Frequently a well-used, high buggy was seen on the streets of the town,
a vehicle of a slightly unfamiliar type, bought perhaps in some remote
market. It would turn slowly around before the county offices and stand
all afternoon under the shade of the tree at the doorway, a privileged
conveyance. It was drawn by a well-conditioned horse, a tall bay that
would step daintily along the stones of the street, and turn the wheels
carefully. The owner, Mr. Tom Singleton, would buy easily at the stores,
careless of bargains, asking for the best. Sometimes he would talk all
afternoon with Anthony Bell, sitting on the gallery of the white house
or under the elm tree. If Tom Singleton’s wife, Miss Doe, were present
she would give great care to her leave-taking. She would mount to the
buggy with ceremonious ease and seat herself, smiling at the accomplished
act, scarcely belonging to the event, her smile lingering until the need
for good-byes obliterated her inner vision of herself. She was a sister
to Anthony Bell. Her name, Theodosia, had been shortened to Doe. The
Singleton farm was ten miles from the town, northwest, down the valley.
Sometimes Mr. Tom would come to town in a carriage drawn by two fine
brown mules. Then he would take Anthony Bell and the two girls, Theodosia
and Annie, back to the farm for a visit.
The two mules trotted down the Quincy pike in the bright widely-spread
glow of a late morning, the waves of heat rolling up from the macadam
and turning about among the cooler undulations that flowed from the tall
corn of the fields. Eight miles from the town and the carriage left the
Quincy pike and entered a crossroad, and here the mules walked slowly
under the roadside trees. The stone wall at the right was rich with moss
and shadows. Two miles along this way, and Tom Singleton’s gate was set
into the stone wall. Beyond, and the mules trotted evenly up a gravel
road under American elms that were widely placed, the driveway leading to
the farmhouse. Pines, lindens, locusts, tulip poplars and elms grew about
the house in a pleasant confusion. The fox hounds, great mongrel beasts,
walked in and out over the portico. From somewhere toward the rear a
great jack, the breeding stallion, was braying at the arrivals.
“You can take the west room,” Miss Doe said, standing with her hands
folded before her body when she welcomed her guests, when she had kissed
each little girl as was her duty. “Anthony, he can take the east room.
Lucas will carry up the valises.”
Upstairs Theodosia showed Annie the high bed in which they were to sleep,
and in the east room another bed, as high, for their grandfather. They
would lean out the window to look far over the west hills where other
farms lay stretched over the rolling earth, white-fenced barnyards and
remote houses about which old trees had gathered. The avenue down to the
stone wall and the white gate turned lightly with its elm trees, the way
they had come. They would look at the photographs of former Bells and
Trotters and Montfords on the chamber walls, and would gaze at a chromo
print of a ship standing above a great sea, caught suspended upon a
wave. Once they explored all the upper rooms, opening all the doors, and
finding a staircase to the attic, they went there to peer out at the land
of the farms, thinking that they could see a hundred miles away. Annie
was six years old. She would look at Theodosia for confirmation of each
new wonder, as if she would say, “And is it so? Is it real?”
Theodosia saw her aunt’s vague hostility to her grandfather where it was
carefully shawled under her function as hostess. The aunt would mount the
stairs to see that all had been made neat in the rooms above, the visit
an ostentation, reserved until the guests were at hand.
A negro girl, Prudie, cooked the meals, passing quickly from the cooking
range to the tables, to the pantry. Her face shaded from one brown to
another and the sweat ran in the neat wrinkles across her neck. She
seemed neither glad nor sorry the guests had come. Miss Doe would give
her pans of flour, sugar, or meal, or cuts of ham, all from the locked
storeroom. “Be sure to take out a plenty,” she would say at the door,
the keys in her fingers. When the uncle and the grandfather were away for
a meal those left at home were served in the breakfast-room behind the
dining-room, and Prudie instead of Lucas carried in the food. One day
soon after the visit began Miss Doe sent the children to carry a message
to a cabin back in the farm. Theodosia knew the way, for she had been for
a walk in that direction with her uncle. There were clouds in the sky
threatening a shower, and the aunt told the little girls to take the old
cotton umbrella from the back porch.
They walked across the pasture and climbed over a gate into a cornfield,
and it was pleasant to walk under the umbrella, treading on the shadow
that moved with them down the field. The path was well beaten, for Prudie
lived in the cabin with her mother, Aunt Deesie, and with Uncle Red. The
cabin stood in a cove under some trees, a place where two hills began.
Aunt Deesie was washing clothes in the yard, and all the lines were
filled with white things hung to dry. A great kettle of boiling clothes
steamed over a wood fire on the ground. The air about was pleasantly
cool from the wooded hills behind the house, and a pleasant odor of lye
soap spread about when the boiling kettle was dipped of its garments.
