Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "They call themselves Brethren. They're Quakers but not Quakers," the storekeep said. "Dutchers who won't go to war, though they were eager enough to help start it, concealing and abetting other people's runaway property. Now that they've touched off the powder keg, they'd rather lay up treasure on earth and leave the rest of us to put out the fire."

  Morgan shrugged. "They seem like a decent enough community," he said.

  As he headed up the road beside the brook, Morgan watched a boy in a man's black hat swing a well-fed trout out of the stream. The boy removed the hook and dropped the trout into his wicker creel. "Good fish!" Morgan called.

  Under his hat, the young fisher had straw-colored hair and blue eyes. He was smiling shyly. "Danke," he said, offering the pole to Morgan. "Wilt try thy luck?"

  "I guess I'll save my luck," Morgan said, smiling back.

  "Dost go to war?"

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "Mein vater says war is bad."

  "Well, I can't argue with him there," Morgan said. "Good luck with your trouting."

  "Gute luck at the war," the boy said gravely.

  The brook flowed along the base of a round hill wooded on top. A railroad track snaked out around the hill, and Morgan could hear a train coming and loud singing. Ahead in the meadow a girl with the same straw hair as the boy, hers mostly hidden by a black bonnet, was driving a brindled cow and a red bull calf up toward the bars in a crooked rail fence, gently swishing a willow branch with the leaves still attached along their clean flanks. It was a pleasing sight, the girl and the animals. As the train steamed into sight, starting its looping circuit around the hill, the cow paused in the field for the red calf to suck. The milkmaid waited patiently. Morgan overtook her and touched his slouch hat. "Good morning, miss."

  "My goodness," she said. "Didst fall off the train?"

  "Fall off the train?"

  "Yon war train." She pointed with her switch toward the locomotive. Now they could hear the words the men on the train were singing.

  When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.

  We'll give him a hearty welcome then, hurrah, hurrah.

  Oh, the men will cheer and the boys will shout ...

  It was a troop train, twenty rolling carriages packed with blue recruits headed south. Some of the soldiers had spilled over onto the tops of the cars, singing and shouting and dodging cinders from the locomotive. One fired his gun off into the sky. Morgan watched them from the meadow. They seemed to be having a jolly time of it. Some were drinking out of glass bottles that sparkled in the morning sunshine.

  "I'm looking for the Findletter place," he said. "Joseph Findletter?"

  "Just beyond the hill," the girl said. Morgan wondered if she was the fishing boy's sister, if all of these Dutchers had light hair like his own. The bull calf pulled hard on the cow, which swung around and butted it with her head. The calf was almost too big to suck.

  Morgan touched his hat to the girl again. "I'll cut over that little knoll, I reckon. Those boys on the train might ask me to come along with them and not take no for an answer. I thank you for the directions."

  And the ladies they will all turn out ...

  Heading up into the little woods, Morgan could still hear snatches of the soldiers' song. Partway up the cow path he turned to wave to the girl and the boy, now trotting through the field to join her. The train was quite close to the cow and calf. A beanpole officer in colonel's epaulets, standing beside a small general with four silver stars on his hat, threw his empty bottle into the brook. Before Morgan had any idea what he was about, the stringbean raised his Yellow Boy carbine and shot the brindled cow through the heart. The animal collapsed onto its side as the calf continued to nuzzle its teat. The girl stood stunned. Then she grabbed the little boy's hand and made for the pasture bars, leaped over them, and cut for home through a field of young rye.

  The blue-clad cow killer was now screaming in rapturous staccato phrases that made no sense at all. His miniature comrade the general fired in the direction of the retreating children. The straw-headed children were running across the field of sprouted rye, the girl's black cap was gone, her yellow hair flying. Morgan sprinted over the hilltop and down the other side to yet another rail fence. The tracks lay about a hundred yards off across a pasture spangled with daisies, buttercups, and the bright orange hawkweed his mother called Indian paintbrush.

