"in place of the truth"

This chapter corrects my erroneous assumption that Ada and Inman were married before he went off to war.  When Ruby returns from Esco's with the cabbages and turnips she had traded for apples, she also brings back a letter from Inman.  Ada waits until she is alone to read it.

She had read the utterly vague announcement of his wound and his planned return five times that afternoon. She could make no more of it after the fifth reading than she had from the first, which was that Inman seemed to have reached some firm conclusion about the state of feeling existing between them, though Ada could not put a name to how she thought things stood. 

"State of feeling existing between them": they are not married, not even formally engaged.  Even the declaration of love seems to have been tentative.  The blurb on the back of the book describes Frazier's novel as "an authentic odyssey" and critics have compared Ada and Inman's travails to those of Ulysses and Penelope.  But Ada and Inman are, in important ways, not Ulysses and Penelope. The Greek couple were long married and had a grown son. Ulysses was coming back to reestablish his marriage.  Ada and Inman, a young couple who are still groping to define the "state of feeling" between them, haven't even experienced marriage.

As the chapter progresses, we get Ada's memory of Inman's departure. On the day before he leaves, Inman comes by the house to say goodbye. At one point he takes off his hat, "which Ada understood to be in preparation for a kiss."  But the mood is spoiled when Inman, in his embrace of her, "brushed an onyx-and-pearl brooch at her collar" which falls into the creek.  By the time he has retrieved the brooch, "the tender moment had been lost and he could find no way to bring it back."

"If I am shot to death," Inman tells her, "in five years you'll hardly remember my name."  The remark confuses Ada, who's not sure "if he was teasing or testing her or simply saying what he thought was the truth."  "You know its not that way," she says, but in "her heart" she wonders, "Is anything remembered forever?"

Inman then tells an Indian story about Cold Mountain, about a stranger coming to a village near Cold Mountain and inviting the inhabitants his "country" were there is no war or fear.  There are two conditions: "everyone must first go into the town house and fast seven days and never leave during that time and never raise the war cry."  The villages decide they want to go and everyone obeys the conditions except one man. When they arrive at the mountain, they have a vision:

. . . a cave opened like a door, and it ran to the heart of the mountain. But inside was light rather than dark. In the distance, inside the mountain, they could see an open country. A river. Rich bottomland. Broad fields of corn.  A valley town, the houses in long rows, a town house atop a pyramidal mount, people in the square-ground dancing.

There is thunder and the people "trembled, but only the man who had eaten deer meat lost his senses from fear." He shouts the war cry, and the opportunity is lost.

Ada senses that "the story evidently meant something to Inman." When she says, "But you don't take it for the truth?", he says: "I take it that she could have been living in a better world, but she [the Indian woman who first told him the story] ended up fugitive, hiding in the balsams."

After Inman has left, Ada is bothered by the awkwardness between them, feeling that "her performance had been glib. Or flinty or pinched. None of which she really wished to be." The next day she visits Inman in his "room" in town.

"We might never speak again," she says, "and I don't plan to leave that comment standing in place of the truth. You're not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I'm sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise [note, another book reference]." 

Then we have another gesture with Inman's hat -- he "took his hat off and spun it by the brim into the air. He caught it and flipped his wrist and sent it skimming through the door to land inside where it would" -- before "the kiss that had eluded them the day before."

Apropos Inman's relationship with Ada,  two scenes from Miller's Crossing come to mind.  Here they are.

Of course, Ada is much more of a lady than Verna.