Cold Mountain Part 32

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therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost.

You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

Ada did not remember that Sunday in much particularity, one out of many. There was nothing she could add to his recollection of the day to make it into a shared memory. But she knew that what Inman had done in his talking was to reimburse her in his own way for the touch she had given him when he entered the cabin. She reached back and swept the hair from her shoulders and up from her neck and she held it with her wrist against the back of her head. She tipped her head slightly forward.

-Do that once more, she said.

But before Inman could act, there was a sound at the door. By the time Ruby had it out of its frame and stuck her head in, Ada was sitting up again and her hair was down on her shoulders. Ruby regarded the two, their awkwardness and the oddity of him sitting behind her.

-You want me to go back out and cough? she said.

n.o.body said anything. Ruby closed the door and put the pot on the floor. She brushed the snow ofF her coat and beat her hat against her leg.

-His fever's down some right now, Ruby said. But that's not saying much. It goes up and down.

Ruby looked at Inman. She said, I cut some boughs and made up a more proper bed than just a pallet of blankets. She paused and then added, Somebody can make use of it, I reckon.

Ada picked up a stick of wood and poked at the fire and then set the stick in to burn. You go on, she said to Inman. I know you're tired.

Tired as he was, though, Inman had a hard time getting to sleep. Stobrod snored and muttered s.n.a.t.c.hes of the chorus to an idiotic fiddle tune, which-as best Inman could tell-was no more than this: The higher up the monkey climbed, the greater he showed his ya-ta-dada-la-ta-di-da. Inman had heard men say all kinds of things when they were submerged in the dark of a profound wound, everything from prayers to curses. But this took the prize for foolery.

In the intervals of silence, Inman tried to decide which part of the evening he might dwell on most pleasurably. Ada's hand on his stomach or her request just before Ruby opened the door. He was still trying to decide when he drifted off.

Ada lay a long time awake too. Thinking any number of thoughts. That Inman looked so much older than four years ought to account for, so thin and grim and held within himself. And she thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

Ruby flounced in her bed and rolled over and settled down and then turned again. She sat up and 2004-3-6.

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puffed in frustration. I can't get to sleep, she said. And I know you're awake over there thinking love thoughts.

-I'm awake, Ada said.

-What's keeping me from sleeping is I'm thinking about what I'll do with him if he lives, Ruby said.

-With Inman? Ada said, confused.

-With Pap. A wound like that will be slow healing. And knowing him, he'll lay extra long a-bed. I can't figure what I'll do with him.

-We'll take him home and care for him is what, Ada said. Hurt as he is, n.o.body will come looking for him. Not anytime soon. And this war has to end someday.

-I'm obliged, Ruby said.

-You've never been obliged to anybody before, Ada said. I don't care to be the first. Just thank you will do.

-That too, Ruby said.

She was quiet awhile and then she said, Many a night when I was little, alone in that cabin, I wished I could take that fiddle of his up to the jump-off and pitch it and let the wind fly it away. In my mind I'd just watch it go till it was just a speck, and then I'd think about the sweet sound it would make breaking to pieces on the river rocks way down below.

The next day dawned grey and colder yet. The snow no longer spilled hard out of the sky in fat flakes; it came down soft and fine like ground cornmeal falling from between millstones. They all slept late, and Inman took breakfast in the women's hut, turkey broth with shreds of turkey in it.

Then, later in the morning, Ada and Inman fed and watered the horse and went hunting together.

They hoped to kill more birds or, if they were extremely lucky, a deer. They walked up the hill and found nothing moving in the woods, nor even animal tracks marking the deep snow. They climbed up through the chestnuts and into the firs and onto the ridge. They followed its spine where it curved.

There was still no game but a few chattering boomers high in the fir boughs. Even if you could hit one, it would make but a mouthful of grey meat, so they did not waste a shot.

They came eventually to a flat rock cropped out at a ledge, and Inman brushed the snow off it and they sat cross-legged facing each other, knees to knees, with the ground cloth Inman had in his pack tented over them, resting on the crowns of their heads. What light came through the weave of it was brown and dim. Inman took the walnuts out of the sack and cracked them open with a stone the size of his fist, and they picked out the meats and ate them. When they were done, he put his hands on Ada's shoulders and leaned forward and touched his forehead to hers. For a while only the sounds of the snow striking the ground cloth broke the silence, but after a time Ada began talking.

She wanted to tell how she had come to be what she was. They were different people now. He needed to know that. She told of Monroe's death, the look on his face in the rain and the wet dogwood petals. She told Inman about deciding not to return to Charleston, about the summer, and all about Ruby. About weather and animals and plants and the things that she was starting to know.

