"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."

"a satisfied mind"

From the ritual slaughters of the previous chapter and its songs "burdened with themes of death and solitude" we come back to Ada and Ruby as they spend "much of the autumn working with apples" and listen to Stobrod play his fiddle, accompanied by a retarded man with an intuitive skill for playing the banjo.

Stobrod uses his fiddle tunes as "a sort of autobiography of his war years." Here's Ada's reaction, which reflects a change in attitude toward life and art.

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. Ada wished there was a way to capture what she was hearing in the way of an ambrotype captures images, so it could be held in reserve for the benefit of a future whose residents might again need access to what it stood for. 

This is indirectly a statement of Frazier's approach to his novel.  Being a first novel it is naturally "coarse" and rough, but his "faith" in the "substance" of his story overcomes that. Frazier's novel is a form of "folk art," gathering together Appalachian and family stories in a quilt-work narrative.

Early in the chapter, Ada starts a letter to a friend in Charleston, which begins, "you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to."  Ada goes on to explain how living in the mountains has changed her:

Working in the fields, there are brief times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek analogy for its blackness. It know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mien. You would not know it on me for I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment. 

Despite the casual-seeming form of  a personal letter (both Ada and Inman have tried, unsuccessfully, to write letters to each other), this is a sophisticated meditation on the distinction between language and the "real" world that "words" attempt to represent.  The example of a "crow" is not a coincidence (is anything in "art" a coincidence?), not pure description.  In the debate between "description" and "analogy" as the heart of writing, Ada declares herself in the camp of those who trust to description.  This provides Frazier with his theoretical basis for the richness and craftsman-like detail of his descriptions.

Ada has been trying to read Adam Bede (by a Victorian woman writer of some note -- George Eliot), but it does not go well.  She gets even more abstract and "literary" in her thoughts:

She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being. 

Looking at the sun setting over the mountains, she states to herself one of the primary "life-lessons" Nature provides:

Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?

"Where am I" is a variation on "who am I?" or what meaning am I supposed to derive from my life.  And the answer is: you are living in a place called "Cold Mountain," and your identity is defined by what you do in that place, the place that is yourself.

This might be the time to quote the full poem by the Chinese poet, Han-shan or "Cold Mountain"

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here. 

To paraphrase: Ada's heart is not the same as Inman's.  No two people's hearts ever are.  The question we are reminded to ask as the novel gets toward the end of its "path" is: With such different hearts, will Ada and Inman make it?

Outside now, steady rain falls on the thick-leaved tulip trees close to the balcony at the back of my third-story apartment. I can see the rain, the trees, and the rough wooden balcony as I turn my eyes from what I'm writing. The day is heavy and overcast.  Inside, on the other side of the window, I am writing in the light of two halogen lamps and a computer screen. I am silent, but my mind is full of thoughts, only few of which make to the screen.

So what does the scene I've just described mean?  What would the mind make of it?  Do we need to make it "represent" something else, something inside us?  Or is the description enough?

"bride bed full of blood"

Before I make my comments about this chapter, I'd like to quote from Roberto Calasso on the elements of ritual sacrifice.  Here's the first quote:

Quechcotona, in Nahuatl, means both "to cut off someone's head" and "to pick an ear of grain with one's hand." The perception which lies at the heart of sacrifice is, in fact that every act of picking is also a killing --- that any uprooting, any detaching of something from what it is connected to (and if we go from one link to the next, this is nothing but the All), is a killing. But life, if it is to be perpetuated, demands that something be picked. [135]

And here is the second:

In surrendering part of the world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity to surrender the rest of the world to him, and to cease intervening in its arbitrary, uncontrollable way.  The sacrificer also wants the divinity's permission to use the world.  Thus, the first consequence of the eclipse of sacrifice will be that the world will be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being devoted to something else. [138]

I'd like to suggest that in this chapter there are two ritual sacrifices: first, of the three Federals who stole Sara's hog and some hens; and second, of the hog itself.  Calasso goes on to say that "the basis of sacrifice lies in the fact that each of us is two, not one. . . . Each of us consists of the two birds of the Upanishads, on the same branch of the cosmic tree: one eats, and the other watches the one that is eating." [134]

Inman is hyper-conscious of the Federals, watching what they do at Sara's cabin and later, after they have taken her hens and the hog, in the woods.  He is also hyper-conscious of his own actions in killing them: "Inman shot out the man's chest in such close range that the muzzle flash set his jacket breast afire." After the killings, Inman "found that the remaining hen had gotten free and had its head immersed in the broken open belly of his [one of the Federal's] exploded guts.

Inman, squatting on the ground and and smoking a cigarette, "watched the hen work."  He then begins to hum "a sacred song" and thinks about the words, which include the phrases, "When I die I'll live again. / My soul will rejoice by the crystal river."  He finishes the ritual by propping all the dead men up in a nearby cave and adding his markings to the wall:

Inman took a stick of charcoal from the old fire at the cave mouth and sketched on the cave depictions of Sara's quilt beasts that had pursued him through the dream world of the night before. In all their angularity they reminded him of how frail the human body is against all that is sharp and hard.

When he gets back to Sara's cabin with the hog, they perform the second sacrifice together.  The hog is "killed, scalded, and scraped of hair" and they spend the day preparing the hog "into two sides of meat, when he then further divided along the joints into the natural categories of pork."

When they are finished, Sara suggests Inman shave his beard: "I believe you'd look some better if you shaved down."  Then, as night engulfs them, Sara also sings a song. Though it isn't called a "sacred" song, she "sang as if shamed by her own sounds, by the way her life voice itself aloud."

The singing carried shrill into the twilight and its tones spoke of despair, resentment, an undertone of panic. Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed. It was like watching a bitter fight carried to a costly draw. 

Even though Sara sings to calm her baby, the "words to the song . . were no lullaby."  The song has to do with the killing at the heart of life, and it contains the words used in the title of the chapter:

I dreamed my bower was full of red swine,
And my bride bed full of blood. 

"freewill savages"

Another short chapter, and I didn't notice the title phrase in it anywhere.

The main focus is the re-introduction of Ruby's father, Stobrod, into the narrative and two key stories that he tells.  One is about how he created his fiddle with its unusual characteristics, and the other is about how he came to learn how to truly play the instrument.

The fiddle, Frazier writes, "was of novel design, for where the scroll would normally be was instead the whittled head of a great serpent curled back against the neck." The first tale is about how he came to put "the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument," deciding that it would "work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other." The story is in the form of a mountain tall tale, and Stobrod believes that the "musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle."

The second story is more realistic but still has elements of a folk tale.  It is about a young girl of fifteen who was dying from a severe burn to her face when a stove lid "had been blown with great force into her head, and the beam of fire that had come out of the opening had charred her flesh near to the bone." When she is asked what might "ease her passing," she answered that fiddle music would do fine."

Although at the time Stobord only knew six fiddles tunes, he is the only fiddler in the army camp.  When he runs out of tunes, the girl says, "Make me up a tune." Stobord is surprised at his ability to do it and becomes obsessed with music.

One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.

The "argument" that "things just happen" is the same one Inman is struggling with.

Having told his stories, Stobord plays his fiddle and is quite impressive.  Despite being impressed, however, "Ruby's face said it would take more than a tale and a fiddle tune to soften her heart toward him."  Ada, on the other hand, is more sympathetic and sees Stobord's new attachment to music "as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial."

This just reinforces our sense that Inman's journey back to Ada and Cold Mountain is a "path to redemption" and the "shadow of the crow" is acknowledge by the qualifying phrase "however partial." Having done what he has done, seen what he has seen, is "full" redemption even possible for Inman?

"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.