Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The logic of this assertion escaped Morgan. He hesitated to bury the poor woman beside the man she had consigned to an unjust execution, and most of all he was loath to delay his journey by one single hour more. But she begged him so, and was so terrified to die alone and be buried apart from her beloved, that against all his better judgment he finally said, "All right, Susan. I promise."

  "There's a spade in the dooryard and a sled to pull me on," Susan said, and she lay back in her narrow wooden coffin, which Morgan guessed she had made herself, and a little later she expired with some measure of peace. Slidell lighted the oil lamp on the trestle table, and in its glow he realized that the trestle was in fact the coffin lid. He wondered what Fair Susan's last name might be.

  Unable to meet Slidell's eyes, he carried the lidded coffin with Susan inside out to the dooryard, where he found the shovel and the hand sled, upon which he pulled the coffin up the dry branch to the cemetery. Under the hackberry tree outside the palings he discovered a stone not much larger than his fist, carved into a hideous little devil's head. He picked the thing up and put it in his towsack, thinking it would be a fitting marker for the grave he intended to dig for Arthur Dinwiddie. Working by the thin light of a quarter moon he buried Susan. To his surprise, Slidell assisted him, taking her own turn with the shovel. From time to time she gave him a quick, considering look, but said nothing. When they were finished, Slidell knelt beside the new grave and somberly recited the Lord's Prayer, laying particular emphasis upon the forgiving of our trespasses.

  The gulf between them still seemed as profound as that which now and forever separated Fair Susan from her own once beloved.

  T HEY CAME INTO A LAND of flat cane fields and rice fields flatter still, of stout riparian trees whose high-kneed trunks seemed rooted in black standing water. Their limbs were draped with moss, like the tattered gray beards of soldiers who had been young when the war began but were now grown old. These strange sights made Morgan uneasy. Like heartsick Ruth, he had come to an alien land. He wondered if the people who lived here would find Vermont alien.

  One morning Slidell woke up weeping. She told Morgan she had dreamed that Dinwiddie was now starving Little Solomon in the bamboo cage in which he had murdered many a runaway slave. That night Morgan asked her what she planned to do if they were able to rescue Little Sol from Grace Plantation. She told him that she had hidden, on the edge of Moccasin Bayou, a small blue fishing boat. Originally, Slidell's plan was to row north with Sol on the Tennessee River, then up the Ohio to Illinois, and from there they would make their way on foot to Canada and freedom. Recently, though, she had begun to think that she and Sol might be safer going on with him if he would agree to take them north after he found Pilgrim. For the first time since he had killed Prophet Floyd, Morgan felt that there might yet be some hope for himself and Slidell, however slender.

  They began to hear terrifying reports of Arthur Dinwiddie's Grace Plantation. Some said there had been a revolt and the plantation had been turned into a prison for former slave owners. Patrollers rode unchecked over the land, visiting atrocities on the population. Here in the Tennessee lowlands it seemed a war within the war was being fought, with armed factions preying upon the refugees pouring northward and upon each other. Anarchy obtained. It was perilous to travel by day, more perilous yet to move at night.

  At a riverbank landing near a place called Shiloh, where some two years ago there had been a terrible battle, a horde of urchins, the oldest of whom could not have been twelve, came boiling out of the burned shell of a steamboat and set upon Morgan and Slidell with rocks and sticks, until Morgan was constrained to fire a warning shot over their heads. They seemed to be starving, and he had nothing to give them but that deadly warning to keep their distance. At the next town he heard that the steamboat children were from a Memphis orphanage. How they had gotten here and formed a guerrilla unit making sorties into the countryside for food and committing all the acts of rapine they were capable of, no one could say. Slidell shook her cropped head. "Weep for mankind," she said. "In such times as these, Morgan, weep for mankind."

  It was the first time she had called him by name in weeks. As for her sentiments, he could only agree.

  Grace Plantation? The graybeards on the square and leaning against the mossy posts on the river wharves pointed off to the south. Rumor had it that Union gunboats were even now assembling on the Tennessee to assault the plantation by water. If Morgan wished to see it, he had best see it quickly. Sherman had ordered that not one brick of the notorious Grace be left standing on another.

