Cold Mountain (41 page)

2004-3-6

页码，173/232

Stobrod described how they had hooked up, and while he did the boy paid not the least attention, did not seem to know or care that he was the topic of discussion. Pangle had been raised somewhat casually, was the way Stobrod told it. The general feeling was that he held no value, for he could not think right nor could he be pressed into labor. Work him too hard and he'd sit down. Whip him and he'd take it without a flinch and still not move. He had, therefore, been set loose in early manhood and had spent the time since wandering Cold Mountain. He came to know its every slit and chink.

Ate what presented itself, with little discrimination between grubs and venison. Paid little heed to time of day, and during the brighter moon phases went largely nocturnal. In summer he slept on the beds of fragrant duff beneath hemlock and balsam except in rains of some duration, when he sheltered under rock ledges. In winter he took instruction from toad and groundhog and bear: he denned up in a cave, scarcely moving during the cold months.

When, with some surprise, Pangle discovered the outliers had taken up residence in his cave, he settled himself among them. He particularly attached himself to Stobrod out of being lovesick for fiddle music. Stobrod was to him a man of deep lore, a wizard, a revelator. When Stobrod struck bow to fiddle strings, the Pangle boy sometimes tried to sing along, but he had a voice like blowing a duck call. After the others shouted him silent, he would get up and stomp out a dance of great mystery, ancient Celtic jerk and spasm such as might have been performed after any number of defeats in battle against Roman and Jute, Saxon and Angle and Brit. The boy would fling around until he blossomed out in sweat beads, and then he would flop down on the floury tamped cave ground and follow the fiddling, his nose describing the music patterns in air like a man watching a fly hover.

Stobrod would get a figure of notes going and it would come round again and again and after a time it would work a spell on Pangle's mind. Pangle liked that feeling he got from Stobrod's playing and became a fool for the fiddle and for the fiddler. He began following Stobrod about, always with the devotion of a spaniel awaiting food. At night in the outliers' cave on the mountain, he would lie awake until Stobrod fell asleep and then he would crawl up and lie pressed against his bowed back.

Stobrod would awake at dawn and beat the boy away to a comfortable distance with his hat. The boy would then sit by the fire on his hams and gaze at Stobrod as if at any minute a miracle might happen.

Stobrod had come upon Pangle's banjo one day on a raid, a term the cave dwellers used to lend dignity to their recent habit of robbing any wealthy farmer against whom one of their number held a vague grudge. Some slight ten years ago would serve as pretext. A man had cantered by and splashed you when you stood afoot in the muddy roadway, had brushed past you and bumped your arm coming out of a store without a word of apology, had hired you for a job of work and shorted you on pay or had given orders to you in a tone that could be glossed to mean you were less than he.

Any snub, slur, or taunt, however old, would do. Times might never be better configured to settle up.

They'd descended on a Walker man's house. He was one of the county's few gentry, a leading slaveholder, and that fell afoul of the cave society, their general opinion having lately swung round to blame the owners of niggers for the war and its related troubles. As well, Walker had long been a highhanded bastard with all he considered his lessers, which in his estimation included most everybody. Punishment, the cavers had decided, was in order.

They had come down on the farm at nightfall and tied Walker and his wife to the stair rails and taken turns slapping Walker about the face. They had gone through the outbuildings and collected all the food they could easily find—hams and middle meat, quantities of crocked goods, sacks of meal and corn grits. From the house they took a mahogany table, silver flatware and candlesticks, beeswax candles, a painted picture of General Washington off the dining room wall, English china, Tennessee store liquor. They had since decorated the cave up with the plunder. Washington propped in a niche of the wall, candles in silver holders. Table set with Wedgwood and silver, though many of them had eaten all their lives from table service made entirely of gourd and horn.

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

2004-3-6

页码，174/232

In some way, though, Stobrod's imagination had not been fully engaged by the Walker raid, and Pangle's banjo had been the whole of his looting. He had taken it from a peg in Walker's toolshed. It was somewhat ugly, lacking as it did the expected symmetry in its round parts, but the head was of cat skin and the strings of gut, and it had a fine mellow tone. And he had slapped Walker's face only once in payment for a time long ago when he had overheard Walker call him a fool as he sat drunk on a log by the road trying in vain to scratch music out of a fiddle. I've now got mastery of a fiddle, Stobrod had said after he popped Walker's already red cheek. In retrospect, he had decided the Walker raid worried him. For the first time in his life he considered the possibility that his actions might be called to account.

