Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "Hi! Hi yi hi!" Morgan yelled. The elephant gave a sudden terrific pull, surging into his harness with enormous force and springing the colossal pine trunk free. The jam began to shift. Morgan continued to exhort the Caliph to pull. The elephant plowed through the current, angling toward the bank, yanking the monstrous log into the slack water and thumping it up onto dry land like a stick of stovewood. The towering log jam began to turn on its axis, then collapsed in upon itself and slowly broke apart. Once again the logs ran freely down Henry Hudson's River.

  "Zachias, come outen that tree!" exclaimed the foreman. "Leviathan hath spoken."

  Morgan unhitched the iron hook on the end of the logging chain from the ring bolt on the elephant's pulling traces.

  "No dyne-a-mite," he said to Big Eva, showing his open hands. "Just a flop-eared old elephant. Now, what can you tell me about--" Morgan sat down on a stump. He was having trouble catching his breath. His last thought as he toppled toward the ground was that as long as you were called upon to do it only once, dying was probably manageable. He was only sorry that he had not found Pilgrim first.

  "'B OUT TIME you come to."

  Morgan opened his eyes. Eva's gray-haired foreman was looking at him through wisps of smoke. No, not smoke. Steam. He was lying on a bed of fresh cedar boughs inside a hut made of green cedar. The foreman was pouring water over red-hot stones in a shallow pit to make still more steam, which rose up through a lacy canopy of cedar boughs. The powerful scent of evergreen filled the hut.

  Through a flap in the side of the hut came Big Eva. She bent over and pressed her ear against Morgan's chest. Then she straightened up as much as she could without striking her head on the woven boughs overhead. "Sound clear," she said. "Just a bad ague was what you had, boy. Maybe a touch of they walking ague. How long you think you been laying here, being minister unto?"

  Morgan sat up, then fell back. "My guns," he said.

  "You guns safe, don't worry. How long you think you been here?"

  "Two days?"

  "Try five," Eva said.

  But Morgan had already sunk back on the cedar boughs, where he slept for yet another day and night. When he woke again he was ravenously hungry.

  M ORGAN KINNESON, STILL WEAK but no longer coughing, scooped smoking pork and beans into his mouth as fast as he could knife-and-thumb them. Mopped up the gravy with a chunk of yellow cornbread the size of a house brick. Oh, it felt wonderful to be well again. As for Pilgrim, Eva told Morgan she had heard through Underground scuttlebutt that Quaker Meeting Kinneson's elder son had vanished during the fighting in Pennsylvania. Be that as it might, Eva told Morgan that Pilgrim had not come through her station, Laguz. Nor had she seen a runaway girl, with or without a little boy. Not that she could say so directly if she had. It was absolutely forbidden for a Railroad employee to mention the name of any passenger or conductor, even to another Railroad employee. But Eva admonished him not to deceive himself with wishful thinking about his brother. When Morgan showed her Jesse's stone, she too implored him to destroy it, saying it jeopardized the safety of every stationmaster from Tennessee to Canada. "Get it by heart and then bury it in they woods, boy," she said. "Be sure you bury it deep."

  Morgan pointed to his rune, , on the stone. "Sabbati called this Nauthiz. He told me to ask you what it meant."

  "Means everything harder than you think. And everything connected."

  "And this one?" Morgan pointed to Pilgrim's sign, , at the bottom of the stone.

  Eva frowned. "Othila. Means separation. And that all you gone tease outen Big Eva. Bury that stone twenty feet deep, boy. Then go home where you belong. That you advice from me."

  Morgan held out his empty tin plate to the cook.

  "Thank you, sir, you welcome, sir," the cook said. "Boy wants to eat offen us wouldn't hurt him none to show some manners. Say please and thank you."

  "I reckon he's earned his meal, please or no," Eva said. "Say, child. You hungry or what?"

  Morgan scooped with the back of the gypsy's dagger, careful not to touch the blade with his tongue. It clicked and scraped on the sides of the refilled tin plate.

  "You ever do get down South, watch out for they killers," Eva said. "They as soon do for you and you ellyphant as look at you."

  Morgan stood up. He beckoned to the Caliph of Baghdad and climbed aboard his back. "What killers?" he said.

