Cold Mountain (35 page)

2004-3-6

页码，147/232

—I will, Inman said.

He turned to walk out of the caravan, but she stopped him. She said, Here, take this with you, and she handed him a square of paper on which was drawn in great detail the globular blue-purple berry cluster of the carrion flower plant in autumn.

freewill savages

At the first gesture of dawn, Ruby was up and out, on her way down to the house to fire up the stove and put on a pot of grits and fry up a few eggs. It was barely light enough to see, and the air was thick with the fog that pooled for an hour or two along the bottom of Black Cove on most mornings in all seasons but winter. But as she neared the house she could make out a man in a dark suit of clothes standing by the corncrib. She walked straight to the kitchen porch and went inside and took the shotgun from where it rested, charged, in the crotch of two forked limbs nailed over the doorframe. She pulled back both hammers and walked briskly toward the crib.

The man wore a big grey slouch hat pulled low on his brow, and his head was tipped down. He was leaned with his shoulder to the crib wall, one leg crossed over the other and cocked up on its toe.

Casual as a traveler propped against a roadside tree waiting for a stage to come by, whiling away the time absorbed in his own thoughts.

Ruby could see, even in the poor light, that the man was dressed in clothes of the finest material and making. And his boots, though somewhat scuffed, were more fit for a squire than a corn thief. Only one thing argued against the man's being utterly relaxed in his current posture. His right arm was entirely inside the hole in the chinking of the crib.

Ruby walked right up to him, the shotgun held at a low angle but nevertheless aimed at about his knees. She was ready to dress him down good for corn thieving, but when she neared the man he tipped his head back to get the hat brim out of his line of sight. He looked at Ruby and grinned and said, They hell fire.

—So you're not dead? Ruby said.

—Not yet, said Stobrod. Set your daddy loose.

Ruby propped the shotgun against the side of the crib and unlocked the door and went inside. She unstaked the trap from the dirt floor and pried open the jaws from around Stobrod's hand and walked back outside. Despite the padding, after he had withdrawn his arm from out the hole in the chinking, Stobrod stood and dripped blood from a cut to his wrist where the skin was thin over the bones. His forearm was bruised blue all around it. He rubbed it with his good hand. He took out a kerchief of fine linen and removed his hat and wiped at his forehead and neck.

—Long night a-standing here trapped, he said.

—No doubt, Ruby said. She looked him over. He had changed some. He seemed such an old man, standing there before her. His hair half gone from his head, whiskers grizzled. He had not filled out any, though. He was still just a little withy man. A quilting frame had more flesh to it.

—How old are you now? she said.

He stood moving his mouth a little as he tried to do the figures in his mind.

—Maybe forty-five, he said eventually.

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

2004-3-6

页码，148/232

—Forty-five, Ruby said.

—About.

—You don't look it.

—Thankee.

—I meant the other way.

—Oh.

—Anybody else, Ruby said, I'd ask why you been dipping our corn when you don't look hurting for money. But I know you better than that. You're going around getting a little here and a little there to run a batch of liquor. And you took that suit off somebody or won it in a card game.

—Something like.

—You've run off from the fighting, no doubt.

—I was owed a furlough, being a hero as I was.

—You?

—Every battle I was in, I led the charge, Stobrod said.

—I've heard it told that the officers like to run the greatest shitheels to the fore, said Ruby. They get shut of them quicker that way.

Then, before Stobrod could answer, she said, You come on with me. She picked up the shotgun and went to the house. She told him to sit on the porch steps and wait. Inside, she lit the fire and put on a pot to make coffee. She mixed biscuit dough and rattled about putting breakfast together. Biscuits, grits, and eggs. A few strips of fried side meat.

Ada came down and sat in her chair by the window and drank coffee, glum as usual in the early morning.

—We finally caught something in that trap, Ruby said.

—It's about time. What was it?

—My daddy. He's out on the porch now, Ruby said. She was stirring a pan of white gravy made from the drippings of the side meat.

—Pardon?

—Stobrod. He's made it home from the war. But alive or dead, he's of little matter to me. A plate of breakfast and then we'll send him on his way.

Ada rose and looked out the door at Stobrod's thin back where he sat humped up on the bottom step.

He held his left hand out before him, and he hummed to himself, and the fingers were working, tapping against the heel of his hand like a man doing sums.

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

2004-3-6

页码，149/232

—You might have asked him in, Ada said when she had returned to her chair.

