Part 19 (1/2)

Ada had on about all the clothes women of her station then wore, and so her body was all cased up underneath many lapped and pleated yards of dead fabric. His hand at her waist touched the whalebones of corset stays, and when she took a step back and looked at him, the bones creaked against each other as she moved and breathed. She guessed she felt to him like a terrapin shut up inside its hull, giving little evidence that a distinct living thing, warm and in its skin, lay inside.

They walked together down the steps, and the door as they pa.s.sed it stood like a promise between them. Near the mouth to the lane, Ada turned and put her forefinger to Inman's collar b.u.t.ton to stop him.

-Here is far enough, she said. Go on back. As you said, I'll see you when I see you.

-But I hope that's soon.

-We both do, then.

That day they had thought the most suitable units of time to measure Inman's absence would be mere months. The war, though, turned out to be a longer experience than either had counted on.

the doing of it Inman followed the yellow man's artful map through what the locals called hill country. Nights were cool and leaves were beginning to color. After he had walked for the better part of a week, he advanced to the bare white places at the map's far margin, and he could see the Blue Ridge hanging like a drift of smoke across the sky ahead. It took him three more nights to pa.s.s through a foul place called Happy Valley, a long broad swath of cropland and pastureland at the foot of the mountains.

There was too much open ground to feel good about walking by day, and by night there was pistol 2004-3-6.

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fire and torchlight, the roads so full of dark riders that Inman spent as much time hiding in ditches and haystacks as walking. He reckoned the riders were Home Guard, all drunk as c.o.o.n hunters greeting the dawn. Out searching for the Federals broken free from the Salisbury jail. Quick to trip a trigger. At wide intervals in the valley stood big houses with white columns. They were ringed around with scattered hovels so that the valley land seemed cut up into fiefdoms. Inman looked at the lights in the big houses at night and knew he had been fighting battles for such men as lived in them, and it made him sick. He just wanted to get on into the thinly settled regions of the mountains, where he hoped people would offer less impediment. So as soon as he could, Inman forsook the dangerous roads of the valley country and took to a narrow cart track that aimed northward and climbed a ridge and fell into a deep river gorge and then rose hard toward the crest of the Blue Ridge. Inman climbed part of one day and all of the next and there was still a wall of mountain reared up before him, the track rising tack and tack endlessly. It soon lifted him into a later stage of autumn, for in the heights the season was already far along, and there were as many leaves on the ground as in the trees.

Late in the afternoon, cold rain began falling, and Inman walked with little enthusiasm through the close of day into dark. Sometime well past the middle of the night, nearly given out, wet as an otter, he stumbled upon a big chestnut tree with a hollow at its base, the bark healed around it like thick lips. He crawled inside and though there was not room to find a position more comfortable than a squat, he was at least in the dry. He sat for a long time listening to the rain fall. He rolled up dead leaves into tight cylinders between thumb and forefinger, then flicked them out into the dark. Lodged there in the tree, he began to feel himself to be a sodden wraith askulk in the night, some gnome or underbridge troll. An outcast, resentful and ready to lash out from spite at any pa.s.serby. Later he dozed in and out, waiting for morning, and then eventually he fell fast asleep wedged tight into the heart of the chestnut.

He dreamed his dream of Fredericksburg, and then sometime shortly after dawn he awoke s.h.i.+vering and in a sour mood. He felt as if things were not as he had left them. He tried to rise from the mouth of the tree but found that all the lower reaches of his body had gone dead. He scrabbled out from the tree, pulling himself along with his arms. For all the feeling in his legs, he might have been sawed off from the waist down. It was as if nothing were there, himself in the process of becoming some mere figment, fading from the ground up, as if the journey ahead were to be continued in the form of a veil or mist. A tissue.

The idea had its appeal. A traveling shade.

Inman stretched out on the wet ground litter and looked up through the tree limbs and their dripping leaves. The clouds were thick and grey. Blue patches of fog, fine and pale as powder, moved through the overstory of chestnut limbs and oak limbs clutching bright autumn leaves. A grouse drummed off in the woods, a deep violent sound like the beat of Inman's own heart in the moment before it shattered within his chest. He c.o.c.ked his head up off the ground and listened, thinking that if this was his last day on earth he might at least be alert. But in a moment, wingbeats burst and spluttered and faded off into the woods. Inman looked down his length, and it was with mixed feelings that he found himself mostly there. He tried to wiggle his feet, and they answered the call. He rubbed his face hard with his palms and pulled his twisted clothes into place. He was wet to the skin.

