Cold Mountain Part 16

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-You a fine-looking thing, she said. Bet you draw the women like dog hair draws lightning.

One of the sisters gazed at Inman and said, I wish he'd hug me till I grunt.

Lila said, This is mine. All that's left for you is just to look at him and then to go to wis.h.i.+ng in one hand and s.h.i.+tting in the other and see which one gets full first.

Inman felt a kind of weary numbness. He was still sawing on the joint but his arms felt heavy. The burning wick of the lantern seemed to be casting out strange rays into the dim of the room. Inman thought back on the jug and wondered what fas.h.i.+on of drunk he was.

Lila took his greasy left hand from its grip on the bone and ran it up under her skirt and rested it high on her thigh so that he could feel that she had on no drawers.

-Get on out, she said to the sisters, and they walked to the hall. One of them turned at the door and said, You just like the preacher says. You church founded on peter.

Lila shoved the meat platter to the high end of the table with a thumb, knocking it off the spoon and slopping out grey gravy, which ran downhill and dripped from the table end. Lila s.h.i.+fted and rolled until she was sitting on the table before Inman, her legs astraddle him, her bare feet resting on the arms of his chair. She pulled her skirt back to a bunch at her waist and leaned back on her elbows and said, How about that? What does that favor?

Not a thing other than itself, Inman thought. But his mind would not shape words, for he felt as inert as one behexed. His glossy handprint remained on her pale thigh, and beyond that, the gaping aperture. It seemed extraordinarily fascinating though it was but a mere slot in flesh.

-Get you some, she said, and she shrugged her shoulders out of the dress top and b.r.e.a.s.t.s came spilling out, pale nipples as big around as the mouth of a pint jar. Lila leaned forward and pulled Inman's head into the rift between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

At that moment the door burst open and Junior stood with a smoking lantern in one hand and the ten-gauge in the other.

-The h.e.l.l's going on? he said.

Inman sat back in his chair and watched as Junior leveled the shotgun at him and c.o.c.ked the pointy hammer that looked as long as a mule's ear. The raw hole at the end of the short barrel was black and enormous. It would throw a shot pattern covering most of the wall. Lila rolled off the table and began yanking in various directions at her dress until she was largely covered again.

This would be one sorry s.h.i.+thole to die in, Inman thought.

There was a long pause and Junior stood sucking on an eyetooth and studying deep on something, and then he said, What you about to learn is they ain't no balm in Gilead.

Inman sat at the table looking at the bore to Junior's shotgun and thought, There would be a thing to do here. A right action to take. But he could not arrive at it. He felt fixed as stone. His hands lay in front of him on the tablecloth and he stared at them and thought uselessly, They're starting to look like my father's, though not long ago they didn't.

Junior said, The only way I can reason this out to my satisfaction is that we've got a marrying coming. That or a killing, one.

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Lila said, Goody.

-Wait, Inman said.

-Wait? Junior said. It's too late to wait.

He looked over to where Veasey lay asleep in the chimney corner. Go wake him up, he said to Lila.

-Wait, Inman said again, but he could not formulate a sentence beyond that point. His thoughts would not serve his purpose. They refused to achieve order or proportion, and he wondered again what had been in the jug by the yard fire.

Lila went and bent over Veasey and shook him. He woke with b.r.e.a.s.t.s in his face, grinning as if he had pa.s.sed on to a new world. Until he saw the shotgun bore.

-Now you go get them other ones, Junior said to Lila. He walked over to her and slapped her hard across the face. She put a hand to the rising red mark and left the room.

-They's one other thing, Junior said to Inman. Get up.

Inman stood but he felt that he frabbled on his feet. Junior moved around, keeping Inman covered, and took Veasey by the coat collar and stood him up and walked him slowly across the room.

Veasey was yanked up onto the b.a.l.l.s of his feet so he walked like a man sneaking up on something.

When he had them paired, Junior prodded Inman in the a.s.s with the jagged shotgun barrel.

-Take a look out yonder at what I fetched, Junior said.

Inman moved as one would under water, effortfully and slow, out to the front porch. Up at the road he could see faint movement in the dark, shapes and ma.s.ses only. He heard the expelled breath of a horse. A man's cough. The tick of a hoof on stone. A light was struck and a lantern flared. Then another, and yet one more, until in the glaring yellowy light Inman could make out a band of Home Guard. Behind them, afoot, a tangle of men, shackled and downcast, shading off into the murk.

