FIVE

Doe Singleton said that she might choose any room above-stairs that

pleased her, and she chose the one in which she and Annie had stayed, the

west room. The high bed leaped at her unpleasantly and receded suddenly

into diminished perceptions as she spread the sheets and quilts over it

to prepare it for occupation. It funneled down suddenly into a very small

object, a familiar pattern, a bed, when she focused her attention upon

it, but left uncentered it bulged suddenly to unapprehended proportions,

divided, proportion at war with proportion and quality. She opened the

windows to the south sun and lay in the bed.

There was no one in the house but the aunt, whose muffled, uncertain

noises fell after undetermined intervals, and herself, who, lying in the

bed, was subtracted from the content of the walls, length, breadth, and

thickness therein contained, and extended as continuing in a running

movement through history, past and future. The second day she noticed the

leaves of the linden tree and how each one carried two small buds or pods

held to the leaf by a slender green wire. At regular intervals the voice

of her aunt called from below.

“It’s ready now. You can come.”

Below-stairs there would be food on a small table in a back room, her

aunt’s bedroom. The bed stood pompously against the wall opposite the

great fireplace, and the dogs came and went or rested before the open

fire, lying down stiffly or arising. There was no servant and the

dining-room across the hall was mouldy and dark. The food was always on

the table when she came down the stairs, bread and meat and milk. There

was coffee in a silver coffeepot.

“I don’t myself keep any cows now,” Miss Doe said. “I got the milk for

you from the tenant man on the place.”

“Don’t you keep any cows any more?”

“No use, just for me, me not very partial to milk in my diet. I eat

mostly the same all the time, but you say the doctor said milk for you

and I got Bland to fetch up some.”

“That was very kind of you, Aunt Doe.”

As she lay again in the bed the avenue ran down to the stone wall and

turned sweetly to the gate, which was perpetually white. Slowly in mind

she walked down the avenue, step by step, stopping to look at each

minute occurrence, as the wild fern by the side of the drive, the small

gray imagined birds that flocked over the stems of the low pasture

weeds and took imagined flight at her step. Her foot twitched lightly

under the quilts. When the birds had flown she passed on, going slowly,

undetermined whether the way should slope downward or extend outward,

shaping it to her will. She would step slowly to make the walk last the

longer. The clover at the side of the path was white and rank, and the

grass and weeds of the pasture ready for cutting. The path she went ran

along the side of the drive although from the window she could see that

there was no path there now, for none ever walked that way. There were

wagon prints on the drive, however, marks of tires, and she shuffled her

toe in the faintly marked rut and wondered what habitual coming had made

it. Each day she prepared the walk, clinging to it with fervor, returning

to it as to a consolation. After five days no wheels had sounded on the

stone and gravel of the way.

The great hounds would come to her room each day, now one and again

another, and they would sniff at the bed or turn about lazily on the

carpet. She would call the names until some flicker of recognition would

denote that the beast had been rightly called—Roscoe, Nomie, Tim, Speed,

Old Mam, Tilly, True. There were some younger dogs, unnamed and unbroken,

but these came little to the house. She would hear them running on the

hills and hunting their prey. She clung to the daily walk to the gate and

back and built the path minutely for comfort, gathering herself out of

a running slant of historic actuality to the more comforting actuality

of the path beside the drive where the ruts of some never-heard wagon

wheels threaded constantly down to the highway. One day it was the shade

of the elms that was intensely realized, or another the sounds of the

beetles and crickets, until, being minutely sensed, the path brought her

to the white flowers, queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief, clustered in tall

masses before the stone wall. The old dogs walked up and down the stairs,

sniffing at her bed. True brought her stiff old limbs laboriously up the

hall and turned about on the carpet to lie down at the foot of her bed.

Below on the hearth in Doe Singleton’s room some great pones of cornbread

were perpetually cooking on rough old iron pans, bread for the old dogs.

* * * * *

One morning after the journey below had been accomplished, while she lay

resting from the difficult ascent of the stairs, a low purr of muffled

noises flowed through the hallways, and the front door was opened and

closed. Then a white cloth was hung on the vine by the door and the

steps receded and became the uncertain tread of her aunt on the pavement

beside the house wall. The hour was long and sunny, undefined, mingled

now with some anticipated event which pointed to the white cloth that

hung by the pillar. Later a yellow truck came up under the elms, fitting

its wheels to the ruts, and the words, PERKINS’ LINIMENTS, grew, boldly

defined, on the yellow sides of the car which backed about at the door.

