Chapter V: Part 5

When the obligation of the lesson was done she went to her room and later she lay on her bed to stare at the ceiling until her grief took shape. At first there were three Conways to play back and forth in her mind, the Conway of the first fact, as he had been Friday evening and many another evening, charming, negligent, beautiful to see, kissing her at the door, flinging her a smile from beyond the lamp. Over against this lay the awful second fact, Conway a charred, shrunken ember lying in a coffin which no one dared open, which would never again be opened. This was Conway. Up the street half a mile, in an avenue of trees to a doorway, through a hall and a parlor, and there lay the horrible fact. She was not afraid of it. It was real, there, never to be denied, and if he could endure it so could she. The second fact was hers now. The third fact grew together, gaining strength as the minutes passed, dominating all the rest. This was Conway become a memory. The third fact had already begun to supplant the first. The fact of him as a memory, as finished, as perpetual now and unchanged, stole over the first and dimmed it. At this recognition she wept with more pain and reached for the first fact with greater eagerness, but the third prevailed until the first became an utter shadow and went before the day was done.

She lay on her bed, spent with weeping, remembering now the alarms of the night and knowing that they had been the last cry of Conway’s circumstance. She probed her memory of the night to penetrate its knowledge for every substance and sound, and she remembered the flat toneless matter that had cluttered her rest. She turned continually to Albert as the one who must give her comfort and ease her pain, and her longing for him became perpetual. She knew that he had gone across the state on some mission, but she thought that he would come to Conway’s funeral when he learned of the disaster. Over and over she decided that she would send him a message telling him to come, and she thought of his grief as identical with her own. Conway had been their friend, Albert’s first, and through Albert her own. She would weep anew to recall how much the two of them had loved Conway. But she kept to a passive rôle and sent no message. Albert did not come. He had been traveling all week into remote countries and was not easily reached by the telegraphed communications which someone sent.

The days passed slowly while her life seemed suspended in grief, days scarcely noticed until many of them were gone and Conway had become the last fact utterly, had achieved dissolution. He lay intangible now among the elements of a past that had slipped by while she was unaware.

* * * * *

Jane Moore came once or twice after she and Theodosia had sat together to talk of Conway’s death, but presently she was occupied with other friends who lived out the Olivet Pike and with these she had begun to go to Sulphur Springs, where there was a hotel and a pavilion for dancing. Frank would come to sit, stopping on his way from the town, or he would offer a bit of rowing on the pool beyond the fairgrounds. She went again and again to see Americy, and she would sit quietly on the chair opposite while Americy ironed for an hour, watching her motions and her changing face. Americy would talk with a slight embarrassment of one thing and another, and Theodosia would look intently at her skin, her looks, her clouded eyes, her hand on the iron, the still veins in her moving wrist where the blood must surely throb. A faint sickness would spread over her, so delicate as to be scarcely perceived, but she would cling to her act of penetration, probing to come nearer to the life under the brown flesh. She would watch Americy’s finger bones as they articulated in moving the iron and in settling the linen in a smooth path before her. She would ask all she dared of her life, her men, her lovers.

“Who’s your fellow now, Americy?”

“Aw, go on!”

“Your man, who is he now?”

“I got no man now.”

“You got a beau, you know you have.”

In the word, beau, she would edge away from a direct scrutiny of Americy’s affairs, diverting the question to gain more space for the discussion. “You know you’ve got a beau. Who takes you places?”

Americy was embarrassed. “I goes by my own self. I don’t need no beau.”

Looking at Americy’s drooping eyelids she would try to detect the nature of her wish, her pleasure, to go into her bosom and know its need, into her body, her limbs, her passive presence. Americy had had many men, that she knew. Did she have more than one at a time, she would wonder, and again she would plead with the brown veins at the wrist above the smoothing iron, with the swaying gestures of the hand above the board, to know what was the quality of the passion that bent Americy to her way of life, pity and pride and tenderness making within herself an emotion which might have been called love. Lethe was usually gone from the house, for she was working as a cook somewhere. If she were at hand she kept aloof, but even in her absence she was more easily comprehended as holding more direct passions.

“You could bring your clo’s for me to do same as always,” Americy said. “You learned me to play and I’d as lief as not do up your clo’s all time.”

Americy had mastered the chords slowly, but she liked to drone the songs that were sung at the church, and Theodosia helped her to set the tunes to the guitar—_Beulah Land_, _I Saw My Jesus_, _Tell It Again_, _Come Sinner Come_, and _Glory to His Name_. Once when Theodosia saw her own face in the dim glass above Americy’s bureau she searched it there, in this strange place. “Lethe hates me,” she thought on the instant, seeing her thin curving lips. It seemed to her that she lived with only a part of her being, that only a small edge of her person lifted up into the light of the day. “Lethe hates me,” she thought, and her mind was fascinated by Lethe’s strong will and by her indifferent enmity that was manifested by her continued absence from the cabin. Feeling herself a commonplace, she left the music when the needs of it were satisfied and went again to sit before Americy’s ironing table and listen to her reserved disclosures. “What am I to her?” she would question, searching into the relation of flesh to flesh.

