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 shining 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 minié 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, 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 fashion 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 principal 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 scrap 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 grown partly over with brush. Inman did not like his position. He feared the Home Guard would be out and about. Horsemen 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 shirt. 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 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 ass and said again, Lord, Oh, Lord.
What to do? Inman wondered. Another stone in his passway. 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 shifted 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 brushing 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, cumbered as he was, it took some time. With a kind of shuffle, he turned to face Inman.
—Set her down, Inman said.
She dropped in a heap at the man’s feet.
—The hell kind of pistol is that? the man said, his eyes fixed on the two big mismatched bores.
—Step away from her, Inman said. Get over here where I can see you.
The man stepped across the body and approached Inman. He held his head tipped down for the hat brim to cut the glare from the torch.
—Best stop right now, Inman said, when the man got close.
—You’re a message from God saying no, the man said. He took two steps more and then dropped to his knees in the road and fell forward and hugged Inman about the legs. Inman leveled the pistol at the man’s head and put pressure on the trigger until he could feel all the metal parts of its firing mechanism tighten up against each other. But then the man turned his face up, and it caught the light from the torch where it still burned on the ground, and Inman could see that his cheeks were shiny with tears. So Inman relented as he might have anyway and only struck the man a mid-force blow across the cheekbone with the long barrel
of the pistol.
The man sprawled in the road on his back, a shallow cut below his eye. His hat had fallen off and his head was pomaded slick as an apple from the forehead back, and the ends of his yellow hair hung in ringlets about his shoulders. He fingered the cut and looked at the blood.
—I accept the merit of that, he said.
—You merit killing, Inman said. He looked to where the woman lay in a heap at the edge of the bluff. She had not moved. I might still feel the need to do it, Inman said.
—Don’t kill me, I’m a man of God, the man said.
—Some say we all are, Inman said.
—A preacher is what I mean, the man said. I’m a preacher.
Inman could think of no response but to blow out air from his nose.
The preacher rose again as far as his knees.
—Is she dead? Inman said.
—No.
—What’s the matter with her? Inman said.
—Not much. She’s somewhat with child. That and what I gave her.
—What would that be?
—A little packet of powders that I bought off a peddler. He said it would put a man to sleep for four hours. It’s been about half that since I dosed her up.
—And you’re the daddy?
—Apparently.
—Not married to her, I reckon?
—No.
Inman stepped to the far side of the girl and knelt. He put a hand to her dark head and lifted it. She was breathing with a kind of faint snore, a whistle at the nose. Her face was slack from being senseless, and the shadows cast from the torch were ugly things, collecting unfavorably in the low spots of her eyes and cheeks. Still, Inman could tell that there might be a beauty to her. He returned her face to the ground and rose from his crouch.
—Put her back on the horse, Inman said. He stepped away, keeping the pistol leveled at the man, who hopped up to his feet, his eyes never leaving the barrel ends. The man hustled over and knelt and struggled to lever the girl off the ground. He rose and staggered to the horse and threw her over. Inman tipped the big pistol up momentarily to catch its profile in the light, thinking how very much he liked the air of urgency and focus it lent to a simple request.
—What now? the man said when he was done. He seemed relieved for someone else to be calling the decisions.
—Hush up, Inman said. He did not know what was next, and his thinking seemed all grainy and sluggish from lack of sleep and hard walking.
—Where did you come from? Inman said.
—There’s a town not far off, the man said, gesturing on up the road in the direction Inman was heading.
—Get on out ahead of me and show the way.
Inman picked up the torch and threw it over the ledge. The preacher stood and watched it fall, a diminishing point in the dark.
—Still the Deep River here? Inman said.
—Folks call it that, the preacher said.
They started walking. Inman kept the pistol in his hand and led the horse with the other. The lead rope was thick hemp and the end had been wrapped for some inches in wire to prevent its fraying, and as he grasped the rope he pricked his thumb, drawing blood. Inman walked along sucking at his cut thumb, thinking had he not stumbled upon them, the woman would be a white smear floating on the black river, her skirts belled out around her and the preacher standing up at the road saying Go down, go down. Inman wondered what the thing to do here would be.
The road soon climbed and crossed a little ridge and left the river behind. It wound through low hills. The moon had risen and Inman could see that the land lay open in great patches where the forest had been burned away to make place for fields. But nothing more toilsome than lighting a fire had been done with it, and so it was a country of black stumps set in runnel-cut clay stretching away bare to a far horizon. The charcoal of the stumps caught the moonlight and glittered. Inman looked about and thought, I could well be on a whole other planet from the place I’m aiming for.
Orion had fully risen and stood at the eastern horizon, and from that Inman made the time to be long past midnight. The great figure of hunter and warrior stood up there like an accusation, like a sign in the sky pointing out your shortfalls. Orion was girded about tight, his weapon ready to strike. Sure of himself as a man can be, if posture is any indication of character. Traveling due west every night and making unfailing good time.
