This evening she marked where the sun dove to the horizon, for over the weeks she had made a practice of noting its setting point on the ridge. She had watched it march southward as the days snuffed out earlier and earlier. Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun’s annual swing. She owned the entire span of ridge where the sun set through the year, and that was a thing to savor. One had then just to mark the points in December and June when the sun wrenched itself from its course and doubled back for another set of seasons. Though upon reflection, she decided a tower was not entirely needed. Only clear some trees to notch the ridge at the turning point. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch with anticipation as the sun drew nigh to the notch and then on a specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?
Ada sat by the fire long after sunset waiting for Ruby. Venus and Saturn had shone out bright to the west and then fallen to the horizon and the full moon had risen, when Ada heard a stirring in the woods. Footsteps in leaves. Low voices. By instinct she took the pitchfork from where it stood in the dirt and moved out of the firelight and watched. Forms moved at the edge of the field and Ada backed farther into the dark and held the fork before her with the five sharp tines aimed toward the sounds of movement. Then she heard her name.
—Hey, Miss Ada Monroe, a voice called softly.
Both names were pronounced in the ways that her father had hated. He had never tired of setting people right on the matter: Broad initial A in Ada; accented second syllable in Monroe, he would say. But over the summer, Ada had given up trying to enforce her name against everyone’s natural leaning, and she was learning to be the Ada Monroe that the voice called. Long A, heavy Mon.
—Who is it? she said.
—Us.
Stobrod and a comrade walked out to be lit by the fire. Stobrod carried his fiddle and bow cradled in the crook of his left arm. The other man held a rough-cast banjo by the neck, poking it out before him as a man at a border crossing might present papers in validation of identity. Both of them squinted against the glare.
—Miss Monroe, Stobrod called again. It’s just us.
Ada walked nearer to them, billing a hand over her brow to block the light.
—Ruby is not here, she said.
—We’re just generally visiting, Stobrod said. If you don’t mind the company.
He and the other man put down their instruments and Stobrod sat on the ground right beside her chair. Ada pulled it a comfortable distance from him and sat too.
—Get us some more wood to liven up the fire, Stobrod said to the banjo man.
Wordless, the man went into the dark edge of woods, and Ada could hear him picking up limbs and breaking them into burning lengths. Stobrod dug around beneath his coat and pulled out a pint pocket tickler full of brown liquor. The glass was dulled almost opaque with scratches and fingerprints. He unstoppered it and passed the mouth of it beneath his nose. He held the glass to the fire and looked at the light through the whiskey and then drank a delicate sip. He made a little whispery two-note whistle, high to low.
—Too good for me, but I’ll drink it anyway, he said.
He took a long pull and then worked the stopper back in with his thumb and put the bottle away.
—We haven’t seen you in some time, Ada said. Have you been well?
—Fair, he said. Living on the mountain like an outlaw is no lark.
Ada was put in mind of the story she’d heard the captive tell through the jail bars. She began recounting it to Stobrod as warning of what might lie in wait for outliers, but he knew it already. It had passed about the county several times, first as news and then as yarn and later as legend.
—That Teague bunch is killers, Stobrod said. Especially so when they’ve got numbers in their favor.
The wood gatherer came back into the light and threw some broken limbs on the fire and then made several trips into the trees for more wood, which he piled for later. When he was done he sat on the ground beside Stobrod. The man said not a word nor looked at Ada, but angled himself away from the fire so he could keep his eyes on Stobrod.
—Who’s your companion? Ada asked.
—He’s a Swanger boy, or a Pangle. Sometimes he says one, sometimes the other. Neither bunch will claim him, for he’s simpleminded, but he’s got the look of a Pangle to me.
The man had a big round head which sat unbalanced on him like God was being witty about making the insides of it so small. Though he was nearly thirty according to Stobrod, people still called him a boy because his thoughts would not wrap around the least puzzle. To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.
He was a fat soft thing, broad-assed, as if he had been raised on a diet of meal and fatback. He had titties like a sow that pushed out his shirtfront and flapped when he walked. His pants were tucked into his boots and bloused out above them, and his tiny feet were hardly big enough to bear up his weight. His hair was the next thing to white and his skin was greyish, so that overall he gave the impression of a china plate filled with biscuit and sawmill gravy. He had no talent in the world but his recently discovered ability to play the banjo, unless one counted as talent the fact that he was gentle and kind and looked on everything that passed before him with soft wide eyes.
Stobrod described how they had hooked up, and while he did the boy paid not the least attention, did not seem to know or care that he was the topic of discussion. Pangle had been raised somewhat casually, was the way Stobrod told it. The general feeling was that he held no value, for he could not think right nor could he be pressed into labor. Work him too hard and he’d sit down. Whip him and he’d take it without a flinch and still not move. He had, therefore, been set loose in early manhood and had spent the time since wandering Cold Mountain. He came to know its every slit and chink. Ate what presented itself, with little discrimination between grubs and venison. Paid little heed to time of day, and during the brighter moon phases went largely nocturnal. In summer he slept on the beds of fragrant duff beneath hemlock and balsam except in rains of some duration, when he sheltered under rock ledges. In winter he took instruction from toad and groundhog and bear: he denned up in a cave, scarcely moving during the cold months.
