My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Anthony lingered in a state of half-illness, in and out of his bed. One day his distress for some missing paper seemed acute and she offered him her help. He was unwilling to share with her. “Your business is the violin now,” he said, sinking weakly into his chair by the fire, but in a moment after he was sickened with faintness and she helped him back to the bed.

Two days later Theodosia found that she had determined to search among the papers in the back upper room to try to find the truth about their house, that she would take upon herself the necessity which awaited her as her grandfather visibly failed. Siver had spoken to her of his wages, which, he said, had not been paid for five weeks. He must have his money, he said, speaking respectfully, embarrassed, for he needed clothing. He must have his pay or he would have to find another place. Theodosia paid him the money from a small sum which she had, and during that same evening she took a mass of papers and letters from the old desk and carried them to her room to examine them before the fire. Many of the letters had been tied into bundles and these she examined first because they offered a modicum of order in the chaos of the mass. Among them were letters of affection which ran through a long gamut of admiration and passion to apathy, letters which had passed between her father and mother.

She sat all the following day over the papers. The memoranda yielded a confusion of dates and moneys spent or collected, a going and coming of funds, lands, expenses. Nothing seemed to have marketable value. No memoranda indicated a note or mortgage held in fee. The farmland had been sold; there were records of sums paid for this tract or that. The musty papers told musty stories, already half-known to her, of acres inherited, of sale bills of watered farmlands and uncut forests lying along the banks of some stream, described with poles and links and the jargon of surveys. In the documents a surveyor walked around a stretch of land, in the sun of warm days, in the wind or the cold or the frost of ill seasons. He walked around tracts with his compass and chain, measuring, writing figures, drawing maps, making descriptions. Five people heired a five-part property, divided equally by the survey, a farm to Joseph, a farm to Eliza, a farm to Jacob, a farm to Anthony T., a farm to Theodosia, the wife of Thomas Singleton.... A will had been opened and read in a parlor, the heirs sitting formally in their seats as became the inheritors of land. Later they drew their chairs together in groups to confer. One sat apart dissatisfied. The truth of the letters met the truth of the surveys and the memoranda. It had been a rainy day. The inheritors had reached the place with difficulty, some of them wet to discomfort. The parlor had been dark and ill dusted, murky with age and memorials. A young woman had brought cedar wood for the fireplace.

They had met again when the survey had been made, sitting again in the light that fell through the old curtains, and their discontents had now been adjusted or hidden. The surveyor had made a plat for each one, a shield of irregular shape drawn on paper, representing lands, arable acres and woodlands. The plows of the spring would slip through the fields and the inheritors would be about their business, belonging now, each one, to his land. But the substance of the myth would fade out from under them. Some of them were dead, and from some the land had melted away. Owners were separated from their ownership. Memoranda of deeds began to tell their tales, items of barter. “Beginning at a stone at the east edge of the Quincy pike, corner to lot 4, thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links, thence south.... Said farm known as Linden Hill....” It was accurately described, line for line. In the house someone was born, the birth told in a letter from Charlotte, the mother, to Anthony. Another paper, notes drawn up for the writing of some deed, “witnesseth that said Anthony, for and in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars to him paid by said Goodwin ... hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred, and released, and by these presents does give, grant, bargain, sell, transfer, and release unto said Goodwin, a certain tract of land situated, lying, and being in the county aforesaid on the south side of the Casey Run and bounded as follows: Beginning at a stone ... thence with edge of said pike south 88½ west 32 poles 23 links ... said farm known as Linden Hill.”

The road ran between the farms, mapped and charted, and the farms were charted and recorded, described and owned, bounded by fences and walls and watercourses, these men belonging to the land as owners of land. But the land was gone, cut from under their feet, in consideration of the sum of nineteen thousand dollars, it was released, bargained, granted, given, sold, transferred. The day of the sale had been a bright day in June. The tillers of the soil had already planted the tobacco and the corn in the arable fields. The child born had been herself. A letter told of the humid noon, dinner on long tables before the house door, the half of a mutton roasted by three negroes over a great wood fire, piles of bread, drink for the men in the barn, whisky poured into little glasses. She had been a baby above-stairs in a cradle. It was all now a mouldy smell on rotting paper, a faint stench and a choking dust. An imperfect chronicle arose out of the stench and this chronicle built the present into a new structure. She sat staring at the embers or she turned again to the documents, for they had hints of more to disclose.

It was on this day that she first helped her grandfather to the commode, that she had known the look of his feeble withered body, had glimpsed at it as she had folded his blanket about his shaking knees. She went away to walk in the twilight of the day, spinning rapidly along the street, meeting Frank and walking with him to the end of the town, merry with him over some joke that he had. Later Albert was sitting under her soft light.

“Take your time, no hurry,” he said, half whispering as he stood by the door at his departure. “Take your time.”

The papers scattered over her sofa in the room above had begun to reveal a hard story, hard to know and realize. She turned a bitter, unsmiling face from him as he stood by the door and glanced at her bent lips in the glass.

“I’ll not hurry. Don’t bother yourself.”

“But in the end you’ll come.”