"epilogue"

What is striking about the epilogue is the complete absence of any thoughts of Inman.  He has completely vanished; the only connection to him is "a tall slender girl of nine."

Otherwise, it's a scene of nature's abundance. It is an October tradition with Ada and Ruby to have "a last picnic there before cold weather set in." In contrast to Inman's dream of a home, this is a real home made by the women's combined efforts.  Ruby has married the boy from Georgia and they have three sons. Ruby's father is there with his fiddle, but he also performs the practical task of milking the cow.

I've said Inman is absent from this epilogue, but he is indirectly suggested in the world of art; first in the fiddle tune Strobrod plays and then in the story Ada reads about Baucis and Philemon. The tune is about Bonnie George Campbell who "rode out on a day" and contains the refrain, "home came his good horse but never came he."

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Baucis and Philemon are an old married couple, the only ones in their town to welcome the disguised gods Zeus and Hermes. The couple feed the gods generously, but when they realize they are in the presence of gods, Philemon "thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it a meal for the guests." Zeus tells them they do not need to slay the goose, but they should climb the nearby mountain. When they reach the top, they turn around to see that their town has been flooded.

Coming back they see that their house has been turned into an ornate temple. The gods also grant them their wish to stay together forever and that when it came time for one of them to die, the other would die as well.  When they died, they were changed into an intertwining pair of trees as Frazier mentions. [All this is from Wikipedia; don't want you to think I actually knew it.]

Finally, there is the gospel tune, Angel Band, in which "the girl," Inman's daughter, joins in the chorus with Strobrod and sings "bear me away on your snowy wings."  The complete line is "bear me away on your snowy wings to my immortal home."

On that note, I leave you with a version sung by Joan Baez and Jeffrey Shurtleff.  You can listen to it as many times as you want -- as I'm sure many mountain people have.

Since my original video is no longer available, I've provided a new one. 

"spirits of crows, dancing"

In this last chapter, the narrator describes Ada and Inman as they "composed a plan for themselves," for what to do now they are reunited.  Notice the suggestion of music in the verb "composed."  I  don't say "what to do now that Inman is home," because the truth is Inman is not home, he is not back at Black Cove. He is in an abandoned Indian village near Cold Mountain.

The narrator says "there were but three courses to pick from":  Inman could 1) return to the army and hope for an early end to the war, 2) stay hidden in the mountains, or 3) cross the mountains north and put himself in the hands of the Federals, who "would make him sign his name to their oath of allegiance, but then he could wait out the fighting and come home."  These "bitter three," the narrator explains, "were all the choices the war allowed."

But there's a fourth choice --- Inman could die a "hero's death." And that's the death Frazier gives him. I would also argue that's the option Inman really wanted.  Let me quote for John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

What strikes me about Frazier's treatment of Inman's death is how much he softens it.  When Inman is shot by the "boy," all the narrator says is "Inman suddenly lay on the ground."  Soon Ada is by Inman's side, and he drifts "in and out" of a "bright dream of a home." Not his home, but an idealized dream of a home. The dream is suffused with nature:

It [his dream home] had a cold water spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October . . . Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and great number of crows, or at least the spirit of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. 

Frazier ends the description by saying "There was something he [Inman] wanted to say."  But we don't know what he wanted to say, or even if he was able to say it.  Instead, Frazier shifts the point of view to "an observer situated up on the brow of the ridge," a sudden shift from inside Inman's dreaming consciousness to a distance consciousness from the "outside" world. This is how we are encouraged to view Inman's death, as a "still, distant tableau in the winter woods."

A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman's lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of her lip. Both touching each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those with glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground. 

It takes a lot of qualifications, romantic qualifications, to turn this into a happy scene.  The observer must be at some distance from the couple (on the ridge) and he or she must have a "glad" temperament.  Even then, the story of "long decades of happy union" is only a "conceivable history," not a real one.

This is exactly the opposite of what Frazier did in the previous chapter, when Ada and Inman were truly secure in the cabin, but the narrator draws back to remind us of what the original Indians had suffered.

A short epilogue is attached to the novel, and I've read it.  But I'll save my comments for later. We need to spend time at this "first" ending of the novel, Inman's ending, before we go on to Ada's ending.

"the far side of trouble"

In the second to last chapter, Inman allows himself to feel that he can be healed---both physically and, more importantly, spiritually.  Part of it comes from simply be able to talk with Ada.  At first she asks about the war and the "great celebrated warriors" he might have seen.  But he doesn't want to talk about it.

     ---Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said.
     Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over. . . . But how on the best days of walking he achieved some success in matching his thoughts to the weather, dark or bright, so as to attune with what freak of God's mind sent cloud or shine. 

So in a way, he has become more "attuned" to Nature, just as Ada has. Though his is a darker vision as indicated by the phrase "freak of God's mind."  In war, what Inman has experienced is the arbitrariness of it all.

In his experience, great wounds sometimes healed, small sometimes festered. Any wound might heal on the skin side but keep on burrowing inward to a man's core until it ate him up. The why of it, like much in life, offered little access.

Ada's lessons, on the other hand, have been primarily positive ones.  When Inman says, "I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear," Ada provides him with her new insights, which are variation on Ruby's perspective.

