My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Theodosia wrote sums on the board and made history questions and outlines or searched out stories to read and made maps with chalk; and felt a slight and very inward jealousy of Betty Hawthorne as holding the interest and affection of the small girls and boys. Betty Hawthorne might wear her blue ribbons and knot up her roan-colored hair for all she cared, and she played a capricious dance tune at the end of the noon hour to state her jealousy of this creature, a careless air barbed with subtle darts that deflected it from its kept rhythm, that jerked it hither and yon under the implied three-four of the measure, her lips smiling. All about the men were planting the corn. All day, looking across the creek from the windows of the schoolhouse, she could see the drills working up and down making exact rows through the broken soil. Everywhere the gardens were being planted, rows of seeds put into the soil in orderly ways to yield them food.

“My own hair, it might be called roan-colored too,” she said, “but a dark roan. A rose in her bosom as white as milk is no matter. I’m a dark roan myself....”

The men were taking a cow through the road toward the slaughter-pen, a fattened heifer to be killed for beef. She came from Burns’s farm at the head of the creek valley.

“What does he kill a heifer for?” one asked at the door of the store. “What for does he kill a heifer?”

“No good, she is. Wouldn’t calve.”

The beast had run past the slaughter-yard and come to the creekside, and four men were not able to drive her. She would go uncertainly forward a few feet or turn and run back, all the men after her with staves, or she broke through hedges and jumped fences, mad to get away. After two hours of struggle she was back by the creek again running in the school-yard. She was a well-marked creature, fattened for the slaughter, but alert and sinewy. She broke one of her horns on Bradley’s gate, but she did not consent to go where the men meant to take her, and she leaped the hedge again. Lee Cummings was after her, and Will Judson, and Lum Brown, the black man who worked with the Burns cattle, who always shot the beef with his shotgun. The heifer’s hair was all on end now and her eyes were wild, her side bleeding where she had scraped against some broken gate hinge, her feet cut and her left horn gone. The children at the school could scarcely attend to their books, knowing how the struggle went forward, although two or three of the boys wanted to join in the fight.

“Would you expect her, though, to walk gentle up to the slaughter-pen and put her head inside the door?” Thad asked. He was standing at noon by the school-yard gate. “That’s how a man expects a critter he aims to butcher to act. Walk right up in front of the shotgun and stand straight.”

The conflict ended at noon when the beast was entrapped in the slaughter-house, but Lum Brown would not go inside to shoot. Hearing the lessons during the afternoon, Theodosia knew the end of the struggle, and the children knew, and a mingled satisfaction and distress made them mindful of their books, abstracted and attentive to the printed sayings of their pages. Lum Brown had been obliged to push the barrel of the gun through a crack in the boarded wall and shoot the heifer from without. There was no answer to the question raised by the unwilling heifer. The answers in the books were easily found.

She had moved up the valley and spring was well at hand. She sat in Judson’s house on a cold green afternoon in late April. The stones of the hearth tilted away from the fireplace and sloped off to the floor, which gave unevenly toward the rear right corner of the room. A jar of cream had been set to sour beside the fender. The children were climbing over one another and over their mother’s feet, asking the words in their books. The mother with a baby in her arms was slowly rocking, was mending a garment, was giving the child her breast. Her hair was marked with gray as if a veil of light were spread under its darkness, and her great bosom was without flesh, was powerful with brawn and gland and bone. This would be her last child, and a quiet in her spent body said, “I am glad; I had enough.” The door to the front bedroom was opened and in the other room, that for the guest, a new fire burned coldly in the grate.

It was the same everywhere with a slight difference, the slow fire of the afternoon in the snug room. At Baker’s there were no infants, but three grown girls came in with embroidery pieces and sat stitching. “Shadow-work” they called what they did. At Sayre’s there was an unborn child. Mr. Fishman would come into his house in the mid-afternoon and fumble awhile at a closet with the faint muffled sound of a bottle and a glass. Lee Cummings had counted on his fingers and marked the foaling of an animal on the calendar that hung beside the mantel. This was the world. She knew no surprise of it and no surprise for herself as being there. Red clover and orchard grass were together in the meadows, growing higher every week. Faint lines of green were crisscrossing the cornfields, going two ways in orderly processions, opening out and closing together as she went by. The men called their sayings from about the shop and the store or the women called from doorways, and she heard the noises a wagon made as it went empty along the road, the noise of wood beating on wood, of wood on iron, of iron on iron, of iron on stone, horse-iron on stone. The voices of the little children came to her as she sat to eat her food at noon under the greatest beech tree, as they were bent to their play at making farms and highroads through the moist earth, and their words, “Queen ... Mollie ... Shirley Bond ... the silo ... Betty Hawthorne ... the cut-up-corn machine,” would arise to speech in their disputes or blend again to the flow of some remote water in their purring acquiescences and contents.