Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "Rein in," Morgan said.

  "Let's take his wagon and sell his poles," Birdcall said. "Let's skag him and plant him and see if he grows in the night."

  "We're going to step down now," Morgan said to the wagoneer. "If you try to double back afoot or lie in wait for us up yonder, I'll cut you down like those bees. Hi, git!"

  He slapped the near horse on the rump, and the team trotted off down the track. The driver looked back with a baleful glare. Morgan drew an admonitory bead on him with the scattershot, and the rum-soak cursed and whipped up his team. Morgan did not think the wagoneer belonged to the gang of killers, but in such times as these there was no way to tell friend from foe. He redoubled his vigilance yet felt more vulnerable with each mile south.

  They came upon a potter in a roadside shop selling stoneware that was light gray and brown with delicate blue forget-me-nots painted around the rim. The potter, a benevolent-appearing, grand-fatherly guildsman, invited the two young wayfarers to look into his clay kiln. "Cobalt-blue glaze with an orange-peel finish can stand TWENTY-TWO HUNDRED DEGREES. CAN A SLAVEHOLDER?" he suddenly roared out. On he raved, assuring them that his kiln was hot, hell's fire hotter still. Morgan and Birdcall backed off through his racks of cider jugs and vinegar jugs, milk pitchers, jars for putting up maple butter, deep crocks for pickles. The war was still some hundreds of miles away. The madness it had fomented infested the entire land.

  C OLONEL JOHN KINNESON looked across the desk at his nephew and the girl. He wished he were back in his classroom at the Elmira academy, where he'd taught before the war, inhaling the comforting schoolroom scents of floor wax and chalk dust and the musty pages of his familiar old Caesar and Cicero. And the faintly pungent aroma of ink, a scent he loved as much as the first sharp redolence of fallen leaves in Elmira's long and lovely autumns, with these two sitting at their desks waiting their turn to recite. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres ...

  The pair looked so innocent, for all of their strangeness. The green-eyed girl wearing some kind of feather-bedecked sack like Puck in the play. His young nephew--the commandant could not think of Morgan as other than a boy, though he was man-grown and then some, six feet high and broad through the shoulders and draped about with enough weaponry to make John Kinneson's old friend from the border wars, the southern general himself, gape in wonder--reciting as chilling a tale as any the colonel had ever heard. Morgan spoke quietly and in measured cadences, choosing his words deliberately so as not to exaggerate. And all the while he was recounting his Dantean narrative, the boy was watching and watching with those level gray eyes, his light hair--save for the burned hank he had left on the doctor's target--hanging to his shoulders, quite like the boys from Georgia and Tennessee at whom just last year the commandant had been shooting with intent to kill. Four short yet interminable years ago, the colonel would not have believed a word of his nephew's story. Now he had no difficulty giving it full credence.

  The colonel, for his part, had no news of either Jesse--the old man had not, so far as he knew, passed through Elmira--or a runaway young woman with a little boy. After he recounted to Morgan what scant details he possessed concerning the surviving three condemned men--the necrophiliac child killer who styled himself an actor, the crazed Prophet, and the slave killer, King George--the boy asked him to describe the escape. The commandant paused for a moment, thinking back to the March dawn a month ago when he'd stepped out on the porch of his wood-frame farmhouse atop East Hill and looked down at the prison where, soon after sunrise, the war criminals were to be hanged. Then he told Morgan and the girl the following story.

  T HESE WERE TO BE the first executions at the Elmira prison camp and, Colonel John Kinneson fervently hoped, the last. With the possible exception of King George, the doomed men were as mad as hatters. By any measure the colonel was aware of, each of the killers was entirely deranged, and he did not hold with executing bedlamites, however unspeakable their deeds. Standing in the cold dawn on the porch, looking down at the prison in the valley below and puffing the cigar his wife forbade him to smoke in the house, sipping the bitter chicory coffee she'd made him by lantern light when they rose, the colonel concluded that the condemned men were living emblems of everything that was insane about all wars.

