Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (10 page)

As if by way of reply, the Caliph reached out with his trunk and planted a big, wet kiss, full on Dolt's mouth. Then Morgan would have sworn that the elephant gave him a sidelong glance and winked.

I
N THE EARLY AFTERNOON they came to a place where the berm was covered with blossoming dandelions. Butter-yellow
cowslips bloomed along marshy backwaters, and each little puddle pond had its own pair of mallards. Wild black cherry trees were blossoming white as new snow in the hedgerows. Ahead was a lock through which canal boats were floated up to the next level of the waterway. It occurred to Morgan that, with his great love of exotic travel books, roaming the land with an elephant and seeing such wonders as the canal and the president's private train would, under normal circumstances, be a splendid adventure. But he doubted, after all he had witnessed and participated in, that he would ever want to read a travel book, or perhaps any book, again.

With a proprietary air Dolt told Morgan that there were eighty-three locks on the Great Western and that the canal was forty feet wide and four feet deep and stretched three hundred and sixty-three miles from the Hudson River to Buffalo over a rise in elevation of five hundred feet. Eighteen cut-stone aqueducts carried side streams across the canal. Numerous dams let water drain in during drought time. The other boats waiting at the lock, their names gilded on their bows in gold flake, were
Canal Master, J. J. Belden, Tug Ridge, Watertown
, and
City of Buffalo
, this last a floating gin mill captained, Dolt said, by the infamous anti-abolitionist dandiprat and raging sodomite Captain Higgenbotham Suggs. Suggs, strutting the deck of his ship, stood four and a half feet tall and fully as wide across, and wore a yellow-and-red-flowered waistcoat, a tall castor hat, a high stock collar, and whipcord breeches tucked into glossy morocco boots with scarlet tops. He guyed Dolt mercilessly, inquiring whether he was expecting a flood and gathering up beasts from afar two by two, or was he hauling gold specie that he needed such a monstrous tusker to pull his boat? Could the elephant count to five with its foot? Recite the Lord's Prayer? Why in the name of King Herod were its ears so small and its snout so short? Dolt stood
by the Caliph with his boots planted two feet apart and his prunella neck cloth fluttering in the spring breeze, and when Suggs's fountain of wit ran dry, which did not take long, Dolt lifted to his lips the horn used to warn passengers of low bridges and blared out a great scornful raspberry by way of reply.

"And what of you, my pretty soldier?" Suggs called out to Morgan. "Come aboard the
City of Buffalo
and I'll give you the cook's tour, lad, abovedeck and below."

Morgan was staring at the two reddish brown horses Suggs was using instead of mules to pull his barge. The two big bays looked familiar. Giving Suggs a hard look, he checked his musket and scattershot to be sure they were primed and loaded.

While they waited their turn to lock up, Dolt confided to Morgan that
His Whaleship
was owned by the wealthy Utica abolitionist Gerrit Smith and was frequently used to carry a cargo of far more importance than the jaws of a dead whale. Currently he was en route to Buffalo with five Underground passengers disguised as crewmen. From there they would be conveyed by steamship across Lake Ontario to Canada. Again Morgan's cousin gave him a look full of meaning. The whale, he said, was merely for flash and dash. Dolton Kinneson an Underground conductor on the canal! Morgan never could have imagined it.

At dusk Morgan hayed the elephant at a town named, elegantly, Mule Fart, then walked on along the towpath under a million wheeling stars, talking to Dolton, while a deckhand manned the tiller. Suggs's
City of Buffalo
, now crowded with gin-swilling revelers bound for annual Spring Rout in Utica, kept pace two or three hundred yards behind them. The reflections of its red and green running lanterns glimmered in the black canal water as the gin boat crawled through the night under a pale quarter moon.

Dolt too had heard that Pilgrim had gone missing at Gettysburg but scoffed at the reports that he might be dead and buried in a Pennsylvania ditch. "Old Pilgrim's too crafty to be killed, and that's a natural fact," he said. "I know he's alive."

"So do I, cousin. But sometimes doubt creeps in."

