Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Soon the wind rose. The wooden sails of the windmill high overhead began to spin and the waterwheel as well commenced turning, its paddles clap-clap-clapping, the gears of the wheel screeking, the mill vibrating as the stone wheels ground against each other. The unclothed girl appeared in the moonlight and again took his hand in her cold grip. When she saw that he feared her, she wet her lips and said, "Just hold me, Morgan. I need to be warm again." But he knew that he must not give in to his desire to lie with her or eat the bread or fall asleep.

  "He was dark, but thou art fair," she murmured, and though Morgan was not sure he understood what she meant, her words chilled him to the marrow. Something told him that he must not ask after his brother here, must not mention Pilgrim's name to these pale revenants of the Cumber.

  After a time the girl went away, casting a sorrowful glance over her bare white shoulder, her billowing dark hair trailing behind her. The wind fell. The wooden sails of Dagaz ground to a halt. The waterwheel ceased clapping and the machinery inside the mill fell silent. Dawn broke, revealing a bilious smudge over range upon range of mountains. Only with difficulty was Morgan able to wake Slidell. They stepped outside, and Morgan slung his sack over his shoulder and checked and double-checked his scattershot and rifle. Without looking back at the mill or the house, he soldiered on up the brook under the white cliffs, Slidell following behind like a sleepwalker. Presently the rill turkey-tailed out into several seeps on a bald at the top of Haint Hollow. Spread out before them to the west was Boone's Gap, cutting through as many more mountains as they had already traversed. Far off to the southeast were the hazy peaks of the Great Smoke Mountains, the Shaconage.

  This morning the loaf in Morgan's sack looked and smelled like any other loaf of bread. He wondered if he could now safely eat it but refrained from doing so. By degrees Slidell came to her senses. After walking a while longer they came out on another sled path. Ahead in a clearing, an elder with a waist-length white beard was frying bacon in a black iron spider over a meager fire. Nearby stood a lean-to made of chestnut bark.

  "I hunger," the hermit said, turning the bacon with a forked twig. "Give me to eat."

  Morgan reached into his tow sack and took out the loaf the miller's girl had given him and broke it in two. The hermit looked as frail as a man made of dry sticks, but he grabbed one of the halves and greased it liberally from the bacon skillet, then stuffed it into his mouth and gummed it down.

  "Now the rest," the hermit demanded. "Be quick about it."

  Morgan, who was so famished he felt weak, gave him the remaining half. The ancient wolfed it down, all but the heel, which he angrily threw into the fire.

  "Where come you by e?" he said.

  Morgan realized that he meant the bread. "A miller gave it to me."

  "I'll wager he did," the hermit said. "All white-like? Beckoning to you like Gabriel a-calling muster? Gal with hands cold as the twentieth of January?"

  "Yes."

  "Put you up for the night at the mill?"

  "Yes."

  "Mill sails commenced to turn?"

  "They did."

  "Waterwheel go round?"

  Morgan nodded.

  "Didn't happen," the hermit said.

  "Of course it happened."

  "Nay. A year ago Yankee bummers kilt all three--man, wife, and green-eyed gal--and hanged them up on the mill sails and burnt down the whole shebang."

  Slidell gave a gasp.

  "Then how do you account for the bread?" Morgan said.

  "What bread?" the hermit said and went inside his bark lean-to and didn't come out again.

  They moved on into the wild Cumber up a series of ridges called Satan's Staircase. Never had Morgan dreamed of such mountains as these. The mountains at home had one main spine running north to south one hundred and fifty miles. In places a few gentle foothills and ridges led up to them. The mountains of the Blue Ridge rose quickly in an orderly series of ramparts. But these peaks in the southern Dominion of Virginia were a devil's puzzle of tier upon tier separated by deep gulfs and troughs and roughs splaying out in every direction and bespangled with streams running all kitty-wampus through the laurel. The mountainsides were so steep that if they slipped and fell forward as they toiled up, they fell only a foot before hitting the sharp slope. In a hollow below a rock pinnacle, they came to a heap of broken caissons and battered cannons that appeared to have been run over the top of the stone spire high above.

