Cold Mountain Part 15

She had later brought her two sisters to live with them, and they had proved her equals in harlotry, for one had borne twin boys of somewhat indeterminate race, and though they were now several years old-he could not put an exact figure to it-they had been raised with no more guidance than a pair of feral hogs, and neither the mother nor anyone else in the household had yet taken the trouble to name them, making reference to them singularly only by hooking a thumb in the direction of the intended boy and saying, That'un.

Junior claimed that the sum of his marital experience had caused him to believe that he should have married a thirteen-year old and raised her to suit himself. As it was, he claimed to lie awake many a night thinking that every moment till his death would be gloom and that his only recourse would be to cut all their throats in their sleep and then put the shotgun to his own head or take to the woods and eventually be hunted down by dogs and treed and shot like a c.o.o.n.

This put something of a damper on Veasey's glee, and in a moment Junior returned the bottle to its place and took up the saw again. He led them down the road a bend or two to his house, which sat off below the road in a damp swale. It was a large structure, batten-sided and in such poor repair that an end of it had fallen off the stacks of flat river stones that served for foundation. As a result, it stood tipped up as if it were in the process of diving into the earth.

The yard was littered with pyramidal gamec.o.c.k dwellings made from unpeeled sticks tied together with honeysuckle vines. Inside, bright birds glared out the slots with cold shiny eyes that saw the whole world as little other than opportunity for an adversary. Thin white smoke rose from the chimney, and a black pillar of smoke swelled skyward from some other source behind the house.

As they left the road to descend into Junior's bottomland, a three-legged, patchy-haired dog of the terrier kind clamored out from under the porch and ran low to the ground and completely soundless on a trajectory straight to Inman, who had learned to heed a silent dog more than a barking dog.

Before it got to him, Inman kicked and caught it under the chin with a boot toe. The dog collapsed and lay motionless in the dirt.

Inman looked to Junior and said, What was I to do?

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-All are not thieves that dogs bark at, Veasey said.

Junior just stood and looked.

The dog eventually rose shakily onto its tripod and in a series of vague tacking maneuvers made its way back under the porch.

-I'm glad he's not dead, Inman said.

-I don't give a s.h.i.t one way or the other, Junior said.

They walked on down to the house and into the kitchen and dining room. Junior immediately went to a pie safe and took out another bottle and three tin cups. The floor to the place was ramplike in its tilt, and when Inman went to sit in a straight chair at the table, he had to clench to the floor as best he could with his feet to keep from skidding with gravity to the low wall. In the chimney corner was a bedstead, and Inman could see that they had not even tried to shim it level but had only made the modest effort of turning it so that the head was to the high side.

There were pictures cut from books and newspapers hanging on the walls, but some were hung parallel to the c.o.c.ked-up floor, some to a more abstract line that might have been arrived at with a spirit level. There was a fire smoldering in the fireplace, and a Dutch oven sitting in the coals putting out a smell of rank meat cooking. The hearth was at such a rake that the smoke in its rise banked off the sidewall before finding the way up the chimney.

With all one's expectations of the world's plumb line so thrown off, even pouring a dram of liquor from the bottle into a cup became a puzzler, and when Inman went to do it, he missed the gla.s.s entirely and wet his shoe tops before he found the proper range and lead. When he had succeeded in filling the gla.s.s, he took a drink and reached to set the cup on the dinner table and noted that little b.u.mpers sawn from birch limbs had been nailed around each place at the table so that the plates and cups would not slide off the low side.

Veasey walked around supping from his cup and looking at the place, trudging uphill and down.

Then an idea struck him.

-We could rig levers under the down end and soon set this thing right, he said.

Levers seemed to have come to occupy the foreground of his thinking, as if he had discovered a machine that could be applied to all the puzzles that might be thrown at a person. Stick a lever under anything wrong and make it sit right and square to the world.

-I reckon we could lever it, Junior said. But it's been this way so long, we've got the hang of it now.

