“Ladybug, when you hear a katydid, it’s then six weeks till frost. Yessir. Six weeks. I often took notice to a katydid that-away. It’s a forerunner to frost for fair.... Oh, it’s a good morning.... Someways I always liked a hilltop....”
The tenant would come about the house talking noisily, his voice striking the wall with a token of life in the fields. Cuttings of hay, stand of wheat, stand of rye, prime good crop of burley this time, “fair good corn if it turns out well in the shock at plucken time”—these were his cries as they smote the upper wall and rolled in at the open windows. There would be money from Doe Singleton’s acres to augment her bank account and her securities. Once her banker called, making a low clatter of steps and voice as he went in and out. One of the dogs, old True, died in the upper hallway, stretched out stiff when the morning food called Theodosia down the stairs, laid out across the carpet. Later one of the tenant men dragged her away, the body pulled by a rope making a dull stiff cluttering of noises on the hard stair. The strong sour odor of her death pervaded the hall for many days after.
Theodosia did not keep the count with the katydid, but the frost came, the leaves richly responding. The katydids had sung their own well-timed requiem. After the season of the first frost the rains set in, plodding heavily on the old walls, wetting the ceilings where the roof leaked. The drip of the water made a continuous impertinence upon her carpeted floor. She arose and set several basins under the drips and climbed shivering back into the bed. In the morning after a continued rainfall of many hours her bed stood under a new drip.
“The roof upstairs leaks everywhere, Aunt Doe,” she said. “There’s hardly a dry place left. Maybe you never noticed it, but the roof ought to be mended. The plaster might fall.”
Doe Singleton was tall and straight, a fantasy of old age, her movements hurried and uncertain. Her hair, white now, had turned coarse and frizzled with its graying. When the report of the roof came to her, her mouth became straighter and more thin. She dipped her bread into her coffee and ate slowly, saying nothing.
“Want more bread?” she said after a little, a curious cheerfulness, reiterated each mealtime over the food.
Theodosia moved to the east room, across the hall, for there were fewer leaks there and the bed could be kept dry. She set three basins under the drips in her new quarters and closed the door of the west room upon its wet misery. When she had lain ten days without fever at any time during the day she might arise and walk a few steps into the yard. This was the doctor’s suggestion when he came in the autumn, his last visit, and found her lung healed. It was difficult to achieve the ten in consecutive occurrence, and with each failure she must begin the count anew.
Her grandfather’s books were in their boxes in the hall, half-unpacked, tumbled together as she had searched among them. In the east room she looked at the walls her grandfather had seen when he lay in Doe Singleton’s house, herself across the hall then in the room with Annie. The likenesses of the Bells and the Trotters stood in stiff frames, awkwardly placed along the walls, and once, indifferent to what she did, she arose and rearranged the small frames to a happier proportion, driving the small tacks with the poker from the fireplace. She was often insulated from her own thought by pain in her head, in her abdomen and loins. The autumn was bright and long, lingering warmly after the leaves had fallen.