Leaning on her elbow she took a gayety from the yellow of the wagon and

the bold design of the printed words and from the brisk man who sold

packages to her aunt with a clatter of good-will and gossip. Tea in

packages, coffee, sugar—the best cane—and did she need any spices this

trip? Liniment, salve, mange cure, soap, oil, baking powders, ointment,

camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator—for hens,

cures mites, chiggers. Any extracts? flavors? perfumery? cake color?

ice-cream powders? sage?

“The coffee and sugar is all.”

“A sight of rain over in the creek country. Water outen bounds.”

“Anybody drowned?”

“Nobody drowned, but a heap of swollen branches and some stock washed

off. Old Man Tumey’s chickens, and Lige Smith lost a calf. They say

prices are a-goen high this time, money for everybody. Corn sold this

week for around two dollars. Old Miss Bee Beach is right sick, they say.

Bound to die, I reckon.”

He shouted his words before the house and his rough voice struck the

corners of the room above and quickened life where it had declined in her

breast. His steps were rough and strong on the gravel of the roadway.

When the purchase had been made he ran quickly through his list again

and closed the rear door of the truck with a crash. Then he swept off

his hat to mop his head with a dim handkerchief of some yellowed silk,

sponging his face and neck. He plunged the handkerchief inside his

collar-band, and he stretched his legs and his back, a tall man with a

dark vigor about him. Theodosia leaned on her arm to watch him, amused

at the painted words on the car, the long rheumatic letters that spelled

the liniment to the afflicted of the county. His vigor reached her where

she lay crumpled under the bed clothing, and she had a quick vision of

herself, arisen, going about her ways of life. She watched every gesture

as he climbed into the car and set it in motion, she concentrated to his

burning darkness, her throat dilated in response to the unaccustomed

man’s voice. When he was gone she sank weakly back to the bed and

presently she made the minute journey to the roadside gate, step by step,

negotiating intricately with the roadside birds and grasses.

Some days later she heard the throb of another car on the driveway

and presently a voice spoke to Doe Singleton at the door, the voice

turning away, saying that it would come again. This would be Frank, she

reflected. Her aunt would not bring him to her room because she was in

bed and the aunt moved among a few old signs and tokens. None but the old

dogs ever walked on the stairway except when she herself replied to the

call from below, “Come on now, it’s ready.” Summer having advanced, the

night-noises made a great swinging water, a vast throbbing sea of sound

beating continually and arising in shrill waves, the crickets, the frogs,

the toads, the treetoads, the katydids. An old voice then, a joyous rise

and skurry of man’s speech, acutely remembered in all its inflections.

“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.

She would fasten her eyes upon the ship, a chromo picture framed in old

gilt, a dull brown mounting. A great still ship, caught on the upward

wash of a wave and tilted with the wind, frozen forever with one stayed

moment. Its great sail lay out on the current of the air and its round

keel swelled high out of the plume of water from which it had arisen and

on which it now hung. Frank was turned away from the door by the same

reiterated cheerfulness that responded to the food. “You better come

again when she’s up and down-stairs. Come again, young man.”

She wondered if she could still count ten rightly and she began to mark

the days on an old calendar. Insulated by pain, she would turn to the

driveway and walk minutely down imagined paths through the first light

snow. She brought wood from her aunt’s hearth and built fires on her own.

The required ten days fell in the end of November and she walked weakly

a little way under the trees among the fallen leaves. Later she brought

wood each day from the old wood-lot behind the garden, the journey to the

woodpile becoming her daily measure of exercise. An old pile of cut wood

was stored there under a small shed, a pile of which her aunt seemed to

have no knowledge. The wood the tenant man brought to her aunt’s room was

scarcely enough now for the one fire below-stairs. She had heard her aunt

give an order, had heard her complain to the tenant of the waste.

“No use to waste the wood so. Eight pieces a day is enough, now.” The

words had come above mingled with the tumbled wood as it fell, or mingled

again with the retreating steps of the man as they fell stiffly on the

pavement.

