Cold Mountain (53 page)

2004-3-6

页码，223/232

She discovered them to be a garment you cannot remove gracefully. The first leg came off fine, but then in switching her weight from one foot to the other she lost her balance and had to crow-hop twice to get it back. She looked toward Inman and found his eyes were open, watching her. She felt foolish and wished she were in the dark instead of standing before the low yellow flames of the smoky cedar fire. Or that she were wearing a gown which she could let fall in a smooth cascade around her. A pool at her feet which she could step away from. But here she stood with Monroe's britches still clenched around one leg.

—Turn your back, she said.

—Not for every gold dollar in the Federal treasury, Inman said.

She turned away from him, nervous and awkward. Then when she was undressed she held her clothes before her and half turned toward him.

Inman sat up with the blanket around his waist. He had been living like a dead man and this was life before him, an offering within his reach. He leaned forward and pulled the clothes from her hands and drew her to him. He put the flats of his palms on her thigh fronts, and then he moved his hands up her flanks and rested his forearms on her hipbones and touched his fingertips to the swale at the small of her back. He moved his fingers up and touched one by one the knobs of her backbone. He touched the insides of her arms, ran his hands down her sides until they rested on the flare of her hips. He bowed his forehead to the soft of her stomach. Then he kissed her there and she smelled like hickory smoke. He pulled her against him and held her and held her. She put a hand to the back of his neck and pulled him harder, and then she pressed her white arms around him as if forever.

With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain.

Later, Ada and Inman lay woven together on their bed of hemlock boughs. The old cabin was nearly dark, and the cedar limbs smoked in the hearth and the hot resin smelled as if someone had walked through swinging a censer. The fire popped. Snow hissed and sighed as it fell. And they did what lovers often do when they think the future stretches out endless before them as bright as on the noon of creation day: they talked ceaselessly of the past, as if each must be caught up on the other's previous doings before they can move forward paired.

They talked through most of the night, as if charged by law with recounting in the greatest of detail their childhoods, their youths. And they both painted them as idylls. Even the brutal muggy heat of Charleston summers took on an element of drama in Ada's telling. When Inman reached the war years, though, he accounted for them in only the weak detail of a newspaper account—the names of the generals who had commanded him, the large movements of troops, the failure and success of various strategies, the frequent force of blind luck in determining which side prevailed. What he wanted Ada to know was that you could tell such things on and on and yet no more get to the full truth of the war than you could get to the full truth of an old sow bear's life by following her sign through the woods. A claw mark on a bee tree and a great pone of greasy scat shot through with yellow berry seeds told only two brief and possibly misleading installments in the big black mystery of the bear itself. No man, not even if you went all the way up to Lee, could accurately describe more than one blunt forehand of the bear—its hooked black claws, the plump cracked pads, the coarse and shiny hair cupping down over the paw ends. Inman figured he himself might only know something as fleeting as the smell of her breath. No one could know the entirety any more than we can know the life of any animal, for they each inhabit a world that is their own and not ours.

All Inman would reveal of a personal nature were little stories like the time during winter camp of file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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sixty-two when the mud-and-stick chimney of his hut caught fire, and the bark-and-moss roof fell burning onto him and his sleeping mates, and they ran whooping and laughing out into the cold in their underdrawers and watched it burn and threw snowballs at each other, and then when the fire died down they fed it with fence rails to keep warm through the night.

Ada asked him if he had ever seen the great celebrated warriors. The allegedly godlike Lee, grim Jackson, gaudy Stuart, stolid Longstreet. Or the lesser lights. Tragic Pelham, pathetic Pickett.

Inman had seen all except Pelham, but he told Ada he had nothing to say about them, neither the living ones nor the dead. Nor did he care to comment upon the Federal leaders, though he had seen some from a distance and knew the rest by their acts. He wished to live a life where little interest could be found in one gang of despots launching attacks upon another. Nor did he want to enumerate further the acts he himself had committed, for he wanted someday, in a time when people weren't dying so much, to judge himself by another measure.

—Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said.

Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over, how he watched Orion climb higher up the slope of sky night by night, and how he had tried to walk with no hope and no fear but had failed miserably, for he had done both. But how on the best days of walking he achieved some success in matching his thoughts to the weather, dark or bright, so as to attune with what freak of God's mind sent cloud or shine.

Then he added, I met a number of folks on the way. There was a goatwoman that fed me, and she claimed it's a sign of God's mercy that He won't let us remember the reddest details of pain. He knows the parts we can't bear and won't let our minds render them again. In time, from disuse, they pale away. At least such was her thinking. God lays the unbearable on you and then takes some back.

Ada begged to differ with a part of the goatwoman's thoughts. She said, I think you have to give Him some help in forgetting. You have to work at not trying to call such thoughts up, for if you call hard enough they'll come.

When they had momentarily exhausted the past, they turned to the future. They talked of all kinds of prospective things. In Virginia, Inman had seen a sawmill, portable and water powered. Even in the mountains, clapboard houses were overtaking log, so he thought that such a sawmill would be a fine thing to have. He could haul it to a man's land and set it up and saw out the material for a house from the man's own timber. There would be an economy in that, and a satisfaction for the man as well, for he could sit in his completed house and delight in all its parts coming right from his own land. Inman could take payment in cash, or lacking that he could be paid in timber, which he could then mill and sell. He could borrow money from his family to buy the equipment. It was not a bad plan. Many a man had got rich on less.

And there were other plans. They would order books on many topics: agriculture, art, botany, travel.

They would take up musical instruments, fiddle and guitar or perhaps the mandolin. Should Stobrod live, he could teach them. And Inman aspired to learn Greek. That would be quite a thing to know.

With it, he could continue the efforts of Balis. He told her the story of the man in the hospital, his lost leg and the sheaf of papers he had left behind him at his sad passing. It's not without sense they call it a dead language, Inman said in conclusion.

They talked on, and time was what they discussed. They detailed an imaginary marriage, the years passing happy and peaceful. Black Cove put in order to Ruby's specifications. Ada described the plans in detail, and all Inman wished to amend was the absence of goats, for he would like to keep a file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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few. They agreed they neither gave two hoots now as to how marriages were normally conducted.

They would do as they pleased and run their lives by the roll of the seasons. In autumn the apple trees would be bright and heavy with apples and they would hunt birds together, since Ada had proved so successful with the turkeys. They would not hunt with the gaudy Italian piece of Monroe's but with fine simple shotguns they would order from England. In summer they would catch trout with tackle from the same sporting country. They would grow old together measuring time by the life spans of a succession of speckled bird dogs. At some point, well past midlife, they might take up painting and get little tin fieldboxes of water-colors, likewise from England. Go on country walks, and when they saw a scene that pleased them, stop and dip cups of water from a creek and form the lines and tints on paper for future reference. Contest with each other to see which might more successfully render the scene. They could picture ships navigating the treacherous North Atlantic for some decades to bring them fine implements of diversion. Oh, the things they would do.

They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.

spirits of crows, dancing

By the morning of the third day in the village the clouds broke open to clear sky, bright sun. The snow began to melt. It dropped in wads from the bent limbs of trees, and all day there was the sound of water running under the snow on the ground. That evening the moon rose full from behind the ridge, and its light fell so bright as to throw crisp shadows of tree trunks and tree limbs on the snow.

The pearly night seemed not day's opposite but a new variant of it, a deputation.

Ada and Inman lay under covers for some time twined and talking, the fire low and the door to their hut open, letting a brilliant trapezoid of cold moonlight project onto their bed. They composed a plan for themselves, and it took much of the night to talk out. The shape of light moved across the floor and its angles changed, and at some point Inman put the door back in its place and stoked the fire.

The plan, despite the length of time it took to form, was simple and in no way unique to them. Many other pairs of lovers in those last days reached identical conclusions, for there were but three courses to pick from, each dangerous and in its own way bitter.

