Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  They were off down the mountainside into the thick laurel. Blood gushed from Keith Vance Shelton's ruined head into the spring. Morgan ran up the slope. The boy Noah Allen, sheltering on his knees behind an orange boulder, was ramming powder and shot into his long squirrel gun. Morgan could smell powder in the air.

  "He won't speak so of my mama," Noah screamed. "Never again he won't."

  Morgan yanked him to his feet and dragged him bodily up the mountainside. "You bloody-minded little fool," Morgan spit out between gritted teeth.

  "He was a-fixing to ravish my mama, the black villain."

  "He intended to join forces with her against the man who killed your father and brothers."

  "You leave me go. I aim to do for the rest."

  "Listen to me, Noah. Those men will now go straight to Hell For Sartin and surprise your people and kill them if they can. Then they'll come back here for you. Can you cross directly over that steep knob, Acony Bell, and beat them to Hell For Sartin?"

  "I aim to track they and pick they off one to a time."

  "No. They'd lay for you. They'd pick you off. You cut over that saddle on Acony Bell, that path you told me of called Up to Heaven, Down to Hell. Get your mama and cousins and uncles out of the Sugarlands fast as ever you can. Take them down to Gatlinburg. If you try to dog the Sheltons, they'll kill you and yours."

  Noah was shaking. Morgan reached into his pocket and produced the general's compass. "You're a good man, Noah. Like your father, Quill Allen. Your path will be true, just as the legend on the back of this compass promises. Keep it as a token to remind yourself who you are. Now run like your dear mama's life depends on it, for most surely it does. Go!"

  Morgan placed the compass in Noah's palm and closed the boy's hand over it. He gave him a quarter turn in the direction of Acony Bell, and off the boy bolted at a crouching gait, seeming to glide over the broken land more than to walk upon it. Morgan felt a deep fraternal affection for Noah despite his foolhardiness, and he wished him well, knowing that unless Barbary Allen could contrive some way to send him off to faraway kin he would not live out that week. He knew that he too was now a marked man, to be hunted by the Sheltons and shot on sight as an accomplice.

  With the brass-bound spyglass he sighted in on the high peak of Great Grandmother, which he reckoned to be fifty miles away. He began to run, moving at the easy woodsman's lope he had learned from Pilgrim, the all-day pace that even in steep and tangly mountains would carry him thirty miles from sunrise to sunset. From time to time he reached out on either side of the path and turned up a laurel leaf to show its pale underside or kicked a rock a few inches aside to reveal a small fresh spot of earth or made a scuff mark with his boot. Despite what he had told young Noah, he was not at all certain that the remaining Sheltons would hit for Hell For Sartin. Instead they might trail him, particularly if he could leave just enough sign to convince them that two or more men, Keith Vance Shelton's shooter and Morgan and maybe a third bushwhacker, had come this way. If they began to overtake him, he'd have to get up on a knob and, with his superior range rifle, shoot them as they approached. He saw again in his mind the red rose spreading over Keith Vance Shelton's forehead. He ran at a smart pace.

  A S MORGAN SPRANG UP the mountainside he taxed himself for the bushwhacking of Keith Vance Shelton. Had he not approached the Allen settlement the evening before, Noah Allen would not have been with him today, would not have ambushed the Shelton chieftain. Yet he had not asked for Noah to guide him, nor had he exactly volunteered to avenge the deaths of Noah's father and brothers at the hands of Oconaluftee. Everything is connected. Nauthiz means everything is harder than you think and everything is connected. As Eva had prophesied, all that had happened since he'd left Vermont seemed connected in some way, and he was a cog in it all, but to what purpose?

  At the top of a knob he paused to look back down the hollow and saw no sign of pursuit. Across the valley to the south, high on the bald of Acony Bell Mountain, he spotted, with the copper-bound spyglass given him by the woman who lived to spite her unfaithful husband, the tiny figure of Noah Allen bounding along like a roebuck. No one seemed to be dogging him, and it was likely that he would arrive at Hell For Sartin in time to warn the rest of the clan that the Sheltons were coming. Looking north, Morgan could make out quite plainly now the singular high, looming peak of Great Grandmother, slightly hazy but a deep shade of blue. It had rained here recently, and the shower had cleansed the air. It felt more like a spring morning than an afternoon in the early fall.

