Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  "Without what, Slidell?"

  "Without what you just asked about."

  "But we got out of the cave. You aren't going to die. You'll be north of slave territory in two days. Three at most."

  She shook her head. "No, sir."

  "No, sir?"

  "No, sir. Because there's something else. Something I didn't tell you. When I was hiding out up in the Moccasin Swamp, my cousin, Mercy Johnson, decided to run, too. Mercy and I talked about running together, but I was still hoping to free Little Sol from that cage and bring him north with me. So I told her to go on ahead, and Sol and I would catch up. Just before she fled, Mercy delivered me two pieces of news. One good, one very bad. The good news, old driver Swag, the slave killer hunting Jesse, had been taken up by bluebellies and sent north to be hanged. The bad news was that Dinwiddie suspected Little Sol knew where Jesse and I were headed. So he had Sol lowered down to the ground in that bamboo cage and told him to peach on Jess and me or he'd cut off Sol's left ring finger with the great tin shears. Little Sol, he refused, so old A.D. snipped off Sol's left ring finger. And still that good little boy refused to deliver Slidell and Jess over to that evil man. So Dinwiddie took up the tin shears again, and he snipped off Sol's right ring finger."

  Slidell was weeping now, but when Morgan started to speak, to reach out to console her, she held up her hand and shook her head again and said, through her sobs, "That second promise I made to myself in the cave? I promised that if I ever got out alive, I'd go straight back to Grace, and one way or another I'd steal Sol and bring him north with me. I'm going south, Morgan. I'd be obliged if I could travel with you for a piece longer."

  SEVEN

  KANO

  M organ had much to consider as he and Slidell headed south through the mountains. He had not yet shown her Jesse's rune stone because he did not know how to tell her that her grandfather was dead and he was responsible. As for Arthur Dinwiddie, the plantation owner who had tried to rape Slidell, Morgan had no doubt that this was Anno Domini, the blind man in the hideous green goggles who, after Slidell had escaped, had gone north and broken out the condemned killers from Elmira and sent them on their murderous rampage to acquire the stone and capture Slidell. But where were the two remaining escapees? They might be lying in wait for him around any bend, and if so, Morgan knew that they would kill Slidell as readily as they'd kill him.

  Dilemma compounded dilemma. Morgan's duty was to find Pilgrim. Yet something made him wonder whether, by going first to Grace Plantation and helping Slidell rescue Little Prince Solomon, he might learn more of his brother. Might there be a connection between Pilgrim and Jesse? Pilgrim had been a conductor. Could he have followed the same route south, from station to station, that Jesse had taken north?

  On the pretext of stepping into the dense rhododendrons beside the path to relieve himself, Morgan took out the stone and studied it. Moving his forefinger down the drawings etched into the smooth surface from one rune to the next he noted that, not far to the southeast of the Mind of God, the rune was accompanied by the likeness of a pillared manse. Perhaps the stationmaster there could tell him something about Pilgrim.

  So it came to pass that he and Slidell walked on, trending southeast now, and as they proceeded Slidell confided to Morgan that at times her faith in God was all she had to rely on. Morgan, for his part, understood for the first time in his life something of the power of the religion of his forefathers. Like Slidell, they had believed in God. And he, operating on a kind of faith, believed in his brother and in his own ability to find him. In both instances that faith came less from outward revealed signs than from within. How many times had old Mahitabel told him that it was an evil generation of men who looked for a sign to bolster their belief? Perhaps she'd been right.

  He wondered what his hero John Brown would do in his place. Brown had been a man of enormous faith. Probably he would keep right on walking clear to the end of the earth, that fanatical old man whose eyes could drill a hole straight through you to your soul. Brown would find Pilgrim and then track down Arthur Dinwiddie, and when he did, by God, mercy would be in short supply.

  Morgan was now walking barefooted, as Slidell was. There was little difference in appearance between them and the mountain people they met, who went mainly barefooted and wore plain homespun. Morgan had read that most of the mountaineers of the Blue Ridge neither owned slaves nor sided with either faction in the war. The men and some of the women carried weapons and wore slouch hats to keep off the sun and rain. A pillared mansion? People looked at him blankly, and hurried onward. All but one poor fellow with a head as big as a blue squash. "They," he said, pointing eastward at half a dozen serried ridges. "Yonder."

