Cold Mountain (16 page)

2004-3-6

页码，64/232

than a temporary hindrance to business.

Inman stayed with the gypsies through the remainder of the day. He took a dip from the stewpot whenever he became hungry. He slept some and listened to the fiddler and watched a woman telling fortunes by reading the pattern of leaves in a cup of herb tea, but he declined her offer to tell his own future for he figured he already had all the discouragement he needed.

Later in the afternoon he watched a dark-haired woman walk among the horses and put a bridle on a dun mare. She was young and wore a man's sweater over a long black skirt and was about as pretty as women get to be. Something in the darkness of her hair or the way she moved or the thinness of her fingers reminded him momentarily of Ada. He sat and stared as she caught up the hems of her long skirt and petticoat and clenched them in her teeth before mounting astride the mare. Her white legs were exposed to the thigh. She rode down the riverbank and crossed at a place deep enough that in the middle the horse lost its footing and swam a stroke or two. It struggled climbing up the far bank, working hard with its haunches. Water streamed off its back and sides and the woman was wet to the hips. She leaned forward for balance with her face almost resting on the horse's neck. Her hair fell against its black mane so that you could not tell one from the other. When they reached level ground she put her heels to the mare's sides and they galloped away through the open woods. It was to Inman a stirring sight, a happy vision that he was grateful to have been granted.

On toward dusk some little gypsy boys whittled gigs from river-birch limbs and went to a backwater and gigged frogs until they had a basketful. They cut their legs off and strung them on sticks to roast over a fire of hickory coals. While the frog meat was cooking, a man came to Inman with a bottle of Moet he claimed he had taken in trade. The man was not entirely sure what it was that he had, but he knew he wished to sell it for top dollar. So Inman counted out some money and composed himself a plate of supper from the frog legs and part of the wine. He found the two not ill sorted, but when he was done they did not make a real dinner for someone as hungry as he was.

He wandered about the camp looking for other food and eventually made his way to the wagon of show folk. A medicine show. A white man came from where he sat near their tent and talked to Inman and queried him as to his business. The man was thin and tall and had some age on him, for the skin under his eyes was pale and pouched and he wore blacking in his hair. He seemed to run the place. Inman asked if he could buy a meal, and the man said he reckoned so, but that they would not eat until much later for they had to practice their act while there was yet light. Inman was welcome to sit and watch.

In a minute the dark-haired woman he had seen earlier came out of the tent. Inman could not take his eyes off her. He studied her bearing beside the man, trying to guess the forces running between them.

He first guessed them to be married and then he guessed not. The two set up a backstop and the woman stood against it and the man threw knives at her so that the blades just missed her and fetched up shivering in the boards. That seemed to Inman plenty to draw a crowd, but they had as well a big grey-bearded Ethiopian who had a regal bearing and dressed in purple robes and was portrayed to have been in his youth the king of Africa. He played a banjolike thing and could just about make a dead man dance, though his instrument was made of but a gourd and had just one string. As well, the troupe included a little menagerie of Indians of several makes, a Seminole from Florida, a Creek, a Cherokee from Echota, and a Yemassee woman. Their part in shows was to tell jokes and beat drums and dance and chant. The wagon they traveled in was loaded with fancy little colored bottles of medicine, each with its special disease to cure: cancer, consumption, neuralgia, malaria, cachexia, stroke, fit, and seizure.

After dark, they asked Inman to join them for dinner, and they all sat on the ground by the fire and ate great bloody beefsteaks and potatoes pan fried in bacon drippings and wild greens dressed with what drippings the potatoes had not soaked up. The Ethiopian and the Indians joined in the meal as if they were all of a color and equals. They took their turns speaking, and permission to talk was file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，65/232

neither sought nor given.

When done, they went and squatted by the water, each scouring his own plate in river sand. Then the white man threw sticks on the coals of the cook fire, building it up with no eye toward thrift of wood until flame stood shoulder high. The show folk passed a bottle around and sat telling Inman stories of their endless travels. The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom. Their stories were of being broke and of sudden windfalls. Card games and horse auctions and the wonderful prevalence of the witless. Various tight spots with the law, disasters narrowly averted, fools bested in trade, wisemen met on the road and their often contradictory wisdom. Townships of gullibility and of particular viciousness. They reminded each other of certain camp places and of meals eaten in them, and they reached consensus that the finest of all was a place some years in the past where a river of considerable size poured directly from the base of a rock face, and they likewise agreed that they had never eaten better fried chicken than they had cooked in the shadow of that cliff.

