Читать книгу Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier - Страница 9

The agreement Ada and Ruby reached on that first morning was this: Ruby would move to the cove and teach Ada how to run a farm. There would be very little money involved in her pay. They would take most of their meals together, but Ruby did not relish the idea of living with anyone else and decided she would move into the old hunting cabin. After they had eaten their first dinner of chicken and dumplings, Ruby went home and was able to wrap everything worth taking in a quilt. She had gathered the ends, slung it over her shoulder, and headed to Black Cove, never looking back.

The two women spent their first days together making an inventory of the place, listing the things that needed doing and their order of urgency. They walked together about the farm, Ruby looking around a lot, evaluating, talking constantly. The most urgent matter, she said, was to get a late-season garden into the ground. Ada followed along, writing it all down in a notebook that heretofore had received only her bits of poetry, her sentiments on life and the large issues of the day. Now she wrote entries such as these:

To be done immediately: Lay out a garden for cool season crops—turnips, onions, cabbage, lettuce, greens.

Cabbage seed, do we have any?

Soon: Patch shingles on barn roof; do we have a maul and froe?

Buy clay crocks for preserving tomatoes and beans.

Pick herbs and make from them worm boluses for the horse.

And on and on. So much to do, for apparently Ruby planned to require every yard of land do its duty.

The hayfields, Ruby said, had not been cut frequently enough, and the grass was in danger of being taken over by spurge and yarrow and ragweed, but it was not too far gone to save. The old cornfield, she declared, had profited from having been left to lie fallow for several years and was now ready for clearing and turning. The outbuildings were in fair shape, but the chicken population was too low. The root cellar in the can house was, in her estimation, a foot too shallow; she feared a bad cold spell might freeze potatoes stored there if they didn’t dig it deeper. A martin colony, if they could establish one alongside the garden in gourd houses, would help keep crows away.

Ruby’s recommendations extended in all directions, and she never seemed to stop. She had ideas concerning schedules for crop rotation among the various fields. Designs for constructing a tub mill so that once they had a corn crop they could grind their own meal and grits using waterpower from the creek and save having to give the miller his tithe. One evening before she set off in the dark to walk up to the cabin, her last words were, We need us some guineas. I’m not partial to their eggs for frying, but they’ll do for baking needs. Even discarding the eggs, guineas are a comfort to have around and useful in a number of ways. They’re good watchdogs, and they’ll bug out a row of pole beans before you can turn around. All that aside from how pleasant they are to look at walking around the yard.

The next morning her first words were, Pigs. Do you have any loose in the woods?

Ada said, No, we always bought our hams.

—There’s a world more to a hog than just the two hams, Ruby said. Take lard for example. We’ll need plenty.

Despite the laxity of Monroe’s tenure at Black Cove, there was nevertheless much more to work with than Ada had realized. On one of their first walks about the place, Ruby was delighted by the extensive apple orchards. They had been planted and maintained by the Blacks and were only now beginning to show the first marks of inattention. Despite lack of recent pruning, they were thick with maturing fruit.

—Come October, Ruby said, we’ll get enough in trade for those apples to make our winter a sight easier than it would be otherwise.

She paused and thought a minute. You don’t have a press, do you? she said. When Ada said she thought they might indeed, Ruby whooped in joy.

—Hard cider is worth considerably more in trade than apples, she said. All we’ll have to do is make it.

Ruby was pleased too with the tobacco patch. In the spring, Monroe had given the hired man permission to plant a small field of tobacco for his own use. Despite most of a summer of neglect, the plants were surprisingly tall and full-leaved and worm-free, though weeds grew thick in the rows and the plants were badly in need of topping and suckering. Ruby believed the plants had thrived despite disregard because they must have been planted in full accordance with the signs. She calculated that with luck they might get a small crop and said that if they cured the leaves and soaked them in sorghum water and twisted them into plugs, they could trade off tobacco for seed and salt and leavening and other items they could not produce themselves.