It would seem queer to live in a place without a grade to it.

They drank on awhile, the liquor going fast to Inman's head, for he had eaten nothing but the pods since last evening's spa.r.s.e supper. It hit Veasey's empty stomach harder, and he sat with his head c.o.c.ked oddly, looking down into his cup.

Shortly a girl of eight or ten walked in the front door. She was a slight child, thin at ankle and shoulder bone. Her skin was the color of heavy cream, her hair brown, falling below her shoulders in crisp ringlets. Inman had seldom seen a prettier child.

-Your mama here? Junior said.

-Yep, the girl said.

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-Where's she at? Junior said.

-Out back. Was a minute ago.

Veasey looked up from his cup and examined the child. He said to Junior, Why, I've seen white children darker complected than that. What would you make her to be, octoroon or less?

-Octoroon or quadroon, makes no difference. She's a n.i.g.g.aroon is all I can see, Junior said.

Veasey suddenly stood and wove his way to the bed. He lay down and pa.s.sed out.

-What's your name? Inman asked the girl.

-Lula, she said.

-No, it ain't, Junior said. He turned to the girl and glared. Say what it is, he said.

-Mama says it's Lula, the girl said.

-Well, it ain't. That's just the kind of cathouse name your mama would come up with. But I do the naming here. Your name is Chast.i.ty.

-Either makes a fine name, I'd say, Inman said.

-No, said Junior. My name throws the other one into the shade, for mine commemorates what a wh.o.r.e her mama is.

He drank off what was left in his cup and said, Come on. Without looking to see if Inman followed, he led Inman out onto the front porch and sat in a rocker.

Inman walked out into the yard and cast back his head to look at the sky. It was coming on evening and the light was thin and slanting, and a portion of moon and the beacon of Venus stood in the eastern sky. The air was dry and there was a chill in it and Inman took a deep pull into his lungs and the smell and feel of it brought a thought to his mind: fall's right now on me. What the air told was that the wheel of the year had turned yet another notch.

-Lila, Junior called.

In a minute a young woman came wandering around the corner of the house and sat on the porch steps directly between Inman and Junior. She drew her knees up high and examined Inman with a critical eye. She was a towheaded, ample-haunched thing in a cotton dress so thin and bleached from Washing that a man could very nearly see the texture of her skin through its parchment-colored fabric. The dress had once been a print of little flowers in files but they had faded out till what was left looked more like characters, faint scribble from one of the vertical languages.

The girl was, in all her lines, circular, and the lower halves of her pale thighs were on full display where the dress hem fell back against the steps.

Her eyes were the pale color of harebell blossoms. She went about with her head not combed. Her feet were bare and briar scratched, and there was something about her that spoke of oddity so much that Inman found himself clearing his mind by adding up muddy toes on one of her round feet to check if the mystic five would indeed be the sum. Junior drew a cob pipe with a clay stem from his pocket. And with it a great wizened pouch of tobacco. He filled the pipe and thrust it into the hole of 2004-3-6.

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his mouth. He dangled the pouch for Inman to examine.

-Bull sack, he said. A man can't make a better pouch than G.o.d did. Such things are a test from G.o.d to see if we will make do with what He provides or if we will shun dominion and seek improvement by our own weak devices.

Then he addressed the girl. Light, he said.

She arose with a certain amount of disturbance and gaping of her dress skirt and went into the house and returned with a lit shuck. She bent over to fit the shuck to the pipe, and as she did she presented her hind end to Inman. The thin dress gathered in the cleft of her b.u.t.tocks and sheathed it over so tight that he could see the cupped s.p.a.ce in the muscle at the sides of her clenched a.s.s and the twin dimples atop the place where her spine met her hipbones. All her underlying structure lay revealed before him, and Inman felt face-to-face with an alien visage, though not an entirely unfriendly one.

But then the girl twisted and squealed out like a rabbit at the end of an owl's stoop, and Inman could see Junior's pincered fingers retreating from the vicinity of her bosom.

