wyrdwind

Once was a soldier,

if that’s what you call them,

barely whiskered wet behind the ears,

all the able bodied men as if any to spare,

and this Inman did clutch to his breast

a book given him, three letters and a tintype,

the scripture of his woman’s words,

never dared response but pressed on and on,

scare looked beyond that trench, fetid gutter,

a mass grave, another day, another bloodbath,

some explosions, stench of gunpowder,

boys half his age dead, someone’s son.

He remembered

Ada from Cold Mountain.

“Men up here had a bearing

on what they thought a woman was,

and then you showed up.” Miss Sally said

the day Ada arrived. The day they met. A welcome.

She brought the working men cider but

cat got his tongue, he was not

a loquacious man. Ada asked for his name

and he stumbled to provide it, found it ugly,

uncouth—saying it don’t improve a thing—

and finally upon stilted silence

insisted he just went by his surname

Inman.

Neither was he born to dance,

not possessed of fine manners

and as we’ve established, words. He worked

and Ada noticed. She invited.

But he’d watch from the dark side

of her doorway, peer into the warm and bright,

standing in the rain

because he was dirty and wet instead.

When she went out that night, as it was clear

he’d remain outside, and gently, gently pressed,

danced around what she really wanted to ask

like a sparrow in a birdbath, skirted

his intentions, the looming war, her,

“This doesn’t come out right.” Halting

as an electrical current run through a corpse,

“If it were enough just to stand,

without the words.”

“It is.” She assured.

“It is.” But he pressed on.

“Look at the sky now.

What color is it? Or the way…

a hawk flies? Or you wake up

and your ribs are bruised

thinking so hard on somebody.

What do you call that?”

It was almost a demand.

They almost made progress

when he snuck his requested likeness

into the pages of some sheet music

and spoke her daddy.

They ran out of time.

Just as he was set to deploy,

if you can call it that, half dressed,

no training, no experience, she gave

him a book with her photograph.

“I’m not smiling in it.

I don’t know how to do that. Hold

a smile.” Well he was always

better off with his hands, pulled

her to him in a hungry kiss

she fully matched.

Inman woke

in a pus-curdled, fly-infested infirmary,

feverish recovering

from infection and injury. A woman in black

at his bedside took mercy, found

his one belonging, and opened

a weathered letter to read

“…So now I say to you

plain as I can. If you are fighting,

stop fighting.

If you are marching,

stop marching.

Come back to me.”

Meanwhile

Ada worried what would be

the last days beside her daddy,

only vaguely aware of the threat

posed by the Home Guard—

cruel and vicious men self-charged

with prowling about town

“protecting” property and womenfolk

and killing deserters.

Her daddy getting old, a widower

never remarried, asked his daughter

if she still thought on her man.

Oh every day all it made no sense

for she hardly knew him.

A handful of moments taking over

her whole night sky, her mind’s eye.

And her daddy, he said

he had her mother all of twenty-two months

before she passed, and that

was more than enough.

A lifetime full

of little treasures. Golden sand

in an hourglass. We love who we love

and love makes the tiniest glance precious.

It don’t have to make sense to be so blessed.

No regrets.

He read and tinkered with sermons

at their dining table nestled

on the lawn beneath a fine, strong tree

with long arms overlooking the forest,

a swooping mountain vista,

and though Ada fretted an oncoming storm

he waved her off and asked if she might

go inside and play the piano

by the open window. The day so beautiful,

would be a shame to miss a moment of it.

Ada’s daddy died.

Inman’s mid-odyssey about face

got off to a bad start.

War was already lost

but that didn’t deter the Home Guard

and their hunting hounds.

Maggoty corn and murdered slave families,

a corrupt rapist preacher he made certain

paid for his decadent ways. Got as far

as a filthy brothel in sordid company,

ends and means, before he was drugged

and clapped in chains,

betrayed.

Then came some Yanks.

They all took the chance.

Everyone got shot in the back,

but Inman survived. Still chained.

Collapsed.

At Cold Mountain,

a growing wall of fallen sons, tiny pictures

and rustic trinkets, and Ada mussed

and beholden to the kindness

of the other women. That greedy old bastard

head of the Home Guard

wouldn’t let her rest or mourn. Sniffing

after her hand. Her good land. Said in church

her man wouldn’t return. Said look at him.

He wasn’t nothing. Ugly ass.

Miss Sally took her in, had been

leaving all manner of baskets, heartsick

for the farm’s disrepair.

Ada had long freed the slaves.

At dinner with her dear friend,

Sally’s husband suddenly said

Ada should take a mirror

and look over her shoulder

into their well water. Her future,

her heart’s desire may be revealed.