  Five hundred feet down the north side of the rock knob, the faint path Morgan was following met another. One branch continued north toward Great Grandmother. The other, which appeared to have been much traveled lately, ran off at a westerly angle. Morgan studied the tracks. Six or seven men, all barefooted, had come through the mud on the path earlier that morning. Those could be Keith Vance Shelton's clan. But within the last hour a much larger band of men, many wearing hobnailed boots and two on horseback, had passed through heading toward Shelton Laurel. Morgan lifted his head and tilted it to the west. From far away he heard the prolonged blast of a mountain horn. He heard it again and then again, a kind of low-register bellow that seemed compounded of wind in the pines on a stormy night, a freshet rushing down a mountain, and the far-off sad whistle of a train. From the north came three long answering blasts. And then the coves and glens and hollows for miles in every direction echoed and re-echoed with the moaning signals of three long notes repeated at about half-minute intervals. As the mountain horns hummed out in concert, the hazy, blued air over the unbroken forest seemed to quiver with their ominous music. What had Barbary said? One blast meant gather. Two meant sickness or injury, the call for a doctor or granny woman. Three blasts, long and repeated, meant danger. There was no doubt at all in Morgan's mind. Oconaluftee must be abroad with his killers. He looked off at Great Grandmother, where the One-legged Man of whom Barbary had spoken might be able to tell him news of Pilgrim. He was a day away at most, and with Luftee off in Shelton Laurel he would likely have free passage. Yet he had given Barbary Allen his word that he would kill Luftee. And how could he stand by and let Luftee harm the Sheltons? Oh, the maddening impossibility of all human choices! Morgan began to run again--away from Great Grandmother Mountain and toward Shelton Laurel.

  He believed that his only chance lay in reaching high ground overlooking the Shelton settlement, but without Noah to guide him he did not know exactly where that settlement was or whether it lay exposed to any high ground. Plunging along in the prints of the gang, he nearly bolted off the edge of a precipice where the path bent sharply and descended to a stream he could have cleared in a single leap. Here the trail ended altogether. But judging from the water recently splashed on the rocks jutting out of the streambed, where the densely hanging trumpet vines had been hacked away and laurel leaves broken off, he believed that Oconaluftee and his killers had proceeded upstream. Morgan began to run up the brook. He entered a cleft between the mountains where the tilted rocks underfoot were slick and treacherous. Fifty yards ahead, a sentinel of Luftee's raiding party wearing a skunk-skin cap with the black-and-white-striped tail over one ear stepped out from behind a boulder, raised an Enfield rifle, and fired at him. The bullet cut through the air an inch from Morgan's temple, smashing into a pine tree clinging to the cliff on his right. Without slackening his pace Morgan unslung his rifle and chambered a shell, lifted the gun to his shoulder, and put a .50 caliber bullet through the sentinel's breast. The man toppled over into the brook and Morgan used him as a stepping stone. A moment later he came to the edge of a clearing.

  Under the direction of a huge bearded man on a mule, the killers had rounded up the women and children and elderly people of Shelton Laurel and were endeavoring to torment them into revealing the whereabouts of their menfolk. An old woman was being slow-hanged over the limb of an oak, hoisted onto her toes by a noose around her neck. A man with a feathered hat was busy dunking a squalling infant into the
brook by its heels. A mountain lad of twelve or thirteen, with an ancient fowling piece beside him, lay dead of a head wound. Children were being chased down in the high weeds and brush around the gardens. Partway up the bald, a sharpshooter in a long duster coat plugged away at the fleeing people. Each time he fired he doffed his hat and slapped it against his thigh and whooped. Another raider was in the process of raping a girl who could not have been ten years old. He was the second marauder Morgan shot, putting a bullet through the ravisher's neck. His next target was the whooping marksman on the bald. He estimated the distance at six hundred yards, with three hundred and fifty feet of elevation to account for. Aiming for the sharpshooter's head, he lodged a bullet in the man's gut and watched him roll over and over down the lichen-carpeted rock face like a tumblebug in a duster coat.