  "They killers," Eva said. "Hundreds of thousands of they. Some wears blue, some wears but'nut. But they all killers."

  Morgan touched the brim of his hat with his finger. Then he and the Caliph headed off along the river, a determined boy and a sad elephant traveling south through the mountains together in the uncertain spring of 1864. Thus far he had eluded the clubfooted killer with his deadly surgical instruments and long-range carbine, but he knew that the time was coming, and sooner rather than later, when he must confront and kill the devil or be killed himself.

  THREE

  MANNAZ

  "T hey say," declaimed Steptoe, "that we are evil incarnate."

  Doctor Surgeon tipped his glass toward the little player. "They say right."

  Prophet Floyd chuckled. "Aye," he said. "Spake old Jeremiah, 'Men's hearts are devious and there is no help for it.' Who among us, brethren, can deny the evil that men do and are? Yet are we not made in His image? So must not He too be evil?" Floyd smiled and nodded in agreement with himself. Then he was off and raving in that private tongue known only to him and perhaps to God, the sacred language in which the angels' voices had enjoined him to kill so many of his flock, both before and after he anointed himself Messiah of the Grand Army, not of the American Republic but of the Republic of Satan himself.

  "Shut your hole," King George said, and Prophet instantly did.

  George, also known as Swagbelly, sat with his back to the window. He was so massive that he blocked most of what faint light crept into Albany's Sign of the Tippling Dutchman, and so dark that he seemed to absorb the rest. How, he wondered for the twentieth time, had he allowed himself to fall in with these madmen? Anno Domini had said he needed them to retrieve the girl, but back at the prison George had been tempted to take them up one by one and snap their necks like trout.

  At his court-martial the player, Steptoe, who styled himself a spymaster, though in fact neither side took him seriously enough to entrust him with any significant information, had boasted of killing more than a dozen young girls and keeping their bodies preserved in a Pennsylvania icehouse so he could violate them repeatedly. Prophet Floyd, the self-proclaimed Messiah, sputtered gibberish day and night, disported himself with deadly serpents, and supposed that he was the instrument of retribution of some supremely wrathful power to whom the stern old Jehovah of the Bible was as benign as George's white-haired grandmother. As for the vivisectionist who called himself Doctor Surgeon, a man who had been chief medical officer of Union field hospitals at six major battles, he'd announced at his trial that by such fell means as introducing infection into open wounds, conducting unnecessary amputations, and prescribing lethal dosages of arsenic drops he had killed more Union and Confederate soldiers than any ten roaring cannons.

  Indeed, George had long suspected that the blind man himself was at least half mad. What sane person referred to himself as Anno Domini, as if wherever he went there too went end-fire and Armageddon? Verily, the day would come when George would have a sufficiency of A.D.'s gold, and when that happy advent arrived, he would make the blind man pay as dearly as mortal man could pay. Yes, by God, George would. And then he would do for the others as well, the pleasant work of a quick moment.

  "You were instructed," King George told the triumvirate of fools, in a voice like mountain thunder, "to fetch me the stone map and the gal. Instead you let the boy kill Ludi."

  "But I killed the gypsy conductor," Doctor Surgeon said in a wounded tone. "Somehow the boy escaped with the elephant into the mountains."

  "Where you played at bo-peep with him for your own diversion," George said. "Now you had b
est find him and the gal as well and kill him and bring me the stone and the wench, unharmed, as the blind man, I mean Anno Domini, instructed you. You"--pointing a forefinger as large as a German sausage at Doctor Surgeon--"to the canal. Your contact there is Captain Suggs of the boat City of Buffalo. You, Preacher, to Elmira. For the lad may stop there to consult with his uncle. And you, who call yourself Steptoe, to Pennsylvania. For that's his destination. If he proceeds so much as a mile beyond Gettysburg, or if you harm a hair on the gal's head, I'll come for all three of you myself. Or, worse yet, A.D. will. Do you want the likes of him, with his horrible green goggles, scouring the land for you? I shouldn't think so. Now. Fan out and do your work.

  "Kill the elephant too," George called after Doctor Surgeon as the clubfoot hitched across the tavern floor toward the door, dragging the black box that enclosed his freakish appendage.

  "The elephant? Why kill--"

  "Because I despise elephants," King George thundered. "Now range out!"

