11
OUR PASSAGE over the mountains of western Virginia was very hard and very slow and most of all very wet. The road was little more than a wretched swamp, through which my uncle’s mule and my horse picked their way, up to their fetlocks in mud. Usually they warned us well in advance of the approach of other travelers, tossing their heads and softly braying or nickering. At first when this happened, my uncle insisted that we rein our mounts off the track and wait out of sight until the wayfarers passed. It soon occurred to him, however, that if we were detected, this evasive conduct would seem suspicious; so, by the second or third day out of Monticello, he stopped avoiding the few people we encountered and merely kept his face turned aside and did not tarry to visit—though he and his costume drew many a long look. Fortunately, no one seemed much inclined to question us, perhaps because we were well armed—I with my flintlock rifle and the private with his arquebus.
I would not wish you to think that my uncle allowed my education to suffer merely because we were away from home. One morning the schoolmaster taught me the first thirty lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which he said was an appropriate poem for “two young blades” off on a springtide pilgrimage of their own. Another day he drilled me in the rudiments of Italian and Russian; on another, the dynasties of ancient Cathay. Each day, too, he encouraged me to stop and draw some of the many varieties of birds, both native and migratory, that were then in those mountains. Once we tarried for more than an hour while I sketched a fierce battle between a nesting pair of scarlet tanagers and a bold young blacksnake attacking their eggs; with some help from my uncle, who wished to assist the birds without harming the snake (or getting too close to it, if I did not miss my guess), the determined pair of tanagers drove the scaly marauder away. On another occasion I drew a rosy grosbeak that landed on my uncle’s shoulder and repeatedly attempted to pluck off a fringe of the buckskin shirt he wore under his mail, to use in its spring house-raising. Seeing that I was amused by this scene, and fearful of being thought too tenderhearted, the private put on a blustering air and cried, in his stage voice, “O for some William Tell to shoot this feathered interloper from off my shoulder. See how even the birds of this abandoned southland violate our persons, Ti. Much more of this familiarity and I’ll wring its neck like a Sunday dinner cockerel.”
Knowing that my uncle could never bring himself to harm any wild creature, I could not help but laugh. At this he drew his long-knife and made a vicious swipe—not at the bird but at his shirt, cutting off half a dozen leather thongs, which he left draped over a laurel branch for the grosbeak to appropriate at its leisure, at the same time muttering that he wished it would hang itself with them. Then he burst into such a hearty laugh that I wondered if it would not do all the people in the world the very greatest good to fall down and strike their heads, and if the world would not be a much happier place for it.
One of my happiest early memories is of my uncle brewing tea. He alone was the tea-maker in our household, and after pouring himself a cup with great ceremony he would set me on his knee and slop half an inch of that delicious beverage sweetened with maple sugar out of his blue mug into the saucer and announce, “Now, Ticonderoga, you may chisel.” Meaning sip tea from the saucer, which never failed to make me feel very grown-up.
Every day of our trip, rain or shine, we reenacted this pleasant ceremony. All morning and on into the afternoon my uncle would keep a sharp eye out for mint or wintergreen or pennyroyal or ginseng leaves or whatever local plant or herb came to hand for tea-making. He brewed the leaves in his all-purpose pannikin, then brought out the blue mug, and after pouring the tea he would announce, as if we were snug at home in our kitchen instead of in alien mountains a thousand miles to the south, “Now, Ticonderoga, you may chisel.” And we would share the mug, as it was the only one we had, and instead of feeling grown-up I felt like a young boy again.
Sometimes a saucy chattering gray squirrel or a white-footed mouse or a chickadee with a neat black cap would venture near. As my uncle tossed it biscuit crumbs, he would say, “Oh, so you too wish to chisel. Is that it? Where is my arquebus, Ti? Well, well. Why waste good shot?” No wild creature that begged ever went hungry, and this was a very agreeable way to travel with a very agreeable man, and though I still missed home, teatime made me feel as if we were taking part of Vermont with us on our adventure.
