Cold Mountain (50 page)

2004-3-6

页码，210/232

The smell of the smoke rose through the woods.

As they walked, Ada talked to Inman in the voice she had heard Ruby use to speak to the horse when it was nervous. The words did not much matter. You could say anything. Speculate in the most common way on the weather or recite lines from
The Ancient Mariner,
it was all the same. All that was needed was a calming tone, the easement of a companion voice.

Ada therefore talked of the first thing that came to mind. She counted off the features of the current scene they inhabited. Herself in dark huntsman's clothes returning with game down wooded hills, the hutments of a village below with smoke rising, blue mountains all around.

—It lacks but fire on the ground and a few people to make it Hunters in the Snow, Ada said. And she talked on seamlessly, recollecting her viewing of that painting years ago with Monroe during their European travels. He had disliked its every feature, finding it too plain, too muted in its colors, lacking any reference to a world other than this. No Italian would have any interest in painting such a thing, had been Monroe's view. Ada, though, had been drawn to it and she had circled around it for a time but ultimately lacked courage to say how she felt, since her reasons for liking it were, point-for-point, identical to those Monroe used as support for his disapproval.

Inman was too cloudy in his thinking to follow anything she said other than that she spoke of Monroe as if he were dead and that she seemed to have a clear destination in mind and that some note in her voice said, Right this minute I know more than you do, and what I know is everything might well be fine.

the far side of trouble

The hut was hot and bright from the leaping fire at the hearth, and with the door shut there was little sign to say if it was morning or night outside. Ruby had made coffee. Ada and Inman sat drinking it, so close to the fireside that the melted snow in their coats steamed around them. Nobody said much of anything and the place seemed tiny with four people in it. Ruby hardly acknowledged Inman's existence other than to dip a bowl of grits and set it on the ground beside him for breakfast.

Stobrod rose into partial consciousness and moved his head from side to side. He opened his eyes, and they had a look of confusion and hurt in them. Then he lay still again.

—He doesn't know where he is, Ada said.

—How could he? Ruby said.

Stobrod, his eyes closed, said to no one in particular, There was so much music back then.

He put his head down and lapsed into sleep again. Ruby went and stood over him and stripped back her sleeve and put her wrist to his brow.

—Clammy, she said. That can be good or bad.

Inman looked at the bowl of grits and could not decide whether to take it up or not. He set the coffee cup beside it. He tried to think what the next thing ought to be. But overwearied and warm from the fire, he could not keep his eyes open. His head bobbed and came back up, and then he had to work to bring his eyes into focus. There were so many things he wanted, but the first thing he needed was sleep.

—That one looks played out, Ruby said.

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

2004-3-6

页码，211/232

Ada folded a blanket and made him a pallet on the floor. She led him to it and tried to help him with his boot laces and with his coat, but he would have none of it. He stretched out and fell asleep fully clothed.

Ada and Ruby stoked the fire and left the two men bedded down. While Inman and Stobrod slept, the snow fell and fell, and the women spent a cold and almost wordless hour collecting wood and cleaning out another of the cabins and cutting fir boughs to close up a small breach in the old bark shingles. In this one there were dead bugs all about the floor, dried-up blistered things. They crunched and popped underfoot. Hut-dweller bugs of some antique make. Ada swept them out the door with a cedar limb.

In the floor clutter she found an old wooden beaker. Or a bowl, more like. Its shape was somewhat indeterminate. It had a wide crack where the wood had dried, and the crack was patched with beeswax, cured brittle and hard. She looked at the grain and thought, Dogwood. She pictured in her mind the making of the thing and the use and then the patching of it, and she decided the bowl might stand as marker for much that was lost.

There was a little niche in the wall of the cabin, a shelf cut in the wood, and she set the bowl there as people in other parts of the world might feature icons or little carved animal totems.

When the hut was clean and the roof patched, they propped the door in place and built a hot fire in the hearth with any kind of wood they could find in the snow. While it burned they made a deep bed of lapped hemlock boughs and they spread it over with a quilt. Then they plucked and cleaned the birds, heaping the bowels into a big curl of bark peeled off a downed chestnut trunk. Ada threw bark and all behind a tree down the creek, and it made an ugly pink and grey pile in the snow.

Later, when the fire had burned down to a bed of coals, they put on green hickory limbs to smoke.

They ran the turkey carcasses through with sharpened sticks and roasted them all day over a slow fire, watching the skins turn to umber. The hut was warm and dim, and it smelled of hickory smoke and turkey. When the wind blew, snow sifted through the patched place in the roof and fell about them and melted. For a long time they sat close to the fire together and neither of them spoke, and they hardly moved other than for Ruby on occasion to go out and throw more wood on the men's fire and to put her wrist to Stobrod's brow.