She turned again and again to Albert, remembering Conway, clung to him in her suffering and implored him silently to come to her, to reconcile her to the loss. He was from the town much of the time, but, returned, he was seen continually with Florence now. Theodosia rejected Florence from her passion; since Conway’s loss she was of no account although she was allowed, recognized. Albert might choose and have whomever he would; this was no matter. But continually she listened for his step on the gallery floor and for his voice in the hallway. Walking to Americy’s cabin in the bright sun of a midday, she would suddenly see his strong firm hand, sunburned and full of power, taking its heavy certain being in gestures or in quiet. She thought that he would surely come some day to sit quietly with her, to talk with her sadly of Conway. She determined that she would contrive to see Albert again although each plan for an encounter was at once rejected. Americy would push her iron over a reach of damp cloth and leave a smooth trail of steaming surface behind, delicately pleased but embarrassed at the visit, and she would talk guardedly, disclosing as little as she might of her life and the life of Lethe. Sitting before her, watching the magic of the iron as it turned rough garments into smooth, Theodosia would know that she must somehow meet Albert again, that she would send him some message which would bring him to her door.

Once when she had brought her freshened clothing home, when she unrolled the papers from about it and prepared it for the drawer, she saw that a garment had been torn apart. The frayed piece was an underslip which was decorated with lace and fine stitchery. It had been torn open by an angry hand; one great tearing motion had sundered it from the hem to the embroidered upper portion where the enforced stitching had given it strength to resist the angry rending hands. It was frayed in many directions when renewed strength had been set upon it, and she knew that it had stood in the way of some quarrel between Americy and Lethe, that it had been torn apart by Lethe’s hands. She tossed the destroyed garment into a trash basket.

She returned over and over to her need to have Albert come, to have him satisfy some longing by coming through her door and sitting a half-hour in her parlor, but each suggestion her mind made toward the promotion of this imperfectly formed wish was repelled. Her divided wishes, the one prompted by her scorn of him, the other by her strange need, defeated each other continually. Once in a moment of clear-seeing she thought, with a flash of cruel wit, that her real need of him was her need to express to him her contempt of him and her indifference of his way, but this moment was fogged as, day after day, her sense of him yearned toward him. She knew of his coming and going, in and out of the town, with intuitive accuracy. But one day the news of his marriage with Florence spread over the town. They had gone away together and would live thereafter in Lexington, Albert’s work being now centered in that city.

* * * * *

It seemed to her that some barrier had come between her and the violin, as if the instrument were vaguely at fault in that it had allowed some intrusion. At intervals some words of the teacher had touched on the limits of the capacity of her hand. Casually once, as she turned the pages of some catalogue and wrote numbers on a paper, the teacher had said, “Beyond you,” or again, “The fingering beyond your reach,” or “Out of your reach.” These phrases built a deep unrest in Theodosia’s days. She went to sit before Americy’s iron and talk of Americy’s life, her hymns, her revivals, her chords, her work. As a commonplace having some relation to the early summer, she arose each morning and set about her tasks. Her playing was tentative, obeying only the suggestions of the teacher, withdrawing from searchings and explorations. The instrument had retreated from her old knowledge of it. She accomplished with skill all that the teacher required and heard the praise she earned with a leap of satisfaction within. She rested upon her perfections where they lay bounded and within her degree, and she surpassed herself at the designated tasks.

She went to the hill overlooking the town, to the spot where Conway was buried, taking Frank to walk there with her. The grave was near the brow of the hill on the side that sloped back from the town, slightly under the top of the rise where the enclosure looked toward the hill farms beyond. She walked about in the summer grass, which was tall now, much of it in blossom, and she heard in some dim way the talk Frank made as he sauntered by her side, as he spoke of Conway, of the grass, of the pine trees, as he quoted something about pines and grass. The high points of the town stood visible off to the north, and the church steeples arose among the tall trees, and a bit of the roof of the Seminary. To the south the graves dipped up and down with the flow of the near hillside and fell away at a fence where a rose clung, but beyond the rose lay a field of oats, ready to cut. It was a strange place in which to find Conway, and a renewed aspect of him arose with a new flavor. The mockingbird that sang on the fence near the rose began to partake of him. The tall grass waved in the late afternoon sun, swaying about throughout the entire graveyard, even over the new mould that had covered him but a few months. The town stretched away to an immeasurable distance, and the song of the mockingbird became the atmosphere one breathed, a touched substance, giving life to the breath of man, set about the earth to flow with the winds. The tall swaying grass with its sunlight was the people of the earth, the reason for the continuance of the world. When Frank spoke she folded his words together, having subtracted from them their meaning, and dropped them over the brow of the hill beyond the reach of the grass, beyond the mockingbird’s song.

“This grass needs to be cut, I declare,” he said. “It’s a shame. It looks as bad as a wilderness.”

“It’s tall. Everywhere. In bloom,” she said. “There might be a field-lark somewhere.”

“It’s the fault of the committee. There are some things....”

She had folded his words together at the moment of her reply and dropped them beyond the sublimated air of the hilltop. The third fact of Conway prevailed now to its last power and had shared now with every beautiful object which her mind might entertain. The former world had departed, shrunken to a minute size in its going, flattened to commonplace, gone with the departed town, the old air, the trite matter of talk. Because she had never before brought Conway into this intense relation with the song of a bird and with the grass, the act brought him nearer each instant. The sense of her losses lay above the hilltop world which was aerated by the mockingbird’s song, and it spread as a cloud drawing nearer, a desolation as yet to be realized.

