Cold Mountain (38 page)

2004-3-6

页码，161/232

shone in the light. Inman walked to the hearth and set the pistol up on a little shelf that served for mantel. The crib was drawn up near the fire and the baby slept facedown so that all that could be seen was a pale fuzzed orb arising from covers.

—You look like an outlaw with that big pistol, she said.

—I'm not sure there's a thing I am right now that you could set a name to.

—If I was to ask you to do something, would you do it?

Inman considered that he should frame an answer here on the order of Maybe, or If I can, or some like provisional phrase.

What he said was, Yes.

—If I was to ask you to come over here and lay in bed with me but not do a thing else, could you do it?

Inman looked at her there and wondered what she saw looking back. Some dread shape filling the clothes of her husband? A visitation of spirit half desired, half feared? His eyes rested on the quilt over her. Its squares depicted blocky beasts, big-eyed and little-legged, awkward but heraldic. They seemed patched together out of partial remembrances of dream animals. Their shoulders humped with muscle, feet bristling with spikes, howling mouths stretched wide and filled with long teeth.

—Could you? she said.

—Yes.

—I believed you could or I'd never have asked.

He went to the bed and drew off the boots and climbed under the quilts fully clothed and lay under the covers flat on his back. The tick over the rope was filled with fresh straw and smelled dry and autumnal and sweet, and underlying that was the smell of the girl herself, like a stand of wet laurels after their blooms have fallen to the ground.

They both kept as still as if a charged and cocked shotgun rested there between them. And then in a few minutes Inman heard her crying great dry sobs.

—I'll go if that would be better, he said.

—Hush.

She cried on awhile and then stopped and sat up and wiped her eyes on the quilt corner and began talking about her husband. She required of Inman only that he bear witness to her tale. Every time he went to speak she said, Hush. There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life. She told the manner in which she and John had met and fallen in love. The building of this cabin and her working like a man beside him, felling the trees and raising the dressed logs and chinking the gaps. The happy life they had planned in this lost place which to Inman seemed so unlikely of sustenance. The hardness of the past four years, John's death, the shortness of food. The only bright spot was John's brief furlough, a time of great happiness which produced the baby sleeping by the fire. Without her, Sara said, there'd be nothing holding me to earth.

The final thing she said was, That will be a good hog out there. It fed on chestnut mast mainly, and I brought it in from the woods and gave it corn for the past two weeks so the lard will render out clear.

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

2004-3-6

页码，162/232

It's so fat its eyes have about swole shut.

When she was done talking, she reached out and touched the scar at Inman's collar line, first with just her fingertips and then with her whole palm. She rested her hand there a moment and then she took it away. She rolled over with her back to him and soon her breathing became deep and regular.

He figured she had found some calm just in telling to another person what a lonely thin edge of life she occupied, where one hog could act as stopple to a demijohn of woes.

Worn as he was, Inman could not rest. While Sara slept he lay looking up, watching the light of the fire diminish on the underside of the roof as the logs burned away. A woman had not touched a hand to him with any degree of tenderness in so long that he had come to see himself as another kind of creature altogether from what he had been. It was his lot to bear the penalty of the unredeemed, that tenderness be forevermore denied him and that his life be marked down a dark mistake. And in his troubled mind and constant sorrow he did not even think it possible to reach a hand to Sara's hip and pull her to him and hold her close till daylight.

What little sleep he did get was troubled by dreams that emanated from the quilt top. The beasts of it chased after him in a dark wood, and there was not place one for sanctuary no matter where he turned. All the world of that dark realm gathered dire and intent against lone him, and everything about it was grey and black, but for teeth and claws as white as the moon.

When Inman awoke it was to Sara shaking his shoulder and saying urgently, Get up and get out.

It was just grey dawn and the cabin was freezing cold and there was the faint sound of horses on the road leading up to the house.

—Get, Sara said. Whether it's Home Guard or raiders, we're both better off if you're not here.

