Cold Mountain Part 6

She could see all the good reasons for parting with the piano. What she was not clear on were the reasons for keeping the cabriolet. There was the fact that it had been Monroe's, but that did not feel like the holding point. She worried that it was the mobility of the thing that held her to it. The promise in its tall wheels that if things got bad enough she could just climb in and ride away. Be like the Blacks before her and take the att.i.tude that there was no burden that couldn't be lightened, no wreckful life that couldn't be set right by heading off down the road.

After Ada made her decision known, Ruby wasted no time. She knew who had excess animals and produce, who would be willing to trade favorably. In this case it was Old Jones up on East Fork she dealt with. His wife had coveted the piano for some time, and knowing that, Ruby traded hard. Jones was finally made to give for it a pied brood sow and a shoat and a hundred pounds of corn grits. And Ruby-thinking how wool was such a useful thing in so many ways, especially with the current high cost of fabric-allowed that it wouldn't hurt to take on a few of the little mountain sheep, not much bigger than a midsized breed of dog full grown. So she convinced Jones to throw in a half dozen of them as well. And a wagonload of cabbages. And a ham and ten pounds of bacon from the first hog he killed in November.

Within a matter of days, Ruby had driven the hogs and the little sheep, two of them dark, up into Black Cove. She shooed them onto the slopes of Cold Mountain to fend for themselves through the autumn, fattening on what mast they could find, which would be plenty. Before she let them go she had taken out her knife and marked their left ears with two smooth crops and a slit so that they all fled b.l.o.o.d.y-headed, squealing and bleating, to the mountain.

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Late one afternoon, Old Jones came with a wagon and another old man to get the piano. The two stood in the parlor and looked at it a long time. The other old man said, I'm not so sure we can lift that thing, and Old Jones said, We've got the advantage of it; we have to. They finally got it into the wagon and roped it in tight, for it hung out past the tailboard.

Ada sat on the porch and watched the piano ride away. It jounced down the road, the unsprung wagon hitting hard on every rut and rock so that the piano played its own alarming and discordant tune in farewell. There was not a lot of regret in Ada's mood, but what she thought about as she watched the wagon go was a party Monroe had given four days before Christmas in the last winter before the war.

The chairs in the parlor had been pushed back against the walls to make room for dancing, and those who could play took turns at the piano, beating out carols and waltzes and sentimental parlor tunes.

The dining room table was loaded with tiny ham biscuits, cakes and brown bread and mince pies, and a pot of tea fragrant with orange and cinnamon and clove. Monroe had caused only a minor scandal by serving champagne, there being no Baptists in attendance. All the gla.s.s-bowled kerosene lamps were lit, and people marveled over them and their crimped chimney tops like the petals of buds opening, for they were a new thing and had not yet become general. Sally Sw.a.n.ger, though, expressed the fear that they would explode, and she judged the light they cast as too glaring and said tapers and hearth light suited her old eyes better.

Early in the evening people formed like-membered groups and gossiped. Ada sat with the women, but her attention flickered about the room. Six old men drew up chairs near the fire and talked of the looming crisis in Congress and sipped at their flutes and then held them up to the lamplight to study the bubbles. Esco said, It comes to a fight the Federals'U kill us all down. When others in the group violently disagreed, Esco looked into his gla.s.s and said, A man made liquor with a bead like this, it'd be judged unsound.

Ada also paid mild heed to the young men, sons of valued members of the congregation. They sat in a back corner of the parlor and talked loudly. Most of them disdained the champagne and drank only somewhat surrept.i.tiously from pocket ticklers full of corn liquor. Hob Mars, who had briefly paid poorly received court to Ada, announced as if speaking to the room at large that he had celebrated the Savior's birth every night for a week. He claimed that from those parties dull enough to have ended before dawn he had lit his way home by pistol fire. He reached and took a drink from another man's flask and then rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and looked at it and rubbed again.

That's got a whang to it, he said loudly and pa.s.sed the flask back.

Women of mixed ages occupied another corner. Sally Sw.a.n.ger wore a new pair of fine shoes, and she sat awaiting comment on them, her feet out before her like a stiff-legged doll. Another of the older women told a somewhat extended tale of her daughter's poor marriage. At the husband's insistence, the daughter shared a house with a family of hounds who lounged about the kitchen at all times but c.o.o.n hunts. The woman said she hated to go visit, for there was always dog hair in the gravy. She said her daughter had for several years produced one baby after another so that, contrary to her earlier wildness to be married, the daughter now viewed matrimony in a dim light. She had come to see it as a state summing up to little more than wiping tails. The other women laughed, but Ada felt for a moment as if she could not catch her breath.

