From her window she could see that the houses in the hamlet were close
together, huddled about the blacksmith’s shop and the store. The noises
of the lane were near at hand, the voices intimate. She was in an upper
chamber in Bradley’s house to rest, for she had asked for two weeks’
time. She had been sick, she said, but she was now recovering. In two
weeks she would begin to teach the children. The doctor said finally:
“I expect your aunt, old Miss Doe, lives right close and stingy now.
She’s half starved you maybe.”
“I’ve been sick. But I’ll be well now,” she said.
She would board with the doctor’s family two weeks, resting. After that
time she would be given her board, week by week, among the patrons of
the school, as the custom was, for the pay was small. Her work at the
Seminary had given her the teacher’s credential. “I got no uneasiness but
you’ll be able to teach those youngones a right smart,” Dr. Bradley said.
“First we must put a little meat on your bones.”
The food was set on the table by the doctor’s wife, a large, breathy
woman who sank comfortably into her ampleness and formed a bulwark
against which their children leaned. She talked habitually of her work,
of the food she prepared. Theodosia saw that she stilled her curiosity
about herself, saw that she turned it into delicate sauces and the creamy
essence of meats, nourishment for the body. The woman set upon each
preparation diligently, carefully choosing an egg, rejecting a cream,
tasting, studying, whipping, shredding, kneading, stirring, each dish
brought to the board with a gesture of deep concern as she slightly
leaned toward it to give it a last scrutiny. These attitudes were her
habitual replies to her husband. The table was laid in the kitchen,
for the days were cool and here was the most snug warmth. The doctor
came from his office, a little room at the end of the yard, and sat at
the head of the table. Sometimes he brought a patient with him, or a
traveler, for there was always an extra place prepared. The heavy savors
would arise and mingle sweetly with their hungers, with the faint odor of
smoke from the cooking fire where the wood burned away now that it was
no longer wanted. The doctor brought a breath of cold air with him and
this lingered about his clothing and spread through the odorous warmth.
When he was seated he bowed his head briefly and asked a blessing in a
psalm-like sentence, and the little children would suck at their spoons
and put their hands into their empty plates, an ear attentive to the
blessing, of which they understood nothing but the amen, their hungers
like the hungers of some small gentle beasts. The ceremony of carving
and of passing plates was swiftly over, subordinated to their cravings.
“Begin on your plate while it’s hot,” the doctor would say. “No waiten.
No use to make any more fuss. Eat your victuals while they’re warm.”
The men in the village road knew one another intimately, calling “John”
or “Bill” or “Thad” back and forth, shouting orders or suggestions. Lee
Cummings worked somewhere on a farm, but he came home with his team at
nightfall, the empty wagon rattling through the roadway. Or beyond the
vapors of her sleep she would hear a night-passer, the wheels of a buggy
or a car on the road which lay but a few feet from the house. In the
early morning the village cows were driven to common waste pasture which
was indifferently owned, along the creek, and the boys who drove them
would loiter to swap knives or to boast of some personal excellence. A
man’s voice would call out a command or a threat and a boy would move
after his cow, simulating hurry. Thad sold goods at the store. He would
stand in the sun in the early morning waiting for trade to come to his
door, shifting his feet, waiting to see what the weather would offer
before he predicted the business of the day. Chickens ran in the road and
plucked at the grain that dropped from passing wagons, but when feeding
times came they gathered at old Oscar Turner’s door. Thad would call out
a jest or a truism to passing friends.
“Yes, the rich they have their ice in summer, but the poor they have
their’n in winter, and everything hit’s all evened up all round,” he
called after some leaving companion, closing some tale or argument. He
took credit to himself as a philosopher. Or again, as a prophet:
“Hit’ll rain all day, you may as well get ready for hit. See them-there
hens out eaten grass in the rain? When you see hens out in the morning
eaten grass in the rain, that’s a sure sign hit’ll rain all day.”
She walked through the lane toward the creek or returned to sit on
Bradley’s doorstep, or she walked along the highroad past the store and
the grist-mill, knowing no surprise that she should be there rather than
anywhere else, and no surprise at the replies of the people that fell the
one against another, as they talked of their tasks, every man knowing the
other’s needs or peculiar quality. One of old Oscar Turner’s hens laid
her eggs in an overturned barrel beside Thad’s door.
“I looked to see if she was on,” a man said, drawing back from the barrel.
“Is she on?”
“I wonder if old Oscar he’ll set her there.”
“A right public place.”
“That old domernik hen, she don’t mind, she’s got no shame.”
They were new with the beginning of the earth, beyond the reach of
truism, fresh and uncertain, the dew of new-birth on every saying. They
were of the world and the world was new. They were free of all but the
bare statement of themselves as standing out before time, before running
duration. Kate Hull driving to the grist-mill with a sack of old corn to
have it cracked for her pullets escaped truism as entirely as did Thad’s
voice and demeanor as he uttered his philosophies, as she drove awkwardly
into the setting and sat dejectedly above the corn sacks. A man, Caleb
Burns, rode down from the upper-lying farmland, riding a brown horse that
had three white feet. A child named Sallie West, unknown to her as yet,
sent her a handful of wild crocuses. A girl, at the door of the store,
buying baking soda and lemon extract, invited her to a party. A woman
standing by a gate, her hand stayed on the latch, said to her as she
passed, “I heard you playen on your violin last night. I heard it when I
was on my way to bed. It was a fair sound.”
* * * * *
She met the children at the school on the appointed day. There were
twenty-three, boys and girls. The schoolhouse stood near the creek at
the end of the village, under a shade of beech and sycamore trees. Some
of the children rode down from the upper valley each day in a buckboard
cart, or a boy or two came horseback. Susan West, who drove the buckboard
cart, would take the old horse from the shaves and hitch it under a great
beech tree, and at noon one of the boys would, as his duty, without
asking leave, take the eight ears of corn from under the buggy seat
and feed the old nag in a wooden box that was nailed to the tree. Old
Oscar’s hens would gather about the horse’s feet to catch the wasted
grains of corn. She began her progress up the valley, living first at the
houses that were nearest to the school and moving week by week farther
away, Cummings’s first, and then Fishman’s place, and Baker’s.
