Cold Mountain Part 12

-Fully. The fascinations of depraved and unchaste women have been proverbial, and I admit I am a man overly charmed by the peculiarities of the female anatomy. Last night when she drew off that big s.h.i.+ft of hers and stood before me, I was sore amazed. Stunned, in fact. It was a sight to mark down for remembrance in old age, one to cheer a mind otherwise falling to despond.

source and root They had begun walking to town in a chill, mizzling rain. Against it, Ada had worn a long coat of waxed poplin, and Ruby had on an enormous sweater she had knitted of undyed wool with the lanolin left in, her claim being that the oil turned water as well as a mackintosh. The sweater's only failing was that in the damp it broadcast the fragrance of an unshorn ewe. Ada had insisted on carrying umbrellas, but an hour down the road the clouds broke open to sun. So once the trees quit dripping, they carried them furled, Ruby with hers over her shoulder like a woodward huntsman toting a rifle.

The brightening sky was busy with resident birds and with traveler birds moving south ahead of the season: various patterns of duck, geese both grey and white, whistling swan, nighthawk, bluebird, jaybird, quail, lark, kingfisher, Cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawk. All these birds and others Ruby remarked upon during their pa.s.sage to town, finding a thread of narrative or evidence of character in their minutest customs. Ruby a.s.sumed the twitter of birds to be utterance as laden with meaning as human talk and claimed to like especially the time in spring when the birds come back singing songs to report where they've been and what they've done while she'd stayed right here.

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When Ruby and Ada came upon five ravens gathered in council at the edge of a yellow stubblefield, Ruby said, I've heard it claimed that rooks live for many hundreds of years, though how one might test that notion is anybody's guess. When a female cardinal with a sprig of birch in its beak flew by, Ruby was curious. She reckoned it a profoundly confused bird, for why would she carry such a thing if not nest building? But this was not the time of year for it. When they pa.s.sed a stand of beech trees by the river, Ruby said the river took its name from the great numbers of pa.s.senger pigeons that sometimes flocked there to eat the beechnuts, and she said she had eaten many a pigeon in her youth when Stobrod would disappear for days at a time leaving her to fend for herself. They were the easiest game for a child to take. You did not even have to shoot them, just knock them out of trees with sticks and wring their necks before they came to their senses.

When three crows harried a hawk across the sky, Ruby expressed her great respect for the normally reviled crow, finding much worthy of emulation in their outlook on life. She noted with disapproval that many a bird would die rather than eat any but food it relishes. Crows will relish what presents itself. She admired their keenness of wit, lack of pridefulness, love of practical jokes, slyness in a fight. All of these she saw as making up the genius of crow, which was a kind of willed mastery over what she a.s.sumed was a natural inclination toward bile and melancholy, as evidenced by its drear plumage.

-We might all take instruction from crow, Ruby said pointedly, for Ada was clearly in something of a mood, the lifting of which lagged considerably behind the fairing sky.

For much of the morning Ada had been so dumb with gloom she might as well have worn a black crepe on her sleeve to announce it to the world. Some of it was attributable to the hard work of the previous week. They had made hay in the neglected fields, though in the end it was so mixed with ragweed and spurge as to be barely usable. One day they had worked for hours preparing the scythes for cutting. They first needed a file and large whetstone to freshen the nicked and rusting edges of the scythes, which they had found lying reclined across the rafters of the toolshed. Ada could not say one way or the other whether Monroe had owned such implements as file and whetstone. She had her doubts, for the scythes had not been his but were left from the Blacks' tenure in the cove.

Together Ada and Ruby had rummaged through the contents of the shed until they found a rat-tail file, its sharp tail end driven into a dusty old cob for handle. But a stone never emerged from the clutter.

-My daddy never had a whetstone either, Ruby said. He'd just spit on a piece of shale and rub his knife on it a pa.s.s or two. However sharp it got, that was fine. No great matter of pride to him if it would shave hair on your arm or not. As long as he could saw off a plug of chaw with it, he was happy enough.

