Cold Mountain (46 page)

2004-3-6

页码，194/232

his face said he believed he had found yet more evidence of the kind of place he was in.

—That's beans, Ada said.

The boy looked at them again and then forked off a tiny bite to test her word.

—We don't eat them thataway atall where I'm from, he said.

While the boy sat on the steps and ate, Ruby sat a step above him and talked him out a map of the long way around Cold Mountain. Ada sat in a porch rocker and watched them, two short dark people of such resemblance they might be taken for brother and sister. Ruby told the boy how to stick to the high ridges and avoid the main ways along creek valleys where people would be. Described all the landmarks he would need to make his way up Cold Spring Knob, then to Double Spring Gap and on to Bearpen Gap, Horsebone Gap, Beech Gap. From there head downhill, and at any fork of trail or creek, bear to the southwest. By such route the boy's flat and sorry home lay no more than two weeks distant.

—Go by dark and sleep by day and don't strike a light, Ruby said. Reckon even if you don't run all the way you'll be there for Christmas. They say you know Georgia when you come to it, for it's nothing but red dirt and rough roads.

Ruby dismissed him from her attention and turned to Ada and started planning their journey. The timing worked out poorly. It was Ruby's reasoning that with the days approaching the shortest of the year, one way or the other, either going or coming, they'd spend a night in the woods. It did not much matter which, was her thinking. They might as well get on. So she and Ada left the boy mopping his plate with a heel of corn bread and went in the house and banked up the fire and quickly threw together a camping kit to Ruby's specification. Bedding, cookware, food, candles, a tin box of lucifer matches and the sandpaper needed to ignite them, a dry bundle of fatwood kindling, a coil of rope, a hand axe, shotgun with powder and shot and wadding, grain for the horse, a mattock and spade. They heaped the gear in paired hemp sacks and tied the necks together and threw them over Ralph's back like rude lumpish panniers.

Ruby looked about at the sky for any marks of cloud or air or light that might foreshow the weather, and what they told was snow and gathering cold.

She said, Have you got any britches in the house?

—Trousers? Ada said.

—Woolen or canvas, either one. Two pair.

—Of my father's, yes.

—We need to go put them on, Ruby said.

—Men's trousers? Ada said.

—You wear what you want, but I don't relish the feel of a winter wind blowing up my dress tail. And who's up there to see?

They found two pairs of heavy wool hunting trousers, one pair black and the other grey. They dressed in long underwear and then drew the trousers on and cuffed up the bottoms and cinched the waists in with belts so that the extra material gathered like big pleats. They put on wool shirts and sweaters, and Ruby noted Monroe's broad-brimmed hats and said they would keep the snow from file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，195/232

their faces, so they took two down from the shelf and put them on as well. Had the circumstances been happier, Ada thought, this would have been like the hair contest, a game of dress-up against which they might wager to see who could accouter herself most convincing as a man. Take lamp soot and draw mustaches and burnsides on their faces, carry around unlit cigars and mimic the silly gestures men used in smoking them. Instead they hardly spoke as they dressed, and they both were filled with dread toward the next pair of days.

Before they left, they rubbed beeswax into their boots and opened the door to the henhouse and likewise the door to the cow's stall and they heaped down hay on the floor. Ruby reckoned Waldo would be bawling to have her bag stripped by the time they got back. They gave the boy food and bedding and told him to sleep in the hayloft until dark made it safe for him to travel. When they went off leading the horse, the boy still sat between the boxwoods, and he waved to them like a host bidding visitors farewell.

• • •

Toward evening, snow fell through fog in the woods. Ada and Ruby walked in dim light under fir trees, and they were but vague dark shapes moving through a place that lacked all color other than gradations of gloom. The nearest trees looked very much like genuine trees, but those only slightly farther away were but a suggestion of trees as in a quick sketch, a casual gesture toward the form of trees. All of it seemed to Ada as if there were no such thing as landscape and that she wandered along in a cloud, with what little she could know an arm's length away. All else shrouded from understanding. It made Ralph nervous, and the horse went bowing his neck to left and right and working his ears back and forth to catch sounds of threat.

