And he especially liked the house he had built there, largely because it represented his faith in a future that would include himself for at least a few more years. Monroe drew the plans for the new house with his own hand, supervised the construction. And it turned out well-made in the current mold, tightly covered in whitewashed clapboards outside, dark beadboard walls inside, a deep porch all across the front, attached kitchen extending from the back, a great broad fireplace in the sitting room, and woodstoves in the bedrooms, a rarity in the mountains. The Blacks’ log cabin stood a few hundred rods up the hill toward Cold Mountain from the new house, and it became quarters for the hired help.
When Monroe had bought the cove, the place had been a fully operating farm, but Monroe had soon let many parts of it lapse, for he never intended it to be self-sufficient. Nor did it ever need to be if, as he had assumed, the money continued to flow from his Charleston investments in rice and indigo and cotton.
Apparently, however, the money would not continue, as Ada found when she left off surveying her holdings from her perch on the ridge and drew the letter from the book in her pocket and read it. Shortly after the funeral, she had written to Monroe’s friend and solicitor in Charleston, informing him of the death and asking for information on her financial position. The letter was the long-delayed response. It was brittlely phrased, cautious. It discussed as if at arm’s length the war, the embargo, the various other expressions of hard times, and their effect on Ada’s income, which would be reduced, in fact, to approximately nothing, at least until the war’s successful conclusion. Should the war effort be unsuccessful, Ada might realistically expect nothing forevermore. The letter ended with an offer to act as administrator of Monroe’s estate since Ada might justifiably feel ill-endowed to perform those duties herself. It was delicately suggested that the task called for judgments and knowledge outside Ada’s realm.
She stood and thrust the letter into her pocket and took the trail down into Black Cove. In light of the thought that the present was threat enough and no one knows what horrid things might overtake them in the time ahead, Ada wondered where she might find the courage to search out hope. When she emerged from the big trees of the ridge, she found that the haze had burned or blown away. The sky was clear, and Cold Mountain suddenly looked close enough to reach out and touch. The day was wearing on and the sun was bearing downward and would in two hours tip below the mountains to begin the interminable high-country twilight. A boomer chattered at her from its perch high in a hickory tree as she passed underneath. Shreds of nut shell fell around her.
When she reached the old stone wall that marked the top of the upper pasture, she paused again. It was a lovely spot, one of her favorite corners of the farm. Lichen and moss had grown on the stones so that the wall looked ancient, though it was not. One of the elder Blacks had apparently started it in an attempt to clear the field of stones but had given up after only twenty feet, at which point split rails took over. The wall ran north to south, and on this sunny afternoon its west face was warm with afternoon sun. An apple tree, a golden delicious, grew near it, and a few early ripening apples had fallen into the tall grass. Bees came to the sweet smell of rotting apples and hummed in the sunshine. The wall did not command a sweeping prospect, just a quiet view of the corner of a woodlot and a blackberry tangle and two big chestnut trees. Ada thought it the most peaceful place she had ever known. She settled herself into the grass at the base of the wall and rolled her shawl into a pillow. She drew the book from her pocket and began reading a chapter titled How Blackbirds Are Taken, and How Blackbirds Fly. She read on and on and forgot herself in the tale of war and outlawry until she eventually fell asleep to the lowering sun and the sound of bees.
She slept a long time and was visited by a strong dream in which she found herself in a train depot amid a crowd of waiting passengers. There was a glass case in the center of the room, and in it stood the bones of a man, much like an anatomy display she had once seen in a museum. As she sat waiting for the train, the case filled with a blue glow, the light rising slowly like twisting up the wick in a lantern globe. Ada saw with horror that the bones were reclothing themselves with flesh, and as the process went on it became clear to her that her father was being reconstructed.
