Cold Mountain
Early in the afternoon they stopped by the house of Mrs. McKennet, a wealthy widow of middle age who had for a season or two taken a keen romantic interest in Monroe and then later, after he failed to see her in the same light, had simply become his friend. It was not the time for tea, but she was so pleased to see Ada that she proposed a greater treat. The summer having been so damp and cool, she still, at that late date, had ice resting in the basement ice pit. It had been cut in great blocks from the lake the previous February and packed in sawdust. And, after swearing them to secrecy, she revealed that she had four barrels of salt and three of sugar stored since long before the war. The extravagance of ice cream was what she had in mind, and she put her handyman—an old grey fellow too feeble for conscription—to chipping ice and cranking the machine. At some time in the past she had made numbers of sugared crepes and twisted them into cones and let them dry, and she served the ice cream in them. Ruby, of course, had never eaten such a thing and she was delighted. After she had licked the last white drop, she reached out her cone to Mrs. McKennet and said, Here’s your little horn back.
Their talk turned to the war and its effects, and Mrs. McKennet held opinions exactly in accord with every newspaper editorial Ada had read for four years, which is to say Mrs. McKennet found the fighting glorious and tragic and heroic. Noble beyond all her powers of expression. She told a long and maudlin story she had read about a recent battle, its obvious fictitiousness apparently lost on her. It was fought—as they all were lately—against dreadful odds. As the battle neared its inevitable conclusion, a dashing young officer was grievously wounded to the chest. He fell back bleeding great gouts of heartblood. A companion stooped and cradled his head to soothe his dying. But as the battle raged around them, the young officer, in the very act of expiring, rose and drew his pistol and added his contribution to the general gunfire. He died erect, with the hammer snapping on empty loads. And there were additional details of somber irony. Found on his person was a letter to his sweetheart, the wording of which foretokened exactly the manner of his death. And further, when the letter was taken by courier to the girl’s home, it was discovered that she had died of a strange chest seizure on precisely the day and hour her beloved had passed. During the latter stages of the tale, Ada developed an itch just to either side of her nose. She touched the places discreetly with her fingertips, but then she found that the corners of her mouth would stay down only with great trembling effort.
When Mrs. McKennet finished, Ada looked around at the furniture and carpet and lamps, at a household running effortlessly, at Mrs. McKennet, satisfied and plump in her velvet chair, her hair in tight rolls dangling from the sides of her head. Ada might as well have been in Charleston. And she felt called upon to take up some of her old Charleston demeanor. She said, That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard. She went further, adding that, contrary to the general view, she found the war to exhibit anything but the fine characteristics of tragedy and nobility. She found it, even at a great distance, brutal and benighted on both sides about equally. Degrading to all.
Her aim was to shock or outrage, but Mrs. McKennet rather seemed amused. She fixed Ada with a half smile and said, You know I have a great affection for you, but you are nevertheless the most naive girl I have yet had the pleasure to encounter.
Ada then fell silent and there was an awkward void that Ruby presently filled by cataloguing the birds she had spied that morning and commenting on the progress of late crops and reporting the amazing fact that Esco Swanger’s turnips had grown so big from his black dirt that he could fit but six in a peck basket. But in a minute Mrs. McKennet interrupted her and said, Perhaps you will share your views on the war with us.
Ruby hesitated only a second and then said the war held little interest for her. She had heard stories of the northern country and had come to understand that it was a godless land, or rather a land of only one god, and that was money. The report was that under the rule of such a grabby creed people grew mean and bitter and deranged until, for lack of higher forms of spirit comfort, entire families became morphine-crazed. They had, as well, invented a holiday called Thanksgiving, which Ruby had only recently got news of, but from what she gathered its features to be, she found it to contain the mark of a tainted culture. To be thankful on just the one day.
