With little else to fill his mind, Odell spent much time reading Scott. In the cool months he hunted and in the warm he fished. He developed an interest in horse breeding. He became bored.
Lucinda came into the household as a result of a complicated set of gambling winnings his father accumulated on an autumn bear hunt. As a result of the evening card play, great numbers of hogs, several families of slaves, a saddle horse, a kennelful of bird dogs, a fine English-made shotgun, and Lucinda changed hands. The day she was delivered by her previous owner, she carried nothing but a square of cloth, the ends tied up around all her personal goods so that the bundle was no bigger than a pumpkin.
She was put to work in the kitchen, and that is where Odell first saw her. He walked into the room and fell in love that moment with the brittle blackness of her hair, the fine bones of her hands and feet and ankles, the way her skin stretched tight across her collarbone. She was barefoot, and Odell told Inman that as he stood there looking down at her pretty little feet he wished his wife was dead.
For months afterward, he spent much of his time sitting in a chair in the stove corner drinking coffee and mooning over Lucinda until everyone in the house knew the way things stood. One day his father took him aside and advised settling the matter by taking her into an outbuilding and, as he put it, laying the jemson to her.
Odell was appalled. He was in love, he explained.
His father laughed. I’ve raised a fool, he said.
The next day Odell’s father rented out Lucinda to a family on the far side of the county. They were farmers of small means, unable to buy slaves of their own. They paid Odell’s father for her labor and used her for fieldwork, milking, carrying wood. Whatever needed doing.
Odell fell into despair. He spent many a day lying abed. Or roving around the county, drinking and gambling. Until he discovered that two days a week, the farmer’s wife had Lucinda carry eggs into town to sell.
Odell would rise on those mornings, suddenly bright in his mood as a man could be, and announce that he was going out hunting. He would have a horse saddled, a charged shotgun in a scabbard, a pair of dogs. He would vault onto the horse from the porch and ride for miles at a canter, the dogs loping along, roaming out into the woods to investigate smells with as much glee as if they were actually hunting. He would ride into town, through it, out the other side, and on down the road until he met Lucinda walking barefoot, a basket of eggs on her arm. He would dismount and walk beside her. Take her basket and carry it for her. Would try to find a suitable topic for conversation. Never once in those first months did he try to draw her into the woods. She would beg him to leave her be, for his sake and for her own. At the edge of town he would give her back the basket and take her hand in his, both their heads bent down at parting.
Eventually, of course, Odell did find himself drawing her into the woods and down into a bed of pine straw. After that he began going to her cabin several nights a month. He would hobble his horse in the woods and tie his dogs to a tree. When he entered the clearing in the pinewoods where her cabin stood, she would run to him in a thin nightshirt and he would clasp her to him and then lead her inside to lie with her until just before the dawn of day.
He stayed away from home under various pretexts, chief of which was coon hunting, and soon every slave in the area knew that Odell would pay top dollar for fresh-killed coon. If he could, he would buy one on the way home to prove out his story of night hunting. Otherwise he would return to the house bemoaning his lack of skill in shooting, the greenness of his dogs, the increasing rareness of game.
This went on for a year. Then one night Lucinda informed him that she was pregnant. At this, Odell could bear it no more, and the next day he went to his father, met with him in what was called his study, though all he ever studied there were the big ledgers of the plantation. They stood together by the fireplace. Odell offered to buy Lucinda off of him. He would pay any price named, no dickering. His father sat blinking in amazement. Let me make sure I’m understanding this, he said. Are you buying this nigger for the fieldwork or the pussy?
Odell struck his father a hard blow to his left ear. The old man fell and then rose and fell again. He bled from his ear hole. Help! he hollered.
Odell spent the next week locked in a canning house, bruised about the head and ribs from the beating he had taken at the hands of his younger brother and his father’s foreman. On the second day his father came to the door and spoke through a crack, saying, I’ve sold that bitch to Mississippi.
Odell flung himself against the door again and again. He bayed through that night like one of his coon dogs and then off and on periodically for the next several days.