-Junior, G.o.ddammit, she said.

Lila returned to her seat on the steps and sat with a forearm pressed tight against her breast and Junior smoked awhile, and then Lila moved her arm and there was a tiny spot of black blood soaked up into the cloth of the front of her dress.

Junior said, Get these b.i.t.c.hes to feed you. I've got a mare to check on down in the lower pasture.

He arose and went to the edge of the porch and dug in his britches and then p.i.s.sed in a thick arc onto a s...o...b..ll bush. He shook himself off, repacked, and walked out into the yard and on down the dimming road still smoking and singing a tune around the pipe stem. The words of it that Inman heard were: G.o.d gave Noah the rainbow sign, not no water but the fire next time.

Inman followed Lila around the house. Outbuildings-smokehouse, can house, springhouse, henhouse, corncrib-bordered a s.p.a.ce of packed earth like a courtyard. In the center of it was a fire of great logs. It flicked up high as Lila's head and threw sparks higher yet. The night was collecting itself and shading black at the edge of trees beyond the weedy gardens of corn and picked-over beans in the middle distance. Nearby stood a kitchen garden enclosed by pales, limp dead crows stuck to the sharpened ends in various stages of rot. The yellow firelight reached out into the dark and threw crisp shadows against the walls of the unpainted buildings. The dome of sky directly overhead, though, was yet silvery and unmarked by stars. -Hey, Lila called.

From the smokehouse came two pale females, the obvious sistern of Lila, for they resembled her in sufficient particulars so that they might have been triplets. And then from the springhouse a pair of dark-headed boy children emerged. They all gathered about the fire and Lila said, Supper done?

n.o.body said anything, and one of the sisters stuck a rusty forefinger into the loop at the neck of a stoppered earthenware jug and lifted it from the ground near the fire. She balanced it on the crook of her arm and took a deep and resonant swig. She pa.s.sed it along and when it got to Inman he expected some foul homebrew, but the flavor of it matched up with no known liquor. It tasted like rich earth and something else, some potent extract blended from tree fungus and animal gland with medicinal properties known to few. The jug went around a number of times.

One of the sisters backed up to the fire and hiked up the tail of her dress and bent over and thrust out her scut to it and stared at Inman with a look of glazed pleasure in her blue eyes. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung round and pendulous as if to crack open her thin bodice. He wondered what sort of house of s.l.u.ts he 2004-3-6.

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had stumbled into.

The third sister stood a minute, cupping a hand to her groin and looking off across the cornfield, and then she went into the smokehouse and came back with a wood-tined rake. She raked in the ashes at the edges of the fire and began turning up charred bundles of corn husks. The pair of boys seemed momentarily engaged. They looked on, and one of them walked over to the pile and said, Doughboy dough, in a fiat voice.

Otherwise the children appeared to Inman stunned. They were hollow-eyed and they moved about in the firelight of the courtyard hantlike and wordless. They paced about the glaring yard in what seemed to be designs repeated over and over, rubbed into the earth with the shuffle of their footsteps.

When Inman spoke to them they neither answered nor flickered an eye in his direction to even acknowledge the sound of his voice, and he began to a.s.sume that what the boy had spoken at the fire comprised their collective word h.o.a.rd.

The sisters began breaking open the husk bundles, and steam rose from them in the cool air. When they were done they had six loaves of dark bread, each shaped to depict a big-headed homunculus, even down to the detail of swollen organs rising up along the bellies of the figures. The girls cast the husks into the fire and they flared up and burned away in a breath.

-We knowed you'd come, Lila said.

The two sisters gave a loaf to each of the boys. They tore at them and thrust pieces as big as their fists into their mouths. When they were done eating they began again treading the faint pathways they had worn in the dirt. Inman watched them, trying to make out what forms they were shaping with their walking. Here might be a sign he ought not miss. But after a time he gave it up. He could make no sense of the marks on the ground.

