Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel (11 page)

Someone was pulling at the fringed sleeve of Morgan's jacket. Expecting another surprise attack from his assailant of the night before, Morgan spun around, already reaching for the gypsy's dagger at his belt. It was the little goose girl. "If you'll bargain for me cheap this afternoon at the poorhouse vendue, mister elephant boy, I'll do you each night and again each morning. But come. First I'll show you something amusing."

The girl, whose name was Birdcall, led him and the elephant
toward a spanking white wooden bandstand on a broad greensward. Thirty or forty young men were crowded around the stand listening to a war recruiter in a blue silk hat harangue them about the sovereign delights of going south for a soldier. The recruiter had a speaking trumpet and an insinuating lisp, and he rampaged back and forth on the bandstand bellowing like a man possessed. "Who'll sign on, gentlemen, for the lark of a lifetime? Yes! The North Country Sharpshooters' Regiment consists of none but gentlemanly men. It is a beautiful chance for those wishing to see something of this life away from home, boys. Yes! Our summer uniform is green, the color of God's good grass, and miller's gray for winter. Our vittles none but the choicest, our officers princes among men." The recruiter pointed the small end of his horn at Morgan. "Will you sign on for the lark of a lifetime, boy?"

Morgan shook his head, though several other young men surged forward to sign up at a table beside the bandstand, where three ensigns in uniform sat enlisting recruits. One recruiter was missing his legs and conducted his affairs from a large wicker basket like a sitting hen. Another seemed in the course of his soldiering to have misplaced an eye and an ear. The third had but one arm, having evidently left the other behind on his holiday in the South.

Dolton, in the meantime, had hired a trap and driver to take him to Mr. Gerrit Smith, to report to the fabled philanthropist and Underground conductor the attack on his showboat the night before. Morgan agreed to meet Dolt that evening at a canal-side tavern called the Robber's Roost, then he and Birdcall, with the elephant lumbering along at their side, made their way to the poorhouse where the spring vendue was to be held. Fleetingly, Morgan wondered if Birdcall might be the girl the killers were pursuing. But
no, they were looking for an older girl, a negro fugitive, and pretty besides. The previous day, when he'd inquired of Dolt about the pretty runaway, his cousin had teased him quite mercilessly, but in the end, he had to admit that he hadn't seen such a girl, with or without a little boy. To Morgan she remained a phantom. A pretty phantom.

N
EAR LOCK NUMBER FIFTY-FOUR, a mile west of town, stood a sooty stone building overlooking a field as stark as a brickyard, which had long served as Utica's poor farm, a catchall for every kind of hapless indigent. Elderly paupers with no family to care for them, waifs like Birdcall, disabled soldiers, the feebleminded hoi polloi, whole destitute clans with not one place else to go in the wide world. Each spring the less infirm on the poor-farm roster were lent out to farmers and petty tradesmen in the surrounding rural precincts to be boarded for the duration of the good weather in exchange for a few dollars and whatever light work the residents might be able to perform, which often consisted of no more than standing in fields and flapping their arms to keep away blackbirds. The annual vendue of paupers was conducted much like an auction, with one notable difference. The poor-farm clientele was considered so entirely feckless and, by virtue of their noxious existence, so bothersome, that instead of renting their services, the good-hearted authorities paid local squires and householders a small stipend to take them off the town for a few months, with the prized rentees going not to the highest bidder but to the lowest.

"Why don't you just run away?" Morgan asked Birdcall. "You
and your geese were ten miles down the canal this morning. Who'd have known or cared if you'd hopped a boat east and never looked back?"

"That's been tried afore. They have to account for us to the board of overseers in Ute. Otherwise, they'd starve us orphlingers off and say we went runagate. If we does run, they send the beadles after us and chain us up in our kennels and feed us naught but bread and water."

"How did you come to be an orphan?" Morgan asked the child. "Have you no family at all?"

"None in the world," said girl, trilling her "world" in an Irisher's brogue. "Me mother and father and infant brother Joshua Jonathan perished of the bloody flux that they calls the cholera on the way over the great salt sea from Dublin town. That was two years back, and I've been on me own since. 'Bout six months ago I was taken up by two bully boys and sold into service at Mother Hubbard's as a crib gal. Mr. Gerrit Smith rescued me out of bondage at Mother's and placed me in the poorhouse, but that's little improvement. You must buy me, honey man. You won't regret it. Otherwise I'll be sold back into service to Mother Hubbard, the vile old whore. Hoy! They're running up the red flag. The vendue's about to commence."

