Cold Mountain (17 page)

2004-3-6

页码，68/232

—The Federals rode down on us and robbed even the niggers, the woman said. They took every bit of food we had been able to raise this year. I even saw one man filling his coat pockets with our lard.

Dipping it by the handful. Then we were tetotally stripped and searched right down to our very persons by a Federal we were told was a woman in uniform. But it was not. It had an Adam's apple.

It took from us every article of jewelry we had hidden. Then they burnt our house down in the rain and rode away. Shortly it was only a chimney standing sentry over a cellar hole full of bitter-smelling black water. We had nothing, but we stayed awhile from lack of will to part from home. On the third day I stood with my least little girl looking down into that hole where was the wreckage of everything we had. She picked up a shard of a broken dinner plate and said, Mama, I expect we'll soon be eating off leaves. Then it was that I knew we had to go.

—That is the way of the Federals, another of the women said. They have come up with a fresh idea in warfare. Make the women and children atone for the deaths of soldiers.

—This is a time that carves the heart down to a bitter nub, the third woman said. You are luckier than you know, hid in this cove.

Ada and Ruby saw the travelers off to bed, and the next morning they cooked nearly all the eggs they had and made a pot of grits and more biscuits. After breakfast, they drew a map of the way to the gap and set them on the next leg of their journey.

That noon, Ruby said she wanted to walk up and check on the apple orchard, so Ada suggested they have their lunch there. They made a picnic of the leftover pieces of last night's fried chicken, a small bowl of potato salad for which Ruby had whipped up the mayonnaise, and some vinegared cucumber slices. They carried the dinner up to the apple orchard in a wooden bucket and ate it under the trees on a quilt spread in the grass.

It was an afternoon of bright haze, the sunlight sourceless and uniform. Ruby examined the trees and judged solemnly that the apples were making tolerably well. Then, out of the blue, she looked at Ada and said, Point north. She grinned at the long delay as Ada worked out the cardinal directions from her recollection of where the sun set. Such questions were a recent habit Ruby had developed. She seemed to delight in demonstrating how disoriented Ada was in the world. As they walked by the creek one day she had asked, What's the course of that water? Where does it come from and what does it run into? Another day she had said, Name me four plants on that hillside that in a pinch you could eat. How many days to the next new moon? Name two things blooming now and two things fruiting.

Ada did not yet have those answers, but she could feel them coming, and Ruby was her principal text. During the daily rounds of work, Ada had soon noted that Ruby's lore included many impracticalities beyond the raising of crops. The names of useless beings—both animal and vegetable— and the custom of their lives apparently occupied much of Ruby's thinking, for she was constantly pointing out the little creatures that occupy the nooks of the world. Her mind marked every mantis in a stand of ragweed, the corn borers in the little tents they folded out of milkweed leaves, striped and spotted salamanders with their friendly smiling faces under rocks in the creek.

Ruby noted little hairy liverish poisonous-looking plants and fungi growing on the damp bark of dying trees, all the larvae and bugs and worms that live alone inside a case of sticks or grit or leaves.

Each life with a story behind it. Every little gesture nature made to suggest a mind marking its life as its own caught Ruby's interest.

So as they sat on the blanket, drowsy and full from lunch, Ada told Ruby that she envied her knowledge of how the world runs. Farming, cookery, wild lore. How do you come to know such things? Ada had asked.

Ruby said she had learned what little she knew in the usual way. A lot of it was grandmother file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，69/232

knowledge, got from wandering around the settlement talking to any old woman who would talk back, watching them work and asking questions. Some came from helping Sally Swanger, who knew, Ruby claimed, a great many quiet things such as the names of all plants down to the plainest weed. Partly, though, she claimed she had just puzzled out in her own mind how the world's logic works. It was mostly a matter of being attentive.

—You commence by trying to see what likes what, Ruby said. Which Ada interpreted to mean, Observe and understand the workings of affinity in nature.

Ruby pointed to red splashes of color on the green hillside of the ridge: sumac and dogwood already turning color in advance of other trees. Why would they do that near a month ahead? she said.

—Chance? Ada said.