When dark had begun settling in, Ruby sat by the fire, square to the world, her knees apart and her hands upon her knees. She had a blanket wrapped around her and it stretched taut and flat as a bedsheet across her lap. She worked at a hickory twig with her knife until she had whittled it to a sharp point. She poked irritably at the turkeys with the stick until clear juice ran from under the stippled skin and fell spitting and sizzling in the coals.

—What? Ada said.

Ruby said, I was watching you in there this morning with him and I've been thinking ever since.

—About him? Ada asked.

—You.

—What about me?

—I've been trying to know what you're thinking. But I can't come to it. So I'll just say out plain what's on my mind. It's that we can do without him. You might think we can't, but we can. We're just starting. I've got a vision in my mind of how that cove needs to be. And I know what needs doing to get there. The crops and animals. Land and buildings. It will take a long time. But I know how to get file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，212/232

there. War or peace, there's not a thing we can't do ourselves. You don't need him.

Ada looked at the fire. She patted the back of Ruby's hand where it rested and then Ada picked it up off Ruby's knee and rubbed the palm of it hard with her thumb until she could feel the cords under the skin. She took off one of her rings and put it on Ruby's hand and tipped it down to the firelight to look at it. A big emerald set in white gold with smaller rubies around it. A Christmas gift some years ago from Monroe. Ada made motions to leave the ring where she had put it, but Ruby took it off and twisted it roughly back on Ada's finger.

—You don't need him, Ruby said.

—I know I don't need him, Ada said. But I think I want him.

—Well that's a whole different thing.

Ada paused, not knowing what to say further but thinking furiously. Things that in her previous life were unimaginable suddenly seemed possible, and then they seemed necessary. She thought that Inman had been alone too long, an outlier. Without the comfort of a human touch, a loving hand laid soft and warm on shoulder, back, leg. And herself the same as well.

—What I'm certain I don't want, she finally said aloud, is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.

• • •

It was after dark when Inman awoke. The fire lay in its ashes and shed but a dim glow into the hut.

There was no way to tell how far the night had progressed. And for a while he misremembered even where he was. It had been so long since he had slept in the same place twice that he had to lie still and try to reconstruct in his mind a sequence of days that would put him in a known bed. He sat up and broke sticks and threw them on the coals and blew on them until new flames blazed up and cast shadows on the walls. Only then was he able to say for sure what point of geography he occupied.

Inman heard a sound of breath being drawn, a wet rattle. He twisted around and saw Stobrod on his bunk, his eyes open and black and shining in the light. Inman tried to remember who the man was.

He had been told but could not recollect.

Stobrod worked his mouth and it made clicking sounds. He looked at Inman and said, Ary water?

Inman looked around and saw neither pail nor jug. He rose and rubbed his hands on his face and through his hair.

—I'll get you a drink, he said.

He went to his packsacks and took out his water bottle and shook it and found it empty. He put the pistol in his haversack and put the strap over his shoulder.

—I'll be back directly, he said.

He moved the door from the passway. Outside was black night and snow came blowing in.

Inman turned and said, Where did they go?

Stobrod lay with his eyes closed. He made no effort toward reply other than two slight jerks of the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，213/232

forefinger and middle finger of one hand that lay outside his blanket.

Inman stepped out and propped the door back in place and stood and waited for his eyes to come to terms with the dark. There was the smell of cold and snow in the air like sheared metal. And the conflicting odors of woodsmoke and wet creek stones. When he could see enough to walk, Inman made his way down to the water. The snow he walked through lay shank high on the ground. The creek looked black and bottomless and might as well have been running in a deep vein that cut to the world's core. He squatted and put the bottle in to fill, and the water against his hand and wrist felt warmer than the air.

When he started back he could see firelight glowing yellow from gaps in the chinking of the hut where he had slept. And also from another hut farther down the creek. He smelled meat cooking and was suddenly overtaken by a mighty hunger.

Inman went back inside and raised Stobrod up and dribbled water in his mouth. Then Stobrod propped himself on his elbows, and with Inman holding the bottle he drank until he choked and coughed, and then he drank some more. He held his head up, his mouth open, his neck stretched. His gullet worked to swallow. That attitude and the way his hair stood up and his whiskers bristled and the blind look in his eyes put Inman in mind of a new-hatched nestling, the same frail horrifying appetite to live.

