Cold Mountain (4 page)

2004-3-6

页码，13/232

and pulled up the covers. Tired from his day of walking about town, Inman read only a short time before falling asleep while it was yet grey dusk.

He awakened sometime deep in the night. The room was black, and the only sounds were those of men breathing and snoring and shifting about in their beds. There was only faint light from the window, and he could see the bright beacon of Jupiter declining to the western horizon. Wind came in the windows, and the pages of dead Balis fluttered on the table and a few of them curled back and half stood so that they caught the faint window light through their backsides and glowed like runtish ghosts come haunting.

Inman rose and dressed in his new clothes. He added his Bartram scroll to the knapsack; then he strapped on his packs and went to the tall open window and looked out. It was the dark of the new moon. Ribbons of fog moved low on the ground though the sky was clear overhead. He set his foot on the sill and stepped out the window.

the ground beneath her hands

Ada sat on the porch of the house that was now hers, a portable writing desk balanced across her lap.

She wet the nib of a pen in ink and wrote:

This you must know: that despite your long absence, such is the light in which I view the happy relation existing between us, that I will never conceal a single thought from you. Let such fears not trouble you. Know that I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.

She blew the paper to dry it and then scanned over what she had written with a critical eye. She mistrusted her handwriting, for no matter how she tried, she had never mastered the flowing whorls and arcs of fine penmanship. The characters her hand insisted on forming were instead blocky and dense as runes. Even more than the penmanship, she disliked the tenor of the letter. She balled up the paper and tossed it into a boxwood bush.

Aloud she said, That is just the way people talk and has nothing to do with the real matter at hand.

She looked off across the yard to the kitchen garden where the beans and squash and tomatoes bore vegetables hardly bigger than her thumb despite the fullness of the growing season. Many of the leaves were eaten away to their veins by bugs and worms. Standing thick in the rows and towering over the vegetables were weeds that Ada could not name and had neither the energy nor the heart to fight. Beyond the failed garden stretched the old cornfield, now grown up shoulder high in poke and sumac. Above the fields and pastures, the mountains were just becoming visible as the morning fog burned away. Their pale outlines stood at the horizon, more like the ghosts of mountains than the actual things.

Ada sat waiting for them to reveal themselves clearly. Her thinking was that it would be a comfort to see something that was as it should be, for otherwise her mind troubled itself with the thought that everything else in her sight was marked by neglect. Since her father's funeral, Ada had hardly turned her hand around the farm. She had at least milked the cow, which Monroe had named Waldo with disregard for gender, and fed the horse, Ralph, but she had not done much more, for she did not know how to do much more. She had left the chickens to fend for themselves and they had gotten skinny and skittish. The hens had abandoned the little chicken house and roosted in trees and dropped their eggs wherever the mood struck them. They vexed Ada with their inability to settle on nesting places. She had to investigate every cranny of the yard to find the eggs, and lately she believed they had taken on a strange taste since the hens' diet had changed from table scraps to bugs.

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

2004-3-6

页码，14/232

Cookery had become a pressing issue for Ada. She was perpetually hungry, having eaten little through the summer but milk, fried eggs, salads, and plates of miniature tomatoes from the untended plants that had grown wild and bushy with suckers. Even butter had proved beyond her means, for the milk she had tried to churn never firmed up beyond the consistency of runny clabber. She wanted a bowl of chicken and dumplings and a peach pie but had not a clue how one might arrive at them.

Ada cast one more look to the far mountains, still fairit and pale, and then she rose and went in search of eggs. She checked the weeds along the fence by the lane, parted the long grass at the base of the pear tree in the side yard, rattled among the clutter of the back porch, ran her hands along the dusty shelves in the toolshed. She found nothing.

She recalled that a red hen had sometimes lately taken to hanging about the big boxwoods at either side of the front steps. She went to the bush that she had thrown the letter into and tried to part the dense leafage and peer inside, but she could see nothing in the dim center. She folded her skirts tightly about her legs, and on hands and knees she worked her way inside the boxwood. Its branches scratched at her forearms and face and neck as she pushed forward. The ground beneath her hands was dry and littered with chicken feathers and old chicken shit and the hard dead leaves of the bush.

Inside, there was a hollow place. The thick outer growth of leaves was just a husk enclosing a space like a tiny room.

