declared that she never in her life would believe a word in any book, and under no circumstances was he ever to speak to her of books again. Watching her ravage a greasy lamb chop in the firelight, Morgan suspected that the girl could not read a single black letter. Yet she had a ceaseless curiosity and asked a thousand questions each day, often repeating them if his answer was jocular or unsatisfactory. Did he, at all, have any wives? If so, how many? Seven, Morgan assured her. One for each day of the week. How many men had he slain, and had he ever slain a woman? How old was he? How old was he when he made the beast with two backs with his first sweetheart? Yet for all of her wild talk and antic waywardness, there was something in Birdcall that he believed in. Something that made him think she might yet land feet-first if he could but find the right landing place for her. Frequently he looked back over his shoulder or off down the pike ahead at bends and likely spots for an ambuscade. The possibility that he might be killed by the remaining prison escapees before he found his brother was insupportable. The thought that Birdcall too might be murdered was worse yet.

  South of Cooperstown they cadged a ride with a rum-befuddled wagoneer carrying hops poles to Elmira. The driver claimed to be a great hand at reading character through phrenology. "For instance," he said, glancing at Morgan, "I can tell by observing sector twenty-three of your skull, which denotes mirth, that you love fun and wit and laughter. But sector eleven, just behint your ear, tells me that you also know how to make a dollar. How much then, soldier, for the pinkling?

  "The pinkling?"

  "The split-tail. What will you take for her? You're going to war anyhow, I expect. I'll give you two round silver dollars."

  "You'd soon offer me three to take her back," Morgan said.

  At this, Birdcall, who was riding between them, whooped like a crane bird. Then she whispered to him to sell her as dear as he could and that night she'd stifle the wagoneer in his sleep and they'd make off with his hops poles and be rich as dukes.

  The phrenologist, who continued to have recourse to his rum bottle with each new pronouncement, began to extol the virtues of hops, whose properties in flavoring beer he claimed to be the most sublime discovery in the history of the world since man tamed fire. He said that hops had a beautiful flower, yet the vines were
shy and retiring, growing mainly in the night, sometimes as much as six inches from dusk to dawn. Then he offered Morgan five dollars to rent Birdcall for an evening.

  When Morgan replied sharply, the hops advocate growled, "What would you do, young boy, was I to rotch out and take them firelocks away from you and boot you out of the wagon and drive off with the bitch?"

  Morgan had been staring at an alder tree on the far side of a little brook slipping through a meadow of ragged robin in full pink blossom. Hanging from a branch of the alder was a cone-shaped hornets' nest as big as a peach basket.

  "What would you do?" the drunken wagoneer repeated.

  "This," Morgan said, raising Hunter. "Forgive me, bees." With that he shot the paper hornets' nest clean off the branch.

  "I Jeroboam!" shouted the driver, reining in the horses, which had started violently when the gun went off. "But ain't you forgot something, boy?"

  "I doubt that I have," Morgan said.

  "Oh, yes, you have, too," said the wagoneer. "Now your chamber's empty. Hand the gun here and step down, or I'll batter out your brains with a hops pole and leave your carcass in the crick."

  Before the wagoneer had finished issuing this disagreeable ultimatum, Ludi's two-barreled pistol with the devilish engravings running wild over it was pressed against the side of his head. In the same motion Morgan pulled back the hammer of the shot barrel.