Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (4 page)

The Yellow Boy was mounted with a slim telescopic tube, through which Ludi now scanned the frozen swamp below. The swamp stretched out for miles in the clear morning sunlight. Good light to shoot by, Ludi thought, though whenever possible he preferred to work with the sun at his back. Also he preferred to work alone. That's why he'd made the clubfoot remain behind in the cabin. Doctor Surgeon had wanted to come along, but Ludi had important work to do this morning, and he did not want the lame little medical man getting in his way. Why King George had brought the clubfoot with them during the escape, or the actor and the Prophet either, was a mystery to Ludi. He and George could easily have taken care of the business at hand themselves.

Except for a black thread of open water winding through it, the swamp was snow-covered. Here and there islands of evergreen trees stood up. The largest one lay only about an eighth of a mile away and occupied no more space than a mule could plow from sunup
to sundown. Just across the dark water from the island stood a dead pine tree, with a very large bird's nest at the top. Between the island and the lightning-snag pine, a beaver lodge of peeled sticks jutted out of the frozen swamp. Ludi couldn't tell for certain, but he believed that the tracks he'd been following approached the beaver lodge and stopped there. So much the better, he thought, as he jacked a shell into the chamber of the Yellow Boy.

M
ORGAN SPENT THE night in the woods at the foot of the mountain. Toward dawn his battle plan had come to him all of a piece. The haunting music from up the mountain was still quite faint, and as he walked across the frozen bog and along the edge of the open slang he knew that he had time. He approached the beaver lodge and ripped some dead sticks away from the side. Then he walked backward in his tracks to a stump beside the slang. He removed his felt boots and woolen stockings and rolled his wool pantaloons up above his knees. Without hesitation he stepped into the water. It was well over his knees and shockingly cold. He gasped, caught his breath, felt his way over the silty bottom to the lightning snag.

He put his boots and stockings back on and began to climb up the dead stobs jutting out from the pine trunk. Up he went, hand over hand, marveling at the whorling wound gashed deep into the trunk of the great tree. He scooped the snow out of the osprey's nest and pulled himself into it. Carefully, he upended his gun, poured powder from his horn down the barrel, ramrodded it home, dropped in the wadded ball, ramrodded again, placed a brass cap under the
gooseneck hammer. He drew back the hammer, then pawed more snow out of the nest to make a hollow for himself. To his astonishment he found a fish skeleton four feet long in the bottom of the nest. In the fish's skeletal jaw was the faded red-and-white homemade lure he'd lost years ago when he and Pilgrim were trolling in the big lake and he had hooked the great fish that had towed them and their canoe into Canada. The three hooks hanging from the bottom of the lure were rusted to points. What this curious reminder of the outing with Pilgrim might signify, Morgan had no idea. Nor could he imagine how the osprey had carried the fish, which must have weighed thirty pounds or more, to its nest. But now a man was coming out of the woods at the foot of the mountain. He was wearing a bearskin coat and playing a zitherlike instrument depending from his neck. Morgan wedged deeper into the nest.

He waited until the musician drew near to the beaver lodge. Waited until he raised his rifle and cut loose with a thunderous volley. Waited until he had discharged both barrels of the scattershot into the lodge as well. Then Morgan fired, and the rifleman sat down in the snow, holding his side.

"Y
OU'VE KILT OLD LUDI DEAD, Yankee boy," Ludi Too said, pressing his blood-soaked hand against his side. "Deader'n pork. And smashed my instrument to boot, damn your cold gray eyes."

"You killed Jesse Moses," Morgan said. He didn't like it that Ludi had noticed the color of his eyes. He reached out and lifted the strange pistol with two barrels over Ludi's big head.

"I'm paunch-shot," Ludi said. "Hand me back over that double horse cock of mine so's I can finish it."

Morgan kicked the big pistol over to Ludi. The killer picked it up, cocked both hammers, called Morgan a misbegotten bushwacking bastard, pointed the gun at him, and pulled the triggers.

The hammers clicked on empty chambers, as Morgan had known they would. He'd seen and heard Ludi fire at the beaver lodge with both barrels. Even so, it was terrifying to have a man cut down on him with a mortal weapon from six feet away.

