Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "What would you pull it with?" the colonel said.

  "A pair of oars," Morgan said. "In half an afternoon, I could cobble this into as tight a little rowing boat as any on the river."

  "No boats!" Birdcall cried out. "I'se a-scart of water."

  "You'll be fine," Morgan assured her.

  The idea of proceeding from Elmira to Gettysburg in a metamorphosed hearse intrigued him, and appealed to his sense of irony, though whether because it reminded him of his own mortality or the killing fields of the South, or because it betokened the deaths of the killers he was now pursuing even as they pursued him, he could not tell. In fact Morgan was a rude fist with a hammer and nail--a gun was the only tool that had ever felt comfortable in his hands--but with his uncle's help it required only a few short hours to dismantle the ghastly thing and convert it into a very serviceable craft. A bit boxy, to be sure, and rather awkward to maneuver, but fine for the little Chemung and the broad, brown, shallow Susquehanna, which cut down through three mountain ranges of Pennsylvania, swept past Harrisburg, and then bowled along to Maryland and the huge estuary.

  The commandant provided them with oars and a long cane pole with some line and hooks, also a letter to the southern general, his old friend, requesting that Morgan be given safe conduct and whatever additional assistance in locating his brother that he could provide. What Morgan's uncle had been unable to do was shed any new illumination on Pilgrim's disappearance at Gettysburg. The past summer, on the second of July, Pilgrim had been ministering to the fallen of both sides under heavy fire in the place called the Slaughter Pen when he had simply vanished. Presumably, like so many others, he had been blown to shreds by a mortar. Uncle John had all but implored Morgan to return to Vermont, telling him that the unknown dead buried in mass graves at Gettysburg were being exhumed and transferred to the new cemetery on the hilltop this very spring, and Pilgrim's remains would surely soon be identified. "No, sir," Morgan had said. "I reckon they won't be."

  Morgan asked his uncle to write to his father explaining that he intended to proceed to Gettysburg, where he would relay to his family whatever news concerning Pilgrim, be it good or ill, that he discovered. And he asked John Kinneson to inform Quaker Meeting that the second killer, like the first, was no more.

  As for the mysterious symbols on the Balancing Boulder and on Jesse's stone, all the colonel could tell him was that he believed that a black man had assigned the runes to certain Underground conductors, including Morgan's grandfather Freethinker Kinneson, many years before. The colonel had selected the sign for his station after moving to Elmira to teach before the war, simply because it was this rune on the Balancing Boulder that his eye seemed most drawn to.

  Morgan and Birdcall left Elmira in the hearse-boat late that afternoon, letting the current carry them down the river, which smelled strongly of fish and mud and spring. At first Birdcall, who couldn't swim a stroke, was frightened. As they drifted past bankside farms, little mill towns, islands with newly leafed-out swamp maples and willows still partly under water from the spring freshet, she began to enjoy herself.

  A warbler flashed, a small bright flame in the limbs of a bankside elm. Birdcall called to a redbreast worming a plowed field, mimicked the low gurgling of a mating bluebird. Morgan and Birdcall, floating down the river on a warm evening in the season his mother had called the soft of the year. The girl buzzed low to a yellowthroat in a hazel bush overhanging a backward-running eddy speckled with foam like his mother's meringue pie, the sugary meringue toasted brown on its rim. She answered the peabody peabody peabody of a white-throated sparrow in the spire of a hemlock where a feeder brook tumbled down a gorge into the river. A red-wing, its orangered shoulder patches flashing like the epaulets of the preening Zouave bravos in Ute, called from a cattail above a skunk cabbage as large as a real head of cabbage. Konkeree. Konkeree. Back whistled the girl, konkeree, as natural as the bird itself. Yet the river was no haven from the pitiless universal code of survivorship informing all life on earth. A white-tailed field mouse swimming across a small lagoon vanished in a furious thrashing spray. "Hi!" Birdcall cried out with a child's satisfaction. Ahead, a pair of shiny green mantises, six inches long, were mating on a willow branch overhanging the current. As the boaters passed the romantical insects, the female swung her horizontal mandibles around and, without so much as a by-your-leave, snipped off her partner's head. The headless male mantis stolidly continued to perform his part of the transaction. "Good on you, old gal!" Birdcall cried out to the long green spouse killer and hooted with laughter. Morgan had been sorely tempted to leave the child with his uncle, but what the old widower could do for such a wilding he had no idea. He knew he could not keep her safe much longer. The remaining escaped killers might well be hunting him at that very moment.

