Cold Mountain (3 page)

2004-3-6

页码，9/232

as he had done every morning lately. Inman pitied the blind man now that he knew how his blindness had come about, for how did you find someone to hate for a thing that just was? What would be the cost of not having an enemy? Who could you strike for retribution other than yourself?

Inman drank all but the dregs of his coffee and then took up his paper, hoping that something in it would engage him and turn his thoughts elsewhere. He tried to read a piece on how badly things stood outside Petersburg, but he couldn't get a grip on it. And anyway, he knew about all there was to say on that topic. When he got to the third page, he found a notice from the state government to deserters and outliers and their families. They would be hunted down. Their names would be put on a list, and the Home Guard would be on alert in every county, patrolling night and day. Then Inman read a story buried at the bottom of a page in the paper's middle. It told that out in the borderlands of the state's western mountains, Thomas and his Cherokee troops had fought numerous skirmishes with Federals. They had been accused of taking scalps. The paper opined that though the practice might be barbarous, it would serve as harsh warning that invasion carried a stiff price.

Inman put the paper down and thought about Cherokee boys scalping Federals. It was humorous in a way, those pale mill workers coming down so confident to steal land and yet losing the tops of their heads out in the woods. Inman knew many Cherokee of the age to be fighting under Thomas, and he wondered if Swimmer was among them. He had met Swimmer the summer they were both sixteen.

Inman had been given the happy job of escorting a few heifers to graze the last grass of summer in the high balds on Balsam Mountain. He had taken a packhorse loaded with cooking tools, side meat, meal, fishing gear, a shotgun, quilts, and a square of waxed canvas for tent. He expected solitude and self-reliance. But when he got to the bald there was a regular party going on. A dozen or so men from Catalooch had made camp at the crest of the ridge and had been there for a week or better, lazing in the cool air of the uplands and joying in the freeing distance from hearth and home. It was a fine place, there on the bald. They had sweeping views to east and west, good pasturage for the cattle, trout streams nearby. Inman joined the men, and for several days they cooked enormous meals of fried corn bread and trout and stews of game animals over a large fire that they kept burning knee-high day and night. They washed the food down with every manner of corn liquor and apple brandy and thick mead so that many in the group laid up drunk from one dawn to the next.

Soon, a band of Cherokee from Cove Creek had come up the other side of the divide with a rawboned herd of spotted cows of no singular breed. The Indians made their camp a short distance away and then cut tall pines and crafted goals from them and marked off boundaries for their vicious ball game. Swimmer, an odd big-handed boy with wide-set eyes, came over and invited the Catalooch party to play, hinting darkly that men sometimes died in the game. Inman and others took up the challenge. They cut and split green saplings to make their own ball racquets, strung them with strips of hide and bootlace.

The two groups camped side by side for two weeks, the younger men playing the ball game most of the day, gambling heavily on the outcomes. It was a contest with no fixed time of play and few rules so that they just ran about slamming into each other and hacking with the racquets as if with clubs until one team reached a set number of points scored by striking the goalposts with the ball. They'd play most of the day and then spend half the night drinking and telling tales at fireside, eating great heaps of little speckled trout, fried crisp, bones and all.

There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge. During a pause in the play, Swimmer had looked out at the landforms and said he believed Cold Mountain to be the chief mountain of the world. Inman asked how he knew that to be true, and Swimmer had swept his hand across the horizon to where Cold Mountain stood and said, Do you see a bigger'n?

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

2004-3-6

页码，10/232

Mornings on the high bald were crisp, with fog lying in the valleys so that the peaks rose from it disconnected like steep blue islands scattered across a pale sea. Inman would awake, still part drunk, and walk off down in a cove to fish with Swimmer for an hour or two before returning for the beginning of the game. They would sit by the rushing creek, stickbait and rockbait on their hooks.

Swimmer would talk seamlessly in a low voice so that it merged with the sound of the water. He told tales of animals and how they came to be as they are. Possum with bare tail, squirrel with fuzzy tail.

