When they came to the forking of the trail, Stobrod looked at the great poplar and the bright blazes of sapwood where the bullets had chipped away the bark. Son-of-a-bitching big tree, he said.
They passed by Pangle’s grave, and it lay in the shade on the north slope, and the snow still covered it almost up to the lashed joint of Ada’s locust cross. Inman just pointed, and Stobrod looked as they passed. He told about Pangle crawling up to sleep at his back in the cave. The boy wanting nothing but warmth and music. Then Stobrod said, If God was to set out killing every man on earth in order of their demerits, that boy would bring up the hind end of the line.
They wayed on for some miles, dark clouds hovering over them, the pathway rough and steep. They came to a place where laurel thickets rowed the trail on either side and arched over like the roof to a tunnel. Galax thick on the ground, the leaves shiny and maroon. The laurel leaves were clenched in tubes from the cold.
They came out of the tunnel into a little clearing, and they walked on and then they heard sounds behind them. They turned, and there were horsemen moving out to fill the trail.
—Good God, Stobrod said.
Teague said, That’s a hard man to kill. Resembles death warmed over, though.
Stobrod looked at the scouts and found them somewhat reconfigured. Teague and the boy he kept at his side remained. They had lost a man or two and gained a man or two in the days since they had shot him. Stobrod recognized a face from the outlier cave, white trash. And the Guard had gained, as well, a pair of mismatched dogs. Droop-eared bloodhound. Wire-beard wolfhound. The dogs sat slouched and casual. Then without prompt from anyone but herself, the wolfhound rose and began sidling toward Inman and Stobrod.
Teague sat astride his horse, the reins loose in his left hand. The other hand he used to monkey with the hammer to his Spencer carbine, as if uncertain whether pulling it full back were called for.
—We’re obliged to you and the boy for setting us onto that cave. Nice dry place to sit out the snow.
The wolfhound cut back and circled, not moving fast, coming at an angle. She would not make eye contact, but everything she did moved her closer.
Inman looked around to gauge the contours of the land to see how it lay for fighting, and he recognized himself back in the familiar terrain of violence. He wanted a stone wall, but there was not one. He studied the Guard and he knew them by the look in their eyes. There was no sense talking with such men. Language would change nothing, no more than gabbling empty sounds into the air. No sense waiting.
He leaned toward Stobrod and made motions to check the halter and lead rope. In a whisper he said, Hold on.
He hit the horse hard on its rump with his left fist, and he pulled out his pistol with his right. In a single curve of motion he shot the wolfhound that was coming toward him and then he shot one of the men. There was not hardly time between the two reports to blink your eyes. The hound and the man fell like-stricken, and they moved but little where they fell. Stobrod went bucking off down the trail like a man breaking a three-year-old to saddle. He was gone in the trees.
There was a moment of stillness, and then there was a great deal of motion. The horses all jumped and stepped in place with their hind ends gathered under them. They had no common direction, but they wanted badly to go somewhere other than here. The bloodhound ran among their legs and riled them further, and then he was kicked in the head and went down yelping.
The riders sawed at the reins to hold the horses back. The empty horse the man had been shot off of looked around for guidance, but finding none, it broke to run blindly. It had not gone three strides, though, before it stepped on its dragging reins and went stumbling into the other horses, and they all went to squealing and spinning, and the riders just tried to hold on.
Inman charged straight at the disordered party of scouts. There was no cover worth the name, just thin trees. No wall to get behind. No direction to go but forward, no time but now. No hope to do anything but run into their midst and try to kill them all.
In full stride, he shot one rider from the saddle. That left but three, and one of them looked already to be in retreat, or his horse had bolted. It went off capering sideways, uphill into a stand of hickory trees.
The two remaining riders were bunched together, and their horses jumped again at the sound of new gunfire and then one of the horses was down and squealing and scrabbling in the dirt to get its hind legs back under it. Its rider was grabbing at his own leg, squeezing it to find the damage where the horse had fallen on him. When he touched a ragged end of bare bone broken through skin and pantleg, he hollered in anguish, and some of it was just sounds and some of it was words, and those were prayers to God and harsh comments about what a heavy thing a horse is. He hollered so loud as to about smother the sound of his horse squealing.
The other horse wheeled out of control. It spun in a tight circle with its neck bent around and its feet bunched under it. Teague yanked at the reins one-handed and held aloft the carbine in the other. He had lost a stirrup, and there was daylight between him and his saddle. He was about to come off, and he fired an involuntary shot into the air. The horse jumped again like you had run a hot poker through it. It wheeled even faster.
Inman ran into the still place around which the horse spun. He reached up and yanked the Spencer from Teague’s hand and let it drop to the ground. He and Teague locked eyes, and Teague reached with his free hand to his belt and pulled a long knife and hollered, I’ll black my knife blade with your blood.
