Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Read online

  BOOKS BY HOWARD FRANK MOSHER

  Disappearances

  Where the Rivers Flow North

  Marie Blythe

  A Stranger in the Kingdom

  Northern Borders

  North Country

  The Fall of the Year

  The True Account

  Waiting for Teddy Williams

  On Kingdom Mountain

  Walking to Gatlinburg

  For my son, Jake

  ONE

  THURISAZ

  Y ears later Morgan Kinneson would conclude that it was probably reading that had gotten him and his brother, Pilgrim, into trouble in the first place. The Kinnesons of Kingdom Mountain had always been great readers. Shakespeare's plays. Pilgrim's Progress. Paradise Lost. His mother had delighted in reading Miss Austen and Mr. Dickens to Morgan and his brother. Their father, Quaker Meeting Kinneson, read aloud regularly from the papers and gazettes out of Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia. After Pilgrim left Kingdom Mountain for Harvard, he sent Morgan books by his professor and friend, the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz, and by Emerson and Thoreau, the Concord freethinkers, and, most recently, the book by that strange Englishman Darwin, which was like no other book Morgan had ever read.

  Of course the Vermont Kinnesons also read the Bible. The elderly female cousin several times removed who had quartered herself upon the family since his father was a boy had read to Morgan, with a satisfaction bordering on gleefulness, the vengeful old scriptures of cataclysmic floods and fire raining out of the sky to incinerate entire wicked cities, and wicked giants laid low by boys with slings, not to mention women turned into salt for the least imaginable infraction, and innumerable millions wailing and gnashing their teeth in everlasting fires for reciting their prayers one way instead of another. "Take from the Bible what you can use and ignore the rest," Pilgrim had advised him. "Just as you would from any other book. It's the book our ancestors were raised on. It can't be all bad."

  "It's the book I was raised on," said the elderly cousin many times removed, whose name was Mahitabel, but whom Pilgrim and Morgan called Cousin Sabbath School. She gave Pilgrim a dark look. "It has served me well. It will serve him"--meaning Morgan--"well. When he is judged, at the end of what I prophesy will be a short and ill-spent life, he will know why he has been consigned. There will be no brook fishing or roving off night and day there, I assure you." Exactly where Morgan would be consigned, Cousin Sabbath School never specified.

  "That sounds like the kind of threat a brimstone preacher would make to scare a fellow into going along with his way of thinking," Pilgrim said. "Around comes the long-handled collection basket, boys. Pay your dues or it will go hard with you by and by."

  "We shall see what we shall see," Mahitabel said.

  "On that much, at least, we can all agree," Morgan's father said, hoping thereby to end the discussion.

  "Aye," said Cousin Sabbath School. "We can."

  Of all the Kinnesons, Pilgrim, who was five years older than Morgan, was the most voracious reader. He studied books about medicine and trees and animals and rocks. Until he went to war he had been studying at Harvard to become a doctor. He had even spent a year studying surgery with Joseph Lister at the renowned medical college in Glasgow, Scotland. Before leaving home for Harvard and beyond, he had taught Morgan a good deal about the animals and plants and birds of Kingdom Mountain. He had shown Morgan how to shoot with Hunter, Pilgrim's old cap-and-ball musket, converted from their grandfather's flintlock. And while Morgan quickly became a good shot, his brother remained the expert marksman in the family. Even after he had stopped hunting, stopped killing things altogether, Pilgrim was the best shot Morgan had ever known. For his part, Morgan had an uncanny natural woods sense, which he had honed ever since he had been allowed to go to the woods on his own. As his father sometimes said, you couldn't haul the boy out of the woods with a yoke of oxen, though he too read avidly himself, travel accounts mainly, by explorers like Marco Polo and Captain James Cook. As for Morgan's formal schooling, that had ended after the episode with Dogood.

