Cold Mountain Part 28

somewhere.

Stobrod bowed a note or two from Cindy, and then some other notes, seeming at random, unrelated.

He went over them and over them, and it began to be clear that they made no sense. But he suddenly gathered them up and worked a variation on them, and then another yet more precise, and they unexpectedly fell together into a tune. He found the pattern he was seeking, and he followed the trail of notes where they led, finding the way of their logic, which was brisk, brittle, effortless as laughing. He played the run of it a time or two until Pangle had his chord changes down and had spun off a series of quick answering notes, bright and harsh. Then they set off together to see what sort of thing they had composed.

Though in form it was neither jig nor reel, it was yet right for dancing. Their stomachs, however, were still in such a rage that neither of them could have shuffled out a step. Pangle, nevertheless, had one foot patting ground on the offbeat and his head was nodding and his eyes were loose-closed so that there was but a trembling rim of white showing between the lashes. Stobrod played a run of notes and then lowered the fiddle from under his bristled neck so that the b.u.t.t of it rested against his chest. He beat out the rhythm on the strings with his bow. Pangle caught on and did the same with his flattened hand against the groundhog hide of the banjo head, and momentarily there was a sense that the instruments they played were just elaborations on the drum. To the thumping, Stobrod put back his head and sang out a lyric he was making up at the moment. It had to do with women whose bellies were hard as the necks of mules. Such women, the song proclaimed, were cruel beyond the generality of their s.e.x.

When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat, which some name General Was.h.i.+ngton's tune. This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life.

Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit's took them now.

None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle's use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod's fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature. There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream-his or some fictive speaker's-said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the pa.s.sage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green.

The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world.

When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good G.o.d, these is holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me.

Teague sucked on a tooth and looked off in the distance as if trying to remember something. He stood and squared his coat lapels and twisted at his pant waist until he had his britches adjusted to his satisfaction. He took his Spencer's from the ground and brought the muzzle of it to bear on the s.p.a.ce between Stobrod and Pangle. He had the forestock of it resting across the back of his left wrist and the hand drooped down calm.

-Stand up against that big poplar, he said, looking at Stobrod. And take that boy with you.

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For lack of a better idea, Stobrod went and stood at the tree. It rose near a hundred feet straight and clear and monolithic above him before there was a limb. Even then there were but two, the size of regular trees themselves, rising in curves like the arms of a candelabra. The crown of the tree had broken off sometime in the previous century, and the mossy stout cylinder of it lay remnant on the ground nearby, slowly melting into the dirt, so soft with rot that you could have kicked it apart like an old dung pile and watched the hister beetles scuttle away.

Stobrod held the fiddle before him in the crook of his arm. The bow hung from a finger and twitched slightly, in time with his heartbeat. Pangle stood beside him, and theirs was the proud and nervous pose men struck when having ambrotypes made at the start of the war, though instead of rifle musket and Colt pistol and bowie knife, Stobrod and Pangle held fiddle and banjo before them as defining implements.

Pangle put his free arm around Stobrod's shoulders as schoolboy companions once did. The Guard raised their rifles and Pangle grinned at them. There was not a bit of irony or bravado in the smile. It was merely friendly.

-I can't shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said, half lowering his rifle.

-Quit grinning, Teague said to Pangle.

Pangle twisted his mouth up and worked to straighten it, but then it twitched and went back into a grin.

-There is nothing funny here, Teague said. Not a thing. Compose yourself to die.

Pangle wiped both hands down his face from hairline to chin. He pulled down the corners of his mouth with his pair of thumbs and when he let them go they sprung back up on him so that his face broke open in smile like a blossom.

-Take your hat off, Teague said.

Pangle took his hat off and, still grinning, held it two-handed at waist level by the brim. He turned it around and around as if in demonstration of how the world turns.

-Hold it over your face, Teague said.

Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where b.a.l.l.s struck after pa.s.sing through the meat of the two men.

black bark in winter -And when they finished up jerking their trigger fingers, the horses all jumped and spooked and the head man went to cussing them and took his hat off and went and slapped them all in their faces with it. They didn't cover them or even go stand over them to say words except that one of them said that what had pa.s.sed might fairly be called a shootout since shots had been fired. Then one of them laughed and one of them went and made water in the fire and they mounted up and rode off. I don't know what kind of place this is that I'm in, where people do one another that way.

