Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (6 page)

O
N THE WEST SIDE of the bay where the Richelieu River debouches from Lake Champlain sat a half-finished fort, its gaping cannon portals overlooking the narrows. Morgan thought it might be the razed old fortress depicted on Jesse's stone. A tall, elderly man in a cocked blue hat stood in a flat-bottomed wooden scow in a small inlet, stabbing at something in the water. He was dressed in a uniform of some sort, and as he punted the boat along the cattails and bulrushes near the shore, he stopped frequently to exchange his long pole for a barbed trident made from a pitchfork. He was spearing chain pickerel, heaving them green and flopping into the boat. Milk-white milt and bright yellow eggs like gold beads spewed out of their vents. A horned bullpout with spiky whiskers and fins squeaked like a frog as he threw it onto the pile
of fish in the boat. With the next lunge of his trident he impaled a great northern pike, snaky-looking and as long as Morgan's arm.

With each furious thrust at the hapless fish, the lanky old gondolier shrieked out an imprecation. "Death to you, John Reb! Death to the Rebellion! And to
you
and
you
and to
you
too, general." When he forked up the long pike, squirming wildly on the pitchfork tines, he roared out, "Taken at last, Jeff Davis. You'll hang for treason."

The madman's blue claw hammer coat was bespattered with fish offal and covered with a tatterdemalion array of shiny tin scraps, shards of colored glass, shredded ribbons of every gay hue, and dozens of buttons studded all over the shoulders and back and seams and even the coat's forked tails. There were mother-of-pearl buttons, pewter buttons, buttons of amber, big brass buttons, and buttons fashioned from bits of white bone as well as from glossy black bitumin, not to mention drilled copper coins, silver dollars, and even a few golden double eagles. Around the man's neck on a string hung a child's tin horn. Wisps of snowy hair stuck out from under his blue tricorn. A scraggly white beard stretched to his waist. His eyes were pale blue. Mounted on a swivel affixed to the front end of the boat was a blunderbuss as long as a small cannon. At the rear a tattered American flag fluttered from an upright besom-broom with a few straws still attached.

The fish killer threw down his trident, picked up the punt pole, and drove the boat through the scratchy reeds onto the pebbly shore a few feet from where Morgan stood watching.

"Come aboard, ensign," the boatman commanded in a brisk military voice. "On the double now. We've not a moment to lose if we're to take back the fort. Avast there, step lively. Are you waiting to be piped on like Lord Nelson? Fine, then."

The white-beard lifted the tin horn to his lips and gave a great lusty blast.

Morgan stepped into the prow and sat on the forward thwart near the blunderbuss.

"Nay, not so fast," the old man said. "When the Admiral of the North speaks to you, lad, you'll salute him. You'll salute, by Jehovah, or I'll have you keelhauled and whipped the length of the fleet and back."

Trying not to smile, Morgan saluted. The Admiral in the meantime had seized his trident and speared another finny Rebel, which he added to the heap of insurrectionists in the bottom of the boat.

"This is how I'd do them Johnnies if they'd but let me enlist," the Admiral cried, and he fell upon the poor gasping fish with his punting pole, belaboring them left and right. In his frenzy he narrowly missed Morgan's head.

Suddenly the boatman began to weep. "Oh, lad, they kilt my two boys," he wailed. "Don't you see? They kilt my boys, and we must retake Sumter and set the world right again. We'll wind time back before the war and my boys won't never have gone for soldiers nor died in battle and all will be as it once was."

He pointed down the lake at the stone fort overlooking the narrows. "There she stands," he said. "Sumter. I retake her every morning. In the interest of bringing back my boys, you understand. Watch now, ensign. This Chesapeake Bay punt gun will play pure hell with the Rebs in that redoubt. We shall take her again, you and I together."