* * * * *

Doe Singleton sat all day reading her books. She would bring an armful

of novels from the front room, the room where she had lived with Tom

Singleton, and she would set herself upon them, one after the other. They

were books she had read in her youth and had reread many times since.

Theodosia would hear her come to the room below, a dull monotony of steps

and of books plucked about in the bookcases, and hear her return, the

door closed, the journeys irregularly placed as her demands required. In

the back room she would read all day, and, going down for food, Theodosia

would see her book where it had been laid aside and would mark her swift

progress through the pages. The food was kept in the storeroom behind

the chamber, and the old pageant of the aunt handing out the supplies

from this doorway, Prudie waiting with full hands, would arise. The

door was locked as in the former time, the key hidden away. Miss Doe

would bend over the fireplace in the chamber, cooking there. One day

Theodosia, leaving after a meal, went into the dining-room and thus to

the kitchen where Prudie had cooked. The range was gone from its place,

but she recognized a part of it in a mass of broken iron behind the door.

She stared at the stale cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in a dusty

fringe, and she sickened at the odors of mice, her mind contemptuous of

the sickness in her throat and her mouth. She looked again and again for

some token of Prudie and the ancient bustle and order of the house, her

eyes clinging to an old felt hat, some man’s headwear, thrown down in the

corner of the pantry and defiled by mice and mould.

At her aunt’s table she would talk of one thing and another, asking

questions of the past, of Aunt Deesie, of Prudie. Where had they gone?

Was her uncle’s grave marked by a stone? She would walk out there some

day when she had grown stronger.

“Which do you like best, Dickens or Scott or Cooper?” she asked.

“About the same, one as the other. A good love-story is what I like best.

Want more bread?”

There was bread and milk and a bit of meat sometimes. A pie baked before

the open fire or a bit of a pudding.

“When I’m better maybe you’ll have the kitchen fixed up and I’ll run it,

Aunt Doe. Or we could have somebody to cook. There’s a heap to do in a

farm kitchen, I know. I’ll take the bother of it any time you want....”

“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.

She would walk a little farther each day and sit to rest on the stile.

Beyond the fence the ricks for feeding cattle had once stood, and she

remembered the dogs on the day they had set upon her and little Annie,

and she wondered if the dogs that were now about the house were, any of

them, the same. An intense desire to have her former strength drove her

to walk her distances several times a day, but she often sank wearily to

the ground under some tree and lay there for an hour. As she lay thus on

the ground she knew that Walter walked through the farm, his rough shoes

brushing the low weeds, and that his brother Abe kept in the lower fields

near the tobacco barn. She would gaze up at the insecure sky where the

clouds turned on the horizon and watch the hazardous trees shake lightly

in the wind and lose now a leaf and now another, or in the later summer

two or three would fall. She knew that Walter knew that she lay to rest

there; sometimes she would see his sullen face set forward as he tramped

across the pasture rim.

At long intervals her aunt hung a signal on the pillar of the portico

and the liniment-man brought his truck to the door to sell her sugar,

coffee, and tea. These days were always Thursdays. Sometimes she would

walk to the truck and look in at the bottles and spice cans, all labeled

in yellow, all lettered with the name of the brand. He would chant his

tale again to try to tempt her buying. Spices, baking powders, ointments,

camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator, flavors,

perfumery, cake color, ice-cream powder, sage.

“Here’s something to take the eye of a young lady. Perfumery and face

powder. The best there is. Both in one box. Fifty cents to a dollar.”

“She’s not much hand to fix up,” Miss Doe said.

“Or ice-cream powders. Makes fine ice-cream. Freezes twice as fast too.”

“Does it take an ice-cream freezer,” Theodosia asked. “And some ice,

maybe? Or just the powder?”

“Of course it takes a freezer. Or say, here’s a little something for a

young lady that’s nice and particular.”

