Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "I'd have said the same thing, Slidell. That's no sin."

  "Maybe not. But what I did next was. To save myself, Morgan, I told Dinwiddie that my granddaddy had a stone, passed down in our family for hundreds of years. That away back in Africa, some men with light hair like yours came in carved ships and gave that stone to our ancestors. On one side were strange letters, very faint. On the other, my granddaddy Jesse had scratched a map of the escape route north for runaway slaves. I told Dinwiddie Little Sol knew that map by heart. And I told Dinwiddie that if he'd leave me be, I'd get Sol to draw it for him. But old A.D. was crazy drunk. He said he'd tend to Sol and the stone soon enough, but first he intended to make a woman of me. That's when I screamed and my granddaddy rushed in. Oh, Morgan. Don't you see? I alone was to blame for Dinwiddie cutting off Sol's fingers, and still that good little boy would not peach and give up what he knew."

  With that, the girl began to moan and sob and shake, but Morgan took her in his arms and said, "Slidell, I'd have done exactly the same thing. You and your granddaddy Jesse were planning to run off with Sol that very night. You just wanted to buy a few hours, not betray anybody. Now you listen to me. I'll tell you something a thousand times worse than what you told me. Something about myself. Can you stop crying and listen?"

  Without waiting for her to reply, Morgan said, "Do you remember what I told you in the cave? About that poor black man I was supposed to be taking into Canada? The man Ludi shot and hanged?"

  She nodded, biting her lower lip.

  "His name was Jesse, Slidell. Jesse Moses. That man was your grandfather. He gave me that rune stone, slipped it into my pocket so the killers wouldn't get it. And when I think about the way I left him alone in that cabin, I agree with just about every word you said about mankind, with myself the worst of the outfit. I'm sorry, Slidell. I shouldn't have hidden this from you."

  In the firelight, as he held out the rune stone, Morgan could see tears sliding down her face. He braced himself for her to spring at him, as she had at Cobbler Tom's when he laughed at her, but she simply wept silently as she took her grandfather's rune stone and turned it over and over in her hand. Then she handed it back and shook her head and after a little she said, "I know all that, Morgan. I suspected as much back in the cave." Then she smiled through her tears. "Can you stand to hear something good now? Stop blaming yourself for what you aren't to blame long enough to hear the other side?"

  Morgan looked at the girl in the firelight. She reached out and took both of his rough hands in hers, which were soft and warm. "Morgan," she said, "there is a whole other side. To mankind. To us. There's the love of my grandfather for our people and their freedom. There's your love for your brother. And mine for Little Solomon. And God's for all of us, despite our fallen ways." She looked at him over their clasped hands and said, "And ours for each other. I love you, too, Morgan. And I do know you love me."

  As the small fire died, high in the pine and oak woods of the unfrequented wilderness, they made love again. This time their passion was infused with all the bonds of respect and deep affection and understanding and the more ecstatic for these bonds, but at last, as they lay in each other's arms, and the embers of the fire faded into darkness, Slidell said, "Morgan, I must tell you one more thing. I know that you have it in mind to kill that evil preacher tomorrow at the Brush Arbor. The one who calls himself Prophet. I must ask you, not for my sake but for yours, not to harm him."

  "Slidell, if I don't kill him, he'll kill me and deliver you and Jesse's stone to Dinwiddie. Other people, many others, will be murdered as well."

  Slidell jumped up and blew on the dying coals, and a few embers flared. "Throw that stone in the fire," she said. "You have it by heart, Morgan. You no longer need it."

  "I do need it."

  A little wind sifted through the treetops. From off over some long-forgotten valley a night bird unknown on Kingdom Mountain cried.

  "I need it to draw them to me," Morgan said. "Not counting Dinwiddie, there are still two left. The Prophet and the one you call Swagbelly--King George. I'm sorry, Slidell."

  "I'm sorry, too," she said. And in that moment, he feared that he had lost her.

