My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

FIVE

Doe Singleton said that she might choose any room above-stairs that pleased her, and she chose the one in which she and Annie had stayed, the west room. The high bed leaped at her unpleasantly and receded suddenly into diminished perceptions as she spread the sheets and quilts over it to prepare it for occupation. It funneled down suddenly into a very small object, a familiar pattern, a bed, when she focused her attention upon it, but left uncentered it bulged suddenly to unapprehended proportions, divided, proportion at war with proportion and quality. She opened the windows to the south sun and lay in the bed.

There was no one in the house but the aunt, whose muffled, uncertain noises fell after undetermined intervals, and herself, who, lying in the bed, was subtracted from the content of the walls, length, breadth, and thickness therein contained, and extended as continuing in a running movement through history, past and future. The second day she noticed the leaves of the linden tree and how each one carried two small buds or pods held to the leaf by a slender green wire. At regular intervals the voice of her aunt called from below.

“It’s ready now. You can come.”

Below-stairs there would be food on a small table in a back room, her aunt’s bedroom. The bed stood pompously against the wall opposite the great fireplace, and the dogs came and went or rested before the open fire, lying down stiffly or arising. There was no servant and the dining-room across the hall was mouldy and dark. The food was always on the table when she came down the stairs, bread and meat and milk. There was coffee in a silver coffeepot.

“I don’t myself keep any cows now,” Miss Doe said. “I got the milk for you from the tenant man on the place.”

“Don’t you keep any cows any more?”

“No use, just for me, me not very partial to milk in my diet. I eat mostly the same all the time, but you say the doctor said milk for you and I got Bland to fetch up some.”

“That was very kind of you, Aunt Doe.”

As she lay again in the bed the avenue ran down to the stone wall and turned sweetly to the gate, which was perpetually white. Slowly in mind she walked down the avenue, step by step, stopping to look at each minute occurrence, as the wild fern by the side of the drive, the small gray imagined birds that flocked over the stems of the low pasture weeds and took imagined flight at her step. Her foot twitched lightly under the quilts. When the birds had flown she passed on, going slowly, undetermined whether the way should slope downward or extend outward, shaping it to her will. She would step slowly to make the walk last the longer. The clover at the side of the path was white and rank, and the grass and weeds of the pasture ready for cutting. The path she went ran along the side of the drive although from the window she could see that there was no path there now, for none ever walked that way. There were wagon prints on the drive, however, marks of tires, and she shuffled her toe in the faintly marked rut and wondered what habitual coming had made it. Each day she prepared the walk, clinging to it with fervor, returning to it as to a consolation. After five days no wheels had sounded on the stone and gravel of the way.

The great hounds would come to her room each day, now one and again another, and they would sniff at the bed or turn about lazily on the carpet. She would call the names until some flicker of recognition would denote that the beast had been rightly called—Roscoe, Nomie, Tim, Speed, Old Mam, Tilly, True. There were some younger dogs, unnamed and unbroken, but these came little to the house. She would hear them running on the hills and hunting their prey. She clung to the daily walk to the gate and back and built the path minutely for comfort, gathering herself out of a running slant of historic actuality to the more comforting actuality of the path beside the drive where the ruts of some never-heard wagon wheels threaded constantly down to the highway. One day it was the shade of the elms that was intensely realized, or another the sounds of the beetles and crickets, until, being minutely sensed, the path brought her to the white flowers, queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief, clustered in tall masses before the stone wall. The old dogs walked up and down the stairs, sniffing at her bed. True brought her stiff old limbs laboriously up the hall and turned about on the carpet to lie down at the foot of her bed. Below on the hearth in Doe Singleton’s room some great pones of cornbread were perpetually cooking on rough old iron pans, bread for the old dogs.

One morning after the journey below had been accomplished, while she lay resting from the difficult ascent of the stairs, a low purr of muffled noises flowed through the hallways, and the front door was opened and closed. Then a white cloth was hung on the vine by the door and the steps receded and became the uncertain tread of her aunt on the pavement beside the house wall. The hour was long and sunny, undefined, mingled now with some anticipated event which pointed to the white cloth that hung by the pillar. Later a yellow truck came up under the elms, fitting its wheels to the ruts, and the words, Perkins’ Liniments, grew, boldly defined, on the yellow sides of the car which backed about at the door. Leaning on her elbow she took a gayety from the yellow of the wagon and the bold design of the printed words and from the brisk man who sold packages to her aunt with a clatter of good-will and gossip. Tea in packages, coffee, sugar—the best cane—and did she need any spices this trip? Liniment, salve, mange cure, soap, oil, baking powders, ointment, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator—for hens, cures mites, chiggers. Any extracts? flavors? perfumery? cake color? ice-cream powders? sage?

“The coffee and sugar is all.”

“A sight of rain over in the creek country. Water outen bounds.”

“Anybody drowned?”

“Nobody drowned, but a heap of swollen branches and some stock washed off. Old Man Tumey’s chickens, and Lige Smith lost a calf. They say prices are a-goen high this time, money for everybody. Corn sold this week for around two dollars. Old Miss Bee Beach is right sick, they say. Bound to die, I reckon.”

He shouted his words before the house and his rough voice struck the corners of the room above and quickened life where it had declined in her breast. His steps were rough and strong on the gravel of the roadway. When the purchase had been made he ran quickly through his list again and closed the rear door of the truck with a crash. Then he swept off his hat to mop his head with a dim handkerchief of some yellowed silk, sponging his face and neck. He plunged the handkerchief inside his collar-band, and he stretched his legs and his back, a tall man with a dark vigor about him. Theodosia leaned on her arm to watch him, amused at the painted words on the car, the long rheumatic letters that spelled the liniment to the afflicted of the county. His vigor reached her where she lay crumpled under the bed clothing, and she had a quick vision of herself, arisen, going about her ways of life. She watched every gesture as he climbed into the car and set it in motion, she concentrated to his burning darkness, her throat dilated in response to the unaccustomed man’s voice. When he was gone she sank weakly back to the bed and presently she made the minute journey to the roadside gate, step by step, negotiating intricately with the roadside birds and grasses.

Some days later she heard the throb of another car on the driveway and presently a voice spoke to Doe Singleton at the door, the voice turning away, saying that it would come again. This would be Frank, she reflected. Her aunt would not bring him to her room because she was in bed and the aunt moved among a few old signs and tokens. None but the old dogs ever walked on the stairway except when she herself replied to the call from below, “Come on now, it’s ready.” Summer having advanced, the night-noises made a great swinging water, a vast throbbing sea of sound beating continually and arising in shrill waves, the crickets, the frogs, the toads, the treetoads, the katydids. An old voice then, a joyous rise and skurry of man’s speech, acutely remembered in all its inflections.

“Ladybug, when you hear a katydid, it’s then six weeks till frost. Yessir. Six weeks. I often took notice to a katydid that-away. It’s a forerunner to frost for fair.... Oh, it’s a good morning.... Someways I always liked a hilltop....”

The tenant would come about the house talking noisily, his voice striking the wall with a token of life in the fields. Cuttings of hay, stand of wheat, stand of rye, prime good crop of burley this time, “fair good corn if it turns out well in the shock at plucken time”—these were his cries as they smote the upper wall and rolled in at the open windows. There would be money from Doe Singleton’s acres to augment her bank account and her securities. Once her banker called, making a low clatter of steps and voice as he went in and out. One of the dogs, old True, died in the upper hallway, stretched out stiff when the morning food called Theodosia down the stairs, laid out across the carpet. Later one of the tenant men dragged her away, the body pulled by a rope making a dull stiff cluttering of noises on the hard stair. The strong sour odor of her death pervaded the hall for many days after.

Theodosia did not keep the count with the katydid, but the frost came, the leaves richly responding. The katydids had sung their own well-timed requiem. After the season of the first frost the rains set in, plodding heavily on the old walls, wetting the ceilings where the roof leaked. The drip of the water made a continuous impertinence upon her carpeted floor. She arose and set several basins under the drips and climbed shivering back into the bed. In the morning after a continued rainfall of many hours her bed stood under a new drip.