Morgan was all but weeping with frustration. First an elephant with a sense of humor to care for. Then an orphan child from over the ocean. Not to mention the clubfooted killer who might, even now, from the upper story of some leaning beehive of a tenement or the roof of a warehouse, be sighting in with his Yellow Boy midway between Morgan's shoulders. He was desperate to be on his way to Gettysburg, but there seemed to be some maddening delay at every
turn in the way. Still, a plan had been forming in his mind. If locating Pilgrim was indeed a kind of military campaign, one that might well necessitate going behind enemy lines, then he must travel as light as possible, unencumbered by elephants and foundlings. And he must be ready to recalibrate his tactics at a moment's notice. With luck, he'd be able to help little Birdcall and at the same time fulfill his promise to the gypsy to find a good home for the Caliph. Then there would be only the killer to deal with. And dealing with killers was a line of work that the soldier Morgan Kinneson was becoming proficient in.

Above the Utica almshouse a crimson pennant snapped in the spring breeze. The auctioneer wore a bottle-green coat and a tall velvet hat and emerald boots rolled at the top. He stood on the tail of a wagon, his addlepated indigents and almshouse dregs crowded around him, cowering together or standing singly and staring away into nowhere. A knot of hard-looking farmers and their hard-looking wives, canal boat captains, tightfisted shop owners, and know-all tradesmen coolly assessed the pickings. Morgan stood near the back of the crowd.

"Hi ho and away we go," cried the auctioneer. "Who'll take three dollars to board this beauty for the summer?"

He gestured toward a blind crone lashed into a bent-hickory rocker with filthy strips of linen, rocking vigorously away in the back of the wagon and gazing up with her sightless eyes at the sun. "She's an easy keeper, good people, and the chair goes with her. Set her rocking on a Sunday eventide and wind her up again in a fortnight like a two-week clock. Her head follows the sun, you can tell the hour by its angle. She's more accurate than a garden dial. Milly the human timepiece, we call her. A little fried mush every three
days and a kick to remind her she's still alive will do very nicely for her. Who'll take three dollars to provender her till fall, and if she don't summer over, why, you pocket what's left. She victuals easy, boys."

"What can the hag do?" demanded a broad woman in a sun hat broader yet. "Crippled up as she is and blind as a bat besides?"

"Why, Mother Hubbard," the auctioneer said, "she can knit two and purl one without a dropped stitch, mumble a winter's tale in a chimney corner to chill your blood, run a dasher, and live on less than a little. Set her out in your kitchen garden and she'd keep off the devil himself."

"Why don't you just stone us all and be done with it?" the old woman in the rocker suddenly croaked out.

"I'll take her for six dollars, not a penny less," the woman in the sun hat said, and "Done!" said the auctioneer.

Next a soft-headed old man with a purple goiter the size of a rutabaga dangling from his chin was fobbed off on a farmer for seven dollars. Then a family was sold, a mother, a spratling of ten or eleven, and a sucking infant. The mother and infant went to a farm wife, but the sprat was seized upon for two dollars by an ancient in a black wig who wanted a replacement for his recently deceased goat to run a treadmill churn. The child screamed at being separated from his mother, who shrieked and lamented most grievously, but the auctioneer told them to be grateful they weren't black Africans on the block in Charleston, where a far worse fate would certainly await them and the infant itself would no doubt have been torn from its mother's breast.

A feebleminded boy of twenty was indentured out to work in a fulling mill. Several homeless girls in their teens were assigned as
washerwomen or cookees on the canal boats. Then the master of ceremonies motioned for Birdcall to join him on the wagon tail. The goose girl hopped lightly up, signaling Morgan by running her finger down the side of her nose. Her feet were green from the goose leavings, and her eyes were as hard as green glass. Her hair was the color of barn paint. "Here's a mere slip of a thing just coming into her womanly own. With a mite of correction, a mite of stripping and whipping, she'll make a fine below-stairs serving gal. She was on the canal last summer with the
Niagara Queen
, and she can hoggee mules, sniggle-snaggle eels, serve breakfast hot, and warm your bed. She only wants a little correcting. Off we go, hi ho, hi ho, who'll take her for five dollars?"

