Cold Mountain (47 page)

2004-3-6

页码，198/232

Ada turned from him and began kicking at the snow with her boot toe. And when she did she turned up pieces of broken banjo. Then the broken fiddlestick, the frog piece dangling from horsehair. She kicked around more, looking for the fiddle, but she did not find it. No fiddle and no Stobrod.

—Where is he? Ada said.

—There's not anybody from Georgia can tell more than half the truth, Ruby said. Dead or alive, they took him with them.

They decided to bury Pangle on a little shelf of land up above the trail near a chestnut tree. The ground dug easily and they hardly needed the mattock, for only a thin rind of ground was frozen and under that the top-soil was black and loose and went down and down. They took turns with the shovel, and soon they were hot in their coats and they took them off and hung them on tree limbs.

Then they were too cold, but it was better to be cold than to wet your clothes with sweat. By the time they started hitting significant rocks they had quite a hole, though it was still two feet shallower than the six which Ada thought to be the rule of graves. But it would do, Ruby said.

They went to Pangle and each took a leg and dragged him through the snow to the grave and slid him in. They had no box, nor even a spare blanket to shroud him with, so Ada spread her kerchief over his face before they began shoveling the dirt. By the time they had covered him to where only one boot toe was left showing, Ada was weeping, though she had seen the boy but once in life, and that by firelight, and all the words that had passed between them had been him saying Stobrod's playing had done her good.

Ada remembered her thoughts when they had buried winter cabbages, how she had made it metaphoric. But she found this burial to be an entirely different matter. Beyond the bare fact of holes in the ground, there was no similarity at all between the two.

When they had filled the grave above level, they had more dirt left, which Ruby noted and attributed to the time of the month, the growing of the moon toward full. Dig a grave a week into the wane and you'd have a swale when you were done. They mounded the moon's extra dirt over Pangle and packed it with the back of the spade. Then Ada took her clasp knife and stripped bark from a hickory sapling and sought out a black locust and lopped two of its limbs with the hand axe and lashed them together with the hickory withes to form up a cross. She stood it in the soft ground at Pangle's head, and though she did not say words aloud over him, she made some in her mind. She'd heard Ruby say locust had such will to live that you could split fence posts from the wood of its trunk and they'd sometimes take root in the postholes and grow. Such was Ada's hope for her own construction, that someday a tall locust would stand to mark Pangle's place, and that every year into the next century it would tell in brief a tale like Persephone's. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring.

Their hands were dirty. Ruby just cupped up snow and rubbed it between her palms and shook off the dirty water. But Ada went through the woods to the creek and knelt and washed her hands and then dashed icy water in her face. She stood and shook her head and looked about. Her eyes fell on a low rock ledge beyond the creek. It made an overhang, a shelter. The brown of the dirt stood out dark against the snow. Under the rock lip sat Stobrod, though it took a minute for Ada to make him out since his clothes matched up with the dark of the exposed earth. He was still, eyes closed, and he sat with his legs crossed, his head to the side and his hands composed around the fiddle in his lap. A little wind rose up and rattled the few oak leaves and shook snow from bare limbs. It fell in Ada's hair and onto the creek face, where it melted as it struck.

—Ruby, Ada called. Ruby, I need you here.

They stood over him and his face was the hue of the snow and he looked so meager in his parts. Such a little man. He had lost a great deal of blood through the wounds and had spit up yet more, and he file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，199/232

was stained all down his shirtfront. Ruby took the fiddle from his lap and handed it to Ada, and the snake rattles shifted dryly inside it. When Ruby undid his buttons, the blood in his shirt was black and stiff. His chest was frail and white. Ruby put her ear to it and pulled away and then listened again.

—He's yet living, she said.

She pulled apart his clothes and turned him about to survey the damage and found he'd been hit three times. Through his bow hand where he held

it before him. Through the meat of his ham nigh to the hipbone. And— the most serious—through the nipple to his chest. That ball had broken a rib and scored the top of his lung and lodged in his back muscles above the shoulder blade. There was a blue lump under his skin the size of a crabapple.

In the moving of him he did not break consciousness or even moan in pain.