The farmers had formed a beef company, a group of six or eight men who
killed a beef every ten days or two weeks and shared in the meat by a
carefully drawn contract. Each man furnished a yearling steer in turn
and each man was given a part in turn. One or two of the men sold their
portions, peddling it from house to house in the hamlet, or others used
all, having many at hand to feed. The slaughter-house was a dull shed at
the back of a small enclosure near the beginning of the village, removed
from the schoolhouse by the whole length of the village, but Theodosia
saw it as she walked in the late afternoon, and on the killing days she
saw the men gathered there. A constant stench floated out from the place,
and toward the back of the shed were scattered quantities of bones, the
heads and feet of cattle that had been gnawed by the dogs until they were
clean, some of them weathered white by the rains. Often the dogs fought
there all night, their yelpings heard through her sleep, and the day
after the night of the snarling dogs there was fresh meat on every table
up and down the lane and the road, and fresh meat to eat with the bread
for the school lunches. It was sweet to taste, good to the mouth and
satisfying to the want of the inner hunger. With the meat was buttered
bread and apples from some cellar or apple house, or there was honey that
had been saved from the past year’s garnering, or conserve. Sometimes
a sheep was slaughtered on one of the farms, or if these animals were
lacking there were fowls to be baked and served in their richly buttered
sauces.
At playtime the children played a game, singing,
I went to the door and picked up a pin,
And asked if Mistress Jones was in,
She neither was in she neither was out,
She’s up in the garret a-hoppen about.
Theodosia heard the song without surprise, heard the strange quality
of the singing as it rang and hollowed broadly under the great beech
trees along the creek. Here the cries of the birds were the more broadly
dispersed as tone, richly amplified. The children were, in general,
attentive to their lessons and eager to progress, to atone for their long
vacation. If they were dull, Theodosia, in her distress at this, played
for them on the fiddle. The day little Johnnie Turner could not learn
to spell “hitching” she played a _Romance_ and an _Adagio_, a pensive
wailing, until all the children were happy and they leaned forward on
their desks, a-tiptoe, to hear. She heard their song game while she sat
under the beech tree at noon not far from Susan’s nag, not far from old
Oscar’s hens, she eating her lunch, the food some village wife had
prepared for her. The names the children called as they walked away,
beginning conversations, lay out under the great beeches as aliens, as
belonging to the farms up the valley, and she accepted the names for
tone without questioning the owner as to whether he were man or child or
woman—the names, Shirley Bond, Betty Hawthorne, Rose Hines, Lum Brown.
The little girls were equal in importance, none seeming to dominate the
rest, the child, Sallie West, always giving, supplying the others, making
the others safe or comfortable at the game, a talkative child. A voice
said one day, receding down to the end of the playground where the little
children kept, “Betty Hawthorne has got a blue ribbon,” or another said
again, “Mollie has got a silver cup.” There were rainy days when the
beech trees dripped their dejected wet. Sometimes she called the children
to their books by playing a jig. They had their sayings; they would talk
of leaving kisses in the drinking dipper, or they called water left in
the dipper after one had drunk “slobbers.” “Let me have your slobbers,”
a little boy said to his favorite among the girls. Or another, “I bid
for Susan’s slobbers.” Susan and Sallie were the West girls; they came
from the top of the valley, Susan a strong, well-rounded girl, misty
and vague with her first flowering, neither child nor woman. “She takes
after Mammy,” Sallie said. “She’s a liven image of....” she called some
strange name. They liked to dwell upon whom they took after, each child
designating himself and trying to discover himself. The lessons in the
books were remote from them, were unknown gods to be appeased with
offerings of study. Their learnings were ceremonials far apart from their
richer flow of living. They measured their height at a door-post and
compared this year with last, and they watched one another. Their words,
coming to her from the end of a game, while they sat to rest:
“What color is Betty Hawthorne’s hair?”
“It’s red.”
“It is not so.”
“It’s brown and red mixed. I looked close at it one time.”
“Roan color is what it is. I heard my pap say one time it was roan color.”
“You think your pap knows everything. Your pap, he don’t own the earth.”
“I touched Betty Hawthorne one time.”
“I laid my eyes on her. That’s as close as ever I got to her.”
“I touched her.”
“Where’d you touch her?”
“I touched her on the leg.”
They were singing the game again, the voices blended to a high thin
shouting that spread widely under the great trees and out before the
creek.
Down she came as soft as silk,
A rose in her bosom as white as milk.
She took off her glove and showed me her ring,
Tomorrow, tomorrow the wedding begins.
Oh, mercy on me what have I done!
I’ve married the father instead of the son.
His back’s as crooked as an old tin pan,
And they’re all a-laughen at my old man.
Theodosia wrote sums on the board and made history questions and
outlines or searched out stories to read and made maps with chalk; and
felt a slight and very inward jealousy of Betty Hawthorne as holding
the interest and affection of the small girls and boys. Betty Hawthorne
might wear her blue ribbons and knot up her roan-colored hair for all she
cared, and she played a capricious dance tune at the end of the noon hour
to state her jealousy of this creature, a careless air barbed with subtle
darts that deflected it from its kept rhythm, that jerked it hither and
yon under the implied three-four of the measure, her lips smiling. All
about the men were planting the corn. All day, looking across the creek
from the windows of the schoolhouse, she could see the drills working
up and down making exact rows through the broken soil. Everywhere the
gardens were being planted, rows of seeds put into the soil in orderly
ways to yield them food.
