Cold Mountain

  While Ruby built up a fire in the hearth, Ada went out and cut a long straight limb and trimmed it sharp with the hatchet and hammered it into the ground and staked out the horse under a cedar. But he was wet and shivering. He stood with his head down and his winter coat was pressed in dark curls to his skin from snowmelt. Ada looked at him and at the sky and judged the cold by the sting of her cheeks. Ralph might be dead on the ground by morning.

  She loosed him from the stake and tried to lead him into one of the huts, but he did not want to duck his head to go through the door. She pulled at the lead rope and he lowered his hind end and backed away, pulling her until she fell forward into the snow. She got up and found a stick as big around as her wrist and she got behind the horse and hit him again and again with all the strength she had left in her, which was not an awful lot. Finally he plunged into that black door hole as if into death.

  Once inside, though, Ralph was immediately content, for the hut hardly differed in dimensions or materials from a barn stall. Within minutes he had relaxed. He shook out his hide and spraddled his legs and pissed a long and satisfying piss. Ada fed him grain out of the cook pot and then took the pot and rinsed it in the creek.

  It was almost dark and Ada stood and looked at the final sheen of light on the water. She was tired and cold and scared. This seemed like the lonesomest place on earth. She dreaded night and the moment when the campcraft was all done and she would have to wrap herself in a blanket and lie in the dark on the cold dirt floor of the ghost cabin to wait for morning. She was so tired her legs felt burnt out from under her, but she believed she could get through this if she did one thing at a time and thought of the remaining things left to be done as sequential, not cumulative.

  She went inside and found that Ruby had cooked a supper like to their breakfast. But when Ada put the first spoon of the greasy grits to her mouth, they would not go down. Her stomach knotted up. She stood and went out and vomited in the snow, though about all she had left in her to bring up was black bile. Then she rubbed her mouth with snow and went inside and ate again until her bowl was empty. She sat with it in her lap, exhausted in stunned silence before the hearth.

  She had forgotten to drink water for most of the day. That and the cold, the walking and the work of burying and healing had turned her mind strange so that her only wish was to seek happier visions in the fire coals. She looked and looked but found none in either the liquid shapes of flame or the geometric scorings charred in the sides of the fire logs. But the burning wood made squeaking sounds like footsteps tramping in dry snow and even Ada knew what that betokened. More ready to fall.

  footsteps in the snow

  When he reached the place where three ways came together there was barely enough light left behind the western clouds for Inman to study signs on the ground for the story they told. The snow was marked by tracks coming up to the flat ground at the fork and then going on up the rising left-hand trail. There was black blood on the ground beneath a big poplar where killing had been done. The snow all about was churned up by the walking of people and horses. There had been a recent fire in a ring of stones beyond the poplar, and the ashes were cold but still held the smell of pork fat. Footsteps and a drag trail led to a cross of sticks standing at the head of a raw dig. Inman squatted and looked at it, thinking this: if there is a world beyond the grave as hymns claim, such a hole makes a grim lonesome portal to it.

  He was somewhat puzzled. There ought to have been two burials. And though Inman had seen men laid one atop another to save shovel work, he reckoned that was not the case here. He rose and went back to studying the signs, and he followed them across the creek to the rock ledge and thereunder he found more blood on the ground and the still-warm coals of a little fire. A pile of sodden roots where they had been cast on the ground with their cooking water. He picked up pieces of root and rubbed them in his hand and smelled them, and he could tell ginseng and mullein.

  He set them on a rock and went to the creek and dipped up a handful of water to drink. A salamander, wildly spotted in colors and patterns unique to that one creek, moved among the stones. Inman lifted it out and held it cupped in his hand and looked at the salamander’s face. The way its mouth curved around its head shaped a smile of such great serenity as to cause Inman envy and distress. Living hid under a creek rock would be about the only way to achieve such countenance, Inman thought. He returned the salamander to its place and walked back and stood in the crotch of the trail and looked off where the tracks led. He could see hardly ten feet ahead before they faded in the dark that was settling fast. He figured Ada might recede before him forever and leave him a lone pilgrim going on and on.

  The clouds hung low and thick. There would be no moon and the night would soon be black as the inside of a cold stove. He put back his head and sniffed the air and it smelled like snow. It was a matter of which was worse, to lose the track in the night or to have it covered over.

  Of the two, the dark was certain and nigh, and so Inman went back to the ledge and sat and watched the last light fall away. He listened to the creek and tried to make up a story to fit the signs, one that would explain the single grave and why the two women had gone on across the mountain instead of following their own tracks home.

  But it was hard to reason things out in the state he was in. Part from choice and part from necessity, Inman was fasting and his senses would not row up properly. He had not eaten bite one in the days since he had cooked the bear cub. The creek had the sound of voices in the rush of its water and the clicking of its bed stones against one another, and he thought they might tell him what had taken place there if he listened hard enough. But the voices shifted and blurred and the words had no meaning to him, try as he might to make them out. Then he reckoned he was not hearing voices at all, just words forming up in his head, and even then he could not make sense of them. He was too empty for sense.

