Ada had on about all the clothes women of her station then wore, and so her body was all cased up underneath many lapped and pleated yards of dead fabric. His hand at her waist touched the whalebones of corset stays, and when she took a step back and looked at him, the bones creaked against each other as she moved and breathed. She guessed she felt to him like a terrapin shut up inside its hull, giving little evidence that a distinct living thing, warm and in its skin, lay inside.
They walked together down the steps, and the door as they passed it stood like a promise between them. Near the mouth to the lane, Ada turned and put her forefinger to Inman’s collar button to stop him.
—Here is far enough, she said. Go on back. As you said, I’ll see you when I see you.
—But I hope that’s soon.
—We both do, then.
That day they had thought the most suitable units of time to measure Inman’s absence would be mere months. The war, though, turned out to be a longer experience than either had counted on.
the doing of it
Inman followed the yellow man’s artful map through what the locals called hill country. Nights were cool and leaves were beginning to color. After he had walked for the better part of a week, he advanced to the bare white places at the map’s far margin, and he could see the Blue Ridge hanging like a drift of smoke across the sky ahead. It took him three more nights to pass through a foul place called Happy Valley, a long broad swath of cropland and pastureland at the foot of the mountains. There was too much open ground to feel good about walking by day, and by night there was pistol fire and torchlight, the roads so full of dark riders that Inman spent as much time hiding in ditches and haystacks as walking. He reckoned the riders were Home Guard, all drunk as coon hunters greeting the dawn. Out searching for the Federals broken free from the Salisbury jail. Quick to trip a trigger.
At wide intervals in the valley stood big houses with white columns. They were ringed around with scattered hovels so that the valley land seemed cut up into fiefdoms. Inman looked at the lights in the big houses at night and knew he had been fighting battles for such men as lived in them, and it made him sick. He just wanted to get on into the thinly settled regions of the mountains, where he hoped people would offer less impediment. So as soon as he could, Inman forsook the dangerous roads of the valley country and took to a narrow cart track that aimed northward and climbed a ridge and fell into a deep river gorge and then rose hard toward the crest of the Blue Ridge. Inman climbed part of one day and all of the next and there was still a wall of mountain reared up before him, the track rising tack and tack endlessly. It soon lifted him into a later stage of autumn, for in the heights the season was already far along, and there were as many leaves on the ground as in the trees.
Late in the afternoon, cold rain began falling, and Inman walked with little enthusiasm through the close of day into dark. Sometime well past the middle of the night, nearly given out, wet as an otter, he stumbled upon a big chestnut tree with a hollow at its base, the bark healed around it like thick lips. He crawled inside and though there was not room to find a position more comfortable than a squat, he was at least in the dry. He sat for a long time listening to the rain fall. He rolled up dead leaves into tight cylinders between thumb and forefinger, then flicked them out into the dark. Lodged there in the tree, he began to feel himself to be a sodden wraith askulk in the night, some gnome or underbridge troll. An outcast, resentful and ready to lash out from spite at any passerby. Later he dozed in and out, waiting for morning, and then eventually he fell fast asleep wedged tight into the heart of the chestnut.
He dreamed his dream of Fredericksburg, and then sometime shortly after dawn he awoke shivering and in a sour mood. He felt as if things were not as he had left them. He tried to rise from the mouth of the tree but found that all the lower reaches of his body had gone dead. He scrabbled out from the tree, pulling himself along with his arms. For all the feeling in his legs, he might have been sawed off from the waist down. It was as if nothing were there, himself in the process of becoming some mere figment, fading from the ground up, as if the journey ahead were to be continued in the form of a veil or mist. A tissue.
The idea had its appeal. A traveling shade.
Inman stretched out on the wet ground litter and looked up through the tree limbs and their dripping leaves. The clouds were thick and grey. Blue patches of fog, fine and pale as powder, moved through the overstory of chestnut limbs and oak limbs clutching bright autumn leaves. A grouse drummed off in the woods, a deep violent sound like the beat of Inman’s own heart in the moment before it shattered within his chest. He cocked his head up off the ground and listened, thinking that if this was his last day on earth he might at least be alert. But in a moment, wingbeats burst and spluttered and faded off into the woods. Inman looked down his length, and it was with mixed feelings that he found himself mostly there. He tried to wiggle his feet, and they answered the call. He rubbed his face hard with his palms and pulled his twisted clothes into place. He was wet to the skin.
He crawled to fetch his sacks from the tree and sat back against it and uncapped his water flask and took a long pull. All the food he had left in his haversack was a cup of cornmeal, so he drew together sticks to make a fire for cooking mush. He lit the tinder and blew on it until little silver orbs danced all across his vision, but the fire only flared up once and threw considerable smoke and then went out altogether.
—I’ll just get up and walk on and on, Inman said, to anything that might be listening.
After he said it, though, he just sat there for a long time.
I am stronger every minute, he thought to himself. But when he sought supporting evidence, he could find none.
