Monroe had declined the advice, saying to one elder that such was not his mission. That comment had gotten itself passed all about the community, the general interpretation being that his use of the word mission set the congregation in the position of benighted savages. They had, many of them, put up cash money to send missionaries among true savages, folks they pictured in skins of various dim colors living in locales they conceived of as infinitely more remote and heathen than their own, and so the remark did not pass easily.
To wet down the fires that were rising around his ministry, Monroe had therefore begun his sermon on the Sunday in question by explaining how every man and woman had a mission. The word meant no more nor less than a job of work, he said. It was one job of his to think about why man was born to die, and he was inclined to go on at it with at least the perseverance of a man with a horse to break or a field to clear of stones. And he did go on. At length. Throughout the preachment that morning, Inman sat staring at Ada’s neck and listening as Monroe repeated four times the Emerson passage about warts and wens and decreasing forever.
When the service concluded, the men and women left the church by their separate doors. Muddy horses stood asleep in their traces, their rigs and traps behind them mired up to the spokes in mud. The voices of the people awoke them, and one chestnut mare shook her hide with the sound of flapping a dirty carpet. The churchyard was filled with the smell of mud and wet leaves and wet clothes and wet horses. The men lined up to shake hands with Monroe, and then they all milled about the wet churchyard visiting and speculating on whether the rain had quit or was just resting. Some of the elders talked in low voices about the queerness of Monroe’s sermon and its lack of Scripture and about how they admired his stubbornness in the face of other people’s desires.
The unmarried men wadded up together, standing with their muddy boots and spattered pant cuffs in a circle. Their talk had more of Saturday night to it than Sunday morning, and all of them periodically cut their eyes to where Ada stood at the edge of the graveyard looking altogether foreign and beautiful and utterly awkward. Everyone else wore woolens against the damp chill, but Ada had on an ivory-colored linen dress with lace at the collar and sleeves and hem. She seemed to have chosen it more by the calendar than the weather.
She stood holding her elbows. The older women came to her and said things and then there were knotty pauses and then they went away. Inman noted that every time she was approached, Ada took a step back until she fetched up against the headstone of a man who had fought in the Revolution.
—If I went and told her my name, reckon she’d say ought to me back? said a Dillard man who had come to church for precisely the same reason Inman had.
—I couldn’t say, Inman said.
—You’d not begin to know where to start courting her, Hob Mars said to Dillard. Best leave that to me.
Mars was shortish and big through the chest. He had a fat watch that pooched out his vest pocket and a silver chain that ran to his pant waist and a scrolled fob hanging from the chain.
Dillard said, You think you bore with a mighty big auger.
—I don’t think it, I know it, Mars said.
Then another man, one of such slight build and irregular features that he was but a bystander, said, I’d bet a hundred dollars against a half a ginger cake that she’s got a husband-elect down in Charleston.
—They can be forgot, Hob said. Many has been before.
Then Hob stared at Inman and surveyed his strict attire. You look like the law, he said. A man courting needs some color about him.
Inman could see that they would all talk the topic round and round until one or another that day might eventually draw up the nerve to go to her and make a fool of himself. Or else they would insult each other until a pair of them would have to meet down the road and fight. So he touched a finger to his brow and said, Boys, and walked away.
He went straight over to Sally Swanger and said, I’d clear an acre of newground for an introduction.
Sally had on a bonnet with a long bill to it so that she had to step back and cock her head to throw the shade off her eyes and look up at Inman. She grinned at him and put her hand up and touched a pinchbeck brooch at her collar and rubbed her fingers across it.
—Notice I’m not even asking who to, she said.
—Now would be the time, Inman said, looking to where Ada stood alone, her back to the people, slightly stooped, peering in apparent fascination at the inscription on the gravestone. The bottom foot of her dress was wet from the tall gravegrass and the tail of it had sometime dragged in mud.
Mrs. Swanger took Inman’s black coat sleeve between finger and thumb and pulled him by such slight harness across the yard to Ada. When his sleeve was let go, he raised the hand to take off his hat; then with the other he raked through his hair all around where it was pressed and banded. He swept the hair back at each temple and rubbed his palm from brow to chin to compose his face. Mrs. Swanger cleared her throat, and Ada turned.
—Miss Monroe, Sally Swanger said, her face bright. Mr. Inman has expressed a deep interest in becoming acquainted. You’ve met his parents. His people built the chapel, she added by way of reference, before she walked away.
Ada looked Inman directly in the face, and he realized too late that he had not planned what to say. Before he could formulate a phrase, Ada said, Yes?
There was not much patience in her voice, and for some reason Inman found that amusing. He looked off to the side, down toward where the river bent around the hill, and tried to bring down the corners of his mouth. The leaves on trees and rhododendron at the riverbanks were glossed and drooping with the weight of water. The river ran heavy and dark in curves like melted glass where it bowed over hidden rocks and then sank into troughs. Inman held his hat by the crown and for lack of anything to say he looked down into the hole as if, from previous experience, he waited in sincere expectation that something might emerge.
