Cold Mountain Part 26

-Eat roots, Ruby said. Drink muddy water. Sleep in a hollow log.

-Have you not got more feeling than that for your daddy? Stobrod said.

-I'm just offering instruction in woodcraft. It comes from experience. I've dined on many a root when you were off roundering. Slept in worse places than hollow logs.

-You know I did my best toward you. Times was hard.

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-Not hard as now. And don't go telling you did your best. You didn't do a thing at all other than what suited you. And I'll not stand you letting on we're much to each other. I never was anything to you. You came and went and I could have been there or not when you got back. It didn't much matter one way or the other. If I had died on the mountain, you might have wondered a week or two would I show up. Like one c.o.o.n dog of a many-numbered pack missing when the horn blows and dawn comes. Just that much regret and no more. So don't expect me to go jumping now when you call.

-But I'm an old man, Stobrod said.

-You told me you're not yet fifty.

-I feel old.

-So do I, for what that's worth. And there's this. If what's told about Teague is counted as even half true, we have plenty to worry about harboring you. This is not my place. It's not my say. But if it was, I'd say no.

They both looked to Ada. She sat with her shawl about her and her hands caught up in the skirts between her knees to keep warm. She could see in their faces that they looked to her as arbiter, maybe for reasons of landownership or education or culture. And though she did have a certain dominion over the immediate land, she found herself uncomfortable in the role of master. All she could think was that Ruby's father had come back from something like the dead, and that it was a second chance which few are granted.

She said, There is the view that he is your father and that at some point it becomes your duty to take care of him.

-Amen, Stobrod said.

Ruby shook her head. We've got two differing ideas of father then, she said. I'll tell you something about it from my view. I don't know how old I was except that I was still cutting teeth. He took off stilling.

She turned to Stobrod and said, Do you even remember? You and Poozler and Cold Mountain? That strike a chord?

-I remember, Stobrod said.

-Well, tell your part of it, Ruby said.

So Stobrod told his story. He and a partner had taken the notion of making liquor for profit, and they went off and lived in bark lean-tos on the mountain. Ruby had seemed to him on her own sufficient, so he had left her for three months when she was not yet eight. He and Poozler were not craftsmen of the liquor trade. They ran quick little batches that would hardly fill a teapot, and they found it was too much bother putting washed fire coals in the singlings to filter it, and so nearly every run dripped out either cloudy green or cloudy yellow. But it was strong. They'd not temper it down past about three quarters straight alcohol. It differed only in minor particulars from the usquebaugh and poteen of their Celt forebears. Many customers, though, found it overly exhilarating to the bowels. Business withered away and they made no money, for after they had poured off what they required for their own needs, the remainder of the liquor was only enough to trade for the next batch of makings.

Stobrod had stayed until the poor economy of the venture and the cold weather of November drove him off the mountain.

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When he finished Ruby told her part, what she had done during those months while he was gone.

She foraged for wild food. Grubbed for roots, caught fish in traps she twisted together out of willow boughs, took birds in snares of similar make. She ate whatever bird she caught with little discrimination other than to avoid fish eaters when possible and carrion eaters always. Learned only by trial and error what of their internalments were to be eaten and what not. One memorable week she had been luckless in her trapping and ate only chestnuts and hickory nuts ground into meal and baked to a crumbly pone on a piece of fireside slate. One day out gathering nuts, Ruby had come upon the still. Stobrod was sleeping under a lean-to and his partner said, He just lays up in bed all day. Only thing that tells you he's not dead is now and then he works his toes. She'd have gladly, at that moment and at several since, have swapped her lot with any wolf child. In Ruby's opinion, Romulus and Remus that Ada had read her about were lucky boys, for they at least had a fierce guardian.

Despite such hard and lonesome times, though, Ruby did in fairness have to say this for Stobrod: he had never laid a hand to her in anger. She could not remember ever being struck. Then again, he had never even patted her head or put his hand to her cheek in a moment of kindness.

She looked at Ada and said, There. Square that with your notion of duty.

Before Ada could formulate a complete thought or even just say Oh, my, Ruby rose and stalked off into the darkness.

Stobrod said nothing, and Pangle said softly, as if to himself, She's got her drawers in a wad now.