He crawled to fetch his sacks from the tree and sat back against it and uncapped his water flask and took a long pull. All the food he had left in his haversack was a cup of cornmeal, so he drew together sticks to make a fire for cooking mush. He lit the tender and blew on it until little silver orbs danced all across his vision, but the fire only flared up once and threw considerable smoke and then went out altogether.

-I'll just get up and walk on and on, Inman said, to anything that might be listening.

After he said it, though, he just sat there for a long time.

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I am stronger every minute, he thought to himself. But when he sought supporting evidence, he could find none.

Inman climbed up from the wet ground and stood, wavery as a toper. He walked awhile and then, involuntarily, he bent over. His middle was wrenched with dry heaves so strong he feared some necessary part of himself might be fetched up. The wound at his neck and the newer ones at his head burned and throbbed in conspiracy against him. He sat awhile on a rock, and then got up and walked all morning through the dim woods. The track was ill used, so coiled and knotted he could not say what its general tendency was. It aimed nowhere certain but up. The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way would not even remain as scar. For several miles it mostly wound its way through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog lay among them so thick that their green boughs were hidden. Only the black trunks were visible, rising into the low sky like old menhirs stood up by a forgotten race to memorialize the darkest events of their history.

Inman had not caught sight of a single mark of human being other than the path through this wilderness. No one to puzzle out his locale from. He felt fuddled and wayless, and the track gyred higher and higher. He still moved one foot before the other, but little more. And even this he did with no confidence that it advanced him one jot toward any mark he wished to hit.

Near midday he rounded a bend and came up on a pinched-ofF little scrag of a person hunkered down under a big hemlock. There was not much but its head and shoulders showing above a bed of tall bracken burnt by frost, each brown fern tip adangle with a bright drop of collected fog. From the person's posture, Inman's first thought was that he had interrupted some old coot in mid-s.h.i.+t. But when he drew closer he saw that it was a little old woman, squatting to bait the sweek stick of a bird trap with a suet gob. Not coot but crone, then.

Inman stopped and said, Hey, mam.

The little woman looked up briefly but waved not a hand. She stayed hunkered down, adjusting the trap in great detail, blissful-looking at her task. When she was done, she stood and walked around and around the trap, examining it until there was a perfect circle beat into the ferns. She was quite old, that much was clear, but aside from the wrinkles and wattles, her cheek skin glowed pink and fine as a girl's. She wore a man's felt hat, and the white hair hanging below it was thin and hung to her shoulders. Her clothes-voluminous skirt and blouse both-were made of soft tanned hides, and they looked to have been cut to pattern with a clasp knife and st.i.tched up in haste. She had a greasy cotton ap.r.o.n tied around her middle, the b.u.t.t of a small-caliber pistol sticking out from the sash of it.

Her boots appeared cobbled by a newcomer to the trade and curled up like sledge runners at the toes.

Propped against a big tulip tree stood a long-barreled fowling piece, remnant from a previous century.

Inman regarded the woman a breath or two and said, You'll not catch quail one in that snare if they smell people all around it.

-I don't throw much scent, the woman said.

-Suit yourself, Inman said. What I'm wondering is whether this road goes somewhere or if it just closes down shortly.

-It turns to nothing but a foot trail in a mile or two, but it goes on and on as far as I know.

-Westward?

-Generally west. It follows the ridges. Southwest would be more accurate. Old trade trail from 2004-3-6.

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Indian days.

-Obliged, Inman said. He hooked a thumb under a pack strap, making ready to walk on. But rain began falling from the low sky, wide-s.p.a.ced drops and heavy, falling like lead from a shot tower.

The woman held out a cupped hand and watched the water pool in it. Then she looked at Inman.

There were no dressings on his wounds, and she studied him and said, Them look like bullet holes.

Inman had nothing to say to that.

-You look faint, she said. White.

-I'm fine, Inman said.

The woman looked at him more. You seem like you could eat something, she said.

-If you could fry me an egg I'd pay, Inman said.

-What? she said.

-I wondered if I might pay you to fry me a few eggs, Inman said.

-Sell you a meal? she said. Reckon not. I'm not that bad off yet. But might be I'd give you a meal. I got no eggs, though. Can't tolerate living around a chicken. No spirit to a chicken at all.

-Is your place nigh?

-Not a mile off, and you'd blithen my day if you'd take shelter and dinner at my camp.

-Then I'd be a fool to say no.