My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“I’m well enough off as I am. I don’t want a big rumpus inside the house.”

She dwelt on the kitchen as Prudie had kept it, the busy mornings there, the kettles steaming on the stove, to try to make it reappear as a part of a pleasant way. She remembered some droll sayings of Prudie’s talk and restored Lucas with a swiftly sketched picture.

“Remember how Prudie used to say, ‘But stick inside your shirt-tail, Lucas, afore you go in to wait on white folks. Shirt-tail always out.’ Remember Prudie?”

“But I like the way I got now. No bother. All I need is right here. I’m well enough off to suit me,” Miss Doe said.

The journey up the stairs required several pauses for rest on the way, and, this accomplished, she was glad to sink into the kindness of the bed. Her flesh was soft like wax. She would look at her strange hands and listen to her fluttering breath. It was spring, she reflected, seeing the swelling buds on the linden tree and hearing the birds at morning. At night the up-and-down seesaw of the frogs in the pond came to her if the breeze were drifting in from the east. Frank came sometimes, always in the late afternoons. She would talk with him on the portico where she would sit wrapped well in shawls. She worked feebly, a little at a time, and rid the parlor of its cobwebs and dust.

A sweet smell of cut grass spread over the farm. The white-top was standing over the clover among the high heads of straying timothy, and then the field was mowed for hay. The oat field was green, and shaken in the breeze it was broken like lace. The rye had turned yellow. The two men, Walter and Abe Bland, had finished setting the tobacco in the field along the creek, and her mind’s eye knew how their plows went there although this field was beyond the hill’s rise and thus beyond her vision. Across the road were two neighboring farms and the matrons there sometimes called on Miss Doe in the fine weather. Seen distantly these houses were full of the busy appearances of life. People came and went from the white house where the Bernards lived, and Miss Alice Bernard, the wife and mistress of the place, would tell of the goings and comings among all the farms, of the berries she had canned and the jams she had made. Miss Doe would acquiesce, remotely smiling; they would be sitting in the shade of the portico. Seen from the upper window, the house where Miss Alice lived presented a remote drama. The shutters, green against the white wall, were opened and closed daily, and people went hurrying down the driveway to the highroad and thus away to the town. In the other house, far to the left, there were two young girls. “They think of me as being very old,” Theodosia thought. She would see them at morning riding their horses, cantering along the road.

She had learned to lift the bow and the fiddle above her breast and to hold them there. Looking out on the earth from the portico where she rested almost all day in an old reclining chair, she would play airs from an overture or a caprice or a sonata, bending the tune to the outspread fertility of the fields and the high tide of mid-summer with herself apart, insulated by the wax-like softness of her flesh and dispossessed by the penurious withdrawals of the house. Out before the wall, in the light of summer, seeing the richness of the fields and the lush plenty of the days, she would surround herself with thin spectral music from which passion had been withdrawn. She kept a sense of hush to her own past.

She could walk now to the stile going over the fence, the way the tenant man, Walter, took in going to and from the house. It was a rude stile that some farmhand had constructed of such plunder as he had found, a log split and a board on end. Sitting on the slab of the log she could look down the pasture where some unbroken colts ran.

“Them colts is too braysh,” Walter said one day as he passed by the stile. “They need a plow line, them fillies.” He passed down the path mumbling his grievance.

She sat on the stile and searched his rough speech after his departure. He was a strong man, past middle life, sturdy and wind-stained, a hardness in the muscles of his face and some austerity in his eyes. His teeth were broken and yellowed with tobacco. He would look past her when he spoke, drawing his eyes as if to see afar, but when he looked back at her his face would gather to a sum of its severity. He lived with his brother in Aunt Deesie’s cabin, and neither he nor the brother had a wife.