  * * *

  Y ET WHEN THEY ARRIVED, the place was not what Morgan had expected. Not that any place was in these inverted times, when the one remaining shared objective of North and South seemed to be to dismantle, as violently and completely as possible, a civilization that had taken several hundred years to develop, with absolutely nothing to replace it save chaos. But the broad avenue between the mature white oaks and spreading copper beeches leading up from the levee road by the Grace River to the gleaming white mansion with soaring limestone pillars seemed placid and blessedly removed from the terror and anguish not ten miles away. The fields stretching off into the distance, rice along the bayous, then cane, then plain upon plain of cotton, bespoke bounty and content and perhaps an oasis of sanity in a land run amok. How Morgan loved the trees. Stately, tall, wondrously varied, they ranged over a spacious park stretching away and away from the great house. Some he knew by name, many he did not.

  The plantation house, as big as the Kingdom County courthouse, was built in the shape of a steamboat, with three decks decorated with ornate gingerbread scrollwork and a cupola on top resembling a pilothouse. Under the porte cochere wound a drive of crushed pink shells, up which Morgan now walked alone, while Slidell waited near the river. It did not look like the scene of a rebellion. The beauty of the place made Morgan wish to read law there, or write up a narrative of his long trek, sitting high in the glassed-in pilothouse where Slidell had read Sir Walter Scott to her small white half brothers and sisters.

  Then he thought of Arthur Dinwiddie, and he strode across the pink shells and lifted the brass door knocker in the shape of a liveried black child knocking, though even Morgan Kinneson from Vermont knew that no slave, child or adult, would ever have been allowed to come to the front door of the Grace mansion. He rapped sharply three times. He had entrusted his rifle, Lady Justice, to Slidell for safekeeping. Ludi's scattershot, both barrels primed and loaded, hung around his neck inside his deerskin jacket. With it he would kill Arthur Dinwiddie. And though he was certain that Slidell knew his intentions, this time she had voiced no objections. Not because she had changed her mind about the wickedness of all killing. She had not. Rather, Slidell knew that if they were to have any chance of rescuing Sol, she must let Morgan do his work as he saw fit. Morgan, for his part, was prepared to dispatch the plantation owner like a coiled snake in his path. That would end it, he believed. That would end it all, and he would be free to find Pilgrim.

  A black child no more than seven or eight years old opened the big door, revealing a lofty manorial hall and majestic spiral staircase. He was dressed in a butler's suit and a tall red turban. "Why, sir," he said, "what a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Welcome. Welcome to the good ship City of Grace. May I have your name, sir?"

  Morgan told the little boy his name. He noticed that the child's ring fingers were missing from each hand. The scarlet turban was a good foot high. "I am Little Prince Solomon," the child said with the greatest insouciance in all the world. "Come in now, Mr. Kinneson. The tour of the City of Grace begins here in the Great Hall. The Great Hall was conceived by Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie the First in 1763 when he drew up the original design for the house. Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie the First was the great-grandfather of the current Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie. Don't mind your boots, sir. Leave them on. Through this door have strode booted potentates stretching all the way back to General George Washington, of whom the current Mr. Dinwidd
ie is a great-great-nephew."

  Little Prince Solomon made a gracious gesture, palm up, toward the circular staircase. "We will tour the second deck momentarily. But let us now view the first-deck staterooms. These portraits lining the Great Hall are of former Dinwiddies and their thoroughbred racing horses. Here's Bonnie Scotland. Here's Iroquois, here's Emperor Jack. The smoke color of the hall paint was selected by Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie the First to enhance and highlight the portraits. The ruby-colored fanlight over the door is the result of blending gold flake with molten glass. The woodwork is yellow poplar, sir. Yellow poplar was very abundant in the day of Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie the First. It was quartersawed to give the appearance of walnut or oak."

  From somewhere downriver Morgan could hear cannon fire. With patrician disregard for the cannons, the child, his shiny butler's shoes clacking on the yellow poplar parquet floor, led the way into a double parlor. Here he resumed his well-polished narrative. "The twin parlors, Mr. Kinneson, with their walls of robin's-egg blue and their varnished sweet-gum ceilings, are furnished with Thomas Chippendale chairs and divans. The tall pier mirrors in gilded frames multiply the chandelier lights. The modern gasoliers were installed only recently for the sake of convenience. The painting of the current Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie, over the Georgia marble mantel, was done in 1848 by the renowned Savannah artist Mr. W. C. Llewelyn Chute."