All the ways life takes shape. You could build your own life on the observation of it. She still missed Monroe more than she could say, and she told Inman many wonderful things about him. But she told as well one terrible thing: that he had tried to keep her a child and that, with little resistance from her, he had largely succeeded.

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-And there's something you need to know about Ruby, Ada said. Whatever comes to pa.s.s between you and me, I want her to stay in Black Cove as long as she cares to. If she never leaves I will be glad, and if she does I'll mourn her absence.

-Could she learn to put up with me around is the question, Inman said.

-I think she can, Ada said. If you understand that she is not a servant nor a hired hand. She is my friend. She does not take orders, and she does not empty night jars other than her own.

They left the rock and hunted on, going netherward into a damp swale rich with the odor of places where galax grows, descending through scattered clumps of twisted laurel to a thin creek. They walked around a blown-down hemlock stretched across the woods floor. The plate of roots stood as high in the air as the gable end of a house, and clenched in the roots many feet above the ground were stones larger than whiskey barrels. Down in that hollow, Ada found a stand of goldenseal, the crowfoot leaves withered but identifiable where they stuck through the thinner snow on the lee side of a poplar so big through the trunk it would have taken five people holding hands in a circle to go around it.

-Ruby needs goldenseal for her father, Ada said.

She knelt at the tree and grubbed at the plants with her hands. Inman stood and watched. The scene was a plain one. Just a woman on her knees digging in the ground, a tall man standing and looking about, waiting. If not for the store cloth of their coats, it could have been any place in time at all. So few markers to show any particular epoch. Ada knocked the dirt from the pale roots and put them in her pocket.

It was in standing that she spotted the arrow in the poplar. Ada's eyes nearly skimmed right over it, marking it as a broken twig, for a part of the shaft remained, though not the fletching. The wood was half rotted away, but still bound to the head with tight windings of sinew. Grey flint point, chipped in smooth scoops. As perfect in symmetry of shape as a handmade thing can be. It lay buried more than an inch into the tree, some of that from the growing of the tree around it in a welted scar. But enough remained exposed to see that the head was broad and long. Not a little bird point. Ada aimed a finger at it to draw Inman's attention.

-Deer arrow, Inman said. Or man killer.

He wet a thumb tip on his tongue and ran it across the revealed portion of the cutting edge like one checking the hone on a pocketknife.

-It would cut meat yet, he said.

During the late-summer plowing and harrowing, Ada and Ruby had unburied any number of bird points and sc.r.a.pers, but this seemed somehow different to her, as if yet partially alive because of its placement. Ada backed up and regarded it in perspective. Summing up much, it was yet such a little thing. A missed shot a hundred years back. Maybe more. Long ago. Or not long if one took the right view. Ada stepped to the tree and put a finger on the end of the shaft and wiggled it. Firm.

It would have been possible to frame the arrow as some relic, a piece of another world, and Ada did something like that. She saw it as an object already numbered among the things that were.

But it did not seem entirely so to Inman. He said, Someone went hungry. Then wondered, Was the missing due to want of skill? Desperation? Shift of wind? Bad light?

-You mark this spot in your mind, he said to Ada.

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And Inman went on to recommend that they revisit it throughout their lives to check the advancement of rot along the arrow shaft, the growth of the green poplar wood around the flint point.

He described a future scene, he and Ada bent, grey as ash, bringing children to the tree in some metallic future world, the dominant features of which he could not even imagine. By then the shaft would be gone. Fallen away. And the poplar would be yet stouter, grown round to envelop the stone entirely. Nothing visible but a lobed scar in bark.

Inman could not imagine whose they would be, but the children will stand entranced and watch as the two old people cut into the soft poplar with knives and dig out a dipperful of new wood, and then, suddenly, the children will see the flint blade as if it had been conjured up. A little piece of art with a clear purpose is how Inman pictured it. And though Ada could not fully envision that distant time, she could imagine the amazement on little faces.

-Indians, Ada said, caught up in Inman's story. The old couple will just say, Indians.

They returned to the village that afternoon without game. All they had to show for the outing was the goldenseal and firewood. They dragged the wood behind them and it carved bands and lines in the snow. Big limbs from a chestnut and smaller ones from a cedar. They found Ruby sitting by Stobrod. He was to some extent awake and seemed to know Ruby and Ada, but he was frightened of Inman.

-Who's that big dark man? he said.

Inman went and squatted at Stobrod's side so as not to loom over him. He said, I gave you water. I'm not after you.