“My own hair, it might be called roan-colored too,” she said, “but a dark
roan. A rose in her bosom as white as milk is no matter. I’m a dark roan
myself....”
* * * * *
The men were taking a cow through the road toward the slaughter-pen, a
fattened heifer to be killed for beef. She came from Burns’s farm at the
head of the creek valley.
“What does he kill a heifer for?” one asked at the door of the store.
“What for does he kill a heifer?”
“No good, she is. Wouldn’t calve.”
The beast had run past the slaughter-yard and come to the creekside, and
four men were not able to drive her. She would go uncertainly forward a
few feet or turn and run back, all the men after her with staves, or she
broke through hedges and jumped fences, mad to get away. After two hours
of struggle she was back by the creek again running in the school-yard.
She was a well-marked creature, fattened for the slaughter, but alert and
sinewy. She broke one of her horns on Bradley’s gate, but she did not
consent to go where the men meant to take her, and she leaped the hedge
again. Lee Cummings was after her, and Will Judson, and Lum Brown, the
black man who worked with the Burns cattle, who always shot the beef with
his shotgun. The heifer’s hair was all on end now and her eyes were wild,
her side bleeding where she had scraped against some broken gate hinge,
her feet cut and her left horn gone. The children at the school could
scarcely attend to their books, knowing how the struggle went forward,
although two or three of the boys wanted to join in the fight.
“Would you expect her, though, to walk gentle up to the slaughter-pen and
put her head inside the door?” Thad asked. He was standing at noon by the
school-yard gate. “That’s how a man expects a critter he aims to butcher
to act. Walk right up in front of the shotgun and stand straight.”
The conflict ended at noon when the beast was entrapped in the
slaughter-house, but Lum Brown would not go inside to shoot. Hearing the
lessons during the afternoon, Theodosia knew the end of the struggle,
and the children knew, and a mingled satisfaction and distress made them
mindful of their books, abstracted and attentive to the printed sayings
of their pages. Lum Brown had been obliged to push the barrel of the gun
through a crack in the boarded wall and shoot the heifer from without.
There was no answer to the question raised by the unwilling heifer. The
answers in the books were easily found.
* * * * *
She had moved up the valley and spring was well at hand. She sat in
Judson’s house on a cold green afternoon in late April. The stones of
the hearth tilted away from the fireplace and sloped off to the floor,
which gave unevenly toward the rear right corner of the room. A jar of
cream had been set to sour beside the fender. The children were climbing
over one another and over their mother’s feet, asking the words in their
books. The mother with a baby in her arms was slowly rocking, was mending
a garment, was giving the child her breast. Her hair was marked with gray
as if a veil of light were spread under its darkness, and her great bosom
was without flesh, was powerful with brawn and gland and bone. This would
be her last child, and a quiet in her spent body said, “I am glad; I had
enough.” The door to the front bedroom was opened and in the other room,
that for the guest, a new fire burned coldly in the grate.
It was the same everywhere with a slight difference, the slow fire of
the afternoon in the snug room. At Baker’s there were no infants, but
three grown girls came in with embroidery pieces and sat stitching.
“Shadow-work” they called what they did. At Sayre’s there was an unborn
child. Mr. Fishman would come into his house in the mid-afternoon and
fumble awhile at a closet with the faint muffled sound of a bottle and
a glass. Lee Cummings had counted on his fingers and marked the foaling
of an animal on the calendar that hung beside the mantel. This was
the world. She knew no surprise of it and no surprise for herself as
being there. Red clover and orchard grass were together in the meadows,
growing higher every week. Faint lines of green were crisscrossing the
cornfields, going two ways in orderly processions, opening out and
closing together as she went by. The men called their sayings from about
the shop and the store or the women called from doorways, and she heard
the noises a wagon made as it went empty along the road, the noise of
wood beating on wood, of wood on iron, of iron on iron, of iron on stone,
horse-iron on stone. The voices of the little children came to her as she
sat to eat her food at noon under the greatest beech tree, as they were
bent to their play at making farms and highroads through the moist earth,
and their words, “Queen ... Mollie ... Shirley Bond ... the silo ...
Betty Hawthorne ... the cut-up-corn machine,” would arise to speech in
their disputes or blend again to the flow of some remote water in their
purring acquiescences and contents.
“Betty Hawthorne has got a calf,” one said.
“Is it Betty Hawthorne’s calf, or Caleb Burns’s calf?”
“It’s both of um’s together.”
“Betty Hawthorne has got a silver cup, two cups. I saw Betty Hawthorne’s
cups last week.”
“I touched Betty Hawthorne myself.”
“Where’d you touch ’er?”
“I touched her on the tit. Where would I be a-touchen ’er?”
“Did you ever milk Betty Hawthorne?”
“Milk? A girl couldn’t milk Betty Hawthorne, or Mollie either. She gives
a whole water-bucket full. Your wrist would in a manner break off in the
bones. It takes Shirley Bond to milk.”
* * * * *
Or Tom Yancey gathered up the lambs, his flock, with his cries, cries the
sheep knew from long use, and carried them with him down the pasture.
A woman once said, “If a young lamb is lost from its mother and is
off in some far part of the field, I’ll tell you what he can do. Two
hundred lambs he’s got, and over, and you’d think they all look just
alike. He can pick up the lamb and carry it across the field amongst a
hundred-and-over ewes, and set it down alongside its own mother.” He
was seen walking down a field carrying a young lamb in his arms. Or
on another day he took all the sheep across two farms, down lanes and
turnings, taking them to newer eatage. He would walk at the head of the
flock, sometimes calling gently, and all the sheep walked close about
him. His form stood high out of the sheep. A woman standing in a doorway,
seeing him pass, the tall man that he was with the low sheep following
and flowing around his feet, said, “The Good Shepherd. Look! How he’s got
them gentled!” and another voice, “They confidence him, the sheep.” And,
“See, there goes the Good Shepherd, goen past.”