She ran to the back door and opened it. Inman jerked on the boots and took the LeMat's from the mantel and rushed out. He went at a dead run to the line of trees and brush beyond the spring. He plunged in and then, hidden from sight, he worked his way around until he found a thick stand of twisted laurel situated to give him a view of the front of the house. He crawled up in the darkness pooled under the laurel and sighted through a fork in a trunk to hide his face. The ground was frozen to a crunchy grit under him.

He could see Sara run barefoot across the frosted ground in her nightgown to the hog pen. She dropped the poles of the pen gate from their stanchions and tried to coax the hog out, but it would not rise. She walked into the muddy pen and kicked at the hog, and her feet when she raised them were black with mud and hog shit where she had broken through the frozen crust to the muck. The hog rose and began to walk, but it was so immense and low slung that it could hardly step over the gate poles on the ground. It had just left the pen and begun to gain some momentum with Sara driving it toward the woods when there was a call from down at the road.

—Stop right there.

Bluejackets. Inman saw three of them on sorry horses. They dismounted and came through the front gate. Two of them carried Springfield rifles in the crooks of their left arms. The muzzles were aimed half at the ground but the men's fingers were inside the trigger guards. The other man held a Navy revolver pointed up as if he aimed to shoot down a high bird, but his eyes were aimed straight at Sara.

The man with the pistol went to her and told her to sit on the ground and she did. The hog reclined on the ground beside her. The two with rifles climbed onto the porch and entered the house, one covering the other as he opened the door and stepped in. They were inside awhile and all that time file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，163/232

the man with the pistol stood over Sara without looking at her or speaking to her. From the house came sounds of clash and breakage. When the two inside reappeared, one of them carried the baby by a fold in its swaddling as one would carry a satchel. It cried out and Sara half rose to go to it and the man with the pistol shoved her back to the frozen ground.

The three Federals convened in the yard, but Inman could not make out what they were saying over the sound of the baby and of Sara pleading with them to give her the child. He could hear their accents though, flat and quick as hammer blows, and they brought up in him the urge to strike back hard. He was, however, beyond reliable range for the LeMat's, and even if he were not, he could think of no plan of attack that would result in anything but death for Sara and the baby and himself.

Then he could hear that they were asking her about money, where she had it hidden. That's their nourishment, Inman thought. Sara said what could only have been the truth, that all she had of worldly goods was the little they could see. They asked again and again and then they led her to the porch and Pistol held her hands behind her while one of the riflemen went to the horses and took straps that looked to be pieces of old plow line from a canvas saddlebag. Pistol tied her to a post with the straps and then just pointed a finger at the baby. One of the men unswaddled the baby and set it out on the frozen ground. Inman could hear the man with the pistol say, We have all day, and then he could hear Sara scream.

The men sat on the porch edge and dangled their feet and talked among themselves. They made cigarettes and smoked them to spittled nubs. The two underlings went to the horses and came back with sabers, and they went about the yard prodding into the cold ground hoping to hit treasure. They went about it for some time. The baby screaming and Sara pleading. Then the one with the pistol arose from his seat on the porch edge and walked to Sara and stuck the barrel of the pistol to the fork of her legs and said, You really don't have shit, do you? The other two came and stood close by, watching.

Inman began moving back through the woods to put the house between him and the porch so that when he came at them he could at least shoot one as he came around the corner before they saw him.

It was a poor plan, but it was all he had, given the open ground he had to cross to get at them. He had no thought other than that he and the woman and the baby would likely all be killed, but he could see no other way out of this.

Before he moved far, though, the men stepped away from Sara. Inman stopped and watched, hoping for some advantageous realignment of forces. Pistol went to his horse and got a length of rope and walked over to the hog and tied it on to its neck. One of the riflemen unhitched Sara from the post and the other went to the baby and hoisted it by an arm and thrust it out to her. They began chasing about the yard gathering up chickens. They caught three hens and tied their legs with twine and hung them upside down behind their saddles.