  They stopped to drink from a cold stream. "You're a good man, Morgan, whether you know it or not," Slidell said. "Feeding that old devil back there. Giving him the last of your bread. Trouble is, you're too serious. Don't know how to enjoy all the great pleasures of the world that God laid out before you." Playfully she smacked down the heel of her hand on the little pool from which they had drunk, spraying his bruised face with cool water.

  Morgan grinned, but now that he had fed the rude hermit he wondered if he might have a stroke of luck. His mother had told him that any beggar who asked for food or a ride in a wagon or shelter from the night might be Our Lord in disguise. If you helped a stranger in need, she said, you'd have luck. His parents had helped every stranger in need who ever came to Kingdom Mountain, but they had not had much luck. One son had gone missing in the war. The other was simply gone.

  Ahead was a glade in the laurel, then a great huckleberry barren, the berries still green, then a sweeping bald carpeted with red and yellow mosses, then a little tarn on a mountaintop with a stone house beside it. A woman, far from young and with a very grim countenance, sat on the roof of the house watching them through a copper-ringed spyglass.

  "Mother, we have come a piece today," Morgan said. "And have a piece yet to travel. We are headed for Brush Arbor Ridge to make inquiry of a preacher there who may be able to help me find my missing brother. Could we trouble you for a bite to eat?"

  "Does this look like a wayside stand? Get along with ye. You Yankee bummers have already stolen every morsel from this land."

  Morgan looked off at the long views in every direction. This would be a fine place to live when a war wasn't going on. In the meantime the woman, who was dressed in widow's weeds, came down a ladder. "Come in, then. I might find ye a small bait, I might not. Leave your firelocks outside. I don't allow them."

  Into the stone threshold of the house was carved the sign . Morgan was not surprised. This remote mountain, far from the towns where slave catchers prowled, was a perfect locale for an Underground station.

  He and Slidell had to duck their heads to enter the house, which consisted of a single room with a peat fire in the hearth. Hanging by their naked tails from smoky dark beams were all kinds of mice and voles. A kettle swung on a crane over the fire. Out of it the woman dipped some kind of stew, which she ladled into stoneware and handed to them. They did not ask what was in the stew, and she didn't say. She motioned for her visitors to sit at a stone bench at a low stone table and watched without comment as they ravened down the stew.

  "Tell me a story," she said. "I'm starved for a story up here."

  "They're preparing to cannonade Richmond."

  "They can cannonade each other to atoms for all of me. Northern atoms, southern atoms. Tell me a story."

  "A boy's brother went missing in the fighting. He walked a thousand miles searching for him."

  The woman nodded. Morgan thought that she would surely ask whether the boy in the story found his brother. Then he would inquire if she had seen Pilgrim. Instead, she said, "Tell me another."

  Morgan thought. "We met a miller and his wife and daughter, all three with dark skin powdered over with flour."

  "Melungeons. Portagee they be, Christianized Moors from Lisbon fled to the American world ages ago to escape the Inquisition. Their ancestors were shipwrecked off Caroline. Over time they worked their way up into these forsaken mountains. Here they stayed. They too helped the runaways. My mother was one of them, and my former husband's grandfather. I never learned their lingo. You aren't tellin
g me a story. I'm telling you one. Have another bait of stew."

  "Did your husband die?" Slidell said. "I'm sorry."

  "He died to me. Did you meet a satanic old creature with a long white beard down the sled trail a piece?"

  "We met a hermit man," Morgan said.

  "He is no hermit but my husband that was. He's dead to me now, though I watch him and his comings and goings through this copper-bound glass. I live to spite him. Come out onto my grounds. I'll show you an amusing thing."

  They went outside, and the woman trained her ancient spyglass down the hollow, then handed it to Morgan. There in the glass was the hermit, on his knees, hands clasped as if praying, looking up toward the stone house on the hill. Morgan passed the telescope to Slidell.

  "He's beseeching me to take him back," the woman said. "Which I most surely will, in seven times seventy years. Watching him grovel is my chief pastime since Jera fell into disuse and the dark ones stopped coming."

  Morgan looked at the hermit again. "I thought he might be Jesus in disguise."

