Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The cobbler nodded gravely. "That's a woman worth hanging on to, son," he said.

  "That a fine woman, love you a great lot," his wife agreed. "Yes, sir. You hang on to she, boy. You hear?"

  As the cobbler worked on, he called out to his wife, "Dearest, where is the book Father left me? Would you please be so kind as to fetch it to me?"

  The woman sighed and shook her head as if everything connected with their lives on Little Mountain was as futile and absurd as owning a book neither of them could read. But after a little time had passed she went inside the cabin and came back with a volume bound in red buckram. "Perhaps you could read to me whilst I cobble up your boots," the shoemaker told Morgan.

  Morgan felt a surge of joy to be holding a book in his hands again. The book Cobbler Tom's wife handed him seemed to connect him with the many books Pilgrim had passed along to him over the years and therefore with Pilgrim himself. The History of the Expedition under the Commands of Captains Lewis and Clark, edited by Nicholas Biddle, had been published in 1814 in Philadelphia. After Morgan had read aloud from it for three quarters of an hour, the cobbler bade him take it on his journey, that it was of no benefit to an illiterate maker of shoes but might inspire Morgan to go west himself like Captain Lewis and Captain Clark and see rare new sights and leave the war and all its evils behind him now and forever after. Morgan was so touched he could only nod.

  By dawn his shoes were ready, and he and Slidell were on their way, in the cobbler's mule-drawn wagon, to the capital. The cobbler and his wife stood in front of the plantation house at the top of the Little Mountain linked arm in arm and swaying gently from side to side, singing the little shoemaker's song. "Whack de loo de dum. Whack de loo de doo."

  B Y NOON they were passing a steady stream of gray-clad soldiers. Morgan had secreted his guns in the storage box under the wagon seat so as not to arouse suspicion. He appeared to be just another boy from the country, a lowlander taking supplies under canvas into town with a lanky young field hand in a straw hat along to help. Most of the soldiers they passed were barefoot, and Morgan felt for them, would have liked to turn over his cargo of shoes to these limping, tattered men. Tobacco fields stretched away from the road, a rich blue-green like mature corn and as aromatic as a Vermont balsam woods after a fresh rain. Morgan noticed that as the soldiers wrestled along the cannons and mortars that would defend the citadel of the Confederacy against the expected Union attack, they stopped frequently to pluck tobacco leaves and chew on them.

  Slidell had not spoken a word to him since the day before. He wondered how much longer she would punish him. She'd allowed the cobbler's wife to stuff her slave bells with cotton, and she wore an odd red muffler over them. Morgan had never met anyone like her.

  In time they came to a major pike on the north bank of a large river. They could see the steady files of blue troops on the far side. The wind was out of the south. Morgan smelled cured tobacco wafting up from the Reb capital's forty tobacco manufactories. Not far ahead loomed Richmond's big flour mills and the stacks of Tredegar's Iron Works, where the cannons now being deployed along the river had been founded. "Satan's own lair," Slidell muttered.

  "Well," Morgan said, thinking of the tavern in Harrisburg and what he had witnessed there. Thinking of the women, children, and elderly folk being auctioned on the block at the Utica almshouse. Yet though he knew he had many a long mile yet to travel, Morgan Kinneson, approaching Richmond past brick kilns and textile factories and sawmills, past gin and beer distilleries, past a poorhouse and a prison and a powder magazine, watching the black foundry smoke pour out of the stacks over Tredegar's, and now nearly deafened by the roar of the rapids on the river, allowed himself a fleeting smile of amusement that he, a Yankee and an abolitionist from the far mountains of Vermont, had, in the guise of a bumpkin muleteer peddling shoes and in the company of a runaway slave, breached uncontested the defenses of the chief city of the Confederate States of America.

  "H OY, YOU GODDAMNED YALLOW-HEADED 'GATOR bait from the stinking backside of nowhere, watch where you a-going."