The other passengers drew back in horror to the walls of the room, but Ada, though also terrified, walked to the glass and put her hands to it and waited. Monroe, however, never fully became himself. He remained but an animated corpse, the skin thin as parchment over the bones. His movements were slow yet frenzied, as a man struggling underwater. He put his mouth to the glass and talked with great earnestness and urgency to Ada. His demeanor was that of one telling the most important thing he knew. But Ada, even pressing her ear to the glass, could not hear a thing other than murmuring. Then there was the sound of wind before a storm, and the case was suddenly empty. A conductor came and called the passengers to the train, and it was clear to Ada that its final destination was Charleston in the past, and that if she got on she would arrive at her girlhood, with the clock turned back twenty years. All the passengers boarded, and they were a jolly band, waving from the windows and smiling. Snatches of song came from some compartments. But Ada stood alone on the siding as the train rolled away.
She awoke to a night sky. The rusty beacon of Mars was just slipping below the line of woodlot trees to the west. That told her it must be past the middle of the night, for she had been marking its early evening position in her notebook. A half-moon stood high in the sky. The night was dry and only a little cool. Ada unrolled the shawl and wrapped it about her. She had, of course, never spent a night in the woods alone, but she found it less frightening than she would have thought, even after her troubling dream. The moon shed a fine blue light on the woods and fields. Cold Mountain was visible only as a faint smudge of darkness across the sky. There was no sound but the call of a bobwhite from the distance. She felt no need to hurry to the house.
Ada pulled the wax seal off the crock of blackberry preserves and dipped two fingers into it and scooped berries into her mouth. The preserves had been made with little sweetening and tasted fresh and sharp. Ada sat for hours and watched the progress of the moon across the sky and ate until the little crock was empty. She thought of her father in the dream and of the dark figure in the well. Though she loved Monroe deeply, she realized she was oddly affected by his appearance in her visions. She did not want him coming for her, nor did she want to follow him too immediately.
Ada sat on long enough to watch the day rise. The first grey light began gathering faintly, and then as the light built the mountains began to form themselves, retaining the dark of night in their bulk. The fog that clung to the peaks lifted and lost the shapes of the mountains and dissipated in the warmth of the morning. In the pasture the forms of trees remained drawn in dew on the grass beneath them. When she stood to walk down to the house, the smell of night still lingered under the two chestnut trees.
At the house, Ada took the lap desk and went to her reading chair. The hallway was in deep gloom but for a patch of the golden light of morning that fell onto the top of the desk where it sat across her legs. The light was sectioned by the muntins of the window sash, and the air it passed through was full of hovering dust motes. Ada put her paper into one of the squares of light and wrote a quick letter thanking the lawyer for his offer but declining it on the grounds that at present she was of the opinion that her qualifications for administering an estate composed of nearly nothing were more than sufficient.
In the hours of her night watch she had gone over and over the possibilities before her. They were few. If she tried to sell out and return to Charleston, the little money she could hope to realize from the farm in such bad times, when buyers would be scarce, could hardly support her for long. She would, after a point, have to attach herself to friends of Monroe’s in some mildly disguised parasitic relationship, tutor or music instructor or the like.
That or marry. And the thought of retu
rning to Charleston as some desperate predatory spinster was appalling to her. She could imagine the scenes. Spending much of what money she had on suitable wardrobe and then negotiating matrimony with the kind of aging and ineffectual leftovers of a certain level of Charleston society—one several layers down from the top—when all the men approximately her age were off to war. All she could foresee was eventually finding herself saying to someone that she loved him, when what she would mean was that he happened to have turned up at a particularly needy time. She could not, even under the current duress, push her mind to imagine—beyond a general feeling of press and smother—the marriage act with such a one.
If she returned to Charleston under those humiliating conditions, she could expect little sympathy and much withering commentary, for in the eyes of many she had foolishly squandered the fleeting few years of courtship when young ladies were elevated to the apex of their culture, and men knelt in deference while all of society stood at attention to watch their progress toward marriage as if the primary moral force of the universe were focused in that direction. At the time, Monroe’s friends and acquaintances had found her relative disinterest in the process puzzling.