“The roof upstairs leaks everywhere, Aunt Doe,” she said. “There’s hardly a dry place left. Maybe you never noticed it, but the roof ought to be mended. The plaster might fall.”

Doe Singleton was tall and straight, a fantasy of old age, her movements hurried and uncertain. Her hair, white now, had turned coarse and frizzled with its graying. When the report of the roof came to her, her mouth became straighter and more thin. She dipped her bread into her coffee and ate slowly, saying nothing.

“Want more bread?” she said after a little, a curious cheerfulness, reiterated each mealtime over the food.

Theodosia moved to the east room, across the hall, for there were fewer leaks there and the bed could be kept dry. She set three basins under the drips in her new quarters and closed the door of the west room upon its wet misery. When she had lain ten days without fever at any time during the day she might arise and walk a few steps into the yard. This was the doctor’s suggestion when he came in the autumn, his last visit, and found her lung healed. It was difficult to achieve the ten in consecutive occurrence, and with each failure she must begin the count anew.

Her grandfather’s books were in their boxes in the hall, half-unpacked, tumbled together as she had searched among them. In the east room she looked at the walls her grandfather had seen when he lay in Doe Singleton’s house, herself across the hall then in the room with Annie. The likenesses of the Bells and the Trotters stood in stiff frames, awkwardly placed along the walls, and once, indifferent to what she did, she arose and rearranged the small frames to a happier proportion, driving the small tacks with the poker from the fireplace. She was often insulated from her own thought by pain in her head, in her abdomen and loins. The autumn was bright and long, lingering warmly after the leaves had fallen.

She would fasten her eyes upon the ship, a chromo picture framed in old gilt, a dull brown mounting. A great still ship, caught on the upward wash of a wave and tilted with the wind, frozen forever with one stayed moment. Its great sail lay out on the current of the air and its round keel swelled high out of the plume of water from which it had arisen and on which it now hung. Frank was turned away from the door by the same reiterated cheerfulness that responded to the food. “You better come again when she’s up and down-stairs. Come again, young man.”

She wondered if she could still count ten rightly and she began to mark the days on an old calendar. Insulated by pain, she would turn to the driveway and walk minutely down imagined paths through the first light snow. She brought wood from her aunt’s hearth and built fires on her own. The required ten days fell in the end of November and she walked weakly a little way under the trees among the fallen leaves. Later she brought wood each day from the old wood-lot behind the garden, the journey to the woodpile becoming her daily measure of exercise. An old pile of cut wood was stored there under a small shed, a pile of which her aunt seemed to have no knowledge. The wood the tenant man brought to her aunt’s room was scarcely enough now for the one fire below-stairs. She had heard her aunt give an order, had heard her complain to the tenant of the waste.

“No use to waste the wood so. Eight pieces a day is enough, now.” The words had come above mingled with the tumbled wood as it fell, or mingled again with the retreating steps of the man as they fell stiffly on the pavement.

Doe Singleton sat all day reading her books. She would bring an armful of novels from the front room, the room where she had lived with Tom Singleton, and she would set herself upon them, one after the other. They were books she had read in her youth and had reread many times since. Theodosia would hear her come to the room below, a dull monotony of steps and of books plucked about in the bookcases, and hear her return, the door closed, the journeys irregularly placed as her demands required. In the back room she would read all day, and, going down for food, Theodosia would see her book where it had been laid aside and would mark her swift progress through the pages. The food was kept in the storeroom behind the chamber, and the old pageant of the aunt handing out the supplies from this doorway, Prudie waiting with full hands, would arise. The door was locked as in the former time, the key hidden away. Miss Doe would bend over the fireplace in the chamber, cooking there. One day Theodosia, leaving after a meal, went into the dining-room and thus to the kitchen where Prudie had cooked. The range was gone from its place, but she recognized a part of it in a mass of broken iron behind the door. She stared at the stale cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in a dusty fringe, and she sickened at the odors of mice, her mind contemptuous of the sickness in her throat and her mouth. She looked again and again for some token of Prudie and the ancient bustle and order of the house, her eyes clinging to an old felt hat, some man’s headwear, thrown down in the corner of the pantry and defiled by mice and mould.

At her aunt’s table she would talk of one thing and another, asking questions of the past, of Aunt Deesie, of Prudie. Where had they gone? Was her uncle’s grave marked by a stone? She would walk out there some day when she had grown stronger.

“Which do you like best, Dickens or Scott or Cooper?” she asked.

“About the same, one as the other. A good love-story is what I like best. Want more bread?”

There was bread and milk and a bit of meat sometimes. A pie baked before the open fire or a bit of a pudding.

“When I’m better maybe you’ll have the kitchen fixed up and I’ll run it, Aunt Doe. Or we could have somebody to cook. There’s a heap to do in a farm kitchen, I know. I’ll take the bother of it any time you want....”

“I’m well enough off as I am. I don’t want a big rumpus inside the house.”

She dwelt on the kitchen as Prudie had kept it, the busy mornings there, the kettles steaming on the stove, to try to make it reappear as a part of a pleasant way. She remembered some droll sayings of Prudie’s talk and restored Lucas with a swiftly sketched picture.

“Remember how Prudie used to say, ‘But stick inside your shirt-tail, Lucas, afore you go in to wait on white folks. Shirt-tail always out.’ Remember Prudie?”

“But I like the way I got now. No bother. All I need is right here. I’m well enough off to suit me,” Miss Doe said.

The journey up the stairs required several pauses for rest on the way, and, this accomplished, she was glad to sink into the kindness of the bed. Her flesh was soft like wax. She would look at her strange hands and listen to her fluttering breath. It was spring, she reflected, seeing the swelling buds on the linden tree and hearing the birds at morning. At night the up-and-down seesaw of the frogs in the pond came to her if the breeze were drifting in from the east. Frank came sometimes, always in the late afternoons. She would talk with him on the portico where she would sit wrapped well in shawls. She worked feebly, a little at a time, and rid the parlor of its cobwebs and dust.

A sweet smell of cut grass spread over the farm. The white-top was standing over the clover among the high heads of straying timothy, and then the field was mowed for hay. The oat field was green, and shaken in the breeze it was broken like lace. The rye had turned yellow. The two men, Walter and Abe Bland, had finished setting the tobacco in the field along the creek, and her mind’s eye knew how their plows went there although this field was beyond the hill’s rise and thus beyond her vision. Across the road were two neighboring farms and the matrons there sometimes called on Miss Doe in the fine weather. Seen distantly these houses were full of the busy appearances of life. People came and went from the white house where the Bernards lived, and Miss Alice Bernard, the wife and mistress of the place, would tell of the goings and comings among all the farms, of the berries she had canned and the jams she had made. Miss Doe would acquiesce, remotely smiling; they would be sitting in the shade of the portico. Seen from the upper window, the house where Miss Alice lived presented a remote drama. The shutters, green against the white wall, were opened and closed daily, and people went hurrying down the driveway to the highroad and thus away to the town. In the other house, far to the left, there were two young girls. “They think of me as being very old,” Theodosia thought. She would see them at morning riding their horses, cantering along the road.

She had learned to lift the bow and the fiddle above her breast and to hold them there. Looking out on the earth from the portico where she rested almost all day in an old reclining chair, she would play airs from an overture or a caprice or a sonata, bending the tune to the outspread fertility of the fields and the high tide of mid-summer with herself apart, insulated by the wax-like softness of her flesh and dispossessed by the penurious withdrawals of the house. Out before the wall, in the light of summer, seeing the richness of the fields and the lush plenty of the days, she would surround herself with thin spectral music from which passion had been withdrawn. She kept a sense of hush to her own past.

She could walk now to the stile going over the fence, the way the tenant man, Walter, took in going to and from the house. It was a rude stile that some farmhand had constructed of such plunder as he had found, a log split and a board on end. Sitting on the slab of the log she could look down the pasture where some unbroken colts ran.

“Them colts is too braysh,” Walter said one day as he passed by the stile. “They need a plow line, them fillies.” He passed down the path mumbling his grievance.

