Cold Mountain (11 page)

2004-3-6

页码，41/232

drooping with the weight of water. The river ran heavy and dark in curves like melted glass where it bowed over hidden rocks and then sank into troughs. Inman held his hat by the crown and for lack of anything to say he looked down into the hole as if, from previous experience, he waited in sincere expectation that something might emerge.

Ada stood a moment looking at his face, and then after a time she looked into the hole of the hat too.

Inman caught himself, fearing that the expression on his face was that of a dog sitting at the lip of a groundhog burrow.

He looked at Ada, and she turned up her palms and raised an eyebrow to signify a general question.

—You're free to put your hat back on and say something, she said.

—It's just that you've been the subject of considerable speculation, Inman said.

—Like a novelty, is it, speaking to me?

—No.

—A challenge, then. Perhaps from that circle of dullards there.

—Not at all.

—Well, then, you supply the simile.

—Like grabbing up a chestnut burr, at least thus far.

Ada smiled and nodded. She had not figured him to know the word.

Then she said, Tell me this. A woman earlier commented on the recent weather. She called it sheep-killing weather. I've been wondering, can't get it out of my mind. Did she mean weather appropriate for slaughtering sheep or weather foul enough to kill them itself without assistance, perhaps by drowning or pneumonia?

—The first, Inman said.

—Well, then, I thank you. You've served a useful purpose.

She turned and walked away to her father. Inman watched her touch Monroe's arm and say something to him, and they went to the cabriolet and climbed in and wheeled off, fading down the lane between fencerows thicketed with blossoming blackberry canes.

Eventually, late in the day, Inman emerged from out the foul pinewoods and found himself wandering the banks of a great swollen river. The sun stood just above the low horizon at the far bank, and there was a haze in the air so that everything was cast in a lurid yellow light. The rain had evidently been harder somewhere upstream and had raised the river to its banks and beyond, too wide and strong to swim, even had Inman been a good swimmer. So, hoping to find an unguarded bridge or trestle, he walked up the riverbank, following a thin footpath that ran between the grim pine forest to his right and the sorry river to his left.

It was a foul region, planed off flat except where there were raw gullies cut deep in the red clay.

Scrubby pines everywhere. Trees of a better make had once stood in their place but had been cut down long ago, the only evidence of them now an occasional hardwood stump as big around as a file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，42/232

dinner table. Poison ivy grew in thick beds that stretched as far as Inman could see through the woods. It climbed the pine trees and spread among their limbs. The falling needles caught in the tangled ivy vines and softened the lines of the trunks and limbs and formed heavy new shapes of them until the trees loomed like green and grey beasts risen out of the ground.

The forest looked to be a sick and dangerous place. It recalled to him a time during the fighting down along the coast when a man had shown him a tiny plant, a strange and hairy thing that grew in bogs.

It knew to eat meat, and they fed it little pieces of fatback from the end of a splinter. You could hold the tip of a finger to what stood for its mouth and it would snap at you. These flatwoods seemed only a step away from learning the trick on a grander scale.

What Inman wanted was to be out of there, but the river stretched wide before him, a shit-brown clog to his passage. As a liquid, it bore likeness more to molasses as it first thickens in the making than to water. He wished never to become accustomed to this sorry make of waterway. It did not even fit his picture of a river. Where he was from, the word
river
meant rocks and moss and the sound of white water moving fast under the spell of a great deal of collected gravity. Not a river in his whole territory was wider than you could pitch a stick across, and in every one of them you could see bottom wherever you looked.

This broad ditch was a smear on the landscape. But for the balls of yellow scud collected in drifted foamy heaps upstream of grounded logs, the river was as opaque and unmarked as a sheet of tin painted brown. Foul as the contents of an outhouse pit.

Inman fared on through this territory, criticizing its every feature. How did he ever think this to be his country and worth fighting for? Ignorance alone would account for it. All he could list in his mind worth combat right now was his right to exist unmolested somewhere on the west fork of the Pigeon River drainage basin, up on Cold Mountain near the source of Scapecat Branch.

He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all the year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks passing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing.

But even though he believed truly that you can think on a thing till it comes real, this last thought never shaped up so, no matter how hard he tried. What hope he had was no brighter than if someone had lit fire to a taper at the mountain's top and left him far away to try setting a course by it.

He walked on and shortly night began to fall and a part of a moon shone through patchy clouds. He came upon a road that ended in the river; beside it, a sign that someone had stuck up at the water's edge read Ferry. $5. Yell Loud.

