Cold Mountain (51 page)

2004-3-6

页码，215/232

awhile.

After Ruby left, the hut seemed smaller, its walls pressing in. Neither of them could think of anything much to say. Momentarily, all the old strictures against a young woman and man being left alone in a house came rolling in and made them awkward. Ada told herself that Charleston, with its cadres of ancient aunts enforcing elaborate rituals of chaperonage, was perhaps some made-up place, with only a tangent relation to the world she now lived in, like Arcady or the Isle of Prospero.

Inman, to fill the silence, began commenting favorably on the food, as if he were at a Sunday dinner.

But he had hardly begun praising the turkey when he stopped and felt foolish. Then, immediately, longing of so many kinds welled up in him that he was afraid it would all come spilling out in a frightening mess of words if he didn't shut his mouth and find some better direction for his thoughts.

He rose and went to his sack and pulled out the Bartram and showed it to Ada as if it were evidence of something. It was scrolled up and tied with a bow knot of dirty string and had been wet and dry and wet again for months now and looked grimy and ancient enough to contain the aggregate knowledge of a lost civilization. He told her how it had helped sustain him on his journey, how he had read it many a night by the firelight of a lonesome bivouac. Ada was unfamiliar with it, and Inman described it to her as a book concerned with this very part of the world and with everything that was important in it. He shared with her his view that the book stood nigh to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.

To prove his point, he pulled the end of the bow and let the limp cov-erless book flap open. He put his finger to a sentence which, as usual, began with the climbing of a mountain and went on for much of a page, and as he read it aloud he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face. It was this: Having gained its summit, we enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulean Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.

When he had finished he sat silent.

Ada said, Is it all like that?

—Not hardly any of it, Inman said.

What he wanted to do was recline on the hemlock bed with Ada beside him and hold her close, as Bartram apparently yearned to lie with the virgins under their bowers. But what Inman did was scroll up the book and set it in the niche of the wall with an old wooden cup. He began collecting the cookware. He stood with it stacked and shifting in his arms.

—I'll go scour these out, he said.

He went to the door and looked back. Ada sat without moving, staring into the coals. Inman went on file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，216/232

down to the water, and he squatted and scrubbed each piece with sand dredged from the bed of the black creek. The snowfall had not eased up a jot. It came straight down hard, and even the boulders in the creek had tall topknots of snow standing on them. Inman blew out clouds of breath through the flakes and tried to think what to do. It would take more than twelve hours' sleep and one big supper to set him right, but at least now he could row his thoughts up again. What he knew he most wanted was to disburden himself of solitude. He had become too proud of walking singular, of his oneness, his loneness.

His stomach and back still held the press of Ada's palms. And as he squatted there in the dark of Cold Mountain, that loving touch seemed like the key to life on earth. Whatever words were in him that needed saying, they ranked as nothing to that laying on of hands.

Inman reentered the cabin with his mind set on going to Ada and putting one hand to her neck and one to her waist and pulling her to him and thereby making all his wishes clear. But when he put the door in its place, the warmth of the fire struck him and his fingers knotted up. They were raw from the sand, stiff from the cold water, frozen in attitudes like the pincers of blue crabs he had seen on his tour of duty along the coast. Nightmare creatures who waved ragged weapons toward all the world, even their own kind. He looked down at the plates and flatware, the pot and frying pan, and he saw they still had a white film of congealed grease on them. So his efforts had been wasted, and he might as well have stayed inside and put the cook pieces facedown in the coals to burn clean.

Ada looked up at him and he watched her take two breaths and then she looked away. He could guess from the set of her face that it had taken all the nerve she could draw up to touch him as she had, to take him between her hands. She could not previously have done a thing so intimate. He knew that. She had made her way to a place where an entirely other order prevailed from what she had always known. But he had been the one who penned those words in August, and now the burden was on him to find a way to say what he had to say.

Inman set his load down and went to her. He sat behind her and rubbed his palms against each other and then against his thighs. He folded his arms and hugged his hands under them and held them tight against his sides. Then he reached around her and spread his hands to the fire and pressed the insides of his wrists and forearms against her shoulders.

—Did you write me letters while I was in the hospital? he said.

—Several, she said. Two during the summer and a brief note in the fall. But I did not know you were there until you were gone. So the first two letters went to Virginia.

—They didn't find me there, he said. Tell me what they were about.

Ada gave summaries, though not precisely of the letters as they had been. She described them as they would be could she revise them from her current perspective. It was an opportunity life seldom offers, to rewrite even a shard of the past, and so she made the most of it. In amended form, the letters were more satisfactory to both of them than would have been the originals. More revealing in the details of her life, more passionate in sensibility, more certain and direct in expression.

Altogether more. The note, though, she left unspoken.

—I wish I'd gotten them, Inman said when she was done. He started to add that they'd have eased some bad days, but he did not want to talk about the hospital right that moment.

