Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  A flung torch landed in the cane, which instantly took fire. Morgan wrestled Dinwiddie over his shoulders. Slidell grabbed Solomon's hand. They ran, fire licking at their heels. In its light Morgan saw, fleeing with them, rats and muskrats, rabbits, snakes, a lumbering turtle. "Shoot me, shoot me, I'm a dead man," screamed Dinwiddie. Shots, flames, snakes. A leaping buck deer. Wee hopping mice. Solomon wailing, Morgan plunging forward, on his back the screaming man whom he had vowed to kill, as light as dry sticks. Six months before, Morgan had been running his trapline and milking his father's cows in Vermont.

  "I S PAPA going to die?"

  "He's burned and shot up pretty badly," Morgan said, whereupon Slidell's brother burst into tears. Morgan was touched, and outraged as well, that the child could weep for the creature who had maimed him for life. They had reached Moccasin Swamp, where Slidell's rowboat lay hidden in a canebrake. A mile downriver, the attacking bluebellies were occupied in firing the plantation.

  "For the sake of God, kill me," Dinwiddie begged. "You might better have let them gin me up."

  "You had Jesse murdered," Morgan said. "Then you sent the others to kill me for his stone. Why?"

  "They stole my property," Dinwiddie said. "Your so-called stationmasters and conductors. I meant to see justice served on them."

  "Where is my brother?" Morgan said. "Where is Pilgrim?"

  It was the very longest of long shots, but to Morgan's astonishment Dinwiddie said, "Ask Oconaluftee."

  "Who?"

  "Water," Dinwiddie pleaded.

  Morgan gave the man a drink from his canteen. He dug in his haversack and found the pouch of opium balls the poppy man had given him. He put one in Dinwiddie's mouth like a priest giving unction.

  Dinwiddie moaned.

  "Papa," Solomon cried.

  "Come to me, boy," Dinwiddie said, groping for the boy's hands. "Can you forgive your father for what he did to your poor little fingers? Oh, child. Can you forgive me?"

  "Yes, yes, papa, I forgive you. Only just don't die."

  "Listen, Sol. You must go with this Yankee man and do as he says. He'll see to it that you're well cared for. Won't you now, Yankee boy?"

  "I will. In the meantime, where do I find this Oconaluftee?"

  "Opium. Then I'll tell you."

  One by one Morgan fed the dying man the balls of opium while Slidell tried to comfort her little brother with the good heart and the daguerreotype powers of recollection. Far off on the eastern horizon the moon was coming up, round and yellow as a wheel of Vermont cheese.

  "You'll find him," Dinwiddie started to say. He was having trouble speaking. Frantically, Morgan pressed Jesse's stone into Dinwiddie's hand. "Show me," he said. "For God's sake. Show me on this stone where can I find Oconaluftee."

  In his frenzied hurry Morgan had forgotten that the blind Dinwiddie could not show him. Yet the dying man in the green goggles took in his hand the relic he had long coveted and, like some latter-day Teiresias, traced his forefinger from top to bottom. Then his jaw fell and his eyes stared up at the moon with blank intensity. The opium had done its work. For Solomon's sake, Morgan shut the lids and placed a long cartridge from Lady Justice on each one. He lifted Dinwiddie's finger from the stone. Beneath it in the pale moonlight was the name Gatlinburg.

  "That's it," Slidell said. "That's where we'll find your brother, Morgan. Gatlinburg. You helped me rescue Sol. Now Slidell's going to help you find Pilgrim."

  Morgan shook his head. All he knew of what lay ahead was that where he was going, no one could accompany him.

  "I will come with you," Slidell said.

  "You can't."

  From his belt Morgan unclipped the carved cedar drinking cup. "This is for you, Slidell. Show it to Auguste Choteau of Montreal, Canada."

  "You going to kill old Mr. Luftee?" Solomon said as Morgan handed Slidell into the little boat and lifted Sol onto the bow thwart facing her.

