Cold Mountain (40 page)

2004-3-6

页码，169/232

working it with the wedge. Moving slow, not straining, just lifting the seven-pound maul and letting it fall so that weight and gravity and the magic of angle combined to disassemble the log. She liked driving the wedge in halfway and then stopping to listen for the ripped-cloth sound of the crack as it kept opening for several seconds after the last blow. The work was calm despite all the pounding.

The stubborn coherence of the wood and the weight of the maul imposed a slow rhythm to the task.

In not much over an hour Ada had split everything but one difficult section where big limbs had once attached to the trunk and confused the grain. From each section she had split eight good-sized pieces of firewood and she reckoned there were forty pieces lying in a jumble on the ground ready to be hauled to the house and burned. She felt a great sense of accomplishment until she realized that the wood would only serve for four, maybe five, days of fire. She started to calculate the approximate number of pieces they would need for the whole winter, but she soon stopped for the figure would be dauntingly high.

Ada's dress was soaked through across the shoulders and back with sweat, and her hair was wet against her neck. So she went to the house and drank two dippers of water from the spring and took off her hat and poured two more over her hair and then twisted the water out of it. She wet her face and rubbed it with her hands and then dried it on her dress sleeve. She went in and got her lap desk and notebook and came out to sit in the sun on the porch edge until she dried.

Ada dipped her pen in ink and started a letter to her cousin Lucy in Charleston. For a time there was hardly a sound but the scritch of nib on paper as she wrote.

I suspect, were we to meet on Market Street, you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current
want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to.

I'm at the moment sitting on my back stoop writing this across my knees, my dress an old print
shirtwaist soaked through with perspiration from splitting oak logs, and I have been wearing a straw
chapeau coming apart at brim and crown so that it bristles every bit as much as the haystacks we
long ago lodged in to await the conclusion of rainstorms (do you remember?). The fingers gripping
the pen are dark as stirrup leathers, stained from shucking walnuts out of their stinking, pulpy husks,
and the nail of the forefinger is ragged as a hackerd and wants filing. The silver bracelet with the
dogwood blossoms cut in it stands out in bright contrast to the dark skin of my wrist. It is a day so
autumnal that to write anything about it would be to engage in elegy. I am resting and waiting for
the dress to dry before I turn my attention to burning a brush pile.

I cannot begin to recount all such rough work that I have done in the time since Father died. It has
changed me. It is amazing the physical alterations that can transpire in but a few months of labor. I
am brown as a penny from being outdoors all day, and I am growing somewhat ropy through the
wrists and forearms. In the glass I see a somewhat firmer face than previously, hollower under the
cheekbones. And a new expression, I think, has sometimes come to occupy it. Working in the fields,
there are brief times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my
senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek
analogy for its blackness. I know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without
comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mien. You would not know it on me for
I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment.

She scanned back over the letter and thought it odd and somewhat deceitful that she had not mentioned Ruby, leaving the impression that she was alone. Thinking to rectify the matter later, she put the letter unfinished inside the desk lid. She collected a pitchfork, some matches, a shawl, the third volume of
Adam Bede,
and a little straight chair with the legs sawn off short and carried them down to the brush pile.

She and Ruby had worked with scythes and brush hooks and bow saws most of a day the previous month and had let the cut brush fall where it would. The mix of blackberry canes, tall grass, good-file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，170/232

sized jack pines, and sumac had sunned for several weeks spread on the ground and was now fairly dry. Ada worked awhile with the fork to draw the brush together, and when she was done the pile was big as the corncrib and the air was full of the sere odor of cut and withered foliage. She kicked up some duff and some doty sticks at the edge of the pile and set it afire. While it caught and burned she pulled the short chair into range of its warmth and sat to read
Adam Bede,
but the book did not go well. She could not keep her mind on it for she had to rise often to head off outrunners of flame that strayed across the stubble of the field. She beat them out with the back of the fork. And then, when the fire burned down flat, she had to draw the pile together and heap it high again, each time with a narrower diameter, and as the afternoon grew old the pile stood tall and conical in the field, flames rising from it like a miniature of a spewing volcano she had seen pictured in a book on South America.