When he became too weary to howl, his father unlocked the door. Odell staggered out, blinking, into the light. I believe you have learned your lesson, his father said, and he strode away toward the lower fields, flicking at weed heads and wildflowers with his plaited crop.
Odell walked into the house and packed a satchel of clothes. From the safe box in his father’s office he took all the cash he could find—a sizable pouch of gold pieces and a stack of paper bills. He went to his mother’s room and took a diamond and ruby brooch, an emerald ring, several strings of pearls. He went and saddled his horse and rode out toward Mississippi.
In the years before the war, he searched the cotton states until he had worn out three horses and exhausted his store of valuables. But he had yet to find Lucinda, and he had never set foot on home ground again.
In a sense, he was still searching. This was the reason that, when it became necessary to make money, he chose a traveling life. His fortunes in business had eventually fallen from tradesman with horse and wagon to tinker pushing a barrow. He had but few more downward steps to go and could picture himself soon dragging some wheelless sledge or travois, that or selling little trinkets from a pack on his back.
When the tale was done, Inman and Odell found they had finished the flask of liquor. Odell went to his packs of goods and brought back two little bottles of patent medicine, mostly grain alcohol. They sat and sipped at it, and after a time Odell said, You’ve never seen the like of meanness I have. He told of his travels in Mississippi looking for Lucinda, sights that made him fear that she had already passed on into the next world in some horrible and bloody way. And sights that made him fear that she had not. He told of niggers burnt alive. Of them having ears and fingers docked for various misdemeanors. The worst such punishment he came upon was near Natchez. He was going down a lonely road near the river. Off in the woods he heard a turmoil of buzzards, a high wail. He took his shotgun and went investigating, and what he found was a woman in a cage made of bean poles beneath a liveoak. The tree was dusky with buzzards. They roosted on the cage and picked at the woman inside. They had pulled out one of her eyes already and had torn strips of hide from her back and arms.
When she saw Odell out of her one eye she hollered, Shoot me. But Odell fired off both barrels up into the tree. Buzzards hit the ground all about and the rest took lumbering flight. Odell had the sudden fear that the woman was Lucinda. He went to her and broke the cage open with the gun butt and drew her out. He laid her on the ground and gave her water. He had no idea what he intended to do, but before he could decide, the woman vomited blood and died. He looked at her and touched her feet and her collarbone and her hair, but she could not have been Lucinda. She was different-colored and her feet were knotted.
When Odell finished talking he was drunk and sat blotting at his eyes with his shirt cuff.
—It’s a feverish world, Inman said, for lack of better comment.
When morning came up grey and foggy, Inman left the burnt inn and hit the road. Veasey soon followed. He had a thin razor cut under one eye that still wept a trail of blood down his cheek, and he kept wiping at it with his coat sleeve.
—Rough night? Inman said.
—She meant no real harm. This razor scratch came by way of me being too firm in haggling over price for her staying th
e night. At least my greatest fear went happily unrealized, that she would lay that blade to the limb of my manhood.
—Well, I hope the night was worth it.
—Fully. The fascinations of depraved and unchaste women have been proverbial, and I admit I am a man overly charmed by the peculiarities of the female anatomy. Last night when she drew off that big shift of hers and stood before me, I was sore amazed. Stunned, in fact. It was a sight to mark down for remembrance in old age, one to cheer a mind otherwise falling to despond.
source and root
They had begun walking to town in a chill, mizzling rain. Against it, Ada had worn a long coat of waxed poplin, and Ruby had on an enormous sweater she had knitted of undyed wool with the lanolin left in, her claim being that the oil turned water as well as a mackintosh. The sweater’s only failing was that in the damp it broadcast the fragrance of an unshorn ewe. Ada had insisted on carrying umbrellas, but an hour down the road the clouds broke open to sun. So once the trees quit dripping, they carried them furled, Ruby with hers over her shoulder like a woodward huntsman toting a rifle.
