Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "That sounds much like freethinking to me."

  "To me it sounds like thinking. I don't stop thinking when I open the Bible."

  From the barnyard, where he was repairing a wagon wheel, Joseph shot the two young people a look. He was coming to like this outspoken boy from the mountains of Vermont. He decided to catechize Morgan further.

  That evening at supper Joseph said, "We Brethren, friend Morgan, have a proverb for war. 'Better an unjust peace than a just war.'"

  "My brother, Pilgrim, would probably agree with you. I wouldn't."

  "Well," Joseph said, "we have another proverb. 'Truth is a medicine that must be given at the right time.' Let us discuss the matter another time. You are a good young man, Morgan, whether we agree or not. You protected my children."

  "We must obey the father," Gretel said to him primly after supper. "Both the Father in heaven and His representative here on earth. My aunt was always quarreling with my father."

  "Shunning's wrong, Gretel," Morgan said. "I know it and so do you. No doubt war is wrong too, but sometimes it may be necessary. I believe that this one the country's fighting is necessary. John Brown understood that. So does President Lincoln."

  That night, lying on his narrow cot in the old gun forge, he pored over Jesse's carved stone by candlelight. He suspected that his father, and perhaps Pilgrim as well, knew more about the runic system than they had told him. Clearly the runes had been inspired by the ancient and mysterious symbols on the great Balancing Boulder atop Kingdom Mountain. Morgan wondered if the whole scheme could be a joke played by Pilgrim, with his great gift for satire and mimicry. What Morgan would not give to hear his clever brother take off the Brethren with their solemn old "thy" and "thou." And Pilgrim could have done the gypsy and Eva and little Birdcall, with her sharp tongue and good heart. Sometimes Pilgrim mimicked Morgan's purposeful mien and unswerving single-mindedness. Pilgrim could always make him laugh. Now in the candlelight Morgan studied Pilgrim's sign, , which appeared in the Great Smokies. He looked at it so long that he could still see the , dancing on the plank wall above his cot when he reached to blow out the candle. He looked again more closely. This was no mirage. Someone had carved his brother's rune on the wall of the blacksmith's shop.

  As Morgan stared at the rune, trembling with the excitement of his discovery, a plan began to take shape in his mind. It was worthy of the subtlety of Pilgrim's great hero, Odysseus, though Morgan couldn't imagine wily Odysseus, or Pilgrim either, getting himself wounded by the cowardly Steptoe and Prophet in the first place. That night he dreamed about being at home on Kingdom Mountain fishing for trout with his brother. "What are you waiting for, soldier?" Pilgrim said to him in the dream. "Are you going to get on with your campaign and find me or not?"

  He woke at dawn with his plan complete. He would have to move fast, for his presence here placed Joseph and his family at great and terrible risk. He must leave as soon as possible. But not, he hoped, without further information about his brother. And not without a better means of defending himself. Where he was headed, his ancient, short-range musket would be of little use to him.

  "Kindly check my bandage for me, Gretel," Morgan said the following morning. "See here where it rubs on my shoulder?"

  She bent over, a strand of her golden hair falling out of her bonnet and catching the early morning sunshine pouring through the window inscribed with the sign of Algiz. Morgan slid his good arm around her and pulled her head close and kissed her.

  "Nein," she cried, jumping back. "What ails thee, Morgan Kinneson?"

  "Other than my wounded shoulder, nothing at all," he said.

  Gretel shook her head but Morgan smiled. From the slight, lingering pressure of her lips on his he knew that, Brethren girl or no, she too had felt some passion.

  F OR MORGAN KINNESON FROM the northern mountains of Vermont, there now came a peaceful interlude in the heart of the land of the Brethren. How, he wondered, as he and Gretel walked hand in hand through her garden, could people who dressed so drably, who made a sovereign virtue of self-denial, and who lived so rigidly--much more rigidly than Christ himself, who after all was a seasoned old dog of the open road who loved to drink wine at weddings and tell stories to his fishing cronies--how could these people grow such beautiful flowers? His mother cultivated flowers, but not like Gretel's rows of deep red peonies, tall spice-scented irises, poppies orange as the belly of a spawning trout, lupines not just blue but every hue of the rainbow.

