Cold Mountain (8 page)

2004-3-6

页码，29/232

—Yes.

—And they still done him like they did? Spiked him up and knifed him and all?

—Yes indeed, Monroe said.

—But you say this story's been passed around some hundred-score years? Esco said.

—Nearly.

—So to say, a long time.

—A very long time.

Esco grinned as if he had solved a puzzle and stood up and slapped Monroe on the shoulder and said, Well, about all we can do is hope it ain't so.

At home that night, Monroe had drawn up plans as to how he might best instruct Esco in proper doctrine and so save him from heathenism. It never entered Monroe's mind that he had been made a butt of humor and that his quest for ignorance had been so apparent from the moment he had entered Esco's gate as to give grave offense. Nor, of course, did he suppose that—instead of shutting the door in his face or pitching a pan of grey footwash water at him or showing him the bore to his shotgun as some so insulted would have done—Esco, a gentle soul, had simply taken pleasure in giving Monroe great quantities of the ignorance he came seeking.

Esco bragged to no one about what he had done. In fact, he seemed not to care in the least whether or not Monroe ever knew the truth of the matter, which was that he and his wife were dipped Baptists.

It was Monroe that spread the tale by way of asking for the names of others so benighted. He found it odd that people took the story as humorous and that people sought him out at the store or on the road and asked him to tell it. They would wait for him to repeat Esco's final line as most men like to do after the recitation of a successful joke. When Monroe failed to do it, some would say the line again themselves, feeling evidently that things would otherwise be left incomplete. This went on until Sally finally took pity and told Monroe that he had been made a jestingstock and why.

Monroe remained low in spirit for days afterward at the ragging he had taken from the settlement at large. He had doubts that he could ever make a place for himself there, until Ada finally said, I think since
we've
been given a lesson in etiquette, we ought to act in accordance.

After that everything became clearer. They went to the Swangers and apologized and thereafter became friends with them and took meals with them regularly and, apparently to make amends for Esco's prank, the Swangers soon ceased to be Baptists and joined the church.

For that first year, Monroe had kept their Charleston house and they Jived in the dank little riverside parsonage that smelled so strongly of mildew in July and August as to burn the nose. Then, when it seemed that the change of climate was working some improvement on Monroe's lungs and the community was finally tolerating him and might someday accept him, he decided to stay indefinitely. He sold the Charleston house and bought the cove from the Black family, who had taken a sudden notion to move to Texas. Monroe liked the picturesque setting, the lay of the land, flat and open at cove bottom, better than twenty acres of it cleared and fenced into fields and pastures. He liked the arc of the wooded hillsides as they swept up, broken by ridge and hollow, to Cold Mountain. Liked the water from the spring, so cold that even in the summer it made your teeth ache and carried the clean neutral taste of the stone it rose from.

And he especially liked the house he had built there, largely because it represented his faith in a file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，30/232

future that would include himself for at least a few more years. Monroe drew the plans for the new house with his own hand, supervised the construction. And it turned out well-made in the current mold, tightly covered in whitewashed clapboards outside, dark beadboard walls inside, a deep porch all across the front, attached kitchen extending from the back, a great broad fireplace in the sitting room, and woodstoves in the bedrooms, a rarity in the mountains. The Blacks' log cabin stood a few hundred rods up the hill toward Cold Mountain from the new house, and it became quarters for the hired help.

When Monroe had bought the cove, the place had been a fully operating farm, but Monroe had soon let many parts of it lapse, for he never intended it to be self-sufficient. Nor did it ever need to be if, as he had assumed, the money continued to flow from his Charleston investments in rice and indigo and cotton.

Apparently, however, the money would not continue, as Ada found when she left off surveying her holdings from her perch on the ridge and drew the letter from the book in her pocket and read it.

Shortly after the funeral, she had written to Monroe's friend and solicitor in Charleston, informing him of the death and asking for information on her financial position. The letter was the long-delayed response. It was brittlely phrased, cautious. It discussed as if at arm's length the war, the embargo, the various other expressions of hard times, and their effect on Ada's income, which would be reduced, in fact, to approximately nothing, at least until the war's successful conclusion. Should the war effort be unsuccessful, Ada might realistically expect nothing forevermore. The letter ended with an offer to act as administrator of Monroe's estate since Ada might justifiably feel ill-endowed to perform those duties herself. It was delicately suggested that the task called for judgments and knowledge outside Ada's realm.

