Читать книгу Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier - Страница 7

Ada sat on the porch of the house that was now hers, a portable writing desk balanced across her lap. She wet the nib of a pen in ink and wrote:

This you must know: that despite your long absence, such is the light in which I view the happy relation existing between us, that I will never conceal a single thought from you. Let such fears not trouble you. Know that I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.

She blew the paper to dry it and then scanned over what she had written with a critical eye. She mistrusted her handwriting, for no matter how she tried, she had never mastered the flowing whorls and arcs of fine penmanship. The characters her hand insisted on forming were instead blocky and dense as runes. Even more than the penmanship, she disliked the tenor of the letter. She balled up the paper and tossed it into a boxwood bush.

Aloud she said, That is just the way people talk and has nothing to do with the real matter at hand.

She looked off across the yard to the kitchen garden where the beans and squash and tomatoes bore vegetables hardly bigger than her thumb despite the fullness of the growing season. Many of the leaves were eaten away to their veins by bugs and worms. Standing thick in the rows and towering over the vegetables were weeds that Ada could not name and had neither the energy nor the heart to fight. Beyond the failed garden stretched the old cornfield, now grown up shoulder high in poke and sumac. Above the fields and pastures, the mountains were just becoming visible as the morning fog burned away. Their pale outlines stood at the horizon, more like the ghosts of mountains than the actual things.

Ada sat waiting for them to reveal themselves clearly. Her thinking was that it would be a comfort to see something that was as it should be, for otherwise her mind troubled itself with the thought that everything else in her sight was marked by neglect. Since her father’s funeral, Ada had hardly turned her hand around the farm. She had at least milked the cow, which Monroe had named Waldo with disregard for gender, and fed the horse, Ralph, but she had not done much more, for she did not know how to do much more. She had left the chickens to fend for themselves and they had gotten skinny and skittish. The hens had abandoned the little chicken house and roosted in trees and dropped their eggs wherever the mood struck them. They vexed Ada with their inability to settle on nesting places. She had to investigate every cranny of the yard to find the eggs, and lately she believed they had taken on a strange taste since the hens’ diet had changed from table scraps to bugs.

Cookery had become a pressing issue for Ada. She was perpetually hungry, having eaten little through the summer but milk, fried eggs, salads, and plates of miniature tomatoes from the untended plants that had grown wild and bushy with suckers. Even butter had proved beyond her means, for the milk she had tried to churn never firmed up beyond the consistency of runny clabber. She wanted a bowl of chicken and dumplings and a peach pie but had not a clue how one might arrive at them.

Ada cast one more look to the far mountains, still faint and pale, and then she rose and went in search of eggs. She checked the weeds along the fence by the lane, parted the long grass at the base of the pear tree in the side yard, rattled among the clutter of the back porch, ran her hands along the dusty shelves in the toolshed. She found nothing.

She recalled that a red hen had sometimes lately taken to hanging about the big boxwoods at either side of the front steps. She went to the bush that she had thrown the letter into and tried to part the dense leafage and peer inside, but she could see nothing in the dim center. She folded her skirts tightly about her legs, and on hands and knees she worked her way inside the boxwood. Its branches scratched at her forearms and face and neck as she pushed forward. The ground beneath her hands was dry and littered with chicken feathers and old chicken shit and the hard dead leaves of the bush. Inside, there was a hollow place. The thick outer growth of leaves was just a husk enclosing a space like a tiny room.

Ada sat up in it and looked about on the ground and in the branches for eggs but found only a broken shell, dried yolk the color of rust in one jag-edged cup. She fitted herself between two limbs and rested with her back against the trunk. The boxwood bower smelled of dust and of the sharpness and bitterness of chickens. Its light was dim, and it reminded her of childhood play in caves made by draping sheets over tables or by tenting carpets over clotheslines. Best of all were the tunnels she and her cousin Lucy dug deep into haystacks on her uncle’s farm. They had spent entire rainy afternoons snug and dry as denned foxes, whispering secrets to each other.

It was with a familiar delicious tingle of pleasure, a tightening in her breathing, that she realized she was now similarly hidden away, that anyone walking from the gate to the porch would never know she was there. If one of the ladies from the church made an obligatory visit to see about her welfare, she could sit motionless as they called her name and knocked at the door. She would not come out until long after she had heard the gate latch clack shut. But she expected no one to call. The visits had tapered off in the face of her indifference to them.

Ada looked up with some disappointment to the faint lacework of pale blue sky visible through the leaves. She wished rain were falling so she would feel even more protected as it rustled the leaves overhead. The occasional drop that might find its way through, plopping a tiny crater into the dust, would only emphasize that though inside she remained dry, outside rain fell wholesale. Ada wished never to leave this fine shelter, for when she considered the pass she had lately reached, she wondered how a human being could be raised more impractically for the demands of an exposed life.

She had grown up in Charleston and at Monroe’s insistence had been educated beyond the point considered wise for females. She had become a knowledgeable companion for him, a lively and attentive daughter. She was filled with opinions on art and politics and literature, and ready to argue the merits of her positions. But what actual talents could she claim? What gifts? A fair command of French and Latin. A hint of Greek. A passable hand at fine needlework. A competency at the piano, though no brilliance. The ability to render landscape and still life with accuracy in either pencil or watercolor. And she was well read.

Those were the abilities to be marked down in her favor. None of them seemed exactly to the point when faced with the hard fact that she now found herself in possession of close to three hundred acres of steep and bottom, a house, a barn, outbuildings, but no idea what to do with them. It gave her pleasure to play on the piano, but not enough to compensate for her recent realization that she could not weed a row of young bean plants without pulling half of them out along with the ragweed.

A certain amount of resentment came upon her when she thought that a measure of applied knowledge in the area of food production and preparation would stand her in better stead at that particular time than any fine understanding of the principles of perspective in painting. All her life, though, her father had kept her back from the hardness of work. As long as she could remember he had hired adequate help, sometimes freed blacks, sometimes unlanded whites of good character, sometimes slaves, in which case the wages were paid directly to the owner. For most of the six years of their mission to the mountains, Monroe had employed a white man and his part-Cherokee wife to run the place, leaving Ada with little to do other than devise a weekly menu. She had therefore been free, as always, to occupy her time with reading and needlework, drawing and music.

But now the hired people were gone. The man had been lukewarm toward secession and counted himself lucky to be too old to volunteer in the first years of the war. But that spring, with the armies in Virginia desperately shorthanded, he had begun to worry that he might soon be conscripted. So, shortly after Monroe died, he and his wife had taken off unannounced and headed over the mountains to cross the lines into territory held by the Federals, leaving Ada to make do on her own.

Since then, she had discovered herself to be frighteningly ill-prepared in the craft of subsistence, living alone on a farm that her father had run rather as an idea than a livelihood. Monroe never developed much interest in the many tiresome areas of agriculture. He had held the opinion that if he could afford to buy feed corn and meal, why bother growing more than they could eat as roasting ears? If he could buy bacon and chops, why be drawn into the more inconvenient details of pork? Ada once heard him instruct the hired man to buy a dozen or so sheep and put them into the pasture below the front yard to mix in with the milk cow. The man had objected, pointing out to Monroe that cows and sheep do not do well pastured together. The man asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat?

