Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (2 page)

At all of these familiar places Morgan had felt terrible pangs of loneliness ever since Pilgrim had gone missing in Pennsylvania. The plan had been taking shape in his mind for some weeks. After Pilgrim went off to war he continued to write to Morgan, though not to their parents. He told Morgan that he felt they were still close
in spirit because they both loved the same places on the mountain. Pilgrim had liked to josh, calling Morgan "soldier" or "Natty," after Natty Bumppo, the fabled scout in Fenimore Cooper's novels. Morgan's parents were too serious-minded to do much joshing. As for the aged cousin, she had never joshed in her life.

"Did Lord Jesus of Nazareth sit around the woodstove cracking wise with his cronies?" she said. "Did he, cousin?"

"I believe not," Morgan's father admitted.

"I believe not, too," Mahitabel said quite viciously. "Lord Jesus of Nazareth never laughed in his life. Not once. Nor did Paul."

"Laughing wasn't Jesus' department," Morgan's father conceded. "It wasn't Paul's department either, from what I can gather about Paul."

"They knew that laughter is a sin," Mahitabel said. "That laughter besmirches the creation. I detest laughter."

The old woman opened her daybook, in which she kept a careful running account of all that she detested, along with clippings of crimes and atrocities culled from the gazettes Morgan's father subscribed to. "Look you," she said, removing a cutting from the
Washington Intelligencer
of two weeks ago. "Do you call this funny? Do you laugh at this?" The heading read, FIVE HARDENED KILLERS ESCAPE FROM YORK STATE PRISON CAMP. Below, in smaller type, "Family of Four Found Hanged. Murderers Said to Be Bound for the South."

The article, which Cousin Sabbath School now proceeded to read aloud with relish for the third or fourth time, was especially painful to the Kinneson family because Quaker Meeting's brother, Colonel John Kinneson, was the commandant of the prison, and during the breakout John's wife had been shot by one of the killers. It described how, in an incredibly violent and audacious action,
the killers had been broken out of the Union prison at Elmira on the morning they were supposed to be executed. The article reported that the five escaped war criminals were the worst dregs that the conflict between the states had produced. Their numbers included a slave killer, a child murderer, an unfrocked minister, and a disbarred army doctor who, so far from healing the wounded soldiers under his care, had practiced vivisection upon them. The family they were thought to have murdered the next day had been connected with the Underground Railroad, a point that delighted Mahitabel, who had long opposed the Railroad and was a staunch anti-abolitionist, on the grounds that the Children of Israel had owned slaves, and what right did abolitionists like Morgan's father and Pilgrim have to oppose a tradition sanctioned by the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac?

"Show me," Mahitabel demanded, "where the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac told Moses to free
his
slaves. Show me where Jesus ordered the Romans to free
their
slaves."

In fact the aged cousin had inherited, from yet another aged cousin, a half-interest in a ladies' cotton undergarment factory near Burlington, which had recently gone bankrupt because of the war, a misfortune for which she blamed abolitionists in general and Morgan's father in particular. She also blamed Morgan, who, after Pilgrim left Vermont for Harvard and then joined the army as a medical adjutant, had been conducting passengers over the border to Canada himself.

That's what Morgan was doing on this gray afternoon in late March of 1864. Not yet eighteen, tall and athletic, light-haired, with wide-set eyes the color of the big lake just before a summer storm, he was guiding a single passenger--there had been many fewer since the president's proclamation just over a year ago--up
the Kinnesonville Pike over the saddle on the east ridge of Kingdom Mountain. He was taking the man, known to him only as Jesse Moses, to the last station before Canada, a seasonal maple-sugar house that Pilgrim had named Beulahland, on the back side of the mountain. There they would rest and eat the cold supper Morgan's mother had packed for them. Then he would guide Jesse Moses the rest of the way through the Canadian forest to Magog and put him on the morning train for Montreal. Morgan's father had already wired Auguste Choteau, the Montreal Underground stationmaster, that a passenger from the South would be arriving so that Choteau could be at the terminal to meet Jesse.

Morgan and Pilgrim had made this trip so many times that as Morgan trudged through the deep snow high on the mountain, he could hear his brother's voice in his head, telling about Professor Agassiz's great ice sheet creeping down from the north, carving out the lake and creating the vast bog called the Great Northern Slang. Telling him the names of the boreal plants clinging to the mountain above the tree line, plants found in few other places south of Labrador, explaining how birds had originated from lizards and humans from something more like monkeys. That's what had caused the falling-out between Pilgrim and his teacher. The professor would have none of Mr. Darwin's monkeys. He and Pilgrim had quarreled bitterly over the matter while on a working holiday together in the Southlands, up in the remote mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina. The quarrel had marked the end of their friendship. Now Pilgrim had gone missing. No doubt buried, according to Morgan's uncle Colonel John Kinneson, in a mass grave for the unknown fallen at Gettysburg. And Morgan would have none of that. He knew for a fact that Pilgrim was alive, though how he knew he couldn't say. He simply did, just as he knew that eventually
spring would follow winter on Kingdom Mountain, and summer, however brief, would follow spring.

When Jesse Moses had arrived at the Kinneson place, he had not been dressed for late winter in the North Country. He had no coat, just a ragged blanket with holes for his arms and head, and rags wrapped around his feet for boots. Morgan's mother had outfitted him with wool stockings and a shirt and some oversized trousers. There had been a fresh dusting of snow earlier in the day, with more on the way. Morgan could smell snow on the sharp north wind, see it coming in the slate sky over the mountain. He'd brought his musket, Hunter, in case he came across a bear early out of its den. Jesse followed him, carrying a tow sack around his neck and wearing a red wool jacket and felt boots Morgan had long ago outgrown. Morgan was glad Jesse was warm but aggrieved to have to give up his boyhood clothes. The red coat had been Pilgrim's before it was his. Even with it buttoned up around his throat, Jesse was shivering. More from fear, Morgan thought, than from the cold. The old black man continually looked back over his shoulder.

