The woman looked as if she thought Inman spoke the greatest foolishness she had ever heard. She pointed her pipe stem at him and said, You listen. Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it’s a common mistake nonetheless.
They sat for a while without talking, just sipping the laudanum. It was sweet and had thickened up so that it was not much runnier than sorghum, nor much clearer. It tasted some like metheglin, though without the taste of honey, and it clung to the cup with such determination that Inman found himself licking it out. The rain came down harder and a few drops made their way through the thatching of the arbor and hissed in the fire. It was a lonesome sound, the rain and the fire and nothing else. Inman tried to picture himself living similarly hermetic in just such a stark and lonesome refuge on Cold Mountain. Build a cabin on a misty frag of rock and go for months without seeing another of his kind. A life just as pure and apart as the goatwoman’s seemed to be. It was a powerful vision, and yet in his mind he saw himself hating every minute of it, his days poisoned by lonesomeness and longing.
—It must get cold in winter up here, Inman said.
—Cold enough. In the chillest months I keep the fire hot and the blankets deep, and my biggest concern is that my ink and watercolors not freeze while I work at the desk. There are days so cold I sit with a cup of water between my legs to warm it. And still when I daub a wet brush in color, the bristles freeze before I can touch the tip to paper.
—What is it you do in those books? Inman said.
—I make a record, the woman said. Draw pictures and write.
—About what?
—Everything. The goats. Plants. Weather. I keep track of what everything’s up to. It can take up all your time just marking down what happens. Miss a day and you get behind and might never catch back up.
—How did you learn to write and read and draw? Inman asked.
—Same way you did. Somebody taught me.
—And you’ve spent your life this way?
—So far I have. I’m not dead yet.
—Do you not get lonesome living here? Inman said.
—Now and again, maybe. But there’s plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much.
—What if you get sick up here by yourself? Inman said.
—I’ve got my herbs.
—And if you die?
The woman said that living with such great scope of privacy had some disadvantages. She knew she could not expect help under any circumstances, nor did she much want to live past the point where she could fend for herself, though she calculated that date still to be writ on a fairly distant calendar. Knowing she was likely to die alone and lie unburied did not trouble her a whit. When she felt death coming, she planned to stretch out at the top of the rock cliff and let the ravens peck her apart and carry her away.
—It’s that or worms, she said. Of the two I’d as soon have ravens carry me off on their black wings.
The rain began falling harder yet, dripping fast through the roofing of the arbor. They called the evening concluded, and Inman crawled under the caravan and rolled up in his blankets and slept. When he woke a day had passed and night was again coming on. A raven sat perched on a spoke looking at him. Inman got up and daubed his wounds with the salve and ate his herb medicines and took another draught of laudanum and liquor. The woman fixed him more of the bean and goat stew, and while he ate they sat together on the caravan steps. The woman told a long and maundering tale of a goat-trading mission she had made down as far as the capital city once. She had sold a half dozen goats to a man. Had the money in her hand when she remembered that she wanted to take the bells back with her. The man declined, saying the deal was completed. She said the bells had never been part of the deal, but he called the dogs on her and ran her off. Late that night she had gone back with a knife and cut the leather collars and gotten the bells and had, as she put it, walked out through the streets of the capital just a-cussing.
Inman felt very foggy throughout the story, for he could feel the medicines working in him, but when she was done he reached over and patted the back of her etched and spotted hand and said, The heroine of the goat bells.
Inman slept again. When he awoke it was dark and no longer raining, but cold. The goats had crowded around him to get warm and their smell was so sharp as to about make his eyes water. He had no idea if it was the same dark he had fallen asleep to or whether a day had intervened. Light from a grease lamp fell in threads through cracks in the caravan floor, and so Inman crawled out and stood in the wet leaves on the ground. There was a sherd of moon partway up the eastern sky, and the stars all stood in their expected places and looked chill and brittle. At the ridge above the cove, an enormous pike of bare rock stood black against the sky like a picket watching for any siege the heavens might throw down. The strong urge to walk came over Inman. He went and knocked at the door and waited for the old woman to let him in, but there was no answer. Inman opened the door and stepped inside and found the place empty. He looked about the desk at the papers. He picked up a journal and opened it to a drawing of goats. They had eyes and feet on them like people, and the sentences of the entry below were hard to parse, but they seemed to contrast the behavior of certain goats on cold days to their behavior on hot. Inman leafed through farther and found pictures of plants and then more pictures of goats in every imaginable attitude, all done in a mute and limited palette, as if she painted with clothes dye. Inman read the stories that went with the pictures, and they told of what the goats ate and how they acted toward each other and what moods seized them from day to day. It seemed to Inman that the woman’s aim was to list in every detail the habits of their culture.