She sat on the stile and searched his rough speech after his departure. He was a strong man, past middle life, sturdy and wind-stained, a hardness in the muscles of his face and some austerity in his eyes. His teeth were broken and yellowed with tobacco. He would look past her when he spoke, drawing his eyes as if to see afar, but when he looked back at her his face would gather to a sum of its severity. He lived with his brother in Aunt Deesie’s cabin, and neither he nor the brother had a wife.

She would walk a little farther each day and sit to rest on the stile. Beyond the fence the ricks for feeding cattle had once stood, and she remembered the dogs on the day they had set upon her and little Annie, and she wondered if the dogs that were now about the house were, any of them, the same. An intense desire to have her former strength drove her to walk her distances several times a day, but she often sank wearily to the ground under some tree and lay there for an hour. As she lay thus on the ground she knew that Walter walked through the farm, his rough shoes brushing the low weeds, and that his brother Abe kept in the lower fields near the tobacco barn. She would gaze up at the insecure sky where the clouds turned on the horizon and watch the hazardous trees shake lightly in the wind and lose now a leaf and now another, or in the later summer two or three would fall. She knew that Walter knew that she lay to rest there; sometimes she would see his sullen face set forward as he tramped across the pasture rim.

At long intervals her aunt hung a signal on the pillar of the portico and the liniment-man brought his truck to the door to sell her sugar, coffee, and tea. These days were always Thursdays. Sometimes she would walk to the truck and look in at the bottles and spice cans, all labeled in yellow, all lettered with the name of the brand. He would chant his tale again to try to tempt her buying. Spices, baking powders, ointments, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator, flavors, perfumery, cake color, ice-cream powder, sage.

“Here’s something to take the eye of a young lady. Perfumery and face powder. The best there is. Both in one box. Fifty cents to a dollar.”

“She’s not much hand to fix up,” Miss Doe said.

“Or ice-cream powders. Makes fine ice-cream. Freezes twice as fast too.”

“Does it take an ice-cream freezer,” Theodosia asked. “And some ice, maybe? Or just the powder?”

“Of course it takes a freezer. Or say, here’s a little something for a young lady that’s nice and particular.”

He would run through the list of his wares again and when the buying was determined he would give some news of the farther valley. Caleb Burns had lost a fine cow, and a fine cow on Burns’s place was a sure-enough fine one. Registered Shorthorns. His dark vigor made a violence about him and his tall strong legs beat on the gravel as he stepped quickly about. His hands were strong on the door of the truck when he slammed it. His nails were untended and he would pluck at his nose with his thumb, remembering his handkerchief afterward. She would go back to the portico, delicately amused, rejecting him pleased with the incident, and he would climb into his vehicle and set it in motion, making a bow toward her in his departure.

She wished for some other contact beside Frank, who came now every week or two. She remembered too vividly his face, his gestures, his presence after his departure. She was lying on the ground under the linden tree, seeing the pods of the linden that hung under each leaf by a slender stem of green. Walter and Abe would be cutting the tobacco in the lower field. The wild horses ran roughly up and down their pasture, their hoof-heavy tread thundering, the young stallion stopping to paw the grass until the dust rose from beneath it. She could scarcely divide this year from last year except by some memory of herself lying in the bed above the stairs, counting days to achieve ten unfevered. Now she lay on the rough grass and herbs under the linden tree not far from the pine, not far from the portico. She remembered Frank from time to time, or he welled upward from within her own being, his hands that seemed strong now as set beside no other hands. She remembered his face, his gray eyes, his still brow, his scrutinizing stare, a picture of his throat, his hand on his thigh.

“I must have some other people,” she said, stirring as she lay to dispel the too-acute picture. “If I could walk to some other house. Go anywhere....”

The cow at the tenant house was dry now and there was no milk. “Now let’s see,” she thought, turning her mind again and again to the problem. Miss Doe had grown weary. She leaned all day over the novels, her eyes in a dim trance when she was called. There was milk on the neighboring farms, Theodosia thought, but she had no money. “You’ve got as much to eat as I’ve got,” Miss Doe said. “You’ve got as much milk and eggs as you see me eat.”

She was in the back room at the hour of food, waiting. The pones for the dogs baked on the hearth.

“Let me help, Aunt Doe,” she said. “Let me help you do something.”

“I’ll mind my own house. Just keep your seat whilst I manage my own.”

The great pones lay over hot coals to bake, the flying ashes dusting over them. The books were piled on the deep window sill. The bed in the back of the room was spread with a dark pieced quilt of some old design. Dust had settled over the quilt and over the pillows that were laid in funeral rigidity at the top of the bed. Walking near the bed to examine the design of the quilt, Theodosia suspected that her aunt did not sleep in the bed.

“Is this the sunshine-and-shade quilt?” she asked. “Did you piece it? You bought it from an old woman. It’s pretty and faded now, the colors blended. They’re pretty, faded together like that....”

The dust on the quilt and on the pillows made her know they were never disturbed. The quilt was clean under the pillows and the bed was always plumped carefully, the quilt on it in the same way. It was never used, she surmised, and she wondered where her aunt lay to sleep. There was a roll of old quilts thrown into the storeroom where the food was kept.

Miss Doe brought out a small leather cake of wheat bread she had cooked by the fire and a bit of conserve that was old and dry. A few brown crackers.

On her way to the wood-lot in the first cold of a November day when the wind was whipping the trees and shrubs and the leaves were falling in mad disaster, “A woman, I am, walking to gather firewood in a wild storm,” she said. In a wind-whipped bush she found a song-sparrow’s nest, revealed now to sight by the upturned branches and the dispersing leaves. She broke the nest from the bush and carried it away. It was made of fine twigs rounded and woven with perfect care, the wooded ends and strands growing more delicate as they approached the center, the pool where the eggs had lain. This cup was lined with human hair, soft and red-brown, laid in an exquisite hollow to make a lining, her own hair. Walking back through the angry air that twisted her garments and beat her steps from the path, a wind that would cry “It is done, make a swift end then,” and would tear life out of the trees and wrench summer off from the sagging vine on the house wall, a fervor of joy welled in her senses and spread backward to some quiet inner part. She had had this ineffable relation with the bird. Unknown to her, the nest had lain on the bough of the old lilac bush all summer, had been built in the spring. The wind slammed the door on the outside violence and she was free of bodily struggle, ribbons of exhaustion and pain unwinding upward into her thighs and back. She placed the nest on her table and looked at it from time to time, picking it delicately apart to try to discover its order.

In the untended pastures the withered white-top and frost-flowers, rejected by the horses, shook stiffly in the cold gusts. The silkweed puffs had blown and their shards were left standing above the dried sweet-fern and the bittersweet. It was now the dark season when night comes on at the earliest hour.

She turned away from her thin face, seen quickly in a mirror, and fear that had crouched in her thought leaped to become a pain in her breast. She was losing what she had gained, the little she had so carefully built together. It was difficult now to walk her small round, through the trees, along the fence to the stile, to the wood-lot, back up the stair. A dragging weariness which she thought would be hunger gnawed at her body. She had talked of it to her aunt, saying, “When I am stronger I will go.” A curious smile had settled to the dim eyes that were glassed over with the fantasies of books.

She was walking out toward the stile in the cold of a December day, the wind blowing her dress and beating through her thin blood, changing her breath to a quivering chill. It came to her as she neared the stile that she would go to the tenant man, Walter Bland, and say, “I must have food, every day; I will sell something. My books are all I have. How will I do it? What shall I do?” She would say, “As a human being and a neighbor, tell me what I’d better do. You know yourself how Aunt Doe lives. We are all here together on the farm. Now what must I do?” He would be rude and rough in his speech, but he would suggest some plan. He would do something.

She climbed over the stile with a new strength and went down the pasture slowly, stopping to regain her panting breath. She was glad that she had decided to do this. A strength greater than she had came to her with the determination and the satisfaction in her plan. She thought that Bland might want some of the books for himself, and she began to name in mind such of the books as might be within his reach. Walter came suddenly out of the brush at the foot of the pasture, just where she entered the field. Her hand was reached to the loop of the wire that held the field gate in place. He came out of the cherry brush suddenly and stood ten feet away. A hard voice accompanied his approach, spreading through the cherry glades and meeting the cold of the wind on the briars.