The Georgia boy's bearing was of a man in the near aftermath of fright. He was yet excited, and there was urgency in his desire to express a tale he believed to be thrilling yet truthful.

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-I seen it all done, he said. Seen it all.

-Then why were you not killed or taken, if you were close enough to witness? Ada said.

The boy thought about it. He looked off to the side and he raked his hair off his brow with splayed fingers and then flipped at the gate latch with his thumb. He stood on the road side of the yard fence, Ada and Ruby on the other. They talked over the gate palings, and they could smell the woodsmoke in his damp sweated clothes, his wet unwashed hair.

-Heard it done, anyways, he answered. Heard what I didn't see, would be more as it was. I'd stepped into the woods, back a piece into the laurels. Of a necessity, like.

-Yes, Ada said.

-For the privacy, so to say.

-We took your meaning, Ruby said. What's the upshot of all this?

-It's what I'm trying to tell you. That I left them a-laying there b.l.o.o.d.y and dead in a heap under a big poplar. And then I run all the way here. I remembered where the fiddler said you lived. I went to that picture rock where we stopped yesterday for food. And I run down from there till I found the house.

-How long? Ruby said.

The boy looked around and examined the flat grey clouds and the blue ridgelines as if trying to get his bearings. But he could not call in which quarter west lay, nor did the sky give much a.s.sistance in saying what the hour might be, for it held no bright spots, only the few colors of an old axehead.

-It's three, Ada informed him. Two-thirty at the earliest.

-Three? the boy said, as if mildly surprised. He looked down and examined the beaten ground at the threshold to the yard. He pressed his lips together and worked his mouth. He was counting back.

He reached up and gripped two of the palings in his fists. He blew out air between his lips in a way as not quite to make a whistle.

-Seven hours, he finally said. Six or seven, I'd say.

-And you running all the way? Ruby said.

-Some of it running, he said. I was scared. It's hard to recollect, but I run till I give out. Then I run some and walked some. First one and then the other.

-We'll need you to guide us back there, Ada said.

But the boy did not wish to go back up on the mountain and would, he claimed, rather be shot where he stood than visit it again. He'd seen all of it he cared to see. Every companion he'd had there was now dead in its woods. He wanted to be home, was his only desire. And by his way of keeping tally, the news he had brought ought of its own to be worth some food and another blanket and a thing or two else he might need on the journey.

-Many another man would have left the two lie where they fell and not care that the wolves would soon strip them to bone, he said. And he told the women he reckoned wolves had already gotten to 2004-3-6.

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his dead cousin. Without digging implements the best he had been able to do by way of burial was to set the body under the lip of a little waterfall in the creek. There had been a dry place there beneath an undercut ledge where the water spilled over and made a curtain, so it was like a chamber between earth and water. He told how he sat his cousin up cross-legged against a rock and said some words over the still face to the effect that there was this world and one more and in that next one they might meet again. He said he walked away, and then he looked back and the sun was s.h.i.+ning through the mist of the waterfall and striking rainbows out of it. So, no. He had no intention of setting foot back on that mountain.

-Cold Mountain stands right in the way of where you want to be, Ruby said, but do as you please.

We've got no need for you. I know about where you're talking of, and we can lead the horse and not lack much of making it in five hours, walking every step of the way. We'll feed you, though. It's not like we've not been feeding every other stray that wanders through.

Ruby opened the gate and let the boy into the yard. He went and sat on the front steps between the big boxwoods and rubbed his hands together and breathed on them. Ruby stayed at the gate. She reached up and rested a hand on a bare twisted bough of the crabapple tree and stood looking out into the road.

Ada stepped to her side and looked at the side of her face. In Ada's experience, what women did at such times of loss was to weep and embrace each other and speak words of comfort and faith. And though she did not entirely trust those formulas anymore, she was ready to offer any of them to Ruby that might do her good. Ada did in fact reach out and touch the dark hair gathered up and bound with a hide strip at Ruby's neck.

