Cold Mountain Part 9

It was held at her cousin's house, a grand place situated on a broad bend of the Wando River, and it lasted for three days. For the duration, they all slept only from dawn to noon and lived on little but oysters and champagne and pastry. Each evening there was music and dancing, and then late in the nights, under a moon growing to full, they went out on the slow water in rowing boats. It was a strange time of war fever, and even young men previously considered dull and charmless suddenly acquired an aura of glamour s.h.i.+mmering about them, for they all suspected that shortly many of them would be dead. During those brief days and nights, any man that wished might become somebody's darling.

On the party's final night, Ada had worn a dress of mauve silk, trimmed in lace dyed to match. It was cut close in the waist to suit her slimness. Monroe had bought the entire bolt of cloth from which the dress was made so that no one else might wear that color. He remarked that it set off her dark hair perfectly and gave her an air of mystery among the more common pinks and pale blues and yellows.

That night, a Savannah man-the das.h.i.+ng-looking but largely witless second son of a wealthy indigo merchant-flirted so tirelessly with Ada that finally she agreed to go out on the river with him, though what little she knew of him inclined her to believe he was only a vain fool.

The man's name was Blount. He rowed to the middle of the Wando and drifted. They sat facing each other, Ada with the mauve dress drawn tight around her legs to keep its hem from the tar that caulked the boat's bottom. Neither of them spoke. Blount feathered the oars over and over, letting the water drip from them into the river. He seemed to have something on his mind that accorded well with the sound of the water running off the oars, for he kept on doing it until Ada told him to stop.

Blount had brought a pair of flutes and a partial bottle of champagne still cool enough to sweat in the heavy air. He offered Ada a gla.s.s, but she declined her portion, so he finished off the bottle and threw it out into the river. The water lay so still that the circles from the splash expanded on and on until they became too distant to see.

Music from the house carried across the water, too faint to identify more precisely than that it was a waltz. In the darkness the low sh.o.r.elines seemed impossibly far. The normal qualities of the landscape were altered beyond recognition, distilled to strange minimal parts, simple as geometry.

Planes and circles and lines. The full moon stood directly overhead, its disc softened by the humidity in the air. The sky glimmered silver, too bright for stars. The wide river was silver as well, only slightly duller. Morning mist already rose from the water, though the dawn was hours away. The only demarcation between river and sky was the line of dark trees at either horizon. Blount finally spoke out. He talked awhile about himself He had recently graduated from the university in Columbia and had just begun learning the Charleston portion of the family business. But of course he would immediately enlist should war begin, as everyone expected it soon would. He talked with 2004-3-6.

.71.

bravado about driving back any force bent on subjugating the Southern states. Ada had heard like sentiments repeated over and over throughout the party and was tired of them.

As Blount continued, though, he apparently became as unconvinced as Ada, for eventually he bogged down in his war talk and fell silent. He stared down into the black bottom of the boat so that Ada could see only the top of his head. Then, under the influence of drink and the strangeness of the night, Blount admitted he was terrified of the fighting that almost certainly lay before him. He was unsure if he would be able to acquit himself in a way that would bring credit. But neither could he see any course of escape that would not be shameful. Further, he had been visited by recurring dreams of horrible death in many forms. One of them, he was certain, would someday claim him.

He had talked looking down, as if addressing his shoe tops, but when he angled his pale face up into the moonlight, Ada noted the s.h.i.+ning paths of tears runneling down his cheeks. She realized with an unexpected flush of tenderness that Blount was no warrior but had instead the heart of a shopkeeper.

She reached forward and touched his hand where it rested on his knee. She knew that the proper thing to say was that duty and honor demanded brave action in defense of homeland. Women had been uttering like phrases all through the party, but Ada found her throat closed against the words.

Lacking them, she could have used a simpler locution, telling him only, Don't worry, or, Be brave.

But any such comforting formula seemed at that moment unutterably false to her. So she said nothing and only continued to stroke the back of his hand. She hoped Blount would not think her token of kindness more than it was, since her first impulse, when pressed upon by men, was to draw up and back off. And the rowing boat left little room for retreat. As they drifted along, though, she was relieved to see that Blount was too overwhelmed by fear of the future to think of courting. They sat that way for some time, until they drifted to the bend of the river. The boat headed straight for the outside of the curve, threatening to ground itself on a sandy bank that shone out as a strip of paleness in the moonlight. Blount composed himself and again took the oars and returned them upstream to the landing.

He walked her to the porch of the brightly lighted house, the interior ablaze with Argand lamps. The silhouettes of dancers pa.s.sed across the yellow windows, and now the music was distinct enough to identify: first Gungl and then Strauss. Blount stopped at the doorway. He put the ends of two fingers to Ada's chin and tipped her face up and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. It was but a brief and brotherly press of lips. Then he walked away. Ada now remembered that as she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror.