-You're not the first one I've snared in here, Junior said to Inman. I get five dollars a head for every outlier I turn over.

One of the hors.e.m.e.n called out, We going or what?

But an hour later they had still not gone. They had tied Inman and Veasey onto a string of prisoners and shoved them all against the wall of the smokehouse. None of the tied men had said a word. They moved to the wall with barely more animation than a parade of cadavers. All shuffle-footed and vague, blank-eyed, so tired from the manner of their recent living-as soldier, fugitive, captive-that they leaned back and immediately fell into openmouthed sleep without twitch or snort. Inman and Veasey, though, sat wakeful as the night progressed. At intervals they wrenched against the windings of rope at their hands, hoping for any sign of give.

The Guard built up the fire until it stood as high as the eaves of the house and threw glare and shade against the walls of the buildings. The light of it blanked out the true stars and sparks flew up in a column and then disappeared into the dark, a vision which suggested to Inman that the stars had drawn together in congress and agreed to flee, to shed light on some more cordial world. Off on the hillside, the beacon of the ghost dog shone orange as a pumpkin and skittered about among the trees.

Inman turned and stared at the fire. Dark figures pa.s.sed back and forth before it, and after a time one of the Guards brought out a fiddle and plinked at the strings to quiz the instrument for tune. Satisfied, he pulled on the bow and struck up a simple droning figure of notes, which soon revealed itself to be 2004-3-6.

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circular in logic. The pattern came around again and again at close intervals and seemed equally suited to dancing or-if repeated long enough-to throwing a man into a daze. The guardsmen, silhouetted against the fire, pitched back from the hips and pulled at the contents of various jugs and stoups. Then they danced about the fire, and sometimes they could be seen paired up with Lila or one of the sisters, rubbing in various shadowy tableaus of rut.

-There is not great variance between this place and a d.a.m.n jenny barn, Veasey said. Other than they've not charged anybody anything yet.

Those men not immediately occupied with Lila or the sisters danced alone. They went round and round, jerking in a buck-and-wing, bent at the waist, stepping with high knees, their faces alternately staring down at their feet on the ground and bending back to speculate on the blanked heavens. Now and again, possessed by the music, one would squeal out as if wounded.

They danced until they all had to stop and blow and then Junior, apparently far gone in drink, tried to organize a wedding between Inman and Lila.

-I went in the house, and that tall one was just getting into the shortrows with Lila, Junior said. We ought to wed them.

-You're not no preacher, the Guard captain said.

-That little shaved-off one is, Junior said, looking at Veasey.

-G.o.dd.a.m.n, the captain said. He don't much look like it.

-Will you witness? Junior said.

-If that will get us on the road, the man said.

They got Inman and Veasey from the smokehouse and untied them and walked them at gunpoint to the fire. The three girls stood waiting, the pair of dark-headed boys with them. The Guard off to the side spectating, their shadows jittery and huge against the walls of the house.

-Get over there, Junior said. Inman took a step toward Lila, but then a thought that had been trying to come into his mind finally arrived. He said, But she's already married.

-By the law she is. Not in my mind or G.o.d's eyes, Junior said. Get on over.

Inman went will-less to stand alongside Lila.

-Oh, boy, she said.

Her hair was newly bound up in a snoodlike wad at her neck. Her cheeks had been daubed with face paint, but under it the left side of her face was still flushed with the mark of Junior's hand. She held clutched against her belly a bunch of goldenrod and ironweed pulled from the fencerow of the cornfield. She described little delighted circles in the dirt with her toes. Junior and Veasey stood to the side, the shotgun pressed to the base of Veasey's spine.

-I'll say what needs to be said and you just say Uh-huh, Junior said to Veasey.

Junior untied the string at his chin and removed his hat and set it on the ground at his feet. His head was covered with a faint smear of coa.r.s.e hair spread thin across his pate, a stand of hair more suited 2004-3-6.

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to be growing on a man's a.s.s. He struck a formal pose with the shotgun cradled in his arms and commenced a rawk-voiced prothalamion. It vaguely took the form of song, modal and dark, and the dire jig of its tune grated on the ear. The theme of its lyric, the best Inman could decipher it, was death and its inevitability and the unpleasant consequences of life. The pair of boy-children tapped their feet as if they knew the main rhythm of the song and approved of it.

