Cold Mountain (31 page)

2004-3-6

页码，130/232

She immediately regretted it, for the story evidently meant something to Inman, though she was not entirely sure what.

He looked at her and started to say something and then he stopped and looked at the creek. In a minute he said, That old woman looked older than God and she cried tears out of her white eyeball when she told the story.

—But you don't take it for the truth? Ada said.

—I take it that she could have been living in a better world, but she ended up fugitive, hiding in the balsams.

Neither knew what to say further, and so Inman said, I need to get on. He took Ada's hand and just brushed his lips to the back of it and turned it loose.

When not twenty feet gone, though, he looked back over his shoulder and saw her just turning to walk to the house. Too soon. She had not even waited for him to round the first bend in the road.

Ada caught herself and stopped and looked at him. She threw up a hand in a wave and then realized that he was still too near for that to be a suitable gesture, so she drew her hand up awkwardly and tucked a stray bit of hair back into the heavy bun at her neck as if that had been her first intent.

Inman stopped and turned to face her and said, You can walk on home. You don't have to stand watch on my going.

—I know I don't, Ada said.

—You don't want to, is my point.

—It would serve no purpose that I can see, she said.

—Some men might be made to feel better for it.

—Not you, Ada said, trying with little success to achieve a tone of lightness.

—Not me, Inman said, as if testing the idea to see if it stood plumb and level to the visible world.

In a moment, he took his hat off and held it down by his leg. He ran his other hand through his hair and then put one finger to his brow and saluted her.

—No, I guess, not me, he said. I'll see you when I see you.

They walked away, this time without looking back.

That night, though, Ada felt not so cavalier about the war and about Inman's going to it. It was a gloomy evening, ushered in by a brief rain before sunset. Immediately after dinner, Monroe went to his study and closed the door to work for hours on the week's sermon. Ada sat alone in the parlor with one taper lit. She read from the latest number of the
North American Review,
and when that failed to engage her she riffled through Monroe's old issues of the
Dial
and
Southern Literary
Messenger.
Then she sat and pecked at the piano for a time. When she stopped there was just the faint sound of the creek, a drip now and then from the eaves, a peeper that soon fell quiet, the house settling. Occasionally the muffled sound of Monroe's voice as he tried a newly composed phrase aloud for cadence. In Charleston at this time of night there would be waves beating on bulkheads, file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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palmetto leaves rattling in the wind. The iron hoops of carriage wheels rumbling, and the hooves of horses tocking like great clocks keeping erratic time. Voices of promenaders and the brush of their shoe leather on gaslit street cobbles. In this mountain cove, though, Ada could hear her ears ring from lack of other report. It was so mum she began to think she felt it as an ache behind her brow bones. And the dark outside the windowpanes was as total as would have been achieved by painting the glass black.

Her thoughts tossed about in such void. A number of things about the morning bothered her. Not among them was that she had shed no tears. Nor that she had left unsaid the things many thousands of women, married and unmarried, said as men left, all of which boiled down to the sentiment that they would await the man's return forever.

What did bother her was Inman's question. How might she react to news of his death? She did not know, though the prospect of it loomed darker in her mind that evening than she would have thought. And she worried that she had rudely dismissed Inman's story, had not summoned the wit at the time to see that it had not been about an old woman but about his own fears and desires.

All in all, she suspected that her performance had been glib. Or flinty and pinched. None of which she really wished to be. True, those manners had their uses. They excelled in causing people to take half a step back and give one breathing room. But she had fallen into them out of habit, and at the wrong time, and she regretted it. She feared that without some act of atonement they would take hold and harden within her and that one day she would find herself clenched tight as a dogwood bud in January.

She had slept poorly that night, tossing in her damp and chilly bed. Later she struck fire to wick and tried to read awhile at
Bleak House,
but she could not adjust her mind to it. She blew out the light and lay twisted in her covers. She wished she had a draught of opium. Sometime long after midnight she took the easement of maiden, spinster, widow. As a girl she had spent her thirteenth year troubled by the belief that she alone had discovered such an act, or perhaps that she alone was capable of it due to some malformation or unique baseness. So it had been a considerable relief when her cousin Lucy, older by some months, had set her straight on the matter of lone love. Lucy's shocking view was that, as habits go, it approached tobacco chewing and snuff dipping and pipe smoking in degree of commonness, which was to say it might as well be considered universal. Ada had proclaimed such opinion to be utterly base and cynical. But Lucy did not budge in her view and remained blithe to the point of frivolity about a thing Ada held to be a dark mystery arising from desperation so great that one must surely go through the next day with a visible stain across one's countenance. Neither Lucy's views nor the intervening years had greatly changed Ada's feelings on the matter.

On that fretful night, the pictures flowing into her mind unbidden and dreamlike were of Inman. And because her knowledge of anatomy was to a degree hypothetical—founded only on various animals and boy-babies and the amazing statues of Italy—the images that appeared to her most clearly were of his fingers and wrists and forearms. All else was speculative and therefore shadowy and without true form. Afterward, she lay wakeful until near dawn, still filled with yearning and hopelessness.

But she awoke the next day clearheaded and bright, and with firm resolve to set right her errors. The day was cloudless and warmer, and Ada told Monroe she wanted to go out for a drive, knowing full well where they ended up anytime he held the reins. He had the hired man harness Ralph to the cabriolet, and in an hour they wheeled into town. They went to the livery, where the horse was taken from between the thills and put in a stall and given a half measure of grain.

