Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Read online

  "We waits here till somebody come for me?" Jesse Moses asked Morgan. "Somebody will come?"

  Morgan thought how frightening all this must be to Jesse. The gathering snowstorm, the deep north woods, the rough mountainside cabin miles from anywhere. He wanted to tell him that the president's proclamation freeing all slaves had gone into effect more than a year ago, that they were four or five hundred miles from the nearest slave state, that he was as safe, as Quaker Meeting liked to say, as a toad in the palm of God's hand. But Jesse's eyes were terrified.

  Morgan smiled at him. "By this o'clock tomorrow, Mr. Jesse, you'll be in Montreal."

  "Where that?" Jesse asked.

  "Canada."

  "Promise land," Jesse Moses said.

  "Yes. The promised land."

  "A young gal 'bout you age been through here lately? Runaway gal, pretty as a pitcher, maybe gots a little boy with she?"

  Morgan shook his head

  "You staying with Jesse, I reckon," Jesse said. "You daddy say you staying with Jess. Put him on the cars. I gots something to tell you. Something important."

  Thinking about the moose, Morgan said, "I'll be back. By nightfall or shortly afterward."

  "I gots to tell you--"

  "I won't be gone long. No one will find you here."

  Morgan knew he should remain with the frightened man. What if, while tracking the moose deer, he was overtaken by the oncoming blizzard and couldn't return to the camp? But he had to get on the animal's trail while there was still tracking light. When he'd first seen the track, it was all he could do not to send Jesse on alone to Beulahland while he lit out after the animal then and there. He'd never shot a moose deer. L'original, the French Canadian trappers who sometimes brought furs down the pike to sell in Kingdom Common called the moose. On this one animal his family could live for an entire year, preserving the meat in the icehouse. He would feel better about putting his plan into action knowing that they had that moose. So he told himself.

  "I'll be back by one hour after dark," he told Jesse Moses. "I promise."

  The old man gave Morgan an uncertain smile and reached out and patted his arm. Morgan smiled back. Then he was out the door into the small driving grains of snow betokening more snow to come. He peered up the mountain through the dark maple boles and judged that he still had half an hour of good light. He started back up the trail at a trot.

  M ORGAN WISHED that he'd thought to bring along his snow-shoes. If Monsieur L'original got into the slang, where the March snow still lay four feet deep, he'd need them. Climbing up the mountain from Beulahland, now running on the snowy trace, he thought he saw where a bear had come out of its den in the tumbled boulders at the foot of a cliff, then had returned to sleep out the balance of the long northern winter. High in a yellow birch tree beside the trail a partridge was nipping off buds, its small head bobbing herky-jerky like a yard hen's. Once he and Pilgrim and their cousin Dolton had found one hundred and sixty-two alder leaves neatly folded one atop the other inside the crop of a cock partridge that Morgan had shot off its drumming log. Morgan knew the exact number of alder leaves inside the bird because Dolton had counted them out in his loud, deliberate voice, the way a child might who had just learned to count to one hundred and beyond. "You're a good counter, Dolt," Pilgrim had said, and Dolton nodded, happy to be complimented by his cousin. After Pilgrim enlisted, Dolt too had attempted to go to war. Twice he had been rejected as unfit for service, once in Vermont, once in Albany. Dolt had decided to stay on in York State because there he would be closer to the war, and who knew, he might yet find a way to join the army.

  Morgan came to the place where the moose had crossed the tote road, its strides a full yard-measure apart. Just up the slope he saw where it had been browsing. Several striped-maple trees about twenty feet tall were barked from the snowline up to eight or nine feet above the ground. When the feeding animal heard him and Jesse coming, it must have rushed across the trail, breasting through drifts a deer would have to leap or go around. Its track was three times the size of a big buck's.

  Think like a moose, Morgan told himself in the dwindling daylight. How did a moose think? Did a moose think? What else besides striped-maple bark did it eat? Where would it go to find its next meal?

  The animal seemed to be headed down the mountain toward Pond Number Three, which the professor had called a glacial tarn. Morgan was running again, angling away from the tracks. He planned to cut the moose off at the base of the mountain before it got out onto the frozen slang beyond the tarn, where it would easily outstrip him. With luck it would stop to feed on the cedar branches and alders along the edge of the slang. If he was fortunate enough to kill it, he'd have to borrow his father's yoke of Red Durhams to skid the dead animal around the foot of the mountain to the home place. Either that or butcher the moose where he shot it and pack out the meat in several trips. He was getting ahead of himself. First he had to shoot it. He ran faster, his felt boots throwing off scoops of snow like a winter hare bounding through high drifts. If the slang beyond the tarn was open, the moose would circle out around it and he could still intercept it before full dark. It was snowing harder. Morgan's hunter's blood was up. He ran faster. The hunt had become a chase.