In the end they had given up the search and resorted to Stobrod's method, using a smooth flat shale they found near the creek. After much rubbing, the blades were still of only marginal sharpness, but Ada and Ruby went to the field and swung the scythes through the afternoon and then raked the cut gra.s.s into windrows, finis.h.i.+ng in the last light, well after the sun had set. On the day before the outing, when the hay had dried on the ground, they filled the drag sled over and over with it and unloaded it in the barn. The stubble underfoot stood hard and sharp so they could feel it pus.h.i.+ng against their shoe soles. They worked from opposite sides of the rows, alternately forking the hay into the sled. When their rhythm broke apart, the tines of their forks chimed against each other and Ralph, dozing in the traces, would startle and toss his head. The work was hot, though the day had not been particularly so. It was a dusty job, and the chaff hung in their hair and the folds of their clothes and stuck to their sweaty forearms and faces.

When they were done, Ada felt near collapse. Her arms were mackled red like a measles sufferer from being p.r.i.c.ked and sc.r.a.ped with the cut gra.s.s ends, and she had a big blood-filled blister in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. She had washed up and collapsed in bed before dark, 2004-3-6.

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having eaten nothing but a cold biscuit with b.u.t.ter and sugar.

Tired as she was, though, she had found herself over and over rising from true sleep into a foggy hovering state of partial wakefulness, a fretful hybrid of sleep and wake partaking of the worst aspects of each. She felt she was raking and pitching hay all through the night. When she roused enough to open her eyes, she saw the black shadows of tree limbs moving in the block of moonlight cast across the floorboards, and the shapes seemed unaccountably troubling and ominous. Then, sometime in the night, clouds blacked out the moon and rain fell hard and Ada finally fell asleep.

She had awakened to the rainy dawn feeling crippled with muscle ache. Her hands would unclench from their imaginary grip on the hayfork only with effort, and her head throbbed with a general pain.

And with a specific one, just above and behind her right eyelid. But she determined that the outing to town would go on as planned, for it was largely a pleasure trip they were taking, though they did need to purchase a few small items. Ruby wanted to replenish their makings for shotgun loads- birdshot, buckshot, and slugs-the cooling weather having put her in a temper to kill wild turkey and deer. For her part, Ada wished to scan the shelves at the back of the stationer's to see if any new books had arrived and to buy a leather-bound journal and a few sketching pencils so she might record some of her efforts toward botanizing. Mainly, though, Ada was feeling thoroughly cove-bound after weeks of work. She yearned so badly to go on a jaunt to town that sore muscles, a black mood, and the morning's unpromising weather had not kept her back. Nor had the unpleasant discovery at the barn that sometime during the previous day's work the horse had stone-bruised the sole of his hoof and was not able to draw the cabriolet.

-I'm going to town if I have to crawl, Ada had said to Ruby's back as Ruby bent in the rain with the horse's muddy hoof in her hands.

So it was a gloomy progress Ada made down the road that morning, despite Ruby's best efforts toward birdlore. They walked past farms set in little valleys and coves, the fields opening up among the wooded hills like rooms in a house. Women and children and old men worked the crops, since every man of age to fight was off warring. The leaves on cornstalks were brown at the tips and edges, and the ears to be left for sh.e.l.l corn still stood on the stalk waiting for sun and frost to dry them out. Pumpkins and winter squash lay bright on the ground between the corn rows. Goldenrod and joe-pye weed and snakeroot blossomed tall along the fence rails, and the leaves on blackberry canes and dogwood were maroon.

In town, Ada and Ruby first walked about the streets looking at the stores, the teams and wagons and the women with their shopping baskets. The day had warmed to the point that Ada carried her waxed coat balled up under an arm. Ruby wore her sweater tied at her waist, and she had yoked her hair back at collar level with a band plaited of horse-tail strands. The air was still hazy. Cold Mountain was a blue smear, a hump on the far ridgeline, made small by the long walk and no more dimensional against the sky than paper pasted on paper.

