—In a little bit I’ll put us some white beans in there and by dinnertime we’ll have some good eating, she said.
Later, the fog gathered up again and rain dripped on the roof of the caravan. Inman sat by the tiny stove in the dim cramped quarters. The place smelled of herbs and roots, earth, woodsmoke. He had entered it through the back door and passed into what amounted to a corridor, a narrow walkway three paces long between a cabinet and table on one side, a narrow sleeping pallet on the other. You came out into a place like a room, though it compassed no more space than two grave plots. There was a little iron stove shoved tight into one corner, and the body of it was not much bigger than a lard bucket. The walls behind were sheathed with roofing tin to keep them from catching afire. The woman had two little grease lamps lit, cracked teacups filled with lard, twisted bits of rag dipped down in them for wicks. They smoked as they burned and smelled faintly of goat.
The table was piled high with paperwork, its surface a shamble of books, mostly flapped open and layered facedown one on the other, page edges foxy from the damp. Scattered about and pinned to the walls were spidery pen-and-ink sketches of plants and animals, some colored with thin washes of mute tones, each with a great deal of tiny writing around the margins, as if stories of many particulars were required to explain the spare images. Bundles of dried herbs and roots hung on strings from the ceiling, and various brown peltry of small animals lay in stacks among the books and on the floor. The wings of a nighthawk, the dark feathers spread as in flight, rested atop the highest book pile. Thin smoke from the smoldering sprucewood fire rose through cracks in the stove door and then hung in a layer against the lath of the roof and the arched ribs of the joists.
Inman watched the woman cook. She was frying flatbread from cornmeal batter in a skillet over the one stove lid. She dipped out batter into sputtering lard and cooked piece after piece. When she had a tall stack in a plate, she folded a flap of the bread around a piece of roast goat and handed it to Inman. The bread was shiny with lard and the meat was deep reddish brown from the fire and the rub of spices.
—Thank you, Inman said.
He ate so fast that the woman just handed him a plate of meat and bread and let him fold his own. While he ate, she swapped the skillet for a pot and began making cheese from goat milk. She stirred the thickening milk, and when it was ready she separated it through a sieve of twisted willow withes, letting the whey run into a tin pot. The remaining curds she tapped out into a small oaken keeler. While she worked, Inman kept having to move his feet to keep them out of her way. They had little to say to each other, for she was busy and Inman was eating with great concentration. When she was done, she handed him a pottery beaker of warm whey the color of dishwater.
—When you got up this morning did you think before sunset you’d see cheese made? she said.
Inman thought about the question. He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind. But he did have to allow that cheese had not factored into this day’s dawn thoughts.
The woman sat in a chair by the stove and took her shoes off. She opened the stove door and lit a briar pipe with a broomstraw. Her bare feet and the shanks of her legs sticking out to the fire were yellow and scaled like the lower parts of a chicken. She took her hat off and raked at her hair with her fingers, and it was so thin you could see through to pink scalp whatever sight line you chose.
—You fresh from killing men in Petersburg? she said.
—Well, there’s the other side to that. Seems like men have been doing their best to kill me for quite some time.
—You run off or what?
Inman pulled out his collar and showed the angry weal at his neck. Wounded and furloughed, he said.
—Airy papers to show that?
—I lost them.
—Oh, I’d wager you did, she said. She drew on her pipe and cocked her feet back on their heels so that her smutched soles took the full benefit of the fire. Inman ate the last of the bread and washed it down with a drink of the goat whey. It tasted about as he had figured it would.
—I’m out of cheese is why I’m making more, she said. Otherwise I’d offer you some right now.
—You just live in this thing all the time? Inman said.
—Got no place else. And I like to be able to move on. I don’t want to stay in a place any longer than it suits me.
Inman looked at the caravan, its smallness, and the hard, narrow sleeping pallet. He thought about the vines in the wheel spokes and said, How long have you been camped here?
The woman held out her hands palm side to and looked down at her fingers and Inman thought she was about to count up years by tapping thumb to digits, but instead she turned her hands over and looked at their backs. The skin was wrinkled, crosshatched with fine lines dense as deep shadow in a steel engraving. The woman went to the narrow cabinet and opened the doors, which swung on leather hinges. She shuffled among shelves of leather-bound journals until she came upon the one sought, and then she stood and paged through it at great length.
—It would make twenty-five years if this is sixty-three, she eventually said.
—It’s sixty-four, Inman said.
—Twenty-six, then.
—You’ve lived here twenty-six years?
The woman peered again into the journal and said, Twenty-seven come next April.
—Lord God, Inman said, looking again at the narrow pallet.
The woman set the journal, binding up, atop a pile of books on the table. I could leave any time, she said. Harness up the goats and break the wheels out of the ground and travel on. Used to be the goats drew me around as suited my fancy. I journeyed all over the world. As far north as Richmond. All the way south nearly to Charleston, and everywhere in between.
—Never married, I don’t guess?