As they approached the empty fortress, the Admiral of the North told Morgan that it was locally known as Fort Blunder, because after the War of '12 it had been mistakenly built by Americans on Canadian soil. Just ahead a raft of wild ducks bobbed on the water,
riding the chop on the lake like painted wooden decoys. "Quack, quack," the Admiral cried out. "Do ye see them, lad? Skirmishers dispatched from Sumter to lay water mines. Quack, quack, quack!" The ancient warrior gave a powerful push with his iron-shod punting pole. He leaped over the heaving pile of fish past Morgan and into the bow of the boat, all the time clucking to himself. Out of a squat keg, using a wooden flour scoop, the Admiral dipped a good pound measure of horseshoe nails, screws, bolts, nuts, and metal fragments, which he dumped rattling into the maw of the great Chesapeake gun on swivels. With the exactitude of an alchemist of yore, he poured in powder, placed a cap as broad as his bent yellow thumb under the hammer, then flung himself down on the shivering mat of fish in the bottom of the boat and trained the gun ahead. He smelled of some awful compound of unwashed flesh, wet wool stockings, fish scales, gunpowder, and despair.

"Ensign," he said. "Pole us forward. Toward the skirmishers."

Morgan moved to the stern, picked up the pole, and drove the boat closer to the ducks, which rose into the air in a great clamorous cloud. The blunderbuss went off with an astonishingly loud roar. An orange tongue of fire shot out of the mouth of the punt gun, and the sky rained bright feathers, gray and white duck down, and squawking ducks. The Admiral gave a tinny blast, signaling a charge, on the child's horn dangling from his neck. He seized the punt pole from Morgan and shoved his scow into the midst of the dead and wounded birds. In a desperate parody of hand-to-hand fighting, the elder began to club the ducks, shouting
take no prisoners, give no quarter, show no mercy
, ordering Morgan to gather up the dead and throw them into the bottom of the boat with the fish.

Morgan's ears rang from the detonation of the punt gun. The Admiral's exhortations sounded faraway and faint. "We'll follow
Nelson's advice, boy, and go straight at 'em. Damn the fancy maneuvers." The sun emerged, and the Admiral's buttons and bits of glass and metal sparkled like the waves on the bay as he poled directly at Fort Blunder in the manner of Lord Nelson. Although Morgan understood that the fort was unmanned, he could not rid his mind of the thought that at any moment the big guns might be run out, and he would be blown to Kingdom Come and never find Pilgrim. The punt boat had the north wind behind her and was fairly skimming toward the fortress. What if Morgan's pursuer was lying in ambush behind its walls?

"Now, lad, again, the switcheroo. Change stations!" cried the Admiral. Nimble as Jack Candlestick, he sprang into the bow. Morgan scrambled back to the stern and took up the pole as once more the madman poured a motley of clanking metal scrap into the blunderbuss. He fired at the fort. Chips of stone flew off the upper parapet above the top row of cannon portals. The Admiral leaped to his feet and shaded his eyes with his hand. Whipping off his blue tricorn, his snowy hair streaming in the wind, he waved the hat over his head and shouted out a great huzzah.

"They've struck their colors," he exulted. "Sumter is ours once more, ensign. Do you see? None of it happened. Time's all wound back on her spindle and my lads are alive. They're home turning mother's garden. They'll be there when I arrive. I'm a-going to set you ashore now. I want you to hold the fort. If the Rebels rise up, leave not one stone upon another. Put 'em all to the sword. Time's spooled back up and my lads are home spading in the garden and tomorrow we'll all go a-blackberrying together."

The man was weeping. Through his tears he cried to Morgan, "Step out on that grass tussock, boy. Go up boldly and occupy the fort and let all be as it was before."

"I need to go another short way down the lake," Morgan said.

"You need to obey your superior's orders," the lunatic roared. "Do you dare answer back to an officer? Do so again and I'll have you shot. Now will you hold that fort and hold back time or not?"

The old man's eyes were riven through with red veins. "Don't you see, lad?" he wailed. "The whole war's as much a blunder as this fort, and all you and I can do is keep retaking her, because come tonight she'll fall and the years will fly off God's great bobbin again. Oh, dear boy. They come for me last week from the village. They tried to take me up in a net, but I ran away like the gingerbread boy. They dogged me like a fish with a close-mesh net for that I lost my boys."