Sometime later, having sent Stobrod and Pangle away with only vague hopes of compromise, Ada walked up the path to the outhouse. The night was turning much colder, and she guessed there would be frost by dawn. The moon, full and high, threw such light that every tree limb cast a blue shadow.

Had Ada wished, she could have pulled Adam Bede Adam Bede from her pocket and opened it to the moon and read. Only the brightest stars shone out against the grey sky. Surveying them, Ada noted Orion climbing in the east, and then she saw that the moon was missing a part. A thin scoop was cut from out it. Eclipse was what it was. from her pocket and opened it to the moon and read. Only the brightest stars shone out against the grey sky. Surveying them, Ada noted Orion climbing in the east, and then she saw that the moon was missing a part. A thin scoop was cut from out it. Eclipse was what it was.

She went back in the house and got three quilts and Monroe's spygla.s.s. It was Italian and pretty to look at, with much scrollwork cut into the bra.s.s, though not so fine in its optics as those the Germans made. She went to the shed and got a campaign chair, wondering as she drew one from the stack of four if it was the chair in which Monroe had died. She unfolded it in the front yard and wrapped up close in the quilts and stretched out with her face tipped up to the heavens. She looked through the gla.s.s, twisting it into focus. The moon snapped sharp in her eye, the shadowed edge copper but still clearly visible. One crater at the top with a mountain at its center.

Ada watched the progress of the shadow as it marched across the bright face, and even when the eclipse was complete, the moon was still slightly visible, the color of an old cent brownie and to all appearances just about that big. With the moon all but gone, the Milky Way shone out, a river of light across the sky, a band like blown road dust. Ada ran the gla.s.s across it and stopped and peered into the deep of it. Through the gla.s.s the stars multiplied into tangled thickets of light and seemed to go on and on until she began to feel that she lay poised and exposed at the edge of a gorge. As if she were looking down, not up, hanging at the bottom limb of her planet's radius. For a moment she spun into the kind of vertigo she had felt at Esco's well lip, as if she might become unstuck and fall helpless into those thorns of light.

She opened her other eye and put aside the spygla.s.s. The dark walls of Black Cove rose up and held her fixed in a cup of land, and she lay content and watched the sky as the moon gradually emerged from the earth's shadow. She thought about the refrain of a tune Stobrod had sung that night, a ragged love song. Its ultimate line was: Come back to me is my request. Stobrod could not have 2004-3-6.

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uttered it with more conviction had it been one of the profounder lines of Endymion. Endymion. Ada had to admit that, at least now and again, just saying what your heart felt, straight and simple and unguarded, could be more useful than four thousand lines of John Keats. She had never been able to do it in her whole life, but she thought she would like to learn how. Ada had to admit that, at least now and again, just saying what your heart felt, straight and simple and unguarded, could be more useful than four thousand lines of John Keats. She had never been able to do it in her whole life, but she thought she would like to learn how.

She went in the house and got her lap desk and a candle lantern and came back to the chair. She inked her pen and then sat and stared at the paper until her nib dried out. Every phrase she thought of seemed nothing but pose and irony. She wiped the pen clean on a blotter and dipped again and wrote, Come back to me is my request. She signed her name and folded the paper and addressed it to the hospital in the capital. She wrapped up tight in the quilts and soon she was asleep and frost fell on her and the outer quilt became crisp with rime.

a vow to bear Inman walked through mountain country and kept to trails and saw few people. He measured out distance in portions of a day. A full day's walk. Half a day. Less than half a day. Anything shorter than that was just a little piece down the road. Miles and hours became concepts he disdained since he had not the means to measure either.

He was held back in his travels after he came upon a little-sized woman sitting humped up on a fence rail crying for her dead girl. The woman's bonnet hood shaded her face so all Inman could see was black but the tip of her nose. When she turned her face up to Inman, though, the tears dripping from her jawbones sparkled in the morning light. She held her mouth slitted open in anguish so that in Inman's mind it resembled the sputcheon to a sword scabbard. The sun was not up good yet and she was about to have to bury her child wound up in an old quilt, for she had no idea of how to make a box.

Inman offered his help and spent the day in her backyard, knocking together a little casket from boards pulled off an ancient curing house. They smelled of hog fat and hickory smoke, and the inside faces of the boards were black and glossy from many years of making hams. From time to time the woman came to the back door to check his progress and each time she said, My girl's bowels was loose as stove ash for two weeks before she died.