The woman pursed up her lips and worked her nose like smelling clabber. Yes, I was, she said. Might yet be, though I reckon he’s long since dead. I was a little ignorant girl, and he was old. Three wives had already died on him. But he had a nice farm, and my folks next thing to sold me to him. There was a boy I had my eye on. Yellow hair. I see his smile yet about once a year in my dreams. Walked me home from a dance one time and kissed me at every turning of the road. But they put me under that old man instead. He didn’t treat me like much more than a field hand. He’d buried the other three wives up on a hill under a sycamore tree, and he’d go up there sometimes by himself and sit. You’ve seen these old men—sixty-five, seventy—and they’ve gone through about five wives. Killed them from work and babies and meanness. I woke up one night laying in bed next to him and knew that’s all I was: fourth in a row of five headstones. I got right up and rode out before dawn on his best horse and traded it a week later for this cart and eight goats. By now there’s not enough greats to say how far these goats are distant from the first batch. And the cart’s like what they say about a hundred-year-old axe, it’s not had but two new heads and four new handles.
—And been on your own since? Inman said.
—Every day. What I soon learned was that a body can mainly live off goats, their milk and cheese. And their meat in times of year when they start increasing to more than I need. I pull whatever wild green is in season. Trap birds. There’s a world of food growing volunteer if you know where to look. And there’s a little town about a half day’s walk north. I go barter off cheese for taters, meal, lard, and the like. Brew simples from plants and sell them. Medicine. Tinctures. Salve. Conjure warts.
—A root doctor then, Inman said.
—That, and I make a few brownies now and then selling tracts.
—Tracts on what?
—There’s ones on sin and salvation, she said. I sell a right smart of those. And there’s one on proper diet. Says a man ought to forsake flesh and eat bread of Graham flour and root crops mostly. A
nother one on head knobs and how to read what they might say about a person.
She reached out to finger Inman’s scalp, but he twisted his head away and said, I’ll buy the one on food. When I get hungry I can just read it. He pulled from his pocket a wad of various scrip.
—I take nothing but specie, she said. Three cent.
Inman jingled around in his pockets until he came up with it.
The woman stepped to a cabinet and took down a yellow pamphlet and handed it to him.
—It says on the front it will change your life if you follow it, she said. But I’m making no claims.
Inman looked through the pamphlet. It was poorly printed on coarse grey paper. There were headings like The Potato: Food of the Gods. The Collard: Tonic for the Spirit. Graham Flour: Pathway to the More Abundant Life.
That last phrase caught Inman’s eye. He said it aloud. Pathway to the More Abundant Life.
—It’s what many seek, the woman said. But I’m not sure a sack of flour will set your foot on it.
—Yes, Inman said. Abundance did seem, in his experience, to be an elusive thing. Unless you counted plenty of hardship. There was ample of that. But abundance of something a man might want was a different matter.
—Scarcity’s much more the general bearing of life, is the way I see it, the woman said.
—Yes, Inman said.
The woman leaned to the stove and knocked the last of the fire out of her pipe and put it to her mouth and blew through it until it nearly whistled. She drew a tobacco pouch from an apron pocket and refilled the pipe, tamping the tobacco down hard with a callused thumb. She lit a straw in the stove and held it to the pipe and drew until it was going to her satisfaction.
—How do you come to have that big red wound and them two little new ones? she said.
—I took the neck wound out by Globe Tavern last summer.
—A dramshop knifing?
—A battle. Below Petersburg.
—Federals shot you, then?
—They were making to take the Weldon rail line and we aimed to stop them. We went at it all that afternoon, fighting in pine thickets, broom grass, old fields, all sorts of a place. Awful flat scrubby country. It was hot and we sweated so bad we could reach down and roll lather off our pant legs with our hands.
—You’ve thought a number of times, I guess, that if the ball had struck a thumb’s width different you’d be dead? It near to took your head off as it is.
—Yes.
—It looks like it could bust open yet.
—It feels about like it could.
—And the new ones, how’d you come by them?
—The usual way. Got shot, Inman said.
—Federals?
—No. The other bunch.
The woman waved her hand through the tobacco smoke like she couldn’t be troubled with the confusing details of his wounds. She said, Well, these new ones’re not as bad. When they heal up, the hair’ll cover them and it’ll be just you and your sweetheart to know. She’ll feel a little welt when she runs her fingers through your hair. What I want to know is, was it worth it, all that fighting for the big man’s nigger?
—That’s not the way I saw it.
—What’s the other way? she said. I’ve traveled a fair bit in those low counties. Nigger-owning makes the rich man proud and ugly and it makes the poor man mean. It’s a curse laid on the land. We’ve lit a fire and now it’s burning us down. God is going to liberate niggers, and fighting to prevent it is against God. Did you own any?
—No. Not hardly anybody I knew did.
—Then what stirred you up enough for fighting and dying?
—Four years ago I maybe could have told you. Now I don’t know. I’ve had all of it I want, though.
—That’s lacking some as an answer.
—I reckon many of us fought to drive off invaders. One man I knew had been north to the big cities, and he said it was every feature of such places that we were fighting to prevent. All I know is anyone thinking the Federals are willing to die to set loose slaves has got an overly merciful view of mankind.