She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp st.i.tch of envy for the woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of a.s.surance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.

Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her.'

The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to s.h.i.+ft colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endors.e.m.e.nt.

The next day, as the partyers were loading into carriages to be taken back into the city, Ada unexpectedly met Blount on the front steps. He could not meet her eye and he barely spoke, so put out of countenance was he by his performance the night before. Ada thought it to his credit, though, that he had not asked her to keep what had happened secret. She had never seen him again, but in a letter from her cousin Lucy, Ada learned that Blount had died at Gettysburg. Shot, according to all reports, in the face during the retreat from Cemetery Ridge. He had been walking backward, not wis.h.i.+ng to be shot in the back.

At the tale's conclusion, Ruby was not much impressed with Blount's effort toward honor and could 2004-3-6.

.72.

only marvel at lives so useless that they required missing sleep and paddling about on a river for pleasure.

-You've missed my point, Ada said.

They sat for a while, watching the light fall away and the details go from the trees on the ridges.

Then Ruby rose and said, Time for my night work. It was her habitual way of saying good night. She went off to take a last look at the animals, check the doors on the outbuildings, bank the fire in the kitchen stove.

Meanwhile, the book still in her lap, Ada remained on the porch looking out across the yard and down to the barn. On past the fields to the wooded slopes. Up to the darkening sky. The colors that had reminded her of Charleston were now muted. Everything declining toward stillness. Her thoughts, though, seemed intent on folding back on themselves, for she recalled that she and Monroe had sat thusly on a night just after moving to the cove. These now-familiar elements of landscape had seemed strange to them both. This mountain country was so dark and inclined to the vertical compared with Charleston. Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which we ought aim all our yearning. And Ada had then agreed.

But now, as she looked out at the view, she held the opinion that what she saw was no token but was all the life there is. It was a position in most ways contrary to Monroe's; nevertheless, it did not rule out its own denomination of sharp yearning, though Ada could not entirely set a name to its direction.

Ruby crossed the yard and paused at the gate. She said, The cow needs putting away. Then, without further salute, she went on up the road toward the cabin.

Ada left the porch and walked down past the barn into the pasture. The sun was long gone below the ridgelines, the light falling fast. The mountains stood grey in the dusk, as pale and insubstantial as breath blown on gla.s.s. The place seemed inhabited by a great force of loneliness. Even the old-timers talked of the weight that bears down on a person alone in the mountains at that time of day, worse even than full dark on a moonless night, for it is at twilight that the threat of dark makes itself felt most strongly. Ada had sensed that power from the beginning and complained of it. She remembered Monroe had tried to reason that the isolate feeling did not arise from this particular ground, as she claimed. It was nothing unique to her or to the place but was an element of common life. Only a very simple or a very hard mind might not feel it, in the way that some rare const.i.tutions are insensitive to heat or cold. And, as with most things, Monroe had an explanation. He said that in their hearts people feel that long ago G.o.d was everywhere all the time; the sense of loneliness is what fills the vacuum when He pulls back one degree more remote.

The air was chill. Dew was in the gra.s.s already, and Ada was damp at the hem by the time she got to Waldo, who was lying in the tall gra.s.s along the lower fencerow. The cow roused up, stiff in her hip joints, and started to the gate. Ada stepped into the oblong of gra.s.s Waldo had flattened. She felt the cow's heat rise from the ground around her legs, and she wanted to lie down there and rest, suddenly unaccountably tired as from an acc.u.mulation of the month's work. Instead, she stooped momentarily and worked her hands under the gra.s.s and into the dirt that still felt warm as a living thing from the heat of the day and the body of the cow.

An owl hooted from the trees beyond the creek. Ada counted off the rhythm of the five-beat phrase as if scanning a line of poetry: a long, two shorts, two longs. Death bird, people said of the owl, though Ada could see no reason why. The call was so soft and lovely in the slaty light, like a dove's cry but with more substance to it. Waldo bawled at the gate, impatient, needing-as so much did in the cove-the things Ada was learning to do, so she took her hands from the ground and stood.

2004-3-6.

.73.

exile and brute wandering Inman walked through days of cooling weather, blue skies, and empty roads. His course was necessarily waggling as he sought to avoid pikes and towns, but the way he found through deep country and widely s.p.a.ced farms seemed safe enough. He met few people and those mainly slaves.

The nights were warm and lit by big moons, growing to full and then achieving it and then falling away. There were often hayricks to sleep in so that he could lie back and look at the moon and stars, and he could fancy for a time that he was a footloose vagabond with not a thing to fear in all creation.