A stout rope stretched from a thick post across the water and disappeared into it. Toward the far bank, the rope rose from the water again to end at another post. Beyond the landing, Inman saw a house on stilts raised above the highwater mark. A window was lit and smoke came from the chimney.

Inman called out, and in a minute a figure appeared on the porch and waved and went back in. Soon, though, it reappeared from behind the house dragging a dugout canoe by a line. The boatman got it afloat and mounted it and set out rowing hard upstream in the slower water that flowed near the bank. Still it was a strong current, and he dug with bowed back at the paddle until it looked like he planned to just keep on going. Before he went out of sight, though, he turned and sat up and let the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，43/232

current carry him down, angling to the east bank, working easily, saving effort. Just barely touching the blade to the water to set a course. The dugout was old and the dry wood was sun-bleached, so that the crude and blockish sides of it shone like beaten pewter against the dark water when the moon broke from between clouds.

As the canoe came in toward shore where Inman stood, he saw that it was piloted by no ferryman but an apple-cheeked girl, dark about the head and skin so as to suggest Indian blood back a generation or two. She wore a dress of homespun that in the dim light he took to be yellow. She had big strong hands, and the muscles of her forearms knotted under the skin with every stroke. Her black hair was loose about her shoulders. She whistled a tune as she approached. At the bank she stepped out of the dugout barefooted into the muddy water, pulling the canoe by a line at its bow to beach it. Inman drew a five-dollar note from his pocket and reached it to her. She didn't reach to take it, but only looked at it with some measure of disgust.

—I wouldn't give a thirsty man a dipper of this river water for five dollars, much less paddle you across it, she said.

—The sign says the ferry charge is five.

—This look like a ferryboat to you?

—Is this a ferry crossing or not?

—It is when Daddy's here. He's got a flatboat big enough to carry a team and wagon. He pulls it across on the rope. But with the river up he can't run it. He's gone off hunting, waiting for the water to drop. Until then, I'm charging the utmost somebody's willing to pay, for I've got me a cowhide and I aim to get a saddle made from it. And when I get me that, I'll start saving for a horse, and when I get one, I'll throw the saddle over it and turn my back to this river and be gone.

—What's the name of this thing? Inman said.

—Why it's nothing but the mighty Cape Fear River is all, the girl said.

—Well, what will you charge me to get over it? Inman said.

—Fifty dollars scrip, the girl said.

—Take twenty?

—Let's go.

Before they could climb into the boat, Inman saw great greasy bubbles rising to the surface thirty feet out from the bank. They shone in the moonlight as they broke, and they moved in a direction counter to the river's flow, going upstream at about the pace of a man walking. The night was windless and still, and there were not other sounds than the water blubbering and the bugs skirling in the pines.

—You see that? Inman said.

—Yeah, the girl said.

—What's making it?

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

2004-3-6

页码，44/232

—Hard to say, it being at the bottom of the river.

The water broke as huge and urgent as breath from a drowning cow. Inman and the girl stood and watched as the bubbles gradually climbed the river until the moon was overblown by a bank of clouds and they disappeared in the darkness.

—Could be a catfish rooting along the river bottom to dig up some food, the girl said. They've got a diet would kill a turkey vulture. I seen one the size of a boar hog one time. It was washed up dead on a sandbar. Whiskers on it the size of blacksnakes.

That would be the sort of thing that would grow in this river, Inman figured. Monstrous flabby fish with meat as slack as fatback. He thought of the great contrast between such a creature and the little trout that lived in the upper branches of the Pigeon where the water poured ofFCold Mountain. They were seldom longer than your hand. Bright and firm as shavings from a bar of silver.

Inman tossed his packs in ahead of him and boarded the canoe and settled himself into the prow. The girl got in behind him and dug hard against the water, paddling with a strong and sure hand, keeping a straight course by kicking out at the tail of the stroke rather than constantly switching sides. The splash of the paddle overrode even the insects' squealing.

The girl dug hard at the water to send them a fair piece up the river from the landing, taking advantage of the slower water near the bank. Then she turned about and quit paddling and stuck the blade in the water like a rudder. She angled them out, using the current to drive them toward the river's midpoint. With the moon hidden, the land beyond the riverbank soon disappeared, and they floated blind in a world black as the inside of a cow. In the silence they heard the sound of voices from the eastern landing carrying far across the water. It might have been anybody. Inman doubted the men from the town had enough purpose to follow him so far.