Buck with antlers. Painter with tooth and claw. Uktena with coil and fang. Tales that explained how the world came about and where it is heading. Swimmer also told of spells he was learning for making desired ends come to pass. He told of ways to produce misfortune, sickness, death, how to return evil by way of fire, how to protect the lone traveler on the road at night, and how to make the road seem short. A number of the spells had to do with the spirit. Swimmer knew a few ways to kill the soul of an enemy and many ways to protect your own. His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies.

Inman sat through the tales and spells, watching the rill in the water where current fell against his dipped line, Swimmer's voice a rush of sound, soothing as creek noise. When they had caught a sackful of little trout, they would quit and go back and then spend the day swatting at each other with the ball sticks, shoving and shouldering and coming to blows.

After many days wet weather set in, and none too soon, for on both sides they were all worn out, hung over, and beat up. There were broken fingers and noses, sundry flesh rents. All were mottled ankle to hip with blue and green bruises from the racquets. The Catalooch party had lost to the Indians everything they could do without and some things they couldn't—fry pans and dutch ovens, sacks of meal, fishing poles, rifles and pistols. Inman himself had lost an entire cow, a fact he could not figure how to explain to his father. He had bet it away piece by piece, point by point. Saying in the heat of play, I'll wager the tenderloin of that heifer on this next point. Or, Every rib on the left side of my betting cow says we win. As the two camps parted ways, Inman's heifer was still walking, but various of the Cherokee had claim to its many partitions.

As recompense and memento, though, Swimmer had given Inman a fine ball racquet of hickory with bat whiskers twisted into the squirrel-skin lacing. Swimmer claimed it would power its user with the speed and deception of the bat. It was decorated with the feathers of swallows and hawks and herons, and, as Swimmer explained it, the characters of those animals too would transfer to Inman—

wheeling grace, soar and stoop, grim single-mindedness. Not all of that had come to pass, but Inman hoped Swimmer was not out fighting Federals but living in a bark hut by a rushing stream.

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.

He raised his coffee cup to his lips and found it cold and nearly empty, and he put it down. He stared into it and watched the dark grounds sink in the remaining quarter inch of liquid. The black flecks swirled, found a pattern, and settled. He thought briefly of divination, seeking the future in the arrangement of coffee grounds, tea leaves, hog entrails, shapes of clouds. As if pattern told something worth knowing. He jostled the cup to break the spell and looked out along the street.

Beyond a row of young trees rose the capitol, an impressive domed pile of stone blocks. It was only a scant shade darker than the high clouds through which the sun shone as a grey disc already declining to the west. In the haze the capitol seemed to rise impossibly high, its bulk Jarge as a medieval tower in a dream of siege. Curtains blew out of open office windows and waggled in the breeze. Above the dome, a dark circle of vultures swirled in the oyster sky, their long wimple file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，11/232

feathers just visible at their blunt wing ends. As Inman watched, the birds did not strike a wingbeat but nonetheless climbed gradually, riding a rising column of air, circling higher and higher until they were little dashes of black on the sky.

In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw.

And, too, Inman guessed Swimmer's spells were right in saying a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take death blows independently. He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him but he was yet walking. Feeling empty, however, as the core of a big black-gum tree. Feeling strange as well, for his recent experience had led him to fear that the mere existence of the Henry repeating rifle or the eprouvette mortar made all talk of spirit immediately antique. His spirit, he feared, had been blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs. It seemed a poor swap to find that the only way one might keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already, with nothing much left of yourself but a hut of bones.

As Inman sat brooding and pining for his lost self, one of Swimmer's creekside stories rushed into his memory with a great urgency and attractiveness. Swimmer claimed that above the blue vault of heaven there was a forest inhabited by a celestial race. Men could not go there to stay and live, but in that high land the dead spirit could be reborn. Swimmer described it as a far and inaccessible region, but he said the highest mountains lifted their dark summits into its lower reaches. Signs and wonders both large and small did sometimes make transit from that world to our own. Animals, Swimmer said, were its primary messengers. Inman had pointed out to Swimmer that he had climbed Cold Mountain to its top, and Pisgah and Mount Sterling as well. Mountains did not get much higher than those, and Inman had seen no upper realm from their summits.

