Cold Mountain (9 page)

2004-3-6

页码，33/232

Monroe often had, that the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow its path.

Such she believed was clearly true. But if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one's nature was, then even stepping out on the path became a snaggy matter.

She therefore sat at the window that morning wondering sincerely and with some confusion what her next action should be when she saw a figure come walking up the road. As it neared the house Ada resolved the figure into a girl of sorts, a short one, thin as a chicken neck except across the points of her sharp hipbones, where she was of substantial width. Ada went to the porch and sat, waiting to see what this person might want.

The girl came up to the porch and without asking leave sat in a rocker next to Ada and hooked her heels on the chair rungs. She started rocking. As a structure, she was stable as a drag sled, low in her center of gravity but knobby and slight in all the extremities. She wore a square-necked dress of coarse homespun cloth, the dusty color of blue that comes from dye made of the inside of ragweed galls.

—Old Lady Swanger said you're in need of help, she said.

Ada examined the girl further. She was a dark thing, corded through the neck and arms. Frail-chested. Her hair was black and coarse as a horse's tail. Broad across the bridge of her nose. Big dark eyes, virtually pupil-less, the whites of them startling in their clarity. She went shoeless, but her feet were clean. The nails to her toes were pale and silver as fish scales.

—Mrs. Swanger is right. I do need help, Ada said, but what I need is in the way of rough work.

Plowing, planting, harvesting, woodcutting, and the like. This place has to be made self-sufficient. I believe I need a man-hand for the job.

—Number one, the girl said, if you've got a horse I can plow all day. Number two, Old Lady Swanger told me your straits. Something for you to keep in mind would be that every man worth hiring is off and gone. It's a harsh truth, but that's mostly the way of things, even under favorable conditions.

The girl's name, Ada soon discovered, was Ruby, and though the look of her was not confidence-inspiring, she convincingly depicted herself as capable of any and all farm tasks. Just as importantly, as they talked, Ada found she was enormously cheered by Ruby. Ada's deep impression was that she had a willing heart. And though Ruby had not spent a day of her life in school and could not read a word nor write even her name, Ada thought she saw in her a spark as bright and hard as one struck with steel and flint. And there was this: like Ada, Ruby was a motherless child from the day she was born. They had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short order, and somewhat to Ada's surprise, they began striking a deal.

Ruby said, I've not ever hired out as hand or servant, and I've not heard good things told about taking on such a job. But Sally said you needed help, and she was right. What I'm saying is, we have to come to some terms.

This is where we talk about money, Ada thought. Monroe had never consulted her in the matter of hiring, but she was under the impression that the help did not ordinarily lay down conditions for their employment. She said, Right this minute, and possibly for some time to come, money is in short supply.

—Money's not it, Ruby said. Like I said, I'm not exactly looking to hire out. I'm saying if I'm to help you here, it's with both us knowing that everybody empties their own night jar.

Ada started to laugh but then realized this was not meant to be funny. Something on the order of file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，34/232

equality, was Ruby's demand. It seemed from Ada's point of view an odd one. But on reflection she decided that since no one else was lined up to help her, and since she had been tossing her own slops all summer, the request was fair enough.

As they talked over the remaining details, the yellow and black rooster walked by the porch and paused to stare at them. He twitched his head and flipped his red comb from one side of his head to the other.

—I despise that bird, Ada said. He tried to flog me.

Ruby said, I'd not keep a flogging rooster.

—Then how might we run it off? Ada said.

Ruby looked at her with a great deal of puzzlement. She rose and stepped off the porch and in one swift motion snatched up the rooster, tucked his body under her left arm, and with her right hand pulled off his head. He struggled under her arm for a minute and then fell still. Ruby threw the head off into a barberry bush by the fence.

—He'll be stringy, so we'd best stew him awhile, Ruby said.

By dinnertime the meat of the rooster was falling from the bone, and gobs of biscuit dough the size of cat heads cooked in the yellow broth.

the color of despair

At another time the scene might have had about it a note of the jaunty. All the elements that composed it suggested the legendary freedom of the open road: the dawn of day, sunlight golden and at a low angle; a cart path bordered on one side by red maples, on the other by a split-rail fence; a tall man in a slouch hat, a knapsack on his back, walking west. But after such wet and miserable nights as he had recently passed, Inman felt like God's most marauded bantling. He stopped and put a boot on the bottom rail of the roadside fence and looked out across the dewy fields. He tried to greet the day with a thankful heart, but in the early pale light his first true vision was of some foul variety of brown flatland viper sliding flabby and turdlike from the roadway into a thick bed of chickweed.