Ruby, though, seemed not to welcome even that small comfort. She twisted her head away. She was not crying or balling up her ap.r.o.n hem in her hands, or in any other visible way fretting over the news of Stobrod's death. She just rested her hand on the crabapple limb and looked out into the road.

She expressed but one concern aloud. Were they burying the men on the mountain or bringing them to Black Cove and resting them in the little graveyard among the Blacks? There were reasons for and against either way. But since Stobrod and the Blacks had not cared for each other in life, she thought it, all in all, better to keep them separate in death.

-We need to know now, for it comes to a matter of what we pack, Ruby said. Shovels and the like.

Ada was somewhat confused about not bringing the men back. It sounded so informal, like burying a dog.

-We cannot just go up there and dig a hole and put them in it and come home, she said.

-How would that differ from what we'd do if we hauled them down here? Ruby said. It was me, I'd about rather rest on the mountain than anywhere else you could name.

Put that way, Ada could find no argument. She needed to go into the house to make dinner for the boy, but before she did she reached out and hugged Ruby for her own comfort if nothing else. Ada realized it was the first time they had embraced, and Ruby stood with her arms to her sides and was just a hard knot of a person in Ada's arms.

In the kitchen Ada made a plate of cold leftovers from their dinner- fried apples, corn bread, some dried lima beans that had cooked overlong to mush. The beans had congealed in the pot as they cooled and had a color and consistency that reminded her of pate. And so on a whim she unmolded the beans from the pot and cut two slices.

When she went outside and handed the boy the plate he studied the beans for some time. The look on 2004-3-6.

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his face said he believed he had found yet more evidence of the kind of place he was in.

-That's beans, Ada said.

The boy looked at them again and then forked off a tiny bite to test her word.

-We don't eat them thataway atall where I'm from, he said.

While the boy sat on the steps and ate, Ruby sat a step above him and talked him out a map of the long way around Cold Mountain. Ada sat in a porch rocker and watched them, two short dark people of such resemblance they might be taken for brother and sister. Ruby told the boy how to stick to the high ridges and avoid the main ways along creek valleys where people would be. Described all the landmarks he would need to make his way up Cold Spring k.n.o.b, then to Double Spring Gap and on to Bearpen Gap, Horsebone Gap, Beech Gap. From there head downhill, and at any fork of trail or creek, bear to the southwest. By such route the boy's flat and sorry home lay no more than two weeks distant.

-Go by dark and sleep by day and don't strike a light, Ruby said. Reckon even if you don't run all the way you'll be there for Christmas. They say you know Georgia when you come to it, for it's nothing but red dirt and rough roads.

Ruby dismissed him from her attention and turned to Ada and started planning their journey. The timing worked out poorly. It was Ruby's reasoning that with the days approaching the shortest of the year, one way or the other, either going or coming, they'd spend a night in the woods. It did not much matter which, was her thinking. They might as well get on. So she and Ada left the boy mopping his plate with a heel of corn bread and went in the house and banked up the fire and quickly threw together a camping kit to Ruby's specification. Bedding, cookware, food, candles, a tin box of lucifer matches and the sandpaper needed to ignite them, a dry bundle of fatwood kindling, a coil of rope, a hand axe, shotgun with powder and shot and wadding, grain for the horse, a mattock and spade. They heaped the gear in paired hemp sacks and tied the necks together and threw them over Ralph's back like rude lumpish panniers.

Ruby looked about at the sky for any marks of cloud or air or light that might foreshow the weather, and what they told was snow and gathering cold.

She said, Have you got any britches in the house?

-Trousers? Ada said.

-Woolen or canvas, either one. Two pair.

-Of my father's, yes.

-We need to go put them on, Ruby said.

-Men's trousers? Ada said.

-You wear what you want, but I don't relish the feel of a winter wind blowing up my dress tail. And who's up there to see?

They found two pairs of heavy wool hunting trousers, one pair black and the other grey. They dressed in long underwear and then drew the trousers on and cuffed up the bottoms and cinched the waists in with belts so that the extra material gathered like big pleats. They put on wool s.h.i.+rts and sweaters, and Ruby noted Monroe's broad-brimmed hats and said they would keep the snow from 2004-3-6.