  "Where yonder?" Morgan said.

  "They," the fellow said. He shook his big head and gave an exasperated sigh. Then he took Morgan by his sleeve and Slidell by hers and led them at a shambling lope over ridge and through hollow and dale until, in the early evening, they came to a hill on which was perched a very large, very dilapidated house with a pillared portico.

  "They," the squash head said yet again, pointing up at the big house. "They's Little Mountain." Then he whirled around and headed back to whatever bourn he had come from, leaving Morgan and Slidell alone on the hill.

  At one time the columned house on Little Mountain had been a showplace. Now it was fast sinking into ruin, overrun with creeping vines, the roof slates falling off, the forlorn brick walkways grown up to weeds. The low stone stables behind the house had started to crumble. The pillars in front were cracked, and the door hung by a single hinge, revealing a high-ceiled entry hall open to the weather. Morgan and Slidell walked around the side of the house and stood behind a large oak to survey the place more closely.

  In an overgrown garden sat a small cabin, a dispiriting single-room affair, not even as large as the sugar camp at home where Morgan had abandoned Jesse. Over the door a slanted board bore the faded words NAIL FACTORY and the symbol . In the dooryard an old black man with a yellowish tinge to his skin sat in a homemade hickory rocker with hickory withes for its arms and back. The man looked to be tall and thin and had a tonsure of graying reddish hair. He wore a shabby suit of clothes that had once been elegant, a blue coat with shining buttons and a worn velvet collar over a high, faded stock. His ruffled shirt had long ago yellowed to the same jaundiced hue as his skin. His eyes, Morgan noted, were milky blue, and he guessed that the man was blind. In one hand he held a halfmade shoe. Beside the rocker was a cobbler's bench and a last with the shoe's mate upside down on it.

  An elderly black woman, darker than the blind man, was tending a fire under a kettle swinging from a tripod in an open-sided summer kitchen separated from the cabin by a dogtrot passageway. Off the summer kitchen a crooked chimney tilted away from the cabin. A homemade ladder leaned against the wall nearby.

  "Ghosts," Slidell whispered. "From the old times. Run!"

  Morgan whispered back, "They're not ghosts. Listen."

  "I have been wondering lately, my love," the shoemaker was saying in the cultivated tones of an educated man. "I have been pondering over who will be remembered as the greater president. Father Abraham or my own father."

  The woman looked up from her cooking fire. "Father Abra," she said, and returned to her fire.

  "I think you are right in that, dearest," the cobbler said. "For Father Abraham freed us all, while my good father freed none of us. Not even my mother, whom he loved dearly."

  "Why not, us gots to wonder?" the woman said. "He a enlighten man, weren't he?"

  "Yes, very enlightened. But he was frail like the rest of mankind. He needed his fields tilled, his tobacco picked, his bed warmed by comely Sal, his nails made and sold by the keg to buy fine books. My father was a neat hand to fashion a nail, you know. And he built his own shoes at this very last. The one useful thing he taught me was how to make a serviceable pair of shoes. And a good tight-clinching nail."

  "You, Tom," the woman said, stirring her comestibles.
"Supper 'bout on." Morgan felt his mouth watering.

  "Speaking of supper, you should have beheld some of my father's collations," the cobbler said. "Great banquets with monogrammed silverware and French china and leaded crystal. At his table dined ambassadors and plenipotentiaries. He sent a stuffed moose to the French court to impress them with our American fauna. He couldn't be expected to perform such acts of largesse and still free his people. Not even those related to him. He needed their labor, you see. Now it's all come to this."

  The shoemaker gestured at the ruined mansion, the overrun orchards and gardens. When the woman poked the fire, sparks flew out of the crooked mud-and-straw chimney, flaring orange in the summer twilight settling over Little Mountain. In the outside fireplace a log collapsed, sending up an eruption of sparks. Instantly the entire chimney took fire. The wind blew sparks onto the roof of the cabin and back toward the tree where Morgan and Slidell were hiding. The sparks gusted and swirled toward the plantation house.