  "Judas is more like. I caught him with the miller's wife two years ago and turned him out. Now I watch him with my Portagee ancestor's sailing glass. He's as dead to me as the miller and his family killed by Sheridan's bummers."

  At this disclosure Slidell nodded with approval and gave Morgan a very significant look.

  "The hermit, your former husband, told me that tale," Morgan said. "He said they hanged them from the windmill sails, then burned the place."

  "For once in his life he told the truth. Point the glass further down the glen into what they call Haint Holler. No, further. What do you spy?"

  "Woods. More woods. Flashes of the brook. A place that looks like a--"

  He stopped. What he saw in the glass was the stone foundation of the grist mill, the ruined windmill beside it, the penstock, and the waterwheel. There had been a fire, but that was some time ago. Now vines encircled the blackened foundation. He handed the glass back to the woman, who laughed bitterly. "Next you'll tell me that you slept in the mill and the sails began to turn and the girl asked to warm herself in your bed. Oh, several like yourself have come by with the same tale. A Confederate boy with a staff carved into the shape of two snakes for a crutch, a shouting preacher with a wagon of slickery snakes. There's no accounting for what happens in Haint Holler, boy. Ye didn't lie with her, did ye? The gal? Or eat of their bread?"

  Morgan shook his head.

  "You'd say not anyway, like my deceased husband." The woman gave him a look as bleak as the windswept bald where she lived. "Here," she said. "Take this spyglass with you. It may save your life. But not if you venture to Brush Arbor Ridge. Cholera has claimed half the souls in that region and will claim half of the rest before it's spent. As for you," she said to Slidell, "your disguise is passable, but your gait is that of a proud, high-toned woman, swinging her hips along with her head held high. In dangerous company you must shuffle and scuffle and spit and draw in the dirt with your toe like a good-for-nothing young man. And you must not look strangers boldly in the face. Avert your eyes as if ashamed of your very being. Now then. Whoever you two may be, and I don't want to know, steer clear of Brush Arbor as you would of the plague, for they're one and the same. To travel there now is as good as a death warrant."

  A S THEY VENTURED on into the mountains Morgan began reading to Slidell, and she to him, by firelight, from the wonder-book Cobbler Tom had given him, chronicling the incredible journey of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. Morgan told Slidell that as Tom had recommended, he had a great longing to go West after he found Pilgrim and see for himself all of the splendid sights the captains had seen. Slidell laughed at this notion and said that the Teton Sioux and the Blackfeet would be glad to hear it, that his long, gold hair would adorn their scalp-poles handsomely. But on the off chance that he did make it through to the Pacific and back, she asked him to bring her a young buffalo-bison to pull her carriage in Canada, where she intended to marry a rich man and live the life of a fine lady. So they passed the time, two lovers and companions, spinning out their dreams one to the other as they trekked ever southward toward a future so uncertain that their fantasies seemed more real than the sober likelihood that Pilgrim was dead, so too Slidell's brother, Solomon, and at any moment they themselves might be shot by Dinwiddie's mad outriders.

  After their encounter with the ghostly Melungeons, Morgan waited for Slidell to remind him that she had told him the Cumber was a place of specters. Instead she asked him why, when God had given so much to mankind and set all the splendors of the world before them, most of all the capacity to love and be loved, mankind was so determined to spurn these great gifts? She asked him if he thought Satan had so much sway on earth that he had corrupted all men and women and all of their works since time began.

  "If I thought so," Morgan told her, "I'd walk Satan down like those killers I told you about."

  "You the boy to do that, all right," Slidell allowed. "Better off to spend your time finding Pilgrim. Rescuing Little Solomon off Grace." She gave him a sly look. "Maybe even making an honest woman of Slidell."

  Morgan smiled. "Slidell, you're the most honest person I've ever known. As for mankind, I want to tell you about a book I read."

  "Not that foolish Uncle Tom's Cabin again. I've already told you what I think about that book. Good enough tale, I suppose."

  "No, it's a book my brother sent me from college. It's called Origin of Species, by Mr. Charles Darwin."