She had done little to help matters, for in the confines of ladies’ parlors following dinner parties where the mated and the mating passed sharp judgment on one another, she was prone to claim she was so dreadfully bored by suitors—all of whom seemed limited in their sphere of interests to business, hunting, and horses—that she felt she ought to have a sign fashioned to read Gentlemen Prohibited hanging from the porch gate. She counted on such pronouncements to evoke a doctrinal response, either from one of the elders in the group or from one of the debutantes eager to ingratiate herself among those who held that the highest expression of married woman was reasonable submission to man’s will. Marriage is the end of woman, one of them would say. And Ada would respond, Indeed. There we can agree, at least as long as we do not dwell too long on the meaning of the word located next-to-the-last-but-one from your period. She delighted in the silence that followed as all present counted back to find the piece of diction in question.
As a result of such behavior, it became not an uncommon opinion among their acquaintances to think that Monroe had shaped her into a type of monster, a creature not entirely fit for the society of men and women. There was, therefore, little surprise, though considerable indignation, at Ada’s response to two marriage proposals during her nineteenth year: she rejected them out of hand, explaining later that what she found lacking in her suitors was a certain amplitude—of thought, of feeling, of being. That and the fact that both men kept their hair shiny with pomatum, as if to compensate in some visible way for their lack of sparkling wit.
To many of her friends, rejection of a marriage proposal made by any man of means who was not defective in a clear and demonstrable way was, if not inconceivable, at least inexcusable, and in the year before their move to the mountains, many of her friends had fallen away, finding her too bristly and eccentric.
Even now, return to Charleston was a bitter thought and one that her pride rejected. There was nothing pulling her back there. Certainly not family. She had no relatives closer than her cousin Lucy, no kindly aunts or doting grandparents welcoming her return. And that state of kinlessness too was a bitter thought, considering that all around her the mountain people were bound together in ties of clan so extensive and firm that they could hardly walk a mile along the river road without coming upon a relative.
But still, outsider though she was, this place, the blue mountains, seemed to be holding her where she was. From any direction she came at it, the only conclusion that left her any hope of self-content was this: what she could see around her was all that she could count on. The mountains and a desire to find if she could make a satisfactory life of common things here—together they seemed to offer the promise of a more content and expansive life, though she could in no way picture even its starkest outlines. It was easy enough to say, as Monroe often had, that the path to contentment was to abide by one’s own nature and follow its path. Such she believed was clearly true. But if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one’s nature was, then even stepping out on the path became a snaggy matter.
She therefore sat at the window that morning wondering sincerely and with some confusion what her next action should be when she saw a figure come walking up the road. As it neared the house Ada resolved the figure into a girl of sorts, a short one, thin as a chicken neck except across the points of her sharp hipbones, where she was of substantial width. Ada went to the porch and sat, waiting to see what this person might want.
The girl came up to the porch and without asking leave sat in a rocker next to Ada and hooked her heels on the chair rungs. She started rocking. As a structure, she was stable as a drag sled, low in her center of gravity but knobby and slight in all the extremities. She wore a square-necked dress of coarse homespun cloth, the dusty color of blue that comes from dye made of the inside of ragweed galls.
—Old Lady Swanger said you’re in need of help, she said.
Ada examined the girl further. She was a dark thing, corded through the neck and arms. Frail-chested. Her hair was black and coarse as a horse’s tail. Broad across the bridge of her nose. Big dark eyes, virtually pupil-less, the whites of them startling in their clarity. She went shoeless, but her feet were clean. The nails to her toes were pale and silver as fish scales.
—Mrs. Swanger is right. I do need help, Ada said, but what I need is in the way of rough work. Plowing, planting, harvesting, woodcutting, and the like. This place has to be made self-sufficient. I believe I need a man-hand for the job.
—Number one, the girl said, if you’ve got a horse I can plow all day. Number two, Old Lady Swanger told me your straits. Something for you to keep in mind would be that every man worth hiring is off and gone. It’s a harsh truth, but that’s mostly the way of things, even under favorable conditions.