  At sunset they passed a gang of several young boys wearing soldier caps made of paper. They were conducting a scouting mission along the riverbank, taking prisoner bullfrogs, worms, salamanders, minnie fish, and turtles, all of which they threw into a copper washtub of boiling water, which they called Andersonville. Morgan supposed that he might have done the same a few short years ago. What was the war itself but a crueler tale yet, writ large across the land? Pilgrim had written to him that in some southern states slavery was referred to as the "peculiar institution." To Morgan, spinning on down the current in the green dusk with Birdcall, mankind was of all species the most peculiar, and the cruelest.

  As darkness fell, they kept to the middle of the river. Cabins with yellow lamplight in parchment windows sat on hillsides, and they glided past a town where lumber arks were drawn up to the shore. On one raft men danced to a squeeze box. Birdcall slept like a dead girl as Morgan rowed on into the night, his blistered hands wrapped in holey wool stockings. Toward morning he put into the mouth of a creek, where they covered the hearse-boat with fragrant honeysuckle blossoms and slept side by side in the former bier, the girl's frail arm flung over Morgan's shoulder. The next night they made forty miles by Morgan's reckoning, though once he dozed off and they nearly plunged over a spillway. He woke just in time to row out of danger and lower the boat around the dam works in the darkness.

  They passed a troop of men with headlamps coming out of a hole in a hillside. An hour or two later they came to a lighted city that turned out to be no city at all but a paper manufactory, and the stench of sulfur and smoke clamped down on their throats like poison gas. The river bends were sharp and frequent. Morgan pressed on. He detected no sign that he and Birdcall were being pursued. Soon it might be safe to travel by day.

  I F THE RIVER AT NIGHT was an alien place of strange illusions and dangers, the daylight world as well had turned topsy-turvy. An itinerant preacher, hitherto unknown in the region, had been vouchsafed a vision with the agreeable tidings that he was the New American Messiah. Unto him had been accorded a revelation in which one hundred thousand of his followers were directly taken up to the celestial sphere, translated on the spot like old Elijah, without first having to undergo the unpleasant formality of dying. The disciples of the New Messiah, though they numbered merely in the hundreds, were confident that the time of their ascendancy was at hand. Were not the signs everywhere? Within the last year the war had come north to Pennsylvania with a singular fury. Across the land multitudes had clashed like the Israelites and the Philistines, an eye for an eye and a bullet for a bullet. From these infallible signifiers, the Messiah and his acolytes had adduced that the end-time had arrived. In Oswego a black-and-white milch cow had given birth to a Percheron colt with two heads. Hail the size of small cannonballs had fallen on an onion field in a town called Allegheny, killing a scoffing nonbeliever named Sweeny Bill McGuire. In Binghamton a precocious nanny goat had pranced into a dancing academy and bleated out, "Repent, for the judgment is nigh." A floating hearse with two young angels, an avenging Gabriel and a female sprite wearing feathers, had been sighted on the Susquehanna hovering in the dawn mist above the current. Handbills proclaimed that on May Day, a
dherents of Floydism should adorn themselves in white sheets and ascend to the greening hilltops, at which time the iniquitous world would give up the ghost and the faithful would be taken up to heaven streaming radiant trails like comets. Yea, before the gleeful eyes of the redeemed, the unanointed would then be cast into eternal roiling flames.

  Every hamlet and mill town and riverside city from the Great Western Canal to the Mason and Dixon Line was abuzz with talk of the millennium. On May 1, as Morgan and Birdcall made their way down the river into full spring, they passed families and entire communities of Floydites, wrapped in bed sheets and muslin curtains and even yellowing old wedding dresses, proceeding solemnly to hilltops overlooking the river in accordance with the vision of the New Messiah. Others clambered onto their rooftops or scaled church steeples. Some held forth in tongues and some blasphemed other religions, claiming Floydism was the only true path. Birdcall was beside herself with laughter, but Morgan feared that this new frenzy sweeping the land was yet another manifestation of the violence done by the war to reason and good sense. When half a million men had died of cannonshot, grapeshot, minie bullets, infection, typhus, cholera, and other diseases, and much of the divided land itself laid waste like cursed Gomorrah, these shenanigans struck Morgan as simply another outbreak of the epidemic of madness gripping the universe.