  As they walked along, Slidell from time to time practicing shuffling and scuffling like a good-for-nothing young man, Morgan outlined Darwin's ideas on survival and evolution. He wasn't sure that Slidell, now imitating the stiff-legged gait of a mule, now floating eerily along like the miller's green-eyed daughter--Hold me, Morgan--was paying the slightest attention.

  That evening, however, as they sat beside their campfire feasting on a young tom turkey that Slidell had killed with her sling, she turned her direct look on him and said, "That's flat-out slap nonsense, boy."

  "What is?"

  "That book by Mr. Charles Darwin you told me about. I've been thinking about it, and it doesn't make one particle of sense. Now you listen to Slidell. Let's say mankind was made to survive. Why then would we spend the last three years killing each other off in this war, half a million or more? Why brand our own children? Run off with the miller's woman? That doesn't sound like survival of the fit. It sounds like the worst pack of rascals ever created, hell-bent to destroy the species. That's not all, either. This coming-down-from-the-apes notion? Why, that's more foolish yet. What did the great apes ever do that we have to blame them for us? Do the great apes kill half a million their kind? No, sir. Not that I ever heard of. Cut off their little ones' fingers? I guess they don't."

  "I think Darwin believed that apes and men both originated from a common--"

  "I don't care what he believed, boy. I'll tell you what I believe. Talk about species, I believe mankind is just about the worst ever created. Go to war, enslave one another, persecute our children, and then blame the gentle ape. No, Morgan. We're evil to start out with because we have chosen to be. Satan's just there to help us out a little. Which is why we must turn to Our Dear Redeemer, Jesus Christ, for salvation."

  Slidell paused for a moment. In her passionate faith she seemed more beautiful than ever. Morgan wished that he could share her beliefs. He reached out and took her hand and looked at her in the firelight. If he could not believe in God, at least he could believe in this beautiful and noble young woman.

  "I agree with the first part of your proposition," he said. "We're a pretty sorry outfit. But I've been wondering about something, Slidell. You haven't mentioned your father. Where was he when Dinwiddie was branding Little Sol and trying to force himself on you? Where was your father when Dinwiddie chopped off Sol's fingers with the tin shears?"

  "He was right there," Slidell said.

  "Your father was there? And didn't try to stop Dinwiddie?"

/>   Again Slidell hesitated. Then, in a voice devoid of emotion, she said, "Dinwiddie is my father, Morgan. Sol's too."

  M ORGAN KINNESON WAS SPARING of words, but only very rarely was he at a loss for them. Now for a time he did not know what to say. It crossed his mind, thinking of Slidell's own father attempting to rape her and maim his son, the little prodigy, that the world held a depth of evil that he had not yet plumbed. After his encounters with Ludi, Doctor Surgeon, and mad Steptoe, he would not have believed it possible.

  "I'm sorry, Slidell," he said at last. "I'm truly sorry. But you need to know this much. However wicked this world may be, you're still the best person I've ever known. After all this"--he gestured with the back of his hand to the north, the way they had come, somehow encompassing all of the evil that he had thus far witnessed--"after all this, I wouldn't have thought it possible. That I could ever love anyone. But I do. I love you."

  "Oh, Morgan," Slidell said, weeping now. "No. No, no, no."

  "Yes. You have to believe me."

  "I do believe you," Slidell said. "But you musn't. You musn't love me. You don't know who I am."

  "I reckon that's about the one thing I do know."

  She continued to shake her head. "You don't," she said. "I'm not the best person you know, Morgan. I'm the worst. Slidell Collateral Dinwiddie? Slidell Judas Dinwiddie is more like."

  Despite himself Morgan smiled. But Slidell said, "That night in the cabin with Dinwiddie? Before I screamed and my granddaddy came running?"

  Morgan was sure he knew what she was going to tell him. He put his finger on her lips. "I don't care what happened that night, Slidell. You couldn't help any of that."

  "It's not what you think. And I could help it. Before my grand-daddy busted in, Morgan, I pleaded and begged. I begged old Dinwiddie not to ravish me. I called out to my dead mama to protect me. He laughed and told me my mama was rotting in the ground. I even told him I had the black-blood cholera, that if he touched me, he'd catch it certain sure."