Cold Mountain Part 17

Inman cast about until he came up with a sharp stone, and he sat until sunrise rubbing his bound wrists against it. When he finally freed himself, he looked again at Veasey. One eyelid now drooped near closed. Inman wished to commit some kind gesture toward him, but lacking even a shovel for burial, all he could think to do was roll Veasey over, facedown.

Inman put the dawn to his back and set out walking west. All that morning he felt stunned and wrenched. His head ached in accordance with the beat of his pulse and felt as if his skull was about to fall into a great number of pieces at his feet. From a fencerow he gathered a wad of the feathery leaves of yarrow and tied it to his head with the stripped stem of the plant. The power of yarrow is to draw out pain, which to an extent it did. The leaves waggled in time with his tired walk, and he spent the morning watching the shadows of them move before him down the road.

By noon he stood at a crossroads, his mind cloudy, unable to settle on one of the three choices laid out on the ground before him. He had only sense to rule out the way he had come. He looked to the sky for orientation, but the sun stood straight up. It could fall any which way. He put his hand to the ridged-up skin at his head, felt the crusty blood under his hairline, thinking, I'll soon be naught but scar. The red Petersburg welt at his neck began to hurt as if in sympathy with its new brethren. All his upper parts felt like some great raw ulcer. He decided to sit in the pine litter at roadside and wait for some sign or token to mark one of the pa.s.sways before him as preferable to the others.

After a time during which he lapsed in and out of wakefulness, he saw a yellow slave coming down the road driving a mismatched team of steers, one red and one white. They dragged a sled loaded with fresh barrels and a great number of small dark melons stacked neat as cordwood. The man caught sight of Inman and whoa'd up the steers.

-They Lord G.o.d amighty, he said. You look like a dirt man.

He reached into the sled and knocked with his fist at two or three melons before selecting one and tossing it underhand to Inman. Inman cracked it open against the edge of a stone. The ragged meat in the halves was pink and firm and cloven by dark seeds, and he plunged his head down into first one and then the other like a hungry dog.

When he arose from them, they were naught but thin hulls and his beard dripped pink juice onto the dirt of the road. Inman stared down for some time onto the pattern the drops made to see if it held significance in the direction of augury, for he knew he needed aid, no matter from what strange fount it arose. The drops in the dust, though, offered no ready sign, neither pictograph nor totem, no matter from what angle he viewed them. The invisible world, he declared to himself, had abandoned him as a gypsy soul to wander singular, without guide or chart, through a broken world composed of little but impediment.

Inman quit his study of the ground and looked up and said his thanks for the melon. The yellow man was a wiry fellow, slim in all his parts but corded with muscle in the neck and the forearms where he had the sleeves of his grey wool shirt turned back to the elbow. His canvas britches had been made for a taller man and were rolled up into deep cuffs above his bare feet.

-Get on this sled and come with me, he said.

Inman rode a ways sitting on the tailboard, his back against a bright barrel, fragrant of fresh-split white oak. He tried to sleep but could not, and he stared down as in a trance at the drag trails of the wide ash runners, watching them fall away down the dusty road, paired lines that seemed to offer some lesson as they drew nearer and nearer to each other the more distant they got. He pulled off the 2004-3-6.

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yarrow headdress and dropped it piece by piece into the s.p.a.ce between the runner trails.

When the yellow man neared the farm where he was owned, he had Inman crawl into one of the barrels, and then he took him on in and unloaded the sled in the barn hall. He hid Inman in the hay under the loft eaves, and Inman rested there in the fodder for some days, and once again he lost track of the count. He spent the time sleeping and being fed by the slaves on corn pone fried in lard, sharp greens, roasted chines of pork rich and crackling with charred fat.

When his legs felt able to bear weight again, Inman prepared to fare forth once more. His clothes had been boiled clean, and his head was some improved and covered with an old black hat stained dark about the brow band with slave sweat. There was a half-moon in the sky, and Inman stood at the barn door bidding the yellow man farewell.