After awhile Inman could attend to little but how beautiful the woman looked in the firelight, the way it lit up her hair and the fineness of her skin. And then at some point the white man said a strange thing. He said that someday the world might be ordered so that when a man uses the term slave it be only metaphoric.

Sometime deep in the night, Inman took his packsacks and went into the woods beyond camp and spread his bedding within earshot of the gypsy music and the sound of voices. He tried to sleep, but he just tossed about on the ground. He lit a candle stub and poured the remainder of the wine into his tin cup and took his Bartram scroll from his knapsack. He opened the book at random and read and reread the sentence that first fell under his eye. It concerned itself with an unnamed plant similar, as best he could tell, to a rhododendron:

This shrub grows in copses or little groves, in open, high situations, where trees of large growth are but scatteringly planted; many simple stems arise together from a root or source erect, four, five and six feet high; their limbs or branches, which are produced towards the top of the stems, also stand nearly erect, lightly diverging from the main stems, which are furnished with moderately large ovate pointed intire leaves, of a pale or yellowish green colour; these leaves are of a firm, compact texture, both surfaces smooth and shining, and stand nearly erect upon short petioles; the branches terminate with long, loose panicles or spikes of white flowers, whose segments are five, long and narrow.

Inman occupied himself pleasurably for quite some time with this long sentence. First he read it until each word rested in his head with a specific weight peculiar to itself, for if he did not, his attention just skittered over phrases so they left no marks. That accomplished, he fixed in his mind the setting, supplying all the missing details of a high open forest; the kinds of trees that would grow there, the birds that would frequent their limbs, the bracken that would grow under them. When he could hold that picture firm and clear, he began constructing the shrub in his mind, forming all its particulars until it arose in his thinking as vivid as he could make it, though it in no way matched any known plant and was in several features quite fantastic.

He blew out his candle and wrapped himself in his bedding and sipped at the last of his wine in preparation for sleep, but his mind turned on the dark-haired woman and on the woman named Laura and the softness of her thigh backs against his arms as he carried her. And then he thought of Ada and of Christmas four years ago, for there had been champagne then too. He leaned his head against the tree bark and took a long draught of the wine and remembered with some particularity the feel of Ada sitting on his lap in the stove corner.

It seemed like another life, another world. He remembered her weight on his legs. The softness of her, and yet the hard angularity of her bones underneath. She had leaned back and rested her head on his shoulder, and her hair smelled of lavender and of herself. Then she sat up and he put his hands to file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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页码，66/232

the points of her shoulders and felt the underlayment of muscle and the knobby shoulder joints beneath the skin. He pulled her back to him and wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her tight, but she blew out air through her pressed lips and stood and pulled at the wrinkles in the skirt of her dress and reached up to smooth back little rings of hair that had sprung loose at her temples. She turned and looked down at him. —Well, she had said. Well.

Inman had leaned forward, taken her hand and rubbed across its back with his thumb. The fine bones running to the wrist from the knuckles moved beneath the pressure like piano keys. Then he turned her hand over and smoothed back the ringers when she tried to draw them in and make a fist. He put his lips to her wrist where the slate-blue veins twined. Ada slowly drew her hand away and then stood looking down absently at its palm. —There's not tidings written on it. Not any we can read, Inman said. Ada had put her hand down and said, That was unexpected. Then she walked away.

When Inman finally let go the memory and slept, he dreamed a dream as bright as the real day. In it he lay, as he did in the ordinary world, in a forest of hardwoods, their boughs visibly tired from a summer of growing and just weeks away from the color and the fall. Mixed in among the trees were the shrubs he had imagined from his reading of Bartram. They were covered in great hallucinatory blossoms, pentangular in form. In the dream world, fine rain sifted down through the heavy leaves and moved along the ground in curtains so sheer that it did not even wet him through his clothes.

Ada appeared among the tree trunks and moved at about the pace of the rain toward him. She wore a white dress and was wound about the shoulders and head in a wrapping of black cloth, but he knew her from her eyes and from the way she walked.

He rose from where he lay on the ground, and though perplexed as to how she came to be there he longed to hold her and went to do it, but three times as he reached his arms to her she fogged through them, vague and flickery and grey. The fourth time, though, she stood firm and substantial and he held her tight. He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.

She looked at him and took the wrapping from about her head and seemed in the look of her face to agree, though she said not a word.

