Cold Mountain Part 10

All around the house were beehives. Some in gums made from sections of the hollow trunks of black-gum trees, holes augured in them and oriented with the points of the compa.s.s. Others in straw skeps, grey as old thatch and starting to soften up and cave in at the crowns. Despite neglect, though, bees worked thick in the suns.h.i.+ne, coming and going.

-If we were to rob one of those gums it would be some good eating, Veasey said.

-Go to it, Inman said.

-I take a bee sting hard, Veasey said. I swell up. It wouldn't do for me to get in amongst them.

-But you'd eat the honey if I went to get it, is what you're saying?

-A dish of honey would hit the spot and would give us strength for the road.

Inman could not argue with that point, so he rolled down his s.h.i.+rtsleeves and tucked his pant cuffs 2004-3-6.

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into his boots and wrapped his head in his coat, leaving but a fold to sight through. He walked to a gum and slid the roof off and dug out handfuls of honey and comb into his pot until it was heaped over and running down the sides. He moved slowly and deliberately and was stung little.

He and Veasey sat on the edge of the porch, the pot between them, and ate the honey by the spoonful. It was black as coffee, having come from every sort of flower, and it was full of bees'

wings and had toughened up from not being robbed in some time. It was nothing if compared to the clear honey from chestnut blossoms that his father had collected from wild bees by lining them to their tree hives as they flew through the woods. But still, Inman and Veasey ate it like it was good.

When the honey was nearly gone, Inman lifted out a chunk of the comb and bit off a piece.

-You eating even the comb? Veasey said, a note of disapproval in his voice.

-You say that like there was a rooster in the pot, Inman said. He chewed at the waxy plug.

-It's just that it looks like it would stopper a man up.

-It's good for you. A tonic, Inman said. He took another bite and reached out a piece to Veasey, who ate it without relish.

-I'm still hungry, Veasey said, after the pot was empty.

-That's it unless you can scare up something for us to shoot, Inman said. And we need to be walking, not hunting. This kind of traveling puts a curb on your appet.i.tes.

-There's some say that's the way to contentment, get to where there's nothing you crave, where you've lost your appet.i.tes. Which is lunacy, Veasey said. Contentment is largely a matter of talking yourself into believing that G.o.d will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers. There's few I've seen who benefit from believing that on the Day of Judgment, moon turns to blood. I know I don't wish to give that belief too much credit.

Inman jumped from the porch and set out. They traveled at a fair pace for another hour until the road became but a path that climbed a rolling ridge and then followed the fall of a little twisty stream for a while. The water ran down the hill in a series of white riffles broken now and then by quiet bends and little pools where the land terraced or curved, so that if one were not too careful about the particulars it might be taken for a mountain stream. The damp cove too had the smell of the mountains to Inman's nose. The fragance of galax and rotted leaves, damp dirt. He ventured to say as much.

Veasey put his head back and sniffed. Smells like somebody's a.s.s, he said.

Inman did not even comment. He was tired, and his mind worked at random. His eyes kept to the bright thread of water before them. The path it had found to make its way to lower ground was as coiled as a hog's bowel. He had learned enough of books to think that gravity in its ideal form was supposed to work in straight lines of force. But looking on the creek as it made its snaky way down the hill, he saw such notions to be just airy thoughts. The creek's turnings marked how all that moves must shape itself to the maze of actual landscape, no matter what its preferences might be.

When it reached flat ground, the creek gentled and became a watercourse little better than a muddy ditch and displayed no further reference that Inman could find to a mountain stream. Veasey stopped and said, Well, look yonder.

There in the creek, which was deep but still narrow enough to step across with scarcely a hop, was a catfish that looked longer than a singletree for an ox team, though much greater in girth. In fact it 2004-3-6.

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was stout as a tub. It was ugly in the face with its tiny eyes and pale barbels run out from its mouth and wagging in the current. Its lower jaw was set back to make sucking up bottom trash easier, and its back was greeny black and gritty-looking. Though it was but a runt compared to what Inman had imagined in the depths of the muddy Cape Fear, it nevertheless looked plenty hefty and must have taken a woefully wrong turn somewhere to find itself here in water so narrow it could reverse its direction only if it had a hinge in its middle.

-He would be good eating, Veasey said.

-We lack tackle, Inman pointed out.

-I'd give anything for a pole and a line and a hook baited with a big wad of greasy wheat bread.

