—Hold it over your face, Teague said.
Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where balls struck after passing through the meat of the two men.
black bark in winter
—And when they finished up jerking their trigger fingers, the horses all jumped and spooked and the head man went to cussing them and took his hat off and went and slapped them all in their faces with it. They didn’t cover them or even go stand over them to say words except that one of them said that what had passed might fairly be called a shootout since shots had been fired. Then one of them laughed and one of them went and made water in the fire and they mounted up and rode off. I don’t know what kind of place this is that I’m in, where people do one another that way.
The Georgia boy’s bearing was of a man in the near aftermath of fright. He was yet excited, and there was urgency in his desire to express a tale he believed to be thrilling yet truthful.
—I seen it all done, he said. Seen it all.
—Then why were you not killed or taken, if you were close enough to witness? Ada said.
The boy thought about it. He looked off to the side and he raked his hair off his brow with splayed fingers and then flipped at the gate latch with his thumb. He stood on the road side of the yard fence, Ada and Ruby on the other. They talked over the gate palings, and they could smell the woodsmoke in his damp sweated clothes, his wet unwashed hair.
—Heard it done, anyways, he answered. Heard what I didn’t see, would be more as it was. I’d stepped into the woods, back a piece into the laurels. Of a necessity, like.
—Yes, Ada said.
—For the privacy, so to say.
—We took your meaning, Ruby said. What’s the upshot of all this?
—It’s what I’m trying to tell you. That I left them a-laying there bloody and dead in a heap under a big poplar. And then I run all the way here. I remembered where the fiddler said you lived. I went to that picture rock where we stopped yesterday for food. And I run down from there till I found the house.
—How long? Ruby said.
The boy looked around and examined the flat grey clouds and the blue ridgelines as if trying to get his bearings. But he could not call in which quarter west lay, nor did the sky give much assistance in saying what the hour might be, for it held no bright spots, only the few colors of an old axehead.
—It’s three, Ada informed him. Two-thirty at the earliest.
—Three? the boy said, as if mildly surprised. He looked down and examined the beaten ground at the threshold to the yard. He pressed his lips together and worked his mouth. He was counting back. He reached up and gripped two of the palings in his fists. He blew out air between his lips in a way as not quite to make a whistle.
—Seven hours, he finally said. Six or seven, I’d say.
—And you running all the way? Ruby said.
—Some of it running, he said. I was scared. It’s hard to recollect, but I run till I give out. Then I run some and walked some. First one and then the other.
—We’ll need you to guide us back there, Ada said.
But the boy did not wish to go back up on the mountain and would, he claimed, rather be shot where he stood than visit it again. He’d seen all of it he cared to see. Every companion he’d had there was now dead in its woods. He wanted to be home, was his only desire. And by his way of keeping tally, the news he had brought ought of its own to be worth some food and another blanket and a thing or two else he might need on the journey.
—Many another man would have left the two lie where they fell and not care that the wolves would soon strip them to bone, he said. And he told the women he reckoned wolves had already gotten to his dead cousin. Without digging implements the best he had been able to do by way of burial was to set the body under the lip of a little waterfall in the creek. There had been a dry place there beneath an undercut ledge where the water spilled over and made a curtain, so it was like a chamber between earth and water. He told how he sat his cousin up cross-legged against a rock and said some words over the still face to the effect that there was this world and one more and in that next one they might meet again. He said he walked away, and then he looked back and the sun was shining through the mist of the waterfall and striking rainbows out of it. So, no. He had no intention of setting foot back on that mountain.
—Cold Mountain stands right in the way of where you want to be, Ruby said, but do as you please. We’ve got no need for you. I know about where you’re talking of, and we can lead the horse and not lack much of making it in five hours, walking every step of the way. We’ll feed you, though. It’s not like we’ve not been feeding every other stray that wanders through.
Ruby opened the gate and let the boy into the yard. He went and sat on the front steps between the big boxwoods and rubbed his hands together and breathed on them. Ruby stayed at the gate. She reached up and rested a hand on a bare twisted bough of the crabapple tree and stood looking out into the road.
Ada stepped to her side and looked at the side of her face. In Ada’s experience, what women did at such times of loss was to weep and embrace each other and speak words of comfort and faith. And though she did not entirely trust those formulas anymore, she was ready to offer any of them to Ruby that might do her good. Ada did in fact reach out and touch the dark hair gathered up and bound with a hide strip at Ruby’s neck.
Ruby, though, seemed not to welcome even that small comfort. She twisted her head away. She was not crying or balling up her apron hem in her hands, or in any other visible way fretting over the news of Stobrod’s death. She just rested her hand on the crabapple limb and looked out into the road. She expressed but one concern aloud. Were they burying the men on the mountain or bringing them to Black Cove and resting them in the little graveyard among the Blacks? There were reasons for and against either way. But since Stobrod and the Blacks had not cared for each other in life, she thought it, all in all, better to keep them separate in death.
—We need to know now, for it comes to a matter of what we pack, Ruby said. Shovels and the like.
