Cold Mountain Part 5

Ada smiled and nodded. She had not figured him to know the word.

Then she said, Tell me this. A woman earlier commented on the recent weather. She called it sheep-killing weather. I've been wondering, can't get it out of my mind. Did she mean weather appropriate for slaughtering sheep or weather foul enough to kill them itself without a.s.sistance, perhaps by drowning or pneumonia?

-The first, Inman said.

-Well, then, I thank you. You've served a useful purpose.

She turned and walked away to her father. Inman watched her touch Monroe's arm and say something to him, and they went to the cabriolet and climbed in and wheeled off, fading down the lane between fencerows thicketed with blossoming blackberry canes.

Eventually, late in the day, Inman emerged from out the foul pinewoods and found himself wandering the banks of a great swollen river. The sun stood just above the low horizon at the far bank, and there was a haze in the air so that everything was cast in a lurid yellow light. The rain had evidently been harder somewhere upstream and had raised the river to its banks and beyond, too wide and strong to swim, even had Inman been a good swimmer. So, hoping to find an unguarded bridge or trestle, he walked up the riverbank, following a thin footpath that ran between the grim pine forest to his right and the sorry river to his left.

It was a foul region, planed off flat except where there were raw gullies cut deep in the red clay.

Scrubby pines everywhere. Trees of a better make had once stood in their place but had been cut down long ago, the only evidence of them now an occasional hardwood stump as big around as a 2004-3-6.

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dinner table. Poison ivy grew in thick beds that stretched as far as Inman could see through the woods. It climbed the pine trees and spread among their limbs. The falling needles caught in the tangled ivy vines and softened the lines of the trunks and limbs and formed heavy new shapes of them until the trees loomed like green and grey beasts risen out of the ground.

The forest looked to be a sick and dangerous place. It recalled to him a time during the fighting down along the coast when a man had shown him a tiny plant, a strange and hairy thing that grew in bogs.

It knew to eat meat, and they fed it little pieces of fatback from the end of a splinter. You could hold the tip of a finger to what stood for its mouth and it would snap at you. These flatwoods seemed only a step away from learning the trick on a grander scale.

What Inman wanted was to be out of there, but the river stretched wide before him, a s.h.i.+t-brown clog to his pa.s.sage. As a liquid, it bore likeness more to mola.s.ses as it first thickens in the making than to water. He wished never to become accustomed to this sorry make of waterway. It did not even fit his picture of a river. Where he was from, the word river river meant rocks and moss and the sound of white water moving fast under the spell of a great deal of collected gravity. Not a river in his whole territory was wider than you could pitch a stick across, and in every one of them you could see bottom wherever you looked. meant rocks and moss and the sound of white water moving fast under the spell of a great deal of collected gravity. Not a river in his whole territory was wider than you could pitch a stick across, and in every one of them you could see bottom wherever you looked.

This broad ditch was a smear on the landscape. But for the b.a.l.l.s of yellow scud collected in drifted foamy heaps upstream of grounded logs, the river was as opaque and unmarked as a sheet of tin painted brown. Foul as the contents of an outhouse pit.

Inman fared on through this territory, criticizing its every feature. How did he ever think this to be his country and worth fighting for? Ignorance alone would account for it. All he could list in his mind worth combat right now was his right to exist unmolested somewhere on the west fork of the Pigeon River drainage basin, up on Cold Mountain near the source of Scapecat Branch.

He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all the year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks pa.s.sing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanis.h.i.+ng.

But even though he believed truly that you can think on a thing till it comes real, this last thought never shaped up so, no matter how hard he tried. What hope he had was no brighter than if someone had lit fire to a taper at the mountain's top and left him far away to try setting a course by it.

He walked on and shortly night began to fall and a part of a moon shone through patchy clouds. He came upon a road that ended in the river; beside it, a sign that someone had stuck up at the water's edge read Ferry. $5. Yell Loud.

A stout rope stretched from a thick post across the water and disappeared into it. Toward the far bank, the rope rose from the water again to end at another post. Beyond the landing, Inman saw a house on stilts raised above the highwater mark. A window was lit and smoke came from the chimney.