So she had work as an excuse for not focusing her thoughts on the page. But, too, she had long since grown impatient with Adam and Hetty and the rest and would have quit the book but for the fact that she had paid so much for it. She wished all the people of the story to be more expansive, not so cramped by circumstance. What they needed was more scope, greater range. Go to the Indes, she directed them. Or to the Andes.

She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

A bull thistle stood beside her. She remembered working around it with the scythe out of admiration for the fist-sized purple bloom, but it was now dry and silver white. She reached out and began picking apart the head. Her thinking was that since every tiny place in the world seemed to make a home for some creature, she would discover who the thistle dwellers might be. Soon down blew about in the breeze and caught in her smoky clothes and hair. She found but one fierce little crablike thing no bigger than a pinhead living solitary inside the dried blossom. It clutched to a thread of down with some of its hind legs and waved a minute pair of pincers before it in a way intended to be menacing. With a puff she blew away the luminous thistledown and nameless creature and watched as they caught an updraft and soared until they disappeared skyward as the souls of the dead are claimed to do.

When she had first lit the fire and begun reading, the light had been bright and even and the sky graded rather too evenly from horizon to zenith, white to blue, in the way Ada associated with landscape paintings of less than the highest quality. But now the seal of evening was on the wooded hillsides and on the pastures. The sky broke into bands and whorls of muted color until the entire west was like the marbled endpapers of her journal. Canada geese—V'd and honking—flew over southward, looking for a place to stay the night. A breeze blew up and flapped the skirts of the scarecrow out in the garden.

Waldo had gone to the gate by the barn. She was waiting and would soon bawl to have her bag stripped, so Ada left her chair and put the cow in her stall and milked. The air was still and damp, cooling with the fall of day, and when the cow turned her head to look back at the milking, her breath fogged and smelled like wet grass. Ada pulled at the teats and watched the milk come out listening for the change in pitch as the pail filled, first a high sizzle against the side and bottom, then a lower drizzle. The skin of her fingers was dark against the pink teat skin.

After Ada put the milk in the springhouse she returned to the field, where the fire still burned slowly, falling into ash. It would have been safe to leave it for the night, though Ada did not wish to. She wanted Ruby to come walking up the road and find her sooty, standing sentry over the afternoon's work.

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

2004-3-6

页码，171/232

The air had a cold edge to it, and Ada drew her shawl around her. She reckoned it only a matter of days before the evenings would become too chill to sit out at sunset, even wrapped in a blanket.

There was dew in the grass, and she stooped and took
Adam Bede
from where she had dropped it and wiped its faces against her skirts. She went and stirred the fire with the fork and it threw sparks into the sky. At the edge of the field, she collected downed hickory limbs and dry jack pine and pitched them on the fire and it soon blazed up and heated a wider circle of air. Ada pulled her chair close and put her hands out to warm. She looked at the lines of mountain ridges, the variety in their darkness as they faded into the distance. She studied the sky to see when it would fall deep enough toward indigo that the beacons of two planets, Venus and another—which she reckoned must be Jupiter or Saturn—might first shine forth low in the west in preparation for the dizzy wheel and spin of the night sky.

This evening she marked where the sun dove to the horizon, for over the weeks she had made a practice of noting its setting point on the ridge. She had watched it march southward as the days snuffed out earlier and earlier. Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun's annual swing. She owned the entire span of ridge where the sun set through the year, and that was a thing to savor. One had then just to mark the points in December and June when the sun wrenched itself from its course and doubled back for another set of seasons. Though upon reflection, she decided a tower was not entirely needed. Only clear some trees to notch the ridge at the turning point. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch with anticipation as the sun drew nigh to the notch and then on a specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?

