My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

All the town had gone to the court as if it were a show to see, and the lawyers had spoken in turn—eloquence, bitterness, laughter. Horace Bell had been on the side of the half-wit and he had made a long speech in defense of her rights as one of the innocents of the earth, rhetoric flowing richly. People had gone in groups to look at the cabin behind the jail and Dolly Brown had met them with smiles and giggling laughter until these visits had wearied her. Then she had thrown boiling water at groups to drive them off. Theodosia could not remember when Stiggins had not stayed in the livery stable and she had always thought of him as being somehow related to the horses and mules there. She had seen his hand on a mule’s throat to slip the harness over the stubby hair, a yellow hand moving knowingly over the mule’s flesh. He was still as a boy of ten in mind although she knew that he was but a few months younger than herself. He had grown up in the livery stable, sleeping on the straw in the loft, and nobody regarded him as more than a semi-idiot. Ladies never went beyond the door of the stable, but she herself had been far inside once when she was a child. Romping along beside her uncle, the horse dealer, on the way to the candy store, she had gone with him into the half-dark of the stable when he had stopped there to look at a horse. She remembered water dripping from a rotting trough, a hand pump where some workmen bent and lifted to the lilt of an iron handle, the closed stall where the show horse was kept. The earth floor was beaten hard by the feet of the horses, and the stalls went, one after another, far back into a brown darkness. Men came there to relieve themselves in the stalls, and there was a foul odor all about.

Stiggins, a link between what men keep and what they throw away, summarized her thought. He breathed the air of the discarded, the foul; he slept in it. She put the scales aside, for their mounting tones no longer reached toward some infinite adjustment, some perpetual promise. Stiggins was her brother. The scales were a weariness.

Albert too was a weariness, set far back and left when she had gone into the region about the yellow half-wit, Stiggins. She refused to ride with him when he asked her to go. He had stood at the house door gravely pleading that the day was warm and bright. His strong limbs offered her ease as he stood there before the bright warmth of the sun. Distracted, she waited beside her grandfather’s door, listening to his argument, but she gave a negative reply. Standing there, she wanted suddenly to go into his breast and rest. Her eyes clung a moment to his large clean bosom where a single intention dwelt, clung to his strong hands. She went back into Anthony’s room shaking her head, closing the door after her.

Catherine Lovell was going away to live in another town and her going began to leave a mark upon the days of the season even before it was consummated at a point upon some exact day. Her going spread through the week that preceded it and gave it a heightened reality, touching it with a not altogether unpleasant sense of disaster. For the last time the rugs were rolled back in the Lovell parlors and the musicians sat in the outer hall. Knowing it to be the last, the dancers were tender and gay, bending toward the departure with heightened beings. Theodosia was more intensely aware of Catherine in her leaving, her affection for her running in a full tide that ran counter to her recent unrest and swept this into its own channel. There was abundant virtue in a Bell then, and with Conway she walked lightly on the rhythms of Hill Street, adoring him in the moment of Catherine’s going. She worked all morning over the fiddle or the harmony, Catherine’s departure giving her faculties intense acumen so that the chords dripped from her pencil-tip and spread over the sheets of lined paper and her lips hummed phrases that played over the chords and departed from them in airy flights of inconsequential song, never returning. Ruth Robinson had brought her a gift of spring blossoms and Jane Moore had come to talk of how much Catherine would be missed. Intensities of affection welled all around her. Albert in the dance, settling his fingers to steady her in the step, had whispered again, “Two weeks now I give you. I’ll close in against next week is done.” They were a warmth of life touching her life minutely. They excluded fear with the warm touch of their nearness.

After a day in the house she went to walk at nightfall, in the dusk of the last twilight hour. People were assembled about the reading-lamps of the firesides, for the shades were not yet drawn and she could see into the houses. Little children were running before the firelight, their heads just reaching above the low window sills. It had been county court day and the town had been filled with busy people and the clatter of pleasant noises. Albert had been everywhere about, talking with the growers, and he had made a speech from the court-house steps. Forty per cent of the farmers had already been pledged to the measure, he had told her, and he would count eighty per cent an assured success, his eyes forgetful of her when he made the declaration, his eyes resting upon her without seeing. “You would eat his per cents from his hand,” now she said.

Footsteps came from the deeply shadowed pavement before her, going steps, receding quickly. The drama of the darkening town was but lightly held together, as if she could break it with a laugh. She walked briskly through an upper street thinking of her friends and of Catherine’s going. She had from each, she reflected, what each held out to her, and her music counted richly for something. A long strange gloom was settling over the rolling hills beyond the town where the fields and the pastures lay, a gloom lit with the strange light from a low-bent horizon, vividly burnt to orange and black-red. The town was the dark core around which the fields centered. Albert was whispering his wish and his intention, growing daily more sure and more restless. All day the town had been the leaping, out-crying center of the farmed acres, the traders shouting their musical incantations over the mounting prices of cattle and mules, and Albert had summarized many goods as he had stood before her to make his speech from the court-house, had set a hilltop upon the day and upon the plowed fields. “In less than two weeks,” he had said the night before, and the week was well begun. “The kind of lover you’ll want.”

All about, up and down the street, were remote sounds of retreating steps, coming steps, voices that cried out in low commands or questions, but they said nothing for her beyond the abundant drama of their passing. She moved in a richness and fullness of sensation, cloaked in sense, or the pleasure of setting her feet forward swiftly drowned all thought in momentary pools of physical being. Or, standing at the gate after the walk, having heard the click of the gate latch which always meant the end of a journey, the peculiar sound of the gate when it was closed from within the garden, a deep metal click, alto, unlike that of any other gate she knew, a token of possible finalities came into her thought and her bodily presence. Albert gathered the fields together and centered them, but in turn he centered himself into her body. The parallels of the street converged far down in the west at the line the set sun made with the hills. The cool of the night touched her face and a shiver passed over her body, less of cold than of emotion deeply established as she recognized some unity within herself which related to her friends, to Albert’s wish, to Conway’s gentleness and beauty, and a clear thought of Conway brought a smile to her lips.

“This is my spirit, my soul. It’s here,” she said. “This unit. I can almost touch it with my words.” Dark had come now. The lights of the town were burning in order, one after the other up the street. She passed up the steps of the gallery slowly.