  O N THE SORROWFUL DAY of the mass funeral for the people swept away by cholera at Brush Arbor Ridge, deep in the mountains of the Cumber, an itinerant divine who had but lately come to the region drew up his mule wagon in front of the house of worship just as the service for the dead began. He was dressed all in black, his face and hands as yellow as the six-foot rattler draped round his neck that he called Angel Jaundice and kept near his person at all times. He climbed down and, already shouting, wrestled out of the wagon bed a great walnut armoire. This was his serpent cabinet, which he manhandled into the church and up to the pulpit, where the elderly minister was saying the prayers for the departed.

  "Avaunt thee, Ahab!" screamed the oracle, thrusting the frail old cleric down into the pews with the bereaved congregation. "I and my scaly apostles have come to bring you great comfort. We have come to resurrect your dead. Yea, say I again, to raise your dead. Bobobalabah and Jabalabah."

  Prophet Floyd stalked back down the aisle of the old country church, spouting in tongues, and thrusting Angel Jaundice into the stricken faces of the congregants. Holding out the Angel, Floyd invited the people, both living and dead, to come forward and take the host. As yellow poison oozed from the reptile's fangs, he likened the deadly fluid to the first sweet pressings of the grapes at the Canaanite's wedding and himself to a benevolent vintner come to trample out disease and death.

  At that moment a tall figure in a slouch hat and a fringed jacket entered the church. As the stranger came forward, Floyd brandished a long horse pistol in his right hand. The snake was now wrapped lovingly around his left forearm, its flat head and a foot and a half of its body reared up level with the chalice into which its poison was dripping.

  "Come forward, boy, and render up the nigger's stone and your black whore, and I'll tell you where you can find your lost brother," screamed the Prophet. "But first take off your hat in the house of the Lord. For you stand before Him risen."

  "When I stand before the Lord I'll leave on my hat and ask him a question or two. Are you the one they call Floyd?"

  "I am that I am," the Prophet replied and leveled his pistol at Morgan and drew back the hammer.

  "Forgive me, snake," Morgan said and fired the lower barrel of Lady Justice point-blank at the lunatic and his serpent. Floyd dropped lifeless to the floor with a hole the size of Morgan's fist where his heart had been, knocking over the snake cabinet onto himself. A leather-red copperhead slithered out, followed by a pygmy rattler less than a foot long and as big around as a fat cigar. More and still more vipers spewed out of the cabinet, as if issuing forth from the Prophet himself. Angel Jaundice, though headless, went whipping off toward the coffins of the dead. Morgan backed down the aisle and out of the tabernacle.

  From the sagging trestle table under the arbor, Morgan hooked a damp grape leaf wrapped around a piece of bread and ham. He folded two boiled eggs and a leg of roast chicken in another leaf and put them in his haversack. Slidell, who had witnessed the shooting of Prophet Floyd and the coming forth of the serpents, looked on with horror. Beside the empty snake wagon stood a small black boy in a big straw hat, patiently keeping the flies off the Prophet's mule with a catalpa-leaf fan. He continued to wave the leaf, seemingly oblivious to the uproar, the loosed snakes inside the church, the defiled dead, the screaming mourners.

  Morgan unhitched the red mule from the wagon and climbed on its back. He motioned to Slidell to climb up behind him. The boy was looking at him. "Today's my birfday," the child informed him. "Twenty-two July. I'se seben." He grinned at Morgan. "Some fine birfday!"

  "Happy birthday," Morgan said and flipped him his last round silver dollar. The child caught the coin in his mouth. He removed it and studied it for a moment. Then he put it back under his tongue.

  Morgan and Slidell rode the mule down the ridge.
At the bottom of the hill a branch ran under the road through a hollow log. He drew rein and swung down. When he held out his hand to Slidell, she shook her head as if she could not bear to touch him and dismounted without assistance. She continued to stare at him as though she had never seen him before.

  "What is it, Slidell?" Morgan said. "Don't you think I can help you rescue Solomon?"

  "Oh, child," she said. "How are you ever going rescue yourself? How are you going to stop all this terrible killing?"

  "Go along now," Morgan said to the mule, swatting it across the rump.

  Then he looked back at Slidell. "I don't know," he said. "I'm not sure I can. I'm not sure I want to."

  The riderless mule walked on up the dusty track. Morgan and Slidell stepped into the water and started up the branch through the bright orange jewelweed that grew beside the brook. Morgan thought of the little boy chasing flies. "Today's my birfday. Twenty-two July." It occurred to him that his own birthday, July nineteenth, had come and gone. Without realizing it, he had turned eighteen. He was a man.