Later in the afternoon, as Ada and Ruby walked down the main street on the way out of town, they saw a knot of people standing at the side wall of the courthouse with their heads tipped up. They went to see what was happening and found that a prisoner at a second-story window was delivering a talk to the people below. The captive had his hands up gripping the bars, and he had his face thrust as far as it would go between them. The hair his head grew was black and oily and hung down in rat tails below his under jaw. A little tuft of black whiskers sprouted from beneath his bottom lip in the French style. All they could see of his attire before the windowsill cut him off was a shabby uniform jacket buttoned up to the neck.
He talked in the urgent meters of a street preacher, and he had drawn a crowd with the rage in his voice. He had fought hard through the war, he claimed. Had killed many a Federal and had taken a ball to the shoulder at Williamsburg. But he had recently lost faith in the war and he missed his wife. He had not been drafted but had volunteered for the fighting, and all he did by way of crime was unvolunteer and walk home. Now here he stood jailed. And they might just hang him, war hero though he was.
The captive went on to tell of how the Home Guard had taken him some days previous from a remote cove farm, his father’s, on the flank of Balsam Mountain. He had been there with other outliers. The woods were filling up with them, he said. As the lone survivor of the day, it was his duty he believed to narrate all the details from out the barred window of his cell, and Ada and Ruby stayed to hear, though it was a tale of considerable sordor and bloodshed.
It had been coming on toward twilight, and the tops of the mountains were cut off by a grey smother of clouds. Rain had begun falling, so fine and windless it would hardly wet a man out in it all night. It served only to deepen colors, making the dirt of the road redder and the leaves of poplar trees that met overhead greener. The captive and two other outliers and the captive’s father had been in the house when they heard horses coming from down below the bend in the road. His father took the shotgun, the only firearm among them, and went out to the road. There not being time to get to the woods, the three others gathered up weapons they had made from farm implements and went to hide in a fodder crib, where they watched the road between the unchinked poles of the wall.
A small party of wordless, ill-accoutered horsemen came traveling around the curve at a slow walk, climbing into the cove. They had apparently been unable to reach consensus on attire. Two great dark men so alike in their features that they might well have been twins rode vaguely uniformed in what could have been leavings scavenged from battlefield dead. A slight white-headed boy wore farm clothes—canvas britches, brown wool shirt, short grey wool jacket. And the other man might have been taken for a traveling preacher in his long-tailed black suitcoat, pants of moleskin, white shirt with a black cravat at the stand-up collar. Their horses were foul spine-sprung things, malandered about the necks, beshat greenly across the hindquarters, and trailing ropy harls of yellow snot blown from all the orifices of their heads. But the men were well armed with blockish Kerr pistols at their hips, shotguns and rifles in saddle scabbards.
The old man stood awaiting them, and in the grey light and drizzle he appeared to be a kind of specter, some grey being standing astraddle the grassy crest between the wagon tracks. He was dressed in garb of homespun wool, dyed butternut from the pulp of walnut husks. He wore a hat that looked as soft as a sleeping bonnet, and it sat on his head like something melting. His jowls hung in flaps like the flews of a hound, and he held the long gun behind him, run down back of his leg.
—Stop right there, he said, when the horsemen were twenty paces away.
The two b
ig men and the white-headed boy ignored the command and squeezed their mounts with their heels, urging them forward at a slow walk. The preacher-looking man took an angling course, making for the road edge, turning his horse so that its body would hide the short Spencer carbine in its scabbard at his knee. His companions stopped in a group before the old man.
There was quick movement and someone let out a high-pitched scream.
The old man had produced his gun from behind him and had in one swift motion poked it up under the soft of one big man’s chin and then pulled it back. It was a fowling piece of antique design. The hammer was cocked, and the bore to it was as big around as a shot glass. A little runnel of blood went down the big man’s neck and disappeared into his shirt collar.
The other big man and the white-headed boy sat and looked off across a little bit of cornfield where an old grey stook of last year’s fodder formed a sagging cone at the edge of the woods. They smiled as if they might have been expecting something of modest drollness to appear among the trees.
