Cold Mountain

  But now the hired people were gone. The man had been lukewarm toward secession and counted himself lucky to be too old to volunteer in the first years of the war. But that spring, with the armies in Virginia desperately shorthanded, he had begun to worry that he might soon be conscripted. So, shortly after Monroe died, he and his wife had taken off unannounced and headed over the mountains to cross the lines into territory held by the Federals, leaving Ada to make do on her own.

  Since then, she had discovered herself to be frighteningly ill-prepared in the craft of subsistence, living alone on a farm that her father had run rather as an idea than a livelihood. Monroe never developed much interest in the many tiresome areas of agriculture. He had held the opinion that if he could afford to buy feed corn and meal, why bother growing more than they could eat as roasting ears? If he could buy bacon and chops, why be drawn into the more inconvenient details of pork? Ada once heard him instruct the hired man to buy a dozen or so sheep and put them into the pasture below the front yard to mix in with the milk cow. The man had objected, pointing out to Monroe that cows and sheep do not do well pastured together. The man asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat?

  Monroe’s answer had been, For the atmosphere.

  But it was hard to live on atmosphere, and so the boxwood appeared to offer about all the feeling of protection Ada could soon expect. She decided she would not quit the shrub until she could count off, at minimum, three convincing reasons to do so. But after several minutes’ thought she could only come up with one: she did not particularly wish to die within the boxwood.

  At that moment, though, the red hen came bursting through the leaves, her wings partially opened and trailing in the dust. She hopped onto a limb near Ada’s head and sounded off with an agitated gabble. Immediately behind her came the big black-and-gold rooster that always frightened Ada a little with his ferocity. He was intent on treading the hen but pulled up short, startled when he saw Ada in so unexpected a place. The rooster cocked his head at an angle and fixed a shining black eye on her. He took a step back and scratched at the ground. He was close enough for Ada to note the dirt lodged between the scales on his yellow legs. The amber spurs looked long as a finger. The golden helmet of feathers at his head and neck fluffed and swelled and in their glossiness seemed almost macassared. He shook himself to settle them back into place. The black of his body had a blue-green sheen like oil on water. His yellow beak opened and closed.

  If he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds he’d kill me where I sit without a doubt, Ada thought.

  She shifted about onto her knees and waved her hands and said, Shoo! When she did, the rooster launched himself at her face, twisting in the air so that he arrived spurs first, wings flogging away. Ada threw up a hand to fend him off and was cut across the wrist by a spur. Her blow knocked the bird to the ground, but he rose and came at her again, wings fanning. As she scrambled crablike to get out from under the bush, the rooster dug at her with a spur and hung it up in the folds of her skirt. She burst from the bush with a great thrash and rose to run, the rooster still attached to her skirt at knee level. The bird pecked at her calves and struck again and again with the spur of his free leg and beat at her with his wings. Ada hit at it with open-handed blows until it fell away, and then she ran to the porch and into the house.

  She sank into an armchair and examined her wounds. There was a smear of blood at her wrist. She wiped it away and with relief saw that she was little more than scraped. She looked at her skirt and found it dusty and smeared with chicken droppings and rent in three places, and then she drew it up and looked to her legs. They were marked variously by scratches and nips, none of them deep enough to draw blood. Her face and neck stung from scratches taken when she scrabbled out of the bush. She patted at her hair and found it moiled all about her head. This is the place I have reached, she thought. I am living in a new world where these are the fruits of even looking for eggs.

  She rose from the chair and climbed the steps to her room and removed her clothes. At her marble-topped washstand, she poured water from the pitcher into the basin and washed off with a piece of lavender soap and a cloth. She ran her fingers through her hair to rake out the boxwood leaves and then just let it fall loose below her shoulders. She had abandoned both of the current hairstyles—either gathered all around and swept into two big rolls that hung from the sides of a woman’s head like the ears of a hound, or pulled tight to the scalp and bunned at the back like a mud-tailed horse. She no longer had need or patience for such updos. She could go about looking like a man-woman in a bookplate and it didn’t matter, for she sometimes went up to a week or ten days without seeing another soul.

  She went to her chest of drawers for clean underdress and found none, laundry having been neglected for some time. She put on linens she drew from near the bottom of the dirty clothes pile, theorizing that perhaps time had made them fresher than the ones she had just taken off. She topped them with a somewhat clean dress and wondered how she might get through the hours until bedtime. When had things altered so that she no longer thought of how to pass the day pleasantly or profitably and began to think merely of how to pass the day?

  Her will to do was near gone. All she had accomplished of note in the months since Monroe’s death was to sort through his things, his clothes and papers. Even that had been a trial, for she had a strange and fearful feeling about her father’s room and had not been able to enter it until many days after the funeral. But during that time she had often stood at the door and looked in as people are drawn to stand at the lip of a cliff and look down. Water had stood in a pitcher at his washstand until it went away of its own accord. When she had finally drawn together the nerve to do it, she went in and sat on the bed, weeping as she folded the well-made white shirts, the black suitcoats and pants for storage. She sorted and labeled and boxed Monroe’s papers, his sermons and botanical notes and commonplace journals. Each little task had brought with it a new round of mourning and a string of empty days that eventually ran together until now she had arrived at such a state that the inevitable answer to the question, What have you accomplished this day? was, Nothing.