She stood and thrust the letter into her pocket and took the trail down into Black Cove. In light of the thought that the present was threat enough and no one knows what horrid things might overtake them in the time ahead,

Ada wondered where she might find the courage to search out hope. When she emerged from the big trees of the ridge, she found that the haze had burned or blown away. The sky was clear, and Cold Mountain suddenly looked close enough to reach out and touch. The day was wearing on and the sun was bearing downward and would in two hours tip below the mountains to begin the interminable high-country twilight. A boomer chattered at her from its perch high in a hickory tree as she passed underneath. Shreds of nut shell fell around her.

When she reached the old stone wall that marked the top of the upper pasture, she paused again. It was a lovely spot, one of her favorite corners of the farm. Lichen and moss had grown on the stones so that the wall looked ancient, though it was not. One of the elder Blacks had apparently started it in an attempt to clear the field of stones but had given up after only twenty feet, at which point split rails took over. The wall ran north to south, and on this sunny afternoon its west face was warm with afternoon sun. An apple tree, a golden delicious, grew near it, and a few early ripening apples had fallen into the tall grass. Bees came to the sweet smell of rotting apples and hummed in the sunshine.

The wall did not command a sweeping prospect, just a quiet view of the corner of a woodlot and a blackberry tangle and two big chestnut trees. Ada thought it the most peaceful place she had ever known. She settled herself into the grass at the base of the wall and rolled her shawl into a pillow.

She drew the book from her pocket and began reading a chapter titled How Blackbirds Are Taken, and How Blackbirds Fly. She read on and on and forgot herself in the tale of war and outlawry until she eventually fell asleep to the lowering sun and the sound of bees.

She slept a long time and was visited by a strong dream in which she found herself in a train depot amid a crowd of waiting passengers. There was a glass case in the center of the room, and in it stood the bones of a man, much like an anatomy display she had once seen in a museum. As she sat waiting for the train, the case filled with a blue glow, the light rising slowly like twisting up the wick file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，31/232

in a lantern globe. Ada saw with horror that the bones were reclothing themselves with flesh, and as the process went on it became clear to her that her father was being reconstructed.

The other passengers drew back in horror to the walls of the room, but Ada, though also terrified, walked to the glass and put her hands to it and waited. Monroe, however, never fully became himself He remained but an animated corpse, the skin thin as parchment over the bones. His movements were slow yet frenzied, as a man struggling underwater. He put his mouth to the glass and talked with great earnestness and urgency to Ada. His demeanor was that of one telling the most important thing he knew. But Ada, even pressing her ear to the glass, could not hear a thing other than murmuring. Then there was the sound of wind before a storm, and the case was suddenly empty. A conductor came and called the passengers to the train, and it was clear to Ada that its final destination was Charleston in the past, and that if she got on she would arrive at her girlhood, with the clock turned back twenty years. All the passengers boarded, and they were a jolly band, waving from the windows and smiling. Snatches of song came from some compartments. But Ada stood alone on the siding as the train rolled away.

She awoke to a night sky. The rusty beacon of Mars was just slipping below the line of woodlot trees to the west. That told her it must be past the middle of the night, for she had been marking its early evening position in her notebook. A half-moon stood high in the sky. The night was dry and only a little cool. Ada unrolled the shawl and wrapped it about her. She had, of course, never spent a night in the woods alone, but she found it less frightening than she would have thought, even after her troubling dream. The moon shed a fine blue light on the woods and fields. Cold Mountain was visible only as a faint smudge of darkness across the sky. There was no sound but the call of a bobwhite from the distance. She felt no need to hurry to the house.

Ada pulled the wax seal off the crock of blackberry preserves and dipped two fingers into it and scooped berries into her mouth. The preserves had been made with little sweetening and tasted fresh and sharp. Ada sat for hours and watched the progress of the moon across the sky and ate until the little crock was empty. She thought of her father in the dream and of the dark figure in the well.

Though she loved Monroe deeply, she realized she was oddly affected by his appearance in her visions. She did not want him coming for her, nor did she want to follow him too immediately.

Ada sat on long enough to watch the day rise. The first grey light began gathering faintly, and then as the light built the mountains began to form themselves, retaining the dark of night in their bulk.

