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Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

Page 16

by Howard Frank Mosher


  Howling with bloodlust, a brace of tracking hounds was swimming through the narrow passageway under the spread legs of Goliath. Slidell leaped up, produced her sling, cradled a stone in the rawhide pocket, twirled it around her head, and sent it rocketing straight to the temple of the lead hound. Morgan jacked a shell into the chamber of his rifle and fired, shattering the skull of the second dog, the roaring shot filling the chamber just as the two slave catchers in frock coats and tall hats and carrying torches appeared directly under Goliath. Morgan fired again, this time at the point where the stone giant's helmet was attached to the ceiling. The gigantic stalactite collapsed. Where the passageway had been, a wall of stone now rose forty feet from the floor of the cave to the roof.

  J UDGING BY HIS HUNGER, Morgan thought they had been wandering downstream, deeper into the cavern, for several hours. Slidell's pine knots were gone, her supply of candles dwindling fast. In places the passageway was almost too narrow to admit them. Elsewhere the cave opened into atriums whose soaring height could only be guessed at. Often several corridors led out of these vast chambers. Morgan and Slidell cleaved to the course of the stream. Might it emerge at the foot of the mountains? Or did some cavern streams merely empty into subterranean aquifers? All Morgan was sure of was that they must keep going to find out, since they could no longer return to the surface the way they had come.

  The stream seemed to stay about the same size, six or eight feet wide, two or three feet deep. Somehow the current was still seeping through under the rubble from the cave-in. If they came to a tributary stream, perhaps they could trace it back to the surface. But they found no tributary.

  When he studied a mountain he wished to climb, Morgan could almost always find the quickest way to the top. Hearing a bird in the woods, even the call of a great horned owl or the drumming of a cock partridge on a log, which seemed to come from all four points of the compass at once, he could walk directly to that bird. He could tell at a glance where the largest trout in a brook lay. He knew north by instinct on the darkest night of the year. Now, lost in the heart of a limestone cavern deep beneath the Dominion of Virginia, he felt helpless.

  "What you studying on, boy?"

  "You. You surely are pretty, Slidell. You're as pretty as a speckled pup."

  "How flattering. Slidell puts him in mind of a smelly old dog."

  Morgan smiled. She was acting nonchalant about their situation. She was being brave, but he knew that she was as terrified as he was.

  "Listen, Slidell. We're going to get out of here. I promise you. Let's rest a little now. Then we'll make a big push. I know that this stream comes out at the foot of the mountain. It probably runs right into the river."

  "What if I drift off to sleep? You promise not to leave Slidell?"

  "I'd never leave you, Slidell."

  Thinking of Jesse Moses, deserted in the sugar camp with Ludi Too and Doctor Surgeon nearby.

  "Morgan? Will you hold me?"

  "I will," he said, and for a time, Morgan could not tell how long, they slept in each other's arms. When they woke Slidell lighted her last candle.

  "One hour," she said.

  They moved along a shelf beside the stream, which split in two around a rock shaped like a lion. "God's House Cat," Slidell said. The stream was moving faster, the floor of the cavern declining sharply. They could hear the murmur of falling water ahead. Again the passageway narrowed. Now they were wading in icy running water up to their waists. Slidell led the way, bent over, her candle flame brushing the ceiling. "Company halt!" she cried.

  Morgan ducked through the spume and started down the pitted wall behind the falls with the hot lighted candle in his teeth. It threw hideous shapes and every mad configuration on the perpendicular wall, illuminating paintings of cave bears, big-toothed tigers, men in animal skins. At the bottom his feet touched slick clay. He stood marveling at the images on the walls. Men hunting an elk, others spearing buffalo, still others sitting by a fire. He understood that he had come to a place that had been sacred to some long-ago people close in kinship to those who had carved the whale and ice bear and runes on the Balancing Rock on the mountaintop at home. He shouted up for Slidell to join him. As she descended, he caught her in one arm and was overcome again by her fragrance of wood smoke and woods on the first warm spring day, pine scent and wild mint and apple blossoms after a long Vermont winter.