  * * *

  T ODAY WAS TO BE a great day in the history of Glens Falls, an otherwise humdrum mill town on the upper Hudson some forty miles above the terminus of commercial navigation. At two o'clock this afternoon the town would welcome and fete the president of the United States. Glens Falls, at least, would do all it could to help Lincoln in his steep uphill bid for reelection. American flags were draped across every storefront. Besides a pig roast, there would be speeches by local dignitaries of the Republican Party. It was rumored that Harriet Tubman herself might introduce the president. Unfortunately, he was slated to be in town for but two short hours, arriving in his special campaign railway car, delivering a brief speech, having a bite with his supporters--a country boy born and bred, Lincoln was known to have a tooth for the salty cracklin' on the outside of the pig--before tearing back to Albany for an evening rally.

  By early afternoon the Falls was teeming with people eager to hear the president. Just south of town, where the Albany, Glens Falls, and Plattsburgh tracks crossed the river on a soaring trestle, spectators lined the banks three and four deep to see Lincoln's campaign train chuff into town. Morgan himself had little interest in viewing the man his father, for all his abolitionist sentiments, referred to as King Abraham; Morgan suspected that Quaker Meeting Kinneson privately blamed Lincoln and his war for Pilgrim's disappearance. But as he and the elephant headed south out of town, he discerned a north-bound engine stopped beside a wooden tank to take on water. The entire train consisted of the locomotive, a single passenger car painted red, white, and blue, and a caboose. As Morgan, aboard the galumphing Caliph, passed nearby, a tall man in his late middle years wearing a rusty black suit stepped down from the railway carriage and began voiding a rather halting stream of urine onto the cinder bank. The man relieving himself, who was the most tired-looking man Morgan had ever seen, looked up and grinned to see a boy sitting on an elephant and watching him.

  A bulky man in a bowler hat swung down from the open coach door and shouted at Morgan, "Who in the blazing hell are you?"

  "It's all right, Pink," the president said in a surprisingly soft voice. "The boy means us no harm."

  Shaking himself off, the president said to Morgan, "You are well armed, son, if I do say so."

  "Well armed!" the man called Pink exclaimed. "Why sir, he's a traveling arsenal. Get down off that animal, boy. Keep your hands right where I can see them."

  "It's all right, Pink," the president repeated. As he buttoned up, the Caliph made a gracious curtsy in his direction, and Lincoln smiled slightly. The lines around his mouth looked as deep as crevasses. Still fumbling with his trouser buttons, he peered up at Morgan and said, "Though I will allow that this is about as awkward a way to launch a reelection campaign as any I can imagine. The water closet in my carriage is out of order, lad."

  "What isn't?" Morgan said.

  Lincoln looked at him again, sharply this time. Then the commander in chief did something he had not done in many months. He laughed. It was a rueful laugh, but it was beyond doubt genuine, though his eyes and face seemed no less careworn and weary.

  Morgan decided that the conversation had lasted long enough. While he believed that he had temporarily given his pursuer the slip, there was no way to be sure. It would not do to have the madman lying close by in the hills above the river, even now drawing a bead on the president of the United States.

  "You, sir," Morgan said to Pink, who had stationed himself directly in his way. "Do you give me the road or no?"

  "By God, now," Pink said, his hand darting inside his jacket.

  "Step aside, Mr. P, step aside," the president said mildly. "This lad is no danger to us." And as Morgan rode past, "God bless you, son."

  Morgan, who wanted no blessing from God or anyone else, touched the drooping brim of his slouch hat with his forefinger. It occurred to him that for such a great man the president had a very commonplace nozzle to do his business with. Under different circumstances, Morgan thought, he might actually like the old fellow.

  "C OME UP, you long-eared sons of a whore. Wake up, roll along, roust out, and walk on, you hammer-headed brace of slackers."

  The hoggee of the showboat His Whaleship out of Utica, New York, cracked his whip over his two canal mules. Down the towpath a hundred yards, Morgan watched as the cursing mule driver charged his stubborn animals. But instead of beating them he patted their heads and scratched their long ears like two highly favored dogs. No matter. The brace of mules refused to budge. Already canal traffic was backing up behind His Whaleship.