What she [Ada] thought was that cures of all sorts exist in the natural world. . . . And there was spirit rising from within to knit sturdy scar over the backsides of wounds. Either way, though, you had to work at it, and they'd both fail you if doubted them too much. She had gathered that from Ruby, at least. 

This chapter is a leisurely one.  Basically, we have two wounded men being taken care of by strong women.  The strength of the bond between Ada and Ruby is also emphasized to the point of almost becoming a marriage.  When Ruby tells Ada that they don't need Inman, that "We're just starting. I've got a vision in my mind of how that cove needs to be," here's Ada response:

She took one of her rings and put in on Ruby's hand and tipped it down to the firelight to look at it . . . Ada made motions to leave the ring where she had put it, but Ruby took it off and twisted it roughly back on Ada's finger.

There is the healing consummation of sex too, but Frazier is discrete and tender with it.

      He [Inman] bowed his forehead to the soft of her stomach. Then he kissed her there and she smelled like hickory smoke. He pulled her against him and held her and held her. She put a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him harder, and then she pressed her white arm around him as if forever.
      With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain. 

At the point of intimacy, Frazier pulls back and gives us a larger view.  For Ada and Inman the cabin was a "safe haven," but the narrator knows it's only a temporary condition. The very cabin which is a save haven for Ada and Inman was a "trailhead to a path of exile, loss and death" for the Indians who had built it.

And for a moment, we hearken back to the story Inman told before he left, the story about the Indian tribe who had been granted a vision of wonderful valley but lost their chance to enter it because one man among them disobeyed the commands and as a result infected everyone else with fear. And that fear kept them from being able to enter their Eden.

"footsteps in the snow"

"The Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel

In this chapter Ada and Inman finally meet, but it is not as the exhausted Inman had imagined it to be:

He would come walking up the road into Black Cove, and he would be weary looking. What he had been through would show in his face and his frame, but only so much as to suggest heroism. He would be bathed and in a clean suit. Ada . . . would be dressed in her fine clothes. She would see him and know him in every feature. . . . She would rush across the yard and through the gate in a flurry of petticoats, and before the gate had even clapped shut they would be holding each other in the roadway.

But they do not meet at the house.  When Inman gets there, he encounters the Georgia boy and finds out that Ada and a female companion have set out to bury Stobrod and Pangle.  He goes out in search of them. As he walks, "a dark voice" comes into his mind and says:

. . . no matter how much you might yearn for it [a happy marriage to Ada] and pray for it, you would never get it. You could be too far ruined. Fear and hate riddling our your core like heartworms. At such time, faith and hope were not to the point. You were ready for your hole in the ground.

Yet, despite the dark voice, he "knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other."

Midway through the chapter, the point of view shifts to Ada and we learn that she is going out in the woods near where they have camped with Stobrod to shoot turkeys for food.  It's the first time she's carried a gun with the intention of shooting a living thing.  But, Ruby assures her, "The worst you can do is fail to kill a turkey and there's not a hunter in the world hasn't done that."

Ada manages to shoot two of the turkeys, "a hen and a young cock."  Inman hears the shot and walks in that direction, "the main hammer of the LeMat's to full cock."  Befitting the novel's loose suggestion of The Odyssey, Inman recognizes her, immediately seeing "Ada's fine face atop some strange trousered figure, like a mannish boy," but Ada does not recognize him.  In fact, she sees him as "a beggar in cast-off clothes, rags thrown over a rood of sticks," just as the original Ulysses came "disguised" as a beggar to his home.

Even though Inman calls out her name, Ada "still did not know him. He seemed to her some madman awander in the snow."  Inman takes the rebuke to heart. "I'm no better than a rank stranger here," he thinks, "A wandering pilgrim in my own place."  He wants to leave, but "there was no trail to follow."  Instead he "turned back to her and held out his empty hands again and said, 'If I knew where to go I'd go there.'"

At that point Ada recognizes him.

Then Ada had only to look at his drawn face to see not a madman but Inman. He was blasted and ravaged, worn ragged and weary and thin, but he was nevertheless Inman. Hunger's seal was on his brow, like a shadow over him. Yearning for food, warmth, kindness. In the hollows of his eyes she could see that the depredations of the long war and the hard road home had left his mind scoured and his heart jailed within the bars of his ribs.

She tells him to come with her. As she turns to walk:

She paired the turkey's feet for handles and grabbed them up breast to breast, and when she did their wings opened and their heads flopped and their long necks twined as if in strange inverted love.

As they walk back to the camp, Ada talks soothingly to Inman and makes an analogy that he doesn't understand.  Of the scene in front of them, she says, "It lacks but fire on the ground and a few people to make it Hunters in the Snow."

She is remembering a painting she and her father saw on a trip to Europe.  Her father didn't like it, but Ada did.

He had disliked its every feature, finding it too plain, too muted in its colors, lacking any reference to a world other than this. . . . Ada, though, had been drawn to it and she had circled around it for a time but ultimately lacked courage to say how she felt, since her reasons for liking it were, point-for-point, identical to those Monroe used as support for his disapproval.

We suspect that Ada has more courage now.  Inman, exhausted, follows her voice and only has a sense that "some note in her voice said, Right this minute I know more than you do, and what I know is everything might well be fine."