Aunt Deesie was tall and strong, and she moved slowly among the tubs and
kettles, keeping an even gait. On a quilt safely removed from the fire a
small baby lay asleep, and two other small children ran about the yard
or clung to Aunt Deesie’s skirt when Theodosia gave her message. These
were Prudie’s children.
“Yes’m,” Aunt Deesie said. “Tell your Aunt Doe she didn’t send me down
no blues. To clear the white clo’s. Tell your Aunt Doe all the blues is
gone, the bluen.”
Theodosia stood about in the cool of Aunt Deesie’s yard, fascinated by
the work that went forward and by the sweet smell of the lye, by the
smell of Aunt Deesie’s warm body leaning over the tubs. The baby waked
and squirmed on the quilt, working its arms and legs about, and Aunt
Deesie stopped her washing to pin a fresh rag about its hips, trying to
hide what she did because the rag was old and without a hem. Theodosia
saw her slip the soiled rag under the wash-bench and she was fascinated
by her shame. The baby was dark brown, a boy child, and the two that ran
about under Aunt Deesie’s feet were girls, their heads a tight nap of
thin wool. Aunt Deesie would push them gently aside and move from tub to
tub, her voice gentle as she worked.
“Why don’t you-all chil’n talk to the white gals. White gals come to see
you-all.”
The little negroes would stare with strange dark faces, their mouths
going up and down as they chewed at their fingers. Theodosia would watch
every move they made, curious, following them, or she would go back to
the quilt to watch the baby. She would watch their small dresses, their
brown legs, their moving gestures, and she would ask them questions to
pretend to an interest in their replies, but her pleasure was in her own
sense of superiority and loathing, in a delicate nausea experienced when
she knelt near the baby’s quilt.
“Katie, why don’t you pick up the baby’s gum rattler offen the ground
and give it to him into his hand,” Aunt Deesie said. “Pick up the baby’s
rattler, Katie.”
The child gave the rattle to the baby, and in the act Theodosia knew a
sweet loathing of the small dark infant and knew that she herself could
not be brought to touch it or to touch Katie. She knew the half-pleasant
disgust felt for the young of another kind, a remote species. Their acts
sent little stabs of joy over her, sickly stabs of pleasant contempt and
pride.
* * * * *
The week at the farm was always full of enhanced being. She would see
her grandfather under the wooden pillars of the portico and see him in
his joyous encounters with his old friend. Away from home he flowered
into some newer intensity, and his rusty clothes were elegant against the
rough running landscape. The office of host became Tom Singleton well,
and Anthony as guest responded. Doe Singleton’s hostility to her brother
did not penetrate his joy or reduce it or shape it in any part. She
scarcely existed for it at all, for she seemed unrelated to everything
present. The dinner waited until she came, Lucas going and coming,
bringing something more, seeming to spread the time of preparation about
until she appeared. When she arrived she came hurrying through the door
and sat at the head of the board. She seemed to be sitting too far from
the table and neglecting her own ease. She handled the cups without
routine or precision, but she poured each cup herself and gave it to
Lucas, who conveyed it to its place. She would ask Anthony how many
spoons of sugar he took, seeming to forget each time that the amount had
been established.
“You’re welcome to all the sugar you want. Pass Mr. Anthony the sugar
bowl,” she would say to Lucas. “And get Mr. Tom the sharp knife. That’s
not the right knife. They say sugar is bad. For grown people, it’s said.”
She would not let her hostility extend to any controversy over the food.
Sitting after the serving was done, she seemed unrelated to her knife and
fork, to her cup, even when her hand lifted it to her mouth to drink.
“When I go next time I think I’ll take nothing along but Blix and Tim and
Roscoe,” Tom Singleton said. “I never cared for a big set-to of dogs when
I hunt. Give me three or four good dogs. What’s the use?”
“Blix is the smartest dog in the whole lot,” Anthony said. “That dog Blix
has got first-rate brains inside his skull. One time....”
“Brains! He’s the stupidest one in the whole pack, the way I look at
it,” Miss Doe said. “Blix hasn’t got one grain of sense. Since he was a
pup he’s been the stupidest one in that litter.”
“We’ll go down after dinner and look over the yearlen mules,” Tom
Singleton said. “I just want to hear what you’ll say about my yearlens.”
He was glad in his guest, unaffectedly gracious, the sweetness of his
smile giving a flavor to every word he spoke. He was childishly nervous
in his care of each hospitality. “As pretty a bunch of mules as ever was.
But I just want your opinion. You’re a prime judge of stock, that I well
know.”