  Not that the Union officer and long-time Underground conductor, leaning against a wooden porch pillar inscribed with the sign and pulling on his boots one-handed, had any earthly idea what should be done with such demons. Nor did he intend to lose a moment's sleep over their fate. It was simply one more question that he did not know how to answer in a time of many unanswerable questions. Less than a year ago he'd been fighting in Pennsylvania, an officer in charge of a feared unit of sharpshooters, a veteran of seven battles. Then, in a fraction of a moment, he'd lost his left arm. It had simply vanished from just below the shoulder, torn clear by a cannonball fired from exactly where he never knew. He'd been tossed this sop, overseer of the hellhole prison camp known as Helmira, because it was near his home. Running the prison without adequate food and medicine for the captured soldiers in his charge was bad enough. Then a week ago the killers had arrived under heavy escort with express orders from the war secretary for their execution.

  The colonel doused the stub of his cigar in his mostly undrunk coffee and tossed the wretched stuff onto the frozen dooryard, where a few March snowdrops blossomed through the icy crust. This afternoon he'd pick them for his wife, a fine, strong woman who, while he was away fighting, had not only worked their small farm but continued to run their Underground station, Ehwaz, harboring all the passengers who came their way and sending them safely along to John's brother in Vermont and so to Canada.

  The sky over East Hill, a deep indigo when he'd brought his coffee out onto the porch and lighted his cigar, was now the color of a dead-ripe orange. It was nearly time to go down the hill and preside over this latest charade. In the past several years John Kinneson had seen--and participated in--enough madness that he thought he should be used to it by now. But he was not.

  From the prison, through the barred window of the stockade house, came the strains of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," plaintive and funereal. The mad minstrel was at it again with his hammered dulcimer, the strangely mournful tune now acquiring volume, floating out the cell window over the parade ground, past the blockhouse and up the hill to the assembled spectators--the mayor of the town was just arriving in his new phaeton with his two young grandchildren--the tune eliding into "Rock of Ages" as smoothly as dawn elides into day, and then, before you could quite say how, "The Green, Green Grass of Home."

  The commandant glanced up the hill above the farmhouse. Four crows appeared over the ridgetop, silhouetted dark and spectral against the red sky. No, by Caesar, not crows--tall black plumes bobbing like sooty featherdusters on the heads of four coal black horses cresting the hill in the cut through the woods and pulling a long black hearse sleigh escorted by four riders in blue uniforms. The colonel could hear the metal runners hissing on the snow, blue in the shadow of the woods. Blue snow, black horses, salmon-colored sky. The driver was beginning to come clear in the strengthening daylight as the hearse started down the steepest pitch of the hill. He too wore a blue uniform. But what mainly accounted for his macabre appearance was a large pair of emerald goggles extending halfway up his forehead and well down over his cheeks.

  Now the colonel could hear, floating up from the stockade house, the sweet treble notes of Ludi's dulcimer playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The spiked ice shoes on the feet of the trotting horses pulling the hearse sleigh gripped the silvering crust on the road as surely as horse hooves shod for summer gripped the packed dirt surface on a bone-dry day in August. The green-goggled driver looked like Death at a ball. What tasteless spectacle was this that the war secretary had staged? Why so elaborate a send-off for five murderous lunatics? The appointments of the hearse were ornate enough for a governor. As the Black Maria on runners glided by his house, John Kinneson noted that the door pull
s were polished brass, so too the side rails inside the partially curtained glass panels, where he supposed the pillowed biers lay waiting. How was it that the condemned men, the very dregs of the Union, merited such panoply? On the black-fringed roof of the runnered hearse, held fast with gold and red cords, was a vast ebony coffin. The commandant supposed that it must be intended for the slave killer, King George, who was close to seven feet tall and weighed nearly four hundred pounds, so gargantuan he'd had to ride a Percheron plow horse while chasing down the runaways he killed as examples. The unearthly dulcimer music, the horse-drawn hearse and black-clad goggled driver--it was a scene from a tale told by a crone to frighten children.

  Suddenly the goggled man stood up. Gripping the reins in one hand and the left front ornamental post atop the hearse in the other, he roared, "Open the gate, goddamn you, in the name of the president."