Monroe’s answer had been, For the atmosphere.

But it was hard to live on atmosphere, and so the boxwood appeared to offer about all the feeling of protection Ada could soon expect. She decided she would not quit the shrub until she could count off, at minimum, three convincing reasons to do so. But after several minutes’ thought she could only come up with one: she did not particularly wish to die within the boxwood.

At that moment, though, the red hen came bursting through the leaves, her wings partially opened and trailing in the dust. She hopped onto a limb near Ada’s head and sounded off with an agitated gabble. Immediately behind her came the big black-and-gold rooster that always frightened Ada a little with his ferocity. He was intent on treading the hen but pulled up short, startled when he saw Ada in so unexpected a place. The rooster cocked his head at an angle and fixed a shining black eye on her. He took a step back and scratched at the ground. He was close enough for Ada to note the dirt lodged between the scales on his yellow legs. The amber spurs looked long as a finger. The golden helmet of feathers at his head and neck fluffed and swelled and in their glossiness seemed almost macassared. He shook himself to settle them back into place. The black of his body had a blue-green sheen like oil on water. His yellow beak opened and closed.

If he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds he’d kill me where I sit without a doubt, Ada thought.

She shifted about onto her knees and waved her hands and said, Shoo! When she did, the rooster launched himself at her face, twisting in the air so that he arrived spurs first, wings flogging away. Ada threw up a hand to fend him off and was cut across the wrist by a spur. Her blow knocked the bird to the ground, but he rose and came at her again, wings fanning. As she scrambled crablike to get out from under the bush, the rooster dug at her with a spur and hung it up in the folds of her skirt. She burst from the bush with a great thrash and rose to run, the rooster still attached to her skirt at knee level. The bird pecked at her calves and struck again and again with the spur of his free leg and beat at her with his wings. Ada hit at it with open-handed blows until it fell away, and then she ran to the porch and into the house.

She sank into an armchair and examined her wounds. There was a smear of blood at her wrist. She wiped it away and with relief saw that she was little more than scraped. She looked at her skirt and found it dusty and smeared with chicken droppings and rent in three places, and then she drew it up and looked to her legs. They were marked variously by scratches and nips, none of them deep enough to draw blood. Her face and neck stung from scratches taken when she scrabbled out of the bush. She patted at her hair and found it moiled all about her head. This is the place I have reached, she thought. I am living in a new world where these are the fruits of even looking for eggs.

She rose from the chair and climbed the steps to her room and removed her clothes. At her marble-topped washstand, she poured water from the pitcher into the basin and washed off with a piece of lavender soap and a cloth. She ran her fingers through her hair to rake out the boxwood leaves and then just let it fall loose below her shoulders. She had abandoned both of the current hairstyles—either gathered all around and swept into two big rolls that hung from the sides of a woman’s head like the ears of a hound, or pulled tight to the scalp and bunned at the back like a mud-tailed horse. She no longer had need or patience for such updos. She could go about looking like a man-woman in a bookplate and it didn’t matter, for she sometimes went up to a week or ten days without seeing another soul.

She went to her chest of drawers for clean underdress and found none, laundry having been neglected for some time. She put on linens she drew from near the bottom of the dirty clothes pile, theorizing that perhaps time had made them fresher than the ones she had just taken off. She topped them with a somewhat clean dress and wondered how she might get through the hours until bedtime. When had things altered so that she no longer thought of how to pass the day pleasantly or profitably and began to think merely of how to pass the day?

Her will to do was near gone. All she had accomplished of note in the months since Monroe’s death was to sort through his things, his clothes and papers. Even that had been a trial, for she had a strange and fearful feeling about her father’s room and had not been able to enter it until many days after the funeral. But during that time she had often stood at the door and looked in as people are drawn to stand at the lip of a cliff and look down. Water had stood in a pitcher at his washstand until it went away of its own accord. When she had finally drawn together the nerve to do it, she went in and sat on the bed, weeping as she folded the well-made white shirts, the black suitcoats and pants for storage. She sorted and labeled and boxed Monroe’s papers, his sermons and botanical notes and commonplace journals. Each little task had brought with it a new round of mourning and a string of empty days that eventually ran together until now she had arrived at such a state that the inevitable answer to the question, What have you accomplished this day? was, Nothing.

Ada took a book from her bedside table and went into the upper hall and sat in the stuffed chair she had pulled from Monroe’s bedroom and situated to catch the good light from the hall window. She had spent much of the past three damp months sitting in the chair reading, a quilt wrapped around her to hold back the chill of the house even in July. The books she had drawn from the shelves that summer had been varied and haphazard, little but recent novels, whatever she happened to pick up from Monroe’s study. Trifles like Sword and Gown by Lawrence and many others of its type. She could read such books and a day later not know what they had been about. When she had read more notable books, the harsh fates of their doomed heroines served only to deepen her gloom. For a time, every book she plucked from the shelves frightened her, their contents all concerning mistakes made by wretched dark-haired women so that they ended their days punished, exiled, and alien. She had gone straight from The Mill on the Floss to a slim and troubling tale by Hawthorne on somewhat the same theme. Monroe had apparently not finished it, for the pages were uncut beyond the third chapter. She guessed Monroe would have thought the book unnecessarily grim, but to Ada it seemed good practice for her coming world. No matter what the book, though, the characters all seemed to lead fuller lives than she did.

At first, all she liked about the reading spot was the comfortable chair and the good light, but over the months she came to appreciate that the window’s view offered some relief against the strain of such bleak stories, for when she looked up from the page, her eyes swept across the fields and rose on waves of foggy ridges to the blue bulk of Cold Mountain. The prospect from the reading chair confronted her with all the major shapes and colors of her current position. Through the summer, the landscape’s most frequent mood had been dim and gloomy. The damp air coming through the window was rich with the fragrance of rot and growth, and to the eye it had much the same shimmering dense quality as looking across a great distance through a telescope. The burden of moisture in the air worked on perception as optics of poor quality do, distorting, expanding, and diminishing distance and altitude, altering the sense of mass moment by moment. Through the window, Ada had been given a tutorial in all the forms of visible moisture—light haze, dense valley fogs, tatters of cloud hanging like rags on the shoulders of Cold Mountain, grey rain falling straight down in streaks all day as if old twine hung from the heavens.

Liking this clouded, humped land, she found, was an altogether more difficult and subtler thing than appreciating the calm voice of Charleston during an evening walk along the Battery with Fort Sumter off in the distance, the great white houses at one’s back, palmettos rattling their leaves in a sea breeze. In comparison, the words this canted landscape spoke were less hushed, harsher. The coves and ridges and peaks seemed closed and baffling, a good place to hide.

The book before Ada this day was another one of her father’s, a tale of frontier adventure by Simms, a Charlestonian and a friend of Monroe’s that Ada had met on a number of occasions when he was in town from his plantation on the Edisto. She had been put in mind of Simms because she had not long ago received a letter from a Charleston acquaintance which described in passing his great anguish at the recent death of his wife. Naught but opiates saved him from madness, her friend had written, and it was a clause that Ada could not put from her thoughts.