  "I'm going to bury your father," Morgan said, and he patted the child's head and shoved the boat out into the bayou. He did not have much hope that they would make it to freedom. He would be surprised if they made it to the Tennessee River, much less Canada. Yet he knew that this was their best chance and that Slidell could get through if anyone could. As they disappeared into the trees, Morgan cried out her name. He thought she called back to him, but he could not be sure over the terrific detonations from the plantation house. In accordance with their orders, the Union soldiers were blowing up the City of Grace. The sky above the house was as red as a newly opened rose. With a cypress stick sharpened to a point at one end, Morgan dug a shallow grave beside the bayou and covered Dinwiddie's body with sticks and leaves. It was all he could do for the man. He thought of the stone devil's head in his towsack, but for Solomon's sake, and Slidell's, he left it in his sack. Then he began walking again, heading east toward Gatlinburg and the Great Smokies, unaware that he was weeping.

  TEN

  ISA

  "A Yankee fella name of Pilgrim? Wall, now. We had Yanks enough here in Gat, I can tell you, when they druve Will Thomas and his wild red injuns out of town. I don't recall any Pilgrim. Did he come in the Mayflower?" The know-all pine-tar man chuckled at his own foolish joke. It was slack time for him, early fall, when the sap in the pine trees was not running much and he had ample leisure to hold court from his cane-bottom chair on the little gallery of his cabin. Grandly, he swept his hand up the single dirt track at the twenty or so log buildings that made up the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, toward the bloating carcass of a calf lying at the far end of the hamlet. "This ain't, you know, downtown Richmond or Atalanter. I never could cipher out what Little Will was fighting for here. A couple dozen shanty shacks, a few patches of undersized corn? It really weren't much of a battle. Not as battles in this man's war have went, it weren't."

  Morgan was squatting on his heels in the tar man's dooryard, listening, which was about all you could do once the man got going.

  "Where is Thomas believed to be quartered now?" Morgan said when the talker finally paused to draw breath.

  "Oh, he's laying up yonder."

  "Up yonder where?"

  The pine-tar man waved the back of his hand vaguely toward the ridge upon ridge of mountains rising into the hazy blue air west of Gatlinburg. "Up there," he said. "In them Smoke Mountains. What they call the Shaconage. But you don't want to venture there, boy. Oh no, you do not. If the Cherokees don't take your scalp, the outliers waiting out the war up Sugarland will bushwhack you. If the outliers don't lay for you, why Oconaluftee himself will string you up. No sir, young boy, up in them Smokes they'll kill ye as quick as look at ye. Oconaluftee is the worst. He wears a stuffed rattlesnake for a necktie, does old Mr. Luftee."

  "Where did he ever acquire such an outlandish name?"

  "After the mountain he dwells on when he ain't out murdering people. It is a very tall mountain over in Caroliny."

  "What is the tallest and wildest peak in these parts?"

  "Why, that would be Great Grandmother. If you know exactly where to look from here, away off there, you can maybe just imagine that you see it."

  Morgan did not imagine that he saw it--he did see it. Faint but definite, like a huge splitting wedge thrusting into the distant sky. There, he thought. That is where Pilgrim would go. He was walking again, headed down the street, past a boy poking at the dead calf's glazed eye with a stick, past a woman in gingham hanging out wash on a porch. Toward the far blue peak in the haze. The light over the hamlet receding behind him was golden. He had walked from Vermont clear to Gatlinburg, and the place was nothing. For all he knew he was not one step closer to finding his brother. Gatlinburg was just another little tumbledown war-torn settlement. The path he was following ran under some tall trees near a stream falling down from the foothills. In the two weeks since he had parted from Slidell, he had forged his way through Moccasin Swamp and on to Gatlinburg, yet at every waking moment he was intensely aware of her absence. What had she called out to him? Had she calle
d out to him? He kept walking.

  F OR ALL HIS determination, Morgan Kinneson was weary. He was weary in body and weary in mind, and Great Grandmother was still many miles away. For the first time since leaving home he felt a surge of panic to be alone and unable to see what was nearby in the darkling woods. He veered uphill off the path and traversed the slope slantwise under the trees until the stream tumbling down the mountainside was just a faraway hush. Using the general's compass, he sighted in on two soaring rock towers, dim in the twilight, like the chimneys of a giant's house. He walked toward them, passing an oak grove where a bear had rooted for mast. Soon he would have to stop for the night because unlike a bear he could not see in the dark.