My uncle cunningly resisted all further attempts on my part to nudge him gently northward. And though we passed several rude inns or, as they were called in that part of the country, “stands,” he insisted that we stop only long enough to resupply ourselves with flour and cornmeal, otherwise steering clear of all vestiges of civilization in order to “harden ourselves off” for the western wilderness that lay ahead. But I was accustomed to hard lying and all kinds of weather from my hunting and fishing excursions in Vermont, and when we stopped in the woods for the night, while my uncle fashioned a snug little lean-to of woven pine boughs and kindled a cheery fire, I had no trouble acquiring our supper from the nearby forest. For while Private True Teague Kinneson could never bring himself to kill any living thing, and would gladly have subsisted on grass like an ox all the way to the Pacific if it had been left to him to get our meat, I did not share his scruples when it came to feeding ourselves. One evening I gobbled into range a fine bronze tom-turkey, which made capital eating at supper and provided us with the next day’s breakfast and luncheon as well. A few days later I shot a yearling buck a-watering at an icy little spring-fed creek. We were delighted to discover that the stream contained small speckled trout identical in every respect to ours in Vermont, down to the milk-white edging along their orange fins. And when no other game presented itself there were pigeons, always pigeons, it being their traveling time. About five o’clock each afternoon they roosted for the night in the forests we rode through, and all but invited me to knock them on the head with a club. How their fat, juicy breasts sizzled in our fry pan; we feasted on them all the way to Tennessee.
Sometimes it seemed as if my uncle and I were back in Vermont playing at being explorers. At other times I felt a million miles away from our beloved Green Mountains, as if in a dream from which I would never wake up. But whether it was a good dream or not, I could not yet tell.
Each noon, on days when the sun was out, my uncle religiously fixed our latitude with his homemade sextant and essayed to take our longitude with his Dutch dock. On starry nights he confirmed our location by training his spyglass on Jupiter and ascertaining the time at which the moon Io disappeared behind it—though I confess that I could never discern the presence of that satellite, nor the great abandoned pyramids, walls, and fortifications of the once-flourishing civilizations my uncle claimed to see on the surface of its controlling planet, either. But on overcast days and nights, when he could not take his celestial measurements, he was restless and said that even the clouds of the heavens conspired against him, and it was beyond him how a human man could be expected to know who and where he was in poor weather. Then he would bravely ring his bell and announce, “Regardless of where Jupiter may be, here I am, Ti.”
To which I would reply, “Here you are, sir.”
And in this manner we were three full weeks getting to Nashville.
Though we expected something of a metropolis, Nashville was little more than an ill-assorted clutch of cribs and hovels along a muddy track in a bend where the Cumberland River hooked north for the Ohio. The three-story Talbot House Hotel resembled nothing so much as a hulking wooden beehive. Even so, I hoped to put up there for the evening. But fearing he would be recognized by Federalist spies, my uncle insisted that we stop only long enough to have our mounts reshod by a local blacksmith. Then we would proceed by a very circuitous route, south through Tennessee on the notorious Natchez Trace, west to Chickasaw Bluffs on the Mississippi, and then up the big river to St. Louis, rather than taking passage from Nashville on a Cumberland flatboat and then down the Ohio.
The smith’
s name was Quick, but he took the better part of a whole afternoon at the job, interrupting his labors every three or four minutes to regale us with stories of the robbers and murderers we were likely to meet on the Natchez Trace. Quick ran the rope ferry across the Cumberland; and at last, about seven in the evening, he carried us and our freshly shod mounts over to the far side. My uncle was exceedingly displeased to discover that the boat was powered by six slaves winding a thick hawser around a turnstile. But when he asked the blacksmith where he had procured those poor people, the man spat a dark jet of tobacco juice into the current and said only, “Harpes.”