“You keep on back up the hill. Don’t you be a-comen down here now. You keep on back up where you belong.”

She tried to say what she had come to say, her words entangled until they were meaningless. The voice spoke out steadily over her struggle to speak.

“You keep on back up to the house.” He glanced fearfully toward the field and the way of the cabin. “You got no business here. You go on back.”

Her words rushed out upon her breath and were shaken with the chill of her body. Her plan would not yield to his uncomprehended speech, and she stood against the gray weathered gate. She drew the flying ends of her bright scarf from before her eyes and stated again her errand. He spoke over her words, trampling them out with his rough voice.

“You keep on back up the hill.... Where you stay.... Anything happens, who is’t gets strung up to a limb? Not you. You go on back. Don’t you be a-comen down this-here way. On back.... You go on, I say.”

She was climbing the rise again, walking along the path, facing the wind now, moaning softly as she went. The cold cut her garments apart and entered her flesh, past her chilled blood. She labored with the low hill and came at last to the stile.

She was drowsed by fatigue and dulled by the cold. She went to the evening bit of food, her life stilled, scarcely knowing when she had eaten the last of the leather cake. When this was done she built a fire on the parlor hearth with wood she had brought there some days earlier and made the wood stand high over the blaze. There would be a great glow, a holiday burning of the demon sticks she had carried, two and two, from the wood-lot. A dozen now went on the flame. She put on a soft gray dress she had saved from her former wardrobe and twined a warm rose-and-yellow scarf about her shoulders.

She sat in the parlor before the high fire and felt the color gather richly above her scarfed breast. The sofa on which she sat ran before the fire in a retreating curve of black, and her mind caught in the irony of warmth and the color that wrapped her throat. Frank came, opening the door for himself, knocking softly and entering, rubbing his hands for their cold, eager for the fire, for the color, eager for herself. He sat beside her and presently he began to kiss her face and her throat and to whisper strange words, but she stared into the blaze and turned his caresses aside with her ironic mind where yes and no functioned identically. His hands were on her body beneath the glowing scarf, were feeding her body, and the fire was food again, these foods rich in their insufficiency. Frank was a kindness at her side, at her ear, at her mouth, and it appeared to her that she would ask him for help. She turned toward him crying with her broken breath close to his ear, “Frank, I’m so hungry. I’m hungry. I never have enough. I’m hungry. Aunt Doe ... I never have real food. I’ll starve.” He warmed her with his caresses, murmuring some pleasure in his bestowal, and she floated out of life, warmed, and presently was appeased and comforted.

She had fallen into a deep inner reverie from which nothing could arouse her. She heard as a long way off the monotony of Frank as he talked. He sat apart from her now, or he had gone, had kissed her in the moment of his departure. He would come back, she could be sure of that, some voice had said. The night would be cold, was cold. Daylight came late. It was winter now, snow on the ground, on the wood in the pile at the back of the wood-lot. The noise of the woodpeckers was strange against the snow, was flattened by the snow. A day was but little different from a night, she observed under the fog of her reverie, one being light, the other dark, a mere difference. Sleep, wake, sleep. The journey to the woodpile was the one link that bound her to that strange and foregone experience, the ways people go and the things people do.

At this time she began to hear voices speaking to her. In the dark of the night or in the cold bright days when she lay in her bed, the windows opened wide, she would stare at the faded rose and pearl of the ceiling or the faded gray of the walls, and the winter knocking of the woodpeckers among the trees about the house would fit into her sense of light and become identical with it. She would lie in an apathy, scarcely breathing, divided in mind, uncoördinated by hunger and unintegrated by pain. Lying thus one day, looking at the woodpecker’s cry as it lay along the ceiling and was interlaced with the faded rose and pearl of the vignettes there, a first voice spoke to her, saying, “The categories of the flesh....” The words receded when they had been said, leaving ripples of flat tone behind, flat words that rode on some rhythm. When the words had receded beyond the reach of hearing and her ears were dulled with listening to their spent rhythms, the voice spoke suddenly again.

First Voice: The categories of the flesh.

“What are they?” she asked, her own voice as real as that which had spoken and as earnest. She began to turn the saying about to see what it would give. Then another voice spoke sharply, swiftly, a hard voice blurting out its rough saying.

Second Voice: The hunger of the mouth.

An inner voice spoke then, a third speaker, more, subtle and persuasive, saying, “And then there’s Frank.”

First Voice: A category too. He is.

Theodosia: Well, then, well? An occurrence—one happening....

She was dull to Frank, to any reminder of him. She stirred wearily in the bed and drew her knees together, crossing her feet.

First Voice: The intense will to continue is centered in the individual organism, and thus, or for this, the matter of continuation is entrusted to the instance.

Third Voice: Brain turned into a walnut and then got a worm in it....

Theodosia: The genteel poor. I’ve always heard it said they were the greatest sufferers on the earth.

First Voice: And suppose, as Science says, it’s unlikely that there’s anything comparable to human life on any other planets. Human life, then, lonely in the great space of the sky, swinging around through space without greeting, without advice or sympathy, afraid.

Second Voice: Drunk to get more of itself!

Third Voice: What if.... Suppose she got more. She. Theodosia.

Second Voice: Love of God! What would it be?

Theodosia: Nothing comparable to life on any other.... Human life, that is. It must look strange from the outside, this one, when you see the whole lot come in a whirl around the sun. Mercury first, then Venus, then the one with life on it. Maybe it makes it look different. Pain, try-to-do, try-again. Stuff that can look up and down on it, stuff that can say, “God, God!”

First Voice: And God took up a handful of dust from the ground and mixed it with his own spittle and formed man. A God-handful of dust and the spittle out of the mouth of God.

Second Voice: In the beginning was the spittle of God, and the spittle was with God. Must have a different smell, the one with life on it. “Phew!” they’d say, “here comes that stinken one.”

Theodosia: I’ll begin back at the first. Take it all over again. Run through the first scale lessons. Bow practice. Where’s the book of duos? As soon as I’m strong enough, the trills.

Second Voice: As soon as you’re strong enough! Love of God! How’ll you get strong on three bites of leather hoecake?

First Voice: And half the time she throws the queer stuff up.

A melody came beating lightly through the noise of her thought, inconsequential, irresponsible to any remembered design of song, under the melody a thud of irregular rhythms delaying it with intricate patterns of silence. Her fingers twitched toward the shelf where the fiddle lay, pointing without motion, drawn under the covering of the bed, her hands folded into her armpits for warmth. The melody lived as a fragile pattern creeping from key to key, spontaneously erecting itself out of some inward repository of dancing, sinking and rising, repeating itself in its own shadow when it fell away, becoming then the still rhythmic nothing of anti-song. Returning afterward, it tapped even more lightly with whisper music that broke upon a faint up-and-down, a mountain ascending and descending, contrived and defeated in a slow design, regular, living each moment and dying in succession, her own breathing. Her breath pushing in and out upon the air, denting the air.

She was sitting in the parlor before the fire which burned the wood she had carried stick by stick from the wood-lot. Dark had long since come. The wind among the trees made a noise like the rush of water in a river, and the night was very dark outside. Once she looked from the window, leaning against the cold glass and bending her neck to see overhead. Back at the fireside again, the whining of the wind in the chimney and the crack of the dry burning logs was a clicking of summer insects shut into winter, imprisoned in frost.

The old bitch, Old Mam, had littered in a bedroom at the end of the upper hallway, three weak puppies in a writhing heap on a bed of rags. They would die of the cold. It would be cold above-stairs, she reflected, her fire untended, the sour odor of cold cleaving the air, rising from the window ledges and gathering at last to the bed. It would be cold beyond the walls of the house, beyond the reach of her fire; all night the air would grow more and more dense with cold. The pond down by the creek would be frozen, a thick sheet of ice to be broken in the morning by some axe. To lie all night on the ground ten feet from the place where she sat would be death to life, the end of all vigor. She would lie on the frozen grass, willing, she predicted, and the wind would search out her thin dress, her thin blood. Determination would hold her there. Pain would wrap around her, fixed into her limbs and her body and her brain, and finally she would become drowsed. All would recede, the all meaning her memory of life. “Was it for this?” something would ask, saying, “You were saved at birth by care, some care, and were taught, praised, kept—a curious thing—for this.” A black irony. Drowsiness would settle nearer. It was for this. Morning would come and she would lie still, frozen, ten feet from the spot in which she now sat, her hands bent, her body stiff, the waters of her flesh congealed, ice in her mouth.