He was pouring another rattling miscellany of metal into his punt gun. Morgan picked up a dead mallard and stepped onto the tussock of marshy grass, felt it quiver and give under his foot, leaped to another and out onto the scree in front of the abandoned fort. He walked backward with his musket at the ready. He would not put it past the Admiral of the North to throw down on him with the great Chesapeake Bay gun and cut him clean in twain. Could the Admiral possibly be one of the killers himself? But no, the griefstricken father was punting hard back into the lake, the flat bottom of the boat whishing over the dead rushes. The sun had disappeared. A chilling mist was falling as, out of the low clouds, winging their way north into the wind, came a flock of snow geese. The white undersides of their wings were fringed in black and they were honking encouragement to each other as they breasted the wind.

"Gunboats!" the Admiral roared. "They seek to flank us on our right."

Frantically he swiveled the punt gun up at the squadron of geese and touched off a barrage of whizzing nails and screws. The air was
full of falling white geese as the Admiral punted over the waves in a world bereft of all reason.

Morgan gathered up some driftwood. Using a bit of birch bark in his pocket for kindle, he struck his flint and steel and started a fire in the lee of the fort to cook the duck he'd carried off the boat. As he plucked and cleaned the bird, he thought about the deranged Admiral. How could the local people allow the madman to work such rapine on innocent creatures, exterminating whatever swam in the lake or flew over it?

The spitted duck took a long time to cook, but Morgan did not want to eat wild fowl red. He dozed with his back against the fort. He dreamed of being called upon in school to recite and not knowing his lesson, woke with a start, sweating and light-headed. Something was burning. It was the mallard, charred and in flames. The waterbird was so old and tough that he could scarcely swallow a morsel. He'd hoped that the wing meat, what little there was, might give him strength, but finally he gave up on the bird and threw the blackened carcass into the fire. He got out Jesse's stone. Beside the drawing of the pile of stones that was Fort Blunder was the rune
. There was a code of some kind here if Morgan could but unravel it. Sitting with his back against the fortress, he fell asleep again.

S
OMETHING COLD AND WET was pressing against the back of Morgan's neck. He jumped up and spun around, groping for Ludi's scattershot pistol, and found himself looking up into the solemn gray face of an elephant. Morgan had seen a live elephant once before, an underfed, ill-used animal with the Sykes Brothers Traveling Menagerie, which had come to Kingdom Common
when he was a shaver. This elephant was half again as big as the Sykes Brothers', bigger than Morgan had known any animal could be. He wondered if it too might belong to a circus. It wore a spangled harness studded with bits of colored glass. On its back was a purple tapestry worked with rainbow-hued figures, dancing women in half-veils, warriors riding camels and fighting with curved swords, giraffes, hippopotamuses, even a crocodile with a small bird standing in its open mouth. The elephant had little black eyes and short bristly lashes, and to Morgan's amazement it was crying. It was shedding real tears, and on its long elephant face was the saddest expression Morgan had ever seen on the visage of man or beast.

"What's the matter?" he said to the weeping elephant. "You look like you just lost your best friend."

Morgan wondered if the animal might be hungry. He wondered what elephants ate. Maybe this one would eat hay if he could find some for it.

Gently, the weeping animal wrapped the end of its trunk around Morgan's wrist and gave him a tug like a biting fish. Still grasping Morgan's wrist, the elephant started walking toward the open gate of the fort. For a moment he wondered if the elephant was an apparition brought on by his exhaustion. But he could smell the animal's musky, comforting scent and feel the moist end of its trunk on his wrist and see the great tears sliding slowly down its face. This animal was as real as he was.

The elephant released Morgan's wrist and walked on ahead, looking back once like a smart dog that wanted to show him something. "What is it?" Morgan said. "What do you want me to see, my friend?"