Cold Mountain (28 page)

2004-3-6

页码，118/232

between hide and bone, routing a shallow groove there as it passed. It exited behind his ear. He fell as if struck by a lathing hatchet, but consciousness did not leave him entirely. He could not move, not so much as to blink an eye, nor did he wish to. The world moved on about him and he observed it, though he felt not a part of it. It seemed to scorn understanding. People died all around him and fell all bound together.

When the firing was done, the Guard stood as if unclear as to what the next step might be. One of them seemed taken by some fit or spell, and he danced about and sang Cotton Eye Joe and capered until another man hit him at the base of his spine with the stock of his musket. Finally one said, We'd best get them under ground.

They went about the job poorly, just digging out a shallow bed and strewing the men in and covering them over with dirt about to the depth that one would plant potatoes. When done, they mounted up and rode away.

Inman had fallen with his face in the crook of his arm and he had breathing space, though the covering of dirt over him was so thin and loose that he might have lain there and starved before he smothered. He rested, drifting in and out of muddled wakefulness. The smell of the dirt pulled at him and drew him down and he could not find the force to raise himself from it. Dying there seemed easier than not.

But before the dawn of day, feral hogs descended from the woods, drawn by the tang in the air. They plowed at the ground with their snouts and dug out arms and feet and heads, and soon Inman found himself uprooted, staring eye to eye, forlorn and hostile and baffled, into the long face of a great tushed boar.

—Yaah, Inman said.

The boar shied off a few feet and stopped and looked back at him dumbfounded, his little eyes blinking. Inman prised his length out of the ground. To rise and bloom again, that became his wish.

When Inman worked his way upright once more, the boar lost interest and went back to grubbing at the ground.

Inman cast back his head to the sky and found it did not look right. There were stars in it, but he could not reason out even one known constellation in the moonless sky. It looked as if someone had taken a stick and stirred it up so that no sense remained, just a smattering of light cast pat-ternless on the general dark.

As head wounds will do, his had bled all out of proportion to its actual direness. Blood covered his face and dirt had gummed to it, so that his visage was ocher in color and appeared like a clay sculpture illustrating some earlier phase of mankind when facial features were yet provisional. He found the two holes in his scalp and probed them with his fingers and found them numb and beginning to clot shut. He wiped at himself to little effect with the tail of his shirt. He commenced pulling on the rope at his hands, bent his back to it, and in a minute Veasey emerged from the ground like a big hooked bass pulled up from a muddy lake. Veasey's face was locked in an expression of numb bewilderment. His eyes were open and dirt clung to the wet of them.

Looking on him, Inman could find no great sorrow at his death, but neither could he find this an example of justice working its way around to show proof that the wrong a man does flies back at him. Inman had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing entirely. He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn't come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，119/232

dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the fire so often he might never make a civilian again.

Inman cast about until he came up with a sharp stone, and he sat until sunrise rubbing his bound wrists against it. When he finally freed himself, he looked again at Veasey. One eyelid now drooped near closed. Inman wished to commit some kind gesture toward him, but lacking even a shovel for burial, all he could think to do was roll Veasey over, facedown.

Inman put the dawn to his back and set out walking west. All that morning he felt stunned and wrenched. His head ached in accordance with the beat of his pulse and felt as if his skull was about to fall into a great number of pieces at his feet. From a fencerow he gathered a wad of the feathery leaves of yarrow and tied it to his head with the stripped stem of the plant. The power of yarrow is to draw out pain, which to an extent it did. The leaves waggled in time with his tired walk, and he spent the morning watching the shadows of them move before him down the road.

By noon he stood at a crossroads, his mind cloudy, unable to settle on one of the three choices laid out on the ground before him. He had only sense to rule out the way he had come. He looked to the sky for orientation, but the sun stood straight up. It could fall any which way. He put his hand to the ridged-up skin at his head, felt the crusty blood under his hairline, thinking, I'll soon be naught but scar. The red Petersburg welt at his neck began to hurt as if in sympathy with its new brethren. All his upper parts felt like some great raw ulcer. He decided to sit in the pine litter at roadside and wait for some sign or token to mark one of the passways before him as preferable to the others.

After a time during which he lapsed in and out of wakefulness, he saw a yellow slave coming down the road driving a mismatched team of steers, one red and one white. They dragged a sled loaded with fresh barrels and a great number of small dark melons stacked neat as cordwood. The man caught sight of Inman and whoa'd up the steers.

—They Lord God amighty, he said. You look like a dirt man.

He reached into the sled and knocked with his fist at two or three melons before selecting one and tossing it underhand to Inman. Inman cracked it open against the edge of a stone. The ragged meat in the halves was pink and firm and cloven by dark seeds, and he plunged his head down into first one and then the other like a hungry dog.

When he arose from them, they were naught but thin hulls and his beard dripped pink juice onto the dirt of the road. Inman stared down for some time onto the pattern the drops made to see if it held significance in the direction of augury, for he knew he needed aid, no matter from what strange fount it arose. The drops in the dust, though, offered no ready sign, neither pictograph nor totem, no matter from what angle he viewed them. The invisible world, he declared to himself, had abandoned him as a gypsy soul to wander singular, without guide or chart, through a broken world composed of little but impediment.

Inman quit his study of the ground and looked up and said his thanks for the melon. The yellow man was a wiry fellow, slim in all his parts but corded with muscle in the neck and the forearms where he had the sleeves of his grey wool shirt turned back to the elbow. His canvas britches had been made for a taller man and were rolled up into deep cuffs above his bare feet.

—Get on this sled and come with me, he said.

