Cold Mountain (52 page)

2004-3-6

页码，219/232

puffed in frustration. I can't get to sleep, she said. And I know you're awake over there thinking love thoughts.

—I'm awake, Ada said.

—What's keeping me from sleeping is I'm thinking about what I'll do with him if he lives, Ruby said.

—With Inman? Ada said, confused.

—With Pap. A wound like that will be slow healing. And knowing him, he'll lay extra long a-bed. I can't figure what I'll do with him.

—We'll take him home and care for him is what, Ada said. Hurt as he is, nobody will come looking for him. Not anytime soon. And this war has to end someday.

—I'm obliged, Ruby said.

—You've never been obliged to anybody before, Ada said. I don't care to be the first. Just thank you will do.

—That too, Ruby said.

She was quiet awhile and then she said, Many a night when I was little, alone in that cabin, I wished I could take that fiddle of his up to the jump-off and pitch it and let the wind fly it away. In my mind I'd just watch it go till it was just a speck, and then I'd think about the sweet sound it would make breaking to pieces on the river rocks way down below.

The next day dawned grey and colder yet. The snow no longer spilled hard out of the sky in fat flakes; it came down soft and fine like ground cornmeal falling from between millstones. They all slept late, and Inman took breakfast in the women's hut, turkey broth with shreds of turkey in it.

Then, later in the morning, Ada and Inman fed and watered the horse and went hunting together.

They hoped to kill more birds or, if they were extremely lucky, a deer. They walked up the hill and found nothing moving in the woods, nor even animal tracks marking the deep snow. They climbed up through the chestnuts and into the firs and onto the ridge. They followed its spine where it curved.

There was still no game but a few chattering boomers high in the fir boughs. Even if you could hit one, it would make but a mouthful of grey meat, so they did not waste a shot.

They came eventually to a flat rock cropped out at a ledge, and Inman brushed the snow off it and they sat cross-legged facing each other, knees to knees, with the ground cloth Inman had in his pack tented over them, resting on the crowns of their heads. What light came through the weave of it was brown and dim. Inman took the walnuts out of the sack and cracked them open with a stone the size of his fist, and they picked out the meats and ate them. When they were done, he put his hands on Ada's shoulders and leaned forward and touched his forehead to hers. For a while only the sounds of the snow striking the ground cloth broke the silence, but after a time Ada began talking.

She wanted to tell how she had come to be what she was. They were different people now. He needed to know that. She told of Monroe's death, the look on his face in the rain and the wet dogwood petals. She told Inman about deciding not to return to Charleston, about the summer, and all about Ruby. About weather and animals and plants and the things that she was starting to know.

All the ways life takes shape. You could build your own life on the observation of it. She still missed Monroe more than she could say, and she told Inman many wonderful things about him. But she told as well one terrible thing: that he had tried to keep her a child and that, with little resistance from her, he had largely succeeded.

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

2004-3-6

页码，220/232

—And there's something you need to know about Ruby, Ada said. Whatever comes to pass between you and me, I want her to stay in Black Cove as long as she cares to. If she never leaves I will be glad, and if she does I'll mourn her absence.

—Could she learn to put up with me around is the question, Inman said.

—I think she can, Ada said. If you understand that she is not a servant nor a hired hand. She is my friend. She does not take orders, and she does not empty night jars other than her own.

They left the rock and hunted on, going netherward into a damp swale rich with the odor of places where galax grows, descending through scattered clumps of twisted laurel to a thin creek. They walked around a blown-down hemlock stretched across the woods floor. The plate of roots stood as high in the air as the gable end of a house, and clenched in the roots many feet above the ground were stones larger than whiskey barrels. Down in that hollow, Ada found a stand of goldenseal, the crowfoot leaves withered but identifiable where they stuck through the thinner snow on the lee side of a poplar so big through the trunk it would have taken five people holding hands in a circle to go around it.

—Ruby needs goldenseal for her father, Ada said.

