As the days blended into one another and the blue autumn weather maintained, with no word of Oconaluftee, Morgan began to relax his vigil. He loved to sit out in the sheep pasturage in the mild sunshine reading Pilgrim's books. Thoreau on Cape Cod, Emerson on self-reliance, Milton and Shakespeare on the good and evil in the hearts of mankind. On Great Grandmother he finished the wonderful account of the journey of Captains Lewis and Clark. And though he still longed to see the upper Missouri River, the Great Divide and the Pacific, he kept coming back to a thick old law book, Blackstone's Commentaries, which Pilgrim sometimes consulted in his secondary capacity as a kind of itinerant and impromptu justice of the peace. This tome was becoming Morgan's lodestone. So far from finding that periwigged old jurist Blackstone tedious in his strict recapitulation of torts and codicils and other legal terms he had never heard of, Morgan regarded him with fascination. With his absolutes, Blackstone suggested to him the comforting possibility of a realm where justice, such as it was, was meted out, however imperfectly, in high-ceiled chambers by men governed not by their immediate passions but by laws as ancient and fixed as the oldest pines rooted in these mountains. Morgan admired Blackstone's attack on the draconian Poor Law and on the savagery of the game laws, for which he had little use himself. He spent whole mornings and afternoons poring over the old volume, discussing what he had read in the evening with his brother.
During the daytime Pilgrim made his medical rounds on a gentle ancient nag that the Sheltons had given him for helping a woman of their clan with a hard birth. It was true, Pilgrim said, that the Shelton and Allen men not murdered by Oconaluftee had, in a fierce shoot-out on the very evening of the day Noah Allen bushwhacked Keith Vance Shelton, bid fair to annihilate each other almost to the last man. He did not know what had become of Barbary Allen, though her new song, "The Ballad of the Outlaw, Childe Morgan," had become popular among the remaining people of the Sugarlands. They had even added a verse:
He fit the Devil at Shelton,
Thirty kilt by one.
He felled Oconaluftee
With his fancy raffle gun.
Pilgrim did not interrogate Morgan about his great odyssey south, nor did Manon. Pilgrim had at last written to their parents to tell them that both sons were safe. Manon had written to her family to say she was well and with Pilgrim. When the baby came, which could be any day now, she would write again in the hope that a grandchild would reconcile them to her marriage to a freethinking Protestant. She and Pilgrim had recently decided to name their child, if a boy, Morgan. This disclosure caused Morgan to realize that he must not live with Pilgrim and Manon any longer under false pretenses. They must know who and what he was.
One warm September evening, as all three members of their small community sat on the log stoop of the cabin looking out over one hundred miles and more of mountains, Morgan told his story. It is a rare enough thing in this world to find anyone truly skilled at listening. To find two beloved friends capable of listening to a two-hour narrative without once interrupting, even when he told of abandoning Jesse Moses before Jesse had a chance to reveal that Pilgrim was alive and dwelling with Manon in the mountains near Gatlinburg, was remarkable. But when Morgan told of shooting the child in the corn patch, Manon took his hand and shook her head, and Pilgrim finally spoke out.
"No, Morgan."
"No?"
"Morgan Kinneson," Pilgrim said. "Hear me well. This monster, Oconaluftee? One of his most evil devices was using human shields. In my recent visit to Shelton Laurel, the dead child's own grandmother said that when she glimpsed the devil Luftee running in the corn, she fired her old hog musket loaded with buckshot at him, then saw that he was holding the child before himself. The little one was struck with buckshot. Your rifle bullet hit Luftee."
If in fact this was the case, Morgan felt strangely little relief. He was beyond the pale of normal human feelings, save the comfort of Manon's hand in his and the knowledge that there was still that much good in the world. For himself, there could be no hope or redemption. Slidell had known as much back in the Cumber.
T HE NEXT MORNING when Morgan came to the table for breakfast, Pilgrim put his arm around his brother's shoulder as he used to do when they were younger and walking the mountains, with Pilgrim telling him the names and secret ways of the birds and woods flowers, where the sleek and intelligent fishing otter dwelt along the river, and how their grandfather had once found a lost seal down from the St. Lawrence River and kept it for a companion like a dog. Some of the stories, like that of the seal and of the professor's gigantic betusked hairy elephants roaming the edge of the creeping walls of ice, were so fantastical that Morgan could never tell whether Pilgrim was recounting facts or spinning tales.
