When dark had begun settling in, Ruby sat by the fire, square to the world, her knees apart and her hands upon her knees. She had a blanket wrapped around her and it stretched taut and flat as a bedsheet across her lap. She worked at a hickory twig with her knife until she had whittled it to a sharp point. She poked irritably at the turkeys with the stick until clear juice ran from under the stippled skin and fell spitting and sizzling in the coals.
—What? Ada said.
Ruby said, I was watching you in there this morning with him and I’ve been thinking ever since.
—About him? Ada asked.
—You.
—What about me?
—I’ve been trying to know what you’re thinking. But I can’t come to it. So I’ll just say out plain what’s on my mind. It’s that we can do without him. You might think we can’t, but we can. We’re just starting. I’ve got a vision in my mind of how that cove needs to be. And I know what needs doing to get there. The crops and animals. Land and buildings. It will take a long time. But I know how to get there. War or peace, there’s not a thing we can’t do ourselves. You don’t need him.
Ada looked at the fire. She patted the back of Ruby’s hand where it rested and then Ada picked it up off Ruby’s knee and rubbed the palm of it hard with her thumb until she could feel the cords under the skin. She took off one of her rings and put it on Ruby’s hand and tipped it down to the firelight to look at it. A big emerald set in white gold with smaller rubies around it. A Christmas gift some years ago from Monroe. Ada made motions to leave the ring where she had put it, but Ruby took it off and twisted it roughly back on Ada’s finger.
—You don’t need him, Ruby said.
—I know I don’t need him, Ada said. But I think I want him.
—Well that’s a whole different thing.
Ada paused, not knowing what to say further but thinking furiously. Things that in her previous life were unimaginable suddenly seemed possible, and then they seemed necessary. She thought that Inman had been alone too long, an outlier. Without the comfort of a human touch, a loving hand laid soft and warm on shoulder, back, leg. And herself the same as well.
—What I’m certain I don’t want, she finally said aloud, is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I’d had more nerve.
• • •
It was after dark when Inman awoke. The fire lay in its ashes and shed but a dim glow into the hut. There was no way to tell how far the night had progressed. And for a while he misremembered even where he was. It had been so long since he had slept in the same place twice that he had to lie still and try to reconstruct in his mind a sequence of days that would put him in a known bed. He sat up and broke sticks and threw them on the coals and blew on them until new flames blazed up and cast shadows on the walls. Only then was he able to say for sure what point of geography he occupied.
Inman heard a sound of breath being drawn, a wet rattle. He twisted around and saw Stobrod on his bunk, his eyes open and black and shining in the light. Inman tried to remember who the man was. He had been told but could not recollect.
Stobrod worked his mouth and it made clicking sounds. He looked at Inman and said, Ary water?
Inman looked around and saw neither pail nor jug. He rose and rubbed his hands on his face and through his hair.
—I’ll get you a drink, he said.
He went to his packsacks and took out his water bottle and shook it and found it empty. He put the pistol in his haversack and put the strap over his shoulder.
—I’ll be back directly, he said.
He moved the door from the passway. Outside was black night and snow came blowing in.
Inman turned and said, Where did they go?
Stobrod lay with his eyes closed. He made no effort toward reply other than two slight jerks of the forefinger and middle finger of one hand that lay outside his blanket.
Inman stepped out and propped the door back in place and stood and waited for his eyes to come to terms with the dark. There was the smell of cold and snow in the air like sheared metal. And the conflicting odors of woodsmoke and wet creek stones. When he could see enough to walk, Inman made his way down to the water. The snow he walked through lay shank high on the ground. The creek looked black and bottomless and might as well have been running in a deep vein that cut to the world’s core. He squatted and put the bottle in to fill, and the water against his hand and wrist felt warmer than the air.
When he started back he could see firelight glowing yellow from gaps in the chinking of the hut where he had slept. And also from another hut farther down the creek. He smelled meat cooking and was suddenly overtaken by a mighty hunger.
Inman went back inside and raised Stobrod up and dribbled water in his mouth. Then Stobrod propped himself on his elbows, and with Inman holding the bottle he drank until he choked and coughed, and then he drank some more. He held his head up, his mouth open, his neck stretched. His gullet worked to swallow. That attitude and the way his hair stood up and his whiskers bristled and the blind look in his eyes put Inman in mind of a new-hatched nestling, the same frail horrifying appetite to live.
He had seen it before, and he had seen its opposite, the will to die. Men took wounds different ways. Inman had seen so many men shot in recent years that it seemed as normal to be shot as not. A natural condition of the world. He’d seen men shot in every part of the body there was to shoot. And he had seen every result of being shot that there was to have, from immediate death to screaming agony to one man at Malvern Hill who had stood with blood dripping from his shattered right hand and laughed a great booming laugh, knowing that he would not die but would thereafter be unable to pull a trigger.