His wife did it all the time—abruptly hushed.

Well Ada

in its slippery reflection a second sight,

glimpsed the shadowy form of a man

in the snow, heralded by a flurry of crows.

Then he was gone.

Inman woke on a twisted branch sled

or some such, being drug into the forest

by an old hermit woman.

Deep emerald foliage, civilization distant

as if it never was, a covered wagon,

a dispersed herd of small goats. Strung herbs.

A cookfire. Made to rise, said he had to go,

but goat woman scoffed. Gruffly replied

he had to heal first.

Inman warned he was a deserter

and she scoffed again because

what would they do?

Cut short her young life?

His wounds begged attention,

his belly a meal, and his fragmented

mind a proper rest. All his fussing in bed,

she pestled up some laudanum, potent

poppy tincture home brew. As it took hold

Inman devolved into some wilderness,

rambled half agony half prayer a woman’s name

implicit, the woman

he was returning to. Compelled, driven

by some force.

“…And I hardly know her.

I hardly know her! And I just

can’t seem

to get back to her.” Slept at last.

Had somewhat more his wits come morn.

Inman watched mutely as a white goat

ambled calmly up to the old woman,

a child’s face.

She lectured

everything in nature has a job.

Bird’s got a job, seed’s got a job,

shit’s got a job. A forest grows.

A goat

gives you milk, cheese, company,

and when necessary,

meat.

She slit it’s throat,

it went peacefully, she still

hushed and praised its sacrifice.

There there. You were such a beauty.

Such a beauty.

Meanwhile Miss Sally sent for help.

One morning at the mercy

of an aggressive rooster, real cock of the walk,

and his uppity spurs

Ada received a visitor.

Ruby Thewes an illiterate farm girl—

a young woman, proud country bumpkin—

marched right up and ripped off the rooster’s head

with her bare hands. Only good rooster

was a dead rooster. Fuck that guy.

She brought a gun. Some other stuff.

Said she didn’t believe in money.

Came there to work, but not as a servant.

Expected to room and board, eat at the table,

be shown respect. Ada would learn

alongside and work as well.

Ada took no offense.

She was just glad.

Their hard labors turned it all around,

better than expected, way you yoke

a skittish or inexperienced horse

to a sturdy or confident one and arrive

at your destination twice as fast.

Ruby learned to read

and Ada learned to wear pants.

Scoundrel Daddy Thewes even came back

from the supposed dead and didn’t ask

for forgiveness, just if they could spare a coat

for his simple friend, his bandmate.

See he’d given up drink

when he took up the strings. Never knew

he had it in him until the war, but the place

he’s filled with song, well it’s all

about his daughter now. When he plays

he’s thinking on her, everything he wrote.

She was always

a good girl.

Ruby Thewes thawed

just a little.

Inman stumbled upon a cabin,

desperate for shelter in the rain

and inside a young widow who bade him

enter

from the other side of a gun.

See when it comes to war

it don’t matter what side

a man claims he’s on

if you’re a woman alone. Whatever she had

to spare was fair enough. He wouldn’t push.

She said she had to believe

he meant her no harm. Would ask for no more.

Her fevered baby fussed.

She dressed him

in her late husband’s dry clothes, neither man

physically imposing, much presence,

straight up and down.

Shadows and bones.

After unrestful repose, toss and turn,

she asked him in off the pile of cobs.

Asked if he could just lie beside her

and expect no more. Take it no further.

There in the dark,

Inman stiff as a board, alarmed

when her fingers laced his own. Declared,

rasped as if wind through hollow trunk,

“I love someone.”

But all she did was weep. Broken. Alone.

He listened.

Dawn brought little comfort.

A troop of Yanks turned up

fixing to steal what little she had,

pull down their pants

for a bit of gang rape. Of course.

Inman did what he did best, silent

as a wraith. A wisp. Blink and you’ll miss.

He was not

an imposing man.

There was no rape that day. That captain

bled out upon his prey, dead between her legs.

His friends soon followed.

Ada’s foul suitor

and his cohorts came down on poor Sally.

Tied a noose around her neck, crushed her hands

in the fence and made her watch

as they murdered her husband, hung him

from her clothesline, and shot both her sons

whom she’d his in their barn.

She went mute.

The girls ran over too late,

brought Sally to Black Cove to recover,

if you can call it that,

and though she never spoke again

she smiled when that fugitive bumpkin band

made merry tunes on Sundays

there on the homestead.

A candle’s trembling breadth of happiness.