  He lay behind the fence, waiting. The Findletters' farm buildings sat across the pasture to his left, as peaceful as a painting. As the girl and her brother ran into the yard, a big yellow-bearded man emerged from the barn. The locomotive pulling the troop train huffed out of the curve circumventing the hill. The soldiers on the car roofs, led by the drunken colonel and general, were singing a slow, sad song. The two officers had linked arms and were swaying to the rhythm of the song and the rhythm of the wheels.

  So green grows the laurel and so does the rue,

  How sorry I am that I parted with you.

  Against the next meeting our joys we'll renew

  When we'll change the green laurel for the red, white, and blue.

  The entire contingent on the train roof was standing with arms joined as they sang and swayed. Some of the men wept openly, and Prophet Floyd bawled for love of his country as he and Steptoe, disguised as Union officers, whinnied out the green laurel song. Then, "Morrrgan," cried out Floyd. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

  Morgan sighted on Floyd and touched off his musket. The Prophet yelped as Morgan's ball grazed his hat. The two killers sent a hail of bullets toward the crooked fence and woods, but Morgan was already racing hard across the pasture toward the train, pulling the scattershot on the lanyard over his hat. The bullets came on, ripping splinters off the fence rails. Morgan ran low, angling to intercept the car directly in front of the Findletters' lane. The train was picking up speed on the downgrade toward the river. A searing pain in Morgan's left shoulder spun him around a half turn. Still he stumbled on. He could hear the bullets whining past his head. The train continued down the grade and out of sight beyond a windmill with a cobblestone base and white-and-blue wooden sails.

  Morgan stopped running and put his hand to his shoulder. It came away wet and warm and red. He toppled over into the white-and-yellow daisies and lay weeping in the meadow, not from the pain of his wound but because if he died here, in a hay field in Pennsylvania, he would never find Pilgrim or learn his fate.

  * * *

  "W E MUST SEND THEE SOUTH, boy, to quell the rebellion. I truly believe thou couldst do so by thyself in a short week's work."

  The man talking to him spoke in the deepest of baritone voices. He had a craggy face thatched over with a yellow, spade-shaped beard extending from just below his cheekbones to the middle of his chest. It was as if the yellow beard itself was speaking in a deep voice. His eyes were blue as cornflowers.

  Morgan looked around. On the walls hung guns of every description. Squirrel rifles, six-shooters, carbines, rifle muskets. A workbench was cluttered with dressing rods, punches, bits, and bullet molds. Nearby sat a great swage-block gun anvil. Remembering the train of blue boys, Morgan thought he'd been taken prisoner and conveyed to some kind of arsenal. Then he recalled the man running to the girl and boy and realized that he was in Joseph Findletter's gun shop. Also that he was in considerable pain. His left shoulder ached as though someone had struck it full on with the smith's anvil hammer. He was naked to the waist, and the shoulder was heavily bandaged.

  From behind the beard came a strange noise. The smith was chuckling. He reached into his apron pocket and removed a small chunk of metal and set it on Morgan's bare chest. "I tonged that out of thy shoulder, boy, while thou slept the sleep of the dead. It's a minie ball. We dared not call the doctor for fear word of thy whereabouts would travel. But the wound is clean. The tongs were red hot from the fire, and I scalded the flesh around the opening as well. The bullet chipped thy collar bone and penetrated the scapula, but thou art not the fi
rst two-legged creature I've cobbled back together. If thou intendeth to go to war against the entire Union army, however, thou must lie still. In the meantime I thank thee for defending mein kinder. Thou art a brave boy. I saw thee assault the train. It was a grand sight."

  "I was angry."

  "I must hope not to make thee angry then. Dost read the newspapers?" "Not much lately."

  Morgan fingered the bullet, cold on his chest. It could not have weighed an ounce. It was cylindrical and seemed grooved, though flattened on the end where it had smashed into his collarbone and shoulder.

  "Canst endure a small laugh? Mirth, you know, is the sugar of life."

  Morgan nodded. But he was puzzled. How could this jovial man have turned out his own sister?