When he was done singing, Junior began the talking portion of the ceremony. The words bound bound and and death death and and sickness sickness were featured prominently. Inman looked off to the hillside, and the ghost light was moving again through the trees. Inman wished it would just come on and carry him away. were featured prominently. Inman looked off to the hillside, and the ghost light was moving again through the trees. Inman wished it would just come on and carry him away.

When the wedding was over, Lila threw the flowers into the fire and hugged Inman tight. Pressed one full thigh up between his legs. She looked him in the eye and said, Bye, bye.

One of the Home Guard stepped behind him and clapped a Colt's pistol to his temple and said, Figure that. One minute a bride, and the next, if I pull this trigger, she'll put a smile on her face and scoop her husband's harns off the ground into a napkin.

I do not understand you people, Inman said, and they retied him and Veasey to the string of men and marched them off down the road east.

For several days Inman walked tied at the wrists to the end of a long rope with fifteen other men so that they went strung together like tailed colts. Veasey was tied directly before Inman, and he slogged along with his head down, stunned at his misfortune. When the line started or stopped he was yanked forward and his bound hands flew up before his face like a man in sudden need of prayer. Some of the men farther up the line were old greybeards, others little more than boys, all of them accused of being deserters or sympathizers. Most of them were country people in homespun.

Inman gathered they were all prison bound. That or to be sent back fighting. Some men periodically called out to the Guard, shouting excuses and declaring to be altogether other men from what they were accused of being. Innocence was their claim. Others muttered out threats, saying were their hands not tied and had they an axe, they would cleave the guardsmen down from crown to groin, dividing them into equal bleeding parts onto which they would p.i.s.s before walking away to find home. Others sobbed and begged to be freed, calling upon some imagined force of kindness resident in men's hearts to advance their interests.

Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pa.s.s from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing-not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces- would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.

Inman hated being sutured up to the others, hated going unarmed, hated most moving retrograde to his desires. Every step east he trod was bitter as backsliding. The miles pa.s.sed, and hope of home began fleeing from him. When the sun rose full in his face he spit at it, having no other way of striking out.

The prisoners walked all that day and for several days following with hardly a word spoken among them. To entertain himself one afternoon, a guardsman rode down the line and with the barrel to his shotgun knocked every man's hat onto the ground and any man who bent to pick up his hat was beat with the stock end of the gun. They walked on leaving fifteen black hats lying in the road as spoor of their pa.s.sage.

For food they were given nothing, and for drink they had but what water they could bend and scoop a cupped hand of whenever the road forded a creek. The old men of the party grew especially weak 2004-3-6.

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from such short rations, and when they could no longer walk, even when prodded by rifle barrels, they were fed a gruel made of b.u.t.termilk with old corn bread crumbed up in it. When their heads cleared they marched on.

The men had got in such a sc.r.a.pe, each of them, in the usual way, one d.a.m.n event treading on the heels of another until they were in a place they never expected to be and could see no way clear of.

Inman's thoughts turned constantly on such matters. And other than to be set free, there was nothing he longed for more than to see Junior's blood running.

Some days the Guard drove the prisoners all day and they slept at night. Some days they would sleep and arise at sundown and set out walking and keep at it all night. But after each march, where they arrived was much of a sameness with where they had been: pinewoods so dense at their crowns that the sun would never s.h.i.+ne on the ground. For all the variance in landscape Inman could see, he might have been moving through the dark at about the strange and sluggish pace of a man in a dream who runs away from what he fears but, try as he might, makes little headway against it.

And, too, he hurt from the hard traveling. He felt weak and dizzy. Hungry as well. The wound at his neck throbbed with his heartbeat, and he thought it might break open and start spitting things out as it had at the hospital. The lens to a field gla.s.s, a corkscrew, a b.l.o.o.d.y little Psalter.

He watched all the westward miles he had accomplished start coming unspooled in a tangle under his feet. After some days of walking, they stopped at nightfall and the prisoners were left tied, without food or water. The Guard, as on the previous nights, made no provision for their sleeping, neither giving them blankets nor striking fire. In their exhaustion the roped men piled up like a dog pack to sleep on the bare red ground.

