“That old domernik hen, she don’t mind, she’s got no shame.”
They were new with the beginning of the earth, beyond the reach of truism, fresh and uncertain, the dew of new-birth on every saying. They were of the world and the world was new. They were free of all but the bare statement of themselves as standing out before time, before running duration. Kate Hull driving to the grist-mill with a sack of old corn to have it cracked for her pullets escaped truism as entirely as did Thad’s voice and demeanor as he uttered his philosophies, as she drove awkwardly into the setting and sat dejectedly above the corn sacks. A man, Caleb Burns, rode down from the upper-lying farmland, riding a brown horse that had three white feet. A child named Sallie West, unknown to her as yet, sent her a handful of wild crocuses. A girl, at the door of the store, buying baking soda and lemon extract, invited her to a party. A woman standing by a gate, her hand stayed on the latch, said to her as she passed, “I heard you playen on your violin last night. I heard it when I was on my way to bed. It was a fair sound.”
She met the children at the school on the appointed day. There were twenty-three, boys and girls. The schoolhouse stood near the creek at the end of the village, under a shade of beech and sycamore trees. Some of the children rode down from the upper valley each day in a buckboard cart, or a boy or two came horseback. Susan West, who drove the buckboard cart, would take the old horse from the shaves and hitch it under a great beech tree, and at noon one of the boys would, as his duty, without asking leave, take the eight ears of corn from under the buggy seat and feed the old nag in a wooden box that was nailed to the tree. Old Oscar’s hens would gather about the horse’s feet to catch the wasted grains of corn. She began her progress up the valley, living first at the houses that were nearest to the school and moving week by week farther away, Cummings’s first, and then Fishman’s place, and Baker’s.
The farmers had formed a beef company, a group of six or eight men who killed a beef every ten days or two weeks and shared in the meat by a carefully drawn contract. Each man furnished a yearling steer in turn and each man was given a part in turn. One or two of the men sold their portions, peddling it from house to house in the hamlet, or others used all, having many at hand to feed. The slaughter-house was a dull shed at the back of a small enclosure near the beginning of the village, removed from the schoolhouse by the whole length of the village, but Theodosia saw it as she walked in the late afternoon, and on the killing days she saw the men gathered there. A constant stench floated out from the place, and toward the back of the shed were scattered quantities of bones, the heads and feet of cattle that had been gnawed by the dogs until they were clean, some of them weathered white by the rains. Often the dogs fought there all night, their yelpings heard through her sleep, and the day after the night of the snarling dogs there was fresh meat on every table up and down the lane and the road, and fresh meat to eat with the bread for the school lunches. It was sweet to taste, good to the mouth and satisfying to the want of the inner hunger. With the meat was buttered bread and apples from some cellar or apple house, or there was honey that had been saved from the past year’s garnering, or conserve. Sometimes a sheep was slaughtered on one of the farms, or if these animals were lacking there were fowls to be baked and served in their richly buttered sauces.
At playtime the children played a game, singing,
I went to the door and picked up a pin,
And asked if Mistress Jones was in,
She neither was in she neither was out,
She’s up in the garret a-hoppen about.
Theodosia heard the song without surprise, heard the strange quality of the singing as it rang and hollowed broadly under the great beech trees along the creek. Here the cries of the birds were the more broadly dispersed as tone, richly amplified. The children were, in general, attentive to their lessons and eager to progress, to atone for their long vacation. If they were dull, Theodosia, in her distress at this, played for them on the fiddle. The day little Johnnie Turner could not learn to spell “hitching” she played a Romance and an Adagio, a pensive wailing, until all the children were happy and they leaned forward on their desks, a-tiptoe, to hear. She heard their song game while she sat under the beech tree at noon not far from Susan’s nag, not far from old Oscar’s hens, she eating her lunch, the food some village wife had prepared for her. The names the children called as they walked away, beginning conversations, lay out under the great beeches as aliens, as belonging to the farms up the valley, and she accepted the names for tone without questioning the owner as to whether he were man or child or woman—the names, Shirley Bond, Betty Hawthorne, Rose Hines, Lum Brown. The little girls were equal in importance, none seeming to dominate the rest, the child, Sallie West, always giving, supplying the others, making the others safe or comfortable at the game, a talkative child. A voice said one day, receding down to the end of the playground where the little children kept, “Betty Hawthorne has got a blue ribbon,” or another said again, “Mollie has got a silver cup.” There were rainy days when the beech trees dripped their dejected wet. Sometimes she called the children to their books by playing a jig. They had their sayings; they would talk of leaving kisses in the drinking dipper, or they called water left in the dipper after one had drunk “slobbers.” “Let me have your slobbers,” a little boy said to his favorite among the girls. Or another, “I bid for Susan’s slobbers.” Susan and Sallie were the West girls; they came from the top of the valley, Susan a strong, well-rounded girl, misty and vague with her first flowering, neither child nor woman. “She takes after Mammy,” Sallie said. “She’s a liven image of....” she called some strange name. They liked to dwell upon whom they took after, each child designating himself and trying to discover himself. The lessons in the books were remote from them, were unknown gods to be appeased with offerings of study. Their learnings were ceremonials far apart from their richer flow of living. They measured their height at a door-post and compared this year with last, and they watched one another. Their words, coming to her from the end of a game, while they sat to rest: