Cold Mountain Part 24

When she was done talking, she reached out and touched the scar at Inman's collar line, first with just her fingertips and then with her whole palm. She rested her hand there a moment and then she took it away. She rolled over with her back to him and soon her breathing became deep and regular.

He figured she had found some calm just in telling to another person what a lonely thin edge of life she occupied, where one hog could act as stopple to a demijohn of woes.

Worn as he was, Inman could not rest. While Sara slept he lay looking up, watching the light of the fire diminish on the underside of the roof as the logs burned away. A woman had not touched a hand to him with any degree of tenderness in so long that he had come to see himself as another kind of creature altogether from what he had been. It was his lot to bear the penalty of the unredeemed, that tenderness be forevermore denied him and that his life be marked down a dark mistake. And in his troubled mind and constant sorrow he did not even think it possible to reach a hand to Sara's hip and pull her to him and hold her close till daylight.

What little sleep he did get was troubled by dreams that emanated from the quilt top. The beasts of it chased after him in a dark wood, and there was not place one for sanctuary no matter where he turned. All the world of that dark realm gathered dire and intent against lone him, and everything about it was grey and black, but for teeth and claws as white as the moon.

When Inman awoke it was to Sara shaking his shoulder and saying urgently, Get up and get out.

It was just grey dawn and the cabin was freezing cold and there was the faint sound of horses on the road leading up to the house.

-Get, Sara said. Whether it's Home Guard or raiders, we're both better off if you're not here.

She ran to the back door and opened it. Inman jerked on the boots and took the LeMat's from the mantel and rushed out. He went at a dead run to the line of trees and brush beyond the spring. He plunged in and then, hidden from sight, he worked his way around until he found a thick stand of twisted laurel situated to give him a view of the front of the house. He crawled up in the darkness pooled under the laurel and sighted through a fork in a trunk to hide his face. The ground was frozen to a crunchy grit under him.

He could see Sara run barefoot across the frosted ground in her nightgown to the hog pen. She dropped the poles of the pen gate from their stanchions and tried to coax the hog out, but it would not rise. She walked into the muddy pen and kicked at the hog, and her feet when she raised them were black with mud and hog s.h.i.t where she had broken through the frozen crust to the muck. The hog rose and began to walk, but it was so immense and low slung that it could hardly step over the gate poles on the ground. It had just left the pen and begun to gain some momentum with Sara driving it toward the woods when there was a call from down at the road.

-Stop right there.

Bluejackets. Inman saw three of them on sorry horses. They dismounted and came through the front gate. Two of them carried Springfield rifles in the crooks of their left arms. The muzzles were aimed half at the ground but the men's fingers were inside the trigger guards. The other man held a Navy revolver pointed up as if he aimed to shoot down a high bird, but his eyes were aimed straight at Sara.

The man with the pistol went to her and told her to sit on the ground and she did. The hog reclined on the ground beside her. The two with rifles climbed onto the porch and entered the house, one covering the other as he opened the door and stepped in. They were inside awhile and all that time 2004-3-6.

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the man with the pistol stood over Sara without looking at her or speaking to her. From the house came sounds of clash and breakage. When the two inside reappeared, one of them carried the baby by a fold in its swaddling as one would carry a satchel. It cried out and Sara half rose to go to it and the man with the pistol shoved her back to the frozen ground.

The three Federals convened in the yard, but Inman could not make out what they were saying over the sound of the baby and of Sara pleading with them to give her the child. He could hear their accents though, flat and quick as hammer blows, and they brought up in him the urge to strike back hard. He was, however, beyond reliable range for the LeMat's, and even if he were not, he could think of no plan of attack that would result in anything but death for Sara and the baby and himself.

Then he could hear that they were asking her about money, where she had it hidden. That's their nourishment, Inman thought. Sara said what could only have been the truth, that all she had of worldly goods was the little they could see. They asked again and again and then they led her to the porch and Pistol held her hands behind her while one of the riflemen went to the horses and took straps that looked to be pieces of old plow line from a canvas saddlebag. Pistol tied her to a post with the straps and then just pointed a finger at the baby. One of the men unswaddled the baby and set it out on the frozen ground. Inman could hear the man with the pistol say, We have all day, and then he could hear Sara scream.

The men sat on the porch edge and dangled their feet and talked among themselves. They made cigarettes and smoked them to spittled nubs. The two underlings went to the horses and came back with sabers, and they went about the yard prodding into the cold ground hoping to hit treasure. They went about it for some time. The baby screaming and Sara pleading. Then the one with the pistol arose from his seat on the porch edge and walked to Sara and stuck the barrel of the pistol to the fork of her legs and said, You really don't have s.h.i.t, do you? The other two came and stood close by, watching.

Inman began moving back through the woods to put the house between him and the porch so that when he came at them he could at least shoot one as he came around the corner before they saw him.

It was a poor plan, but it was all he had, given the open ground he had to cross to get at them. He had no thought other than that he and the woman and the baby would likely all be killed, but he could see no other way out of this.

Before he moved far, though, the men stepped away from Sara. Inman stopped and watched, hoping for some advantageous realignment of forces. Pistol went to his horse and got a length of rope and walked over to the hog and tied it on to its neck. One of the riflemen unhitched Sara from the post and the other went to the baby and hoisted it by an arm and thrust it out to her. They began chasing about the yard gathering up chickens. They caught three hens and tied their legs with twine and hung them upside down behind their saddles.

Sara held the baby to her. When she saw Pistol leading the hog off she yelled out, That hog's all I've got. You take it and you might as well knock both of us in the head and kill us now, for it will all come out the same. But the men mounted up and headed back down the road, Pistol leading the hog, which trotted along effortfully at the end of the rope. They turned a curve and were gone.

Inman ran down to the porch and looked up to Sara. He said, Warm your baby up and then build you a fire just as high as your head and put on a cauldron of water to boil. And then he jogged off down the road.

He trailed the Federals, sticking to the margins of the woods and wondering what it was he intended to do. All he could hope was that something would present itself.

They did not go long, about two or three miles, until they pulled off the road into a swale at the 2004-3-6.

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mouth to a ragged little cove. They went up it a ways and tied the hog to a locust sapling and set about building a fire close up to a rock ledge near a swift creek. Inman reckoned their aim was to camp there for the night and eat until they were full, even if that meant cutting the hams off the hog.

Inman circled through the woods until he was above them at the top of the ledge. He hid in the rocks and watched them wring the necks of two of the chickens and pluck and gut them and put them on spits of green limbs above the fire.

They sat with their backs to the rock and watched the chickens cook. Inman could hear that they were talking of home and it came out that the two were from Philadelphia and the one with the pistol was from New York City. They spoke of how they missed home and how they wished they were there, and Inman wished they were there too, for he was not anxious to do what he was about to try to do.

He moved a fair way along the top of the ledge, going quiet and slow, until it declined into the common level of the ground. Near the edge of the rock outcropping he found a shallow cave and stuck his head in to find that it went only ten feet deep into the rock. It had long ago sheltered c.o.o.n hunters or the like, for there was an old black fire ring at the mouth. The cave had also sheltered other men even earlier on. Their sign was scribbled on the walls of the cave, odd angular marks from some lost pattern of writing. None alive now could look on it and tell alpha from zed. Other marks depicted beasts long departed from this earth or never here, mere figment residents of brainpans long since empty as an old gourd.

Inman left the cave and kept circling the ledge until he could approach the encampment walking downhill along the stream through the gorge. Just out of eyesight of the men, he found a big hemlock with low-growing limbs, and he climbed up about ten feet into it and stood tall on the limb right up against the dark trunk like he had seen long-eared owls do when they're laying up in the daytime and seeking to stay hid. Three times he gobbled out the call of a wild turkey and then he waited.

