When the men had gotten to the place, Stobrod cast his eyes about and then knelt and felt around with his hands under the leaves. Then he started raking with the edge of his boot and soon he had uncovered a round flat stone set in the ground. It was about the size of the mouth of a washtub, and the markings showed not any feature of the Cherokee style. They were too abrupt and strict in the angles of their characters, which jittered across the stone as a spider on a skillet. It might have come from some race prior to man. Under the edge of the rock they found a tin box of cornmeal, some dried apples twisted up in a piece of newspaper, a few shavings of side meat, an earthen crock of pickled beans. These they had added to their own provisions of liquor and smoking tobacco and chewing tobacco.
—Reckon which trail we want? the Georgia boy now said to Stobrod. The blanket bumped out where his elbow gestured toward the trail forks and made folds to the ground like drapery in carved stone.
Stobrod looked as directed, but he was not at all sure where they were nor which way they were going. He just knew higher, more remote. It was a big mountain. Walk a circuit around what might rightly be called the base of it and you’d walk not far short of a hundred mile. There’s a right smart of range encompassed therein, even if it were flat as a plat map rather than rared up into the sky and folded into every kind of cove and hollow and vale. As well, Stobrod’s previous experience of Cold Mountain had been, whenever possible, as a drunk. So in his mind, the trails tangled together and could lead anywhither.
Pangle watched Stobrod’s confused study of the landscape. And then finally, with a halting preamble of apology for knowing more that his mentor, he said he knew exactly where he was and knew that the right-hand fork soon grew faint but worked its way on and on across the mountain, leading farther than he had ever cared to follow, going wherever it was the Indians went. The left fork was broader at first but just wandered around and petered out shortly near a dank pool of water.
—We’ll cook us a meal and head on, then, Stobrod said.
The men drew together wood and struck a reluctant blaze in the old black ring of stones. They put some cornmeal mush to boiling in creek water, supposing that its blandness might settle their moiled stomachs. They pulled up sitting logs and lit clay pipes and puffed and crowded as near to the faint flames as they could without setting their clothes and their boot soles afire. They passed the liquor bottle and took long swigs. The keen weather had seeped into their bones and jelled their marrow hard as cold lard. They sat quiet waiting for the warmth of fire and liquor to loosen them up.
After a time, Stobrod became deeply engaged in probing his knife blade into the crock of pickled beans he held before him. He nibbled one bean at a time from the end of the knife and between each one wiped the vinegar off the blade against his pant leg. Pangle ate a little withered ring of dried apple, first rubbing it out flat between his palms and holding it up to his eye as if its core hole served as spyglass to give new perspective on the things of the world. The Georgia boy sat humped forward, hands to the fire. His blanket was cowled over his head, and it left his visage all shadowed but for the firelight striking off his black eyes. He put a hand to his belly and stiffened up as if someone had run a pointed stick through his vitals.
—If I’d known I’d have the scours this bad I’d not have eat one mouthful of that venison, he said.
He stood and walked slowly and with some delicacy off into the rhododendron thicket beyond the clearing. Stobrod watched him go.
—I feel sorry for that boy, he said. He’s wishing he’d never left home, but he’s not even got sense to know what kind of vile state he’s from. If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I’d try to bust the one out of Georgia first.
—I never been so far as Georgia, Pangle said.
—I went just the one time, Stobrod said. Not but a little piece into it. Just until I could see what poor stuff it was made of, and then I turned back.
The fire flared up from a puff of wind, and the men put their hands out to warm. Stobrod dozed off. His head nodded until his chin was at his chest. When it jerked back up, he was looking at mounted men in the trail, just cresting the brow of the hill. A little bunch of sorry-looking scouts led by a dandyman and a slight boy. But the men had sabers and pistols and rifles, several of which were pointed at Stobrod. The Guard rode bundled in heavy coats and wrapped in blankets and the horses steamed in the cold air and puffed out plumes from their pooched nostrils. There was a skin of ice in the roadway, and when they stepped forward their hooves gritted in it like pestle against mortar.
The Guard came on up the trail and into the clearing until they loomed over the men and threw their shadows on them. Stobrod made to rise and Teague said, Sit still. He sat loose in the saddle and he held a short-barreled Spencer carbine with the in-curved butt plate of it fit against the swell of his thigh. He had on wool gloves, the thumb and forefinger cut off the right hand so he could pull back a hammer and trip a trigger unhindered. Plaited reins held finely between the covered finger and thumb of his other hand. He studied the pair of men before him for some time. Their skin was grey and their eyes looked raw as holes burnt in a quilt top. The fat boy’s hair stood in greasy brown peaks like meringue on one side of his head and lay matted to the skull on the other. The skin of Stobrod’s balding pate was grainy and dull, slack-looking over the bone, altogether lacking in the tight sheen common to the hairless. His face looked to have collapsed all around the point of his nose so that he resembled a funnel.