—He can wait out there.

When breakfast was cooked, Ruby carried his plate to the table under the pear tree. She and Ada took their breakfast in the dining room, and they could see from the window that Stobrod ate quickly and with urgency, his hat brim bobbing in time with his chewing. He stopped just short of picking up his plate and licking the last skim of grease from it.

—He could have eaten in here, Ada said.

—That's where I draw the line, Ruby said.

She went outside to collect his plate.

—Have you got somewhere to go? Ruby said to Stobrod.

Stobrod told her that he did indeed have a home and a society of sorts, for he had fallen in with a collection of heavily armed outliers. They lived in a deep cave of the mountain like freewill savages.

All they wished to do was hunt and eat and lay up all night drunk, making music.

—Well, I guess that suits you, Ruby said. Your aim in life always was to dance all night with a bottle in your hand. Now I've fed you. You can get on out of here. We've got nothing else for you. You go dipping our corn again, I might put a barrel of shot into you, and I don't load salt.

She flapped her hands at him as if shooing cattle, and he walked off at a saunter, hands in his pockets, taking a course toward Cold Mountain.

• • •

The day that followed was warm and brilliant and dry. There had been nothing but one faint morning rain so far that month, and the leaves that had fallen and those yet on the trees were crisp as cold cracklings. They rattled aloft in the breeze and underfoot as Ruby and Ada walked down to the barn to see how the tobacco was drying. The broad leaves had been tied together at their stem ends and they hung in rows upside down from poles strung underneath the shelter of the barn's cantilevered ends. There was something human and female and ominous in their flared hanging shapes, the bunched leaves fanning out like old yellowed cotton skirts. Ruby walked among them, touching the leaves, rubbing them between her fingers. She pronounced everything in fine order, owing to the favorably dry weather and to the care with which the tobacco was planted and harvested in accord with the signs. They would soon be able to soak it in molasses water and twist it into plugs and use it for trade.

Ruby then proposed that they take a rest in the hayloft, a fine place for a sit-down, she said. She climbed the ladder and sat spraddle-legged in the wide hay door and dangled her feet into the open space below in a way that no other grown woman Ada knew would have done.

Ada at first hesitated to join her. She sat in the hay with her legs under her and her skirts composed.

Ruby looked at her with some amusement, as if to say, I can do this because I never have been proper, and you can do it because you have recently quit being so. Ada went and sat at the hay door too. They lounged and chewed on pieces of hay and swung their legs like boys. The big door framed the view uphill to the house and beyond, across the upper fields, to Cold Mountain, which looked close and sharp-edged in the dry air, all mottled with the colors of autumn. The house looked pert, unsmudged white. A feather of blue smoke rose straight up from the black kitchen pipe. Then a breeze swept down the cove and swirled it away.

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

2004-3-6

页码，150/232

—You say you want to get to know the running of this land, Ruby said.

—Yes, Ada said.

Ruby rose and knelt behind Ada and cupped her hands over Ada's eyes.

—Listen, Ruby said. Her hands were warm and rough over Ada's face. They smelled of hay, tobacco leaves, flour, and something deeper, a clean animal smell. Ada felt their thin bones against her fluttering eyes.

—What do you hear? Ruby said.

Ada heard the sound of wind in the trees, the dry rattle of their late leaves. She said as much.

—Trees, Ruby said contemptuously, as if she had expected just such a foolish answer. Just general trees is all? You've got a long way to go.

She removed her hands and took her seat again and said nothing more on the topic, leaving Ada to conclude that what she meant was that this is a particular world. Until Ada could listen and at the bare minimum tell the sound of poplar from oak at this time of year when it is easiest to do, she had not even started to know the place.

Late that afternoon, despite the warmth, the light fell brittle and blue and announced clearly in its slant that the year was circling toward its close. This was surely one of the last of the warm dry days, and in its honor Ada and Ruby decided to take supper outdoors at the table under the pear tree. They roasted a venison tenderloin that Esco had brought by. Fried a skillet of potatoes and onions, and drizzled bacon drippings over some late lettuce to wilt it. They had brushed the brown leaves from the table and were just setting places for the two of them when Stobrod appeared from out the woods. He carried a tow sack, and he came and took a seat at the table as if he carried an invitation in his coat pocket.

—You say the word, I'll run him off again, Ruby said to Ada.

Ada said, We have plenty.

