Long Hunt (9781101559208) (33 page)

“I told you, Titus, that my father, your grandfather, wore a mask when he robbed coaches passing by Skellenwood. There was more reason than just a wish to hide who he was. He had a deformity on his visage, one almost exactly like that you saw on the brow of Tom Crale. He wore the mask partly out of shame at his disfigurement. It was the same kind of disfigurement that had run in the family as far back as anyone could remember, though sometimes generations would go by before it would show itself in another male child.”

“I'll be hanged!”

“Your grandfather wearing that mask and living in Skellenwood caused a legend to come about, one made up by nurses and mothers and fathers and grandfathers to keep their children behaving right.”

Titus said, “Loafhead?”

“That's right.”

Titus pulled his horse to a stop. “My grandfather was Loafhead?”

“No. There never was no Loafhead, not really. There was just your grandfather in his mask, a mask that didn't do a particularly good job of fully hiding the lump. You could still see the bulge of it from his brow. So some clever soul decided to put the fear of God into her children one night and used your grandfather as inspiration for a new bogeyman tale. Loafhead was born. Your grandfather gave rise to a legend.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Just say a prayer of thanks that you didn't inherit the deformity yourself. I'm grateful for you and me both that we didn't.”

“But if I have a male child, he could have such a disfigurement?”

“It appears to be the case. Always the men, never the women, and usually two or three generations between the appearance of it.”

“That gives a man a lot to think about, Pap.”

“It does. Oh, and there's one further thing you should know. We're Fains. I'm a Fain, you're a Fain, and your children will be Fains. But that ain't always been the family name. It was changed from the original name to Fain a few generations back, 'cording to my father. Exactly why, nobody remembers. Probably somebody trying to hide who they were because of crime, or debt, or some other trouble.”

“So what was the family name before they changed it?”

“It was Crale, son. Crale.”

 

The wedding took place in the spring, at the foot of a high, round hill outside Jonesborough. The ring that Titus Fain slipped onto the finger of Amy DeVault was made by Benjamin Crawley from gold that came from the Atley mine.

When Titus kissed his new bride, even Micah Tate clapped and cheered, though a part of him still wished it was his lips pressed to those of the prettiest young woman in the state of Franklin, which was doomed to be gone as a legal entity within a few short months.

Langdon Potts did not attend. About a week prior to the wedding, he had been introduced to a young Scottish beauty named Katherine McClure, a recent arrival in America on her way to visit relatives at and around White's Fort, whose population was burgeoning and would soon be part of a city to be named Knoxville. Potts and Katherine spent the hour of the Fain-DeVault wedding taking a long walk together in a meadow just outside town, talking intently and so enthralled with each other that they didn't even notice when they trod directly across the fresh grave of the troubled preacher Abner Bledsoe, who had been found in the privy behind the Harkin Inn, slumped back against the wall with a bullet hole in the roof of his mouth and a pistol still gripped loosely in his hand.

Nearly the whole town of Jonesborough, and many of the residents of the surrounding countryside, turned out to see the son of the famed Crawford Fain take his new bride. Conducting the ceremony was a clergyman Fain fetched in from White's Fort for the occasion, the academy builder Eben Bledsoe, who had grieved only briefly beside the grave of his unhappy brother.

There was one wedding observer, though, who watched from the woods at the top of the hill, out of view of the crowd, seeing it all through only one functioning eye.

The wedding image that would soon appear on a flat stone inside one of the region's many caves would linger for more than a century, until at last it weathered and faded away and was forgotten.

I
n the case of novels such as
The Long Hunt
, which present a fictional central story played out against a historical backdrop, it is useful for authors to clarify what is real and what is made up.

In the case of
The Long Hunt
, the central story line is almost entirely a work of imagination. There were real-life long hunters, some of whom became well-known, but no actual Crawford Fain; there were, and are, individuals and families with propensities toward physical deformity, but no Crale family (at least no Crale family identical with the one presented in this novel), and there was in fact early-day gold mining in portions of North Carolina and what is now Tennessee, but most of that came a little later than the time period of this novel, 1786–87. There was no historical Atley mine.

There were, as well, preachers and educators, and combinations thereof, on the Carolina-Tennessee frontier, but the Bledsoe brothers are entirely fictional. Also fictional are Littleton, Gilly, and their outlaw companions, as well as the traveling liquor seller Ott Dixon.

The towns of Greeneville and Jonesborough, Tennessee, which provide part of the setting for this story, certainly were and are real, and existed in the time period depicted. For storytelling purposes, however, some liberties have been taken regarding those towns and the individuals living in and around them. The Harkin family and inn, the silversmith Benjamin Crawley, and Jonesborough leading citizen Matthew Stuart are all fictional creations, for example. Stuart's character, along with that of Dr. Peter Houser, draws some inspiration from the historical figure of Dr. William P. Chester, a native of York County, Pennsylvania, and an excellent Jonesborough physician, who opened an inn in Jonesborough in 1797. The Chester Inn remains a beloved Jonesborough landmark to this day.

Also still present at Jonesborough is the rounded hill from which Tom Crale watches the wedding of Titus Fain and Amy DeVault in the closing portion of the novel. It stands beside Highway 11 East, a short distance beyond the Dillow-Taylor Funeral Home, on the left side of the highway when traveling from Jonesborough toward Greeneville, and is a noticeably steep and beautiful hill quite familiar to Northeast Tennesseans.

John Crockett was, of course, entirely real, and lived at the time and place depicted. His son, David, became one of the nation's most famous frontiersmen, achieving legendary status as “Davy” Crockett.

There is no real-life legend of a British “bogeyman” figure called Loafhead, though folklore does abound with many similar legendary figures of fright. Nor does England possess, to my knowledge, an actual forest named Skellenwood.

