My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

She was climbing the rise again, walking along the path, facing the wind now, moaning softly as she went. The cold cut her garments apart and entered her flesh, past her chilled blood. She labored with the low hill and came at last to the stile.

She was drowsed by fatigue and dulled by the cold. She went to the evening bit of food, her life stilled, scarcely knowing when she had eaten the last of the leather cake. When this was done she built a fire on the parlor hearth with wood she had brought there some days earlier and made the wood stand high over the blaze. There would be a great glow, a holiday burning of the demon sticks she had carried, two and two, from the wood-lot. A dozen now went on the flame. She put on a soft gray dress she had saved from her former wardrobe and twined a warm rose-and-yellow scarf about her shoulders.

She sat in the parlor before the high fire and felt the color gather richly above her scarfed breast. The sofa on which she sat ran before the fire in a retreating curve of black, and her mind caught in the irony of warmth and the color that wrapped her throat. Frank came, opening the door for himself, knocking softly and entering, rubbing his hands for their cold, eager for the fire, for the color, eager for herself. He sat beside her and presently he began to kiss her face and her throat and to whisper strange words, but she stared into the blaze and turned his caresses aside with her ironic mind where yes and no functioned identically. His hands were on her body beneath the glowing scarf, were feeding her body, and the fire was food again, these foods rich in their insufficiency. Frank was a kindness at her side, at her ear, at her mouth, and it appeared to her that she would ask him for help. She turned toward him crying with her broken breath close to his ear, “Frank, I’m so hungry. I’m hungry. I never have enough. I’m hungry. Aunt Doe ... I never have real food. I’ll starve.” He warmed her with his caresses, murmuring some pleasure in his bestowal, and she floated out of life, warmed, and presently was appeased and comforted.

She had fallen into a deep inner reverie from which nothing could arouse her. She heard as a long way off the monotony of Frank as he talked. He sat apart from her now, or he had gone, had kissed her in the moment of his departure. He would come back, she could be sure of that, some voice had said. The night would be cold, was cold. Daylight came late. It was winter now, snow on the ground, on the wood in the pile at the back of the wood-lot. The noise of the woodpeckers was strange against the snow, was flattened by the snow. A day was but little different from a night, she observed under the fog of her reverie, one being light, the other dark, a mere difference. Sleep, wake, sleep. The journey to the woodpile was the one link that bound her to that strange and foregone experience, the ways people go and the things people do.

At this time she began to hear voices speaking to her. In the dark of the night or in the cold bright days when she lay in her bed, the windows opened wide, she would stare at the faded rose and pearl of the ceiling or the faded gray of the walls, and the winter knocking of the woodpeckers among the trees about the house would fit into her sense of light and become identical with it. She would lie in an apathy, scarcely breathing, divided in mind, uncoördinated by hunger and unintegrated by pain. Lying thus one day, looking at the woodpecker’s cry as it lay along the ceiling and was interlaced with the faded rose and pearl of the vignettes there, a first voice spoke to her, saying, “The categories of the flesh....” The words receded when they had been said, leaving ripples of flat tone behind, flat words that rode on some rhythm. When the words had receded beyond the reach of hearing and her ears were dulled with listening to their spent rhythms, the voice spoke suddenly again.

First Voice: The categories of the flesh.

“What are they?” she asked, her own voice as real as that which had spoken and as earnest. She began to turn the saying about to see what it would give. Then another voice spoke sharply, swiftly, a hard voice blurting out its rough saying.

Second Voice: The hunger of the mouth.

An inner voice spoke then, a third speaker, more, subtle and persuasive, saying, “And then there’s Frank.”