She moved nearer to the fire with a sharp cry and held her hands to the flame, leaning her body nearer. She looked at her hands as she rubbed them well into the warmth of the fire’s radiance, her thin narrow hands moving with life, blood in their channels, and she loved her hands.

Frank was coming in at the hallway, closing the front door, whistling. In the next instant came a great clutter of leaping feet, confused thought, cries, growls, oaths, blows. A rush of animal feet on the stairway and more outcries. She went to the door of the parlor and opened it wide, and Frank was there trying to defend himself from two dogs, another dog coming down the stair. He was kicking at the beast that was at his feet, but another was at his breast, leaping.

She drove the dog, Old Mam, from his breast, ordered her back with a sharp command. There were four dogs now in the dim hallway, one coming from the region beyond the stair.

“This house, it’s full of devils,” Frank cried out. He was drawing back toward the door. “This whole damn place is a den of demons. For God’s sake keep that dog off me!”

The dogs went away sullenly, Old Mam above to her whelps, Tilly to lie at Miss Doe’s door until it opened for her tapping.

“This house, it’s full of devils.” He was coming striding across the carpet toward the fire, indignation scarcely waning. He opened the door to the dining-room and gazed into the blackness beyond, listening. “Ugh! devils, demons, ghouls!” He slammed the door quickly. “You wouldn’t catch me out there. I wouldn’t go out that door.... You couldn’t bribe me to go.”

Five large pones of coarse bread, unsifted meal stirred with water and set in skillets of hot grease to bake before the fire, this was the food for the old dogs. Miss Doe mixed it with her hands or with a spoon that was never cleaned. It baked on the hearth all morning, not far from the place where Tilly and Old Mam lay. While it cooked Tilly would sometimes sniff at each hot pone, impatient for the heat to do its work. The thick vapors and gases from the dogs spread through the room, and Theodosia ate her small leather wheat cake quickly and went back to her chamber to lie weakly down. The voices began to ply, issuing and receding.

First Voice: The receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. Said Anthony hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred and released, and by these presents doth give, grant, bargain, sell, transfer and release unto said Goodwin a certain tract of land situated, lying and being in the county aforesaid on the south side of Casey Run....

Theodosia: Situated, lying and being. Theodosia, born a Bell, now situated, lying and being. Here. Herself.

First Voice: Could a woman butcher a hog?

Second Voice: How many hogs has Frank butchered for you? Did Frank ever offer you a hog?

Third Voice: Come, let us butcher a hog together. The celestial hog. A sea hog that swims in the river of forgetfulness. Easy to know and lived in a lonely place.

Second Voice: Took the trouble to look into the matter of the old lady’s will. Peeped around and made old Daniels talk. How about the Singleton farm, old lady Singleton, Miss Doe, they call her? Does anybody know how old Miss Doe is a-leaven her estate? Horace Bell and Theodosia are her natural heirs.... If Theodosia is to get the farm.... Easy to do.

She settled her whole mind upon some event, long past, selected at random from the nothingness of all forgotten events and brought forward to be examined minutely. It was the meeting, some meeting, of the literary society at the Seminary—quotations, addresses, papers, debates. She began to recite carefully, dwelling on each phrase with humorous interest, sucking from each its last degree of pleasure.

And, “Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able

By means of secret charms to draw

All creatures living beneath the sun,

That creep or swim or fly or run,

After me as you never saw!

And I chiefly use my charm

On creatures that do people harm,

The mole, the toad, the newt, the viper;

And people call me the Pied Piper.”

Second Voice: The murderer. Murder in her hands. A snake in her belly.

A Fourth Voice, screaming: She eats murder and snakes.

First Voice: Frank. She asked him for bread and he gave her a snake.

Second Voice: If you had a hog to kill for food, could you butcher a hog? Would you?

Theodosia: I’d have no idea how to go about it.

Second Voice: Knock it in the head with the axe. Then watch it bleed. Stick its throat and catch the blood in a dish. Blood is good to drink. Blood pudding. Cut it open along the bacon. Cut out the melt first. Hog liver fried in fat is good. A little onion. Pepper. Makes your mouth water.

Theodosia: But the hog is still alive. Where is the hog now?

First Voice: You asked him for bread and he gave you a serpent.

Second Voice: What was she out to kill?

Fourth Voice: She helped Lethe kill Ross.

Second Voice: She wanted to kill. Kill! kill! Why didn’t she kill a hog?

Theodosia: Where was I? Oh, yes.

And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying

As if impatient to be playing

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled

Over his vesture so old-fangled.

Third Voice: She wanted to kill. There was a night when she had kill inside her. She helped Lethe do her work.

Second Voice: Why isn’t she in prison then? Where’s Lethe?

Theodosia:

As if impatient to be playing

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled

Over his vesture so old-fangled.

Second Voice: Her hand went with Lethe’s. Into Ross. All night blood ran out.

Fourth Voice: Too bad it wasn’t a hog. Melts fried in fat make a right good dish. Onion. A little butter.

Theodosia:

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled

Over his vesture so old-fangled.

Second Voice: She likes to forget it. All night Ross bled out his life. A man, he was, what they call life in his body, and then he went out, a slash in his throat.

Theodosia:

And as for what your brain bewilders,

If I can rid your town of rats,

Will you give me a thousand gilders?

Third Voice: Took the trouble to find out about the will. Peeped around and quizzed old Daniels. How now, is old Miss Doe a-leaven her farm? Too bad. Told her the second time he’d had her. Too bad. Left it all to some charity, every cent. Some kind of hospitals away off somewhere, a long way off. In trust to some board.

Theodosia:

The mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel;

And the former called the latter Little Prig.

The former called the latter....

Second Voice: Told her after he’d had her. Sat back afterward, cool, to smoke a little. Said old Daniels gave him to know. Too bad. Not a cent to any niece. All to some hospital. Away off somewhere.

Theodosia:

To make up a year

And a sphere.

And I think it’s no disgrace

To occupy my place.

First Voice: She remembers Ross. A big man, he was. Dug ditches for the town. Whenever there was a heavy load or a big job....

Second Voice: Then she ate a snake.

First Voice: Where’s Lethe now? In the prison. Among the women. She works all day in a room with iron over the windows. Twenty years. When she comes out she’ll be over fifty.

Theodosia: He is a fool that destourbeth the moder to wepen in the death of her child, til she have wept hir fille, as for a certein tyme....

First Voice: They sew all day, to make clothes for the men prisoners to wear. Over and over, a stitch, the same, over and over, never done.

Theodosia: You have to let her weep out her litter of tears. That’s all there is to it.

Third Voice: No more lovers, no more men. She killed her man. Theodosia helping.

First Voice: Why don’t you tell Frank to bring you down food? F—o—o—d. A beefsteak. Give an order. Speak plain this time. Say, “See here....”

Second Voice, a retreating laughter:

That creep or swim or fly or run,

After me as you never saw!

Theodosia: I’ll tell him nothing.

Second Voice:

By means of secret charms to draw

All creatures living beneath the sun.

First Voice, arguing: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an old friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”

Theodosia: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.

Second Voice: Last night while you were asleep a great black face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody throat, came swimming, tonight will come swimming close into your eyes, into the very light of your brain. Swims up into your sight.

She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold lace against the sky. Across the steep ledge of dull light some crows were moving on stiff wings, the movements of the birds and the birds being two separate things, unrelated. When the birds were gone the movement remained, sobbing against the wall of light.

