My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Americy had mastered the chords slowly, but she liked to drone the songs that were sung at the church, and Theodosia helped her to set the tunes to the guitar—Beulah Land, I Saw My Jesus, Tell It Again, Come Sinner Come, and Glory to His Name. Once when Theodosia saw her own face in the dim glass above Americy’s bureau she searched it there, in this strange place. “Lethe hates me,” she thought on the instant, seeing her thin curving lips. It seemed to her that she lived with only a part of her being, that only a small edge of her person lifted up into the light of the day. “Lethe hates me,” she thought, and her mind was fascinated by Lethe’s strong will and by her indifferent enmity that was manifested by her continued absence from the cabin. Feeling herself a commonplace, she left the music when the needs of it were satisfied and went again to sit before Americy’s ironing table and listen to her reserved disclosures. “What am I to her?” she would question, searching into the relation of flesh to flesh.

She turned again and again to Albert, remembering Conway, clung to him in her suffering and implored him silently to come to her, to reconcile her to the loss. He was from the town much of the time, but, returned, he was seen continually with Florence now. Theodosia rejected Florence from her passion; since Conway’s loss she was of no account although she was allowed, recognized. Albert might choose and have whomever he would; this was no matter. But continually she listened for his step on the gallery floor and for his voice in the hallway. Walking to Americy’s cabin in the bright sun of a midday, she would suddenly see his strong firm hand, sunburned and full of power, taking its heavy certain being in gestures or in quiet. She thought that he would surely come some day to sit quietly with her, to talk with her sadly of Conway. She determined that she would contrive to see Albert again although each plan for an encounter was at once rejected. Americy would push her iron over a reach of damp cloth and leave a smooth trail of steaming surface behind, delicately pleased but embarrassed at the visit, and she would talk guardedly, disclosing as little as she might of her life and the life of Lethe. Sitting before her, watching the magic of the iron as it turned rough garments into smooth, Theodosia would know that she must somehow meet Albert again, that she would send him some message which would bring him to her door.

Once when she had brought her freshened clothing home, when she unrolled the papers from about it and prepared it for the drawer, she saw that a garment had been torn apart. The frayed piece was an underslip which was decorated with lace and fine stitchery. It had been torn open by an angry hand; one great tearing motion had sundered it from the hem to the embroidered upper portion where the enforced stitching had given it strength to resist the angry rending hands. It was frayed in many directions when renewed strength had been set upon it, and she knew that it had stood in the way of some quarrel between Americy and Lethe, that it had been torn apart by Lethe’s hands. She tossed the destroyed garment into a trash basket.

She returned over and over to her need to have Albert come, to have him satisfy some longing by coming through her door and sitting a half-hour in her parlor, but each suggestion her mind made toward the promotion of this imperfectly formed wish was repelled. Her divided wishes, the one prompted by her scorn of him, the other by her strange need, defeated each other continually. Once in a moment of clear-seeing she thought, with a flash of cruel wit, that her real need of him was her need to express to him her contempt of him and her indifference of his way, but this moment was fogged as, day after day, her sense of him yearned toward him. She knew of his coming and going, in and out of the town, with intuitive accuracy. But one day the news of his marriage with Florence spread over the town. They had gone away together and would live thereafter in Lexington, Albert’s work being now centered in that city.

It seemed to her that some barrier had come between her and the violin, as if the instrument were vaguely at fault in that it had allowed some intrusion. At intervals some words of the teacher had touched on the limits of the capacity of her hand. Casually once, as she turned the pages of some catalogue and wrote numbers on a paper, the teacher had said, “Beyond you,” or again, “The fingering beyond your reach,” or “Out of your reach.” These phrases built a deep unrest in Theodosia’s days. She went to sit before Americy’s iron and talk of Americy’s life, her hymns, her revivals, her chords, her work. As a commonplace having some relation to the early summer, she arose each morning and set about her tasks. Her playing was tentative, obeying only the suggestions of the teacher, withdrawing from searchings and explorations. The instrument had retreated from her old knowledge of it. She accomplished with skill all that the teacher required and heard the praise she earned with a leap of satisfaction within. She rested upon her perfections where they lay bounded and within her degree, and she surpassed herself at the designated tasks.

She went to the hill overlooking the town, to the spot where Conway was buried, taking Frank to walk there with her. The grave was near the brow of the hill on the side that sloped back from the town, slightly under the top of the rise where the enclosure looked toward the hill farms beyond. She walked about in the summer grass, which was tall now, much of it in blossom, and she heard in some dim way the talk Frank made as he sauntered by her side, as he spoke of Conway, of the grass, of the pine trees, as he quoted something about pines and grass. The high points of the town stood visible off to the north, and the church steeples arose among the tall trees, and a bit of the roof of the Seminary. To the south the graves dipped up and down with the flow of the near hillside and fell away at a fence where a rose clung, but beyond the rose lay a field of oats, ready to cut. It was a strange place in which to find Conway, and a renewed aspect of him arose with a new flavor. The mockingbird that sang on the fence near the rose began to partake of him. The tall grass waved in the late afternoon sun, swaying about throughout the entire graveyard, even over the new mould that had covered him but a few months. The town stretched away to an immeasurable distance, and the song of the mockingbird became the atmosphere one breathed, a touched substance, giving life to the breath of man, set about the earth to flow with the winds. The tall swaying grass with its sunlight was the people of the earth, the reason for the continuance of the world. When Frank spoke she folded his words together, having subtracted from them their meaning, and dropped them over the brow of the hill beyond the reach of the grass, beyond the mockingbird’s song.

“This grass needs to be cut, I declare,” he said. “It’s a shame. It looks as bad as a wilderness.”

“It’s tall. Everywhere. In bloom,” she said. “There might be a field-lark somewhere.”

“It’s the fault of the committee. There are some things....”

She had folded his words together at the moment of her reply and dropped them beyond the sublimated air of the hilltop. The third fact of Conway prevailed now to its last power and had shared now with every beautiful object which her mind might entertain. The former world had departed, shrunken to a minute size in its going, flattened to commonplace, gone with the departed town, the old air, the trite matter of talk. Because she had never before brought Conway into this intense relation with the song of a bird and with the grass, the act brought him nearer each instant. The sense of her losses lay above the hilltop world which was aerated by the mockingbird’s song, and it spread as a cloud drawing nearer, a desolation as yet to be realized.