-Well, we don't have it, Inman said, disgusted at such custom of flatland fis.h.i.+ng. He had no more than moved a foot to walk on when the fish spooked at his shadow on the water and wallowed off upstream.

Veasey followed Inman as he walked away, but he kept turning back and looking up the creek. He made it clear he was sulking. Every hundred yards of progress they made he would say, That was a big fish.

When they had gone only about a half a mile, Veasey stopped and said, There's nothing else but that I've got to have me that catfish. He turned and set into a jog trot up the trail. Inman followed at a walk. When Veasey got near to where the fish had been, he led them off into the woods and thrashed ahead, circling through them for some time so that when he came back to the water they were well upstream. Inman watched as Veasey began scouting into the woods for downed limbs and dragging them into the stream. He piled them up and jumped on them to pack them down. Eventually he had built a kind of weir, all p.r.i.c.kly with limbs.

-What are you up to? Inman said.

-You just wait right here and watch, Veasey said.

Then he circled in the woods again and struck the creek downstream of where he figured the fish to be. He jumped in the creek and walked upstream, kicking the water as he went, and though he did not ever see the fish, he knew he must be driving it before him.

When Veasey neared the weir, Inman could finally see the catfish nosed against the branches trying to find a pa.s.sage. Veasey pulled off his hat and threw it onto the creek bank. He waded to the fish and bent and dipped his upper half into the water to grapple it out. Fish and man came up thras.h.i.+ng, spilling water offin sheets. Veasey had the fish in a hug about its middle, his hands clenched at its white belly. It fought him with all it had. Its neckless head beat back against his, and the whiskers whipped about his face. Then it bent like a great strong bow, sprung straight, and shot from his arms back into the water.

Veasey stood wheezing for air. His face was marked with long red weals where he had been stung by the whiskers of the fish, and his arms were cut from the spined fins, but he bent and took it up out of the water again and wrestled it to another draw. He tried over and over but failed each time until he and the fish both could hardly move from exhaustion. Veasey climbed wearily from the stream and sat on the bank.

-Could you get down in there and try your hand at it? he asked Inman.

Inman reached to his hip and took out the LeMat's and shot the catfish through the head. It thrashed 2004-3-6.

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for a minute and then lay still.

-They G.o.d, Veasey said.

They camped there that night. Veasey left the building and tending of the creekside fire to Inman, as well as all the cooking. He apparently knew to do nothing but talk and eat. When Inman cut the fish open, he found among the contents of its stomach the head to a ballpeen hammer and a bluebird that had been swallowed whole. He set them aside on a flat rock. He next peeled the skin off a part of the fish's back and sides and whittled off fillets. Among the stores in Veasey's packsack was a waxed paper parcel of lard. Inman melted it in the pan and rolled pieces of the fish in his own cornmeal and fried them up brown. As they ate, Veasey looked at the rock and speculated on the catfish's diet.

-You reckon it swallowed that hammer entire a long time ago and then the juice in its stomach ate off the handle? he said.

-Might be, Inman said. I've heard stranger things.

But the bluebird was a puzzler. The only satisfactory way Inman could account for it was that a better cla.s.s of fish, a wondrous trout, say, had risen from the water and taken the bluebird from a low limb of a creekside tree, and then that fine trout had immediately died and the catfish sucked it up whole from the bottom and digested it from the outside in, so all that was left was the bluebird.

They feasted on the fish through the evening, eating until all the meal and lard was gone. Then they just cut chunks of fish and skewered them on green sticks and roasted them bare over fire coals.

Veasey talked on and on, and when he tired of relating his own history, he tried to draw out Inman's story. Where his home might be. Where he was heading. Where he had been. But Veasey could get hardly a word in answer. Inman just sat cross-legged and looked into the fire.

-You're about as bad off as Legion, I believe, Veasey finally said. And he told Inman the story of the man whose wounded spirit Jesus comforted. How Jesus found him naked, fleeing mankind, hiding in the wilderness, gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth on tomb rocks, cutting himself with stones. Turned wild by some ill fortune. What few thoughts Legion had just rampant.

-Always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying and wailing like a dog, Veasey said. And Jesus heard of him and went to him and straightened him right out quicker than a dose of salts running through you. Legion went home a new self.

Inman just sat, and so Veasey said, I know you've run off from the war. That makes us both escapees.