"There'll be no bidders," an elderly hoggee with a hook for a hand told Morgan in a confiding voice. "She has a ruputation, young as she is. No respectable householder will tech her."

"I'll take her for a dollar and she'll have all the correction she needs," Mother Hubbard said. She shouldered her way up to the wagon and reached out and ran her hand up Birdcall's bare leg as if appraising a cut of meat at the market. Fast as a bull mastiff, Birdcall grabbed the matron's wrist and sank her sharp little white incisors deep into her thumb.

Mother screamed and danced a jig and held up her bleeding thumb, roaring out that she'd take the bitch back for nothing.

"Mr. Auctioneer," Morgan called out. "I'll pay you two dollars for her."

"What? What are you, boy, a millionaire-man?" With a well-aimed kick, the auctioneer booted Birdcall off the wagon. "Take her then and be damned," he said cheerily, snatching Morgan's money out of his hand.

"You and the hellcat are both tripe, boy," Mother Hubbard snarled at Morgan. "You are both dead as tripe. See if you ain't."

Morgan motioned for the elephant to kneel and told Birdcall to climb up on the animal's back. Then he led the Caliph, with the girl atop it hurling scurrilous epithets at the harridan and the laughing throng, back toward the town.

As they headed along the berm Morgan once again considered his situation. He needed to swing south toward Elmira to see his uncle John, who had been in the great battle at Gettysburg, in order to learn more of Pilgrim's disappearance. His uncle might also be able to tell him more about the killers who had escaped from the Union prison, particularly the clubfooted doctor. His cousin Dolton needed, above all, not to go south. Then there was the wilding, young Birdcall, who had attached herself to him like a canal leech, and the matter of what to do with the Caliph. Barring an unforeseen encounter with the doctor, his plan was nearly ready.

A
S DUSK SETTLED IN, the Spring Rout was in full swing between the wharf where
His Whaleship
was tethered and Mother Hubbard's whore-cribs and tavern at the far end of Canal Street. There were beer tents and open-air eateries serving ribs braised with maple syrup, Hudson River oysters on the half shell, and hot cross buns. There were ring-toss and coin-toss booths, guess-your-weight-and-age charlatans, tinkers, and pack peddlers hawking yard goods and scissors and genuine silver spoons with the brass showing through. There were dancers on stilts. And in the quagmire in front of Mother Hubbard's, near a swing-bridge over the canal, a party of maskers accoutered in feather boas, cloaks of many colors,
and sashes glowing vividly in the flaring gas street lamps. Some of Mother's whores pranced in the mud attired in top hats, eye masks like highwaymen, and not one stitch else. Their gentleman escorts wore gossamer gowns in pastel hues. A gigantic butler in snow-white livery made a stately promenade along the street pouring a viscous, bright emerald liqueur from a retort with a long pipe neck into crystal goblets held high by the masked bacchanals. Some of the celebrants wore crowns of gilded paper, and all were miming the most clownish extravagancies that men and women deep in drink and debauchery are capable of. No one seemed to think Morgan's elephant extraordinary in the least. In fine, the spectacle reminded Morgan of nothing so much as a scene from a collection of passing strange tales by a writer named E. A. Poe that Pilgrim had sent him for his birthday two years ago.

Dolt was sitting on a bench outside a beer tent with a supremely foolish grin on his face, toward which he was ever so carefully advancing, with both hands, a flagon of amber ale a good two feet high. "Morgie," he shouted. "Have you seen the Spanish Mute? The knife thrower? You won't believe what the fella can do. Why, he can pick a bluebottle fly off a fat man's arse blindfolded from thirty foot away."

Morgan couldn't help laughing as, with the painstaking deliberation of a very drunken man, the Dolter tilted his tankard--in the process sloshing half of the beer over his jacket--toward a motley knot of equally intoxicated fairgoers just up the street. They were gathered around a man in a flowing black cape and a death's-head mask standing a little beyond the last street lamp. He had provided his own illumination with a flambeau made of lighted rags soaked in coal oil and wrapped on an upright spear with a razor-sharp flanged point, thrust handle-first into the mud. Leaning against the flaming
projectile was a wooden spear extender, an ancient device Morgan recognized from a travel book Pilgrim had sent him, known as an atlatl. The blazing rags were bound just below the spear-point.