Inman thought he should answer maybe or I can do something to cope with it.

But he said I could promise.
I want you to come to bed and lie next to me, but don’t do nothing. Can you promise?
Inman looked at her and thought, "What do you see in her eyes at this moment? A terrible ghost in her husband’s clothes, a ghost that makes her sad." Inman’s eyes fell on her quilt, and the quilt was painted with thick beasts, big eyes, small legs, clumsy but noble heraldic animals. They seemed to be pieced together according to the incomplete memory of seeing monsters in dreams. The shoulders were swollen with large muscles and claws, and Zhang Ju’s mouth growled and long fangs were exposed.
Can you? she asked again
can
I know you’re not, and I wouldn’t ask.
He went to the bed, took off his boots and clothes, put them on his back and got into bed.
The mattress is filled with fresh hay, giving off a dry fragrance, which reminds people of the girl who was still in bed in autumn. She smells like a wet laurel petal and has fallen to the ground.
Both of them lay motionless as if they were holding a shotgun with a ready-to-fire chamber. After a while, Inman heard her sobbing violently.
I’d better go. It will make you feel better, he said.
stop talking
After a long time, she stopped crying, sat up and was wiped her eyes. She told Inman to listen. Every time he wanted to talk, she said that there was nothing strange about her story, but it was her life. She said that John met and fell in love and built this wooden house. Like a man, John worked together to build a flat wood and mud seam. In such an Inman’s view, it was difficult to make a living, but they imagined a bright future. She talked about the hardships of the past four years. John died, and there was not enough food. The only highlight was that John took a vacation, which was really a paradise. That
Finally, she said that the pig outside looks good and has been eating chestnuts in the Woods. After coming back, she has been feeding corn lard for two weeks. It should be so fat that she can’t open her eyes.
Sarah reached out and touched Inman’s neck scar. First, the fingertips and then the palms were attached. After a while, she turned her back on Inman and lay down. Soon, her breathing became deep and even. Inman wanted to find someone to tell her that she was living a lonely and precarious life, so she got comfort from it. Her life was like an altar full of sorrow, and the jar was stuffed with a pig.
Although he was very tired, Inman managed to sleep. He lay beside Sarah and watched the light on the roof gradually dim as the fire weakened. For a long time, he had never experienced a woman, even if he touched her with a little tenderness, so that he had regarded himself as the past. Another creature could not be redeemed and punished. This was his fate. He would never get tenderness. His life was doomed to be a terrible mistake. Inman’s thoughts were ups and downs, and his heart was filled with sadness. He dared not think that he could put his hand on Sarah’s waist and pull her to his side to embrace him to the sky.
Inman slept very little this night and had many dreams. He dreamed that the quilt animals were chasing themselves in a dark forest and fled to a place where there was no refuge in any direction. He was alone in the face of the darkness and seemed to kill him and unite in a world where everything was dark and dark except for white teeth and claws like the moon.
Inman woke up and found Sarah pushing her shoulder up and running away. She said it was extremely urgent.
It’s just dawn, and it’s freezing in the wooden house. The road rings and weak hooves are coming here
Let’s go. Sarah said it’s not good for us to be here, whether it’s the militia or the North Army
She ran to the back door, kicked Inman’s boots, grabbed the fireplace pistol and rushed over. He ran desperately to the opposite side of the stream, plunged into the Woods and fled to the shelter. He carefully went around the Woods and hid in the shadow of a dense laurel tree, looking out from two branches to avoid exposing his face. The ground was already frozen, and the ice lumps clicked on his feet.
He saw Sarah running barefoot across the frosty ground in her pajamas to the pigsty. She took the crossbar from the post and tried to coax the pig, but it just didn’t move. She walked into the pigsty and broke the thin ice shell with her feet, covered with black mud. When Sarah kicked the pig, it got up and walked towards the door, but it was too big and too heavy, and its belly hung too low. It was hard to walk to the door. Sarah drove it towards the Woods. Just after a little improvement, she heard a passerby shout, Don’t move.
Inman saw three federal soldiers in blue uniforms coming into the front door from several weak horses. Two of them were holding new Springfield rifles in their left arms, but their fingers were stuck in the trigger bow. The other one was holding a navy revolver as if to shoot birds in the sky, but his eyes were fixed on Sarah.
The man with a pistol walked over to Sarah and told her to sit on the ground. Sarah obeyed, and the pig lay down beside her. Two men with rifles went to the porch and entered the room. Then the sound of banging and smashing things sounded. The man with a pistol had been beside Sarah, neither looking at her nor talking to her. After a long time, the two men came. One of them grabbed a cloth horn and held a baby in his hand, just like carrying a small cloth bag and crying. Sarah stood up and tried to get there, but the man with a pistol was pushed to the ground.
The three soldiers discussed for a while in the courtyard, crying for Sarah in the child, begging Zhongying Mangan not to hear what they were saying, but he could hear their accent flat and fast as a hammer, which aroused a strong desire to fight back in Inman’s heart. However, the other side was out of the reliable range of Lematte revolver, but even in the range, he couldn’t see how to do it, so as not to take Sarah’s life.