  Ada took a book from her bedside table and went into the upper hall and sat in the stuffed chair she had pulled from Monroe’s bedroom and situated to catch the good light from the hall window. She had spent much of the past three damp months sitting in the chair reading, a quilt wrapped around her to hold back the chill of the house even in July. The books she had drawn from the shelves that summer had been varied and haphazard, little but recent novels, whatever she happened to pick up from Monroe’s study. Trifles like Sword and Gown by Lawrence and many others of its type. She could read such books and a day later not know what they had been about. When she had read more notable books, the harsh fates of their doomed heroines served only to deepen her gloom. For a time, every book she plucked from the shelves frightened her, their contents all concerning mistakes made by wretched dark-haired women so that they ended their days punished, exiled, and alien. She had gone straight from The Mill on the Floss to a slim and troubling tale by Hawthorne on somewhat the same theme. Monroe had apparently not finished it, for the pages were uncut beyond the third chapter. She guessed Monroe would have thought the book unnecessarily grim, but to Ada it seemed good practice for her coming world. No matter what the book, though, the characters all seemed to lead fuller lives than she did.

  At first, all she liked about the reading spot was the comfortable chair and the good light, but over the months she came to appreciate that the window’s view offered some relief against the strain of such bleak stories, for when she looked up from the page, her eyes swept across the fields and rose on waves of foggy ridges to the blue bulk of Cold Mountain. The prospect from the reading chair confronted her with all the major shapes and colors of her current position. Through the summer, the landscape’s most frequent mood had been dim and gloomy. The damp air coming through the window was rich with the fragrance of rot and grow
th, and to the eye it had much the same shimmering dense quality as looking across a great distance through a telescope. The burden of moisture in the air worked on perception as optics of poor quality do, distorting, expanding, and diminishing distance and altitude, altering the sense of mass moment by moment. Through the window, Ada had been given a tutorial in all the forms of visible moisture—light haze, dense valley fogs, tatters of cloud hanging like rags on the shoulders of Cold Mountain, grey rain falling straight down in streaks all day as if old twine hung from the heavens.

  Liking this clouded, humped land, she found, was an altogether more difficult and subtler thing than appreciating the calm voice of Charleston during an evening walk along the Battery with Fort Sumter off in the distance, the great white houses at one’s back, palmettos rattling their leaves in a sea breeze. In comparison, the words this canted landscape spoke were less hushed, harsher. The coves and ridges and peaks seemed closed and baffling, a good place to hide.

  The book before Ada this day was another one of her father’s, a tale of frontier adventure by Simms, a Charlestonian and a friend of Monroe’s that Ada had met on a number of occasions when he was in town from his plantation on the Edisto. She had been put in mind of Simms because she had not long ago received a letter from a Charleston acquaintance which described in passing his great anguish at the recent death of his wife. Naught but opiates saved him from madness, her friend had written, and it was a clause that Ada could not put from her thoughts.

  She began to read, but stirring though the story’s events were, she could not get food off her mind. Since the search for eggs had not gone in her favor, she had not yet eaten breakfast, though the day was coming up on midmorning. After only a few pages, she put the book into a pocket and went down to the kitchen and prowled through the pantry for something she could turn into a meal. She spent nearly two hours firing up the oven and trying to raise a loaf of wheat bread with saleratus, the only leavening she could find. When the loaf came from the oven, though, it resembled a great poorly made biscuit; its crust was of a crackerlike texture, and the remainder was sodden and tasted of uncooked flour. Ada nibbled at a piece and then gave up and threw it out into the yard for the chickens to peck at. For dinner she ate only a plate of the little tomatoes and cucumbers, sliced and dribbled with vinegar and sprinkled with salt. For all the satisfaction they gave her, she might have just breathed air.

  Ada left her dirty plate and fork on the table. She took a shawl from where it lay balled on the sofa and shook it out and wrapped it about her shoulders. She went to the porch and stood looking. The sky was cloudless, though hazed so that the blue looked faded and thin. She could see the black and gold rooster down near the barn. He scratched at the ground and pecked where he had scratched and then paced about fiercely. Ada left the house and went to the gate and out into the lane. It had carried so little traffic of late that the ridge down the center had grown a tall ruff of asters and foxtails. The fencerows at roadside were lined with tiny yellow and orange blossoms, and Ada went and touched one to watch it snap apart and throw its seeds.

  —Snapweed, she said aloud, happy that there was something she could put a name to, even if it was one of her own devising.

  She walked down the lane a mile, and then she passed out of Black Cove and turned onto the river road. As she went she picked a bouquet of wild-flowers—whatever caught her eye—fleabane, angelica, tickseed, heal-all. At the river, she turned upstream to go to the church. The road was the community thoroughfare and was rutted with wagon tracks and had sunken below grade from hard use. Low spots were churned into a black muddy bog from the passing of horses and cows and pigs, and at such places footpaths had been worn alongside the road by walkers seeking to avoid sinking up to their boot tops. Along the roadside the trees hung heavy with the green burden of leaves approaching the end of the season. They appeared tired of growth, drooping, though not from drought, for the summer had been wet and the black river alongside the road ran deep and smooth.