Ruby drew together kindling and whittled off shavings from a pine branch and struck fire from the matches. When the fire was going, she held the blade of the homemade knife in the flames. She cut into Stobrod's back and he still made no sound nor fluttered his eyes. There was just a bare rindle of blood from the cut, as if he had not enough left for the new wound to do more than sweat a few red drops. Ruby put her finger into his back and inquired around with it and then she hooked the ball out.

She reached and put it into Ada's hand and it was like a gobbet of raw meat.

—Go rinse that off, Ruby said. He'll want it someday.

Ada went to the creek and held her hand in the water and let the current run through her caged fingers. When she drew it out and looked at it, the lead was clean and grey. In passing through Stobrod it had been pressed into a shape like a mushroom, the cap fluted and split and misgrown.

The stem end, though, was intact, cut with three precise rings during its manufacture to take best advantage of a barrel's rifling.

Ada went back to the ledge and set the bullet beside the fiddle. Ruby had Stobrod wrapped in blankets and the fire was burning knee high.

—You stay and boil me some water, Ruby said to Ada.

Ada watched her wander off through the woods, the shovel over her shoulder and her head down, looking for healing roots which she could know only from their dried stalks and husks poking up from the snow. Ada arranged stones around the fire for pot rest and went to the horse and got a pot from the sacks. She dipped it full of creek water and put it on the stones to heat. She sat and looked at Stobrod, and he lay like a dead man. There was no sign to show he lived other than a slight movement of his jacket front when he breathed. Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.

When Ruby returned an hour later, she had her pockets full of any root she could find that might be remotely useful—mullein, yarrow, burdock, ginseng. But she had not found goldenseal, which was the thing she needed most. The herb had been scarce of late. Hard to find. She worried that people were proving themselves not worthy of healing and that goldenseal had departed in disgust. She packed a mash of mullein and yarrow root and burdock into Stobrod's wounds and bound them with strips cut from a blanket. She brewed tea from the mullein and ginseng and dribbled it into his mouth, but his throat seemed clenched shut and she could not tell if any went down or not.

After awhile she said, It's too far home. He'll not make it there alive. It might be days before he can travel, and I'd not be surprised if there was more snow coming. We need better shelter than this.

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

2004-3-6

页码，200/232

—Back to the rock lodge? Ada said.

—We wouldn't all fit. Not and have room to cook and work over him. There's a place I know. If it's there yet.

They left Stobrod where he lay while they cut long poles to make shafts for a drag sledge. They tied the poles together with rope and lashed more across for web sling and harnessed the rig to the horse.

They carried Stobrod across the creek in the blankets and put him on, but when they headed up the left trail fork with him dragging behind the horse and bumping on every rock and root, they could see that their thoughts had been wrong and that the jarring would tear him apart at his wounds. So they pulled the sledge to pieces, coiled the rope, and draped Stobrod over the horse and went on slowly.

The sky was flat and grey and it hovered over their heads so close it seemed they could reach up and touch it. For a brief while, snow again emerged out of it, blown on a cutting wind. First it came in great flakes like goosedown, then faint and dry as ashes. When the snow stopped, fog welled up thick around them, and the only thing clear was that the day was falling away.

They walked for some time without speaking except when Ruby would say, Here, and then they would turn at a fork. Ada did not know which way they went, for she had long since lost certainty of the cardinal points.

When they stopped to rest, the horse stood head down, tired and miserable, exhausted from the load he was carrying and the altitude. Ada and Ruby brushed the snow off a log and sat. They could not see a thing in the fog but the nearest trees. The feel of the air, though, suggested that they were on a ridge and that there was much open air and gravity around them. Ada huddled inside her coat, trying not to think of going through another day of this or of where they might spend the night, just the next mile. Stobrod lay draped over the horse exactly where Ada and Ruby had placed him.

While they sat, two peregrines came bursting out of the fog. They flew into the shifting wind, their wings making short choppy strokes for purchase against the difficult air. They flared so close that Ada could hear the hiss of wind through the feathers. Stobrod awoke and raised his head momentarily as the birds passed and then he stared after them vaguely as they faded back in the fog.

A line of blood ran to his chin from his mouth corner, thin as a razor cut.

—Pigeon hawk, he said, as if putting a name to the birds might help him regain his footing.

