When they finished, they sat quiet for a while and felt the uneasy feel of occupying space wherein other lives have unfolded and then disappeared.
After awhile Inman told her how all the way home all he could think was hoping she would have him, would marry him. He had kept it in his mind, and it rose up in his dreams. But now, he said, he couldn’t ask her to bind herself to him. Not to one disordered as he knew himself to be.
—I’m ruined beyond repair, is what I fear, he said. And if so, in time we’d both be wretched and bitter.
Ada shifted and turned and looked at him over her shoulder. He had unbuttoned his collar in the warmth, and there was the white wound at his neck. Others in the look of his face and in his eyes, which would not quite meet hers.
She turned back around. What she thought was that cures of all sorts exist in the natural world. Its every nook and cranny apparently lay filled with physic and restorative to bind up rents from the outside. Even the most hidden root or web served some use. And there was spirit rising from within to knit sturdy scar over the backsides of wounds. Either way, though, you had to work at it, and they’d both fail you if you doubted them too much. She had gathered that from Ruby, at least.
Finally, without looking at him, she said, I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don’t see why not you.
—Why not me? Inman said, as if to test the thought.
He took his hands from where he held them to warm at the fire and touched his fingertips to his face to see if they were still cold as the nub ends of icicles. He found them unexpectedly warm. They felt not at all like the parts of a weapon. He reached to Ada’s dark hair, which lay loose on her back, and he gathered it into a thick bunch in his hand. He lifted it with one hand, and with the fingertips of the other he brushed the hollow of her neck between the cords that ran down into her shoulders, the fine curls of hair. He leaned forward and touched his lips to the hollow of her neck. He let the hair fall back into place and he kissed her on the crown of her head and took in the remembered smell of her hair. He leaned back and pulled her against him, her waist into his stomach, her shoulders into his chest.
She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp his jaw and pinch them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.
Ada did not remember that Sunday in much particularity, one out of many. There was nothing she could add to his recollection of the day to make it into a shared memory. But she knew that what Inman had done in his talking was to reimburse her in his own way for the touch she had given him when he entered the cabin. She reached back and swept the hair from her shoulders and up from her neck and she held it with her wrist against the back of her head. She tipped her head slightly forward.
—Do that once more, she said.
But before Inman could act, there was a sound at the door. By the time Ruby had it out of its frame and stuck her head in, Ada was sitting up again and her hair was down on her shoulders. Ruby regarded the two, their awkwardness and the oddity of him sitting behind her.
—You want me to go back out and cough? she said.
Nobody said anything. Ruby closed the door and put the pot on the floor. She brushed the snow off her coat and beat her hat against her leg.
—His fever’s down some right now, Ruby said. But that’s not saying much. It goes up and down.
Ruby looked at Inman. She said, I cut some boughs and made up a more proper bed than just a pallet of blankets. She paused and then added, Somebody can make use of it, I reckon.
Ada picked up a stick of wood and poked at the fire and then set the stick in to burn. You go on, she said to Inman. I know you’re tired.
Tired as he was, though, Inman had a hard time getting to sleep. Stobrod snored and muttered snatches of the chorus to an idiotic fiddle tune, which—as best Inman could tell—was no more than this: The higher up the monkey climbed, the greater he showed his ya-ta-dada-la-ta-di-da. Inman had heard men say all kinds of things when they were submerged in the dark of a profound wound, everything from prayers to curses. But this took the prize for foolery.
In the intervals of silence, Inman tried to decide which part of the evening he might dwell on most pleasurably. Ada’s hand on his stomach or her request just before Ruby opened the door. He was still trying to decide when he drifted off.
Ada lay a long time awake too. Thinking any number of thoughts. That Inman looked so much older than four years ought to account for, so thin and grim and held within himself. And she thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.
Ruby flounced in her bed and rolled over and settled down and then turned again. She sat up and puffed in frustration. I can’t get to sleep, she said. And I know you’re awake over there thinking love thoughts.
—I’m awake, Ada said.
—What’s keeping me from sleeping is I’m thinking about what I’ll do with him if he lives, Ruby said.
—With Inman? Ada said, confused.
—With Pap. A wound like that will be slow healing. And knowing him, he’ll lay extra long a-bed. I can’t figure what I’ll do with him.
—We’ll take him home and care for him is what, Ada said. Hurt as he is, nobody will come looking for him. Not anytime soon. And this war has to end someday.
—I’m obliged, Ruby said.
