Cold Mountain Part 13

Teague let the men run a ways and then he put the carbine to his shoulder and shot down the two frontrunners, who fell with a great clatter of weaponry. The last man, the captive, stopped and raised his hands and faced them. Teague looked at him a minute. The man went bootless that day, and he dug his toes at the dirt as if looking for a better hold. Teague licked his thumb and wiped it on the fore sight of his Spencer and raised the carbine and fit bead to notch. The man stood there motionless. He kept his grip on the spiked cudgel so that he stood with it raised over his head as savages are depicted in bookplates.

Teague lowered the carbine and put the b.u.t.t of it on the ground and held it loose in one hand by the barrel.

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-Throw that stick down, or I'm sending these two over to pull you apart, he said.

The captive looked at the two big men and then dropped the pine knot at his feet.

-Good, Teague said. Now just stand there.

The men all walked over to the captive, and Ayron grabbed him by the neck and s.n.a.t.c.hed him up like a pup by the scruff. They then turned their attention toward the two men on the ground. One was dead and had hardly bled enough to stain his clothes. The other had taken a bullet to the bowels. He yet lived, but barely. He was propped up on his elbows and had pulled his britches and drawers down about his knees. He probed his wound with a pair of fingers and then looked at them and hollered, I'm kill't.

The Guard came and stood around him but when they smelled the tang in the air they backed off.

The captive squirmed like he wanted to go to his downed friend and Ayron hit him at the side of the head, three flat blows with the meat of his fist heel. Birch took out a black twist of chaw and gripped one end between his teeth and took his knife and sawed it off at his lips and put the remainder in his pocket. When he spit he scuffed dirt with his boot toe over the amber spot as if fastidious about marking the ground, heedful of leaving sign.

The shot man lay back flat and blinked at the sky and seemed baffled by it. His mouth formed words but he made no sound beyond the clickings of a dry mouth. Then his eyes closed and for some time he might have been thought dead except that at wide intervals he worked his fingers. He bled beyond all reason. The gra.s.s around him was matted red and his clothes hung heavy and slick like oilcloth.

Even in the dim light it looked bright. Then the blood quit coming and he opened his eyes again without any effort toward focus.

They guessed he had died.

Birch offered to go spit juice in his eye to see would he blink, but Teague said, We don't need to test him. He's pa.s.sed.

-This'uns preceded you in death like your old daddy, Birch said to the captive.

The man said nothing and Teague said, Birch, hush, and get me something to tie his hands and then we'll lead him back to town on the end of a line.

The boy went to the horses and came back with a coil of rope. But when Teague bent to tie his hands, the captive lost his mind. There was no accounting for his actions other than that he would rather die than be bound. He kicked out in fright, fetching Teague a glancing blow to the thigh. So Teague and the big men fought him and the man was so wild that for a time it was unclear who would prevail. He struck at them with every limb he had and b.u.t.ted with his head as well. He screamed the whole time, a high warbling scream that near to unnerved them all. But finally they threw him to the ground and lashed his wrists and ankles together. Even then he bucked and strained and reached with his head until he bit Teague on the hand, drawing blood. Teague wiped his hand on a coattail and looked at it.

-I'd rather take a hog bite than a man, he said.

He sent Birch back to the house for a straight chair and then they all worked at tying the man into it, binding him down with his arms to his sides and looping rope about his neck until he could do little but wiggle his fingers and twist his head about in the way turtles will do when flipped onto their backs.

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-There, Teague said. Like to see him bite me now.

-Berserk, Birch said. I've read about it. It's a word for a thing people can go.

They paused and squatted and caught their breaths, and the man strained against the ropes until his neck bled and then he fell quiet. Byron and Ayron rested with their forearms on their ma.s.sy thighs.

Teague sucked at his wound and then took out a kerchief and brushed the dirt from his black coat and wiped at the toe marks the man had left on the thigh of his pale pants. Birch held up his left hand and saw that in the struggle he had torn his long fingernail halfway across. He took out his knife and pared it away, cursing all the while at his loss.

Ayron said, We could take that little drag sled there and set him up in it and ride him into town harnessed to that chair.

-Could, Teague said. But I'm leaning right now toward carrying him up to the barn loft and roping his neck to a rafter and shoving him out the hay door.