  In fifteen minutes Ada reached the little chapel that had been in Monroe’s charge. Compared to the fine stone churches of Charleston, it was hardly more formal in its architecture than a bird trap, but its proportions—the pitch of its gable roof, the relations of its length and width and height, the placement of its simple steeple—were decidedly spare and elegant. Monroe had developed a great deal of affection for the chapel, its strict geometry according well with the plain impulses of his later years. Often as he and Ada had walked toward the chapel from the river he said, This is the way God speaks in this particular vernacular.

  Ada climbed the hill and went to the burial ground behind the church and stood before Monroe’s plot. The black dirt had not yet grown a thick stand of grass. There was still no marker, Ada having rejected the local styles—either a flat river rock or an oak plank with the name and dates scratched faintly on the surface. She had instead ordered a carved granite headstone from the county seat, but it was slow in coming. She put the flowers on the ground at the head of the grave and picked up the previous bundle, now wilted and soggy.

  The day Monroe had died was in May. Late that afternoon, Ada had prepared to go out for a time with a box of watercolors and a piece of paper to paint the newly opened blossoms on a rhododendron by the lower creek. As she left the house, she stopped to speak to Monroe, who sat reading a book in a striped canvas campaign chair under the pear tree. He seemed tired and said that he doubted he had vitality even to finish the page he was on before he dropped off to sleep, but he asked her to wake him when she returned, for he did not want to lie sleeping into the damp of evening. Too, he said, he feared he was just beyond the age at which he could rise unassisted from so low a chair.

  Ada was away less than an hour. As she walked from the fields into the yard, she saw that Monroe lay in complete repose. His mouth was open and she thought he might be snoring and that over supper she would tease him for leaving himself exposed in so undignified a posture. She walked up to wake him, but as she approached she could see that his eyes were open, the book fallen into the grass. She ran the last three steps and put her hand to his shoulder to shake him, but at a touch she knew he was dead, for the flesh under her hand was so completely inert.

  Ada went as fast as she could for help, running some and walking some over the shortcut trail that crossed the ridge and descended to the river road near the Swangers’ homestead. By that route they were the nearest neighbors. They were members of her father’s congregation, and Ada had known them from her earliest days in the mountains. She reached their house breathless and crying. Before Esco Swanger could hitch his team to a buggy and return with Ada by the roundabout way of the road, a rain blew in from the west. When they got back to the cove, darkness was falling and Monroe was wet as a trout and there were dogwood petals on his face. The watercolor Ada had dropped under the pear tree was an abstract splatter of pink and green.

  She had spent that night in the Swangers’ house, lying wide awake and dry eyed, thinking for a long time that she wished she could have gone before Monroe, though she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

  Two days later, Ada had buried Monroe on the knoll above the Little East Fork of the Pigeon River. The morning was bright, and a temperate wind swept down off Cold Mountain, and all the world quivered in it. There was scant humidity in the air for a change and all the colors and edges of things seemed crisp beyond the natural. Forty people, dressed in black, nearly filled the little chapel. The coffin rested on sawhorses before the pulpit, the lid off. Monroe’s face had collapsed upon itself since his death. Gravity working on slack skin had hollowed out his cheeks and eye sockets, and his nose seemed sharper and longer than in life. There was the pale shine of eyewhite where one lid had lifted a crack.

  Ada, a hand cupped to her mouth, leaned
and spoke softly to a man across the aisle from her. He rose and jingled in his pockets for change and drew out two brownies. He went and set one on each of Monroe’s eyes, for just to have covered the opening one would have looked strange and piratical.

  The funeral service had been improvisational since no other ordained minister of their faith lived within traveling distance, and all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe’s failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy. Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.

  So they had to make do with words from a few men of the church. One after the other they had shuffled to the pulpit and stood with their chins tucked against their chests in order to avoid looking directly at the congregation, especially at Ada, who sat on the front pew of the women’s side. Her mourning dress, dyed the day before greenish-black like the feathers of a drake’s head, was still fragrant from the process. Her face white as a stripped tendon in her cold grief.

  The men talked awkwardly of what they called Monroe’s great learning and his other fine qualities. Of how since his coming from Charleston he had shed on the community a glowing light. They told of his small acts of kindness and the sage advice that he dispensed. Esco Swanger had been one of the speakers, a shade more articulate than the rest, though no less nervous. He spoke of Ada and her terrible loss, of how she would be missed when she returned to her home in Charleston.

  Then, later, they stood at graveside as the coffin was lowered on ropes by the six men of the congregation who had carried the box from the chapel. With the coffin snugged down in its hole, another of the men led a final prayer, remarking of Monroe’s vigor, his untiring service to the church and the community, the troubling suddenness with which he had faltered and fallen into death’s eternal slumber. He seemed to find in those simple events a message for all concerning the shifty nature of life, how God intended it as a lesson.