  Morgan had nodded off, and the cobbler's mule, in its mulish wisdom, had walked directly into a crossroads in front of a massive cannon being hauled along on a six-ox wheeled truck. A very irate soldier was screaming at him. Morgan drew hard on the reins, but the mule would no more back up than sprout wings like Pegasus and fly. The intersection was all braying mule and bellowing oxen and cursing soldier until Slidell snatched the reins away from Morgan. "Hear me well, sir mule," she shouted. "Now you're under the management of someone who knows all your wiles and guiles. Come up, now." She gave a furious jerk on the reins. "Come up, sir!" she shouted again, and somehow the animals were disentangled and the oxen drew the cannon onward. No one else on the street paid the slightest attention.

  Slidell cracked the reins smartly. "I know mules," she said. "They are a miscreant outfit from start to finish. One good thing about them though."

  "What's that?" Morgan said, terribly relieved that she was talking to him again.

  "They can't make more mules," Slidell said. "God rendered them sterile for being so lazy. Go ahead and smile, boy. We'll see how you smile when He strikes you the same for laughing at Slidell and poking all the pretty gals on your way south."

  "Slidell, I do believe you are jealous."

  She gave him a sharp jab with her elbow. "And vain besides," she said. "Next time you forget that and laugh at Slidell, there isn't going to be a next time."

  The general's home was situated between the capitol building and the river. At the gate stood a short, grinning sergeant and a behemoth of a fellow a good six and a half feet tall wearing on his head an incongruous little gray kepi.

  "Message for the general, sir," Morgan said to the sergeant. "And a delivery of shoes." He tried to speak in the softly modulated tones of the southern soldiers he'd overheard, but besides his Yankee accent, which fell harshly enough upon the ears, he had a sharp carrying voice with, Pilgrim had once said, an edge like a well-whetted adze.

  The sergeant drew his revolver and pointed it at Morgan. "Got us a Yank here, corporal," he said. "I do believe we have captured us a Yankee and his nigger. Just hand over your so-called message, boy. We'll see the general gets her."

  "Easy, boy," Slidell said, drawing the reins tighter. Morgan did not know whether she was talking to the mule or to him.

  "My instructions were to deliver it myself. It's from Colonel John Kinneson. He and the general soldiered together in old Mexico."

  "Well, the general ain't to home to Yankee boys, Yankee boy. He's down in old Mex with Colonel John Kinnerson. Ain't that right, Corporal Mann?"

  The giant with the corporal's chevrons, his uniform coat unbuttoned because he was too thick through the chest for any normal coat and some of the dark hair on his chest growing out through the holes in his ragged undershirt, stared at Morgan the way he might watch a snake sidewinding its way across the road. Trying to decide whether or not it was worth the trouble of killing.

  "Corporal Mann here, that we call the Man Mountain, don't say much," the sergeant said. "Corporal Man Mountain Mann is a man of action, you mought say. Fight first and parlay arter if at all is Corporal Mann's motto. Corporal Mann"--the grinning sergeant lowered his voice as if to convey an important secret--"is about the fightingest man in Richmond town."

  It fell out that at just that moment a gang of drunken soldiers was coming along the street dancing barefooted to a penny whistle. When they drew even with the general's house they stopped to observe the hoo-ha between Morgan and the two guards.

  "I'll fight ye for it. Your letter," said Man Mountain Mann in a rumbling voice. "Catch as catch can, winner to carry the letter into the general."

  The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Morgan had launched himself off the wagon seat, striking the fightingest man in Richmond town feet first in the chest. The new boots the cobbler had made him, into whose toes Cobbler Tom had inserted half-circle iron ox shoes, thudded
against Man Mountain Mann. Un-fazed, the giant laced his fingers together, lifted them high over his head, and brought them crashing down on Morgan's neck.

  "It's a Texas two-step!" shouted a soldier. "I put a silver cartwheel on the Mountain."

  Instantly the mob of celebrants formed a ring around the combatants. Morgan, on his feet again, circled clockwise. He feinted with his right hand and drove his left fist three times straight out from the shoulder into the Mountain's face. Blood flowed from the corporal's nose, but he doubled his hand and smashed it into Morgan's midriff, knocking him into the mule hitched to the wagon. The mule galloped off down the street with the wagonload of shoes, Slidell sawing on the reins and shouting at the animal to halt.