A morning in January cut across the air in a different way from a morning in some former month, she observed. The sky beyond the matted twigs of the trees crowded outward in unequal grays, but the twigs bore upward their January buds that were swollen in spite of the cold. She began to think of the Promethean substance, fire, diligently admired by man and guarded. First a few bits of thin wood at the end of a match, a faint sulphurous odor, a frail burning daintily coaxed to life and tenderly nursed by the shaded palm of a hand. The smoke would arise heavily, unwarmed as yet, and the blaze would spread and lie cautiously, perilously, buried under the damp smouldering wood. Another splinter and another, and then the blaze grows slowly, spreading laterally, having consumed the first splint and turned it to a bent cinder of red ash. Wood is laid across the steady blaze now and the fire laps lovingly around it. The cold slips back from the hearth and the breast reaches toward the warmth, the hands feel for it, outstretched. One is glad for it, grateful to it. In the northern zones man could not live without it. His life is owed to it. If the Promethean spell is lost man would shrink down toward the tropics, though the men might venture into the cold regions to hunt. Woman and fire are married now forever; she would have to have fire for herself and for the young.

She drew her hands under the coverlet to warm them and looked across at the dead hearth where the last of the wood was burnt. The pile in the wood-lot, saved for the evenings with the fiddle, would last, she thought, for four more burnings, and her picturing mind slipped along the stack as it had stood in autumn in the wood-yard, the knotted edges of the hickory protruding, the lichened beech sticks that were weathered and aerated, phantoms now. A few dry flakes of snow were falling, passing the opened window in a slanted line. Once man had got it he could never live without the Promethean gift, she thought, her gaze not lifted from the passing snow to the dead hearth but seeing both in one widespread plane of vision without focus.

Accustomed-unaccustomed sounds came from somewhere below. The liniment-man was at the door, the aunt crouching under an old cape receiving her purchases from the portico. His voice:

“Sakes-alive! It’s weatheren outside today. A right hard winter it is, I reckon. But it won’t be long now. No teacher yet for the Spring Valley school. Folks over there is right put-to to find a teacher. Miss Hettie up and married in the middle of the term and went off, resigned and went. Old Ronnie Beam’s wife has got a fine new girl up there, ten pounder, they say. I’ll tell you this-here, it’s weather. But it won’t be long now.”

The noises below sank to the usual delicate click and remote thump of silence, the front door having long since been closed and the steps having gone uncertainly back into the hallway.

Second Voice: Old Ronnie Beam. Heaven sake! Father Time has begotten. There’s no end to it. Seventy years old.

First Voice: Why didn’t she take some clean meal and make a mush over her fire? Eat it hot with salt.

Second Voice: The habit of the locked storeroom.

Third Voice: Thank God she hasn’t got lice. What would she do to get rid of vermin?

Theodosia: Coal-oil out of the lamp. Kills, they say.

Third Voice: A ten-pound girl. I tell you that-there, it’s weather.

First Voice: The dog bread is not bad bread to eat; a little ashy, perhaps. Unsifted meal. Slobbered over by the two bitches, Tilly and Old Mam.

Second Voice, softly: She eats the dog bread.

Third Voice: A small musical talent. A limited achievement in music.

Theodosia: Small talents should not be allowed. Small talents are treason. They shouldn’t be.

In the night she lay half asleep, running with the dogs as they hunted in the wooded slopes back of the fields. Young Blix, Nomie, Speed, Congo, they were on the trail of a hare, of a fox. She ran with them down the woods and pounded the earth of the plowed field, keen to the scent. She howled with them when the smell of the fox was renewed where the fence crossed the track. Congo turned toward her beyond the water of the creek when they had lashed swiftly over, clattering the rocks and dashing the spray. She ran neck to neck with Congo, seeing into his red mouth, feeling his flying breath, his wide jaw. At the foot of the walnut tree they were on the varmint, all their teeth in his side, in his flank, leaping over him, tearing at his hide, emptying out his entrails, her teeth in his flesh.

One day after the evening meal below-stairs she turned to the hearth and broke a piece of one of the corn-pones that lay there withering under the heat since morning. She carried the bread to her room and ate a part of it as she sat before the cold hearth. The sticks were sacred to the fiddle and she did not burn one that night. Later there was speaking.

First Voice: This is the whole story of the earth. He made love like a tomcat. Cat guts make fiddle strings. Cat guts hale souls out of men’s bodies.

Third Voice: The daughter of the Don Juan of the Kentucky villages. God knows!

First Voice: The first to be born as far as is known at present was Lethe. River of forgetfulness. Her name shall be Lethe, saying, I forgot myself. A careless brown wench in a love mood and I forgot myself.

Third Voice: Then Americy. A whole continent to name an incontinent hour.

Theodosia: A sad, kind-voiced creature. Given to religious practices.

Third Voice: Then Theodosia, given the surname Bell, the first so honored. Named for Theodosia Singleton, born Bell, sister to the Old War Horse. Godmother sucks all day at the sugar-tit of books, turns back again to the nipple to avoid knowledge.

Second Voice: I drink to the health of the unbegotten!

Third Voice: Then Stiggins. Curious eyes bent down at the corners. Slobbery mouth. A steel-cunning in his hand. Elastic speed, recoil and reach.

First Voice: Man is a nervous system. I once saw a picture of a man, a real likeness.

Second Voice: I drink to the health of the unbegotten! [Shouting.] I drink to the health!

First Voice: He looked like something you might expect to see under a microscope. A ten-thousand-footed octopus, a rigmarole, a many-fanged serpent. A real likeness.

Theodosia: Something you might see under a microscope?

Second Voice: A cunning in his hand, sewed up in a dull fist. Speed, recoil, reach. Stands above it a slobbery mouth.

First Voice: Annie, then. Fifth child. White, delicate. Fair hair, gray eyes, a frail body.

Theodosia: An angel among the white angels of the graves. All the sweetness of the earth brought into one frame. A tired little child, used to call to me to wait, gentled by sickness and pain maybe. Her little mouth with the fresh dew of God on it.

First Voice: She was a nervous system, like all the others.

Second Voice: Something you might expect to see under a microscope.

Third Voice: James Henry Burden, then, sixth child born to Horace and first male heir to the house of Burden. I baptize thee, James Henry Burden, in the name of the.... Second male in the house of Bell, as far as is known. Easy to know. Sweet, blonde languors among the cushions in a portico.

First Voice: I saw the picture of a man, a real speaking likeness. It was a ten-thousand-footed octopus.

Theodosia: What color was it?

First Voice: White and gray. They called the stuff white matter and gray matter.

Theodosia: Excellent names.

First Voice: A ten-thousand-footed serpent, every foot a feeler out to feel something.

Second Voice: A maw in the middle of it, the chief part, the chief part set in the middle, a hungry enlargement in the alimentary gut.

Third Voice: Another maw in the lower middle, the chiefest chief part, another hungry entrail, if you don’t like the short word.

First Voice: A little knob, a very little knob on the top. I saw the true likeness. An infinite number of feelers running out all ways, shaped like a serpent, and a very little knob on the top.

Theodosia: You couldn’t blaspheme the human mind, you couldn’t ever. To try to lower yourself by your own bootstraps. It wouldn’t operate, that’s all. You might try ever so hard, but you couldn’t do it. Stumble? Fall over your own boots and stumble, yes, but if you did you’d never know it. What you didn’t know couldn’t happen.

Second Voice: Oh talk! Which of the commandments have you not broken? Every last God’s ten of the lot.

First Voice: There ought to be more than ten, ought to be about ten thousand more commandments. One for every nerve-end.

Third Voice: A man could keep all ten and still be a writhing devil in hell.

Second Voice: The whole thing draws itself inside its own maw, lies down to sleep in its snake’s nest, replete, when it has enough.

First Voice: Yellow hair, Annie, and gentle ways. Loved everybody. The angel whiteness of the grave on her from the first. “How He took little children as lambs to His fold.” The song.

Third Voice: Your mother was dark, but this child was fair. Your father’s own child. The one most like your father. Your father’s own, then.

Theodosia: Oh, God, I believe, and there’s nothing to believe.