  The thought of stopping had no sooner crossed his mind than he smelled smoke. It seemed to be drifting out of a narrow side cove, where yet another rill spilled down the mountainside. He peered up the little crease. However dangerous the mountain dwellers of this region might be, they would know if a Yankee doctor had come through lately. Cautiously, Morgan started up the brook through the laurel. The tang of wood smoke grew stronger. He smelled meat cooking. He cut up the glen with the wind in his face, out around an open bowl, a cirque in the side of the mountain. Several hundred feet below, dark as the boulders along the little stream, were a few scattered cabins. He kept the breeze in his face so that any hunting dogs these people kept would be less apt to scent him. He eased his rifle over his head, then reshouldered it. It would not do to walk into a settlement in these mountains holding a gun at the ready. He started down toward the cabins, and as he approached, a woman sitting out on her log stoop in the dusk began to sing in a high, jerky voice:

  All in the month, the month of May,

  The green buds they were swelling.

  They swelled till the pretty birds chose their mates

  And Barbary her Sweet William.

  By degrees, as the old tune that Morgan's mother had once sung to him proceeded toward its tragic conclusion, men, women, and children came to the doors of their cabins to listen. The men wore dark hats and carried their long-barreled mountain guns. Morgan wondered if they slept in their hats with their guns beside them like wives.

  Will sent a letter through the town

  To Barbary Allen's dwelling,

  Saying here's a young man sick and he sent for you,

  For you to come and see him.

  A notion occurred to Morgan. He was no singer. He had never been able to carry a tune, and Pilgrim made gentle fun of his unmusicalness, as he did of Morgan's solemnity. Yet this was a song that he knew well. If these people called such a nasal quivering wail singing, surely he could do that much himself. The song went on as hard-hearted Barbary slighted William and he took to his bed.

  O mother, O mother, O fix my bed,

  Go fix it long and narrow.

  Whereupon Morgan began to sing counterpoint in the same tremolo:

  Sweet William he died for me today,

  And I'll die for him tomorrow.

  The singing woman gave a start. The men reached out their long arms for their mountain guns, longer still. Morgan did not try to conceal himself. That would bring a hail of bullets. He started down the mountainside and sang on in some approximation of the woman's minor key:

  They buried Sweet William in the old churchyard

  And Barbary close by the side of him.

  He stopped, hoping, hoping. And yes, from below came the woman's quavering voice, rich and low in the dew-laden twilight:

  At the head of Sweet William's grave there sprung a red, red rose

  And Barbary Allen's was a briar.

  And Morgan, now walking in stately accompaniment to the ballad:

  They grew, they grew to the top of the church

  And they could not grow any higher.

  The woman's answering voice was full of vibrato and deep sorrow:

  They leaned and tied in a lover's knot

  And the rose hanged onto the briar.

  Morgan stopped in the woman's swept-earth dooryard. "Good evening, ma'am."

  The singer stood, her copper-red hair falling down her back, her wide-set eyes as silver as new money. In her sack dress she was as spare as a girl, and Morgan could see that she had been and still was beautiful.

  "Eventide to ye as well, son William."

  There was a hint of irony and humor in her "son William," discernible more in her eyes than in her tone. Her voice was sharp with the ring of authority, and when the man at the nearest cabin shifted his gun Morgan's way, she made a short and queenly gesture with her palm straight out from her narrow waist and instantly he turned his gun barrel away. Whether she was the rifleman's mother or the matriarch of this clan Morgan couldn't tell. Only that he was now temporarily under her protection.

  "Have ye tooken your nightly bait?"

  "I have not."

  "Be ye too dauncy high-born for porridge?"

  "I like porridge."

  "Then leave all your mickle weapons here by the house wall and venture in and be welcome to what I have. And afterwards ye'll tell us your story by firelight and we'll gather close to attend and then we'll determine what to do with ye. Come now, eat. No one in all the Sugarlands will dare molest your weaponry. Yet I do hope ye shoot better than ye sing, for meaning no offense, ye cain't croon a note."