  "Here," a faraway voice said. "What in the name of heaven is all this? My wife is sick, I've a meeting in twenty minutes to try to save what's left of the Confederacy, and you men have turned my yard into Blackfriar's Fair. What have you done, boys? Have you killed this young man?"

  "I believe they may have, sir," Morgan said, staggering to his feet and saluting the general, for that was clearly who the graying man with the short white beard and the tired but commanding voice must be. "I believe they may have. But they have not quite defeated me yet."

  At this the general smiled. "Well," he said. "I believe I know from my own recent experience exactly what you mean. State your business here, son. Kindly make it brief. Sergeant, fetch back this lad's wagon. A mule may bolt but it won't bolt far."

  "Does the name John Kinneson mean anything to you, general?"

  "It does."

  "I have a letter to you. From Colonel Kinneson."

  The general looked at Morgan with weary eyes. "Come inside, son," he said. "I'd be honored to receive a letter from my friend Colonel Kinneson. And young man? The next time you decide to go up against a fellow twice your own size, make as though to grapple at close quarters with him, and when he opens his fists, seize his thumbs and bend them right back until he cries uncle."

  "What if he doesn't?"

  "Well, keep bending until you hear them snap. Then he's yours. That's one truly useful thing I learned at the Point. Now you know it too."

  The general's study occupied a small room overlooking the river. It was lined with books on wars and warfare, some in Latin and Greek. A large map of the Dominion of Virginia with the major campaigns laid out in black ink in a neat hand lay on his flat-top quartered-oak desk, which was otherwise bare except for a small New Testament, a volume of Caesar's Gallic Wars, and a framed daguerreotype of what Morgan judged to be the general's home plantation at Arlington. Before the desk was a single straight-backed chair. The general motioned for Morgan to sit down. As Morgan handed the letter from his uncle across the desk, he thought he saw the general's face light up to see his name written in his old friend's hand. The general read the letter quickly. Then he looked up at Morgan. "Colonel Kinneson has requested that I give you a safe-conduct pass through the Dominion to Tennessee and North Carolina." He smiled. "The colonel--John Bookworm to his friends--was and is a fighting officer and a fine and learned man. He and I were at the Point together. He received but one demerit." The general smiled again. "For reading after hours. I believe it was Catullus. He says you're his nephew and that you will have a story to tell me. Can you tell it fast?"

  Economically, Morgan recounted the story of his long walk south and why he had undertaken it. The general listened without interrupting, though during parts of the narrative his face expressed quickened interest. When Morgan finished, he showed the general Jesse's rune stone.

  "This is a most interesting artifact," the general said. "These strange signs--we had one carved on the woodshed at home where fugitives were welcome to stay. We pretended we didn't know about them, but of course we did. Here. The sign looked like this." On the stone, he pointed to the rune T. "My father didn't know what to call it, but he said he believed it meant the warrior."

  The general smiled a wry smile and shook his head. "I fear that's not quite proven to be accurate in my case. The true warrior seems to be that dogged Illinois shopkeeper, my opposite number. As we speak he is poised to deliver the final blow to our noble experiment."

  "You call slavery a noble experiment?"

  "I do not. I mean our experiment in independence. Like the independence declared by our forefathers. But to return to your missing brother. Son, if I didn't have rather more pressing business at the moment I'd help you hunt down these demons myself, the way I hunted John Brown, and I'd hang them higher than ever we did that poor mad devil. But God bless you, boy, you can't live beyond the law for revenge."

  "I don't want God's blessing or his help or least of all his interference. This has nothing to do with God. It's between me and Arthur Dinwiddie. Not to mention finding my brother. Will you give me safe-conduct to complete my work?"

  The general looked at Morgan, looked at the strange old oval relic in his hand, then looked out the window over the river. He thought of the mistakes he had made, in comparison to which this Vermont boy's misguided quest for justice was a trifling nothing. Not listening to Longstreet a year ago when he said the round hill could not, could not, be taken ... But he would not torment himself by enumerating his blunders again today.

  "Son, I well remember hearing of your brother the surgeon and the great service he performed for my wounded as well as his own in the Slaughter Pen at Gettysburg. He subjected himself to murderous crossfire from both armies. But even if he survived, which I can scarcely suppose, why would he then come south?"