He would run through the list of his wares again and when the buying was

determined he would give some news of the farther valley. Caleb Burns had

lost a fine cow, and a fine cow on Burns’s place was a sure-enough fine

one. Registered Shorthorns. His dark vigor made a violence about him and

his tall strong legs beat on the gravel as he stepped quickly about. His

hands were strong on the door of the truck when he slammed it. His nails

were untended and he would pluck at his nose with his thumb, remembering

his handkerchief afterward. She would go back to the portico, delicately

amused, rejecting him pleased with the incident, and he would climb

into his vehicle and set it in motion, making a bow toward her in his

departure.

She wished for some other contact beside Frank, who came now every week

or two. She remembered too vividly his face, his gestures, his presence

after his departure. She was lying on the ground under the linden tree,

seeing the pods of the linden that hung under each leaf by a slender stem

of green. Walter and Abe would be cutting the tobacco in the lower field.

The wild horses ran roughly up and down their pasture, their hoof-heavy

tread thundering, the young stallion stopping to paw the grass until the

dust rose from beneath it. She could scarcely divide this year from last

year except by some memory of herself lying in the bed above the stairs,

counting days to achieve ten unfevered. Now she lay on the rough grass

and herbs under the linden tree not far from the pine, not far from the

portico. She remembered Frank from time to time, or he welled upward from

within her own being, his hands that seemed strong now as set beside no

other hands. She remembered his face, his gray eyes, his still brow, his

scrutinizing stare, a picture of his throat, his hand on his thigh.

“I must have some other people,” she said, stirring as she lay to

dispel the too-acute picture. “If I could walk to some other house. Go

anywhere....”

* * * * *

The cow at the tenant house was dry now and there was no milk. “Now let’s

see,” she thought, turning her mind again and again to the problem. Miss

Doe had grown weary. She leaned all day over the novels, her eyes in a

dim trance when she was called. There was milk on the neighboring farms,

Theodosia thought, but she had no money. “You’ve got as much to eat as

I’ve got,” Miss Doe said. “You’ve got as much milk and eggs as you see me

eat.”

She was in the back room at the hour of food, waiting. The pones for the

dogs baked on the hearth.

“Let me help, Aunt Doe,” she said. “Let me help you do something.”

“I’ll mind my own house. Just keep your seat whilst I manage my own.”

The great pones lay over hot coals to bake, the flying ashes dusting

over them. The books were piled on the deep window sill. The bed in the

back of the room was spread with a dark pieced quilt of some old design.

Dust had settled over the quilt and over the pillows that were laid in

funeral rigidity at the top of the bed. Walking near the bed to examine

the design of the quilt, Theodosia suspected that her aunt did not sleep

in the bed.

“Is this the sunshine-and-shade quilt?” she asked. “Did you piece it?

You bought it from an old woman. It’s pretty and faded now, the colors

blended. They’re pretty, faded together like that....”

The dust on the quilt and on the pillows made her know they were never

disturbed. The quilt was clean under the pillows and the bed was always

plumped carefully, the quilt on it in the same way. It was never used,

she surmised, and she wondered where her aunt lay to sleep. There was a

roll of old quilts thrown into the storeroom where the food was kept.

Miss Doe brought out a small leather cake of wheat bread she had cooked

by the fire and a bit of conserve that was old and dry. A few brown

crackers.

* * * * *

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.”

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.”

FIRST VOICE: A category too. He is.

THEODOSIA: Well, then, well? An occurrence—one happening....

She was dull to Frank, to any reminder of him. She stirred wearily in the

bed and drew her knees together, crossing her feet.

FIRST VOICE: The intense will to continue is centered in the

individual organism, and thus, or for this, the matter of

continuation is entrusted to the instance.

THIRD VOICE: Brain turned into a walnut and then got a worm in

it....

THEODOSIA: The genteel poor. I’ve always heard it said they

were the greatest sufferers on the earth.

FIRST VOICE: And suppose, as Science says, it’s unlikely that

there’s anything comparable to human life on any other planets.

Human life, then, lonely in the great space of the sky,

swinging around through space without greeting, without advice

or sympathy, afraid.

SECOND VOICE: Drunk to get more of itself!

THIRD VOICE: What if.... Suppose she got more. She. Theodosia.

SECOND VOICE: Love of God! What would it be?

THEODOSIA: Nothing comparable to life on any other.... Human

life, that is. It must look strange from the outside, this one,

when you see the whole lot come in a whirl around the sun.

