Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel

by Howard Frank Mosher

  When she opened her eyes she saw, coming up through the sheep pasture, what at first she mistook for the trained dancing bear in her old picture book at home with the brightly dyed cloth pages. The sheep fled up the slope bleating wildly as the bear came on. But it was not a bear. It was a man, monstrous, in a bearskin, beating on a zither of a kind Manon had no acquaintance with, a flat wooden stringed affair hung round his neck and jutting out from his mid-section like a shelf. He beat it with mad vigor as he shambled along, bending his great head, over which the bear's own maw was draped, inclining his ear nearly to the zither and then straightening up and rearing far back as if about to flip over, yet always coming onward, now shuffling, now in the frenzied throes of a Cossack dance, now performing an intricate figure from a long-ago time when men had danced such dances in animal skins by moonlight. On he came, hammering loud and louder on his instrument until the clearing filled with music and Manon's small polished black shoes danced a little dance of their own, even as she reached for Morgan's rifle and sprang to her feet, upsetting the table and sending bowl and nuts and nutmeats and shells galley west on the puncheon floor. She feared that the noise would frighten the baby inside her. The child was her sole concern. Into the firing chamber of the great gun she levered a shell as Morgan had taught her, lifted the gun to her shoulder, and fired. The bullet ripped a splinter off the chestnut door jamb.

  The bear man, filling the doorway, laughed as Manon jacked in another shell and fired again. The man's left arm fell to his side, one dulcimer hammer hitting the edge of the table and bouncing toward the hearth. He was wearing a rattlesnake necktie. Backlit by the peach-colored autumnal sunlight he stepped nimbly through the door, eliding with his one good hand into "Bonaparte's Retreat." An odor at once rancid and sulfurous filled the cabin. With his right hand the creature ripped off the bearskin and shook it, rippling black as a starless night, as a gladiator of old might shake a net to terrorize and distract a victim before sweeping him up in its meshes and driving a trident through his throat. Manon lifted the gun high and brought the barrel crashing down on his head. He staggered. She stumbled on a hickory nut and fell to the floor. Oconaluftee feinted left as his feet moved right. He hurled the bearskin over her head, and with a triumphant bellow he was upon her.

  M ORGAN LOST THE trout wager. He had caught a mere thirty-one fish to brother Pilgrim's seventy-eight. Pilgrim, he remembered, had the touch. He was connected to trout brooks the way he had once been connected to hunting and guns, through some deep affinity approaching magic that even Morgan did not possess. Watching his brother crutch down the boulder-strewn creek bed, his rod tip moving over the likely pools and pockets like a long compass needle attuned to trout, Morgan realized that while he himself understood how to read the woods and brooks and mountains for spoor of beast or man, Pilgrim loved them for what they were. That was the difference.

  The bejeweled fish were so small, only three or four inches long, that they decided not to clean them until they reached the crofter's cabin. Morgan's penalty for losing the wager would be to carry the luncheon tow sack, now sopping wet and full of fish, while Pilgrim hopped beside on his snake staff, both brothers sogged to the waist from wading the stream, Pilgrim's arm looped affectionately round Morgan's shoulder. They were tired from the climb and the fishing, happy to be together, clopping along sweating like a span of weary mules, two joshing country lads out for a ramble, with the world and its bounty before them.

  "No, brother," Pilgrim said, allowing Morgan to bear more of his weight, "were I you, which I realize I am not, I would not fret much about whom to marry just--"

  The first shot cracked out from the direction of the farmstead, echoing and reechoing up the glen and across the valleys. Immediately Morgan knew the gun to be Justice. There was no other rifle like her in the Shaconage. He dropped the fish sack, the slippery little trout pouring out like so many precious fish-shaped gems in a sparkling heap on the green moss. He began to run, holding the scattergun away from his neck so it didn't bounce up in his face. Heedless of the ache in his side where he had been wounded, heedless of breaking a leg in a sinkhole or snapping an ankle between two fallen logs, he plunged down the mountainside like a leaping stag with the hounds at its flanks. Pilgrim vaulted behind him on his two-headed staff. The wound in Morgan's side was bleeding as he burst into the sheep meadow at full run, just as the westering sun struck the opening on the mountainside before setting, illuminating the crofter's cabin in crimson light like a visitation. The door was still open, and the splinter from the jamb lay like a dagger in the dooryard. Morgan cleared the log step in a wild bound, skidded on the dark, slick blood on the gallery. The floor of the cabin was a-slather with curdling blood. The chestnut-plank table lay on its side, one leg broken off, hickory nuts and shells strewn about like the remains of a shelling bee. Pinned to the floor with the fireplace poker was a sheet torn from one of Pilgrim's journals. Scrawled across it in blood these words:

  THE GAL FER THE NIGGERS STONE YR FAITHFULL SARVANT OCONALUFTY ALSO KNON AS LUDI TOO.

