644
PARTISAN REVIEW
willingly fled." His mind, on the other hand, is full of exact visions of
Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, where he had
gotten his. At Fredericksburg, as the Union soldiers marched uphill across
open ground, line after line in their thousands, Inman had kept firing till
his arm was weary from working the ramrod of his rifle, his jaws sore from
biting off the paper ends of cartridges, and he could hear without a pause
"the slap of balls into meat." Mterwards, as the wounded lay on the field,
many still moaning and crying, some of the poorly shod of Inman's com–
pany went out to pull off the boots of the dead against whose bodies those
who could still move huddled in the cold. Again and again in the odyssey
of Inman's journey these spectacles surface in his mind
But the actual scene of Inman's narrative is not battle but its aftermath
and the behind-the-lines side of the War at its close in a countryside emp–
tied of its own young men and full of fugitives and "Federals" and, more
dangerously, of the Confederate "Home Guard" on the prowl for desert–
ers.
It
is such a deserter, or "outlier," that Inman has become. His journey
is a progress of "exile and brute wandering" along hidden trails and dark
woods, shelterless, often starving, and in constant danger of being killed.
Meanwhile, another story is unfolding far from the front-for this is a
novel of two major narratives. At Cold Mountain, Ada, waiting for Inman's
return, is trying to survive in a world without men. Her father has died,
leaving her a hard-scrabble farm he never expected her to run for herself.
An eccentric clergyman, he had moved with her from Charleston only a
few years earlier, seeking recovery for his tubercular lungs and imagining–
deludedly-that his sermons (a
mix
of personal quirkiness and Emersonian
idealism) would be welcomed by his mountain congregation. His cultivat–
ed daughter, aloof from the small community and without any farm skills
at all, is now quite alone. Yet she does not leave; perhaps she is waiting for
Inman, whom she had begun to love. And, after a while, help arrives in the
form of a new friend and partner. Ruby cannot read or write but knows
everything about surviving with the help of nature--how to make the tiny
farm give them food enough and leave them a small margin for other
necessities. Her father had neglected and abandoned her when she was still
a child; she possesses a wisdom born of her own hard-schooled life of pri–
vation and sorrow. With Ruby's guidance Ada begins her own journey
away from her former self into a new kind of independent womanhood.
Frazier's two narratives are artfully interlaced, and are only joined at
the end when Inman reaches his destination. And within each of these
narratives the writer has inserted sub-narratives in the form of the recol–
lections of Inman and of Ada, and, besides this, small stories within stories,
the histories of others. The writer's rich fabric incorporates earlier
moments of Inman's life as well those ineradicable battle scenes as they