“Everybody liked him,” Frank said. “He was just like his brother Reginald. Everybody likes Reg. It was careless to leave a lamp all night under an incubator, wasn’t it? It’s queer nobody heard the explosion.”

“Let’s sit here a little while, under this pine tree. On the grass.”

“I went to the creek to fish one summer with a party, Conway in the lot. I remember how we laughed and talked all the best part of a night once, a big log fire, and how Conway looked, by the fire, in the light of the blaze. Laughed till he shook all over when Albert told the one about the deacon up at Elijah Church. Did you ever hear Albert tell about Deacon Pope’s prayer?”

“No. Or maybe I have. I don’t know.”

She sat under the pine tree, inattentive to Frank’s story, lost in a haze of grief which was no less ever-present because she did not know exactly where it centered. She knew that if Frank had not been present she should actually have wept, but that he held the flow of her grief intact with some hushing power, that his presence called for definite tears, exactly wept, committed to a future which she had now obliterated.

Alone in her room when the walk was over, she remembered the beauty of the hilltop and the sublimated air of the bird’s song, and the grass that swung backward in the late afternoon sunlight. As her memory grew more intense, dwelt upon, the intensity of her grief multiplied, gathered now into a passion for Conway, whom she was free to mourn and long for. She remembered every gesture and posture of his body, conned each one to bring it back to being, and focused about his jealousy, which had become precious now, and about his bitter, hurt replies, that fell the more poignantly in that they were surrounded by his lightness and carelessness. She was free to love him and to want him. Her hate of Albert inverted itself and became an intense passion for Conway. She searched for a small picture of him, turning out boxes and drawers in a state of violent grief which centered half the night about the finding of this small physical token. When she had found it she set it upon her mantel in the place of honor from which she had withdrawn pictures of Albert, of Ruth, and of Jane.

Preoccupied with her grief she took less account of the town. Jane came no more to sit on her piano bench and twitter at the notes of the music, or if she came to the portico for a brief call she seemed business-like, abstracted, mirthless. Ruth had found diversions in another street. She saw them clearly now. They had liked her sincerely, in their ways, but they had liked her as a means of access to Conway and Albert. They had poured their friendship over her for this.

* * * * *

She practised in her chamber now, above the street, close to the lower boughs of the great elm tree, remote from interruption, and in her zeal Conway kept with her in mind, delighting with her in each graceful run and in each whispering trill. She would speak to him continually, commenting on each effort and each achievement, assuming him in mind as a companion. “You hear that?” she would say, or “How’s that for a few first-hand remarks on the joy of being above the ground? Of running around the wheel of the seasons?” Or, inarticulate before what she did, articulating only with the cry of the strings, she felt such rush of impulse as would say: Here in this succession of sound cries out a sorrow greater than our personal sorrows, the sorrow of the whole of man at finding himself in an earth addicted to time. As would say: Here in the adagio man spreads out the infinite tentacles of his multiform being, his personality, and lays, kind for kind, each sensitive feeler upon a like that protrudes from the Source. As would say: This theme, a pastoral from some central-European rolling plain, is ours as we sit in the heart of this land where the seasons rise and fall in waves, a melancholy procession, and men mark their time with their labor as they roll the soil over from year to year endlessly plowing. Conway was with her in these articulations, in the breath of her throat, in the beat of her right hand over the gut wires. The people went by, fluttering to the county fair and back, and August was over. A disaster from the outside world, reported, passed over the town and left a ripple of hysteria. Theodosia played in her chamber, except on the day set for the appearance of her master, above the shock of the street, above the calamity, relating her carefully guarded playing, guardedly within its bounds, to Conway. The town had begun to rumble of a mishap of its own.

Through the buying and selling of the town, the greetings and passings here and there, a mishap had begun to be felt. A young woman, a girl named Minnie Harter, was known to be bearing a child. Whispers of this had floated over the gossip of the streets and the porches. Minnie was a plump soft girl who limped slightly when she walked. She lived with her parents at the end of the street, near the house where Conway had lived. Whispers said that she had had too many intimates. The long roadway up the avenue under the trees now led to Minnie’s door as the shock of her ill-doing mounted and frayed out to a settled fact. The rumor of Minnie came upon Theodosia as she worked over the adagio one summer morning, or it faintly colored her sense of her act as she darned the household linens that were now worn and thin. Looking intently at the lapping threads of the cloth as she darned, she penetrated the folding lines of cotton, one up and one down, over and over, they unsatisfied and completed in one instant, and she searched minutely into the flash of recognition that had accompanied her first seeing when reality had lain on the instant just behind the warp and weft of these accurately braided lines of old worn cloth. “Some truth is near at hand,” she thought, striving to regain the acumen of the lost moment. She became more cool and more abstracted, passing to another mood regarding her playing, as if some cold disinterested part stood outside herself. In this temper she searched into the limitations of her hand, at the end of an hour of duos with her master, and pried out each truth, flinching from nothing, testing her reach as if it were the reach of some other musician, some hand remote from her in which she had only a curious interest.