Ada sat up in it and looked about on the ground and in the branches for eggs but found only a broken shell, dried yolk the color of rust in one jag-edged cup. She fitted herself between two limbs and rested with her back against the trunk. The boxwood bower smelled of dust and of the sharpness and bitterness of chickens. Its light was dim, and it reminded her of childhood play in caves made by draping sheets over tables or by tenting carpets over clotheslines. Best of all were the tunnels she and her cousin Lucy dug deep into haystacks on her uncle's farm. They had spent entire rainy afternoons snug and dry as denned foxes, whispering secrets to each other.

It was with a familiar delicious tingle of pleasure, a tightening in her breathing, that she realized she was now similarly hidden away, that anyone walking from the gate to the porch would never know she was there. If one of the ladies from the church made an obligatory visit to see about her welfare, she could sit motionless as they called her name and knocked at the door. She would not come out until long after she had heard the gate latch clack shut. But she expected no one to call. The visits had tapered off in the face of her indifference to them.

Ada looked up with some disappointment to the faint lacework of pale blue sky visible through the leaves. She wished rain were falling so she would feel even more protected as it rustled the leaves overhead. The occasional drop that might find its way through, plopping a tiny crater into the dust, would only emphasize that though inside she remained dry, outside rain fell wholesale. Ada wished never to leave this fine shelter, for when she considered the pass she had lately reached, she wondered how a human being could be raised more impractically for the demands of an exposed life.

She had grown up in Charleston and at Monroe's insistence had been educated beyond the point considered wise for females. She had become a knowledgeable companion for him, a lively and attentive daughter. She was filled with opinions on art and politics and literature, and ready to argue the merits of her positions. But what actual talents could she claim? What gifts? A fair command of French and Latin. A hint of Greek. A passable hand at fine needlework. A competency at the piano, though no brilliance. The ability to render landscape and still life with accuracy in either pencil or watercolor. And she was well read.

Those were the abilities to be marked down in her favor. None of them seemed exactly to the point when faced with the hard fact that she now found herself in possession of close to three hundred acres of steep and bottom, a house, a barn, outbuildings, but no idea what to do with them. It gave her pleasure to play on the piano, but not enough to compensate for her recent realization that she file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，15/232

could not weed a row of young bean plants without pulling half of them out along with the ragweed.

A certain amount of resentment came upon her when she thought that a measure of applied knowledge in the area of food production and preparation would stand her in better stead at that particular time than any fine understanding of the principles of perspective in painting. All her life, though, her father had kept her back from the hardness of work. As long as she could remember he had hired adequate help, sometimes freed blacks, sometimes unlanded whites of good character, sometimes slaves, in which case the wages were paid directly to the owner. For most of the six years of their mission to the mountains, Monroe had employed a white man and his part-Cherokee wife to am the place, leaving Ada with little to do other than devise a weekly menu. She had therefore been free, as always, to occupy her time with reading and needlework, drawing and music.

But now the hired people were gone. The man had been lukewarm toward secession and counted himself lucky to be too old to volunteer in the first years of the war. But that spring, with the armies in Virginia desperately shorthanded, he had begun to worry that he might soon be conscripted. So, shortly after Monroe died, he and his wife had taken off unannounced and headed over the mountains to cross the lines into territory held by the Federals, leaving Ada to make do on her own.

Since then, she had discovered herself to be frighteningly ill-prepared in the craft of subsistence, living alone on a farm that her father had run rather as an idea than a livelihood. Monroe never developed much interest in the many tiresome areas of agriculture. He had held the opinion that if he could afford to buy feed corn and meal, why bother growing more than they could eat as roasting ears? If he could buy bacon and chops, why be drawn into the more inconvenient details of pork?

Ada once heard him instruct the hired man to buy a dozen or so sheep and put them into the pasture below the front yard to mix in with the milk cow. The man had objected, pointing out to Monroe that cows and sheep do not do well pastured together. The man asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat?

Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere.

But it was hard to live on atmosphere, and so the boxwood appeared to offer about all the feeling of protection Ada could soon expect. She decided she would not quit the shrub until she could count off, at minimum, three convincing reasons to do so. But after several minutes' thought she could only come up with one: she did not particularly wish to die within the boxwood.

At that moment, though, the red hen came bursting through the leaves, her wings partially opened and trailing in the dust. She hopped onto a limb near Ada's head and sounded off with an agitated gabble. Immediately behind her came the big black-and-gold rooster that always frightened Ada a little with his ferocity. He was intent on treading the hen but pulled up short, startled when he saw Ada in so unexpected a place. The rooster cocked his head at an angle and fixed a shining black eye on her. He took a step back and scratched at the ground. He was close enough for Ada to note the dirt lodged between the scales on his yellow legs. The amber spurs looked long as a finger. The golden helmet of feathers at his head and neck fluffed and swelled and in their glossiness seemed almost macassared. He shook himself to settle them back into place. The black of his body had a blue-green sheen like oil on water. His yellow beak opened and closed.