"What was it the old reverend at home used to say, Morgie? Faith without a measure of doubt ain't worth a brass farthin'. Doubt be damned, don't you never stop looking for your brother. Never. See here, cousin. Say you was the one missing. Do you think Pilgrim would stop looking for you?
I
guess he wouldn't. Now here's a hard question that I need to ask a smart person. It's about this war."

"I don't care much about the war, Dolt."

"Well, don't care about it, then. Just answer the question for me. They say the fighting ain't about slavery. Ruther it's about states' rights."

"So I've heard."

"All right, then. You tell me, Morgie. States' rights to do what?"

"Secede, I reckon."

"Secede why? Over what?"

Morgan laughed. "Well, Mr. Grand Inquisitor, over slavery."

"Then why ain't the war about slavery?"

"I suppose it is."

"I suppose it is too," Dolt said. "So don't you never stop looking for Pilgrim!"

Morgan laughed again and shook his head. Philosophizing with Dolt Kinneson, now a canalman and Underground conductor, in the middle of the night in the company of a dead whale and a live elephant. And while Dolt's private algebra eluded Morgan--the x's and y's equating the cause of the war with the imperative to find
Pilgrim--the justness of his cousin's sentiments did not. He too believed that he must keep looking for Pilgrim, if only because the looking might sustain his faith that his brother was still alive. As to the war, well, he did not disagree that slavery, the greatest evil mankind had ever devised, was the ultimate issue, but it had long seemed to him that the conflict had acquired a malignant life of its own. Pilgrim had slipped away from it. Morgan wanted no part of it. His sole concern was to stay alive long enough to locate his missing brother.

Later Dolt told him that according to Gerrit Smith, the sign on the boat,
, stood for
Mannaz
, meaning beginnings. The canal, one of the main passages to Canada, was where the new lives of the
Whaleship
's fugitive passengers truly began.

Morgan was pondering this idea when he noticed, down the waterway in the thin moonlight, that the
City of Buffalo
had shortened the distance between the two boats by half. The bay horses pulling the barge were coming on at a sweeping trot.

"S
UGGS MEANS to pass us up yonder in the Yellow Jack Fens," Dolt said, looking back over his shoulder at the oncoming barge. "He means to cut our towropes with his boat scythes. Can your big boy run, Morgan? Shall we give the old sod a run for his money?"

"He can," Morgan said. "And we shall. Hi, Caliph. Run! Run, boy!"

The elephant broke into a lumbering trot.
His Whaleship
bounced along behind on the moon-shimmered surface of the canal. Suggs,
at the tiller of his gin boat, blew his warning horn, and the hoggee leading the
Buffalo's
bays leaped onto the back of one of the horses and whipped them up. The chase was on.

As the boats entered the vast swampy region known as the Yellow Jack Fens, the
Buffalo
continued to gain on them, the revelers on deck howling the bays on. Suggs blared out a ringing charge on his horn, and a blinding orange tongue of fire, accompanied by a terrific crashing report, shot out from the bow. A torrent of flying metal raked the stern and port side of
His Whaleship
. In the moonlight Morgan could make out the long shining barrel of the Admiral's Chesapeake Bay punt gun jutting off the bow of the
City of Buffalo
. Furiously reloading the deadly weapon, over which he hunched like a great cloaked bat, his outsized hat as black as a pirate sail, was the clubfooted creature from the wintery bog in Vermont. "Hands high overhead now, niggers and nigger stealers alike," shrieked Doctor Surgeon.

Flinging his musket to Dolt and calling out to the Caliph to run, run, run, Morgan broke into a sprint, heading directly back toward the
City of Buffalo
and straight into the maw of the Chesapeake punt gun now swiveling his way. As Doctor Surgeon thumbed back the gooseneck hammer, Morgan whipped the cord of Ludi's two-barreled scattershot over his head. He leaped over the mouth of the punt gun just as it exploded again, clearing the flying death-charge of shot by scant inches. He landed on the foredeck of the
Buffalo
and threw down on Doctor Surgeon with the scattershot. The terrified horses shied, causing the bow of the boat to crash into the side of the berm. A barrel of high-proof gin flew off the roof of the cabin, emptying its volatile contents over the deck. Morgan was flung across the deck by the collision. He fired one barrel of the scattershot
wildly into the night, striking a running lantern, which shattered and fell onto the deck, torching the spreading pool of gin.