  Morgan shrugged. "My brother was a pacifist. To get to a place where there was no war? He couldn't go north. He'd be shot for desertion."

  "What evidence do you have that he didn't die at Gettysburg?"

  "He just didn't, I reckon."

  "How can you know that, son?"

  "General, do you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?"

  "I do."

  "Where is your evidence?"

  "Why, it's all around us. In the universal spirit of love of our Lord and Savior."

  "My question stands. What shred of evidence have you lately seen in your Confederate States of America or in our United States either of the universal spirit of love?"

  "My brand of faith comes from my heart," the general said.

  "Just so," Morgan said.

  The general sighed. He got a sheet of paper and an inkwell and pen out of his desk. He wrote something and handed it to Morgan. It was a safe-conduct north for him and his Negro servant. This was not what Morgan had wanted, but it might serve him in a pinch, and the general knew well that what Morgan did with it would be up to Morgan.

  Just then they heard a commotion in the street. It was the sergeant and Slidell, returned with the cobbler's mule and wagon. "In the wagon are boots for your men from a well-wisher," Morgan said. "Also some belongings of mine. The mules and wagon to go to this address on Capitol Hill." He borrowed the general's pen and wrote the address of the cobbler's sister on a slip of paper.

  The general nodded. From another drawer of his desk he took a compass, which he placed in Morgan's hand. On the back were his three etched initials above the words "The good man's course is always true." Morgan privately thought that the inscription was an example of the kind of suspect reasoning that the little testament on the general's desk and all other testaments abounded with. But he nodded politely and held his tongue as he started to hand the compass back. The general closed Morgan's fingers over the instrument. "Put it in your pocket," he said.

  "Let's walk a little," the general suggested. "Walk down to the river with me if you will. I'm stiff and"--smiling slightly--"you must be too. You took quite a drubbing from Corporal Mann. Next time, remember, go for the--"

  "Thumbs," Morgan said, wriggling his.

  Outside, the general lifted his graying eyebrows as Slidell removed from the wagon box Morgan's scattershot and Lady Justice and silently passed them to him. On the way to the river they passed a tobacco manufactory. "D
on't ever use tobacco, son," the general said. "I don't and I'm proud of it. Tobacco is a bad business."

  Then, "You fought Corporal Mann like a tiger. Well, that's how I'm fighting."

  "You might better have fought to persuade the Dominion of Virginia to join the Union."

  Slidell, slouching along behind, put her hand over her mouth.

  "You Vermonters are plain-spoken enough," the general said.

  They sat on a bench on a marge of grass on a low berm by the river. Slidell stood nearby. "Perhaps you're right," the general conceded. "None of us ever thought the war would turn into"--he waved his hand at the fortified city jammed with soldiers, the river filled with blockade runners and ironclad naval boats--"this. Sometimes, son, a man needs to know when to say 'enough.' Sherman already in Georgia and poised to cut the Confederacy in two. Sheridan raising Cain here in Virginia. My best fighting general, a man so devout he refused to give battle on Sunday, accidentally shot through the back by his own soldiers. The very first battle of the war and all battles thereafter no more nor less than bloody clashes between armed mobs. My opposing number has lost nigh two men to my one, Morgan. Yet he knows not the meaning of retreat. Whyever would we keep on?"

  "Like he said, Virginia should have waltzed in on the side of the North," Slidell said.

  "Good Lord," the general said, looking from Morgan to Slidell and then back to Morgan. "I see why Vermont still calls itself a Republic. Even your servants are outspoken up there."

  "Again," Morgan said hurriedly, with a warning look at Slidell, "my point remains. Had you and your Commonwealth thrown in with the president, all this warring would be long over."

  "Boy, you should go into the law. Here. Promise me that if you live through this madness you'll look into the law."

  "I'll consider it."

  "You've heard this one, of course," the general said, "apropos of why we've kept on. During a Sunday truce a boy from Massachusetts called across this very river and asked a boy clad in gray why he was fighting. 'Why, because you're down here,' the southern boy called back. Perhaps that's as good an answer as I can give."