Like his friend, Anthony, he seemed unaware of Miss Doe’s denials. Their
entire unconsciousness of this led Theodosia to distrust her own sense of
the house, the furniture, the shading trees in the garden as seen from
the windows of the dining-room. Lucas walked slowly about the table, his
passing timed to some unreality that colored her whole vision. Her joy
in being there spread widely about her and suffused her knowledge of
her aunt’s way until she was scarcely sure that she was there at all,
scarcely sure that Annie was real or that her grandfather was of the
same flesh she had always known him to be. She could touch Annie but was
she the same, she questioned, that she had touched before and was she
herself present? Her joy in the farm and her pain in her aunt could not
interfuse. The talk, as something extra and beyond her reach, flowed
about the dogs, the coming elections, or it would drift away to market
prices or to books they had read, to the gossip of the town.
“Downing, he’s the best man. I aim to vote for the best man this time,”
Tom Singleton said.
Lucas walked evenly about with a dish of some scalloped food, passing
it from place to place. Miss Doe spoke then, acquiescing; Downing was,
she said, a good man, a good clever man. The county could see what he
had in him when he was magistrate. The trees outside moved lightly in
the air, green moving against blue in a motion which flowed continually,
never returning, some unfamiliar tree which settled a new rhythm into
Theodosia’s mind, and a passion to know all of this strange thing exalted
her being as she glanced again toward the window where the boughs stood
across a meadow and a field and passed thus to the blue of the horizon.
“And Bond in his way is all right,” Anthony said. “For the place he’s
expected to fill. And Johns is a right clever man now. Honest, he is, and
fair-spoken.”
“I never yet saw any good in old Johns,” Miss Doe said, “and Bond, he’s
not one whit better. If that’s what you call honest! I know a tale would
make his honesty blush, and you know it too, Anthony Bell.”
It seemed to Theodosia then that the air would split asunder with a great
crash, the flaw centering in her aunt’s hands and extending two ways
across the solid of the room. She glanced at her uncle in distress and
apprehension. His smile then was open and tender, and he reached across
and touched her hand with his palm while he finished saying something to
her grandfather, and then he said:
“What does Ladybug want? I know what’ll be good for her. Doe, le’s pour
some more cream in her milk, outen the cream pitcher. Take this glass
around to Miss Doe, Lucas. She needs it to grow on. Growen like a weed
now, Ladybug is. What does Little Lady want on her plate? Doe, Little
Lady’s got not one thing on her plate.”
* * * * *
The memories of his college sat lightly upon his mind, guests indulgently
entertained when they were given any recognition. He had never overtaken
the attitude of learning. Anthony would bring some book to the portico
and read aloud, or he would say, “Do you remember Thomas, old Thomas?” A
professor in some college he would mean. “English letters.... He loved it
too well to teach it well....” The aunt would sit with her hands folded
in her lap, a smile that scarcely belonged to her lips hovering over the
bent hands while the man’s voice intoned the sumptuous lines. She had
heard him read all this before, but she lent herself gracefully to the
act, and Tom Singleton lowered his head, remembering, or he would glance
up at Anthony’s face when some new guest arrived and was joyously greeted
and housed for the time in elegant chambers. The reading:
Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Anthony Bell’s hair was thinly grizzled. His hands were familiar upon the
book, his voice well-used to the words of the poets. Vertical lines lay
parallel across his cheeks. His mouth was thin-lipped and shut down at
the corners with drooping plumes, feathered lines that frayed out upon
the skin.
Tramping the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Theodosia thought sometimes, when he read aloud, seeing his moving mouth
running perpetually along the channels of song, that he must know some
eternals, some truths, some ways unknown to her, and she would yearn with
an inner sob of longing that he might impart this thing to her, whatever
it might be. It was known to his body rather, to his delicate hands bent
lovingly at the edges of a book, his sitting posture, his mouth that
rolled out the elegant words and was unafraid of any word or saying. She
would sit quietly among these, her elders, trying to understand, gaining
a rich exaltation where the words revealed their splendor even if they
withheld their thought. She was eleven years old.
These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds
Whom he gluts on groans and blood....
When the old man spoke suddenly after a period of quiet a tiny spray of
spittle would sometimes fly from his ill-balanced teeth. In rest his
thin-lipped mouth bent downward at the corners and imposed its angles
upon the lower cheeks. She did not know it then, but his mouth had been
closed by sorrow. “By God, Shelley was no jackass,” he said, snapping
shut the book.
Annie had brought the paper dolls to the doorsill, hinting for play.
Theodosia joined her there and began to stand the long, slim ladies
in rows against the house, half gravely, half in frolic, wavering
between Annie and the men, her grave way belonging to Annie. The hour
had been rich and dark with the voices from the poem. Now Annie’s soft
child-speech fell high and thin about the matters of the paper images of
women and girls, the chirping of some familiar bird.