Inman could not tell what Stobrod’s fate might be, neither from the look in his face nor from the condition of his wound, which, upon inspection, Inman found to be dry and packed with spiderweb and root shavings. Stobrod was hot to the touch, but Inman had long since quit trying to forecast whether shot men would die or not. In his experience, great wounds sometimes healed, small sometimes festered. Any wound might heal on the skin side but keep on burrowing inward to a man’s core until it ate him up. The why of it, like much in life, offered little access to logic.
Inman built the fire to a blaze, and when the hut was bright and warm he left Stobrod asleep and went outside. He trod in his own tracks to the creek again and cupped up water in his hand and dashed it in his face. He pulled a twig off a beech limb and frazzled the end of it with his thumbnail and brushed his teeth. Then he walked down to the other lighted hut. He stood outside and listened but could hear no voices. The smell of roasted turkey filled the air.
Inman said, Hello?
He waited and there was no response and he said it again. Then he knocked on the door. Ruby edged it open about a hand wide and looked out.
—Oh, she said, as if she might have been expecting somebody else.
—I woke up, he said. I don’t know how long I was asleep. That man back there wanted water and I gave him some.
—You’ve slept twelve hours or better, Ruby said. She slid the door out of the way to let him in.
Ada sat cross-legged on the ground before the fire, and as Inman entered she looked up at him. The yellow light was on her face, and her dark hair was loose on her shoulders. Inman thought her about as handsome a sight as men are allowed to see, and he was momentarily taken aback by it. She looked so beautiful to him it made his cheekbones hurt. He pressed a knuckle beneath his eye. He did not know what to do with himself. No previous formula of etiquette seemed to apply, other than to take off his hat. There was little ceremony to stand on in an Indian hut in a snowstorm, at least none that he was privy to. He thought he might just as well go and sit beside her.
But before he had any more than made up his mind and set his haversack in the corner, she rose and stepped close in front of him and did a thing he knew he would never forget. She reached behind him and put one palm on the smal
l of his back. The other she pressed against his stomach just above his pant waist.
—You feel so thin between my hands, she said.
Inman could think of no response that he would not later regret as inadequate.
Ada took her hands away and said, When did you last eat?
Inman counted back. Three days, he said. Or four. Four, I think.
—Well, then, you’ll be hungry enough not to worry about the details of cookery.
Ruby had already torn the meat off the bones of one bird and had its carcass boiling in the big pot over the fire to make broth for Stobrod. So Ada sat Inman down by the hearth and handed him a plate of the pulled turkey to start nibbling on. Ruby knelt and tended the pot with great concentration. She skimmed the grey foam off the water with a spurtle she had whittled that afternoon out of a poplar limb for lack of the dogwood she needed to do the job right. She flung the foam in the fire, where it hissed away.
While Inman ate the chunks of turkey, Ada worked at composing a real supper. She put dried apple rings in water, and while they soaked she fried wedges of leftover grits in grease from a strip of fatback. When the grits were crisp and brown at the edges, she took them out and put the apples in the pan and stirred them around. She cooked cross-legged for a time, leaning forward to tend the food. Then she turned sideways and stretched one leg out straight before her and kept the other bent. Inman watched with great interest. He had not yet gotten used to her in britches, and he found the poses they allowed her to take stirring in their freedom.
The meal Ada arrived at was rich and brown, flavored with woodsmoke and pork fat, and it was just the kind of food called for by the upcoming solstice of winter, food that offered consolation against short days and long nights. Inman fell to eating it like the starving man he was, but then he stopped and said, Are you not having any?
—We dined some time ago, Ada said.
Inman ate without talking. Before he was finished, Ruby judged that the turkey carcass had given the creek water about all it had to give in the way of sustenance. She dipped out enough to half fill the smaller pot. The broth had the life of the wild bird in it and was rich and cloudy, the color of nutmeats toasted in a dry pan.
—I’ll see if I can get him to take some of this, she said.
She took the pot by its bail and went to the door. She stopped before she went out and said, It’s time to change the packing on that wound, and I’m going to sit with him some. So to say, I might be gone awhile.
After Ruby left, the hut seemed smaller, its walls pressing in. Neither of them could think of anything much to say. Momentarily, all the old strictures against a young woman and man being left alone in a house came rolling in and made them awkward. Ada told herself that Charleston, with its cadres of ancient aunts enforcing elaborate rituals of chaperonage, was perhaps some made-up place, with only a tangent relation to the world she now lived in, like Arcady or the Isle of Prospero.
Inman, to fill the silence, began commenting favorably on the food, as if he were at a Sunday dinner. But he had hardly begun praising the turkey when he stopped and felt foolish. Then, immediately, longing of so many kinds welled up in him that he was afraid it would all come spilling out in a frightening mess of words if he didn’t shut his mouth and find some better direction for his thoughts.