Inman was roused from sleep by the song of morning birds. The vision of Ada would not loose its grip on his mind, nor did he wish it to. He arose and there was a heavy dew on the grass and the sun already stood at the treetops. He walked through the woods to the camp, but everyone was gone. The fire where the medicine wagon had been was dead. There was nothing to say the show folk had been real but the big black fire ring and a set of parallel lines cut in the dirt by their wagon wheels. Inman was sorry not to have bid them farewell, but he walked all through the day with some brightening of his spirit from the clear dream he had been awarded in the dark of night.

ashes of roses

One warm afternoon at the brink of fall, Ruby and Ada worked in the lower field, which Ruby had designated as the winter garden. It was the sort of day when joe-pye weed had grown seven feet tall and its autumnal metallic flowerheads suddenly opened and glittered in the sun, looking for all the world like frost early of a morning. They served as reminders of just how rapidly the first real frost was approaching, even though the sun was still hot and the cow still spent the day following the shade of the big hickory tree as it moved across the lower pasture.

Ada and Ruby hoed and pulled weeds among the rows of young cabbages and turnips, collards and onions, the kind of coarse food they would mostly live on for the winter. Some weeks earlier they had prepared the garden carefully, plowing and sweetening the dirt with fireplace ashes and manure from the barn and then harrowing the cloddy ground, Ruby driving the horse while Ada rode the drag to add weight. The harrow was a crude device, knocked together by one of the Blacks from a file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，67/232

fork in an oak trunk. Holes had been augured through the green wood of the two spreading ends of the trunk and fitted with long spikes of cured black locust. As the oak dried, it had tightened hard around the sharpened locust and needed no further attachment. During the work, Ada had sat at the fork, braced with hands and feet as the harrow jounced across the ground, breaking up clumps of plowed dirt and combing it smooth with the tines of locust. She had watched the turned ground passing and had snatched up three partial arrowheads and a flint scraper and one fine complete bird point. When they began planting, Ruby had held out a handful of tiny black seeds. Looks like not much, she said. It takes faith to jump from this to a root cellar filled with turnips some many weeks hence. That and a warm fall, for we started late.

The crops were growing well, largely, Ruby claimed, because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby's mind, everything—setting fence posts, making sauerkraut, killing hogs— fell under the rule of the heavens. Cut firewood in the old of the moon, she'd advised, otherwise it won't do much but fry and hiss at you come winter. Next April when the poplar leaves are about the size of a squirrel's ear, we'll plant corn when the signs are in the feet; otherwise the corn will just shank and hang down. November, we'll kill a hog in the growing of the moon, for if we don't the meat will lack grease and pork chops will cup up in the pan.

Monroe would have dismissed such beliefs as superstition, folklore. But Ada, increasingly covetous of Ruby's learning in the ways living things inhabited this particular place, chose to view the signs as metaphoric. They were, as Ada saw them, an expression of stewardship, a means of taking care, a discipline. They provided a ritual of concern for the patterns and tendencies of the material world where it might be seen to intersect with some other world. Ultimately, she decided, the signs were a way of being alert, and under those terms she could honor them.

They worked among the plants for some time that afternoon, and then they heard the sound of wheels, a horse, a metal pail banging against a sideboard with a ring that filled the cove. A pair of ancient mules and then a wagon rounded the curve of the road and stopped by the fence. The wagon bed was piled full with satchels and boxes to such extent that the people all walked. Ada and Ruby went to the fence and found the group to be made of pilgrims from Tennessee on their way to South Carolina. They had taken a number of wrong turnings along the river, had missed the way to Wagon Road Gap, and were now fetched up at this dead end. The party was composed of three broken women and a half dozen young children. They were tended by a pair of kind slaves, a man and wife, who hovered about the women as close as shadows, even though they might just as easily have cut every throat in the family any night as they slept.

The women said their husbands were off at the fighting, and they were fleeing the Federals in Tennessee, aiming for Camden in South Carolina where one of the women had a sister. They asked leave to sleep in the hayloft, and while they were making up their nests in the hay, Ada and Ruby went to work cooking. Ruby cut the heads off three chickens, for the yard was now so full of chicks they could hardly walk to the springhouse without stepping on one, and the population was such that they could anticipate a sufficiency of capons soon. They cut the chickens up and fried them, cooked pole beans, boiled potatoes and stewed squash. Ruby made a triple recipe of biscuits, and when supper was ready they called in the visitors and sat them at the dining-room table. The slaves had the same fare, but ate out under the pear tree.

The travelers dined hard for quite some time, and when they were done eating, there were but two wings and a thigh left on the chicken platter, and they had gone through more than a pound of butter and a pint pitcher of sorghum. One woman said, My, that was good. It's been two weeks now that we've had little to eat but dry corn bread, without butter or bacon drippings or molasses to wetten it up a little. Choky food.

—How do you come to be on the road? Ada said.

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