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.