She knelt at the tree and grubbed at the plants with her hands. Inman stood and watched. The scene was a plain one. Just a woman on her knees digging in the ground, a tall man standing and looking about, waiting. If not for the store cloth of their coats, it could have been any place in time at all. So few markers to show any particular epoch. Ada knocked the dirt from the pale roots and put them in her pocket.

It was in standing that she spotted the arrow in the poplar. Ada's eyes nearly skimmed right over it, marking it as a broken twig, for a part of the shaft remained, though not the fletching. The wood was half rotted away, but still bound to the head with tight windings of sinew. Grey flint point, chipped in smooth scoops. As perfect in symmetry of shape as a handmade thing can be. It lay buried more than an inch into the tree, some of that from the growing of the tree around it in a welted scar. But enough remained exposed to see that the head was broad and long. Not a little bird point. Ada aimed a finger at it to draw Inman's attention.

—Deer arrow, Inman said. Or man killer.

He wet a thumb tip on his tongue and ran it across the revealed portion of the cutting edge like one checking the hone on a pocketknife.

—It would cut meat yet, he said.

During the late-summer plowing and harrowing, Ada and Ruby had unburied any number of bird points and scrapers, but this seemed somehow different to her, as if yet partially alive because of its placement. Ada backed up and regarded it in perspective. Summing up much, it was yet such a little thing. A missed shot a hundred years back. Maybe more. Long ago. Or not long if one took the right view. Ada stepped to the tree and put a finger on the end of the shaft and wiggled it. Firm.

It would have been possible to frame the arrow as some relic, a piece of another world, and Ada did something like that. She saw it as an object already numbered among the things that were.

But it did not seem entirely so to Inman. He said, Someone went hungry. Then wondered, Was the missing due to want of skill? Desperation? Shift of wind? Bad light?

—You mark this spot in your mind, he said to Ada.

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

2004-3-6

页码，221/232

And Inman went on to recommend that they revisit it throughout their lives to check the advancement of rot along the arrow shaft, the growth of the green poplar wood around the flint point.

He described a future scene, he and Ada bent, grey as ash, bringing children to the tree in some metallic future world, the dominant features of which he could not even imagine. By then the shaft would be gone. Fallen away. And the poplar would be yet stouter, grown round to envelop the stone entirely. Nothing visible but a lobed scar in bark.

Inman could not imagine whose they would be, but the children will stand entranced and watch as the two old people cut into the soft poplar with knives and dig out a dipperful of new wood, and then, suddenly, the children will see the flint blade as if it had been conjured up. A little piece of art with a clear purpose is how Inman pictured it. And though Ada could not fully envision that distant time, she could imagine the amazement on little faces.

—Indians, Ada said, caught up in Inman's story. The old couple will just say, Indians.

They returned to the village that afternoon without game. All they had to show for the outing was the goldenseal and firewood. They dragged the

wood behind them and it carved bands and lines in the snow. Big limbs from a chestnut and smaller ones from a cedar. They found Ruby sitting by Stobrod. He was to some extent awake and seemed to know Ruby and Ada, but he was frightened of Inman.

—Who's that big dark man? he said.

Inman went and squatted at Stobrod's side so as not to loom over him. He said, I gave you water. I'm not after you.

Stobrod said, Well.

Ruby wet a cloth and swabbed at his face and he struggled against it like a child. She mashed pieces of the goldenseal and packed it into the wounds and she brewed other pieces into tea and made Stobrod drink it. When she was done he fell immediately asleep.

Ada looked at Inman, the tiredness in his face. She said, I believe you ought to go do the same.

—-Just don't let me sleep past dark, Inman said. He went out, and while the door was open Ada and Ruby could see snow behind him, streaking the air in its falling. They could hear the sounds of him breaking limbs, and in a minute the door opened again. He set an armload of chestnut wood down just inside and then he left. They built the fire up and sat together for a long time with their backs against the cabin wall, a blanket around them.

Ada said, Tell me what we'll do next, when warm weather comes. What things to put the place in order?