The brightening sky was busy with resident birds and with traveler birds moving south ahead of the season: various patterns of duck, geese both grey and white, whistling swan, nighthawk, bluebird, jaybird, quail, lark, kingfisher, Cooper’s hawk, red-tailed hawk. All these birds and others Ruby remarked upon during their passage to town, finding a thread of narrative or evidence of character in their minutest customs. Ruby assumed the twitter of birds to be utterance as laden with meaning as human talk and claimed to like especially the time in spring when the birds come back singing songs to report where they’ve been and what they’ve done while she’d stayed right here.
When Ruby and Ada came upon five ravens gathered in council at the edge of a yellow stubblefield, Ruby said, I’ve heard it claimed that rooks live for many hundreds of years, though how one might test that notion is anybody’s guess. When a female cardinal with a sprig of birch in its beak flew by, Ruby was curious. She reckoned it a profoundly confused bird, for why would she carry such a thing if not nest building? But this was not the time of year for it. When they passed a stand of beech trees by the river, Ruby said the river took its name from the great numbers of passenger pigeons that sometimes flocked there to eat the beechnuts, and she said she had eaten many a pigeon in her youth when Stobrod would disappear for days at a time leaving her to fend for herself. They were the easiest game for a child to take. You did not even have to shoot them, just knock them out of trees with sticks and wring their necks before they came to their senses.
When three crows harried a hawk across the sky, Ruby expressed her great respect for the normally reviled crow, finding much worthy of emulation in their outlook on life. She noted with disapproval that many a bird would die rather than eat any but food it relishes. Crows will relish what presents itself. She admired their keenness of wit, lack of pridefulness, love of practical jokes, slyness in a fight. All of these she saw as making up the genius of crow, which was a kind of willed mastery over what she assumed was a natural inclination toward bile and melancholy, as evidenced by its drear plumage.
—We might all take instruction from crow, Ruby said pointedly, for Ada was clearly in something of a mood, the lifting of which lagged considerably behind the fairing sky.
For much of the morning Ada had been so dumb with gloom she might as well have worn a black crepe on her sleeve to announce it to the world. Some of it was attributable to the hard work of the previous week. They had made hay in the neglected fields, though in the end it was so mixed with ragweed and spurge as to be barely usable. One day they had worked for hours preparing the scythes for cutting. They first needed a file and large whetstone to freshen the nicked and rusting edges of the scythes, which they had found lying reclined across the rafters of the toolshed. Ada could not say one way or the other whether Monroe had owned such implements as file and whetstone. She had her doubts, for the scythes had not been his but were left from the Blacks’ tenure in the cove. Together Ada and Ruby had rummaged through the contents of the shed until they found a rat-tail file, its sharp tail end driven into a dusty old cob for handle. But a stone never emerged from the clutter.
—My daddy never had a whetstone either, Ruby said. He’d just spit on a piece of shale and rub his knife on it a pass or two. However sharp it got, that was fine. No great matter of pride to him if it would shave hair on your arm or not. As long as he could saw off a plug of chaw with it, he was happy enough.
In the end they had given up the search and resorted to Stobrod’s method, using a smooth flat shale they found near the creek. After much rubbing, the blades were still of only marginal sharpness, but Ada and Ruby went to the field and swung the scythes through the afternoon and then raked the cut grass into windrows, finishing in the last light, well after the sun had set. On the day before the outing, when the hay had dried on the ground, they filled the drag sled over and over with it and unloaded it in the barn. The stubble underfoot stood hard and sharp so they could feel it pushing against their shoe soles. They worked from opposite sides of the rows, alternately forking the hay into the sled. When their rhythm broke apart, the tines of their forks chimed against each other and Ralph, dozing in the traces, would startle and toss his head. The work was hot, though the day had not been particularly so. It was a dusty job, and the chaff hung in their hair and the folds of their clothes and stuck to their sweaty forearms and faces.
