My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“I did it,” Theodosia cried out again, sitting up in bed again. “I’ll go to prison ten years, fifteen maybe. Hang maybe. I don’t want to be hung. But I did it....”

The strength of the chill multiplied and the rhythms flowed in a strange complexity, short rhythms fitted into the long flow of the heavier beat. Later the fever came and she was still again.

A month later Theodosia sat for a little while each day in the sunshine on the south side of her room. Dr. Muir had come every day to listen to her breathing through a stethoscope. She had let life bring her back to life if it would, lending little aid herself to the return. Her fiddle had been shut securely into its case.

She would have to rest for a long while, Dr. Muir said, and she would have to live in the country and have much rich food. She was shut into some remote death although breath came and went in her throat. The doctor’s suggestions became a law that moved over her, having its way without protest. Abundant food regularly taken, more than was desired—it came to her bed. Presently it would be owed for, but now it was merely there, to be eaten, the last caloric measure. She would not be playing the fiddle, Dr. Muir said, not for several months anyhow. Playing would put too much strain on the arms and chest. The town had its spring season, the birds in the trees. Her windows were always opened wide.

“You had better go to your Aunt Doe’s, in the country,” Dr. Muir said. “A long rest, fresh air, food. That’s all you need.”

She had better sell the house and let the mortgages be paid, the doctor said; she had better close her life there in the town. She was unable to continue her teaching. He went into the facts about her inheritance and weighed each in her presence, asking questions, making judgments. She had better sell all, he advised, and turn away the creditors, had better relieve herself of all worry. She had better go. In the heart of this remote death into which she had passed she stirred a little, remembering the great sweep of rolling land as it was to be seen from the upper windows at the farm.

Some light sorrel horses had stood by a fence, and the queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief was spreading white beyond the creek path. “Oh, it’s a good morning. I someways like a day just like this,” the words arose and flowed back into the mingled picture—a path along a cornfield where sweet hot weeds gave out their savors in the sunshine of noon, the man in the low field plowing all day, the horse and the plow and the figure of the dark creature that bent over the plow-handles making an even pattern of dark lines that crept slowly over the earth and continued all day, pleasant to see and of no effort to herself. The high cackle and clatter of the feeding times soon after dawn when the poultry and the geese and the guinea-fowls sang their food cries through the baaing of the calves and the low grunting of the swine, and she had turned on her pillow to sleep again, lulled by the sweet blended clatter. The hill field sometimes plowed but mainly left in pasture grass. Out the upper window the land had rolled away a hundred miles, two hundred, never to be measured, beyond hills and fields, insufficient even where the last frail tree stood on the most removed hilltop, beyond two farms.

She would go. Frank came to sit with her frequently or he brought passages to read, tribute to her convalescing hours. “Good old Frank,” her tears surprised her in saying once when his departure clicked the latch of the gate.

A dealer in old furniture came from Lester and bargained for the pieces. A crier sold the house from the gallery steps one noisy court day in May. The archaic hatchets and flints were dispersed, culled over by a collector from Louisville, some of them rejected and thrown into a large basket. Theodosia saved for herself Anthony’s books, and she had them packed into boxes to be hauled to the farm. Dr. Muir had been to call upon her aunt and to ask hospitality for the invalid. All was arranged. She would go. The way was sunny and long on the day of the journey, the road heavy to go, distorted with shadows, the hedges standing back far and the woods vistas spacious to the point of giving pain. As if bandage had been removed from a recent hurt or fracture, the confines of the town taken away, she spread painfully out through the hills and fields, through the ways to go. She closed her eyes and the car slipped lightly, too lightly, among the road windings.