  Hand in hand, they walked around the chamber behind the falls as if viewing an exhibition of pictures in a gallery. The men and women in the paintings had long hair. In one tableau a young couple sat facing each other joined hand to hand like Slidell and Morgan, as if in matrimonial union, he wearing a set of antlers, she a wreath of laurel. But the largest tableau showed men at war, some hurling spears at one another. One man was about to crush the head of an enemy with a raised boulder. Another was pulling out the guts of a fallen victim and devouring them warm from the body cavity. One of the painted men was swinging an infant by the foot and dashing out its brains against a rock. One was in the act of raping a girl. And looming over the battle scene, many times the size of the contending figures, was a deity with the body of a man, the tail of a serpent, and the head of an eagle.

  "Judas Iscaria!" Slidell shouted. But Morgan merely shook his head. The prophet of yore had been right. Be it 1864 or ten thousand years ago, there was nothing, nothing at all, new under the sun.

  They made their way out of the cave within the cave and past the waterfall to the edge of another lake. The water was several feet deep and a transparent green in the low candlelight. On the white sand bottom Morgan saw the outline of a sunken canoe. It was a dugout, perfectly preserved, and reclining on its floor was the petrified skeleton of a man. Somehow Morgan was certain that this was the painter who had created the tableau on the walls of the chamber behind the falls. The artist had been left here as a sacrifice or perhaps had even taken his own life because he could not bear to leave the scene of his great creation.

  * * *

  "I READ THIS BOOK back home at Grace Plantatia," Slidell said as they drifted on the lake in the dugout, waiting for some slight current to deliver them from the cave, if any deliverance there might be from such a place. At first Slidell had refused to get into the dugout because she feared the skeleton. Morgan had taken the boatman's remains, with the stub of their last candle for light, into the hidden gallery of pictures.

  "You mean the Bible?"

  "No, this book was called Uncle Tom's Cabin. Old Master A.D. would flay us alive if he ever caught us reading it. I hated it."

  "I've read it. My whole family has read it. Is it not then an accurate protrayal?"

  "No. It should show old Simon Legree sloping into the quarters at Grace, what A.D. called the breeding barn, poking his vile old hog into Miss Lisa Harris, breeding more slaves. You told me your story, boy, a little while ago. Now I'll tell you mine. Down Grace, down the great state of Tennessee, master didn't just study raising cotton. No. He raised slaves. Slidell was lucky. A.D. made me his housegirl. Teach his white children to say please, sir, and thank you, ma'am. Recite their abc's and wipe their lily-white asses. Where you think Slidell got her middle name? Collateral?"

  "I don't know. Where?"

  "Up until I was five year old I didn't have a middle name. That year A.D. had himself a bad season. First came the old weevil, creeping and creeping into the cotton. Next you know, along down the river rolled a big flood. In case we didn't have tribulation enough already, in waltzed sickness. Typhus got into the quarters and swept off half the people. So old master took out a loan with a slave buyer up north and put little Slidell up for collateral. 'Slidell,' he said, 'fetch me the family Bible where I recorded your name.' In between my two names, on the page marked 'Bondsmen and Bondswomen,' he wrote the word Collateral."

  "You don't have to use that name ever again, Slidell."

  "Don't have to, but I intend to. Same as I intend to leave on the slave collar. Also, I'm insured."

  "Insured?"

/>   "That's right. For two thousand dollars. Old Dinwiddie that we called A.D. insured me for two thousand spondaloons. He insured my granddaddy and my brother Little Prince Solomon too. Granddaddy kept Dinwiddie's accounts and did all the bookwork for Grace Plantatia. He was insured for three thousand dollars. Little Prince Sol was insured for a thousand dollars. Granddaddy was already training him to keep the books on account of Sol being a great prodigy. Reading the Bible at two, multiplying great sums in his head at three. Reciting 'Curious Little-Known Facts' from the Memphis Gazette word for word. The last time I ran off before this time, I brought Sol with me. Dinwiddie sent old driver Swag after us with the dogs, and we never got ten miles. That's when Dinwiddie fitted me out with my nice collar. Also branded Prince Solomon's buttocks."

  "Slidell, wait. What do you mean? Your master branded your brother? Like a cow or a horse?"