They had climbed for a long time under the thick canopy of dark hemlock. Then they crossed a low ridge and descended into a creek valley. They had long since left what to Ada was familiar territory.

The footing was soft from layers of dropped needles, and snow fell through the treetops as dry as sifted meal and swirled about the ground in patterns of arcs and loops. It seemed not to want to lie down.

After a time they crossed a black creek, stepping with care on the dry backs of humped stones. Ada looked at the way the creek was seizing up with a thin rim of bright ice along its banks and around rocks and fallen trees and nubbles of moss, anything that hindered the flow. In the center of the creek, though, the fast water ripped along as always.

Where it ran shallower and slower, then, were the places prone to freezing. Monroe would have made a lesson of such a thing, Ada thought. He would have said what the match of that creek's parts would be in a person's life, what God intended it to be the type of. All God's works but elaborate analogy. Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.

Monroe had a book wherein you could look up the types. The rose— its thorns and its blossom—a type of the difficult and dangerous path to spiritual awakening. The baby—come wailing to the world in pain and blood—a type of our miserable earthly lives, so consumed with violence. The crow—its blackness, its outlaw nature, its tendency to feast on carrion—a type of the dark forces that wait to overtake man's soul.

So Ada quite naturally thought the stream and the ice might offer a weapon of the spirit. Or, perhaps, a warning. But she refused to believe that a book could say just how it should be construed or to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lack something essential and be as useless by itself as the gudgeon to a door hinge with no pintle.

On the stream's far bank the horse stopped and shook its hide until the pots rattled in their sacks, and file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，196/232

then he stretched his neck and breathed soft and long out into the world in hope of some assuring companion breath in return. Ada cupped her hand to his velvet muzzle. He put his tongue out and she took it between thumb and forefinger and waggled it gently and then they went on.

For a time they kept to the creekside as it tumbled from the mountain, but then the trail turned up a faint branch and entered a forest of hardwoods where there were yet twisted scraps of leaves clinging to the oak trees. They were old tired oaks and had globes of mistletoe in their branches. Snow fell harder and began to stick to the ground and the trail became a faint sunken line through the woods, an easy thing to miss as night came on. What path there was held not even the cupped tracks of hogs.

It seemed some abandoned Indian trail, long unwalked, linking a set of points that no longer existed.

They walked on well past nightfall, the snow still coming down. The clouds were thick and hid the waxing moon. Nevertheless there was light in the snow where it stood gathered up under the black tree trunks.

Shelter was Ada's first thought, and at every rock ledge she said, There's a place we could sleep. But Ruby said she knew a better place, or at least thought she remembered a place nearby, and they walked on.

In time, they came to a tumble of great flat rocks. Ruby cast about until she found what she was looking for: three that had fallen upon each other so as to form a lean-to, a sort of accidental dolmen with flat straight walls, a capstone fitted tight and angled back so as to shed water, leaving underneath a room no bigger than a cock loft, but enough to sit up and shift around in. As architecture, its shape reminded Ada of the symbol for pi. Inside, the floor was thick with dry leaves.

Spring water rose from the ground not twenty yards away. All set around with chestnut and oak trees that had never been cut since the day of creation. It made as fine a camp as anyone could ever expect to find, and Ruby said that though she had not visited the place in years, it was exactly as she remembered from having spent many a night there as a child out foraging for food.

Ruby put Ada to gathering armloads of the dryest limbs she could find, and within half an hour they had a warm blaze going at the mouth of the shelter. A pot of water boiling for tea. When it was done steeping, they sat and drank it, ate a few dried biscuits and some dried apples. The rings were from apples so small as to be little more than a bite apiece but their sharp taste bound together all the best features of the past warm season.

