She went to the house. Upstairs she opened a trunk and took out an old pair of riding breeches and a maroon wool shirt of Monroe’s. His beaver hat and a bright throat scarf. From them she might craft a fine and stylish scarecrow. But as she stood looking down at the folded clothes in her hands, all she could imagine was every day walking out and seeing the effigy of Monroe standing in the field. From the porch at dusk it would be a dark figure watching. Her fear was that it would loom larger and more troubling in her mind than it would in the crows’.
Ada put the clothes back in the trunk and went to her room and riffled through drawers and wardrobes, and finally she decided on the mauve dress that she had worn the last night of the party on the Wando River. And she took out a French-made straw hat Monroe had bought her fifteen years earlier on their tour of Europe and now frizzing apart at the brim edge. Ruby, she knew, would object to the dress, not on grounds of sentiment but because the material could be put to better use. Cut up, it could make pillow covers, quilt tops, antimacassars for chairbacks, any number of useful things. Ada, though, decided that if it was silk that was wanted, she had a number of other gowns that could as easily be put into service. This was the one she wanted to see standing in a field through rain and shine.
She carried the dress outside and then wired together a rood of bean poles as armature and planted it out in the center of the garden, beating it firm into the dirt with a hand sledge. She topped it with a head made by stuffing the end of a worn-out pillowcase with leaves and straw and daubing a grinning face on it with paint she stirred up from chimney soot and lamp oil. She put the dress over the poles and fleshed out the bodice with straw and gave the figure the straw hat for millinery. From the end of one arm she hung a small tin pail with a rust hole in its bottom. She went to the fencerow and broke off stems of goldenrod and aster and filled the pail with them.
When she was done Ada backed off and examined her work. The figure stood staring off toward Cold Mountain, as if during a leisurely walk gathering flowers for a table arrangement she had been struck momentarily still by the beauty of the scene before her. The full skirts of the lavender dress swayed in the breeze, and all Ada could think was that after a year of weather it would become bleached to the color of an old shuck. Ada herself wore a fading print dress and a straw bonnet. She wondered if an observer standing off on Jonas Ridge and looking down into the cove would choose right if asked to pick the scarecrow from the two figures standing in the field.
She washed her hands at the basin on the kitchen porch and fixed herself a dinner of a few umber shavings from Esco’s ham, cold biscuits left from breakfast, and a wedge of baked pumpkin from supper the evening before. She took her journal and her plate and went to the table under the pear tree. When she was done eating, she paged through the journal—past the sketch of the heron, studies of dogwood berries, clusters of sumac fruit, a pair of water striders—until she reached the first blank page, and on it she sketched the scarecrow and above it the notched wings of the crow. She wrote down the date, and an approximation of the time, and then the current phase of the moon. At the bottom of the page she put down the names of the flowers in the scarecrow’s bucket, and in an unused corner of the page she sketched a detail of aster blossom.
Shortly after Ada was done, Ruby came walking up the road. She led the horse, six lumpy sacks of cabbages paired up and slung across his back. That was two sacks more than was fair, but Ruby had not been so proud as to deny Esco the impulse toward generosity. Ada went to the road. Ruby walked to her and stopped and reached in a skirt pocket and took out a letter.
—Here you go, she said. I stopped at the mill. In her tone was the conviction that any message conveyed other than by voice, face-to-face, was likely to be unwelcome. The letter was creased and wrinkled, dirty as an old work glove. It had been wet at some point in its journey and had dried puckered and stained. It lacked return address, but Ada knew the hand in which her own name was written. She pocketed the letter, not wanting to read it under Ruby’s scrutiny.
Together they unloaded the sacks beside the smokehouse, and while Ruby put the horse away Ada went to the kitchen and made another plate the like of her own dinner. Then Ruby ate, talking all the while of cabbages and the many things they would make from them, which to Ada seemed few indeed—kraut, fried cabbage, boiled cabbage, stuffed cabbage, slaw.
When Ruby had eaten they went to the sacks. One they held back for making into sauerkraut when the signs came around right for it again. Do it otherwise and it might rot in the crocks. The rest they buried for the winter. It was to Ada an odd and troubling job, digging the gravelike trench behind the smokehouse and lining it with straw and heaping the pale heads in and covering them with more straw and then dirt. When they were done mounding up the dirt, Ruby marked the place with a plank, beating at it with the heel of her shovel until it stood like a tombstone.
—There, Ruby said. That might save us having to scratch around in the snow come January.
All Ada could think was how grim it would be on some cloudy midwinter afternoon—wind blowing, bare trees heaving, the ground covered in a grey crust of old snow—to come out and dig into that barrow pit for a mere cabbage.
Late that afternoon they sat on the stone steps, Ada behind Ruby and a riser above her. Ruby leaned against Ada’s shins and knees like they were the ladder to a chairback. Watching the sun fall. The blue shadow of Jonas Ridge advancing across the creek and then the pasture. Barn swallows in jittery and reckless flight. Ada stroked Ruby’s dark hair with an English-made brush of boar bristles. She worked until the hair was sleek and had the sheen of a new gunbarrel. She ran her fingers through it, parting it into seven sections, and each cord had its own heft and resistance in her hands. She spaced them across Ruby’s shoulders and studied them.