Theodosia saw them flow about his feet like dull yellow-gray waves of
water when he took them from pasture to pasture to feed. But one day,
June, he sold them to the trader, and then he led them down the road,
past the shop, past the store, beyond the schoolhouse and over the
creek, along the stony road, himself walking ahead and calling with low
cries if the sheep lagged, but they lagged but seldom, for they flowed
evenly after him, crowding for near places and hurdling up toward his
shadow, running up the stony lane toward the shipping pen. They were seen
intently long after they were gone from the way, seen moving along the
highroads and farther.
* * * * *
One morning when she came to the school she saw that the little children
were huddled together before the coalhouse at the back of the yard as
if they were afraid, clustered together as fowls afraid of a hawk. Two
larger boys played with a ball along the creekside. When she went inside
she found the blackboards and walls written over with obscene words, her
name among them. The little children had been inside the house to leave
their books and their food, but she knew that they had not written on the
walls, and that it was unlikely that the boys throwing the ball before
the creek had written. She erased the words slowly, carefully, without
anger, thinking of how they belonged to the entire country, valley
and upland and the farms beyond, the town, all towns and cities. They
belonged to Thad and his wisdoms and gallantries, himself stepping about
his store quickly to get her yards of cloth wrapped into a neat yellow
bundle. They belonged to Anne Sawyer and her unborn child and to Johnnie
Turner weeping over his multiplication tables, and to the man Caleb
Burns riding down from the upper fields on his neat horse with three
white feet, as much to Caleb Burns as if he had written them himself,
and equally to Mary Judson holding her last infant to her great bosom.
She erased the words, seeing them, unafraid of them. They named the
excretions of the body and the acts of excretion, she observed. If one is
to name the discharges of the body he should name them all, she thought,
looking at the last of the words as she erased. Name them all, slighting
none. Among these words should be written the omitted word, a true juice
of the human frame, _tear_. Spelled with four letters, as were the other
words, she ruminated, belonging with the others entirely. Let the boy,
whoever he was, who wrote for the whole people of the community, let
him write the last word; he would write it in time, this supreme juice
from the body of man, the point where he stands above himself, where he
outdoes the cattle.
The words were all erased now and her hands dusted free of the chalk.
She was thinking of the men of the countryside as she knew them, as she
had seen them about. She called the roll of them with a swift thought
as she stood there, appraising them, measuring their quality, at first
in one mass and later as one by one. Will Judson was busy, intent on
his children and his business, scarcely aware of his wife, at whom he
never looked. He was a pleasant, abstracted man of middle age, too deeply
married to his wife ever to see her again. Thad was a kind, cheerful,
conceited yokel. Fishman was married to his bottle, coupled by way of his
beloved glass. Lee Cummings went then down the frieze of the roll and
passed quickly by, for he had the odor of a goat or of a discarded kidney
thrown behind the slaughter-house ten days. “It may be the corduroy he
wears,” she said, and he passed with the calling of his name. Charlie
Johns then, a gay youth, given to cock-fighting and over-dressing on
Sundays, a lightness of touch in his goings and comings. The eldest
Weakley boy was solid matter and was devoted to Rowena West, as was said,
devoted finally and without departure. The Baker girls, sitting over
their shadow-work, had told her this. West came then, Lucian West. He
had been to visit the school with his daughters, Susan and Sallie, to
see how they did. He was Rowena’s father, husband to their mother. He
was full of kindly feeling and full of the goodness of life, and he went
with brisk steps along the road, giving cheerful good-mornings to all the
men and women alike, but the women would like him best. Beyond, in the
next farm, past West, came Caleb Burns and his men, Shirley Bond and Lum
Brown, the negro who shot the beef cattle. Lum Brown came and went on
loaded wagons, a large man firmly put together, a large kindly mouth that
turned easily with its utterances. Shirley Bond she knew of from the
West child, Sallie; he rode away out of the country every Sunday to see
some woman somewhere. He was a great sunburnt man, a giant upstanding to
take the red of the sun on his face and on his neck, and he belonged with
the Shorthorn cows in the pastures and breeding pens. Caleb Burns, then,
the master of the Shorthorns, seen going along the road on the top of a
wagon piled with old hay. He was the owner of the cows, Mollie, Queen,
and Betty Hawthorne, and of the one Sallie had been taught not to dare
name, the one she called the “male cow,” Good Boy. He rode down into the
village on a trim horse with three white feet. “He’s a queer one,” Thad
said to her once, explaining him after his departure, “but it takes all
sorts to make up this-here world. He’s a queer one, but we-all got used
to his ways a long while back, and we hardly notice how queer he might
seem to a new-comer in our midst.” There had been a woman about him once,
but Sallie was vaguely informed of her. He was a sun-browned man with
dark hair, a gaunt man. His lips seemed always prepared for speech, he
seemed always about to speak or to have just spoken, and he talked to
everybody as if they knew all he meant. “He’s a smart man underneath it
all, as smart as ever I saw in life, and it’s his book-sense, I reckon,
makes him so he seems different,” Thad said. Beyond, going far, vaguely
merged with outlying farms, were vague names, Bose Hines, Farley Penn,
and Washington Tandy, names gathered back into the fields and distances.
This was the list of the valley as it reached upward toward the farms
and frayed into the hills.
* * * * *
The tenth week she stayed at Alfred Kirk’s place and rode back and forth
morning and evening with Susan and Sallie in the buckboard behind the
large-boned old horse, and the eleventh week she stayed at Si Weakley’s
and rode with Susan and Sallie again. “Next week and you’ll get to know
Rowena,” Sallie promised her, offering Rowena with pride. The twelfth
week brought her to the top of the valley.
