Cold Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

was now hers, a portable writing desk balanced across her lap. She wet the nib of a pen in ink and wrote:
    This you must know: that despite your long absence, such is the light in which I view the happy relation existing between us, that I will never conceal a single thought from you. Let such fears not trouble you. Know that I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.
    She blew the paper to dry it and then scanned over what she had written with a critical eye. She mistrusted her handwriting, for no matter how she tried, she had never mastered the flowing whorls and arcs of fine penmanship. The characters her hand insisted on forming were instead blocky and dense as runes. Even more than the penmanship, she disliked the tenor of the letter. She balled up the paper and tossed it into a boxwood bush.
    Aloud she said, That is just the way people talk and has nothing to do with the real matter at hand.
    She looked off across the yard to the kitchen garden where the beans and squash and tomatoes bore vegetables hardly bigger than her thumb despite the fullness of the growing season. Many of the leaves were eaten away to their veins by bugs and worms. Standing thick in the rows and towering over the vegetables were weeds that Ada could not name and had neither the energy nor the heart to fight. Beyond the failed garden stretchedthe old cornfield, now grown up shoulder high in poke and sumac. Above the fields and pastures, the mountains were just becoming visible as the morning fog burned away. Their pale outlines stood at the horizon, more like the ghosts of mountains than the actual things.
    Ada sat waiting for them to reveal themselves clearly. Her thinking was that it would be a comfort to see something that was as it should be, for otherwise her mind troubled itself with the thought that everything else in her sight was marked by neglect. Since her father’s funeral, Ada had hardly turned her hand around the farm. She had at least milked the cow, which Monroe had named Waldo with disregard for gender, and fed the horse, Ralph, but she had not done much more, for she did not know how to do much more. She had left the chickens to fend for themselves and they had gotten skinny and skittish. The hens had abandoned the little chicken house and roosted in trees and dropped their eggs wherever the mood struck them. They vexed Ada with their inability to settle on nesting places. She had to investigate every cranny of the yard to find the eggs, and lately she believed they had taken on a strange taste since the hens’ diet had changed from table scraps to bugs.
    Cookery had become a pressing issue for Ada. She was perpetually hungry, having eaten little through the summer but milk, fried eggs, salads, and plates of miniature tomatoes from the untended plants that had grown wild and bushy with suckers. Even butter had proved beyond her means, for the milk she had tried to churn never firmed up beyond the consistency of runny clabber. She wanted a bowl of chicken and dumplings and a peach pie but had not a clue how one might arrive at them.
    Ada cast one more look to the far mountains, still faint and pale, and then she rose and went in search of eggs. She checked the weeds along the fence by the lane, parted the long grass at the base of the pear tree in the side yard, rattled among the clutter of the back porch, ran her hands along the dusty shelves in the toolshed. She found nothing.
    She recalled that a red hen had sometimes lately taken to hanging about the big boxwoods at either side of the front steps. She went to the bush that she had thrown the letter into and tried to part the dense leafage and peer inside, but she could see nothing in the dim center. She folded her skirts tightly about her legs, and on hands and knees she worked her way inside the boxwood. Its branches scratched at her forearms and face and