She thought again and again of the pond below the hill in the creek bottom. The water would be fresh and sweet after the long winter rains and it would stand high along the banks. In the morning someone would find her body there, water-soaked, lying in the clean mud at the bottom of the water, stones tied to her feet. It would be easy to go out the door some night and never come back. Once she had gone out the door the rest would be inevitable, the door having become the line between to go and not to go. The front door seemed necessary, and she could not think tenderly of the morning, of any morning, of the stones that would be tied to her feet. All circumstances were set toward this departure. The days of the week, distantly comprehended, did not differ, one from another; Tuesday or Monday, Friday, all sank into a flat mass and were approached without emotion. She felt her hand as it was folded into the other hand and knew the feel of the bones and their bent articulations and the texture of skin as felt by itself. Prophecy gathered vaguely about the facts which were already well stated. One fact more remained as the act of departure. She slept lightly, her sleep weighted by the act, burdened by it.

A pleasant sense of Frank gathered in and out of her sleep, Frank representative of something he was not, blended with the positive he signified and become one with it. A warmth as of life crept over her, memories that were symbols and dim anticipations. Half dreaming, her body knew that it would be renewed by his presence, that her beauty would be restored by his praise, that he would drape her scarf about her shoulders and set her hair to the way he liked. “It’s pretty this way, soft ripples in it,” a kind voice said, more kind than the voices of the dialogues. Kind voices were speaking now, voices of praise, giving warm life and the warm flow of blood through her members. The passage through the door receded and flattened to a mere saying, a doctrine. The kindness of Frank suffused her and the need of him ran over her. She knew clearly then the strength of his body as it was warm with life, his hands full of life-blood, his limbs rich with the throb of their joy. The odor of life was about him, the strength of people, of places, of people talking together.

A gentle rain had begun to fall and the snow of the day before would melt. She had waded to the wood-lot through the running snow and had brought in the last of the wood, six or eight pieces, piled now at the side of her hearth. A winter light lay on the running leaves of gray and silver and a winter apathy was settled deeply into the stilled vignettes at the border, the woodpeckers knocking at the recurring tendrils that spread about the faded roses. The day, Wednesday, seemed on tiptoe, aware of itself. She could scarcely remember whether she had been down to her aunt’s room for the noon meal or not. The light lying along the ceiling seemed to be an afternoon light, but the drifting of the rain across the air suggested morning. She tried to recall some detail of the descent for the food which would make the memory of it differ from every other descent. A picture of the old dog, Tilly, moving across the hearth near the baking pones of bread and lying down heavily on the stones beyond the hearth-rug came again and again. The dog had opened her mouth near the hot pone but she had drawn away, closing her mouth slowly with a yawn-spasm jerking her lower jaw, and just at that instant the clock on the mantel had begun to strike some hour.

Third Voice: She’s already dead, already dead. She died one night. Anyhow they found her on the old rags down before the fire, dead, in the room with five old crazy hounds. Found her on the floor rolled up in a knot, dead where she’d been asleep. Five insane old dogs, half-starved, in the room all night. She died on the floor with the dogs.

Second Voice: This house, it’s full of devils, full of demons, full of devils.

Third Voice: Her bed had not been slept in for months on end. Dust on the pillows. Dead, she is, already.

Theodosia: She didn’t have to continue in life if she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to sleep in the bed either. She could sleep any way she wanted to. She didn’t have to sleep in some regular way to prove she was alive.

Second Voice: This house, it’s full of devils. [Screaming.] Full of demons.

Third Voice: “See,” they said. “Look, look, she ate the dog bread.” What else is there around? Between her teeth a crust of the dog bread.

Theodosia: And very good bread it is. Don’t be too light with the dog bread.

First Voice: The foul breath of an old fox-killing bitch on a hot pone and a clock strikes. That’s what time is. There is nothing comparable to it on any other planet. Nothing like it.

Third Voice: You are a murderer yourself. You, Theodosia. And an adulteress. Which of the commandments have you not broken?

Theodosia: I thought that was finished, settled. I thought I’d put that by.

Third Voice: What honor did you show your father? Why didn’t you honor him as he wanted to be honored? Easy to know and lived in the same house.

Time was measured then by the walking of a dog over a hearth, but the day, Wednesday, stood apart from time as having some entity of its own, some extra faculty. She saw innumerable dogs walking in procession across a hearth, ticking time, yesterday and tomorrow, forever, as far back as memory could reach. A warmth then began to drown her memory of Tilly and she knew in some inner way that it was afternoon and that Frank would come. A pleasant sense of Frank stole over her. He would talk a little of his success in the courts and gossip of law secrets, wills, marriage settlements, threatened procedures, giving comradeship. Perhaps he would grow amorous, offering compliments. Through him she would touch the world again. The vignettes on the border were fading with the waning day, the birds being still, the sun set. She sat up in the bed suddenly, the act a sudden cry to the departing light. Except for a few patches of lit upland, the landscape was dark now, settling into the shadows where the hills arose, biting at the sky with sullen lines along the west hill rim. Weak from the strain of sitting up suddenly she sank into a momentary apathy, but her breathing was one continuous burden borne by the prophecy which was already clearly stated as fact. She arose from the bed as if some determination had come to her. She felt herself moving slowly, but with little forward rushes of settled opinion, going straight without dalliance. She mended the fire without stint of the wood and dressed herself in the first gown that came to her hand, the gray wool gown, and took the scarf to her shoulders. Her hands trembled with exhaustion, but she lit the lamp and carried it to the lower hall and set it on the table there.

She went to her aunt’s room and lingered a little by the fire, taking a farewell of her by a quiet lingering, a few commonplace speeches passing between them, the old sayings of the months that were past. Of the two ordeals that lay before her she regarded Frank as the more difficult, for he and his disposal had not been predicted by prophecy or settled to an act, he being rather a menace within her own body where it reached toward life. The aunt settled to her book again, and Theodosia stood by the door of the room, waiting and listening, and presently there was a noise at the front door of the house. She went into the hall then, and, Old Mam and Tilly following after her, she let them come or she laid her hand on Old Mam’s neck to keep her at hand. Frank was coming into the hall, was standing at the door looking cautiously back into the gloom of the half-lit spaces beyond the stairs.

She held Old Mam by the collar and called to Tilly, keeping them near. At the foot of the stairs she spoke to Frank across the ten feet that lay between them and she moved backward toward the steps, mounting the first, taking the dogs with her, holding them fast. He was arguing, outraged and unbelieving, growing angry. “I hold no grudge against you,” she said. She kept the dogs close to her, holding their collars. “I will never see you again,” she said. “But I hold no grudge.” She had gone half-way up the steps now, but the ascent was difficult, the dogs unwilling to come. The dogs dragged her back; “They make it too hard,” she thought, half yielding to their strength at the point where her own strength failed. Frank was commanding, accusing, saying she had not been fair.

“Drive those devils away,” he shouted after her. “You drive those dogs off. I’m here now. I’ve come.”

She was pushed by the great bodies of the dogs until she glided along the wall, but she moved upward, and the dogs came with her, a part of her ascending motion now. She took the dogs to her room and closed the door. The tumult in her mind had increased, for Frank had brought a newer quality of argument, of rational approach to himself. Pity for Frank worked in her now. He had called after her, “I want to marry you, Theodosia. That’s what I want now in life.” Frank was still below; the front door was yet open; she knew this by the draught under her door that sang a loud thin cry as the air rushed through the wide crevice and made for the loosely fitted window. Trembling, knowing that Frank was below, she began to hiss at Tilly, the more evil-tempered of the brutes, until the dog growled and barked in great anger, until she ran to the window and leaped again and again at the door. There was nothing left now but to walk out at the door when the menace of Frank should depart. She hissed up Tilly’s anger whenever it abated. She sat relaxed in her chair, her muscles indifferent to their functions. Below-stairs other dogs were in an uproar now, the whole house of dogs in a mad stir. She passed into the remote barkings of the dogs, already as dead, indifferent to the air she continued to suck in and out with her habitual breathing, indifferent to the icy water of the pond where it would lay pain about her. Her hissing was continuous with the anger of the dogs.