-You can't hang a man a-sitting, Birch said.

-Can't? Teague said. I'd like to know why not? h.e.l.l, I've seen it done.

-Well, still, it'd look better if we brought somebody in now and then, Birch said.

The men stood and conferred and they evidently saw the reason in Birch's thinking, for they gathered around the chair and lifted it and carried it to the sled. They tied the chair to the sled and harnessed it to the mule and set off for town, the man's head jouncing for he had no will to even hold it level.

-This world won't stand long, the captive hollered in conclusion to his tale. G.o.d won't let it stand this way long.

By the time he was done talking, the sun had fallen well to the west, and Ada and Ruby turned from the courthouse and started walking home. They were both grim and initially wordless, and then later along the way they discussed the captive's story. Ada wanted to cast it as exaggeration, but Ruby's conclusion was that it ought to be viewed as truth since it sorted so well with the capabilities of men.

Then they argued generally for a mile or two as to whether the world might better be viewed as such a place of threat and fear that the only consonant att.i.tude one could maintain was gloom, or whether one should strive for light and cheer even though a dark-fisted hand seemed poised ready to strike at any moment.

When they reached the west fork of the Pigeon and turned up the river road, the light was growing thin and a shadow already draped itself over the k.n.o.b called Big Stomp, cast by the larger mountains of the Blue Ridge. The water looked black and cold, and the smell of river hung in the air, about equal parts mineral and vegetable. Though the river had fallen some since morning, it was still up from the last night's rain, and the rocks out in it were wet and dark where trees from either bank nearly met in the middle and kept the watercourse shaded all day.

They had not walked far above the fork when Ruby stopped and squared her body to the water, sighting on something in it as if to take range. She sank down in her knees just a notch, like a fighter lowering his center of gravity to compose himself for attack. She said, Well, look there. That's not a common sight.

Off in the river stood a great blue heron. It was a tall bird to begin with, but something about the angle from which they viewed it and the cast of low sun made it seem even taller. It looked high as a man in the slant light with its long shadow blown out across the water. Its legs and the tips of its 2004-3-6.

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wings were black as the river. The beak of it was black on top and yellow underneath, and the light shone off it with muted sheen as from satin or chipped flint. The heron stared down into the water with fierce concentration. At wide intervals it took delicate slow steps, lifting a foot from out the water and pausing, as if waiting for it to quit dripping, and then placing it back on the river bottom in a new spot apparently chosen only after deep reflection.

Ruby said, He's looking for a frog or a fish.

But his staring so heedfully into the water reminded Ada of Narcissus, and to further their continuing studies of the Greeks, she told Ruby a brief version of the tale.

-That bird's not thinking about himself at all, Ruby said, when Ada had finished the story. Look at that beak on him. Stab wounds; that's his main nature. He's thinking about what other thing he can stab and eat.

They stepped slowly toward the river edge and the heron turned to look at them with some interest.

He made tiny precise adjustments of his narrow head as if having trouble sighting around his blade of beak. His eyes seemed to Ada to be searching for her merits and coming up short.

-What are you doing up here? she said aloud to the heron. But she knew by the look of him that his nature was anchorite and mystic. Like all of his kind, he was a solitary pilgrim, strange in his ways and governed by no policy or creed common to flocking birds. Ada wondered that herons could tolerate each other close enough to breed. She had seen a scant number in her life, and those so lonesome as to make the heart sting on their behalf. Exile birds. Everywhere they were seemed far from home.

The heron walked toward them to the river edge and stood on a welt of mud. He was not ten feet away. He tipped his head a notch off level, raised a black leg, scales as big as fingernails, the foot held just off the ground. Ada stared down at the strange footprint in the mud. When she looked up, the bird was staring at her as at someone met long ago, dimly registered in memory.

Then the heron slowly opened its wings. The process was carried out as if it were a matter of hinges and levers, cranks and pulleys. All the long bones under feathers and skin were much in evidence.

When it was done the wings were so broad that Ada could not imagine how it would get out among the trees. The bird took a step toward Ada, lifted itself from the ground, and with only a slow beat or two of the immense wings soared just above her head and up and away through the forest canopy.

