Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Mother Bremmen smiled. "No one knows the meaning of Perth. It's a mystery, like our own little lives."

  When Morgan finished his tale, Mother Bremmen wrote something with a goose quill and elderberry ink on a dry chestnut leaf. She handed the leaf to Morgan. "This give to mein former brother, Joseph Findletter," she said. "In Trout Run, about forty miles southwest of Harrisburg, three miles northeast of the river. Here, I'll show you on your strange stone." She pointed to the symbol, . "Algiz. It signifies, among other things, protection. My brother will protect you if necessary."

  "You don't believe I'm going to find him, do you?" Morgan said.

  "My brother?"

  "No, mine."

  "I never said that. Only that many a good man hath gone missing in the war and never yet been found."

  Birdcall lay quietly in the hammock, her eyes shut. Asleep, she looked no more than nine or ten. It occurred to Morgan that he had no idea how old she actually was. The cat was curled up by her side, content as only a cat can be. Morgan knew he must be on his way before the killers realized their mistake and returned to the island.

  "Mother," he said. "You need someone to help tend your garden, cut your wood. The child needs a home. You could care for each other."

  Instantly Birdcall opened her eyes and sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Morgan could tell from her expression that she was torn between wanting to go on with him and wanting to stay with the motherly tree woman and her purring ship's cat.

  "You need to go to school and learn to read and write," Morgan told her.

  "There's a schoolhouse between here and New Canaan," Mother Bremmen said. "School keeps there five months a year."

  "No school!" Birdcall cried. "You can't keep me in a cage like your littly owl, old woman."

  "Then wilt teach thee myself from the Bible. Thou must know thy scripture," the tree woman said.

  "I've never lived in a tree at all," Birdcall said.

  "I want you to take good care of Mother Bremmen," Morgan said.

  "Pass me that scattershot and I'll take good care of you," she wailed out. "Don't you see, Morgan Kinneson? I loves you, I do. And I hopes you'll die of the Black Death for abandoning me."

  Morgan touched his hat to the woman, who clasped him in her strong arms the way his mother had when he had come into his teens and considered himself too big to be hugged but had not really minded.

  "Here," Mother Bremmen told Birdcall as Morgan started down the rope ladder. "Wilt show thee a new thing. From this book, wilt teach thee thy letters."

  "Make me learn them if you can, crone," Birdcall shrieked.

  Morgan grinned.

  "Look now," the woman said. "Dost see this gentleman with the two slanted legs and the crossbar like an apple-picking ladder? It's an A. The first letter in the alphabet. And here is a B that thy name, Birdcall, begins with."

  "It does not at all," Birdcall shouted. "Never in all Christendom does me name begin with any such outlandish figure. And your A looks like a drunk man on stilts. What's next? In your so-called alphabet?"

  "Why C is next, girl. See it here? 'Call,' as in Birdcall, beginneth with this goodly letter."

  "Never, never, never!" cried the girl. "We'll have no vile, sneaking C in me name."

  "I tell thee there is a C in thy name," insisted the woman, who, kindhearted though she was, had as strong a will as any woman or man Morgan had ever met.

  "Then I'll barter me name away. I'll go before the highest magistrate in the land and change it to Nebuchadnezzar. What's next, now? Pray Jesus we'll have no more C's."

  This world, Morgan thought, this woeful, wondrous world. Dawn was breaking. Across the river on the east bank the trees, shrubs, grasses, and springing weeds were twenty different shades of green, all reflected in the river. He got into the hearse-boat and began to row south, his musket and scattershot primed and at the ready beside him.