"They goddamn!" Ludi shouted, and hurled the gun feebly at Morgan. It fell at his feet, and the boy picked it up and hung it around his neck by its lanyard.

"Well, then," Ludi said. "I've played out my hand. End it, old son. Put a ball in my head. For I don't care to bleed out here in this arctic fastness. Hark. I'll sing me a hymn to pass over on."

Ludi reached into his bear coat pocket and brought out his poplar mallet, and on the shattered dulcimer he played a bar of "Rock of Ages."

"Let me hide myself in thee," warbled the minstrel. "Come, boy, join in. We'll make a duet of it.

"For the sake of Jesus seated at the right hand of Jehovah, put a ball in my breast, lad. I'm begging you. Put a ball in my breast and take my instrument and sing in a ballad that I died game. Finish me, man. Only tell me first. Where be the nigger's stone? Does the gal have it?"

Morgan stared at him.

"Never mind," Ludi said. "Anno Domini will get it. One way or another, old A.D. will come at it when he finds the wench."

It was clouding over again in the west beyond the mountaintop. Big flakes of snow were dropping out of the sky.

Morgan said, "Toss me your ammunition belt."

"Eh?"

"Your ammunition."

Slowly, Ludi unbuckled the two bandoliers crossed over his chest under his bear coat and heaved them in Morgan's direction. He was bleeding harder now.

Morgan fetched the Yellow Boy, half buried in the snow nearby, and reloaded it with one bullet from Ludi's belt. He set the rifle upright against a cedar tree, training his musket on Ludi lest he snatch up the loaded rifle and turn it Morgan's way. "I'm leaving you your gun with one shell in the chamber to do with as you see fit," he said.

"How do you propose that I pull the trigger?"

Morgan knelt at the musician's feet and pulled off Ludi's right boot and stocking.

"Wigwag your toe."

"What?"

"Wigwag your great toe. Do you have life in it?"

Ludi moved his toe, as black as his boot.

"That's how," Morgan said and began backing away toward the cedar island, the musket in his hands pointed at Ludi.

"A curse on your yallow head, boy. Unto the seventh generation."

Morgan faded into the cedar trees on the island, trotted to the other side, and began to run toward the foot of the mountain. The snowflakes were as big as the palm of his hand and coming faster. A minute later he heard a muffled shot from behind him.

Quartering with the northwest wind on his left cheek, he reached the shelter of the woods at the foot of the mountain. He wanted to return to the cabin and deal with the second man, whose tracks he'd seen going over the mountain with Ludi's the night before, but
his wet feet and legs were freezing. He had no choice but to stop and pull some loose bark from a yellow birch and break off dead limbs close to the trunk of a skunk spruce, make a brush pile, and build a fire. Otherwise he'd freeze his feet, and that he could not risk. If there was one part of him that Morgan Kinneson knew he would need over the coming weeks, it was his feet.

T
he second snowstorm was a full-fledged blizzard. It lasted almost twenty-four hours, pinning down all living things on the mountain. All Morgan could do was wait it out for a day and a night while maintaining an economical fire from the dead limbs of the softwoods along the edge of the bog at the foot of the mountain.

During this interlude Morgan thought about Dogood, the schoolmaster. A year ago, at a Saturday-night spelldown at the schoolhouse, Morgan and Dogood were the last spellers standing. The word was "vengeance."

Dogood, tall, rawboned, a brawler and a bully, had been hired not for his knowledge but because he could keep order with his fists. It was rumored that he had paid a cousin from New Hampshire
two hundred and forty dollars to go to war in his place, preferring to lord it over a schoolroom of children than fight to preserve the Union. Dogood went first. "Vengeance. V-E-N-J-A-N-C-E. Vengeance."

"Nay," said Quaker Meeting Kinneson, who was serving as spell-master. He looked at Morgan. "Vengeance. As in 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord."

"Vengeance," said Morgan, who, though he detested every minute of his life spent in school and away from his beloved woods, had a memory like glue. "V-E-N-G-E-A-N-C-E."