Ada felt the sweep of wings, the stir of air, a cold blue shadow across the ground, across the skin of her face. She wheeled and watched until the heron was gone into the sky. She threw up a hand like waving 'bye to visiting kin. What would that be? she wondered. A blessing? A warning beacon?

Picket of the spirit world?

Ada took out her new journal and whittled one of the charcoal pencils to a point with her penknife.

She made a quick, loose-lined memory sketch of the heron as it had stood in the mud. When she was done she was dissatisfied with the curve of the neck and the angle of the beak, but she had the legs and the ruff of feathers at his crop and the look in his eye just right. Across the bottom of the page in her runic hand she wrote Blue heron/Forks of the Pigeon/9 October 1864. Blue heron/Forks of the Pigeon/9 October 1864. She looked up at the sky and then said to Ruby, What time would you guess it to be? She looked up at the sky and then said to Ruby, What time would you guess it to be?

Ruby c.o.c.ked an eye to the west and said, A little after five, and Ada wrote down five o'clock five o'clock and closed the journal. and closed the journal.

As they walked on up the river they talked of the bird, and Ruby revealed what she felt to be her snaggy relations.h.i.+p with herons. Stobrod, she said, had often during her childhood disclaimed her, saying she had no man-father. Her mother, during her pregnancy with Ruby-when drunk and 2004-3-6.

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embittered and wis.h.i.+ng to get a rise out of him-had often charged that Stobrod had no part in the baby and that its cause was a tall blue heron. She claimed it had lit at the creek one morning and, after spending the forenoon spearing crawfish, had come into the yard where she was breaking apart a crust of old corn bread and scattering it on the ground for the chickens. The tale Ruby's mother told, as recounted by Stobrod, was that the heron strode up on its long back-hinged legs and looked her eye to eye. She claimed, Stobrod said, that the look was unmistakable, not open to but one interpretation. She turned and ran, but the heron chased her into the house, where, as she hunkered on hands and knees trying to squeeze under the bedstead to hide, the heron came upon her from behind. She described what ensued as like a flogging of dreadful scope.

-He told me that story a hundred times, Ruby said. I mostly know it to be one of his lies, but I still can't look on one of those birds without wondering.

Ada did not know what to say. The light under the trees by the river had fallen to gold and the leaves on beech and poplar s.h.i.+vered in a small wind. Ruby stopped and put on her sweater and Ada shook the wrinkles out of the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cloak. They walked on, and at the ford of the river they met a young woman carrying a baby wrapped in a checked tablecloth slung over her shoulder. She skipped barefoot across the stepping stones as graceful as a deer running and said not a word nor even met their eyes when she pa.s.sed, though the baby stared at them expressionless from eyes as brown as acorn caps set in his head. Soon after the ford, small birds flew from an apple tree standing alone in an old field. They flew close to the ground and entered the woods. The setting sun was in Ruby's eyes so that she could only make a guess at their kind, but for weather purposes it did not matter. The thing their pattern of flying told was more rain.

Yet farther up the road, near a hole in the river where people were sometimes dipped in baptism, a cloud of martins erupted out of a maple tree nearing the peak of its color. The sun's bottom limb was just touching the ridge and the sky was the color of hammered pewter. The martins flew from the tree as one body, still in the shape of the round maple they had filled. Then they banked into the wind, slipped sideways in the moving air on extended wings for two heartbeats, so that Ada viewed them in thin profile and saw much silver s.p.a.ce between the individual birds. Immediately, as if on signal, they swept into a steep climb and the fullness of their wings turned toward her and closed the bright gaps between the birds so that the flock looked like the black image of the red maple projected into the sky. The bird shadows across the long field gra.s.s beyond the road flickered.

Twilight rose up around Ada and Ruby as if the dark from the river were seeping skyward. Ruby's fanciful heron story of source and root reminded Ada of a story Monroe had told not long before his death. It concerned the manner in which he had wooed her mother, and to pa.s.s the darkening miles upriver, Ada recounted it in some detail to Ruby.

Ada had known that Monroe and her mother had married relatively late in life, he at forty-five, she at thirty-six. And Ada knew their time together had been brief. But she did not know the circ.u.mstances of their courts.h.i.+p and marriage, a.s.suming it an alliance of calm friends.h.i.+p, the sort of tie she had seen formed numerous times between peculiar old bachelors and aging spinsters. She supposed herself to be a product of some sad miscalculation.