Ada and Ruby were having a hair contest. It had been Ada’s idea, suggested to her from watching Ruby absentmindedly plait Ralph’s tail in intricate patterns. Ruby would stand behind him, her thoughts elsewhere, eyes unfocused, fingers moving apparently without effort through the long tail hair. It seemed to assist in her thinking. And it would about put Ralph to sleep. He would stand with one hind hoof tipped and his eyelids flickering. Afterward, though, he went about with his backquarters slightly tucked under him, nervous and embarrassed-looking, until one or the other of them went and undid his tail and brushed it out.
Ruby seemed so enviably dreamy during the making of the plaits that Ada imagined her as a lonely and abandoned child wandering the countryside to braid the tails of old solitary plow horses out of need for proximity to something live and warm. To touch it in a way both intimate and distant, not to lay a hand directly to its life but to the beautiful and bloodless extrusion of it. In such spirit, Ada had proposed they vie to see who could compose the most intricate or beautiful or outlandish plait of the other’s hair. It would make the competition all the more interesting that neither would know what had been done with her own hair—only what she had done with the other’s—until they went inside and stood with paired mirrors to examine the backs of their heads. The loser was to perform all the night work while the winner rocked on the porch and watched the sky darken and counted the stars as they appeared.
Ada’s hair had already been finished. Ruby had worked for some time, pulling and twisting until it was yanked back tight at Ada’s temples. She could feel its pull at her eye corners. She started to pat the back of her head, but Ruby reached and slapped her hand away to prevent any foreknowledge as to how the competition stood.
Ada took the three tresses at the center of Ruby’s back and made a simple pigtail. That was the easy part. With the remaining pieces she planned to build a complex overbraid, lapping and weaving in a herringbone pattern like a favorite raffia basket of hers. She took up two of the side pieces and began lacing them up.
Four crows, Notchwing in the lead, drifted down into the cove and then flared when they saw the new scarecrow. They flew away squealing like shot pigs.
/> Ruby called it a favorable comment on Ada’s construction.
—That hat in particular’s a fine touch, she said.
—It came from France, Ada said,
—France? Ruby said. We’ve got hats here. A man up East Fork weaves straw hats and will swap them for butter and eggs. Hatter in town makes beaver and wool but generally wants money.
This business of carrying hats halfway around the world to sell made no sense to her. It marked a lack of seriousness in a person that they could think about such matters. There was not one thing in a place like France or New York or Charleston that Ruby wanted. And little she even needed that she couldn’t make or grow or find on Cold Mountain. She held a deep distrust of travel, whether to Europe or anywhere else. Her view was that a world properly put together would yield inhabitants so suited to their lives in their assigned place that they would have neither need nor wish to travel. No stagecoach or railway or steamship would be required; all such vehicles would sit idle. Folks would, out of utter contentment, choose to stay home since the failure to do so was patently the root of many ills, current and historic. In such a stable world as she envisioned, some might live many happy years hearing the bay of a distant neighbor’s dog and yet never venture out far enough from their own fields to see whether the yawp was from hound or setter, plain or pied.
Ada did not bother arguing, for she figured that her life was moving toward a place where travel and imported hats would figure small. The braid was finished, and she looked on it with disappointment. As with all her efforts toward art, it did not match up with her imagining of it. She thought it looked like a hemp lanyard twisted together by a mad or drunken sailor.
Ada and Ruby stood up from the steps and took turns touching each other’s braids to smooth down stray hairs and tuck in loose pieces. They went to Ada’s bedroom and backed up to the large mirror over the commode table and took a silver hand mirror and paired up the images. Ada’s plait was simple and tight, and when she put her fingers to it she thought it felt like touching a chestnut limb. You could work all day and it would not spring loose.
When it came Ruby’s turn, she took a long time looking. She had never seen the back of her head before. She put her hand to her hair and touched it flat-palmed, patting it over and over. She declared it perfect and would hear of nothing but that Ada be judged victor.
They went back to the porch and Ruby went on into the yard, ready to get on with the night work. But she stopped and stood looking around and then up at the sky. She touched the hair at her neck and at the crown of her head. Out from under the shade of the porch she could see that there was yet light enough to read a few pages from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she said as much. So they sat back on the steps and Ada read, glossing as she went, and when she got to a line of Robin’s—where he says, “Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn”—Ruby was immensely amused and said the words over and over as if they held a great deal of meaning and delight just in themselves.
The light soon fell too grey to read. A pair of bobwhites called their identical three-word messages back and forth from the field to the woods. Ruby rose and said, I better get on.
—Check our trap, Ada said.
—No point. You don’t catch anything by day, Ruby said, before walking away.