12
THE NEXT DAY was the first fiercely hot day of the year, and as we followed the Natchez Trace southwest from Nashville, we rode from spring into full summer. A dense ceiling of foliage reached out over the narrow trail from the trees on each side, in places roofing it entirely with a living green canopy. Nesting redbirds, mockingbirds, and warblers poured out their songs, and the orange trumpet-flowers were full of black and yellow swallowtails. Here in the Tennessee forest grew many tall trees unfamiliar to me. Some of these my uncle identified as chestnuts, live oaks, pecans, hickories, and tulip trees. But copperheads, cottonmouths, and rattlesnakes were everywhere, sunning themselves on logs, coiled on ledges beside the trail, and lying beside puddles and backwaters, and I was very glad, and my uncle as well, that we had no such long and deadly gentlemen as these at home in Vermont.
That evening we came to an inn known as Grinder’s Stand, not far from the Buffalo River. As we rode into the dooryard, we were greeted by Mrs. Grinder herself, attired in a buckskin dress and a flop-brimmed slouch hat such as the backwoodsmen in those parts favored. She showed us where to stable and bait our mounts, then conducted us into a log house consisting of a single large room with a packed dirt floor. On the hearth was a spitted joint of venison. The only other guest was a wooden dressmaker’s dummy, seated at the head of a long trestle table, whom Mrs. Grinder introduced as George Washington.
As our landlady laid plates and mugs on the table, a ruffianly-looking pair of mountain men arrived. Sitting directly across from us, they produced a stone jug from which they began to swill, turn and turn about, laying the neck of the jug upon a massive shoulder and gurgling down prodigious quantities of spirits. When these men tipped back to drink, their faces, behind thicketlike black beards, resembled those of boars. For apparel they wore stitched-together pelts of skunks, woodchucks, and possums, with bleached skulls of mice and moles dangling from the fringes of their blouses and trousers. Their sloping hats were fashioned from the skins of bitterns with the feathers still attached; the thumbs of both and the forehead of one were branded with the words HORSE THIEF.
Mother Grinder bustled about laying two new places in front of them and spitting another haunch of venison on the fire. The cooked meat she placed on a pewter charger, which she set before the larger of the two travelers, who was stuffing chunks of bread into his mouth with both hands. “Perhaps you’ll do us the honor of carving, Bigger,” she said. Bigger drew from his belt a glistening blade a foot and a half long; but instead of addressing the roast before him, he hurled this weapon backward over his shoulder without turning to look at his target, burying the knife to its hilt in the bloody haunch of venison on the spit.
Bigger turned to the landlady. “Fotch us that un on the hearth. I and Big takes our meat just singed.”
Mrs. Grinder instantly did as directed. Big and Bigger fell upon the oozing bloody joint, hacking off and carrying to their mouths on the points of their knives chunks of meat as large as the half-grown cat on the inglenook bench. They ate with such ravenous lust that the haunch was soon gone, after which they repaired again to the stone jug.
My uncle set about his meal with his usual good appetite, but my own hunger was now gone. Suddenly, the larger of our fellow travelers looked out from behind his vinelike hair and said, “Where did you Yankee-boys say you was a-going?”
“Why, friend,” said my uncle with a pleasant smile, “we didn’t.”
Bigger said, “If you’re going down the Trace, you’d best look sharp for robbers and killers. Particularly the Harpe brothers. Ain’t that right now, Big?”
“It is,” said the other. “They’re a desperate pair. I heard they’ve murdered twenty men.”
“Twenty-six,” Bigger corrected him. “And afterwards drinked a toast to their wictims with mead distilled from their own bees’ honey.” He shoved the stone jug across the table and said, “Wet your whistle with our mead, Yankee. You can taste the wild honey in it and it goes down smooth.”
My uncle shook his head and pushed back the jug. “We’ve heard of these Harpes, gentlemen. I wonder if you might be so good as to describe them for us? That way we’ll know them if we encounter them out in the wilds. How many brothers are there? A gang of at least five or six, no doubt, from their desperate reputation.”
“Only two,” Bigger said. “But two such as unsuspecting travelers will remember for the rest of their lives.”
“Which would be about three minutes,” Big said, looking off at George Washington.
Bigger made a rumbling sound that seemed to begin and end far down in his massive chest. “What does these Harpe brothers look like, the Yankee wonders? Would you allow, brother, that one would be big?”
“I would. And the other bigger.”