Ada was somewhat confused about not bringing the men back. It sounded so informal, like burying a dog.
—We cannot just go up there and dig a hole and put them in it and come home, she said.
—How would that differ from what we’d do if we hauled them down here? Ruby said. It was me, I’d about rather rest on the mountain than anywhere else you could name.
Put that way, Ada could find no argument. She needed to go into the house to make dinner for the boy, but before she did she reached out and hugged Ruby for her own comfort if nothing else. Ada realized it was the first time they had embraced, and Ruby stood with her arms to her sides and was just a hard knot of a person in Ada’s arms.
In the kitchen Ada made a plate of cold leftovers from their dinner—fried apples, corn bread, some dried lima beans that had cooked overlong to mush. The beans had congealed in the pot as they cooled and had a color and consistency that reminded her of pâté. And so on a whim she unmolded the beans from the pot and cut two slices.
When she went outside and handed the boy the plate he studied the beans for some time. The look on his face said he believed he had found yet more evidence of the kind of place he was in.
—That’s beans, Ada said.
The boy looked at them again and then forked off a tiny bite to test her word.
—We don’t eat them thataway atall where I’m from, he said.
While the boy sat on the steps and ate, Ruby sat a step above him and talked him out a map of the long way around Cold Mountain. Ada sat in a porch rocker and watched them, two short dark people of such resemblance they might be taken for brother and sister. Ruby told the boy how to stick to the high ridges and avoid the main ways along creek valleys where people would be. Described all the landmarks he would need to make his way up Cold Spring Knob, then to Double Spri
ng Gap and on to Bearpen Gap, Horsebone Gap, Beech Gap. From there head downhill, and at any fork of trail or creek, bear to the southwest. By such route the boy’s flat and sorry home lay no more than two weeks distant.
—Go by dark and sleep by day and don’t strike a light, Ruby said. Reckon even if you don’t run all the way you’ll be there for Christmas. They say you know Georgia when you come to it, for it’s nothing but red dirt and rough roads.
Ruby dismissed him from her attention and turned to Ada and started planning their journey. The timing worked out poorly. It was Ruby’s reasoning that with the days approaching the shortest of the year, one way or the other, either going or coming, they’d spend a night in the woods. It did not much matter which, was her thinking. They might as well get on. So she and Ada left the boy mopping his plate with a heel of corn bread and went in the house and banked up the fire and quickly threw together a camping kit to Ruby’s specification. Bedding, cookware, food, candles, a tin box of lucifer matches and the sandpaper needed to ignite them, a dry bundle of fatwood kindling, a coil of rope, a hand axe, shotgun with powder and shot and wadding, grain for the horse, a mattock and spade. They heaped the gear in paired hemp sacks and tied the necks together and threw them over Ralph’s back like rude lumpish panniers.
Ruby looked about at the sky for any marks of cloud or air or light that might foreshow the weather, and what they told was snow and gathering cold.
She said, Have you got any britches in the house?
—Trousers? Ada said.
—Woolen or canvas, either one. Two pair.
—Of my father’s, yes.
—We need to go put them on, Ruby said.
—Men’s trousers? Ada said.
—You wear what you want, but I don’t relish the feel of a winter wind blowing up my dress tail. And who’s up there to see?
They found two pairs of heavy wool hunting trousers, one pair black and the other grey. They dressed in long underwear and then drew the trousers on and cuffed up the bottoms and cinched the waists in with belts so that the extra material gathered like big pleats. They put on wool shirts and sweaters, and Ruby noted Monroe’s broad-brimmed hats and said they would keep the snow from their faces, so they took two down from the shelf and put them on as well. Had the circumstances been happier, Ada thought, this would have been like the hair contest, a game of dress-up against which they might wager to see who could accouter herself most convincing as a man. Take lamp soot and draw mustaches and burnsides on their faces, carry around unlit cigars and mimic the silly gestures men used in smoking them. Instead they hardly spoke as they dressed, and they both were filled with dread toward the next pair of days.
Before they left, they rubbed beeswax into their boots and opened the door to the henhouse and likewise the door to the cow’s stall and they heaped down hay on the floor. Ruby reckoned Waldo would be bawling to have her bag stripped by the time they got back. They gave the boy food and bedding and told him to sleep in the hayloft until dark made it safe for him to travel. When they went off leading the horse, the boy still sat between the boxwoods, and he waved to them like a host bidding visitors farewell.
• • •
Toward evening, snow fell through fog in the woods. Ada and Ruby walked in dim light under fir trees, and they were but vague dark shapes moving through a place that lacked all color other than gradations of gloom. The nearest trees looked very much like genuine trees, but those only slightly farther away were but a suggestion of trees as in a quick sketch, a casual gesture toward the form of trees. All of it seemed to Ada as if there were no such thing as landscape and that she wandered along in a cloud, with what little she could know an arm’s length away. All else shrouded from understanding. It made Ralph nervous, and the horse went bowing his neck to left and right and working his ears back and forth to catch sounds of threat.