The house at West’s place stood sharply defined at the head of the rise
of land, but lying away to the south were rolling levels of fields that
were of one elevation. The grassy yard before the house was without a
path although feet walked there freely and the front door was opened for
use. There was a square porch before the house with pillars above and
below, the wood of the pillars white against the dull red brick wall.
A pet goose came to the doorstep and begged for attention. There were
only two rooms above-stairs, a diminished house that belied the spacious
doorway. There were no boys in the household and it was Susan who fed the
old nag and carried in the water.
It was the busy season with the farmers, and all went early to bed,
Lucian West rising stiffly from his chair after supper, drawing himself
up slowly as his limbs cried out their protest at the fields; but on
his feet he walked away briskly, making no compromises with his hurts.
Neighbors came to borrow tools or to beg seeds or plants, or to grind
tools at the stone. Si Weakley’s oldest boy came to talk with Rowena
a little before he rested for the night. Lucian West and the girls
called the mother by some name which had been kept from Rowena’s first
prattlings, “Meedee,” or “Midi”—they could not say how it should be
spelled.
Then Theodosia asked leave to stay at the farm during the summer,
boarding, for she had saved the money she had earned, and their consent
pleased the small child, Sallie, very well. Lucian West proposed that her
bed be made on the upper porch.
“Couldn’t you, Midi? I’ve heard it said it’s a prime thing to sleep out
for a body that’s been out of health for a spell.”
Lying on the upper porch, the small square upper stoop above the front
doorway, she could look at the night sky between the trees, all the
people now in their beds to rest. Outside the tree-grown garden the road
ran past, and beyond the road lay the Burns pasture, the great barns in
the middle vista, and often she could hear the cattle eat if they came
near the roadway to crop the grass, for they ate at night when the moon
shone. Lying thus, she would go out quietly across the powdered dark that
was granulated with dull light, go with the incandescent insects and the
firmaments of night-cries that set stars of sound into the mellow black.
Midi, when her daughters were safely away, liked to talk about brothels
and women selling for hire. She lay now on the porch to sleep, she,
Theodosia, on the bed Midi had made for her; she had come house by house
up the valley. Midi was kind, a little withering woman with a high voice
and hard, nervous, knotty hands. She saw Midi acutely as she lay in the
half-dark to rest, and she heard again her breathless, fearful stories
and conjectures of what must pass in wicked places. She knew that the
woman was thus because she was heightened by the going of her prolific
age, by the passing of her fecund power. The fiddle was stilled that she
might not awaken those asleep in the house, but her mind played at a
crooked phrase, a distressed lack-melody that mounted with a perpetual
question toward the constellations in the open sky above and in the grass
below, Midi turned momentarily back upon herself in intense departure,
and she reflected that a woman’s life is short and full of peril.
Or she would remember Sallie’s song. Sallie gathered strawberries from
the garden, bobbing among the straw-lined rows as if she were a giant
hop-toad. Rowena was her chief admonisher, and if she were admonished
enough she would scrape the new potatoes out of their thin pinkish skins
and wash them in readiness for the cooking. She brought the peas to
Theodosia’s porch and shelled them there, and often she would remember a
song about the peas, a singsong tune,
Who buttoned up the peasecod?
Who buttoned up the bean?
I’m sure I never buttoned any,
Although I’ve unbuttoned a many.
Caleb Burns had sung that song to her, she said, one day when he had come
upon her as she shelled behind the house at the kitchen steps. She would
laugh at the invisible buttons and drop the unbuttoned peas lazily into
her pan.
* * * * *
They would sit about the doorway after sundown to rest and often a
neighbor, come on an errand, would linger with them there. Sallie would
have fastened the last of the chickens and turkeys into their small coops
and she would sit in the grass, growing quiet now as she approached the
necessity of sleep. On Saturday evenings the talk beside the door lasted
until long after nightfall. Sometimes Theodosia would sit with them in
the twilight, or again she would go to the upper gallery, her place, and
play for them on her instrument if they desired this, or she would call
down replies to them when she was questioned. Often Caleb Burns came,
stopping but a little while if it were an evening before a busy day, or
lingering an hour or more at the end of the week. Then he and Lucian
West talked of their farming and recounted their experiments or offered
proofs of this thing and that, or Burns fell into monologue while all
sat still to hear him. Midi would be asked to confirm a date, or place
rightly some distant sequence of incidents. She dated all happenings by
the birth of some child, either her own or some other woman’s offspring.
Her chronology was final and beyond dispute, her datings written with the
indelibles, pain and new life. The men used history and memory and were
often refuted, their method wanting.
Sitting on the small gallery above, their voices would come to Theodosia,
but half attended, as the refrains from some flowing song into which
she had gone and in which she lived. Caleb talked of the age when man
followed after the herds as they roamed, to prey on their flesh, of
the deep relation between man and these beasts, or another voice would
give some reply. Man following after the herds.... Or, “Thou shalt not
muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn....” The Shorthorn, called
formerly Durham, or Teeswater, or Holderness.... Used to be called the
Patton stock in America, but new breeds imported of late.... This winter
I fed corn silage with oat and clover hay and ground corn for a grain
ration, mixed with bran and cottonseed meal, in proportions 200, 200, and
75.... Percentage of shrinkage in corn.... Mineral mixture for hogs....
Wood ashes and common salt. Ten parts of wood ashes to one part of
salt.... Worms in hogs.... Internal parasites in sheep.... Grub-in-head,
lung-worm, tape-worm, nodular disease, stomach-worms.... Drenchings....
Three-ounce doses of one per cent copper sulphate solution given three
days in succession.... Drench your sheep twice a year.... Young lambs
before and at weanen time.