“And that marks the limit of what you can do in that direction.... Your mind can go beyond your hand....” The master made her points clear.

Theodosia leaned over the instrument, her mind cool before these words, a sensation as of a keen blade cutting a cold path down her back near her spine. “Then I’ll make a new instrument,” her sad arrogance said. Determination yielded nothing before the words of her master. “I’ll not be stopped,” she said. “If this instrument can’t serve me.... I’m still here.”

At practice her mind turned continually to Conway, relating to him the curious limitations of musical machines, tools, implements, and retold to him her predicament in half-amused despair that yielded nothing. “We’re here,” she said, addressing Song, taking Conway with her as she walked impudently up to the face of Song. “They can remake the thing,” she said. “They must make a new kind.... You’re not done with us yet.”

The summer was passing. Mr. Reed called on Anthony again, sitting with him in the shade of the gallery, and after his departure Theodosia felt the renewed distress that had settled over her grandfather’s day. Ruth Robinson came but seldom now, or if she came she seemed vague, matter-of-fact, unlovely, preoccupied, ready to go soon after her coming. “Ours is a dull house now,” Theodosia thought, and she turned again to her grandfather’s need. She decided to stop her lessons for a time, for she was afraid that the bill would never be paid. She scarcely dared to give her distrust of her grandfather’s further ability to pay as a reason for her act, and so she asked for a vacation. She was in need of a rest, she said. She stressed her weariness and recalled that the summer had been very warm. Having established the season of vacation with the teacher, she said, “I will pay whatever is owed. You may send the bill to me.”

One or two students had applied to her for tuition, and presently another came, boys who were too immature in their talent to interest her own teacher, and she thought that after a little she might find a class of beginning students in the town. She practised many hours, relating her playing over and over to her devotion to Conway, glancing at his beautiful pictured face. “We’re here,” she said, addressing Song with her mind where the value of a phrase was tasted even before it was played and where harmonies were heard. She took delight in the lyric quality of the instrument and in her running fingers, and she had a pensive happiness in the running, singing parts she played, or she supplied a second-fiddle part in her thought, her ear leaning inwardly to listen. The whispers of the town came but faintly into her intense preoccupations. “I can’t be called upon to decide the paternity of Minnie Harter’s young one,” she said, addressing the town as she set her bow over the strings, a cruel saying, as she knew, as she commented upon all cruelty then with plucked wires. “Her lameness has set her apart,” the plucked strings said, “and her isolation has made her wanton.”

“A smart say-so,” her own lips replied to the last speaker. “It’s easy to summarize other people in their talents and ways. It’s all, likely, not so easy to Minnie Harter herself.” The dialogue continued.

The whispers of the town became less hushed. They began to penetrate her chamber or to meet her in her walks, to meet her in Frank’s diligent talk of other matters. The settled fact, accepted by the town, came accidentally upon her in her passing to and fro, came from Aunt Bet, from Siver’s shuffled tread and shifted glance, from Americy’s lowered eyelids. Horace brought the last bold word, the summary. Minnie Harter had called out a name in the hour of birth.

“I see by the papers that Conway was acquainted with Minnie,” Horace said. “Did you know Minnie, Dosia?”

“Oh, yes. At school, I knew her.”

“Oh, incomparable brown eyes and the lispen tongue. Just enough limp to make her, you might say, appealen. ‘Oh, wait for me, Minnie,’ and her walk said, ‘I’ll wait.’ Conway knew Minnie. All the town in a whisper. Simplest thing on earth. Not worth one damn ‘hush.’ Easy to know and lived next door.”

“The story they tell, it’s not true,” she said softly. “It’s not true.”

Some part of her knowledge of which she had not been taking account seemed to be speaking to her suddenly out of a confused dark, speaking, rejecting, foretelling. Indignation and pain clouded her thinking, and her protective sense surrounded all that was left of Conway so that she spoke angrily, arisen now to become a flame of anger. “It’s not true. Minnie Harter lied. What is there to do?... In the face of the town what can I do?”

* * * * *

Her business with the three students occupied very much of her time, for she helped them generously with their practice. She knew that the report Minnie Harter had made was not true. It might have been true in the nature of the earth, but it was not in this case true. On the second day after her talk with Horace she knew again within herself that the report was untrue. She was busy all day mending undergarments for Anthony. Cotton cloth drawn together with sewing thread, scrutinized minutely, told her a final thing about the form of yarn which was in reality floating undevised lint brought into a line by spinning, bound together in a knitted chain of net. The lint floated from the design in a continual wasting, perpetual dissolution, and her own mind strove to bind its own threads, to regather its lint and impose some well-knit conclusions into the chaos. On the third day she knew again that the story was untrue. Minnie Harter had, she divined, claimed Conway as it were out of the grave to give herself a posthumous romance, a right lover. With this story she would arise in dignity in the town. The infant had been still-born and after a little all but the richly tragic parts of the drama would be forgotten.