They had climbed for a long time under the thick canopy of dark hemlock. Then they crossed a low ridge and descended into a creek valley. They had long since left what to Ada was familiar territory. The footing was soft from layers of dropped needles, and snow fell through the treetops as dry as sifted meal and swirled about the ground in patterns of arcs and loops. It seemed not to want to lie down.
After a time they crossed a black creek, stepping with care on the dry backs of humped stones. Ada looked at the way the creek was seizing up with a thin rim of bright ice along its banks and around rocks and fallen trees and nubbles of moss, anything that hindered the flow. In the center of the creek, though, the fast water ripped along as always.
Where it ran shallower and slower, then, were the places prone to freezing. Monroe would have made a lesson of such a thing, Ada thought. He would have said what the match of that creek’s parts would be in a person’s life, what God intended it to be the type of. All God’s works but elaborate analogy. Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.
Monroe had a book wherein you could look up the types. The rose—its thorns and its blossom—a type of the difficult and dangerous path to spiritual awakening. The baby—come wailing to the world in pain and blood—a type of our miserable earthly lives, so consumed with violence. The crow—its blackness, its outlaw nature, its tendency to feast on carrion—a type of the dark forces that wait to overtake man’s soul.
So Ada quite naturally thought the stream and the ice might offer a weapon of the spirit. Or, perhaps, a warning. But she refused to believe that a book could say just how it should be construed or to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lack something essential and be as useless by itself as the gudgeon to a door hinge with no pintle.
On the stream’s far bank the horse stopped and shook its hide until the pots rattled in their sacks, and then he stretched his neck and breathed soft and long out into the world in hope of some assuring companion breath in return. Ada cupped her hand to his velvet muzzle. He put his tongue out and she took it between thumb and forefinger and waggled it gently and then they went on.
For a time they kept to the creekside as it tumbled from the mountain, but then the trail turned up a faint branch and entered a forest of hardwoods where there were yet twisted scraps of leaves clinging to the oak trees. They were old tired oaks and had globes of mistletoe in their branches. Snow fell harder and began to stick to the ground and the trail became a faint sunken line through the woods, an easy thing to miss as night came on. What path there was held not even the cupped tracks of hogs. It seemed some abandoned Indian trail, long unwalked, linking a set of points that no longer existed.
They walked on well past nightfall, the snow still coming down. The clouds were thick and hid the waxing moon. Nevertheless there was light in the snow where it stood gathered up under the black tree trunks.
Shelter was Ada’s first thought, and at every rock ledge she said, There’s a place we could sleep. But Ruby said she knew a better place, or at least thought she remembered a place nearby, and they walked on.
In time, they came to a tumble of great flat rocks. Ruby cast about until she found what she was looking for: three that had fallen upon each other so as to form a lean-to, a sort of accidental dolmen with flat straight walls, a capstone fitted tight and angled back so as to shed water, leaving underneath a room no bigger than a cock loft, but enough to sit up and shift around in. As architecture, its shape reminded Ada of the symbol for pi. Inside, the floor was thick with dry leaves. Spring water rose from the ground not twenty yards away. All set around with chestnut and oak trees that had never been cut since the day of creation. It made as fine a camp as anyone could ever expect to find, and Ruby said that though she had not visited the place in years, it was exactly as she remembered from having spent many a night there as a child out foraging for food.
Ruby put Ada to gathering armloads of the dryest limbs she could find, and within half an hour they had a warm blaze going at the
mouth of the shelter. A pot of water boiling for tea. When it was done steeping, they sat and drank it, ate a few dried biscuits and some dried apples. The rings were from apples so small as to be little more than a bite apiece but their sharp taste bound together all the best features of the past warm season.
They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the general order of men, which is to say that he would greatly benefit from having someone’s foot in his back every waking minute.
When they were done eating, Ruby brushed away the leaves of the shelter floor with the heel of her hand and scooped out dirt and sifted it through her fingers and held out a palm to the firelight for Ada to see. Fragments of charcoal and splinters of flint. Ancient fire and partial arrow points flawed and discarded. Flakes of old hope however slight.
Neither of them said anything, but Ada picked through the flint splinters and kept the point nearest completion and found comfort that people in some dim other time had done as they were doing, had found shelter in the rock pile and eaten a meal and slept.
The snow hissed as it fell and the temperature was dropping fast, but the fire soon heated the stones, and when Ada and Ruby wrapped themselves in blankets and burrowed in among the dry leaves and heaped more leaves atop the quilts, they were warm as lying in a bed at home. This would do, Ada thought, as she lay there. The abandoned trail through mountains and rivers. Not a soul around. The stone shelter warm and dry and strange as an elfin lodge. Though others might view it as an utterly bare haven, it matched her needs so much that she could just move in and live there.
The fire threw patterns of light and shadow on the pitched roof stone, and Ada found that if she watched long enough the fire would form the shapes of things in the world. A bird. A bear. A snake. A fox. Or perhaps it was a wolf. The fire seemed to have no interests other than animals.