Teague said, I’m not even going to ask if you’ve got papers. I’ve heard every falsehood there is to tell in that regard. We’re after a bunch of outliers said to live in a cave. They’ve been robbing folks. If a man knew where that cave bores into the mountain, it might be in his favor to tell it.
—I don’t exactly know, Stobrod said. His voice was real quick and bright, though inside he was gloomy, figuring that within a month he would be back in bloody Virginia working a ramrod into a musket. I’d say if I did, he said. I’ve just heard talk of such a thing. Some say it’s way over on the backside of the mountain, close on Bearpen Branch or Shining Creek or some like place.
Pangle looked funny at Stobrod. Puzzlement dark on his face as a shadow.
—What’s your word on this? Teague said to Pangle.
The boy sat with his torso canted back, his weight settled on the platform of his wide hipbones. A hand shaded his eyes from the hazed sun that stood behind the shoulders of the horsemen grouped before him. He peered from his little-sized eyes in some confusion. He wondered how best to answer the question that had been put to him. All manner of thoughts crossing his soft face.
—Why that’s not even close to it, Pangle finally said, looking to Stobrod. It’s this side. You know. Over on Big Stomp. Not three mile up Nick Creek. You get where it turkey-foots out and there’s a stand of hickory trees growing up on the right-hand slope. A sight of squirrels works the ground under them in the fall. Squirrels thick on the ground. You can kill them with rocks. You climb straight up a ways through them hickories to a rock fall, and then at the top of it there you are. There’s a hollow in the clift there big as a great barn loft.
—Much obliged, Teague said. He turned to two big dark horsemen and twisted up a slight shade of meaning with one corner of his mouth. He put his weight in his stirrups and his leathers squeaked and he swung a leg over and dismounted.
The other men followed.
—We’ll join you at your fire if you don’t mind, Teague said to Stobrod. Take some breakfast with you. Cook and eat. And then in a little bit we’ll hear you boys pick some. See if you’re any account.
They built up the fire and sat around it as if they were all fellowmen. The Guard had a great quantity of sausage tied up in casings, and when they pulled it out of their saddlebags it was frozen hard and coiled like the bowels of something. They had to cut it in cooking pieces with a little hand axe. They put the cut pieces on flat stones at the edge of the fire to thaw enough to
run sharpened sticks through them and hold them out to roast.
The fire was soon tall flame and red coal and a bed of white ash, and it threw enough heat that Pangle unbuttoned his jacket and then his shirt and put out a strip of his pale chest and belly to it and became all at ease. He had no sense that there was anything to the moment but warmth and comradeship and the smell of food cooking. He studied his banjo a minute, seeming to admire its form and the rightness of its materials as if he had never seen it before. As though he liked studying its geometry nearly as much as he did playing it. Soon his eyes fogged over and closed and he sat slumped, all the weight of him collapsed through his trunk onto the broad base of his ass, so that the front of him was a cascade of white flesh rolls. He was a sculpture carved in the medium of lard.
—Gone from the world, Stobrod said. Wore out.
Teague took a bottle of liquor from his coat pocket and held it out to Stobrod.
—Not too early for you, is it? he said.
—I commenced some time ago, Stobrod said. When you’ve not slept but a snatch or two in days it’s hard to say what’s too early.
He took the offered bottle and drew the cork and tipped it to his mouth, and though it was only of mediocre quality he was polite in his estimation of it. He smacked his lips and blew out his breath and nodded at the taste.
—Why have you not slept? Teague said.
Stobrod explained that they had been picking music and gambling for a few days and nights with some sharps, though he neglected to say that it had been at the outliers’ cave. Cards, chicken fights, dog fights, dice. Any contest they could think up to lay bets on. Big gamblers hot to wager. Some in such a fever they would win the hat off your head and then oddman for your hair. Lacking anything more striking, they’d put money on which of a gathering of birds would fly off a limb first. Stobrod bragged that he had broken even, which in such company was a thing to marvel at.
Teague put the knuckles of his fingers together and made a motion like thumbing cards off a deck.
—Sportsmen, he said.
The sausages swelled, oozed fat, squealed faintly in their casings, made spitting sounds when they dripped in the coals. Eventually they were brown. All the men but Pangle, who yet slept, ate them off the points of the cooking sticks. And when they had eaten until the meat was gone, Teague looked at the fiddle and banjo and said, Can you play those things?
—Some, Stobrod said.