Inman climbed up from the wet ground and stood, wavery as a toper. He walked awhile and then, involuntarily, he bent over. His middle was wrenched with dry heaves so strong he feared some necessary part of himself might be fetched up. The wound at his neck and the newer ones at his head burned and throbbed in conspiracy against him. He sat awhile on a rock, and then got up and walked all morning through the dim woods. The track was ill used, so coiled and knotted he could not say what its general tendency was. It aimed nowhere certain but up. The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way would not even remain as scar. For several miles it mostly wound its way through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog lay among them so thick that their green boughs were hidden. Only the black trunks were visible, rising into the low sky like old menhirs stood up by a forgotten race to memorialize the darkest events of their history.
Inman had not caught sight of a single mark of human being other than the path through this wilderness. No one to puzzle out his locale from. He felt fuddled and wayless, and the track gyred higher and higher. He still moved one foot before the other, but little more. And even this he did with no confidence that it advanced him one jot toward any mark he wished to hit.
Near midday he rounded a bend and came up on a pinched-off little scrag of a person hunkered down under a big hemlock. There was not much but its head and shoulders showing above a bed of tall bracken burnt by frost, each brown fern tip adangle with a bright drop of collected fog. From the person’s posture, Inman’s first thought was that he had interrupted some old coot in mid-shit. But when he drew closer he saw that it was a little old woman, squatting to bait the sweek stick of a bird trap with a suet gob. Not coot but crone, then.
Inman stopped and said, Hey, mam.
The little woman looked up briefly but waved not a hand. She stayed hunkered down, adjusting the trap in great detail, blissful-looking at her task. When she was done, she stood and walked around and around the trap, examining it until there was a perfect circle beat into the ferns. She was quite old, that much was clear, but aside from the wrinkles and wattles, her cheek skin glowed pink and fine as a girl’s. She wore a man’s felt hat, and the white hair hanging below it was thin and hung
to her shoulders. Her clothes—voluminous skirt and blouse both—were made of soft tanned hides, and they looked to have been cut to pattern with a clasp knife and stitched up in haste. She had a greasy cotton apron tied around her middle, the butt of a small-caliber pistol sticking out from the sash of it. Her boots appeared cobbled by a newcomer to the trade and curled up like sledge runners at the toes. Propped against a big tulip tree stood a long-barreled fowling piece, remnant from a previous century.
Inman regarded the woman a breath or two and said, You’ll not catch quail one in that snare if they smell people all around it.
—I don’t throw much scent, the woman said.
—Suit yourself, Inman said. What I’m wondering is whether this road goes somewhere or if it just closes down shortly.
—It turns to nothing but a foot trail in a mile or two, but it goes on and on as far as I know.
—Westward?
—Generally west. It follows the ridges. Southwest would be more accurate. Old trade trail from Indian days.
—Obliged, Inman said. He hooked a thumb under a pack strap, making ready to walk on. But rain began falling from the low sky, wide-spaced drops and heavy, falling like lead from a shot tower.
The woman held out a cupped hand and watched the water pool in it. Then she looked at Inman. There were no dressings on his wounds, and she studied him and said, Them look like bullet holes.
Inman had nothing to say to that.
—You look faint, she said. White.
—I’m fine, Inman said.
The woman looked at him more. You seem like you could eat something, she said.
—If you could fry me an egg I’d pay, Inman said.
—What? she said.
—I wondered if I might pay you to fry me a few eggs, Inman said.
—Sell you a meal? she said. Reckon not. I’m not that bad off yet. But might be I’d give you a meal. I got no eggs, though. Can’t tolerate living around a chicken. No spirit to a chicken at all.
—Is your place nigh?
—Not a mile off, and you’d blithen my day if you’d take shelter and dinner at my camp.
—Then I’d be a fool to say no.
Inman followed the woman, noting that she stepped with inturned toes, a style of walking often said to be favored by Indians, though Inman had known many a Cherokee, Swimmer among them, who walked splay-footed as mergansers. They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness. The rain tailed off into a thin drizzle, and then turned to hard pellets of snow that rattled against the stones. They stopped to watch it fall, but it lasted only a minute and then the fog started lifting, moving fast, sheets of fog sweeping on an updraft. Blue patches of sky opened above him, and Inman craned his head back to look at them. He reckoned it was going to be a day of just every kind of weather.
Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back. A river gorge—apparently the one he had climbed out of—stretched blue and purple beneath him, and he suspected he could spit and nearly hit where he’d walked the day before yesterday. The country around was high, broken. Inman looked about and was startled to see a great knobby mountain forming up out of the fog to the west, looming into the sky. The sun broke through a slot in the clouds, and a great band of Jacob’s ladder suddenly hung in the air like a gauze curtain between Inman and the blue mountain. On its north flank was a figuration of rocks, the profile of an immense bearded man reclining across the horizon.
—Has that mountain got a name? he said.
—Tanawha, the woman said. The Indians called it that.