The county seat was not a town of great refinement. On one side there were four clapboard store buildings in a row, then a hog pen and a mud pit, then two more stores, a church, and a livery. On the other side, three stores, then the courthouse-a cupolaed white frame building set back from the road with a patchy lawn in front-then four more storefronts, two of them brick. After that, the town trailed off into a fenced field of dried cornstalks. The streets were cut deep by narrow wagon wheels.

Light glinted off water pooled in the numberless basins made by horse tracks.

Ada and Ruby went to a hardware and bought wadding, shot, slugs, caps, and powder. At the stationer's, Ada paid more than she could afford for Adam Bede Adam Bede in three volumes, six fat charcoal pencils, and an octavo-sized journal of well-made paper that appealed to her because it was small enough to fit in a coat pocket. From a street vendor they bought newspapers-the county paper and the larger one from Asheville. They bought lukewarm root beer from a woman tapping a barrel in a file://H:EbookCharles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[... in three volumes, six fat charcoal pencils, and an octavo-sized journal of well-made paper that appealed to her because it was small enough to fit in a coat pocket. From a street vendor they bought newspapers-the county paper and the larger one from Asheville. They bought lukewarm root beer from a woman tapping a barrel in a 2004-3-6.

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pushcart and drank it down where they stood and handed the woman back her tin cups. For dinner they bought hard cheese and fresh bread and took it down by the river and sat on rocks to eat.

Early in the afternoon they stopped by the house of Mrs. McKennet, a wealthy widow of middle age who had for a season or two taken a keen romantic interest in Monroe and then later, after he failed to see her in the same light, had simply become his friend. It was not the time for tea, but she was so pleased to see Ada that she proposed a greater treat. The summer having been so damp and cool, she still, at that late date, had ice resting in the bas.e.m.e.nt ice pit. It had been cut in great blocks from the lake the previous February and packed in sawdust. And, after swearing them to secrecy, she revealed that she had four barrels of salt and three of sugar stored since long before the war. The extravagance of ice cream was what she had in mind, and she put her handyman-an old grey fellow too feeble for conscription-to chipping ice and cranking the machine. At some time in the past she had made numbers of sugared crepes and twisted them into cones and let them dry, and she served the ice cream in them. Ruby, of course, had never eaten such a thing and she was delighted. After she had licked the last white drop, she reached out her cone to Mrs. McKennet and said, Here's your little horn back.

Their talk turned to the war and its effects, and Mrs. McKennet held opinions exactly in accord with every newspaper editorial Ada had read for four years, which is to say Mrs. McKennet found the fighting glorious and tragic and heroic. n.o.ble beyond all her powers of expression. She told a long and maudlin story she had read about a recent battle, its obvious ficti-tiousness apparently lost on her. It was fought-as they all were lately- against dreadful odds. As the battle neared its inevitable conclusion, a das.h.i.+ng young officer was grievously wounded to the chest. He fell back bleeding great gouts of heartblood. A companion stooped and cradled his head to soothe his dying. But as the battle raged around them, the young officer, in the very act of expiring, rose and drew his pistol and added his contribution to the general gunfire. He died erect, with the hammer snapping on empty loads. And there were additional details of somber irony. Found on his person was a letter to his sweetheart, the wording of which foretokened exactly the manner of his death. And further, when the letter was taken by courier to the girl's home, it was discovered that she had died of a strange chest seizure on precisely the day and hour her beloved had pa.s.sed. During the latter stages of the tale, Ada developed an itch just to either side of her nose. She touched the places discreetly with her fingertips, but then she found that the corners of her mouth would stay down only with great trembling effort.