“Would you venture to say they wears clothing made from skunks and possums?”
“I would so venture.”
“Would you further say that they wears hats of swamp-bird feathers, to shed the rain?”
“Yes, I would further say so. And has you heerd, brother mine, how they disposed of their twenty wictims?”
“Not twenty, brother. Twenty-six. Yes, I has. They gut them up the belly, like fishes, and fills up their insides with stones. Then they sinks them in the nearest river or stream. But don’t worry, friends. We’ll ride with you and protect you from the Harpes. For there is strength in numbers. And if we meet and overcome the Harpes, there is a reward of five hundred dollars apiece on their heads, which we shall split four ways.”
By now, Big, Bigger, and the landlady were all holding their sides with laughter. I was stricken dumb with fright. But my uncle abruptly produced his arquebus from beneath the table. “Gentlemen, I am sure that we’re much obliged to you for your good information about the Natchez villains we’re apt to meet, particularly the feather-bedecked and skunk-clad Harpes. We appreciate, as well, your kind offer to accompany us. But as you can see from the good companion I hold here in my hands”—raising the arquebus so that it was now pointed straight at Bigger’s head—“we already have protection enough.”
With this he rose and rang a dollar down on the table. “Ma’am”—without taking his eyes off the Harpes—“we thank you for the provender. Gentlemen, we thank you for the warning. Rest assured that if we encounter the Harpes, we will be ready.”
Neither of the outlaws said a word as we backed out of the inn. A few minutes later we were riding south on the Trace in the red evening, my uncle cheerily whistling a Scottish ballad and I full of wonder at the scene I had witnessed at the inn. For the soldierly man who had coolly faced down the assassins as if they were schoolboys in his Vermont classroom was a man I had never seen before in the sixteen years that I had known Private True Teague Kinneson, of the First Continental Army of the United States of America, Green Mountain Regiment.
13
AROUND MIDNIGHT the moon went behind the clouds. Directly it began to rain, so we turned off the path and took shelter under my uncle’s big umbrella beneath a spreading pine tree. Advising me to get some sleep, he got out his notebook—for with his large yellow owl-eyes he could see nearly as well in the dark as in daylight—and began jotting down ideas for his ever-evolving Comical History of Ethan Allen. Knowing that my uncle was watching over me, I slept as soundly as if I were home in my loft bedchamber above my mother’s warm kitchen. The next morning I awoke much refreshed, with
the sun already an hour high.
We made a hasty breakfast of several slices of bread we’d slipped into our pockets the night before at dinner, sharing them with Bucephalus and Ethan Allen. Upon returning to the Trace, the white mule paused and tossed his head; for, although he was deaf as a post, he had a very keen sense of scent. Bucephalus flared his nostrils to test the breeze sifting up from the southwest, struck the ground twice with his forehoof, and smelled the wind again.
Soon enough we came upon the faint, mostly washed-out tracks of two large dray horses such as those the Harpes had ridden in on the evening before at Grinder’s Stand. To my alarm, they were headed in the same direction as we were. But my uncle assured me that by tarrying behind a bit, we would run no very great danger of stumbling upon them unawares before they passed the Buffalo River, where he intended to strike off on the Chickasaw Path to the Mississippi.
We reached the Buffalo about noon. As we approached the Metal Ford on that stream, so called from the ironlike rocks of the river bottom just below the horse ferry, we spotted a pillar of dark smoke rising from the trees across the water. It had a thick, sooty aspect and a most noxious odor. From the far bank of the river we could hear someone weeping.
We urged our animals across the hardpan ford and rode fast into a dooryard whose cabin and barn had both been burned to the ground within the past several hours. Low blue flames still licked over the charred logs. Wailing and rocking back and forth on a nearby stump was an ancient black woman with a bloody rag wrapped around her head. My uncle leaped off his mule and rushed to the woman’s aid, unwinding her head-rag and dabbing at her wound with his nightcap. He told me to run to the river with the rag and soak it thoroughly. Then, with many soothing words, he bound her gashed head properly, at the same time urging her to tell what had happened.
The True Account Page 5