He started struggling and it seemed he wanted to square himself on the horse to ride, and so Ruby helped him. But when she let go he fell forward until his head rested on the withers. His eyes were closed and his arms stretched past his head to grip the mane with both hands. His legs swung limp below Ralph's round belly. Ruby wiped his mouth with her coat sleeve and they went on.

For most of an hour they descended a steep hillside and then Ada thought they were cupped in a valley, though she could not see far enough in any direction to verify the feeling. They crossed a marshy place and on either side of the trail huckleberry bushes grew head high. At the bottom of the valley they passed a pool of still black water. It came up out of the fog as if a hole had opened in the world. Old dead ribbons of taupe bunchgrass ringed it, and ice scalloped all around its verge like a camera iris closing. Three black ducks floated motionless in the pool's center, their heads tucked against their breasts. Were she writing a book of types, Ada thought, that would do for fear.

The fog was thinning some. They climbed again, just a low ridge with hemlocks growing on its spine and many were blown down with their root plates standing revealed in the air like a dissection. They descended through the trees and into a stand of chestnuts. They were moving toward a stream which they could hear but not see. It was rough walking. There was not really a trail at all, just enough file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，201/232

space between the trees and the ragged brush and low scrub to make way for passage. When they came off the ridge toward a pinched creek bottom, the light had not changed, though the day felt all but spent.

Ada began to make out rectangular shapes through the trees. Huts. Cabins. A tiny Cherokee village, a ghost town, its people long since driven out onto the Trail of Tears and banished to a barren land.

Except for one rotted relic from the age of wattle and daub, the cabins were made of chestnut logs, peeled and notched and lapped. Roofed with shingles and curls of chestnut bark. A big white oak had fallen across one hut, but the rest were largely intact after three decades alone, and such was the power of chestnut timber against damp that they might remain so for a hundred years more before melting into the ground. Grey lichen grew on the cabin logs and dried stalks of horseweed and pigweed and fleabane rose from the snow in the doorways. There was not flat ground for raising much in the way of crops, so it might have been a seasonal hunting camp. Or refuge wherein a handful of carnivore outcasts had lived, nearly anchoritic. All in all, only a half-dozen little windowless cells. They were set at uneven intervals down the bank of the creek, which was deep and strong and black, its way broken by great smooth boulders with green moss grown on their faces.

In Ada's fatigue, she thought it a matter of great importance to know, without asking, on which bank of the creek the cabins stood. North, south, east, west. It would go a way toward ordering her mind congruent with where she was. Ruby always seemed to know the compass points and to find them significant, not just when giving directions but even in telling a story and indicating where an event had happened. West bank of the Little East Fork, east bank of the West Fork, that sort of thing. What was required to speak that language was a picture held in the mind of the land one occupied. Ada knew the ridges and coves and drainages were the frame of it, the skeleton. You learned them and where they stood in relation to each other, and then you filled in the details working from those known marks. General to particular. Everything had a name. To live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail.

Ada had only just begun to form such a picture, and she looked to the sky for help in finding direction. But it offered none, for the sky lay so close it seemed she might hit her head on it. And there were no other hints to follow. In this lush climate, moss grew on whatever side of a tree it cared to. North meant nothing to moss here. So Ada knew only that, as far as she was concerned, the village could stand on any bank of the creek whatsoever. No direction could be ruled out.

The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been passed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that its people, even in the last days, had ever looked ahead and imagined loss so total and so soon. They had not foreseen a near time when theirs would be another world filled with other people whose mouths would speak other words, whose sleep would be eased or troubled with other dreams, whose prayers would be offered up to other gods.

Ruby picked the best of the cabins, and they stopped before it. They took Stobrod off the horse and made him a nest on the ground of the tarpaulin and blankets, and then they went into the hut's one windowless room. The door was made of hewn planks and had swung on leather hinges, long since broken. It lay on the floor. All that could be done to close it was to prop it in its hole. The packed dirt floor was littered with blown leaves, and they swept it with a pine bough. There was a drystone hearth, a mud-and-stick chimney. Ruby put her head in and looked up and saw daylight. But it had apparently never drawn well, and the chestnut-log roof beams were dark and shiny with years of accumulated smoke. Beneath the odor of dust, the house was still infused with the rich smell of a thousand old campfires. There was a wooden sleeping platform along one wall, a layer of grey straw still on it. They carried Stobrod in and rested him there.

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