When Inman was done with the carpentry he layered the bottom of the box with dry pine needles. He went into the house and got the girl, who lay on a downstairs bed, cased in the quilt. He lifted her, and she was a hard, tight bundle like a pod or gall. He carried her through the back door and the mother sat at the kitchen table and looked at him out of blank eyes. He unwrapped the quilt and set the girl on the coffin lid and tried not to let his mind dwell on her pinched grey cheeks and keen nose. He cut the quilt with his knife and tacked it into the casket for lining, and then he lifted up the girl and settled her in the box and picked up the hammer and went to the door.

-I'd better nail it to, he said.

The woman came out and kissed the girl on each caved cheek and on her forehead, then she sat on the porch edge and watched Inman hammer the lid tight.

They buried her on a nearby knoll where lay four old graves, marked with scratched flats of river shale. The first three were infants, birth dates lacking a month of being a year apart. Death dates falling mere days after birth. The fourth grave was the mother, and Inman noted she had died on the birth date of the last child. He did quick sums in his head and saw that she lived only to twenty.

Inman dug the hole for the new grave at the end of the little row of stones, and when he was done he said, Do you want to say something?

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-No, the woman said. Every word in me would come out bitter.

By the time Inman refilled the hole, dark was coming on. He and the woman went back to the house.

She said, I ought to feed you, but I haven't got it in me to even light a fire, much less cook a meal.

She went inside and came back with provisions. Two little cloth bundles, one of corn grits and the other of flour. A chunk of lard tied in paper dark with grease, a brown piece of smoke-cured hog neckbone, some parched corn, about a cup of soup beans twisted in a square of paper, a leek and a turnip and three carrots, a bar of lye soap. Inman took them and thanked the woman and turned to walk away. But before he reached the fence gate the woman called to him.

-I can't ever look back on this day with a still mind if I let you go without cooking for you, she said.

Inman kindled up a fire, and the woman sat on a low hearthstool and fried him a great beefsteak from a neighbor's heifer that had mired in a slough and died before anyone noticed it missing. The woman filled a brown crockery plate with yellow corn grits cooked thin so they ran to the edges. The steak cupped up in the frying like a hand held out for change, and she put it atop the grits with the cupped side down and then mounted a pair of fried eggs atop the dome of meat. As final garnish she scooped a plug of b.u.t.ter as big as a squirrel's head onto the eggs.

When she set it on the table in front of Inman, he looked down on the plate and nearly cried as he watched the b.u.t.ter melt across the egg yolks and the whites and the brown meat and the yellow grits until the whole plate glistered in the taper light. He sat with knife and fork fisted up before him, but he could not eat. The food seemed to require some special thanks to be returned, and he could not find the words. Outside in the dark a bobwhite called and waited for an answer and then called again, and a small wind rose and there was a momentary rain that rattled the leaves and the roof shakes and then it stopped.

-This meal needs blessing, Inman said.

-Say one, then, the woman said.

Inman thought a minute and said, I can't call one up.

-For what I am about to receive, I am thankful. That's one, she said.

Inman said her words, trying them on for fit. Then he said, You don't know how long it's been.

As he ate, the woman took a picture from a shelf and studied it.

-We had our likeness made one time, she said. Man traveling in a wagon with all his picture tackle.

I'm the one survivor now.

She wiped the dust from it on her sleeve and then reached out the little framed artifact for Inman to admire.

Inman took it and tipped it to the candle. A daguerreotype. There was a father, the woman some years younger, an old granny, six children ranging from boys old enough to wear brimmed hats to bonneted babies. All the members wore black and sat with hunched shoulders and all looked either suspicious or stunned, as if report of their deaths had just reached them.

-I'm sorry, Inman said.

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When he was finished eating, the woman sent him on his way. He walked into the dark until new star patterns arose, and then he made a fire-less bivouac alongside a thin creek. He tramped out a sleeping place in the tall dead gra.s.s and rolled up in his blanket and slept hard.

Then, for several wet days following, he walked as long as he could and slept in the haunts of birds.