The days blended uneventfully together, though he tried to mark something down in his mind from each of them. One day he remembered only as being composed of hard course-setting. There were many road turnings, all of them unmarked by signpost or blaze so that he had to ask the way over and over. He first came to a house built right in the crotch of two roads, so close that the porch nearly blocked the pa.s.sway. A tired-looking woman rested spraddle-legged in a straight chair. She chewed on her lower lip, and her eyes seemed focused on some great and indefinite event at the horizon. Where her skirt dipped at her lap was a pool of shadow.

-Is this the way to Salisbury? Inman said.

The woman sat with her knotty hands in fists on her knees. Intent, apparently, on exercising thrift in gestures, she barely tipped the right thumb in response. It might have been no more than a nervous tic. Not another feature of her moved, but Inman proceeded in the direction suggested.

Later he came on a grey-headed man sitting in the shade of a sweet-gum tree. The man wore a fine vest of yellow silk with no s.h.i.+rt under it, and it was unb.u.t.toned and lay open so that his old dugs hung down like those on a sow hog. His legs stuck out straight before him and he slapped one thigh openhanded as if it were a beloved but misbehaving dog. When he talked, his speech seemed cramped to nothing but vowels.

-Is this the turning to Salisbury? Inman said.

-EEEEE? the man said.

-Salisbury, Inman said. Is this the way?

-AAAAA! the man said with finality.

Inman went on.

Still later he came to a man in a field pulling onions.

-Salisbury? Inman said.

The man spoke not a word but stretched out an arm and pointed the way with an onion.

All Inman remembered of another day's march was the white sky and that sometime during it a crow had died in flight, falling with a puff of dust into the road before him, its black beak open and its grey tongue out as if to taste the dirt, and that later he came upon three farm girls in pale cotton dresses dancing barefoot in the dust of the road. They stopped when they saw him coming and climbed a fence and sat on the top rail with their heels hooked on the second rail and their rusty knees up under their chins. They watched him as he walked by but would not speak when he threw up a hand and said, Hey.

2004-3-6.

.74.

One morning at the end of this time, Inman found himself walking through a wood of young poplar, their leaves already turning to yellow, though the season did not yet call for it. His thinking turned on issues of food. He had been making fair time, but had grown tired of skulking and starving and living off of nothing but corn mush and apples and persimmons and stolen melons. He was thinking how much he would relish some meat and bread. He was weighing that desire against a calculation of the risk he would have to take to get them when he came upon a group of women at a river doing laundry. He stepped into an edge of forest and watched.

The women stood out in water to their calves, slapping the clothes against smooth stones and rinsing and wringing them, then draping them over nearby bushes to dry. Some talked and laughed, and others hummed s.n.a.t.c.hes of song. They had their skirt tails caught up between their legs and tucked into their waistbands to keep them from the water. To Inman they looked like they were wearing the oriental pantaloons of the Zouave regiments, whose soldiers looked so strangely bright and festive scattered dead across a battlefield. The women, not knowing they were being watched, had their skirts hiked up high onto their thighs, and the water running from the clothes sheeted off the pale skin and glistened in the light like oil.

On some other day this would have had its appeal, but Inman's attention rested on the fact that the women had brought their dinners-some in withy baskets and some tied up in cloths. They had left them sitting on the riverbank. He first thought to call out and ask to buy something to eat from them, but he suspected that they would immediately form ranks and take up rocks from the river bottom and drive him away. So he decided to stay hidden.

He worked his way down among the trees and boulders to the riverbank. After sneaking out a hand from behind the s.h.a.ggy trunk of a big river birch to heft several of the dinners, he took the heaviest one, leaving much more than fair money in its place, for it seemed especially important at that moment to be generous.

He walked off down the road, swinging the cloth bundle by one of its loose ends, and when he put some distance between himself and the river, he opened the knotted cloth and found three large chunks of poached fish, three boiled potatoes, and a pair of underdone biscuits.

Biscuits with fish? Inman thought. What unseemly cookery. And what a pale meal it made, especially when matched up against the brown feast he had imagined.

He ate it anyway, lunching afoot. A short time later-traveling down a deserted stretch of road, the last of the potatoes two bites from gone-Inman got a feeling like an itch at the back of his head. He paused and looked around. There was a figure in the distance behind him, a man walking fast. Inman finished the potato and stepped out briskly until he came to the first bend in the road. Once he was around it, he went into the woods and took up a good watching position behind a downed tree trunk.

Shortly the walker came around the bend. He went hatless and wore a long grey coat with flapping skirts and carried a lumpish leather knapsack and a walking staff as tall as he was. He strode along, head down, marking his pace with the staff like some mendicant friar from days of yore. As the man drew nearer, it became plain that his face was cut and marked by bruises fading to yellow and green.

A split lip was part healed with a dark scab so that he looked like a harelip. Tufts of patchy blond fuzz grew from his white scalp, which was marked here and there by long scabs. So fine was he through the stomach that the top of his britches lapped over like great pleats and was tied with a length of rope. When the walker lifted his blue eyes from looking down at the road beneath his feet, Inman saw immediately that, underneath all the damage, it was the preacher.