  In a way it had been the Kinneson mania for reading that had resulted in Pilgrim's trouble as well. In the third year of fighting, Pilgrim had enlisted in the Union army. Like his father, who operated the northernmost station on Vermont's Underground Railroad, Pilgrim was an abolitionist. But the rift with Professor Agassiz had led to his leaving college to enlist. It was Darwin's Origin of Species that had resulted in the break, though by then Pilgrim and his parents had already quarreled over the matter of Manon Thibeau. Not that Morgan believed there was any lesson to be learned from such reflections. You couldn't just stop reading, any more than you could help falling in love. Still, he had to acknowledge, at least to himself, that reading was the main problem, as true in his case as it was in Pilgrim's. If he'd never encountered those travel books, he might never have come up with the idea for his own great odyssey after Pilgrim had gone missing at the place in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

  F OR A TIME after Pilgrim went off to college, Morgan dreaded going to places on Kingdom Mountain that he and his older brother had once frequented. Places where Pilgrim had taught him to wait for a buck to slip down to a stream to drink. Brooks where they'd caught the vividly colored little native trout that lived in every rill on the mountain. The big lake, Memphremagog, which stretched twenty-five miles north into French Canada, where they'd watched the snow geese alight, thousands of them, sailing out of the dense clouds in family gaggles of four and five and six on their way north to Baffin Bay or south to the Chesapeake. Once, while they were trolling on the lake in the birch canoe they had made, Morgan had hooked a huge deepwater fish, probably a lake trout but possibly a sturgeon. The fish had towed the canoe for almost a mile over the border, between the steep mountains rising abruptly three thousand feet out of the water, before breaking off with Morgan's homemade red-and-white lure in its mouth.

  The two brothers loved to camp overnight on top of Kingdom Mountain, high above the treeline, where you could see four different states and deep into Canada. One night, tenting on the mountaintop with their cousin Dolton Kinneson, a great bear of a fellow who was Pilgrim's age but in his head much younger than Morgan, they'd watched the entire northern sky flare blue, green, red, silver, yellow, and pink from the northern lights. Pilgrim had told them about the Canadian voyageurs, fur traders in colorful tuques and sashes, who paddled thirty-foot-long canots du nord in grand flotillas from Montreal to Lake Athabasca and a place with the wonderful name of Flin Flon--twenty-five hundred miles and back again, racing to beat the onset of winter, singing their stirring paddling songs, penetrating wilderness never before seen by anyone save a few scattered bands of Cree. At twelve and thirteen and fourteen, Morgan had longed to go north with these bold adventurers.

  He and Pilgrim and Dolton had brought Professor Agassiz to the mountaintop to examine the glacial erratics, boulders carried down from the Far North by the great ice sheet. They'd showed him the Balancing Boulder, a gigantic round rock as big as their farmhouse, perched on a smaller flat-topped boulder, with strange glyphs that the professor called runes carved into it beside pictographs of a whale, a walrus, and a reindeer. The professor believed that the pictographs and the runes might have been carved by Norse explorers hundreds of years before, but neither he nor anyone else could tell for certain. Only that the carvings were very ancient. Sometimes Morgan and Pilgrim played a variation of blindman's bluff at the Balancing Boulder, shutting their eyes and reaching for the boulder to see which rune they touched most often. Even when he tried not to, Morgan usually touched the symbol ; Pilgrim, .

  At all of these familiar places Morgan had felt
terrible pangs of loneliness ever since Pilgrim had gone missing in Pennsylvania. The plan had been taking shape in his mind for some weeks. After Pilgrim went off to war he continued to write to Morgan, though not to their parents. He told Morgan that he felt they were still close in spirit because they both loved the same places on the mountain. Pilgrim had liked to josh, calling Morgan "soldier" or "Natty," after Natty Bumppo, the fabled scout in Fenimore Cooper's novels. Morgan's parents were too serious-minded to do much joshing. As for the aged cousin, she had never joshed in her life.

  "Did Lord Jesus of Nazareth sit around the woodstove cracking wise with his cronies?" she said. "Did he, cousin?"

  "I believe not," Morgan's father admitted.

  "I believe not, too," Mahitabel said quite viciously. "Lord Jesus of Nazareth never laughed in his life. Not once. Nor did Paul."

  "Laughing wasn't Jesus' department," Morgan's father conceded. "It wasn't Paul's department either, from what I can gather about Paul."

  "They knew that laughter is a sin," Mahitabel said. "That laughter besmirches the creation. I detest laughter."