Ada stood a moment looking at his face, and then after a time she looked into the hole of the hat too. Inman caught himself, fearing that the expression on his face was that of a dog sitting at the lip of a groundhog burrow.
He looked at Ada, and she turned up her palms and raised an eyebrow to signify a general question.
—You’re free to put your hat back on and say something, she said.
—It’s just that you’ve been the subject of considerable speculation, Inman said.
—Like a novelty, is it, speaking to me?
—No.
—A challenge, then. Perhaps from that circle of dullards there.
—Not at all.
—Well, then, you supply the simile.
—Like grabbing up a chestnut burr, at least thus far.
Ada smiled and nodded. She had not figured him to know the word.
Then she said, Tell me this. A woman earlier commented on the recent weather. She called it sheep-killing weather. I’ve been wondering, can’t get it out of my mind. Did she mean weather appropriate for slaughtering sheep or weather foul enough to kill them itself without assistance, perhaps by drowning or pneumonia?
—The first, Inman said.
—Well, then, I thank you. You’ve served a useful purpose.
She turned and walked away to her father. Inman watched her touch Monroe’s arm and say something to him, and they went to the cabriolet and climbed in and wheeled off, fading down the lane between fencerows thicketed with blossoming blackberry canes.
Eventually, late in the day, Inman emerged from out the foul pinewoods and found himself wandering the banks of a great swollen river. The sun stood just above the low horizon at the far bank, and there was a haze in the air so that everything was cast in a lurid yellow light. The rain had evidently been harder somewhere upstream and had raised the river to its banks and beyond, too wide and strong to swim, even had Inman been a good swimmer. So, hoping to find an unguarded bridge or trestle, he walked up the riverbank, following a thin footpath that ran between the grim pi
ne forest to his right and the sorry river to his left.
It was a foul region, planed off flat except where there were raw gullies cut deep in the red clay. Scrubby pines everywhere. Trees of a better make had once stood in their place but had been cut down long ago, the only evidence of them now an occasional hardwood stump as big around as a dinner table. Poison ivy grew in thick beds that stretched as far as Inman could see through the woods. It climbed the pine trees and spread among their limbs. The falling needles caught in the tangled ivy vines and softened the lines of the trunks and limbs and formed heavy new shapes of them until the trees loomed like green and grey beasts risen out of the ground.
The forest looked to be a sick and dangerous place. It recalled to him a time during the fighting down along the coast when a man had shown him a tiny plant, a strange and hairy thing that grew in bogs. It knew to eat meat, and they fed it little pieces of fatback from the end of a splinter. You could hold the tip of a finger to what stood for its mouth and it would snap at you. These flatwoods seemed only a step away from learning the trick on a grander scale.
What Inman wanted was to be out of there, but the river stretched wide before him, a shit-brown clog to his passage. As a liquid, it bore likeness more to molasses as it first thickens in the making than to water. He wished never to become accustomed to this sorry make of waterway. It did not even fit his picture of a river. Where he was from, the word river meant rocks and moss and the sound of white water moving fast under the spell of a great deal of collected gravity. Not a river in his whole territory was wider than you could pitch a stick across, and in every one of them you could see bottom wherever you looked.
This broad ditch was a smear on the landscape. But for the balls of yellow scud collected in drifted foamy heaps upstream of grounded logs, the river was as opaque and unmarked as a sheet of tin painted brown. Foul as the contents of an outhouse pit.
Inman fared on through this territory, criticizing its every feature. How did he ever think this to be his country and worth fighting for? Ignorance alone would account for it. All he could list in his mind worth combat right now was his right to exist unmolested somewhere on the west fork of the Pigeon River drainage basin, up on Cold Mountain near the source of Scapecat Branch.
He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all the year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks passing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing.
But even though he believed truly that you can think on a thing till it comes real, this last thought never shaped up so, no matter how hard he tried. What hope he had was no brighter than if someone had lit fire to a taper at the mountain’s top and left him far away to try setting a course by it.
He walked on and shortly night began to fall and a part of a moon shone through patchy clouds. He came upon a road that ended in the river; beside it, a sign that someone had stuck up at the water’s edge read Ferry. $5. Yell Loud.
A stout rope stretched from a thick post across the water and disappeared into it. Toward the far bank, the rope rose from the water again to end at another post. Beyond the landing, Inman saw a house on stilts raised above the highwater mark. A window was lit and smoke came from the chimney.
Inman called out, and in a minute a figure appeared on the porch and waved and went back in. Soon, though, it reappeared from behind the house dragging a dugout canoe by a line. The boatman got it afloat and mounted it and set out rowing hard upstream in the slower water that flowed near the bank. Still it was a strong current, and he dug with bowed back at the paddle until it looked like he planned to just keep on going. Before he went out of sight, though, he turned and sat up and let the current carry him down, angling to the east bank, working easily, saving effort. Just barely touching the blade to the water to set a course. The dugout was old and the dry wood was sun-bleached, so that the crude and blockish sides of it shone like beaten pewter against the dark water when the moon broke from between clouds.