-It doesn't make us both anything together.

-I was not fit for service, Veasey said.

-A fool could see that.

-I mean a doctor said it. I've wondered if I missed much.

-Oh, you missed plenty, Inman said.

-Well, s.h.i.+t. I guessed as much.

-I'll tell you a thing you missed. See how much use a sorry preacher would have been.

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What he told Veasey was about the blowup at Petersburg. His regiment had been situated directly beside the South Carolina boys that got exploded by the Federal tunnelers. Inman was in the wattled trenches parching rye to make a pot of what they would call coffee when the ground heaved up along the lines to his right. A column of dirt and men rose into the air and then fell all around. Inman was showered with dirt. A piece of a man's lower leg with the boot still on the foot landed right beside him. A man down the trench from Inman came running through and hollering, h.e.l.l has busted!

The men in the trenches to left and right of the hole fell back expecting an attack, but in a little while they realized that the Federals had rushed into the crater and then, amazed at what they had done, just huddled there, confused by that new landscape of pure force.

Right quick Haskell called up his eprouvette mortars and put them just beyond the lip of the crater and had them loaded with a scant ounce and a half of powder, since all they had to do was loft the sh.e.l.ls fifty feet to where the Federals milled about like a pen of shoats waiting for the hammer between the eyes. The mortar fire blew many of them to pieces, and when that was done, Inman's regiment led the attack into the crater, and the fighting inside was of a different order from any he had done before. It was war in its most antique form, as if hundreds of men were put into a cave, shoulder to shoulder, and told to kill each other. There was no room for firing and loading muskets, so they mainly used them as clubs. Inman saw one little drummer boy beating a man's head in with an ammunition box. The Federals hardly even bothered to fight back. All underfoot were bodies and pieces of bodies, and so many men had come apart in the blowup and the sh.e.l.ling that the ground was slick and threw a terrible stink from their wet internalments. The raw dirt walls of the crater loomed all around with just a circle of sky above, as if this was all the world there was and fighting was all there was to it. They killed everybody that didn't run away.

-There's the sort of thing you missed, Inman said. You sorry?

Inman spread his bedding and slept, and in the morning they ate carvings off the fish again for breakfast. They roasted up extra chunks to carry along for dinner, but still, when they broke camp, there was more fish left than had been eaten. Three crows waited in the top of a hickory tree.

Late in the afternoon of the following day, clouds gathered up and a wind blew and rain fell hard and steady with no sign of stopping. They walked on into it looking for shelter, Veasey all the while rubbing at the back of his neck and complaining of a piercing headache, a result of Inman having clubbed him to his knees with a wagon hub earlier in the day.

They had gone into a deserted-looking country store to buy food, and no sooner had they walked through the door than Veasey pulled his Colt's and told the shopkeep to empty his till. Inman had taken the first heavy thing that fell to hand-the hub that sat on a shelf by the door-and struck Veasey down. The Colt's went clattering across the wood floor and fetched up against a sack of meal. Veasey knelt on the brink of a swoon, but was taken with a fit of coughing and became thus restored to mindfulness. The shopkeep looked at Veasey and then at Inman and raised an eyebrow and said, The h.e.l.l?

Inman had quickly made his apologies, picked up the pistol, and grabbed Veasey by the coat collar, lifting him as by a handle. Inman half dragged him out to the stoop and then sat him down on the steps and went back in the store to buy goods. In the interval, though, the man had taken out a shotgun and was squatted behind his counter with it, covering the door.

-Get going, he had said. I've not got thirty cents in silver money here, but I'm killing whoever comes for it.

Inman had held his hands out, palms up.

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-He's but a fool, he had said, backing up.

Now, as they walked through the rain, Veasey whined and wished to halt and squat in the drizzle under a pine tree. But Inman, wrapped in his groundsheet, walked on, looking for a likely barn. They found none, but later met a stout old slave woman coming down the road. She had fas.h.i.+oned an enormous rain bonnet in some complicated manner from big flopping catalpa leaves. She went as dry as under an umbrella. Immediately seeing what their state was-a pair of outliers-she told them that lodging lay ahead, run by a man who cared not a whit for the war and would ask no questions.