—You’ve never been obliged to anybody before, Ada said. I don’t care to be the first. Just thank you will do.
—That too, Ruby said.
She was quiet awhile and then she said, Many a night when I was little, alone in that cabin, I wished I could take that fiddle of his up to the jump-off and pitch it and let the wind fly it away. In my mind I’d just watch it go till it was just a speck, and then I’d think about the sweet sound it would make breaking to pieces on the river rocks way down below.
The next day dawned grey and colder yet. The snow no longer spilled hard out of the sky in fat flakes; it came down soft and fine like ground cornmeal falling from between millstones. They all slept late, and Inman took breakfast in the women’s hut, turkey broth with shreds of turkey in it.
Then, later in the morning, Ada and Inman fed and watered the horse and went hunting together. They hoped to kill more birds or, if they were extremely lucky, a deer. They walked up the hill and found nothing moving in the woods, nor even animal tracks mar
king the deep snow. They climbed up through the chestnuts and into the firs and onto the ridge. They followed its spine where it curved. There was still no game but a few chattering boomers high in the fir boughs. Even if you could hit one, it would make but a mouthful of grey meat, so they did not waste a shot.
They came eventually to a flat rock cropped out at a ledge, and Inman brushed the snow off it and they sat cross-legged facing each other, knees to knees, with the ground cloth Inman had in his pack tented over them, resting on the crowns of their heads. What light came through the weave of it was brown and dim. Inman took the walnuts out of the sack and cracked them open with a stone the size of his fist, and they picked out the meats and ate them. When they were done, he put his hands on Ada’s shoulders and leaned forward and touched his forehead to hers. For a while only the sounds of the snow striking the ground cloth broke the silence, but after a time Ada began talking.
She wanted to tell how she had come to be what she was. They were different people now. He needed to know that. She told of Monroe’s death, the look on his face in the rain and the wet dogwood petals. She told Inman about deciding not to return to Charleston, about the summer, and all about Ruby. About weather and animals and plants and the things that she was starting to know. All the ways life takes shape. You could build your own life on the observation of it. She still missed Monroe more than she could say, and she told Inman many wonderful things about him. But she told as well one terrible thing: that he had tried to keep her a child and that, with little resistance from her, he had largely succeeded.
—And there’s something you need to know about Ruby, Ada said. Whatever comes to pass between you and me, I want her to stay in Black Cove as long as she cares to. If she never leaves I will be glad, and if she does I’ll mourn her absence.
—Could she learn to put up with me around is the question, Inman said.
—I think she can, Ada said. If you understand that she is not a servant nor a hired hand. She is my friend. She does not take orders, and she does not empty night jars other than her own.
They left the rock and hunted on, going netherward into a damp swale rich with the odor of places where galax grows, descending through scattered clumps of twisted laurel to a thin creek. They walked around a blown-down hemlock stretched across the woods floor. The plate of roots stood as high in the air as the gable end of a house, and clenched in the roots many feet above the ground were stones larger than whiskey barrels. Down in that hollow, Ada found a stand of goldenseal, the crowfoot leaves withered but identifiable where they stuck through the thinner snow on the lee side of a poplar so big through the trunk it would have taken five people holding hands in a circle to go around it.
—Ruby needs goldenseal for her father, Ada said.
She knelt at the tree and grubbed at the plants with her hands. Inman stood and watched. The scene was a plain one. Just a woman on her knees digging in the ground, a tall man standing and looking about, waiting. If not for the store cloth of their coats, it could have been any place in time at all. So few markers to show any particular epoch. Ada knocked the dirt from the pale roots and put them in her pocket.
It was in standing that she spotted the arrow in the poplar. Ada’s eyes nearly skimmed right over it, marking it as a broken twig, for a part of the shaft remained, though not the fletching. The wood was half rotted away, but still bound to the head with tight windings of sinew. Grey flint point, chipped in smooth scoops. As perfect in symmetry of shape as a handmade thing can be. It lay buried more than an inch into the tree, some of that from the growing of the tree around it in a welted scar. But enough remained exposed to see that the head was broad and long. Not a little bird point. Ada aimed a finger at it to draw Inman’s attention.
—Deer arrow, Inman said. Or man killer.
He wet a thumb tip on his tongue and ran it across the revealed portion of the cutting edge like one checking the hone on a pocketknife.
—It would cut meat yet, he said.