Inman called out, and in a minute a figure appeared on the porch and waved and went back in. Soon, though, it reappeared from behind the house dragging a dugout canoe by a line. The boatman got it afloat and mounted it and set out rowing hard upstream in the slower water that flowed near the bank. Still it was a strong current, and he dug with bowed back at the paddle until it looked like he planned to just keep on going. Before he went out of sight, though, he turned and sat up and let the 2004-3-6.

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current carry him down, angling to the east bank, working easily, saving effort. Just barely touching the blade to the water to set a course. The dugout was old and the dry wood was sun-bleached, so that the crude and blockish sides of it shone like beaten pewter against the dark water when the moon broke from between clouds.

As the canoe came in toward sh.o.r.e where Inman stood, he saw that it was piloted by no ferryman but an apple-cheeked girl, dark about the head and skin so as to suggest Indian blood back a generation or two. She wore a dress of homespun that in the dim light he took to be yellow. She had big strong hands, and the muscles of her forearms knotted under the skin with every stroke. Her black hair was loose about her shoulders. She whistled a tune as she approached. At the bank she stepped out of the dugout barefooted into the muddy water, pulling the canoe by a line at its bow to beach it. Inman drew a five-dollar note from his pocket and reached it to her. She didn't reach to take it, but only looked at it with some measure of disgust.

-I wouldn't give a thirsty man a dipper of this river water for five dollars, much less paddle you across it, she said.

-The sign says the ferry charge is five.

-This look like a ferryboat to you?

-Is this a ferry crossing or not?

-It is when Daddy's here. He's got a flatboat big enough to carry a team and wagon. He pulls it across on the rope. But with the river up he can't run it. He's gone off hunting, waiting for the water to drop. Until then, I'm charging the utmost somebody's willing to pay, for I've got me a cowhide and I aim to get a saddle made from it. And when I get me that, I'll start saving for a horse, and when I get one, I'll throw the saddle over it and turn my back to this river and be gone.

-What's the name of this thing? Inman said.

-Why it's nothing but the mighty Cape Fear River is all, the girl said.

-Well, what will you charge me to get over it? Inman said.

-Fifty dollars scrip, the girl said.

-Take twenty?

-Let's go.

Before they could climb into the boat, Inman saw great greasy bubbles rising to the surface thirty feet out from the bank. They shone in the moonlight as they broke, and they moved in a direction counter to the river's flow, going upstream at about the pace of a man walking. The night was windless and still, and there were not other sounds than the water blubbering and the bugs skirling in the pines.

-You see that? Inman said.

-Yeah, the girl said.

-What's making it?

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-Hard to say, it being at the bottom of the river.

The water broke as huge and urgent as breath from a drowning cow. Inman and the girl stood and watched as the bubbles gradually climbed the river until the moon was overblown by a bank of clouds and they disappeared in the darkness.

-Could be a catfish rooting along the river bottom to dig up some food, the girl said. They've got a diet would kill a turkey vulture. I seen one the size of a boar hog one time. It was washed up dead on a sandbar. Whiskers on it the size of blacksnakes.

That would be the sort of thing that would grow in this river, Inman figured. Monstrous flabby fish with meat as slack as fatback. He thought of the great contrast between such a creature and the little trout that lived in the upper branches of the Pigeon where the water poured ofFCold Mountain. They were seldom longer than your hand. Bright and firm as shavings from a bar of silver.

Inman tossed his packs in ahead of him and boarded the canoe and settled himself into the prow. The girl got in behind him and dug hard against the water, paddling with a strong and sure hand, keeping a straight course by kicking out at the tail of the stroke rather than constantly switching sides. The splash of the paddle overrode even the insects' squealing.

The girl dug hard at the water to send them a fair piece up the river from the landing, taking advantage of the slower water near the bank. Then she turned about and quit paddling and stuck the blade in the water like a rudder. She angled them out, using the current to drive them toward the river's midpoint. With the moon hidden, the land beyond the riverbank soon disappeared, and they floated blind in a world black as the inside of a cow. In the silence they heard the sound of voices from the eastern landing carrying far across the water. It might have been anybody. Inman doubted the men from the town had enough purpose to follow him so far.

Still, he turned and, whispering, said to the girl, We'd best not be found out. But at that moment he looked up and saw a radius of moon appear from under clouds. It soon stood fully revealed in a little ragged window of sky. The sun-bleached side of the canoe shone out like a beacon on the dark water.