  FIVE

  ALGIZ

  A nd it was full spring as Morgan Kinneson worked his way down the river in his little floating hearse, past the blue-green of spruce and firs, the leafy, ever-changing green of maples and lighter green of oaks, the emerald of the sedges cloaking the banks, and the green of growing corn and wheat and clover in the fields, all reflected one shade darker in the crawling river. There was no sign of his pursuers. Toward evening he studied Jesse's stone yet again. So far it had done him little good. The more he pondered it, the more puzzling it seemed. Yet this much was clear. Whoever he might have been and wherever he had come from, Jesse Moses was no ordinary Underground passenger. Big Eva had said that Nauthiz, Morgan's rune, meant that everything was harder than it seemed and that everything was connected. His quest for Pilgrim was turning out to be far more difficult than he had ever imagined. And he could not help wondering, Were Jesse Moses and his stone somehow connected with Pilgrim's disappearance? Might the killers be hunting Pilgrim as well as him and the mysterious runaway slave girl? If so, why? A year ago, at home in Vermont, Morgan had come across Pilgrim's well-worn old solid geometry text. In it was many a recondite problem involving cones and cylinders and the devil alone knew what other configurations. Morgan had set himself the task of solving each problem in the book, and with persistence, he had done so, if only to prove that he could. If only he could unlock the mystery of Jesse's stone.

  At dusk he entered a long bend where the river hooked east and then dived southeasterly. He tied up on an island just above Harrisburg, and in the summery twilight he located a crawfish under a flat rock in the shallows, the blue-shelled crustacean fast scuttling backward out from under the rock, Morgan's hand descending faster still. He baited the crawdad on a hook and with it caught a bass on the cane pole his uncle had given him. He cooked the fish on a rock shelf by the water. The bass was flavorful but no more filling than fish usually is. As night settled over the wooded bar, the river frogs began to croak. He and Pilgrim had used homemade tridents fashioned from hay forks to spear frogs for their tasty legs along the edge of the Great Northern Slang. On his fishhook he fixed a bit of red cloth cut from his shirt and cast it like a fly up into the bulrushes. Five casts yielded five lolloping bullfrogs. The cut-off legs jerked and twitched as if still alive in the fry pan his uncle John had given him. They tasted good but wanted salt. A generous sprinkling of salt and a good thick slice of his mother's bread, liberally buttered.

  The lights of Harrisburg lay scattered over a ridge on the north side of the river. As Morgan contemplated venturing into town to buy bread, he hummed, rather tunelessly, for he was no musician, a catchy refrain to himself. Satan's shoe, Satan's shoe. With horror he realized that he'd been hearing the ghoulish ditty for some time from somewhere down the river.

  Morgan kicked the coals of his campfire into the water and scrambled into the hearse-boat. He began to row hard toward the singing, which faded, then rose.

  We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree.

  Davis and Pilgrim and the gal all three.

  How did these demons know about Pilgrim? Their raft, its plunder from the zealous millennialists covered with canvas, was moored to a wharf at the foot of the hill leading up to the lights of the town. The dreadful singing had ceased and the killers were nowhere to be seen. Morgan put in a hundred yards below the raft. Musket in hand, scattershot dangling by its cord from his neck, he headed up a dark and narrow street toward a dimly lighted tavern.

  It was Saturday night, and the Sign of the Yellow Beaver Tooth was packed with roisterers. The Beaver Tooth was a wretched kennel scarcely bigger than a henhouse and fully as foul, with a rank buffalo robe for a door. Inside, a press of rivermen stood under a smoky low ceiling at a counter made from a rough plank supported at each end by a spigoted beer barrel. Suddenly a huge black man blocked his way.

  "Where did you come by that double hog's leg round your neck on that string, boy?" the black man said in a very deep voice. "I'll take it off you for five dollars."

  "It's not up for sale," Morgan said.

  Th
e giant grinned, showing teeth as large as piano ivories. "Step this way and I'll show you a sight you ain't seen before." He wore a blue vest with a silver watch fob; a Navy Colt revolver stuck out of his enormous waistband. "It will cost you only one dollar."

  "I don't have a dollar."

  "Well, you should view it anyway. I runs the show." The man put out his hand. "Swagbelly, some calls me. I have the questionable privilege of providing entertainment for this high-toned establishment tonight. Come along, boy. What I want you to see is out back. Consider this part of your free and accepted education."