The old man said, You by the fence. I know who you are. You’re Teague. Get over here.
Teague did not move.
The old man said, You not coming?
Teague sat his ground. He had a grin on his face, but his eyes looked like a cold fireplace with the ashes shoveled out.
—These your big niggers? the old man said to Teague.
—I don’t know that’s what they are, Teague said. But they’re not mine. You couldn’t give me that pair free.
—Whose then?
—Their own, I reckon, Teague said.
—You get on over here with us, the man said.
—I’ll just rest here at the edge of the woods, Teague said.
—You’re making me jumpy and I’m fixing to put a load in somebody, the man said.
—You’ve just got the one barrel, Teague pointed out.
—This gun’s right comprehensive when you let fly with it, the man said. He took several steps backward until he judged the three men before him were all compassed by the wide shot pattern the big gun threw. Then he said, Get down off them horses and stand in a bunch.
Everyone but Teague dismounted. The horses stood with their reins dragging the ground, their ears forward like they were enjoying themselves. The man with the wound, Byron by name, put his fingers to it and looked at the blood and then wiped his hands on his loose shirt tail. The other one, name of Ayron, held his head cocked up to the side, and a pink tip of tongue showed at his mouth, so carefully was he now attending to every detail of the current scene. The white-headed boy rubbed his blue eyes and pulled in several directions at his clothing as if he had just woken up from sleeping in them. Then he stood and examined with great fascination the nail to his left index finger. It was near as long as the finger itself, the way some people will grow them for cutting butter and dipping lard and other such tasks.
The old man stood with the shotgun covering the three of them and surveyed their various armature.
—What do them niggers use their long cavalry sabers for? Hold meat over a fire to roast? he asked Teague.
There was a long moment of silence and then the old man said, What are you up here after?
—You know, Teague said. Catch up outliers.
—They’re all gone, the old man said. Long since. Laying out in the woods where they’ll be hard to find. Or passed on over the mountains to cross the lines and oath allegiance.
—Oh, Teague said. If I take your point, we best just go back to town then. Is that what you’re saying?
—Save us all trouble if you do, the man said.
—You don’t watch out, we’re liable to hang your old ass too, Teague said. They were gone, you wouldn’t be meeting us in the road armed.
At that moment the white-headed boy fell prone in the dirt and yelled out, King of kings!
The first instant that the old man’s attention collected on the boy, Ayron lunged with a grace unexpected in one of so much size and struck the man a clubbing blow to the head with his left fist. He followed that with a slap to the hand, knocking the shotgun away. The old man fell on his back, his hat in the dirt beside him. Ayron stepped over and picked up the shotgun and beat the old man with it until the stock broke off and then he beat him with just the barrel. After a time the man lay still in the road. He was somewhat conscious but had a puzzled look in his eyes. Something ran from one ear that had all the features of red-eye gravy.
Byron spit at the ground and wiped away the blood on his head, and then he drew his saber and put the point of it under the old man’s lapped chin and pressed until he caused a runnel of blood equal to his own.
—Hold meat over a fire, he said.
—Leave him be, Ayron said. There’s no harm left in him.
Both men, despite their size, had little keen voices, pitched high as birdsong.
Byron took the sword from the man’s chin, but then, before anyone could make out his intentions, he took the haft in both hands, and in a motion that looked no more effortful than plunging the dasher into a butter churn, he skewered the old man through the stomach.
Byron stepped away with his hands held out open to either side. There was nothing to see of the sword blade, just the scrolled guard and wire-wrapped grip sticking from beneath the old man’s chest. He tried to rise but only his head and knees came up, for he was spiked to the ground.
Byron looked at Teague and said, You want me to finish him?
—Just let him fight it out with his Maker, said Teague.
The boy rose from where he still lay on the ground and went and stood over the man and gawped at him.
—He’s ready for death, the boy said. His lamp is burning and he waits for the bridegroom.