Later the groups mixed and some stood around the piano and sang and then some of the younger people danced. Ada took a turn at the keyboard, but her mind hovered above the music. She played a number of waltzes and then left the piano and watched amused as Esco arose and, to no accompaniment other than his own whistling, performed a solitary shuffle step during which his eyes glazed over and his head bobbed like it hung by a string.

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As the evening went on, Ada found that she had taken more than one gla.s.s of champagne beyond the prudent. Her face felt clammy and her neck was sweating under the ruching at the tall collar of her green velvet dress. Her nose felt as if it had swollen, so much so that she pinched it between thumb and forefinger to check its breadth and then went to the hall mirror, where she was startled to see it looking normal.

Sally Sw.a.n.ger, apparently under the sway of Monroe's champagne as well, had at that moment pulled Ada aside in the hallway and in a whisper said, That Inman boy just got here. I should keep my mouth shut, but you ought to marry him. The two of you'd likely make pretty brown-eyed babies.

Ada had been appalled by the comment and, blus.h.i.+ng fiercely, she fled to the kitchen to compose herself.

But there, throwing her thoughts into further disarray, she found Inman alone, sitting in the stove corner. He had arrived late, having ridden through a slow winter rain, and he was warming up and drying out before joining the party. He wore a black suit and sat with his legs crossed, his wet hat suspended from the toe of a dress boot near the hot stove. The palms of his hands were held up to catch the heat of the fire so that he looked like he was pus.h.i.+ng something away.

-Oh, my, Ada said. There you are. The ladies are already so pleased to know you're here.

-The old ladies? Inman said.

-Well, everyone. Your arrival has been noted with particular approval by Mrs. Sw.a.n.ger.

This called up a vivid and unplanned image, its theme suggested by Mrs. Sw.a.n.ger's comment, and Ada felt a rus.h.i.+ng in her head. She blushed again and quickly added, And by others, no doubt.

-Not feeling qualmish, are you? Inman said, somewhat confused by her behavior.

-No, no. This room is just close.

-You look flushed.

Ada touched her damp face at various points with the backs of her fingers and could not think of a thing to say. She made calipers with her fingers and took the measure of her nose again. She went to the door and opened it for a breath of cool air. The night smelled of wet rotting leaves and was so dark she could not see beyond the drops of water catching the door light as they fell from the porch eve. From the parlor came the simple first notes of Good King Wenceslas, and Ada recognized Monroe's stiff phrasing at the piano. Then from out in the dark, over a great distance, came the high lonesome baying of a grey wolf far off in the mountains.

-That is a forlorn sound, Inman said.

Ada held the door open and waited to hear an answering call, but it never came. Poor thing, she said.

She closed the door and turned to Inman, but when she did the heat of the room and the champagne and the look on Inman's face, which was softer than any contour she had ever seen there, conspired against her and she felt at once faint and giddy. She took a few uncertain steps, and when Inman half stood and reached out a hand to steady her, she took it. And then, by some mechanism she was unable to reconstruct later, she found herself in his lap.

He put his hands to her shoulders a moment and she settled back with her head beneath his chin. Ada remembered thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it 2004-3-6.

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aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out to the points of her shoulders and held her there. She remembered the smell of his damp wool suit and a lingering smell of horse and tack.

She might have rested in his lap for half a minute, no more. Then she was up and away, and she remembered turning at the door, her hand on the casing, to look back at him where he sat with a puzzled smile on his face and his hat lying crown down on the floor.

Ada went back to the piano, where she moved Monroe aside and played for quite some time. Inman eventually came and stood, leaning with his shoulder against the doorjamb. He drank from a flute and watched her for a while and then he moved on to talk to Esco, who still sat near the fire.

Through the rest of the evening, neither Ada nor Inman mentioned what had taken place in the kitchen. They talked only briefly and awkwardly and Inman left early.

Much later, in the small hours when the party broke up, Ada looked from the parlor window and watched as the young men went down the road, firing their pistols toward the heavens, the muzzle flash lighting them in brief silhouette.

Ada sat awhile after the wagon bearing the piano rounded the bend in the road. Then she lit a lantern and went to the bas.e.m.e.nt, thinking that Monroe might have cellared a case or two of champagne there and that opening a bottle now and again might be pleasant. She found no wine but turned up instead a genuine treasure, one that greatly advanced their efforts toward barter. It was a hundred-pound sack of green coffee beans that Monroe had stored away, sitting there fat and sagging in a corner.