  Morgan could not figure a way to get past the giant without shooting him. The back room, a crib off the rear of the shed, was open to the sky and surrounded by a rude paling of pointed stakes. A knot of rivermen and townies was gathered around an enormous white bull raised a few feet above the dirt yard in a blacksmith's ox sling. The bull was bellowing and foaming. Morgan stepped onto an overturned apple box for a better look. Strapped to a board below the animal was a naked black woman, her legs spraddled wide. Cut into the leather ox sling was an opening through which extended the bull's engorged member, a full three feet long.

  Morgan started through the crowd toward the white bull. "You weren't meant for this," he said to the bellowing animal.

  He placed the muzzle of the scattershot against the animal's temple, thumbed back one hammer, and shot the white bull dead with the four-ounce ball. He whipped out the gypsy's dagger and cut the ropes fastening the woman to the plank and pulled her, dazed, to her feet. He threw his jacket around her.

  "You've kilt old Zeus!" King George roared, going for his revolver. "Hand over the runaway, goddamn you. Where is she?"

  As George drew his Colt, Morgan buffaloed him full in the face with the butt of the scattershot, clouting him down in his tracks.

  "Why, boy, you've leveled old Swag," a man with half an ear cried out.

  "Free suds tonight, boys, drink up!" Morgan shouted as he led the groggy woman through the stinking robe over the entrance and into the street.

  "Who?" the woman in his jacket mumbled as he helped her down the hill. "Who you?"

  "A friend," Morgan said. "Just a friend." But he felt more desperate, more untethered from his own friends and family and all that he thought of as his previous life than he had felt since he discovered Jesse Moses hanging dead from the rowanberry tree. He felt like a man at war, not with an enemy wearing a different-colored uniform, but with his former self.

  B Y DEGREES, as Morgan rowed down the night river in the hearse-boat, the black woman came to her senses. She told him that her name was Mercy Johnson and that she had run away from her plantation in Tennessee. So far from being safe and free in the North, she had been seized by the enormous slave killer and forced to couple with the bull in taverns and wherever men who were no better than beasts came together to get drunk and work evil. George had kept her in a state of semiconsciousness by lacing her drinking water with laudanum, but tonight she had poured it out and begged water from the spectators at the show. She'd planned to escape that very evening and run back to her plantation. "At home they was never nothing but harsh and cruel to Mercy," she said. "But they didn't make her lay with no bull. You Northerners more wicked by far. You say you free the slave, then you use the slave so. Old Swagbelly, King George, want Mercy to peach on she gal cousin, run away just before me. He say tell him where that gal cousin headed or he gone let old Zeus rut on she till she dead."

  "What is your cousin's name, Mercy? Did she have a little boy with her when she ran?"

  "Never you mind no names," Mercy said. "Mercy headed back home."

  "You listen to me, Mercy Johnson," Morgan said. "You don't need to go back south. I'll find you a safe place where no one will ever mistreat you again. Will you trust me?"

  She looked at him, at the scattershot slung round his neck, the musket leaning over the thwart, the long dagger dangling from his belt.

  "All right," Morgan said. "I won't ask you to trust me. I'll just ask you to trust yourself. Will you trust yourself?"

  "Trust herself? Mercy done a good job so far trust herself. Run away from the Grace plantatia and land in a bull show because she won't peach on she cousin. What you grand idea?"

  "Can you row, Mercy? Can you row a boat?"

  "Row a boat? She reckon."

  "Good enough. I'm looking for a little stream called Trout Run that empties into this river a few miles below here. We'll go up it a short piece and hide the boat back in the bushes. Come tomorrow night, you row back upriver. Go right on past Harrisburg. Past that bad place where I found you. Just upriver there's a big wide bend. You'll find an island at the foot of that curve in the river. Put up there during the day. Come dark again, row upriver. You'll come to another island about half a mile long. Go up the easy water on the east." He pointed. "This side. Put in at the cove in the island and you'll find a path through the briars. Walk uphill about one hundred steps. There's a big old chestnut tree there with a little house in it. Call up for Mother Bremmen. Tell her Morgan Kinneson sent you. That's me. She'll see that you get to safety."

  "Trust herself," Mercy Johnson muttered. "Call up Mother Bremmen, live in they tree."

