The Traveler and the Tavern

“Sit down and give ear to a story,” the innkeeper said, part Cherokee and part unknown, gray and combed hair, wearing a Victorian styled three-piece suit appearing as a gothic presidential candidate. The pipe in his mouth sparked, packed with a strange sea-weed colored tobacco and he exhaled roiling smoke and when it evaporated it revealed a great Buddha smile stitched upon his face.

The time it took the traveler to reach the tavern seemed as much a glimpse as it did eternal. He left Savannah in the winter of 1804 on his twenty-first birthday, the day his father took gravely ill. He touched his father’s face in the dark room, sunken under the ghostly aura of his breath, overcast and gloom painting the windows. Beside his bed was an oak clock beckoning out a different bird call with each new hour. The seconds rattled and ticked underneath the glass a score for a horror tale.

The traveler packed his wagon with seven slaves, each of them manacled at the wrists and the ankles, and when he departed, the tides of the Atlantic, pulled by the moon, crashed and rolled through the ports, rocking the docked ships, chimney smoke merged with the crimson sky and the clock in his father’s room rang out the tongue of crows.

He made his way along the Federal Road. In the smog sky the sun burned out a dwindling light, rapidly fleeing from this world and on the third day he became lost and checked his compass. A watercolor portrait on the lid depicting the Santa Maria sailing across the blue ocean underneath pale-blue sky, the orange sun glowing as a candle.

He crossed through present-day Egypt, Georgia, where Kirtland’s warblers and piping plover birds sang out enchanted melodies, yellow nutsedge festered along the coast and whipped against raging winds, and hundreds of alligators lifted their heads up from the swamps and gathered together on land, shaking the earth.

Endless miles of wilderness, all the naked branches scratching the atmosphere, pale-barked maple and the shape of diamonds throughout the hickory with arms reaching for the heavens and the ancient cracks throughout the oak, the red cockaded woodpeckers digging into the bark and their hatching eggs and newborn cries.

Then he came to Babylon, where a lake in the night shined crystal blue, magnetic and boiling, mud exploding from within, a tribe of Cherokee stripped down and walked into the waters, and as soon as they did, thousands of stars lit the sky.

In all, it took 370 miles and thirty-four days to get to the tavern. The innkeeper led him along a ferry across the Tennessee River. Steam from the river gyrated in the image of ancient spirits and a flock of crows glided by the boat eyelevel.

In the death room of the tavern was a painting of Cain cursed by God in the desert, golden urns on the mantle, a giant catfish and a bear in its entirety mounted to the walls and within the oak siding moaned the stuff of spirits.

The innkeeper fed him well and after dinner, he passed him the pipe and the traveler partook and that’s when the innkeeper told stories of the soul of the river, the storm in the sky as the divine creator, how it was God’s mistress that was a witch that gave birth to the world, stories of women turned into catfish and men turned into hunted bears, and the traveler could hear bears roar outside synchronized with the timing of the story and saw the essence of Cain in the painting stand and walk outside the portrait and walk through the room past him, a storm-shaped trial of smoke and air following, and crows from the painted sky screamed their way from the canvas too, straight toward the traveler’s face until he screamed himself and in the morning he screamed himself awake, wondering if he had dreamed the night prior.

The innkeeper fed him breakfast, eggs and milk from the cows and chickens and he continued north to Nashville and returned to the tavern again eighteen days thereafter and when he arrived the innkeeper was digging a grave, he said, for one of his mules.

The innkeeper asked how much currency he earned for the slaves and the traveler told him and showed him the cash, saying it was enough to save his house back in Savannah, and it was enough to make the innkeeper smile almost seductively. He led the traveler toward the dock where the ferry was tied, telling him a story. When he finished, he said, “See that in the river.”

The traveler looked upon the waters. The current rolled over stones and between the banks, and around the bend and flushed and rollicked heavenly. The traveler breathed out relief, nodding, smiling. “I see it,” he said.

A dark sketch of his reflection was taken by the river, the money was held in the palms of the innkeeper, and a loud knocking clanked against the traveler’s cranium and the world he saw was drawn upon a dark and violet canvas. A being gyrating in the skies as a storm looking down upon creation, and a mistress painted in green make-up and charcoal hair and torn leggings screaming. Animals drowning as the storm washes away the clay of earth.

By the time the traveler returned to consciousness, his body was packed and unmovable beneath tons of dirt. The sun stung through his vision violently and dark wings shuffled amongst the sky. More and more shovels of dirt washed over his face and he screamed until his voice were as the lungs of demons wandering beneath earth.