Mercury first, then Venus, then the one with life on it. Maybe

it makes it look different. Pain, try-to-do, try-again. Stuff

that can look up and down on it, stuff that can say, “God, God!”

FIRST VOICE: And God took up a handful of dust from the ground

and mixed it with his own spittle and formed man. A God-handful

of dust and the spittle out of the mouth of God.

SECOND VOICE: In the beginning was the spittle of God, and the

spittle was with God. Must have a different smell, the one with

life on it. “Phew!” they’d say, “here comes that stinken one.”

THEODOSIA: I’ll begin back at the first. Take it all over

again. Run through the first scale lessons. Bow practice.

Where’s the book of duos? As soon as I’m strong enough, the

trills.

SECOND VOICE: As soon as you’re strong enough! Love of God!

How’ll you get strong on three bites of leather hoecake?

FIRST VOICE: And half the time she throws the queer stuff up.

A melody came beating lightly through the noise of her thought,

inconsequential, irresponsible to any remembered design of song, under

the melody a thud of irregular rhythms delaying it with intricate

patterns of silence. Her fingers twitched toward the shelf where the

fiddle lay, pointing without motion, drawn under the covering of the

bed, her hands folded into her armpits for warmth. The melody lived

as a fragile pattern creeping from key to key, spontaneously erecting

itself out of some inward repository of dancing, sinking and rising,

repeating itself in its own shadow when it fell away, becoming then the

still rhythmic nothing of anti-song. Returning afterward, it tapped even

more lightly with whisper music that broke upon a faint up-and-down,

a mountain ascending and descending, contrived and defeated in a slow

design, regular, living each moment and dying in succession, her own

breathing. Her breath pushing in and out upon the air, denting the air.

* * * * *

She was sitting in the parlor before the fire which burned the wood she

had carried stick by stick from the wood-lot. Dark had long since come.

The wind among the trees made a noise like the rush of water in a river,

and the night was very dark outside. Once she looked from the window,

leaning against the cold glass and bending her neck to see overhead. Back

at the fireside again, the whining of the wind in the chimney and the

crack of the dry burning logs was a clicking of summer insects shut into

winter, imprisoned in frost.

The old bitch, Old Mam, had littered in a bedroom at the end of the upper

hallway, three weak puppies in a writhing heap on a bed of rags. They

would die of the cold. It would be cold above-stairs, she reflected, her

fire untended, the sour odor of cold cleaving the air, rising from the

window ledges and gathering at last to the bed. It would be cold beyond

the walls of the house, beyond the reach of her fire; all night the air

would grow more and more dense with cold. The pond down by the creek

would be frozen, a thick sheet of ice to be broken in the morning by

some axe. To lie all night on the ground ten feet from the place where

she sat would be death to life, the end of all vigor. She would lie on

the frozen grass, willing, she predicted, and the wind would search out

her thin dress, her thin blood. Determination would hold her there. Pain

would wrap around her, fixed into her limbs and her body and her brain,

and finally she would become drowsed. All would recede, the all meaning

her memory of life. “Was it for this?” something would ask, saying, “You

were saved at birth by care, some care, and were taught, praised, kept—a

curious thing—for this.” A black irony. Drowsiness would settle nearer.

It was for this. Morning would come and she would lie still, frozen, ten

feet from the spot in which she now sat, her hands bent, her body stiff,

the waters of her flesh congealed, ice in her mouth.

She moved nearer to the fire with a sharp cry and held her hands to the

flame, leaning her body nearer. She looked at her hands as she rubbed

them well into the warmth of the fire’s radiance, her thin narrow hands

moving with life, blood in their channels, and she loved her hands.

Frank was coming in at the hallway, closing the front door, whistling. In

the next instant came a great clutter of leaping feet, confused thought,

cries, growls, oaths, blows. A rush of animal feet on the stairway and

more outcries. She went to the door of the parlor and opened it wide,

and Frank was there trying to defend himself from two dogs, another dog

coming down the stair. He was kicking at the beast that was at his feet,

but another was at his breast, leaping.

She drove the dog, Old Mam, from his breast, ordered her back with a

sharp command. There were four dogs now in the dim hallway, one coming

from the region beyond the stair.

