Part 4 (1/2)

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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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sed, Inman felt like G.o.d'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 t.u.r.dlike 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.

He calculated that his days of traveling had put little distance between himself and the hospital. His condition had required him to walk more slowly and to rest more often than he would have liked, and he had been able to cover only a few miles at a time, and even that slow pace had been at considerable cost. He was bone tired and at least partially lost, still trying to find a pa.s.sway bearing directly west toward home. But the country had been one of small farmsteads, all cut up by a welter 2004-3-6.

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of interlaced roads, none marked by any signpost to announce it as more likely westering than another. He kept feeling that he had been led farther south than he wanted. And the weather had been bad, hard rain off and on through the period, sudden downpours with thunder and lightning, both day and night. The small clapboard farmhouses had lain close-s.p.a.ced, one to the other, with cornfields all but run together and nothing but fence rails to mark one man's place from the next. Each farm had two or three vicious hounds set to go off at the merest sound, rus.h.i.+ng barkless and low out of the dark shadows of roadside trees to rip at his legs with jaws like scythes. The first night, he had kicked away several attacks and a spotted b.i.t.c.h pierced the hide of his calf as if with a leather punch. After that he had looked for weaponry and found a stout locust limb in a ditch. With some little effort he had beat off the next dog that bit at him, striking at it with short downward blows like tamping dirt around a new-set post. Through much of that night and the ones thereafter, he had clubbed dogs off with dull percussion to send them scooting back still soundless into the dark. The dogs and the threat of Home Guard out prowling and the gloom of the cloudy nights made for nervous wayfaring.

The night just pa.s.sed had been the worst. The clouds had broken open and revealed meteors flinging themselves out of an empty point of sky. They had shot in on whizzing trajectories that Inman took to be aimed decidedly himward. Little projectiles flung from on high. Later, a great fireball had come roaring out of the dark, moving slow but aimed to land directly atop Inman. Before it had reached him, though, it simply disappeared like a candle flame pinched out with spittled finger and thumb. The fireball had been close-followed by some stub-winged whoos.h.i.+ng nightbird or hog-faced bat, flicking low to Inman's head, causing him to duck and walk stooped for three full strides. Then presently a pa.s.sing luna moth flashed open its great eye-spotted wings directly in front of Inman's nose, and he had mistaken it for some bizarre green dreamface thrust suddenly at him out of the dark with a message to speak. Inman had yelped and struck out at the air before him with hard blows that hit nothing. Later, he had heard the beat of horses cantering and had climbed a tree and watched as a pack of Guard rumbled by, seeking out just such a one as himself to seize and thrash and return to service. When he had climbed down and begun walking again, every tree stump seemed to take on the shape of a lurker in the dark, and he once pulled his pistol on a scraggly myrtle bush that looked like a big-hatted fatman. Crossing a sunken creek long after midnight, he had reached a finger down into the wet clay bank and daubed on the breast of his jacket two concentric circles with a dot at the center and walked on, marked as the b.u.t.t of the celestial realm, a night traveler, a fugitive, an outlier.

Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.

That long night accomplished, his greatest desire now was to climb over the fence and walk out across that old field into the flatwoods. Den up in the pines and sleep. But having at last reached open country, he needed to move on, so he took his foot off the fence rail and addressed himself anew to his travels.

The sun climbed the sky and turned hot, and all the insect world seemed to find Inman's bodily fluids fascinating. Striped mosquitoes hummed around his ears and bit his back through his s.h.i.+rt. Ticks dropped from trailside brush and attached themselves to him at hairline and pant waist and grew fat.

Gnats sought out the water in his eyes. A horsefly followed him for a while, troubling his neck. It was a big black glob of buzzing matter the size of the end joint to his thumb, and he longed to kill it but could not, no matter how he jerked and beat at himself as it landed to bite out gouts of flesh and blood. The blows rang out in the still air. From a distance he would have seemed one of a musical temper experimenting with a new method of percussion, or a loosed bedlamite, at odds with his better nature and striking out flat-palmed with self-loathing.

He stopped and p.i.s.sed in the dirt. Before he was hardly done, spring azure b.u.t.terflies alit on it to drink, the color of their wings in the sun like blued metal. They seemed to him things too beautiful to be drinking p.i.s.s. It was, though, apparently the nature of the place.

In the afternoon, he came to a crossroads settlement. He stopped at the edge of town and surveyed the scene. There was but a store, a few houses, a lean-to where a smith pedaled at a wheel, 2004-3-6.