She began to read, but stirring though the story’s events were, she could not get food off her mind. Since the search for eggs had not gone in her favor, she had not yet eaten breakfast, though the day was coming up on midmorning. After only a few pages, she put the book into a pocket and went down to the kitchen and prowled through the pantry for something she could turn into a meal. She spent nearly two hours firing up the oven and trying to raise a loaf of wheat bread with saleratus, the only leavening she could find. When the loaf came from the oven, though, it resembled a great poorly made biscuit; its crust was of a crackerlike texture, and the remainder was sodden and tasted of uncooked flour. Ada nibbled at a piece and then gave up and threw it out into the yard for the chickens to peck at. For dinner she ate only a plate of the little tomatoes and cucumbers, sliced and dribbled with vinegar and sprinkled with salt. For all the satisfaction they gave her, she might have just breathed air.

Ada left her dirty plate and fork on the table. She took a shawl from where it lay balled on the sofa and shook it out and wrapped it about her shoulders. She went to the porch and stood looking. The sky was cloudless, though hazed so that the blue looked faded and thin. She could see the black and gold rooster down near the barn. He scratched at the ground and pecked where he had scratched and then paced about fiercely. Ada left the house and went to the gate and out into the lane. It had carried so little traffic of late that the ridge down the center had grown a tall ruff of asters and foxtails. The fencerows at roadside were lined with tiny yellow and orange blossoms, and Ada went and touched one to watch it snap apart and throw its seeds.

—Snapweed, she said aloud, happy that there was something she could put a name to, even if it was one of her own devising.

She walked down the lane a mile, and then she passed out of Black Cove and turned onto the river road. As she went she picked a bouquet of wild-flowers—whatever caught her eye—fleabane, angelica, tickseed, heal-all. At the river, she turned upstream to go to the church. The road was the community thoroughfare and was rutted with wagon tracks and had sunken below grade from hard use. Low spots were churned into a black muddy bog from the passing of horses and cows and pigs, and at such places footpaths had been worn alongside the road by walkers seeking to avoid sinking up to their boot tops. Along the roadside the trees hung heavy with the green burden of leaves approaching the end of the season. They appeared tired of growth, drooping, though not from drought, for the summer had been wet and the black river alongside the road ran deep and smooth.

In fifteen minutes Ada reached the little chapel that had been in Monroe’s charge. Compared to the fine stone churches of Charleston, it was hardly more formal in its architecture than a bird trap, but its proportions—the pitch of its gable roof, the relations of its length and width and height, the placement of its simple steeple—were decidedly spare and elegant. Monroe had developed a great deal of affection for the chapel, its strict geometry according well with the plain impulses of his later years. Often as he and Ada had walked toward the chapel from the river he said, This is the way God speaks in this particular vernacular.

Ada climbed the hill and went to the burial ground behind the church and stood before Monroe’s plot. The black dirt had not yet grown a thick stand of grass. There was still no marker, Ada having rejected the local styles—either a flat river rock or an oak plank with the name and dates scratched faintly on the surface. She had instead ordered a carved granite headstone from the county seat, but it was slow in coming. She put the flowers on the ground at the head of the grave and picked up the previous bundle, now wilted and soggy.

The day Monroe had died was in May. Late that afternoon, Ada had prepared to go out for a time with a box of watercolors and a piece of paper to paint the newly opened blossoms on a rhododendron by the lower creek. As she left the house, she stopped to speak to Monroe, who sat reading a book in a striped canvas campaign chair under the pear tree. He seemed tired and said that he doubted he had vitality even to finish the page he was on before he dropped off to sleep, but he asked her to wake him when she returned, for he did not want to lie sleeping into the damp of evening. Too, he said, he feared he was just beyond the age at which he could rise unassisted from so low a chair.

Ada was away less than an hour. As she walked from the fields into the yard, she saw that Monroe lay in complete repose. His mouth was open and she thought he might be snoring and that over supper she would tease him for leaving himself exposed in so undignified a posture. She walked up to wake him, but as she approached she could see that his eyes were open, the book fallen into the grass. She ran the last three steps and put her hand to his shoulder to shake him, but at a touch she knew he was dead, for the flesh under her hand was so completely inert.

Ada went as fast as she could for help, running some and walking some over the shortcut trail that crossed the ridge and descended to the river road near the Swangers’ homestead. By that route they were the nearest neighbors. They were members of her father’s congregation, and Ada had known them from her earliest days in the mountains. She reached their house breathless and crying. Before Esco Swanger could hitch his team to a buggy and return with Ada by the roundabout way of the road, a rain blew in from the west. When they got back to the cove, darkness was falling and Monroe was wet as a trout and there were dogwood petals on his face. The watercolor Ada had dropped under the pear tree was an abstract splatter of pink and green.

She had spent that night in the Swangers’ house, lying wide awake and dry eyed, thinking for a long time that she wished she could have gone before Monroe, though she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

Two days later, Ada had buried Monroe on the knoll above the Little East Fork of the Pigeon River. The morning was bright, and a temperate wind swept down off Cold Mountain, and all the world quivered in it. There was scant humidity in the air for a change and all the colors and edges of things seemed crisp beyond the natural. Forty people, dressed in black, nearly filled the little chapel. The coffin rested on sawhorses before the pulpit, the lid off. Monroe’s face had collapsed upon itself since his death. Gravity working on slack skin had hollowed out his cheeks and eye sockets, and his nose seemed sharper and longer than in life. There was the pale shine of eyewhite where one lid had lifted a crack.

Ada, a hand cupped to her mouth, leaned and spoke softly to a man across the aisle from her. He rose and jingled in his pockets for change and drew out two brownies. He went and set one on each of Monroe’s eyes, for just to have covered the opening one would have looked strange and piratical.

The funeral service had been improvisational since no other ordained minister of their faith lived within traveling distance, and all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe’s failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy. Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.

So they had to make do with words from a few men of the church. One after the other they had shuffled to the pulpit and stood with their chins tucked against their chests in order to avoid looking directly at the congregation, especially at Ada, who sat on the front pew of the women’s side. Her mourning dress, dyed the day before greenish-black like the feathers of a drake’s head, was still fragrant from the process. Her face white as a stripped tendon in her cold grief.

The men talked awkwardly of what they called Monroe’s great learning and his other fine qualities. Of how since his coming from Charleston he had shed on the community a glowing light. They told of his small acts of kindness and the sage advice that he dispensed. Esco Swanger had been one of the speakers, a shade more articulate than the rest, though no less nervous. He spoke of Ada and her terrible loss, of how she would be missed when she returned to her home in Charleston.

Then, later, they stood at graveside as the coffin was lowered on ropes by the six men of the congregation who had carried the box from the chapel. With the coffin snugged down in its hole, another of the men led a final prayer, remarking of Monroe’s vigor, his untiring service to the church and the community, the troubling suddenness with which he had faltered and fallen into death’s eternal slumber. He seemed to find in those simple events a message for all concerning the shifty nature of life, how God intended it as a lesson.

They had all stood and watched as the grave was filled, but halfway through Ada had to turn her head and look away toward the bend of the river to be able to stand the moment. When the grave was tamped and mounded up, they all turned and walked away. Sally Swanger had taken Ada by the elbow and steered her down the hill.