When, with some surprise, Pangle discovered the outliers had taken up residence in his cave, he settled himself among them. He particularly attached himself to Stobrod out of being lovesick for fiddle music. Stobrod was to him a man of deep lore, a wizard, a revelator. When Stobrod struck bow to fiddle strings, the Pangle boy sometimes tried to sing along, but he had a voice like blowing a duck call. After the others shouted him silent, he would get up and stomp out a dance of great mystery, ancient Celtic jerk and spasm such as might have been performed after any number of defeats in battle against Roman and Jute, Saxon and Angle and Brit. The boy would fling around until he blossomed out in sweat beads, and then he would flop down on the floury tamped cave ground and follow the fiddling, his nose describing the music patterns in air like a man watching a fly hover.
Stobrod would get a figure of notes going and it would come round again and again and after a time it would work a spell on Pangle’s mind. Pangle liked that feeling he got from Stobrod’s playing and became a fool for the fiddle and for the fiddler. He began following Stobrod about, always with the devotion of a spaniel awaiting food. At night in the outliers’ cave on the mountain, he would lie awake until Stobrod fell asleep and then he would crawl up and lie pressed against his bowed back. Stobrod would awake at dawn and beat the boy away to a comfortable di
stance with his hat. The boy would then sit by the fire on his hams and gaze at Stobrod as if at any minute a miracle might happen.
Stobrod had come upon Pangle’s banjo one day on a raid, a term the cave dwellers used to lend dignity to their recent habit of robbing any wealthy farmer against whom one of their number held a vague grudge. Some slight ten years ago would serve as pretext. A man had cantered by and splashed you when you stood afoot in the muddy roadway, had brushed past you and bumped your arm coming out of a store without a word of apology, had hired you for a job of work and shorted you on pay or had given orders to you in a tone that could be glossed to mean you were less than he. Any snub, slur, or taunt, however old, would do. Times might never be better configured to settle up.
They’d descended on a Walker man’s house. He was one of the county’s few gentry, a leading slaveholder, and that fell afoul of the cave society, their general opinion having lately swung round to blame the owners of niggers for the war and its related troubles. As well, Walker had long been a highhanded bastard with all he considered his lessers, which in his estimation included most everybody. Punishment, the cavers had decided, was in order.
They had come down on the farm at nightfall and tied Walker and his wife to the stair rails and taken turns slapping Walker about the face. They had gone through the outbuildings and collected all the food they could easily find—hams and middle meat, quantities of crocked goods, sacks of meal and corn grits. From the house they took a mahogany table, silver flatware and candlesticks, beeswax candles, a painted picture of General Washington off the dining room wall, English china, Tennessee store liquor. They had since decorated the cave up with the plunder. Washington propped in a niche of the wall, candles in silver holders. Table set with Wedgwood and silver, though many of them had eaten all their lives from table service made entirely of gourd and horn.
In some way, though, Stobrod’s imagination had not been fully engaged by the Walker raid, and Pangle’s banjo had been the whole of his looting. He had taken it from a peg in Walker’s toolshed. It was somewhat ugly, lacking as it did the expected symmetry in its round parts, but the head was of cat skin and the strings of gut, and it had a fine mellow tone. And he had slapped Walker’s face only once in payment for a time long ago when he had overheard Walker call him a fool as he sat drunk on a log by the road trying in vain to scratch music out of a fiddle. I’ve now got mastery of a fiddle, Stobrod had said after he popped Walker’s already red cheek. In retrospect, he had decided the Walker raid worried him. For the first time in his life he considered the possibility that his actions might be called to account.
Back at the cave, Stobrod had given the banjo to the Pangle boy and showed him what little he knew of its working: how to twist the pegs to make a few tunings, how to frail it with thumb and forefinger, sometimes strumming, sometimes grabbing at the strings like a barred owl grabbing at a rabbit. The boy, apparently out of stunning natural talent and a heartfelt desire to provide fitting accompaniment to Stobrod’s fiddle, had shown little more difficulty in discovering how to play it than one would in learning to beat a drum.
He and Pangle had done not much since the raid but make music. For drink they had Walker’s good liquor, and they ate nothing besides stolen jellies. They slept only when they were too drunk to play, and they had not traveled to the cave mouth frequently enough even to keep track of when day and night occurred. As a result, however, the Pangle boy now knew Stobrod’s entire repertoire and they had become a duo.
When Ruby finally returned, she carried only a small bloody brisket wrapped in paper and one jug of cider, for Adams was willing to part with considerably less beef than she had hoped. Ruby stood and looked at her father and the boy and didn’t say a word. Her eyes were black in her head, and during her walk her hair had come loose from its tie and spread across her shoulders. She wore a dark green and cream paneled wool skirt, her grey sweater, and a grey felt man’s hat with a tiny cardinal feather in the satin band. She held the paper bundle in her upturned hand and made little up-and-down weighing motions.