-I need to be going, Inman said. I've got a little business down this way, and then I've got to get home.

-You listen, the yellow man said. A band of Federals broke out of Salisbury prison last week, and the roads are running thick with patrols riding day and night looking for them. You try to go through there, they'll sure catch you up, you're not careful. Probably catch you even if you are.

-What would be best to do?

-Where you headed?

-West.

-Cut north. Go toward Wilkes. Taking that heading, there's Moravians and Quakers all the way that will help. Hit the bottom of the Blue Ridge and then cut south again following the foothills. Or go on into the mountains and follow the ridges back down to your course. But, they say it's cold and rough back in there.

-That's where I'm from, Inman said.

The yellow man gave him cornmeal twisted up in paper and tied with twine, a strip of salt pork, and some pieces of roast pork. Then he worked for some time scratching out a map in ink on a piece of paper, and when it was done it was a work of art. All detailed with little houses and odd-shaped barns and crooked trees with faces in their trunks and limbs like arms and hair. A fancy compa.s.s rose in one corner. And there were notes in a precise script to say who could be trusted and who could not. Gradually things got vague and far apart until in the west all was white but for interlinked arcs the man had drawn to suggest the shapes of mountains.

-That's as far as I've been, he said. Just right there to the edge.

-You can read and write? Inman said.

-Got a crazy man for a master. That law don't mean a thing to him.

Inman reached in his pockets for money to give the man. He thought to draw out a generous amount, but he found his pockets empty and remembered that what money he had left was in the haversack hidden in Junior's woodpile.

-I wish I had something to pay you with, Inman said.

-I might not have took it anyway, the man said.

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Several nights later Inman stood in front of the slanted house. It sat toadlike down in its swale, and the windows were all black. He softly called the three-legged dog from out its den and offered it a piece of pork bone that he had carried in his pocket wrapped in sycamore leaves. The dog came sniffing, soundless. It s.n.a.t.c.hed the bone and then disappeared under the front porch. Inman followed the dog down to the house and circled around to the rear. The big fire was but a cold black pock on the ground. He went to the back porch. His knapsack still lay there in a pile. He looked through it, and everything was there but for Veasey's Colt pistol. He thrust his arm into the woodstack and seized the haversack and felt the b.u.t.t of the LeMat's through the fabric. He drew it forth and it was like a tonic to feel the weight of the pistol in his hand, the balance and the sound when he pulled back the hammer.

A rind of light shone under the smokehouse door and Inman went and cracked the door and looked inside. Junior stood rubbing salt on a ham. A bayonet was s...o...b..d into the dirt floor, and its muzzle socket held a taper as neatly as a silver candlestick. The floor of the smokehouse was so packed and greasy that the flame cast glints off it. Junior bent over the ham. He had his hat on and his face was dark in the shade of its brim. Inman opened the door fully and stood in the light. Junior raised up his face and looked at him but seemed not to recognize him. Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat's and then clubbed at him with the b.u.t.t until he lay flat on his back. There was no movement out of him but for the bright flow of blood which ran from his nose and cuts to his head and the corners of his eyes. It gathered and pooled on the black earth of the smokehouse floor.

Inman stopped and squatted and rested his forearms on his knees to catch his breath. He twisted the candle out of its socket and felt the roughness of it where roaches had been eating at the tallow. He held the light to Junior's face. What lay before him was indeed a horrid thing, and yet Inman feared that the minds of all men share the same nature with little true variance. He blew out the candle and then turned and walked outside. There was a wedge of grey light at the east horizon where the moon was fixing to rise. On the hill the ghost light was weak, fluttery in its movement. It faded off and vanished, though so slowly that you could not have said exactly when.

Inman walked all that night circling north through a heavily peopled country, window lights shining everywhere, dogs barking. And the yellow man was right; hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.sed over and over in the dark, but Inman could hear them coming in time to step into the bushes. When morning came there was fog, so, not having to worry about a little smoke, he lit a fire in the woods and boiled two strips of salt pork and poured meal into the water and made a mess of corn mush. He laid up all that day in a thicket, sleeping some and fretting some. There were crows in the limbs above him, three of them, and they were harrying a rat snake they had discovered up in the tree. They sat on the limbs above the snake and gabbled at it, and now and again one flew close by and feinted at it with glinting bill.