  Morgan was five feet eleven and one half inches tall and still growing, with long legs like a racehorse. He was as farsighted as a hawk. Three years running, at the Harvest Saturday turkey shoot in Kingdom Common, he'd placed five of five balls in the bull's-eye at one hundred paces with Hunter. He was confident that if he could get that close to the moose with any shooting light at all left in the sky, he could kill the animal. That was all that mattered to him as he leaped over a blowdown, cleared a crease in the snow where a rill cut diagonally down the slope, glimpsed dark water ahead at the base of the mountain where the flume dropped into the pond. Water. Not ice. He believed, hoped, that the moose would avoid the frigid open water at this time of year. The swirling snow fell thicker, blotting out the slang beyond the tarn. The air smelled like spent gunpowder, like wet hay smoldering, like more snow coming.

  Morgan thought he heard church chimes. Here on the back side of the mountain, that could not possibly be, though once from the mountaintop, when the wind was out of the southwest, he'd heard church bells floating out from the Common, faint and mysterious. Yet he was almost certain he heard music. He even recognized the number, "Sucre d'erable"--"Maple Sugar"--maybe played on a zither like his mother's. Running to intercept the animal, he thought of church music, thought of a herd of lean moose devouring a herd of fat moose to the bright wild strains of "Sucre d'erable," like the cattle in Joseph's dream. A year ago at the Sabbath school pageant at church, Morgan had recited the story of Joseph to the entire congregation. Then he had told them straight out in his sharp, carrying voice that if he'd had a raft of good-for-nothing jealous brothers like Joseph's and they'd shoved him into a pit to be devoured by wild beasts, he'd have found a way out and hunted them down one by one, little brother Benjamin excepted, and done unto them as they had done unto him. The congregation had been horrified, especially the somber old churchmen and the ancient churchwomen who shared Mahitabel's opinion of the place where Morgan and his like would spend eternity. In fact, he had deliberately outraged the churchgoers in retaliation for their urging his parents--not that they had needed much encouragement--to forbid Pilgrim to marry Manon Thibeau, a French Canadian Catholic, on the grounds that such a union would condemn the young couple to eternal hellfire. Manon's parents, who attended Our Lady of the Green Mountains in Kingdom Common, felt the same way, threatening to send their daughter to a convent in Quebec City if she continued to keep company with Pilgrim. Shortly afterward Pilgrim had enlisted. Heartbroken, Manon had wandered off into the slang and vanished forever.

  After the pageant Morgan's parents had stopped making him attend Sabbath school and church, so when he finished his barn chores on Sundays he had all day to hunt and fish. That had been the second part of his design in telling the sanctimonious
old churchfolk that in Joseph's place he would have hunted down his treacherous brothers from one end of the Holy Land to the other. At the same time he'd spoken in deadly earnest. Maybe it wasn't in Joseph's nature to see justice served, but it was in his.

  He came out on the edge of the cedar bog at the north end of the tarn. Along the slang draining the bog were the moose's tracks, and out on the frozen surface, as black as a bear in the falling snow, the huge animal was making fast toward an island of cedars, where the ice ended and the open water of the slang began. It was moving in ponderous, loping strides entirely different from the bounding of a deer, and it was well beyond the killing range of Hunter. The moose disappeared in the patch of cedars. If Morgan had been five minutes earlier he'd have had a perfect shot broadside at close range.

  Through the thickening snow he marked a beaver lodge jutting up through the bog just this side of the cedar island. The lodge squatted round and dome-roofed like the Esquimau icehouse in his old school geography. Across from it, on the opposite side of the open lead of water through the ice, stood a dead pine tree. Many years before, the pine had been struck by a bolt of lightning, which had corkscrewed its way down the trunk from top to bottom and riven the tree wide open in a spiraling crease, exposing the heart-wood. In the top of the pine sat a fish hawk's nest abandoned for the winter. The stick nest was nearly as big as a hayrick. Morgan studied the beaver house and the osprey nest. He tried to think what the moose might do next. A true deer would bed down in the cedars and wait out the storm. Toward dawn if the snow stopped, it would come out to feed. He supposed that a moose deer might do the same. He decided that at first light the next morning he'd be back here waiting for the animal. He'd spend the night in the sugar camp with Jesse and be here ready at dawn. Then he would take Jesse along to Magog and the railway.