One of the things Inman marked as a comfort was that he could put a name to the brightest star in Orion. He had shared that fact with a Tennessee boy on the night after Fredericksburg. They had sat at the lip of the ditch behind the wall. The night was cold and brittle, and the stars were sharp points of light and the aurora had already flared up and gone out. They had blankets wrapped about them, draped over their heads and shoulders, and their breaths blew out in plumes and hung in the windless air before them like spirits in process of departure.
—It’s so cold, you was to lick your gun barrel your tongue’d bind to it, the boy had said.
He held his Enfield up before his face and breathed on the barrel of it and then scratched at the place with a fingernail and raked off frost. He looked at Inman and then did it again. He held the finger up for Inman’s inspection and Inman said, I see it. The boy spit between his feet and then bent to witness if it froze, but the bottom of the ditch was too dark to tell yes or no.
Before them was the battlefield falling away to the town and the river. The land lay bleak as nightmare and seemed to have been recast to fit a new and horrible model, all littered with bodies and churned up by artillery. Hell’s newground, one man had called it. To turn his mind from such a place that night, Inman had looked toward Orion and said the name he knew. The Tennessee boy had peered up at the star so indicated and said, How do you know its name is Rigel?
—I read it in a book, Inman said.
—Then that’s just a name we give it, the boy said. It ain’t God’s name.
Inman had thought on the issue a minute and then said, How would you ever come to know God’s name for that star?
—You wouldn’t, He holds it close, the boy said. It’s a thing you’ll never know. It’s a lesson that sometimes we’re meant to settle for ignorance. Right there’s what mostly comes of knowledge, the boy said, tipping his chin out at the broken land, apparently not even finding it worthy of sweeping a hand across its contours in sign of dismissal. At the time, Inman had thought the boy a fool and had remained content to know our name for Orion’s principal star and to let God keep His a dark secret. But he now wondered if the boy might have had a point about knowledge, or at least some varieties of it.
Inman and the preacher walked in silence for some time, until finally the preacher said, What do you intend doing with me?
—I’m thinking on it, Inman said. How did you get in this fix?
—It is hard to say. None in the settlement suspect a thing even yet. She lives with her grandmother, so old and deaf you must scream to make yourself understood. It was an easy matter for her to slip away at midnight to sport in a hayrick or on a mossy creek bank until the first birds began singing in the hour before dawn. All through the summer we crept about the nightwoods for our meetings.
—Crafty as panthers in the ways of stealth? Is that the picture you’re painting?
—Well, yes. After a fashion.
—How did it come to this pass?
—In the normal way. A certain look of eye, bend of voice, brush of hand in passing the chicken when we had dinners on the ground following Sunday services.
—There’s a smart distance between that and you with your britches around your ankles in a hayrick.
—Yes.
—Even further to you getting set to pitch her into a gorge like a shoat dead of the hog cholera.
—Well, yes. But it is more tangled than you make it to be. For one thing, there is my position. If we had been found out, I would have been run from the county. Our church is strict. We have churched members for as little as allowing fiddles to be
played in their houses. Believe me, I anguished over it through many a night.
—Those would be the rainy nights? When the hayricks and moss banks were too damp.
The preacher walked on.
—There were simpler repairs, Inman said.
—I could not find them.
—Marry her would be one.
—Again, you miss the tangles. I am already betrothed.
—Oh.
—I now believe that when I took to preaching I answered a false call.
—Yes, Inman said. I’d say you’re ill suited for that business.
They walked another mile and then before them, on the banks of a river, the same as flowed at the bottom of the gorge, was a kind of town. A collection of wood structures. A clapboard church, whitewashed. A business or two. Houses.
—What I believe we’re going to do, Inman said, is put her back in her bed like this night never happened. Have you a kerchief?
—Yes.
—Wad it up and put it in your mouth and lie facedown in the dirt, Inman said. He stripped the wire off the lead rope while the preacher did what he was told. Inman walked up behind the preacher and put a knee in his back and wound the wire around his head a half-dozen turns and then twisted the ends together.
—If you had screamed out, Inman said, people would come running and you could lay this all off on me. There’s no way I could tell it to make myself believed here.
They entered the town. At first, dogs barked. But then, recognizing the preacher and familiar with his nighttime rambles, they fell silent.
—Which house? Inman said.
The preacher pointed on down the road and then led the way through the town and out the other side to a little grove of poplars. Set back among the trees was a tiny cottage, just one room, covered over with batten boards and painted white. The preacher looked toward it and nodded. The way the wire stretched back the corners of his mouth made him look all agrin, and the expression ill-consisted with Inman’s mood.