  The Prophet himself seemed ubiquitous. On the night before the Taking Up of the Chosen, he had been sighted preaching in a country church near Canandaigua, lining out a hymn sing in Allentown, and performing an exorcism in Gloversville upon a seven-year-old girl possessed of a demon with a guttural voice who had dared to call Floyd a fraud and his apostles jackasses. In designating May 1 the Day of the Ascension, the Prophet had urged his apostles to render up to him their silver and gold coinage and to slaughter their fowl and beasts and raze their houses and even their churches. For after the Uptaking there would no longer be any need for money or temporal abodes or any worldly enterprises whatsoever. As Morgan and Birdcall floated south, they passed houses ablaze, crops and rich timbered woods afire in every direction. One man was using a ram with two great whorled horns to plow salt into his goodly tillage. Another husbandman had split open his tiled silo and spread out the ensilage therein for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Yet another was shoveling fresh dung from a cart into his parlor through broken window sashes while his wife and grown daughters warbled out Hosannahs. One devotee poleaxed his prize herd of Jersey cows. Householders who had not come under the sway of the Prophet had armed themselves and their families and were guarding their homes and fields against the rampaging Floydites. Fire bells tolled. The hills were covered with worshippers in scraps and tatters of white, some holding infants in lace dresses on high in the mild spring sunshine, others having lashed themselves to treetops, windmills, and wooden coal-mine towers to gaze at the sun through shards of smoked glass and sing the praises of Floyd.

  Who, well pleased with that which he had wrought, now lay waiting with his comrade the actor on a small stolen ferry-raft in the mouth of a tributary near the riverine settlement of New Canaan. Morgan and Birdcall had just come into sight upriver. Prophet and Steptoe, arrayed in white themselves, were expecting them. Dimly outlined in the twilight, the hearse-boat floated like a cork as Morgan rowed past the tributary and the girl trailed one small bare foot in their wake. Steptoe trained the sights of his Yellow Boy square on the rowing lad's temple and squeezed the trigger. The pin fell on the empty chamber with a small click, which carried over the river's flat surface in the noiseless dusk like a hammer blow.

  "You fool!" Prophet hissed. "You forgot to load."

  "That's her," Steptoe said. "Oh, dear Jesus. That's the gal."

  "It is not," Prophet said, staying Steptoe's hand as he tried to load his rifle. "The bitch we're after is black as your boot."

  "I want the child, black or white, quick or dead," Steptoe begged. "I must and will have her."

  "And so you shall, brother," Prophet said. "Be patient, and so you shall."

  Morgan glanced toward the tributary. The raft was well hidden in a copse of bankside willows. He saw nothing untoward, only the close-ranked willow trees. He rowed on.

  Prophet and Steptoe poled the raft, laden down with the spoils of the Floydites, into the gentle current as the hearse-boat passed out of sight around a bend. Prophet began to sing, in honor of the minstrel Ludi Too, Dec'd, a dirgeful hymn of his own composition.

  Satan wears a sinful shoe.

  Mind now, Morgan, or he'll slip it on you.

  Render up the gal, boy, render up the stone.

  Render unto Prophet and he'll leave you alone.

  Downriver, as the spring night settled in around them, Birdcall cocked her head. "What's that? Do you hear someone a-singing?"

  Morgan shipped his oars and listened. Now he too heard the singing, heard his own name wafting down the river through the dusk. Render up the gal, boy, render up the stone. Followed by hysterical laughter not of this world. They coming. Who is coming, Jesse? They coming. Propping Ludi's scattershot and his charged musket on the thwart of the hearse-boat, Morgan began to ply his oars in earnest.

  "Our father who art in heaven," Birdcall started to recite.

  "Hush," Morgan told her. "Crawl into the bier and lie flat. Quick as ever you moved. Get in."

  She did. He rowed. Render unto Prophet ... The singing faded into the night of a land benighted, upon which little light had fallen for many years or would for years to come.