Back at the cave, Stobrod had given the banjo to the Pangle boy and showed him what little he knew of its working: how to twist the pegs to make a few tunings, how to frail it with thumb and forefinger, sometimes strumming, sometimes grabbing at the strings like a barred owl grabbing at a rabbit. The boy, apparently out of stunning natural talent and a heartfelt desire to provide fitting accompaniment to Stobrod's fiddle, had shown little more difficulty in discovering how to play it than one would in learning to beat a drum.

He and Pangle had done not much since the raid but make music. For drink they had Walker's good liquor, and they ate nothing besides stolen jellies. They slept only when they were too drunk to play, and they had not traveled to the cave mouth frequently enough even to keep track of when day and night occurred. As a result, however, the Pangle boy now knew Stobrod's entire repertoire and they had become a duo.

When Ruby finally returned, she carried only a small bloody brisket wrapped in paper and one jug of cider, for Adams was willing to part with considerably less beef than she had hoped. Ruby stood and looked at her father and the boy and didn't say a word. Her eyes were black in her head, and during her walk her hair had come loose from its tie and spread across her shoulders. She wore a dark green and cream paneled wool skirt, her grey sweater, and a grey felt man's hat with a tiny cardinal feather in the satin band. She held the paper bundle in her upturned hand and made little up-and-down weighing motions.

—Not hardly four pounds, she said. She set it and the jug on the ground and went to the house and came back carrying four small glasses and a cup of salt, sugar, black pepper, and red pepper all mixed together. She opened the paper and rubbed the mixture on the meat to case it, and then she buried it in the ashes of the fire and sat on the ground beside Ada. The skirt was long since dingy and would be none the worse for her sitting in the dirt.

While the meat cooked, they all sipped at the cider, and then Stobrod took out his fiddle, shook it to hear the rattles inside, and then put it to his chin, bowed a note, and twisted a peg. When he did the boy sat up and grabbed his instrument and frailed off a series of chiming phrases. Stobrod set off on a minor key tune that was yet somehow sprightly.

When he was finished Ada said, The plaintive fiddle.

Ruby looked at her funny.

—My father called it that, always ironically, Ada explained. She went on to say that unlike the common run of preachers—who oppose fiddle music as a sin and see the instrument itself as the devil's box—Monroe despised it on aesthetic grounds. His critique was that all fiddle tunes sound just alike and all have strange names.

—That's what I like about them, Stobrod said. He tuned some more and then said, This is one of mine. I call it Drunk Neggar. It was a careening tune, loopy and syncopated, with little work for the left hand but the bow arm working as frantic as a man fighting off a deer fly from around his head.

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

2004-3-6

页码，175/232

Stobrod ran through a number more of his compositions. Altogether, they were an odd music.

Harshly rhythmic but unsuited, many of them, for dancing, which was the only purpose to which Ruby had ever heard the fiddle addressed. Ada and Ruby sat together and listened, and as they did Ruby took Ada's hand and held it and absently removed Ada's silver bracelet and slipped it over her own hand and then after a time returned it to its place.

Stobrod changed tunings and called out the names of the pieces before playing them, and gradually Ada and Ruby began to suspect that what they heard collectively formed a sort of autobiography of his war years. Among the tunes were these: Touching the Elephant, Musket Stock Was My Pillow, Ramrod, Six Nights Drunk, Tavern Fight, Don't Sell It Give It Away, Razor Cut, Ladies of Richmond, Farewell General Lee.

To conclude the series he played one he called Stone Was My Bedstead, a tune made up largely of scraping sounds, chiefly of middling tempo, rhythms of approach and retreat, a great deal of suspense in the relations among its measures. There was no lyric other than a moment when Stobrod threw back his head and chanted the title three times. The Pangle boy had sense enough to add only subtle little runs and fills, muting the banjo's ring by just softly touching the strings with the meatiest part of thumb and forefinger.

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. Ada wished there were a way to capture what she was hearing in the way an ambrotype captures images, so it could be held in reserve for the benefit of a future whose residents might again need access to what it stood for.