Ruby made a little sound like spitting a fleck of dirt or a gnat from the tip of her tongue. Her view was that people like to lay off anything they can't fathom as random. She saw it another way. Both sumac and dogwood were full of ripe berries at that time of year. The thing a person had to ask was, What else is happening that might bear on the subject? One thing was, birds moving. They were passing over all day long and all night too. You didn't have to but look up to know that. Enough to make you dizzy at the numbers of them. Then think about standing on a high place like the jump-off rock and looking down on the trees as the birds see them. Then wonder at how green and alike the trees look. One very much resembling another, whether it offers a meal or not. That's all roving birds see. They don't know these woods. They don't know where a particular food tree might live. Ruby's conclusion was, dogwood and sumac maybe turn red to say
eat
to hungry stranger birds.

Ada said, You seem to suppose that a dogwood might have a plan in this.

—Well, maybe they do, Ruby said.

She asked whether Ada had ever looked close up at the particular mess of various birds. Their droppings.

—Hardly, Ada said.

—Don't act so proud about it, Ruby said. In her view that's where the answer to this issue might lie.

Every little dogwood can't grow up right where it falls under the big dogwood. Being rooted, they use the birds to move themselves around to more likely ground. Birds eat berries, and the seeds come through whole and unmarred, ready to grow where dropped, already dressed with manure. It was Ruby's opinion that if a person puzzled all this out over time, she might also find a lesson somewhere in it, for much of creation worked by such method and to such ends.

They sat quietly for a while, and then in the warm still air of the afternoon Ruby lay down and dozed on the quilt. Ada was tired too, but she fought off sleep like a child at bedtime. She rose and walked beyond the orchard to the margin of the woods where the tall autumn flowers—goldenrod and ironweed and joe-pye weed—were beginning to bloom yellow and indigo and iron grey. Monarchs and swallowtails worked among the flower heads. Three finches balanced on blackberry canes, the leaves already turned maroon, and then flew away, flaring out low to the ground, their yellow backs flashing between their black wings until they disappeared into a clump of dog hobble and sumac at the transition between field and woods.

Ada stood still and let her eyes go unfocused, and as she did she became aware of the busy movements of myriad tiny creatures vibrating all through the massed flowers, down the stems and clear to the ground. Insects flying, crawling, climbing, eating. Their accumulation of energy was a kind of luminous quiver of life that filled Ada's undirected vision right to the edges.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，70/232

She stood there, part in a lethargic daze, part watchful, thinking of what the pilgrim woman had said about Ada's great luck. On such a day as this, despite the looming war and all the work she knew the cove required of her, she could not see how she could improve her world. It seemed so fine she doubted it could be done.

That evening after dinner, Ruby and Ada sat on the porch, Ada reading aloud. They were nearly done with Homer. Ruby had grown impatient with Penelope, but she would sit of a long evening and laugh and laugh at the tribulations of Odysseus, all the stones the gods threw in his passway. She held the suspicion, though, that there was more of Stobrod in Odysseus than old Homer was willing to let on, and she found his alibis for stretching out his trip to be suspect in the extreme, an opinion only confirmed by the current passage in which the characters were denned up in a swineherd's hut drinking and telling tales. She concluded that, all in all, not much had altered in the way of things despite the passage of a great volume of time. When the light began to give out, Ada put down the book. She sat and examined the sky. Something about the color of the light or the smell of night coming on brought to mind a party she had attended on her last trip back to Charleston shortly before Sumter, and she recounted it to Ruby.

It was held at her cousin's house, a grand place situated on a broad bend of the Wando River, and it lasted for three days. For the duration, they all slept only from dawn to noon and lived on little but oysters and champagne and pastry. Each evening there was music and dancing, and then late in the nights, under a moon growing to full, they went out on the slow water in rowing boats. It was a strange time of war fever, and even young men previously considered dull and charmless suddenly acquired an aura of glamour shimmering about them, for they all suspected that shortly many of them would be dead. During those brief days and nights, any man that wished might become somebody's darling.

On the party's final night, Ada had worn a dress of mauve silk, trimmed in lace dyed to match. It was cut close in the waist to suit her slimness. Monroe had bought the entire bolt of cloth from which the dress was made so that no one else might wear that color. He remarked that it set off her dark hair perfectly and gave her an air of mystery among the more common pinks and pale blues and yellows.

That night, a Savannah man—the dashing-looking but largely witless second son of a wealthy indigo merchant—flirted so tirelessly with Ada that finally she agreed to go out on the river with him, though what little she knew of him inclined her to believe he was only a vain fool.