  A LONG WOODED ISLAND LOOMED ahead in the middle of the dark river. Seeing that the hard current ran west of the island, Morgan rowed the hearse-boat down the slack water on the east side and nosed into a small cove lined with swamp maples. There he and Birdcall waited in the darkness. Presently they heard the singing again. Tomorrow at rising sun, Satan's going to stop young Morgan's tongue. Morgan readied his musket and scattershot. Far off over the fields across the river the moon was rising. The singing faded out of earshot again, and Morgan knew that their pursuers had followed the main channel on the west side of the island. For the time being he and Birdcall were safe. He drew the hearse-boat onto a mud flat and, taking her hand, headed along a path toward a large tree outlined in the moonlight on a knoll overlooking the rest of the island.

  As Morgan looked up into the tree he noticed a small house shaped like a boat about twenty feet off the ground, cunningly guyed to the branches with ropes and shrouds. On its deck stood a woman in a peaked bonnet.

  "Well," she called down in a friendly voice. "Art afraid of a shunned creature who dwells in a tree like a spectacled owl?"

  "What kind of tree?" Morgan asked.

  "A chestnut," the woman said. "A great spreading umbrageous chestnut tree. There is none other like it for fifty miles around."

  "It's a fine-looking tree," Morgan said. "We don't have chestnuts in Vermont."

  "I don't imagine you do," the woman said. "From what I've heard of Vermont, it's the next place to the North Pole for cold and misery. Here." She unfurled a rope ladder down the chestnut's massive ridged trunk. "Come aboard, thee and thy sister. We'll have a palaver, a sea confabulation. Only leave thine artillery on the ground below. I don't allow weapons aboard the good ship Perth. She flies a neutral flag."

  Morgan sent Birdcall up the rope ladder and through a hatchway into the ship house, then went up himself, leaving his musket and scattershot at the base of the tree. Inside all was snug and shipshape, with the tree woman's household appurtenances and clothing stored away in wooden lockers, a sleeping hammock strung from the limb rafters, and four round portholes to admit good light by day. The decking planks, which were roped to tree-limb floor joists, had been holystoned to a soft sheen. A compact sheet-metal galley stove sat on the deck, its bent pipe jutting out of the side of the house. A lighted whale-oil lamp swung over the table. On a perch in a hanging cage sat a saw-whet owl, and a mewing black ship's cat arched its back and purred when Birdcall began to make of it. On the inside and out
side of the hatchway cover someone had carved the sign that appeared on the drawing of the treehouse on Jesse's stone: .

  "I loves this vessel," Birdcall said. "Was you ever a sailor woman, mother?"

  "I have sailed the world over in the good ship Perth without ever leaving this tree," the woman replied. "Yet not a single nail was used to construct it, for it was nails, thou knowest, that pinned our blessed Savior to His cross." In the light of the binnacle lamp the tree woman appeared to be in late middle age. She was quite stout, with a plain, good-natured face and sad, kind brown eyes. She was dressed all in somber gray, and her head was covered with a gray bonnet.

  "My former brother, the smith Joseph Findletter, built this ship for me after my man and our two boys were killed in the war at Nash's Ford. Hast heard of the battle there? Thousands murdered on both sides, neither able to claim victory. My brother shuns me because I refused to shun my men after they decided to go to war. I, in turn, now shun the earth where my fallen men lie entombed."

  "What kind of smith is your brother?" Morgan asked.

  "Why, any kind thou needest, son. He makes the best clipping horseshoes in Lancaster County, free-swinging fireplace cranes, deep-thrusting plows, guns--oh, he maketh lovely guns for hunting, though none for warring. He made my ship house in less than a week and never drove a single nail nor spake one word to me as it was a-building. Then he and the other Brethren banned me to it. But what brings you young people to New Canaan?"

  "I'm looking for my brother, Pilgrim Kinneson," Morgan said. "He went missing in the war at Gettysburg."

  "Oh, child," the tree woman said. "I fear that multitudes of brothers and sons and fathers as well have gone missing in this war."

  As Mother Bremmen, as the tree woman was called, fixed them a late supper of fish and vegetable stew, the wind came up from the west and the tree boat swayed in the limbs of the chestnut. Birdcall fell asleep with the rumbling cat in her lap and her head beside her plate. Morgan picked her up and placed her in the woman's hammock. Then he and Mother Bremmen sat by the light of the oil lamp while he recounted his story and traced out his route thus far on Jesse's stone. When he came to her sign, , he asked what it was called and what it meant.