As the tune drew toward a close, Stobrod jacked back his head so that he seemed to be reviewing the stars, but his eyes were shut. The butt of the fiddle pressed against his heart and the bow worked in jerky, stuttering little strokes. His mouth flew open at the ultimate moment, but he did not hoot or squeal as Ada expected. Instead, he smiled a deep long smile of silent delight.

He stopped and held the bow in the air at the place where the last upstroke ended and opened his eyes and looked at the others in the firelight to see what effect his playing had. At that moment, his was a saint's blithesome face, loose and half a-smile with the generosity of his gift and with a becoming neutrality toward his own abilities, as if he had long since cheerfully submitted to knowing that however well he rendered a piece, he could always imagine doing better. If all the world had a like countenance, war would be only bitter memory.

—He's done you some good there, Pangle said to Ada. And then he seemed appalled at having spoken directly to her and ducked his head and then looked off into the woods.

—We'll do one last one, Stobrod said.

He and Pangle put down their instruments and took off their hats in signification that the next song would be holy. A gospel. Stobrod led off singing and Pangle followed him. Stobrod had trained the boy's natural gabble into a strained high tenor, and so Pangle chattered partial repetitions of Stobrod's phrases in a style that might, under a whole other system of thinking, have been viewed as comic. Their voices mostly fought against each other until the chorus came around, and then they matched up and found a deep place of concord. The song was about how dark our lives are, how cold and stormy, how void of understanding, and at the end death. That was all. The song ended somewhat incomplete and blockaded, for contrary to every expectation of the genre, there was no shining path limned out at the last minute to lead one onward with hope. It seemed short one crucial verse. But the chorus harmonies were close and brotherlike, sweet enough in themselves to make partial headway against the song's otherwise gloom.

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

2004-3-6

页码，176/232

They put their hats back on and Stobrod held out his glass. Ruby poured him a dram of the cider and stopped and then he touched the back of her hand with a forefinger. Ada, watching, thought it a tender gesture until she realized it was but to urge the pouring of an extra measure.

After Mars had risen red from behind Jonas Ridge and the fire had burned down to a bed of coals, Ruby pronounced the meat done and dug it from the ashes with the pitchfork. The spices had formed a crust around the brisket, and Ruby put it on a stump butt and sliced it thin across the grain with her knife. The inside was pink and running with juice. They ate it with their fingers without benefit of plates and there was nothing else to the dinner. When they finished they pulled dry sedge grass from the field edge and scrubbed their hands clean.

Stobrod then buttoned the top button of his shirt and grabbed his lapels and pulled at them alternately to square his jacket on him. He took off his hat and wiped the two sprigs of hair back from his temples with his palms and put the hat back on.

Ruby watched and then said to no one in particular, He's about to need somebody to do something for him.

Stobrod said, I want to talk to you is all. To ask you something.

—Well? she said.

—Thing is, I need caring for, Stobrod said.

—Has your liquor give out?

—Of that, there's aplenty. What it is, he said, is I'm scared.

His fear, he explained, was that the raiding was going to bring the law down on them. A leader had arisen from the outliers—the bearskin man. He was a talker and had given them a common creed: that their fighting in the war had not been pure as they once thought. It had been tainted because they had fought witless for the big man's ownership of his nigger, the human weakness of hatred driving them on. They were a company of former fools, but they had seen the light. They talked about it all the time, gathered about the fire in seminar. All subsequent warring, they agreed, would be for no other interests but their own. They would not be taken easy and sent back to the armies.

—He's wanting us all to take a blood oath to die like dogs, Stobrod said. With our teeth in someone's throat. But I didn't quit one army to sign on with another.

What Stobrod had decided was that he and Pangle would before long pull out, seek other shelter.

Leave the warrior band. What he needed was a

promise of food, a dry barn loft in bad weather, and maybe now and then a little money, at least until the fighting was over and he could come out free.

—Eat roots, Ruby said. Drink muddy water. Sleep in a hollow log.

—Have you not got more feeling than that for your daddy? Stobrod said.

—I'm just offering instruction in woodcraft. It comes from experience. I've dined on many a root when you were off roundering. Slept in worse places than hollow logs.

—You know I did my best toward you. Times was hard.

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