“Caleb, he’s a queer man,” Rowena had said. She was seen churning the
cream in a rocking churn, her moist hands soft on the handle as she
tilted it forward and back. She worked on the stone-paved terrace at the
back of the house, in the north shade of the early morning, not far from
the milk house where the cream was kept. Often Lester Weakley came to
speak to her there, looking into her soft face. She was moist and fresh,
was but more of the sweet butter she churned, garnered fat become flesh.
“Caleb, he’s queer. I don’t know another like Caleb.”
“Well, I’ll tell you about Caleb,” West had said as he passed, stopping
a little on the stones to talk. “I’ll tell you how he is. He don’t make
clear much money, maybe, but he makes mighty good Shorthorns, mighty
good.”
“In his talk he’s queer,” Rowena said. “He says out loud anything that
might come into his head. He says out all those little things that come
in your head, things you never heard about, or heard anybody speak about,
or never read about in a book.”
“He raises mighty good Shorthorn cows, now,” the other said. “I don’t
know anybody raises better. In debt, he is, they say, and it’s true, and
he may go broke yet. Makes no mint of money, but by golly he makes mighty
good cows.”
“It’s not because he’s got book-sense, either,” Rowena said, following
her own. “Old Mr. Tumey, he’s got book-sense, and he’s not a thing on
earth like Caleb Burns. Caleb, it seems like he says out all those little
things that come in head, that you wouldn’t think to say. That nobody
else says. That lay in your mind, you might say. He’s queer like that.
I never saw another like him. You’re bound to give in he’s queer. But I
reckon he does raise right good stock.”
To the small gallery, the voices. Fine milk and beef cattle, that they
are. Three times a day we milk. Twice a day for us is enough.... Oh,
tirra-lirra, joy come thither.... Betty Hawthorne, 17,768.6 pounds
of milk in a twelve months and out of it 581.4 pounds of butter fat.
How about Queen?... 16,990-and-over pounds of milk, or Mollie, 14,000
pounds and over.... Or Princess.... Betty Hawthorne and Princess carry
the blood of Julia 16, and so does Good Boy 11, and there never was a
better transmitten sire than Good Boy.... Their names all written in
the Shorthorn Herd Book, registered cows.... Pure-bred Shorthorns are a
good stock, as fine as there is, I reckon. We ship the cream and let the
calves and pigs take up the skim.... Did you notice the papers today?
What’s the quotation?... I always keep the run of the market.... I could
almost tell you her registered number, Betty Hawthorne’s, three six six
five eight nine something, I forget the exact figures. Or Mollie.... My
aim is to people the pasture with good cows.... Her name written in the
Shorthorn Book of Herds.... Or there’s Prudence. I expect you’ll get big
figures out of Prudence.... When she comes to the milken age. Second calf
of Mollie’s. Mollie’s first was a bull and we butchered it.
Is my name written there,
On that page white and fair....
Milk cows ought to have a legume hay, clover, alfalfa, or maybe peas or
soy beans. But sorghum hay can be used, but then the grain feed will have
to be more liberal. The leaves make a pleasant coolness when they fan the
night air and the nightjars dart through the sky with opened mouths to
drain the insects out of the dark. The mid-summer insects were crying a
week ago and the longest day in the year has passed. The voices below,
speaking forth and back:
“What year did Jones run for Congress, now?”
“About ninety-nine or ninety-eight.”
“Jones? No, about ninety-two that was. I’ll tell you for why I think
so....”
“It was eighteen ninety-six,” Midi said. “Eighteen ninety-six it was and
no mistakes made.”
“Before ninety-six, I’ll bet my last dollar on it. I’m under a doubt that
it was as late as that, Midi.”
“It was ninety-six. I know. It was the same year Rowena was borned. I
have a way of knowen. I recall. We all know what year Rowena was borned
in. How old are you, Rowena? Just ask Rowena how old she is and you get
the answer to how long it’s been.”
“I’m nineteen now.”
“Nineteen. That’s how long it’s been. Ninety-six, it was.”
* * * * *
She would not go to look at his cattle although Midi invited her,
offered to take her there. The harvesters came to the wheat, and the
cut field, laid up in orderly bundles, row after row, was increased in
size, multiplied or enhanced by the elasticity of lines spreading two
ways over a rolling land. The harvest hands were lusty feeders, sitting
heartily to the food Midi and Rowena and Susan prepared, pouring great
goblets of soured milk from the tall white pitcher or helping themselves
again to the roasted meat that was piled high on the platter. Some voice
at the cattle barns beyond the road and the pasture sang from mid-summer
forward. Sallie found two saddles for as many old brood mares that were
unemployed in the fields, and she and Theodosia rode back through the
farm paths into remote land and explored a tangle of twiggy glades to
find the spring that gave the first water to Spring Run, and they lay
to rest all through the heat of the day in the cool woodland. The oat
harvest followed the wheat, the voice at the distant barn singing now and
then, Caleb Burns singing over the heads of his cattle, some phrase as
“We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion,” phrases that intoned
well before the great barn and fitted well to the voice as it hollowed
richly before the resonant walls, the lay of the hills lending assistance.
We’re marching upward to Zion,
The beautiful city of God....
In the dusk before the house door, he had looked at her once, his eyes
pointed with some distress. “I saw you the day you came here, in the
wagon with the peddler,” he said. His face had been in that moment
pointed, like the face of a fox, drawn to a sharp focus by its troubled
interval, “I saw you the day you came here.”
* * * * *
“Now I’ll tell you-all what my idea is about a sugar-cured ham. Meat,
now, ought to be allowed to take salt a day and a half for every pound
in the piece. A ham weighen eighteen pounds ought to stay in the salt
twenty-seven days. Twenty pounds, if your ham weighs, then thirty days
in the salt ...” The refrains hung over the summer country and settled
to the distant groves of locust that grew in the places where the hills
crumpled together. The tomato vines in the garden were hanging thick now
with great green fruits which Midi, when they were turning toward a pale
white for ripening, laid in rows on an outer shelf or on the stringers of
the fence where they flushed daily more red. The odors of cooking tomato
relishes savored the house and the yard when Midi made ready for the
winter. Lucian West took three of his sugar-cured hams from the luscious,
feathery dark of his meat house where they had ripened, and sold them to
someone in the town.