“I wish you-all had brought the fiddle,” Tom said. “I’m just sick for
a little fiddle music myself. Tony, you got no call to come down here
without you bring along your music. Next time you come you got to play a
double quantity just because you forgot this time to fetch it along.”
“Too many people sit around and do nothing all day as ’tis,” Miss Doe
said.
“I recall how you used to play Heart Bowed Down and Lucy Lammermoor.
‘Farewell, farewell my own true love.’ I recall one night ...”
“It’s Theodosia plays the fiddle now,” Anthony said. “I give over now to
the young hoss. Plays, egad, yes she does. Takes right after it.”
Theodosia turned to the paper dolls with grave willingness and
preoccupation. Her blood flowed warmly because of the praise, spreading
over her like a soft mantle.
* * * * *
The girls went for a walk with their uncle one bright mid-morning, going
to a tobacco barn which stood down in a creek valley beyond two fields.
Of the dogs, Blix and Roscoe were allowed, and they ran smelling at the
path, quietly humble when they were called. The other dogs were locked
into the old apple house, the place where they were kept when they were
not wanted running about, where they were seasoned for the hunt.
Some abundance within herself would not let Theodosia acquiesce
completely to the hour, to any hour or to any experience, as being
sufficient. She kept on the way a pleasant sense of her grandfather
sitting reading under the pine before the house, knowing a curious joy in
his absence and enjoying the walk more intensely in that she enjoyed it
for him as well as for herself. The corn in the field was very high, near
its maturing. Tom Singleton wondered and delighted in the height of the
corn. His pride in the high corn seemed then to touch her vague distrust
of pride and delight, and she smiled with him happily, swinging his hand.
“Some of it fifteen feet high, Ladybug, if it’s one inch. Have to tear
the shock down to pluck it.”
A humming came from one end of the cornfield, audible as they passed, and
there myriads of bees were working over the corn tassels, taking the
pollen of the corn. A walnut tree glistened in the light. The edges of
the leaves made crystals on the green bank of the tree, sharp facets of
brightness on green leaves. Theodosia did not know the name of this hard,
brilliant tree, but she knew some response to the scintillating surfaces
and lined edges where the sun met the leaves.
“This-here, it’s a walnut tree. A fine old walnut,” he said. “And what’s
this, Ladybug?”
“That’s the queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief,” he said when she could
not reply. The name was itself a bright altar-cloth for some shrine in
a valley, and Theodosia grew in all ways to comprehend the beauty of
the weed, but insufficiency grew likewise, moving outward beyond every
comprehended meaning and pleasure.
Some buzzards were soaring over the stream, lying out on the air with
long wings, searching the water-holes for fowls that might come there to
drink. They seemed rather to rest on the air and to turn about for the
mere happiness of turning. Near the creek a pool of water, fed by some
spring, had been banked about with earth to make a pond, the place where
the mules drank when the creek was low and the water-holes foul. Four
light sorrel horses stood by the fence, one of them a large glossy mare
with a half-grown mule colt beside her, the colt sorrel and brilliant
like the mother. It seemed very foolish in its fright, edging close to
its mother’s side, afraid even of little Annie when she ran near to
gather the plush, aster-like flowers that grew near the creek.
In the field the laborers were bending over the tobacco plants, breaking
out the top of each and trimming away undesired growth. They lifted their
backs from the labor to watch the passing and to greet the owner of the
field. At the barn beyond the field Tom left the girls in the shade of
the doorway while he looked at the walls of the building, or he climbed
high into the upper structure, talking happily to himself as he mounted.
It was a good barn, he said. It would do. A little work on the roof and a
few nails to tighten the loose scantlings. Then they went back along the
tobacco field and passed the shy sorrel colt again.
“Oh, it’s a good morning,” he said. “I someways like a day just like
this, just enough heat so’s you know it’s summer. Cool breezes shiften in
and out of the thicket and a mockbird over towards the hill a-singen once
in a little while. A prime good day. I don’t know why it is but seems
like I always liked a hilltop. We’ll go up this-here fenceline and around
home by the orchard to see if the early harvests are all gone offen the
trees. That’s a summer apple fit for a queen to eat.”
They accepted his joy in them as their due and saw it blend with his joy
in the morning. It had been but a little while since Annie had thought
that if she darkened her eyes with her hand the sun went out and all the
earth was in darkness. Suddenly a redbird made a solitary peal of song,
a rich modulation from the three high whistled notes to the low throaty
altos of the decline where the singing darkened to meet the brush and
undergrowth of the thicket. The song set the hilltop clear in a high
relief.
