"exile and brute wandering"

In this chapter, Inman spends a rainy night in a "grim roadside inn and stable," where he and a fellow-traveler "drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering."

In terms of "exile and brute wandering," a contrast is set up between two men (and by implicit extension with Inman).  One is the preacher Inman had met earlier; his name is Soloman Veasey (rhymes with "greasy" I suspect).  When Veasey was discovered the next day with Inman's short explanation nailed to the tree, the community thorougly beat him and sent him out in exile.

The other man is named Odell, and he has condemned himself to wandering after falling in love with a slave woman named Lucinda. When Odell offers to buy the woman, his father crudely asks if he's buying her "for the fieldwork or the pussy."  At which point, Odell strikes his father and is promptly beaten by his younger brother and his father's foreman and "locked in a canning house." After keeping him there a few days, his father "spoke through a crack [in the canning house], saying, I've sold that bitch to Mississippi."

So both men, like Inman, are living "a traveling life."  Each has his reasons (including Inman), and the reasons reflect each's character.  Veasey and Odell, except for their inclination toward violence and involvement with women, could not be more different. Veasey was engaged to a proper woman, had a mistress and was willing to kill her in order not to be discovered and have his position as preacher ruined.

Odell was married to proper girl, yet after "the wedding . . . once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be just about nothing left. She was so slight and wispish. He found little there to keep his mind from wandering." He genuinely falls in love with Lucinda and leaves his "good life" to search for her, though he has little hope of finding her.

Veasey is cast out of the community for his obvious lack of human decency; Odell, trying to be decent (to the extent a slave culture allows it), casts himself out. Veasey is very quick to lust after a woman and is incapable of love. Odell, having been struck by love, refuses to make the "proper" sacrifices to come into his inheritance.  Veasey is on the road toward Texas to make his fortune; Odel is looking for this "lost love," though he's long given up any systematic search for her.

If we compare these men to Inman, what do we see.  Inman, like Veasey, is looking for a place to live his life successfully though he isn't crassly looking to make a fortune.  Like Odell, Inman is trying to be decent and seeking to reclaim his "lost love;" though, unlike Odell's Lucinda, Ada is Inman's lawful wife, a "proper" love match.

The question comes up: is it possible that the war has changed Inman so much that Ada will no longer love him?  By the same token, will Inman be able to love Ada in way she expects.  We've seen how "wounded" Inman is, not just physically, but emotionally.  His contempt for Veasey is obvious and he doesn't shun violence as needed.  We've seen the violent side of him already. How will Ada respond to that part of him?  Has she already seen it; or is this something that the war has done that she's not aware of?  How will she react?

One of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets (Sonnet 116) raises the question:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Notice that he refers to a "marriage of true minds."  He also admits to the possibility of error; perhaps love does alter.  But if that is the case, there is no point to either poetry or love.

Right now Ada (and Cold Mountain) are "the star" to Inman's "wandering bark." The question is: in his search for the ideal home and ideal love, how will the real Cold Mountain and Ada measure up? The same question can be asked from Ada's point of view. She is making a home for herself, but seems to remember Inman primarily from the "courting" stage.  Is her love strong enough, constant enough, to "bear" the "edge of doom" that Inman now carries within him?

Those, not the philosphical questions about perception, are the questions that keep you reading.