Ruby took up a stick and drew out a map in the dirt, Black Cove. She put in the road and the house and the barn, scratched up areas to show current fields, woodlots, the orchard. Then she talked, and her vision was one of plenty and how to get there. Trade for a team of mules. Reclaim the old fields from ragweed and sumac. Establish new vegetable gardens. Break a little more newground. Grow enough corn and wheat to suit their needs for bread. Enlarge the orchard. Build a proper can house and apple house. Years and years of work. But they would one day see the fields standing high in summer with crops. Chickens pecking in the yard, cows grazing in the pasture, pigs foraging on the hillside mast. So many that they could have two bunches: bacon pigs, thin of leg and long of side; and ham pigs, close-coupled and stout, with their bellies swinging against the ground. Hams and bacon sides hanging thick in the smokehouse; a skillet good and greasy all the time on the stove top.

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

2004-3-6

页码，222/232

Apples heaped in the apple house, jar after jar of vegetables rowed on shelves in the can house.

Plenty.

—It will be a sight to see, Ada said.

Ruby rubbed her map away with her palm. They sat quiet, and after a while Ruby slumped and leaned her shoulder into Ada's and dozed off, tired from the effort of imagination. Ada sat and watched the fire and listened to its pop and hiss, and later the brittle fall of its embers. She smelled the sweet woodsmoke and thought that it would be a measure of one's success at attending to the details of the world if one could identify trees by the scent of their smoke. It would be a skill one might happily aspire to master. There were many worse things to know. Things that did damage to others and eventually to oneself.

When Ruby awoke, it was late in the afternoon, almost dark. She sat up and blinked her eyes and rubbed her face and yawned. She went to check on Stobrod. She touched his face and forehead, pulled back the covers and looked at his wound.

—His fever's back up, she said. Night will be the crisis, I believe. He'll stay or go, but tonight will be the deciding of it. I'd better not leave him.

Ada came over and put her wrist to Stobrod's forehead. She could feel no difference from earlier tests. She looked at Ruby, but Ruby would not look back.

—I wouldn't feel right leaving him tonight, Ruby said.

It was dark when Ada walked down the creek to the other hut. The snow fell in fine flakes. What lay on the ground was so deep she had to walk awkwardly, stepping high-kneed, even though she trod in earlier footsteps. The snow held whatever light came through the clouds so that the earth seemed lit evenly from within, luminous as a mica lantern. She opened the door quietly and entered. Inman lay asleep, and he did not stir. The fire had burned low. Before it, Ada saw that his things were laid out to dry like objects displayed in a museum, as if each one needed space around it to reveal its true meaning and be properly valued. His clothing, his boots, his hat, rucksack, haversack, cook gear, sheath knife, and the great ugly pistol with its attendant parts: ramrod and cap tin and nipple pick and cartridges, and the wadding, powder, and buckshot for the shotgun barrel. To be complete as a display, it needed but the Bartram taken down from its niche and laid alongside the pistol. A white printed card to label what one saw: The Outlier, His Kit.

Ada took off her coat and put three cedar limbs on the fire and blew on the coals. Then she went to Inman and knelt beside him. He lay with his face to the wall. The bed of hemlock boughs smelled sharp and clean with the needles crushed under him. She touched his brow, smoothed back his hair, ran her fingertips across his eyelids, cheekbones, nose, lips, stubbled chin.

She drew back the blanket and found that he had his shirt off, and she pressed her palm to the side of his neck, the tight new scar of his wound. She ran her hand to his shoulder top and gripped him tight and held him there.

He woke slowly. He shifted in the bed and turned and looked at her and seemed to understand her intent, but then, apparently without willing it, his eyes closed and he slept again.

The world was such an incredibly lonely place, and to lie down beside him, skin to skin, seemed the only cure. The wish to do it swept through Ada's mind. Then, like leaves stirring in the wind, something akin to panic shivered within her. But she put it away from her and stood and started undoing the waist button and long strange row of fly buttons on her britches.

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