  "Yes, he did. This was right after our mama died of the black-blood cholera. He wouldn't have dared do any such thing if mama was still alive. A.D. said he branded Sol to identify him in case he ran again. I know better. He branded that little boy's backside from pure natural meanness. Worse yet, he made my granddaddy do the branding. He told granddaddy that if he didn't burn that little boy with the iron he'd hang up Sol and Slidell too in a bamboo cage and starve us to death just the way he had other runaways. That's how cruel he was."

  Slidell paused. The dugout seemed to be turning a little, as if it had found some slight current. Morgan could sense the girl go tense. She too knew that they were moving, however slowly.

  Still Slidell hesitated as, ever so slowly, the dugout drifted out of the chamber. At last she said, "My granddaddy didn't have any choice, Morgan. He knew Dinwiddie meant business. He'd starved many a captured runaway in that bamboo cage. Granddaddy had to put that sizzling iron on that little child. Then Dinwiddie hung Sol up in that cage anyway, said he was going to keep him there for a month on bread and water. My granddaddy told me to collect my possibles and hide them, because as soon as we could figure a way to get Sol out of the cage, we would all three run together. In the meantime granddaddy told me to go about my business as usual. So I set about to whitewash the inside of our little crib-cabin--that's what we always do after the black-blood cholera comes through. It was evening time. Sol was up in the cage in the cypress tree by the river. Granddaddy was working in his little kitchen garden the next cabin down. I was all alone--that's what I thought. I lighted the candle on the table and then in staggered Dinwiddie, drunk as old Lot. He gave the door a slam and said, 'Slidell, it's time you started earning your keep around here. Put down that bucket of whitewash and shuck off that smock and get over on that mattress, gal. I'm going to make a woman of you.'"

  "Good God, Slidell. What did you do?"

  "Gave out a scream like a swamp panther, is what I did. Dinwiddie grabbed me by the neck and commenced to drag me toward the cornshuck mattress. That's when my granddaddy came busting through the door. He knew right off what was happening. He picked up that big slopping bucket of lime whitewash and flung it in Dinwiddie's face. Then he took my hand and we ran. Past the kitchen garden, past the mock orange hedge all sweet in the dewy dusk, through Dinwiddie's prize rose beds and up along the River Grace. We ran deep into the Moccasin Swamp to the secret gathering place where the slaves go to worship on Sunday. Granddaddy told me to hide out there while he led Dinwiddie's slave catchers on a merry chase. Then in a few days I could break out Sol, and we'd all meet up here in Gebo."

  Slidell looked at Morgan for a long moment. Then she appeared to make a decision. With her fingernail she drew a symbol on the clay floor of the cavern. "Granddaddy's sign," she said. "Wunjo. Means freedom. Granddaddy told me to look for it on the Liberty Bell. Meant Little Sol and I should wait here in the cave, he was nearby."

  Morgan studied the sign Slidell had drawn, Wunjo. He frowned. The sign on the Liberty Bell had been different. Beside Wunjo, he scratched the symbol from the bell: .

  Slidell took a deep breath. "Wunjo reversed." She hesitated, then said, "Means danger."

  Morgan started to speak, but she cut him off and resumed her story. "Back in that swamp, granddaddy took off and I stayed on. Moccasin Swamp, boy. Where I learned to eat snake and be grateful for it. I lived in there off serpents and whatever other creatures I could kill with my sling and what little my cousin Mercy could bring out to me at night, and all the while I tried to think of a way to get Sol down out of that tree. But Mercy told me Dinwiddie had set a guard over him. He was using Sol as bait, you see. Bait to catch Slidell. So I figured I'd just have to come on ahead alone. I got here the day before yesterday and found that danger sign on the side of the bell. I knew they were chasing granddaddy. He left that warning so I'd keep on going clear through to Canada, not wait for him. Well, Morgan, I was plumb tuckered out after traveling all the way from Tennessee. So I decided to rest here for a couple of days, then press on this very night. Figured I was too smart to get caught--but this morning I very nearly did. I was out chasing a rabbit through the bushes and I came this close to running right onto those dogs."

  The dugout was moving faster now, but Morgan was scarcely aware of their progress. "Slidell," he said, "tell me more about your granddaddy."

