Thread by @JuliusGoat

FOUNTAIN

The Love Party came west in 1787, to make their fortune in the new-formed Northwest Territory.

The “Love Party,” so named after Isaac Love. A bachelor smith and former corporal in the Colonial army, he quickly proved the most capable among them, and a natural leader besides.

The group, setting out from Raleigh, targeting Cincinnati, was made up of a loose and unaffiliated kit of families and fortune hunters, without head or government, but when the guide they hired took ill early in their trip, they found themselves in early danger of failure.

The sickly guide was a sometime mountain man by the name of Isaac Runyan, though “Barefoot” was the appellation bestowed upon him in the Appalachians.

He tucked himself away in one of their low cow-wagons, groaning and drinking and clutching his gut, and soon it was Love who moved wagon to wagon, assigning tasks, tending to livestock, serving as arbiter in disagreements.

By the time Runyan pulled himself, heaving and pale, from the wagon, he was guide only; Love had easily assumed unassailable leadership.

A short, broad man who kept clean-shaven, he wore clean white shirts and high chambray overalls and a brown hat with a wide brim to shade his eyes.

His chest and shoulders were thick and powerful, his forearms burly. He held his posture erect, spine straight as a plumb-line in defiance of years stooped over the forge with hammer and tongs.

Love proved capable of great feats of strength and possessed a native mechanical understanding; using only a length of chain fixed to a pulley block, he had extracted a wagon, oxen and all, mired foot-deep in muck.

He looked you in the eye longer than you’d find comfortable, and then a little longer still—hypnotizing, almost.

Men found themselves taking up his positions while in his presence, even if they disagreed, and then, to avoid the appearance they had been cowed, argued as his proxy with skeptical wives, defending convictions they themselves did not hold.

Women avoided his company, and in this at least he ceded ground to the man he had replaced. Barefoot Runyan was taller than he, and comelier; his gaze, less fanatic, did not unnerve. He was jolly and easy around a campfire, and apt with a fiddle.

So, while the trust and the dependence of the people went to Love and his manifold capabilities, their affection remained with the feckless Runyan, and while Love’s gaze went with increasing frequency to the young and fetching Margaret Rambo, hers went to their guide.

Without Love they would have foundered and failed.

The families were mainly of farmer stock, and used to rough living; however, the trail offered new hardships: of tedium, of deadfalls, blockages, detours, of rivers with no easy ford ...

... , of blinding rain churning up paste-thick mud, of insects beyond count, and of disease, which incapacitated the strong and dispatched the weak.

. Pushed from behind by a relentless Love, they soon wearied of the hard trail, which left them dirty and tired and every day fearing attack ...

... and so, when they broke through into a clearing beside which a happy river chuckled, they rested the night, and when, following a strange disappearance ...

Love returned to announce it was not the Ohio territory in which they would plant themselves, but rather here in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, no dissenting voice sounded.

A cask of cider was relieved of its bung, and the travelers themselves were relieved of their travels, for it was relief indeed to have come to a perch—any perch.

They became talkative and gay, incurious about their leader’s sudden, uncharacteristic deviation from their objective, glad for cessation of discomfort.

Love shared none of this felicity. He had been captured already.

On the first morning, as had become his custom, he had gone foraging alone.

The river crafted an abeyance through the thickness of the forest, a bank of packed loam and gravel along which Love walked at ease.

Presently, however, he spied a curiosity: a pathway, cut into a spinney growing up between old growth of evergreen and so attenuated by neglect, it seemed more tunnel than path.

Curious, Love followed it into the thickness, and soon found himself within a tunnel indeed. The spinney surrounding him was composed of bushes, from whose darkwood branches wicked thorns projected and crimson berries hung.

The thicket to each side was impenetrable, concentrated, and between the rare gaps in its profusion could be glimpsed hazardous rotten deadfalls.

Love pressed on.

The wood encroached wetly around, putting him in mind of constrictive snakes.

The farther inward the path led, the narrower it grew, the tangling above descending until Love found himself obliged to walk stooped, marveling ...

... at the forester who had set himself the task of fashioning a path here—the will, the strength, the madness vested in any man who would dream of such an undertaking.

Yet here it stood, even now it had lasted against a wood so consuming, so impenetrable, so dark and malevolent. What end had fueled such obsession?

Love’s curiosity contended against a growing sense of entombment.

The wood, though silent, was too close, too alive, too quiescent; it was a watchful thing, and not only watchful, for the thicket’s thorns now bit his shoulder, and ...

... though reminding himself he was no timid man, still he resolved to continue along this course for another minute only, and no more.

By the time he broke into the clearing, the path had narrowed to such a degree that he walked bent with head nearly level to his waist, arms shielding his face, hands cut and bleeding; his shirt, once clean, now spotted red.

He came to the opening, little more now than a rabbit hole, and, heedless with an excitement he could not name, pushed through into brightness.

He stood, shielding his face from the sunshine, in a place most unnatural.

Love was no superstitious man, but now he remembered tales of fairies, of bogies, of druids, of hob and sprite, sylph and imp.

This lacuna in the forest’s heart was circular. No, that was too imprecise a formulation: not circular; it was a circle. As if some titan had crafted it in the earth by means of a vast compass.

The debouchment in the greenery birthing him into this grassy ring was the only rip visible in the fabric of the surrounding wood.

Inside, the ground lay draped with a bright green turf as soft and as level, in surface and coloration, as any fitted carpet in any gentleman’s sitting room.

It was hot there, and very still; he could hear no hop of hare, no twirrup of bird, no chatter of squirrel.

At the hub of this wheel, in the very center, a fountain pointed its white finger to the sky.

A.R. Moxon, THE REVISIONARIES

Paperback out December 1st. Preorder now.

bookshop.org/books/the-revi…