They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the general order of men, which is to say that he would greatly benefit from having someone's foot in his back every waking minute.

When they were done eating, Ruby brushed away the leaves of the shelter floor with the heel of her hand and scooped out dirt and sifted it through her fingers and held out a palm to the firelight for Ada to see. Fragments of charcoal and splinters of flint. Ancient fire and partial arrow points flawed and discarded. Flakes of old hope however slight.

Neither of them said anything, but Ada picked through the flint splinters and kept the point nearest completion and found comfort that people in some dim other time had done as they were doing, had found shelter in the rock pile and eaten a meal and slept.

The snow hissed as it fell and the temperature was dropping fast, but the fire soon heated the stones, and when Ada and Ruby wrapped themselves in blankets and burrowed in among the dry leaves and heaped more leaves atop the quilts, they were warm as lying in a bed at home. This would do, Ada thought, as she lay there. The abandoned trail through mountains and rivers. Not a soul around. The stone shelter warm and dry and strange as an elfin lodge. Though others might view it as an utterly file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，197/232

bare haven, it matched her needs so much that she could just move in and live there.

The fire threw patterns of light and shadow on the pitched roof stone, and Ada found that if she watched long enough the fire would form the shapes of things in the world. A bird. A bear. A snake.

A fox. Or perhaps it was a wolf. The fire seemed to have no interests other than animals.

The pictures put Ada in mind of a song, one of Stobrod's. It had particularly stuck in her mind. She had noted it for the oddity of its lyric and for Stobrod's singing, which had been of an intensity that Ada could only assume represented deep personal expression. It took as subject the imagined behavior of its speaker, what he would do had he the power to become one of a variety of brute creature. A lizard in the spring—hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly—go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground—root a mountain down.

Ada worried over the song. The animals seemed wonderful and horrible in their desires, especially the mole, a little powerless hermit blind thing propelled by lonesomeness and resentment to bring the world falling around him. More wonderful and horrible still was the human voice speaking the song's words, wishing away its humanity to ease the pain inflicted by lost love, love betrayed, love left unexpressed, wasted love.

Ada could hear in Ruby's breathing that she was yet awake, and so she said, Do you remember that song of your father's about the mole in the ground?

Ruby said that she did, and Ada asked if Ruby thought Stobrod had written the song. Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.

Ada lay and watched the fire shadows and listened to the sound of snow in the leaves and soon drifted off and slept a dreamless sleep, not even waking when Ruby rose to toss more wood on the fire. When Ada awoke it was first light, and she could see that the snow had slackened in its falling but had not stopped. It lay anklebone deep on the ground. Neither Ruby nor Ada was eager to get on with the day that stretched before them. They sat with the blankets around their shoulders, and Ruby blew up the coals and stoked the fire. She fried a piece of side meat and forked it out of its grease and put it on a flat rock. Then she added water to the grease and cooked a pot of grits and took the side meat from the rock and crumbled it into the pot and stirred it into the grits. In the smaller pot Ada made tea, and as they sipped Ruby told how when she first had tea, supplied by Mrs. Swanger, she admired it so much that she gave Stobrod a handful of it tied in a square of cloth as he went off on a coon hunt. The next time she saw him some weeks later she had asked him how he liked it.

Stobrod had said it was no better than fair and that he didn't find it preferable to any other kind of greens. Ruby came to find out he had cooked it up with a strip of fatback and eaten it like cresses.

• • •

When they reached the trail fork, they found the Pangle boy lying alone, face up beneath the poplar.

He was covered with a mantle of snow. It lay slumped over him, thinner than on the ground nearby, and it was clear how the snow had first melted about him and then had not. Ruby brushed away the snow to look at his face, and when she did she found him still smiling, though with a look of confusion in his eyes, which might have been just the look of death. Ruby cupped her hand to his fat cheek and then touched him with her fingertips on his brow, as if to stamp him with the badge of a like outcast.

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