Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "No pay," the smith said. "I have never seen such shooting."

  "My brother shoots better than I do. Or did before he gave it up. Pilgrim."

  Again Joseph's open and expressive face showed no sign of recognition. "Morgan?" the smith said. "A confession. I do wish I were coming with thee. After the shooting of the brindled cow and the bullets fired at the children, I do wish. I have prayed for forgiveness. My sign, Algiz, means two things. Protection for others. Self-control for myself. So I am told, at any rate. I fear that my self-control is far from perfect. Do you still believe that I was hasty with mine sister?"

  "I do."

  "Well. I will pray for better understanding. In the meantime may I offer thee one word more of advice?"

  Morgan nodded.

  "From him who made thee thy gun. Now thou has a Joseph Findletter rifle worthy of thy talent. A gun years ahead of its time. Be worthy of it, young brother. The times thou dost not fire the gun, which I name Lady Justice, are more important than the times thou dost. Wilt remember?"

  "I wish I could stay and get to know you people better," Morgan said. "I thank you for Lady Justice. You'll tell Gretel good-bye for me?"

  "Aye," said the smith, with what Morgan believed was a mixture of regret and relief, which was just what he felt himself.

  When Joseph Findletter held out his hand to Morgan, it was like putting his hand in the man's gun vise. Then the boy began to walk south and did not look back.

  M ORGAN'S BOOTS were wearing out. The soles were so thin that the dew soaked through. As for the uppers, they had long since pulled away from what was left of the heels. He'd had to ask Joseph Findletter for a couple of hanks of rope to tie them to his feet. A few more days and he'd be barefooted. Having come this far, he believed his shoes could get him the rest of the way to Gettysburg. He did not believe he could continue barefooted, though a year ago Pilgrim had written that many of the Rebels went to war unshod. Pilgrim's writer friend from Concord, Mr. H. D. Thoreau, had noted in his book, "Beware of enterprises that require new clothes." He'd said nothing about new boots.

  Morgan had learned from the German Brethren of a shoe manufactory in Gettysburg. He had very little money left, but he believed he could barter services for boots. Footgear was the order of the day.

  The morning after he left the Findletters' it began to rain. At first the rain fell gently, but quickly it gathered into a driving storm slanting directly into Morgan's face. He was glad that he and Joseph had taken the time to blue Lady Justice. The downpour continued all morning. The newly cut hay fields and the young grain fields and the leafy green woods were indistinct through the rain billowing in from the west.

  The rain beat down. More troop trains passed on the railroad track beside the sloppy red clay road Morgan was following, but the recruits were packed inside the carriages out of the weather. No one took any shots at him or at the cattle grazing in the rain or at the chimney pots of the farmhouses or the drenched beehives in the meadows.

  A year ago the Rebels had penetrated this country. In places they had laid waste to the land, burning some of the barns and houses and leaving only blackened foundations behind. Other farmsteads were untouched. Morgan felt strangely comforted knowing that Pilgrim had been in these parts doctoring northern and southern soldiers alike. Before the battle Pilgrim had written that there was a seminary college in the shoe manufacturing town. He had said that his greatest hope was that Morgan would someday attend college and study a profession. For now the open road was Morgan's college, hard soldiering his profession. He walked at double time. Gettysburg was not far away.

  Passing a small field of tobacco, he pinched off a piece of broad green tobacco leaf and crushed it between his fingers. It had an intoxicating odor. He put the leaf fragment on his tongue but promptly spit it out like wormwood.

  The seminary college and the village below it had been spared destruction during the battle, though some of the stone houses and shops had bullets embedded in their walls, the richly hued sandstone having absorbed the errant balls like caked mud. The shoe factory was now engaged in making boots for the northern army. When Morgan asked about exchanging a day's work for a pair of boots, the timekeeper at the gate laughed and turned him out of the mill yard, thinking him a craven straw-headed Dutcher dodging conscription. So much for his plan to acquire footgear at Gettysburg.

  "K INNESON? PILGRIM KINNESON, YOU SAY? That's an odd name, you'd think I'd remember it." The quartermaster in charge of exhuming the battlefield graves and moving them up the hill to the new cemetery thumbed through his register. "No, no one here under--holt on. Holt on here, boy. I do recall a Kinneson."