In him, Caleb, there was a sense of the whole country, of the rolling
farms as owned up and down the watercourses and farther, including
the town, Anneville and beyond, other towns, Lester, Quincy, all the
reach of the entire region. With a gesture he included all, fearless,
comprehending, or he spoke of the people of Anneville, knowing them, of
the history of the place and how each street was named, Hill Street,
Jackson, Simon, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane.... The buying of seeds and
the summer faced toward the new year.... I see where I can get....
Frost-proof cabbage.... Bermuda onion plants.... Unhulled white-blossom
sweet clover, six dollars.... It was still summer, the nightjars crying
in the sky, the fireflies making jeweled streaks in the dark, moving
upward. Caleb’s voice, saying man looks forward toward a city, always
looks forward to a city, a place, streets of gold, jasper walls, but
looks backward to a garden, Eden. “Looken back he sees a garden. Well?...”
“It’s been about twelve years since the first automobiles came into this
country,” Lucian West said. “Fully twelve, and look how many people still
hold a prejudice against ...”
“Hardly twelve, I’d say, although I don’t exactly recollect.”
“It’s been twelve if it’s been a day, and look how headstrong some
keep....”
“Nine, it’s been,” Midi said. “Nine exactly. It was the year Julie Judson
was—the year little Sadie Judson was borned. I know. I recall. You can’t
get that outen my head. I recall what a hard time Julie had all spring
and I recall Dr. Bradley a-sitten in Julie’s room a-talken about the
first automobile that went through the road, and it was that very day,
that day it went past, and a-talken about what a stir it made. Theodosia
can tell you how old Sadie Johnson is. She kept the roll-call at the
schoolhouse.”
“Midi’s right. It’s been nine years,” Theodosia said. “Nine is on the
roll book.”
Where did the people of this country come from? The question was asked
and some reply given—from Virginia. Long ago. The garden spot of the
earth. They came through the Wilderness Trace. The voices about the
door flowed backward toward ultimate beginnings and settled slowly
around their sad maxims and histories. Before dark had fallen she had
seen his eyes as he, Caleb Burns, had greeted her, and she had seen
that there were flakes of amber in their brown parts and that the
lids were heavy as if they could not rest entirely. The talk dwelt on
the town again, Anneville, named for a woman, Anne Montford. “Your
great-great-grandmother,” he said. He knew of them, speaking of them
tenderly now. “Mother to Theodosia Montford, grandmother to Anthony
Bell....”
* * * * *
But one day she went to see the cattle, Midi having been asked by Caleb
to bring her, and with Midi and Sallie she walked down the road that
curved once toward the south and turned in at the large gate where the
driveway began. As they walked back through the pasture they were met
half-way by Caleb, and Shirley Bond left his mowing and came toward the
barns to bring the cattle to be viewed. Mollie and Queen were on the rise
of the hill near the haw tree and Theodosia walked there with Caleb and
Midi and Sallie, and she laid her hands on the animal’s shoulders and
looked at her, Queen, at her great hard eyes with their murky veins, at
her thick shoulders and her falling dewlap and low brisket. There was a
great fullness beginning at her middle under part and extending backward
and downward, the great sack where the milk vein emptied the milk for
storage. Her teats, hanging to her shanks, almost to her feet, were tight
and full of life, delicately pink with blood. The hairs of her coat,
viewed closely, were red and white, salted together in varying degrees of
one on the other so that she was spotted with white or roan spots that
shaded to red about her face and neck or again about her feet. Mollie was
less quiet and she moved nervously away to find eatage at the other side
of the pasture, where her pale sides and flanks sank into the bright play
of sun and shadows from a locust tree.
Betty Hawthorne stood in the shade of a sugar tree chewing her cud, half
sleeping, her eyes fixed on the barn at the end of the field. She was
redder than Queen and larger in frame, her udders even more ripe and
low-drooping. Her horns curved slightly above her eyes and her large jaws
showed the veins that branched under the heavy skin. She was dreamily
set to the business of chewing, her great body having succumbed to the
tyranny of milk. Princess was beautifully marked with white spots that
were balanced, side for side. The long straight line of her back that
curved upward slightly at the base of her head drew the design into form.
The calves were penned in a smaller pasture beside the barn, five or
six heifers. They played together, trying to use their horns, or one
or two bawled at the fence, but their mothers were undisturbed. “She’s
well enough off,” Princess said through her indifference as she bent her
straight back slightly to take a bite of clover. Betty Hawthorne too had
an offspring among the young in the calf pen. Caleb pointed it out.
“I’ll raise it to a year old or so and put it on the market. Weaned now.
He’s a good calf but he’s not marked right and so he’ll have to go for
beef.”
The great white sire, Good Boy, stood in a pen beyond the lower barn,
fenced by rails that were strung high above his head. He was larger
than his cows and his coat was creamy white, soft and pliable, in the
fine pink of health and life. His horns were short and slightly drooped
downward. He had left the grass of his enclosure and stood complacently
beside the fence, chewing sleepily. The great ring through his nose
scarcely moved as he opened his mouth, and when he swallowed he fell
momentarily asleep, but another pellet of unchewed matter, arising from
below with a spasmodic movement, would awaken him.
She walked among his cattle, these great beasts that had been brought
to serve the needs of men, that had been deflected from their own ends
by husbandry, and she admired their shining coats of fine red-and-white
hair and their great bodies. The calves were restless now, crying now and
then, some of them giving deeply matured cries, others the bleat of the
young. This disturbance made a pleasant din that settled over the pasture
and brought nearer the milking hour. Only one, Mollie, was nervous and
wild, and she had run to the end of the pasture where she gamboled with
some others, her necessity upon her, but the great quiet sire was unaware
of her as yet.