She called Ruby and they immediately filled the roaster and parched a half pound over the fire and ground it and then brewed up the first real coffee either of them had had in over a year. They drank cup after cup and stayed up most of the night, talking nonstop of plans for the future and memories of the past, and at one point Ada retold the entire thrilling plot of Little Dorrit, Little Dorrit, one of the books she had read during the summer. Over the next several days they bartered the coffee by the half pound and by the nogginful to neighbors, keeping back only ten pounds for their own use. When the sack was empty, they had taken in a side of bacon, five bushels of Irish potatoes and four of sweet, a tin of baking powder, eight chickens, various baskets of squash and beans and okra, an old wheel and loom in need of minor repair, six bushels of sh.e.l.l corn, and enough split shakes to reroof the smokehouse. one of the books she had read during the summer. Over the next several days they bartered the coffee by the half pound and by the nogginful to neighbors, keeping back only ten pounds for their own use. When the sack was empty, they had taken in a side of bacon, five bushels of Irish potatoes and four of sweet, a tin of baking powder, eight chickens, various baskets of squash and beans and okra, an old wheel and loom in need of minor repair, six bushels of sh.e.l.l corn, and enough split shakes to reroof the smokehouse.

The most valuable trade, though, was the five-pound sack of salt they had gotten, it having become so scarce and dear that some people now dug up their smokehouse floors and boiled and strained the dirt and then boiled it down and strained it again. Over and over until the dirt was gone and the water steamed away, so that in the end they had reclaimed the salt fallen to the ground from the hams of yesteryear.

In such matters of trade and in every other regard, Ruby proved herself a marvel of energy, and she soon imposed a routine on Ada's day. Before dawn Ruby would have walked down from the cabin, fed the horse, milked the cow, and be banging pots and pans in the kitchen, a hot fire going in the stove, yellow corn grits bubbling in a pot, eggs and bacon spitting grease in a black pan. Ada was not accustomed to rising in the grey of morning- in fact, through the summer she had rarely risen before ten-but suddenly there was little choice. If Ada lay abed, Ruby would come roust her out.

Ruby figured setting things to working was her job, not waiting on somebody and doing their bidding. On the few occasions when Ada had slipped and given her an order as if to a servant, Ruby had just looked at Ada hard and had then gone on doing what she was doing. What the look said was that Ruby could be gone at a moment's notice like morning fog on a sunny day.

Part of the code for Ruby was that though she did not expect Ada to do the cooking at breakfast, she did expect her, at minimum, to be there to watch its conclusion. So Ada would walk down to the 2004-3-6.

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kitchen in her robe and sit in the chair in the warm stove corner and wrap her hands around a cup of coffee. Through the window the day would be starting to take shape, grey and loose in its features.

Even on days that would eventually prove to be clear, Ada could seldom make out even the palings of the fence around the kitchen garden through the fog. At some point Ruby would blow out the yellow light of the lamp and the kitchen would go dim and then the light from outside would rise and fill the room. It seemed a thing of such wonder to Ada, who had not witnessed many dawns.

All during the cooking and the eating, Ruby would talk seamlessly, drawing up hard plans for the coming day that struck Ada as incongruent with its soft vagueness out the window. By the time summer drew toward its conclusion, Ruby seemed to feel the approach of winter as urgently as a bear in autumn, eating all night and half the day to pack on the fat necessary to feed it through hibernation. All Ruby's talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through winter. To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

When Ada remarked that at least they could rest when winter came, Ruby said, Oh, when winter comes we'll mend fence and piece quilts and fix what's broke around here, which is a lot.

Simply living had never struck Ada as such a tiresome business. After breakfast was done, they worked constantly. On days when there was not one big thing to do, they did many small ones, choring around as needed. When Monroe was alive, living was little more laborsome than drawing on bank accounts, abstract and distant. Now, with Ruby, all the actual facts and processes connected with food and clothing and shelter were unpleasantly concrete, falling immediately and directly to hand, and every one of them calling for exertion.

Of course, in her previous life Ada had taken little part in the garden Monroe had always paid someone to grow for them, and her mind, in consequence, had latched itself to the product-the food on the table-not the job of getting it there. Ruby disabused her of that practice. The rudeness of eating, of living, that's where Ruby seemed to aim Ada every day that first month. She held Ada's nose to the dirt to see its purpose. She made Ada work when she did not want to, made her dress in rough clothes and grub in the dirt until her nails seemed to her crude as the claws of a beast, made her climb onto the pitched smokehouse roof and lay shakes even though the green triangle of Cold Mountain seemed to spin about the horizon. Ruby counted her first victory when Ada succeeded in churning cream to b.u.t.ter. Her second victory was when she noted that Ada no longer always put a book in her pocket when she went out to hoe the fields.