From around the corner of the low cabin came Suggs, his ten-foot-long fending pole raised above his head. Morgan dodged aside and Suggs slipped and fell onto the flaming deck and instantly took fire, as if the tons of gin he had consumed over his lifetime had ignited to consume him. As the blazing captain leaped into the canal, Morgan sprang off the boat. Casks of gin in the hold were now exploding like barrels of gunpowder. One of the bay horses was missing, as was the creature in black. The revelers had fled back down the berm.

Another barrel of gin burst and another and yet a third, as the
City of Buffalo
burned to the waterline. Soon all that could be heard was the jingling chorus of spring peeping frogs and one lone late-flying snipe, winnowing through the night sky high overhead.

Then, coming from nowhere and everywhere, a trilling ululation. "Morrr-gaaan. Morrr-gaaan. The girl, Morrr-gaaan. Where is the girrrl?" Followed by curdling laughter. Followed by silence.

D
AWN WAS an enraged red streak in the northeastern sky. Black clouds scudded low overhead as Morgan and the elephant plodded west along the berm while Dolt manned the tiller of the showboat, its skeletal jaws pointing the way, its elegant blue-and-white gingerbread trim riddled to scrapwood. Two of the Underground passengers had been killed in the battle the night before by flying shrapnel from the punt gun. Two others, badly injured, had been taken on ahead to Utica for medical attention by the driver of
a passing lumber wagon. Dolt, who had never before lost a fugitive passenger, was close to distraction. Morgan blamed himself. He was the one who had led the mad killer straight to
His Whaleship
and the runaways. It seemed that wheresoever he went he brought nothing but death and destruction to all who would help him.

Ahead on the towpath a goose girl was driving to market a score of gray Toulouse honkers and several dozen turkeys, and the path was beslimed with the birds' copious phlegm-green leavings. As Morgan passed the girl, who was long-legged and saucy and as sharp as the little end of nothing, she beckoned to him lewdly and broke into wild gales of laughter. She wore a shift of goose feathers and down glued to a potato sack, and her legs were as brown from the sun as the muddy canal water; her feet and ankles were the green of weathered copper from the droppings of the geese and turkeys, which kept up a din you could hear half a mile away, a constant lunatic honking and gabbling and gobbling. And as she harried them along, the little hoyden gabbled back at them in a strange and uncanny approximation of their own peculiar tongue.

U
TICA. AT THE JUNCTION of the Great Western Canal and the River Tug, which ran out of the dank spruces and hemlocks of an area called the Limberlost, the sun came streaming forth on the wharves of the town. The streets were thronged with country folk and townspeople gathered for the Ute Spring Rout, a species of licensed saturnalia where a sober man, or woman either, was a rare spectacle. The docks were crowded with every manner of line boat, freight craft, and pleasure packet. Drunken wagoneers whipped their teams down the muddy main street between high
warehouses, clerks' offices, and whore-cribs. From the wharf where he unhitched the Caliph from
His Whaleship
, Morgan counted three separate fisticuff brawls in progress. Fishwives screeched from makeshift stalls, farmers had set up impromptu pens crowded with bleating spring lambs and grunching pigs. Bare-breasted women were hanging out of the upper windows of a canal-side doggery with a swinging sign upon which someone had painted in staggering scarlet letters MOTHER HUBBARDS FRESH GIRLS AND FINE SPIRITS.

Dolton had already begun his showboat spiel. In a singsong voice, standing on the whale's lower jawbone, he called out through his polished brass speaking horn, "Ladies and gentlemen of the metropolis of Utica, flower of the Great Western Canal and upper York State, for two dollars you may have your likeness made seated in His Whaleship's great jaws. Come all you York State Jonahs! Whilst you sit for your daguerreotype, Professor Dolton Kinneson, that's yours truly, will instruct you in the nomenclature of whales, of which there be Right, Sperm, Finback, Blue, and many another curious variety. You are invited to examine His Whaleship as close as you wish. If you find he be not a true and honest whale, your money will be cheerfully returned and you will keep your photograph as well."