The fog that clung to the peaks lifted and lost the shapes of the mountains and dissipated in the warmth of the morning. In the pasture the forms of trees remained drawn in dew on the grass beneath them. When she stood to walk down to the house, the smell of night still lingered under the two chestnut trees.

At the house, Ada took the lap desk and went to her reading chair. The hallway was in deep gloom but for a patch of the golden light of morning that fell onto the top of the desk where it sat across her legs. The light was sectioned by the muntins of the window sash, and the air it passed through was full of hovering dust motes. Ada put her paper into one of the squares of light and wrote a quick letter thanking the lawyer for his offer but declining it on the grounds that at present she was of the opinion that her qualifications for administering an estate composed of nearly nothing were more than sufficient.

In the hours of her night watch she had gone over and over the possibilities before her. They were few. If she tried to sell out and return to Charleston, the little money she could hope to realize from the farm in such bad times, when buyers would be scarce, could hardly support her for long. She would, after a point, have to attach herself to friends of Monroe's in some mildly disguised parasitic relationship, tutor or music instructor or the like.

That or marry. And the thought of returning to Charleston as some desperate predatory spinster was file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，32/232

appalling to her. She could imagine the scenes. Spending much of what money she had on suitable wardrobe and then negotiating matrimony with the kind of aging and ineffectual leftovers of a certain level of Charleston society—one several layers down from the top—when all the men approximately her age were off to war. All she could foresee was eventually finding herself saying to someone that she loved him, when what she would mean was that he happened to have turned up at a particularly needy time. She could not, even under the current duress, push her mind to imagine—

beyond a general feeling of press and smother— the marriage act with such a one.

If she returned to Charleston under those humiliating conditions, she could expect little sympathy and much withering commentary, for in the eyes of many she had foolishly squandered the fleeting few years of courtship when young ladies were elevated to the apex of their culture, and men knelt in deference while all of society stood at attention to watch their progress toward marriage as if the primary moral force of the universe were focused in that direction. At the time, Monroe's friends and acquaintances had found her relative disinterest in the process puzzling.

She had done little to help matters, for in the confines of ladies' parlors following dinner parties where the mated and the mating passed sharp judgment on one another, she was prone to claim she was so dreadfully bored by suitors—all of whom seemed limited in their sphere of interests to business, hunting, and horses—that she felt she ought to have a sign fashioned to read Gentlemen Prohibited hanging from the porch gate. She counted on such pronouncements to evoke a doctrinal response, either from one of the elders in the group or from one of the debutantes eager to ingratiate herself among those who held that the highest expression of married woman was reasonable submission to man's will. Marriage is the end of woman, one of them would say. And Ada would respond, Indeed. There we can agree, at least as long as we do not dwell too long on the meaning of the word located next-to-the-last-but-one from your period. She delighted in the silence that followed as all present counted back to find the piece of diction in question.

As a result of such behavior, it became not an uncommon opinion among their acquaintances to think that Monroe had shaped her into a type of monster, a creature not entirely fit for the society of men and women. There was, therefore, little surprise, though considerable indignation, at Ada's response to two marriage proposals during her nineteenth year: she rejected them out of hand, explaining later that what she found lacking in her suitors was a certain amplitude—of thought, of feeling, of being. That and the fact that both men kept their hair shiny with pomatum, as if to compensate in some visible way for their lack of sparkling wit.

To many of her friends, rejection of a marriage proposal made by any man of means who was not defective in a clear and demonstrable way was, if not inconceivable, at least inexcusable, and in the year before their move to the mountains, many of her friends had fallen away, finding her too bristly and eccentric.

Even now, return to Charleston was a bitter thought and one that her pride rejected. There was nothing pulling her back there. Certainly not family. She had no relatives closer than her cousin Lucy, no kindly aunts or doting grandparents welcoming her return. And that state of kinlessness too was a bitter thought, considering that all around her the mountain people were bound together in ties of clan so extensive and firm that they could hardly walk a mile along the river road without coming upon a relative.

But still, outsider though she was, this place, the blue mountains, seemed to be holding her where she was. From any direction she came at it, the only conclusion that left her any hope of self-content was this: what she could see around her was all that she could count on. The mountains and a desire to find if she could make a satisfactory life of common things here— together they seemed to offer the promise of a more content and expansive

Jife, though she could in no way picture even its starkest outlines. It was easy enough to say, as file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...