That is until one afternoon in the winter before Monroe's death. A wet snow had fallen all day, the large flakes melting as they struck the ground. Ada and Monroe sat by the fire through the long afternoon, Ada reading to him from a new book, The Conduct of Life. The Conduct of Life. Monroe had for many years followed Mr. Emerson's every published utterance with keen interest, and that day he thought Emerson, as always, even in old age, perhaps one degree more extreme in his spiritual views than was called for. Monroe had for many years followed Mr. Emerson's every published utterance with keen interest, and that day he thought Emerson, as always, even in old age, perhaps one degree more extreme in his spiritual views than was called for.

As the day drew to a close outside the windows, Ada put the book aside. Monroe looked tired, grey, his eyes sunken. He sat studying the fire, which had settled into its ashes and burned slowly, with 2004-3-6.

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scarce flame. Eventually he said, I have never told you how I came to marry your mother.

-No, Ada said.

-It is a thing that keeps coming into my mind of late. I don't know why. You've never known that I met your mother when she was barely sixteen and I twenty-five.

-No, Ada said.

-Oh, yes. The first time I saw her I thought she was the loveliest thing I'd ever seen. It was February. A grey day, chill, with a faint damp breeze blowing from off the ocean. I was out riding. I had then recently bought a great Hanoverian gelding. Seventeen hands if an inch. A bloodstone chestnut. He was just the slightest bit cow-hocked, but not enough to matter. His canter was a thing of wonder, like floating. I had ridden him some way out of Charleston, north along the Ashley, past Middleton. Then over and down to Hanahan on my way back home. It was a long ride. The horse was lathered despite the coolness of the air, and I was hungry and anxious for supper. It was just this time of day. Grey night. We were at the first point where you could with confidence say we had left the country and entered the city.

We came to a house, one that could be described as neither modest nor grand. It had a broad porch with old palmettos at either end. It was too near the road for my tastes. Its windows were dark, and it had a water trough in the yard. Thinking no one home, I stopped and dismounted to water my horse.

From the porch a woman's voice came, saying, You might ask leave first.

She had apparently been sitting alone on a bench beneath the windows. I took off my hat and said, I beg your pardon. She stepped out from the shadow of the porch and walked down the steps and stopped on the bottom one. She wore a winter dress of grey wool, a black shawl about her shoulders.

Hair the color of a crow's wing. She had been brus.h.i.+ng it, for it was down nearly to the small of her back, and she held a brush with a tor-toisesh.e.l.l handle. Her face was pale as marble. There was not a thing about her that was not either black, white, or a shade between the two.

Despite her harsh attire, I was totally disarmed. I have never seen the match to her. There is not a word for how beautiful she looked to me. All I could say was, Again, miss, I beg your pardon. I mounted and rode away, fl.u.s.tered, my thoughts all in a churn. Some time that night, after I had taken dinner and gone to bed, it came to me. That was the woman I was meant to marry.

The next day I set about courting her, and I went at it just as hard and as carefully as a man can. First I collected information. I found that her name was Claire Dechutes. Her father, a Frenchman, made a living trading back and forth with his home country, importing wine and exporting rice. He was a man of comfort, if not of great means. I arranged a meeting with him at his warehouse near a dock on the Cooper. A dank and gloomy place that smelled of the river. It was filled with wooden crates of claret, both fine and cheap, and tow sacks of our rice. We were introduced by my friend Aswell, who had done business with Dechutes in the past. Dechutes, your grandfather, was a short man, and heavy. Portly would be the term. More French in his ways than I care for, if you take my meaning.

Neither you nor your mother shared any observable characteristic with him.

I made my intentions clear from the start: I wished to marry his daughter and sought his approval and a.s.sistance. I offered to provide him with references, financial statements, anything that might convince him of my desirability as a son-in-law. I could see his mind working. He tugged at his cravat. Rolled his eyes. He went off to the side and conferred with Aswell for a time. When he returned, he reached out his hand and said, May I offer any a.s.sistance within my power.