—You stay with us until you can fix up things for going back to Charleston, she said.

Ada stopped and looked at her. I will not be returning to Charleston immediately, she said.

—They Lord, Mrs. Swanger said. Where are you going?

—Black Cove, Ada said. I will be staying here, at least for a time.

Mrs. Swanger stared, then caught herself. How will you make it? she said.

—I am not entirely sure, Ada said.

—You’re not going up to that big dark house by yourself today. Take dinner with us and stay until you’re ready to leave.

—I would be obliged, Ada said. She had stayed on with the Swangers three days and then returned to the empty house, frightened and alone. After three months, the fright had somewhat faded, but Ada reckoned that to be little comfort since her new life seemed only a foreview of herself as an old woman, awash in solitude and the feeling of diminishing capabilities.

Ada turned from the grave plot and walked down the hill to the road and decided as she reached it to keep on walking upriver and over the shortcut back into Black Cove. Aside from being quicker, that route had the advantage of taking her by the post office. And, too, she would pass the Swanger place, where they might offer some dinner.

She walked along and met an old woman driving a red hog and a pair of turkeys before her, cutting at them with a willow switch when they strayed. Then a man caught up with her from behind and passed. He was stooped, walking fast, carrying a shovel out before him. A mound of hot coals smoked in the blade of it. The man grinned and without pausing said over his shoulder that he’d let his fire go out and had gone to borrow some. Then Ada came upon a man with a heavy croker sack hanging pendant from a chestnut limb. Three crows sat high in the tree and watched down and said not a word in judgment. The man was bigly made and he beat at the sack with a broken-off hoe handle, laying into it so that the dust flew. He talked at the sack, cursing it, as if it were the chief impediment to his living a life of ease and content. There was the sound of dull blows, his breathing and his muttering, the gritting of his feet finding hold in the dirt from which to strike another lick at the sack. Ada studied him as she passed, and then she stopped and went back and asked him what he was doing. Beating the shells off beans, he said. And he made it clear that he was of the mind that every little bean in there was a thing to hate. He’d plowed and planted in hate. Trained the vines up poles and weeded the rows in hate and watched the blossoms set and the pods form and fill in hate. He had picked beans cursing every one his fingers touched, flinging them off into a withy basket as if filth clung to his hands. Beating was the only part of the process, even down to the eating of them, that he cared for.

By the time Ada reached the mill, the day’s haze had not yet burned away, but she had become too warm for her shawl. She removed it and rolled it to carry under her arm. The mill wheel was turning, spilling its load of water into the tailrace, spraying and splattering. When Ada set her hand to the doorframe, the whole building vibrated with the turning of mill wheel and gears and drive shaft and grindstones. She stuck her head in the door and raised her voice loud enough to be heard over the creak and groan of the machinery. Mr. Peek? she said.

The room smelled of dried corn, old wood, the mossy millrace, falling water. The inside was dim, and what light did come in the two little windows and the door fell in beams through an atmosphere thick with the dust of ground corn. The miller stepped from behind the grindstones. He brushed his hands together and more dust flew. When he came into the light of the door, Ada could see that his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes and the hair of his arms were frosted pale grey with corn dust.

—Come for mail? he said.

—If there is any.

The miller went into the post office, a tiny shed-roofed extension cobbled onto the gristmill. He came out with a letter and looked at it, turning it front and back. Ada stuck it into the book in her pocket, the Simms, and walked on up the road to the Swanger place.

She found Esco by the barn. He was bent over trying to cotter a cartwheel with a peg he had whittled from a locust branch, driving it in with a hand sledge. As Ada walked to him from the road, he stood and set down the sledge and leaned forward against the cart, gripping the topboard two-fisted. There appeared to be no great odds between the color and hardness of his hands and the boards. He had sweated through his shirt, and as Ada came near, she drew in his smell, which was that of wet pottery. Esco was tall and thin with a tiny head and a great shock of dry grey hair which roached up to a point like the crest on a titmouse.

He welcomed the excuse to quit working and walked Ada to the house, passing through the fence gate into the yard. Esco had used the fence for hitching rack, and the pointed tops of the palings had been cribbed away to splintered nubs by bored horses. The yard was bare, swept clean, with not a bush or flower bed as ornament, only a half-dozen big oak trees and a covered well, a novelty in that country of moving water, for the place they had chosen to live in was called No Creek Cove. The house was large and had once been painted white, but the paint was flaking off in patches as big as a hand so that currently it could fairly be said to resemble a dapple mare, though one day soon it would just be grey.

Sally sat on the porch threading beans on strings to make leatherbritches, and five long strings of pods already hung above her from the porch rafters to dry. She was shaped round in every feature and her skin was as lucent and shiny as a tallow candle and her greying hair was hennaed to the color of the stripe down a mule’s back. Esco pushed an empty straight chair to Ada and then he went inside and brought out another for himself. He started snapping beans. Nothing was said of dinner, and Ada looked to the pale sky. With some disappointment she saw that the bright spot where the sun stood indicated midafternoon. The Swangers would have long since eaten.

They sat together quietly for a minute, the only sounds the snap of beans and the hiss of Sally pulling thread through them with a needle and, from inside the house, the mantel clock ticking with the sound of a knuckle knocking on a box. Esco and Sally worked together comfortably, hands sometimes touching as they simultaneously reached into the bean basket. They were both quiet and slow in their movements, gentle toward each other, and they touched each pod as if it were a thing requiring great tenderness. Though not a childless couple, they had retained an air of romance to their marriage as the barren often do. They seemed never to have quite brought their courting to a proper close. Ada thought them sweet partners, but she saw nothing remarkable about their ease together. Having lived all her life with a widower, she had no true model in her mind of what marriage might be like, what toll the daily round might exact.

Their first talk was of the war, of how the prospects seemed grim, the Federals just over the mountains to the north, and things growing desperate in Virginia if the newspaper accounts of trench warfare in Petersburg were to be believed. Neither Esco nor Sally understood the war in any but the vaguest way, knowing for certain only two things: that they generally disapproved of it, and that Esco had reached an age when he required some help about the farm. For those and many other reasons, they would be glad to see the war done and their boys come walking up the road. Ada asked if there was any news from either of the boys, the two Swanger sons being off to the fighting. But they’d heard not a word in many months and knew not even what state they were in.

The Swangers had opposed the war from the start and had until recently remained generally sympathetic with the Federals, as had many in the mountains. But Esco had grown bitter with both sides, fearing them about equally now that the Federals were ranked up just over the big mountains to the north. He worried that they would soon come looking for food, take what they want, and leave a man with nothing. He’d been in to the county seat recently, and it was all over town that Kirk and his bluecoats had already started raiding up near the state line. Came down on a family and looted their farm at grey dawn, stole every animal they could find and every bit of portable food they could carry, and set fire to the corncrib in parting.

—Them’s the liberators, Esco said. And our own bunch is as bad or worse. Teague and his Home Guard roaring around like a band of marauders. Setting their own laws as suits them, and them nothing but trash looking for a way to stay out of the army.