  In the full-length oil portrait Slidell's father was dressed in a riding outfit. He was still quite young and did not look like a cruel man.

  "Where is the current Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie?" Morgan asked.

  Little Prince Solomon placed a finger to his lips. "Won't you come this way now and see the ship's library, Mr. Kinneson? Like the parlors, it boasts a fourteen-foot ceiling. The oak bookcases help take up wall space. The bird's-eye maple breakfront and secretary were commissioned for the library by the first Mr. Dinwiddie. The maroon racing silks above the door are the oldest registered racing silks in what we once called the United States--united, I fear, no longer. We'll tour the stables and grounds presently." In an aside, like a player delivering a soliloquy, Solomon whispered behind his maimed hand, "Help poor papa, Mr. Kinneson."

  "What?" Morgan said. "Help who?"

  The boy made a rapid silencing gesture. Except for the distant cannons, it was still and very warm. Morgan had the sense that he and Solomon were being scrutinized by the Dinwiddie ancestors on the walls of the Great Hall. He no longer wished to write up his journey in this anomalous steamship of a house, which seemed to him more mausoleum than manor. A mausoleum of a way of life that, like Cousin Mahitabel's textile mill far to the north, had been sustained by trade in human flesh, and very soon, when the approaching gunboats arrived, would be dead.

  The cannonading downriver seemed to be drawing closer. The glass in the many-paned windows shuddered with each blast. "Well, well," Solomon said. "We have just time to tour the grounds and outbuildings before the troops arrive." Then, "Old Swag rode in two weeks ago. He hung papa up in a cage."

  From which he glided with perfect cadence back to his narrative. "Are you fond of roses, Mr. Kinneson? Come. We have one of the finest collections in the Confederacy. You must see our thorn-less Himalayan and the unique Grace Colony Black Beauty. A true black rose is unheard of, you know. Mr. Arthur's blossomed a fortnight ago. Just before the Reign began."

  "The Reign?"

  "Of King George the Terrible. Come now, sir. See our rare black rose. Mr. Arthur was working on hybridizing a blue one as well. It too may have produced a blossom."

  As the early evening shadows crept over the manicured grounds, Little Prince Solomon led Morgan to the rose garden, showing him many a new cultivar developed by his botanically minded father. He conducted Morgan through an arboretum of exotic trees from Africa and South America, then down a path toward the crawling black river. Near several bee gums they came upon a thundering steam-powered cotton gin. In a nearby cypress tree hung a bamboo cage with an elderly white man inside it. He was wearing a filthy plantation owner's suit and green goggles. Twelve black men, whom Morgan judged to be former slaves, were holding a court below the tree, under the direction of a thirteenth, a black giant in a frock coat and top hat. The giant's nose seemed to have been recently broken. He was standing on the back of a tobacco wagon, and beside him, bolted to the wagon bed, was a gleaming silver gun with a crank handle and a ventilated barrel pointed straight at the man in the cage.

  The huge man in the silk hat intoned in a grave voice, "And did you, Arthur Dinwiddie, after passage of the law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States from old Afric, did you continue to commission the theft and enslavement of Africans?" When the man in the cage refused to reply, his interrogator knelt beside the silver gun and began to turn the handle, sending a racketing volley of bullets into the branches of the cypress. The prisoner, grasping the bamboo poles of the cage, never flinched. "Fine, then," the judge rumbled. "Citizen Stoker, I bring you as witness. Did Arthur Bedford Dinwiddie, also known as Anno Domini, breed and sell into slavery some two thousand men, women, and children?"

  "He did, Citizen George."

  "And did he commission the murder of some thirty-five runaway slaves?"

  "He did."

  "I put the question to you again, Mr. Arthur Dinwiddie. Did you--"

  "I don't have to answer your questions and I don't intend to," Arthur Dinwiddie said in a voice as dignified as is possible for a starving man in a bamboo cage. "Mr. Lee will be here shortly, and then, gentlemen mine, we shall see what we shall see."