  His sacks held no food but for a few walnuts he had picked up off the ground two days previous at a place where a cabin had burned. There was nothing left of it but a cone of sooty dirt where the clay chimney had stood and a good-sized walnut tree beyond where the front of the house would have been. There had been yet walnuts on the ground under it. The black shells lay inside little nests in the grass where the grass had grown long around the husks and the husks had rotted away. Inman had put what nuts he could find in his haversack, but had never got around to eating them, for the more he thought the more he reckoned that the work it would take to break them open would overbalance the sustenance he would get from them, each one holding no more meat than would be around the end joint of your forefinger. Yet he didn’t throw them out, for he worried that if you put all of life to such a test it would not seem worth living. And, too, he found the sound of them comforting as he walked. They rattled against each other with the dry tock of old bones hanging in trees.

  He looked at the bitter roots on the rock where he had laid them. He first thought to nibble at them, but then he picked them up and threw them into the creek. He took a walnut out of his sack and threw it in the creek too, and it made the valved sound of a scared frog plunging in water. He left the other nuts in his sack, though he intended to eat nothing until he found Ada. If she would not have him he would go on to the heights and see if the portals at the Shining Rocks would open to him as the woman with the snake tattoos had suggested they would to one with a fasting heart, empty in all his faculties. Inman could think of no reason to hold back. He doubted there was a man in the world emptier than he at that moment. He would walk right out of this world and keep on going into that happy valley she had described.

  Inman broke up limbs and kindled a strong fire on the coals of the earlier fire. He rolled two large stones into it to heat. For a long time he lay wrapped in his blankets with his feet to the fire and thought about that pair of tracks leading away.

  When he had started the day he had not thought that by dark he would be lying on the cold ground again. Once home, he assumed he
would differ from his recent self in every regard, in his design of living, his views on life, and even in the way he walked and stood. And that morning he had thought certainly by nightfall to have declared himself to Ada and to have gotten some response. Yea, nay, or maybe. He had played out the scene in his mind many days as he walked and as he lay waiting for sleep in every bare camp along the way. He would come walking up the road into Black Cove, and he would be weary looking. What he had been through would show in his face and in his frame, but only so much as to suggest heroism. He would be bathed and in a clean suit. Ada would step out the door onto the porch without knowing he was coming, just going about her doings. She would be dressed in her fine clothes. She would see him and know him in every feature. She would run to him, lifting her skirts above her ankle boots as she came down the steps. She would rush across the yard and through the gate in a flurry of petticoats, and before the gate had even clapped shut they would be holding each other in the roadway. He had seen it in his mind over and over until it came to seem that there was no other way it could happen except that he be killed getting home.

  Such an imagined scene of homecoming had been the hope in his heart when he had come walking up the Black Cove road before noon. He had done his part to make it so, for he arrived weary but clean, having on the day previous—aware that he looked rougher than the lowest muleteer—stopped at a creek to bathe and to wash his clothes. It had been chill weather for such work, but he built a fire of dry logs until the flames stood shoulder high. He heated pot after pot of water almost to boiling and unfolded his soap from its brown paper wrapping, dark and greasy from the tallow. He poured the water on the clothes and rubbed them with the soap and twisted them and battled them on stones and then rinsed them in the creek. He had spread the clothes on bushes near the fire to dry and then he started in on himself. The soap was brown and gritty and had a great deal of lye in it so that it would about take off hide. He had washed himself with water as hot as he could stand and scrubbed with the soap until his skin felt raw. Then he touched his face and hair. He had just about raised a new beard since shaving at the girl’s cabin, and his hair was half wild about his head. He had no razor, and so the beard would have to stand. And he reckoned himself a poor barber even had he scissors and a glass. With nothing but a sheath knife and a still pool at the creek edge, he could not expect to improve his haircut any. The best he could do was to heat more water, soap and rinse his hair, comb it out with his fingers and try to shape it to his head so that it would not stand up and look alarming.

  When he had finished washing, he sat through the remainder of the chill day squatting naked but clean under his blankets. He slept naked, wrapped in his blankets while his clothes dried over the fire. Where he had camped, the snow but came spitting out of the sky awhile and then stopped. When he dressed in the morning, the clothes at least smelled of lye soap and creek water and chestnut smoke rather than sweat.

  He had then made his way to Black Cove over trails, taking care not to strike the road until he was but a bend or two below the house. When he came to it there was smoke from the chimney but no other sign of life. The little snow in the yard lay unmarked. He opened the gate and went to the door and knocked. No one came, and he knocked again. He went around back, where he found the tracks of a man’s boots in the snow between the house and the privy. A frozen nightgown hung stiff from the clothesline. Chickens in the henhouse fluttered and clucked and then settled down. He went to the back door and knocked hard, and in a minute an upstairs window flew open and a black-haired boy stuck his head out and asked him who the hell he was and what the hell he meant making such a racket.