  NINE

  BERKANA

  A nd so the soldier Morgan Kinneson keeps walking because walking is what he knows to do. He believes that if he can but walk far enough, now trending south by southwest by the general's compass, he will get where he needs to go even if he is not quite sure where that is. He will know when he arrives because his brother will be there.

  In such a fashion Morgan had begun to narrate his journey in his mind, he had no idea why. There was a moment when he and Slidell stood at a fork in the trail at the very top of Boone's Gap near the cabin of an opium grower, surrounded by poppies in full blossom. One branch of the trail headed toward the southeast and the hazy outlines of the tall Shaconage, where he believed his brother might be. The other prong of the fork was a narrow sled path cutting off to the southwest, toward the Tennessee lowlands, the Grace River, and Dinwiddie's plantation. Morgan reached into his haversack and took out the general's compass. Unhelpfully, the needle swung north, as compass needles are wont to do.

  "Trouble?" the old opium grower at the little cabin overlooking the grand prospect said. "Trouble making up your mind which-a-way to go?"

  Morgan looked up. "I fear there will be trouble enough whichever way I choose."

  A few days back, before he killed Prophet Floyd, Slidell might have had something to say. Now she just looked off into the distance.

  "You see here," said the grower, who had over his shoulder a haversack like Morgan's. "I am an old man and I have seen me a great pile of your so-called trouble. Much of it never happened."

  "I imagine some of it did," Morgan said.

  The old man spread out his arms, encompassing the mountains flowing away and away to the south. "Behold. These peaks and coves are called Satan's Puzzlement. They're a hundred miles wide and all horribly gashed by little hollows that lead to nowhere, sprigging off like this and this and this." With each "this," the opium grower closed and then snapped open his fingers to indicate the hopelessness of negotiating Satan's Puzzlement. "What's more, each leads to trouble. For they are populated with a race of people who would almost as soon murder you as their neighbor and near as lief murder their neighbor as a blood relation with whom they have fallen out. Murder is the order of the day in those hollows. My brother was murdered at eighteen by his wife of two hours. At their wedding party she saw him talking to her sister. They was only passing the time, was they. But in a jealous rage she gunned him down on the spot. She had just turned fourteen."

  Beside the old man's cabin, the poppies nodded pleasantly in the breeze. "Opium is much in demand these days," Morgan said, to shift the subject. "You must get a pretty penny for it."

  "I get nothing for it. I give half of what I refine to the North and half to the South and have never taken a cent in return. It is my small contribution not to the war but to the peace. The peace of mind of dying men. Here." The grower reached into his sack and brought out a pouch, like a soldier's tobacco sack. Embroidered neatly on the pouch in scarlet thread was the rune . Inside were twelve brown pellets about the size of common clay marbles. One by one the old man dropped them back into the little sack. As he did so, he named each one. "Matthew, Mark ... James, John ... and last of all, Judas. Take these and use them well, son. Employed wisely, they will bring more peace and relief than all the religion in this sad world."

  To hell and gone with it all, Morgan suddenly thought. If, as he suspected, his brother was a short three or four days away in the Great Smokies, he would compass off to the southeast, along the left-hand branch of the fork, and Slidell could come with him or not as she chose. But his feet, his damnable walking feet, took him instead off to the west toward Grace Plantation. He knew that whether he found Pilgrim or no, his work would not be done until he dealt with Dinwiddie and helped Slidell rescue her brother, if he was still alive to be rescued. He had given his word to do so, and his word was all the certainty he had left in the world. Slidell walked beside him, as silent as the surrounding forest.

  S O THE SUMMER WORE ON, and as Morgan and Slidell worked their way through Satan's Puzzlement they did not happen upon any feuding mountaineers, nor did they get caught in their crossfire. This, Morgan believed, would have greatly disappointed the old opium grower. One morning their path lay through the remains of a close-set stand of woods so recently burned over that the blackened trees were still smoking. With the fumaroles of smoke twisting above it, the scorched landscape looked like some stern Old World painter's vision of hell. Some of the trees were still on fire, and scattered through them lay the charred remains of soldiers shot in the flaming woods and burned to cindery outlines where they had fallen. Slidell refused to look at the soldiers' remains. For the most part she no longer spoke at all. Since the killing of Prophet Floyd at the Brush Arbor Tabernacle, she and Morgan had not made love. On the few occasions when it was necessary for her to speak, she would not look at him.

