My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Betty Hawthorne stood in the shade of a sugar tree chewing her cud, half sleeping, her eyes fixed on the barn at the end of the field. She was redder than Queen and larger in frame, her udders even more ripe and low-drooping. Her horns curved slightly above her eyes and her large jaws showed the veins that branched under the heavy skin. She was dreamily set to the business of chewing, her great body having succumbed to the tyranny of milk. Princess was beautifully marked with white spots that were balanced, side for side. The long straight line of her back that curved upward slightly at the base of her head drew the design into form.

The calves were penned in a smaller pasture beside the barn, five or six heifers. They played together, trying to use their horns, or one or two bawled at the fence, but their mothers were undisturbed. “She’s well enough off,” Princess said through her indifference as she bent her straight back slightly to take a bite of clover. Betty Hawthorne too had an offspring among the young in the calf pen. Caleb pointed it out.

“I’ll raise it to a year old or so and put it on the market. Weaned now. He’s a good calf but he’s not marked right and so he’ll have to go for beef.”

The great white sire, Good Boy, stood in a pen beyond the lower barn, fenced by rails that were strung high above his head. He was larger than his cows and his coat was creamy white, soft and pliable, in the fine pink of health and life. His horns were short and slightly drooped downward. He had left the grass of his enclosure and stood complacently beside the fence, chewing sleepily. The great ring through his nose scarcely moved as he opened his mouth, and when he swallowed he fell momentarily asleep, but another pellet of unchewed matter, arising from below with a spasmodic movement, would awaken him.

She walked among his cattle, these great beasts that had been brought to serve the needs of men, that had been deflected from their own ends by husbandry, and she admired their shining coats of fine red-and-white hair and their great bodies. The calves were restless now, crying now and then, some of them giving deeply matured cries, others the bleat of the young. This disturbance made a pleasant din that settled over the pasture and brought nearer the milking hour. Only one, Mollie, was nervous and wild, and she had run to the end of the pasture where she gamboled with some others, her necessity upon her, but the great quiet sire was unaware of her as yet.

Walking beside Theodosia, keeping always at her elbow, Caleb Burns told her the good qualities of each beast, offering figures in proof, pointing out this and that. Midi was as quiet as a dove, or she would ask a question of the flow of milk or the age of a heifer, shy of the great male and willing to turn away from his pen.

Theodosia knew the intensities of Midi as she walked up the pasture toward the rise of the low hill, going now to view Prudence, two years old, not yet come to the age of milk, but beautifully marked and deeply characterized by the qualities her author had devised for her. The intensities of Midi contrasted the quiet of the herd at this hour, the hour before milking time, when the lush plenty of the grass and the filled rumen induced quiet, but the force of intense life lay back of the animals in the power of their great bodies and of the young that were gathered in the calf pens. Or walking along the grass toward the middle of the pasture, Caleb talked about the beginning of the breed near the river Tees at Croft and about the first Duchess, man borrowing and shaping a little the power under the earth.

Midi and the child, Sallie, were gone now, had walked away toward the road after they had stopped to gather a few wild berries from the briars. Some little birds that were flocked in a clump of haws then began to sing, all in harmony, twittering together as a burst of high song out of a bush, as if it were to celebrate the coming of Aphrodite among the herds, to announce the beginnings of fine desires and the passing of Aphrodite among the pastures. They passed the haw trees and came then to a walnut sapling, but they turned back again and came the way they had gone. The insufficient summer twilight was beginning to settle to the pasture and the abundant but inadequate thorn bushes kept their singing, a burst of loud high twittering. The cows had been gathered to the barns. Caleb Burns, his hands touching her hands, was talking, had been talking from moment to moment. “I’ve dreamed about you so long, my arms fitted around you, seems, now you’re here I’m afraid, as if my mind would burst open. What will we do?... The moon tonight will be a petal from an old flower.” They were walking back toward the sugar tree, toward the highroad. “It’ll go, maybe, and we’ll never know what way it went. Between two summers and it’ll be gone, this drunkenness. I’ll have you then, maybe, the way Lucian West has Midi, unable to come to the house without I find you and have something to say about a gate-post or a milk can, God knows!... I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler....”

Night then, in the upper gallery, and she was trying to picture Caleb’s face, to restore it entirely now that it was not by. A hard pointed face, sharpened to a moment of anxiety, or diffused to a general scrutiny as he looked at Queen’s offspring, searching for blemishes, looked back then at her face. She saw him as a vague shape against the haw bushes. “I’m a-goen to give you Betty Hawthorne. The best cow I’ve got. If you’ll be so good as to have her until I can make you a better.”