They walked down the creek bank beyond the pasture and then stopped in a mixed stand of oak and tulip trees. As they talked, Inman seemed alternately cheerful and solemn, and at one point he took off his hat, which Ada understood to be in preparation for a kiss. He reached out to pluck away a pale green dogwood petal that was tangled in her hair and then his hand dropped to caress her shoulder and to draw her to him, but in doing so he brushed an onyx-and-pearl brooch at her collar. The pin snapped open and the brooch fell, bouncing off a rock and into the creek.
Inman put his hat back on and splashed in the water and scrabbled about the mossy rocks for some time until he came up with the brooch. He repinned it to her collar, but it was wet and his hands were wet and her dress was smeared dark at the neck. He stepped back from her. His pant cuffs dripped. He raised one of his new boots and let the water fall off of it. He seemed saddened that the tender moment had been lost and he could find no way to bring it back.
Ada found herself wondering, What if he is killed? But she could not, of course, voice the thought. She did not have to, though, for Inman at that instant said, If I am shot to death, in five years you’ll hardly remember my name.
She had not been sure if he was teasing or testing her or simply saying what he thought was the truth.
—You know it’s not that way, she said.
In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?
Inman looked off and seemed to be made shy by what he had said.
—Look there, he said. He tipped his head back to take in Cold Mountain, where all was yet wintery and drab as a slate shingle. Inman stood looking up at the mountain and told her a story about it. He had heard it as a child from an old Cherokee woman who had successfully hidden from the army when they scoured the mountains, gathering the Indians in preparation for driving them out on the Trail of Tears. The woman had frightened him. She claimed to be a hundred and thirty-five years old and to remember a time before any white man had yet come to this territory. She spoke in a voice that conveyed all her disgust with the time between then and now. Her face was seamed and gnarled. One eye entirely lacked color and was set in her head as slick and white as a boiled bird egg with the shell off. Her face was tattooed with two snakes, their bodies stretching in wavery lines to where their tails coiled into the hair at her temples. Their heads were opposite each other at the corners of her mouth so that when she spoke the snakes opened their mouths too, and seemed to share in telling the tale. It was about a village called Kanuga that many years ago stood at the fork of the Pigeon River. It is long since gone and no trace remains other than potsherds that people sometimes find, looking for stickbait at the river edge.
One day a man looking like any other man came into this Kanuga. He appeared to be an outlander, but the people greeted him and fed him. That was their custom toward any with an open hand. As he ate, they asked him if he came from far away in the western settlements.
—No, he said. I live in a town nearby. We are all, in fact, relatives of yours.
They were puzzled. Any kinsmen living nearby would be known.
—What town is it that you come from? they asked.
—Oh, you have never seen it, he said, even though it is just there. And he pointed south in the direction of Datsunalasgunyi, which the snake woman said was the name they had for Cold Mountain and did not signify either cold or mountain at all but something else entirely.
—There is no village up there, the people said.
—Oh, yes, the stranger said. The Shining Rocks are the gateposts to our country.
—But I have been to the Shining Rocks many times and have seen no such country, said one. And others agreed, for they knew the place he spoke of well.
—You must fast, the stranger said; otherwise we see you but you do not see us. Our land is not altogether like yours. Here is constant fighting, sickness, foes wherever you turn. And soon a stronger enemy than you have yet faced will come and take your country away from you and leave you exiles. But there we have peace. And though we die as all men do and must struggle for our food, we need not think of danger. Our minds are not filled with fear. We do not endlessly contend with each other. I come to invite you to live with us. Your place is ready. There is room for all of you. But if you are to come, everyone must first go into the town house and fast seven days and never leave during that time and never raise the war cry. When that is done, climb to the Shining Rocks and they will open as a door and you may enter our country and live with us.
Having said this, the stranger went away. The people watched him go and then began arguing the merits of his invitation. Some thought he was a savior and some thought a liar. At length, though, they decided to accept. They went into the town house, and for seven days they all remained there fasting, drinking only a sip or two of water each day. All but one man, who slipped away every night when the others were asleep. He went to his house and ate smoked deer meat and then returned before dawn.
On the morning of the seventh day the people began climbing Datsunalasgunyi toward the Shining Rocks. They arrived just at sunset. The rocks were white as a snowdrift, and when the people stood before them, a cave opened like a door, and it ran to the heart of the mountain. But inside was light rather than dark. In the distance, inside the mountain, they could see an open country. A river. Rich bottomland. Broad fields of corn. A valley town, the houses in long rows, a town house atop a pyramidal mount, people in the square-ground dancing. The faint sound of drums.
Then there was thunder. Great claps and peals that seemed to be drawing near. The sky turned black and lightning fell around the people outside the cave. They all trembled, but only the man who had eaten the deer meat lost his senses from fear. He ran to the mouth of the cave and shouted the war cry, and when he did the lightning ceased and the thunder began to fade into the distance and soon it was gone, moving off to the west. The people turned to watch it go. When they looked back to the rocks, they saw no cave but only the solid face of white rock, shining in the last light of the sun.