Barter was very much on Ada’s mind, since she did not understand it and yet found herself suddenly so untethered to the money economy. In the spirit of partnership and confidence, she had shared with Ruby the details of her shattered finances. When she told Ruby of the little money they had to work with, Ruby said, I’ve never held a money piece bigger than a dollar in my hand. What Ada came to understand was that though she might be greatly concerned at their lack of cash, Ruby’s opinion was that they were about as well off without it. Ruby had always functioned at arm’s length from the buying of things and viewed money with a great deal of suspicion even in the best of times, especially when she contrasted it in her mind with the solidity of hunting and gathering, planting and harvesting. At present, matters had pretty much borne out Ruby’s darkest opinions. Scrip had gotten so cheapened in its value that it was hard to buy anything with it anyway. On their first trip together into town they had been stunned to have to give fifteen dollars for a pound of soda, five dollars for a paper of triple-ought needles, and ten for a quire of writing paper. Had they been able to afford it, a bolt of cloth would have cost fifty dollars. Ruby pointed out that cloth would cost them not a cent if they had sheep and set about shearing, carding, spinning, winding, dyeing, and weaving the wool into cloth for dresses and underdrawers. All Ada could think was that every step in the process that Ruby had so casually sketched out would be many days of hard work to come up with a few yards of material coarse as sacking. Money made things so much easier.

But even if they had it, shopkeepers really didn’t want money since the value of it would likely drop before they could get shut of it. The general feeling was that paper money ought to be spent as soon as possible; otherwise it might easily become worth no more than an equal volume of chaff. Barter was surer. And that Ruby seemed to understand fully. She had a headful of designs as to how they might make Black Cove answer for itself in that regard.

In short order Ruby had devised a plan. She put it to Ada as a choice. The two things she had marked in her inventory of the place as being valuable and portable and inessential were the cabriolet and the piano. She believed she could trade either one for about all they would need to make it through the winter. Ada weighed them in her mind for two days. At one point she said, It would be a shame to reduce that fine dapple gelding to drawing a plow, and Ruby said, He’ll be doing that whichever way you pick. He’ll have to work out his feed like anybody else around here.

Ada finally surprised even herself by settling on the piano to part with. Truth be told, though, her hand at the instrument was not particularly fine, and it had been Monroe’s choice that she learn to play it to begin with. It had meant so much to him that he had hired a teacher to live with them, a little man named Tip Benson who seldom kept a position for long as he could not refrain from falling in love with his charges. Ada had been no exception. She was fifteen at the time, and one afternoon, as she sat attempting a baffling passage from Bach, Benson had fallen to his knees by the piano bench and pulled her hands from the keys and drawn them to him and pressed their backs to his round cheeks. He was a plump man, no more than twenty-four at the time, with extraordinarily long fingers for one of his squat build. He pressed his pursed red lips to the backs of her hands and kissed them with great ardor. Another girl of Ada’s age might have played him to her advantage for a time, but Ada excused herself right then and went straight to Monroe and told him what had passed. Benson had his bags packed and was gone by suppertime. Monroe immediately hired as music tutor an old spinster with clothes that smelled of naphtha and underarms.

Part of Ada’s reasoning in choosing the piano for barter was that there would be little room for art in her coming life and what place she had for it could be occupied by drawing. The simple implements of pencil and paper would answer her needs in that regard.

She could see all the good reasons for parting with the piano. What she was not clear on were the reasons for keeping the cabriolet. There was the fact that it had been Monroe’s, but that did not feel like the holding point. She worried that it was the mobility of the thing that held her to it. The promise in its tall wheels that if things got bad enough she could just climb in and ride away. Be like the Blacks before her and take the attitude that there was no burden that couldn’t be lightened, no wreckful life that couldn’t be set right by heading off down the road.

After Ada made her decision known, Ruby wasted no time. She knew who had excess animals and produce, who would be willing to trade favorably. In this case it was Old Jones up on East Fork she dealt with. His wife had coveted the piano for some time, and knowing that, Ruby traded hard. Jones was finally made to give for it a pied brood sow and a shoat and a hundred pounds of corn grits. And Ruby—thinking how wool was such a useful thing in so many ways, especially with the current high cost of fabric—allowed that it wouldn’t hurt to take on a few of the little mountain sheep, not much bigger than a midsized breed of dog full grown. So she convinced Jones to throw in a half dozen of them as well. And a wagonload of cabbages. And a ham and ten pounds of bacon from the first hog he killed in November.