  Morgan and Gretel and the boy, young Joseph, swam in the deep green pool beneath Jacob's Ladder, as the Brethren called the great stone arch above the Trout Run. The icy water of the spring-fed brook provided more relief to Morgan's healing shoulder than the hot compresses Gretel applied.

  "Let me cut thine hair," Gretel said.

  "I'll let you cut it when you cut yours."

  "That will be when I am married. Then I must cut it."

  "Not if you married me," Morgan said, and the girl laughed, her cheeks as pink as her own June roses. But that very afternoon the smith took Morgan aside and said to him, "If I make thee a rifle, wilt go away and not return?"

  "Yes," Morgan said, detesting himself.

  Joseph nodded. "Very well, then. Thou wilt help build thine own rifle. Working together, we can do it in one week. By then thou shouldst be well enough to travel again."

  As he walked his ox into the treadmill that ran the great bellows above the forge, Joseph said, "We will make the new gun from thine old gun, like Our Lord turning old wine into new. See how beautiful the stock is? Curled maple, among the very strongest and most handsome of woods. And we'll use the long barrel, as well, for the barrel of the rifle."

  "My grandfather cut the maple tree for this stock in the small of the moon in January when there was no sap in the tree," Morgan said. "So the family story goes, at least. Before the gun was passed on to me it belonged to my brother, Pilgrim. Then Pilgrim decided he was a pacifist like you folks."

  The smith gave no indication that he recognized Pilgrim's name, though Morgan watched his face narrowly from the tail of his eye. The double bellows blew a powerful stream of air onto the glowing bed of coke and oak charcoal in the forge. Findletter's blue eyes gleamed with pleasure. He was happy to be making a gun again.

  As he took apart the old musket, Joseph's hands seemed to work independently of his head. Over the years all of the craft and knowledge of gunsmithing had been incorporated into his strong sure hands, and he no longer had to think of what he did, any more than Morgan thought what he was about when he raised the weapon to fire. The burning coal and charcoal had a fierce, acrid smell. Joseph inhaled deeply, as though the scent of the forge were oxygen to him.

  Ordinarily sparing of words, the smith talked steadily while he worked. "A gunsmith, Morgan, is a specialized blacksmith. The carbines I made by hand are now made piecemeal by machines in thy New England manufactories. But those machines only imitate what people did first. Machine-made guns never truly become a part of thee. When thou make and assemble a gun thyself, each part becomes a part of thee. Dost see? No winch 'em squinch 'em the trigger thou pinch 'em and then thou flinch 'em. Nein. Thy gun will be made."

  They spent most of the first day taking apart the old musket and pouring the molten homemade steel for the new lower barrel, which would fire heavy shot at close range in a way that would make Morgan's scattershot pistol seem like a child's popgun. The groove in the swage block anvil formed half of the circle of the lower barrel. The smith's concave hammer shaped the other half. The barrel was formed around a mandrel rod, which Joseph drove out when he finished the process. He let Morgan wield the swage hammer as he shoved the barrel along the groove in the anvil. The hammer rang loudly through the glen, clang clang clang clang, until it seemed to Morgan as though it and the gun barrel were extensions of his own two arms. Joseph's beautiful homemade swage anvil, sometimes known as a dumb anvil or buffalo head, had scrolled corners and a six-pointed star over the sign of Algiz, . On one end was
a horn for forging horseshoes, on the other a gentle curve for welding wagon wheels. The anvil was pierced with several holes for truing the mandrel bars. Thus they forged the lower barrel, on the first day.

  On the second day Joseph showed his apprentice how to bore and remill his old round musket barrel, which would sit atop the lower barrel, using a gun-boring machine invented and patented by the smith himself. The hand-cranked Findletter boring device drove a pulley attached to a reaming rod that screwed itself into the muzzle of Morgan's musket barrel. The tapered, squared-off working end of the rod enlarged the barrel to accommodate a .50 caliber bullet fired out of a self-contained cartridge. It took them most of that day to bore out the musket barrel properly. Like the shot barrel below, it was fifty-eight inches long.

  On the third day Findletter showed Morgan how to rifle the top barrel of his new gun. The smith explained that the rifling guide etched spiral grooves inside the barrel to impart lateral spin to the bullet. "You must understand, lad, that a bullet from your old smooth-bore musket will begin to tumble over and over and go astray after sixty or seventy yards. The rifling grooves inside a barrel transfer a furious deadly spin to the bullet and keep it on course."

