Part 23 (1/2)

-Comes right down to cases, I'm about as unaffiliated as you are. My boy got shot to death at Sharpsburg and I've not give a pinch of s.h.i.+t for neither side since.

-I attended the fight at Sharpsburg, Inman said.

The man stuck out his hand and said, Potts.

Inman shook his hand and said his own name.

-What was Sharpsburg like? Potts said.

-About like 'em all, but bigger than common. First they threw bombs among us and we among them. Then there was the charging and the shooting, grapeshot and musketball. Lots of boys died.

They stood for a time examining the nearby forest, and then Potts said, You look worn to a nub.

-Food's been scarce and I've been walking hard as I can, which has been slow.

-I'd give you something to eat if I had any handy, but I don't. They's a good gal down the road three or four mile that will feed you and ask no questions.

Rain fell slantwise and stinging on the wind. Inman wrapped himself in his ground cloth and walked on without slackening his pace. He looked cowled and robed as a pilgrim from days of yore, a dark monk out awander for the good of his soul, seeking remedy in walking from being fouled by contact with the world. Rain dripped off his nose and into his beard.

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Within the hour he reached the house Potts had described, a lonesome little one-room cabin of squared-off timbers set above the road at the mouth to a dank cove. The windows were greased paper. Thin brown smoke rose from the mud-and-stick chimney and then whipped away on the wind.

A hog s.h.i.+fted about in a pen up the hill. Roosting boxes for chickens in the corner between the house and chimney. Inman stepped up to the gate in the fence and yelled out his presence.

The rain had become mixed with spitting ice. His two face cheeks felt pinched together such that they seemed to touch on the inside of his empty mouth. While he waited he regarded a spicebush just on the other side of the fence, ice beginning to cling to the red berries. He yelled out again and a young woman, a girl really, cracked the door and stuck her brown head out and then pulled it back in again. He heard the clack of a latch to secure the door. Afraid with good cause, Inman thought.

He called out once more, this time adding that Potts had sent him for a meal. The door opened and the girl stepped out onto the porch.

-Why didn't you say so? she said.

She was a pretty thing, little and slim and tight-skinned. She was brown-headed and wore a cotton print dress which ill sorted with the bitter weather. Inman slipped the length of chain off the nail on the gatepost and walked up to the porch, unwrapping himself as he went. He shook the ground cloth out and draped it along the porch edge to drip. He took off the knapsack and haversack and set them on the porch in the dry. He stood there in the falling ice waiting.

-Well, come on up, she said.

-I'll pay for what I eat, Inman said. He stepped onto the porch next to the woman.

-I'm hard up but not that far gone that I have to take money for what little I can offer. There's a pone of corn bread and some beans is all.

She turned and walked into the house. Inman followed. The room was dark, lit by just the fire and the little brown light that came through the paper windows and fell on the scrubbed plank floor, but he could see that though it was bare as a barn the room was clean. There was spa.r.s.e furniture. A table, a pair of chairs, a cupboard, a rope bed.

Other than a quilt on the bed there was not a mark of ornament in the place. Not a picture of a loved one or of Jesus or even an ill.u.s.tration cut from a magazine on the wall, as if herein great strictures toward graven images held sway. Nor was there even a little figurine on the mantel or bow of ribbon tied to the hearth broom. The quilt alone stood as garnish to the eye. It was pieced together into no named pattern native to this country, not star flower or flying bird or churn dasher or poplar leaf, but was some entirely made-up bestiary or zodiac of half-visionary creatures. Its colors were the dim tones of red and green and yellow that can be drawn from bark and flower and nut hull. Otherwise there was not a speck of color but brown elsewhere in the cabin, except for the raw-skinned face of a recent baby that lay swaddled up tight in a cradle crafted rudely from pine sticks, the bark still on.

As he looked about the room, Inman was suddenly aware of his filth. In this clean, closed s.p.a.ce he found that his clothes threw a powerful reek from the gathered sweat of his long walking. His boots and pant legs were caked muddy to the s.h.i.+ns, and he left tracks as he stepped. He considered taking the boots off but feared that his socks would stink like rotted meat. It had been some time since he had last gone unshod. The cabin was not an old one and still held a faint crisp smell of dressed timbers, chestnut and hickory, and Inman felt marked and at odds with their bouquet.

The woman pulled one of the chairs to the side of the fire and gestured for him to sit. In a minute a faint steam had begun to rise around him from his sodden clothes, and little puddles of muddy water 2004-3-6.

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had dripped from his cuffs onto the floorboards. He looked down at his feet and noted that a half circle of puncheon was scuffed and worn pale around the front of the hearth the way a dog on a rope will beat down the dirt at the perimeter of its range.

The pot of pinto beans swung by its bail on an iron rod to the side of the fire. A fresh round of corn bread rested in a Dutch oven on the hearth. The woman served him up a plate heaped high with beans and bread and a big peeled onion. She set a pail of spring water and a dipper down next to him.

-You can eat at the table or here. Its warmer here, she said.

Inman took the plate and a knife and spoon into his lap and fell to eating. A part of him wished to be polite, but it was overcome by some dog organ deep in his brain, and so he ate loudly and in gulps, pausing to chew only when absolutely necessary. He forewent slicing the onion and ate on it like an apple. He spooned the hot beans into his mouth and gnawed the wedges of greasy bread at such a rate that he alarmed even himself. The liquor of the beans dripped off his beard and onto the front of his filthy s.h.i.+rt. His breath came short and whistled in his nose from lack of regular breathing.

With some effort he slowed down his chewing. He drank a dipperful of the cold spring water. The woman had pulled the chair to the other side of the hearth and sat watching him as one would a boar feeding on carrion, that is to say with a certain measure of fascinated disgust.

-I'm sorry. I've not taken actual food in days. Just wild cress and creek water, he said.

-It's no need to be sorry, she said, in such an even tone that Inman could not interpret whether in that last word she had meant to absolve or admonish.

Inman looked at her closely for the first time. She was indeed just a pale slim girl here alone in this dark hollow where the sun never would s.h.i.+ne bright for long. Her life so bare that she lacked b.u.t.tons, for he noted that the top of her dress was held to with a long briar from a c.o.c.kspur bush.

-How old are you? Inman said.

-Eighteen, she said.

-Name's Inman. Yours?

-Sara.

-How do you come to be here all alone?

-My man, John, went off for the fighting. He died awhile back. They killed him up in Virginia. He never saw his baby, and it's just us two now.

Inman sat silent for a minute, thinking that every man that died in that war on either side might just as soon have put a pistol against the soft of his palate and blown out the back of his head for all the meaning it had.

-Have you got any help here? he said.

-Not a lick.

-How do you make it?

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-I take a push plow and do what I can to lay me out a little patch of corn and a kitchen garden around the side of the hill apiece, though neither one didn't make much this year. I've got a tub mill to grind up the corn in. And there's a few chickens for the eggs. We had us a cow but the raiders came over the mountain and took it off back in the summer and burnt down what little shed of a barn there was and robbed the bee gums and took a hatchet and broke open a bluetick hound we had right out there on the porch to scare me. That big hog in the pen is mostly it for the winter. I've got to slaughter it soon and I dread it, because I've never killed hogs on my own yet.

-You'll need help, Inman said. She seemed such a slight thing to be butchering hogs.

-Needing and getting don't seem likely to match up anytime soon. All my family's dead now, and there's no neighbors around here I can ask but Potts, and he's no help at all when it comes to work.