  Morgan ran across the dooryard in the dusk, placed the homemade ladder against the summer kitchen, and scrambled up to where the chimney bent away from the wall. He braced his back against the wall and his bare feet against the burning mud-and-straw bricks, and by dint of a tremendous wrenching shove, he knocked the chimney down in a clatter of rubble and sparks into which he himself plunged.

  Shielding his eyes with the inside of his bent arm, Morgan rolled out of the flames and jumped up to help the woman put out the small fires on the cabin roof with buckets of water from the mule trough. Slidell, her fear of ghosts notwithstanding, ran to the big house with a bucket of water and threw it on the smoking pile of broken boards that had once been the side gallery. At the risk of burning his hands as well as his feet, which were well scorched by the chimney fire, Morgan threw the boards out into the yard away from the plantation house.

  After the flames had all been put out, Morgan sat on the cabin steps with his feet in a bucket of cold water. Slidell stood close beside him, still wary of the two elderly black people from the old times. When the woman brought an ointment of hog lard and wax-berry wax, Morgan could smell his scorched soles.

  "I think you feets be all right, boy. They just char a bit on they bottom," the woman said, rubbing the compound into his feet. "This chimbly cotching on fire business happen two, three times before. Someday the whole shooting match go up. Good riddance."

  The old man rocked away in his rocker. "Once this was the grandest place in Albemarle County," he said. "'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.' That's 'Ozymandias,' of course. P. Bysshe Shelley, whom my father knew personally and much admired. Father could quote the entire poem. So too can I, though I can't read a single letter. My father never taught me to read, you see. I can cite the first book of the Iliad in Greek, yet I can't write my own name. My father did not think the art of writing necessary for me to learn. Instead he taught me to make shoes. Our sign, Kano, you know, means opportunity. In my own instance, the opportunity to make shoes. Put your poor burnt foot here on my last, lad, so that I may measure it. Ah. You have a good broad understanding."

  He chuckled, so delighted with his pun that he turned to Slidell and repeated it. "Your master has a good broad understanding." "He isn't my master," Slidell said sharply.

  The old man apparently saw better than Morgan had supposed. It occurred to him that ever since he had started out for Canada with Jesse Moses, months ago, very little had been as he had supposed.

  "Be gentle with that foot, sir. It and the other must carry me another four or five hundred miles."

  "They will heal. My good wife knows all the old country remedies. 'Twill heal very nicely. Other one now, if you please. Sometimes one foot is as much as an inch longer or shorter than its mate. For the heels of your boots I'll use olive wood. My father imported black olives and green olives from Portugal, but they never flourished. Our Virginia climate is not quite adapted for them. So we used the olive wood for boot heels and for the clogs worn about the house by the slave women. I make my own tacks. My father showed me how. Did I tell you he was a shrewd fellow to fashion a tack? He could turn his hand to most anything. He even tried presidenting. My mother wore fine dresses in the latest Parisian style. She visited Paris with my father after his first wife died--I call her his first wife. He truly had but one. My mother was her half-sister. Did I tell you that? The president ran mad when his wife died. He saw his dead wife's eyes in the eyes of my mother, so he took Sal into his bed and into his heart. Ah, well. All's one in the end. All three rest in Abraham's bosom. Shall we sing the 'Little Shoemaker's Song' now, my love? My father taught it to me when I was a lad." The cobbler leading, his wife joining in, they sang:

  I am a little shoemaker by my trade, I'll work in rainy weather.

  Two finished pair I've made today of a side and a half of leather.

  Whack de loo de dum. Whack de loo de doo.

  Whack de loo de dum. Sal, will you wear my shoe?

  Go hand me down my pegging awl, I stuck it right up yonder.

  Go hand me down my sewing awl to peg and sew my leather.

  Oh! I've lost my shoemaker's wax

  And where do you think I'll find it?

  Ain't that enough to break my heart.

  Oh! Right here, Sal, I've found it.

  Whack de loo de dum. Whack de loo de doo.

  Whack de loo de dum. Sal, will you wear my shoe?

