Cold Mountain (10 page)

2004-3-6

页码，37/232

The smith took a step back and came over his head with the scythe like a man splitting wood. His thinking, apparently, was to cleave Inman down the center, cut him open from collarbone to groin, but it was an awkward blow, made doubly so by the shape of the implement. He missed by a foot and the point of the blade buried itself in the dirt.

Inman jerked the scythe from the smith's hands and used it as it was intended, making long sweeping strokes close to the ground. He went at their feet with it, mowing at them and making them drop back before they were cut off at the ankles. It felt natural to him, holding a scythe in his hands again and working with it, though the current effort was different from mowing fodder since his strokes were hard, hoping as he was to strike bone. But even under these unfavorable circumstances he found that all the elements of scything—the way you hold it, the wide-footed way you stand, the heel-down angle of the blade to the plane of the ground—fell into the old pattern and struck him as being a thing he could do to some actual effect.

The men skipped and dodged about to avoid the long blade, but soon they regrouped and swarmed again. Inman went to slash at the shinbones of the smith, but the blade clashed on the stone of the foundation and threw a spray of white sparks and broke off close so that he was left holding but the snath. He fought on with it, though it made a poor cudgel, long and misbalanced and awkwardly curved as it was.

In the end though it was adequate, for he eventually smote the three down to their knees in the dirt of the street so they looked like those of the Romish faith at prayer. Then he kept at it until they all lay prone and quiet, faces down.

He threw the snath off across the road into a patch of ragweed. But as soon as he did it, the smith rolled over and raised up weakly and pulled a small-caliber revolver from under his apron and began drawing a shaky bead on Inman.

Inman said, Shitfire. He palmed the little weapon away and stuck it to the man's head just below an eye and commenced pulling the trigger out of sheer frustration with the willfulness of these sorry offscourings. The caps, though, were damp or otherwise faulty, and the pistol snapped on four chambers before he gave up and beat the man about the head with it and flung it onto the top of the building and walked away.

Outside of town he turned into the woods and walked roadless to elude pursuers. All through the afternoon, the best he could do was to continue westering among pine trunks, thrashing his way through brush, stopping now and again to listen for anyone following. Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the distance, but they were faint and might have been imagination, as when one sleeps near a river and all night thinks he hears conversation pitched too low for understanding.

There was no baying of hounds, and so Inman reckoned that even if the voices were the men from town, he was safe enough, especially with night coming on. For course-setting, Inman had the sun wheeling above him, its light broken by the pine boughs, and he followed as it slid off toward the western edge of the earth.

As Inman walked, he thought of a spell Swimmer had taught him, one of particular potency. It was called To Destroy Life, and the words of it formed themselves over and over in his mind. Swimmer had said that it only worked in Cherokee, not in English, and that there was no consequence in teaching it to Inman. But Inman thought all words had some issue, so he walked and said the spell, aiming it out against the world at large, all his enemies. He repeated it over and over to himself as some people, in fear or hope, will say a single prayer endlessly until it burns itself in their thoughts so that they can work or even carry on a conversation with it still running unimpeded. The words Inman remembered were these:

Listen. Your path will stretch up toward the Nightland. You will be lonely. You will be like the dog file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，38/232

in heat. You will carry dog shit before you in your cupped hands. You will howl like a dog as you walk alone toward the Nightland. You will be smeared with dog shit. It will cling to you. Your black guts will be hanging all about you. They will whip about your feet as you walk. You will be living fitfully. Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. This is your path. There is no other.

Inman carried on this way for some miles, but for all he could tell the words were just flying back to strike him alone. And then after awhile the sentiments of Swimmer's words brought to mind a sermon of Monroe's, one dense to the point of clotting with quotations from various sages as was Monroe's habit. It had taken for text not some Bible verse but a baffling passage from Emerson, and Inman found in it some similarity to the spell, though all in all he preferred Swimmer's wording.

What Inman remembered was this passage, which Monroe had repeated four times at dramatic intervals throughout the sermon: That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decrease forever. Inman thought that had been the best sermon he had ever heard, and Monroe had delivered it on the day Inman first saw Ada.