If he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds he'd kill me where I sit without a doubt, Ada thought.

She shifted about onto her knees and waved her hands and said, Shoo! When she did, the rooster launched himself at her face, twisting in the air so that he arrived spurs first, wings flogging away.

Ada threw up a hand to fend him off and was cut across the wrist by a spur. Her blow knocked the bird to the ground, but he rose and came at her again, wings fanning. As she scrambled crablike to get out from under the bush, the rooster dug at her with a spur and hung it up in the folds of her skirt.

She burst from the bush with a great thrash and rose to run, the rooster still attached to her skirt at file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，16/232

knee level. The bird pecked at her calves and struck again and again with the spur of his free leg and beat at her with his wings. Ada hit at it with open-handed blows until it fell away, and then she ran to the porch and into the house.

She sank into an armchair and examined her wounds. There was a smear of blood at her wrist. She wiped it away and with relief saw that she was little more than scraped. She looked at her skirt and found it dusty and smeared with chicken droppings and rent in three places, and then she drew it up and looked to her legs. They were marked variously by scratches and nips, none of them deep enough to draw blood. Her face and neck stung from scratches taken when she scrabbled out of the bush. She patted at her hair and found it moiled all about her head. This is the place I have reached, she thought. I am living in a new world where these are the fruits of even looking for eggs.

She rose from the chair and climbed the steps to her room and removed her clothes. At her marble-topped washstand, she poured water from the pitcher into the basin and washed off with a piece of lavender soap and a cloth. She ran her fingers through her hair to rake out the boxwood leaves and then just let it fall loose below her shoulders. She had
abandoned both
of the current hairstyles—

either gathered all around and swept into two big rolls that hung from the sides of a woman's head like the ears of a hound, or pulled tight to the scalp and bunned at the back like a mud-tailed horse.

She no longer had need or patience for such updos. She could go about looking like a madwoman in a bookplate and it didn't matter, for she sometimes went up to a week or ten days without seeing another soul.

She went to her chest of drawers for clean underdress and found none, laundry having been neglected for some time. She put on linens she drew from near the bottom of the dirty clothes pile, theorizing that perhaps time had made them fresher than the ones she had just taken off. She topped them with a somewhat clean dress and wondered how she might get through the hours until bedtime.

When had things altered so that she no longer thought of how to pass the day pleasantly or profitably and began to think merely of how to pass the day?

Her will to do was near gone. All she had accomplished of note in the months since Monroe's death was to sort through his things, his clothes and papers. Even that had been a trial, for she had a strange and fearful feeling about her father's room and had not been able to enter it until many days after the funeral. But during that time she had often stood at the door and looked in as people are drawn to stand at the lip of a cliff and look down. Water had stood in a pitcher at his washstand until it went away of its own accord. When she had finally drawn together the nerve to do it, she went in and sat on the bed, weeping as she folded the well-made white shirts, the black suitcoats and pants for storage. She sorted and labeled and boxed Monroe's papers, his sermons and botanical notes and commonplace journals. Each little task had brought with it a new round of mourning and a string of empty days that eventually ran together until now she had arrived at such a state that the inevitable answer to the question, What have you accomplished this day? was, Nothing.

Ada took a book from her bedside table and went into the upper hall and sat in the stuffed chair she had pulled from Monroe's bedroom and situated to catch the good light from the hall window. She had spent much of the past three damp months sitting in the chair reading, a quilt wrapped around her to hold back the chill of the house even in July. The books she had drawn from the shelves that summer had been varied and haphazard, little but recent novels, whatever she happened to pick up from Monroe's study. Trifles like
Sword and Gown
by Lawrence and many others of its type. She could read such books and a day later not know what they had been about. When she had read more notable books, the harsh fates of their doomed heroines served only to deepen her gloom. For a time, every book she plucked from the shelves frightened her, their contents all concerning mistakes made by wretched dark-haired women so that they ended their days punished, exiled, and alien. She had gone straight from
The Mill on the Floss
to a slim and troubling tale by Hawthorne on somewhat the same theme. Monroe had apparently not finished it, for the pages were uncut beyond the third chapter. She guessed Monroe would have thought the book unnecessarily grim, but to Ada it seemed file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...