Passing in her room, Theodosia observed that she had removed Conway’s picture from her shelf although she scarcely remembered the act. It had been put into a box of photographs, taken up without passion and slipped inside the cover of the box at some casual moment between coming and going. She laughed once a swift, cruel laughter that bent downward the corners of her mouth at the spectacle of two women quarreling over a dead man, herself one. She discovered that she had no quarrel beyond that induced by friendly loyalty. A suspicion grew in the arising confusion of her thought that her own posthumous passion for Conway had been identified with her lost hope of the fiddle, with her tenderness and self-love that had been shielding her limitation from inner examination and despair. The story remained untrue, but Conway grew remote for her, increasing in remoteness as three days wore away. The shock of the argument opened new vistas down into the dark of her inner thought. She remembered him tenderly, as dead, as wronged in his grave. She thought of him less often.

FOUR

She ran out of the house at dusk, her fiddle in her hand, fiddle and bow clutched in her fingers. She went rapidly down the street, thinking that she would walk toward the pool, toward the fields, toward some point far beyond the town. She would hurl fiddle-playing into the tops of tall trees and hurl it again into the darkening sky. The ripples of the water would be black and the plowed fields would be black where the dusk had sunk into the autumn furrows.

Before the livery stable she saw Stiggins, who stood listlessly, his hands in his pockets, swaying unevenly from one foot to the other. The wind that would have blown the dark water of the pool was shifting the straws and trash of the stable about before Stig’s feet, making a shallow drift in the dirt and refuse.

“Come on with me, Stig,” she said. “Come and go with me where I go.”

He shuffled uncertainly, hearing her words slowly. “Come on now, Stiggins,” she said.

She turned about and went toward Hill Street, Stiggins following after her a few steps. It was the hour when the street-lights were not yet lit and the people who passed were gray undistinguished motions drifting unevenly through the fog of the first-dark. Now and then as she went she called to Stiggins and was assured that he was following by his shuffling uneven steps that quickened at each cry. She went to Lethe’s cabin and knocked at the door, and at Americy’s call she went inside, passing swiftly over the threshold. Stig remained on the doorstep staring, but after a moment he crouched in the doorway. Americy brought a chair to the middle of the floor and offered it without a greeting. Then she went to sit on the bed, her accustomed place, and Lethe turned slightly about from the table, where food had been eaten. A few crusts of bread lay on a plate, but the other dishes were empty. Lethe was sullen, sitting turned away from the door, and when Theodosia was seated she moved slightly and spoke with contempt, speaking softly.

“You come here and all the town will be a-talken. You want the town to be a-talken about you-all? What you want t’start up everybody a-talken about you for?”

“What’s to talk about now?”

Stig began to mumble half-articulate words, looking at the floor with a strange smile about his eyes. “A leetle scrop to eat, a leetle leavens. All I want is a leetle mess to eat. The pickens on a ham bone is good, the pickens on a ham bone. Have you-all got e’er ham bone around? All I want....”

Theodosia took her fiddle to her chin and began to play Americy’s tune, touching the bow lightly to the strings. The eyes in Stig’s face were bent down slightly at the corners, wearily drooped, but his lips smiled at the music. Theodosia remembered at that moment that Lethe had once had a child. “They buried Lethe’s baby today,” some voice was remembered saying. “Another death on Hill Street.” A child epidemic had been sweeping over the town. Remembering the infant she looked at Lethe with a searching gaze, the dead child and Lethe’s grief in her mind, wondering at the nature of this grief and searching Lethe’s face anew for some remnant of it.

“Skeeter Shoots, he’s got a thing like that-there to play on,” Stig said, speaking suddenly in a flare of words, half shouting. “Only he plays his’n on his mouth, plays it with his spit.” He began to hum aloud and to sing unmusical sounds, his hands crumpled at his lips. “Plays on it with his spit in his mouth,” he said. “Goes like this-here.”

“What you bring Stig here for?” Lethe said. “Did I tell you to bring Stig here?”

He began to tell of some confused happening which was related to the mouth harp in his mind. A rat had been killed in the corn room, a half-starved rat that had been shut into a tank for many days. He talked, catching at his breath, gleeful over the story, waving his hands. “We kill ol’ rat in corn room,” he said. “We brain ol’ rat one day in corn room.”

“What’s he want?” Lethe asked.

“He don’ want e’er thing,” Americy said, speaking gently. “Leave him be.”

“There was a rat, ol’ rat,” Stig began afresh. “Got shut in water-tank. Tin water-tank, not got no water in it. You ought to ’a’ seen ol’ rat! Skeeter Shoots he says to me, ‘Look at that-there rat, God knows, shut inside that-there tank. Been shut up three weeks since that-there rat got shut up since tank was open last. Skeeter Shoots says.”

Lethe turned back to the table, her elbows on the board, her knees crossed. Her body was bent slightly forward as if she were deeply fatigued.

“What’d you bring him here for?” she asked. “What’s he here for now?”

“What is it you know about him?” Theodosia asked sharply, turning suddenly on Lethe, unafraid in her sudden surprise.

“I know enough. I ain’t been borned so long ago for nothing.”

“A ham bone,” Stig began to whimper. “Ham-meat is right good now. Ham.”

“You can take him on away when you’ve done whatever you come for.”

