Cold Mountain (24 page)

2004-3-6

页码，99/232

embittered and wishing to get a rise out of him—had often charged that Stobrod had no part in the baby and that its cause was a tall blue heron. She claimed it had lit at the creek one morning and, after spending the forenoon spearing crawfish, had come into the yard where she was breaking apart a crust of old corn bread and scattering it on the ground for the chickens. The tale Ruby's mother told, as recounted by Stobrod, was that the heron strode up on its long back-hinged legs and looked her eye to eye. She claimed, Stobrod said, that the look was unmistakable, not open to but one interpretation. She turned and ran, but the heron chased her into the house, where, as she hunkered on hands and knees trying to squeeze under the bedstead to hide, the heron came upon her from behind. She described what ensued as like a flogging of dreadful scope.

—He told me that story a hundred times, Ruby said. I mostly know it to be one of his lies, but I still can't look on one of those birds without wondering.

Ada did not know what to say. The light under the trees by the river had fallen to gold and the leaves on beech and poplar shivered in a small wind. Ruby stopped and put on her sweater and Ada shook the wrinkles out of the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cloak. They walked on, and at the ford of the river they met a young woman carrying a baby wrapped in a checked tablecloth slung over her shoulder. She skipped barefoot across the stepping stones as graceful as a deer running and said not a word nor even met their eyes when she passed, though the baby stared at them expressionless from eyes as brown as acorn caps set in his head. Soon after the ford, small birds flew from an apple tree standing alone in an old field. They flew close to the ground and entered the woods. The setting sun was in Ruby's eyes so that she could only make a guess at their kind, but for weather purposes it did not matter. The thing their pattern of flying told was more rain.

Yet farther up the road, near a hole in the river where people were sometimes dipped in baptism, a cloud of martins erupted out of a maple tree nearing the peak of its color. The sun's bottom limb was just touching the ridge and the sky was the color of hammered pewter. The martins flew from the tree as one body, still in the shape of the round maple they had filled. Then they banked into the wind, slipped sideways in the moving air on extended wings for two heartbeats, so that Ada viewed them in thin profile and saw much silver space between the individual birds. Immediately, as if on signal, they swept into a steep climb and the fullness of their wings turned toward her and closed the bright gaps between the birds so that the flock looked like the black image of the red maple projected into the sky. The bird shadows across the long field grass beyond the road flickered.

Twilight rose up around Ada and Ruby as if the dark from the river were seeping skyward. Ruby's fanciful heron story of source and root reminded Ada of a story Monroe had told not long before his death. It concerned the manner in which he had wooed her mother, and to pass the darkening miles upriver, Ada recounted it in some detail to Ruby.

Ada had known that Monroe and her mother had married relatively late in life, he at forty-five, she at thirty-six. And Ada knew their time together had been brief. But she did not know the circumstances of their courtship and marriage, assuming it an alliance of calm friendship, the sort of tie she had seen formed numerous times between peculiar old bachelors and aging spinsters. She supposed herself to be a product of some sad miscalculation.

That is until one afternoon in the winter before Monroe's death. A wet snow had fallen all day, the large flakes melting as they struck the ground. Ada and Monroe sat by the fire through the long afternoon, Ada reading to him from a new book,
The Conduct of Life.
Monroe had for many years followed Mr. Emerson's every published utterance with keen interest, and that day he thought Emerson, as always, even in old age, perhaps one degree more extreme in his spiritual views than was called for.

As the day drew to a close outside the windows, Ada put the book aside. Monroe looked tired, grey, his eyes sunken. He sat studying the fire, which had settled into its ashes and burned slowly, with file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，100/232

scarce flame. Eventually he said, I have never told you how I came to marry your mother.

—No, Ada said.

—It is a thing that keeps coming into my mind of late. I don't know why. You've never known that I met your mother when she was barely sixteen and I twenty-five.

—No, Ada said.

—Oh, yes. The first time I saw her I thought she was the loveliest thing I'd ever seen. It was February. A grey day, chill, with a faint damp breeze blowing from off the ocean. I was out riding. I had then recently bought a great Hanoverian gelding. Seventeen hands if an inch. A bloodstone chestnut. He was just the slightest bit cow-hocked, but not enough to matter. His canter was a thing of wonder, like floating. I had ridden him some way out of Charleston, north along the Ashley, past Middleton. Then over and down to Hanahan on my way back home. It was a long ride. The horse was lathered despite the coolness of the air, and I was hungry and anxious for supper. It was just this time of day. Grey night. We were at the first point where you could with confidence say we had left the country and entered the city.