He held his hands to the warm hearth and counted back the winters it had lain dark and cold. He said, Twenty-six years since a fire was kindled here.

It gave them a topic. They sat for a while easy together and talked as people do in the ruins of the file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，217/232

past, having the unavoidable feeling that we are a short time here, a long time gone. They imagined the last fire that had burned in the hearth, and they cast the players they imagined sitting before it. A Cherokee family. Mother, father, children, an old grannywoman. They gave them personalities unique to each one, tragic or comic as fit the tale they were telling. Inman made one of the boys to be much like Swimmer, strange and mystic. It satisfied them to invent lives for the imagined family that were more whole by instinct than any they themselves could ever achieve with hard effort. In their story of the family, Ada and Inman gave them premonitions of the end of their world. And though it is true that every age considers the world to be in a precarious state, at the very edge of dark, nevertheless Ada and Inman doubted if at any foretime in history the sense of an ending was as justified as it had been then. Those people's fears had been fully realized. The wider world had found them, even hidden here, and had fallen on them with all its weight.

When they finished, they sat quiet for a while and felt the uneasy feel of occupying space wherein other lives have unfolded and then disappeared.

After awhile Inman told her how all the way home all he could think was hoping she would have him, would marry him. He had kept it in his mind, and it rose up in his dreams. But now, he said, he couldn't ask her to bind herself to him. Not to one disordered as he knew himself to be.

—I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear, he said. And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter.

Ada shifted and turned and looked at him over her shoulder. He had unbuttoned his collar in the warmth, and there was the white wound at his neck. Others in the look of his face and in his eyes, which would not quite meet hers.

She turned back around. What she thought was that cures of all sorts exist in the natural world. Its every nook and cranny apparently lay filled with physic and restorative to bind up rents from the outside. Even the most hidden root or web served some use. And there was spirit rising from within to knit sturdy scar over the backsides of wounds. Either way, though, you had to work at it, and they'd both fail you if you doubted them too much. She had gathered that from Ruby, at least.

Finally, without looking at him, she said, I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you.

—Why not me? Inman said, as if to test the thought.

He took his hands from where he held them to warm at the fire and touched his fingertips to his face to see if they were still cold as the nub ends of icicles. He found them unexpectedly warm. They felt not at all like the parts of a weapon. He reached to Ada's dark hair, which lay loose on her back, and he gathered it into a thick bunch in his hand. He lifted it with one hand, and with the fingertips of the other he brushed the hollow of her neck between the cords that ran down into her shoulders, the fine curls of hair. He leaned forward and touched his lips to the hollow of her neck. He let the hair fall back into place and he kissed her on the crown of her head and took in the remembered smell of her hair. He leaned back and pulled her against him, her waist into his stomach, her shoulders into his chest.

She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp his jaw and pinch them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，218/232

therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost.

You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

Ada did not remember that Sunday in much particularity, one out of many. There was nothing she could add to his recollection of the day to make it into a shared memory. But she knew that what Inman had done in his talking was to reimburse her in his own way for the touch she had given him when he entered the cabin. She reached back and swept the hair from her shoulders and up from her neck and she held it with her wrist against the back of her head. She tipped her head slightly forward.

—Do that once more, she said.

But before Inman could act, there was a sound at the door. By the time Ruby had it out of its frame and stuck her head in, Ada was sitting up again and her hair was down on her shoulders. Ruby regarded the two, their awkwardness and the oddity of him sitting behind her.

—You want me to go back out and cough? she said.

Nobody said anything. Ruby closed the door and put the pot on the floor. She brushed the snow ofF

her coat and beat her hat against her leg.

—His fever's down some right now, Ruby said. But that's not saying much. It goes up and down.

Ruby looked at Inman. She said, I cut some boughs and made up a more proper bed than just a pallet of blankets. She paused and then added, Somebody can make use of it, I reckon.

Ada picked up a stick of wood and poked at the fire and then set the stick in to burn. You go on, she said to Inman. I know you're tired.

Tired as he was, though, Inman had a hard time getting to sleep. Stobrod snored and muttered snatches of the chorus to an idiotic fiddle tune, which—as best Inman could tell—was no more than this: The higher up the monkey climbed, the greater he showed his ya-ta-dada-la-ta-di-da. Inman had heard men say all kinds of things when they were submerged in the dark of a profound wound, everything from prayers to curses. But this took the prize for foolery.

In the intervals of silence, Inman tried to decide which part of the evening he might dwell on most pleasurably. Ada's hand on his stomach or her request just before Ruby opened the door. He was still trying to decide when he drifted off.

Ada lay a long time awake too. Thinking any number of thoughts. That Inman looked so much older than four years ought to account for, so thin and grim and held within himself. And she thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.

Ruby flounced in her bed and rolled over and settled down and then turned again. She sat up and file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...