He rose and went to his sack and pulled out the Bartram and showed it to Ada as if it were evidence of something. It was scrolled up and tied with a bow knot of dirty string and had been wet and dry and wet again for months now and looked grimy and ancient enough to contain the aggregate knowledge of a lost civilization. He told her how it had helped sustain him on his journey, how he had read it many a night by the firelight of a lonesome bivouac. Ada was unfamiliar with it, and Inman described it to her as a book concerned with this very part of the world and with everything that was important in it. He shared with her his view that the book stood nigh to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.
To prove his point, he pulled the end of the bow and let the limp coverless book flap open. He put his finger to a sentence which, as usual, began with the climbing of a mountain and went on for much of a page, and as he read it aloud he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face. It was this:
Having gained its summit, we enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulean Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.
When he had finished he sat silent.
Ada said, Is it all like that?
—Not hardly any of it, Inman said.
What he wanted to do was recline on the hemlock bed with Ada beside him and hold her close, as Bartram apparently yearned to lie with the virgins under their bowers. But what Inman did was scroll up the book and set it in the niche of the wall with an old wooden cup. He began collecting the cookware. He stood with it stacked and shifting in his arms.
—I’ll go scour these out, he said.
He went to the door and looked back. Ada sat without moving, staring into the coals. Inman went on down to the water, and he squatted and scrubbed each piece with sand dredged from the bed of the black creek. The snowfall had not eased up a jot. It came straight down hard, and even the boulders in the creek had tall topknots of snow standing on them. Inman blew out clouds of breath through the flakes and tried to think what to do. It would take more than twelve hours’ sleep and one big supper to set him right, but at least now he could row his thoughts up again. What he knew he most wanted was to disburden himself of solitude. He had become too proud of walking singular, of his oneness, his loneness.
His stomach and back still held the press of Ada’s palms. And as he squatted there in the dark of Cold Mountain, that loving touch seemed like the key to life on earth. Whatever words were in him that needed saying, they ranked as nothing to that laying on of hands.
Inman reentered the cabin with his mind set on going to Ada and putting one hand to her neck and one to her waist and pulling her to him and thereby making all his wishes clear. But when he put the door in its place, the warmth of the fire struck him and his fingers knotted up. They were raw from the sand, stiff from the cold water, frozen in attitudes like the pincers of blue crabs he had seen on his tour of duty along the coast. Nightmare creatures who waved ragged weapons toward all the world, even their own kind. He looked down at the plates and flatware, the pot and frying pan, and he saw they still had a white film of congealed grease on them. So his efforts had been wasted, and he might as well have stayed inside and put the cook pieces facedown in the coals to burn clean.
Ada looked up at him and he watched her take two breaths and then she looked away. He could guess from the set of her face that it had taken all the nerve she could draw up to touch him as she had, to take him between her hands. She could not previously have done a thing so intimate. He knew that. She had made her way to a place where an entirely other order prevailed from what she had always known. But he had been the one who penned those words in August, and now the burden was on him to find a way to say what he had to say.
Inman set his l
oad down and went to her. He sat behind her and rubbed his palms against each other and then against his thighs. He folded his arms and hugged his hands under them and held them tight against his sides. Then he reached around her and spread his hands to the fire and pressed the insides of his wrists and forearms against her shoulders.
—Did you write me letters while I was in the hospital? he said.
—Several, she said. Two during the summer and a brief note in the fall. But I did not know you were there until you were gone. So the first two letters went to Virginia.
—They didn’t find me there, he said. Tell me what they were about.
Ada gave summaries, though not precisely of the letters as they had been. She described them as they would be could she revise them from her current perspective. It was an opportunity life seldom offers, to rewrite even a shard of the past, and so she made the most of it. In amended form, the letters were more satisfactory to both of them than would have been the originals. More revealing in the details of her life, more passionate in sensibility, more certain and direct in expression. Altogether more. The note, though, she left unspoken.
—I wish I’d gotten them, Inman said when she was done. He started to add that they’d have eased some bad days, but he did not want to talk about the hospital right that moment.
He held his hands to the warm hearth and counted back the winters it had lain dark and cold. He said, Twenty-six years since a fire was kindled here.
It gave them a topic. They sat for a while easy together and talked as people do in the ruins of the past, having the unavoidable feeling that we are a short time here, a long time gone. They imagined the last fire that had burned in the hearth, and they cast the players they imagined sitting before it. A Cherokee family. Mother, father, children, an old grannywoman. They gave them personalities unique to each one, tragic or comic as fit the tale they were telling. Inman made one of the boys to be much like Swimmer, strange and mystic. It satisfied them to invent lives for the imagined family that were more whole by instinct than any they themselves could ever achieve with hard effort. In their story of the family, Ada and Inman gave them premonitions of the end of their world. And though it is true that every age considers the world to be in a precarious state, at the very edge of dark, nevertheless Ada and Inman doubted if at any foretime in history the sense of an ending was as justified as it had been then. Those people’s fears had been fully realized. The wider world had found them, even hidden here, and had fallen on them with all its weight.