They all laughed except for the old man and Teague. Teague said, Shut up, Birch. Let’s move.
They mounted to ride to the house, and as they did the old man breathed his last and died with a wail. In passing, Byron leaned low from his saddle, agile as a trick rider in a tent show, and drew out the saber and wiped it on the mane of his horse before returning it to its scabbard.
Byron went to the gate and kicked it open to break the latch, and they rode through it and right up to the porch.
—Come on out, Teague called. There was a note of the festive to his voice.
When no one appeared, Teague looked at Byron and Ayron and tipped his chin at the front door.
The two dismounted and looped their reins around porch posts and set about making circuits of the house in opposite directions, pistols drawn. They moved as a partnership of wolves will hunt, in wordless coordination of effort toward a shared purpose. They were naturally quick and their movements were easy and fluent, despite their being so bulky. But in a clench was where their main advantage was, for between the two of them they looked to be about able to dismember a man with their hands.
After they had orbited the empty house three times they burst through the front and back doors at the same instant. In a minute they came out, Ayron with a fistful of tapers paired by their wicks and Byron carrying part of a ham, which he held by the shank of its white bone like a chicken leg. They put them in panniers on the horses. Then without word or gesture of command or even suggestion, Teague and Birch climbed down to earth from their mounts and they all walked to the barn, where they threw open the doors to the stalls. They found but one old mule inside. They trod about among the hay in the loft and ran their sabers into the deepest piles and then they came out and turned their attention to the fodder crib, but as they approached it, the door sprung open and the three outliers broke to run.
The men were hindered in their escape, for they carried improvised weapons that had the look of artifacts from a yet darker age—a sharpened plow point swinging at the end of a chain, an old spade beaten and filed into the semblance of a spear, a pine-knot cudgel spiked at its head with horseshoe nails.
Teague let the men run a ways and then he put the carbine to his shoulder and shot down the two fr
ontrunners, who fell with a great clatter of weaponry. The last man, the captive, stopped and raised his hands and faced them. Teague looked at him a minute. The man went bootless that day, and he dug his toes at the dirt as if looking for a better hold. Teague licked his thumb and wiped it on the fore sight of his Spencer and raised the carbine and fit bead to notch. The man stood there motionless. He kept his grip on the spiked cudgel so that he stood with it raised over his head as savages are depicted in bookplates.
Teague lowered the carbine and put the butt of it on the ground and held it loose in one hand by the barrel.
—Throw that stick down, or I’m sending these two over to pull you apart, he said.
The captive looked at the two big men and then dropped the pine knot at his feet.
—Good, Teague said. Now just stand there.
The men all walked over to the captive, and Ayron grabbed him by the neck and snatched him up like a pup by the scruff. They then turned their attention toward the two men on the ground. One was dead and had hardly bled enough to stain his clothes. The other had taken a bullet to the bowels. He yet lived, but barely. He was propped up on his elbows and had pulled his britches and drawers down about his knees. He probed his wound with a pair of fingers and then looked at them and hollered, I’m kill’t.
The Guard came and stood around him but when they smelled the tang in the air they backed off. The captive squirmed like he wanted to go to his downed friend and Ayron hit him at the side of the head, three flat blows with the meat of his fist heel. Birch took out a black twist of chaw and gripped one end between his teeth and took his knife and sawed it off at his lips and put the remainder in his pocket. When he spit he scuffed dirt with his boot toe over the amber spot as if fastidious about marking the ground, heedful of leaving sign.
The shot man lay back flat and blinked at the sky and seemed baffled by it. His mouth formed words but he made no sound beyond the clickings of a dry mouth. Then his eyes closed and for some time he might have been thought dead except that at wide intervals he worked his fingers. He bled beyond all reason. The grass around him was matted red and his clothes hung heavy and slick like oilcloth. Even in the dim light it looked bright. Then the blood quit coming and he opened his eyes again without any effort toward focus.