Cold Mountain (55 page)

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epilogue. October of 1874

Even after all this time and three children together, Ada still found them clasping each other at the oddest moments. In the barn loft after knocking down the mud-cup nests of swallows. Behind the smokehouse after stoking a fire with wet cobs and hickory limbs. Earlier this day, it had been out in the potato field while breaking up the ground with big grubbing hoes. They had stood awkward and wide-footed in the furrows, each embracing with one arm, gripping the hoes with their free hands.

Ada first thought to make some wry comment. Do I need to cough? But then she noted the hoe handles. The angles at which they descended to the dirt suggested levers that worked the secret engines of earth. She just went on about her business and let them be.

The boy had never gone back to Georgia and had become a man in Black Cove, and not a half-bad one at that. Ruby had seen to it. She had kept at him the two years he had been a hand, and she did not let up when he became her husband. A foot in the back when that was needed, a hug otherwise. It worked out to about equal measures. His name was Reid. Their babies had been born eighteen months apart, all boys, with full scalps of black hair and shiny brown eyes like little chestnuts set in their heads. They were growing into stout short things with pink cheeks and ready smiles, and Ruby worked them hard and played them hard. Despite the age difference, when they rolled around in the yard below the boxwoods, they looked alike as a litter of puppies.

Now, late in the afternoon, the three boys squatted around a firepit behind the house. Four small chickens barbecuing over coals on the ground, the boys quarreling with each other over whose turn it was to swab them with a sauce of vinegar and hot peppers.

Ada stood under the pear tree watching them, as she spread a cloth and rowed eight plates nearly lip to lip on the small table. She had thus far missed but one year since the war of having a last picnic there before cold weather set in. And that had been three years ago, an October unlike all others, heavy skies and rain throughout the month except for one day when it had spit snow.

Ada had tried to love all the year equally, with no discrimination against the greyness of winter, its smell of rotted leaves underfoot, the stillness in the woods and fields. Nevertheless, she could not get over loving autumn best, and she could not entirely overcome the sentimentality of finding poignancy in the fall of leaves, of seeing it as the conclusion to the year and therefore metaphoric, though she knew the seasons came around and around and had neither inauguration nor epilogue.

October of 1874 was shaping up, to her delight, just as fine as the month can be in the mountains. It had been dry and warm and clear for weeks, and the leaves had progressed in their change to the point that poplar was yellow and maple was red, but oak was still green. Cold Mountain was a mottle of color rising behind the house. It changed day by day, and if you watched closely you could follow the color as it overtook the green and came down the mountain and spread into the cove like a wave breaking over you slowly.

Shortly, with an hour of daylight left, Ruby came out from the kitchen. At her side, a tall slender girl of nine. Both of them carrying baskets. Potato salad, corn, corn bread, string beans. Reid took the chickens from the coals, and Ruby and the girl spread the food on the table. Stobrod came up from the barn where he had been milking. He set the pail on the ground by the table and the children dipped their cups full. They all took their places.

Later, with twilight settling into the cove, they built up the fire and Stobrod took out his fiddle and played some variant he had made of Bonnie George Campbell, speeding it up and overlaying a dance jig. The children all ran around the fire and yelled. They were not dancing but just running to the music, and the girl waved a burning stick and made cursive shapes in the dim air with the yellow file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

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ember at its tip until Ada told her to stop it.

The girl said, But Mama, and Ada shook her head. The girl came and kissed her cheek and danced away and threw the stick into the flames.

Stobrod played the simple figure of the tune around and around until the children were flushed and damp. When he stopped, they collapsed on the ground by the fire. Stobrod took his fiddle down from his chin. He wanted to sing a gospel, and the fiddle was after all the devil's box and universally prohibited from such songs. Nevertheless, he held it preciously, cradled against his chest, the bow depending from a crooked finger. He sang Angel Band, a new tune. The girl sang behind him on the chorus, her voice clear and high and strong. Bear me away on your snowy wings.

Stobrod put the fiddle away, and the children begged for a story. Ada took a book from her apron and tipped it toward the firelight and read. Baucis and Philemon. She turned the pages with slight difficulty because she had lost the end of her right index finger four years previous on the day after winter solstice. She had been up on the ridge alone cutting trees in the spot where she had marked the sun setting the day before from the porch. The log chain had kinked, and she had been trying to work loose the disordered links when the horse started forward in the traces and pinched off the fingertip clean as snapping a tomato sucker. Ruby poulticed it, and though it took the better part of a year, it healed so neatly you would think that was the way the ends of people's fingers were meant to look.

When Ada reached the story's conclusion, and the old lovers after long years together in peace and harmony had turned to oak and linden, it was full dark. The night was growing cool, and Ada put the book away. A crescent moon stood close upon Venus in the sky. The children were sleepy, and morning would dawn as early and demanding as always. Time to go inside and cover up the coals and pull in the latch string.

acknowledgments

I would like to offer thanks to several people for their support during the writing of
Cold Mountain.
I am happily in their debt. My father, Charles O. Frazier, preserved the family stories and shared them with me. He set me on Inman's trail, and his detailed knowledge of western North Carolina history and culture was helpful throughout. Kaye Gibbons was generous with her advice and encouragement; she took my writing seriously before I did and offered a model of hard work and commitment. W. F. and Dora Beal provided me with a wonderful writer's retreat in the North Carolina mountains, where much of the book was written; the long view from the porch is the book's presiding spirit. Leigh Feldman prodded me along when I bogged down and helped me find the story's direction. Elisabeth Schmitz's thoughtful, sensitive, and enthusiastic editing significantly improved its final shape.

A number of books were helpful in developing the cultural and historical background for the novel, these in particular: Robert Cantwell,
Blue-grass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound
(1984); Richard Chase,
Jack Tales
(1943) and
Grandfather Tales
(1948); Walter Clark,
Histories of
the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War
(1901); Daniel Ellis,
Thrilling Adventures
(1867); J. V. Hadley,
Seven Months a Prisoner
(1898); Horace Kephart,
Our
Southern Highlanders
(1913); W. K. McNeil,
Applachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture
(1995); James Mooney,
Myths of the Cherokee
(1900) a
nd Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees
(1891); Philip Shaw Paludin,
Victims
(1981); William R. Trotter,
Bushwhackers: The Civil War in
North Carolina,
Vol. II,
The Mountains
(1988).

Finally, I would like to offer apologies for the great liberties I have taken with W. P. Inman's life and with the geography surrounding Cold Mountain (6030 feet).

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2004-3-6

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