Out on the street, Monroe patted at the various pockets to his pants and waistcoat and topcoat until he found his money purse. He picked out a little twenty-dollar gold piece and handed it to Ada with no more thought than if it were a nickel. He suggested she buy something nice in the way of clothes file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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and books and then meet back at the livery in two hours. She knew he was setting out to find a friend of his, an old doctor, and that they would talk about writers and painters and the like, and that in the process he would drink either one tiny glass of Scotch whisky or one large glass of claret, and that he would be exactly fifteen minutes late in meeting her.

She went straight to the stationer's and without browsing bought sheet music for a number of recent tunes by Stephen Foster, a songster about whom she and Monroe held violently differing opinions.

As for books, the first thing that fell to hand was a three-volume Trollope, near cubic in its mass. She had no particular desire to read it, but it was there. She had the purchases wrapped in paper and sent to the livery. Then she went to a mercantile and quickly bought a scarf, a pair of buff leather gloves, ankle boots the color of doeskin. These too she had wrapped and sent on ahead. She went out on the street, consulted the time, and found that she had successfully spent considerably less than an hour in shopping.

Knowing what she did was more than unseemly, she turned down the lane between the law office and the smithy. She climbed the open board steps to the covered landing before Inman's door and knocked.

He'd been blacking a boot and still had his left hand thrust up in it when he opened the door. A rag in the other where he kept his grip on the knob. One foot with but a sock and the other shod but its boot yet unpolished. He wore no jacket, and his shirtsleeves were turned back nearly to the elbow. His head was bare.

Inman's face was a display of total wonderment as he looked on Ada, materialized in the least likely place either of them could have imagined. He seemed not to know what words to say, only that those which would invite her in were not among the possibles. He held up a forefinger to signify a brief period of time, a moment. Then he closed the door, leaving her standing there.

What Ada had seen of the room through the opened door was disheartening. It was tiny with but one small window high on the far wall, and that with a prospect only on the clapboards and the shakes of the store across the alley. For furnishing, the room had a narrow iron bedstead, a chest of drawers with a washbasin atop it, a straight chair and writing table, some books in stacks. It was a cell. All in all more fit, she thought, for a monk than for someone she might class as beau.

True to Inman's signal, the door soon reopened. He had turned down his shirt cuffs and put on a jacket and a hat. Both boots were on, though one was dirty brown and the other black as a greased stove lid. And he had gathered his thoughts somewhat.

—I'm sorry, he said. I was taken by surprise.

—I hope not an unpleasant one.

—A happy one, he said, though nothing about his expression supported such sentiment.

Inman came out on the landing and leaned back against the railing, his arms crossed at his chest. Out in the sun, his hat cast a shadow on his face so that all above his mouth was dim. There was a long silence. He looked back at the door. He had left it open, and Ada guessed he wished he'd closed it but could not now decide which was worse, the awkwardness of taking the two strides to do it, or the sharp intimacy suggested by the yawning doorway and the narrow bedstead.

She said, I wanted to tell you I thought things concluded badly yesterday. Not at all as I wished them to. Not in a satisfying way.

Inman's mouth tightened like a cord had been pulled in him. He said, I don't believe I take your file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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meaning. I was headed upriver to say my goodbyes to Esco and Sally. When I came to the road up Black Cove, I thought I might as well say one to you too. And I did. It was, as best I could tell, satisfactory.

Ada lacked experience in having her apologies rejected, and her first thought was to turn and walk down the steps and put Inman forever behind her. But what she said was, We might never speak again, and I don't plan to leave that comment standing in place of the truth. You're not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I'm sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise.

—That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on.

Inman still stood with his arms crossed, and Ada reached and touched where his shirt cuff came out from his coat sleeve. She held the cuff between finger and thumb and pulled until she unlocked his arms. She touched the back of his hand, tracing with one finger the curving course of a vein from knuckle to wrist. Then she took his wrist and squeezed it hard, and the feel of him in her hand made her wonder what the rest of him would be like.

Neither of them, for a moment, could look the other in the face. Then Inman pulled his hand away and took his hat off and spun it by the brim into the air. He caught it and flipped his wrist and sent it skimming through the door to land inside where it would. They both smiled, and Inman put one hand to Ada's waist and the other to the back of her head. Her hair was in a loose upsweep, held with a clasp, and it was the cold nacre that Inman's fingers touched as he tipped her head to him for the kiss that had eluded them the day before.

Ada had on about all the clothes women of her station then wore, and so her body was all cased up underneath many lapped and pleated yards of dead fabric. His hand at her waist touched the whalebones of corset stays, and when she took a step back and looked at him, the bones creaked against each other as she moved and breathed. She guessed she felt to him like a terrapin shut up inside its hull, giving little evidence that a distinct living thing, warm and in its skin, lay inside.

They walked together down the steps, and the door as they passed it stood like a promise between them. Near the mouth to the lane, Ada turned and put her forefinger to Inman's collar button to stop him.

—Here is far enough, she said. Go on back. As you said, I'll see you when I see you.

—But I hope that's soon.

—We both do, then.

That day they had thought the most suitable units of time to measure Inman's absence would be mere months. The war, though, turned out to be a longer experience than either had counted on.

the doing of it

Inman followed the yellow man's artful map through what the locals called hill country. Nights were cool and leaves were beginning to color. After he had walked for the better part of a week, he advanced to the bare white places at the map's far margin, and he could see the Blue Ridge hanging like a drift of smoke across the sky ahead. It took him three more nights to pass through a foul place called Happy Valley, a long broad swath of cropland and pastureland at the foot of the mountains.

There was too much open ground to feel good about walking by day, and by night there was pistol file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...