Inman had attended church expressly for the purpose of viewing her. In the weeks following Ada's arrival in Cold Mountain, Inman had heard much about her before he saw her. She and her father stayed too long green in the country they had taken up, and they soon became a source of great comedy to many households along the river road. For people to sit on the porch and watch Ada and Monroe pass by in the cabriolet or to see Ada on one of her nature walks along the big road was as near to theater as most would come, and she provoked as much discussion as a new production at the Dock Street opera. All agreed that she was pretty enough, but her very choice of Charleston garb or flourish of hairstyle was subject to ridicule. If she were seen holding a stem of beardtongue blossoms to admire their color or stooping to touch the spikes of jimson leaves, some would solemnly call her mazed in the head not to know beardtongue when she saw it, and others would wonder, grinning, was she so wit-scoured as perhaps to eat jimson? Gossip had it that she went about with a notebook and pencil and would stare at a thing—bird or bush, weed, sunset, mountain—and then scratch at paper awhile as if she were addled enough in her thinking that she might forget what was important to her if she did not mark it down.

So one Sunday morning Inman dressed himself carefully—in a new black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hat—and set out for church to view Ada. It was a time of blackberry winter and a chill rain had fallen without pause for three days, and though the rain had stopped sometime in the night, the morning sun had not yet burned through the clouds, and the slash of sky visible between the ridgelines was dark and low and utterly without feature. The roads were nothing but sucking mud, and so Inman had arrived late and taken a seat at a rear pew. There was already a hymn going.

Someone had lit a greenwood fire in the stove. It smoked from around the top plate, and the smoke rose to the ceiling and spread flat against the beadboards and hung there grey like a miniature of the actual sky.

Inman had but the back of her head to find Ada by, yet that took only a moment since her dark hair was done up in a heavy and intricate plait of such recent fashion that it was not then known in the mountains. Below where her hair was twisted up, two faint cords of muscle ran up under the skin on either side of her white neck to hold her head on. Between them a scoop, a shaded hollow of skin.

Curls too fine to be worked up into the plait. All through the hymn, Inman's eyes rested there, so that after awhile, even before he saw her face, all he wanted was to press two fingertips against that mystery place.

Monroe began the sermon by commenting on the hymn they had all just mouthed. Its words seemed to look with passionate yearning to a time when they would be immersed in an ocean of love. But Monroe preached that they were misunderstanding the song if they fooled themselves into thinking file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，39/232

all creation would someday love them. What it really required was for them to love all creation. That was altogether a more difficult thing and, to judge by the congregation's reaction, somewhat shocking and distressful.

The remainder of the sermon took the same topic as all others of Monroe's since his arrival in Cold Mountain. Sundays and Wednesdays both, he had talked only of what he thought to be the prime riddle of creation: why was man born to die? It made no sense on the face of it. Over the weeks, he had tried coming at the question from every direction. What the Bible had to say on the matter. How wisemen of many lands and all of known time had reasoned it out. Revelatory metaphors from nature. Monroe tested every hold he could devise to get purchase on it, all without success. After several weeks, grumbling in the congregation made it clear that death troubled him to a greater degree than it did them. Many thought it not the tragedy Monroe did, but saw it rather as a good thing. They were looking forward to the rest. Monroe's thoughts would sit smoother, some had suggested, if he went back to doing what the old dead preacher had done. Mainly condemn sinners and tell Bible tales with entertaining zeal. Baby Moses in the bulrush. Boy David slinging rocks.

Monroe had declined the advice, saying to one elder that such was not his mission. That comment had gotten itself passed all about the community, the general interpretation being that his use of the word
mission
set the congregation in the position of benighted savages. They had, many of them, put up cash money to send missionaries among true savages, folks they pictured in skins of various dim colors living in locales they conceived of as infinitely more remote and heathen than their own, and so the remark did not pass easily.

To wet down the fires that were rising around his ministry, Monroe had therefore begun his sermon on the Sunday in question by explaining how every man and woman had a mission. The word meant no more nor less than a job of work, he said. It was one job of his to think about why man was born to die, and he was inclined to go on at it with at least the perseverance of a man with a horse to break or a field to clear of stones. And he did go on. At length. Throughout the preachment that morning, Inman sat staring at Ada's neck and listening as Monroe repeated four times the Emerson passage about warts and wens and decreasing forever.