Ada sat by the fire long after sunset waiting for Ruby. Venus and Saturn had shone out bright to the west and then fallen to the horizon and the full moon had risen, when Ada heard a stirring in the woods. Footsteps in leaves. Low voices. By instinct she took the pitchfork from where it stood in the dirt and moved out of the firelight and watched. Forms moved at the edge of the field and Ada backed farther into the dark and held the fork before her with the five sharp tines aimed toward the sounds of movement. Then she heard her name.

—Hey, Miss Ada Monroe, a voice called softly.

Both names were pronounced in the ways that her father had hated. He had never tired of setting people right on the matter: Broad initial A in Ada; accented second syllable in Monroe, he would say. But over the summer, Ada had given up trying to enforce her name against everyone's natural leaning, and she was learning to be the Ada Monroe that the voice called. Long A, heavy Mon.

—Who is it? she said.

—Us.

Stobrod and a comrade walked out to be lit by the fire. Stobrod carried his fiddle and bow cradled in the crook of his left arm. The other man held a rough-cast banjo by the neck, poking it out before him as a man at a border crossing might present papers in validation of identity. Both of them squinted against the glare.

—Miss Monroe, Stobrod called again. It's just us.

Ada walked nearer to them, billing a hand over her brow to block the light.

—Ruby is not here, she said.

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

2004-3-6

页码，172/232

—We're just generally visiting, Stobrod said. If you don't mind the company.

He and the other man put down their instruments and Stobrod sat on the ground right beside her chair. Ada pulled it a comfortable distance from him and sat too.

—Get us some more wood to liven up the fire, Stobrod said to the banjo man.

Wordless, the man went into the dark edge of woods, and Ada could hear him picking up limbs and breaking them into burning lengths. Stobrod dug around beneath his coat and pulled out a pint pocket tickler full of brown liquor. The glass was dulled almost opaque with scratches and fingerprints.

He unstoppered it and passed the mouth of it beneath his nose. He held the glass to the fire and looked at the light through the whiskey and then drank a delicate sip. He made a little whispery two-note whistle, high to low.

—Too good for me, but I'll drink it anyway, he said.

He took a long pull and then worked the stopper back in with his thumb and put the bottle away.

—We haven't seen you in some time, Ada said. Have you been well?

—Fair, he said. Living on the mountain like an outlaw is no lark.

Ada was put in mind of the story she'd heard the captive tell through the jail bars. She began recounting it to Stobrod as warning of what might lie in wait for outliers, but he knew it already. It had passed about the county several times, first as news and then as yarn and later as legend.

—That Teague bunch is killers, Stobrod said. Especially so when they've got numbers in their favor.

The wood gatherer came back into the light and threw some broken limbs on the fire and then made several trips into the trees for more wood, which he piled for later. When he was done he sat on the ground beside Stobrod. The man said not a word nor looked at Ada, but angled himself away from the fire so he could keep his eyes on Stobrod.

—Who's your companion? Ada asked.

—He's a Swanger boy, or a Pangle. Sometimes he says one, sometimes the other. Neither bunch will claim him, for he's simpleminded, but he's got the look of a Pangle to me.

The man had a big round head which sat unbalanced on him like God was being witty about making the insides of it so small. Though he was nearly thirty according to Stobrod, people still called him a boy because his thoughts would not wrap around the least puzzle. To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.

He was a fat soft thing, broad-assed, as if he had been raised on a diet of meal and fatback. He had titties like a sow that pushed out his shirtfront and flapped when he walked. His pants were tucked into his boots and bloused out above them, and his tiny feet were hardly big enough to bear up his weight. His hair was the next thing to white and his skin was greyish, so that overall he gave the impression of a china plate filled with biscuit and sawmill gravy. He had no talent in the world but his recently discovered ability to play the banjo, unless one counted as talent the fact that he was gentle and kind and looked on everything that passed before him with soft wide eyes.

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