—Not hardly four pounds, she said. She set it and the jug on the ground and went to the house and came back carrying four small glasses and a cup of salt, sugar, black pepper, and red pepper all mixed together. She opened the paper and rubbed the mixture on the meat to case it, and then she buried it in the ashes of the fire and sat on the ground beside Ada. The skirt was long since dingy and would be none the worse for her sitting in the dirt.
While the meat cooked, they all sipped at the cider, and then Stobrod took out his fiddle, shook it to hear the rattles inside, and then put it to his chin, bowed a note, and twisted a peg. When he did the boy sat up and grabbed his instrument and frailed off a series of chiming phrases. Stobrod set off on a minor key tune that was yet somehow sprightly.
When he was finished Ada said, The plaintive fiddle.
Ruby looked at her funny.
—My father called it that, always ironically, Ada explained. She went on to say that unlike the common run of preachers—who oppose fiddle music as a sin and see the instrument itself as the devil’s box—Monroe despised it on aesthetic grounds. His critique was that all fiddle tunes sound just alike and all have strange names.
—That’s what I like about them, Stobrod said. He tuned some more and then said, This is one of mine. I call it Drunk Neggar. It was a careening tune, loopy and syncopated, with little work for the left hand but the bow arm working as frantic as a man fighting off a deer fly from around his head.
Stobrod ran through a number more of his compositions. Altogether, they were an odd music. Harshly rhythmic but unsuited, many of them, for dancing, which was the only purpose to which Ruby had ever heard the fiddle addressed. Ada and Ruby sat together and listened, and as they did Ruby took Ada’s hand and held it and absently removed Ada’s silver bracelet and slipped it over her own hand and then after a time returned it to its place.
Stobrod changed tunings and called out the names of the pieces before playing them, and gradually Ada and Ruby began to suspect that what they heard collectively formed a sort of autobiography of his war years. Among the tunes were these: Touching the Elephant, Musket Stock Was My Pillow, Ramrod, Six Nights Drunk, Tavern Fight, Don’t Sell It Give It Away, Razor Cut, Ladies of Richmond, Farewell General Lee.
To conclude the series he played one he called Stone Was My Bedstead, a tune made up largely of scraping sounds, chiefly of middling tempo, rhythms of approach and retreat, a great deal of suspense in the relations among its measures. There was no lyric other than a moment when Stobrod threw back his head and chanted the title three times. The Pangle boy had sense enough to add only subtle little runs and fills, muting the banjo’s ring by just softly touching the strings with the meatiest part of thumb and forefinger.
Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. Ada wished there were a way to capture what she was hearing in the way an ambrotype captures images, so it could be held in reserve for the benefit of a future whose residents might again need access to what it stood for.
As the tune drew toward a close, Stobrod jacked back his head so that he seemed to be reviewing the stars, but his eyes were shut. The butt of the fiddle pressed against his heart and the bow worked in jerky, stuttering little strokes. His mouth flew open at the ultimate moment, but he did not hoot or squeal as Ada expected. Instead, he smiled a deep long smile of silent delight.
He stopped and held the bow in the air at the place where the last upstroke ended and opened his eyes and looked at the others in the firelight to see what effect his playing had. At that moment, his was a saint’s blithesome face, loose and half a-smile with the generosity of his gift and with a becoming neutrality toward his own abilities, as if he had long since c
heerfully submitted to knowing that however well he rendered a piece, he could always imagine doing better. If all the world had a like countenance, war would be only bitter memory.
—He’s done you some good there, Pangle said to Ada. And then he seemed appalled at having spoken directly to her and ducked his head and then looked off into the woods.
—We’ll do one last one, Stobrod said.
He and Pangle put down their instruments and took off their hats in signification that the next song would be holy. A gospel. Stobrod led off singing and Pangle followed him. Stobrod had trained the boy’s natural gabble into a strained high tenor, and so Pangle chattered partial repetitions of Stobrod’s phrases in a style that might, under a whole other system of thinking, have been viewed as comic. Their voices mostly fought against each other until the chorus came around, and then they matched up and found a deep place of concord. The song was about how dark our lives are, how cold and stormy, how void of understanding, and at the end death. That was all. The song ended somewhat incomplete and blockaded, for contrary to every expectation of the genre, there was no shining path limned out at the last minute to lead one onward with hope. It seemed short one crucial verse. But the chorus harmonies were close and brotherlike, sweet enough in themselves to make partial headway against the song’s otherwise gloom.
They put their hats back on and Stobrod held out his glass. Ruby poured him a dram of the cider and stopped and then he touched the back of her hand with a forefinger. Ada, watching, thought it a tender gesture until she realized it was but to urge the pouring of an extra measure.