They went back to Kanuga, walking down the dark path as if in mourning, and every mind was fixed on the vision they had seen within the mountain. Soon, what the stranger had forevisioned came about. Their land was taken from them, and they were driven away into exile, except for the few who fought and hid among the crags, living frightened and hunted like animals.
When Inman was finished Ada did not know what to say, so she said, Well, that was certainly folkloric.
She immediately regretted it, for the story evidently meant something to Inman, though she was not entirely sure what.
He looked at her and started to say something and then he stopped and looked at the creek. In a minute he said, That old woman looked older than God and she cried tears out of her white eyeball when she told the story.
—But you don’t take it for the truth? Ada said.
—I take it that she could have been living in a better world, but she ended up fugitive, hiding in the balsams.
Neither knew what to say further, and so Inman said, I need to get on. He took Ada’s hand and just brushed his lips to the back of it and turned it loose.
When not twenty feet gone, though, he looked back over his shoulder and saw her just turning to walk to the house. Too soon. She had not even waited for him to round the first bend in the road.
Ada caught herself and stopped and looked at him. She threw up a hand in a wave and then realized that he was still too near for that to be a suitable gesture, so she drew her hand up awkwardly and tucked a stray bit of hair back into the heavy bun at her neck as if that had been her first intent.
Inman stopped and turned to face her and said, You can walk on home. You don’t have to stand watch on my going.
—I know I don’t, Ada said.
—You don’t want to, is my point.
—It would serve no purpose that I can see, she said.
—Some men might be made to feel better for it.
—Not you, Ada said, trying with little success to achieve a tone of lightness.
—Not me, Inman said, as if testing the idea to see if it stood plumb and level to the visible world.
In a moment, he took his hat off and held it down by his leg. He ran his other hand through his hair and then put one finger to his brow and saluted her.
—No, I guess, not me, he said. I’ll see you when I see you.
They walked away, this time without looking back.
That night, though, Ada felt not so cavalier about the war and about Inman’s going to it. It was a gloomy evening, ushered in by a brief rain before sunset. Immediately after dinner, Monroe went to his study and closed the door to work for hours on the week’s sermon. Ada sat alone in the parlor with one taper lit. She read from the latest number of the North American Review, and when that failed to engage her she riffled through Monroe’s old issues of the Dial and Southern Literary Messenger. Then she sat and pecked at the piano for a time. When she stopped there was just the faint sound of the creek, a drip now and then from the eaves, a peeper that soon fell quiet, the house settling. Occasionally the muffled sound of Monroe’s voice as he tried a newly composed phrase aloud for cadence. In Charleston at this time of night there would be waves beating on bulkheads, palmetto leaves rattling in the wind. The iron hoops of carriage wheels rumbling, and the hooves of horses tocking like great clocks keeping erratic time. Voices of promenaders and the brush of their shoe leather on gaslit street cobbles. In this mountain cove, though, Ada could hear her ears ring from lack of other report. It was so mum she began to think she felt it as an ache behind her brow bones. And the dark outside the windowpanes was as total as would have been achieved by painting the glass black.
Her thoughts tossed about in such void. A number of things about the morning bothered her. Not among them was that she had shed no tears. Nor that she had left unsaid the things many thousands of women, married and unmarried, said as men left, all of which boiled down to the sentiment that they would await the man’s return forever.
What did bother her was Inman’s question. How might she react to news of his death? She did not know, though the prospect of it loomed darker in her mind that evening than she would have thought. And she worried that she had rudely dismissed Inman’s story, had not summoned the wit at the time to see that it had not been about an old woman but about his own fears and desires.
All in all, she suspected that her performance had been glib. Or flinty and pinched. None of which she really wished to be. True, those manners had their uses. They excelled in causing people to take half a step back and give one breathing room. But she had fallen into them out of habit, and at the wrong time, and she regretted it. She feared that without some act of atonement they would take hold and harden within her and that one day she would find herself clenched tight as a dogwood bud in January.
She had slept poorly that night, tossing in her damp and chilly bed. Later she struck fire to wick and tried to read awhile at Bleak House, but she could not adjust her mind to it. She blew out the light and lay twisted in her covers. She wished she had a draught of opium. Sometime long after midnight she took the easement of maiden, spinster, widow. As a girl she had spent her thirteenth year troubled by the belief that she alone had discovered such an act, or perhaps that she alone was capable of it due to some malformation or unique baseness. So it had been a considerable relief when her cousin Lucy, older by some months, had set her straight on the matter of lone love. Lucy’s shocking view was that, as habits go, it approached tobacco chewing and snuff dipping and pipe smoking in degree of commonness, which was to say it might as well be considered universal. Ada had proclaimed such opinion to be utterly base and cynical. But Lucy did not budge in her view and remained blithe to the point of frivolity about a thing Ada held to be a dark mystery arising from desperation so great that one must surely go through the next day with a visible stain across one’s countenance. Neither Lucy’s views nor the intervening years had greatly changed Ada’s feelings on the matter.