  The rifling guide was a cylindrical pole made of the trunk of a young poplar, grooved to have what the smith called a slow twist, to which a metal rod was attached. To the end of this rod Joseph had brazed a cutting button with miniature teeth fashioned from the teeth of a saw blade. The rod and cutting button completed exactly one revolution in fifty-eight inches as the smith helped Morgan turn the poplar pole by means of a wooden handle at the end. This process they repeated five times. A bullet fired through the rifled barrel would fly fast and true.

  The smith referred to Morgan's old cap-and-ball Hunter as a Kentucky musket or hog gun. The top barrel of the new gun fired cartridges with grooved bullets superior even to the minie balls that were causing such carnage in the war. On the fourth day Joseph inserted a breech-loading mechanism, first showing Morgan how to drill lock-plate screw holes with a bow drill, one of the oldest tools known to man. The handle for the lever-action loading mechanism had been fashioned from part of a plowshare heated red hot and then white hot in the coke forge. The irony of beating an agricultural implement into a weapon did not escape Morgan, who then made a request. He asked Joseph to affix ring seats to the bottom barrel so he could attach the gypsy's long-bladed dagger as a bayonet. Reluctantly, the smith did so.

  On the fifth day they brazed on a peephole at the front of the top barrel and, at the opposite end, a pointed sight made from the tip of a rattail rasp, plunging the barrel once, twice, and yet a third time into icy water from the nearby trout stream to anneal the new welds. Then the smith showed him the art of strengthening the maple stock and the new walnut forearm grip with aqua fortis, just as a true soldier's heart must be fortified against anger or revenge or pity for his enemy or whatever other passions that might come between him and his duty.

  One afternoon when Joseph had business in Lancaster town, Gretel took Morgan to visit her little schoolhouse on the Trout Run. To throw off any suspicious bypassers, he wore one of her father's dark hats and suits. It felt odd to be in a school again. Morgan sat beside Gretel on a bench built for a shaver not half his size, dressed all in black like a croaking raven. She was much amused by his embarrassment, but when he began to tell her the story of Pilgrim's disappearance she listened intently. He concluded his tale by asking her if, either before the great battle at Gettysburg or afterward, Pilgrim had stopped at the Findletters', possibly in the company of an elderly black runaway named Jesse Moses.

  Gretel said that so far as she knew, no young doctor answering to Pilgrim's description had come to her father's place. About two months ago, however, an ancient black man, very frightened and carrying a tow sack, had appeared at Algiz one evening. She did not know the old passenger's name, but her father had hidden him for several days before sending him along upriver to her aunt Bremmen's on his way to Canada. Morgan felt his heart fall. It was very possible that Jesse himself, not Pilgrim, had carved the sign of Othila on the wall. He asked Gretel if anyone other than he and the fugitive Underground passengers ever stopped at Algiz. The past winter, she said, a beautiful young Creole woman from New Orleans, who had gone to visit relatives in Montreal, where she was trapped by the war, was trying to work her way back to Louisiana and had spent a night at the forge. The woman was fearful, Gretel said, of being mistaken for a Confederate spy. Gretel smiled. "She was as beautiful as a princess," she said. "I like to think that she was a spy."

  "Well, maybe she was at that," Morgan said. "In these times just about anything is possible."

  "It is," Gretel said. "I know it is not allowed to speak the name of a passenger or a conductor or stationmaster, but to prove thy point, Morgan, we even had an injured Confederate soldier seek sanctuary at Algiz. He was badly wounded in the leg. The father whipped it off for him just below the knee, clean as a whistle. He was from Alabama, and his way of speaking was an endless source of mirth for us. We could scarce decipher a word the poor fellow said. But he was very handsome, with fine black eyes and a ready smile."

  "What became of him?" Morgan said. He was a little jealous of this Alabama soldier with the fine eyes, and he suspected that Gretel meant for him to be.

  Gretel laughed. "He went off south with the Creole woman," she said. "He agreed to guide her back to New Orleans. But we all believed he'd fallen in love with her. For a long time we teased the father for running a courting station."

