My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Hard words, cracked with age and anger, spent strength, and he trembled in his chair. Tone left his words high as jagged missiles thrust upon the air of the room. She was weeping now.

“Get about your business. Get on. Get outen here. Away.”

She was playing scales all morning in her room, using difficult intervals, her content running now with the cry of the tone and settling to the grace of her fingers as they crumpled over the strings. Her hands were pliant but narrow, not good fiddle hands, the teacher had said. They were her mother’s hands much diminished. She was hearing the words of the teacher, her master, as they discoursed of vibration. She was, the teacher, herself an epitome of the fiddle, her quick graceful standing figure, her hand that was broad and flexible in the palm. She wondered if anything else touched this woman. The inner psychic vibration which should be reflected in the rapid vibrations of the fingers on the strings, such as this was her meat and drink. The greater master had played a Chopin Nocturne for one “eating the bitter bread of exile.”

“It should be easy, though, to make a dethroned king weep,” she said.

She let her fingers have their joy in their skill knowing that an ironic undertow had set upon her thought. Enough virtue in a Bell to carry along any quantity of excess weight, Anthony had said to her, his anger in a flame. The two daughters of black Josie’s girl, Deb, were grown women now. She remembered them as cooks or nurses or laundresses. They were named Americy and Lethe, and now she remembered vividly one warm September day when she had stopped Lethe on the street and asked her to do some laundry work. The reply had been a faintly smiling refusal, some evil in it. She recalled now her tone of mind and her bodily attitude as she had worked the end of her parasol between the bricks of the pavement, a gesture to accompany the slightly forward pose of her head, her manner condescending, amused, expectant. “Could I get you to do some fine laundry work for me, Lethe?”

Now she labored with the more difficult scales, grown weary of them as she thought of the September day, her parasol daintily plucking at the bricks, her assurance and expectancy, and then the strange, brief, but not curt refusal, “No’m, you couldn’t.” A smile she could not understand, some evil in it, had dented the brown girl’s face, had dented her brown cheeks and slightly lifted her lips. Her words had been slowly spoken and her gaze had fixed itself upon the parasol for an instant while the decision was being made, but had traveled then over the blue silk crêpe dress to Theodosia’s face. She remembered the evil of the smile and the slowly spoken refusal, and how they had lain over her evening, had weighted her day as with a rebuff and had brought a distress to her members that had mounted to a deep fatigue.

“My sisters,” she said, rubbing the rosin over the hair threads of the bow. A distinct fear stood in her breast for the moment. She opened the window wide.

She thought minutely of Americy and Lethy—or Lethe. She wondered which of the names she should think when she thought of the brown girl, and she guessed the origin of the name. “Call it Aphrodite, Aurora, Lethe, call it Lethe, Lethy,” she heard a voice say. Now she thought intently of the two dark women and tried to picture them. They were older than herself. Americy had strange marks like freckles on her face, splotches of deeper brown. There had been some story of her which she could not now distinctly remember. It had something to do with her having been in the jail for stealing or for drunkenness. She found that her penetrating memory yielded her more of Lethe than of Americy, for she could recall Lethe’s face more sharply. Her picture of Lethe’s face was more clear than the detailed story of Americy although she now remembered that it was for drunken brawling that Americy had been incarcerated. The incident belonged a year or two back in time. Americy had been making loud obscene talk on the street, in a brawl with some man, and she had been taken to the lockup. There was something more of it, she remembered, cocaine or whisky. She had pled guilty and had somehow raised the money for the fine when she was tried in the court two days later.

“All right, then, my sisters,” she said. A great weariness assailed her and she was aware of fear. There was more to comprehend and the exercises grew irksome, difficult.

Her thought passed beyond fear and rested on pity, abhorrence, sickening loathing. Stiggins, then—she turned no longer from the thought of Stiggins. His mother was the half-wit who lived in the alley behind the jail. She had lived there many years, for the cabin there had been left to her by some white woman. There had once been some litigation over the property; it had been wanted by the county for some purpose and there had been a suit in the court, all the lawyers taking sides, half-jocularly at first. In the end the cabin had not been sold, for Dolly Brown had been adjudged incompetent and her property had been secured from sale or condemnation. The affair had been threshed through several courts and all the lawyers had enlisted, renewing old bitternesses over it. The people of the town had gone to hear the speeches of the lawyers. “They’re a-tryen Dolly Brown’s cabin,” Conway had said.