My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“Now I’ll tell you-all what my idea is about a sugar-cured ham. Meat, now, ought to be allowed to take salt a day and a half for every pound in the piece. A ham weighen eighteen pounds ought to stay in the salt twenty-seven days. Twenty pounds, if your ham weighs, then thirty days in the salt ...” The refrains hung over the summer country and settled to the distant groves of locust that grew in the places where the hills crumpled together. The tomato vines in the garden were hanging thick now with great green fruits which Midi, when they were turning toward a pale white for ripening, laid in rows on an outer shelf or on the stringers of the fence where they flushed daily more red. The odors of cooking tomato relishes savored the house and the yard when Midi made ready for the winter. Lucian West took three of his sugar-cured hams from the luscious, feathery dark of his meat house where they had ripened, and sold them to someone in the town.

In him, Caleb, there was a sense of the whole country, of the rolling farms as owned up and down the watercourses and farther, including the town, Anneville and beyond, other towns, Lester, Quincy, all the reach of the entire region. With a gesture he included all, fearless, comprehending, or he spoke of the people of Anneville, knowing them, of the history of the place and how each street was named, Hill Street, Jackson, Simon, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane.... The buying of seeds and the summer faced toward the new year.... I see where I can get.... Frost-proof cabbage.... Bermuda onion plants.... Unhulled white-blossom sweet clover, six dollars.... It was still summer, the nightjars crying in the sky, the fireflies making jeweled streaks in the dark, moving upward. Caleb’s voice, saying man looks forward toward a city, always looks forward to a city, a place, streets of gold, jasper walls, but looks backward to a garden, Eden. “Looken back he sees a garden. Well?...”

“It’s been about twelve years since the first automobiles came into this country,” Lucian West said. “Fully twelve, and look how many people still hold a prejudice against ...”

“Hardly twelve, I’d say, although I don’t exactly recollect.”

“It’s been twelve if it’s been a day, and look how headstrong some keep....”

“Nine, it’s been,” Midi said. “Nine exactly. It was the year Julie Judson was—the year little Sadie Judson was borned. I know. I recall. You can’t get that outen my head. I recall what a hard time Julie had all spring and I recall Dr. Bradley a-sitten in Julie’s room a-talken about the first automobile that went through the road, and it was that very day, that day it went past, and a-talken about what a stir it made. Theodosia can tell you how old Sadie Johnson is. She kept the roll-call at the schoolhouse.”

“Midi’s right. It’s been nine years,” Theodosia said. “Nine is on the roll book.”

Where did the people of this country come from? The question was asked and some reply given—from Virginia. Long ago. The garden spot of the earth. They came through the Wilderness Trace. The voices about the door flowed backward toward ultimate beginnings and settled slowly around their sad maxims and histories. Before dark had fallen she had seen his eyes as he, Caleb Burns, had greeted her, and she had seen that there were flakes of amber in their brown parts and that the lids were heavy as if they could not rest entirely. The talk dwelt on the town again, Anneville, named for a woman, Anne Montford. “Your great-great-grandmother,” he said. He knew of them, speaking of them tenderly now. “Mother to Theodosia Montford, grandmother to Anthony Bell....”

But one day she went to see the cattle, Midi having been asked by Caleb to bring her, and with Midi and Sallie she walked down the road that curved once toward the south and turned in at the large gate where the driveway began. As they walked back through the pasture they were met half-way by Caleb, and Shirley Bond left his mowing and came toward the barns to bring the cattle to be viewed. Mollie and Queen were on the rise of the hill near the haw tree and Theodosia walked there with Caleb and Midi and Sallie, and she laid her hands on the animal’s shoulders and looked at her, Queen, at her great hard eyes with their murky veins, at her thick shoulders and her falling dewlap and low brisket. There was a great fullness beginning at her middle under part and extending backward and downward, the great sack where the milk vein emptied the milk for storage. Her teats, hanging to her shanks, almost to her feet, were tight and full of life, delicately pink with blood. The hairs of her coat, viewed closely, were red and white, salted together in varying degrees of one on the other so that she was spotted with white or roan spots that shaded to red about her face and neck or again about her feet. Mollie was less quiet and she moved nervously away to find eatage at the other side of the pasture, where her pale sides and flanks sank into the bright play of sun and shadows from a locust tree.