The logic they followed was simple. The war was as good as lost and could not go on many more months. It might end in spring and it might not. But by no act of imagination could it be pictured as continuing past late summer. The choices were these. Inman could return to the army. Short-handed as they were, he would be received with open arms and then immediately be put back in the muddy trenches of Petersburg, where he would try to keep his head down and hope for an early end. Or he could stay hidden in the mountains or in Black Cove as an outlier and be hunted like bear, wolf, catamount. Or he could cross the mountains north and put himself in the hands of the Federals, the very bastards who had spent four years shooting at him. They would make him sign his name to their oath of allegiance, but then he could wait out the fighting and come home.

They tried to devise other plans, but they just spun out illusions. Inman told Ada of Veasey's dream of Texas, the wildness and freedom and opportunity of it. They could get a second horse, a camping kit, set out riding west. And if Texas proved bleak there was the Colorado territory. Wyoming. The great Columbia River territory. But the war was out there too. If they had money, they could sail to some far off sunny place, to Spain or Italy. But they had no money and there was the blockade. As a last resort, they could fast for the prescribed number of days and wait for the portals of the Shining Rocks to open and welcome them into the land of peace.

Finally, they acknowledged that there were limits to things. Those original bitter three were all the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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choices the war allowed. Inman rejected the first as unacceptable. And Ada vetoed the second as, in her estimation, the most dangerous. So by default it was the third they settled on. Over the Blue Ridge. Three days or four of steady walking, keeping to wilderness trails, and then he would cross the state line. Put up his hands and bow his head and say he'd been whipped. Salute their striped banner which he'd fought all he could. Learn from the faces of the enemy that, contrary to the teachings of various religions, the man that whips generally feels better than the man that takes the whipping, no matter who's in the wrong of the matter.

—But this too, Ada said to him. It's often believed by preachers and old women that being beaten breeds compassion. And they're right. It can. But it also breeds hardness. There's to some degree a choice.

In the end, what they both vowed to keep their minds on was the homecoming some months hence.

They would go forward from there into whatever new world the war left behind. Make their part of it match the vision of the future they'd talked out to each other during the two nights previous.

On the fourth day in the village, patches of brown leaves and black dirt began to open up in clearings, and mixed flocks of nuthatches and titmice came to them and pecked at something on the uncovered ground. That day Stobrod could sit unassisted and talk so as to make partial sense, which Ruby said was about all you could expect of him, even in the brightest bloom of health. His wounds were clean and odorless and showed signs of soon beginning to knit up. And he could eat solid food, though all they had left was a little bit of grits and five squirrels that Ruby had shot and gutted and skinned. She had skewered them on sticks and roasted them with the heads on over chestnut coals, and that evening Ruby and Stobrod and Inman ate theirs like you would an ear of corn. Ada sat a minute and examined her portion. The front teeth were yellow and long. She was not accustomed to eating things with the teeth still in them. Stobrod watched her and said, That head'U twist right off, if it's bothering you.

By the dawning of the fifth day, the snow was better than halfway gone. There were needles thick on the banks of snow that remained under the hemlock trees, and the bark on the trunks was streaked wet and black from the melt. High clouds had blown in after two days of sun, and Stobrod proclaimed himself ready to travel.

—Six hours home, Ruby said. Seven at most. That's accounting for the poor footing and stopping some to rest.

Ada assumed they would all go as a party, but Inman would not hear of it.

—The woods feel so empty sometimes, and then so full others. You two can go where you want without being bothered. It's us they'd want, he said, flicking a thumb at Stobrod. No sense putting everybody in danger.

He would hear of nothing but that Ruby and Ada walk on ahead. He would come behind shortly with Stobrod astride the horse. Wait in the woods until dark. The next morning, if the weather looked promising, he would set out to surrender. They would keep Stobrod home and hidden, and if the war had not ended by the time he healed, they'd send him across the mountains to join Inman.

Stobrod had no opinion on the matter, but Ruby judged there was sense in what Inman said, so that is what they did. The women started out afoot, and Inman stood and watched them climb the slope.

When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.

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