“We all say, ‘Whoopee! come see ol’ rat.’ So weak in his legs he can’t walk on his feet. Crawl on his belly. Slow, go like a snail-bug. See ol’ rat go up stable. Ol’ rat. ‘Take ker, ol’ rat!’ We all watch ol’ rat go towarge corn room. Slow, slow, towarge corn room.” He made slow creeping gestures with his fingers on the floor.

“I know enough. Was I borned last week? For God’s sake!”

“You hate me, Lethe,” Theodosia said after a little, speaking through Stig’s garbled recitative that continued. “You hate me. What makes you hate me? What did I ever do to you?”

“Was I borned last week? Don’t you reckon I know your tricks? Is he anybody to me?”

Americy began to play one of her tunes, laboring with the chords and humming softly, half whispering, and Theodosia watched the fingers on the strings or she plucked her own strings to make harmonious chords with the tune. The music set Stig’s eyes in a dance and renewed his memory of the scene in the corn room. His voice was lifted to a higher pitch.

“We all says ‘Whoopee! Come see ol’ rat.’ Crawl on his belly. Go a leetle piece, stop, go a leetle piece. Three weeks in that-there tank and ne’er a bite inside him.”

“For God’s sake!” Lethe said. She turned wearily toward the table again. “Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Ol’ rat,” Stig said. “Rat go crawl, crawl down towarge corn room. We all walk behind ol’ rat and see ol’ rat go crawl down towarge corn room. Skeeter Shoots says ‘Come see ol’ rat.’ Says, ‘Naw, don’t kill yet. Watch ’im crawl down towarge corn room.’ Take ol’ rat, I reckon, hour. I go water Rose and hitch up Beckie. Come back. ‘Ain’t ol’ rat got there yet?’”

“To let Minnie Harter take your man away. For God’s sake! You’re easy. To let Min Harter get ahead on you. The lame slut.” Lethe spoke with great passion, turning half about and staring at Theodosia, eyeing her form up and down.

“What you know about that?” Theodosia asked. She turned back to Americy’s playing again. “What do you know about that?”

“Plays a tune right outen his spit,” Stig said.

“Oh, God’s pity on us all,” Americy said. She was rocking herself forward and back.

“What’s God got to do about this?” Theodosia asked. She turned on Americy, her words like an outcry. Americy stopped her rocking and sat stilled, afraid before the rush of the question.

“What’s God got to do? I do’ know,” Americy said. And then she whispered, “Oh, God ’a’ pity.”

“Where is any God?”

“A ham bone to gnaw on’s all I want. My spit wants a ham bone to lick,” Stig said.

“Oh, I d’know,” Americy said, speaking to both of them. “Oh, I got no ham bone.” Her face was bent low and her voice was low.

“Ol’ rat go crawl, crawl, so weak he can’t go.”

Theodosia looked at the small flame in the lamp behind the dull burnt chimney, her eyes on the little apple of light that throbbed unevenly there. She was thinking of the light as a small flower in bloom, and she traced its essence to Americy’s face and then to Stig’s forehead where it shone against his brow. The shadows beside Americy’s nostrils made hollows in the long, blank brown of her face, her two dark eyes bent over the guitar in a stupid anxiety to accomplish a chord she had known a few days before. There was a step outside on the roadway, and presently steps were moving away from the house. Somebody had been looking in at the window. Theodosia stirred a little in her chair and her own part in the room troubled her, in the house. “What am I here? What to them?” she was asking herself. She sat in the stiff chair, in the middle of the floor, facing Americy, feeling Lethe’s hate. “Her hate pushes me back, but it does not push me out at the door,” she was thinking. She began to play some melody on the fiddle, a melody which she broke and distorted, rubbing the bow softly over the gut, making a thin, distracted music, unjointed, without logic. Lethe turned away and sat toward the table, and Stig had begun to tell his story again. Lethe’s hate did not forbid her, but rather it pricked the air with some fertile pollen and prepared every moment a newer menace, and to each moment the fiddle responded with soft demonic music, ill-flavored, crooked, sinister. She brought her playing to crashing discords, softly played, a disturbance working upward through half-tones, and Lethe turned about, her head and shoulders facing the fiddle, and said:

“To let Min Harter take your man. God’s sake. Right afore your own eyes. Would I stand that-there, me? Min lame and you got two good legs yourself.”

“You hate me hard, don’t you, Lethe,” Theodosia said, speaking sharply. She tried to turn back to Americy’s song.

“Or let Flo Agnew. Some said it was Flo Agnew got your goat. God’s sake! You a tame one.” Lethe’s words were bitter to her own taste now, turned back upon herself, as if she were defending herself.

“Where’s Ross now?” Americy asked, speaking softly, afraid of Lethe’s passion. Her tone was slightly knowing, as if she gave a taunt in defense of Theodosia. Softly spoken, “Where’s Ross by now?”

“He works now of a night at the brick-yard, works all night at the brick-kiln.”

“It was said Ross was sweet on Lou at the lodge supper a Sat’day, sweet as pie on Lou, was said.” Americy spoke to herself, in a dream, and she began to rock to and fro again. “That’s what was said a Sunday at the church.”