"Correct," Quaker Meeting said. "And vengeance belongs to?"

"The Lord," Morgan said, but Dogood, publicly humiliated by one of his own scholars, evidently thought differently. The schoolmaster bided his time, and soon enough that time arrived. One evening when Quaker Meeting was off doing chores for a sick neighbor, Morgan did his father's barn work as well as his own and thus failed to complete his lessons for the next day. When he arrived at school unprepared, Dogood drew a small circle on the slate behind his desk and ordered the boy to stand bent over with his nose in the circle while he beat him with his ironwood pointer. After the beating, a dozen hard licks, Morgan turned around and challenged the teacher to bare-knuckles fisticuffs that Friday night at the schoolhouse. Then he walked out the door.

Word spread like brushfire that Master Dogood and the young firebrand Morgan Kinneson were to square off at the schoolhouse. Every ne'er-do-well in Kingdom County was on hand to see Dogood, stripped to the waist, his suspenders hanging from his worn serge trousers, lift his fists against his pupil. Morgan had asked his cousin Dolton to second for him. The schoolmaster had no cornerman but he assumed a formidable attitude with his fists turned
up, his elbows down, his long, cruel horse face tucked between his rugged shoulders.

"No head-butting, no gouging, no biting, go in and fight to win," roared old man Kittredge, and Morgan rushed the teacher with a haymaker that would have felled a stallion.

Dogood slipped the blow and flicked out a looping jab that stung Morgan's left eye like a bumblebee. He knocked the boy on the forehead with his right hand, then delivered a crunching blow to the breastbone that lifted Morgan off his feet and dropped him like the kick of a workhorse.

"Put your boots to the little bastard, Teach," someone yelled.

Spittle white as table salt glazed Dogood's lips as he drew back his boot. Before he could cave in the boy's ribs, Dolt Kinneson had him in a bear hug. "I reckon that's enough for tonight, Mr. Schoolmaster," Dolt said, lifting the thrashing pedagogue right off the schoolroom floor.

Dolt set the teacher down, went to the vestibule, and returned with the wooden drinking bucket. He dashed the full contents over the face of Morgan Kinneson, who came sputtering to his knees. Dolt grinned. "That's good for tonight, cousin. Sometimes a fella has to take a whopping to give a whopping. You're halfway there."

Now Morgan was alone in a blowdown, with the wind howling through the forest on all sides, Jesse Moses hanging from the rowanberry tree outside the cabin high on the mountain, the mad musician no doubt sitting dead as a stump in the bog, and another man, likely a killer himself, at large on the land nearby. For the first time in his life, he was the hunted rather than the hunter, a terrifying thought. Yet he knew that his life depended on his keeping a clear mind.

Rummaging in his jacket pocket, he felt something smooth and
hard. He drew out an oval, grayish stone, about as large as his palm. It was attached, through a small hole drilled through the top, to a leather necklace. Etched into the surface on one side were the words
Jesse's stone
. Below the writing a jagged line of what appeared to be mountain peaks ran from north to south, interrupted at intervals by a dozen or so curious miniature drawings. A ruined fortress. A little ship perched high in a tree. What might be the entrance to a cave. Also a pillared manse on a hilltop, a windmill and waterwheel, and a field of flowers. Each drawing was accompanied by a symbol similar to the runes on the Balancing Boulder. The other side of the stone seemed, at first, to be smooth. But when he examined it closely, Morgan could discern, very faintly, many of those same symbols, rubbed nearly indecipherable like the words on an ancient coin.

Morgan continued to look at the carved images until they all started to run together. He could not imagine how the strange stone had gotten into his jacket pocket unless Jesse had tucked it there back at the cabin. The killer in the bear coat had referred to a stone--the "nigger's stone." Might this be it? What did it signify? And what about the girl the killer had mentioned? The voice inside the cabin had alluded to a wench, and Jesse had inquired about a runaway girl, Morgan's age and pretty as a picture. Who might she be? If only he had stayed at the camp with Jesse, listened to what the old man had wanted to tell him.