On that fretful night, the pictures flowing into her mind unbidden and dreamlike were of Inman. And because her knowledge of anatomy was to a degree hypothetical—founded only on various animals and boy-babies and the amazing statues of Italy—the images that appeared to her most clearly were of his fingers and wrists and forearms. All else was speculative and therefore shadowy and without true form. Afterward, she lay wakeful until near dawn, still filled with yearning and hopelessness.
But she awoke the next day clearheaded and bright, and with firm resolve to set right her errors. The day was cloudless and warmer, and Ada told Monroe she wanted to go out for a drive, knowing full well where they ended up anytime he held the reins. He had the hired man harness Ralph to the cabriolet, and in an hour they wheeled into town. They went to the livery, where the horse was taken from between the thills and put in a stall and given a half measure of grain.
Out on the street, Monroe patted at the various pockets to his pants and waistcoat and topcoat until he found his money purse. He picked out a little twenty-dollar gold piece and handed it to Ada with no more thought than if it were a nickel. He suggested she buy something nice in the way of clothes and books and then meet back at the livery in two hours. She knew he was setting out to find a friend of his, an old doctor, and that they would talk about writers and painters and the like, and that in the process he would drink either one tiny glass of Scotch whisky or one large glass of claret, and that he would be exactly fifteen minutes late in meeting her.
She went straight to the stationer’s and without browsing bought sheet music for a number of recent tunes by Stephen Foster, a songster about whom she and Monroe held violently differing opinions. As for books, the first thing that fell to hand was a three-volume Trollope, near cubic in its mass. She had no particular desire to read it, but it was there. She had the purchases wrapped in paper and sent to the livery. Then she went to a mercantile and quickly bought a scarf, a pair of buff leather gloves, ankle boots the color of doeskin. These too she had wrapped and sent on ahead. She went out on the street, consulted the time, and found that she had successfully spent considerably less than an hour in shopping.
Knowing what she did was more than unseemly, she turned down the lane between the law office and the smithy. She climbed the open board steps to the covered landing before Inman’s door and knocked.
He’d been blacking a boot and still had his left hand thrust up in it when he opened the door. A rag in the other where he kept his grip on the knob. One foot with but a sock and the other shod but its boot yet unpolished. He wore no jacket, and his shirtsleeves were turned back nearly to the elbow. His head was bare.
Inman’s face was a display of total wonderment as he looked on Ada, materialized in the least likely place either of them could have imagined. He seemed not to know what words to say, only that those which would invite her in were not among the possibles. He held up a forefinger to signify a brief period of time, a moment. Then he closed the door, leaving her standing there.
What Ada had seen of the room through the opened door was disheartening. It was tiny with but one small window high on the far wall, and that with a prospect only on the clapboards and the shakes of the store across the alley. For furnishing, the room had a narrow iron bedstead, a chest of drawers with a washbasin atop it, a straight chair and writing table, some books in stacks. It was a cell. All in all more fit, she thought, for a monk than for someone she might class as beau.
True to Inman’s signal, the door soon reopened. He had turned down his shirt cuffs and put on a jacket and a hat. Both boots were on, though one was dirty brown and the other black as a greased stove lid. And he had gathered his thoughts somewhat.
—I’m sorry, he said. I was taken by surprise.
—I hope not an unpleasant one.
—A happy one, he said, though nothing about his expression supported such sentiment.
Inman came out on the landing and leaned back
against the railing, his arms crossed at his chest. Out in the sun, his hat cast a shadow on his face so that all above his mouth was dim. There was a long silence. He looked back at the door. He had left it open, and Ada guessed he wished he’d closed it but could not now decide which was worse, the awkwardness of taking the two strides to do it, or the sharp intimacy suggested by the yawning doorway and the narrow bedstead.
She said, I wanted to tell you I thought things concluded badly yesterday. Not at all as I wished them to. Not in a satisfying way.
Inman’s mouth tightened like a cord had been pulled in him. He said, I don’t believe I take your meaning. I was headed upriver to say my goodbyes to Esco and Sally. When I came to the road up Black Cove, I thought I might as well say one to you too. And I did. It was, as best I could tell, satisfactory.
Ada lacked experience in having her apologies rejected, and her first thought was to turn and walk down the steps and put Inman forever behind her. But what she said was, We might never speak again, and I don’t plan to leave that comment standing in place of the truth. You’re not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I’m sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise.
—That’s not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn’t suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on.
Inman still stood with his arms crossed, and Ada reached and touched where his shirt cuff came out from his coat sleeve. She held the cuff between finger and thumb and pulled until she unlocked his arms. She touched the back of his hand, tracing with one finger the curving course of a vein from knuckle to wrist. Then she took his wrist and squeezed it hard, and the feel of him in her hand made her wonder what the rest of him would be like.
Neither of them, for a moment, could look the other in the face. Then Inman pulled his hand away and took his hat off and spun it by the brim into the air. He caught it and flipped his wrist and sent it skimming through the door to land inside where it would. They both smiled, and Inman put one hand to Ada’s waist and the other to the back of her head. Her hair was in a loose upsweep, held with a clasp, and it was the cold nacre that Inman’s fingers touched as he tipped her head to him for the kiss that had eluded them the day before.