"Are you able to climb the mountain with me today?" Pilgrim asked.
Morgan looked inquiringly at Manon.
"I am perfectly fine to stay alone," she said. "This kicking man-child--I'm certain it is a Morgan, for he kicks far too hard and angrily for a girl--is a full week away from making his presence known. Go, Morgan and Pilgrim. Your luncheon for the mountain outing is ready. Cold baked beans. My own bread baked in the petit stone oven. Young Morgan"--she patted herself--"and I will be safe and content. Have the day with your brother, Pilgrim. He is nearly well, you know. Soon enough he will be off for the Northlands and his new life. I see a beautiful girl in it."
Manon's dark eyes danced with mischief, and Morgan's heart seemed about to break in two. But he said nothing.
On the way up the mountain the brothers talked freely about everything under the sun, as they had together at home. Morgan shared with Pilgrim his recent doubts about the violent actions of his hero John Brown, who it now seemed to him was no less a murderer than he himself. He spoke of the strange glyphs carved into the dwellings of the conductors and stationmasters he had met on his way south, how each conductor seemed to have a different reason for helping fugitives reach Canada and how, in some cases, those reasons had little to do with a hatred of slavery or a love of universal freedom. He asked Pilgrim if he thought that Jesse had set up the Mountain Branch of the Underground. Pilgrim said that he did think so, but he was much less certain about the provenance of the rune stone. It was possible, he supposed, that in accordance with the old myth Slidell had told Morgan, it had been passed down from one generation to another by Jesse's African ancestors. How they might have come by such a relic was unknowable. Like the similarly engraved Balancing Boulder at home, Jesse's rune stone would likely remain a mystery for all time to come.
"Now look here, brother," Pilgrim continued as he hopped up the mountain like a one-legged frog with a two-headed stick. "I'm in love with Manon--she is peerless. Peerless. And soon to present us with a son or daughter, also peerless. I'm about to be a peerless father. And you a peerless old uncle. Can you credit it?"
Morgan could not.
The game path they followed grew fainter as it climbed at a sharp pitch through twelve-foot-high laurel and dense, raking blackberry bushes, then waist-high huckleberries. Pilgrim continued to effervesce about his beloved mountains. "Manon is my cherished wife, but I have fallen in love with this land, brother. She teases me that these mountains are my mistress. The tall cardinal flower beside the brook, the flowering dogwood, the swift and amiable black-snake."
"Why next you'll have me believing that you live in Eden, brother," Morgan said. "Though an old gaffer from the Sugarlands, an Allen, told me he once moved to North Carolina--you would think to hear him that it was as far off as Van Diemen's Land--and returned home the very next day because the drinking water was inferior." He looked off to the east. "Good God, Pilgrim. What is that massive soaring peak?"
"That is Oconaluftee, brother. There's a narrow lead threading up to the top. It's said that the blockaders, the first old mountain whiskey makers who defied the tax laws, had impregnable strongholds in the caves hereabouts. One such rascal captured a cannon from federal revenuers and mounted it atop Oconaluftee Mountain. The only access
to the peak now is by a long swinging rope bridge. I've not been there, but I intend to go, now that the madman who named himself for it is dead."
They sat on the rocky summit of Great Grandmother, eating Manon's good lunch and looking far out over the flowing mountains, drained by many a well-concealed stream, cloaked in woods and thickets made slightly indistinct by the blue mist that floated over the highlands, so that it was difficult to say whether the more distant peaks were true mountains or filmy clouds or mirages. It was as lovely a scene as Morgan had ever beheld.
"I was especially taken by your story of our friend Joseph Findletter making you the rifle, the gun you call Lady Justice," Pilgrim said. "Your account of shooting the big orange pumpkin across the gorge is a grand tale. I can see it bursting apart in my mind's eye."
"Well, you could have hit it, Pilgrim. You always had a magic touch with a gun. I expect you still do"
"Life plays us many a prank, Morgie. I was born with the gift of shooting, but I haven't fired a gun in four or five years. Nor do I intend to do so ever again."
"Brother," Morgan said. "You said you were wed to Manon, but these mountains were your mistress. May I ask, has Manon been your only sweetheart?"