“I sometimes plow this-here, but mainly I leave it in pasture grass.”
Beyond the fence the earth rolled gently up to a summit that held a few
scattered trees, an oak and two or three thorns. “And on the top, right
there on the summit, is where I expect to be buried, right there. Off to
the left of the oak but on the summit like. From that-there spot you can
see—it’s curious now—you can see the whole farm, every last field. You
can look down on the house and the barns and right down this-here valley
to the creek. It’s curious. There’s where I expect to be buried some day.
I always like family buryen-grounds. I expect to lay down my bones right
there on this hilltop.”
The hill-crest rolled in a fair curve against the sky between the limits
of the trees, but it slipped beyond the trees again and sank away into
the curving field, and Theodosia felt a quick pleasure in it as the place
where he would be buried, and felt it as the summit of the farm that
looked down upon all the fields and the meanderings of the creek and
the life of the barns, on the singing mockingbird and the goodness of
the day. Her eagerness ran forward and longed to have him buried there,
anticipated his entombment on the brow of the hill he had chosen, so that
she could scarcely wait for the consummation of his wish. She looked
at him happily and smiled, and he took her hand in some unconscious
delight, and thus they walked up the fence path.
* * * * *
Theodosia would watch the long brown hand with its yellow shadowed nails
when Lucas passed a plate of some food at her side. While she helped
herself to a serving her eyes would cling to the hand where it folded at
the edge of the plate, the thumb near the food, and she would remember
the baby on the quilt in Aunt Deesie’s yard. An exquisite disgust of the
hand would make the food taste doubly sweet in her mouth when the hand
was withdrawn.
“Well, Ladybug,” Tom Singleton said when they had passed to the portico,
“what’s the best thing in the world?”
She had never thought before that one thing might be the best, superior
to all other things, but when her uncle placed the question at once it
became clear that among all the betters there must be one supreme best.
She was bewildered in her pursuit of some reply, wanting to find the true
answer, and she stared at the ground or at the wooden pillar, penetrating
the query with the whole of her strength. Her uncle had turned to some
other matter, he was talking with Anthony now—the foot-and-mouth disease,
Henry Watterson, the tobacco pool in the dark district, Mnemosyne, the
secret of the mind, the price of sugar mules, and back to the pool
again. The vine that spread over the brick walls of the house made a
great plane of flowing green that turned with the turning wall and lapped
over the south front and reached to the north gable. It had come from
somewhere far away; her attention did not cling to the place as Anthony
repeated it with wonder. The main stem of the vine grew on the south side
of the house under the window of the room where the aunt and uncle lived,
the room across the hall from the parlor, but the longest reach of it,
at the farthest end of the west wall, was a hundred feet or more from
the root. It was as if it were a great tree, flattened and attenuated to
a vine and bent about a house, and her grandfather and uncle were two
children in their simple delight in the great growth. Doe had brought it
from some place far away a long while ago. From Virginia. She had come
back from a visit there and had brought the vine wrapped in a bit of
earth, delicately rooted in soil. She was proud now of the vine and of
herself as its author.
“See, Tony,” she said. “See.”
They walked about the house to the north wall and traced the creeper to
its last and most remote tendril high at the eaves above the north attic
window, calling, “See here!”
“See, Tony,” she said. “A hundred feet and over since it touched ground.”
They seemed sweetly childish in their pleasure in the vine and Theodosia
looked at them with wonder and detachment. The best thing in the world
teased her for a reply. She saw that her aunt had cared for the vine and
had become actual and present in her pride of it. She had brought it
from a long distance and had cared for it along the way in the train,
giving it water. It had come from the wall of some relative in Virginia.
She turned to Mnemosyne, for the beautiful word came again and again
to her ear once her grandfather had named it. He had told her of it
before, Memory, the mother of all, the seed of the mind. It was a curious
question, the query her uncle had made, as simple as breath; she thought
that all the people in the world must know the answer or must be in
pursuit of the answer to a question of such importance—the best thing in
the world. She wondered if Mnemosyne might not be the answer, the best,
and her mind swam dizzily in a sense of vaguely remembered beautiful
words, their ideas ill-shaped, words remembered more for their beauty
of tone than for their thought—asphodel, Mytilene. But there were other
beautiful things, other best things. They eluded her, unnamed, receding
down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions
when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to
be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing
in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was
never enough.
They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling
on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined,
immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great
reach from the soil of the ground. In the moment all the people present
became actors in a pageant and all the words they said seemed deeply
significant as if they were proclaiming themselves now in their real and
permanent, unillusory aspect, in their true cause and relation. Annie lay
in the doorway with a picture book. Anthony Bell was talking, his hand
upraised. Lucas came from the kitchen garden with a respectful message,
affected embarrassment, his head bowed, the proper approach. Their voices
stood with length and breadth, sharply edged.
