Cold Mountain (34 page)

2004-3-6

页码，143/232

more than spitting in that fire that you've run off.

And to make her point she spat a dark gob of matter, arcing it expertly into the open stove door. She looked back at Inman and said, It's dangerous for you, is all.

He looked her in the eyes and was surprised to find that they were wells of kindness despite all her hard talk. Not a soul he had met in some time drew him out as this goatwoman did, and so he told her what was in his heart. The shame he felt now to think of his zeal in sixty-one to go off and fight the downtrodden mill workers of the Federal army, men so ignorant it took many lessons to convince them to load their cartridges ball foremost. These were the foes, so numberless that not even their own government put much value to them. They just ran them at you for years on end, and there seemed no shortage. You could kill them down until you grew heartsick and they would still keep ranking up to march southward.

Then he told her how this very morning he had found a late-bearing bush of huckleberries, dusty blue on their sunward faces, still green on their shady back halves. How he had picked and eaten them for breakfast and watched as a cloud of passenger pigeons darked out the sun momentarily as they passed over, going to wherever they wintered in the remote south. At least that much remained unchanged, he had thought, berries ripening and birds flying. He said he had seen not much other than change for four years, and he guessed the promise of it was part of what made up the war frenzy in the early days. The powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereunder you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed, but rather be decorated. Men talked of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman now guessed it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons. War took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. He had not been immune to its pull. But sooner or later you get awful tired and just plain sick of watching people killing one another for every kind of reason at all, using whatever implements fall to hand. So that morning he had looked at the berries and the birds and had felt cheered by them, happy they had waited for him to come to his senses, even though he feared himself deeply at variance with such elements of the harmonious.

The woman thought about what he had said, and then she waved her pipe stem at his head and neck.

Them hurting bad still? she said.

—They seem not to want to quit.

—Looks like it. Red as a damn winesap. But I can do something for you there. That's within my realm of power.

She got up and went to the cabinet and took out a basketful of withered poppies and set about making laudanum. She picked out the poppy heads one by one, pierced the capsules with a sewing needle and then dropped them into a small glazed crock and set it near the stove for the opium to sweat out.

—Before long this will be about right. I'll take and add me a little corn liquor and sugar to it. Makes it go down better. Let it sit and it gets thick. It's good for any kind of pain—sore joints, headaches, any hurt. If you can't sleep, just have a drink of it and stretch out in the bed and pretty soon you'll know no more.

She went back to the cabinet and took out a little narrow-mouth crock and ran a finger down in it.

She daubed at Inman's neck and at his head wounds with what looked like black axle grease but smelled of bitter herbs and roots. He jerked when her finger first touched his wounds.

—That's just pain, she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，144/232

the worst of it, anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.

Inman first thought to argue and then he thought he'd keep silent and let her think what she wished if it gave her comfort, no matter how filled with error her logic. But then his mouth just started working and he said, I wouldn't want to puzzle too long about the why of pain nor the frame of mind somebody would be in to make up a thing like it to begin with.

The old woman looked at the fire in the stove door, and then she looked at her forefinger, greasy from the medicine. She rubbed her thumb over it three times rapidly, and then she twisted it in her apron hem to wipe it off. She dismissed her hand from her thoughts and it fell to rest at her side. She said, You get to be my age, just recollecting pleasures long ago is pain enough.

She stoppered the salve crock with a cob and put it in Inman's coat pocket. Take it with you, she said. Keep it rubbed on thick until it's gone, but keep your collar off it. It don't wash out. Then she reached into a wide goat-hide purse and pulled out a handful of great lozenges made of rolled and bound herbs, like fat little sections of cheroot. She heaped them into Inman's hand.

—Swallow one of these a day. Starting now.

Inman put them in his pocket, saving one. He put it in his mouth and tried to swallow. It seemed to swell. A great soggy bolus like a chaw of tobacco. It would not go down, and it threw offa taste like old socks. Inman's eyes watered. He gagged and grabbed for his beaker of whey and drank it down.

Sometime in the evening they ate the stew of white beans and the pieces of the little goat. They sat side by side under the brush arbor and listened to the faint rain come down in the woods. Inman ate three bowlsful and then they both had little earthen cups of laudanum and fed the fire and talked. To Inman's surprise, he found himself telling about Ada. He described her character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they became one line. It was a doctrine he could not entirely credit. Nor was he at all sure Ada would find his offer welcome, not from a man galled in body and mind as he had become. He concluded by saying that though Ada was somewhat thistleish in comportment, she was, by his way of thinking, very beautiful. Her eyes were down-turned and set slightly asymmetrically in her head, and it gave her always a sad expression which in his view only served to point up her beauty.

The woman looked as if she thought Inman spoke the greatest foolishness she had ever heard. She pointed her pipe stem at him and said, You listen. Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.

They sat for a while without talking, just sipping the laudanum. It was sweet and had thickened up so that it was not much runnier than sorghum, nor much clearer. It tasted some like metheglin, though without the taste of honey, and it clung to the cup with such determination that Inman found himself licking it out. The rain came down harder and a few drops made their way through the thatching of the arbor and hissed in the fire. It was a lonesome sound, the rain and the fire and nothing else.

Inman tried to picture himself living similarly hermetic in just such a stark and lonesome refuge on Cold Mountain. Build a cabin on a misty frag of rock and go for months without seeing another of his kind. A life just as pure and apart as the goatwoman's seemed to be. It was a powerful vision, and yet in his mind he saw himself hating every minute of it, his days poisoned by lonesome-ness and longing.

—It must get cold in winter up here, Inman said.