Within a matter of days, Ruby had driven the hogs and the little sheep, two of them dark, up into Black Cove. She shooed them onto the slopes of Cold Mountain to fend for themselves through the autumn, fattening on what mast they could find, which would be plenty. Before she let them go she had taken out her knife and marked their left ears with two smooth crops and a slit so that they all fled bloody-headed, squealing and bleating, to the mountain.

Late one afternoon, Old Jones came with a wagon and another old man to get the piano. The two stood in the parlor and looked at it a long time. The other old man said, I’m not so sure we can lift that thing, and Old Jones said, We’ve got the advantage of it; we have to. They finally got it into the wagon and roped it in tight, for it hung out past the tailboard.

Ada sat on the porch and watched the piano ride away. It jounced down the road, the unsprung wagon hitting hard on every rut and rock so that the piano played its own alarming and discordant tune in farewell. There was not a lot of regret in Ada’s mood, but what she thought about as she watched the wagon go was a party Monroe had given four days before Christmas in the last winter before the war.

• • •

The chairs in the parlor had been pushed back against the walls to make room for dancing, and those who could play took turns at the piano, beating out carols and waltzes and sentimental parlor tunes. The dining room table was loaded with tiny ham biscuits, cakes and brown bread and mince pies, and a pot of tea fragrant with orange and cinnamon and clove. Monroe had caused only a minor scandal by serving champagne, there being no Baptists in attendance. All the glass-bowled kerosene lamps were lit, and people marveled over them and their crimped chimney tops like the petals of buds opening, for they were a new thing and had not yet become general. Sally Swanger, though, expressed the fear that they would explode, and she judged the light they cast as too glaring and said tapers and hearth light suited her old eyes better.

Early in the evening people formed like-membered groups and gossiped. Ada sat with the women, but her attention flickered about the room. Six old men drew up chairs near the fire and talked of the looming crisis in Congress and sipped at their flutes and then held them up to the lamplight to study the bubbles. Esco said, It comes to a fight the Federals’ll kill us all down. When others in the group violently disagreed, Esco looked into his glass and said, A man made liquor with a bead like this, it’d be judged unsound.

Ada also paid mild heed to the young men, sons of valued members of the congregation. They sat in a back corner of the parlor and talked loudly. Most of them disdained the champagne and drank only somewhat surreptitiously from pocket ticklers full of corn liquor. Hob Mars, who had briefly paid poorly received court to Ada, announced as if speaking to the room at large that he had celebrated the Savior’s birth every night for a week. He claimed that from those parties dull enough to have ended before dawn he had lit his way home by pistol fire. He reached and took a drink from another man’s flask and then rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and looked at it and rubbed again. That’s got a whang to it, he said loudly and passed the flask back.

Women of mixed ages occupied another corner. Sally Swanger wore a new pair of fine shoes, and she sat awaiting comment on them, her feet out before her like a stiff-legged doll. Another of the older women told a somewhat extended tale of her daughter’s poor marriage. At the husband’s insistence, the daughter shared a house with a family of hounds who lounged about the kitchen at all times but coon hunts. The woman said she hated to go visit, for there was always dog hair in the gravy. She said her daughter had for several years produced one baby after another so that, contrary to her earlier wildness to be married, the daughter now viewed matrimony in a dim light. She had come to see it as a state summing up to little more than wiping tails. The other women laughed, but Ada felt for a moment as if she could not catch her breath.

Later the groups mixed and some stood around the piano and sang and then some of the younger people danced. Ada took a turn at the keyboard, but her mind hovered above the music. She played a number of waltzes and then left the piano and watched amused as Esco arose and, to no accompaniment other than his own whistling, performed a solitary shuffle step during which his eyes glazed over and his head bobbed like it hung by a string.

As the evening went on, Ada found that she had taken more than one glass of champagne beyond the prudent. Her face felt clammy and her neck was sweating under the ruching at the tall collar of her green velvet dress. Her nose felt as if it had swollen, so much so that she pinched it between thumb and forefinger to check its breadth and then went to the hall mirror, where she was startled to see it looking normal.