When the service concluded, the men and women left the church by their separate doors. Muddy horses stood asleep in their traces, their rigs and traps behind them mired up to the spokes in mud.

The voices of the people awoke them, and one chestnut mare shook her hide with the sound of flapping a dirty carpet. The churchyard was filled with the smell of mud and wet leaves and wet clothes and wet horses. The men lined up to shake hands with Monroe, and then they all milled about the wet churchyard visiting and speculating on whether the rain had quit or was just resting. Some of the elders talked in low voices about the queerness of Monroe's sermon and its lack of Scripture and about how they admired his stubbornness in the face of other people's desires.

The unmarried men wadded up together, standing with their muddy boots and spattered pant cuffs in a circle. Their talk had more of Saturday night to it than Sunday morning, and all of them periodically cut their eyes to where Ada stood at the edge of the graveyard looking altogether foreign and beautiful and utterly awkward. Everyone else wore woolens against the damp chill, but Ada had on an ivory-colored linen dress with lace at the collar and sleeves and hem. She seemed to have chosen it more by the calendar than the weather.

She stood holding her elbows. The older women came to her and said things and then there were knotty pauses and then they went away. Inman noted that every time she was approached, Ada took a step back until she fetched up against the headstone of a man who had fought in the Revolution.

—If I went and told her my name, reckon she'd say ought to me back? said a Dillard man who had come to church for precisely the same reason Inman had.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，40/232

—I couldn't say, Inman said.

—You'd not begin to know where to start courting her, Hob Mars said to Dillard. Best leave that to me.

Mars was shortish and big through the chest. He had a fat watch that pooched out his vest pocket and a silver chain that ran to his pant waist and a scrolled fob hanging from the chain.

Dillard said, You think you bore with a mighty big auger.

—I don't think it, I know it, Mars said.

Then another man, one of such slight build and irregular features that he was but a bystander, said, I'd bet a hundred dollars against a half a ginger cake that she's got a husband-elect down in Charleston.

—They can be forgot, Hob said. Many has been before.

Then Hob stared at Inman and surveyed his strict attire. You look like the law, he said. A man courting needs some color about him.

Inman could see that they would all talk the topic round and round until one or another that day might eventually draw up the nerve to go to her and make a fool of himself. Or else they would insult each other until a pair of them would have to meet down the road and fight. So he touched a finger to his brow and said, Boys, and walked away.

He went straight over to Sally Swanger and said, I'd clear an acre of newground for an introduction.

Sally had on a bonnet with a long bill to it so that she had to step back and cock her head to throw the shade off her eyes and look up at Inman. She grinned at him and put her hand up and touched a pinchbeck brooch at her collar and rubbed her fingers across it.

—Notice I'm not even asking who to, she said.

—Now would be the time, Inman said, looking to where Ada stood alone, her back to the people, slightly stooped, peering in apparent fascination at the inscription on the gravestone. The bottom foot of her dress was wet from the tall gravegrass and the tail of it had sometime dragged in mud.

Mrs. Swanger took Inman's black coat sleeve between finger and thumb and pulled him by such slight harness across the yard to Ada. When his sleeve was let go, he raised the hand to take off his hat; then with the other he raked through his hair all around where it was pressed and banded. He swept the hair back at each temple and rubbed his palm from brow to chin to compose his face. Mrs.

Swanger cleared her throat, and Ada turned.

—Miss Monroe, Sally Swanger said, her face bright. Mr. Inman has expressed a deep interest in becoming acquainted. You've met his parents. His people built the chapel, she added by way of reference, before she walked away.

Ada looked Inman directly in the face, and he realized too late that he had not planned what to say.

Before he could formulate a phrase, Ada said, Yes?

There was not much patience in her voice, and for some reason Inman found that amusing. He looked off to the side, down toward where the river bent around the hill, and tried to bring down the corners of his mouth. The leaves on trees and rhododendron at the riverbanks were glossed and file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...