  TWELVE

  NAUTHIZ

  M organ and Pilgrim followed the blood trail across the clearing in the fading light, to the path leading up the mountain. In the twilight, glistening on the scree like a slug's trail, was a broken thread of dark spots, some as small as pinheads, others the size of dollars. Morgan bent down, dipped his fingers into a larger puddle of the dark liquid, now coagulating into a viscous glue, touched his fingers to his tongue, and tasted the saltiness of blood. He could only hope that it was Ludi's.

  "We'll make some pine links and follow," Pilgrim said.

  Morgan shook his head. "That's what he's counting on. He'll bushwhack us. We'd stand no chance trailing him through the night forest. He'll lie up in the laurel beside the path and let us go by, then pick us off. We have to wait for daylight."

  "Let him have the stone, then," Pilgrim said. "We'll give him the stone for Manon. Then we'll track him down and get it back."

  Morgan had already turned and started down toward the cabin. Without breaking stride he called over his shoulder, "He means to keep her and the baby, too."

  Pilgrim hurtled across the space between them, seized Morgan by the shoulders as if he would throw him down. "What do you mean, man?" he shouted. "Good Christ. What do you mean?"

  It was the first time Morgan could recall hearing Pilgrim raise his voice in anger to him, but what he suspected was so horrifying he had no intention of explaining himself further.

  "I mean that we will find them tomorrow. Giving him the stone won't matter. There's one way and one way only that we'll get Manon back. We have to kill Ludi Too. We have to kill Ludi Too, and this time we have to find a way to kill him so he stays dead." The two tall men stood face-to-face in the dusk, one standing upon a single leg and a staff.

  "Brother," Morgan said. "You must be prepared to put aside your Quaker beliefs. Otherwise I'll go now alone and take my chances with an ambush."

  "Brother, I cannot put my Quaker beliefs aside. They are who I am. But I promise to do all in my power to help you with what must be done and not stand in your way. I must and will come with you. And I still think we should start now."

  "Pilgrim Kinneson," Morgan said. "You're the best and wisest man I know. But this requires a different kind of knowledge. My kind. We'll do this my way. Ludi may hear the cock crow tomorrow if he's near enough a barnyard to hear one. Let him listen well, for he'll never hear it crow again."

  * * *

  D AWN IN THE HIGH PEAKS of the Shaconage, with autumn ground fog and the mist from a hundred hidden streams layering over the valleys and the mountaintops jutting up pink in the rising sun. The monster had stopped at the fork in the game trail where one branch led to the top of Great Grandmother and the other slipped off the back side of the saddle on the east shoulder toward the Great American Dome and Oconaluftee Mountain. All night, while Manon lay bound hand and foot beneath his bearskin, the beast had sat under the stars and watched the swit
chback on the trail below. His pursuers had not come. They would find his trail today, but Ludi already had the jump he needed to reach his redoubt first. In the old blockaders' stronghold, approachable only by the swinging bridge, he would be safe from capture. And once the babe was born and they were on their way north with the stone, killing stationmasters and conductors as they progressed, none of the bungling thus far would matter. For Ludi Too, known in these parts now as Oconaluftee, was a man of character and conscience. He left no job unfinished once he had given his word, and he intended to keep his word to dead Dinwiddie and rid the mountains of the nigger-helpers once and for all, as Dinwiddie and Jesus had bade him.

  It was time to wake up the young virgin. Gently, with his one good hand, Ludi played the waking song while he sweetly sang.

  Good morning, good morning, my pretty little miss.

  The virgin of my song. O Lor', says he,

  Won't you marry me? She answers, I'm too young.

  The younger you be the better for me,

  More fitting to be my bride.

  For I want to say on me wedding day

  That I married before I died.