  Again he swore he could hear chimes floating over the bog. The music was eerie. "Rock of Ages," he thought. It faded in and out of earshot. I gots something to tell you. Something important. What was it Jesse wanted to tell him? Morgan couldn't imagine. Just as he turned to start back up the mountainside he heard the first gunshot, muffled by the falling snow but followed seconds later by another.

  * * *

  H E SPRINTED BACK UP the mountain, his feet finding the trail, which he could discern only by looking ahead at the narrow opening between the tops of the snowclad fir and spruce trees delineating the path below. There were tracks in the road where two men had come through after him and Jesse, headed in the same direction. Ahead the tote road forked. The left branch went west to the big lake, then hooked north. The right branch led directly to the sugar camp. It was hard to tell which way the men he was following had gone. The falling snow had sifted deep into their tracks and drifted over them, but from a slantwise indentation, little more than a shadow on the snow, it appeared to Morgan--who could trail a deer or bear over hardpan ledge by the faintest imprint in the lichen, or by a snapped-off saxifrage blossom or a hair caught on a Labrador tea plant--that the men had taken the route to the sugar camp. When he and Pilgrim played the tracking game they called Chase, Pilgrim had taught him to watch for a single bent-back blade of grass, a wool thread snagged by a bull thistle, half a heel print in the swale. Spring or fall, summer or winter, Morgan read the woods the way Pilgrim read books. From the inside out.

  He moved quickly over the snow. He was quite certain he would overtake the men soon and was hoping against hope to come up on them before the sugar camp. The snow was letting up. Behind the thinning clouds he could see moonglow.

  On the mountaintop the Balancing Boulder shone like a huge crystal ball in the emerging moonlight. Ahead, Morgan smelled wood smoke. In the pale moonlight he saw smoke standing straight up from the chimney of the sugar camp. Searching for the pole star to tell the time, he looked up through the black and leafless branches of the rowanberry tree outside the camp door. A corpse dangled with its feet just above Morgan's head. Jesse Moses. Hanging dead on the rowanberry tree.

  The cabin door opened, and Morgan slid behind a tree. In the pale starlight a black bear stood upright in the doorway and pissed in the snow. No, not a bear. A huge man in a bearskin coat with the head of the bear still attached and pulled up over his head. The animal's front legs were tied loosely over the massive chest of the man in the shaggy coat, each bear paw as big around as the bottom of a milk pail. The bear-man saluted Jesse Moses hanging in the rowanberry tree, and as he did so, snapping off the salute neat and brisk as you please, Morgan raised Hunter and fired. The man gave a surprised howl and reeled backward into the cabin, gripping his left shoulder. In his haste Morgan had aimed high.

  "What is it?" a voice inside the camp cried out. "Did you spot the nigger wench? For God's sake don't kill her."

  The cabin door slammed shut. Morgan started running back down the mountainside toward the cedar bog.

  A T DAWN Ludi Too eased downslope in Morgan's tracks. The entire eastern sky was suffused with alternating bands of gold and crimson and turquoise. Ludi, wrapped in his reeking bearskin, elided into "Marching to Georgia" on his hammered dulcimer. He'd created the instrument from a washboard nailed over a rectangular ammunition box. The strings had belonged to a piano in a darky church that he'd fired. Chestnut-wood pegs, a black cherry soundboard. Inside the cut-down ammo box was a loose rattlesnake rattle to give the instrument vibrato and resonance. The dulcimer hung around his neck on a thick strap made from mule reins stained dark with sweat. He beat the strings with two mallets of yellow poplar, for of all the trees in the forest the tulip tree made the most melodious music in a windstorm. And oh, the dulcimer sounded like a whole marching band going off to war. Out of it Ludi could coax the wail of a fiddle, the ringing notes of a banjo, the feeling sentiment of a Spanish guitar, the percussive beat of a kettledrum, even the brassy blare of a bugle, cornet, or trombone. How he conjured such concerts from his homemade mountain instrument no one knew, least of all the musician himself. Even with an injured left shoulder where Morgan's musket ball had torn through flesh and grazed bone, Ludi was a wonder musician. It was said in the coves and hollows of Ludi's mountains that he could lure a wild rabbit out of a laurel thicket, the heart out of a pretty maid. The troubador could charm fish from a brook right into his fry pan, quail to his horsehair quail trap, could still a storm like the Lord on Gennesaret. Ludi Too could play the venom out of a moccasin, money from a miser, silence from a preacher, the fight from the fightingest enemy. If A.D.'s wench was laying low nearby, he had no doubt he could conjure her out of her hidey-hole with the magical dulcimer.