Sally Swanger, apparently under the sway of Monroe’s champagne as well, had at that moment pulled Ada aside in the hallway and in a whisper said, That Inman boy just got here. I should keep my mouth shut, but you ought to marry him. The two of you’d likely make pretty brown-eyed babies.

Ada had been appalled by the comment and, blushing fiercely, she fled to the kitchen to compose herself.

But there, throwing her thoughts into further disarray, she found Inman alone, sitting in the stove corner. He had arrived late, having ridden through a slow winter rain, and he was warming up and drying out before joining the party. He wore a black suit and sat with his legs crossed, his wet hat suspended from the toe of a dress boot near the hot stove. The palms of his hands were held up to catch the heat of the fire so that he looked like he was pushing something away.

—Oh, my, Ada said. There you are. The ladies are already so pleased to know you’re here.

—The old ladies? Inman said.

—Well, everyone. Your arrival has been noted with particular approval by Mrs. Swanger.

This called up a vivid and unplanned image, its theme suggested by Mrs. Swanger’s comment, and Ada felt a rushing in her head. She blushed again and quickly added, And by others, no doubt.

—Not feeling qualmish, are you? Inman said, somewhat confused by her behavior.

—No, no. This room is just close.

—You look flushed.

Ada touched her damp face at various points with the backs of her fingers and could not think of a thing to say. She made calipers with her fingers and took the measure of her nose again. She went to the door and opened it for a breath of cool air. The night smelled of wet rotting leaves and was so dark she could not see beyond the drops of water catching the door light as they fell from the porch eve. From the parlor came the simple first notes of Good King Wenceslas, and Ada recognized Monroe’s stiff phrasing at the piano. Then from out in the dark, over a great distance, came the high lonesome baying of a grey wolf far off in the mountains.

—That is a forlorn sound, Inman said.

Ada held the door open and waited to hear an answering call, but it never came. Poor thing, she said.

She closed the door and turned to Inman, but when she did the heat of the room and the champagne and the look on Inman’s face, which was softer than any contour she had ever seen there, conspired against her and she felt at once faint and giddy. She took a few uncertain steps, and when Inman half stood and reached out a hand to steady her, she took it. And then, by some mechanism she was unable to reconstruct later, she found herself in his lap.

He put his hands to her shoulders a moment and she settled back with her head beneath his chin. Ada remembered thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out to the points of her shoulders and held her there. She remembered the smell of his damp wool suit and a lingering smell of horse and tack.

She might have rested in his lap for half a minute, no more. Then she was up and away, and she remembered turning at the door, her hand on the casing, to look back at him where he sat with a puzzled smile on his face and his hat lying crown down on the floor.

Ada went back to the piano, where she moved Monroe aside and played for quite some time. Inman eventually came and stood, leaning with his shoulder against the doorjamb. He drank from a flute and watched her for a while and then he moved on to talk to Esco, who still sat near the fire. Through the rest of the evening, neither Ada nor Inman mentioned what had taken place in the kitchen. They talked only briefly and awkwardly and Inman left early.

Much later, in the small hours when the party broke up, Ada looked from the parlor window and watched as the young men went down the road, firing their pistols toward the heavens, the muzzle flash lighting them in brief silhouette.

Ada sat awhile after the wagon bearing the piano rounded the bend in the road. Then she lit a lantern and went to the basement, thinking that Monroe might have cellared a case or two of champagne there and that opening a bottle now and again might be pleasant. She found no wine but turned up instead a genuine treasure, one that greatly advanced their efforts toward barter. It was a hundred-pound sack of green coffee beans that Monroe had stored away, sitting there fat and sagging in a corner.