Stobrod said, Well.

Ruby wet a cloth and swabbed at his face and he struggled against it like a child. She mashed pieces of the goldenseal and packed it into the wounds and she brewed other pieces into tea and made Stobrod drink it. When she was done he fell immediately asleep.

Ada looked at Inman, the tiredness in his face. She said, I believe you ought to go do the same.

--Just don't let me sleep past dark, Inman said. He went out, and while the door was open Ada and Ruby could see snow behind him, streaking the air in its falling. They could hear the sounds of him breaking limbs, and in a minute the door opened again. He set an armload of chestnut wood down just inside and then he left. They built the fire up and sat together for a long time with their backs against the cabin wall, a blanket around them.

Ada said, Tell me what we'll do next, when warm weather comes. What things to put the place in order?

Ruby took up a stick and drew out a map in the dirt, Black Cove. She put in the road and the house and the barn, scratched up areas to show current fields, woodlots, the orchard. Then she talked, and her vision was one of plenty and how to get there. Trade for a team of mules. Reclaim the old fields from ragweed and sumac. Establish new vegetable gardens. Break a little more newground. Grow enough corn and wheat to suit their needs for bread. Enlarge the orchard. Build a proper can house and apple house. Years and years of work. But they would one day see the fields standing high in summer with crops. Chickens pecking in the yard, cows grazing in the pasture, pigs foraging on the hillside mast. So many that they could have two bunches: bacon pigs, thin of leg and long of side; and ham pigs, close-coupled and stout, with their bellies swinging against the ground. Hams and bacon sides hanging thick in the smokehouse; a skillet good and greasy all the time on the stove top.

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Apples heaped in the apple house, jar after jar of vegetables rowed on shelves in the can house.

Plenty.

-It will be a sight to see, Ada said.

Ruby rubbed her map away with her palm. They sat quiet, and after a while Ruby slumped and leaned her shoulder into Ada's and dozed off, tired from the effort of imagination. Ada sat and watched the fire and listened to its pop and hiss, and later the brittle fall of its embers. She smelled the sweet woodsmoke and thought that it would be a measure of one's success at attending to the details of the world if one could identify trees by the scent of their smoke. It would be a skill one might happily aspire to master. There were many worse things to know. Things that did damage to others and eventually to oneself.

When Ruby awoke, it was late in the afternoon, almost dark. She sat up and blinked her eyes and rubbed her face and yawned. She went to check on Stobrod. She touched his face and forehead, pulled back the covers and looked at his wound.

-His fever's back up, she said. Night will be the crisis, I believe. He'll stay or go, but tonight will be the deciding of it. I'd better not leave him.

Ada came over and put her wrist to Stobrod's forehead. She could feel no difference from earlier tests. She looked at Ruby, but Ruby would not look back.

-I wouldn't feel right leaving him tonight, Ruby said.

It was dark when Ada walked down the creek to the other hut. The snow fell in fine flakes. What lay on the ground was so deep she had to walk awkwardly, stepping high-kneed, even though she trod in earlier footsteps. The snow held whatever light came through the clouds so that the earth seemed lit evenly from within, luminous as a mica lantern. She opened the door quietly and entered. Inman lay asleep, and he did not stir. The fire had burned low. Before it, Ada saw that his things were laid out to dry like objects displayed in a museum, as if each one needed s.p.a.ce around it to reveal its true meaning and be properly valued. His clothing, his boots, his hat, rucksack, haversack, cook gear, sheath knife, and the great ugly pistol with its attendant parts: ramrod and cap tin and nipple pick and cartridges, and the wadding, powder, and buckshot for the shotgun barrel. To be complete as a display, it needed but the Bartram taken down from its niche and laid alongside the pistol. A white printed card to label what one saw: The Outlier, His Kit.

Ada took off her coat and put three cedar limbs on the fire and blew on the coals. Then she went to Inman and knelt beside him. He lay with his face to the wall. The bed of hemlock boughs smelled sharp and clean with the needles crushed under him. She touched his brow, smoothed back his hair, ran her fingertips across his eyelids, cheekbones, nose, lips, stubbled chin.

She drew back the blanket and found that he had his shirt off, and she pressed her palm to the side of his neck, the tight new scar of his wound. She ran her hand to his shoulder top and gripped him tight and held him there.

He woke slowly. He shifted in the bed and turned and looked at her and seemed to understand her intent, but then, apparently without willing it, his eyes closed and he slept again.