  It was evident that the sleigh hearse was not going to slacken its pace. The gatekeeper, known to some of the prisoners as Cerberus, swung wide the reinforced door. As the hearse approached the entry the commandant realized what was wrong. It was the escort. Why four hale cavalrymen when soldiers and horses were so desperately needed in the war? Even as the timbered door swung open to admit the black hearse and its black-plumed horses, the commandant knew that this was all wrong.

  Suddenly a great deal was happening at once. The standing driver in the green goggles began to crack the reins over the backs of his horses, flinging his arm wildly from side to side. Guided by the two cavalrymen in the van, the horses pulling the sleigh rushed through the entryway onto the prison parade ground. The other two riders stood in their stirrups, then leaped onto the backs of their horses and swung up onto the parapet beside the blockhouse, which they stormed like an entire army of blue men, shooting down the guards with their sidearms, commandeering the two swivel guns and blasting the gallows and scaffolding to flinders, reloading and sweeping with grape canister the assembling soldiers and the barracks beyond.

  Then, sitting up in the large coffin atop the hearse, another blue man flung away a black crepe covering to reveal a strange machine. It was not a cannon, exactly, nor was it a swivel gun like those in the blockhouse. The machine was silver in the sunrise and beautifully fitted out with gleaming brass, like the brass appurtenances of the runnered hearse. It was operated by means of a crank handle on the side, and it spit bullets out of a ventilated barrel fed by a large revolving chamber at a steady rapid rate, chattering like a trip hammer as it mowed down the phalanx of guards marching to the stockade house to bring forth the condemned men. The commandant, now running into his house, boots and all, returning with his Henry Big Fifty, had read of such a weapon. What was it called? In the meantime the driver of the hearse was lashing the plumed black horses around and around the parade ground, trampling the wounded and dying under the basket-sized, befeathered hooves as his cape billowed backward. Inside the guardhouse Ludi Too was beating out "Turkey in the Straw" on his dulcimer, his sweet voice ringing out over the scene of the massacre. "Ha, ha, ha, hee, hee, hee. Turkey in the straw and you can't catch me." One of the blue riders was busily hurling glass jars of Greek fire at the barracks, officers' quarters, commissary, and dispensary. The jars shattered, plastering the roofs and wooden sides of the buildings with a volatile paste of phosphorus and sulfur, which took flame as soon as air hit it. The one-armed commandant loaded the Henry awkwardly, standing the rifle barrel-up against the porch rail, kneeling down, and wedging the stock between his knees while he inserted six .50-caliber bullets one at a time with his single hand. He cursed his missing arm as if it had abandoned him of its own malign will.

  The careering hearse stopped in front of the stockade house. A blue escort leaped off his horse and produced from inside the sleigh a heavy chain, one end of which he wrapped around the wrought-iron upswept curve of the sleigh runners, the other through the bolted ring-handle on the stockade house door, which the black horses yanked free of its hinges as if it were made of kindle. The strains of the dulcimer were louder now, then were drowned by another raking burst from the big silver gun on the hearse. What the deuce was that gun called? The commandant had read about it in a War Department publication. The thing had been invented by a physician and was heralded as a superweapon that would win the war for the North in a month. That had been more than a year ago. Colonel John Kinneson was incredulous that at such a moment as this his forgetfulness would fret him so. He balanced the loaded Henry on the porch rail and sighted on one of the two blue men in the blockhouse with the swivel guns, a good five hundred yards away. Maddeningly awkward as it was to shoot with a single arm, it all came back to him. He'd always been a natural marksman, able to concentrate so completely that he scarcely heard the crack of his rifle as he shot the blue man on the right swivel gun squarely between his shoulder blades. He lowered the gun stock to the porch floor, knelt, wedged it between his knees, lever-jacked another shell into the chamber, steadied the gun on the rail, and fired at the second man in the blockhouse. This time he missed. A foot-long splinter jumped off the railing beside the swivel gun and flew directly through the hearse. Why would a physician sworn to heal the sick and do no harm invent such a fiendish machine? What was it called? Levered, steadied, aimed through the peephole over the open end sight--no windage this calm morning, but a good hundred-foot drop in elevation to take into account--and shot the man operating the silver weapon. The five condemned men ran out of the stockade house and swarmed up onto the hearse, pulling Yellow Boy repeating rifles out as they clambered aboard, firing at soldiers and fleeing spectators alike while the prison burned. If the commandant could only get a line on the driver, he might stop this yet. Some of the other prisoners were loose, fleeing across a cut cornfield toward the river. A few remaining guards were firing on them. Wounded guards and townspersons were screaming. The remnants of the scaffolding and gallows were afire, the stockade house blazing.