  Citizen George fired another burst of bullets from the Gatling gun. Then he gave a nod to Citizen Stoker, now building up a fearful blaze in the rumbling steam gin. Hiding among the bee gums, Morgan heard shots from the river. The gunboats were arriving. Citizen Stoker, stripped to the waist, his red galluses aglow in the furnace fire of the clattering gin, smiled grimly.

  "Jurymen, cast your stones, white for 'innocent,' black for blackhearted villainous 'guilty,' as we know this man to be," King George said.

  "Help him!" Solomon whispered in Morgan's ear. "Help papa."

  In the dusk a slender figure in a straw hat slipped out of the trees along the river and passed stealthily through the bee gums. Slidell slid in beside Morgan and thrust Lady Justice into his hands. "Sol," Slidell whispered. "Oh, Sol. It's your sister. It's Slidell, Sol. Come for you."

  The boy looked at her blankly. When she hugged him he stiffened, still not recognizing her.

  "Sol, I cut my hair," she whispered. "Otherwise, I'm just Slidell. Come, now. This man and I came back to rescue you."

  "Rescue papa," the little boy said, pointing at Dinwiddie, huddled in the cage in the cypress tree.

  Slidell shook her head. To Morgan she said, "I found my little blue boat. Right where I left it the night granddaddy and I ran."

  Swagbelly stepped down off the wagon bed and removed his tall hat. As he walked from juryman to juryman, each one dropped a stone into the hat. Swagbelly took his hat to the steam gin, and in the light of the fire he dumped the stones rattling into his hand. Every one was black as obsidian. He strode back to the cage and stood beneath it with his hat over his heart.

  "Arthur Bedford Dinwiddie, you have raped and pillaged and plundered. You have enslaved people on Grace Plantation for forty years. Into the land of Gath you sold your own children and nieces and nephews. You have ginned up the cotton and ginned up the lives of your people. Therefore I do sentence you to be ginned up in your own cotton gin."

  "Do you think I care for your threats?" Dinwiddie snapped his fingers. "I don't care that much. General Lee is arriving as we speak. Can't you hear his boats? I'll whip you all again like the miserable curs you are. Even if I can't see you, I can still whip you."

  "We gone gin up old Dinwiddie," Stoker said.

  "No!" Little Sol screamed.

  Morgan stepped out of the bee hives. "You men lower that cage and let him out. Be quick about it."

  The jurymen fell back, letti
ng go of the rope attached to the top of the cage. It dropped ten feet to the ground, split open, and spilled out the former plantation owner in a heap of rags.

  King George laughed and came at Morgan with his massive hands opening and closing and made to seize his neck and throttle him. As Swagbelly lunged for him, Morgan grasped his huge thumbs, one in each hand, and bent them back onto the giant's wrist, breaking them at the second joint like matchsticks. Swag roared and rolled on the ground.

  "Help Mr. Dinwiddie up," Morgan ordered the jurymen.

  "Oh bee-gum man, hear us good," Citizen Stoker pleaded. "He they devil carnate. He send hundreds of chirren into bonda, kill all they runaway."

  "I know what he's done. Assist him to his feet."

  One of the men darted up to Dinwiddie and helped him stand.

  "What's going on up there?" a nasal voice called out from the direction of the river. "What for's that cotton gin running at this time of night?" Citizen Stoker leaped onto the wagon bed, swiveled the Gatling gun in Dinwiddie's direction, and began to crank the handle, raking the area beneath the cypress tree with bullets. One struck the boiler of the gin, which blew up like an overheated steamboat engine, spraying some of the jurymen and Arthur Dinwiddie with boiling water. More shooting, as the scalded members of the court screamed and plunged into the river for relief. Morgan grabbed the wounded, badly burned, and screaming Dinwiddie by the back of his jacket and dragged him into the sugarcane, with Slidell and Little Sol close behind. Sol wailed as a torch flew out over the river. In its flaring incandescence, the oncoming blue-clad soldiers shot at the helpless men in the water. Someone discovered the Gatling gun and was finishing off the slaves in the river with burst after chattering burst. The soldiers were whooping, shooting at anything that moved now. The man on the wagon bed gave out a great hurrah and turned the deadly machine gun on the cane, sending a volley of flying lead in the general direction of Morgan, Slidell, and Sol.