  In time, Inman got the Georgia boy to come to the door and let him in. They sat by the fire and Inman heard the tale of the killings. The boy had worked over the story in his mind and refined it until it had taken on all the earmarks of a great gun battle during which the boy had fought his way clear but Stobrod and Pangle had been captured and killed. And in this latest version, Stobrod’s final tune had been of his own composition and it arose out of the full knowledge of immediate death. Stobrod had titled it Fiddler’s Farewell and it was the saddest song that had ever been made and had drawn tears from the eyes of all present, even his executioners. But the boy was not a musician and could not reproduce the tune, not even to whistle it accurately and so it was unfortunately lost forever. He had run all the way to tell the women the story, and they had, in appreciation, insisted he spend as many days eating and resting in the house as it took him to recover from the ague he had acquired on his desperate flight down the mountain. It was a strange and possibly fatal affliction, with few external marks.

  Inman had put a number of questions to the boy but found he did not know who Monroe was nor where he might be and could offer no help in identifying Ada’s female companion other than that he thought her to be the fiddler’s daughter. The boy had given the best directions he could, and Inman set out once more walking.

  Thus it was he found himself sleeping again on the ground. His mind was all tangled. He lay by the fire and thoughts came and went and he had no control over them. Inman was afraid he was falling apart at a bad time. Then he wondered when a good time might be. He couldn’t think of one. He tried to force the raggedness from his breathing and make it come steady. The assumption he worked from was that mastery of his thoughts might follow mastery of his lungs, but he could not even make his chest rise and fall at his bidding and so his breath and his mind went where they would in juddering fashion.

  He thought Ada might save him from his troubles and redeem him from the past four years and that there would be time ahead for her to do it in. He suspected you could work yourself some good in calming your mind by thinking forward to what great pleasure it would be to hold your grandchild on your knee. But to believe such an event might actually happen required deep faith in right order. How would you go about getting it when it was in such short supply? A dark voice came in Inman’s mind and said no matter how much you might yearn for it and pray for it, you would never get it. You could be too far ruined. Fear and hate riddling out your core like heartworms. At such time, faith and hope were not to the point. You were ready for your hole in the ground. There were many preachers the like of Veasey who swore they could save the souls of the awfulest kinds of sinner. They offered salvation to killers and thieves and adulterers and even those gnawed by despair. But Inman’s dark voice figured such braggart claims to be lies. Those men could not even save their own selves from living bad lives. The false hope they offered was poisonous as any venom. All the resurrection any man might expect was Veasey’s, to be dragged dead from the grave at rope’s end.

  There was fact in what the dark voice said. You could become so lost in bitterness and anger that you could not find your way back. No map nor guidebook for such journey. One part of Inman knew that. But he knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other.

  The fire began to die out, and he rolled the hot stones onto the ground and stretched out next to them and fell asleep. When the cold wakened him before dawn, he was curled around the bigger of them as if it were his sweetheart.

  At first light he set out, and to the eye there was not hardly a trail at all, just a felt vacancy that drew him forward. Were it not for tracing the tracks in the old snow, Inman could not have kept to the way. He had lost confidence in his sense of direction, since during the past months he had been lost in every kind of place where parallel fences did not hem him in from going wrong. The clouds lowered. Then a little wind fell downslope, carrying on it snow too dry and fine to be called flakes. It came so hard one minute as to sting the cheeks, and then it stopped the next. Inman looked at the cupped tracks and they held the new snow like blown grit.

  He came to a black pool set round as a jar lid on the ground. Ice had rimmed it and a lone drake rode the water at its center and it did n
ot care enough even to turn its head to look at Inman. It seemed to look at nothing. Inman reckoned the drake’s world was constricting about it and that it would float there until the ice clenched at the webbing of its feet. Then, flap as it might, it would be pulled down to death. Inman first thought to shoot it and change its fate at least in minor detail, but if he did he would have to go wading to get it for he abhorred killing an animal and not eating it. And if he got it he would be left in a quandary over his fast. So he left the duck to struggle it out with its Maker and went on.

  When the trail turned uphill, snow started falling again. This time it was real snow in flakes like thistledown, falling slantwise so thick it made Inman dizzy with its movement. The tracks began fading off like twilight as the snow filled them. He walked fast, climbing to a ridge, and when the tracks started to disappear he broke into a run. He ran and ran downhill through dark hemlocks. He watched the tracks fill and their edges blur. No matter how fast he ran, the footprints disappeared before him until they were faint, like scars from old wounds. Then like watermarks through paper held to window light. Then the snow lay even all around, unmarked.

  The flakes still fell hard and Inman could not even feel the way the trail went, but he ran on until finally he stopped in a place where the hemlocks stood black around him and made a world undifferentiated, with no compass degree preferable to another and with not a sound but snow falling on snow, and he reckoned if he lay down it would cover him and when it melted it would wash the tears from his eyes and, in time, the eyes from his head and the skin from his skull.