  Gretel smiled again, a little ruefully this time. "I was beginning to think, Morgan, that it might be possible for thee to remain here as one of us and be happy. Until thou told me about thy great search for thy brother. Now I understand. Thou must find him."

  "You're the first person I've met who thinks he's still alive," Morgan said. "No, the second. You and my cousin Dolton."

  "I do think he is alive," Gretel said. She stood up and took Morgan's hand. Her hand in his felt warm and friendly but nothing more, and in fact that was how he felt toward her. She would make an ideal sister for a rough-and-tumble fellow like him. A few days ago he'd been tempted to give her his cedar drinking cup. Now, in accordance with Auguste Choteau's advice, he would save it for the one he loved, assuming that someday, when the war and all it had wrought in his life was far behind him, he might be worthy and capable of loving a woman.

  "Pilgrim is alive," Gretel said again.

  "You have a great abundance of faith, Gretel Findletter."

  "And thou, too, Morgan Kinneson, have a great abundance of faith. Vermont freethinker or no, thou have an abundance of faith. But"--and here her full-throated laugh reminded Morgan of her father's quick laughter--"I still think thou look very well in a Brethren's black hat."

  O N DAY NUMBER SIX Morgan and Joseph Findletter blued the two barrels of the gun with a chemical solution of soft water from the farmhouse rain barrel, a handful of crushed bluestone from a quarry north of Lancaster, and a sloshing bedpan of "chamber lye"--Morgan's own urine. The finished barrels, which Joseph polished with beeswax, had a blue-gray sheen, like the big lake at home under a gray November sky.

  That afternoon they made lead bullets in a mold, and as the bullets began to cool they took them to the natural stone bridge and turned them out of the mold over the side of the bridge to fall into the green pool far below, the bullets assuming in flight the slightly cylindrical teardrop shape best adapted to the .50 caliber rifled bore of the upper barrel. They made one hundred bullets. It occurred to Morgan as he watched the bits of hot lead plunge down and down to the pool below, diminishing to tiny gray flecks, that the burly smith could easily snatch him up and hurl him off the stone bridge to his death, thereby ridding himself altogether of an alien suitor for his beautiful daughter. But Joseph Findletter was no killer. Morgan and young Joseph and Gretel waded barefoot in the lime-green water, groping with their toes for the oval-shaped bullets.

  "I put a drop of silver on t
he tip of each one," Joseph Findletter said, smiling. "It is all that will kill the devil, thou knowest."

  The seventh day was no day of rest for the gunsmith. He and Morgan walked to the top of Gilead Hill, across the glen from Snap-finger, where Gilead Brook fell down the sheer side of the glen in a white billowing curtain over the red and yellow sandstone. They carried a rank cabbage left over from the past winter, also a soft orange pumpkin and a twenty-ounce apple, a good keeping variety much prized by Morgan's mother at home in Vermont. They placed the cabbage on a jutting ledge. The pumpkin they set in the crotch of a hickory. They skewered the apple on the pointed end of a long stick, which they thrust into a crevice in the rock wall below the cabbage. Then they made their way back across Jacob's Ladder and up to the top of Snapfinger. Across the gorge, about five hundred yards away, the cabbage, pumpkin, and apple were all visible. The smith lay down on a carpet of shiny green partridgeberry leaves. He sighted with the gun, tinkered the peephole, levered a shell into the firing chamber with a smooth, oiled snick, took careful aim, and fired. The rock beside the cabbage flew into splinters. The smith tinkered the sight again with a little screwdriver and aimed once more. The rifle spoke with a booming crack, and last year's rotten cabbage cleaved neatly into two halves, one of which tumbled over the falls. Joseph stood and handed the gun to Morgan. "Now is the time to master your work. Practice makes perfection. It will take practice. The gun is accurate enough. Now everything depends on the man behind the gun. Do not be impatient."

  In a single motion Morgan raised the rifle and fired. The pumpkin in the hickory crotch burst into a thousand fragments. The astonished smith could see bits of orange shell and fibrous yellow pumpkin guts on the trunk of the hickory and the nearby laurel bushes, and as he marveled at the gun he had wrought and at the deadly skill of Morgan Kinneson, the rifle spoke again and the apple on the sharpened stick vanished.

  The reverberating echo in the glen died away. "It's a pretty good gun," Morgan said. "I wish I could pay you for it."