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sharpening the long blade of a scythe. Grinding it wrongly, Inman noted, for the smith was sharpening away from the cutting edge rather than toward, and holding the blade at right angles to the wheel rather than diagonal. There were no other people moving about the town. Inman decided to risk going to the whitewashed store to buy food. He stuck his pistol in the folds of the blanket roll so as to look harmless and not draw attention.

Two men sitting on the porch to the store hardly looked up as he mounted the steps. One man was hatless, his hair sticking up on one side as if he had just risen from bed and not even run his fingers across his head. He was deeply engaged in cleaning his fingernails with the nipple pick to a rifle musket. All his faculties were so fully brought to bear on the task that the tip of his tongue, grey as the foot of a goose, was stuck out at the corner of his mouth. The other man was studying a newspaper. He wore leavings from a uniform, but the bill to his forage cap had been torn off so that the crown alone topped his head like a grey tarboosh. It was c.o.c.ked off to the side at a sharp angle, and Inman supposed the man styled himself as a rounder. Propped up against the wall behind the man was a fine Whitworth rifle, an elaborate bra.s.s-scoped artifact, with many complex little wheels and screws to adjust for windage and elevation. The hexagonal barrel was plugged with a tompion of maple wood to keep out dirt. Inman had seen but a few Whitworths before. They were favorites of snipers. Imported from England, as were their scarce and expensive paper tube cartridges. At .45 caliber, they were not awesome in power, but they were frightfully accurate at distances up to near a mile. If you could see it and had even a measure of skill in marksmans.h.i.+p, a Whitworth could hit it.

Inman wondered how men like these might come by such a fine rifle.

He walked past them into the store, and they still did not look up. Inside by the fire two old men played a game on a barrel top. One man put his hand out on the circle of wood and spread his fingers. The other stabbed at the s.p.a.ces between the fingers with the point of a pocketknife. Inman watched a minute but could not figure out what the rules might be, nor how score might be kept, nor what might need to occur so that one or the other would be declared the victor.

From the store's meager stock, Inman bought five pounds of cornmeal, a piece of cheese, some dried biscuit, and a big sweet pickle, and then he went out onto the porch. The two men were gone, had left so recently that their rockers were still in motion. Inman stepped down into the road to go on walking west, eating as he traveled. In front of him a pair of black dogs crossed from one patch of shade to another.

Then, as Inman came to the edge of the town, the two men who had been on the porch came from behind the smithy and stood in the road blocking his way out. The smith stopped pedaling the wheel and stood watching.

-Where you going, son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h? the man with the cap said.

Inman said nothing. He ate the wet pickle in two big bites and stuck the remainder of the cheese and biscuit in the haversack. The nipple-pick man moved off to the side of him. The smith, wearing a heavy leather ap.r.o.n and carrying the scythe, came out of the lean-to and circled around to come at Inman from the other side. They were not big men, not even the smith, who seemed in all ways unsuited to his craft. They looked to be layabouts, drunk maybe, and overconfident, for they appeared to presume, since numbers were in their favor, that they could take him with no more weapon than the scythe.

Inman had begun to reach behind him into the roll of his bedding when the three jumped as one, swarming at him. At once they were fighting him fist and skull. He had not time even to remove his pack and thus brawled enc.u.mbered.

Inman fought them backing up. His last wish was for them to mob him over onto the ground, and so he gave way until he was forced against the side of the store.

2004-3-6.

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The smith took a step back and came over his head with the scythe like a man splitting wood. His thinking, apparently, was to cleave Inman down the center, cut him open from collarbone to groin, but it was an awkward blow, made doubly so by the shape of the implement. He missed by a foot and the point of the blade buried itself in the dirt.

Inman jerked the scythe from the smith's hands and used it as it was intended, making long sweeping strokes close to the ground. He went at their feet with it, mowing at them and making them drop back before they were cut off at the ankles. It felt natural to him, holding a scythe in his hands again and working with it, though the current effort was different from mowing fodder since his strokes were hard, hoping as he was to strike bone. But even under these unfavorable circ.u.mstances he found that all the elements of scything-the way you hold it, the wide-footed way you stand, the heel-down angle of the blade to the plane of the ground-fell into the old pattern and struck him as being a thing he could do to some actual effect.

The men skipped and dodged about to avoid the long blade, but soon they regrouped and swarmed again. Inman went to slash at the s.h.i.+nbones of the smith, but the blade clashed on the stone of the foundation and threw a spray of white sparks and broke off close so that he was left holding but the snath. He fought on with it, though it made a poor cudgel, long and misbalanced and awkwardly curved as it was.