The snake made the customary vicious displays of its kind, erecting itself and hooding out its neck and hissing and striking as if it were deadly. But all its efforts were met with hilarity and ridicule by the crows, and the snake soon departed.

The crows stayed on through much of the afternoon, celebrating their victory. Inman watched them anytime his eyes were open, observing closely their deportment and method of expression. And when his eyes were closed, he dreamed he lived in a kind of world where if a man wished it he could think himself into crow form, so that, though filled with dark error, he still had power either to fly from enemies or laugh them away. Then, after awhile of pa.s.sing time in such wise, Inman watched night fall, and it seemed to him as if the crows had swelled out to blacken everything.

in place of the truth The morning sky was featureless, a color like that made on paper from a thin wash of lampblack.

Ralph stood stopped in the field, head down, blowing. He was harnessed to a sled load of locust 2004-3-6.

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fence rails, and they were heavy as a similar amount of stones. He seemed not to care to draw them one pace farther toward the edge of the creek along which Ruby intended to lay out the snake for a new pasture fence. Ada held the plaited carriage whip, and she popped Ralph's back a time or two with the frizzled end of it to no effect.

-He's a carriage horse, she said to Ruby.

Ruby said, He's a horse.

She went to Ralph's head and took his chin in her hand and looked him in the eye. He put back his ears and showed her a rim of white at the tops of his eyeb.a.l.l.s.

Ruby pressed her lips to the velvet nose of the horse and then backed off an inch and opened her mouth wide and blew out a deep slow breath into its f.l.a.n.g.ed nostrils. The dispatch sent by such a gesture, she believed, concerned an understanding between them. What it said was that she and Ralph were of like minds on the issue at hand. You settled horses' thinking that way. They took it as a message to let down from their usual state of high nerves. You could calm white-eyed horses with such a companionable breath.

Ruby breathed again and then took Ralph by a handful of mane above his withers and pulled. He stepped out, pulling the sled, and when they got to the creek Ruby loosed him from his harness. She set him to grazing on clover that grew at the edge of the tree shade, and then she and Ada worked at laying out a zagging line of locust down the creek bank. When they got the time, they would lay three more lapped courses atop the snake to make the fence.

Ada had noticed that it was not always Ruby's way to start a job and finish it all at one time. She worked at things as they came up, taking them in order of urgency. If nothing was particularly urgent, Ruby did whatever could be done in the time at hand. Putting down the first row offence rails was chosen that morning because it could be done in the hour or so before Ruby went off to trade with Esco: apples for cabbages and turnips.

For the job of handling the heavy rails, Ada wore a pair of leather work gloves, but they had been made rough side to, and so when she was done her fingertips were about as raw as if she had gone bare-handed. She sat on the sled and felt for blisters and then rubbed her hands in the creek and dried them on her skirt.

They led the horse back to the barn and unharnessed him and started to bridle him in preparation for Ruby's trading trip. But Ruby stopped and stood looking at an old trap hanging from a peg on the barn wall. It was sized for beaver and groundhogs and like-bodied animals. Something the Blacks had left when they pulled out for Texas. Its jaws were nearly fused shut, and it had been there so long that rust streaks stained the siding below it.

-That's exactly the thing we need, she said. Might as well set it before I go.

They were concerned over the corncrib. A little bit of corn had been missing each morning for days.

After Ruby noticed the shortage, she had fitted the door with a hasp and lock and worked on the c.h.i.n.king where it had dried up and fallen away. But the next morning she found a new hole gouged out in the fresh mud between the crib logs. It was a s.p.a.ce plenty big enough for a hand or a squirrel, and maybe big enough for a small c.o.o.n or possum or groundhog. She had daubed mud into the hole twice, only to find it open again the next morning. Not much corn was stolen at a time, just barely enough to notice, but if the loss kept on it would soon amount to something worth worrying about.