Inman had read books where prisoners in castlekeeps scratch marks on sticks or rocks to track the pa.s.sage of days, but he had not even the means to do that, though he could see how useful it would be because he had already started to doubt his mental calendar. No further accounting needed to be kept, though, for deep in the night the prisoners were rousted from thin sleep by one of the guards.

He s.h.i.+ned a lantern in their faces and told them to stand. The other half-dozen guards stood in a loose group. Some of them were smoking pipes and they held their rifle muskets b.u.t.t down on the ground. One of them who acted in the role of leader said, We had us a talk and decided that you pack of s.h.i.+t are just wasting our time.

At that the Guard raised their rifles.

A captive boy, not much over twelve, fell to his knees and commenced crying. An old man, grey headed, said, You can't mean to kill us all here.

One of the guards lowered his weapon and looked to the leader and said, I didn't sign on to kill grandpaws and little boys.

The leader said to him, c.o.c.k back to fire or get down there with them.

Inman looked off into the dark pinewoods. The view from my last resting place, he said within himself.

Then the firing started with a volley. Men and boys began falling all around. Veasey stepped forward as far as the rope would allow and shouted amid the firing. He said, It is not too late to put away this meanness. Then he was shot through a number of times.

The ball that hit Inman had already pa.s.sed through Veasey's shoulder and as a result did not strike with full briskness. It took Inman in the side of the head at his hairline and ran along his skull 2004-3-6.

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between hide and bone, routing a shallow groove there as it pa.s.sed. It exited behind his ear. He fell as if struck by a lathing hatchet, but consciousness did not leave him entirely. He could not move, not so much as to blink an eye, nor did he wish to. The world moved on about him and he observed it, though he felt not a part of it. It seemed to scorn understanding. People died all around him and fell all bound together.

When the firing was done, the Guard stood as if unclear as to what the next step might be. One of them seemed taken by some fit or spell, and he danced about and sang Cotton Eye Joe and capered until another man hit him at the base of his spine with the stock of his musket. Finally one said, We'd best get them under ground.

They went about the job poorly, just digging out a shallow bed and strewing the men in and covering them over with dirt about to the depth that one would plant potatoes. When done, they mounted up and rode away.

Inman had fallen with his face in the crook of his arm and he had breathing s.p.a.ce, though the covering of dirt over him was so thin and loose that he might have lain there and starved before he smothered. He rested, drifting in and out of muddled wakefulness. The smell of the dirt pulled at him and drew him down and he could not find the force to raise himself from it. Dying there seemed easier than not.

But before the dawn of day, feral hogs descended from the woods, drawn by the tang in the air. They plowed at the ground with their snouts and dug out arms and feet and heads, and soon Inman found himself uprooted, staring eye to eye, forlorn and hostile and baffled, into the long face of a great tushed boar.

-Yaah, Inman said.

The boar s.h.i.+ed off a few feet and stopped and looked back at him dumbfounded, his little eyes blinking. Inman prised his length out of the ground. To rise and bloom again, that became his wish.

When Inman worked his way upright once more, the boar lost interest and went back to grubbing at the ground.

Inman cast back his head to the sky and found it did not look right. There were stars in it, but he could not reason out even one known constellation in the moonless sky. It looked as if someone had taken a stick and stirred it up so that no sense remained, just a smattering of light cast pat-ternless on the general dark.

As head wounds will do, his had bled all out of proportion to its actual direness. Blood covered his face and dirt had gummed to it, so that his visage was ocher in color and appeared like a clay sculpture ill.u.s.trating some earlier phase of mankind when facial features were yet provisional. He found the two holes in his scalp and probed them with his fingers and found them numb and beginning to clot shut. He wiped at himself to little effect with the tail of his s.h.i.+rt. He commenced pulling on the rope at his hands, bent his back to it, and in a minute Veasey emerged from the ground like a big hooked ba.s.s pulled up from a muddy lake. Veasey's face was locked in an expression of numb bewilderment. His eyes were open and dirt clung to the wet of them.

Looking on him, Inman could find no great sorrow at his death, but neither could he find this an example of justice working its way around to show proof that the wrong a man does flies back at him. Inman had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing entirely. He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn't come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer 2004-3-6.

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dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the fire so often he might never make a civilian again.