  "That's it," Morgan said. But what sort of union drove fugitives back to slavery again? What sort of war laid waste to whole states, then allowed such evils as he had seen to reign unchecked? Why hadn't someone arrested King George and his gang of madmen? Was there no one left to rise up and denounce the savage coupling of a bull and a woman in the very capital of a state long renowned for its humane enlightenment?

  Even Jesse's precious rune stone seemed a sham. Where on the stone was the pictograph of a runaway slave being forced to copulate with a bull? A madman killing fish because his sons had been taken from him? Women, children, and ancients being bid for on the block in York State, the heart of abolitionist country? A beautiful chance for those wishing to see something of this life away from home, boys. The bloodiest war in American history, which had already taken the lives of more than half a million men? A beautiful chance to travel? The absurdity of it all. The futility. And yet Morgan had not, when he'd had the opportunity, finished off King George. He was evidently not the killer he'd thought he was, though he might yet have to become one. That the gang would continue to pursue him until they killed him and obtained the stone or he killed them, he had no doubt. He resolved that the next time he saw his pursuers he would shoot them on sight, without compunction or remorse.

  He thought about asking Mercy once more for the name of her runaway cousin, but he feared doing so would only make her more suspicious of him. At first he had wondered whether she might be the runaway girl that the killers were hunting, but that did not seem to be the case. He wondered what the connection could be between Jesse, his rune stone, and the pretty fugitive, Mercy's cousin. Like the river he was following, the Susquehanna, the mysteries he needed to unravel seemed only to deepen as he drew nearer to Gettysburg and the Southland. He gave Mercy two of his three remaining dollars and left her and the hearse-boat in a copse of willows beside Trout Run just above its juncture with the Susquehanna.

  M ORGAN WALKED UP into a deep ravine where, over more time than he could imagine, the stream had cut its way down to its present bed through alternating bands of red and yellow sandstone. In the gorge all was green--the mosses on the rocks in the streambed that had broken off from the cliffs, the ferns (it bothered him not to be able to tell their names, other than the common edible fiddlehead, as Pilgrim could have), the hemlock trees clinging to the ledges above. What little sunlight filtered into the heart of the ravine was tinted green, like the sky just after a thunderstorm. Yet Trout Run was well named. Dark little speckled trout like those he and Pilgrim had angled for on the mountain at home darted away from him. He longed to cut a wand for a pole and look under a rock for a wriggling worm to bait his hook so he could feel the sudden electric tug of a trout in the spring-green canyon and be a young boy again.

  Hig
h overhead a natural rock bridge spanned the gorge. Morgan sat on a tilted slab of limestone in the brook and looked up at the stone arch and tried to imagine how it had been formed. Again, Pilgrim would know. Or at the least, from his geological studies with the professor, he would be able to cipher out what had likely happened. Was the stone bridge the roof of a former cave carved out by running water eons ago? It looked to be about sixty feet long and twenty feet wide and sixty or seventy feet thick. Ferns and blossoming laurel spilled over its sides, creating a wild and lovely park in the sky. He had seen a daguerreotype of the Natural Bridge of Virginia, once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Here was a miniature duplicate of that bridge in William Penn's Land, a splendid natural wonder he never would have seen had he not left Vermont, though he would have traded any number of such marvels to know that Pilgrim was alive and well and Jesse safe in Canada.

  He hiked up out of the gorge into a sweet-smelling morning. Plowed fields, lush pastures, blossoming orchards, hedgerows abloom with white drifts of dogwood. The farmers tilling their fields wore black hats. Women and girls in black dresses and bonnets tended dooryard flower gardens more colorful and orderly than any Morgan had ever beheld. The little boys wore dark hats like their fathers, a comical and touching sight.

  He stopped to ask directions at a crossroads store beside the brook, a dank and narrow emporium with a shaded gallery in front beautified by several tobacco-spitting, staring louts. The store reeked of harness oil and pickles. "Who are the black-clad farmers?" he asked the storekeeper, a lanky man in a full-length white apron.