Ada closed the book and plucked a boxwood leaf as page marker. She took Inman’s letter from her skirt pocket and tipped the face of it to the west to gather what light remained there. She had read the utterly vague announcement of his wound and his planned return five times that afternoon. She could make no more of it after the fifth reading than she had from the first, which was that Inman seemed to have reached some firm conclusion about the state of feeling existing between them, though Ada could not herself put a name to how she thought things stood. She had not seen him in almost four years, and it had been more than four months since she had last heard from him. Just a brief dashed note from Petersburg, its tone impersonal as something one would write to a distant relation, though that was not unusual, for early on Inman had asked that they never speculate on what might happen between them after the war. Nobody could say how things would be then, and imagining the various possibilities—either pleasant or grim—only cast a shadow over his thoughts. Their correspondence through the war had been irregular. Flurries of letters, and then stretches of silence. This last stretch, though, was a long one even by their standards.
The letter Ada now held was without date, nor did it contain any mention of recent events or even weather by which it could be dated. It could have been written the week past, or it might be three months old. The letter’s battered condition argued for a date nearer the latter, but there was no way to know. And she was unclear about his coming home. Did he mean now or at the end of the war? If he meant now, there was no telling whether he was long overdue to return or just setting out on his journey. Ada thought of the story she and Ruby had heard the captive tell from the barred window of the courthouse. She feared every county would have its Teague.
She squinted at the paper. Inman’s hand being somewhat cramped and minute, all Ada could make clear in the dark was this brief paragraph:
Should you still possess the likeness I sent four years ago, I ask you, please, do not look at it. I currently bear it no resemblance in either form or spirit.
Ada of course went immediately to her bedroom and lit a lamp and opened drawers until she found the portrait. She had put it away because she never thought it looked much like him to begin with. When it arrived, she showed it to Monroe, who held a dim view toward photography and had never been photographed and never intended to be, though he had twice in his younger years sat for painters. He had examined Inman’s countenance with some interest and then snapped the case shut. He went to the shelves and pulled out a volume and read from Emerson on the experience of being daguerreotyped, saying these words: “And in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every moment more rigid; the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed as they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?”
And though that was not precisely the effect of Inman’s picture, Ada had been forced to admit that it was not far off the mark either. So she had put it away in order not to have her memory of Inman blurred by it.
Such little mechanical portraits as Ada now held in her hand were not rare. She had seen any number of them. Nearly every family in the settlement with a son or husband off fighting had one, even if only cased in tin. Displayed on mantel or table with the Bible, a taper, sprigs of galax, so that the effect was altarlike. In sixty-one, any soldier with a dollar and seventy-five cents could have his aspect recorded in the form of ambrotype, tintype, calotype, or daguerreotype. In those early days of war, Ada had found most of the ones she had seen comic. Later she found them depressing in their depictions of men now dead. One after the other, they had sat bristling with weaponry before the portraitist for the long exposure. They held pistols crossed at their breasts or bayoneted rifles at their sides. Shiny new bowie knives brandished for the camera. Forage caps set at swank angles on their heads. Farm boys more bright in their moods than on hog-killing days. Their costumes were various. Men wore every kind of thing to fight in, from clothes you might put on for plowing to actual uniforms, to garbs of such immense ridiculousness that even in peacetime someone might take a shot at you for wearing them.
Inman’s portrait differed from most in that he had spent more money on the case than was usual. It was a beautiful little filigreed silver thing and Ada rubbed it, front and back, against the skirt at her hip to polish away the dusty tarnish. She opened it and held it to the lamp. The image was like oil on water. She had to tip it in her hand, making fine adjustments to get the light to make sense of it.
Inman’s regiment had been casual about uniform, having agreed with their captain that
nothing in the killing of Federals required an alteration of one’s ordinary attire. In accordance with that belief, Inman wore a loosely constructed tweed jacket, collarless shirt, and soft slouch hat, the brim of which drooped to his brow. He had then affected a little pointed goatee and appeared less a soldier than a gentleman vagabond. He had a Colt’s Navy at his hip, but his jacket covered all but the grip of it. He did not touch it. His hands were open, resting on the tops of his legs. He had tried to fix his eyes on a spot some twenty degrees to the side of the lens, but sometime during the exposure he had moved them and they were blurred and strange. His expression was intent and stern so that he seemed to be staring hard at nothing identifiable, interested in something other than the camera or the act of portraiture or indeed even in the viewer’s opinion of him in this static form.
Saying he no longer matched that image didn’t tell Ada much. It didn’t in any regard capture her recollection of him on the last day she saw him before he left, and that could not have been more than a matter of weeks before the picture was made. He had come by the house to say goodbye. He was, at the time, still living in a room at the county seat but would be leaving in two days, three at the most. Monroe had been reading by the fire in the parlor and had not bothered to come out to speak. Ada and Inman had walked together down to the creek. Ada could not remember a thing of Inman’s attire but his slouch hat—the same as in the picture—and that his boots were newly made. It was a damp, chill morning following a day of rain, and the sky was still half filled with high thin clouds. The cow pasture by the creek was turning pale green with new shoots rising through the grey stubble of the previous year. It was sodden from the rain so that the two had to pick their way through it to keep from miring shin-deep. Along the creek and up the hillside, blossoms on redbud and dogwood shone out against the grey trees, their limbs frosted green with the first thin edges of leaf growth.