The crying of the draught under the door had ceased now, and the cold had ceased to rush along the floor. Then it seemed that a long while since she had heard the door below when it slammed and she heard the motor start. She continued to hiss Tilly’s anger. Sitting indifferently in her chair, relaxed in every fiber, she lived only where the hissing breath came from her lips to stir the dogs. She had no relation to the bed in which she had lain formerly and no need or thought or memory of it, no possessive sense of it. The world became more and more dim as the fire sank lower, the air colored with a pink afterglow, and the dark crept nearer, a fact which she held somehow but to which she was indifferent. Old Tilly barked fitfully now, or lay exhausted in a corner of the room. She kept no relation to the fiddle as it lay on the table beyond the hearth, beyond the reach of the firelight; it was a darkened mass among the shadows of the table, holding a remote kindness for some being far apart from herself, identical with some abstract goodness that would never be stated. It gathered to a dim shadow that concentrated to a dull point and receded through elastic space to infinite depths of remoteness. She stared at the wall to the left of the fireplace, her vision having no function. Only one fact held truth in the singleness of prophecy. She saw herself leap from the chair suddenly and rush out at the door; a sudden start and she would be gone. She stared at the wall; the picture of her going, a felt picture, spread downward through her limbs that lay relaxed now, ready for the sudden spasm of movement.

At once a vivid appearance entered her mind, so brilliant and powerful that her consciousness was abashed. Larger than the world, more spacious than the universe, the new apparition spread through her members and tightened her hands so that they knotted suddenly together. It tightened her spine until she sat erect. Her recognition settled to a word, groped with words, settled again about a word, some word, catching at words with a net. The word was vivid, was like a new flower in a sunny place, and unable to say it she knew it with a rush of thanksgiving that out-ran all her recognition of it. The word she could not say, could only approach with reaching tentacles of memory and thought, erected a joy throughout her senses. Her body spread widely and expanded to its former reach, and the earth came back, herself acutely aware of it. A pleasure that she still lived to participate in this recognition caught her throat with a deep sob. She had shifted her gaze so that she looked now into the fire. She sat leaned forward, tense with new life, with the new world, and she penetrated the embers with her gaze and saw into the universe of the fire, the firmament of dimly glowing heat that receded, worlds on worlds, back into infinities, atoms, powers, all replete with their own abundance. She laughed in her joy and went with the fire, more living now than the coals in the heart of the red ash. The word let a happy substitute stand for itself, a delegate appearing clearly defined, a word experienced as a glow of pride in life and joy. “Tomorrow” was the utterance, clearly placed then. On the next day the peddler would come along the road. This homely, habitual fact had been the Arise-ye of her resurrection. “I’m still alive,” she sang under her breath, “I’m alive, I’m alive.” She leaned tensely near the hearth and spoke, or she smiled without speaking. Her eyes were dim with the new birth and the bloom of renascence slightly blurred her consciousness as yet. The loaned word grew more vivid, “Tomorrow,” substituted now for the unsaid word that receded, its mission accomplished. She leaned near the hearth.

Then she arose quickly and gathered her wraps and some clothing to a chair. She shut her fiddle into its case and placed the music in a pile beside it. Then she went below and hung a white cloth on the pillar of the portico, for she thought that the peddler might pass early. In her room again she found a piece of the coarse bread under her pillow and of this she ate sitting wrapped in the blanket of the bed, the room being cold now, the fire almost gone. Without undressing she lay in the bed, ready for her departure, a gladness singing through her thin blood where life still beat. Presently she was aware that it was morning and that she had slept happily. She bathed in the cold water, shaking with cold and joy, and she ate the last of the bread. When the peddler brought his car along the driveway she took her things into her arms and went down to the portico.

“I’d be plumb pleased to death,” he said when she asked her favor, although she told him she would have to ask him to wait for his pay. “I wouldn’t charge a young lady e’er a cent to ride along with me. Pay? Don’t say e’er word about pay. Would I charge a young lady to go a-riden with me? Sakes-alive!”

When he asked her where she wanted to go she had no answer ready, but she was joyous in her evasions, making questions and replies that kept the destination delicately poised at the brink of an answer. He would go here and stop there, naming farms, and he could come to Spring Run Valley by noon of the day, he said. Then he stopped at a farm, the house near the roadway, and called his wares to the farmer’s wife, who bought. She peered curiously at the front of the truck but she made no comment.

“Where did you say you aimed to go?” he asked when they were on the road again, and she answered, “Spring Run Valley.” Then he told her of the origin of the name, she having asked. “Spring Run is a creek that rises in a spring off a way to the north there.” He told the news of the countryside, of the dead, the sick, the new-born, the lucky. Along the roadside men were clearing the ditches, shoveling out drains for the roadway, and over the tops of the hills some crows were flying. The winter had blown the last leaf from every bush and every vine and the earth stood ready to be remade, the streams running cold under the little bridges, the water quick and yellow. The truck ran swiftly, and there were few sales made, for the people were busy with other matters, with the plant beds, the hen-houses, the early gardening or fencing. They would wave the liniment-man away with a greeting. “You know somebody in Spring Valley?” he asked. She did not know what she would say to that, and she waited for a reply to find its way to her mouth, her humor that of a bird waiting for its song. She saw her strange happiness going its unknown ways and she looked from afar, quaintly amused, as if place were a humorous adjunct to being, for if one is happy in being alive he has to have a place to be happy in. They could never take that away from happiness in being. That control of places kept in the hands of men, certain men, this seemed exquisitely droll.

“Miss Hettie, she up and married awhile back, took and married and went off right in the middle of the school. They haven’t got a teacher yet to the best of my belief and knowledge. Doc Bradley said to me they would be right put-to to find one so late in the term.” Bradley was the school trustee for the district, and the appointment of the teacher was his duty, he said.

She was weary in body, aching from the long ride, and a vertigo seized her now and then, induced by the unaccustomed motion of the truck and the swift passage, but her pleasure ran still with the slipping countryside as it opened before her and with the flocking of the crows as they made off toward some farther hill. She had waited for her replies as a bird might wait, but finally she made known her mission as it appeared to her. She would ask to be allowed to teach the Spring Run Valley school for the three months remaining. “So that’s were you’re bound for,” he said. “Well I vum! They’ll be right glad to get you, that I know.” He would let her down at Dr. Bradley’s house, he said. “I’m bound straight for that very place.”

Then he took a package from his coat pocket and said that it was a snack of lunch his wife always wrapped up for him, that he never could tell where he would be for his dinner and she always tied him up a little snack to be on the safe side.

“I’m a mind to eat it now, to get shed of it,” he said. “I’ll be in Spring Valley to dinner, that I well see, and I always eat my dinner with Doc Bradley when I pass. I’m a mind to eat the bite I got here now, and maybe you’ll have a bite along with me, just to keep me company.”

He unrolled a paper from about the food and offered her one of the sandwiches in his hands. Then the juices of her vitals leaped like hungry serpents at the sight of the food and her hand reached for it, afraid it might be withdrawn, her hand trembling. She took the food out of his hand, her eyes smiling, her mind joyous, the serpent of her maw beating with anticipation, reaching forward with craving, and she knew that her way was strange as she took the bread into her hand, that even he, unobserving and eager to talk, one of his hands on the steering-wheel of the wagon, knew that her manner was biased, deflected from the ways of women. In her fingers the food was seen to be pieces of well-baked bread buttered richly, between the pieces bits of tender meat delicately salted, the flesh of cattle made ready for food. At the first moment a sickness arose as she swallowed, but she ate slowly, a rich repast, two pieces of buttered bread and the meat. When she had fed she drowsed slightly, and she let the morning spend itself as it would, let it run past her unhindered, noted but unguided.

Some people were standing in an old doorway talking together, and they shook their heads when the peddler called out to them, sufficient in themselves, joyous over some departure, waving hands as two went down a path. At a small gate beside a bridge a woman was driving a great turkey-gobbler, guiding it skilfully into the small entry, and her passing set a bright glow of color against the brown of the earth and the faint yellow that lay over the bushes, her shawl dull blue plaided with gray. Some children loitered at the side of the road making a seesaw of a fallen board and two larger girls came idly down the road under the lacery of stripped boughs, a renewed token that school did not keep. Her joy lasted and the journey came to an end. The truck went slowly down the village road between the small houses, scattering the hens from its path, calling the men to the door of the blacksmith’s shop, curving its path to the curving way.