When Mrs. McKennet finished, Ada looked around at the furniture and carpet and lamps, at a household running effortlessly, at Mrs. McKennet, satisfied and plump in her velvet chair, her hair in tight rolls dangling from the sides of her head. Ada might as well have been in Charleston. And she felt called upon to take up some of her old Charleston demeanor. She said, That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard. She went further, adding that, contrary to the general view, she found the war to exhibit anything but the fine characteristics of tragedy and n.o.bility. She found it, even at a great distance, brutal and benighted on both sides about equally. Degrading to all.

Her aim was to shock or outrage, but Mrs. McKennet rather seemed amused. She fixed Ada with a half smile and said, You know I have a great affection for you, but you are nevertheless the most naive girl I have yet had the pleasure to encounter.

Ada then fell silent and there was an awkward void that Ruby presently filled by cataloguing the birds she had spied that morning and commenting on the progress of late crops and reporting the amazing fact that Esco Sw.a.n.ger's turnips had grown so big from his black dirt that he could fit but six in a peck basket. But in a minute Mrs. McKennet interrupted her and said, Perhaps you will share your views on the war with us.

Ruby hesitated only a second and then said the war held little interest for her. She had heard stories of the northern country and had come to understand that it was a G.o.dless land, or rather a land of 2004-3-6.

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only one G.o.d, and that was money. The report was that under the rule of such a grabby creed people grew mean and bitter and deranged until, for lack of higher forms of spirit comfort, entire families became morphine-crazed. They had, as well, invented a holiday called Thanksgiving, which Ruby had only recently got news of, but from what she gathered its features to be, she found it to contain the mark of a tainted culture. To be thankful on just the one day.

Later in the afternoon, as Ada and Ruby walked down the main street on the way out of town, they saw a knot of people standing at the side wall of the courthouse with their heads tipped up. They went to see what was happening and found that a prisoner at a second-story window was delivering a talk to the people below. The captive had his hands up gripping the bars, and he had his face thrust as far as it would go between them. The hair his head grew was black and oily and hung down in rat tails below his under jaw. A little tuft of black whiskers sprouted from beneath his bottom lip in the French style. All they could see of his attire before the windowsill cut him off was a shabby uniform jacket b.u.t.toned up to the neck.

He talked in the urgent meters of a street preacher, and he had drawn a crowd with the rage in his voice. He had fought hard through the war, he claimed. Had killed many a Federal and had taken a ball to the shoulder at Williamsburg. But he had recently lost faith in the war and he missed his wife.

He had not been drafted but had volunteered for the fighting, and all he did by way of crime was unvolunteer and walk home. Now here he stood jailed. And they might just hang him, war hero though he was.

The captive went on to tell of how the Home Guard had taken him some days previous from a remote cove farm, his father's, on the flank of Balsam Mountain. He had been there with other outliers. The woods were filling up with them, he said. As the lone survivor of the day, it was his duty he believed to narrate all the details from out the barred window of his cell, and Ada and Ruby stayed to hear, though it was a tale of considerable sordor and bloodshed.

It had been coming on toward twilight, and the tops of the mountains were cut off by a grey smother of clouds. Rain had begun falling, so fine and windless it would hardly wet a man out in it all night.

It served only to deepen colors, making the dirt of the road redder and the leaves of poplar trees that met overhead greener. The captive and two other outliers and the captive's father had been in the house when they heard horses coming from down below the bend in the road. His father took the shotgun, the only firearm among them, and went out to the road. There not being time to get to the woods, the three others gathered up weapons they had made from farm implements and went to hide in a fodder crib, where they watched the road between the unc.h.i.n.ked poles of the wall.