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their faces, so they took two down from the shelf and put them on as well. Had the circ.u.mstances been happier, Ada thought, this would have been like the hair contest, a game of dress-up against which they might wager to see who could accouter herself most convincing as a man. Take lamp soot and draw mustaches and burnsides on their faces, carry around unlit cigars and mimic the silly gestures men used in smoking them. Instead they hardly spoke as they dressed, and they both were filled with dread toward the next pair of days.

Before they left, they rubbed beeswax into their boots and opened the door to the henhouse and likewise the door to the cow's stall and they heaped down hay on the floor. Ruby reckoned Waldo would be bawling to have her bag stripped by the time they got back. They gave the boy food and bedding and told him to sleep in the hayloft until dark made it safe for him to travel. When they went off leading the horse, the boy still sat between the boxwoods, and he waved to them like a host bidding visitors farewell.

Toward evening, snow fell through fog in the woods. Ada and Ruby walked in dim light under fir trees, and they were but vague dark shapes moving through a place that lacked all color other than gradations of gloom. The nearest trees looked very much like genuine trees, but those only slightly farther away were but a suggestion of trees as in a quick sketch, a casual gesture toward the form of trees. All of it seemed to Ada as if there were no such thing as landscape and that she wandered along in a cloud, with what little she could know an arm's length away. All else shrouded from understanding. It made Ralph nervous, and the horse went bowing his neck to left and right and working his ears back and forth to catch sounds of threat.

They had climbed for a long time under the thick canopy of dark hemlock. Then they crossed a low ridge and descended into a creek valley. They had long since left what to Ada was familiar territory.

The footing was soft from layers of dropped needles, and snow fell through the treetops as dry as sifted meal and swirled about the ground in patterns of arcs and loops. It seemed not to want to lie down.

After a time they crossed a black creek, stepping with care on the dry backs of humped stones. Ada looked at the way the creek was seizing up with a thin rim of bright ice along its banks and around rocks and fallen trees and nubbles of moss, anything that hindered the flow. In the center of the creek, though, the fast water ripped along as always.

Where it ran shallower and slower, then, were the places p.r.o.ne to freezing. Monroe would have made a lesson of such a thing, Ada thought. He would have said what the match of that creek's parts would be in a person's life, what G.o.d intended it to be the type of. All G.o.d's works but elaborate a.n.a.logy. Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.

Monroe had a book wherein you could look up the types. The rose- its thorns and its blossom-a type of the difficult and dangerous path to spiritual awakening. The baby-come wailing to the world in pain and blood-a type of our miserable earthly lives, so consumed with violence. The crow-its blackness, its outlaw nature, its tendency to feast on carrion-a type of the dark forces that wait to overtake man's soul.

So Ada quite naturally thought the stream and the ice might offer a weapon of the spirit. Or, perhaps, a warning. But she refused to believe that a book could say just how it should be construed or to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lack something essential and be as useless by itself as the gudgeon to a door hinge with no pintle.

On the stream's far bank the horse stopped and shook its hide until the pots rattled in their sacks, and 2004-3-6.

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then he stretched his neck and breathed soft and long out into the world in hope of some a.s.suring companion breath in return. Ada cupped her hand to his velvet muzzle. He put his tongue out and she took it between thumb and forefinger and waggled it gently and then they went on.

For a time they kept to the creekside as it tumbled from the mountain, but then the trail turned up a faint branch and entered a forest of hardwoods where there were yet twisted sc.r.a.ps of leaves clinging to the oak trees. They were old tired oaks and had globes of mistletoe in their branches. Snow fell harder and began to stick to the ground and the trail became a faint sunken line through the woods, an easy thing to miss as night came on. What path there was held not even the cupped tracks of hogs.

It seemed some abandoned Indian trail, long unwalked, linking a set of points that no longer existed.

They walked on well past nightfall, the snow still coming down. The clouds were thick and hid the waxing moon. Nevertheless there was light in the snow where it stood gathered up under the black tree trunks.