The man's name was Blount. He rowed to the middle of the Wando and drifted. They sat facing each other, Ada with the mauve dress drawn tight around her legs to keep its hem from the tar that caulked the boat's bottom. Neither of them spoke. Blount feathered the oars over and over, letting the water drip from them into the river. He seemed to have something on his mind that accorded well with the sound of the water running off the oars, for he kept on doing it until Ada told him to stop.

Blount had brought a pair of flutes and a partial bottle of champagne still cool enough to sweat in the heavy air. He offered Ada a glass, but she declined her portion, so he finished off the bottle and threw it out into the river. The water lay so still that the circles from the splash expanded on and on until they became too distant to see.

Music from the house carried across the water, too faint to identify more precisely than that it was a waltz. In the darkness the low shorelines seemed impossibly far. The normal qualities of the landscape were altered beyond recognition, distilled to strange minimal parts, simple as geometry.

Planes and circles and lines. The full moon stood directly overhead, its disc softened by the humidity in the air. The sky glimmered silver, too bright for stars. The wide river was silver as well, only slightly duller. Morning mist already rose from the water, though the dawn was hours away. The only demarcation between river and sky was the line of dark trees at either horizon. Blount finally spoke out. He talked awhile about himself He had recently graduated from the university in Columbia and had just begun learning the Charleston portion of the family business. But of course he would immediately enlist should war begin, as everyone expected it soon would. He talked with file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，71/232

bravado about driving back any force bent on subjugating the Southern states. Ada had heard like sentiments repeated over and over throughout the party and was tired of them.

As Blount continued, though, he apparently became as unconvinced as Ada, for eventually he bogged down in his war talk and fell silent. He stared down into the black bottom of the boat so that Ada could see only the top of his head. Then, under the influence of drink and the strangeness of the night, Blount admitted he was terrified of the fighting that almost certainly lay before him. He was unsure if he would be able to acquit himself in a way that would bring credit. But neither could he see any course of escape that would not be shameful. Further, he had been visited by recurring dreams of horrible death in many forms. One of them, he was certain, would someday claim him.

He had talked looking down, as if addressing his shoe tops, but when he angled his pale face up into the moonlight, Ada noted the shining paths of tears runneling down his cheeks. She realized with an unexpected flush of tenderness that Blount was no warrior but had instead the heart of a shopkeeper.

She reached forward and touched his hand where it rested on his knee. She knew that the proper thing to say was that duty and honor demanded brave action in defense of homeland. Women had been uttering like phrases all through the party, but Ada found her throat closed against the words.

Lacking them, she could have used a simpler locution, telling him only, Don't worry, or, Be brave.

But any such comforting formula seemed at that moment unutterably false to her. So she said nothing and only continued to stroke the back of his hand. She hoped Blount would not think her token of kindness more than it was, since her first impulse, when pressed upon by men, was to draw up and back off. And the rowing boat left little room for retreat. As they drifted along, though, she was relieved to see that Blount was too overwhelmed by fear of the future to think of courting. They sat that way for some time, until they drifted to the bend of the river. The boat headed straight for the outside of the curve, threatening to ground itself on a sandy bank that shone out as a strip of paleness in the moonlight. Blount composed himself and again took the oars and returned them upstream to the landing.

He walked her to the porch of the brightly lighted house, the interior ablaze with Argand lamps. The silhouettes of dancers passed across the yellow windows, and now the music was distinct enough to identify: first Gungl and then Strauss. Blount stopped at the doorway. He put the ends of two fingers to Ada's chin and tipped her face up and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. It was but a brief and brotherly press of lips. Then he walked away. Ada now remembered that as she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror.

She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy for the woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.

Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her.'

The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement.

The next day, as the partyers were loading into carriages to be taken back into the city, Ada unexpectedly met Blount on the front steps. He could not meet her eye and he barely spoke, so put out of countenance was he by his performance the night before. Ada thought it to his credit, though, that he had not asked her to keep what had happened secret. She had never seen him again, but in a letter from her cousin Lucy, Ada learned that Blount had died at Gettysburg. Shot, according to all reports, in the face during the retreat from Cemetery Ridge. He had been walking backward, not wishing to be shot in the back.

At the tale's conclusion, Ruby was not much impressed with Blount's effort toward honor and could file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...