One night he found lodging in a log pigeonnier and the birds ignored him except when he rolled over, and then they all stirred and made watery gurgling sounds and settled back in. The next night he slept on the dry square of ground under a steepled dovecote, a structure suggestive of a temple devoted to a tiny null G.o.d. He had to sleep balled up, for if he stretched out, either his feet or his head would catch the drip from the steep hip roof. Another night he slept in an abandoned chicken house, and he spread his ground cloth over the floor, which was thick with chalky old chicken s.h.i.t that gritted under him when he moved and smelled like the dusty remainders of ancient deadmen.

When he woke sometime long before dawn and could not get back to sleep, he dug in his pack and found a stub of candle and lit it. He unrolled the Bartram and held it to the yellow light and riffled through the pages until his eyes fell on a pa.s.sage that caught his attention. It was this: The mountainous wilderness which I had lately traversed appeared regularly undulated as the great The mountainous wilderness which I had lately traversed appeared regularly undulated as the great ocean after a tempest; the undulations gradually depressing, yet perfectly regular, as the squama of ocean after a tempest; the undulations gradually depressing, yet perfectly regular, as the squama of fish, or imbrications of tile on a roof: the nearest ground to me of a perfect full green; next more fish, or imbrications of tile on a roof: the nearest ground to me of a perfect full green; next more glaucous; and lastly almost blue as the ether with which the most distant curve of the horizon glaucous; and lastly almost blue as the ether with which the most distant curve of the horizon seemed to be blended. My imagination thus wholly engaged in the contemplation of this magnificent seemed to be blended. My imagination thus wholly engaged in the contemplation of this magnificent landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound, I was almost insensible or regardless of the landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound, I was almost insensible or regardless of the charming objects more within my reach. charming objects more within my reach.

A picture of the land Bartram detailed leapt dimensional into Inman's mind. Mountains and valleys on and on forever. A gnarled and taliped and snaggy landscape where man might be seen as an afterthought. Inman had many times looked across the view Bartram described. It was the border country stretching endlessly north and west from the slope of Cold Mountain. Inman knew it well.

He had walked its contours in detail, had felt all its seasons and registered its colors and smelled its smells. Bartram was only a traveler and knew but the one season of his visit and the weather that happened to fall in a matter of days. But to Inman's mind the land stood not as he'd seen it and known it for all his life, but as Bartram had summed it up. The peaks now stood higher, the vales deeper than they did in truth. Inman imagined the fading rows of ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks, and he built the contours of them and he colored them, each a shade paler and bluer until, when he had finally reached the invented ridgeline where it faded into sky, he was asleep.

The next day found Inman angling down to the southwest, footslogging an old cart path through the mountains. A brisk day with all the leaves dead and on the ground. He was not even aware of what county he was in. b.l.o.o.d.y Madison, perhaps. He came to a sign and on one side it read TOBO55M and on the other TOAV65M. All he could figure was that it would be a fair walk to whatever towns were meant.

He rounded a bend and came to a small pool, a kind of spring, the rocks around it green with sphagnum. The spring bottom was covered with rotting oak and poplar leaves and the water was amber like a weak steeping of them, a tea. Inman bent to dip his canteen. Wind blew up and he heard a strange tock and click, a sound like an attempt at music using only dry sticks as instruments. He looked off into the poolside woods toward the sound and discovered an odd sight. Inman found himself viewing a trio of hanging skeletons swaying in the breeze and tapping into each other.

The canteen glugged full. Inman stood and stoppered it and walked to the bones. They hung in a row from the lower limb of a big hemlock. Not even hung with rope, just plaited strips of bark from hickory saplings. The pelvis and leg bones of one had fallen to the ground and lay in a heap, with the toes of one foot sticking up. On one of the complete skeletons, the plaits had stretched so much that 2004-3-6.

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the man's toes reached the ground. Inman swept the leaves away, thinking to find a tamped patch in the dirt where the man had danced around and packed the earth in his dying. His hair had fallen off the skull and lay among the leaves about his toe bones. Blond. All the bones so white, teeth in the slack jaws yellow. Inman ran his hand down the arm bones of the man that had half fallen away.

They had a grain to them. The bones of legs and feet in a pile as kindling for a fire. He couldn't cut himself down, Inman thought, but if he'll be patient, it will happen.