This would be one way to live, Inman thought, a hermit among the clouds. The contentious world but a fading memory. Mind turned only toward God’s finer productions. But the more he studied the journal, the more he wondered how it must be for the woman to count back through the decades, figuring how many years had passed since some event in her youth—the romance with the yellow-haired farmboy she had wanted to marry instead of the old man, an autumn day of particular glory, a dance that evening after the harvest, later out on the porch an amber moon rising over the trees, kissing the boy with her lips parted while inside fiddlers played a piece of ancient music to which she had attached an unreasonable enthusiasm. So many years gone between then and now that even the bare number would seem unutterably sad even without some sweet attendant memory.
Inman looked about and found there was not a scrap of mirror in the caravan, and he therefore assumed the woman must go about her grooming by feel. Did she even know her own recent countenance? Long hair as pale and fine as cobwebs, hide sagged and puckered and folded about her eyes and jowls, brindled across her brow, bristles growing from her ears. Only her cheeks pink, the discs in her eyes still bright and blue. If you held a glass up to her would she wrench back in surprise and fright at the relic looking out, her mind still grasping a picture of herself in an incarnation some decades previous? A person might get to such a state of mind, living so remote.
Inman waited a long time for the goatwoman to come back. Dawn rose, and he blew out the lamp and broke some sticks to put in the little stove. He wanted to get on, but he did not wish to leave without thanking her. She did not return until the morning was far advanced. She walked through the door with a brace of rabbits hanging limp from her grip on their hind legs.
—I need to be going, Inman said. I just wanted to see if I could pay you for the food and medicine.
—You could try, the woman said. But I wouldn’t take it.
—Well, thank you, Inman said.
—Look here, the woman said. If I had a boy, I’d tell him the same as I’m telling you. Watch yourself.
—I will, Inman said.
He turned to walk out of the caravan, but she stopped him. She said, Here, take this with you, and she handed him a square of paper on which was drawn in great deta
il the globular blue-purple berry cluster of the carrion flower plant in autumn.
freewill savages
At the first gesture of dawn, Ruby was up and out, on her way down to the house to fire up the stove and put on a pot of grits and fry up a few eggs. It was barely light enough to see, and the air was thick with the fog that pooled for an hour or two along the bottom of Black Cove on most mornings in all seasons but winter. But as she neared the house she could make out a man in a dark suit of clothes standing by the corncrib. She walked straight to the kitchen porch and went inside and took the shotgun from where it rested, charged, in the crotch of two forked limbs nailed over the doorframe. She pulled back both hammers and walked briskly toward the crib.
The man wore a big grey slouch hat pulled low on his brow, and his head was tipped down. He was leaned with his shoulder to the crib wall, one leg crossed over the other and cocked up on its toe. Casual as a traveler propped against a roadside tree waiting for a stage to come by, whiling away the time absorbed in his own thoughts.
Ruby could see, even in the poor light, that the man was dressed in clothes of the finest material and making. And his boots, though somewhat scuffed, were more fit for a squire than a corn thief. Only one thing argued against the man’s being utterly relaxed in his current posture. His right arm was entirely inside the hole in the chinking of the crib.
Ruby walked right up to him, the shotgun held at a low angle but nevertheless aimed at about his knees. She was ready to dress him down good for corn thieving, but when she neared the man he tipped his head back to get the hat brim out of his line of sight. He looked at Ruby and grinned and said, They hell fire.
—So you’re not dead? Ruby said.
—Not yet, said Stobrod. Set your daddy loose.
Ruby propped the shotgun against the side of the crib and unlocked the door and went inside. She unstaked the trap from the dirt floor and pried open the jaws from around Stobrod’s hand and walked back outside. Despite the padding, after he had withdrawn his arm from out the hole in the chinking, Stobrod stood and dripped blood from a cut to his wrist where the skin was thin over the bones. His forearm was bruised blue all around it. He rubbed it with his good hand. He took out a kerchief of fine linen and removed his hat and wiped at his forehead and neck.
—Long night a-standing here trapped, he said.
—No doubt, Ruby said. She looked him over. He had changed some. He seemed such an old man, standing there before her. His hair half gone from his head, whiskers grizzled. He had not filled out any, though. He was still just a little withy man. A quilting frame had more flesh to it.
—How old are you now? she said.
He stood moving his mouth a little as he tried to do the figures in his mind.
—Maybe forty-five, he said eventually.
—Forty-five, Ruby said.
—About.
—You don’t look it.
—Thankee.
—I meant the other way.
—Oh.
—Anybody else, Ruby said, I’d ask why you been dipping our corn when you don’t look hurting for money. But I know you better than that. You’re going around getting a little here and a little there to run a batch of liquor. And you took that suit off somebody or won it in a card game.
—Something like.
—You’ve run off from the fighting, no doubt.
—I was owed a furlough, being a hero as I was.
—You?
—Every battle I was in, I led the charge, Stobrod said.
—I’ve heard it told that the officers like to run the greatest shitheels to the fore, said Ruby. They get shut of them quicker that way.
Then, before Stobrod could answer, she said, You come on with me. She picked up the shotgun and went to the house. She told him to sit on the porch steps and wait. Inside, she lit the fire and put on a pot to make coffee. She mixed biscuit dough and rattled about putting breakfast together. Biscuits, grits, and eggs. A few strips of fried side meat.