He’d heard the Guard had rousted a family out into their yard at dinnertime. Owenses from down about Iron Duff. Teague claimed they were known to be lovers of the Federals and suspected members of the Red String Band and that whatever hoard of treasure they had must fall forfeit. First they took the house apart and then they prodded around in the yard with their sabers to see if they could find soft dirt from fresh digging. They slapped the man some, and later his wife. Then they hanged a pair of bird dogs each by each, and when that failed to get the man’s attention, they tied the woman’s thumbs together behind her back and hoisted her up by them with a cord thrown over a tree limb. Hauled on it till her toes just touched the ground. But the man still wouldn’t say word one, so they took her down and set the corner of a rail fence on her thumbs, but that didn’t faze the man either.

The children were wailing and the woman was down on the ground with her thumbs still under the fence corner screaming how she knew her man had hid the silver service and the hoard of gold pieces they had remaining after the hard times of the war. She didn’t know where he’d buried it, she just knew he had. She first begged him to tell, then she begged the Guard to have mercy. Then, when Owens still refused to talk, she begged them to kill him first so she could at least have the satisfaction of watching.

About that time one of the Guard, a white-headed boy called Birch, said he believed they maybe should stop and leave, but Teague leveled a pistol at him and said, I’ll not be told how to treat the likes of Bill Owens and his wife and the young’uns. I’ll go to the Federals before I’ll live in a country where I can’t deal out to such people what they deserve.

—In the end, Esco concluded, they didn’t kill nobody and they didn’t find the silver. Just lost interest and headed off down the road. The wife left Owens on the spot. Came to town with the children and is living with her brother and telling the tale to whoever’ll listen.

Esco sat for a time leaned forward in the chair with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging loose from their wrists. He seemed to be studying the porch boards or gauging the wear of his boot leather. Ada knew from experience that, were he outside, he would spit between his feet and then stare at the spot in evident fascination.

—This war’s something else, he said in a minute. Every man’s sweat has a price for it. Big flatland cotton men steal it every day, but I think sometime maybe they’ll wish they’d chopped their own damn cotton. I just want my boys home and out hoeing the bottomland while I sit on the porch and holler Good job every time that clock strikes the half hour.

Sally nodded and said, Uh-huh, and that seemed to close the topic.

They moved on to other matters, Ada listening with interest as Esco and Sally listed the old signs they had noted of a hard winter coming. Grey squirrels rattling in hickory trees, frantic to hoard more and more nuts. Wax thick on the wild crabapples. Wide bands of black on caterpillars. Yarrow crushed between the hands smelling sharp as falling snow. Hawthorns loaded with red haws burning bright as blood.

—Other signs too, Esco said. Bad ones.

He had been keeping a tally of omens and portents from around the county. A mule was said to have given birth near Catalooch, a pig to have been born with human hands at Balsam. A man at Cove Creek claimed to have slaughtered a sheep, and among its internals no heart was found. Hunters on Big Laurel swore that an owl made utterments like those of a human, and though they found no agreement on its message, all confirmed that as the owl spoke, there appeared to be two moons in the sky. For three years running there had been uncommon raving of wolves in the winter, weak harvest of grain in summer. They all pointed to evil times. Esco’s thinking was that though they had so far been isolated from the general meanness of the war, its cess might soon spill through the low gaps and pour in to foul them all.

There was a pause, and then Sally said, Have you set on a course yet?

—No, Ada said.

—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 shifted 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 shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.

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.

—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 Swangers’ farm, and it climbed steeply away from the river. It first passed 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 compassed 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 proprietorship 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 passed for a hotel, until Monroe could arrange for muleteers to transport their crated belongings across the Blue Ridge to the village of Cold Mountain. During that time Monroe bought a carriage and a horse to draw it, and he was, as always, lucky in the purchase of things. He happened upon a man just rubbing a shine into the final coat of black lacquer on a new and beautifully built cabriolet. In addition, the man had a strong dappled gelding well matched to the carriage. Monroe bought them both without a moment of haggle, counting out money from his wallet into the yellowy and callused hand of the wainwright. It took several moments, but when he was done Monroe had sporty equipage indeed for a country preacher.

Thus outfitted, they went on ahead of their things, traveling first to the little town of Brevard, where there was no hotel, only a boardinghouse. They left from there in the blue light of the hour before dawn. It was a fine spring morning, and as they passed through the town Monroe had said, I am told we should be to Cold Mountain by suppertime.

The gelding seemed pleased to be on a jaunt. He stepped out smartly, pulling the light rig at a thrilling clip, the shiny spokes of its two high wheels buzzing with speed.

They climbed all through the bright morning. The wagon road was bound tight to left and right by bower and thicket, and it folded back upon itself in an endless succession of switchbacks as it ascended a narrow vale. The blue sky became but a thin cut above the dark slopes. They crossed and recrossed an upper branch of the French Broad and once passed so near a waterfall that the cold spray wet their faces.

Ada had never seen mountains other than the rocky Alps before and was not sure what to make of this strange and vegetal topography, its every cranny and crag home to some leafy plant foreign to the spare and sandy low country. The spreading tops of oak and chestnut and tulip poplar converged to make a canopy that crowded out the sunlight. Close to the ground, azalea and rhododendron ranked up to make an understory thick as a stone wall.

Nor was Ada easy in her mind with this land’s pitiful and informal roads. So inferior were these rutted tracks to the broad and sandy pikes of the low country that they seemed more the product of roaming cattle than of man. The road decreased in width at every turning until Ada became convinced that the way would soon disappear altogether, leaving them adrift in a wilderness as trackless and profound as that which leapt up when God first spoke the word greenwood.

Monroe, though, was in high glee for a man so recently hemorrhaging. He looked about as if he had been charged, upon penalty of death, with remembering every fold of terrain and every shade of green. Periodically, he startled the horse by suddenly declaiming lines from Wordsworth in a loud voice. When they rounded a bend and stopped before a distant pale vista of the flat country they had left behind, he hollered, “Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would be the soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.”

Later in the afternoon, when the sky had filled with roiling clouds driven by an eastering wind, they paused amid a stand of black balsam where the track topped out at Wagon Road Gap. From there the way ahead plunged alarmingly to follow the fall of waters down a roaring fork of the Pigeon River. Before them they could see the bulk of Cold Mountain reared up better than six thousand feet, its summit hidden by dark clouds and white fog in bands. Between the gap and the mountain was a wild and broken terrain of scarp and gorge. At that lonesome spot Monroe again called upon his favorite poet and cried, “The sick sight and giddy prospect of the raving stream, the unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—were all like workings of one mind, the features of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, characters of the great Apocalypse, the types and symbols of Eternity, of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”

Ada had laughed and kissed Monroe’s cheek, thinking, I would follow this old man to Liberia if he asked me to do so.

Monroe then eyed the troubled clouds and raised the folded carriage top of painted and waxed canvas, as black and angular on its frame of hinged members as a bat’s wing. So new it crackled as he pulled it into place.

He shook the reins, and the sweated gelding pitched forward, happy to be on the easy side of gravity. Soon, though, the road was at such a cant that Monroe had to set the brake to keep the cabriolet from riding up over the horse’s haunches.