Some days later, Inman climbed all morning not really knowing where he was. Mists moved ahead of him like deer through the trees. And then for the afternoon he walked a ridgeline trail that rolled between balsam highlands and little gladed gaps where stood beech groves and the tail ends of cove hardwoods as they reached the highest places where they could live. As he walked he began to suspect that he knew roughly where he was. It was an old pa.s.sway, that much was clear. He pa.s.sed a rock cairn that the Cherokee in times long past were in the habit of building along the way to signify something, though whether way marker or memorial or holy place was now unknowable. Inman picked up a fresh rock and dropped it on the pile in pa.s.sing as commemoration of some old upward yearning.

Late in the day he found himself on a rocky scarp bordered by heath bald, a thick tangle of waist-high azalea and laurel and myrtle growing right to the bare rock of the ledge. The trail emptied onto it as if travelers had made a custom of stopping to admire the view. Then the way reentered the forest through a faint pa.s.sage in the azalea not forty feet from where he had emerged.

The sun was falling, and Inman reckoned he would again make a bivouac without benefit of fire or water. In the s.p.a.ce near the edge of the scarp, he sc.r.a.ped together what little duff there was to soften a sleeping place. He ate parched corn from his palm and stretched out in his bedding to sleep, wishing there were a bigger moon in the sky to light the prospect before him.

He was awakened at first grey dawn by the sound of walking in the heath. He sat up and set the LeMat's on full c.o.c.k and leveled it at the sound. In a minute a black sow bear poked her head through the leaves not twenty feet from where Inman sat. She stood, tan muzzle up, neck stretched long, sniffing the breeze and blinking her little eyes.

She did not like what she smelled. She shuffled forward and grunted. A single cub not much bigger than a man's head climbed a little way up the trunk of a young Fraser fir behind her. Inman knew that with her poor sight she could smell him but not see him in the faint light. She was in fact so near that even with his man's poor nose he could take her scent. Wet dog and something deeper.

The bear twice whoofed out air from nose and mouth and moved forward tentatively. Inman shifted about and stood, and the bear p.r.i.c.ked up her ears. She blinked and stretched her neck again and sniffed and moved another step forward.

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding, for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot one, though he had killed and eaten many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. The decision came as a result of a series of dreams he had over the period of a week in the muddy trenches of Petersburg. In the first of the dreams he had started as a man. He was sick and drank tea from bearberry leaves as tonic, and gradually he became transformed into a black bear. During the nights the bear visions rode him, Inman roamed the green dream mountains alone and four-legged, avoiding all of his own kind and of other kinds, He rooted in the ground for pale grubs and tore at bee trees for honey and ate huckleberries by the bushful and was happy and strong.

In that manner of life, he thought, there might be a lesson in how to wage peace and heal the wounds of war into white scars.

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In the final dream, though, he was shot by hunters after a long chase. He was strung from a tree by a rope about his neck and skinned, and he watched the process as from above. His dripping red carca.s.s was as he knew an actual bear's to be after skinning: that is to say, manlike, thinner than one would expect, the structure of paws beneath the fur long like a man's hand. With that killing, the dreams had run their course, and he awoke that last morning feeling bear was an animal of particular import to him, one he might observe and learn from, and that it would be on the order of a sin for him to kill one no matter what the expense, for there was something in bear that spoke to him of hope.

Still, he did not much favor his current position, backed up against the brow of the rocky ledge, the heath knotted up before him, and the sow nervous with a cub born out of season. In his favor was this: he knew a bear was much more likely to run than attack, that she might at most make a false charge, rushing forward fifteen feet or so, bouncing as she came on her front legs and snorting out air. The purpose would be to scare him off, not to hurt him. But he had nowhere to run. He wanted her to know where he was, so he spoke to her, saying, I've no aim to trouble you. I'll walk on from here and never be back. I'm just asking for clear pa.s.sage. He spoke calm and straight and he wanted his voice to carry respect.

The bear sniffed more. She shifted from foot to foot, rocked from side to side. Inman slowly rolled up his bedding and slipped on his sacks.

-I'll be going, he said.

He moved two steps and the bear false-charged.

Inman could figure in his mind as it happened that none of the measurements would work out. Like a problem of carpentry where none of the dimensions match up. He had only three feet to back up. She had all the momentum of her bulk and only ten feet ahead of her before the lip of the cliff.