The girl’s name, Ada soon discovered, was Ruby, and though the look of her was not confidence-inspiring, she convincingly depicted herself as capable of any and all farm tasks. Just as importantly, as they talked, Ada found she was enormously cheered by Ruby. Ada’s deep impression was that she had a willing heart. And though Ruby had not spent a day of her life in school and could not read a word nor write even her name, Ada thought she saw in her a spark as bright and hard as one struck with steel and flint. And there was this: like Ada, Ruby was a motherless child from the day she was born. They had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short order, and somewhat to Ada’s surprise, they began striking a deal.
Ruby said, I’ve not ever hired out as hand or servant, and I’ve not heard good things told about taking on such a job. But Sally said you needed help, and she was right. What I’m saying is, we have to come to some terms.
This is where we talk about money, Ada thought. Monroe had never consulted her in the matter of hiring, but she was under the impression that the help did not ordinarily lay down conditions for their employment. She said, Right this minute, and possibly for some time to come, money is in short supply.
—Money’s not it, Ruby said. Like I said, I’m not exactly looking to hire out. I’m saying if I’m to help you here, it’s with both us knowing that everybody empties their own night jar.
Ada started to laugh but then realized this was not meant to be funny. Something on the order of equality, was Ruby’s demand. It seemed from Ada’s point of view an odd one. But on reflection she decided that since no one else was lined up to help her, and since she had been tossing her own slops all summer, the request was fair enough.
As they talked over the remaining details, the yellow and black rooster walked by the porch and paused to stare at them. He twitched his head and flipped his red comb from one side of his head to the other.
—I despise that bird, Ada said. He tried to flog me.
Ruby said, I’d not keep a
flogging rooster.
—Then how might we run it off? Ada said.
Ruby looked at her with a great deal of puzzlement. She rose and stepped off the porch and in one swift motion snatched up the rooster, tucked his body under her left arm, and with her right hand pulled off his head. He struggled under her arm for a minute and then fell still. Ruby threw the head off into a barberry bush by the fence.
—He’ll be stringy, so we’d best stew him awhile, Ruby said.
By dinnertime the meat of the rooster was falling from the bone, and gobs of biscuit dough the size of cat heads cooked in the yellow broth.
the color of despair
At another time the scene might have had about it a note of the jaunty. All the elements that composed it suggested the legendary freedom of the open road: the dawn of day, sunlight golden and at a low angle; a cart path bordered on one side by red maples, on the other by a split-rail fence; a tall man in a slouch hat, a knapsack on his back, walking west. But after such wet and miserable nights as he had recently passed, Inman felt like God’s most marauded bantling. He stopped and put a boot on the bottom rail of the roadside fence and looked out across the dewy fields. He tried to greet the day with a thankful heart, but in the early pale light his first true vision was of some foul variety of brown flatland viper sliding flabby and turdlike from the roadway into a thick bed of chickweed.
Beyond the fields stood flatwoods. Nothing but trash trees. Jack pine, slash pine, red cedar. Inman hated these planed-off, tangled pinebrakes. All this flat land. Red dirt. Mean towns. He had fought over ground like this from the piedmont to the sea, and it seemed like nothing but the place where all that was foul and sorry had flowed downhill and pooled in the low spots. Country of swill and sullage, sump of the continent. A miry slough indeed, and he could take little more of it. Out in the woods, cicadas shrilled all around, near and far, a pulsing screech like the sound of many jagged pieces of dry bone twisting against each other. So dense was the noise that it came to seem a vibration conceived inside Inman’s head from the jangle of his own troubled mind. A personal affliction, rather than a sensation of the general world shared by all. The wound at his neck felt freshly raw, and it throbbed with every pulse of cicadas. He ran a finger up under the dressing, half expecting to feel a place as deep and red as a gill slit, but instead what he found was a great crusted welt at his collar line.