We came to a house, one that could be described as neither modest nor grand. It had a broad porch with old palmettos at either end. It was too near the road for my tastes. Its windows were dark, and it had a water trough in the yard. Thinking no one home, I stopped and dismounted to water my horse.

From the porch a woman's voice came, saying, You might ask leave first.

She had apparently been sitting alone on a bench beneath the windows. I took off my hat and said, I beg your pardon. She stepped out from the shadow of the porch and walked down the steps and stopped on the bottom one. She wore a winter dress of grey wool, a black shawl about her shoulders.

Hair the color of a crow's wing. She had been brushing it, for it was down nearly to the small of her back, and she held a brush with a tor-toiseshell handle. Her face was pale as marble. There was not a thing about her that was not either black, white, or a shade between the two.

Despite her harsh attire, I was totally disarmed. I have never seen the match to her. There is not a word for how beautiful she looked to me. All I could say was, Again, miss, I beg your pardon. I mounted and rode away, flustered, my thoughts all in a churn. Some time that night, after I had taken dinner and gone to bed, it came to me. That was the woman I was meant to marry.

The next day I set about courting her, and I went at it just as hard and as carefully as a man can. First I collected information. I found that her name was Claire Dechutes. Her father, a Frenchman, made a living trading back and forth with his home country, importing wine and exporting rice. He was a man of comfort, if not of great means. I arranged a meeting with him at his warehouse near a dock on the Cooper. A dank and gloomy place that smelled of the river. It was filled with wooden crates of claret, both fine and cheap, and tow sacks of our rice. We were introduced by my friend Aswell, who had done business with Dechutes in the past. Dechutes, your grandfather, was a short man, and heavy. Portly would be the term. More French in his ways than I care for, if you take my meaning.

Neither you nor your mother shared any observable characteristic with him.

I made my intentions clear from the start: I wished to marry his daughter and sought his approval and assistance. I offered to provide him with references, financial statements, anything that might convince him of my desirability as a son-in-law. I could see his mind working. He tugged at his cravat. Rolled his eyes. He went off to the side and conferred with Aswell for a time. When he returned, he reached out his hand and said, May I offer any assistance within my power.

His only sticking point was this: he wished Claire not to marry before her eighteenth birthday. I agreed. Two years seemed not too long to wait, and a fair request on his part. Within a few days he file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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页码，101/232

took me home to dinner as his guest. My introduction to your mother was at his hand. I could see in her eyes that she knew me from the night in the yard, but she said not a word of it. I believed from the beginning that my feeling toward her was returned.

We courted for months, through the spring and summer and into the autumn. We met at balls to which I arranged her invitation. I rode north to the Dechutes house over and over on the Hanoverian gelding. Claire and I sat on the bench on the broad porch night after night through the humid summer and talked of every subject dear to our hearts. Days when I could not ride out, we posted letters which crossed paths somewhere on Meeting Street. In the late fall, I had a ring made. It was a blue diamond, a stone as big as the end of your little finger. It was set in a band of white filigreed gold. I made up my mind to present it to her one evening in late November as a surprise.

On the chosen date, I rode the Hanoverian out north in the dusk, the ring nestling in a pouch of velvet in my waistcoat pocket. It was a night with a chill in the air, brisk and wintery, at least in Charleston terms. A night alike in its every feature to the one on which we had first met.

By the time I reached the Dechutes house, the sky was fully dark. But the house was lighted, every window ablaze in welcome. The sound of a piano, Bach, faintly reached me from inside. I sat in the road a moment, thinking the night to be the culmination of the previous seasons' effort. All my heart's desire within easy reach.

Then I heard the low murmur of voices from the porch. Saw movement. Claire's profile leaned forward, her black silhouette framed in the yellow light of the window. There was no mistaking it for anyone else's. From the other side of the window leaned another face, a man's. They met and kissed, a long kiss and a passionate one from what I could tell. Their faces parted, and her hand reached to his face and guided it back again. My stomach clenched. And my hands. I longed to step to the porch and shout my outrage and thrash someone. But the humiliating role of the betrayed suitor was not one I relished playing.