—With all those fine reasons for fighting, thing I want to know is why did you run off?
—Furloughed.
—Yes, she said, and she reared back and cackled as if a joke had been cracked. Man on furlough, she said. Nary papers, though. Had them stole off him.
—Lost them.
She stopped laughing and looked at Inman. She said, Listen here, I lack all affiliation. I don’t care no more than spitting in that fire that you’ve run off.
And to make her point she spat a dark gob of matter, arcing it expertly into the open stove door. She looked back at Inman and said, It’s dangerous for you, is all.
He looked her in the eyes and was surprised to find that they were wells of kindness despite all her hard talk. Not a soul he had met in some time drew him out as this goatwoman did, and so he told her what was in his heart. The shame he felt now to think of his zeal in sixty-one to go off and fight the downtrodden mill workers of the Federal army, men so ignorant it took many lessons to convince them to load their cartridges ball foremost. These were the foes, so numberless that not even their own government put much value to them. They just ran them at you for years on end, and there seemed no shortage. You could kill them down until you grew heartsick and they would still keep ranking up to march southward.
Then he told her how this very morning he had found a late-bearing bush of huckleberries, dusty blue on their sunward faces, still green on their shady back halves. How he had picked and eaten them for breakfast and watched as a cloud of passenger pigeons darked out the sun momentarily as they passed over, going to wherever they wintered in the remote south. At least that much remained unchanged, he had thought, berries ripening and birds flying. He said he had seen not much other than change for four years, and he guessed the promise of it was part of what made up the war frenzy in the early days. The powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereunder you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed, but rather be decorated. Men talked of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman now guessed it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons. War took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. He had not been immune to its pull. But sooner or later you get awful tired and just plain sick of watching people killing one another for every kind of reason at all, using whatever implements fall to hand. So that morning he had looked at the berries and the birds and had felt cheered by them, happy they had waited for him to come to his senses, even though he feared himself deeply at variance with such elements of the harmonious.
The woman thought about what he had said, and then she waved her pipe stem at his head and neck. Them hurting bad still? she said.
—They seem not to want to quit.
—Looks like it. Red as a damn winesap. But I can do something for you there. That’s within my realm of power.
She got up and went to the cabinet and took out a basketful of withered poppies and set about making laudanum. She picked out the poppy heads one by one, pierced the capsules with a sewing needle and then dropped them into a small glazed crock and set it near the stove for the opium to sweat out.
—Before long this will be about right. I’ll take and add me a little corn liquor and sugar to it. Makes it go down better. Let it sit and it gets thick. It’s good for any kind of pain—sore joints, headaches, any hurt. If you can’t sleep, just have a drink of it and stretch out in the bed and pretty soon you’ll know no more.
She went back to the cabinet and took out a little narrow-mouth crock and ran a finger down in it. She daubed at Inman’s neck and at his head wounds with what looked like black axle grease but smelled of bitter herbs and roots. He jerked when her finger first touched his wounds.
—That’s just pain, she s
aid. It goes eventually. And when it’s gone, there’s no lasting memory. Not the worst of it, anyway. It fades. Our minds aren’t made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It’s a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.
Inman first thought to argue and then he thought he’d keep silent and let her think what she wished if it gave her comfort, no matter how filled with error her logic. But then his mouth just started working and he said, I wouldn’t want to puzzle too long about the why of pain nor the frame of mind somebody would be in to make up a thing like it to begin with.
The old woman looked at the fire in the stove door, and then she looked at her forefinger, greasy from the medicine. She rubbed her thumb over it three times rapidly, and then she twisted it in her apron hem to wipe it off. She dismissed her hand from her thoughts and it fell to rest at her side. She said, You get to be my age, just recollecting pleasures long ago is pain enough.
She stoppered the salve crock with a cob and put it in Inman’s coat pocket. Take it with you, she said. Keep it rubbed on thick until it’s gone, but keep your collar off it. It don’t wash out. Then she reached into a wide goat-hide purse and pulled out a handful of great lozenges made of rolled and bound herbs, like fat little sections of cheroot. She heaped them into Inman’s hand.
—Swallow one of these a day. Starting now.
Inman put them in his pocket, saving one. He put it in his mouth and tried to swallow. It seemed to swell. A great soggy bolus like a chaw of tobacco. It would not go down, and it threw off a taste like old socks. Inman’s eyes watered. He gagged and grabbed for his beaker of whey and drank it down.
Sometime in the evening they ate the stew of white beans and the pieces of the little goat. They sat side by side under the brush arbor and listened to the faint rain come down in the woods. Inman ate three bowlsful and then they both had little earthen cups of laudanum and fed the fire and talked. To Inman’s surprise, he found himself telling about Ada. He described her character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they became one line. It was a doctrine he could not entirely credit. Nor was he at all sure Ada would find his offer welcome, not from a man galled in body and mind as he had become. He concluded by saying that though Ada was somewhat thistleish in comportment, she was, by his way of thinking, very beautiful. Her eyes were down-turned and set slightly asymmetrically in her head, and it gave her always a sad expression which in his view only served to point up her beauty.