So Ada and Ruby worked over the trap, scrubbing the rust with a wire brush and greasing its joints with lard. When they were done Ruby put her foot to it and sprung open the jaws. Then she touched 2004-3-6.

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the trip plate with a stick and the thing snapped shut so hard it jumped off the ground. They carried it to the crib and nestled it in among the corn just within reach of the hole. Ruby hammered the spike at the end of its chain as deep as it would go into the packed dirt of the floor. In case the pilferage was from man rather than beast, Ada urged wrapping the teeth of the trap with strips of sacking, which Ruby did, judging the padding carefully so as not to err too much in the direction of kindness.

When done, Ruby bridled Ralph and slung two big sacks of apples over his withers. She mounted and rode off bareback, and at the road she stopped and hollered to Ada to make herself useful by putting up a scarecrow in the winter garden. Then she touched her heels to the horse and trotted away.

It was with some relief that Ada watched Ruby round the bend. She now had the entire midday stretching before her with no more required than the pleasant and somehow childlike task of making a big doll.

A band of crows had been working in the winter garden, picking at the young plants in a sort of bored way, but even so, without some discouragement they would soon pick it clean. One crow had feathers missing from both trailing wing edges, identical square notches. It seemed to be the chief of the crows and was always the first to fly from field or limb. The rest were but followers. Notchwing was more vocal than the others and said every kind of crow word there was, from the sound of a dry hinge to the gabble of a duck being killed by a fox. Ada had been tracking its doings for weeks, and Ruby had once got so ill at it that she let off a precious barrel of shot in its direction, though at too great a range to do any good. So Ada took pleasure in imagining that her scarecrow would be a thing that Notchwing would have to include in its thinking.

With mixed feelings she said aloud, I am living a life now where I keep account of the doings of particular birds.

She went to the house. Upstairs she opened a trunk and took out an old pair of riding breeches and a maroon wool shirt of Monroe's. His beaver hat and a bright throat scarf. From them she might craft a fine and stylish scarecrow. But as she stood looking down at the folded clothes in her hands, all she could imagine was every day walking out and seeing the effigy of Monroe standing in the field.

From the porch at dusk it would be a dark figure watching. Her fear was that it would loom larger and more troubling in her mind than it would in the crows'.

Ada put the clothes back in the trunk and went to her room and riffled through drawers and wardrobes, and finally she decided on the mauve dress that she had worn the last night of the party on the Wando River. And she took out a French-made straw hat Monroe had bought her fifteen years earlier on their tour of Europe and now frizzing apart at the brim edge. Ruby, she knew, would object to the dress, not on grounds of sentiment but because the material could be put to better use.

Cut up, it could make pillow covers, quilt tops, antimaca.s.sars for chairbacks, any number of useful things. Ada, though, decided that if it was silk that was wanted, she had a number of other gowns that could as easily be put into service. This was the one she wanted to see standing in a field through rain and shine.

She carried the dress outside and then wired together a rood of bean poles as armature and planted it out in the center of the garden, beating it firm into the dirt with a hand sledge. She topped it with a head made by stuffing the end of a worn-out pillowcase with leaves and straw and daubing a grinning face on it with paint she stirred up from chimney soot and lamp oil. She put the dress over the poles and fleshed out the bodice with straw and gave the figure the straw hat for millinery. From the end of one arm she hung a small tin pail with a rust hole in its bottom. She went to the fencerow and broke off stems of goldenrod and aster and filled the pail with them.

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Cold Mountain, as if during a leisurely walk gathering flowers for a table arrangement she had been struck momentarily still by the beauty of the scene before her. The full skirts of the lavender dress swayed in the breeze, and all Ada could think was that after a year of weather it would become bleached to the color of an old shuck. Ada herself wore a fading print dress and a straw bonnet. She wondered if an observer standing off on Jonas Ridge and looking down into the cove would choose right if asked to pick the scarecrow from the two figures standing in the field.