“If he spends one quarter on her,” Lethe said, laying down her hard oath with slow, careful words, “If he spends one quarter on her or walks in the dark once beside her, I’ll ... I’ll cut her body open with a hog knife. One time, and I’ll do it, so help me God.”

Stig was telling his story, making small tracks with his fingers on the bare floor, his mouth dripping in his eagerness to relate the happenings. Theodosia looked at Lethe continually now and she saw her hate arise to an intense power and she knew, seeing her, the force of hate where it mounted, direct, willing, uncurbed by self-searching. Looking intently at Lethe she merged for the instant with her and felt the sting of hate where it spread over her own face and her breast.

“That’s what was said,” Americy whispered, staring at the floor. “Sweet on Ross, Lou was, and him sweet back on her, was said.”

“One time, and I’ll cut her open with a hog knife. She knows I will. She better know.” A cry.

“Crawl, crawl, crawl down stable. Climb step. Can’t climb last step. Too steep. Skeeter Shoots, he says, ‘I help ol’ rat up last step.’ Sets ol’ rat down on top. ‘See?’ Skeet says. ‘Here’s corn room.’ We kill ol’ rat inside corn room.”

“Americy, have you got a soul, a spirit?” Theodosia asked. “Did you inherit one? Did you?”

“I saw the glory o’ the Lord one time,” Americy said, half singing. “I saw the Lamb o’ God. Oh, my Jesus!”

Theodosia arose quickly from her chair and stood by the door, her hand having flung open the door. “Stig, have you got a soul? Inside you somewhere? Inside?” She knew that she was persisting cruelly. She leaned over him where he sat by the frame of the door.

“I got a hungry belly insides me. I got a tape-snake wants a ham bone to gnaw,” Stig said. “I mean what I say.”

She was leaning over him, looking at him intently, seeing his large heavy face from above and watching its changing shadows, looking at his dirty brown coat and his frayed breeches that bulged into the light where his knees were raised. He seemed to be chewing at something, his lips working in and out. Her eyes centered to his hands that drifted about over his thighs and cupped together beyond his knees.

“Hold out your hands, Stig,” she said, “hold out your hand. Your hand.”

His hand, broad in the palm, flexible, sensitive to the boards of the floor, was stretched, palm downward, beyond his foot, or it crept over the floor; it turned upward and moved back and forth before her. The long reach of the thumb and the span of the thumb and the fingers assailed her, and the hand fiddled a moment on the air. Then it crumpled together, bones and muscles flexed, and withdrew to the shadow under his knee. “The fiddle hand,” she said, standing straight beside the door now. “You got the fiddle hand, Stig,” she whispered. “You got it.”

“I got a hungry belly insides me, that’s what I got. I already told you-all now. I got a hungry gut.”

She ran out the door, making a clatter on the steps, flinging the gate back after her. The lights were lit along the streets and lanes now and people were stirring about. The town seemed of one essence, every detail flattened to the mass, and she walked as if she walked alone, arrogant, stepping upon the closely conglomerated matter of voices, stones, shadows, faces, acquaintance, history. Singularly marked, standing above the stones on which she stepped, above the earth on which she walked, she came down the street and entered her gate, detached from her own entrance, standing above the click of the latch, above the segments of light that lay as broken rectangles on the gallery floor.

* * * * *

Anthony had passed into a delusion, imagining he was in some other place; he talked of a sea which he thought could be seen from the window and he would ask the state of the tide. He called Theodosia by a strange name, Amelia, one she had never heard in the family before.

Theodosia set herself to gather a class of students for stringed instruments and presently she had as large a number as her time allowed, for a passing fancy for this kind of playing was spreading over the town. The house was desolate and poorly warmed. There was little fuel, and Aunt Bet sulked of insufficient supplies for the kitchen. Theodosia brought the children to the parlor and taught them there, wondering at Anthony’s myth of Amelia and a sea. Or passing away from his room after he had talked with her in his strange knowledge, she would look with an unyielding scrutiny at herself, at the myth of Anthony, to try to find some last sign of an inevitable substance or kind, perpetually existent, unchanged, beyond delusion. “I join hands with him, and he is gone,” she said.

“Tell Sylvester to put harness on the gray,” Anthony would say, or again, “High tide comes the second of the month, Amelia....” If he were from his bed he would sit very quietly, sinking slowly with the fire until he sat crumpled in sleep.

He had departed although he continued some manner of life. He never again called Theodosia by any name but Amelia. She fed him broth from a spoon and thus nourished his continuation while he had already gone into some memory, perpetually keeping there now. “He’s gone, he’s gone,” she said in her thought, “and I join hands with him,” and as she tuned some child’s instrument or busied herself with the lessons she leaped forward to try to experience entire dissolution, to consummate it for him, to foretell the encounter already well begun, stayed from any outcry by the enveloping confusion and distrust without and within.

His regard for Amelia was constant, tender, dispassionate, and a curiosity to know who this person could have been troubled her and set her to search among all the names she had ever heard spoken in the house. Or she asked her father.

“Who was Amelia in Grandfather’s life? When did Grandfather know Amelia?”

“Amelia? Search me. You can’t never tell about the old war horse. Lived a long time, he did, and he lived well. What’s one skirt more to the old war horse? But she was a lady nohow. You can set that much down for certain. The old war horse, his taste ran to ladies. No white trash in his loven days. Amelia was a lady.” Horace spoke with tenderness now.