  When she opened her eyes, the beast smiled kindly and sang the second verse again to comfort her and let her know she was safe, and he told her that she had naught to fear from him. Ludi's left arm hung useless at his side, yet he seemed not to notice. He untied her feet with his good hand and chafed the feeling back into them, working chastely with his huge beast-paw. She felt the baby move, thank God. It kicked her sharply. She gave a little moan, and he inclined his great head to her swollen belly and smiled and nodded as though to confirm what he already knew. Then he lifted his right hand into the air to give praise and cried out, "Hosanna! He cometh soon now, do the Child. The Son of Man do cometh. O, I will wed thee and blind thee and the babe, and all three on us will dwell like moles in a cavern beneath the ground. And you shall be called Mary and the boy Emmanuel the American Messiah. For his time be at hand, my virgin."

  Although the monster seemed in earnest, there was also a terrible mockery in his voice as he continued in this mad vein while feeding her some broken dry pone and urging her to drink deeply from his canteen. "I shall let you see one more day, virgin queen," he said, "so look well on the wicked world you'll never behold no more nor need to."

  As they started out for his stronghold on Oconaluftee, where the creature proclaimed that he would kill Morgan and Pilgrim, he helped her along, since her hands were again bound behind her. In her dress pocket, Manon felt the light weight of Pilgrim's surgical fleam, her last hope. The madman beat his dulcimer with one hand, and the notes chimed brightly through glens and dales as he sang.

  The first I see was a young banshee a-combing back her locks.

  She says she see young Morgan amongst the high cliff rocks.

  With a ho ho ho and a rat tat tat and away with a bow wow wow.

  The next I see was a partisan a-carrying his gun.

  He said he shot young Morgan as he come down the run.

  With a ho ho ho and a tiddy tiddy tat and away with a cat's meow.

  The third I see was a terrapin

  A-crawling through the mud.

  He said he saw poor Pilgrim

  Washed away by flood.

  With a ho and a hi and a rat tat tat and a terrapin's loud bow wow.

  With a tiddy tat tat and a brown barn rat and a terrapin turkle's meow.

  Manon worked her fingers behind her back. If she could twist her dress around to get at her pocket, she was as good as free, and the lunatic, with his horrible song of killing and terrapin turkles, was a dead man.

  * * *

  T HEY WERE READY well before first light. Morgan checked his weapons by lantern light, and in his medical bag Pilgrim brought linen bandages and some herbal medicines to assist with childbirth. Morgan still had forty of the silver-tipped .50 caliber bullets for Lady Justice. As the first yellowish light leaked into the eastern sky over the Great American Dome and Oconaluftee, they started up the path that Morgan and Pilgrim had taken the day before. Yesterday's blood had dried to dark spots like shriveled black toadstools.

  "Morgan?"

  "Aye, brother?"

  "You know this demon. Is he apt to harm her?"

  "No," Morgan lied. "He wants the stone too badly."

  As they pushed their way up the tilted mountainside, the laurel and hardwood leaves and evergreens now acquiring color in the dawn, Pilgrim said, "Luftee makes no effort to throw us off the trail. He must be badly hit. Gut-shot, I'd warrant."

  "He wants us to follow him," Morgan said. "He has a place in mind to fight us."

  On the shoulder of the mountain where the trail forked, one branch leading up to the summit of Great Grandmother, the other dipping into the huge valley between the Dome and Oconaluftee, they veered eastward, down into Lost River country. In the distance across the valley, resolving into form in the dissipating mist, Oconaluftee loomed, its massive brow overhanging the valley below. Just below the summit, in the side of the sheer rampart, a dark hole peered out like the sightless eye socket of a giant. This, Pilgrim said, was Polyphemus's Pupil, the cave where the moonshining blockaders had established their lair, hauling a small cannon to the rampart to guard their still in the valley against any who sought to prevent them from making whiskey.

  Morgan glassed the defile leading up to a stone pinnacle about four hundred feet away from the cave and even with it. A hanging rope bridge with wooden foot slats connected the top of the pinnacle with the cave. Occupied by a single man with an accurate rifle, the stronghold looked as impregnable as Gibraltar. Still, there might yet be a way to finish Ludi for good and recover Manon. Once again a battle plan was forming in the mind of the soldier Morgan Kinneson.