He had seen it before, and he had seen its opposite, the will to die. Men took wounds different ways.

Inman had seen so many men shot in recent years that it seemed as normal to be shot as not. A natural condition of the world. He'd seen men shot in every part of the body there was to shoot. And he had seen every result of being shot that there was to have, from immediate death to screaming agony to one man at Malvern Hill who had stood with blood dripping from his shattered right hand and laughed a great booming laugh, knowing that he would not die but would thereafter be unable to pull a trigger.

Inman could not tell what Stobrod's fate might be, neither from the look in his face nor from the condition of his wound, which, upon inspection, Inman found to be dry and packed with spiderweb and root shavings. Stobrod was hot to the touch, but Inman had long since quit trying to forecast whether shot men would die or not. In his experience, great wounds sometimes healed, small sometimes festered. Any wound might heal on the skin side but keep on burrowing inward to a man's core until it ate him up. The why of it, like much in life, offered little access to logic.

Inman built the fire to a blaze, and when the hut was bright and warm he left Stobrod asleep and went outside. He trod in his own tracks to the creek again and cupped up water in his hand and dashed it in his face. He pulled a twig off a beech limb and frazzled the end of it with his thumbnail and brushed his teeth. Then he walked down to the other lighted hut. He stood outside and listened but could hear no voices. The smell of roasted turkey filled the air.

Inman said, Hello?

He waited and there was no response and he said it again. Then he knocked on the door. Ruby edged it open about a hand wide and looked out.

—Oh, she said, as if she might have been expecting somebody else.

—I woke up, he said. I don't know how long I was asleep. That man back there wanted water and I gave him some.

—You've slept twelve hours or better, Ruby said. She slid the door out of the way to let him in.

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

2004-3-6

页码，214/232

Ada sat cross-legged on the ground before the fire, and as Inman entered she looked up at him. The yellow light was on her face, and her dark hair was loose on her shoulders. Inman thought her about as handsome a sight as men are allowed to see, and he was momentarily taken aback by it. She looked so beautiful to him it made his cheekbones hurt. He pressed a knuckle beneath his eye. He did not know what to do with himself. No previous formula of etiquette seemed to apply, other than to take off his hat. There was little ceremony to stand on in an Indian hut in a snowstorm, at least none that he was privy to. He thought he might just as well go and sit beside her.

But before he had any more than made up his mind and set his haversack in the corner, she rose and stepped close in front of him and did a thing he knew he would never forget. She reached behind him and put one palm on the small of his back. The other she pressed against his stomach just above his pant waist.

—You feel so thin between my hands, she said.

Inman could think of no response that he would not later regret as inadequate.

Ada took her hands away and said, When did you last eat?

Inman counted back. Three days, he said. Or four. Four, I think.

—Well, then, you'll be hungry enough not to worry about the details of cookery.

Ruby had already torn the meat off the bones of one bird and had its carcass boiling in the big pot over the fire to make broth for Stobrod. So Ada sat Inman down by the hearth and handed him a plate of the pulled turkey to start nibbling on. Ruby knelt and tended the pot with great concentration. She skimmed the grey foam off the water with a spurtle she had whittled that afternoon out of a poplar limb for lack of the dogwood she needed to do the job right. She flung the foam in the fire, where it hissed away.

While Inman ate the chunks of turkey, Ada worked at composing a real supper. She put dried apple rings in water, and while they soaked she fried wedges of leftover grits in grease from a strip of fatback. When the grits were crisp and brown at the edges, she took them out and put the apples in the pan and stirred them around. She cooked cross-legged for a time, leaning forward to tend the food. Then she turned sideways and stretched one leg out straight before her and kept the other bent.

Inman watched with great interest. He had not yet gotten used to her in britches, and he found the poses they allowed her to take stirring in their freedom.

The meal Ada arrived at was rich and brown, flavored with woodsmoke and pork fat, and it was just the kind of food called for by the upcoming solstice of winter, food that offered consolation against short days and long nights. Inman fell to eating it like the starving man he was, but then he stopped and said, Are you not having any?

—We dined some time ago, Ada said.

Inman ate without talking. Before he was finished, Ruby judged that the turkey carcass had given the creek water about all it had to give in the way of sustenance. She dipped out enough to half fill the smaller pot. The broth had the life of the wild bird in it and was rich and cloudy, the color of nutmeats toasted in a dry pan.

—I'll see if I can get him to take some of this, she said.

She took the pot by its bail and went to the door. She stopped before she went out and said, It's time to change the packing on that wound, and I'm going to sit with him some. So to say, I might be gone file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...