A small party of wordless, ill-accoutered hors.e.m.e.n came traveling around the curve at a slow walk, climbing into the cove. They had apparently been unable to reach consensus on attire. Two great dark men so alike in their features that they might well have been twins rode vaguely uniformed in what could have been leavings scavenged from battlefield dead. A slight white-headed boy wore farm clothes-canvas britches, brown wool s.h.i.+rt, short grey wool jacket. And the other man might have been taken for a traveling preacher in his long-tailed black suitcoat, pants of moleskin, white s.h.i.+rt with a black cravat at the stand-up collar. Their horses were foul spine-sprung things, malandered about the necks, beshat greenly across the hindquarters, and trailing ropy harls of yellow snot blown from all the orifices of their heads. But the men were well armed with blockish Kerr pistols at their hips, shotguns and rifles in saddle scabbards.

The old man stood awaiting them, and in the grey light and drizzle he appeared to be a kind of specter, some grey being standing astraddle the gra.s.sy crest between the wagon tracks. He was dressed in garb of homespun wool, dyed b.u.t.ternut from the pulp of walnut husks. He wore a hat that looked as soft as a sleeping bonnet, and it sat on his head like something melting. His jowls hung in flaps like the flews of a hound, and he held the long gun behind him, run down back of his leg.

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-Stop right there, he said, when the hors.e.m.e.n were twenty paces away.

The two big men and the white-headed boy ignored the command and squeezed their mounts with their heels, urging them forward at a slow walk. The preacher-looking man took an angling course, making for the road edge, turning his horse so that its body would hide the short Spencer carbine in its scabbard at his knee. His companions stopped in a group before the old man.

There was quick movement and someone let out a high-pitched scream.

The old man had produced his gun from behind him and had in one swift motion poked it up under the soft of one big man's chin and then pulled it back. It was a fowling piece of antique design. The hammer was c.o.c.ked, and the bore to it was as big around as a shot gla.s.s. A little runnel of blood went down the big man's neck and disappeared into his s.h.i.+rt collar.

The other big man and the white-headed boy sat and looked off across a little bit of cornfield where an old grey stook of last year's fodder formed a sagging cone at the edge of the woods. They smiled as if they might have been expecting something of modest drollness to appear among the trees.

The old man said, You by the fence. I know who you are. You're Teague. Get over here.

Teague did not move.

The old man said, You not coming?

Teague sat his ground. He had a grin on his face, but his eyes looked like a cold fireplace with the ashes shoveled out.

-These your big n.i.g.g.e.rs? the old man said to Teague.

-I don't know that's what they are, Teague said. But they're not mine. You couldn't give me that pair free.

-Whose then?

-Their own, I reckon, Teague said.

-You get on over here with us, the man said.

-I'll just rest here at the edge of the woods, Teague said.

-You're making me jumpy and I'm fixing to put a load in somebody, the man said.

-You've just got the one barrel, Teague pointed out.

-This gun's right comprehensive when you let fly with it, the man said. He took several steps backward until he judged the three men before him were all compa.s.sed by the wide shot pattern the big gun threw. Then he said, Get down off them horses and stand in a bunch.

Everyone but Teague dismounted. The horses stood with their reins dragging the ground, their ears forward like they were enjoying themselves. The man with the wound, Byron by name, put his fingers to it and looked at the blood and then wiped his hands on his loose s.h.i.+rt tail. The other one, name of Ayron, held his head c.o.c.ked up to the side, and a pink tip of tongue showed at his mouth, so carefully was he now attending to every detail of the current scene. The white-headed boy rubbed his 2004-3-6.

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blue eyes and pulled in several directions at his clothing as if he had just woken up from sleeping in them. Then he stood and examined with great fascination the nail to his left index finger. It was near as long as the finger itself, the way some people will grow them for cutting b.u.t.ter and dipping lard and other such tasks.

The old man stood with the shotgun covering the three of them and surveyed their various armature.

-What do them n.i.g.g.e.rs use their long cavalry sabers for? Hold meat over a fire to roast? he asked Teague.

There was a long moment of silence and then the old man said, What are you up here after?

-You know, Teague said. Catch up outliers.

