Cold Mountain Part 23

-Comes right down to cases, I'm about as unaffiliated as you are. My boy got shot to death at Sharpsburg and I've not give a pinch of s.h.i.t for neither side since.

-I attended the fight at Sharpsburg, Inman said.

The man stuck out his hand and said, Potts.

Inman shook his hand and said his own name.

-What was Sharpsburg like? Potts said.

-About like 'em all, but bigger than common. First they threw bombs among us and we among them. Then there was the charging and the shooting, grapeshot and musketball. Lots of boys died.

They stood for a time examining the nearby forest, and then Potts said, You look worn to a nub.

-Food's been scarce and I've been walking hard as I can, which has been slow.

-I'd give you something to eat if I had any handy, but I don't. They's a good gal down the road three or four mile that will feed you and ask no questions.

Rain fell slantwise and stinging on the wind. Inman wrapped himself in his ground cloth and walked on without slackening his pace. He looked cowled and robed as a pilgrim from days of yore, a dark monk out awander for the good of his soul, seeking remedy in walking from being fouled by contact with the world. Rain dripped off his nose and into his beard.

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Within the hour he reached the house Potts had described, a lonesome little one-room cabin of squared-off timbers set above the road at the mouth to a dank cove. The windows were greased paper. Thin brown smoke rose from the mud-and-stick chimney and then whipped away on the wind.

A hog shifted about in a pen up the hill. Roosting boxes for chickens in the corner between the house and chimney. Inman stepped up to the gate in the fence and yelled out his presence.

The rain had become mixed with spitting ice. His two face cheeks felt pinched together such that they seemed to touch on the inside of his empty mouth. While he waited he regarded a spicebush just on the other side of the fence, ice beginning to cling to the red berries. He yelled out again and a young woman, a girl really, cracked the door and stuck her brown head out and then pulled it back in again. He heard the clack of a latch to secure the door. Afraid with good cause, Inman thought.

He called out once more, this time adding that Potts had sent him for a meal. The door opened and the girl stepped out onto the porch.

-Why didn't you say so? she said.

She was a pretty thing, little and slim and tight-skinned. She was brown-headed and wore a cotton print dress which ill sorted with the bitter weather. Inman slipped the length of chain off the nail on the gatepost and walked up to the porch, unwrapping himself as he went. He shook the ground cloth out and draped it along the porch edge to drip. He took off the knapsack and haversack and set them on the porch in the dry. He stood there in the falling ice waiting.

-Well, come on up, she said.

-I'll pay for what I eat, Inman said. He stepped onto the porch next to the woman.

-I'm hard up but not that far gone that I have to take money for what little I can offer. There's a pone of corn bread and some beans is all.

She turned and walked into the house. Inman followed. The room was dark, lit by just the fire and the little brown light that came through the paper windows and fell on the scrubbed plank floor, but he could see that though it was bare as a barn the room was clean. There was spa.r.s.e furniture. A table, a pair of chairs, a cupboard, a rope bed.

Other than a quilt on the bed there was not a mark of ornament in the place. Not a picture of a loved one or of Jesus or even an ill.u.s.tration cut from a magazine on the wall, as if herein great strictures toward graven images held sway. Nor was there even a little figurine on the mantel or bow of ribbon tied to the hearth broom. The quilt alone stood as garnish to the eye. It was pieced together into no named pattern native to this country, not star flower or flying bird or churn dasher or poplar leaf, but was some entirely made-up bestiary or zodiac of half-visionary creatures. Its colors were the dim tones of red and green and yellow that can be drawn from bark and flower and nut hull. Otherwise there was not a speck of color but brown elsewhere in the cabin, except for the raw-skinned face of a recent baby that lay swaddled up tight in a cradle crafted rudely from pine sticks, the bark still on.

As he looked about the room, Inman was suddenly aware of his filth. In this clean, closed s.p.a.ce he found that his clothes threw a powerful reek from the gathered sweat of his long walking. His boots and pant legs were caked muddy to the shins, and he left tracks as he stepped. He considered taking the boots off but feared that his socks would stink like rotted meat. It had been some time since he had last gone unshod. The cabin was not an old one and still held a faint crisp smell of dressed timbers, chestnut and hickory, and Inman felt marked and at odds with their bouquet.

The woman pulled one of the chairs to the side of the fire and gestured for him to sit. In a minute a faint steam had begun to rise around him from his sodden clothes, and little puddles of muddy water 2004-3-6.

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had dripped from his cuffs onto the floorboards. He looked down at his feet and noted that a half circle of puncheon was scuffed and worn pale around the front of the hearth the way a dog on a rope will beat down the dirt at the perimeter of its range.

The pot of pinto beans swung by its bail on an iron rod to the side of the fire. A fresh round of corn bread rested in a Dutch oven on the hearth. The woman served him up a plate heaped high with beans and bread and a big peeled onion. She set a pail of spring water and a dipper down next to him.

-You can eat at the table or here. Its warmer here, she said.