  The old woman opened her daybook, in which she kept a careful running account of all that she detested, along with clippings of crimes and atrocities culled from the gazettes Morgan's father subscribed to. "Look you," she said, removing a cutting from the Washington Intelligencer of two weeks ago. "Do you call this funny? Do you laugh at this?" The heading read, FIVE HARDENED KILLERS ESCAPE FROM YORK STATE PRISON CAMP. Below, in smaller type, "Family of Four Found Hanged. Murderers Said to Be Bound for the South."

  The article, which Cousin Sabbath School now proceeded to read aloud with relish for the third or fourth time, was especially painful to the Kinneson family because Quaker Meeting's brother, Colonel John Kinneson, was the commandant of the prison, and during the breakout John's wife had been shot by one of the killers. It described how, in an incredibly violent and audacious action, the killers had been broken out of the Union prison at Elmira on the morning they were supposed to be executed. The article reported that the five escaped war criminals were the worst dregs that the conflict between the states had produced. Their numbers included a slave killer, a child murderer, an unfrocked minister, and a disbarred army doctor who, so far from healing the wounded soldiers under his care, had practiced vivisection upon them. The family they were thought to have murdered the next day had been connected with the Underground Railroad, a point that delighted Mahitabel, who had long opposed the Railroad and was a staunch anti-abolitionist, on the grounds that the Children of Israel had owned slaves, and what right did abolitionists like Morgan's father and Pilgrim have to oppose a tradition sanctioned by the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac?

  "Show me," Mahitabel demanded, "where the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac told Moses to free his slaves. Show me where Jesus ordered the Romans to free their slaves."

  In fact the aged cousin had inherited, from yet another aged cousin, a half-interest in a ladies' cotton undergarment factory near Burlington, which had recently gone bankrupt because of the war, a misfortune for which she blamed abolitionists in general and Morgan's father in particular. She also blamed Morgan, who, after Pilgrim left Vermont for Harvard and then joined the army as a medical adjutant, had been conducting passengers over the border to Canada himself.

  That's what Morgan was doing on this gray afternoon in late March of 1864. Not yet eighteen, tall and athletic, light-haired, with wide-set eyes the color of the big lake just before a summer storm, he was guiding a single passenger--there had been many fewer since the president's proclamation just over a year ago--up the Kinnesonville Pike over the saddle on the east ridge of Kingdom Mountain. He was taking the man, known to him only as Jesse Moses, to the last station before Canada, a seasonal maple-sugar house that Pilgrim had named Beulahland, on the back side of the mountain. There they would rest and eat the cold supper Morgan's mother had packed for them. Then he would guide Jesse Moses the rest of the way through the Canadian forest to Magog and put him on the morning train for Montreal. Morgan's father had already wired Auguste Choteau, the Montreal Underground stationmaster, that a passenger from the South would be arriving so that Choteau could be at the terminal to meet Jesse.

  Morgan and Pilgrim had made this trip so many times that as Morgan trudged through the deep snow high on the mountain, he could hear his brother's voice in his head, telling about Professor Agassiz's great ice sheet creeping down from the north, carving out the lake and creating the vast bog called the Great Northern Slang. Telling him the names of the boreal plants clinging to the mountain above the tree line, plants found in few other places south of Labrador, explaining how birds had originated from lizards and humans from something more like monkeys. That's what had caused the falling-out between Pilgrim and his teacher. The professor would have none of Mr. Darwin's monkeys. He and Pilgrim had quarreled bitterly over the matter while on a working holiday together in the Southlands, up in the remote mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina. The quarrel had marked the end of their friendship. Now Pilgrim had gone missing. No doubt buried, according to Morgan's uncle Colonel John Kinneson, in a mass grave for the unknown fallen at Gettysburg. And Morgan would have none of that. He knew for a fact that Pilgrim was alive, though how he knew he couldn't say. He simply did, just as he knew that eventually spring would follow winter on Kingdom Mountain, and summer, however brief, would follow spring.

