Cold Mountain (13 page)

2004-3-6

页码，50/232

As the evening went on, Ada found that she had taken more than one glass of champagne beyond the prudent. Her face felt clammy and her neck was sweating under the ruching at the tall collar of her green velvet dress. Her nose felt as if it had swollen, so much so that she pinched it between thumb and forefinger to check its breadth and then went to the hall mirror, where she was startled to see it looking normal.

Sally Swanger, apparently under the sway of Monroe's champagne as well, had at that moment pulled Ada aside in the hallway and in a whisper said, That Inman boy just got here. I should keep my mouth shut, but you ought to marry him. The two of you'd likely make pretty brown-eyed babies.

Ada had been appalled by the comment and, blushing fiercely, she fled to the kitchen to compose herself.

But there, throwing her thoughts into further disarray, she found Inman alone, sitting in the stove corner. He had arrived late, having ridden through a slow winter rain, and he was warming up and drying out before joining the party. He wore a black suit and sat with his legs crossed, his wet hat suspended from the toe of a dress boot near the hot stove. The palms of his hands were held up to catch the heat of the fire so that he looked like he was pushing something away.

—Oh, my, Ada said. There you are. The ladies are already so pleased to know you're here.

—The old ladies? Inman said.

—Well, everyone. Your arrival has been noted with particular approval by Mrs. Swanger.

This called up a vivid and unplanned image, its theme suggested by Mrs. Swanger's comment, and Ada felt a rushing in her head. She blushed again and quickly added, And by others, no doubt.

—Not feeling qualmish, are you? Inman said, somewhat confused by her behavior.

—No, no. This room is just close.

—You look flushed.

Ada touched her damp face at various points with the backs of her fingers and could not think of a thing to say. She made calipers with her fingers and took the measure of her nose again. She went to the door and opened it for a breath of cool air. The night smelled of wet rotting leaves and was so dark she could not see beyond the drops of water catching the door light as they fell from the porch eve. From the parlor came the simple first notes of Good King Wenceslas, and Ada recognized Monroe's stiff phrasing at the piano. Then from out in the dark, over a great distance, came the high lonesome baying of a grey wolf far off in the mountains.

—That is a forlorn sound, Inman said.

Ada held the door open and waited to hear an answering call, but it never came. Poor thing, she said.

She closed the door and turned to Inman, but when she did the heat of the room and the champagne and the look on Inman's face, which was softer than any contour she had ever seen there, conspired against her and she felt at once faint and giddy. She took a few uncertain steps, and when Inman half stood and reached out a hand to steady her, she took it. And then, by some mechanism she was unable to reconstruct later, she found herself in his lap.

He put his hands to her shoulders a moment and she settled back with her head beneath his chin. Ada remembered thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，51/232

aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out to the points of her shoulders and held her there. She remembered the smell of his damp wool suit and a lingering smell of horse and tack.

She might have rested in his lap for half a minute, no more. Then she was up and away, and she remembered turning at the door, her hand on the casing, to look back at him where he sat with a puzzled smile on his face and his hat lying crown down on the floor.

Ada went back to the piano, where she moved Monroe aside and played for quite some time. Inman eventually came and stood, leaning with his shoulder against the doorjamb. He drank from a flute and watched her for a while and then he moved on to talk to Esco, who still sat near the fire.

Through the rest of the evening, neither Ada nor Inman mentioned what had taken place in the kitchen. They talked only briefly and awkwardly and Inman left early.

Much later, in the small hours when the party broke up, Ada looked from the parlor window and watched as the young men went down the road, firing their pistols toward the heavens, the muzzle flash lighting them in brief silhouette.

Ada sat awhile after the wagon bearing the piano rounded the bend in the road. Then she lit a lantern and went to the basement, thinking that Monroe might have cellared a case or two of champagne there and that opening a bottle now and again might be pleasant. She found no wine but turned up instead a genuine treasure, one that greatly advanced their efforts toward barter. It was a hundred-pound sack of green coffee beans that Monroe had stored away, sitting there fat and sagging in a corner.