  Morgan's heart seemed to stop altogether while the quartermaster looked at a roll of names in a different part of his ledger. "Here he is, by God, big as life. 'Kinneson, John. Colonel of the New York Forty-fourth. Wounded July 3, 1863. Transferred to Elmira August 20, 1863.' That's our only Kinneson thus far, boy. Maybe your brother, what's left of him, will turn up, but I wouldn't stake much on it. Some of them stinking trenches we've uncovered? We can't tell blue from gray, they was tore up so bad."

  Scarcely knowing where he was headed, Morgan walked down the hill toward the gravediggers. He paused near a group of gaily dressed young men and women, holidayers touring the battlefield. A strange little man in a blue uniform jacket and a dashing blue cavalry officer's hat with a long ostrich plume was addressing the group in a voice full of self-important confidence.

  "Not since Troy had such forces been arrayed one against another," intoned the orator, who had an uncommonly small, nodding head set slightly off center on a neck not much bigger around than a celery stalk. "But do not suppose, good friends, that I report to you as a mere bystanding historian. My credentials? I, a Union spymaster, was battlefield advisor to the generals. It was I who recommended at the outset, when we received word that the Virginian was marching this way with seventy thousands of men, that we must occupy the high ground first. Grant says to me, says he, 'Colonel Garrick. A word with you, sir. Is the high round hill good ground to make our stand?' And I said, 'Aye, Odysseus'--I called him so, a little private joke between us in reference to the Greek version of his fine Roman name--'Aye, Odysseus. The big round hill is very good ground to make our stand.'"

  At this a passerby with a wooden leg laughed out loud. "The general you're referring to wasn't within five hundred miles of this battlefield last summer," he said. "I doubt you were, either."

  "Laugh away, sir," the elocutionist replied in an injured tone. "Were you here, then? Or were you among the good gentlefolk of Philadelphia who, when they heard our cannonading from afar, fled in their carriages to New York? Eh, sir? Eh?"

  With a histrionic gesture the little man pointed out over the fields, over the remnants of the peach orchard shot to splinters less than a year before. "The long-legged insurrectionists from Texas pelted up through that orchard screeching defiance. Would you people care to hear their infamous cry?"

  The party, grown to about thirty, assured their diminutive guide, now donning a gray tunic and a Confederate kepi, that they much wished to hear the Rebel cry.

  "Very well," he said. Without preliminaries he whirled around with his eyes all fiery red, uttered a falsetto shriek, and rushed madly upon the holidayers, who fell away in startled disarray, all but the man with the wooden leg, who laughed in the orator's face.

  "But we stood our ground, good people," the speaker went on, "while down below in the great rocks known as the Devil's Building Blocks the advancing Rebs were caught by our crossfire and killed like so many sheep led to the slaughter. Eeee! Eeee! Hear them shriek! Eeee!"

  "What made the West Point-trained southerner suppose he could ever take these two hills, outnumbered and outgunned as he was?" asked a young man in a paisley waistcoat.

  "Why, he had enjoyed some fine victories lately in which he was also outnumbered and outgunned. He had outgeneraled his opposite number before and thought to do the same again here at Gettysburg."r />
  "Nonsense. He was out of choices. It was all an act of desperation," the wooden-leg muttered. The crowd, however, snake-fascinated by the little man, hissed his detractor into silence.

  "Now, over there," the self-styled spymaster continued, shrugging out of his gray coat and into his blue again but neglecting to remove his Confederate cap, "where the little hill stands, presided the learned professor from the great state o' Maine, who held the hilltop like Leonidas at Thermopylae until he and his company had no more ammunition. Meanwhile the traitors were coming on hard and hard. Their objective? No less than to take the hillock and flank our forces here atop the bigger knob. I arrived just in time to advise the Maine men to charge down the slope with bayonets set, though their rifles were empty. Oh, good ladies. We paunched 'em and backstabbed 'em and drove 'em before us like the Lord drove the cattle from the temple. We harried them into the Devil's Pen, where once again we did general butchery. Aye, we did. Pick pick, stick stick. Eeee! Eeee!"

