My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

On her way to the wood-lot in the first cold of a November day when the wind was whipping the trees and shrubs and the leaves were falling in mad disaster, “A woman, I am, walking to gather firewood in a wild storm,” she said. In a wind-whipped bush she found a song-sparrow’s nest, revealed now to sight by the upturned branches and the dispersing leaves. She broke the nest from the bush and carried it away. It was made of fine twigs rounded and woven with perfect care, the wooded ends and strands growing more delicate as they approached the center, the pool where the eggs had lain. This cup was lined with human hair, soft and red-brown, laid in an exquisite hollow to make a lining, her own hair. Walking back through the angry air that twisted her garments and beat her steps from the path, a wind that would cry “It is done, make a swift end then,” and would tear life out of the trees and wrench summer off from the sagging vine on the house wall, a fervor of joy welled in her senses and spread backward to some quiet inner part. She had had this ineffable relation with the bird. Unknown to her, the nest had lain on the bough of the old lilac bush all summer, had been built in the spring. The wind slammed the door on the outside violence and she was free of bodily struggle, ribbons of exhaustion and pain unwinding upward into her thighs and back. She placed the nest on her table and looked at it from time to time, picking it delicately apart to try to discover its order.

In the untended pastures the withered white-top and frost-flowers, rejected by the horses, shook stiffly in the cold gusts. The silkweed puffs had blown and their shards were left standing above the dried sweet-fern and the bittersweet. It was now the dark season when night comes on at the earliest hour.

She turned away from her thin face, seen quickly in a mirror, and fear that had crouched in her thought leaped to become a pain in her breast. She was losing what she had gained, the little she had so carefully built together. It was difficult now to walk her small round, through the trees, along the fence to the stile, to the wood-lot, back up the stair. A dragging weariness which she thought would be hunger gnawed at her body. She had talked of it to her aunt, saying, “When I am stronger I will go.” A curious smile had settled to the dim eyes that were glassed over with the fantasies of books.

She was walking out toward the stile in the cold of a December day, the wind blowing her dress and beating through her thin blood, changing her breath to a quivering chill. It came to her as she neared the stile that she would go to the tenant man, Walter Bland, and say, “I must have food, every day; I will sell something. My books are all I have. How will I do it? What shall I do?” She would say, “As a human being and a neighbor, tell me what I’d better do. You know yourself how Aunt Doe lives. We are all here together on the farm. Now what must I do?” He would be rude and rough in his speech, but he would suggest some plan. He would do something.

She climbed over the stile with a new strength and went down the pasture slowly, stopping to regain her panting breath. She was glad that she had decided to do this. A strength greater than she had came to her with the determination and the satisfaction in her plan. She thought that Bland might want some of the books for himself, and she began to name in mind such of the books as might be within his reach. Walter came suddenly out of the brush at the foot of the pasture, just where she entered the field. Her hand was reached to the loop of the wire that held the field gate in place. He came out of the cherry brush suddenly and stood ten feet away. A hard voice accompanied his approach, spreading through the cherry glades and meeting the cold of the wind on the briars.

“You keep on back up the hill. Don’t you be a-comen down here now. You keep on back up where you belong.”

She tried to say what she had come to say, her words entangled until they were meaningless. The voice spoke out steadily over her struggle to speak.

“You keep on back up to the house.” He glanced fearfully toward the field and the way of the cabin. “You got no business here. You go on back.”

Her words rushed out upon her breath and were shaken with the chill of her body. Her plan would not yield to his uncomprehended speech, and she stood against the gray weathered gate. She drew the flying ends of her bright scarf from before her eyes and stated again her errand. He spoke over her words, trampling them out with his rough voice.

“You keep on back up the hill.... Where you stay.... Anything happens, who is’t gets strung up to a limb? Not you. You go on back. Don’t you be a-comen down this-here way. On back.... You go on, I say.”