Ada came down and sat in her chair by the window and drank coffee, glum as usual in the early morning.
—We finally caught something in that trap, Ruby said.
—It’s about time. What was it?
—My daddy. He’s out on the porch now, Ruby said. She was stirring a pan of white gravy made from the drippings of the side meat.
—Pardon?
—Stobrod. He’s made it home from the war. But alive or dead, he’s of little matter to me. A plate of breakfast and then we’ll send him on his way.
Ada rose and looked out the door at Stobrod’s thin back where he sat humped up on the bottom step. He held his left hand out before him, and he hummed to himself, and the fingers were working, tapping against the heel of his hand like a man doing sums.
—You might have asked him in, Ada said when she had returned to her chair.
—He can wait out there.
When breakfast was cooked, Ruby carried his plate to the table under the pear tree. She and Ada took their breakfast in the dining room, and they could see from the window that Stobrod ate quickly and with urgency, his hat brim bobbing in time with his chewing. He stopped just short of picking up his plate and licking the last skim of grease from it.
—He could have eaten in here, Ada said.
—That’s where I draw the line, Ruby said.
She went outside to collect his plate.
—Have you got somewhere to go? Ruby said to Stobrod.
Stobrod told her that he did indeed have a home and a society of sorts, for he had fallen in with a collection of heavily armed outliers. They lived in a deep cave of the mountain like freewill savages. All they wished to do was hunt and eat and lay up all night drunk, making music.
—Well, I guess that suits you, Ruby said. Your aim in life always was to dance all night with a bottle in your hand. Now I’ve fed you. You can get on out of here. We’ve got nothing else for you. You go dipping our corn again, I might put a barrel of shot into you, and I don’t load salt.
She flapped her hands at him as if shooing cattle, and he walked off at a saunter, hands in his pockets, taking a course toward Cold Mountain.
• • •
The day that followed was warm and brilliant and dry. There had been nothing but one faint morning rain so far that month, and the leaves that had fallen and those yet on the trees were crisp as cold cracklings. They rattled aloft in the breeze and underfoot as Ruby and Ada walked down to the barn to see how the tobacco was drying. The broad leaves had been tied together at their stem ends and they hung in rows upside down from poles strung underneath the shelter of the barn’s cantilevered ends. There was something human and female and ominous in their flared hanging shapes, the bunched leaves fanning out like old yellowed cotton skirts. Ruby walked among them, touching the leaves, rubbing them between her fingers. She pronounced everything in fine order, owing to the favorably dry weather and to the care with which the tobacco was planted and harvested in accord with the signs. They would soon be able to soak it in molasses water and twist it into plugs and use it for trade.
Ruby then proposed that they take a rest in the hayloft, a fine place for a sit-down, she said. She climbed the ladder and sat spraddle-legged in the wide hay door and dangled her feet into the open space below in a way that no other grown woman Ada knew would have done.
Ada at first hesitated to join her. She sat in the hay with her legs under her and her skirts composed. Ruby looked at her with some amusement, as if to say, I can do this because I never have been proper, and you can do it because you have recently quit being so. Ada went and sat at the hay door too. They lounged and chewed on pieces of hay and swung their legs like boys. The big door framed the view uphill to the house and beyond, across the upper fields, to Cold Mountain, which looked close and sharp-edged in the dry air, all mottled with the colors of autumn. The house looked pert, unsmudged white. A feather of blue smoke rose straight up from the black kitchen pipe. Then a breeze swept down the cove and swirle
d it away.
—You say you want to get to know the running of this land, Ruby said.
—Yes, Ada said.
Ruby rose and knelt behind Ada and cupped her hands over Ada’s eyes.
—Listen, Ruby said. Her hands were warm and rough over Ada’s face. They smelled of hay, tobacco leaves, flour, and something deeper, a clean animal smell. Ada felt their thin bones against her fluttering eyes.
—What do you hear? Ruby said.
Ada heard the sound of wind in the trees, the dry rattle of their late leaves. She said as much.
—Trees, Ruby said contemptuously, as if she had expected just such a foolish answer. Just general trees is all? You’ve got a long way to go.
She removed her hands and took her seat again and said nothing more on the topic, leaving Ada to conclude that what she meant was that this is a particular world. Until Ada could listen and at the bare minimum tell the sound of poplar from oak at this time of year when it is easiest to do, she had not even started to know the place.
Late that afternoon, despite the warmth, the light fell brittle and blue and announced clearly in its slant that the year was circling toward its close. This was surely one of the last of the warm dry days, and in its honor Ada and Ruby decided to take supper outdoors at the table under the pear tree. They roasted a venison tenderloin that Esco had brought by. Fried a skillet of potatoes and onions, and drizzled bacon drippings over some late lettuce to wilt it. They had brushed the brown leaves from the table and were just setting places for the two of them when Stobrod appeared from out the woods. He carried a tow sack, and he came and took a seat at the table as if he carried an invitation in his coat pocket.