* * * * *
Every day or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might
go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield
was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie
ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that
burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls
stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom
Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy
of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets.
Near the end of the week Miss Doe went away in the buggy early in the
afternoon and Tom and Anthony played checkers under the pine tree. The
dogs walked about sleepily in the bright air, which was of the radiance
of early autumn, or they slept in the shaded doorway of the barn. The day
moved slowly and her stay at the farm seemed to Theodosia to be bent or
deflected from its purposes. Little Annie wanted to play with the dolls,
but Theodosia grew weary of them. The kitchen was closed; there was no
drama being done there; no one was feeding the stock at the barns or
fastening the dogs into the apple house. She wandered back to the pine
tree where the game of checkers went happily along, but it could not
entertain her. She whispered to Annie as they went behind the house in
their search for something to do.
“We’ll go to see Aunt Deesie.”
They took the cotton umbrella from the back porch although there were no
clouds. The memory of the first visit should tinge this adventure. They
crossed the pasture in the brilliant sun and entered the cornfield, but
when they were scarcely started along the path by the corn Annie said
that she was thirsty and that she must have a drink, and she cried. She
could not go farther without a drink, she said. Theodosia urged her on
and promised a drink at Aunt Deesie’s cabin. When they left the cornfield
and came near the cove a strange aspect of the place accosted them, for
it was closed and still. All the tubs were neatly piled beside the door,
their bottoms turned up, and the clotheslines were gone. They shouted
from the small gate but the house was empty. Aunt Deesie and the children
were gone. The place was frightful crouched under its loneliness.
Annie cried again and said that she was thirsty and Theodosia went into
the wooded hill behind the cabin to try to find the spring, but she did
not look for a path and her search led them far up the hillside but gave
them nothing. It was cool under the trees and Annie forgot her need for
the water. Presently they saw two small animals, and Annie ran after
them, calling them her little cats. The small beasts ran close to the
ground and kept together. They were strange creatures and they made
the wooded hill seem strange to Theodosia, as if she had never seen it
before. Annie herself seemed strange, having forgotten her thirst now in
an ecstasy of pleasure over the little animals, which she tried to catch
with her hands.
“They’re little doggies,” she said. “They’re my little cats.”
Theodosia tried to catch them too, and she closed her hands upon them
once, but they were elusive and quick although they seemed unable to run
very fast. They ran along, tumbling at each other, keeping together.
Theodosia knelt quickly and spread her skirt before them, but they turned
aside and ran away. Then suddenly they went into a hollow stump through a
little hole at the side, and Theodosia poked the umbrella into the hole
and Annie called, “Come out, little doggies,” but a cat-like hiss came
from the stump and when Theodosia jerked the umbrella away a quick paw
shot out and a snarl followed. The girls ran away from the stump, afraid
of it, and presently they went back toward the cornfield. The sun was low
now and they hurried across the pasture. They had not asked leave to go.
At the end of the pasture where the fodder stalks were scattered near the
feeding ricks two of the dogs came toward them, Blix and Lady, and in an
instant Theodosia knew that they were not coming for play. Blix and Lady
and Roscoe were coming fast upon them, full speed now, rushing down the
littered pasture, their eyes set and their jaws opened, their backs a
straight line. Theodosia screamed and caught Annie’s hand as she ran, and
the dogs were upon them, five beasts now. She dropped the umbrella and
turned screaming toward the barn, dragging Annie, and Uncle Red came from
the cattle shed and shouted something. The dogs stopped at the umbrella
and set upon it with their teeth and tore it to pieces at once, but the
delay gave Theodosia time to come near the barn before they set upon her
again. All the dogs were out now, a dozen or more, some of them worrying
the torn pieces of the umbrella and some in a pack around the girls.
Uncle Red beat them away with a rail and carried Annie to the house, for
she was weak with terror.
“Um—m! Skunk!” he said. “That-there skunk. Has you-all youngones been
handlen a skunk or a polecat maybe?”
Theodosia remembered the terror and fury in the eyes of the dogs and all
through the evening she sat quietly with a book she tried to read. Annie
cried out in her sleep many times during the night. The next day the dogs
were locked in the apple house, but Annie would not go beyond the doorway
unless she held her grandfather’s hand. Soon afterward the week came to
an end and the visit was over.