Rain fell, and then darkness. There was not moonlight nor the prick of lantern light from some welcoming home. The town of Cold Mountain was ahead, but they knew not how far. They drove on into the black, trusting the horse not to fall headlong over some rocky ledge. The lack of even lonesome cabins indicated that they were still a way from the village. Distances, apparently, had been misjudged.

The rain fell aslant, coming at their faces so that the top of the carriage did little good in sheltering them from it. The horse walked head down. They came to turn after turn in the road, every one unmarred by signpost. At each fork, Monroe simply guessed at the route they ought to take.

Late, long after midnight, they came to a dark chapel on a hill above the road and a river. They went in out of the rain and slept stretched out on pews in their sodden clothes.

Morning broke to fog, but its brightness announced that it would burn off quickly. Monroe rose stiffly and walked outside. Ada heard him laugh and then say, Powers that be, I thank you yet again.

She went to him. He stood before the chapel grinning and pointing above the door. She turned and read the sign: Cold Mountain Assembly.

—We have against all odds arrived at home, Monroe had said. At the time, it was a sentiment Ada took with a great deal of skepticism. All of their Charleston friends had expressed the opinion that the mountain region was a heathenish part of creation, outlandish in its many affronts to sensibility, a place of wilderness and gloom and rain where man, woman, and child grew gaunt and brutal, addicted to acts of raw violence with not even a nod in the direction of self-restraint. Only men of gentry affected underdrawers, and women of every station suckled their young, leaving the civilized trade of wet nurse unknown. Ada’s informants had claimed the mountaineers to be but one step more advanced in their manner of living than tribes of vagrant savages.

In the weeks that followed their arrival, as she and Monroe visited current and potential members of his congregation, Ada discovered that these people were indeed odd, though not exactly in the ways predicted by Charlestonians. During their visits they found the people to be touchy and distant, largely unreadable. They often acted as if they had been insulted, though neither Ada nor Monroe could say how. Many homesteads operated as if embattled. Only men would come out onto the porch to meet them as they came visiting, and sometimes Monroe and Ada would be invited in and sometimes not. And often it was worse to be asked in than to be left standing awkwardly out in the yard, for Ada found such visits frightening.

The houses were dark inside, even on a bright day. Those with shutters kept them pulled to. Those with curtains kept them drawn. The houses smelled strangely, though not uncleanly, of cooking and animals and of people who worked. Rifles stood in the corners and hung on pegs above mantels and doors. Monroe would rattle on at great length, introducing himself and explaining his view of the church’s mission and talking theology and urging attendance at prayer meetings and services. All the while the men would sit in straight chairs looking at the fire. Many of them went unshod and they stuck their feet out before them with no shame whatsoever. For all you could tell by their bearing, they might have been alone. They looked at the fire and said not a word and moved not one muscle in their faces as response to anything Monroe said. When he pressed them with a direct question they sat and thought about it for a long time, and sometimes they answered in brief vague phrases and more often they just looked sharply at him as if that in itself conveyed all the message they cared to pass. There were hidden people in the houses. Ada could hear them knocking about in other rooms, but they would not come forth. She supposed them to be women, children, and old people. It was as if they found the world beyond their cove so terrible that they might be fouled by any contact with outlanders and that all but kith and kin were best counted as enemy.

After such visits, Ada and Monroe always left at a brisk clip, and as they spun down the road in the cabriolet, he talked of ignorance and devised strategies for its defeat. Ada just felt the whirl of the wheels, the speed of their retreat, and a vague envy of people who seemed to care nothing at all for the things she and Monroe knew. They had evidently come to entirely different conclusions about life and lived utterly by their own light.

Monroe’s greatest debacle as missionary had come later that summer and involved Sally and Esco. A Mies man in the congregation had told Monroe that the Swangers were stunning in their ignorance. Esco, according to Mies, could scarcely read, in fact had never advanced in his understanding of history beyond the earliest doings of the Deity in Genesis. The creation of light was about the last thing he had a firm grasp of. Sally Swanger, Mies had said, was somewhat less informed. They both saw the Bible only as a magic book and used it like a gypsy hand reader. They held it and let it fall open and then stabbed a finger at the page and tried to puzzle out the meaning of the word so indicated. It was deemed oracular, and they acted upon it as instructions straight from God’s mind. If God said go, they went. He said abide, they stayed put. He said slay, Esco got the hatchet and went looking for a pullet. They were, despite their ignorance, unavoidably prosperous since their farm occupied a wide piece of cove bottom with dirt so black and rich it would raise sweet potatoes as long as your arm with only the least efforts toward keeping the weeds shaved back. They would make valuable members of the congregation if Monroe could only bring them up-to-date.

So Monroe had gone visiting, Ada at his side. They’d sat together in the parlor, Esco humped forward as Monroe tried to engage him in a discussion of faith. But Esco gave up little of himself and his beliefs. Monroe found no evidence of religion other than a worship of animals and trees and rocks and weather. Esco was some old relic Celt was what Monroe concluded; what few thoughts Esco might have would more than likely be in Gaelic.

Seizing such a unique opportunity, Monroe attempted to explain the high points of true religion. When they got to the holy trinity Esco had perked up and said, Three into one. Like a turkey foot.

Then in awhile, convinced that Esco had indeed not yet got report of his culture’s central narrative, Monroe told the story of Christ from divine birth to bloody crucifixion. He included all the famous details and, while keeping it simple, he summoned all the eloquence he could. When he’d finished, he sat back waiting for a reaction.

Esco said, And you say this took place some time ago?

Monroe said, Two thousand years, if you consider that some time ago.

—Oh, I’d call that a stretch all right, Esco said. He looked at his hands where they hung from the wrists. He flexed the fingers and looked at them critically as if trying the fittings of a new implement. He thought on the story awhile and then said, And what this fellow come down for was to save us?

—Yes, Monroe said.

—From our own bad natures and the like?

—Yes.

—And they still done him like they did? Spiked him up and knifed him and all?

—Yes indeed, Monroe said.

—But you say this story’s been passed around some hundred-score years? Esco said.

—Nearly.

—So to say, a long time.

—A very long time.

Esco grinned as if he had solved a puzzle and stood up and slapped Monroe on the shoulder and said, Well, about all we can do is hope it ain’t so.

At home that night, Monroe had drawn up plans as to how he might best instruct Esco in proper doctrine and so save him from heathenism. It never entered Monroe’s mind that he had been made a butt of humor and that his quest for ignorance had been so apparent from the moment he had entered Esco’s gate as to give grave offense. Nor, of course, did he suppose that—instead of shutting the door in his face or pitching a pan of grey footwash water at him or showing him the bore to his shotgun as some so insulted would have done—Esco, a gentle soul, had simply taken pleasure in giving Monroe great quantities of the ignorance he came seeking.

Esco bragged to no one about what he had done. In fact, he seemed not to care in the least whether or not Monroe ever knew the truth of the matter, which was that he and his wife were dipped Baptists. It was Monroe that spread the tale by way of asking for the names of others so benighted. He found it odd that people took the story as humorous and that people sought him out at the store or on the road and asked him to tell it. They would wait for him to repeat Esco’s final line as most men like to do after the recitation of a successful joke. When Monroe failed to do it, some would say the line again themselves, feeling evidently that things would otherwise be left incomplete. This went on until Sally finally took pity and told Monroe that he had been made a jestingstock and why.