Inman cocked back the shotshell hammer of the LeMat’s and fired. The big pistol about leapt out of his hand, like it was trying to get away. The charge took Teague in the chest and opened him up. He went tumbling on the ground and lay in a heap, and his horse hopped off a few steps and stood with its eye whites showing and its ears pinned to its head.
Inman turned and looked at the howling man. Now he was howling curses at Inman and scrabbling toward his pistol, which lay in a mess of slush. Inman reached down and picked the Spencer up by the barrel end. He swung it one-handed and took the man in the side of the head with the flat of the butt stock, and the man quit howling. Inman picked up the man’s pistol and stuck it in his pant waist.
The downed horse was on its legs again. It was grey and in the low light it looked like the ghost of a horse. It went and stood alongside the other riderless horses, and they all seemed too stunned to flee. They whickered back and forth, seeking any signs that could be interpreted as a comfort to them.
Inman looked around for the last rider. He expected the man to be long gone, but he found him off in the thickest part of the stand of hickory trees, some fifty paces distant. Far enough to make a pistol shot somewhat open to doubt. There was snow still under the trees and a mist rose from it and also from the horse’s wet coat, and two puffs of breath rose from its muzzle. The horse was a skewbald mare, and she patterned up so well with the snow and the trees and the patches of open ground that she appeared to be melting into them. Behind the hickories, a steep broken pitch of rock.
The rider tried to jockey the horse to keep a tree between him and Inman, but he was only partly successful at it. In the times when he was exposed, he revealed himself to be but a boy. Inman could see that he had lost his hat. His head was white. He looked to have German or Dutch blood in him. Maybe Irish or some inbred product of Cornwall. No matter. He was now American all through, white skin, white hair, and a killer. But he looked as if his first shave lay still ahead of him, and Inman hoped not to have to shoot a boy.
—Come on out of there, Inman said, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard.
Nothing.
The boy stayed behind the tree. All that showed was the rump and the head of the horse bisected by the hickory. The horse stepped a pace forward and then the boy reined her back.
—Come on, Inman said. I’m not asking again. Put down what arms you’ve got and you can ride on home.
—Naw sir, the boy said. Here’s fine.
—Not with me, Inman said. Not fine at all. I’ll just shoot your horse. That’ll flush you out.
—Shoot her then, the boy said. She ain’t mine.
—Damn it, Inman said. I’m looking for a way not to kill you. We can do this so that twenty years on, we might run into one another in town and take a drink together and remember this dark time and shake our heads over it.
—Not and me throw down my pistol we can’t, the boy said. Have you shoot me anyway.
—I’m not one of you-all and that’s not the way I do. But I’ll kill you before I walk down this mountain worrying every step that you’re behind a rock drawing a bead on my head.
—Oh, I’d be laying for you, the boy said. I’d be laying.
—Well, that about says it, Inman said. You’ll have to come through me to get out of there.
Inman went and picked up the Spencer and checked the tube magazine in the butt stock and found it empty. A spent brass cartridge in the chamber. He threw it down and looked to the cylinder of the LeMat’s. Six loads left out of the nine, and the shot barrel fired. He took a paper cartridge from his pocket and bit the end off it and let the powder run into the big barrel. Then he pushed the paper of shot into the barrel and rammed it home with the little ramrod and fitted a brass cap to the nipple. He stood square to the world and waited.
—You’re going to have to come out from behind that tree sometime, he said.
In a minute the horse stepped forward. The boy tried to break through the woods and circle back to the trail. Inman ran to cut him off. It was just a man on a mount and one afoot chasing each other in the woods. They used the trees and the lay of the ground, and they went jockeying back and forth, trying to find a clear shot but also trying not to get too close.
The mare was confused and had her own wants, first of which was to go stand shoulder to shoulder with the other frightened horses. Taking the bit in her teeth, she flared off from where the boy was trying to guide her with the reins, and she ran straight at Inman. When she was near to him, she half bucked and then brushed the boy against a hickory trunk and raked him from the saddle. With the bit loose in her mouth, she brayed like a mule and cantered off and went to the other horses and they touched noses and quivered.
The boy lay in the snow where he had fallen. Then he half sat and fiddled with the caps and the hammer to his pistol.
—Put that thing down, Inman said. He had the shot hammer back and the bore leveled at the boy.
The boy looked at him and his blue eyes were empty as a round of ice frozen on a bucket top. He looked white in the face and even whiter in crescents under his eyes. He was a little wormy blond thing, his hair cropped close as if he had recently been battling headlice. Face blank.
Nothing about the boy moved but his hand, and it moved quicker than you could see.
Inman suddenly lay on the ground.
The boy sat and looked at him and then looked at the pistol in his hand and said, They God. As if he had not reckoned at all on it functioning as it had.
Ada heard the gunshots in the distance, dry and thin as sticks breaking. She did not say anything to Ruby. She just turned and ran. Her hat flew off her head and she kept on running and left it on the ground like a shadow behind her. She met Stobrod and he held Ralph’s mane in a death grip, though the horse had slowed to a trot.