Ruby made a point of refusing to tackle all the unpleasant work herself and made Ada hold a struggling chicken down on the chopping block and cleave off its head with a hatchet. When the bleeding headless body staggered about the yard in the time-honored habit of sots, Ruby pointed to it with her ragged sheath knife and said, That's your sustenance there.

The force that Ruby used to drive Ada on was this: somewhere Ada knew that anyone else she might hire would grow weary and walk away and let her fail. Ruby would not let her fail.

The only moments of rest were after the supper dishes had been washed and put away. Then Ada and Ruby sat on the porch and Ada would read aloud in the time remaining before dark. Books and their contents were a great novelty to Ruby, and so Ada had reckoned that the place to begin was near the beginning. After filling Ruby in on who the Greeks were, she had begun reading from Homer. They usually covered fifteen or twenty pages of an evening. Then, when it became too dark to read and the air turned blue and started to congeal with mist, Ada would close the book and solicit stories from Ruby. Over a period of weeks she collected the tale of Ruby's life in pieces.

As Ruby put it, she'd grown up so poor she was forced to cook with no more grease than you would get wiping the frying pan with a meat skin. And she was tired of it. She had never known her mother, 2004-3-6.

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and her father had been a notorious local ne'er-do-well and scofflaw called Stobrod Thewes. They lived in a dirt-floored cabin little better than a roofed pen. It was tiny and had about it the air of the temporary. About the only thing distinguis.h.i.+ng it from a gypsy caravan was its lack of wheels and floor. She had slept on a kind of miniature loft platform, just a shelf, really. She had an old tick for mattress that she stuffed with dried moss. Because there was no ceiling, only the geometrical pattern made by the lapped undersides of the roof shakes, Ruby awoke many a morning with an inch of snow atop her pile of quilts, blown by the wind between the curled edges of the shakes like sifted flour. On such mornings, Ruby found that the great benefit of such a small cabin was that even a fire of twigs warmed it up fast, though the faulty chimney that Stobrod had constructed drew so poorly you could have smoked hams in the place. In all but the foulest weather, she preferred cooking out back under a brush arbor.

Yet, little and plain as it was, the cabin was still more than Stobrod cared to maintain. If not for the inconvenience of his having a daughter, he might happily have taken up dwelling in a hollow tree, for in Ruby's estimation an animal with a memory was about her father's loftiest expression of himself.

Feeding herself was Ruby's to do as soon as she was old enough to be held accountable for it, which in Stobrod's opinion fell close after learning to walk. As an infant, Ruby foraged for food in the woods and up and down the river at charitable farms. Her brightest childhood memory was of walking up the river trail for some of Sally Sw.a.n.ger's white bean soup and on the way home having her nightgown-for several years her usual attire, even in the daytime-get caught on a trailside blackthorn briar. The thorn was long as a c.o.c.k's spur, and she had been unable to free herself. No one pa.s.sed that afternoon. Broken clouds blew over and the day faded like a guttering lamp. Night fell and the moon was black, the new moon of May. Ruby was four and spent the night attached to the blackthorn tree.

Those dark hours were a revelation to her, and they never left her. It was chill out in the drifting mists of the riverbank. She remembered s.h.i.+vering and crying for a time, calling out for help. She feared she would be eaten by a wandering panther down from Cold Mountain. They would carry off a child in a heartbeat, was what she had heard from Stobrod's drinking friends. The way they told it, the mountains were full of creatures hungry for the meat of a child. Bears out foraging. Wolves roaming. Hants aplenty too in the mountains. They would come in many forms, all terrifying, and they would s.n.a.t.c.h you up and take you to who knew what manner of h.e.l.l.

She had heard the old Cherokee women talk of cannibal spirits that lived in the rivers and ate the flesh of people, stealing them near daybreak and carrying them down in the water. Children were their favorite food, and when they took one they left in its place a shade, a twin, that moved about and talked but had no real life to it. Seven days later it withered and died.

The night drew together all those threats, and young Ruby thus sat for some time, s.h.i.+vering from the cold and sobbing until she could hardly breathe from the recognition of all the things that seemed ranked up to prey on weakness.