During the meal Ruby refused to speak, and Stobrod engaged Ada in talk of the war. He wished it would end so he could come down off the mountain but feared that it would drag on and that hard times would bear down upon everyone. Ada heard herself agree, but as she looked about her cove in the blue falling light, hard times seemed far away.

When supper was done, Stobrod took his sack off the ground and drew from it a fiddle and set it across his knees. It was of novel design, for where the scroll would normally be was instead the whittled head of a great serpent curled back against the neck, detailed right down to the scales and the slit pupils of the eyes. It was clear Stobrod was proud as could be of it, and he had a right, for though the fiddle was far from perfect, he had fashioned it himself during the months of living fugitive. His previous instrument had been stolen from him during his trip home, and so, lacking a model, he had shaped the new one from memory of a fiddle's proportions, and it therefore looked like a rare artifact from some primitive period of instrument-making.

He turned it front and back so they could admire its faces, and he told them the story of its creation.

He had spent weeks tramping the ridges to cut spruce and maple and boxwood, and when they were cured he sat for hours on end knifing out fiddle parts. He cut forms and clamps of his own devising.

Boiled the wood of the side pieces soft and shaped them so that when they cooled and dried they set to the forms in smooth curves that would not come unsprung. He carved the tailpiece and bridge and file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，151/232

fingerboard freehand. Boiled down deer hooves for glue. Augured out holes for the tuning pegs, pieced it all together, and let it dry. Then, he set the sound post with aid of a wire, dyed the boxwood fingerboard dark with the juice of poke berries, and sat for hours carving the viper's head curled over against its body. Finally, he stole a little tin of varnish from a man's toolshed in the dark of night and put the finish on it. Then he strung it up and tuned it. Even went out one night and trimmed a horse's tail to hair his bow.

He then looked upon his work and thought, I've almost got my music now, for he had but one job left, the killing of a snake. For some time, he had speculated that putting the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument would work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other. The greater the number of rattles the better, was his thinking on the matter. He described it along the lines of a quest. The musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle.

To that end, he had roamed Cold Mountain. He knew that in the first cool days of autumn the snakes were moving in anticipation of winter, looking for dens. He killed a number of fair-sized rattlers, but once he had them dead, their little tails seemed pitifully insufficient. Finally, after climbing high, up where the black balsams grow, he ran upon a great old timber rattler, laid out on a flat slate to sun. It was not enormous in length, for they do not get terribly long, but it was stouter through the body than the fat part of a man's arm. The markings on its back had all run together until it was black as a blacksnake, almost. It had grown a set of rattles as long as Stobrod's index finger. In telling this to Ada he held out the finger and then with the thumbnail of the other hand he marked offa place right at the third knuckle. He said, They was that long. And he snicked the nail repeatedly across the dry skin.

Stobrod had walked up near the stone and said to the snake, Hey, I aim to take them rattles. The big snake had a head like a fist, and it raised it up off the stone and evaluated Stobrod through slitted yellow eyes. It shifted into a part coil, declaring it would rather fight than move. The snake quivered its tail a moment, warming up. Then it went to rattling with a screech so dreadful as to make one's thinking seize up in all its units.

Stobrod took a step back as he was intended by nature to do. But he wanted those rattles. He drew out his pocketknife and cut a forked stick about four feet long and went back to the snake, which had not moved and seemed to relish the prospect of a contest. Stobrod stood about arm's length outside what he judged the striking range to be. The snake perked up, raised its head farther from the ground.

Stobrod urged it to strike.

Whooh! he said, shaking the stick in its face.

The snake rattled on, unfazed.

Waah! Stobrod said, poking at it with the fork. The rattling diminished a bit in volume and pitch as the snake shifted its coils. Then it fell silent, as if from boredom.

The snake clearly required an offering of more substance. Stobrod eased forward, then crouched. He put the knife between his teeth and held the split sapling in his right hand, poised on high. He waved his left hand fast, well within striking distance of the snake. It lunged, parallel to the ground. Its jaws unhinged, fangs down. The pink of its mouth looked big as the palm of an opened hand. It missed.

Stobrod jabbed with the sapling and trapped the head against the rock. Moving fast he set his foot to the back of the snake's head. He grabbed the thrashing tail. Drew his knife from his mouth. Cut the rattles off clean, right at the buttons. Jumped back the way a cat will do when startled. The snake writhed, collected itself again into striking stance. It tried to rattle, though it had now but a bleeding stub.

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