Walking beside Theodosia, keeping always at her elbow, Caleb Burns told
her the good qualities of each beast, offering figures in proof, pointing
out this and that. Midi was as quiet as a dove, or she would ask a
question of the flow of milk or the age of a heifer, shy of the great
male and willing to turn away from his pen.
Theodosia knew the intensities of Midi as she walked up the pasture
toward the rise of the low hill, going now to view Prudence, two years
old, not yet come to the age of milk, but beautifully marked and deeply
characterized by the qualities her author had devised for her. The
intensities of Midi contrasted the quiet of the herd at this hour, the
hour before milking time, when the lush plenty of the grass and the
filled rumen induced quiet, but the force of intense life lay back of
the animals in the power of their great bodies and of the young that
were gathered in the calf pens. Or walking along the grass toward the
middle of the pasture, Caleb talked about the beginning of the breed near
the river Tees at Croft and about the first Duchess, man borrowing and
shaping a little the power under the earth.
Midi and the child, Sallie, were gone now, had walked away toward the
road after they had stopped to gather a few wild berries from the briars.
Some little birds that were flocked in a clump of haws then began to
sing, all in harmony, twittering together as a burst of high song out
of a bush, as if it were to celebrate the coming of Aphrodite among the
herds, to announce the beginnings of fine desires and the passing of
Aphrodite among the pastures. They passed the haw trees and came then
to a walnut sapling, but they turned back again and came the way they
had gone. The insufficient summer twilight was beginning to settle to
the pasture and the abundant but inadequate thorn bushes kept their
singing, a burst of loud high twittering. The cows had been gathered to
the barns. Caleb Burns, his hands touching her hands, was talking, had
been talking from moment to moment. “I’ve dreamed about you so long, my
arms fitted around you, seems, now you’re here I’m afraid, as if my mind
would burst open. What will we do?... The moon tonight will be a petal
from an old flower.” They were walking back toward the sugar tree, toward
the highroad. “It’ll go, maybe, and we’ll never know what way it went.
Between two summers and it’ll be gone, this drunkenness. I’ll have you
then, maybe, the way Lucian West has Midi, unable to come to the house
without I find you and have something to say about a gate-post or a milk
can, God knows!... I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the
peddler....”
Night then, in the upper gallery, and she was trying to picture Caleb’s
face, to restore it entirely now that it was not by. A hard pointed face,
sharpened to a moment of anxiety, or diffused to a general scrutiny as he
looked at Queen’s offspring, searching for blemishes, looked back then
at her face. She saw him as a vague shape against the haw bushes. “I’m
a-goen to give you Betty Hawthorne. The best cow I’ve got. If you’ll be
so good as to have her until I can make you a better.”
“No, not Betty Hawthorne. No. A sprig of hawthorn flower in the spring
from the bushes at the top of the pasture, or a handful of bright red
haws in the fall. I’ll string a string of beads out of them, or I’ll eat
the little haw-apples. A handful of haws.”
“Betty Hawthorne, I aim to give you, if you’ll be so good as to take her.
The finest cow I ever owned, and the prettiest. Sister to Princess, full
sister, and half-sister to Queen. She’s taken three premiums at the state
fair and not yet come to her prime. If you’ll be so good as to take her.”
She reheard the argument, their voices falling together, one over
the other or waiting for a reply, one voice for a moment stilled but
answering in turn with swifter fervor. “Whenever I touch you,” his
voice making the saying, “I have to take a deeper breath to accommodate
the new life that’s grown in me.” He had marks—what kind of marks? she
questioned—beside his mouth. They were deep marks, put there by a woman,
or perhaps they had been put there by the cows in their failures to
fulfil the promises he devised for them.
Then she remembered hell. A clear sharp memory, acutely realized, the
more acutely realized in that it fell in this moment of pleasure. Self
appeared, saturated with memory-realization, herself subtracted from the
earth and elevated to a pinnacle of searching, her body hungering, seeing
itself slipping into decay. All the disconnections operating, everything
was lost then but Frank. Frank in her hands and her fingers, her
shoulders, her name, her sight, her sleep. Pure and excruciating distress
shook her as if it were a chill and she called to her grandfather,
Anthony Bell, but when she was more quiet again, the memory receding, she
called in mind the newer name.
She heard the noises of the night, the treefrogs and crickets, the frogs
at the wet place beyond the milk house. The frogs set themselves against
the night as if to saw a hole into the dark, but when they were done
there was a season of quiet. The night was warm and the people indoors
slept noisily, their breathing and their sighs in sleep a protest against
the heat. She heard them faintly as they moved or threshed at their
beds or sucked inward at the hot close air. Outside the purity of the
night spread over the cut fields and the cows were laid down on the open
pasture-top near the ragged tree. Steps came off the farther slope, man’s
steps, sublimated and hollowed by the distance, feet walking through the
grass, about the barns, off to the farther end of the pasture. They were
lost then and denied as being delusion, an impossible. The night was warm
and all but herself were asleep, drugged by the heat indoors. She saw
them laid out to sleep or crumpled into relaxed postures, in their beds,
up and down the countryside, from farm to farm, abstracted, a man asleep.
Man lies down to rest, but the cows rest half kneeling, their crumpled
forefeet ready to arise. She saw Caleb Burns asleep.
The leaves of the poplar tree lifted and turned, swayed outward and all
quivered together, holding the night coolness. The steps returned to the
pasture, going unevenly and stopping, going again, restless. They went
across the hollow place and came back again toward the rise where the
cows lay. They walked among the sleeping cows, but these did not stir for
it was a tread they knew.