Inman took the plate and a knife and spoon into his lap and fell to eating. A part of him wished to be polite, but it was overcome by some dog organ deep in his brain, and so he ate loudly and in gulps, pausing to chew only when absolutely necessary. He forewent slicing the onion and ate on it like an apple. He spooned the hot beans into his mouth and gnawed the wedges of greasy bread at such a rate that he alarmed even himself. The liquor of the beans dripped off his beard and onto the front of his filthy shirt. His breath came short and whistled in his nose from lack of regular breathing.

With some effort he slowed down his chewing. He drank a dipperful of the cold spring water. The woman had pulled the chair to the other side of the hearth and sat watching him as one would a boar feeding on carrion, that is to say with a certain measure of fascinated disgust.

-I'm sorry. I've not taken actual food in days. Just wild cress and creek water, he said.

-It's no need to be sorry, she said, in such an even tone that Inman could not interpret whether in that last word she had meant to absolve or admonish.

Inman looked at her closely for the first time. She was indeed just a pale slim girl here alone in this dark hollow where the sun never would shine bright for long. Her life so bare that she lacked b.u.t.tons, for he noted that the top of her dress was held to with a long briar from a c.o.c.kspur bush.

-How old are you? Inman said.

-Eighteen, she said.

-Name's Inman. Yours?

-Sara.

-How do you come to be here all alone?

-My man, John, went off for the fighting. He died awhile back. They killed him up in Virginia. He never saw his baby, and it's just us two now.

Inman sat silent for a minute, thinking that every man that died in that war on either side might just as soon have put a pistol against the soft of his palate and blown out the back of his head for all the meaning it had.

-Have you got any help here? he said.

-Not a lick.

-How do you make it?

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-I take a push plow and do what I can to lay me out a little patch of corn and a kitchen garden around the side of the hill apiece, though neither one didn't make much this year. I've got a tub mill to grind up the corn in. And there's a few chickens for the eggs. We had us a cow but the raiders came over the mountain and took it off back in the summer and burnt down what little shed of a barn there was and robbed the bee gums and took a hatchet and broke open a bluetick hound we had right out there on the porch to scare me. That big hog in the pen is mostly it for the winter. I've got to slaughter it soon and I dread it, because I've never killed hogs on my own yet.

-You'll need help, Inman said. She seemed such a slight thing to be butchering hogs.

-Needing and getting don't seem likely to match up anytime soon. All my family's dead now, and there's no neighbors around here I can ask but Potts, and he's no help at all when it comes to work.

What needs doing is mine to do.

She would be old in five years from such a load, and recognizing this Inman wished he had not set foot in this house, wished he had kept walking even if it meant falling by the wayside never to rise again. He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight till death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.

It was near dark outside now and the room was murky as a bear den except for the wedge of yellow light cast by the fire. The girl's legs were stretched out before her to the heat. She had on a thick pair of grey men's socks turned down at the ankles and her dress hem had risen so that he could see shining in the firelight fine gold hairs lying flat and soft against the skin at the sides of her narrow calves. So disordered was his mind from the past days' fasting that he thought to stroke it like the neck of a nervous horse one would seek to calm, for he could see etched in every angle of her body all the lineaments of despair.

-I could help, Inman discovered himself to be saying. It's some early, but this would pa.s.s for hog-killing weather.

-I couldn't ask it.

-You didn't ask it. I offered.

-I'd have to trade you something. I could clean and mend those clothes of yours. It's not like they don't need it. That big rent in the coat could use a wedge sewed over it. Meanwhile, you could put on clothes my man left. He was about as long as you are.

Inman bent and ate some more from the plate in his lap, and shortly he mopped up the last juice with a crust of corn bread and finished it off. Without asking, Sara spooned him up another pile of beans and forked out a wedge of bread. The baby commenced crying. While he worked on the second plate of food she went back into the dim of the room and unb.u.t.toned her dress near to the waist and nursed the baby sitting sideways on the bed to Inman.

He wished not to look but could nevertheless see the round side of her breast, full and luminous white in the grainy light. In awhile she pulled the baby off and a point of firelight caught on the end of her wet nipple.

When she returned to the hearth she carried a stack of folded clothes with a clean pair of good boots standing atop them. He handed her the empty plate and she put the clothes and boots in his lap.

-You can go out on the porch and put these on. And use this.

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She handed him water in a basin made from the bottom of a gourd, a chunk of grey soap, and a rag.

He stepped out into the night. There was a washboard at the end of the porch, and on the post above the board hung a little round mirror of polished metal going to rust. Young John's shaving place.