As the canoe came in toward shore where Inman stood, he saw that it was piloted by no ferryman but an apple-cheeked girl, dark about the head and skin so as to suggest Indian blood back a generation or two. She wore a dress of homespun that in the dim light he took to be yellow. She had big strong hands, and the muscles of her forearms knotted under the skin with every stroke. Her black hair was loose about her shoulders. She whistled a tune as she approached. At the bank she stepped out of the dugout barefooted into the muddy water, pulling the canoe by a line at its bow to beach it. Inman drew a five-dollar note from his pocket and reached it to her. She didn’t reach to take it, but only looked at it with some measure of disgust.
—I wouldn’t give a thirsty man a dipper of this river water for five dollars, much less paddle you across it, she said.
—The sign says the ferry charge is five.
—This look like a ferryboat to you?
—Is this a ferry crossing or not?
—It is when Daddy’s here. He’s got a flatboat big enough to carry a team and wagon. He pulls it across on the rope. But with the river up he can’t run it. He’s gone off hunting, waiting for the water to drop. Until then, I’m charging the utmost somebody’s willing to pay, for I’ve got me a cowhide and I aim to get a saddle made from it. And when I get me that, I’ll start saving for a horse, and when I get one, I’ll throw the saddle over it and turn my back to this river and be gone.
—What’s the name of this thing? Inman said.
—Why it’s nothing but the mighty Cape Fear River is all, the girl said.
—Well, what will you charge me to get over it? Inman said.
—Fifty dollars scrip, the girl said.
—Take twenty?
—Let’s go.
Before they could climb into the boat, Inman saw great greasy bubbles rising to the surface thirty feet out from the bank. They shone in the moonlight as they broke, and they moved in a direction counter to the river’s flow, going upstream at about the pace of a man walking. The night was windless and still, and there were not other sounds than the water blubbering and the bugs skirling in the pines.
—You see that? Inman said.
—Yeah, the girl said.
—What’s making it?
—Hard to say, it being at the bottom of the river.
The water broke as huge and urgent as breath from a drowning cow. Inman and the girl stood and watched as the bubbles gradually climbed the river until the moon was overblown by a bank of clouds and they disappeared in the darkness.
—Could be a catfish rooting along the river bottom to dig up some food, the girl said. They’ve got a diet would kill a turkey vulture. I seen one the size of a boar hog one time. It was washed up dead on a sandbar. Whiskers on it the size of blacksnakes.
That would be the sort of thing that would grow in this river, Inman figured. Monstrous flabby fish with meat as slack as fatback. He thought of the great contrast between such a creature and the little trout that lived in the upper branches of the Pigeon where the water poured off Cold Mountain. They were seldom longer than your hand. Bright and firm as shavings from a bar of silver.
Inman tossed his packs in ahead of him and boarded the canoe and settled himself into the prow. The girl got in behind him and dug hard against the water, paddling with a strong and sure hand, keeping a straight course by kicking out at the tail of the stroke rather than constantly switching sides. The splash of the paddle overrode even the insects’ squealing.
The girl dug hard at the water to send them a fair piece up the river from the landing, taking advantage of the slower water near the bank. Then she
turned about and quit paddling and stuck the blade in the water like a rudder. She angled them out, using the current to drive them toward the river’s midpoint. With the moon hidden, the land beyond the riverbank soon disappeared, and they floated blind in a world black as the inside of a cow. In the silence they heard the sound of voices from the eastern landing carrying far across the water. It might have been anybody. Inman doubted the men from the town had enough purpose to follow him so far.
Still, he turned and, whispering, said to the girl, We’d best not be found out. But at that moment he looked up and saw a radius of moon appear from under clouds. It soon stood fully revealed in a little ragged window of sky. The sun-bleached side of the canoe shone out like a beacon on the dark water.
There was a sound like running fingernails across the grain of corduroy and a whacking sound. The crack of gunfire followed.
The Whitworth, Inman thought.
A hole opened up at the back of the canoe at waterline. Brown water streamed in at the alarming rate of a cow pissing. Inman looked ahead to the landing and saw a party of a half-dozen men milling about in the moonlight. Some of them began firing their little pistols, but they had not the carrying power to cover the distance. The man with the rifle, though, had it turned up and was working with the ramrod to tamp in a fresh load. The only way Inman could figure it, the men must have framed the evening in their minds as a type of coon hunt, as sport; otherwise they would have long since gone back to town.
The ferry girl sized up the situation immediately and threw her weight to rock the canoe hard, tipping it to the gunwales to wet it down and darken it. Inman tore the cuff off his shirt and was plugging the hole when another ball struck the side at waterline and tore off a chunk of wood as big as a hand. The river poured in and soon began filling the bottom of the boat.