She washed her hands at the basin on the kitchen porch and fixed herself a dinner of a few umber shavings from Esco's ham, cold biscuits left from breakfast, and a wedge of baked pumpkin from supper the evening before. She took her journal and her plate and went to the table under the pear tree. When she was done eating, she paged through the journal-past the sketch of the heron, studies of dogwood berries, cl.u.s.ters of sumac fruit, a pair of water striders-until she reached the first blank page, and on it she sketched the scarecrow and above it the notched wings of the crow. She wrote down the date, and an approximation of the time, and then the current phase of the moon. At the bottom of the page she put down the names of the flowers in the scarecrow's bucket, and in an unused corner of the page she sketched a detail of aster blossom.

Shortly after Ada was done, Ruby came walking up the road. She led the horse, six lumpy sacks of cabbages paired up and slung across his back. That was two sacks more than was fair, but Ruby had not been so proud as to deny Esco the impulse toward generosity. Ada went to the road. Ruby walked to her and stopped and reached in a skirt pocket and took out a letter.

-Here you go, she said. I stopped at the mill. In her tone was the conviction that any message conveyed other than by voice, face-to-face, was likely to be unwelcome. The letter was creased and wrinkled, dirty as an old work glove. It had been wet at some point in its journey and had dried puckered and stained. It lacked return address, but Ada knew the hand in which her own name was written. She pocketed the letter, not wanting to read it under Ruby's scrutiny.

Together they unloaded the sacks beside the smokehouse, and while Ruby put the horse away Ada went to the kitchen and made another plate the like of her own dinner. Then Ruby ate, talking all the while of cabbages and the many things they would make from them, which to Ada seemed few indeed-kraut, fried cabbage, boiled cabbage, stuffed cabbage, slaw.

When Ruby had eaten they went to the sacks. One they held back for making into sauerkraut when the signs came around right for it again. Do it otherwise and it might rot in the crocks. The rest they buried for the winter. It was to Ada an odd and troublingjob, digging the gravelike trench behind the smokehouse and lining it with straw and heaping the pale heads in and covering them with more straw and then dirt. When they were done mounding up the dirt, Ruby marked the place with a plank, beating at it with the heel of her shovel until it stood like a tombstone.

-There, Ruby said. That might save us having to scratch around in the snow come January.

All Ada could think was how grim it would be on some cloudy midwinter afternoon-wind blowing, bare trees heaving, the ground covered in a grey crust of old snow-to come out and dig into that barrow pit for a mere cabbage.

Late that afternoon they sat on the stone steps, Ada behind Ruby and a riser above her. Ruby leaned against Ada's shins and knees like they were the ladder to a chairback. Watching the sun fall. The blue shadow of Jonas Ridge advancing across the creek and then the pasture. Barn swallows in jittery and reckless flight. Ada stroked Ruby's dark hair with an English-made brush of boar bristles.

She worked until the hair was sleek and had the sheen of a new gunbarrel. She ran her fingers through it, parting it into seven sections, and each cord had its own heft and resistance in her hands.

She s.p.a.ced them across Ruby's shoulders and studied them.

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Ada and Ruby were having a hair contest. It had been Ada's idea, suggested to her from watching Ruby absentmindedly plait Ralph's tail in intricate patterns. Ruby would stand behind him, her thoughts elsewhere, eyes unfocused, fingers moving apparently without effort through the long tail hair. It seemed to a.s.sist in her thinking. And it would about put Ralph to sleep. He would stand with one hind hoof tipped and his eyelids flickering. Afterward, though, he went about with his backquarters slightly tucked under him, nervous and embarra.s.sed-looking, until one or the other of them went and undid his tail and brushed it out.