—Back there, Stobrod said. He kept on going.
When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and then she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had a coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say.
An observer situated up on the brow of the ridge would have looked down on a still, distant tableau in the winter woods. A creek, remnants of snow. A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman’s lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of her hip. Both touching each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground.
epilogue. October of 1874
Even after all this time and three children together, Ada still found them clasping each other at the oddest moments. In the barn loft after knocking down the mud-cup nests of swallows. Behind the smokehouse after stoking a fire with wet cobs and hickory limbs. Earlier this day, it had been out in the potato field while breaking up the ground with big grubbing hoes. They had stood awkward and wide-footed in the furrows, each embracing with one arm, gripping the hoes with their free hands.
Ada first thought to make some wry comment. Do I need to cough? But then she noted the hoe handles. The angles at which they descended to the dirt suggested levers that worked the secret engines of earth. She just went on about her business and let them be.
The boy had never gone back to Georgia and had become a man in Black Cove, and not a half-bad one at that. Ruby had seen to it. She had kept at him the two years he had been a hand, and she did not let up when he became her husband. A foot in the back when that was needed, a hug otherwise. It worked out to about equal measures. His name was Reid. Their babies had been born eighteen months apart, all boys, with full scalps of black hair and shiny brown eyes like little chestnuts set in their heads. They were growing into stout short things with pink cheeks and ready smiles, and Ruby worked them hard and played them hard. Despite the age difference, when they rolled around in the yard below the boxwoods, they looked alike as a litter of puppies.
Now, late in the afternoon, the three boys squatted around a firepit behind the house. Four small chickens barbecuing over coals on the ground, the boys quarreling with each other over whose turn it was to swab them with a sauce of vinegar and hot peppers.
Ada stood under the pear tree watching them, as she spread a cloth and rowed eight plates nearly lip to lip on the small table. She had thus far missed but one year since the war of having a last picnic there before cold weather set in. And that had been three years ago, an October unlike all others, heavy skies and rain throughout the month except for one day when it had spit snow.
Ada had tried to love all the year equally, with no discrimination against the greyness of winter, its smell of rotted leaves underfoot, the stillness in the woods and fields. Nevertheless, she could not get over loving autumn best, and she could not entirely overcome the sentimentality of finding poignancy in the fall of leaves, of seeing it as the conclusion to the year and therefore metaphoric, though she knew the seasons came around and around and had neither inauguration nor epilogue.
October of 1874 was shaping up, to her delight, just as fine as the month can be in the mountains. It had been dry and warm and clear for weeks, and the leaves had progressed in their change to the point that poplar was yellow and maple was red, but oak was still green. Cold Mountain was a mottle of color rising behind the house. It changed day by day, and if you watched closely you could follow the color as it overtook the green and came down the mountain and spread into the cove like a wave breaking over y
ou slowly.
Shortly, with an hour of daylight left, Ruby came out from the kitchen. At her side, a tall slender girl of nine. Both of them carrying baskets. Potato salad, corn, corn bread, string beans. Reid took the chickens from the coals, and Ruby and the girl spread the food on the table. Stobrod came up from the barn where he had been milking. He set the pail on the ground by the table and the children dipped their cups full. They all took their places.
Later, with twilight settling into the cove, they built up the fire and Stobrod took out his fiddle and played some variant he had made of Bonnie George Campbell, speeding it up and overlaying a dance jig. The children all ran around the fire and yelled. They were not dancing but just running to the music, and the girl waved a burning stick and made cursive shapes in the dim air with the yellow ember at its tip until Ada told her to stop it.
The girl said, But Mama, and Ada shook her head. The girl came and kissed her cheek and danced away and threw the stick into the flames.
Stobrod played the simple figure of the tune around and around until the children were flushed and damp. When he stopped, they collapsed on the ground by the fire. Stobrod took his fiddle down from his chin. He wanted to sing a gospel, and the fiddle was after all the devil’s box and universally prohibited from such songs. Nevertheless, he held it preciously, cradled against his chest, the bow depending from a crooked finger. He sang Angel Band, a new tune. The girl sang behind him on the chorus, her voice clear and high and strong. Bear me away on your snowy wings.
Stobrod put the fiddle away, and the children begged for a story. Ada took a book from her apron and tipped it toward the firelight and read. Baucis and Philemon. She turned the pages with slight difficulty because she had lost the end of her right index finger four years previous on the day after winter solstice. She had been up on the ridge alone cutting trees in the spot where she had marked the sun setting the day before from the porch. The log chain had kinked, and she had been trying to work loose the disordered links when the horse started forward in the traces and pinched off the fingertip clean as snapping a tomato sucker. Ruby poulticed it, and though it took the better part of a year, it healed so neatly you would think that was the way the ends of people’s fingers were meant to look.