  When Jesse Moses had arrived at the Kinneson place, he had not been dressed for late winter in the North Country. He had no coat, just a ragged blanket with holes for his arms and head, and rags wrapped around his feet for boots. Morgan's mother had outfitted him with wool stockings and a shirt and some oversized trousers. There had been a fresh dusting of snow earlier in the day, with more on the way. Morgan could smell snow on the sharp north wind, see it coming in the slate sky over the mountain. He'd brought his musket, Hunter, in case he came across a bear early out of its den. Jesse followed him, carrying a tow sack around his neck and wearing a red wool jacket and felt boots Morgan had long ago outgrown. Morgan was glad Jesse was warm but aggrieved to have to give up his boyhood clothes. The red coat had been Pilgrim's before it was his. Even with it buttoned up around his throat, Jesse was shivering. More from fear, Morgan thought, than from the cold. The old black man continually looked back over his shoulder.

  "They coming," Jesse said.

  "Who?" Morgan said. "Who is coming?"

  "They coming, I reckon," Jesse said again.

  They crossed the saddle of the mountain and started down toward the maple orchard. The trees on the wild north side produced wonderful syrup and sugar. The sap here ran late, often not starting to flow until early April. The syrup was light amber, the sugar a lovely blond, a full shade lighter than Morgan's light hair. When the sap was running Morgan and his mother sometimes stayed at the sugar camp for several days. Returning to the camp through the inky maple trees at twilight behind the big red oxen, his shoulders on fire from lugging full sap buckets all day, seeing the red sparks climb high over the black woods where his mother was sugaring off, Morgan would pretend he was an Esquimau coming home from a seal hunt. He loved sugaring time, and this afternoon, guiding Jesse Moses down the mountainside, he looked for any sign that spring and sugaring were close at hand. A blue jay in some black spruces made its late-winter rusty-hinge cry. That was all.

  It began to snow lightly, hard pellets sifting through the bare branches at a slant. Morgan came to a place where something had crashed out of the snowy woods and crossed the old tote road. It was a huge, cloven-footed animal like an ox--but what would an ox be doing on the far side of the mountain before sugaring time? And where an ox's belly would have dragged in the snow, this animal left no belly furrow. It was, Morgan realized, a moose deer. He was overcome by the hunter's urge to strike out and track it down. His grandfather Kinneson had married an Abenaki woman. Yet Morgan, with his light hair and complexion and ice-gray eyes, seemed to have inherited all of the Indian ways in the
family. Pilgrim, who was dark-complected and looked more like an Indian, was the scholarly brother. He'd have been able to say the moose's scientific name. Morgan just wanted to hunt the animal.

  There was a good supply of wood at Beulahland. Last fall Morgan had cut several cords against this spring's sugaring season. He passed under the rowanberry tree in the camp yard, marked with the rune , Thurisaz. A black man, an Underground conductor himself, had carved the symbol deep into the tree many years ago, when Morgan's father was a boy. There was a similar rune on the Balancing Boulder atop the mountain. Pilgrim's professor had said it meant "gateway," which made sense because the Kinnesons' Underground station was the gateway to Canada.

  Morgan lifted the latch of the plank door, went inside, and poured a little coal oil on some kindling in the stove to get a fire going.

  Jesse Moses started to unbutton his borrowed jacket. "I gone give you back you warm red coat, mister tall boy," he said. "Put me in mind of that Joseph coat."

  Morgan smiled at Jesse's "mister tall boy." He was ashamed of his selfish unwillingness to part with something no longer of any use to him. "You keep that coat, sir," he said. "It's just a mite small for me."

  Snap. Outside, a snow-laden branch broke off a maple tree, as loud as a pistol shot. Jesse started. "It's all right," Morgan said. "Just an old tree limb."

  Morgan could not seem to stop thinking of his brother. Pilgrim had no great love for hard physical labor around the farm--making hay, threshing oats, cutting firewood--but he loved sugaring season, loved to come to the camp to help celebrate the first exhilarating task of the approaching spring.

  As Morgan unpacked ham, bread, baked beans, and pie from his haversack and laid them out on the unplaned table, he ran his eyes over the titles of the books on the window shelf. Most had belonged to Pilgrim. Gray's Anatomy. The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The professor's great book on glaciation.