About a mile on, they found the place, a kind of grim roadside inn and stable. A way station where coaches changed horses and travelers found shelter. The main building was a shambling tavern with a low shed-roofed ell running from the back. It was painted the color of rust and sat under two vast oak trees. Drovers and their hogs and cattle and geese overnighted there in the days before the war when the turnpikes running to the railhead stock markets were thick with animals. But those times were like a lost paradise, and the sprawly corrals around the place now stood near empty and growing over in ragweed.

Inman and Veasey went to the door and tried it and found it latched, though they could hear voices inside. They knocked and an eye appeared at a crack between boards. The latch lifted and they walked in and found themselves in a dank hole, windowless, with but a fireplace for light and a strong reek of wet clothes and dirty hair. Their eyes were not adjusted to the dark as they moved into the room, but the preacher walked ahead, a grin fixed on his face like he was entering known territory and expected to meet friends. He soon stumbled over an old man sitting on a low stool and knocked him onto the floor. The man on the floor said, They d.a.m.n, and there were sympathetic mutterings from the dark figures sitting at tables about the room. Inman grabbed Veasey by the shoulder and pulled him around behind him. He righted the overturned chair and helped the old man to his feet.

They walked on into the room and found seats, and when their sight cleared they saw that a recent chimney fire had burnt holes in one end of the roof. The breaches had yet to be patched, and rain fell in all around the hearth about as thick as it did outside so that the wet guests could not profitably stand by the fire to warm and dry themselves. The fireplace was vast, stretching across most of the end of the room and leading one to imagine great blazes of yesteryear. What fire was in it now, though, you could have covered with a saddlecloth.

In a minute a black wh.o.r.e as big as a big man came in from a back room. She carried a bottle in one hand. In the other, five shot gla.s.ses. Her thick fingers down in them. Inman could see the red handle of a straight razor thrust into the tangle of hair above her right ear. She wore a leather ap.r.o.n about her stout waist, and her b.u.t.ternut dress was cut low and partially unb.u.t.toned to display a vast bosom.

When she pa.s.sed before the little fire, every man in the room turned his head to see the outline of her splendid thighs through the thin dress. The dress skirt fell short of full coverage, and so her hard-muscled calves were on complete display. She went barefooted, her feet muddy. Her skin was black as a stove lid and she was fine looking, at least to any man for whom such grand scale had appeal.

She paced about the room, pouring drinks, and then came to Inman's table. She set down two gla.s.ses and filled them and then pulled up a chair and sat, legs open, skirt hiked. On her inner thigh, Inman could see a pale knife scar running from her knee upward to disappear into the shadow of her bunched skirts.

-Gents, she said, eyeing them to see where advantage might be found. She grinned. Straight white teeth, blue gums. The preacher drained his gla.s.s and thrust it out to her, his eyes resting on the cranny between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She topped up his gla.s.s and said, What's your name, honey?

-Veasey, he said. Solomon Veasey. He drank off his second gla.s.s of liquor without taking his eyes from the mighty cleft of her chest. He appeared to be trembling, so hard had the feeling of rut fallen 2004-3-6.

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upon him.

-Well, Solomon Veasey, she said, what do you have to say for yourself?

-Not much, he said.

-Fair enough. You don't look like much neither, she said. But that don't matter. What would you give to spend some time out back with Big Tildy?

-I'd give a lot, Veasey said. He was as earnest as a man can be.

-But have you got a lot to give is the question, she said.

-Oh, don't you worry about that.

Tildy looked at Inman. You want to come along too? she said.

-You all go on ahead, Inman said.

Before they could leave, though, a man in a filthy leather jacket and jingly spurs came over from the other side of the room and put a hand on Tildy's shoulder. He had a red wen at his temple and looked to be half drunk. Inman's first impulse was to tally the man's weaponry. A pistol at one hip, sheath knife at the other, a handmade thing like a blackjack hanging from a thong at his belt buckle. The man looked down at Tildy and said, Come over here, big'un. Some of us men want a word with you.

He tugged at her shoulder.

-I got business here, she said.

The man looked at Veasey and grinned. He said, This little feller don't have a say in it.

At that Veasey rose and drew his Colt's from under his coat and went about bringing it to bear on the man's belly. But so slow and so obvious was Veasey in making his move that, by the time his pistol barrel reached level, the man had drawn his own pistol. His arm was stretched to its limit and the muzzle sat a ringer's length from Veasey's nose.

Veasey's hand wavered uncertainly, and the barrel drooped so that if he had fired he would have but shot the man's foot.