  A S MORGAN HAD PERCEIVED through the Portuguese spyglass, the blockaders' cave was not truly a cave but a natural dent in the face of the cliff under the beaked overhang of the mountain. Ever the gentleman, Ludi helped Manon up the defile to the pinnacle and then out over the thousand-foot-high rope bridge to the stronghold. There he lashed her to the ring bolt to which was chained the old rusted cannon, still facing out across the valley as if to repel revenue men. Earlier in the day Ludi had shot two fat gray squirrels and a grouse. It grew cooler as the sun lowered toward the western mountain, Manon's mountain, Great Grandmother. The considerate troubadour put his bearskin over her shoulders and drew its fearsome head over her dark hair. She looked down the sheer rock wall. Just below the parapet, a spring, framed with ferns and moss, came shooting out of the side of the mountain.

  "We'll build a snug little fire and fry up these squirrels and the grouse in a savory mess," Ludi said. "For you, my dearest, must eat well to keep yourself and the babe in health."

  The madman wore a tunic that was blue in front, gray on the back, and Manon saw that his vast trousers, previously concealed by the bearskin, had one gray leg and one blue, each with a gold stripe down the side. In his private lunacy, Ludi had made of himself a living mockery of the war.

  Manon looked down past the gushing spring into the canopy of trees far below, beginning now to turn color for fall, recognizing the crimson and orange maple, purple ash, yellow birch. The spring fell down and down the red rock face into a deep blue pool. Ludi skipped to the lou to the gushing spring and pranced and danced as he exhibited his great member, as long as a stallion's, and peed off the edge of the parapet, squealing with glee as his urine arced out in the last rays of the sun and fell mingling with the spring water beside it. "Let us have a gloss on 'Sir Hugh,'" cried the mountain songcatcher, "pentameter mode as singed to me, with variations, by Mrs. Ale Sawyer at Black Cove Hollow afore I et her gizzard." He began to hammer on his dulcimer and to roar out over the valley below:

  Bury Pilgrim's snake staff at his feet, his wood leg at his head.

  When Childe Morgan calls for him, pray tell him Pilgrim's dead.

  "You are safe now, virgin," Ludi crooned to Manon as he cut open the squirrels and
grouse with his Arkansas toothpick dagger and washed them thoroughly under the icy spring and then washed his hands and scrubbed them well and said he would wash them again in water heated in his pannikin should he be called upon to deliver Emmanuel that night. He told Manon that she must not fret, that before blinding her and the babe he would sing them to sleep. He set his pannikin on the fire to boil with the point of the dagger in the water to sterilize it for the blinding of Manon, bidding her to look well upon the world now, for soon it would all be but a bad memory and she would never have to view its cruelties again. He said he had popped out many an eye in a gouging brawl, and it would be quick and surprisingly painless.

  Under the bearskin Manon worked her bound hands into her side pocket. Her fingertips brushed against the metal casing of Pilgrim's surgical fleam. She found the groove in the back of the blade and opened it and turned it ever so carefully in order not to slice herself, and while the beast cooked their evening repast, she began to cut through the cords fastening her wrists.

  Oh, Ludi Too was in fine fettle. As he busied himself with supper he hummed bits and snatches of "The Ballad of the Outlaw, Childe Morgan Kinneson." He practiced with his Yellow Boy, shooting, with just one arm, and in quick succession, a raccoon feeling under rocks for crawfish in the plunge pool a thousand feet below, a peregrine falcon riding the updraft some hundreds of feet above the mountain's summit, and the top two feet off a rock chimney on a razorback ridge two miles away. In no instance did he seem to take aim but merely brought the carbine to his shoulder and fired in one swift motion. He cleaned under his thumbnails with the sterilized point of his dagger so that there would be no chance of infection when he gouged out Manon's eyes. Then he heaved on the rope handholds of the suspension bridge like a sailor, causing the rackety wooden crosspieces spanning the abyss to clatter and echo and the bridge to sway wildly. Ludi sang "Bye, Baby Bunting" and said the old bridge would make a fine cradle for a big baby like him. The setting sun, red and vast, rested on the top of Great Grandmother. Manon felt one cord give way, then another. She rubbed her wrists together to bring back circulation. Soon it will be all right, she silently told the child within her. You're safe. You're safe.