  As he ranted on, the manikin seemed to be looking straight at Morgan.

  "Now, see here, sir, really," said the undaunted one-legged man. "How could you be so many places on the battlefield doing so many things at once?"

  "Sssss! Sssss!" hissed the merrymakers, but the little man grandly waved them silent. "I trow we have a naysayer among us," he said. "I ask you again, old Methusalah. Were you here?"

  "I was," the man said. "And I tell you that you were not. You are a brazen liar. I say so to your face. Perhaps you would like to defend your honor against the charge?"

  "I scorn to stoop so low. I am no hobbling cripple. I have nothing to prove."

  To a serpents' chorus of hisses, the one-legged man turned on his wooden heel and stumped away, and the player called out that scoffers had walked up and down in the land before now mocking truth-tellers far greater than he. He said he would conduct the multitude down to the common graves, whose contents were being transferred to the new cemetery on the hilltop even as he spoke, and show them at first hand the horrors of the battle and its grisly trophies. All the time, the player never stopped talking. Paying no attention to the workmen transferring the bodies, calling the noisome fumes of the yawning graves more fragrant than all the attars of Araby, yea, the very frankincense of war, the lunatic clambered down into a mass charnel pit and held up skulls and faded blue and gray cloth and finger bones white as sticks of chalk.

  "A tanner will last seven years," he cited. "Ha ha! This poor fellow was no tanner, I fear. Oh, dear people. Would that you could have been here to see it. On and on came the last great charge, rushing up the hill into the death-dealing maws of our cannons. We poured volley upon volley of shot into them, but they continued toward us. A few of my comrades at arms, I am sorry to report, took leg bail. Yes, they skedaddled, and for all I know they're skedaddling still. But I cried out, 'Double canister, boys. A dose of the double grape for the Johnnies.' On they came, now thirty paces off, now twenty. At ten yards we poured it onto them like Nelson at Trafalgar. Do we have here this afternoon any visitors from Vermont? Yes? The tall lad in the fringed jacket? That's very apt. Rallied by my exhortations, the boys from the Vermont Twenty-second held their ground and fought like panthers. We kept the charging Rebs from overrunning the cannons. It was glorious to see. Yet lookee. These sad bones and rags and bits of rotting flesh are all that's left."

  To the horror of the tourists, the creature was now fondling the shreds of uniforms and fragments of bones, cooing to them as if to an infant. Pressing scented handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, gagging and retching, the people began to stumble back up the hillside, just as the doomed southern charge had done.

  "Wait, wait, dear playgoers," cried the necrophiliac, reaching into his carpetbag and withdrawing a black stovepipe hat and a false beard on a string. "Tarry one moment more. You haven't heard my presidential address. 'Fourscore and--' Oh, Vermont boy. Where's my audience? Where have they gone? Come, then. Let us go down to the Slaughter Pen without them."

  On their way Morgan's guide, now accoutered in the beard and top hat, said, "Can you keep a secret, boy? I'm writing a book. A very great book about this great battle."

  Morgan, who was appalled by this hideous farce at the site of the bloodiest encounter of the war between North and South, the place where his beloved brother had last been seen, knew not what to say. "I assume that you've written many books" was all he could manage.

  To which the madman replied, "Why no, sir. But what bearing, pray, does that have? Any fool can write a book. All it requires is time, and not so very much of that. My book on the battle will be an original history, for I shall write from real life, not from conning over other men's books or second-handed reports."

  "Did you know a medical corpsman from Vermont named Kinneson?"

  "Only slightly. He was a fine gentleman by all reports. But let us return to my book-in-progress, for I love best to talk of it. I was here to see it all and, like noble Fortinbras in the play, I'll go forth, or my book will, to tell it all. Are you familiar with the immortal bard's old Prince of Denmark?"

  "I am."

  "What do you think of it?"

  "It goes on a great while. I would have done for the wicked uncle in Act the First."

  "Aye, but then there would have been no play. Or a very short one. Do you recollect the moment where old Polonius meets his quietus?"