But later she was spoken to by a voice in the dark. Its talk seemed to arise from the rush and splatter of the river noise, but it was no cannibal demon. It seemed some tender force of landscape or sky, an animal sprite, a guardian that took her under its wing and concerned itself with her well-being from that moment on. She remembered every star pattern that pa.s.sed across the piece of sky visible to her among the tree boughs, and every word spoken directly to her deep core by the calm voice that took her in and comforted and protected her all through the night. She stopped s.h.i.+vering in the thin gown, and her sobbing pa.s.sed away from her.

The next morning a man fis.h.i.+ng set her loose, and she walked home and never spoke a word to Stobrod about it. Nor did he ask where she had been. The voice, though, still echoed in her head, and 2004-3-6.

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after that night she became like one born with a caul over one's face, knowing things others never would.

As she got older, she and Stobrod had lived off what Ruby raised on the little bit of their land that diverged far enough from the vertical for her to plow. For his part, her father spent his time elsewhere, often disappearing for days at a stretch. He'd walk forty miles for a party. At even the rumor of a dance he would head out down the road, toting the fiddle from which he could barely scratch out a handful of standard figures. Ruby might not see him again for days. Lacking that sort of entertainment, Stobrod would go off to the woods. Hunting, he claimed. But he usually provided only an occasional squirrel or groundhog for the stewpot. His ambitions never rose as high as deer, so when rodents were scarce they ate chestnuts and rhubarb and poke and other wild food that Ruby gathered, so it could often be said that a large part of their diet was mast.

Even Stobrod's love of liquor failed to make a farmer of him. Rather than grow corn, he would go out with a tow sack on moonless nights when the ears were ripe and steal corn. From it he distilled a greasy yellow liquor which his fellows claimed was unmatched in rawness and potency.

His one known flirtation with employment had ended in disaster. A man from down the river had hired him to help finish clearing a piece of newground to ready it for spring planting. The big trees had already been felled and lay in great tangles of tree laps piled at the wood's edge. The man wanted Stobrod to help him burn them. They lit a roaring fire and were lopping limbs off the downed trees so they could roll them into the fire when Stobrod suddenly came to the realization that this was more work than he had reckoned on. He turned his s.h.i.+rtsleeves down and headed up the road. The man kept at it alone, working with a log hook to try to roll the tree trunks into the fire. He was standing near the flames when several burning logs s.h.i.+fted and trapped his leg tight down among them. Try as he might, he could not break free, and he hollered for help until his voice gave out. The fire kept moving his way until, rather than be burned up, he took the axe he had used for lopping limbs and hewed away his leg just at the knee. He tied off the bleeding with a strip of his pant leg twisted tight with a stick and then trimmed a forked limb into a crutch and walked home. He lived, but just.

For years thereafter, Stobrod was wary of walking the road by the man's house, for the peg-legged man had, to Stobrod's bitter disappointment, held a grudge and would sometimes take a shot at him from the porch.

It was not until Ruby was nearly grown that it occurred to her to wonder what kind of woman her mother had been to have married such a man as Stobrod. But by then her mother seemed to have been wiped nearly clean from the slate of his mind, for when Ruby asked what she had been like, Stobrod claimed he had little recollection. I can't even see in my mind whether she was slight or stout, he said.

To the surprise of one and all, in the first days of the war fever, Stobrod had enlisted in the army. He rode off one morning on their old hinny to do battle, and Ruby had heard nothing from him since.

Her last remembrance of him was his white shanks s.h.i.+ning above his boot tops as he jostled away down the road. She guessed that Stobrod had not warred for long. He had surely died in his first fight, that or deserted forever, for Ruby had heard from a man of his regiment-come home with an arm shot off--that Stobrod was unaccounted for after Sharpsburg.

Whatever his fate, whether he had taken a minie ball to his hinder parts or lit out for the western territories, he had left Ruby high and dry. Without the hinny, she could no longer even plow the sorry fields. All she was able to plant was a little garden that she worked by hand with a single-foot plow and a hoe.

The first year of the war had been hard for her, but at least Stobrod had left his old unrifled musket, 2004-3-6.