Ruby and the youngest musician

called Georgia for where he’d from,

well they took interest in each other.

Then, one day they slipped up,

didn’t leave soon enough, steal away

before the diamond dust, and left

tracks in the snow.

The Home Guard shared their fire

and their song while the youngest

was off vomiting

from eating an old frozen doe.

Made Daddy Thewes and his simple friend

stand with their hats off, told the idiot

to stop smiling, but he couldn’t,

it was just his way. So they made

him hold his hat over his face.

Ada and Ruby went up the mountain

to grieve their freshly dead. In reality

they hid Daddy Thewes who yet breathed

and there his wounds did tend.

Ruby sent Ada on a hunt

and she came back with a wild turkey

and Inman. Met again

at the business end of her rifle.

Ruby sussed the situation,

all fine boned and pale eyed, the man

she knew only as Ada’s one way

message recipient.

Said she ought to send Ada

into the woods with a gun more often.

They settled into the hunter’s camp,

a cluster of rickety shelters about a cookfire.

Inman sussed the situation,

and let Ruby know he wasn’t looking

to usurp anybody’s position at Black Cove,

reckoned he needed to ask her permission first.

She noted his pig’s ear attempt

at making himself presentable. Took the knife

and drew it along his long pale throat

and saw to that feral billy goat, swatted

at him when he turned his head to look,

huffed, then after a pause while she worked,

“You got the right feelings for her?”

Knife. Throat.

“I do.” Not a man to mince words.

Night fell and Ruby retired early. Of course.

Ada and Inman shuffled and glanced,

made eyes at each other all filly and colt.

She asked

if he received all her letters,

must’ve been one hundred plus,

asked why he didn’t respond if so.

She’d been talking to him

this entire time, inside her mind, despite

the foolishness. They hardly knew each other.

Understood if it was too much. She was too much.

He don’t give a girl much to go on.

At her uncertainty Inman spoke up, said

that all those little moments they shared

were like a bag of tiny diamonds,

that it didn’t matter if they were real.

They were all he had.

“If you could see my inside,

my spirit?

That’s what I fear.

I think I’m ruined.

They kept trying to put me in the ground.

But I wasn’t ready.

But if I had goodness, I lost it.

If I had anything tender in me

I shot it dead.

How could I write to you

after what I done?

What I seen?”

Ruby took the opportunity

to briefly intervene, this boy was spiraling,

said she’d have to go someplace else

to get some shut eye. If they must continue,

do it inside.

So there they were in the low lamplight,

miles and miles of ache between them,

Inman wary as if

he couldn’t dare to know Her will.

Pulse kicked breath blossomed in the cold.

Ada’s every heartbeat

calling her revenant home, unwilling

to wait one moment more.

She said her preacher daddy

would understand how such frivolity

as a wedding seemed pointless now.

Inman struggled to convey his full intention,

the fact he didn’t come all that way

to mess around.

Ada nervously recalled a religion

where the only thing required

of man and wife

is to say it three times aloud.

Well that’s three words

he could manage dire earnest,

“I marry you.

I marry you.

I marry you,”

for that had always

been his undercurrent.

She sprung upon him

in amorous reassurance, echoed

profusion of his sentiment. Two rivers

entwined. He rushed

to give her the best piece

to remember him by,

and that part

understood his job well enough,

oh he got that right.

The next day

brought the final fight.

That Home Guard sought to further

terrorize.

But this time

with the end in sight

and blood run high, none

of those men would leave alive.

Gun smoke in stark sunlight. Rapid fire.

Inman rode hard

in pursuit of the last man, up the mountain

into the forest. A pale and vicious youth.

They both fired a single shot.

Ada heard the crows.

She knew.

Her one true love bled

out into the snow in her arms.

He was beautiful.

And years down the road,

she still spoke to him

if only in her head, every day.

Said this time of year

when the lambs newborn

and the ewes rich with milk,

when spring wakes upon the winter down,

and there is so much life, for a moment

she doesn’t hurt. She looks into that well

and the sky is just blue.

Beneath her great oak tree

at Black Cove, she sets a table

as her daughter Grace Inman

sneaks treats into her mouth.

Ruby and Georgia, baby in tow,

Miss Sally and Daddy Thewes gather round,

Ada says if you could see it all now

you would know

that every step of your journey

was worth it.

@~^~

Cold Mountain (2003). Entire soundtrack, though You Will Be My Ain True Love is my favorite. I actually left quite a bit out for the sake of brevity, some threads I consider instrumental to the spirit of this film. It definitely rearranged some things inside me when I was fourteen for reasons I’m sure are immediately obvious.