Beyond the fields stood flatwoods. Nothing but trash trees. Jack pine, slash pine, red cedar. Inman hated these planed-off, tangled pinebrakes. All this flat land. Red dirt. Mean towns. He had fought over ground like this from the piedmont to the sea, and it seemed like nothing but the place where all that was foul and sorry had flowed downhill and pooled in the low spots. Country of swill and sullage, sump of the continent. A miry slough indeed, and he could take little more of it. Out in the woods, cicadas shrilled all around, near and far, a pulsing screech like the sound of many jagged pieces of dry bone twisting against each other. So dense was the noise that it came to seem a vibration conceived inside Inman's head from the jangle of his own troubled mind. A personal affliction, rather than a sensation of the general world shared by all. The wound at his neck felt freshly raw, and it throbbed with every pulse of cicadas. He ran a finger up under the dressing, half expecting to feel a place as deep and red as a gill slit, but instead what he found was a great crusted welt at his collar line.

He calculated that his days of traveling had put little distance between himself and the hospital. His condition had required him to walk more slowly and to rest more often than he would have liked, and he had been able to cover only a few miles at a time, and even that slow pace had been at considerable cost. He was bone tired and at least partially lost, still trying to find a passway bearing directly west toward home. But the country had been one of small farmsteads, all cut up by a welter file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，35/232

of interlaced roads, none marked by any signpost to announce it as more likely westering than another. He kept feeling that he had been led farther south than he wanted. And the weather had been bad, hard rain off and on through the period, sudden downpours with thunder and lightning, both day and night. The small clapboard farmhouses had lain close-spaced, one to the other, with cornfields all but run together and nothing but fence rails to mark one man's place from the next. Each farm had two or three vicious hounds set to go off at the merest sound, rushing barkless and low out of the dark shadows of roadside trees to rip at his legs with jaws like scythes. The first night, he had kicked away several attacks and a spotted bitch pierced the hide of his calf as if with a leather punch. After that he had looked for weaponry and found a stout locust limb in a ditch. With some little effort he had beat off the next dog that bit at him, striking at it with short downward blows like tamping dirt around a new-set post. Through much of that night and the ones thereafter, he had clubbed dogs off with dull percussion to send them scooting back still soundless into the dark. The dogs and the threat of Home Guard out prowling and the gloom of the cloudy nights made for nervous wayfaring.

The night just passed had been the worst. The clouds had broken open and revealed meteors flinging themselves out of an empty point of sky. They had shot in on whizzing trajectories that Inman took to be aimed decidedly himward. Little projectiles flung from on high. Later, a great fireball had come roaring out of the dark, moving slow but aimed to land directly atop Inman. Before it had reached him, though, it simply disappeared like a candle flame pinched out with spittled finger and thumb. The fireball had been close-followed by some stub-winged whooshing nightbird or hog-faced bat, flicking low to Inman's head, causing him to duck and walk stooped for three full strides. Then presently a passing luna moth flashed open its great eye-spotted wings directly in front of Inman's nose, and he had mistaken it for some bizarre green dreamface thrust suddenly at him out of the dark with a message to speak. Inman had yelped and struck out at the air before him with hard blows that hit nothing. Later, he had heard the beat of horses cantering and had climbed a tree and watched as a pack of Guard rumbled by, seeking out just such a one as himself to seize and thrash and return to service. When he had climbed down and begun walking again, every tree stump seemed to take on the shape of a lurker in the dark, and he once pulled his pistol on a scraggly myrtle bush that looked like a big-hatted fatman. Crossing a sunken creek long after midnight, he had reached a finger down into the wet clay bank and daubed on the breast of his jacket two concentric circles with a dot at the center and walked on, marked as the butt of the celestial realm, a night traveler, a fugitive, an outlier.

Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.

That long night accomplished, his greatest desire now was to climb over the fence and walk out across that old field into the flatwoods. Den up in the pines and sleep. But having at last reached open country, he needed to move on, so he took his foot off the fence rail and addressed himself anew to his travels.