  Ludi was as uncanny a shot with his breech-loading Yellow Boy carbine as he was a musician. With the Yellow Boy, both south and north of Mason and Dixon's Line, he had dispatched more than three hundred Union and Secesh soldiers. This morning, all-merciful Jesus willing, he'd dispatch the bushwhacker who had winged him the night before at the cabin on the mountain. And, if not before then afterward, he'd run down the gal into the bargain. He might have her himself before turning her over to A.D., aye, he might. But he would have to keep the mad doctor off her. It had been all Ludi could do to prevent the vivisectionist from ripping out the old nigger's live beating heart with his dreadful gleaming instruments before they hung him up in the tree to bait the gal in. Ludi made up his mind to put a bullet in Doctor Surgeon's brain the moment they captured the wench.

  Ludi carried a second weapon, which resembled a long horse pistol such as cavalrymen sometimes wore. But instead of one barrel, it had two snugged up side by side, with two hammers and two triggers. One barrel threw buckshot, the other a four-ounce ball capable of penetrating an oaken door. Ludi wore this weapon around his neck on a lanyard of human gut. Its cracked walnut stock was held together with a spare string from the dulcimer. Etched on the barrels were several demonic faces.

  The Yellow Boy was mounted with a slim telescopic tube, through which Ludi now scanned the frozen swamp below. The swamp stretched out for miles in the clear morning sunlight. Good light to shoot by,
Ludi thought, though whenever possible he preferred to work with the sun at his back. Also he preferred to work alone. That's why he'd made the clubfoot remain behind in the cabin. Doctor Surgeon had wanted to come along, but Ludi had important work to do this morning, and he did not want the lame little medical man getting in his way. Why King George had brought the clubfoot with them during the escape, or the actor and the Prophet either, was a mystery to Ludi. He and George could easily have taken care of the business at hand themselves.

  Except for a black thread of open water winding through it, the swamp was snow-covered. Here and there islands of evergreen trees stood up. The largest one lay only about an eighth of a mile away and occupied no more space than a mule could plow from sunup to sundown. Just across the dark water from the island stood a dead pine tree, with a very large bird's nest at the top. Between the island and the lightning-snag pine, a beaver lodge of peeled sticks jutted out of the frozen swamp. Ludi couldn't tell for certain, but he believed that the tracks he'd been following approached the beaver lodge and stopped there. So much the better, he thought, as he jacked a shell into the chamber of the Yellow Boy.

  M ORGAN SPENT THE night in the woods at the foot of the mountain. Toward dawn his battle plan had come to him all of a piece. The haunting music from up the mountain was still quite faint, and as he walked across the frozen bog and along the edge of the open slang he knew that he had time. He approached the beaver lodge and ripped some dead sticks away from the side. Then he walked backward in his tracks to a stump beside the slang. He removed his felt boots and woolen stockings and rolled his wool pantaloons up above his knees. Without hesitation he stepped into the water. It was well over his knees and shockingly cold. He gasped, caught his breath, felt his way over the silty bottom to the lightning snag.

  He put his boots and stockings back on and began to climb up the dead stobs jutting out from the pine trunk. Up he went, hand over hand, marveling at the whorling wound gashed deep into the trunk of the great tree. He scooped the snow out of the osprey's nest and pulled himself into it. Carefully, he upended his gun, poured powder from his horn down the barrel, ramrodded it home, dropped in the wadded ball, ramrodded again, placed a brass cap under the gooseneck hammer. He drew back the hammer, then pawed more snow out of the nest to make a hollow for himself. To his astonishment he found a fish skeleton four feet long in the bottom of the nest. In the fish's skeletal jaw was the faded red-and-white homemade lure he'd lost years ago when he and Pilgrim were trolling in the big lake and he had hooked the great fish that had towed them and their canoe into Canada. The three hooks hanging from the bottom of the lure were rusted to points. What this curious reminder of the outing with Pilgrim might signify, Morgan had no idea. Nor could he imagine how the osprey had carried the fish, which must have weighed thirty pounds or more, to its nest. But now a man was coming out of the woods at the foot of the mountain. He was wearing a bearskin coat and playing a zitherlike instrument depending from his neck. Morgan wedged deeper into the nest.