Inman looked at the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond it to the lesser mountains as they faded off into the southwest horizon, bathed in faint smoky haze. Waves of mountains. For all the evidence the eye told, they were endless. The grey overlapping humps of the farthest peaks distinguished themselves only as slightly darker values of the pale grey air. The shapes and their ghostly appearance spoke to Inman in a way he could not clearly interpret. They graded off like the tapering of pain from the neck wound as it healed.
The woman swept an arm to where he was looking, gesturing toward two keen barbs on a distant edge of horizon.
—Table Rock, she said. Hawk’s Bill. They say Indians built fires on them of a night and you could see them for a hundred miles around. She rose and started walking. The camp is just up here, she said.
They soon left the main way and entered a narrow and heavily treed cut in the mountain, a dark pocket of cove, odorous with plant rot and soggy earth. A little rill of water cut through it. The trees grew stunted and gnarled and bearded with lichen, and they all leaned hard in the same direction. Inman could imagine the place in February with a howling downhill wind driving snow sideways among the bare trees. When they came to the woman’s camp, Inman saw it to be a construction that had evidently begun life nomadic but had taken root. It was a little rust-colored caravan standing in a clearing among the canted trees. The shakes of its arched roof were spotted with black mildew, green moss, grey lichen. Three ravens walked about on the roof and picked at something in the cracks. Vines of bindweed twined in the spokes of the tall wheels. The sides of the caravan were painted up with garish scenes and portraits and crude lettered epigraphs and slogans, and under the eaves hung bunches of drying herbs, strings of red peppers, various wizened roots. There was a thin line of smoke coming from a pipe out of the roof.
The woman stopped and hollered, Hey there.
At her call, the ravens flew away cawing, and little delicate two-toned goats came from out the woods and around the side of the caravan. They were suddenly all about, two dozen or more. They walked up to inspect Inman and peered at him with upstretched necks, their slotted yellow eyes bright and smart. Inman wondered how a goat could look so much more curious and witful than a sheep when they were in many features alike. The goats clustered about him, shifting position. They shouldered one another, bleated, jingled the bells about their necks. Some in the rear rose to put their little hooves onto the backs of those before them so as to get a better view.
The woman kept on walking and Inman tried to follow her, but one big he-goat backed up a step or two, shoving lesser goats aside. The goat rared onto his back legs and fell forward, butting Inman in the thigh. He was weak from the hard walking of the past days, and his head was awhirl from lack of food, and so the goat butt drove him to his knees and then onto his back in the ground litter. The billy was colored black and brown and had long chin whiskers worn pointed in the fashion of Satan. He came and stood over Inman as if to examine his handiwork. The dizziness in Inman’s head and the pain in his head swelled until he feared he might pass into a swoon. But he gathered himself and sat and pulled off his hat and slapped the goat across the face to back it off. Then he rose tottering to his feet and got his bearings. He reached out and slapped the goat again.
The woman had not even stopped in her walking, and she had disappeared around the side of the caravan. Inman and the billy and a number of the other goats followed her. He found her squatted under a lean-to roofed with pine boughs, putting kindling on the banked coals of her cook fire. When she had a blaze going, Inman went to it and put out his hands to warm. The woman threw larger chunks of hickory on the fire and then she picked up a white enameled basin and walked some distance away and sat on the ground. A little spotted brown-and-white goat came to her and she stroked it and scratched below its neck until it folded its legs and lay down. The animal’s long neck was stretched forward. The old woman scratched it close under its jaw and stroked its ears. Inman thought it a peaceful scene. He watched as she continued to scratch with her left hand and reach with her right into an apron pocket. With one motion she pulled out a short-bladed
knife and cut deep into the artery below the jawline and shoved the white basin underneath to catch the leap of bright blood. The animal jerked once, then lay trembling as she continued to scratch the fur and fondle the ears. The basin filled slowly. The goat and the woman stared intently off toward the distance as if waiting for a signal.
As the goat finished its dying, Inman inspected the caravan and its markings. A border of little blue people shapes, hand in hand, danced across the bottom. Above that, in no particular order, were various portraits, some unfinished, apparently abandoned part way through. One face, its features screwed up in anguish, was labeled Job. Below that was writing in black script letters, and what it said was partially covered by a stretched goat hide, so Inman could see only a fragment, which read, At odds with his Maker. Another picture was of a man down on his hands and knees, his head cocked up to look toward a white orb above him. Sun? Moon? What? A blank look on the man’s face. Beneath him the question, Are you among the lost? One of the partial faces was merely a smear of paint with eyes. Its caption was, Our personal lives are brief indeed.
Inman turned from the pictures and watched the woman work. She split the little goat from breastbone to asshole and let the bowels fall in the basin with the blood. Then she shucked the goat out of its skin, and it looked strange and long-necked and goggle-eyed. She cut it into parts. The tenderest pieces she coated with a dry rub of herbs, ground peppers, salt, a little sugar. These she skewered on green twigs and set to roast. The other pieces she put into an iron pot with water, onions, an entire bulb of garlic, five dried red peppers, leaves of sage, and summer savory scrubbed between her palms. The pot had little legs, and she took a stick and scraped coals under it for slow cooking.