She called Ruby and they immediately filled the roaster and parched a half pound over the fire and ground it and then brewed up the first real coffee either of them had had in over a year. They drank cup after cup and stayed up most of the night, talking nonstop of plans for the future and memories of the past, and at one point Ada retold the entire thrilling plot of
Little Dorrit,
one of the books she had read during the summer. Over the next several days they bartered the coffee by the half pound and by the nogginful to neighbors, keeping back only ten pounds for their own use. When the sack was empty, they had taken in a side of bacon, five bushels of Irish potatoes and four of sweet, a tin of baking powder, eight chickens, various baskets of squash and beans and okra, an old wheel and loom in need of minor repair, six bushels of shell corn, and enough split shakes to reroof the smokehouse.

The most valuable trade, though, was the five-pound sack of salt they had gotten, it having become so scarce and dear that some people now dug up their smokehouse floors and boiled and strained the dirt and then boiled it down and strained it again. Over and over until the dirt was gone and the water steamed away, so that in the end they had reclaimed the salt fallen to the ground from the hams of yesteryear.

In such matters of trade and in every other regard, Ruby proved herself a marvel of energy, and she soon imposed a routine on Ada's day. Before dawn Ruby would have walked down from the cabin, fed the horse, milked the cow, and be banging pots and pans in the kitchen, a hot fire going in the stove, yellow corn grits bubbling in a pot, eggs and bacon spitting grease in a black pan. Ada was not accustomed to rising in the grey of morning— in fact, through the summer she had rarely risen before ten—but suddenly there was little choice. If Ada lay abed, Ruby would come roust her out.

Ruby figured setting things to working was her job, not waiting on somebody and doing their bidding. On the few occasions when Ada had slipped and given her an order as if to a servant, Ruby had just looked at Ada hard and had then gone on doing what she was doing. What the look said was that Ruby could be gone at a moment's notice like morning fog on a sunny day.

Part of the code for Ruby was that though she did not expect Ada to do the cooking at breakfast, she did expect her, at minimum, to be there to watch its conclusion. So Ada would walk down to the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，52/232

kitchen in her robe and sit in the chair in the warm stove corner and wrap her hands around a cup of coffee. Through the window the day would be starting to take shape, grey and loose in its features.

Even on days that would eventually prove to be clear, Ada could seldom make out even the palings of the fence around the kitchen garden through the fog. At some point Ruby would blow out the yellow light of the lamp and the kitchen would go dim and then the light from outside would rise and fill the room. It seemed a thing of such wonder to Ada, who had not witnessed many dawns.

All during the cooking and the eating, Ruby would talk seamlessly, drawing up hard plans for the coming day that struck Ada as incongruent with its soft vagueness out the window. By the time summer drew toward its conclusion, Ruby seemed to feel the approach of winter as urgently as a bear in autumn, eating all night and half the day to pack on the fat necessary to feed it through hibernation. All Ruby's talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through winter. To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

When Ada remarked that at least they could rest when winter came, Ruby said, Oh, when winter comes we'll mend fence and piece quilts and fix what's broke around here, which is a lot.

Simply living had never struck Ada as such a tiresome business. After breakfast was done, they worked constantly. On days when there was not one big thing to do, they did many small ones, choring around as needed. When Monroe was alive, living was little more laborsome than drawing on bank accounts, abstract and distant. Now, with Ruby, all the actual facts and processes connected with food and clothing and shelter were unpleasantly concrete, falling immediately and directly to hand, and every one of them calling for exertion.

Of course, in her previous life Ada had taken little part in the garden Monroe had always paid someone to grow for them, and her mind, in consequence, had latched itself to the product—the food on the table—not the job of getting it there. Ruby disabused her of that practice. The rudeness of eating, of living, that's where Ruby seemed to aim Ada every day that first month. She held Ada's nose to the dirt to see its purpose. She made Ada work when she did not want to, made her dress in rough clothes and grub in the dirt until her nails seemed to her crude as the claws of a beast, made her climb onto the pitched smokehouse roof and lay shakes even though the green triangle of Cold Mountain seemed to spin about the horizon. Ruby counted her first victory when Ada succeeded in churning cream to butter. Her second victory was when she noted that Ada no longer always put a book in her pocket when she went out to hoe the fields.

Ruby made a point of refusing to tackle all the unpleasant work herself and made Ada hold a struggling chicken down on the chopping block and cleave off its head with a hatchet. When the bleeding headless body staggered about the yard in the time-honored habit of sots, Ruby pointed to it with her ragged sheath knife and said, That's your sustenance there.