  "Listen," Joseph Findletter said. "From the Lancaster Telegraph, fresh off the press this morning:

  On this Tuesday at approximately 9:15 o'clock in the morning a large party of REBEL RAIDERS attacked a troop train near the Trout Run general mercantile. The cravenly REBELS had laid an ambuscade for the train at the foot of Snapfinger Hill, from whence they rained down upon the unarmed recruits a murderous hail of small-arms fire from behind the cover of a rail fence. The COWARDLY TRAITORS then attempted to SWARM the train, which they rushed from both sides of the tracks. Their numbers were estimated at upward of one hundred strong. Their ghastly traitorous yell was heard as far away as West Lancaster. Under the direction of two officers, a colonel and a general who departed the troop train at York, a few brave boys on the roof of the rail carriages were able to hold them off until the train got across the river at the Billups Bend trestle. The survivors of the gang, most of which was SHOT TO FLINDERS, are now being hunted down.

  Post Script. The treasonous leader of the Reb outlaws stopped at the Trout Run store just prior to the MILITARY ACTION against our troops. There, in an act of unparalleled AUDACITY, he held the proprietor and several venerable patriarchs of the region at gunpoint and tried, unsuccessfully, to cow them into reciting the Confederate Oath. He is described as young, with thick unkempt light hair falling to his shoulders, heavily armed, above six foot tall and well set up, with mad gray eyes and an ALTOGETHER MURDEROUS ASPECT. Posters bearing a tolerable likeness have been distributed by the Lancaster County High Sheriff."

  Morgan mustered a smile. Was there ever such a famous outlaw as the outlaw Morgan Kinneson, wanted for treason and murder in Will Penn's Land? Yet he was deeply concerned that the killers had left the train at York. Even now they might be combing the region for him and for the two Brethren children as well. But Joseph Findletter shook his head. "Thou art perfectly safe here," he said. "No one has ever discovered Algiz."

  The smith nodded at the window over the workbench. Carved into the pane was the character , which Morgan recognized from Jesse's stone. Outside the window he could see leafy green treetops. Algiz was located deep in the woods.

  "This is my gun shop," Findletter said. "I no longer sell guns, but I come here from time to time to make them. Making guns is what I do. What dost thou? Art with the army?"

  "I'm with no army. Didn't you look at the stone around my neck? Your sign is marked on it."

  "Young sir. Never, unless you departed this life, would I or any of my family molest thy belongings. We do not fight. Nor do we steal. Nor do we pry into another's possessions or affairs."

  Morgan lifted the stone on the thong over his head and silently handed it to Joseph Findletter. While the blue-eyed smith intently studied the etchings, Morgan closed his eyes. Talking had tired him. His shoulder throbbed. In the hidden gun shop he breathed in the scents of well-oiled metal, powder, wooden stocks, dead ashes in the coke forge. Also the deep green of the woods outside.

  "Where didst acquire this?" the smith said finally.

  "From a black man named Jesse Moses." Morgan thought he saw a flicker of recognition in Joseph's eyes. "Your sister sent me here," Morgan said. "Mrs. Bremmen."

  "I no longer have a sister."

  "Yes, you do, Joseph Findletter. And what you're doing to her is flat wrong. Shunning your own family? That's just killing someone a little slower. In my haversack there's a tree leaf with a message printed on it for you. From your sister. You still do have a sister."

  "Nein."

  "Yes. Do you believe in Jesus?"

  "Of course."

  "Who did Jesus shun? No one. Shunning's about the most cruel punishment I've ever heard of. If a tall man and a short man, neither right in the head, come calling, notify me immediately. Also be on the lookout for a huge black man with a stove-in face. Whatever you do, don't let them near your children. I'm going to shut my eyes and rest now."

  When he woke again it was night. He was weak and thirsty, but the fever was gone and he thought he might recover. Especially when he looked up and saw, gazing down at him solemnly, instead of the blacksmith and his talking beard, the girl from the meadow. A bull's-eye lantern glowed on the workbench behind her, and in its light she looked beautiful.

  "Did they catch that big gang of audacious rebels that attacked the train?" Morgan said.

  "Newspapers do not tell the truth. I am here to change your dressing. Also I have brought you some good soup. My father thinks he should not come for a time. He thinks the authorities looking for the 'gang' may be watching him. Or, worse yet, the men you warned him of."