-They're all gone, the old man said. Long since. Laying out in the woods where they'll be hard to find. Or pa.s.sed on over the mountains to cross the lines and oath allegiance.

-Oh, Teague said. If I take your point, we best just go back to town then. Is that what you're saying?

-Save us all trouble if you do, the man said.

-You don't watch out, we're liable to hang your old a.s.s too, Teague said. They were gone, you wouldn't be meeting us in the road armed.

At that moment the white-headed boy fell p.r.o.ne in the dirt and yelled out, King of kings!

The first instant that the old man's attention collected on the boy, Ayron lunged with a grace unexpected in one of so much size and struck the man a clubbing blow to the head with his left fist.

He followed that with a slap to the hand, knocking the shotgun away. The old man fell on his back, his hat in the dirt beside him. Ayron stepped over and picked up the shotgun and beat the old man with it until the stock broke off and then he beat him with just the barrel. After a time the man lay still in the road. He was somewhat conscious but had a puzzled look in his eyes. Something ran from one ear that had all the features of red-eye gravy.

Byron spit at the ground and wiped away the blood on his head, and then he drew his saber and put the point of it under the old man's lapped chin and pressed until he caused a runnel of blood equal to his own.

-Hold meat over a fire, he said.

-Leave him be, Ayron said. There's no harm left in him.

Both men, despite their size, had little keen voices, pitched high as birdsong.

Byron took the sword from the man's chin, but then, before anyone could make out his intentions, he took the haft in both hands, and in a motion that looked no more effortful than plunging the dasher into a b.u.t.ter churn, he skewered the old man through the stomach.

Byron stepped away with his hands held out open to either side. There was nothing to see of the sword blade, just the scrolled guard and wire-wrapped grip sticking from beneath the old man's chest. He tried to rise but only his head and knees came up, for he was spiked to the ground.

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Byron looked at Teague and said, You want me to finish him?

--Just let him fight it out with his Maker, said Teague.

The boy rose from where he still lay on the ground and went and stood over the man and gawped at him.

-He's ready for death, the boy said. His lamp is burning and he waits for the bridegroom.

They all laughed except for the old man and Teague. Teague said, Shut up, Birch. Let's move.

They mounted to ride to the house, and as they did the old man breathed his last and died with a wail. In pa.s.sing, Byron leaned low from his saddle, agile as a trick rider in a tent show, and drew out the saber and wiped it on the mane of his horse before returning it to its scabbard.

Byron went to the gate and kicked it open to break the latch, and they rode through it and right up to the porch.

-Come on out, Teague called. There was a note of the festive to his voice.

When no one appeared, Teague looked at Byron and Ayron and tipped his chin at the front door.

The two dismounted and looped their reins around porch posts and set about making circuits of the house in opposite directions, pistols drawn. They moved as a partners.h.i.+p of wolves will hunt, in wordless coordination of effort toward a shared purpose. They were naturally quick and their movements were easy and fluent, despite their being so bulky. But in a clench was where their main advantage was, for between the two of them they looked to be about able to dismember a man with their hands.

After they had orbited the empty house three times they burst through the front and back doors at the same instant. In a minute they came out, Ayron with a fistful of tapers paired by their wicks and Byron carrying part of a ham, which he held by the shank of its white bone like a chicken leg. They put them in panniers on the horses. Then without word or gesture of command or even suggestion, Teague and Birch climbed down to earth from their mounts and they all walked to the barn, where they threw open the doors to the stalls. They found but one old mule inside. They trod about among the hay in the loft and ran their sabers into the deepest piles and then they came out and turned their attention to the fodder crib, but as they approached it, the door sprung open and the three outliers broke to run.

The men were hindered in their escape, for they carried improvised weapons that had the look of artifacts from a yet darker age-a sharpened plow point swinging at the end of a chain, an old spade beaten and filed into the semblance of a spear, a pine-knot cudgel spiked at its head with horseshoe nails.