Pilgrim roared with laughter. "Yes, Morgan. Manon has been my sweetheart from our early childhood. There has never been another girl, and luckily she isn't jealous of my mountains so long as I always come home to her."
Encouraged by his brother's good-natured candor, Morgan said, "Pilgrim, I must tell you that on my way south I met a girl who stole my heart."
Pilgrim seemed in no wise surprised. "Who was she, you young dog, you?" he said. "Some wealthy planter's daughter, no doubt, with a soft southern voice and a fetching black eye."
Morgan shook his head. "She was not. She was the runaway slave of whom I told you and Manon something last night. Slidell Dinwiddie. Jesse Moses's granddaughter. We became very close."
Pilgrim nodded but said nothing.
"Are you distressed with me, brother? For falling in love with a black woman?"
"Hardly, Morgan. You did what any young man might well have done. I'm only surprised that you didn't bring Slidell here to the Shaconage to wait out the war with Manon and me."
"She went north with her brother, the little savant. I gave her Auguste Choteau's name in Montreal. As for us, I mean Slidell and myself, she is a deeply and sincerely Christian woman. She found me, in my quest for the killers, unsuitable. I fear there can be no hope in that quarter now or in the future."
"Morgan, like many another soldier, both blue and gray, you have done only what you had to do. As for the future, it is more unfathomable than those far peaks that fade so subtly into the sky we can't tell them from the horizon. No one can know it. Not even Slidell's friend Jesus. Who, when it came to the future, mistakenly supposed that the Kingdom of God on earth was at hand and would surely arrive in his lifetime. Listen to me, Morgan. Let the future look out for itself, for I assure you that it will. I thank you for placing your confidence in me and telling me of your romance. The tale will travel no further. Now, brother, I will in turn tell you why I left my surgeon's post in Pennsylvania. And then we'll talk no more of war forever."
Quietly, with a measure of detachment suggesting that he had already put this part of his life behind him, Pilgrim began by speaking of the problematic, palliative nature of much of the field surgery he had performed during the war. Do what a doctor might, wounds to the brain, chest, and abdomen were nearly always fatal. One fourth of all amputations resulted in death. The higher on the limb the amputation, the greater the risk. Pilgrim counted himself fortunate that he'd been wounded just below the knee. Three inches to the north, he said, and he and Morgan would not be having this conversation.
Pilgrim paused for a moment, shaking his head. Then he continued his story. On July of the past year, the fighting at Gettysburg had been so fierce, particularly in the Wheat Field and the Devil's Den, that Meade had asked for surgeon volunteers to establish regimental medical outposts in those contested areas. With his head wrapped in a white flag and wearing white armbands, Pilgrim had crawled, under steady musket and artillery fire, into the Slaughter Pen. Using field tourniquets and emergency ligatures, he had provided first aid to more than forty badly wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. As the fighting inside the Pen continued at a greater intensity than anything Pilgrim had ever witnessed or imagined, six Union bandsmen impressed into medical service arrived with two cannon limbers cobbled together into a makeshift ambulance. Under Pilgrim's direction the wounded were piled onto the rough planks of the connected limbers, and the bandsmen set off at the doublequick toward the tent hospital on the ridgetop a mile away. The drifting smoke was so thick that all Pilgrim could see of the ambulance squad was their running legs. Before they were out of the Devil's Den, two of their number were shot dead. The remaining four were unable to pull their human cargo up the steep slope, and a moment later the limbers started to roll backward.
Pilgrim had just extracted, from the left shoulder of a southern captain, a Union minie ball that had entered on the right side of the man's jaw and had somehow traveled down and across the soldier's neck without severing the jugular. With the ball still gripped between his bloody thumb and forefinger, Pilgrim rushed to the assistance of the ambulance men. Seizing the long wooden tongue of the front limber and exhorting the four remaining bandsmen to follow his lead, he began hauling the jury-rigged cart of wounded blue and gray up the hill through the hail of bullets coming at them from all sides. The screams of the injured were inaudible over the steady racketing musket fire, the thundering artillery, and the deadly canister with its own horrible whining, like a million of quail or wild pigeons taking flight as one. Another ambulance man fell. And another. By some superhuman effort Pilgrim labored on. Then he was running quite freely again. His first thought was that more men had come to his assistance, perhaps pushing the rear limber from behind. But when he glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that the ambulance wagon was gone. Bits of the men he had but lately patched together were falling out of the smoke, which was now tinted rose red from the fine steady mist of blood raining about him like some latter-day plague. Pilgrim ran, screaming, unable to hear his own scream. He ran until he could run no more. Only then did he realize that he too had been hit, in the lower leg. His face, hands, hair, the once white flag around his head, all of his clothing and his boots, and the splinter of limber tongue he was still gripping were soaked in blood. He began to weep. Then he began to laugh. Still clinging to the bloody tongue of wood--all that was left of his efforts--limping now and with his back to the battlefield, he began to walk. As he would tell Morgan a year and some months later, high on a mountain on the wild border of Tennessee and North Carolina, Dr. Pilgrim Kinneson was through with warring.