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

2004-3-6

页码，145/232

—Cold enough. In the dullest months I keep the fire hot and the blankets deep, and my biggest concern is that my ink and watercolors not freeze while I work at the desk. There are days so cold I sit with a cup of water between my legs to warm it. And still when I daub a wet brush in color, the bristles freeze before I can touch the tip to paper.

—What is it you do in those books? Inman said.

—I make a record, the woman said. Draw pictures and write.

—About what?

—Everything. The goats. Plants. Weather. I keep track of what everything's up to. It can take up all your time just marking down what happens. Miss a day and you get behind and might never catch back up.

—How did you learn to write and read and draw? Inman asked.

—Same way you did. Somebody taught me.

—And you've spent your life this way?

—So far I have. I'm not dead yet.

—Do you not get lonesome living here? Inman said.

—Now and again, maybe. But there's plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much.

—What if you get sick up here by yourself? Inman said.

—I've got my herbs.

—And if you die?

The woman said that living with such great scope of privacy had some disadvantages. She knew she could not expect help under any circumstances, nor did she much want to live past the point where she could fend for herself, though she calculated that date still to be writ on a fairly distant calendar.

Knowing she was likely to die alone and lie unburied did not trouble her a whit. When she felt death coming, she planned to stretch out at the top of the rock cliff and let the ravens peck her apart and carry her away.

—It's that or worms, she said. Of the two I'd as soon have ravens carry me off on their black wings.

The rain began falling harder yet, dripping fast through the roofing of the arbor. They called the evening concluded, and Inman crawled under the caravan and rolled up in his blankets and slept.

When he woke a day had passed and night was again coming on. A raven sat perched on a spoke looking at him. Inman got up and daubed his wounds with the salve and ate his herb medicines and took another draught of laudanum and liquor. The woman fixed him more of the bean and goat stew, and while he ate they sat together on the caravan steps. The woman told a long and maundering tale of a goat-trading mission she had made down as far as the capital city once. She had sold a half dozen goats to a man. Had the money in her hand when she remembered that she wanted to take the bells back with her. The man declined, saying the deal was completed. She said the bells had never been part of the deal, but he called the dogs on her and ran her off. Late that night she had gone back with a knife and cut the leather collars and gotten the bells and had, as she put it, walked out through file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，146/232

the streets of the capital just a-cussing.

Inman felt very foggy throughout the story, for he could feel the medicines working in him, but when she was done he reached over and patted the back of her etched and spotted hand and said, The heroine of the goat bells.

Inman slept again. When he awoke it was dark and no longer raining, but cold. The goats had crowded around him to get warm and their smell was so sharp as to about make his eyes water. He had no idea if it was the same dark he had fallen asleep to or whether a day had intervened. Light from a grease lamp fell in threads through cracks in the caravan floor, and so Inman crawled out and stood in the wet leaves on the ground. There was a sherd of moon partway up the eastern sky, and the stars all stood in their expected places and looked chill and brittle. At the ridge above the cove, an enormous pike of bare rock stood black against the sky like a picket watching for any siege the heavens might throw down. The strong urge to walk came over Inman. He went and knocked at the door and waited for the old woman to let him in, but there was no answer. Inman opened the door and stepped inside and found the place empty. He looked about the desk at the papers. He picked up a journal and opened it to a drawing of goats. They had eyes and feet on them like people, and the sentences of the entry below were hard to parse, but they seemed to contrast the behavior of certain goats on cold days to their behavior on hot. Inman leafed through farther and found pictures of plants and then more pictures of goats in every imaginable attitude, all done in a mute and limited palette, as if she painted with clothes dye. Inman read the stories that went with the pictures, and they told of what the goats ate and how they acted toward each other and what moods seized them from day to day. It seemed to Inman that the woman's aim was to list in every detail the habits of their culture.

This would be one way to live, Inman thought, a hermit among the clouds. The contentious world but a fading memory. Mind turned only toward God's finer productions. But the more he studied the journal, the more he wondered how it must be for the woman to count back through the decades, figuring how many years had passed since some event in her youth—the romance with the yellow-haired farmboy she had wanted to marry instead of the old man, an autumn day of particular glory, a dance that evening after the harvest, later out on the porch an amber moon rising over the trees, kissing the boy with her lips parted while inside fiddlers played apiece of ancient music to which she had attached an unreasonable enthusiasm. So many years gone between then and now that even the bare number would seem unutterably sad even without some sweet attendant memory.

Inman looked about and found there was not a scrap of mirror in the caravan, and he therefore assumed the woman must go about her grooming by feel. Did she even know her own recent countenance? Long hair as pale and fine as cobwebs, hide sagged and puckered and folded about her eyes and jowls, brindled across her brow, bristles growing from her ears. Only her cheeks pink, the discs in her eyes still bright and blue. If you held a glass up to her would she wrench back in surprise and fright at the relic looking out, her mind still grasping a picture of herself in an incarnation some decades previous? A person might get to such a state of mind, living so remote.

Inman waited a long time for the goatwoman to come back. Dawn rose, and he blew out the lamp and broke some sticks to put in the little stove. He wanted to get on, but he did not wish to leave without thanking her. She did not return until the morning was far advanced. She walked through the door with a brace of rabbits hanging limp from her grip on their hind legs.

—I need to be going, Inman said. I just wanted to see if I could pay you for the food and medicine.

—You could try, the woman said. But I wouldn't take it.

—Well, thank you, Inman said.

—Look here, the woman said. If I had a boy, I'd tell him the same as I'm telling you. Watch yourself.

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