  Before Morgan could reply, Steptoe drew a long gleaming bodkin from his blue tunic and, uttering his crazed ululation, leaped toward his intended victim. Morgan, who had recognized the child killer the moment he'd laid eyes on him, caught him off guard by taking two short quick steps directly toward him. Before Steptoe could plunge the bodkin into Morgan's neck he found himself impaled on the gypsy's dagger attached to Lady Justice. Morgan lifted the screaming player off the ground and ran with the rifle straight toward a blasted peach tree. He drove the dagger point, on which the demon squirmed like a fly on a pin, into the dead trunk of a tree that not two years ago had borne sweet fruit. He stood back to regard Steptoe, still alive and glaring at him.

  "Who sent you?" Morgan said.

  Nothing.

  "Who sent you?" Morgan said again.

  "Oh, you needn't fret, lad. They'll find the gal and the stone long afore you find them," Steptoe said. "And when they do, every last one of your thieving, nigger-loving, so-called stationmasters will die a death worse than mine!" As if to illustrate his point, Steptoe gave one last anguished, defiant outcry and died.

  Morgan yanked on the gun stock, but the bayonet was embedded in the fire-blackened tree like Excalibur in the stone. He put his foot on Steptoe's chest and heaved back. As gravediggers came running down the hill, Morgan took hold of the stock and twirled Lady Justice around and around until it came free of the bayonet socket, leaving the player, still in the incarnation of the president, skewered on the tree.

  Backing away into the jumbled boulders, Morgan jacked a shell into the chamber of his rifle barrel and swept the gun from side to side as the horrified workmen took in the scene.

  "Don't follow me," he said.

  As he turned and began to run toward the woods, he heard someone screaming, a scream louder than any Rebel yell. Morgan realized that it was his own voice.

  SIX

  GEBO

  A s he'd promised his uncle John, Morgan had written to his folks, informing them that he had found no trace of Pilgrim at Gettysburg and now believed that his brother might have been captured or perhaps had even headed south alone in order to avoid being taken up for desertion. He said that he would soon be behind enemy lines himself and that it might be many weeks before he could find means to post another letter.

  A week later, it was raining again, at first just a spattering of big drops on Morgan's slouch hat and the steep path he was following, then cold, drenching sheets of water. The fever he thought he had left behind in Big Eva's steam hut in the Mountains of the Bark Eaters had flared up again, and as he walked southward he was scarcely certai
n what he actually saw and what he imagined. A huge crop of ripe orange field pumpkins came bobbing down the swollen brown current of a river under a long covered bridge. It was a pumpkin freshet, yet the season for pumpkins was three or four months away. As he slogged along a forlorn ridgetop in the northern foothills of the Blue Ridge he found that he had no notion what time of day it was. It could be midmorning, it could be early evening. Nor did he have any clear memory of the countryside he'd passed through for the last several hours, whether open fields, wooded terrain, or village streets.

  He came to a town at the foot of the mountains designated on a signpost as Mason Or Dixon. Mason Or Dixon was a stately little village with several fine stone, red-brick, and ornate wooden homes. Yet the place seemed to be deserted. Ahead on the village green was a pump, but when Morgan tried the handle, a stream of white sand poured out of the spout.

  On the south edge of the village a land tortoise was unhurriedly working its way across the road. Rather boxy in appearance, the tortoise was about as large as a dinner plate with tan-and-orange-chequered markings on the sides of its shell. It would make a good soup for his fever, Morgan thought. The tortoise stopped, extended its leathery neck, looked at Morgan with its calm dark eyes, and spoke. "My name is Pilgrim," it said. "I can tell you how this town got its name and where to look for my namesake, your brother. But not if you eat me."

  "Tell your story," Morgan said.

  In the voice of a seasoned raconteur, the reptile began its tale. "You must know, Morgan, that this town was settled by two brothers. Their names were Mason and Dixon Alexander. Both were attorneys and learned men. Do you see those two great houses facing each other across the street? Those were the original homes of the Alexanders. Mason lived in the Italianate house of orange sandstone on our right. Brother Dixon resided in the big white Greek Revival opposite. Very well, then. Time ran along as time will, and their law firm, Mason and Dixon Alexander, thrived. Then they quarreled."