Monroe remained low in spirit for days afterward at the ragging he had taken from the settlement at large. He had doubts that he could ever make a place for himself there, until Ada finally said, I think since we’ve been given a lesson in etiquette, we ought to act in accordance.

After that everything became clearer. They went to the Swangers and apologized and thereafter became friends with them and took meals with them regularly and, apparently to make amends for Esco’s prank, the Swangers soon ceased to be Baptists and joined the church.

For that first year, Monroe had kept their Charleston house and they lived in the dank little riverside parsonage that smelled so strongly of mildew in July and August as to burn the nose. Then, when it seemed that the change of climate was working some improvement on Monroe’s lungs and the community was finally tolerating him and might someday accept him, he decided to stay indefinitely. He sold the Charleston house and bought the cove from the Black family, who had taken a sudden notion to move to Texas. Monroe liked the picturesque setting, the lay of the land, flat and open at cove bottom, better than twenty acres of it cleared and fenced into fields and pastures. He liked the arc of the wooded hillsides as they swept up, broken by ridge and hollow, to Cold Mountain. Liked the water from the spring, so cold that even in the summer it made your teeth ache and carried the clean neutral taste of the stone it rose from.

And he especially liked the house he had built there, largely because it represented his faith in a future that would include himself for at least a few more years. Monroe drew the plans for the new house with his own hand, supervised the construction. And it turned out well-made in the current mold, tightly covered in whitewashed clapboards outside, dark beadboard walls inside, a deep porch all across the front, attached kitchen extending from the back, a great broad fireplace in the sitting room, and woodstoves in the bedrooms, a rarity in the mountains. The Blacks’ log cabin stood a few hundred rods up the hill toward Cold Mountain from the new house, and it became quarters for the hired help.

When Monroe had bought the cove, the place had been a fully operating farm, but Monroe had soon let many parts of it lapse, for he never intended it to be self-sufficient. Nor did it ever need to be if, as he had assumed, the money continued to flow from his Charleston investments in rice and indigo and cotton.

Apparently, however, the money would not continue, as Ada found when she left off surveying her holdings from her perch on the ridge and drew the letter from the book in her pocket and read it. Shortly after the funeral, she had written to Monroe’s friend and solicitor in Charleston, informing him of the death and asking for information on her financial position. The letter was the long-delayed response. It was brittlely phrased, cautious. It discussed as if at arm’s length the war, the embargo, the various other expressions of hard times, and their effect on Ada’s income, which would be reduced, in fact, to approximately nothing, at least until the war’s successful conclusion. Should the war effort be unsuccessful, Ada might realistically expect nothing forevermore. The letter ended with an offer to act as administrator of Monroe’s estate since Ada might justifiably feel ill-endowed to perform those duties herself. It was delicately suggested that the task called for judgments and knowledge outside Ada’s realm.

She stood and thrust the letter into her pocket and took the trail down into Black Cove. In light of the thought that the present was threat enough and no one knows what horrid things might overtake them in the time ahead, Ada wondered where she might find the courage to search out hope. When she emerged from the big trees of the ridge, she found that the haze had burned or blown away. The sky was clear, and Cold Mountain suddenly looked close enough to reach out and touch. The day was wearing on and the sun was bearing downward and would in two hours tip below the mountains to begin the interminable high-country twilight. A boomer chattered at her from its perch high in a hickory tree as she passed underneath. Shreds of nut shell fell around her.

When she reached the old stone wall that marked the top of the upper pasture, she paused again. It was a lovely spot, one of her favorite corners of the farm. Lichen and moss had grown on the stones so that the wall looked ancient, though it was not. One of the elder Blacks had apparently started it in an attempt to clear the field of stones but had given up after only twenty feet, at which point split rails took over. The wall ran north to south, and on this sunny afternoon its west face was warm with afternoon sun. An apple tree, a golden delicious, grew near it, and a few early ripening apples had fallen into the tall grass. Bees came to the sweet smell of rotting apples and hummed in the sunshine. The wall did not command a sweeping prospect, just a quiet view of the corner of a woodlot and a blackberry tangle and two big chestnut trees. Ada thought it the most peaceful place she had ever known. She settled herself into the grass at the base of the wall and rolled her shawl into a pillow. She drew the book from her pocket and began reading a chapter titled How Blackbirds Are Taken, and How Blackbirds Fly. She read on and on and forgot herself in the tale of war and outlawry until she eventually fell asleep to the lowering sun and the sound of bees.

She slept a long time and was visited by a strong dream in which she found herself in a train depot amid a crowd of waiting passengers. There was a glass case in the center of the room, and in it stood the bones of a man, much like an anatomy display she had once seen in a museum. As she sat waiting for the train, the case filled with a blue glow, the light rising slowly like twisting up the wick in a lantern globe. Ada saw with horror that the bones were reclothing themselves with flesh, and as the process went on it became clear to her that her father was being reconstructed.

The other passengers drew back in horror to the walls of the room, but Ada, though also terrified, walked to the glass and put her hands to it and waited. Monroe, however, never fully became himself. He remained but an animated corpse, the skin thin as parchment over the bones. His movements were slow yet frenzied, as a man struggling underwater. He put his mouth to the glass and talked with great earnestness and urgency to Ada. His demeanor was that of one telling the most important thing he knew. But Ada, even pressing her ear to the glass, could not hear a thing other than murmuring. Then there was the sound of wind before a storm, and the case was suddenly empty. A conductor came and called the passengers to the train, and it was clear to Ada that its final destination was Charleston in the past, and that if she got on she would arrive at her girlhood, with the clock turned back twenty years. All the passengers boarded, and they were a jolly band, waving from the windows and smiling. Snatches of song came from some compartments. But Ada stood alone on the siding as the train rolled away.

She awoke to a night sky. The rusty beacon of Mars was just slipping below the line of woodlot trees to the west. That told her it must be past the middle of the night, for she had been marking its early evening position in her notebook. A half-moon stood high in the sky. The night was dry and only a little cool. Ada unrolled the shawl and wrapped it about her. She had, of course, never spent a night in the woods alone, but she found it less frightening than she would have thought, even after her troubling dream. The moon shed a fine blue light on the woods and fields. Cold Mountain was visible only as a faint smudge of darkness across the sky. There was no sound but the call of a bobwhite from the distance. She felt no need to hurry to the house.

Ada pulled the wax seal off the crock of blackberry preserves and dipped two fingers into it and scooped berries into her mouth. The preserves had been made with little sweetening and tasted fresh and sharp. Ada sat for hours and watched the progress of the moon across the sky and ate until the little crock was empty. She thought of her father in the dream and of the dark figure in the well. Though she loved Monroe deeply, she realized she was oddly affected by his appearance in her visions. She did not want him coming for her, nor did she want to follow him too immediately.

Ada sat on long enough to watch the day rise. The first grey light began gathering faintly, and then as the light built the mountains began to form themselves, retaining the dark of night in their bulk. The fog that clung to the peaks lifted and lost the shapes of the mountains and dissipated in the warmth of the morning. In the pasture the forms of trees remained drawn in dew on the grass beneath them. When she stood to walk down to the house, the smell of night still lingered under the two chestnut trees.