  Slidell rolled her eyes as if they had stumbled upon a madhouse, but Morgan looked on in wonder. There was not a hint of viciousness in these good people, who in their day, Morgan supposed from the sign of Kano, , over the door of their cabin, had helped many others to freedom. Yet what could they possibly tell him of his brother? And why would Pilgrim come here or head south instead of north in the first place? Still, he had to ask. "No, sir," the cobbler said.

  "No man that I know of named Pilgrim traveled this way lately headed either north or south. Yet I have met many a pilgrim on many a long hard progress. Last summer I met a one-legged man riding south by night. I believe he was a Secesh deserter, for he had a very quaint way of speaking. What is vulgarly referred to as a peckerwood dialect from the Deep South. He was headed toward the Cumber, so I directed him to the sign of Ansuz and Two Snake. Ansuz, you know, means messenger. If you go there, Two Snake will give you a message. The one-legged deserter traveled with his sister, a nun sworn to silence. A dangerous business, escorting any woman through these parts in such times. They both rode the same mule and would not dismount."

  Morgan privately consulted Jesse's stone while the shoemaker nattered on. The sign of Ansuz, , to the southwest of Little Mountain in a region designated as Boone's Gap, was accompanied by two intertwined serpents. Could the shoemaker's one-legged deserter be the Rebel soldier whose leg Joseph Findletter had amputated, traveling south with the beautiful Creole woman in disguise? It wasn't much to go on. It was less than a little and had no apparent connection to Pilgrim. Yet it was all Morgan had. If the Rebel deserter had followed this route, perhaps his missing brother had too.

  The shoemaker's wife cut her eyes at Slidell. "You ain't from up north," she said. "But wearing that sinful yalla dress? Tossing that long glossy hair, switching you tail like they mockingbird? You calling altogether too much attention to yourself, Jezbel. You gone get caught up and fotched right back to wherever you run off from. Come 'long with me."

  The old woman led the protesting girl into the cabin. Meanwhile the shoemaker turned his learned discourse to the war. He shook his head. "Wouldn't my father the president have been saddened to see what's become of his great Republic, lad? And all because he failed to free his slaves."

  "How do you arrive at that conclusion, sir?"

  "Why, friend, had Thomas freed his people, other luminaries of the Dominion would have freed theirs. Old Virginia would have stayed with the Union like a good wife cleaving to her husband. Our noble general would have accepted the commission Father Abraham offered him and swept the Rebels from the face of the
earth in a few short months. Will you take a delivery of shoes to the general in the capital? Though I don't approve his cause, I can't bear to think of his poor soldier boys going barefoot. My half sister who lives on Capitol Hill will return the wagon and mule."

  Morgan could hardly endure the thought of going to Richmond with shoes for the general's men. It would delay him, not to mention the risk involved. And he did not wish to aid the enemy even in this small humane way. Yet he could not refuse the cobbler his request. And it was possible that the southern general, to whom Morgan's uncle John had written on his behalf, might have heard something of his brother. It was even possible that Pilgrim had been taken prisoner at Gettysburg, in which case the general might be able to help Morgan locate him. Richmond it must be, Morgan thought. Boone's Gap and Ansuz would have to wait, as would Arthur Dinwiddie. But Morgan was determined that he would not wait long.

  Just then the cobbler's wife appeared from the cabin with a young field hand in tow. The hand wore a large straw hat, outsized overalls with hanks of twine for straps, a long gray duster coat, and mismatched brogans. Morgan began to laugh, upon which Slidell ripped off the hat and flung it angrily to the ground, revealing a hideously cropped head like a person with mange. And without further ado, she tackled Morgan and knocked him to the ground. Silently and fiercely Slidell pounded him with her fists until she could pound him no more. Then she began to cry.

  "This the worst," she said through her sobs. "Dress Slidell up like a scarecrow and then make sport of her."

  With that she pitched onto him again, clawing like a bobcat while he tried to fend her off, to justify, to apologize, until he feared for his eyes she was ripping at him so. Seizing her by one leg and the bib of her overalls, he none too gently tossed her into the mule watering trough.