  "Here's a pretty pass," roared the hoggee, still gentling his animals. "We've got as capital a mess on our--why, as I live and die, it's Morgie Kinneson!"

  To Morgan's astonishment the showboat hoggee turned out to be his cousin Dolton Kinneson. The two young men stared at each other with amazed delight.

  "What under the sun are you doing here, Dolt?" Morgan said.

  Dolt caught Morgan up in a crushing bear hug. Then he explained that the Great Western Canal was as far south as he'd gotten on his quest to enlist. Some months ago he'd taken a job with the showboat, whose principal attraction was the gigantic head and jaws of a sperm whale, in which twenty ladies and gentlemen could sit as proud as Jonah and have their daguerreotype made. On the deck several black crewmen were watching the reunion between the cousins with interest.

  "Meet the Caliph, cousin," Morgan said. Dolton gravely extended his hand. Equally solemnly, the elephant took it in his trunk and gave it a formal tug.

  Not to be outdone, Dolton gestured at his boat. "Meet His Whaleship, Morgie. But these two mules are on their last legs. Say. I'll pay you five dollars to hitch your big boy to His Whaleship and haul her up to Ute for me. Will you do it?"

  "I will," Morgan said. "And I won't take a round copper penny. Hitch him up, cousin. I've a great deal to tell you."

  "And I you," Dolt said as he unhooked the mules and hitched the Caliph to His Whaleship. Dolt glanced significantly at the side of the showboat. Inscribed in black below its gilded name was the figure . "You won't believe what I'm truly doing here, Morgie."

  As if by way of reply, the Caliph reached out with his trunk and planted a big, wet kiss, full on Dolt's mouth. Then Morgan would have sworn that the elephant gave him a sidelong glance and winked.

  I N THE EARLY AFTERNOON they came to a place where the berm was covered with blossoming dandelions. Butter-yellow cowslips bloomed along marshy backwaters, and each little puddle pond had its own pair of mallards. Wild black cherry trees were blossoming white as new snow in the hedgerows. Ahead was a lock through which canal boats were floated up to the next level of the waterway. It occurred to Morgan that, with his great love of exotic travel books, roaming the land with an elephant and seeing such wonders as the canal and the president's private train would, under normal circumstances, be a splendid adventure. But he doubted, after all he had witnessed and participated in, that he would ever want to read a travel book, or perhaps any book, again.

 
With a proprietary air Dolt told Morgan that there were eighty-three locks on the Great Western and that the canal was forty feet wide and four feet deep and stretched three hundred and sixty-three miles from the Hudson River to Buffalo over a rise in elevation of five hundred feet. Eighteen cut-stone aqueducts carried side streams across the canal. Numerous dams let water drain in during drought time. The other boats waiting at the lock, their names gilded on their bows in gold flake, were Canal Master, J. J. Belden, Tug Ridge, Watertown, and City of Buffalo, this last a floating gin mill captained, Dolt said, by the infamous anti-abolitionist dandiprat and raging sodomite Captain Higgenbotham Suggs. Suggs, strutting the deck of his ship, stood four and a half feet tall and fully as wide across, and wore a yellow-and-red-flowered waistcoat, a tall castor hat, a high stock collar, and whipcord breeches tucked into glossy morocco boots with scarlet tops. He guyed Dolt mercilessly, inquiring whether he was expecting a flood and gathering up beasts from afar two by two, or was he hauling gold specie that he needed such a monstrous tusker to pull his boat? Could the elephant count to five with its foot? Recite the Lord's Prayer? Why in the name of King Herod were its ears so small and its snout so short? Dolt stood by the Caliph with his boots planted two feet apart and his prunella neck cloth fluttering in the spring breeze, and when Suggs's fountain of wit ran dry, which did not take long, Dolt lifted to his lips the horn used to warn passengers of low bridges and blared out a great scornful raspberry by way of reply.

  "And what of you, my pretty soldier?" Suggs called out to Morgan. "Come aboard the City of Buffalo and I'll give you the cook's tour, lad, abovedeck and below."

  Morgan was staring at the two reddish brown horses Suggs was using instead of mules to pull his barge. The two big bays looked familiar. Giving Suggs a hard look, he checked his musket and scattershot to be sure they were primed and loaded.