The sun climbed the sky and turned hot, and all the insect world seemed to find Inman's bodily fluids fascinating. Striped mosquitoes hummed around his ears and bit his back through his shirt. Ticks dropped from trailside brush and attached themselves to him at hairline and pant waist and grew fat.

Gnats sought out the water in his eyes. A horsefly followed him for a while, troubling his neck. It was a big black glob of buzzing matter the size of the end joint to his thumb, and he longed to kill it but could not, no matter how he jerked and beat at himself as it landed to bite out gouts of flesh and blood. The blows rang out in the still air. From a distance he would have seemed one of a musical temper experimenting with a new method of percussion, or a loosed bedlamite, at odds with his better nature and striking out flat-palmed with self-loathing.

He stopped and pissed in the dirt. Before he was hardly done, spring azure butterflies alit on it to drink, the color of their wings in the sun like blued metal. They seemed to him things too beautiful to be drinking piss. It was, though, apparently the nature of the place.

In the afternoon, he came to a crossroads settlement. He stopped at the edge of town and surveyed the scene. There was but a store, a few houses, a lean-to where a smith pedaled at a wheel, file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，36/232

sharpening the long blade of a scythe. Grinding it wrongly, Inman noted, for the smith was sharpening away from the cutting edge rather than toward, and holding the blade at right angles to the wheel rather than diagonal. There were no other people moving about the town. Inman decided to risk going to the whitewashed store to buy food. He stuck his pistol in the folds of the blanket roll so as to look harmless and not draw attention.

Two men sitting on the porch to the store hardly looked up as he mounted the steps. One man was hatless, his hair sticking up on one side as if he had just risen from bed and not even run his fingers across his head. He was deeply engaged in cleaning his fingernails with the nipple pick to a rifle musket. All his faculties were so fully brought to bear on the task that the tip of his tongue, grey as the foot of a goose, was stuck out at the corner of his mouth. The other man was studying a newspaper. He wore leavings from a uniform, but the bill to his forage cap had been torn off so that the crown alone topped his head like a grey tarboosh. It was cocked off to the side at a sharp angle, and Inman supposed the man styled himself as a rounder. Propped up against the wall behind the man was a fine Whitworth rifle, an elaborate brass-scoped artifact, with many complex little wheels and screws to adjust for windage and elevation. The hexagonal barrel was plugged with a tompion of maple wood to keep out dirt. Inman had seen but a few Whitworths before. They were favorites of snipers. Imported from England, as were their scarce and expensive paper tube cartridges. At .45

caliber, they were not awesome in power, but they were frightfully accurate at distances up to near a mile. If you could see it and had even a measure of skill in marksmanship, a Whitworth could hit it.

Inman wondered how men like these might come by such a fine rifle.

He walked past them into the store, and they still did not look up. Inside by the fire two old men played a game on a barrel top. One man put his hand out on the circle of wood and spread his fingers. The other stabbed at the spaces between the fingers with the point of a pocketknife. Inman watched a minute but could not figure out what the rules might be, nor how score might be kept, nor what might need to occur so that one or the other would be declared the victor.

From the store's meager stock, Inman bought five pounds of cornmeal, a piece of cheese, some dried biscuit, and a big sweet pickle, and then he went out onto the porch. The two men were gone, had left so recently that their rockers were still in motion. Inman stepped down into the road to go on walking west, eating as he traveled. In front of him a pair of black dogs crossed from one patch of shade to another.

Then, as Inman came to the edge of the town, the two men who had been on the porch came from behind the smithy and stood in the road blocking his way out. The smith stopped pedaling the wheel and stood watching.

—Where you going, son-of-a-bitch? the man with the cap said.

Inman said nothing. He ate the wet pickle in two big bites and stuck the remainder of the cheese and biscuit in the haversack. The nipple-pick man moved off to the side of him. The smith, wearing a heavy leather apron and carrying the scythe, came out of the lean-to and circled around to come at Inman from the other side. They were not big men, not even the smith, who seemed in all ways unsuited to his craft. They looked to be layabouts, drunk maybe, and overconfident, for they appeared to presume, since numbers were in their favor, that they could take him with no more weapon than the scythe.

Inman had begun to reach behind him into the roll of his bedding when the three jumped as one, swarming at him. At once they were fighting him fist and skull. He had not time even to remove his pack and thus brawled encumbered.

Inman fought them backing up. His last wish was for them to mob him over onto the ground, and so he gave way until he was forced against the side of the store.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...