"like any other thing, a gift"

The chapter title refers to Inman's sense that "fighting had come easy to him," and "it was like any other thing, a gift." In other words, Inman has a natural flair for war.  But I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I want to touch on Frazier's mixture of language, God, and women.

In this chapter Inman encounters two women -- one a drugged victim of an errant preacher's lust, the other a "dark-haired" gypsy woman who grants Inman a "happy vision" of her riding a horse across the river.  The gypsy woman reminds Inman of Ada, and he remembers his encounter with Ada in the kitchen on the Christmas before the war, the same Ada had remembered when the piano was being moved.  The chapter ends with a dream of Ada mixed with the rhododendron-like shurbs Inman had been reading about in his Bartram's Travels just before going to sleep.

When Inman stops the preacher from through his drugged mistress into the river, the preacher says: "You're a message from God saying no."  Notice he doesn't say that Inman is bringing a message, but that Inman is the message.  While Inman takes the preacher and the unconscious woman back to town, he remembers a short conversation with a "Tennessee boy on the night after Fredericksburg." Since he knows the name of the brightest star in Orion, he points to it and says "the name he knew."  But the boy gives a curious response. Here's their exchange:

---How do you know its name is Rigel?
---I read it in a book, Inman said.
---Then that's just a name we give it, the boy said. It ain't God's name.
---How would you ever come to know God's name for that star? [Inman says]
---You wouldn't, He holds it close, the boy said. It's a thing you'll never know. It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance. Right there's [the boy points to the bodies strewn on the battlefield] what mostly comes of knowledge.

Later, when Inman returns the young woman to her bed, she momentarily wakes up.  "What's your name?" Inman asks. When she answers, he addresses her by her name and says, "Listen to me, Laura. . . That preacher does not speak for God. No man does. . . . He [the preacher] means you no good."

When Inman remembers the Christmas incident with Ada, he remembers how:

 ". . . he turned her hand over and smoothed back the fingers when she tried to draw them in and make a fist.   He put his lips to her wrist where the slate-blue veins twined. Ada slowly drew her hand away and then stood looking down absently at its palm.
---There's not tidings written on it. Not any we can read, Inman said.

In the "Language" section of his essay "Nature," Emerson says, "Nature is the vehicle of thought."  He later goes on to famously declare, "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

One of the main purposes of language is to "name"[label] things accurately and clearly. But to whose purpose: Man's or God's?  What if man becomes corrupted? How do we know we are naming things according to God's all-encompassing vision and not our own limited human vision.

Here's what Emerson had to say:

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires --- the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise --- the power over nature as interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not. . . . In due time . . . words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. 

When Inman leaves the "false" preacher tied to a tree, he writes "out the story in brief, putting little headwork and no fine touches to it, merely pressing down what he had learned of the near killing into a paragraph."

In other words, Inman wrote what he saw, based on "his love of truth and desire to communicate it without loss."  When Ada stares down at her palm, Inman honesty declares, "There's not tiding written on it. Not any we can read."

In the Beginning there was the Word.  It is up to us to learn how to read.