—There's more to it than just the climbing, Swimmer had said. Though Inman could not recall whether Swimmer had told him what else might be involved in reaching that healing realm, Cold Mountain nevertheless soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather.

Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul. So he held to the idea of another world, a better place, and he figured be might as well consider Cold Mountain to be the location of it as anywhere.

Inman took his new coat off and draped it across his chairback. He commenced working on a letter.

It was long, and as the afternoon passed he drank several more cups of coffee and darkened a number of pages front and back with ink. He found himself telling things he did not want to tell about the fighting. At one point he wrote:

The ground was awash with blood and we could see where the blood had flown onto the rocks and the marks of bloody hands on tree trunks. . . .

Then he stopped and wadded up his efforts and started again on a fresh sheet and this was part of what he wrote:

I am coming home one way or another, and I do not know how things might stand between us. I first file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，12/232

thought to tell in this letter what I have done and seen so that you might judge me before I return.

But I decided it would need a page as broad as the blue sky to write that tale, and I have not the will or the energy. Do you recall that night before Christmas four years ago when I took you in my lap in the kitchen by the stove and you told me you would forever like to sit there and rest your head on my shoulder? Now it is a bitter surety in my heart that if you knew what I have seen and done, it would make you fear to do such again.

Inman sat back and looked across the capitol lawn. A woman in a white dress carrying a small wrapped parcel hurried across the grass. A black carriage went by on the street between the capitol and the red stone church. A wind stirred up dust in the roadway, and Inman noticed that the afternoon was far advanced, the light falling at a slant that spoke of autumn coming. He felt the breeze work its way through a fold in the bandage and touch the wound at his neck, which began aching in the moving air.

Inman stood and doubled up the letter and then put his hand above his collar and fingered the scabbed slash. The doctors now claimed he was healing quickly, but he still felt he could poke a stick in there and push it out the other side with no more resistance offered than might a rotted pumpkin. It still hurt to talk and to eat and, sometimes, to breathe. Troubling as well were the deep pains on humid days from the hip wound he had taken at Malvern Hill years ago. All in all, his wounds gave him just reason to doubt that he would ever heal up and feel whole and of a piece again. But on the walk down the street to post the letter and then back out to the hospital, his legs felt surprisingly sturdy and willing.

When he reached his ward, Inman saw immediately that Balis was not at his table. His bed was empty. His dark goggles rested atop his pile of papers. Inman asked after him and was told that he had died in the afternoon, a quiet death. He had looked grey and had moved from his table to the bed. He had turned on his side and faced the wall and died as if falling asleep.

Inman went to the papers and riffled through them. The top of the first page said Fragments, and the word was underscored three times. The work seemed a confusing mess. The handwriting was spidery, thin and angular. There were more strikeovers and cross-hatchings than plain writing. And what could be made out clear was just a line here and there, sometimes not even a sentence but just a shattered-off piece of one. A sentiment that struck Inman's eye as he leafed through the pages was this: We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day is identical.

Inman believed he would rather die than subscribe to that, and it made him sad to think that Balis had spent his last days studying on the words of a fool. But then he came upon a line that seemed to have more sense to it. It was this: The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.

That, Inman decided, he could consent to. He tapped the pages against the desktop to square their edges and then he set them down in their place.

After supper, Inman checked the packs under his bed. To the blanket and waxed-cloth groundsheet already in his knapsack he added the cup and little pot, the sheath knife. The haversack had for some time been filled with dried biscuit, some cornmeal, a chunk of salt pork, a little dried beef that he had bought off the hospital staff.

He sat at the window and watched the close of day. Sunset was troubling. Low grey clouds massed at the flat horizon, but as the sun fell to earthline it found an opening in the clouds and shot a beam of light the color of hot hickory coals straight upward. The light was tubular and hard-edged as the barrel of a rifle and stood reared up into the sky for a full five minutes before winking out abruptly.

Nature, Inman was fully aware, sometimes calls attention to its special features and recommends them for interpretation. This sign, though, as best he could tell, spoke of nothing but strife, danger, grief. Of those he needed no reminder, so he judged the show a great waste of effort. He got in bed file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...