He could hear the men talking, but he could not tell what they were saying. In just a minute Pistol came easing along with the Navy revolver out in front of him. He walked right under the tree and stopped. Inman was looking down on his hat crown. Pistol stuck his revolver under his armpit and took the hat off and ran his hand through his hair. He was going bald at the back of his head. There was a white spot of scalp the size of a poker chip and Inman took aim at it.

He said, Hey.

Pistol looked up and Inman shot down on him at such an angle that he missed the bald spot. The bullet entered at the shoulder near the neck and erupted from the stomach in a bright outpouring that resembled violent vomiting. The man fell to the ground as if the bones in his legs had suddenly liquified. He tried to pull himself along the ground with his arms, but earth seemed to elude his grasp. He rolled and looked above him to see what make of predator had fallen on him with such weight. When their eyes met, Inman put two fingers to his hat brim in greeting, and then the man died in an att.i.tude of deep confusion.

-Did you hit it? one of the riflemen called out from down the hill.

After that it was fairly simple. Inman descended from the tree and retraced his steps, making a quick flanking movement back up and around the long rock outcropping so that this time he approached the camp coming up the creek. He stopped at a thicket of rhododendron and waited.

The two riflemen by the fire called out to the dead man over and over, and Inman discovered that his name had been Eben. The men eventually gave up calling and took up their Springfields and headed upstream to find him. Inman followed them, screened by trees, until they came upon Eben. They stood for a time at a distance from the partially disa.s.sembled body and talked over what they ought 2004-3-6.

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to do. In their voices it was clear that their true wish was to forget what lay before them and turn and go home. But they decided to do what Inman knew they would, go on upstream looking for the killer, which they could not imagine as having done other than fled.

Inman followed behind, stalking them up the cove. They moved along among the big tight-s.p.a.ced trees near the creek bank, fearful of straying far from it lest they lose their way. They were city boys wary of woods and thoughtful in the face of the killing they a.s.sumed they were getting ready to do.

This was to them a trackless wilderness, and they entered it with great timidity, yet to Inman they seemed like men walking up a thoroughfare. They made show of looking for sign of the killer's pa.s.sage, but anything short of a big deep footprint in mud was lost on them.

Inman drew nearer and nearer to them, and when he shot them with the LeMat's, he was so near he might have reached out and touched them at their collars with his hand. The first one took a bullet near the point where his spine met his skull and the ball carried away most of his forehead on its path out. He fell, needless to say, in a heap. The other, Inman caught half turning, at about the armpit.

Mortal damage was not done, much to Inman's dismay. The man fell to his knees, gripping his rifle before him.

-If you'd stayed home this would not have come to pa.s.s, Inman said. The man tried to swing the long Springfield around to bear on Inman, but Inman shot out the man's chest at such close range that the muzzle flash set his jacket breast on fire.

The Philadelphians had fallen not far above the cave, so Inman dragged them into it and sat them up together. He went back and got the Springfields and propped them against the wall beside the men, and then he walked down the gorge. Under the hemlock he found that the remaining hen had gotten free and had its head immersed in the broken open belly of Eben the New Yorker. It pecked at the colorful flesh pulp of his exploded guts.

Inman fished in the man's pockets for cigarette makings and then squatted on the ground and watched the hen work. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it down and rubbed out the fire of it on a boot heel. He was reminded of a sacred song usually done counterpoint, but he hummed a little of it to himself and thought the words. They were these: The fear of the grave is removed forever. When I die I'll live again. My soul will rejoice by the crystal river. When I die I'll live again. Hallelujah I'll live again. crystal river. When I die I'll live again. Hallelujah I'll live again.

Inman decided to view what was before him in this context: next to the field in front of the sunken road at Fredericksburg or the acc.u.mulated mess at the bottom of the crater, this was near nothing. At either place he had probably killed any number of men more satisfactory in all their attributes than this Eben. Nevertheless, he figured this might be a story he would never tell.