She called Ruby and they immediately filled the roaster and parched a half pound over the fire and ground it and then brewed up the first real coffee either of them had had in over a year. They drank cup after cup and stayed up most of the night, talking nonstop of plans for the future and memories of the past, and at one point Ada retold the entire thrilling plot of Little Dorrit, one of the books she had read during the summer. Over the next several days they bartered the coffee by the half pound and by the nogginful to neighbors, keeping back only ten pounds for their own use. When the sack was empty, they had taken in a side of bacon, five bushels of Irish potatoes and four of sweet, a tin of baking powder, eight chickens, various baskets of squash and beans and okra, an old wheel and loom in need of minor repair, six bushels of shell corn, and enough split shakes to reroof the smokehouse. The most valuable trade, though, was the five-pound sack of salt they had gotten, it having become so scarce and dear that some people now dug up their smokehouse floors and boiled and strained the dirt and then boiled it down and strained it again. Over and over until the dirt was gone and the water steamed away, so that in the end they had reclaimed the salt fallen to the ground from the hams of yesteryear.

In such matters of trade and in every other regard, Ruby proved herself a marvel of energy, and she soon imposed a routine on Ada’s day. Before dawn Ruby would have walked down from the cabin, fed the horse, milked the cow, and be banging pots and pans in the kitchen, a hot fire going in the stove, yellow corn grits bubbling in a pot, eggs and bacon spitting grease in a black pan. Ada was not accustomed to rising in the grey of morning—in fact, through the summer she had rarely risen before ten—but suddenly there was little choice. If Ada lay abed, Ruby would come roust her out. Ruby figured setting things to working was her job, not waiting on somebody and doing their bidding. On the few occasions when Ada had slipped and given her an order as if to a servant, Ruby had just looked at Ada hard and had then gone on doing what she was doing. What the look said was that Ruby could be gone at a moment’s notice like morning fog on a sunny day.

Part of the code for Ruby was that though she did not expect Ada to do the cooking at breakfast, she did expect her, at minimum, to be there to watch its conclusion. So Ada would walk down to the kitchen in her robe and sit in the chair in the warm stove corner and wrap her hands around a cup of coffee. Through the window the day would be starting to take shape, grey and loose in its features. Even on days that would eventually prove to be clear, Ada could seldom make out even the palings of the fence around the kitchen garden through the fog. At some point Ruby would blow out the yellow light of the lamp and the kitchen would go dim and then the light from outside would rise and fill the room. It seemed a thing of such wonder to Ada, who had not witnessed many dawns.

All during the cooking and the eating, Ruby would talk seamlessly, drawing up hard plans for the coming day that struck Ada as incongruent with its soft vagueness out the window. By the time summer drew toward its conclusion, Ruby seemed to feel the approach of winter as urgently as a bear in autumn, eating all night and half the day to pack on the fat necessary to feed it through hibernation. All Ruby’s talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through winter. To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

When Ada remarked that at least they could rest when winter came, Ruby said, Oh, when winter comes we’ll mend fence and piece quilts and fix what’s broke around here, which is a lot.

Simply living had never struck Ada as such a tiresome business. After breakfast was done, they worked constantly. On days when there was not one big thing to do, they did many small ones, choring around as needed. When Monroe was alive, living was little more laborsome than drawing on bank accounts, abstract and distant. Now, with Ruby, all the actual facts and processes connected with food and clothing and shelter were unpleasantly concrete, falling immediately and directly to hand, and every one of them calling for exertion.

Of course, in her previous life Ada had taken little part in the garden Monroe had always paid someone to grow for them, and her mind, in consequence, had latched itself to the product—the food on the table—not the job of getting it there. Ruby disabused her of that practice. The rudeness of eating, of living, that’s where Ruby seemed to aim Ada every day that first month. She held Ada’s nose to the dirt to see its purpose. She made Ada work when she did not want to, made her dress in rough clothes and grub in the dirt until her nails seemed to her crude as the claws of a beast, made her climb onto the pitched smokehouse roof and lay shakes even though the green triangle of Cold Mountain seemed to spin about the horizon. Ruby counted her first victory when Ada succeeded in churning cream to butter. Her second victory was when she noted that Ada no longer always put a book in her pocket when she went out to hoe the fields.

Ruby made a point of refusing to tackle all the unpleasant work herself and made Ada hold a struggling chicken down on the chopping block and cleave off its head with a hatchet. When the bleeding headless body staggered about the yard in the time-honored habit of sots, Ruby pointed to it with her ragged sheath knife and said, That’s your sustenance there.