There was a sound like running fingernails across the grain of corduroy and a whacking sound. The crack of gunfire followed.

The Whitworth, Inman thought.

A hole opened up at the back of the canoe at waterline. Brown water streamed in at the alarming rate of a cow p.i.s.sing. Inman looked ahead to the landing and saw a party of a half-dozen men milling about in the moonlight. Some of them began firing their little pistols, but they had not the carrying power to cover the distance. The man with the rifle, though, had it turned up and was working with the ramrod to tamp in a fresh load. The only way Inman could figure it, the men must have framed the evening in their minds as a type of c.o.o.n hunt, as sport; otherwise they would have long since gone back to town.

The ferry girl sized up the situation immediately and threw her weight to rock the canoe hard, tipping it to the gunwales to wet it down and darken it. Inman tore the cuff off his s.h.i.+rt and was plugging the hole when another ball struck the side at waterline and tore off a chunk of wood as big as a hand.

The river poured in and soon began filling the bottom of the boat.

-There's nothing else but that we are going to have to get down in the river, the girl said.

Inman first thought she intended them to strike out swimming for sh.o.r.e. Not having come from a 2004-3-6.

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country of deep water, though, he doubted his ability to swim that far. Instead, she proposed they get in the water and hold to the canoe, using it for cover. Inman wrapped his packs with his oilcloth and tied the bundle off tight as he could with the loose ends in case the canoe should sink entirely. Then, together, he and the girl threw themselves into the river to let the current take them, bearing them up and away, spinning them off downstream.

Though the surface was smooth as a mirror and looked as if it could move at no greater pace than an ooze, the swollen river boomed along at the speed of a millrace. The dugout, partially filled with water, floated low in the river, just the spade-shaped bow fully above the surface. Inman had swallowed water, and he spit and spit until he could bring up nothing but white foam, trying to clear his mouth of the foul river. Uglier water he had never tasted.

The moon came and went among the clouds, and when there was enough light to aim by, rounds from the Whitworth hit the canoe or struck the water and skipped off stuttering across the surface.

Inman and the girl tried to kick with their legs and steer the upturned boat to the western sh.o.r.e, but in its heaviness it seemed to have a mind of its own and would in no way do their bidding. They gave up and let themselves be carried along, just their faces above water. There was nothing to do but hang on and wait for a bend in the river and hope that the evening would present something to their advantage.

From down in it, the river looked even wider than from the bank. The foul country pa.s.sing along on either side was vague and ominous in the moonlight. Inman's hope was that it would strike neither mark nor impress on his mental workings, so vile did its contours lie about him.

Even from out in the river he could hear that the bugs squealed among the poison ivy without pause.

He was but a little head floating in a great void plane bounded by a dark jungle of venomous plants.

Any minute he figured to see the white bewhiskered maw of the monster catfish rise from the water and suck him in. All his life adding up to no more than catfish droppings on the bottom of this swill trough of a river.

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. Hate took no effort other than to look about. It was a weakness, he acknowledged, to be of such a mind that all around him had to lie fair for him call it satisfactory. But there were places he knew where such would generally be the case. Cold Mountain. Scapecat Branch. And right now the first impediment to being there was a hundred yards of river.

After a time, the moon was blinded again by clouds, and they drifted past the landing, and Inman could hear the men talking as clearly as if he stood amid the group. One man, evidently the owner of the Whitworth, said, It was daylight, I could shoot the ears off his head with this thing.

Long moments later the moon again appeared. Inman raised up and looked across the dugout. Way back at the ferry landing, he saw little figures waving their arms and jumping up and down in their rage. They receded, and he could think of many things that he wished could similarly just get smaller and smaller until they disappeared. The main evidence of their existence was the occasional splash of lead, followed at some interval by the report of the long rifle. Like lightning and thunder, Inman thought. He occupied the time counting the seconds between the slap of a ball and the faint pop. He could not, however, remember the way you were supposed to figure distance from it. Nor did he know if the same principle applied.

The river eventually swept them around a bend and put the landing out of sight. Now that they could safely get to the other side of the canoe they could kick to some effect, and in short order they fetched up on land. That side of the canoe was shot to pieces beyond repair, so they left it wallowing in the shallow water and set out walking upstream.