In the end though it was adequate, for he eventually smote the three down to their knees in the dirt of the street so they looked like those of the Romish faith at prayer. Then he kept at it until they all lay p.r.o.ne and quiet, faces down.

He threw the snath off across the road into a patch of ragweed. But as soon as he did it, the smith rolled over and raised up weakly and pulled a small-caliber revolver from under his ap.r.o.n and began drawing a shaky bead on Inman.

Inman said, s.h.i.+tfire. He palmed the little weapon away and stuck it to the man's head just below an eye and commenced pulling the trigger out of sheer frustration with the willfulness of these sorry offscourings. The caps, though, were damp or otherwise faulty, and the pistol snapped on four chambers before he gave up and beat the man about the head with it and flung it onto the top of the building and walked away.

Outside of town he turned into the woods and walked roadless to elude pursuers. All through the afternoon, the best he could do was to continue westering among pine trunks, thras.h.i.+ng his way through brush, stopping now and again to listen for anyone following. Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the distance, but they were faint and might have been imagination, as when one sleeps near a river and all night thinks he hears conversation pitched too low for understanding.

There was no baying of hounds, and so Inman reckoned that even if the voices were the men from town, he was safe enough, especially with night coming on. For course-setting, Inman had the sun wheeling above him, its light broken by the pine boughs, and he followed as it slid off toward the western edge of the earth.

As Inman walked, he thought of a spell Swimmer had taught him, one of particular potency. It was called To Destroy Life, and the words of it formed themselves over and over in his mind. Swimmer had said that it only worked in Cherokee, not in English, and that there was no consequence in teaching it to Inman. But Inman thought all words had some issue, so he walked and said the spell, aiming it out against the world at large, all his enemies. He repeated it over and over to himself as some people, in fear or hope, will say a single prayer endlessly until it burns itself in their thoughts so that they can work or even carry on a conversation with it still running unimpeded. The words Inman remembered were these: Listen. Your path will stretch up toward the Nightland. You will be lonely. You will be like the dog 2004-3-6.

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in heat. You will carry dog s.h.i.+t before you in your cupped hands. You will howl like a dog as you walk alone toward the Nightland. You will be smeared with dog s.h.i.+t. It will cling to you. Your black guts will be hanging all about you. They will whip about your feet as you walk. You will be living fitfully. Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. This is your path. There is no other.

Inman carried on this way for some miles, but for all he could tell the words were just flying back to strike him alone. And then after awhile the sentiments of Swimmer's words brought to mind a sermon of Monroe's, one dense to the point of clotting with quotations from various sages as was Monroe's habit. It had taken for text not some Bible verse but a baffling pa.s.sage from Emerson, and Inman found in it some similarity to the spell, though all in all he preferred Swimmer's wording.

What Inman remembered was this pa.s.sage, which Monroe had repeated four times at dramatic intervals throughout the sermon: That which shows G.o.d in me, fortifies me. That which shows G.o.d out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decrease forever. Inman thought that had been the best sermon he had ever heard, and Monroe had delivered it on the day Inman first saw Ada.

Inman had attended church expressly for the purpose of viewing her. In the weeks following Ada's arrival in Cold Mountain, Inman had heard much about her before he saw her. She and her father stayed too long green in the country they had taken up, and they soon became a source of great comedy to many households along the river road. For people to sit on the porch and watch Ada and Monroe pa.s.s by in the cabriolet or to see Ada on one of her nature walks along the big road was as near to theater as most would come, and she provoked as much discussion as a new production at the Dock Street opera. All agreed that she was pretty enough, but her very choice of Charleston garb or flourish of hairstyle was subject to ridicule. If she were seen holding a stem of beardtongue blossoms to admire their color or stooping to touch the spikes of jimson leaves, some would solemnly call her mazed in the head not to know beardtongue when she saw it, and others would wonder, grinning, was she so wit-scoured as perhaps to eat jimson? Gossip had it that she went about with a notebook and pencil and would stare at a thing-bird or bush, weed, sunset, mountain-and then scratch at paper awhile as if she were addled enough in her thinking that she might forget what was important to her if she did not mark it down.

So one Sunday morning Inman dressed himself carefully-in a new black suit, white s.h.i.+rt, black tie, black hat-and set out for church to view Ada. It was a time of blackberry winter and a chill rain had fallen without pause for three days, and though the rain had stopped sometime in the night, the morning sun had not yet burned through the clouds, and the slash of sky visible between the ridgelines was dark and low and utterly without feature. The roads were nothing but sucking mud, and so Inman had arrived late and taken a seat at a rear pew. There was already a hymn going.