The character of Tom Crale was inspired by an unknown individual with a similar facial deformity I saw once as a boy. He was seated in the passenger seat of a car in a grocery store parking lot, apparently awaiting the return of the driver, and I have never forgotten him, though I never knew his name or actually met him.

White's Fort, where Fain first meets with Eben Bledsoe, is real, and a replica of it still stands in the heart of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. James White, who founded the fort and is generally seen as the father of Knoxville, is buried in a cemetery not very far from his fort.

There was no Edohi Station in actual history. Nor did the Cumberland Scouts, who respond to the raid that killed most of the Deveraux family, exist. The fictional group is loosely based on an actual organization, however: the Cumberland Guard, which provided armed escorts for travelers going from the settlements around what is now Knoxville to the Cumberland Settlements in and around what is now Nashville. It was a dangerous road to travel, particularly in the days when the Lower Cherokee, or Chickamauga, were defending their frontier against white advancement.

The state of Franklin was entirely real, though it never found permanence and is not much remembered outside the areas it once encompassed. Established by over-mountain settlers who were isolated from both the North Carolinian and the federal governments, it made a valiant but contested effort to achieve full statehood, but instead slowly died away. It did launch or bolster the careers of various early leaders of the region, however, including that of John Sevier, who went on to be Tennessee's first governor after serving in the same role for Franklin.

O
ttwell Plumb swabbed his broad tongue across a mouthful of gold teeth and said, “To get straight to the point, Mr. Colter, I am told you are the best. I am told that any band of travelers you pilot is as assured of decent provisioning and safe arrival as any band of travelers in these times can be. And I am told you have made two successful journeys to Oregon already, and one to California.”

“No,” said Jedd Colter, sipping on a mug of hot black coffee. He was a lean, weathered man of twenty-eight who stood an impressive six feet tall and was well featured, considered a fine figure despite a tendency to go too long unshorn and unshaven. “I would say I have made two journeys to California. I guess it depends upon how you count it. The first journey was the whole trot, St. Joseph to Sacramento.

“The second I piloted only the final half of the journey, replacing the original pilot, who died along the way. I got the pilgrims safely to their destination in his place.”

“Here's to his memory, and your success,” said Plumb, lifting his coffee in salute. Colter followed suit out of politeness, and marveled as he received another flash of Plumb's mouthful of gold.

“Let me ask you something, sir,” Colter said to the man he'd met only an hour earlier. “Is that California gold you've had them gilded Waterloos made from?”

Plumb smiled widely, displaying the golden false teeth to full measure. Then he squelched the smile and leaned a little closer to Colter. “Between you and me, Mr. Colter . . .”

“Call me Jedd.”

“And call me Ottwell. Between you and me, Jedd, the gold is not from California, though I sometimes encourage people to believe it is. In my line of business, it pays to display some degree of, shall we say, flamboyance. Promotion. Showmanship. It draws the public eye, and that is what I need. And that is one reason I have sought you out and hope to involve you in my work.”

“I would advise you to find another way to advertise your venture other than them teeth. With the hunger for gold as high as it is in this nation just now, there are plenty who might find it easiest to ‘mine' their gold by knocking you in the head and taking your teeth with them.”

“I believe I can take care of myself sufficiently to avoid trouble,” Plumb said, patting his chest in a way that let Jedd know there was a pistol hidden beneath his coat.

“I hope you can,” Colter said. The subject shifted back to the proposed job again. “What you're asking of me, Ottwell, is to work with your Destiny Company of . . . of . . .”

“The American Destiny California Passage and Enterprise Company,” Plumb corrected.

“Right, right. You want me to work with your company as part of its team of scouts, pilots, guides, and protectors. I think that's how you put it.”

“Precisely so. Essentially the same work you have done already for others, but in this case, we seek to promote your name and reputation as part of our company's attraction to the public.” Plumb paused and took on a sly expression. “What you haven't been told yet is that I intend to pay you twice what you received on your first excursion to the gold country.”

Jedd Colter was struck dumb for a moment. This indeed was news, and welcome. He was a man with plans of his own, and such compensation would make those plans much more possible, and worth delaying for a little longer.

“I'm astonished, sir. What is there about me that would seem to be of such value to you? There are a lot of California pilots available who would serve you well and cost you far less. I'm not trying to undermine my own opportunity by speaking to you this way, Ottwell, but the fact is, I insist that those I work for be fully open and honest with me, and thus I consider that I owe equal frankness in return.”

Plumb squeezed his eyes and lips closed so that his face looked oddly pinched, and nodded profoundly. “An excellent notion and habit, sir. And a verification that my instincts in approaching you are well-founded.”

“Good. Now answer my question.”

Plumb squirmed as if struck with a hidden itch. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir, indeed.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I put much trust in reputation, Jedd. And with associations. Those who have earned a good name deserve to benefit from it. You have earned such a good name. As for associations, it is much the same. The Colter family has been associated with the expanding American frontier for generations now.

“Merely to hear the name calls forth images of the Carolina mountains in the days of the frontier, and of courage and leadership. Thus I find myself desirous of your services for reasons both individual to yourself and individual to your family. Are you following me?”

“I follow what you're saying. That's not to say I've made a decision about what you offer.” In fact, Colter had decided the moment he learned of the generous level of recompense. He was in no position to turn away high-paying work. But it went against his grain to appear overeager.

“I think you would find yourself in a happy position as we make our journey,” said Plumb. “The commander of the venture, as I have titled him, is General Gordon Lloyd. He no longer works in a military role but is still stalwart, wise, and active. You would serve as a practical adviser to him, keeping things on the path, as it were—forewarning of dangers, leading an armed band of protectors and hunters who will make the entire journey.”