  The black hearse horses, guided by the mounted blue men, raced toward the gate, itself in flames. King George picked up the blue gunner slumped across the silver weapon, lifted him high over his head, and flung him at a guard on the stockade wall near the gate, who was training a rifle on the hearse driver. The corpse flew a good fifteen feet through the air, blue arms and legs aspraddle, and knocked the rifleman off the wall backward. As the hearse passed through the gate, the Prophet stabbed the fallen guard with a splintered length of stockade paling, shouting "SOUEE, HERE PIG PIG PIG," like a man at a hog-calling contest. Ludi began to beat out that next-to-impossible-to-sing new "Star-Spangled" number. The hearse raced past the cornfield toward the river. Ludi Too was sighting a Yellow Boy back toward the hilltop. Before the former commandant could draw a bead on him, the Henry burst apart in his hand, the end of the barrel peeling in two, a groove in the stock materializing as suddenly as the commandant's left arm had vanished at Gettysburg, the lever-action handle flying past the colonel's head. He was left holding the skeleton of a rifle with a split barrel. At first he thought the gun had blown up in his hand. Then he could hear the dulcimer again. Ludi had set down his rifle and picked up his mallets and was playing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," and the commandant realized that the musician had deliberately shot his gun out of his hand at seven hundred yards. Ludi was toying with him. "Hurrah, hurrah! When Johnny comes"--more rifle shots--"Well, the girls will cry, the boys will shout ..." A small roadside church on the river road burst into flames as if of its own accord as the death sleigh rushed past. Then the sleigh was concealed in a copse of yellowing willows by the river.

  "I suppose they need you down there," the commandant's wife said. She was standing beside him on the porch, her hand on his shoulder.

  Gently, almost tenderly, he set down the remnants of the Henry, as if it were a fallen comrade. "I suppose they do," he said, and started down the porch steps to see what order he could bring forth from the mayhem below.

  In the past three years Colonel John Kinneson had had many horrifying experiences. He had se
en a tinder-dry forest catch fire from shelling and incinerate alive hundreds of fallen men lying helpless in the path of the flames. Once, after running out of ammunition, he had covered the retreat of his men by beating off the advancing enemy with the stock of his gun, which he'd swung by the barrel like a war club. When Pickett's men were swarming up the hill toward his company at Gettysburg, he had fought with a two-headed felling ax. On the second day of that battle he had seen his own nephew, the beloved elder son of his beloved elder brother, a noncombatant surgeon, descend into the Slaughter Pen, medical bag in hand, and disappear without a trace, no doubt blown off the face of the earth by mortar fire, though of friend or foe it was impossible to say. But in all that time he had never witnessed anything like the scene below him now.

  Gatling. That was it. The secret new weapon was called a Gatling gun, named for its physician inventor. But the commandant knew that neither it nor any other weapon would win this war. It was a war that no one could ever truly win, no matter who surrendered first. As he headed down the hill toward the inferno, he would have given nearly anything for a cup of real coffee to fortify himself. It didn't seem like a lot to wish for. Just before the escapees abandoned the hearse for the horses hidden beside the river, a mile or more away, Liza called his name from the porch. Her voice sounded surprised. At the same time he heard the distant, sharp report of Ludi's Yellow Boy. He spun around to see his wife collapse over the porch railing and pitch headfirst into the frozen dooryard, spattering the carved sign on the pillar, the railing, and the snowdrops he had intended to pick for her that afternoon blood red, changing his world forever.

  M ORGAN STARED AT THE BED of the shot-up hearse sleigh, abandoned a month ago by the escaped prisoners beside the river just south of the prison, where they'd split up to ride their separate ways. As he studied the wrecked old Black Maria, a thought occurred to him. He turned to his uncle. "With a hammer and saw and a sack of two-penny nails, anyone could turn this into a neat enough little conveyance."