He rose and grabbed the chicken by the feet and pulled it from out the New Yorker and took it over to the creek and sloshed it in the water until it was white again. He tied its feet with a piece of the Federals' twine and set it on the ground. It twisted its head about and regarded the world through its black eyes with what struck Inman as a new level of interest and enthusiasm.

He dragged the New Yorker by his feet to the cave and sat him up inside with his companions. The cave was little enough that the men sat almost in a circle. They looked stunned and perplexed, and in their demeanor they seemed like drunks about to play a hand of cards. From the expressions on their faces, death seemed to have settled in on them much like melancholy, a sinking of the spirits. Inman took a stick of charcoal from the old fire at the cave mouth and sketched on the cave wall depictions of Sara's quilt beasts that had pursued him through the dream world of the night before. In all their angularity they reminded him of how frail the human body is against all that is sharp and hard. His pictures fit in like near kin with the antique scratchings already put there by Cherokee or whatever 2004-3-6.

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kind of person came before them.

Inman returned to the clearing and checked the horses and saw that they had army brands, which saddened him. He untacked them and made three trips to the cave, hauling the Federals' gear to rest with them, all but for one haversack. Into it he placed the two cooked chickens. He led the horses up the cove far beyond the cave and then shot them in the heads. It was not a happy thing to do, but marked as they were there was no other way that would not threaten to fly back at him or Sara. At the camp again, he put the live chicken into the haversack with the cooked chickens and slung it over his shoulder. He untied the hog and pulled at its rope, and then he left that place behind him.

When he returned to the cabin, Sara had a strong fire going in the yard. Over it, a black cauldron of water boiled up a cloud of steam into the crisp air. She had washed his clothes and they were spread on bushes to dry. Inman tipped back his head to the sun and saw that it was yet morning though it did not seem possible to him that it could still be such.

They made an early lunch of the cooked chickens and set to work. Within two hours the hog-killed, scalded, and sc.r.a.ped of its hair-was hanging pale from a big tree limb by a gambrel stick run through the tendons of its hind feet. Its various organs and fluids steamed in tubs on the ground. The girl was working at a lard tub. She held up a sheet of caul fat and looked through it as if it were a lace shawl, and then she wadded it up and put it in the tub for rendering. Inman part.i.tioned up the carca.s.s with a hatchet. He chopped down on both sides of the spine until the hog fell into two sides of meat, which he then further divided along the joints into the natural categories of pork.

They worked into near dark, rendering all the fat into lard, washing out the intestines for chittlings, grinding and canning the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and sc.r.a.ps into sausage, salting down the hams and middling meat, soaking the blood out of the head to ready it for making souse.

They washed up and went inside, and Sara began on supper while Inman snacked on a plate of cracklings that she had intended to add to the corn bread. Since they wouldn't keep, she cooked up a kind of stew of the liver and lights, spiced with much onion and hot pepper. They ate and then stopped and rested. Then they ate again.

After dinner Sara said, I believe you'd look some better if you shaved down.

-If you've a razor I'll give it a try, Inman said.

She went to the trunk and dug around and came back with a razor and a heavy strop of oiled leather.

She set them in Inman's lap.

-That was John's too, she said.

She dippered enough water for a shave out of the water piggin into a black pot and set it to heat over the fire. When the water started steaming she poured it into the small gourd basin. She lit a candle in a tin holder, and Inman carried all of it out and spread it on the washboard at the end of the porch.

Inman stropped the razor and wet his beard. He held the razor up and took note of a brown smear of blood on the cuff of John's shirt. Man or hog, one. He looked in the metal mirror, put the razor's edge to his face, and went to work in the flickery light of the candle flame.

He had not gone beardless since the second year of the war, and he was mixed in his feelings about seeing what he looked like after all that time. He sc.r.a.ped at the hair until the razor dulled and then he restropped. He did not like looking on himself long enough for shaving, was one reason why he quit.

That and the hardness of keeping track of a razor and making hot water during the past two years.

Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.