The two girls took the remaining three loaves and went into the house. Lila came and stood next to Inman. She put a hand onto his shoulder and said, Big man like you.

He could not see what response was called for here. Finally he took off his haversack, with his money and the LeMat's in it, and set it on the ground at his feet. The night had risen up to all but full dark now, and he could see off on a hillside that there seemed to be a yellow light moving wavery and inconclusive through the trees, one moment haloed and diffuse, the next a hard bright point. So odd did the light appear that Inman wondered if it emanated from no outside source but was an effect of some misfunction in his thinking.

-What is that? Inman said.

Lila followed the light a moment and said, That's nothing. It's little tonight. Sometimes it's big as an extra moon. What it is, up on that hill one time when I was a girl, Junior killed a man and his dog.

Cleaved off their two heads with a froe and set them each by each up on a hickory stump. We all went and looked. The man's face was turned almost n.i.g.g.e.r black, and he had a funny look in its eyes.

Ever since then, some nights there's that light moving across the hill. You could go up there right now and not see a thing, but maybe something would rub up against you like an old dry heifer hide.

-Why did he kill the man? Inman asked.

-He never said. He's got a temper on him. And he's quick to strike out. He shot his own mama dead. Way he tells it, she had her ap.r.o.n wrapped about her and he took her for a swan.

-I've not noticed a surplus of swans in this country.

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-They's few.

The light on the hill had sharpened off to blue and picked up speed, flickering among the trees. And then it was gone.

-What do you think that light is? Inman said.

-G.o.damighty Hisself says clear as day in the Bible that the dead don't have a idea in their heads.

Every thought flies from them. So it's not that headless man. I believe it's like people say, sometimes specter dogs carry lanterns on their heads. But I could be wrong. The old folks say there used to be a sight more ghosts than now.

Lila looked at him a fair length of time. She rubbed her hand on his forearm. I believe you traveling under a black flag, she said.

I'm under no colors, he said.

One of the sisters came to the back stoop and said, Come eat. Inman carried the haversack to the porch and Lila reached and took the straps of his pack over his shoulders and down his arms and set it beside the sack. Inman looked down at it and thought, That would be a mistake, but he could not order his thoughts farther.

As Lila and her sister turned to walk into the house, he took the haversack and thrust it elbow deep into a s.p.a.ce between sticks of cordwood stacked on the porch. He followed the girls into the house, which now seemed unaccountably larger than it had earlier. They led him down a ramplike hallway of unpainted plank walls, and he felt that his feet were about to slide out from under him. In the dark the place seemed a vast warren, cut up mazy into many tiny rooms with doors on each wall. The rooms fed into each other in ways that defied logic, but eventually Inman and Lila made their way into the canted main room, where places were set at the b.u.mpered table. Veasey slept on like the dead in the chimney corner.

A lamp was smoking on the table, and its feeble light moved across the surfaces of wall and floor and tablecloth like shadows on the stones of a creek bottom. Lila sat Inman at the head of the table and tied a checked napkin around his neck. A loaf from the ashes was wrapped in another napkin in the center of the table.

One of the sisters brought a platter from the hearth, atop it a ma.s.sive joint of meat swimming in lucent grease. Inman could not say just what creature it came from. It seemed too big for hog but too pale for cow. It was a ball-and-socket arrangement, clods of meat at either bone end. White threads of tendon and ligament wove through the meat. The girl set the platter in front of him, chocking it level with the bowl of an upturned cooking spoon. There was only a rust-spotted knife at his place.

He picked it up and looked at Lila.

-We've nary meat fork, she said.

Inman gripped the bone with his left hand and carved and carved, but never made scarce a mark on the pith of the joint.

All three girls now had gathered about the table to gauge his progress. Together they cast a breedy scent like that arising from dank beds of galax, and it overpowered even the reek of the strange meat.

Lila eased over next to Inman and rubbed the soft of her belly against his shoulder and then she shifted up on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet and he could feel the bewhiskered notch of her legs scratch at his skin through the thin dress.