  A stand-up fight against fifteen or twenty men was not what Morgan had wanted, though he had no fear for his own safety or for his life. He shot again and spun the bearded man, whom he judged to be Oconaluftee, right off his mule. He shot the man drowning the infant in the temple, the baby dropping unharmed, he hoped, in the sedges beside the brook. The hangmen ran for the woods but did not get far. From his bandolier Morgan fed Lady Justice one shell at a time, since he did not have leisure to reload all eight. He popped three of the four-inch-long projectiles out of their bandolier pockets and stuck them between his teeth like three short gleaming cigars. One by one he removed and inserted them in his gun and fired, hitting home each time with unerring deadliness.

  The mule galloped round and round the meadow, dragging the wounded Oconaluftee by one foot caught in a stirrup. The woman who had been slow-hanged was crawling toward a cabin with her toddler child. As the mule thundered down upon them, Morgan shot it through the withers. It collapsed like an animal made of cloth. Luftee, detached from the stirrup, flew through the air, landing in a corn patch beside the cabin. The mattock man who had chopped the dying to pieces not a week ago lifted the hateful implement high over the crawling woman's head. Morgan shot him through the heart. There was a rustling in the corn patch where Luftee had gone sailing. Morgan lifted Lady Justice to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

  The meadow lay still in the early autumn sunlight. Morgan walked quickly to the stand of corn but saw no sign of Luftee. Instead, lying behind a shattered scarecrow were the lifeless remains of the toddler, still clinging to the straw leg of the pumpkin-headed figure as he would have to his mother. So far from dispatching the monster Oconaluftee, Morgan Kinneson had shot and killed a child.

  H E JUDGED THAT Great Grandmother, where he hoped to find the mountain doctor Noah had told him of, was still twenty miles away. Perhaps farther, depending on how many ridges and hollows intervened between him and the mountain. He had staunched the gunshot wound in his side--he had not even realized he'd been shot until after the battle--by packing it with damp moss from a streamside boulder and webbing from the beautiful air trap of a yellow-and-black spider. He bound the wound with two strips of cloth cut from the bottom of Quill Allen's shirt. He felt a painful throbbing up and down his side and could not rid his mind of the picture of the poor dead toddler clinging to the leg of the straw figure. He knew he was eternally damned, not by Mahitabel's angry Jehovah but by his own conscience. And Oconaluftee was still abroad on the land. Perhaps the monster had headed east toward the mountain bearing his name. Morgan scooped up a dripping handful of brook water and laved it over his forehead. He kept walking. He knew that he must find the mountain doctor soon.

  * * *

  I T WAS EVENING. For some time he had been vaguely aware that he was ascending a steep mountainside. Ahead sat a small cabin in a meadow. As Morgan approached it, he saw, painted on the door, the symbol . He stepped up onto the single log stoop, but before he could knock, the door opened and a tall man with a short dark beard, standing on one leg and leaning on a two-headed snake staff, said, "Yes?" Then, "My God, man, you're hurt. Come, let me--"

  "Pilgrim," Morgan said, collapsing into his brother's arms and into oblivion.

  ELEVEN

  OTHILA

  "I know you," Morgan said.

  "Well, Morgan. I should hope that you do," the girl said, smiling. Dark hair framed her heart-shaped face, and her dark eyes were serene and amused, just as he remembered them from when he and she were both alive.

  Reading his thoughts, she said in her mild accent, "No, Morgan. It is not what you suppose. I will explain when you are stronger, as you most certainement will be. We took the bullet from your side and sewed you back together again neat as a Christmas goose. Oh, Morgan. Silly garcon that you were to adventure into these mountains alone. But we are tres heureux to see you."

  He was lying on a bed in an airy cabin with sunshine falling through an open doorway on the quilted bed cover. Bunches of herbs hung from the rafters overhead. Across the room stood a stone fireplace, and on a table between the bed and the door were more herbs and roots, as well as some small blue and green bottles. He could smell pennyroyal and some kind of wild mint and horehound and perhaps tansy. As the young woman spoke, she washed his forehead and face with a cool cloth, and though he felt weaker than he could ever remember feeling, his fever was gone and he believed he might live now that the bullet had been removed and he was stitched back up neat as a Christmas goose. What he couldn't get his mind around was that the lovely young woman was Manon Thibeau, Pilgrim's intended, who had wandered off to her death in the bog on Kingdom Mountain more than a year before. Moreover, she appeared to be with child.