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The job at hand took some time, but eventually his face was bared. The mirror had gone to rust in scattered brown patches, and as Inman regarded himself in it, his pale face appeared scabbed over with crusty wounds. The eyes that looked back had a slit and sideling quality that he did not remember. A pinched and hollow cast to the features that was more than just food hunger.

What's looking out from there now is all different from her boy husband, Inman thought. Some killer visage lodged in the place where once young John looked out. What would be the reaction if you sat by a fire in winter and looked up to a black window and saw that face staring back? he wondered.

What seizure or spasm would it set off?

It was to Inman's credit, though, that he tried to believe such a face was not him in any true way and that it could in time be altered for the better.

When he went back in, Sara smiled at him and said, You look part human now.

They sat and looked at the fire and Sara rocked the baby in her arms. It had a croupy cough. Inman figured there was little reason to expect it to come out the other side of winter alive. It fretted in Sara's arms and would not sleep and so she sang it a song.

She sang as if shamed by her own sounds, by the way her life voiced itself aloud. As she began, it seemed that a blockage had set up in her throat. And so the chant that escaped her did so with much effort. The force of air from her chest needed somewhere to go, but finding the jaw set firm and jutted and the mouth clenched against music, it took the far way out and reached expression in high nasal tones that hurt to hear in their loneliness.

The singing carried shrill into the twilight and its tones spoke of despair, resentment, an undertone of panic. Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed. It was like watching a bitter fight carried to a costly draw. The sound of her was that of a woman of the previous century living on in the present, that old and weary. Sara was such a child to sound that way. Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman. The effect was eerie, troubling. You'd have thought the baby would cry out in distress to hear its mother in such a state, but it did not. It fell asleep in her arms as to a lullaby.

The words to the song, though, were no lullaby. They linked up to make a horrible story, a murder ballad called Fair Margaret and Sweet William. It was an old song, but Inman had not heard it before. The lines were these: / dreamed that my bower was full of red swine, And my bride bed full of blood. dreamed that my bower was full of red swine, And my bride bed full of blood.

When that one was done she started in on Wayfaring Stranger, at first just humming it and tapping her foot. When she eventually pitched in singing, it bore little kin to music but was more like some pinched declamation of spirit sickness, a squeal of barren lonesomeness as pure and undiluted as the pain following a sharp blow to the nose. When she finished, there was a long silence broken only by the sound of an owl calling in the dark woods, fit conclusion to songs so burdened with themes of death and solitude and carrying more than a hint of the specter world.

Sara's offering of such music might have seemed to give no hope of consolation, either to the baby or, especially, to Inman. How unlikely that such a severe gift might yield a reduction of sadness when it was itself so bleak. Yet such proved to be the case, for though they talked but little the rest of the evening, they sat side by side in front of the fire, tired from the business of living, content and resting and happy, and later they again lay in bed together.

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The next morning before he set out onto the road, Inman ate the brains of the hog, parboiled and scrambled up with an egg from the hen that had been eating on the raider from New York.

a satisfied mind Ada and Ruby spent much of the autumn working with apples. Apples had come in heavy and had to be picked, peeled, sliced, and juiced: pleasant clean work, out among the trees handling the fruit. The sky for much of the time was cloudless blue, the air dry. The light, even at midday, brittle and raking, so that by angle alone it told of the year's waning. In the mornings they went carrying ladders when the dew still stood in the orchard gra.s.s. They'd climb among the tree limbs to fill sacks with apples, the ladders swaying as the limbs they were propped against gave under their weight. When all the sacks were full, they would bring the horse and sled to the orchard, haul them in, empty them and begin again.

It was work that was just moderately tiring and, unlike the haying, produced only a peaceful still picture in Ada's mind as she lay in bed at night: a red or yellow apple hanging from a drooping limb, behind it deep blue sky, her hand palm up, reaching out to the apple but not touching it.