“And who was Sylvester then?”

“No tellen. Some nigger, I reckon. I wouldn’t say.”

* * * * *

“You can’t tell. A man lives a long time. Goes through a heap from first to last.”

They sat in the dining-room waiting; there were many hours of waiting now. Horace talked incessantly, as if the summary of a life being enacted on the bed in the front room loosed his tongue and brought his own experience to a period, to a momentary full-stop. Or he talked of the old man and he was touched often with grief. Theodosia sat half-drowsed now, for she had slept but little of late. The words came as a continued recitative as Horace talked.

“The old man was a good soldier. Nobody could say any dirt of the old man. Proud of his lineage and rightly so. He loved the fine things of the mind, you might say, and pursued classical learnen. Faithful to his ideal, honest with all men, proud, gentle, tender as a woman. Why, Father was a traveler far and wide. In his youth he spent several years in travel—and a right smart of money too, I reckon. Few men of his generation were more widely read, more richly informed. I know what I say. In his youth he was an omnivorous reader, optimistic, salubrious, and among his colleagues there was none better fitted to lead and counsel the young. Faithful to his highest conceptions, an inspiration to the youth of his circle, he was intelligent, honest, proud, and as tender as a woman.”

He would grow tired and slip into his more negligent mood. “Did I ever tell you about the time the old man put up Leslie Robinson for Governor? He put out, I reckon, five thousand dollars to nominate Les Robinson. It’s a pity the old man ever turned his talent to politics, even for so short a time as it took to roll Les Robinson up into a spit-ball and throw him up on the roof of the convention hall. It’s all in the count. But Father believed in Les Robinson’s genius, wanted to see him win, and he had some notion to get something for himself out of it, I reckon. It’s no use now to waste breath on old measures. All the west counties got in line, and then somebody got all the mountains in a handful. It was a frame-up on Les. The owls of iniquity will howl. No use to go into it now. Money melts in politics like sugar in hot water. Nobody knows where’t goes. The most hearty desire to render succor, service, unselfish devotion to the common cause of myself and my country. I promise, if elected, to emulate the great heroes of our great commonwealth in word and act, to uphold the constitutions of the state and of the nation, to honor the law and the right, and to protect the home as the sanctuary of mankind.”

He was personally reminiscent now, his feet on a high hassock. “You remember, don’t you, Theodosia, the time I ran for the state senate?... It’s queer how it is, but your own brat that you begot yourself grows up and looks you full in the face and asks you with a sharp shoulder-blade, ‘What made you ever do that durned fool thing for?’ I’ve known you, Theodosia, ever since you were no bigger than my two hands, and earlier. Ronnie Robinson says, ‘Le’s make this one a toast,’ and then Mike O’Connor says, ‘We’ll drink to the health of the unborn.’ The time I acted Santy Claus in the church. I never told in your hearen about that, did I, Dosia?

“Folks there in the church thought here’s a good time to get Horace interested in church work, I reckon. Charlotte played the organ there part of the time. I recollect they asked me to act Santy Claus. ‘Who ever saw a Santy Claus six foot and over?’ I says, but they’d got their heads set to’t. Mike O’Connor says, ‘God’s sake, Horace!’ when he heard I was to be the Santy Claus. Christmas Eve at night, it was to be. Rosie Granger made the costume for me to wear, a red coat, boots with fur sewed on the top. A white beard all over my mouth. ‘I drink to the health of the unborn,’ Mike O’Connor says.”

She saw that he was repaying her for being a shoulder-blade to his pride. “I drink to the health of the unborn,” he repeated the saying. He was repaying her for all her scorn of him. “Tom Molloy says, ‘God’s sake, he won’t stay sober.’ I recollect after I got on my costume we all sat down in Tom Molloy’s room to wait till the church was ready, all the singen down and the tableau over, up the street from the church, in the old hotel. Miss Esther What’s-her-name down-stairs promised to call me when it was my time to go on, and we all sat down to a little cards, Tom Molloy, Mike O’Connor, and Ronnie Robinson, uncle to Ruth, he was. Sat down to a few hands of poker. Ronnie poured out the spirits and he poured big measures, and I sat there all dolled up for Santy Claus. ‘Christmas comes but once a year,’ Ronnie said, and then Mike stood up and, solemnly, he meant every word of it too, says, ‘We’ll drink to the health of the unborn.’ Charlotte was not goen out then. She was, you might say, in a delicate condition, and God’s sake! It was you yourself, Theodosia, that was curled up inside her asleep like a little kitten. God’s sake! Mike stood up, solemnly, too, meant every word he said, and out comes, ‘We’ll drink to the health of the unborn.’ Don’t you ever forget that about Mike. Then Ronnie in his turn, ‘I drink to the health of the unbegotten.’ I swear to God he did. After we’d drunk to the health of the unbegotten twice or three times Tom was so drunk he was beside himself and he says, ‘It’ll never do. It’ll never do on earth. He can’t stand up on his feet, let alone walk around a Christmas tree and hand out pretties,’ and we all sat down again to a little cards to steady our nerves.