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When they got to the house, Inman gave the girl more money as compensation for the old dugout, and she gave him directions for finding the roads west.

-Some few miles up, this river forks out into the Haw and the Deep. The Deep's the left fork and you'll stay near it for some time, for it runs mainly from the west.

Inman walked on up the river until he reached the forks, and then he went into the brush until he was hid. He dared not light a fire to make corn mush and so ate but a green windfall apple he had picked up out of the road and the cheese and dry biscuit, which now carried a strong foretaste of the Cape Fear. He kicked together a bed of duff deep enough to keep him off the damp ground and stretched out and slept for three hours. He awoke sore and bruised about the face from the fight. Blisters of poison ivy beaded up on his hands and forearms from his flight through the flat/woods. When he put a hand to his neck, he found fresh blood where his wound had cracked open and leaked, from the strain of whipping the three men or from the soaking in the river. He took up his packs and set off again walking.

verbs, all of them tiring The agreement Ada and Ruby reached on that first morning was this: Ruby would move to the cove and teach Ada how to run a farm. There would be very little money involved in her pay. They would take most of their meals together, but Ruby did not relish the idea of living with anyone else and decided she would move into the old hunting cabin. After they had eaten their first dinner of chicken and dumplings, Ruby went home and was able to wrap everything worth taking in a quilt. She had gathered the ends, slung it over her shoulder, and headed to Black Cove, never looking back.

The two women spent their first days together making an inventory of the place, listing the things that needed doing and their order of urgency. They walked together about the farm, Ruby looking around a lot, evaluating, talking constantly. The most urgent matter, she said, was to get a late-season garden into the ground. Ada followed along, writing it all down in a notebook that heretofore had received only her bits of poetry, her sentiments on life and the large issues of the day. Now she wrote entries such as these: To be done immediately: Lay out a garden for cool season crops- turnips, onions, cabbage, lettuce, turnips, onions, cabbage, lettuce, greens. Cabbage seed, do we have any? greens. Cabbage seed, do we have any?

Soon: Patch s.h.i.+ngles on barn roof; do we have a maul andfroe? Buy clay crocks for preserving tomatoes and beans. Pick herbs and make from them worm boluses for the horse. tomatoes and beans. Pick herbs and make from them worm boluses for the horse.

And on and on. So much to do, for apparently Ruby planned to require every yard of land do its duty.

The hayfields, Ruby said, had not been cut frequently enough, and the gra.s.s was in danger of being taken over by spurge and yarrow and ragweed, but it was not too far gone to save. The old cornfield, she declared, had profited from having been left to lie fallow for several years and was now ready for clearing and turning. The outbuildings were in fair shape, but the chicken population was too low.

The root cellar in the can house was, in her estimation, a foot too shallow; she feared a bad cold spell might freeze potatoes stored there if they didn't dig it deeper. A martin colony, if they could establish one alongside the garden in gourd houses, would help keep crows away.

Ruby's recommendations extended in all directions, and she never seemed to stop. She had ideas concerning schedules for crop rotation among the various fields. Designs for constructing a tub mill so that once they had a corn crop they could grind their own meal and grits using waterpower from the creek and save having to give the miller his t.i.the. One evening before she set off in the dark to 2004-3-6.

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walk up to the cabin, her last words were, We need us some guineas. I'm not partial to their eggs for frying, but they'll do for baking needs. Even discarding the eggs, guineas are a comfort to have around and useful in a number of ways. They're good watchdogs, and they'll bug out a row of pole beans before you can turn around. All that aside from how pleasant they are to look at walking around the yard.

The next morning her first words were, Pigs. Do you have any loose in the woods?

Ada said, No, we always bought our hams.

-There's a world more to a hog than just the two hams, Ruby said. Take lard for example. We'll need plenty.

Despite the laxity of Monroe's tenure at Black Cove, there was nevertheless much more to work with than Ada had realized. On one of their first walks about the place, Ruby was delighted by the extensive apple orchards. They had been planted and maintained by the Blacks and were only now beginning to show the first marks of inattention. Despite lack of recent pruning, they were thick with maturing fruit.