Ruby seemed so enviably dreamy during the making of the plaits that Ada imagined her as a lonely and abandoned child wandering the countryside to braid the tails of old solitary plow horses out of need for proximity to something live and warm. To touch it in a way both intimate and distant, not to lay a hand directly to its.life but to the beautiful and bloodless extrusion of it. In such spirit, Ada had proposed they vie to see who could compose the most intricate or beautiful or outlandish plait of the other's hair. It would make the compet.i.tion all the more interesting that neither would know what had been done with her own hair-only what she had done with the other's-until they went inside and stood with paired mirrors to examine the backs of their heads. The loser was to perform all the night work while the winner rocked on the porch and watched the sky darken and counted the stars as they appeared.

Ada's hair had already been finished. Ruby had worked for some time, pulling and twisting until it was yanked back tight at Ada's temples. She could feel its pull at her eye corners. She started to pat the back of her head, but Ruby reached and slapped her hand away to prevent any foreknowledge as to how the compet.i.tion stood.

Ada took the three tresses at the center of Ruby's back and made a simple pigtail. That was the easy part. With the remaining pieces she planned to build a complex overbraid, lapping and weaving in a herringbone pattern like a favorite raffia basket of hers. She took up two of the side pieces and began lacing them up.

Four crows, Notchwing in the lead, drifted down into the cove and then flared when they saw the new scarecrow. They flew away squealing like shot pigs.

Ruby called it a favorable comment on Ada's construction.

-That hat in particular's a fine touch, she said.

-It came from France, Ada said, -France? Ruby said. We've got hats here. A man up East Fork weaves straw hats and will swap them for b.u.t.ter and eggs. Hatter in town makes beaver and wool but generally wants money.

This business of carrying hats halfway around the world to sell made no sense to her. It marked a lack of seriousness in a person that they could think about such matters. There was not one thing in a place like France or New York or Charleston that Ruby wanted. And little she even needed that she couldn't make or grow or find on Cold Mountain. She held a deep distrust of travel, whether to Europe or anywhere else. Her view was that a world properly put together would yield inhabitants so suited to their lives in their a.s.signed place that they would have neither need nor wish to travel. No stagecoach or railway or steamship would be required; all such vehicles would sit idle. Folks would, out of utter contentment, choose to stay home since the failure to do so was patently the root of many ills, current and historic. In such a stable world as she envisioned, some might live many happy years hearing the bay of a distant neighbor's dog and yet never venture out far enough from their own fields to see whether the yawp was from hound or setter, plain or pied.

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imported hats would figure small. The braid was finished, and she looked on it with disappointment.

As with all her efforts toward art, it did not match up with her imagining of it. She thought it looked like a hemp lanyard twisted together by a mad or drunken sailor.

Ada and Ruby stood up from the steps and took turns touching each other's braids to smooth down stray hairs and tuck in loose pieces. They went to Ada's bedroom and backed up to the large mirror over the commode table and took a silver hand mirror and paired up the images. Ada's plait was simple and tight, and when she put her fingers to it she thought it felt like touching a chestnut limb.

You could work all day and it would not spring loose.

When it came Ruby's turn, she took a long time looking. She had never seen the back of her head before. She put her hand to her hair and touched it flat-palmed, patting it over and over. She declared it perfect and would hear of nothing but that Ada be judged victor.

They went back to the porch and Ruby went on into the yard, ready to get on with the night work.

But she stopped and stood looking around and then up at the sky. She touched the hair at her neck and at the crown of her head. Out from under the shade of the porch she could see that there was yet light enough to read a few pages from Midsummer Night's Dream, Midsummer Night's Dream, and she said as much. So they sat back on the steps and Ada read, glossing as she went, and when she got to a line of Robin's-where he says, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn -Ruby was immensely amused and said the words over and over as if they held a great deal of meaning and delight just in themselves. and she said as much. So they sat back on the steps and Ada read, glossing as she went, and when she got to a line of Robin's-where he says, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn -Ruby was immensely amused and said the words over and over as if they held a great deal of meaning and delight just in themselves.

The light soon fell too grey to read. A pair of bobwhites called their identical three-word messages back and forth from the field to the woods. Ruby rose and said, I better get on.