Then he heard them asking her for money and asking where the money was hidden. Inman thought that money was their lifeblood. Sarah said that something they saw before their eyes was her property. They asked and asked. Finally, they took her to the porch. The pistol man twisted his hands behind his back. A rifle man went to the horse and took an old plow rope from the saddle bag. The pistol man tied her to a post with a rope, and then he pointed a finger at the child. Inman put the child on the frozen ground.
A few people were sitting on the porch chatting, their feet kept swinging, and they rolled up their cigarettes and smoked them to their butts. Then the two soldiers took sabres from horseback and stuck them around in the cold ground of the courtyard, hoping to find something. The baby kept crying. Sarah kept begging the man with the pistol to get up, walked up to Sarah, put the gun in her legs and said, you really don’t even have shit, right? The other two came over and watched.
Inman has to move around the side of the house in the Woods so that when he turns around from the back of the house, he can kill one when they are not looking. This plan is not high at all, but he has no choice because the two sides are separated by a large area. He knows that his woman and children are likely to die, but he has no choice.
But before he could move far, the men left Sarah’s side. Inman stopped to wait and see, hoping to see what the situation would be. The pistol man took a piece of rope from the saddle bag and went to the pig and tied it to the pig’s neck. One of the other two untied Sarah’s hand rope, and the other went to the child’s side to lift her up with one arm and stuffed her to Sarah. They finally caught three hens chasing chickens all over the yard, tied the chicken legs with their heads hanging behind the saddle.
Sarah held the child tightly in her arms, and when she saw that they were going to take the pig away, she shouted, I only have that pig left, and it’s not there yet. We both shot each other first, so it’s all the same, but those people rode back, and the pig was trotted behind. They turned a corner and walked away.
Inman ran to the front of the porch and looked up at Sarah, saying, warm the baby quickly, then light a fire, the bigger the better, and cook a big pot of water. Then he ran along the road
He was hidden on the edge of the forest and quietly followed those federal soldiers, and he didn’t know what to do in his heart, so he could wait for the right time.
After walking for two or three miles, they turned off the road and entered a small ravine with uneven terrain. At the entrance, they made a slope. They tied the pig to a small thorn locust tree, and a large rock burst by a swift stream. They made a fire next to the rock. Inman estimated that they wanted to camp here for the night and would definitely have a full meal, even if they had to cut the pig’s leg from the Woods and hide on the top of the rock. They watched them from afar and saw them break two chicken necks, pull out chicken feathers and pull out dirty branches and put them on the fire.
With their backs to the rocks, they waited for the chicken to cook slowly. Inman heard them talking about their hometown. The two families came to the city with pistols, and the man came to new york. When they talked about homesickness, Inman really hoped to stay at home, and Inman also hoped that they would stay at home, because he was not particularly keen on doing what he could.
He moved quietly on the rock for quite a long distance until he reached the level of the ground. At this time, he found a hole on the edge of the rock. It was only ten feet deep when he looked in. A long time ago, raccoon hunters came here to kill raccoons. There were other people who lived in the cave wall for a long time. They carved their own marks. Some strange cuneiform characters have long been forgotten. Nowadays, no living person can distinguish their meanings. In addition, some animals or roots have long since disappeared from this world, and those who imagined them have become shells as old gourds.
Inman left the cave and continued to move forward around the rock. Finally, he walked along the stream and crossed the canyon, and approached the few people. Just out of their sight, he found a hemlock tree with low branches. He climbed up the tree for about ten feet and clung to the black trunk on a branch. Like he had seen a long-eared owl hiding in the tree during the day, he imitated the wild turkey and called for three times, then waited quietly.
He could hear the people talking, but he couldn’t hear what it was. After a while, the pistol man turned slowly with a navy revolver and went straight to Tsuga. Inman could see the revolver on the top of his hat, put it in his armpit, took off his hat and scratched his hair. His head was bald, and a piece of white scalp as big as a poker chip was aimed there.
He said hi.
When the pistol man looked up, Inman pulled the trigger and didn’t hit the scalp bullet. It was shot from the shoulder near the neck and exploded from the abdomen, followed by spraying a mass of things. Like severe vomiting, the man’s leg bone seemed to suddenly melt. He fell to the ground and tried to climb forward, but his hand could not catch anything. He turned over to see what beast had given him a fatal blow. When they looked at each other, Inman reached out two fingers and touched the brim to say hello to him. The man immediately died with a puzzled expression on his face.
Did you hit it? One of the other two shouted from the side.
After that, everything was simple. Inman came from the tree and quickly went back to the rock along the route. He came from the other side, this time against the stream and touched the campfire. He hid behind a clump of azaleas and waited.
The two men by the fire called Inman over and over again to find out that he had killed the man named Yi. In the end, they stopped shouting, picked up the Springfield rifle and swam to find him. Inman followed closely under the cover of trees. They found the dead body and discussed what to do in a little farther away. It was obvious from the sound that they really wanted to put everything behind them and go back to their hometown, but Inman expected that they finally decided to swim to search for the murderer and fled in that direction.
Inman followed them quietly to the hillside. They had been walking through the trees near the stream, fearing that they would lose their way if they deviated from the stream. They were urban youths who were afraid of the forest and thought of the upcoming murder. They looked dignified. For them, it was a road wilderness, but in Inman’s view, they were marching on the thoroughfare. They pretended to look for the murderer to leave a trail, but they could not see anything unless it was as obvious as a big footprint in the mud.