His only sticking point was this: he wished Claire not to marry before her eighteenth birthday. I agreed. Two years seemed not too long to wait, and a fair request on his part. Within a few days he 2004-3-6.

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took me home to dinner as his guest. My introduction to your mother was at his hand. I could see in her eyes that she knew me from the night in the yard, but she said not a word of it. I believed from the beginning that my feeling toward her was returned.

We courted for months, through the spring and summer and into the autumn. We met at b.a.l.l.s to which I arranged her invitation. I rode north to the Dechutes house over and over on the Hanoverian gelding. Claire and I sat on the bench on the broad porch night after night through the humid summer and talked of every subject dear to our hearts. Days when I could not ride out, we posted letters which crossed paths somewhere on Meeting Street. In the late fall, I had a ring made. It was a blue diamond, a stone as big as the end of your little finger. It was set in a band of white filigreed gold. I made up my mind to present it to her one evening in late November as a surprise.

On the chosen date, I rode the Hanoverian out north in the dusk, the ring nestling in a pouch of velvet in my waistcoat pocket. It was a night with a chill in the air, brisk and wintery, at least in Charleston terms. A night alike in its every feature to the one on which we had first met.

By the time I reached the Dechutes house, the sky was fully dark. But the house was lighted, every window ablaze in welcome. The sound of a piano, Bach, faintly reached me from inside. I sat in the road a moment, thinking the night to be the culmination of the previous seasons' effort. All my heart's desire within easy reach.

Then I heard the low murmur of voices from the porch. Saw movement. Claire's profile leaned forward, her black silhouette framed in the yellow light of the window. There was no mistaking it for anyone else's. From the other side of the window leaned another face, a man's. They met and kissed, a long kiss and a pa.s.sionate one from what I could tell. Their faces parted, and her hand reached to his face and guided it back again. My stomach clenched. And my hands. I longed to step to the porch and shout my outrage and thrash someone. But the humiliating role of the betrayed suitor was not one I relished playing.

Without another thought I put spurs to the horse and sped off north at a feverish pace. We went for miles and miles. That tall horse stretching out long in its gallop. It was like riding in a dream, hurling through a dark world at a rate more akin to winged flight than riding horseback. We pa.s.sed through dense flats of turkey oak and slash pine and yaupon, through open barrens of wire gra.s.s and saw gra.s.s, until finally, in a place where wax myrtle thickets hemmed in the road to left and right, the horse slowed and walked, blowing hard, head down.

I had no clear idea where I was. I had not kept up with the turnings of the roads or even the fine points of the compa.s.s bearing we had been following. Generally north was all I knew, for we had not plunged into either the Ashley or the Cooper and drowned. In the scant light of a partial moon, the sweated chestnut gelding looked black as ebony, and as glossy. Other than act fully the wildman and set a course west to lose myself for life in the trackless territories of Texas, there was little to do but turn and head home. As I fixed to do so, however, I saw that ahead of me the sky was lighted up yellow over the wax myrtles as by a bonfire. Other features of creation seemed as inflamed as I was.

The fire provided, I reasoned, an interim direction.

I made toward its light, and in a turn or two of the road came upon a church afire. Its roof and steeple were ablaze, but the body of the building was yet untouched. I left the horse and walked to the church and entered the door and walked down the aisle. I took the ring pouch from my pocket and placed it on the altar and then stood there in the smoke and the garish light. Pieces of roof began falling about me flaming. I am the groom waiting at the altar; I will burn myself down, I thought.

Just then a man burst through the doors. His clothes were twisted on him and he carried a quart liquor bottle with but an inch left glowing amber at the bottom. He said, What are you doing here?

Get out.

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Pride, I guess, made me say, I happened by. I came in to see if I could be of help.

-Well, get out, he said.

I left the church with him, and we determined to try to save it, though he was drunk and I was half out of my mind. From a creek nearby, we carried what water we could in his liquor bottle. We'd squat by the creek waiting for the bottle to glug full through its narrow neck and then together we would walk to the church and throw the water on the fire a quart at a time, not so much in hope of putting it out as to be able to say, if asked, that we tried. When dawn came, the man and I stood with sooty faces looking at a round black circle on the land.

-Well, that's that. Everything's burned but the hinges and the doork.n.o.bs, the man said.

-Yes, I said.