Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (26 page)

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.

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?"