“This house, it’s full of devils,” Frank cried out. He was drawing back

toward the door. “This whole damn place is a den of demons. For God’s

sake keep that dog off me!”

The dogs went away sullenly, Old Mam above to her whelps, Tilly to lie at

Miss Doe’s door until it opened for her tapping.

“This house, it’s full of devils.” He was coming striding across the

carpet toward the fire, indignation scarcely waning. He opened the door

to the dining-room and gazed into the blackness beyond, listening. “Ugh!

devils, demons, ghouls!” He slammed the door quickly. “You wouldn’t catch

me out there. I wouldn’t go out that door.... You couldn’t bribe me to

go.”

* * * * *

Five large pones of coarse bread, unsifted meal stirred with water and

set in skillets of hot grease to bake before the fire, this was the food

for the old dogs. Miss Doe mixed it with her hands or with a spoon that

was never cleaned. It baked on the hearth all morning, not far from the

place where Tilly and Old Mam lay. While it cooked Tilly would sometimes

sniff at each hot pone, impatient for the heat to do its work. The thick

vapors and gases from the dogs spread through the room, and Theodosia ate

her small leather wheat cake quickly and went back to her chamber to lie

weakly down. The voices began to ply, issuing and receding.

FIRST VOICE: The receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. Said

Anthony hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred and

released, and by these presents doth give, grant, bargain,

sell, transfer and release unto said Goodwin a certain tract of

land situated, lying and being in the county aforesaid on the

south side of Casey Run....

THEODOSIA: Situated, lying and being. Theodosia, born a Bell,

now situated, lying and being. Here. Herself.

FIRST VOICE: Could a woman butcher a hog?

SECOND VOICE: How many hogs has Frank butchered for you? Did

Frank ever offer you a hog?

THIRD VOICE: Come, let us butcher a hog together. The celestial

hog. A sea hog that swims in the river of forgetfulness. Easy

to know and lived in a lonely place.

SECOND VOICE: Took the trouble to look into the matter of the

old lady’s will. Peeped around and made old Daniels talk. How

about the Singleton farm, old lady Singleton, Miss Doe, they

call her? Does anybody know how old Miss Doe is a-leaven her

estate? Horace Bell and Theodosia are her natural heirs.... If

Theodosia is to get the farm.... Easy to do.

She settled her whole mind upon some event, long past, selected at random

from the nothingness of all forgotten events and brought forward to be

examined minutely. It was the meeting, some meeting, of the literary

society at the Seminary—quotations, addresses, papers, debates. She began

to recite carefully, dwelling on each phrase with humorous interest,

sucking from each its last degree of pleasure.

And, “Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able

By means of secret charms to draw

All creatures living beneath the sun,

That creep or swim or fly or run,

After me as you never saw!

And I chiefly use my charm

On creatures that do people harm,

The mole, the toad, the newt, the viper;

And people call me the Pied Piper.”

SECOND VOICE: The murderer. Murder in her hands. A snake in her

belly.

A FOURTH VOICE, _screaming_: She eats murder and snakes.

FIRST VOICE: Frank. She asked him for bread and he gave her a

snake.

SECOND VOICE: If you had a hog to kill for food, could you

butcher a hog? Would you?

THEODOSIA: I’d have no idea how to go about it.

SECOND VOICE: Knock it in the head with the axe. Then watch it

bleed. Stick its throat and catch the blood in a dish. Blood

is good to drink. Blood pudding. Cut it open along the bacon.

Cut out the melt first. Hog liver fried in fat is good. A

little onion. Pepper. Makes your mouth water.

THEODOSIA: But the hog is still alive. Where is the hog now?

FIRST VOICE: You asked him for bread and he gave you a serpent.

SECOND VOICE: What was she out to kill?

FOURTH VOICE: She helped Lethe kill Ross.

SECOND VOICE: She wanted to kill. Kill! kill! Why didn’t she

kill a hog?

THEODOSIA: Where was I? Oh, yes.

And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying

As if impatient to be playing

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled

Over his vesture so old-fangled.

THIRD VOICE: She wanted to kill. There was a night when she had

kill inside her. She helped Lethe do her work.

SECOND VOICE: Why isn’t she in prison then? Where’s Lethe?