My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Some buzzards were soaring over the stream, lying out on the air with long wings, searching the water-holes for fowls that might come there to drink. They seemed rather to rest on the air and to turn about for the mere happiness of turning. Near the creek a pool of water, fed by some spring, had been banked about with earth to make a pond, the place where the mules drank when the creek was low and the water-holes foul. Four light sorrel horses stood by the fence, one of them a large glossy mare with a half-grown mule colt beside her, the colt sorrel and brilliant like the mother. It seemed very foolish in its fright, edging close to its mother’s side, afraid even of little Annie when she ran near to gather the plush, aster-like flowers that grew near the creek.

In the field the laborers were bending over the tobacco plants, breaking out the top of each and trimming away undesired growth. They lifted their backs from the labor to watch the passing and to greet the owner of the field. At the barn beyond the field Tom left the girls in the shade of the doorway while he looked at the walls of the building, or he climbed high into the upper structure, talking happily to himself as he mounted. It was a good barn, he said. It would do. A little work on the roof and a few nails to tighten the loose scantlings. Then they went back along the tobacco field and passed the shy sorrel colt again.

“Oh, it’s a good morning,” he said. “I someways like a day just like this, just enough heat so’s you know it’s summer. Cool breezes shiften in and out of the thicket and a mockbird over towards the hill a-singen once in a little while. A prime good day. I don’t know why it is but seems like I always liked a hilltop. We’ll go up this-here fenceline and around home by the orchard to see if the early harvests are all gone offen the trees. That’s a summer apple fit for a queen to eat.”

They accepted his joy in them as their due and saw it blend with his joy in the morning. It had been but a little while since Annie had thought that if she darkened her eyes with her hand the sun went out and all the earth was in darkness. Suddenly a redbird made a solitary peal of song, a rich modulation from the three high whistled notes to the low throaty altos of the decline where the singing darkened to meet the brush and undergrowth of the thicket. The song set the hilltop clear in a high relief.

“I sometimes plow this-here, but mainly I leave it in pasture grass.” Beyond the fence the earth rolled gently up to a summit that held a few scattered trees, an oak and two or three thorns. “And on the top, right there on the summit, is where I expect to be buried, right there. Off to the left of the oak but on the summit like. From that-there spot you can see—it’s curious now—you can see the whole farm, every last field. You can look down on the house and the barns and right down this-here valley to the creek. It’s curious. There’s where I expect to be buried some day. I always like family buryen-grounds. I expect to lay down my bones right there on this hilltop.”

The hill-crest rolled in a fair curve against the sky between the limits of the trees, but it slipped beyond the trees again and sank away into the curving field, and Theodosia felt a quick pleasure in it as the place where he would be buried, and felt it as the summit of the farm that looked down upon all the fields and the meanderings of the creek and the life of the barns, on the singing mockingbird and the goodness of the day. Her eagerness ran forward and longed to have him buried there, anticipated his entombment on the brow of the hill he had chosen, so that she could scarcely wait for the consummation of his wish. She looked at him happily and smiled, and he took her hand in some unconscious delight, and thus they walked up the fence path.

Theodosia would watch the long brown hand with its yellow shadowed nails when Lucas passed a plate of some food at her side. While she helped herself to a serving her eyes would cling to the hand where it folded at the edge of the plate, the thumb near the food, and she would remember the baby on the quilt in Aunt Deesie’s yard. An exquisite disgust of the hand would make the food taste doubly sweet in her mouth when the hand was withdrawn.

“Well, Ladybug,” Tom Singleton said when they had passed to the portico, “what’s the best thing in the world?”

She had never thought before that one thing might be the best, superior to all other things, but when her uncle placed the question at once it became clear that among all the betters there must be one supreme best. She was bewildered in her pursuit of some reply, wanting to find the true answer, and she stared at the ground or at the wooden pillar, penetrating the query with the whole of her strength. Her uncle had turned to some other matter, he was talking with Anthony now—the foot-and-mouth disease, Henry Watterson, the tobacco pool in the dark district, Mnemosyne, the secret of the mind, the price of sugar mules, and back to the pool again. The vine that spread over the brick walls of the house made a great plane of flowing green that turned with the turning wall and lapped over the south front and reached to the north gable. It had come from somewhere far away; her attention did not cling to the place as Anthony repeated it with wonder. The main stem of the vine grew on the south side of the house under the window of the room where the aunt and uncle lived, the room across the hall from the parlor, but the longest reach of it, at the farthest end of the west wall, was a hundred feet or more from the root. It was as if it were a great tree, flattened and attenuated to a vine and bent about a house, and her grandfather and uncle were two children in their simple delight in the great growth. Doe had brought it from some place far away a long while ago. From Virginia. She had come back from a visit there and had brought the vine wrapped in a bit of earth, delicately rooted in soil. She was proud now of the vine and of herself as its author.

“See, Tony,” she said. “See.”