The force that Ruby used to drive Ada on was this: somewhere Ada knew that anyone else she might hire would grow weary and walk away and let her fail. Ruby would not let her fail.

The only moments of rest were after the supper dishes had been washed and put away. Then Ada and Ruby sat on the porch and Ada would read aloud in the time remaining before dark. Books and their contents were a great novelty to Ruby, and so Ada had reckoned that the place to begin was near the beginning. After filling Ruby in on who the Greeks were, she had begun reading from Homer. They usually covered fifteen or twenty pages of an evening. Then, when it became too dark to read and the air turned blue and started to congeal with mist, Ada would close the book and solicit stories from Ruby. Over a period of weeks she collected the tale of Ruby's life in pieces.

As Ruby put it, she'd grown up so poor she was forced to cook with no more grease than you would get wiping the frying pan with a meat skin. And she was tired of it. She had never known her mother, file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，53/232

and her father had been a notorious local ne'er-do-well and scofflaw called Stobrod Thewes. They lived in a dirt-floored cabin little better than a roofed pen. It was tiny and had about it the air of the temporary. About the only thing distinguishing it from a gypsy caravan was its lack of wheels and floor. She had slept on a kind of miniature loft platform, just a shelf, really. She had an old tick for mattress that she stuffed with dried moss. Because there was no ceiling, only the geometrical pattern made by the lapped undersides of the roof shakes, Ruby awoke many a morning with an inch of snow atop her pile of quilts, blown by the wind between the curled edges of the shakes like sifted flour. On such mornings, Ruby found that the great benefit of such a small cabin was that even a fire of twigs warmed it up fast, though the faulty chimney that Stobrod had constructed drew so poorly you could have smoked hams in the place. In all but the foulest weather, she preferred cooking out back under a brush arbor.

Yet, little and plain as it was, the cabin was still more than Stobrod cared to maintain. If not for the inconvenience of his having a daughter, he might happily have taken up dwelling in a hollow tree, for in Ruby's estimation an animal with a memory was about her father's loftiest expression of himself.

Feeding herself was Ruby's to do as soon as she was old enough to be held accountable for it, which in Stobrod's opinion fell close after learning to walk. As an infant, Ruby foraged for food in the woods and up and down the river at charitable farms. Her brightest childhood memory was of walking up the river trail for some of Sally Swanger's white bean soup and on the way home having her nightgown—for several years her usual attire, even in the daytime—get caught on a trailside blackthorn briar. The thorn was long as a cock's spur, and she had been unable to free herself. No one passed that afternoon. Broken clouds blew over and the day faded like a guttering lamp. Night fell and the moon was black, the new moon of May. Ruby was four and spent the night attached to the blackthorn tree.

Those dark hours were a revelation to her, and they never left her. It was chill out in the drifting mists of the riverbank. She remembered shivering and crying for a time, calling out for help. She feared she would be eaten by a wandering panther down from Cold Mountain. They would carry off a child in a heartbeat, was what she had heard from Stobrod's drinking friends. The way they told it, the mountains were full of creatures hungry for the meat of a child. Bears out foraging. Wolves roaming. Hants aplenty too in the mountains. They would come in many forms, all terrifying, and they would snatch you up and take you to who knew what manner of hell.

She had heard the old Cherokee women talk of cannibal spirits that lived in the rivers and ate the flesh of people, stealing them near daybreak and carrying them down in the water. Children were their favorite food, and when they took one they left in its place a shade, a twin, that moved about and talked but had no real life to it. Seven days later it withered and died.

The night drew together all those threats, and young Ruby thus sat for some time, shivering from the cold and sobbing until she could hardly breathe from the recognition of all the things that seemed ranked up to prey on weakness.

But later she was spoken to by a voice in the dark. Its talk seemed to arise from the rush and splatter of the river noise, but it was no cannibal demon. It seemed some tender force of landscape or sky, an animal sprite, a guardian that took her under its wing and concerned itself with her well-being from that moment on. She remembered every star pattern that passed across the piece of sky visible to her among the tree boughs, and every word spoken directly to her deep core by the calm voice that took her in and comforted and protected her all through the night. She stopped shivering in the thin gown, and her sobbing passed away from her.

The next morning a man fishing set her loose, and she walked home and never spoke a word to Stobrod about it. Nor did he ask where she had been. The voice, though, still echoed in her head, and file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...