* * * * *
The ladies of the town played a game with cards, a simple game that did
not prevent conversation. On the day of the card party there was a faint
flutter in the town, the ladies riding by in phaëtons and traps, wearing
their best. If Charlotte Bell entertained the group she would, at some
time during the party, sit at the piano with Theodosia standing near, and
they would play some simple part of an overture or a popular air. The
Bell house was a white frame structure to which several additions had
been built, a long portico or gallery running almost the entire length
of the front giving a pleasant open space above stairs as well as below
where one might take the air. On summer evenings Charlotte would sit for
a while on the upper gallery with the two girls and sing, sitting apart
from the house where Horace Bell came and went lightly, never troubling
to hide his destination whether it was a gambling party with men or an
evening with some woman. Seen once at dusk as she sat on the upper
gallery, her head against the bank of vines, her two little girls grouped
close about her to sing, she had looked like the pitying madonna diverted
by hate. She had wanted a rightly-placed hearth. Now she played much
with Theodosia, their simple airs arising above the quiet of the street.
Horace, departing, would wave them a gay farewell, a greeting that was
all of himself, lightly given, or once in a while he would stop briefly
beside the piano and join his great voice to the song, booming the words
across the fiddle notes, taking a pride and a delight in his great
running voice that emasculated the piano. When he had made his point he
would leave in a thunder of laughter, waving a hasty good-bye.
When Annie was seven years old she sickened of a fatal child malady and
died. The funeral was held in the church, and Luce wept when she saw the
Bells weeping as they sat near together at the front of the church in the
space respectfully left for the mourners, seeing them huddled together
and set apart by death. The minister preached of the kingdom of heaven,
the world to come, and of becoming as a little child. A lady, Mrs. Bent,
sang a song while the organ hummed softly. She was full-breasted and
maternal, and as she sang she looked as if she only a moment before had
held a child in her arms, and the words of the song seemed truer as she
sang them, truer than the sayings of the minister to which they lent
truth. Her own children sat with their father in a pew at the side, and
the words of the song came very gently across the church as she looked as
if some child might easily creep into her arms.
I think when I read that sweet story of old,
Of Jesus while here among men,
How He took little children as lambs to His fold....
The words were of her own, coming from her soft bosom and her strong
round arms. The Bells, Anthony, Charlotte, Horace, and Theodosia, sat
huddled together to weep, remote from the others of the church, sitting
forward. They could not hear the words of the song as Miss May Bent sang
it, as she sent it from her warm, kind body, they being too near to the
whole of the event. In Charlotte Bell was the song itself, waiting. She
could not hear the singing. Theodosia heard it as a bright myth having
some celestial, candle-lit meaning she could not understand.
* * * * *
Theodosia was delicately modeled with strong slender limbs, swift in a
game, quick-witted at play. Her red-brown hair hung in a long braid or
was twined braided about her head. Her fingers were small and thin, bent
strangely about a fiddle, were quick among the fiddle strings, weighted
with music. Little Annie’s grave was marked now by a small white stone in
the graveyard, a stone which read only the name, ANNIE, in hard letters
set deeply into the marble. To see Theodosia was to think of the child
and to wonder if she had forgotten. As she ran down the ball field where
the boys and girls played together, as swift as the best of the girls,
the act would question if she had forgotten. As she bent her fingers over
the fiddle strings and pressed them down in cunning ways, her knowing
fingers keen with music, the act again would test her memory of the small
girl.
The people of the town were assembled at the chapel hall of the Seminary
to hear the school choruses and solo pieces, the last day of the term.
The piano had been tuned and its dark squat legs had been polished, an
effort made to remove all blemishes and all dust. There were pieces
recited and some bits of dialogue given. When Theodosia had finished
playing, Anthony Bell went forward and lifted her down from the platform
and kissed her, proud of her applause. “Her playen, it’s not so much,”
voices in the throng said. “I’ve heard better fiddle-playen.” Hostile
voices, and then another, “But fine for a child only fourteen, right good
for a child now.” “Right good for anybody, I’d say. I only wish I could
do half as well.” “But it sounds like exercises.” “It’s classical music.
It all sounds like that, classical music does.” “Classical music all
sounds alike.” “Give her another encore. It pleases old Mr. Bell.” “It
pleases him too much. He’s a vain old man.” “But do it no matter. It’s
right sweet the way he takes on over Dosia’s playen. He’s given her his
fiddle and they say it’s one of the finest in the whole state. It’s a
famous fiddle, they say. Give another encore.” “He says he aims to send
her off to learn from a high teacher, away off somewheres, and he may do
it.” “It would take a sight of money to do that.” “They may manage it
somehow. Give another encore.” “She’s a-goen to play again. He may manage
it.” “I for one hope so.” “She’s right sweet with her fiddle up to her
chin like that.” “She’s as sweet as a picture. I just love to sit here
and watch her.”