The world was such an incredibly lonely place, and to lie down beside him, skin to skin, seemed the only cure. The wish to do it swept through Ada's mind. Then, like leaves stirring in the wind, something akin to panic shivered within her. But she put it away from her and stood and started undoing the waist b.u.t.ton and long strange row of fly b.u.t.tons on her britches.

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She discovered them to be a garment you cannot remove gracefully. The first leg came off fine, but then in switching her weight from one foot to the other she lost her balance and had to crow-hop twice to get it back. She looked toward Inman and found his eyes were open, watching her. She felt foolish and wished she were in the dark instead of standing before the low yellow flames of the smoky cedar fire. Or that she were wearing a gown which she could let fall in a smooth cascade around her. A pool at her feet which she could step away from. But here she stood with Monroe's britches still clenched around one leg.

-Turn your back, she said.

-Not for every gold dollar in the Federal treasury, Inman said.

She turned away from him, nervous and awkward. Then when she was undressed she held her clothes before her and half turned toward him.

Inman sat up with the blanket around his waist. He had been living like a dead man and this was life before him, an offering within his reach. He leaned forward and pulled the clothes from her hands and drew her to him. He put the flats of his palms on her thigh fronts, and then he moved his hands up her flanks and rested his forearms on her hipbones and touched his fingertips to the swale at the small of her back. He moved his fingers up and touched one by one the k.n.o.bs of her backbone. He touched the insides of her arms, ran his hands down her sides until they rested on the flare of her hips. He bowed his forehead to the soft of her stomach. Then he kissed her there and she smelled like hickory smoke. He pulled her against him and held her and held her. She put a hand to the back of his neck and pulled him harder, and then she pressed her white arms around him as if forever.

With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain.

Later, Ada and Inman lay woven together on their bed of hemlock boughs. The old cabin was nearly dark, and the cedar limbs smoked in the hearth and the hot resin smelled as if someone had walked through swinging a censer. The fire popped. Snow hissed and sighed as it fell. And they did what lovers often do when they think the future stretches out endless before them as bright as on the noon of creation day: they talked ceaselessly of the past, as if each must be caught up on the other's previous doings before they can move forward paired.

They talked through most of the night, as if charged by law with recounting in the greatest of detail their childhoods, their youths. And they both painted them as idylls. Even the brutal muggy heat of Charleston summers took on an element of drama in Ada's telling. When Inman reached the war years, though, he accounted for them in only the weak detail of a newspaper account-the names of the generals who had commanded him, the large movements of troops, the failure and success of various strategies, the frequent force of blind luck in determining which side prevailed. What he wanted Ada to know was that you could tell such things on and on and yet no more get to the full truth of the war than you could get to the full truth of an old sow bear's life by following her sign through the woods. A claw mark on a bee tree and a great pone of greasy scat shot through with yellow berry seeds told only two brief and possibly misleading installments in the big black mystery of the bear itself. No man, not even if you went all the way up to Lee, could accurately describe more than one blunt forehand of the bear-its hooked black claws, the plump cracked pads, the coa.r.s.e and shiny hair cupping down over the paw ends. Inman figured he himself might only know something as fleeting as the smell of her breath. No one could know the entirety any more than we can know the life of any animal, for they each inhabit a world that is their own and not ours.

All Inman would reveal of a personal nature were little stories like the time during winter camp of 2004-3-6.

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sixty-two when the mud-and-stick chimney of his hut caught fire, and the bark-and-moss roof fell burning onto him and his sleeping mates, and they ran whooping and laughing out into the cold in their underdrawers and watched it burn and threw s...o...b..a.l.l.s at each other, and then when the fire died down they fed it with fence rails to keep warm through the night.

Ada asked him if he had ever seen the great celebrated warriors. The allegedly G.o.dlike Lee, grim Jackson, gaudy Stuart, stolid Longstreet. Or the lesser lights. Tragic Pelham, pathetic Pickett.

Inman had seen all except Pelham, but he told Ada he had nothing to say about them, neither the living ones nor the dead. Nor did he care to comment upon the Federal leaders, though he had seen some from a distance and knew the rest by their acts. He wished to live a life where little interest could be found in one gang of despots launching attacks upon another. Nor did he want to enumerate further the acts he himself had committed, for he wanted someday, in a time when people weren't dying so much, to judge himself by another measure.

-Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said.

Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over, how he watched Orion climb higher up the slope of sky night by night, and how he had tried to walk with no hope and no fear but had failed miserably, for he had done both. But how on the best days of walking he achieved some success in matching his thoughts to the weather, dark or bright, so as to attune with what freak of G.o.d's mind sent cloud or shine.