The two brothers sat side by side looking out over the wilderness. There was a little breeze. Pilgrim tapped the iron-shod tip of his two-headed snake staff against a rock.
"Well," Morgan said.
"Yes," Pilgrim replied. "We have each seen the war at first hand, Morgan. We each have sustained our own wounds, outer and inner. I suppose we will each be a long while recovering from them, and that is how it is. In the meantime let us enjoy this fall day together, two brothers and friends out on a frisk in the mountains. We can be grateful that the war and its wickedness has not reached, nor is it apt to reach, Great Grandmother Mountain. We are beyond its reach here. Now look. I brought fish lines and hooks. That crease in the mountainside below hides the brook that spills down to the base of our field. It teems with little trout as pretty as ours at home. Let's cut two poles and trout our way down to Manon and feast tonight on fresh-caught fish the way we used to at home. What do you say to an afternoon of sport? I'll wager I catch two to your one, the sorry loser to clean the fish."
"Done," Morgan said. "You never could outfish me, brother. You won't today. It's the one skill I surpass you at."
"That and girling it, evidently," Pi
lgrim said with a laugh. "Come now, you young Casanova, you. Let's see who the trouter is in the Kinneson family, you or your one-legged brother."
* * *
T HE SLANT MIDAFTERNOON autumn sunlight illuminated the sheep meadow around the crofter's cabin and fell through the open door on Manon, sitting at the chestnut plank table crushing hickory nuts she'd picked the day before for a cake frosting to surprise Pilgrim and Morgan. She whacked each nut with a mallet on an oaken block, then picked out the meats with one of Pilgrim's steel surgical fleams. As she worked she hummed to the child within her, a tune called "L'eglise a Ste. Anne," a reel she and Pilgrim had loved to quick-step to at schoolhouse junkets while Manon's father, old Thibeau, sat on the master's platform sawing out the tune on his homemade violin and clogging his feet in time.
Manon had a fine voice, low and mellow, with natural pitch, and she hummed the old tune loudly enough for its plangent resonance to float out the door and across the pasture, where her brown-and-white brindled cow grazed and her small flock of sheep was lying down under the watchful eye of the bellwether ram in the shadow of one of the sudden ledgy outcroppings where she had lately planted daffodil bulbs. She had an eye out, too, for the devilish wild pigs that roved the mountains and came in broad daylight, under the command of their captain pig, bold as newly polished brass, to root up her flower bulbs and potatoes. Morgan had left her his gun, Lady Justice, to deal with the marauding hogs.
From the far end of the pasture in the hickory grove, she heard an echo of the reel she was humming. Some mountain minstrel, perhaps Barbary Allen, was coming up the lead from the cove below playing softly in melodious counterpoint to her song. It was a zither, Manon thought. The instrument rang out joyfully, the small, bright grace notes and longer chords reverberating over the green field below and making her toe tap. The music was bewitching. Even the bellwether in the pasture stood up and looked down the lead. Manon could no more keep her toes still than keep her heart from beating. The zither sounded like the soughing wind in the tops of the forest trees--what neighboring mountaineers called the hickory wind--and the whisper of the brook falling down the mountainside on a still September night. The music had a silky texture and a rare gold color like the fall itself and seemed to perfume the air with the most delicate of scents, like the shy mountain flowers Pilgrim used to bring her at home, the spring beauties and woods anemones. Manon's feet were going faster, her nut hammer still poised over the block. She closed her eyes and passed her hand through her raven hair and sighed as she had when Pilgrim read her the "St. Agnes" poem.
Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Page 26