At the house, Ada took the lap desk and went to her reading chair. The hallway was in deep gloom but for a patch of the golden light of morning that fell onto the top of the desk where it sat across her legs. The light was sectioned by the muntins of the window sash, and the air it passed through was full of hovering dust motes. Ada put her paper into one of the squares of light and wrote a quick letter thanking the lawyer for his offer but declining it on the grounds that at present she was of the opinion that her qualifications for administering an estate composed of nearly nothing were more than sufficient.

In the hours of her night watch she had gone over and over the possibilities before her. They were few. If she tried to sell out and return to Charleston, the little money she could hope to realize from the farm in such bad times, when buyers would be scarce, could hardly support her for long. She would, after a point, have to attach herself to friends of Monroe’s in some mildly disguised parasitic relationship, tutor or music instructor or the like.

That or marry. And the thought of returning to Charleston as some desperate predatory spinster was appalling to her. She could imagine the scenes. Spending much of what money she had on suitable wardrobe and then negotiating matrimony with the kind of aging and ineffectual leftovers of a certain level of Charleston society—one several layers down from the top—when all the men approximately her age were off to war. All she could foresee was eventually finding herself saying to someone that she loved him, when what she would mean was that he happened to have turned up at a particularly needy time. She could not, even under the current duress, push her mind to imagine—beyond a general feeling of press and smother—the marriage act with such a one.

If she returned to Charleston under those humiliating conditions, she could expect little sympathy and much withering commentary, for in the eyes of many she had foolishly squandered the fleeting few years of courtship when young ladies were elevated to the apex of their culture, and men knelt in deference while all of society stood at attention to watch their progress toward marriage as if the primary moral force of the universe were focused in that direction. At the time, Monroe’s friends and acquaintances had found her relative disinterest in the process puzzling.

She had done little to help matters, for in the confines of ladies’ parlors following dinner parties where the mated and the mating passed sharp judgment on one another, she was prone to claim she was so dreadfully bored by suitors—all of whom seemed limited in their sphere of interests to business, hunting, and horses—that she felt she ought to have a sign fashioned to read Gentlemen Prohibited hanging from the porch gate. She counted on such pronouncements to evoke a doctrinal response, either from one of the elders in the group or from one of the debutantes eager to ingratiate herself among those who held that the highest expression of married woman was reasonable submission to man’s will. Marriage is the end of woman, one of them would say. And Ada would respond, Indeed. There we can agree, at least as long as we do not dwell too long on the meaning of the word located next-to-the-last-but-one from your period. She delighted in the silence that followed as all present counted back to find the piece of diction in question.

As a result of such behavior, it became not an uncommon opinion among their acquaintances to think that Monroe had shaped her into a type of monster, a creature not entirely fit for the society of men and women. There was, therefore, little surprise, though considerable indignation, at Ada’s response to two marriage proposals during her nineteenth year: she rejected them out of hand, explaining later that what she found lacking in her suitors was a certain amplitude—of thought, of feeling, of being. That and the fact that both men kept their hair shiny with pomatum, as if to compensate in some visible way for their lack of sparkling wit.

To many of her friends, rejection of a marriage proposal made by any man of means who was not defective in a clear and demonstrable way was, if not inconceivable, at least inexcusable, and in the year before their move to the mountains, many of her friends had fallen away, finding her too bristly and eccentric.

Even now, return to Charleston was a bitter thought and one that her pride rejected. There was nothing pulling her back there. Certainly not family. She had no relatives closer than her cousin Lucy, no kindly aunts or doting grandparents welcoming her return. And that state of kinlessness too was a bitter thought, considering that all around her the mountain people were bound together in ties of clan so extensive and firm that they could hardly walk a mile along the river road without coming upon a relative.

But still, outsider though she was, this place, the blue mountains, seemed to be holding her where she was. From any direction she came at it, the only conclusion that left her any hope of self-content was this: what she could see around her was all that she could count on. The mountains and a desire to find if she could make a satisfactory life of common things here—together they seemed to offer the promise of a more content and expansive life, though she could in no way picture even its starkest outlines. It was easy enough to say, as Monroe often had, that the path to contentment was to abide by one’s own nature and follow its path. Such she believed was clearly true. But if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one’s nature was, then even stepping out on the path became a snaggy matter.

She therefore sat at the window that morning wondering sincerely and with some confusion what her next action should be when she saw a figure come walking up the road. As it neared the house Ada resolved the figure into a girl of sorts, a short one, thin as a chicken neck except across the points of her sharp hipbones, where she was of substantial width. Ada went to the porch and sat, waiting to see what this person might want.

The girl came up to the porch and without asking leave sat in a rocker next to Ada and hooked her heels on the chair rungs. She started rocking. As a structure, she was stable as a drag sled, low in her center of gravity but knobby and slight in all the extremities. She wore a square-necked dress of coarse homespun cloth, the dusty color of blue that comes from dye made of the inside of ragweed galls.

—Old Lady Swanger said you’re in need of help, she said.

Ada examined the girl further. She was a dark thing, corded through the neck and arms. Frail-chested. Her hair was black and coarse as a horse’s tail. Broad across the bridge of her nose. Big dark eyes, virtually pupil-less, the whites of them startling in their clarity. She went shoeless, but her feet were clean. The nails to her toes were pale and silver as fish scales.

—Mrs. Swanger is right. I do need help, Ada said, but what I need is in the way of rough work. Plowing, planting, harvesting, woodcutting, and the like. This place has to be made self-sufficient. I believe I need a man-hand for the job.

—Number one, the girl said, if you’ve got a horse I can plow all day. Number two, Old Lady Swanger told me your straits. Something for you to keep in mind would be that every man worth hiring is off and gone. It’s a harsh truth, but that’s mostly the way of things, even under favorable conditions.

The girl’s name, Ada soon discovered, was Ruby, and though the look of her was not confidence-inspiring, she convincingly depicted herself as capable of any and all farm tasks. Just as importantly, as they talked, Ada found she was enormously cheered by Ruby. Ada’s deep impression was that she had a willing heart. And though Ruby had not spent a day of her life in school and could not read a word nor write even her name, Ada thought she saw in her a spark as bright and hard as one struck with steel and flint. And there was this: like Ada, Ruby was a motherless child from the day she was born. They had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short order, and somewhat to Ada’s surprise, they began striking a deal.

Ruby said, I’ve not ever hired out as hand or servant, and I’ve not heard good things told about taking on such a job. But Sally said you needed help, and she was right. What I’m saying is, we have to come to some terms.

This is where we talk about money, Ada thought. Monroe had never consulted her in the matter of hiring, but she was under the impression that the help did not ordinarily lay down conditions for their employment. She said, Right this minute, and possibly for some time to come, money is in short supply.

—Money’s not it, Ruby said. Like I said, I’m not exactly looking to hire out. I’m saying if I’m to help you here, it’s with both us knowing that everybody empties their own night jar.

Ada started to laugh but then realized this was not meant to be funny. Something on the order of 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 snatched 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.