Fine ice still rattled on the dry leaves clinging yet to the black oaks, but at the open end of the hollow he could see breaking clouds scudding across the face of the moon behind them. Inman thought about the dog the raiders had killed on the porch, the girl watching. He stripped off in the cold, and the clothes he removed were like skinned pelts, wet and heavy and limp. He did not look in the mirror but scrubbed hard at himself with the soap and rag. He poured the remainder of the gourd water over his head and then he dressed. The dead man's clothes were a fair fit, soft and thin from much washing, and the boots fit like they were cut to his feet, though all in all he felt he had donned the husk of another life. When he reentered the cabin he felt as a ghost must, occupying the shape of the past to little effect. Sara had lit a tallow dip and was at the table washing dishes in a basin. The air around the light seemed thick. All the bright objects close to it appeared haloed. Everything in the shadows beyond it was extinguished completely, as if never to reappear. The curve of the girl's back as she bent over the table seemed to Inman a shape not to be duplicated in all the time stretched out before him. A thing to fix in mind and hold, so that should he become an old man the memory might be useful, not a remedy against time but nevertheless a consolation.

He sat again at the chair by the hearth. Soon the girl joined him, and they sat quiet, staring into the red fire. She looked up at him, her face an unreadable lovely blank.

-If I had a barn you could sleep there, she said. But I don't now.

-The corncrib will do fine.

She looked back into the fire as if to dismiss him, and Inman walked out onto the porch again and collected his packs and his sodden bedding and walked behind the house to the crib. The clouds were breaking in earnest and the near landscape was gathering and starting to form up under the light of the revealed moon. The air was chilling off toward a hard freeze.

Inman climbed into the crib and burrowed up with his blankets as best he could into the cobs. Up the cove an owl called out a number of times, the calls descending the scale. The hog stirred and snuffled and then fell silent.

Inman figured it to be a bleak and k.n.o.bby night of sleep coming on, but all-in-all favorable in contrast to stretching out on the bare ground. Bars of blue moonlight came in between the crib slats, and Inman could see to take the LeMat's from the haversack and check its ten loads and rub it down with the tail of the dead husband's shirt and set it to half c.o.c.k. He took out his knife and stropped its edge against the clean leather of a boot sole, and then he rolled up in the blankets to sleep.

But he had slept little before he was wakened by footsteps in the leaves. He reached and set his hand on the pistol, moving slowly so as not to rattle the cobs. The steps stopped a dozen feet from the crib.

-Come inside please, Sara said. And she turned and walked away.

Inman clambered out and stood and slid the pistol inside the waist of the pants and cast back his head to survey the narrow slot of sky. Orion was fully risen and seemed to bestride the close ridgelines at either side of the cove with the sure demeanor of one who knows his own mind and follows it. Inman walked on back to the house, and as he approached it he saw that the paper windows glowed like a j.a.panese lantern. Inside he found that the girl had fed the fire with hickory logs and it blazed high and the room was as bright and warm as it would ever be.

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shone in the light. Inman walked to the hearth and set the pistol up on a little shelf that served for mantel. The crib was drawn up near the fire and the baby slept facedown so that all that could be seen was a pale fuzzed orb arising from covers.

-You look like an outlaw with that big pistol, she said.

-I'm not sure there's a thing I am right now that you could set a name to.

-If I was to ask you to do something, would you do it?

Inman considered that he should frame an answer here on the order of Maybe, or If I can, or some like provisional phrase.

What he said was, Yes.

-If I was to ask you to come over here and lay in bed with me but not do a thing else, could you do it?

Inman looked at her there and wondered what she saw looking back. Some dread shape filling the clothes of her husband? A visitation of spirit half desired, half feared? His eyes rested on the quilt over her. Its squares depicted blocky beasts, big-eyed and little-legged, awkward but heraldic. They seemed patched together out of partial remembrances of dream animals. Their shoulders humped with muscle, feet bristling with spikes, howling mouths stretched wide and filled with long teeth.

-Could you? she said.

-Yes.

-I believed you could or I'd never have asked.

He went to the bed and drew off the boots and climbed under the quilts fully clothed and lay under the covers flat on his back. The tick over the rope was filled with fresh straw and smelled dry and autumnal and sweet, and underlying that was the smell of the girl herself, like a stand of wet laurels after their blooms have fallen to the ground.

They both kept as still as if a charged and c.o.c.ked shotgun rested there between them. And then in a few minutes Inman heard her crying great dry sobs.

-I'll go if that would be better, he said.

-Hush.

She cried on awhile and then stopped and sat up and wiped her eyes on the quilt corner and began talking about her husband. She required of Inman only that he bear witness to her tale. Every time he went to speak she said, Hush. There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life. She told the manner in which she and John had met and fallen in love. The building of this cabin and her working like a man beside him, felling the trees and raising the dressed logs and c.h.i.n.king the gaps. The happy life they had planned in this lost place which to Inman seemed so unlikely of sustenance. The hardness of the past four years, John's death, the shortness of food. The only bright spot was John's brief furlough, a time of great happiness which produced the baby sleeping by the fire. Without her, Sara said, there'd be nothing holding me to earth.

The final thing she said was, That will be a good hog out there. It fed on chestnut mast mainly, and I brought it in from the woods and gave it corn for the past two weeks so the lard will render out clear.

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It's so fat its eyes have about swole shut.