"the doing of it"

In this chapter Inman is befriended by an unnamed old woman he calls the "goatwoman" because of all the goats that hang around her solitary camp, "a little rust-colored caravan standing in a clearing among the canted trees."  Frazier writes that Inman "saw it to be a construction that had evidently begun life nomadic but had taken root."

While the goatwoman feeds him (she would later treat Inman's wounds), she summarizes her life story.  She had been married young.

I was a little ignorant girl, and he was old. Three wives had died on him. . . . Killed them from work and babies and meanness. I woke up one night laying in bed next to him and knew that's all I was: fourth in a row of five headstones. I got right up and rode out before dawn on his best horse and traded it a week later for this cart and eight goats." 

Like Ruby, she's a skilled survivior in nature.  But she has one characteristic that sets her apart from Ruby and connects her with Ada and Inman. Here's the description of the inside of her hovel:

The table was piled high with paperwork, its surface a shamble of books, mostly flapped open and layer facedown one on the other, page edges foxy from the damp. Scattered about and pinned to the walls were spidery pen-and-ink sketches of plants and animals, some colored thin washes of mute tones, each with a great deal of tiny writing around the margins, as if stories of many particulars were required to explain the spare images.

The goatwoman lives in a world of nature and of books. When Inman asks what she does with the books, the goatwoman says, "I make a record" and goes on to explain:

I keep track of what everything's up to. It can take up all your time just marking down what happens. Miss a day and you get behind and might never catch up.

As for getting "lonesome," she says, "Now and again, maybe. But there's plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much."

In a way, the goatwoman represent the solitary life of the dedicated artist.  Inman considers it as a possibility but dismisses it.

Inman tried to picture himself living similarly hermetic in just such a stark and lonesome refuge on Cold Mountain. . . . A life just as pure and apart as the goatwoman's seemed to be. It was a powerful vision, and yet in his mind he saw himself hating every minute of it, his days poisoned by lonesomeness and longing. 

At one point Inman finds himself telling the woman about his feelings for Ada, and his thoughts have a very abstract and bookish quality:

He described her character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, 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 become one line. It was a doctrine he could not entirely credit.

When Inman leaves, the goatwoman gives him, as a parting gift, "a square of paper on which was drawn in great detail the globular blue-purple cluster of the carrion flower plant in autumn."

And we are reminded of Ada's desire to sketch the things around her.