"the color of despair"

The title for this chapter comes from the "To Destroy Life" spell Swimmer, Inman's Cherokee friend, taught him.  I won't quote the whole spell, just the beginning and the end.

Listen. Your path will stretch up toward the Nightland. You will be lonely. . . . Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. This is your path. There is no other.

It's meant to be a curse on any enemies Inman should encounter (he's already survived an attack by three "layabouts" from a town he passed through), but Inman suspects "the words were just flying back to strike him alone."

In this chapter we learn of Inman's first meeting with Ada. It's in front of the church after a sermon delivered by Ada's father, Monroe. Having gotten an introduction, Inman doesn't know what to say to Ada. Exasperated, she asks him about a phrase a local woman used earlier, "sheep-killing weather." "Did she mean weather appropriate for slaughtering sheep or weather foul enough to kill them itself without assistance?"  Inman's answer is, "The first."  At which point Ada says, "Well, then. I thank you. You've served a useful purpose." Then she turns and walks away to join her father.

It's interesting that their first conversation, however brief, should be about language. Although well educated, Ada doesn't understand some of the language used by the mountain folk.

The mountain folk also tend to misunderstand some of the words Ada's father uses. An example is the confusion over what Monroe meant when he said being an ordinary preacher who "condemned sinners and told Bible tales with entertaining zeal" was not his mission.  This insulted the community because they felt it "set the congregation in the position of benighted savages." Monroe later clarifies and explains that the "word meant no more nor less than a job of work."

The contrast between words -- either in books, sermons, or Cherokee Indian spells -- and reality is brought up again. The power of language compared to the power of nature.  The power of the ideas we carry around in our heads versus the power of the "real" world around us, the facts that we can't ignore.

In this chapter Inman is walking through a "foul region" of nature that wasn't worth fighting for. What keeps him going is "the thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain."  If he could do that, and "if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope. . . that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin it would be nearly the same as vanishing."

As the chapter ends, Inman has these thoughts:

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. Hate took no effort other than to look about. It was a weakness, he acknowledged, to be of such a mind  that all around him had to lie fair for him to call it satisfactory. But there were places he knew where such would generally be the case. Cold Mountain. Scapecat Branch." 

As the chapter ended I was more and more aware of the old-fashioned, rambling structure of Frazier's sentences.  They are not confused sentences, they are simply leisurely sentences used by people who had more time to form their thoughts. The world was slower then. Not less violent, just slower with more time to look around at the world -- in contrast to the present, when ideas about the world bombard us  every minute and we rarely have time to gaze out a window and contemplate a static-seeming landscape.