Cold Mountain Part 7

She dropped in a heap at the man's feet.

-The h.e.l.l kind of pistol is that? the man said, his eyes fixed on the two big mismatched bores.

-Step away from her, Inman said. Get over here where I can see you.

The man stepped across the body and approached Inman. He held his head tipped down for the hat brim to cut the glare from the torch.

-Best stop right now, Inman said, when the man got close.

-You're a message from G.o.d saying no, the man said. He took two steps more and then dropped to his knees in the road and fell forward and hugged Inman about the legs. Inman leveled the pistol at the man's head and put pressure on the trigger until he could feel all the metal parts of its firing mechanism tighten up against each other. But then the man turned his face up, and it caught the light from the torch where it still burned on the ground, and Inman could see that his cheeks were shiny with tears. So Inman relented as he might have anyway and only struck the man a mid-force blow across the cheekbone with the long barrel of the pistol.

The man sprawled in the road on his back, a shallow cut below his eye. His hat had fallen off and his head was pomaded slick as an apple from the forehead back, and the ends of his yellow hair hung in ringlets about his shoulders. He fingered the cut and looked at the blood.

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-I accept the merit of that, he said.

-You merit killing, Inman said. He looked to where the woman lay in a heap at the edge of the bluff. She had not moved. I might still feel the need to do it, Inman said.

-Don't kill me, I'm a man of G.o.d, the man said.

-Some say we all are, Inman said.

-A preacher is what I mean, the man said. I'm a preacher.

Inman could think of no response but to blow out air from his nose.

The preacher rose again as far as his knees.

-Is she dead? Inman said.

-No.

-What's the matter with her? Inman said.

-Not much. She's somewhat with child. That and what I gave her.

-What would that be?

-A little packet of powders that I bought off a peddler. He said it would put a man to sleep for four hours. It's been about half that since I dosed her up.

-And you're the daddy?

-Apparently.

-Not married to her, I reckon?

-No.

Inman stepped to the far side of the girl and knelt. He put a hand to her dark head and lifted it. She was breathing with a kind of faint snore, a whistle at the nose. Her face was slack from being senseless, and the shadows cast from the torch were ugly things, collecting unfavorably in the low spots of her eyes and cheeks. Still, Inman could tell that there might be a beauty to her. He returned her face to the ground and rose from his crouch.

-Put her back on the horse, Inman said. He stepped away, keeping the pistol leveled at the man, who hopped up to his feet, his eyes never leaving the barrel ends. The man hustled over and knelt and struggled to lever the girl off the ground. He rose and staggered to the horse and threw her over.

Inman tipped the big pistol up momentarily to catch its profile in the light, thinking how very much he liked the air of urgency and focus it lent to a simple request.

-What now? the man said when he was done. He seemed relieved for someone else to be calling the decisions.

-Hush up, Inman said. He did not know what was next, and his thinking seemed all grainy and sluggish from lack of sleep and hard walking.

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-Where did you come from? Inman said.

-There's a town not far off, the man said, gesturing on up the road in the direction Inman was heading.

-Get on out ahead of me and show the way.

Inman picked up the torch and threw it over the ledge. The preacher stood and watched it fall, a diminishing point in the dark.

-Still the Deep River here? Inman said.

-Folks call it that, the preacher said.

They started walking. Inman kept the pistol in his hand and led the hone with the other. The lead rope was thick hemp and the end had been wrapped for some inches in wire to prevent its fraying, and as he grasped the rope he p.r.i.c.ked his thumb, drawing blood. Inman walked along sucking at his cut thumb, thinking had he not stumbled upon them, the woman would be a white smear floating on the black river, her skirts belled out around her and the preacher standing up at the road saying Go down, go down. Inman wondered what the thing to do here would be.

The road soon climbed and crossed a little ridge and left the river behind. It wound through low hills.

The moon had risen and Inman could see that the land lay open in great patches where the forest had been burned away to make place for fields. But nothing more toilsome than lighting a fire had been done with it, and so it was a country of black stumps set in runnel-cut clay stretching away bare to a far horizon. The charcoal of the stumps caught the moonlight and glittered. Inman looked about and thought, I could well be on a whole other planet from the place I'm aiming for.