  One evening at dusk they happened upon a double-crib cabin. From one of the two rooms came a horrible high shriek, like a woman in childbirth. Inside on a straw tick stuffed into a rough open coffin lay an old, old woman with long white hair. On the door of the cabin was the symbol and the word Berkana.

  "Who be there?" the woman called out between moans.

  "Morgan Kinneson from Kingdom County, Vermont."

  "Take my hand, then, Morgan Kinneson, for I'm about to travel over."

  He knelt beside the old woman and took her hand in his, and she held it deathly tight and moaned.

  "Where do you have pain, grandmother?" Slidell said. "Can I fetch you water?"

  "No, no water. The pain is in my soul. Ye must forgive me, dear children. Oh, oh, oh! I've lived with my own ruined conscience for nigh sixty years, and I can live with it no longer nor die with it, neither. Please forgive me."

  "Grandmother, I'm no preacher. I can't forgive you."

  "Ye must."

  "I don't know what to say."

  "Say, 'I forgive you, Fair Susan.'"

  Fair Susan gripped his hand the harder, as though she wished to cling to life a little longer or possibly take Morgan across to the other side with her. By now he had seen enough of dying to know that she had only a few minutes left in this world. She said, "Listen, child. Long before your time I was the beauty of these mountains. I was known far and known wide as Fair Susan. I loved my young lover, but he married another and oh, it like to split my heart in twain. One eve I slipped up the mountain to their little cabin and found my rival asleep. On the table in the room where she lay sleeping, as if placed there by the horned devil himself, was a cleaver. I seized it up and drove it into her heart. Oh, child. Can you forgive me?"

  A thousand thoughts went through Morgan's head. How could he of all people, abroad on the land walking down other men, wicked though they were, forgive anyone? Only God had that power, and Morgan had seen scant evidence that God, if he existed at all, ever forgave anyone. But his heart went out to Susan and so, though he be
lieved that such a blasphemous act would surely certify his own damnation, he said, "Susan, I forgive you."

  "Oh," she moaned. "There's more."

  More! Morgan did not think he could bear to hear more--he already had guilt enough of his own for any ten men to bear. Worse yet, Slidell was watching him intently. He was certain that he had no chance of reclaiming her esteem, but he could not bear the thought of continuing this blasphemous charade. And he doubted that he could have broken Fair Susan's grip save by chopping off her hand or his own with a cleaver like the one she had plunged into the poor innocent bride's heart.

  "Can you forgive me, child, if I tell you the rest? For I'm more sorry than words can say. I thought that taking in the poor black runaways at the sign of Berkana would ease my conscience, but it never did. Berkana means rebirth. There was no rebirth for Fair Susan."

  "How many fugitives did you take in, Susan?"

  "Hundreds. Yet it never relieved my anguish for one moment. Can you forgive me again?"

  "Yes," Morgan said despite himself. "I forgive you, Susan. But don't tell the rest. You don't need to."

  She let out another moan. "I must. After I did my fell deed, the high sheriff came riding, and he took up my former lover for the murder. He maintained his innocence up and down and forward and backward, but they tried him at Parched Corn Courthouse and found him guilty, and they hanged him from a tall gallows for the world to see. I went to the hanging. Until the moment they pulled the trip, I intended to confess. In the end I had not the staunchness. And all these years since I've never told a soul. Can you forgive me?"

  "I can," Morgan said. "And I do."

  "Thankee," the woman said with a sigh. "Thankee. And now there's one more boon I must ask of you. I want you to sit nigh for another little while until I travel and then take Fair Susan's corse up the Sugar Fork and lay her to rest beside her poor lover that was wrongfully hanged. He lies buried outside the graveyard palings under a hackberry tree. There's a little stone there, carved like unto a devil's skull, that his murdered wife's people set as a marker. Promise me, child. Ye owe it to me, having forgive me."