Without another thought I put spurs to the horse and sped off north at a feverish pace. We went for miles and miles. That tall horse stretching out long in its gallop. It was like riding in a dream, hurling through a dark world at a rate more akin to winged flight than riding horseback. We passed through dense flats of turkey oak and slash pine and yaupon, through open barrens of wire grass and saw grass, until finally, in a place where wax myrtle thickets hemmed in the road to left and right, the horse slowed and walked, blowing hard, head down.

I had no clear idea where I was. I had not kept up with the turnings of the roads or even the fine points of the compass bearing we had been following. Generally north was all I knew, for we had not plunged into either the Ashley or the Cooper and drowned. In the scant light of a partial moon, the sweated chestnut gelding looked black as ebony, and as glossy. Other than act fully the wildman and set a course west to lose myself for life in the trackless territories of Texas, there was little to do but turn and head home. As I fixed to do so, however, I saw that ahead of me the sky was lighted up yellow over the wax myrtles as by a bonfire. Other features of creation seemed as inflamed as I was.

The fire provided, I reasoned, an interim direction.

I made toward its light, and in a turn or two of the road came upon a church afire. Its roof and steeple were ablaze, but the body of the building was yet untouched. I left the horse and walked to the church and entered the door and walked down the aisle. I took the ring pouch from my pocket and placed it on the altar and then stood there in the smoke and the garish light. Pieces of roof began falling about me flaming. I am the groom waiting at the altar; I will burn myself down, I thought.

Just then a man burst through the doors. His clothes were twisted on him and he carried a quart liquor bottle with but an inch left glowing amber at the bottom. He said, What are you doing here?

Get out.

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

2004-3-6

页码，102/232

Pride, I guess, made me say, I happened by. I came in to see if I could be of help.

—Well, get out, he said.

I left the church with him, and we determined to try to save it, though he was drunk and I was half out of my mind. From a creek nearby, we carried what water we could in his liquor bottle. We'd squat by the creek waiting for the bottle to glug full through its narrow neck and then together we would walk to the church and throw the water on the fire a quart at a time, not so much in hope of putting it out as to be able to say, if asked, that we tried. When dawn came, the man and I stood with sooty faces looking at a round black circle on the land.

—Well, that's that. Everything's burned but the hinges and the doorknobs, the man said.

—Yes, I said.

—We did what we could.

—Without a doubt.

—There's not a man that could lay blame on us for lack of effort.

—No. Not a man, I said

He shook the last drops of water out of his liquor bottle onto the singed grass at the edge of the fire ring and put it in his coat pocket and walked on up the road. I went to the horse and mounted and rode back into Charleston.

A week later I booked passage on a ship bound for England, and for the next year I did little but roam about examining old churches and old paintings. When I returned, I found that your mother had married the man I had seen her with on the porch. He was a Frenchman, an associate of her father's, a broker of wines. She had gone with him to live in France. It was like a door closed.

I had always been drawn to matters of the spirit, and so I withdrew from my duties in the family business and went into ministry with both resignation and glee. I have never for a moment regretted that decision.

Nineteen years passed, and one spring day I discovered that Claire had returned from France alone.

Her husband had died. It had been a childless marriage, and not entirely a pleasant one if gossip was to be believed. Bitter, in fact. The little Frenchman had lived up to my most selfish dreams.

Within days of hearing this news I returned to the warehouse on the Cooper and met again with Dechutes. He was now an old man, great of waist and flabby at the jowls, and I had a widow's peak and had grown grey at the temples. The look he gave me would serve perfectly as illustration of the word
supercilious.
He said, How might I help you? in a tone that some previous time might have led to seconds and pistols.

I said, We are going to go at this thing again, and this time I intend to see that it sticks.

That autumn, your mother and I married, and for two years I was as happy as a man can be. And I think I made her happy as well. Her previous husband, the little Frenchman, had been unsatisfactory in every regard. He blamed her for the lack of children and grew sour and harsh. I made it my business to reimburse her for every slight, every meanness.

The months when we knew you were to come seemed a strange blessing for a pair such as we were: file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...