-Come October, Ruby said, we'll get enough in trade for those apples to make our winter a sight easier than it would be otherwise.

She paused and thought a minute. You don't have a press, do you? she said. When Ada said she thought they might indeed, Ruby whooped in joy.

-Hard cider is worth considerably more in trade than apples, she said. All we'll have to do is make it.

Ruby was pleased too with the tobacco patch. In the spring, Monroe had given the hired man permission to plant a small field of tobacco for his own use. Despite most of a summer of neglect, the plants were surprisingly tall and full-leaved and worm-free, though weeds grew thick in the rows and the plants were badly in need of topping and suckering. Ruby believed the plants had thrived despite disregard because they must have been planted in full accordance with the signs. She calculated that with luck they might get a small crop and said that if they cured the leaves and soaked them in sorghum water and twisted them into plugs, they could trade off tobacco for seed and salt and leavening and other items they could not produce themselves.

Barter was very much on Ada's mind, since she did not understand it and yet found herself suddenly so untethered to the money economy. In the spirit of partners.h.i.+p and confidence, she had shared with Ruby the details of her shattered finances. When she told Ruby of the little money they had to work with, Ruby said, I've never held a money piece bigger than a dollar in my hand. What Ada came to understand was that though she might be greatly concerned at their lack of cash, Ruby's opinion was that they were about as well off without it. Ruby had always functioned at arm's length from the buying of things and viewed money with a great deal of suspicion even in the best of times, especially when she contrasted it in her mind with the solidity of hunting and gathering, planting and harvesting. At present, matters had pretty much borne out Ruby's darkest opinions. Scrip had gotten so cheapened in its value that it was hard to buy anything with it anyway. On their first trip together into town they had been stunned to have to give fifteen dollars for a pound of soda, five dollars for a paper of triple-ought needles, and ten for a quire of writing paper. Had they been able to afford it, a bolt of cloth would have cost fifty dollars. Ruby pointed out that cloth would cost them not a cent if they had sheep and set about shearing, carding, spinning, winding, dyeing, and weaving the wool into cloth for dresses and underdrawers. All Ada could think was that every step in the process that Ruby had so casually sketched out would be many days of hard work to come up with a few yards of material coa.r.s.e as sacking. Money made things so much easier.

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But even if they had it, shopkeepers really didn't want money since the value of it would likely drop before they could get shut of it. The general feeling was that paper money ought to be spent as soon as possible; otherwise it might easily become worth no more than an equal volume of chaff. Barter was surer. And that Ruby seemed to understand fully. She had a headful of designs as to how they might make Black Cove answer for itself in that regard.

In short order Ruby had devised a plan. She put it to Ada as a choice. The two things she had marked in her inventory of the place as being valuable and portable and inessential were the cabriolet and the piano. She believed she could trade either one for about all they would need to make it through the winter. Ada weighed them in her mind for two days. At one point she said, It would be a shame to reduce that fine dapple gelding to drawing a plow, and Ruby said, He'll be doing that whichever way you pick. He'll have to work out his feed like anybody else around here.

Ada finally surprised even herself by settling on the piano to part with. Truth be told, though, her hand at the instrument was not particularly fine, and it had been Monroe's choice that she learn to play it to begin with. It had meant so much to him that he had hired a teacher to live with them, a little man named Tip Benson who seldom kept a position for long as he could not refrain from falling in love with his charges. Ada had been no exception. She was fifteen at the time, and one afternoon, as she sat attempting a baffling pa.s.sage from Bach, Benson had fallen to his knees by the piano bench and pulled her hands from the keys and drawn them to him and pressed their backs to his round cheeks. He was a plump man, no more than twenty-four at the time, with extraordinarily long fingers for one of his squat build. He pressed his pursed red lips to the backs of her hands and kissed them with great ardor. Another girl of Ada's age might have played him to her advantage for a time, but Ada excused herself right then and went straight to Monroe and told him what had pa.s.sed.

Benson had his bags packed and was gone by suppertime. Monroe immediately hired as music tutor an old spinster with clothes that smelled of naphtha and underarms.

Part of Ada's reasoning in choosing the piano for barter was that there would be little room for art in her coming life and what place she had for it could be occupied by drawing. The simple implements of pencil and paper would answer her needs in that regard.