Part 2 (2/2)

-You're not yet ready to return home? Sally asked.

-Home? Ada said, momentarily confused, for she had felt all summer that she had none.

-Charleston, Sally said.

-No. I'm not yet ready, Ada said.

-Have you heard from Charleston?

-Not yet, Ada said. But I suspect that the letter I just picked up from Mr. Peek may clarify the matter of funds. It appears to be from my father's solicitor.

-Pull it out and see what it says, Esco said.

-I cannot bring myself to look. And, in truth, all it will tell me is whether I have money to live. It will not tell me where I might find myself a year farther on or what I might be doing with myself.

Those are the questions that worry me most.

Esco rubbed his hands together and grinned. I might be the only man in the county that can help you there, he said. It's claimed that if you take a mirror and look backwards into a well, you'll see your future down in the water.

So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance. She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below.

Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well.

She s.h.i.+fted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror. The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror. It cast back the s.h.i.+ne of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.

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Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away. She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames.

All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon.

Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well. And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror. It was like a poorly executed calotype. Vague in its details, low in contrast, grainy. What she saw was a wheel of bright light, a fringe of foliage all around. Perhaps a suggestion of a road through a corridor of trees, an incline. At the center of the light, a black silhouette of a figure moved as if walking, but the image was too vague to tell if it approached or walked away. But wherever it was bound, something in its posture suggested firm resolution. Am I meant to follow, or should I wait its coming? Ada wondered.

Then dizziness swept over her again. Her knees gave way and she slumped to the ground. Everything whirled about her for a second. Her ears rang and her whole mind was filled with lines from the hymn Wayfaring Stranger. She thought she might faint, but suddenly the spinning world caught and held still. She looked to see if anyone had noticed her fall, but Sally and Esco were engaged in their work to the exclusion of all else. Ada picked herself up and walked to the porch.

-See anything? Esco said.

-Not exactly, Ada said.

Sally gave her a sharp look, started to go back to stringing beans, then changed her mind and said, You look white-eyed. Are you not well?

Ada tried to listen but could not focus her thoughts on Sally's voice. In her mind she still saw the dark figure, and the brave phrases of the hymn sang on in her ears: Traveling through this world below. No toil, no sick nor danger, in that fair land to which I go. She was sure the figure was important, though she could put no face to it.

-Did you see something down in that well or not? Sally said.

-I'm not sure, Ada said.

-She looks white-eyed, Sally said to Esco.

-It's just a story people tell, Esco said. I've looked in there time and again and never seen a thing myself.

-Yes, said Ada. There was nothing.

But she could not shake the picture from her mind. A wood. A road through it. A clearing. A man, walking. The feeling that she was meant to follow. Or else to wait.

The clock rang out four chimes as flat and wanting in music as striking a pike blade with a hammer.

Ada rose to go, but Sally made her sit. She reached and put the heel of her hand to Ada's cheek.

-You're not hot. Have you eaten today? she said.

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-I had something, Ada said.

-Not much I bet, Sally said. You come on with me, I'll give you something to take with you.

Ada followed her inside. The house smelled of dried herbs and strings of peppers that hung in rows down the long central hall, ready to spice the various relishes and sauces and pickles and chutneys that Sally was famous for making. All around the fireplace mantels and doorframes and mirrors were bows of red ribbon, and the newel post in the hall was painted in red and white stripes like a barber pole.

In the kitchen, Sally went to a cupboard and took out a pottery crock of blackberry preserves, the mouth sealed with beeswax. She gave it to Ada and said, This'll be good on your leftover supper biscuits. Ada said her thanks without mentioning her failure as biscuit maker. On the porch, she asked Esco and Sally to stop by if they were out in their buggy and found themselves near Black Cove. She walked away, carrying the shawl and the crock of preserves in her arms.

The old footpath crossing the ridge into Black Cove began not five hundred yards up the road from the Sw.a.n.gers' farm, and it climbed steeply away from the river. It first pa.s.sed through open woods of second-growth oak and hickory and poplar, and then closer to the ridge the timber remained uncut and the trees were immense and became mixed with spruce and hemlock and a few dark balsams.

The ground there was a jumble of fallen trees in various stages of decay. Ada climbed without pause, and she found that the rhythm of her walking soon matched up with the tune of Wayfaring Stranger, still chanting itself faintly in her head. Its brave and heartening lines braced her, though she half dreaded to look ahead up the trail for fear a dark shape might step into view.

When she reached the crest of the ridge, she rested, sitting on a rock outcrop which commanded a prospect back into the river valley. Below her she could see the river and the road, and to her right- a fleck of white in the general green-the chapel.

She turned and looked in the other direction, up toward Cold Mountain, pale and grey and distant-looking, then down into Black Cove. Her house and her fields showed no neglect from this distance.

They looked crisp and cared for. All compa.s.sed round by her woods, her ridges, her creek. With the junglelike rate of growth here, though, she knew that if she were to stay, she would need help; otherwise the fields and yard would soon heal over with weeds and brush and scrub until the house would disappear in a thicket as completely as the bramble-covered palace of Sleeping Beauty. She doubted, though, that any hired man worth having could be found, since anyone fit to work was off warring.

Ada sat and traced the approximate boundaries of her farm, surveying a line with her eyes. When she came back around to her starting point, the land so enclosed seemed such a substantial portion of earth. How it had come to be under her proprietors.h.i.+p still seemed a mystery to her, though she could name every step along the way.

She and her father had come to the mountains six years earlier in hopes of finding relief for the consumption that had slowly worked at Monroe's lungs until he wet a half-dozen handkerchiefs a day with blood. His Charleston doctor, putting all his faith in the powers of cool fresh air and exercise, had recommended a well-known highland resort with a fine dining room and therapeutic mineral hot springs. But Monroe did not relish the idea of a restful quiet place full of the well-to-do and their many afflictions. He instead found a mountain church of his denomination lacking a preacher, reasoning that useful work would be more therapeutic than reeking sulfur water.

They had set out immediately, traveling by train to Spartanburg, the railhead in the upstate. It was a rough town situated hard up against the wall of the mountains, and they had stayed there several days, living in what pa.s.sed for a hotel, until Monroe could arrange for muleteers to transport their 2004-3-6.

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