Still, he turned and, whispering, said to the girl, We'd best not be found out. But at that moment he looked up and saw a radius of moon appear from under clouds. It soon stood fully revealed in a little ragged window of sky. The sun-bleached side of the canoe shone out like a beacon on the dark water.

There was a sound like running fingernails across the grain of corduroy and a whacking sound. The crack of gunfire followed.

The Whitworth, Inman thought.

A hole opened up at the back of the canoe at waterline. Brown water streamed in at the alarming rate of a cow pissing. Inman looked ahead to the landing and saw a party of a half-dozen men milling about in the moonlight. Some of them began firing their little pistols, but they had not the carrying power to cover the distance. The man with the rifle, though, had it turned up and was working with the ramrod to tamp in a fresh load. The only way Inman could figure it, the men must have framed the evening in their minds as a type of coon hunt, as sport; otherwise they would have long since gone back to town.

The ferry girl sized up the situation immediately and threw her weight to rock the canoe hard, tipping it to the gunwales to wet it down and darken it. Inman tore the cuff off his shirt and was plugging the hole when another ball struck the side at waterline and tore off a chunk of wood as big as a hand.

The river poured in and soon began filling the bottom of the boat.

—There's nothing else but that we are going to have to get down in the river, the girl said.

Inman first thought she intended them to strike out swimming for shore. Not having come from a file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，45/232

country of deep water, though, he doubted his ability to swim that far. Instead, she proposed they get in the water and hold to the canoe, using it for cover. Inman wrapped his packs with his oilcloth and tied the bundle off tight as he could with the loose ends in case the canoe should sink entirely. Then, together, he and the girl threw themselves into the river to let the current take them, bearing them up and away, spinning them off downstream.

Though the surface was smooth as a mirror and looked as if it could move at no greater pace than an ooze, the swollen river boomed along at the speed of a millrace. The dugout, partially filled with water, floated low in the river, just the spade-shaped bow fully above the surface. Inman had swallowed water, and he spit and spit until he could bring up nothing but white foam, trying to clear his mouth of the foul river. Uglier water he had never tasted.

The moon came and went among the clouds, and when there was enough light to aim by, rounds from the Whitworth hit the canoe or struck the water and skipped off stuttering across the surface.

Inman and the girl tried to kick with their legs and steer the upturned boat to the western shore, but in its heaviness it seemed to have a mind of its own and would in no way do their bidding. They gave up and let themselves be carried along, just their faces above water. There was nothing to do but hang on and wait for a bend in the river and hope that the evening would present something to their advantage.

From down in it, the river looked even wider than from the bank. The foul country passing along on either side was vague and ominous in the moonlight. Inman's hope was that it would strike neither mark nor impress on his mental workings, so vile did its contours lie about him.

Even from out in the river he could hear that the bugs squealed among the poison ivy without pause.

He was but a little head floating in a great void plane bounded by a dark jungle of venomous plants.

Any minute he figured to see the white bewhiskered maw of the monster catfish rise from the water and suck him in. All his life adding up to no more than catfish droppings on the bottom of this swill trough of a river.

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. Hate took no effort other than to look about. It was a weakness, he acknowledged, to be of such a mind that all around him had to lie fair for him call it satisfactory. But there were places he knew where such would generally be the case. Cold Mountain. Scapecat Branch. And right now the first impediment to being there was a hundred yards of river.

After a time, the moon was blinded again by clouds, and they drifted past the landing, and Inman could hear the men talking as clearly as if he stood amid the group. One man, evidently the owner of the Whitworth, said, It was daylight, I could shoot the ears off his head with this thing.

Long moments later the moon again appeared. Inman raised up and looked across the dugout. Way back at the ferry landing, he saw little figures waving their arms and jumping up and down in their rage. They receded, and he could think of many things that he wished could similarly just get smaller and smaller until they disappeared. The main evidence of their existence was the occasional splash of lead, followed at some interval by the report of the long rifle. Like lightning and thunder, Inman thought. He occupied the time counting the seconds between the slap of a ball and the faint pop. He could not, however, remember the way you were supposed to figure distance from it. Nor did he know if the same principle applied.

The river eventually swept them around a bend and put the landing out of sight. Now that they could safely get to the other side of the canoe they could kick to some effect, and in short order they fetched up on land. That side of the canoe was shot to pieces beyond repair, so they left it wallowing in the shallow water and set out walking upstream.

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