Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier

...all he could vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

How did you find someone to hate for a thing that just was? What would be the cost of not having an enemy? Who could you strike for retribution other than yourself?

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.

Am I meant to follow, or should I wait its coming? Ada wondered.

-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.

-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.

The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.

He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.

This world won't stand long, the captive hollered in conclusion to his tale. God won't let it stand this way long.

The martins flew from the tree as one body, still in the shape of the round maple they had filled.

I'll soon be naught but scar.

The image was like oil on water. She had to tip it in her hand, making fine adjustments to get the light to make sense of it.

He seemed saddened that the tender moment had been lost and he could find no way to bring it back.

In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?

We might never speak again, and I don't plan to leave that comment standing in the place of truth. You're not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I'm sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise.
-That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on.


Inman climbed part of one day and all of the next and there was still a wall of mountain reared up before him, the track rising tack and tack endlessly. It soon lifted him into a later stage of autumn, for in the heights the season was already far along, and there were as many leaves on the ground as in the trees.

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

Waves of mountains. For all the evidence the eye told, they were endless.

-That's just pain, she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it, anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.

You get to be my age, just recollecting pleasures long ago is pain enough.

...though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they became one line.

Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.

Look here, the woman said. If I had a boy, I'd tell him the same as I'm telling you. Watch yourself.

God, if I could sprout wings and fly, he thought. I would be gone from this place, my great wings bearing me up and out, long feathers hissing in the wind.

He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight until death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute, he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.

Sara had lit a tallow dip and was at the table washing dishes in a basin. The air around the light seemed thick. All the bright objects close to it haloed. Everything in the shadows beyond it was extinguished completely, as if never to reappear. The curve of the girl's back as she bent over the table seemed to Inman a shape not to be duplicated in all the time stretched out before him. A thing to fix in mind and hold...

-If I was to ask you to do something, would you do it?
Inman considered that he should frame an answer here on the order of Maybe, or If I can, or some provisional phrase.
What he said was, Yes.

The tick over the rope was filled with fresh straw and smelled dry and autumnal and sweet, and underlying that was the smell of the girl herself, like a stand of wet laurels after their blooms have fallen to the ground.

...the baby sleeping by the fire. Without her, Sara said, there'd be nothing holding me to earth.

Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed.

Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman.

Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do again tomorrow. No more, and no less.

...as if he had long since cheerfully submitted to knowing that however well he rendered a piece, he could always imagine doing better.

She wiped the pen clean on a blotter and dipped again and wrote, Come back to me is my request.

Do you want to say something?
-No, the woman said. Every word in me would come out bitter.

-I can't ever look back on this day with a still mind if I let you go without cooking for you, she said.

The peaks now stood higher, the vales deeper than they did in truth. Inman imagined the fading rows of ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks, and he built the contours of them and he colored them, each a shade paler and bluer until, when had finally reached the invented ridgeline where it faded into sky, he was asleep.

I've no aim to trouble you. I'll walk on from here and never be back. I'm just asking for clear passage.

He could walk and the wind would blow the yellow leaves across his footsteps and he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large.

He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.

It was me, I'd about rather rest of the mountain than anywhere else you could name.

They say you know Georgia when you come to it, for it's nothing but red dirt and rough roads.

All God's works but elaborate analogy. Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.

The rose-- it's thorns and its blossom-- a type of the difficult and dangerous path to spiritual awakening.

But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not, the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.

She was so tired her legs felt burnt out from under her, but she believed she could get through this if she did one thing at a time and thought of the remaining things left to be done as sequential, not cumulative.

She would see him and know him in every feature.

You could become so lost in bitterness and anger that you could not find your way back. No map nor guidebook for such journey.

-I know I don't need him, Ada said. But I think I want him.

-What I'm certain I don't want, she finally said aloud, is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.

The why of it, like much in life, offered little access to logic.

Then, immediately, longing of so many kinds welled up in him that he was afraid it would all come spilling out in a frightening mess of words if he didn't shut his mouth and find some better direction for his thoughts.

She had made her way to a place where an entirely other order prevailed from what she had always known.

He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse.

You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.

There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past.

She smelled the sweet woodsmoke and thought that it would be a measure of one's success at attending to the details of the world if one could identify trees by the scent of their smoke. It would be a skill one might happily aspire to master. There were many worse things to know. Things that did damage to others and eventually to oneself.

The world was such an incredibly lonely place, and to lie down beside him, skin to skin, seemed the only cure.

And they did what lovers often do when they think the future stretches out endless before them as bright as on the noon of creation day: they talked ceaselessly of the past, as if each must be caught up on the other's previous doings before they can move forward paired.

God lays the unbearable on you and then takes some back.

They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.

When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear the space for something better.

He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of home. It had a coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves as red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once.