  "I thought we were both dead," he said.

  "I believe not, Morgan." Manon's eyes were delighted by such a comic notion. "Can you turn your head? No, the other. I mean the other way, not the other head. You have but one head, I hope. A little more."

  Through the window to his left he saw a one-legged man in a dark suit and hat limping up the lane, framed by the jumbled mountains in the background. The man was using a homemade crutch in the shape of two snakes, swinging along on the crutch and his single leg at a brisk clip, and as he approached the cabin he called out in a booming voice Morgan knew as well as any voice on earth, "Is he awake, the young layabout?"

  "He is," Manon called back. The one-legged man shouted with joy, and then for a moment he was out of sight, and then he was swinging fast through the door in the sunlight, shouting Morgan's name.

  "Morgan Kinneson!" he thundered, grabbing Morgan's hand. "You young devil. You walked all the way down here to get yourself shot when you could have done it as easily in Virginia. Look. Here's the ball I yanked out of your side, you rapscallion. Where have you been? I expected you months ago. You've grown six inches! Did you meet up with old Jess?"

  Morgan tried to raise himself off the pillow but could only lift his arms to embrace his brother.

  T HIS TIME when he woke he knew that he was alive and so too was Manon and so of course was Pilgrim, though somewhere in his travels his brother had lost a leg.

  Manon fed him some soup and tea. Afterward Pilgrim changed his bandages, working swiftly and expertly with Manon's assistance. She seemed, as she rewrapped the wound with cotton strips, as skillful as Pilgrim, who explained to Morgan that he was teaching his profession, including surgery, to his wife and that she already knew considerably more than most of his medical school colleagues and infinitely more than nearly any army doctor he'd met. He explained, in his confident, engaging fashion, that after walking away from the battlefield he had headed north, planning to return to Kingdom County, where Manon was waiting, and then possibly travel across the border with her to practice medicine in Canada. He had gotten only as far as Joseph Findletter's when he realized that the wound he'd sustained at Gettysburg had become infected. Posing as a wounded Confederate medical aide, Pilgrim had directed the smith in the removal of his leg. During his recuperation, he had carved his sign , Othila, on the wall of the smith's shop. He had then secretly written to Manon, who, after feigning her disappearance in the bog, had made her way south by rail and stage t
o join Pilgrim in Pennsylvania. Together, in the guise of a southern soldier and his sister, the couple had stopped briefly at many of the Underground stations Morgan had visited, including Cobbler Tom's, Two Snake's, and the ghostly Melungeons', before venturing farther south to the primeval forest above Gatlinburg where Pilgrim had once spent a scientific holiday with his professor. Here, in an abandoned crofter's cabin on Great Grandmother, Pilgrim established his medical practice. The runaway Jesse Moses had been one of his first patients, brought to him by Barbary Allen. He had cured Jesse of malarial fever. Before continuing north, Jesse had painted the sign of Othila, , on the cabin door, then etched it on his rune stone.

  It was an astounding tale, but no more amazing than Slidell's and perhaps less so than Morgan's own, which he had not yet told Pilgrim and Manon, and part of which he dreaded to disclose. Gots something important to tell you. If only he had stopped to listen to Jesse, he might have avoided much of what had happened in the past several months. No matter. If, as Big Eva had told him, Othila meant separation, his long separation from Pilgrim had come to an end.

  During the succeeding days Pilgrim and Manon did not press Morgan for his story but let him build up his strength by walking over the old sheep pasturage, to which Manon had some months ago introduced a small new flock purchased from Barbary. When Morgan first set out on his quest, he had believed that he must rely on himself alone and, moreover, that each man and woman in the world must do the same. Now he realized that without the help of others he never would have reached Gatlinburg and these southern mountains, much less survived here. Like his own ancestors, who, as the carved words on the door lintel at home stated, "lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind," he had befriended a fair number of people--Birdcall, Cobbler Tom, the runaway slave Mercy Johnson, Slidell, Little Solomon, the Findletters, and others. But the help he had given was negligible compared to that which he had received, and if there was great and unspeakable evil in the world, was there not also, as Slidell had told him, great kindness and love? Yet Morgan could not remember thanking a single person who had assisted him.