—Pick me something then, Teague said.
Stobrod did not much want to. He was tired. And he figured his audience had no thought of music, lacked entirely what was needed to love it. But he took up his fiddle anyway and just brushed the dry skin of his palm across the strings and knew from their whisper what keys to twist.
—What do you want to hear? he said.
—No matter. You call it.
Stobrod reached over and prodded Pangle in the shoulder. The boy came to, his little eyes just slitted. With evident effort he pulled his thoughts together so that they trained up to some purpose.
—They want to hear us pick a tune, Stobrod said.
Pangle said nothing, but worked his finger joints awhile in the heat of the fire. He picked up his banjo and twiddled with the pegs and then, without waiting for Stobrod, began knocking out a few notes to Backstep Cindy. As he picked, the rolled fat of his front jiggled in time with the frailing, but when he got to where the tune was ready to come around again, the notes scrambled all together and he bogged down and halted.
—That’un’s come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere.
Stobrod bowed a note or two from Cindy, and then some other notes, seeming at random, unrelated. He went over them and over them, and it began to be clear that they made no sense. But he suddenly gathered them up and worked a variation on them, and then another yet more precise, and they unexpectedly fell together into a tune. He found the pattern he was seeking, and he followed the trail of notes where they led, finding the way of their logic, which was brisk, brittle, effortless as laughing. He played the run of it a time or two until Pangle had his chord changes down and had spun off a series of quick answering notes, bright and harsh. Then they set off together to see what sort of thing they had composed.
Though in form it was neither jig nor reel, it was yet right for dancing. Their stomachs, however, were still in such a rage that neither of them could have shuffled out a step. Pangle, nevertheless, had one foot patting ground on the offbeat and his head was nodding and his eyes were loose-closed so that there was but a trembling rim of white showing between the lashes. Stobrod played a run of notes and then lowered the fiddle from under his bristled neck so that the butt of it rested against his chest. He beat out the rhythm on the strings with his bow. Pangle caught on and did the same with his flattened hand against the groundhog hide of the banjo head, and momentarily there was a sense that the instruments they played were just elaborations on the drum. To the thumping, Stobrod put back his head and sang out a lyric he was making up at the moment. It had to do with women whose bellies were hard as the necks of mules. Such women, the song proclaimed, were cruel beyond the generality of their sex.
When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man’s tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte’s Retreat, which some name General Washington’s tune. This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life.
Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit’s took them now.
None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle’s use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod’s fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature. There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream—his or some fictive speaker’s—said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the passage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green. The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world.
When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good God, these is holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me.
Teague sucked on a tooth and looked off in the distance as if trying to remember something. He stood and squared his coat lapels and twisted at his pant waist until he had his britches adjusted to his satisfaction. He took his Spencer’s from the ground and brought the muzzle of it to bear on the space between Stobrod and Pangle. He had the forestock of it resting across the back of his left wrist and the hand drooped down calm.
—Stand up against that big poplar, he said, looking at Stobrod. And take that boy with you.
For lack of a better idea, Stobrod went and stood at the tree. It rose near a hundred feet straight and clear and monolithic above him before there was a limb. Even then there were but two, the size of regular trees themselves, rising in curves like the arms of a candelabra. The crown of the tree had broken off sometime in the previous century, and the mossy stout cylinder of it lay remnant on the ground nearby, slowly melting into the dirt, so soft with rot that you could have kicked it apart like an old dung pile and watched the hister beetles scuttle away.
Stobrod held the fiddle before him in the crook of his arm. The bow hung fro
m a finger and twitched slightly, in time with his heartbeat. Pangle stood beside him, and theirs was the proud and nervous pose men struck when having ambrotypes made at the start of the war, though instead of rifle musket and Colt pistol and bowie knife, Stobrod and Pangle held fiddle and banjo before them as defining implements.
Pangle put his free arm around Stobrod’s shoulders as schoolboy companions once did. The Guard raised their rifles and Pangle grinned at them. There was not a bit of irony or bravado in the smile. It was merely friendly.
—I can’t shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said, half lowering his rifle.
—Quit grinning, Teague said to Pangle.
Pangle twisted his mouth up and worked to straighten it, but then it twitched and went back into a grin.
—There is nothing funny here, Teague said. Not a thing. Compose yourself to die.
Pangle wiped both hands down his face from hairline to chin. He pulled down the corners of his mouth with his pair of thumbs and when he let them go they sprung back up on him so that his face broke open in smile like a blossom.
—Take your hat off, Teague said.
Pangle took his hat off and, still grinning, held it two-handed at waist level by the brim. He turned it around and around as if in demonstration of how the world turns.