During the late-summer plowing and harrowing, Ada and Ruby had unburied any number of bird points and scrapers, but this seemed somehow different to her, as if yet partially alive because of its placement. Ada backed up and regarded it in perspective. Summing up much, it was yet such a little thing. A missed shot a hundred years back. Maybe more. Long ago. Or not long if one took the right view. Ada stepped to the tree and put a finger on the end of the shaft and wiggled it. Firm.
It would have been possible to frame the arrow as some relic, a piece of another world, and Ada did something like that. She saw it as an object already numbered among the things that were.
But it did not seem entirely so to Inman. He said, Someone went hungry. Then wondered, Was the missing due to want of skill? Desperation? Shift of wind? Bad light?
—You mark this spot in your mind, he said to Ada.
And Inman went on to recommend that they revisit it throughout their lives to check the advancement of rot along the arrow shaft, the growth of the green poplar wood around the flint point. He described a future scene, he and Ada bent, grey as ash, bringing children to the tree in some metallic future world, the dominant features of which he could not even imagine. By then the shaft would be gone. Fallen away. And the poplar would be yet stouter, grown round to envelop the stone entirely. Nothing visible but a lobed scar in bark.
Inman could not imagine whose they would be, but the children will stand entranced and watch as the two old people cut into the soft poplar with knives and dig out a dipperful of new wood, and then, suddenly, the children will see the flint blade as if it had been conjured up. A little piece of art with a clear purpose is how Inman pictured it. And though Ada could not fully envision that distant time, she could imagine the amazement on little faces.
—Indians, Ada said, caught up in Inman’s story. The old couple will just say, Indians.
They returned to the village that afternoon without game. All they had to show for the outing was the goldenseal and firewood. They dragged the wood behind them and it carved bands and lines in the snow. Big limbs from a chestnut and smaller ones from a cedar. They found Ruby sitting by Stobrod. He was to some extent awake and seemed to know Ruby and Ada, but he was frightened of Inman.
—Who’s that big dark man? he said.
Inman went and squatted at Stobrod’s side so as not to loom over him. He said, I gave you water. I’m not after you.
Stobrod said, Well.
Ruby wet a cloth and swabbed at his face and he struggled against it like a child. She mashed pieces of the goldenseal and packed it into the wounds and she brewed other pieces into tea and made Stobrod drink it. When she was done he fell immediately asleep.
Ada looked at Inman, the tiredness in his face. She said, I believe you ought to go do the same.
—Just don’t let me sleep past dark, Inman said. He went out, and while the door was open Ada and Ruby could see snow behind him, streaking the air in its falling. They could hear the sounds of him breaking limbs, and in a minute the door opened again. He set an armload of chestnut wood down just inside and then he left. They built the fire up and sat together for a long time with their backs against the cabin wall, a blanket around them.
Ada said, Tell me what we’ll do next, when warm weather comes. What things to put the place in order?
Ruby took up a stick and drew out a map in the dirt, Black Cove. She put in the road and the house and the barn, scratched up areas to show current fields, woodlots, the orchard. Then she talked, and her vision was one of plenty and how to get there. Trade for a team of mules. Reclaim the old fields from ragweed and sumac. Establish new vegetable gardens. Break a little more newground. Grow enough corn and wheat to suit their needs for bread. Enlarge the orchard. Build a proper can house and apple house. Years and years of work. But they would one day see the fields standing high in summer with crops. Chickens pecking in the yard, cows grazing in the pasture, pigs foraging on the hillside mast. So many that they could have two bunches: bacon pigs, thi
n of leg and long of side; and ham pigs, close-coupled and stout, with their bellies swinging against the ground. Hams and bacon sides hanging thick in the smokehouse; a skillet good and greasy all the time on the stove top. Apples heaped in the apple house, jar after jar of vegetables rowed on shelves in the can house. Plenty.
—It will be a sight to see, Ada said.
Ruby rubbed her map away with her palm. They sat quiet, and after a while Ruby slumped and leaned her shoulder into Ada’s and dozed off, tired from the effort of imagination. Ada sat and watched the fire and listened to its pop and hiss, and later the brittle fall of its embers. She smelled the sweet woodsmoke and thought that it would be a measure of one’s success at attending to the details of the world if one could identify trees by the scent of their smoke. It would be a skill one might happily aspire to master. There were many worse things to know. Things that did damage to others and eventually to oneself.
When Ruby awoke, it was late in the afternoon, almost dark. She sat up and blinked her eyes and rubbed her face and yawned. She went to check on Stobrod. She touched his face and forehead, pulled back the covers and looked at his wound.