When they were done, Ada felt near collapse. Her arms were mackled red like a measles sufferer from being pricked and scraped with the cut grass ends, and she had a big blood-filled blister in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. She had washed up and collapsed in bed before dark, having eaten nothing but a cold biscuit with butter and sugar.
Tired as she was, though, she had found herself over and over rising from true sleep into a foggy hovering state of partial wakefulness, a fretful hybrid of sleep and wake partaking of the worst aspects of each. She felt she was raking and pitching hay all through the night. When she roused enough to open her eyes, she saw the black shadows of tree limbs moving in the block of moonlight cast across the floorboards, and the shapes seemed unaccountably troubling and ominous. Then, sometime in the night, clouds blacked out the moon and rain fell hard and Ada finally fell asleep.
She had awakened to the rainy dawn feeling crippled with muscle ache. Her hands would unclench from their imaginary grip on the hayfork only with effort, and her head throbbed with a general pain. And with a specific one, just above and behind her right eyelid. But she determined that the outing to town would go on as planned, for it was largely a pleasure trip they were taking, though they did need to purchase a few small items. Ruby wanted to replenish their makings for shotgun loads—birdshot, buckshot, and slugs—the cooling weather having put her in a temper to kill wild turkey and deer. For her part, Ada wished to scan the shelves at the back of the stationer’s to see if any new books had arrived and to buy a leather-bound journal and a few sketching pencils so she might record some of her efforts toward botanizing. Mainly, though, Ada was feeling thoroughly cove-bound after weeks of work. She yearned so badly to go on a jaunt to town that sore muscles, a black mood, and the morning’s unpromising weather had not kept her back. Nor had the unpleasant discovery at the barn that sometime during the previous day’s work the horse had stone-bruised the sole of his hoof and was not able to draw the cabriolet.
—I’m going to town if I have to crawl, Ada had said to Ruby’s back as Ruby bent in the rain with the horse’s muddy hoof in her hands.
So it was a gloomy progress Ada made down the road that morning, despite Ruby’s best efforts toward birdlore. They walked past farms set in little valleys and coves, the fields opening up among the wooded hills like rooms in a house. Women and children and old men worked the crops, since every man of age to fight was off warring. The leaves on cornstalks were brown at the tips and edges, and the ears to be left for shell corn still s
tood on the stalk waiting for sun and frost to dry them out. Pumpkins and winter squash lay bright on the ground between the corn rows. Goldenrod and joe-pye weed and snakeroot blossomed tall along the fence rails, and the leaves on blackberry canes and dogwood were maroon.
In town, Ada and Ruby first walked about the streets looking at the stores, the teams and wagons and the women with their shopping baskets. The day had warmed to the point that Ada carried her waxed coat balled up under an arm. Ruby wore her sweater tied at her waist, and she had yoked her hair back at collar level with a band plaited of horse-tail strands. The air was still hazy. Cold Mountain was a blue smear, a hump on the far ridgeline, made small by the long walk and no more dimensional against the sky than paper pasted on paper.
The county seat was not a town of great refinement. On one side there were four clapboard store buildings in a row, then a hog pen and a mud pit, then two more stores, a church, and a livery. On the other side, three stores, then the courthouse—a cupolaed white frame building set back from the road with a patchy lawn in front—then four more storefronts, two of them brick. After that, the town trailed off into a fenced field of dried cornstalks. The streets were cut deep by narrow wagon wheels. Light glinted off water pooled in the numberless basins made by horse tracks.
Ada and Ruby went to a hardware and bought wadding, shot, slugs, caps, and powder. At the stationer’s, Ada paid more than she could afford for Adam Bede in three volumes, six fat charcoal pencils, and an octavo-sized journal of well-made paper that appealed to her because it was small enough to fit in a coat pocket. From a street vendor they bought news-papers—the county paper and the larger one from Asheville. They bought lukewarm root beer from a woman tapping a barrel in a pushcart and drank it down where they stood and handed the woman back her tin cups. For dinner they bought hard cheese and fresh bread and took it down by the river and sat on rocks to eat.