Inman raised up from behind the log and said, Hey there.

The preacher stopped and stared. Good G.o.d, he said. Just the man I was looking for.

2004-3-6.

.75.

Inman pulled out his knife and held it point down, his arm relaxed. He said, You come to me looking for vengeance, I won't even waste a cartridge. I'll lay you open right here.

-Oh, no. I mean to thank you. You saved me from mortal sin.

-You walked all this way just in hope of saying that?

-No, I'm traveling. A pilgrim like yourself. Though maybe I speak too soon, for all who wander are not pilgrims. At any rate, where are you headed?

Inman looked the preacher over. What happened to your face? he said.

-When I was found as you left me, and when the note was read, a number of the men of the congregation, led by our Deacon Johnston, stripped me and gave me a fair beating. They threw my clothes in the river and cut my hair off with their knives, I think in bafflement over some part of the story of Samson and Delilah. Then they refused even to give me an hour to draw my things together.

They held me from behind, and the woman I was to marry came and spit at me and thanked the Almighty that she was not to become a Veasey. I had nothing but my two hands to cover my prides with, and I was told to get out of town or they would hang me naked from the church steeple. It was just as well. I couldn't have lived on there anyway.

-Yes, I imagine not, Inman said. What about the other woman?

-Oh, Laura Foster, Veasey said. They hauled her out to tell what she knew, but she could still hardly put two thoughts together. When it becomes clear what state of motherhood she is in, she will be churched for a time. A year, say. And then she'll be but a subject of gossip. In two or three years more she'll take for husband some old bachelor willing to raise a b.a.s.t.a.r.d just as long as a fine-looking woman comes with the deal. She'll wind up all the better for our relations, and for me having set my mind on putting both her and my betrothed behind me.

-It is still a cloudy matter to me if I did the right thing, letting you live, Inman said.

Without a further word he sheathed his knife and returned to the roadway and made to continue his journey. But the preacher fell in beside him.

-Since you appear to be going west, I'll just walk on with you if you don't mind, he said.

-Thing is, I do, Inman said, thinking it better to go alone than with a fool for comrade.

He made a motion as if to backhand the preacher, but the man did not run or fight or even try to raise his staff to parry. Rather, he hunched his shoulders to take the blow like a cowed dog, and so Inman pulled up and did not strike. He reasoned that lacking the will to drive the man off, he'd just walk on and see what came about.

Veasey drifted along at Inman's elbow, talking seamlessly. He worked under the notion that he had acquired a cohort. His ambition seemed to be to disburden himself of every feature of his prior life by pa.s.sing it along to Inman. Every misstep he had made-and it was clear he'd made plenty- he sought to share. He was a sorry preacher; that much was apparent even to him.

-I displayed a great poorness at every feature of the job but the pulpitism, he admitted. But there I s.h.i.+ned. I've saved more souls than there are fingers to your hands and toes to your feet. But I've foresworn it now and I'm going to the Texes and start fresh.

-Many are.

2004-3-6.

.76.

-There's a place in Judges where it talks about a time when there was no rule in Israel and every man just did what was right in his own eyes. I've heard the same of the Texes. It's a land of freedom.

-That's the tale that's told of it, Inman said. What do you aim to do there, farmer?

-Oh, hardly. I lack apt.i.tude for grubbing in the dirt. As for suitable career, I'm undecided. Short of a clear calling, I might just go and claim me a piece of land the size of a county and run cattle on it until I have me a herd big enough so that you could walk all day across the backs of them without ever putting a foot to ground, Veasey said.

-What are you figuring to use to buy your first bull and cow with?

-This right here.

Veasey pulled from under his coat skirts a great long Colt's Army revolver, which he had appropriated on his way out of town.

-I might train myself to be a pistolero of some note, he said.

-Where did that come from? Inman said.

-Old Johnston's wife knew what had happened and took pity on me. She saw me lurking in the bushes and called out to me to come to the window, and while she went in the bedroom to get me this sorry costume I'm wearing, I espied this pistol on the kitchen table. I reached in through the window and took it and pitched it off in the gra.s.s, and then when I was dressed, I picked it up and took it on with me.

He sounded pleased with himself as a boy who had pilfered a cooling pie from a sill.

-That's how the pistoleer idea came to me, he continued. These things give you notions unsought.

He held the Colt's before him, looking into it as if he expected to see his future in the sheen of its cylinder.

That afternoon's march was one of great luck in foraging, for Inman and Veasey had not traveled far when they came upon an abandoned house set back in a grove of oaks. The doors stood open and the windows were broken out and the yard was grown up in mullein and burdock and Indian tobacco.