Orion had fully risen and stood at the eastern horizon, and from that Inman made the time to be long past midnight. The great figure of hunter and warrior stood up there like an accusation, like a sign in the sky pointing out your shortfalls. Orion was girded about tight, his weapon ready to strike. Sure of himself as a man can be, if posture is any indication of character. Traveling due west every night and making unfailing good time.

One of the things Inman marked as a comfort was that he could put a name to the brightest star in Orion. He had shared that fact with a Tennessee boy on the night after Fredericksburg. They had sat at the lip of the ditch behind the wall. The night was cold and brittle, and the stars were sharp points of light and the aurora had already flared up and gone out. They had blankets wrapped about them, draped over their heads and shoulders, and their breaths blew out in plumes and hung in the windless air before them like spirits in process of departure.

-It's so cold, you was to lick your gun barrel your tongue'd bind to it, the boy had said.

He held his Enfield up before his face and breathed on the barrel of it and then scratched at the place with a fingernail and raked off frost. He looked at Inman and then did it again. He held the finger up for Inman's inspection and Inman said, I see it. The boy spit between his feet and then bent to witness if it froze, but the bottom of the ditch was too dark to tell yes or no.

Before them was the battlefield falling away to the town and the river. The land lay bleak as nightmare and seemed to have been recast to fit a new and horrible model, all littered with bodies and churned up by artillery. h.e.l.l's newground, one man had called it. To turn his mind from such a place that night, Inman had looked toward Orion and said the name he knew. The Tennessee boy had peered up at the star so indicated and said, How do you know its name is Rigel?

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-I read it in a book, Inman said.

-Then that's just a name we give it, the boy said. It ain't G.o.d's name. Inman had thought on the issue a minute and then said, How would you ever come to know G.o.d's name for that star?

-You wouldn't, He holds it close, the boy said. It's a thing you'll never know. It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance. Right there's what mostly comes of knowledge, the boy said, tipping his chin out at the broken land, apparently not even finding it worthy of sweeping a hand across its contours in sign of dismissal. At the time, Inman had thought the boy a fool and had remained content to know our name for Orion's princ.i.p.al star and to let G.o.d keep His a dark secret.

But he now wondered if the boy might have had a point about knowledge, or at least some varieties of it.

Inman and the preacher walked in silence for some time, until finally the preacher said, What do you intend doing with me?

-I'm thinking on it, Inman said. How did you get in this fix? -It is hard to say. None in the settlement suspect a thing even yet. She lives with her grandmother, so old and deaf you must scream to make yourself understood. It was an easy matter for her to slip away at midnight to sport in a hayrick or on a mossy creek bank until the first birds began singing in the hour before dawn. All through the summer we crept about the nightwoods for our meetings.

-Crafty as panthers in the ways of stealth? Is that the picture you're painting?

-Well, yes. After a fashion. -How did it come to this pa.s.s?

-In the normal way. A certain look of eye, bend of voice, brush of hand in pa.s.sing the chicken when we had dinners on the ground following Sunday services.

-There's a smart distance between that and you with your britches around your ankles in a hayrick.

-Yes.

-Even further to you getting set to pitch her into a gorge like a shoat dead of the hog cholera.

-Well, yes. But it is more tangled than you make it to be. For one thing, there is my position. If we had been found out, I would have been run from the county. Our church is strict. We have churched members for as little as allowing fiddles to be played in their houses. Believe me, I anguished over it through many a night.

-Those would be the rainy nights? When the hayricks and moss banks were too damp.

The preacher walked on.

-There were simpler repairs, Inman said.

-I could not find them.

-Marry her would be one.

-Again, you miss the tangles. I am already betrothed.

-Oh.

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-I now believe that when I took to preaching I answered a false call.

-Yes, Inman said. I'd say you're ill suited for that business.

They walked another mile and then before them, on the banks of a river, the same as flowed at the bottom of the gorge, was a kind of town. A collection of wood structures. A clapboard church, whitewashed. A business or two. Houses.

-What I believe we're going to do, Inman said, is put her back in her bed like this night never happened. Have you a kerchief?

-Yes.

-Wad it up and put it in your mouth and lie facedown in the dirt, Inman said. He stripped the wire off the lead rope while the preacher did what he was told. Inman walked up behind the preacher and put a knee in his back and wound the wire around his head a half-dozen turns and then twisted the ends together.