For a long time Ada and Ruby ate apples at every meal, fried and stewed and pied and sauced. They dried rings of them into little sc.r.a.ps of apple leather, which they stored in cloth bags and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. One day they built a fire in the yard and made a black kettle of apple b.u.t.ter so big that when they stood over it and stirred the apple mash with spurtles, the scene put Ada in mind of the witches in Macbeth Macbeth working at their brew. The apple b.u.t.ter had come out thick, the color of old harness from spice and brown sugar, and they sealed enough of it in crocks to eat on for a year. They pressed cider from rusty culls and fallen apples, and they fed the pomace to the hogs, for Ruby said it would make the meat sweet. working at their brew. The apple b.u.t.ter had come out thick, the color of old harness from spice and brown sugar, and they sealed enough of it in crocks to eat on for a year. They pressed cider from rusty culls and fallen apples, and they fed the pomace to the hogs, for Ruby said it would make the meat sweet.

The cider had hardened up enough by now to be worth something, and for that reason Ruby went out one afternoon on a trading mission. She had heard that an Adams man down the river had killed a beef, and she had gone off with two jugs of cider to see how much meat they might bring. She left Ada with two tasks. Burn the brush that had resulted from their earlier clearing a portion of the neglected lower field. And, using the method Ruby had taught her, split the six rounds of an old black-oak log they had discovered already cut into lengths out in the tall gra.s.s at the field edge. It would be a good initiation into timber work, for they would soon need to go up on the mountain and cut a hickory or an oak, limb it, and let the horse drag it home with a J-grab to be sectioned and split.

Ada had wondered if they had the strength for such work, but Ruby argued in detail that it did not necessarily require pure power. Just pacing, patience, rhythm. Pull the saw and release. Wait for the one at the other end of the saw to draw it away and then pull again. Avoid binding up. The main thing, Ruby said, was not to get ahead of yourself. Go at a rhythm that could be sustained on and on.

Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do again tomorrow. No more, and no less.

Ada watched Ruby go down the road and decided to split the logs first and enjoy the fire in the cool of afternoon. She walked from the garden to the toolshed and got a maul and a wedge and carried them to the lower field and stamped out a circle in the waist-high gra.s.s around the oak logs to make working room. The logs lay on their sides and were better than two feet across the cut ends. The wood was grey, for they had been lying forgotten since the tree was felled two or three years earlier by the hired man. Ruby had warned that the dry logs would not want to split easily as when fresh and wet.

Ada upended the big cylinders of wood, feeling the way they clung to the ground, and when she got them upright she found shiny black stag beetles the size of her thumb burrowing in the rotting bark.

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working it with the wedge. Moving slow, not straining, just lifting the seven-pound maul and letting it fall so that weight and gravity and the magic of angle combined to disa.s.semble the log. She liked driving the wedge in halfway and then stopping to listen for the ripped-cloth sound of the crack as it kept opening for several seconds after the last blow. The work was calm despite all the pounding.

The stubborn coherence of the wood and the weight of the maul imposed a slow rhythm to the task.

In not much over an hour Ada had split everything but one difficult section where big limbs had once attached to the trunk and confused the grain. From each section she had split eight good-sized pieces of firewood and she reckoned there were forty pieces lying in a jumble on the ground ready to be hauled to the house and burned. She felt a great sense of accomplishment until she realized that the wood would only serve for four, maybe five, days of fire. She started to calculate the approximate number of pieces they would need for the whole winter, but she soon stopped for the figure would be dauntingly high.

Ada's dress was soaked through across the shoulders and back with sweat, and her hair was wet against her neck. So she went to the house and drank two dippers of water from the spring and took off her hat and poured two more over her hair and then twisted the water out of it. She wet her face and rubbed it with her hands and then dried it on her dress sleeve. She went in and got her lap desk and notebook and came out to sit in the sun on the porch edge until she dried.

Ada dipped her pen in ink and started a letter to her cousin Lucy in Charleston. For a time there was hardly a sound but the scritch of nib on paper as she wrote.

I suspect, were we to meet on Market Street, you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to. want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to.