Sara held the baby to her. When she saw Pistol leading the hog off she yelled out, That hog's all I've got. You take it and you might as well knock both of us in the head and kill us now, for it will all come out the same. But the men mounted up and headed back down the road, Pistol leading the hog, which trotted along effortfully at the end of the rope. They turned a curve and were gone.

Inman ran down to the porch and looked up to Sara. He said, Warm your baby up and then build you a fire just as high as your head and put on a cauldron of water to boil. And then he jogged off down the road.

He trailed the Federals, sticking to the margins of the woods and wondering what it was he intended to do. All he could hope was that something would present itself.

They did not go long, about two or three miles, until they pulled off the road into a swale at the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，164/232

mouth to a ragged little cove. They went up it a ways and tied the hog to a locust sapling and set about building a fire close up to a rock ledge near a swift creek. Inman reckoned their aim was to camp there for the night and eat until they were full, even if that meant cutting the hams off the hog.

Inman circled through the woods until he was above them at the top of the ledge. He hid in the rocks and watched them wring the necks of two of the chickens and pluck and gut them and put them on spits of green limbs above the fire.

They sat with their backs to the rock and watched the chickens cook. Inman could hear that they were talking of home and it came out that the two were from Philadelphia and the one with the pistol was from New York City. They spoke of how they missed home and how they wished they were there, and Inman wished they were there too, for he was not anxious to do what he was about to try to do.

He moved a fair way along the top of the ledge, going quiet and slow, until it declined into the common level of the ground. Near the edge of the rock outcropping he found a shallow cave and stuck his head in to find that it went only ten feet deep into the rock. It had long ago sheltered coon hunters or the like, for there was an old black fire ring at the mouth. The cave had also sheltered other men even earlier on. Their sign was scribbled on the walls of the cave, odd angular marks from some lost pattern of writing. None alive now could look on it and tell alpha from zed. Other marks depicted beasts long departed from this earth or never here, mere figment residents of brainpans long since empty as an old gourd.

Inman left the cave and kept circling the ledge until he could approach the encampment walking downhill along the stream through the gorge. Just out of eyesight of the men, he found a big hemlock with low-growing limbs, and he climbed up about ten feet into it and stood tall on the limb right up against the dark trunk like he had seen long-eared owls do when they're laying up in the daytime and seeking to stay hid. Three times he gobbled out the call of a wild turkey and then he waited.

He could hear the men talking, but he could not tell what they were saying. In just a minute Pistol came easing along with the Navy revolver out in front of him. He walked right under the tree and stopped. Inman was looking down on his hat crown. Pistol stuck his revolver under his armpit and took the hat off and ran his hand through his hair. He was going bald at the back of his head. There was a white spot of scalp the size of a poker chip and Inman took aim at it.

He said, Hey.

Pistol looked up and Inman shot down on him at such an angle that he missed the bald spot. The bullet entered at the shoulder near the neck and erupted from the stomach in a bright outpouring that resembled violent vomiting. The man fell to the ground as if the bones in his legs had suddenly liquified. He tried to pull himself along the ground with his arms, but earth seemed to elude his grasp. He rolled and looked above him to see what make of predator had fallen on him with such weight. When their eyes met, Inman put two fingers to his hat brim in greeting, and then the man died in an attitude of deep confusion.

—Did you hit it? one of the riflemen called out from down the hill.

After that it was fairly simple. Inman descended from the tree and retraced his steps, making a quick flanking movement back up and around the long rock outcropping so that this time he approached the camp coming up the creek. He stopped at a thicket of rhododendron and waited.

The two riflemen by the fire called out to the dead man over and over, and Inman discovered that his name had been Eben. The men eventually gave up calling and took up their Springfields and headed upstream to find him. Inman followed them, screened by trees, until they came upon Eben. They stood for a time at a distance from the partially disassembled body and talked over what they ought file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...