-If you had screamed out, Inman said, people would come running and you could lay this all off on me. There's no way I could tell it to make myself believed here.

They entered the town. At first, dogs barked. But then, recognizing the preacher and familiar with his nighttime rambles, they fell silent.

-Which house? Inman said.

The preacher pointed on down the road and then led the way through the town and out the other side to a little grove of poplars. Set back among the trees was a tiny cottage, just one room, covered over with batten boards and painted white. The preacher looked toward it and nodded. The way the wire stretched back the corners of his mouth made him look all agrin, and the expression ill-consisted with Inman's mood.

-Back up to this little poplar, Inman said. He took the lead rope off the horse and with it tied the preacher by his neck to the tree. Inman took the loose end of rope and drew it over the preacher's shoulder and tied his wrists tight behind him.

-Stand here real quiet and we'll all live through this, Inman said.

He lifted the girl from the horse and adjusted her in his arms to a good balance for carrying. An arm under her waist, another under her soft thigh backs. Her dark head rested on his shoulder and her hair swept across his arm like a breath as he walked. She gave a little moan, like one briefly troubled in regular sleep by a pa.s.sing dream. She was such a helpless thing, lying there without even consciousness as defense. Exposed to every danger and guarded only by the rare goodwill of the random world. I ought yet to kill that s.h.i.tpoke preacher, Inman thought.

He carried her to the house and set her down in a patch of tansy by the stoop. He went onto the porch and looked in a window to a dim room. A fire burned low on the hearth, and an old woman slept on a pallet by the fire. She had lived so long as to have achieved a state of near transparency, her skin the color of parchment, as if, were Inman to s.n.a.t.c.h her up and hold her in front of the fire, he could read a paper through her. Her mouth was open, snoring. The little bit of light left in the hearth lit up the fact that she had but two pair of teeth remaining. One pair in front on top, the other in front on bottom. The effect was harelike.

Inman tried the door and found it unlatched. He opened it and stuck his head in. He said Hey in a 2004-3-6.

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middling voice. The old woman snored on. He clapped his hands twice, but she still did not stir. Safe enough, he decided and walked on in. By the fire was a plate with half a round of corn bread and two pieces of fried pork. Inman took the food and put it in his haversack. There was an empty bedstead at the end of the room away from the fire. The girl's bed, he reckoned. He went to it and threw the covers back and then stepped outside and stood looking at the dark-headed girl. In her pale dress she was just a swatch of light on the black ground.

He lifted her and carried her inside and put her into the bed. He pulled off her shoes and covered her to her chin. Then he thought again and drew the covers down and turned her on her side, for he remembered that a boy of his regiment had pa.s.sed out drunk on his back and would have smothered in his own spew had someone not taken note and kicked him over. This way she would live to wake in the morning with a pounding head, wondering how she came to be back in her own bed when the last she could remember was sporting in a hayloft with the preacher.

At that moment, the logs in the fireplace fell from the irons with a crash, shifting into a more favorable relation, and the fire brightened up. The girl's eyes opened and she turned her head and stared straight at Inman. Her face was white in the firelight, her hair a turmoil. She seemed terrified.

Confused. Her mouth opened as if to scream, but no sound came out. Inman leaned over and reached out his hand to her and touched her brow and brushed back the hair where it curled at the temples.

-What's your name? he said.

-Laura, the woman said.

-Listen to me, Laura, he said. That preacher does not speak for G.o.d. No man does. Go back to sleep and wake up in the morning with me just a strong dream urging you to put him behind you. He means you no good. Set your mind on it.

He touched her eyes with the tips of two fingers as he had seen people do to the dead to close their lids against bad visions. She gentled down under his hand, settling back into sleep.

Inman left her and walked back out to where the preacher stood tied to the tree. At that moment the notion that he should take out his knife and cut the man up had much to recommend it, but instead Inman prowled in his knapsack and took out his pen and ink and paper. He found a place where moonlight came down through the trees. In its blue beam he wrote out the story in brief, putting little headwork and no fine touches to it, merely pressing down what he had learned of the near killing into a paragraph. When he was done he skewered the paper onto a tree branch at head level just beyond the preacher's reach.