  She thought for a moment. "Well, besides managing Dinwiddie's plantation, granddaddy is a carving man. Oh, yes. He is a great hand to carve about anything. Granddaddy can whittle out a baby dolly from a stick of yellow pine that looks more real than a real child. Something else, too. What old master didn't know, for years and years my granddaddy helped slaves run north. Not just Dinwiddie's slaves, either, but hundreds of others. That's why he didn't run sooner himself. He was helping the others. Every time Dinwiddie sent granddaddy north on plantatia business? Granddaddy was setting up more stations, finding more conductors."

  Morgan drew in a sharp breath. "What was--what is your grandfather's name, Slidell?"

  "His name? His name Jesse. Only the people called him--look out, boy! Sit still, you'll turn us right out in the drink. As I was saying, my granddaddy went by the name of Jesse Moses. Because he helped folks get to the Promised Land."

  * * *

  J ESSE MOSES HANGING on the rowanberry tree. Ludi Too gutshot in the wintery bog. Dinwiddie blinded in the slave cabin on his great estate. Images tumbled through Morgan's head. Big Eva telling him that Nauthiz, his rune, meant that everything was more difficult than he thought and everything was connected. Mercy Johnson, refusing to tell King George the name of her runaway girl cousin. Now Morgan knew who that cousin was.

  Slidell's last candle flared and guttered out. The ancient boat drifted on through what seemed to be another narrow corridor. Morgan lifted his hand. The ceiling of the cave was just over his head. "Duck," he said. Then, "Slidell. He got in here somehow. The cave painter. He surely didn't come down over those falls upstream in this boat. If he got in, we can get out."

  Later they came to a lake where the current was imperceptible at first, but eventually it found them and nudged them forward. Morgan had not gathered the courage to inform Slidell about her grandfather's terrible fate in the wintery woods of Vermont. He told himself that she needed to concentrate on reaching Canada. He told himself that the news would be a distraction that would only further endanger her. He knew he was lying, that he simply did not have the courage to disclose to her what had happened to Jesse and his own part in it.

  "What's that?" Slidell said.

  "Wind," Morgan said. "No. Moving water."

  Ahead was a dim light. The underground stream was rushing toward it. The noise of running water grew louder. Morgan was momentarily overcome by the sweet scent of fresh air and foliage, a thousand mingled green fragrances, as they approached another falls.

  "Jump, Slidell," he shouted, grabbing her hand. The dugout capsized and shot over the lip of the falls. Morgan scrambled out of the water onto a rock shelf and pulled Slidell out after him. Not ten feet below them, running blue in the twilight, was the Shenandoah.

 
T HAT NIGHT THEY SWAM TOGETHER in a deep pool in the river, and then Morgan built a fire on the sand and Slidell asked him to hold her again, and she was warm in his arms and as fragrant as pine and river water and autumn on Kingdom Mountain. For a time they slept. When they woke they kissed, and Slidell's bells tinkled gently. Morgan said her entire name and she his, and he built the fire back up from its faint coals because he wanted to see her as she was. She was beautiful. Morgan felt wholly alive again for the first time since discovering Jesse dead in the tree. Then, for an interval hard to measure except for the time it took the fire to die down again, they loved each other beside the river deep in the heart of the Blue Ridge, and the bells inside Slidell's slave collar rang out under and over and beside Morgan like a whole carillon, and he believed there could yet be something better to live for than he had heretofore imagined. Slidell was both gentle and wild, soft and firm, quiet and joyous, slow and fast, bold and shy, part of him and he of her yet fully herself, and her bells rang like steeple bells, on into the night.

  At dawn they played in the river again. Slidell reached in under a cut bank and pulled out a thrashing catfish as long as her arm. To Morgan's amusement, she made him look away while she put her yellow dress back on. Over their fish breakfast she said, "Well, Morgan Kinneson, I imagine God will smite us right down for breaking His commandment."

  "I doubt it," Morgan said, thinking that what he truly doubted was God's existence. "I killed those two slave catchers, if in fact I did kill them, in self-defense."

  "That's not the commandment I'm talking about. I'm talking about 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.'"

  Morgan grinned. "What did you do it for, then?"

  He was about to suggest that they might as well be smitten for two such transgressions as one, when she said to him, "Morgan Kinneson from King County, you listen to me now. Back in Gebo? The Mind of God? I made myself two promises. Promise number one was, I wasn't going to die without."

 

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