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figuring he stood a chance of bettering his weaponry if he showed up empty-handed. Ruby had taken the relic piece- more relative to the harquebus than to the current fas.h.i.+on in rifles-and hunted wild turkey and deer through the winter, jerking the venison by the fire like an Indian. Stobrod had taken their only knife, so she sliced up the meat with one she had made from a cast-off section of a crosscut saw. Her princ.i.p.al tool for the job of bladesmith was the hammer. She heated the saw blade in the fire and scribed a knife shape in the hot metal with a bent horseshoe nail she had picked up out of the road. When the metal cooled, she hammered off the excess from the scribed line and filed burrs from the blade and haft. Again using the hammer, she pounded in rivets made of sc.r.a.p copper to hold a handle of applewood that she had sawed from a thick limb. She honed the blade keen on a greased river rock. Her handiwork was rough looking, but it cut as good as a bought knife.

Looking back on her life so far, she listed as achievements the fact that by the age of ten, she knew all features of the mountains for twenty-five miles in any direction as intimately as a gardener would his bean rows. And that later, when yet barely a woman, she had whipped men single-handed in encounters she did not wish to detail.

At present, she believed herself to be twenty-one years old, though she did not know for sure because Stobrod had not marked down in his memory either the year of her birth or the day. He could not even recall the season it had been when she arrived. Not that she was planning a birthday party, for celebration had been a lacking feature of her life since survival had such a sharp way of focusing one's attentions elsewhere.

like any other thing, a gift Late in the night, Inman followed a road of sorts that ran along the banks of the Deep River. It soon dipped into a rocky swale that after a time narrowed and made a gorge. The sky closed up between walls of jumbled rocks and trees until it was only a swath directly above, Milky Way the only light.

It was so dark that for a time, down in the cut, he had to feel with his feet for the soft dust of the road to keep his way. The sheen of light on the water was so slight that he could see it only by looking to the side, like detecting faint stars by not peering right at them.

Eventually, traversing a rocky bluff, the road became a narrow notch between the river below a drop-off and a steep bank of broken rock and dirt grownpartly over with brush. Inman did not like his position. He feared the Home Guard would be out and about. Hors.e.m.e.n might be upon him before he could find a place to leave the road, and the bank was too broken and steep to climb quietly in the dark. It would be a poor place to make a stand against armed riders. Best to step on out smartly and put this wound in the earth behind him.

Inman broke into a painful little jog trot and kept at it for some minutes until he saw up ahead a flickery light, which looked to be right in the courseway. He slowed to a walk, and soon he had closed on the light near enough to tell that it was made by a man in a broad-brimmed hat standing in the road, casting a yellow circle around him from a smoky torch of bundled pitchwood splits.

Walking quietly, Inman eased closer and stopped alongside a boulder not ten yards away.

The man wore a suit of black clothes, a white s.h.i.+rt. He held a horse by a lead rope tied around its neck. In the light Inman could see that the horse carried a burden, an unformed white thickness across its back like a drooping bundle of linen. As Inman watched, the man sat down in the road and drew his knees up toward his chest with one arm. The elbow of his torch arm rested in the notch between the knees so that his fist stuck out before him and held the fire as steady as if fixed in a sconce. He let his head sink down until the hat brim touched his extended arm. He made a kind of illuminated dark wad in the road.

He's going to fall asleep with that torch blazing, Inman thought. In a minute he'll have his feet on 2004-3-6.

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fire.

But the man was not dozing; he was in despair. He looked up toward the horse and let out a moan.

-Lord, Oh, Lord, he cried. We once lived in a land of paradise.

He rocked from side to side on the bones of his a.s.s and said again, Lord, Oh, Lord.

What to do? Inman wondered. Another stone in his pa.s.sway. Couldn't go back. Couldn't go around.

Couldn't stand there like a penned heifer all night. He took out the pistol and held it up to catch what light reached him from the torch and checked his loads.

Inman was about ready to make his move when the man stood and worked the base of the torch around in the dirt until it held upright. He rose and walked to the horse's far side. He began trying to lift the bundle from the horse, which s.h.i.+fted about nervously and put back its ears, the whites of its eyes visible all along the lower rims.

The man got the bundle off the horse and over his shoulder and came walking from behind the animal in a kind of stagger. Inman could see that what he was lugging was a woman, one limp arm swinging, a cascade of black hair brus.h.i.+ng the ground. The man carried her from out the diameter of torchlight so that they became near invisible, but his direction was clearly toward the verge of the drop-off. Inman could hear the man sobbing in the dark as he walked.

Inman ran along the road to the torch and grabbed it up and pitched it softly underhand out toward the sound of crying. What the fire lit when it struck ground was the man standing on the very lip of the bluff with the woman in his arms. He was trying to whirl to see the source of this sudden illumination, but, c.u.mbered as he was, it took some time. With a kind of shuffle, he turned to face Inman.

-Set her down, Inman said.