  As he stepped on to the gallery, leaving his guns leaning against the cabin wall, Morgan noticed, carved deeply into the woman's door, the sign . Inside the cabin, the windows were covered with black crepe, as if there had been a recent death in the family. He devoured the porridge, which was no more than oats pounded into a watery gruel and slow-cooked for a few hours with raw molasses dribbled over for sweetening.

  Outside, the men had built an open fire to sit around. Morgan sat on a log near the fire, the reflection of the red flames playing on his sun-darkened face and light mustache, his gray eyes trained inward on his own unswerving purpose. Some of the men and boys had been standing by the cabin admiring Lady Justice and Morgan's scattershot, but as the beautiful matriarch had promised, no one troubled Morgan's weapons. If he offended these people they might well shoot him. They would not steal from him.

  "Why come ye armed amongst us? What draws you here to Hell For Sartin?" the man who had shifted his gun said. At first Morgan was at some pains to understand him--the grace syllable in the word "here," he-ear, the name Hell For Sartin. Hell For Sartin must be the community of cabins.

  "I am looking for my brother."

  Maybe they had trouble understanding him as well, because after a few moments of silence the singing woman said, "He's questing for his kin," as though translating what Morgan had said into their tongue.

  "Who be he, Barbary? What do they call his brother?" the rifleman said.

  "My brother's name is Pilgrim Kinneson. My name is Morgan Kinneson. My brother was a doctor with the Union army."

  "The kin he's questing for be a doctor man," the silver-eyed woman said. "Name of Pilgrim Kin."

  "Kinneson."

  "Kin-son. The son of kin. He is a-looking for kin."

  "From whence?"

  "Where hail ye from, boy?"

  "Vermont."

  "I ken it not."

  "Far to the north."

  "He comes from the Northlands."

  "Up Pinch Gut? Kemper's Stand? Up Broke Leg? Where north?"

  "Farther," the woman said. "Hundreds of leagues. Where the running ones go."

  "T'other side of Old Mistress Grandmother? Caroliny?"

  An old man back in the shadows spoke up. "I dropped down to Caroliny when I was a stripling. Tooken work in a mill. It was a shingle mill. Hied me home the next day."

  "Why for was that, grandsire?" Barbary said fondly. "Why hied ye back so abrupt?"

  "Why, Barbary, I didn't favor the drinking water. 'Twarn't sweet like ours. It tasted like unto metalwork. I hied me straight home."

  "This boy is from far beyont Caroline. Tell us your story, Morgan Kinneson. Tell us all about your
quest for your brother and leave out nothing. And if you met ary young women on your way and left them broke-heart, tell us that. For we love a sad tragic story of love above any other."

  Morgan leaned in closer to the splits of dried hickory burning clear and bright on this fallish evening. He had told some of his story to Slidell. Told some of it to the southern general. Now he would tell it to these mountain people.

  "Talk slow," the woman said. "For your fashion of speech is outlandish and difficult, and ye talk as much from your nose, the way we sing, as from your mouth, and the words fall rude on the ear to listen at. But above all leave out nothing, for we love a long story on a chill evening. No tales neither, story us no stories, but a spang-true chronicle. And if'n you left a sweetheart in your so-called Vermont, you must tell us about her. And when your story is finished, if we love it and love you, why we mought help ye find your kin. And if we do not love your story it will go the worse for you. Commence."

  Morgan began his tale. He told of finding Jesse hanged and of the shoot-out with Ludi in the bog. That's when the copper-haired woman made him stop and directed the men to go to their cabins and return with their women and children. For she did not want any of the Allen clan of Hell For Sartin to miss hearing such a narrative. The women came forth with infants swaddled in quilts in their arms and with toddling children and school-age boys and girls who had never been to school a day in their lives, and Barbary made him start again from the beginning. Morgan recounted how he had acquired the gypsy man's elephant, an animal that none of the children and few of the grown-ups had heard of. He chronicled his adventures with Birdcall on the canal and his battle with Steptoe and Prophet on the troop train in the land of the German Brethren. He told of meeting the southern general in Richmond but doubted that they had ever heard of him either. They murmured approval when he described how he had bested Swagbelly at Grace Plantation by breaking his thumbs. When he finished, all was still. Then Barbary said to the other women, "Put the small ones to bed now." And carrying their sleeping infants and some of the toddlers as well, the women departed.