* * * * *
Charlotte Bell died one cold season when the town was numb and bewildered
with the unaccustomed freezing. Few could realize her loss. When the mild
days reappeared she was somehow gone from the gallery.
Old Anthony Bell walked the garden path in the early morning in a soiled
smoking-jacket, stiff-legged, his eyes dim. Theodosia went to school at
the Seminary, or she practised at the fiddle half the day, exploring
music without guidance. She studied harmony at the school and assembled a
small group there to play quartets, her quick skill dominating. She grew
tall in a year. Her rounded breasts were up-tilted—two small graceful
cups—as if they would offer drink to some spirit of the air. She ran
swiftly from one thing to the next, the books in her grandfather’s cases,
the fiddle, the games with the other girls. “This,” her grandfather said
to her, “is the family tree of the Montfords and the Trotters. There’s a
collection of family traditions written into the blank book on the second
shelf. My mother was a Montford, and don’t you forget that, Miss.”
She read the notes in the book of records swiftly one hour while she
waited for a dance at the tobacco warehouse. She had learned to kiss with
her first lover, but she had learned to kiss more deeply with her second,
one of the boys at the Seminary, Charles Montgomery. In the kitchen at
the back of the house she would bake a cake or make a pudding to augment
Aunt Bet’s plain dinner, the cook book propped up on the music rack she
had set in the middle of the floor. Her slender legs leaped quickly from
the pantry to the table, and she made emphases unconsciously with fiddle
gestures, a long wooden spoon in her right hand. “The whites of five
eggs, it says. Have we got five, Aunt Bet? Here’s one says four whole
eggs. All right, Aunt Bet. You fire up. Gentle at first, then big later
on. Here we go.”
The movements in the streets and along the roads were becoming more
swift, and there were fewer horses in the pastures. “The horse business,
it’s ruined, plumb ruined, or soon will be,” Anthony Bell said. Theodosia
quarreled with Charles after slapping his face one night in early spring.
“You don’t know what you want,” he said.
“Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading
within, a subtle fuel in her body mounting to a swift burning in her
face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”
Charles went away from the town at some time after that and did not
return. Anthony was palsied in his hands, but he would stop in his stroll
along the path and beat the ground sharply with his cane, tapping on
the bricks or on the boards under his feet. “Oh, tut!” he would say.
Sometimes Theodosia would see him in his mantle of old age as he stepped
uncertainly along, and a pang of pity, self-pity, fear, and apprehension
would assail her. Or, seeing his shrunken form, his feet questioning the
path for a place, she herself would walk there and she would see through
her present self as through a swift glass, quickly adjusted for vision,
as would say, “See, bent spine, eyes fixed, gestures squared at their
turnings, the up-and-down jog of age.” But her life ran upon itself
eagerly and there were other things to see.
He would begin to sing as formerly, letting his voice fall away to a
whisper when it failed in its tone. “Oh, tut!” he would say, returning to
mumble his old knowledge, reiterating himself endlessly. “Yet hath the
shepherd boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling
than rural, more rumbling than rural.” Theodosia had won a diploma at the
Seminary. She was a tall girl now, fragile but quick, swift at the girls’
sports. “She must study to play the fiddle. She’s a master fiddler,” the
old man said, stepping more briskly over the boards. “With rhymes more
rumbling than rural.... She must. She gets her music two ways, Charlotte
and the Trotters. Old Matthew Trotter was a master musicianer in his day,
and had red hair.... Yet hath the shepherd boy.... I’ll see to the matter
myself.... A small matter, a few paltry dollars to buy instruction for a
girl of talent.... Oh, tut! What became of the farmland, sixteen hundred
broad acres, I had? Well, I’ll say, ask her aunt Doe for the small sum.
A rich farm, she’s got, and not a chick or a child to spend on. ‘Madam,
your one namesake, your only godchild, has a rare musical gift. Madam,
are you aware that your namesake has a bit of a musical talent? Has it
ever occurred to you to give the child a gift, a year in the metropolis
maybe? Madam! Your humble servant. Yours very truly, Anthony Bell. Give
the child a big red apple. A peach plucked from the peach orchard. Send
the child the first peach of the season. Namesake! For God’s sake! Has it
ever occurred to you, Madam, to do something you might call substantial
for the baby, your namesake? If your husband, Tom Singleton, had lived it
would occur to him. To reward his wife’s namesake. God knows it would!’
... Oh tut!... What became of the farmland, my patrimony? ‘Young Man,
your only daughter.’ ... God’s sake!... As well talk to a jacksnipe.
‘Horace, your daughter approaches her maturity lacken a few miserable
pennies to buy her a bit of a finish in music.’ I’ll see to the matter
myself.”