  As the girl removed the old bandage and cleaned his wound, then rewound strips of sheeting around his shoulder, he said, "I met your aunt. She lives in a tree."

  "Ja."

  "Your father has put her aside."

  "I know. Do not move, please. My name is Gretel."

  "You're sparing of words, Gretel."

  "Words bring trouble. Fighting words brought about the war. I tell this to my children."

  "You don't look old enough to have children."

  "I mean my scholars. I am a teacher."

  "You don't look old enough to be a teacher."

  "Next month I am sixteen. Then I will be marriageable and have children of my own. My father, the smith and horse doctor, did an excellent job removing the bullet from your shoulder. He does much of our doctoring for us--I mean us Brethren."

  "He's a good man. Probably he saved my life. But he shouldn't put aside his sister."

  "Perhaps not," she agreed, tightening the bandage. "And you should not shoot at people. Even bad people. I teach my children first to tell the truth, then to practice kindness. We must love our enemies."

  "That's easier to do when they aren't shooting at us."

  She pursed her lips. "Fighting is always wrong. So I was taught. So I teach my small scholars."

  "If you knew my enemies, you might think differently. They were firing at you, Gretel. And at your brother. They killed your cow."

  "Then we must pray for them that they will see the error of their ways."

  "I'll leave that department to you. How long do you reckon before I can travel?"

  "Three, perhaps four weeks."

  "Four days is more like."

  She shook her head over such stubbornness. Morgan wished she would take off her bonnet so he could see her hair again, but he supposed that the bonnet went with the rest of the costume. Her tanned, shapely hands on his shoulder and neck were warm and gentle, and a slight smile played at the corners of her mouth, as though she was secretly glad that he had fought for her and her brother. She was slender yet full-figured. Morgan wondered what she would be like if she were not a Brethren. He wondered if it might be possible for him to love this girl--or any girl. After all he had done and must yet do, how would he ever be worthy of anyone's love?

  L YING FLAT ON HIS BACK in the smith's gun forge, Morgan found himself starved for reading matter and took that as a good sign. But what was he to read? The Brethren read little but the Bible. Morgan asked Gretel to bring him the gazette containing the story of his attack on the troop train, which he devoured from front to back like one of his beloved travel books. After being away from books for a month, even the ad
vertisements made good reading. Poultices for aching teeth. Harnesses. A new seed-boring machine. Some of the notices offered rewards for runaway slaves:

  Run off from the subscriber, a likely yellow wench of 17 or 18 years of age, answering to the name Slidell. A girl of uncommon height, quick parts, and supreme insolence. A five hundred dollar reward, in United States currency, will be paid for the return of this fugitive to Arthur Dinwiddie, Grace River, Tennessee.

  Reading this notice, which no newspaper in Vermont would ever have printed, rekindled Morgan's determination to enlist in the army as soon as he found Pilgrim.

  Over the next several days he grew stronger. Joseph Findletter said he was a good healer, like certain mules he had doctored, too set in his ways to be laid low for long. "The pot and the kettle," Morgan said, and Findletter smiled. Gretel, who was on summer vacation from school, since the Brethren children were now needed in the fields at home, took him on slow walks over her father's farm. Things were done differently here in the land of the Brethren. The sandstone barns had brown tile roofs and double walls filled with stone rubble and were impregnable to weather, warm in winter, cool in summer, clean and sweet-smelling year-round. Gretel showed him how the thatched roofs of the stone outbuildings were fashioned from rye stalks tied off in bundles and woven through the rafters with hazel withes. She showed him how flax was soaked in water to soften the outer husk, then dragged through a scutching board with iron hackles and pounded into spinning thread. She said that because cotton had been raised by slaves, the Findletter family wore only wool or linen made from flax. She stitched elegant quilts for which she compounded her own dyes. In Gretel's personal garden grew calendula flowers for yellow, beets for madder-red, woad for blue. She too believed that mirth was the sugar of life, and she teased him gently as they picked tiny wild strawberries along the fishing brook, a full morning's picking barely enough to make a shortcake. "I wish thou wouldst stay and become one of us," she told him. "Hast read the Bible?"

  "I have. I take from the Bible what I find useful and ignore the rest."