"They coming," Jesse said.

"Who?" Morgan said. "Who is coming?"

"They coming, I reckon," Jesse said again.

They crossed the saddle of the mountain and started down toward the maple orchard. The trees on the wild north side produced wonderful syrup and sugar. The sap here ran late, often not starting to flow until early April. The syrup was light amber, the sugar a lovely blond, a full shade lighter than Morgan's light hair. When the sap was running Morgan and his mother sometimes stayed at the sugar camp for several days. Returning to the camp through the inky maple trees at twilight behind the big red oxen, his shoulders on fire from lugging full sap buckets all day, seeing the red sparks
climb high over the black woods where his mother was sugaring off, Morgan would pretend he was an Esquimau coming home from a seal hunt. He loved sugaring time, and this afternoon, guiding Jesse Moses down the mountainside, he looked for any sign that spring and sugaring were close at hand. A blue jay in some black spruces made its late-winter rusty-hinge cry. That was all.

It began to snow lightly, hard pellets sifting through the bare branches at a slant. Morgan came to a place where something had crashed out of the snowy woods and crossed the old tote road. It was a huge, cloven-footed animal like an ox--but what would an ox be doing on the far side of the mountain before sugaring time? And where an ox's belly would have dragged in the snow, this animal left no belly furrow. It was, Morgan realized, a moose deer. He was overcome by the hunter's urge to strike out and track it down. His grandfather Kinneson had married an Abenaki woman. Yet Morgan, with his light hair and complexion and ice-gray eyes, seemed to have inherited all of the Indian ways in the family. Pilgrim, who was dark-complected and looked more like an Indian, was the scholarly brother. He'd have been able to say the moose's scientific name. Morgan just wanted to hunt the animal.

There was a good supply of wood at Beulahland. Last fall Morgan had cut several cords against this spring's sugaring season. He passed under the rowanberry tree in the camp yard, marked with the rune
,
Thurisaz
. A black man, an Underground conductor himself, had carved the symbol deep into the tree many years ago, when Morgan's father was a boy. There was a similar rune on the Balancing Boulder atop the mountain. Pilgrim's professor had said it meant "gateway," which made sense because the Kinnesons' Underground station was the gateway to Canada.

Morgan lifted the latch of the plank door, went inside, and poured a little coal oil on some kindling in the stove to get a fire going.

Jesse Moses started to unbutton his borrowed jacket. "I gone give you back you warm red coat, mister tall boy," he said. "Put me in mind of that Joseph coat."

Morgan smiled at Jesse's "mister tall boy." He was ashamed of his selfish unwillingness to part with something no longer of any use to him. "You keep that coat, sir," he said. "It's just a mite small for me."

Snap
. Outside, a snow-laden branch broke off a maple tree, as loud as a pistol shot. Jesse started. "It's all right," Morgan said. "Just an old tree limb."

Morgan could not seem to stop thinking of his brother. Pilgrim had no great love for hard physical labor around the farm--making hay, threshing oats, cutting firewood--but he loved sugaring season, loved to come to the camp to help celebrate the first exhilarating task of the approaching spring.

As Morgan unpacked ham, bread, baked beans, and pie from his haversack and laid them out on the unplaned table, he ran his eyes over the titles of the books on the window shelf. Most had belonged to Pilgrim.
Gray's Anatomy
.
The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare
. Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
. The professor's great book on glaciation.

"We waits here till somebody come for me?" Jesse Moses asked Morgan. "Somebody will come?"

Morgan thought how frightening all this must be to Jesse. The gathering snowstorm, the deep north woods, the rough mountainside cabin miles from anywhere. He wanted to tell him that the president's proclamation freeing all slaves had gone into effect more
than a year ago, that they were four or five hundred miles from the nearest slave state, that he was as safe, as Quaker Meeting liked to say, as a toad in the palm of God's hand. But Jesse's eyes were terrified.

Morgan smiled at him. "By this o'clock tomorrow, Mr. Jesse, you'll be in Montreal."

"Where that?" Jesse asked.

"Canada."

"Promise land," Jesse Moses said.

"Yes. The promised land."

"A young gal 'bout you age been through here lately? Runaway gal, pretty as a pitcher, maybe gots a little boy with she?"

Morgan shook his head

"You staying with Jesse, I reckon," Jesse said. "You daddy say you staying with Jess. Put him on the cars. I gots something to tell you. Something important."

Thinking about the moose, Morgan said, "I'll be back. By nightfall or shortly afterward."

"I gots to tell you--"

"I won't be gone long. No one will find you here."

Morgan knew he should remain with the frightened man. What if, while tracking the moose deer, he was overtaken by the oncoming blizzard and couldn't return to the camp? But he had to get on the animal's trail while there was still tracking light. When he'd first seen the track, it was all he could do not to send Jesse on alone to Beulahland while he lit out after the animal then and there. He'd never shot a moose deer.
L'original
, the French Canadian trappers who sometimes brought furs down the pike to sell in Kingdom Common called the moose. On this one animal his family could live for an entire year, preserving the meat in the icehouse. He
would feel better about putting his plan into action knowing that they had that moose. So he told himself.

"I'll be back by one hour after dark," he told Jesse Moses. "I promise."

The old man gave Morgan an uncertain smile and reached out and patted his arm. Morgan smiled back. Then he was out the door into the small driving grains of snow betokening more snow to come. He peered up the mountain through the dark maple boles and judged that he still had half an hour of good light. He started back up the trail at a trot.