"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."

"black bark in winter"

Snow is falling on Cold Mountain.  Pangle is dead -- Ada and Ruby bury him -- but Stobrod is miraculously alive, though unconscious, "huddled with his fiddle under a rock lip." The chapter title comes for Ada's gesture at Pangle's grave and her hope for him.  She plants a cross  of "black locust . . . together with hickory withes" and hopes a locust tree will grow and "tell in brief a tale like Persephone's. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring."

Ruby and Ada had been informed about "the shootout" by the Georgia boy who was hidden away in the bushes when the Guard shot the two musicians.  Ruby is determined to bury them near where they died.

The journey up to the spot is punctuated by Ada's meditations. At one point as they follow an icy creek, she remembers her father and thinks he "would have made a lesson of such a thing."

He would have said what the match of that creek's parts would be in a person's life, what God intended it to be the type of.  All God's works but elaborate analogy.  Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.

She remembers that he had a book "wherein you could look up the types, but with her new-found connection with life, she

. . . refused to believe that a book could say just how it [creek, or anything in life] should be construed or to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lack something essential and be as useless by itself as the gudgeon to a door hinge with no pintle.

(For anyone needing an visual, the "pintle" is the pin on the bottom and the "gudgeon" is what it slides into.)

In other words, the world of books lacks "something essential" and is "useless" without a true sense of the real world. The real world isn't a pale companion of the ideal world.  If anything, the reverse is true.

As she and Ruby camp under a rock formation for the night, Ada thinks, "This would do . . .Though others might view it as an utterly bare haven, it matched her needs so much that she could just move in and live there."

Ada also finds herself considering one of Stobrod's fiddle tunes.

She had noted it for the oddity of its lyric and for Stobrod's singing, which had been of an intensity that Ada could only assume represented deep personal expression. It took as subject the imagined behavior of its speaker, what he would do had he the power to become one of a variety of brute creature.

Earlier, as we know, Inman has imagined himself to be a crow.  But Ada focuses on Stobrod's image of a "mole in the ground --- root a mountain down."

The animals seemed wonderful and horrible in their desires, especially the mole, a little powerless hermit blind thing propelled by a lonesomeness and resentment to bring the world falling around him. More wonderful and horrible still was the human voice speaking the song's words, wishing away its humanity to ease the pain inflicted by lost love, love betrayed, love left unexpressed, wasted love.

When Ada asks Ruby about the song, if she "thought Stobrod had written the song," we get some of Ruby's mystical skepticism:

A song went round from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even.  Anything otherwise was empty pride. 

You wonder if Ruby isn't speaking for Frazier himself in this passage.  As with songs, so with people. For all the life events that we go through, "something is added and something is taken away from" us.  All we can hope for, if we're lucky, is that the losing doesn't outstrip the gaining.

There is a famous T.S. Eliot phrase from his poem "The Dry Salvages" that I'll end this entry with because it expresses the connection between songs (music) and human beings. [The italics are mine.]

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

"naught and grief"

I'm half tempted to just play this video of a fiddler playing "Bonaparte's Retreat" and leave it at that.

This is a curious, short chapter that doesn't directly include either Ada, Ruby or Inman.  Instead its central characters are Stobrod and Pangle, his retarded companion who plays the banjo.  In fact, it is Pangle who mouths the words that contain the chapter's title.

A group of "The Guard" has caught Stobrod and Pangle asleep at a cross-trail around Cold Mountain. The men are "after a bunch of outliers said to live in a cave."  Stobrod lies and says he doesn't know anything, but Pangle naively tells them the truth. "Much obliged," says Teague, their leader and he invites the two to join his men in a meal. "And then in a little bit we'll hear you boys pick some. See if you're any account," Teague adds.

When Stobrod and Pangle start to play, Pangle starts on his own: "but when he got to where the tune was ready to come around again, the notes scrambled all together and he bogged down and halted."

---That'un's come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere.

The suggestion, of course, is that two people (Stobrod and Pangle. Ada and Inman?) can succeed in getting "somewhere" (the life represented by Cold Mountain)  when one person has failed.

Stobrod is initially reluctant to play because  "he figured his audience had no thought of music, lacked entirely what was needed to love it." But he gets caught up in his playing and even sings.

When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat . . . This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. . . . It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of inner life." 

The men are apparently impressed -- one says, "Good God, these is holy men -- put that doesn't stop them from rather nonchalantly killing them.  The only thing that makes them hesitate is Pangle's foolish and persistent smile: "I can't shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said."

The solution is to have Pangle cover his face with his hat (a hat again, not tossed this time, but held).

Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where balls struck after passing through the meat of the two men.

By the way, standard tuning on a fiddle is GDAE.  You get "Dead man's tuning" by lowering the G string to D to give you "DDAD" which can be pronounced "Dee-Dad" or "dead."

"a vow to bear"

Let me get this out of the way because it's really (maybe) a distraction. Here's the sentence this chapter title is taken from:

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot  one, though he had killed many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. [italics mine]

The editor in me wants to change that; it seems like a typo.  Didn't he mean "he had taken upon himself a vow never to again shoot a bear"?  Why the awkward construction? Why not "vow to a bear" or "vow to all bears"?

Methinks I detect a pun, something Elizabethans delighted in but not something I expected to stumble across in a contemporary story of Appalachia during the Civil War.  If you lift out just the phrase, it can be completed by adding "a vow to bear all the trouble he had seen and expected to see." Or there's a possible additional layer if you see "bear" as a variation on "bearings" and an indirect comment on Inman's having lost his true sense of direction, lost his bearings in other words.

See how it could be a distraction?  Enough side.

This chapter really emphasizes Inman's contradictions.  On the one hand, he's had dreams of being a bear and "there was something in [the?] bear that spoke to him of hope." (There's that construction again; maybe it's an Appalachian dialect thing.)  Yet, in his attempt not to harm the bear, it rushed past him and "plunged over the high ledge that she never saw in the gloom."  Now, Inman muses, "Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle."

Then Inman kills the bear's cub and eats it, so "as not to waste the meat."  (We're reminded of how quickly Ruby dispatches a rooster and how the goatwoman dispenses with a goat.)

Pretty bleak.  Yet as Inman looks at the "scene . . . there was growing joy" in his heart.  He finally sees his home, even if it is at a distance:

It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland. 

But what kind of home is it going to be?  Inman sees it as a filled with people "he would not be called upon to hate or fear" and a place where "he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large."

How will this vision of Cold Mountain sync up with Ada's growing vision of it?  Their emotions seem to be going in opposite directions: Ada is getting a positive sense of her strength, while Inman becomes increasingly negative.  When he eats the meat of the bear cub, "it tasted . . . like sin."

Again the theme of language comes back in the last sentence in the chapter: "He [Inman] tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."