Inman rode a ways sitting on the tailboard, his back against a bright barrel, fragrant of fresh-split white oak. He tried to sleep but could not, and he stared down as in a trance at the drag trails of the wide ash runners, watching them fall away down the dusty road, paired lines that seemed to offer some lesson as they drew nearer and nearer to each other the more distant they got. He pulled off the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，120/232

yarrow headdress and dropped it piece by piece into the space between the runner trails.

When the yellow man neared the farm where he was owned, he had Inman crawl into one of the barrels, and then he took him on in and unloaded the sled in the barn hall. He hid Inman in the hay under the loft eaves, and Inman rested there in the fodder for some days, and once again he lost track of the count. He spent the time sleeping and being fed by the slaves on corn pone fried in lard, sharp greens, roasted chines of pork rich and crackling with charred fat.

When his legs felt able to bear weight again, Inman prepared to fare forth once more. His clothes had been boiled clean, and his head was some improved and covered with an old black hat stained dark about the brow band with slave sweat. There was a half-moon in the sky, and Inman stood at the barn door bidding the yellow man farewell.

—I need to be going, Inman said. I've got a little business down this way, and then I've got to get home.

—You listen, the yellow man said. A band of Federals broke out of Salisbury prison last week, and the roads are running thick with patrols riding day and night looking for them. You try to go through there, they'll sure catch you up, you're not careful. Probably catch you even if you are.

—What would be best to do?

—Where you headed?

—West.

—Cut north. Go toward Wilkes. Taking that heading, there's Moravians and Quakers all the way that will help. Hit the bottom of the Blue Ridge and then cut south again following the foothills. Or go on into the mountains and follow the ridges back down to your course. But, they say it's cold and rough back in there.

—That's where I'm from, Inman said.

The yellow man gave him cornmeal twisted up in paper and tied with twine, a strip of salt pork, and some pieces of roast pork. Then he worked for some time scratching out a map in ink on a piece of paper, and when it was done it was a work of art. All detailed with little houses and odd-shaped barns and crooked trees with faces in their trunks and limbs like arms and hair. A fancy compass rose in one corner. And there were notes in a precise script to say who could be trusted and who could not. Gradually things got vague and far apart until in the west all was white but for interlinked arcs the man had drawn to suggest the shapes of mountains.

—That's as far as I've been, he said. Just right there to the edge.

—You can read and write? Inman said.

—Got a crazy man for a master. That law don't mean a thing to him.

Inman reached in his pockets for money to give the man. He thought to draw out a generous amount, but he found his pockets empty and remembered that what money he had left was in the haversack hidden in Junior's woodpile.

—I wish I had something to pay you with, Inman said.

—I might not have took it anyway, the man said.

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

2004-3-6

页码，121/232

Several nights later Inman stood in front of the slanted house. It sat toadlike down in its swale, and the windows were all black. He softly called the three-legged dog from out its den and offered it a piece of pork bone that he had carried in his pocket wrapped in sycamore leaves. The dog came sniffing, soundless. It snatched the bone and then disappeared under the front porch. Inman followed the dog down to the house and circled around to the rear. The big fire was but a cold black pock on the ground. He went to the back porch. His knapsack still lay there in a pile. He looked through it, and everything was there but for Veasey's Colt pistol. He thrust his arm into the woodstack and seized the haversack and felt the butt of the LeMat's through the fabric. He drew it forth and it was like a tonic to feel the weight of the pistol in his hand, the balance and the sound when he pulled back the hammer.

A rind of light shone under the smokehouse door and Inman went and cracked the door and looked inside. Junior stood rubbing salt on a ham. A bayonet was stobbed into the dirt floor, and its muzzle socket held a taper as neatly as a silver candlestick. The floor of the smokehouse was so packed and greasy that the flame cast glints off it. Junior bent over the ham. He had his hat on and his face was dark in the shade of its brim. Inman opened the door fully and stood in the light. Junior raised up his face and looked at him but seemed not to recognize him. Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat's and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. There was no movement out of him but for the bright flow of blood which ran from his nose and cuts to his head and the corners of his eyes. It gathered and pooled on the black earth of the smokehouse floor.

Inman stopped and squatted and rested his forearms on his knees to catch his breath. He twisted the candle out of its socket and felt the roughness of it where roaches had been eating at the tallow. He held the light to Junior's face. What lay before him was indeed a horrid thing, and yet Inman feared that the minds of all men share the same nature with little true variance. He blew out the candle and then turned and walked outside. There was a wedge of grey light at the east horizon where the moon was fixing to rise. On the hill the ghost light was weak, fluttery in its movement. It faded off and vanished, though so slowly that you could not have said exactly when.

Inman walked all that night circling north through a heavily peopled country, window lights shining everywhere, dogs barking. And the yellow man was right; horsemen passed over and over in the dark, but Inman could hear them coming in time to step into the bushes. When morning came there was fog, so, not having to worry about a little smoke, he lit a fire in the woods and boiled two strips of salt pork and poured meal into the water and made a mess of corn mush. He laid up all that day in a thicket, sleeping some and fretting some. There were crows in the limbs above him, three of them, and they were harrying a rat snake they had discovered up in the tree. They sat on the limbs above the snake and gabbled at it, and now and again one flew close by and feinted at it with glinting bill.

The snake made the customary vicious displays of its kind, erecting itself and hooding out its neck and hissing and striking as if it were deadly. But all its efforts were met with hilarity and ridicule by the crows, and the snake soon departed.

The crows stayed on through much of the afternoon, celebrating their victory. Inman watched them anytime his eyes were open, observing closely their deportment and method of expression. And when his eyes were closed, he dreamed he lived in a kind of world where if a man wished it he could think himself into crow form, so that, though filled with dark error, he still had power either to fly from enemies or laugh them away. Then, after awhile of passing time in such wise, Inman watched night fall, and it seemed to him as if the crows had swelled out to blacken everything.