Chapter VI: Part 6

“Tinkle, tinkle, merry bells. I remember the night as well, cold outside, the fire big in the grate, fireworks up the street where the boys were out, good cheer, good friends, and a world new-born. I recall I held two queens and was drawen for a third when up calls Miss Esther and says it’s time to go over, says they’re on the last piece, she can tell by the singen, and says they’ve already begun to light the candles on the tree. Then Tom says, ‘He can’t do it. He’s drunk. God’s sake, there’ll be a holy show if we let him get loose,’ and I called down to tell ’em to wait till I draw another queen, to keep the song on foot till I draw one time more. Well, we went over, and Ronnie laughed so hard he said he was in a paroxysm, and Mike says, ‘A what?’ Mike always was a good friend of mine. I recollect Tom was all in a tremble and he says, ‘It’ll be a holy show.’ Thought I couldn’t do it.”

A pity for him came into her mind and a hatred, cruel and bitter, for these men, his friends, some of them dead or gone somewhere. She remembered them now; they were scattered away from the town, or some of them were dead. She pushed her hair back from her forehead and sank into the hollows of the chair, her face turned toward him and away from the fire. She pitied him for a moment before he spoke again, but when he spoke her pity was lost, dispelled. “I handed out these little gauze sacks with candy showen through to fifty chaps. ‘I drink to the health of the unborn,’ Mike says. Old Mike. I handed out these little gauze sacks and I handed a good precept along with each one. I made a first-rate Santy Claus. ‘I drink to the health of the unbegotten,’ Ronnie says, over at the hotel before we set out for the church.”

She could see him as she sat. He ran his fingers through his hair, full of the pride of memory. He had forgotten her then. His blond hair stood over his head, ready always for his fingers when they responded to his pride, and she pitied again, seeing the bare spots above his temples. His great body was untouched by fatigue, was full of vitality. He could talk all night, she thought. He was speaking further, half slyly, making an end each instant and renewing himself.

“There’s more I could tell if I was of a mind to, but I won’t. After it was over we decided to take a walk in the cold to sort of clear up our heads. We took a walk after it was over, a long walk, took a walk....” His voice seemed delayed, the words slowly pushed apart to let clearer pictures stand between.

She was waiting on a street that was thronged with people, all of them hushed to await some event that gathered itself together and approached far up the street. “The street-parade,” a voice said. There was a wide promenade left for the procession which was coming far up the way, all the people standing back and all very still. The procession was near at hand then, was passing by. It was made up of women, long strange creatures, not old but haggard, spent, thin, labored. Their long lank garments hung to their ankles, but their meager thin forms could be seen through the dejected attire they wore. They walked in an irregular procession, more than a hundred although they were uncounted. It was a terror to see them.

They converged toward something, focused toward some following object or person although their faces were set forward and they marched on. Their steps plodded on the pavement. They centered back in a fan-shape of interest toward some other, some focus. Then there was a great blare of sudden music and, the women being finished, the object was at hand. It was the figure of a man, made of human flesh. He stood at ease on a dais or float and moved forward with the blare of music without effort. The women were gone now, their backs visible as they walked down the way of the procession, but the man was at hand in the midst of a great burst of horn music. He was more than life-size, was of heroic proportions, moving easily along on the float as if he were propelled by some unseen force engendered by the multitude of women. He was one, one man, heroic in size, bursting with strength and life, made of flesh like a man. He stood erect, his limbs apart, in a lewd pose. He was naked. On his body were marks then; on his chest they began, as small warts sprinkled over his breast, but lower, on his upper abdomen, they were larger and were shaped like small teats. They became larger as they descended over his abdomen and became more alive, each one more living than the last. They were rigid with life and were pointed forward toward the women.

Her own self stood at her elbow. She turned quickly about, toward her self, and she knew a deep wish, an ardent prayer that her self had not seen this last. Her self had not seen, was watching the women as they were going far down the street. The great fanfare of horns became suddenly remote and the float had passed by. Her self had not seen it. She was glad with a great thankful prayer. She found then, suddenly, that she had waked from sleep, that she was in the room with Horace, who was still speaking. His voice gathered itself back, closing the wide opening that had stood between his words. “_Silent Night_ and one thing and another,” the words said, gathering together into sense. “It was Mike proposed to take a walk, and we sang a long while out by the Johntown forks of the road.”

Her dream rolled back before her conscious eyes, vivid in memory now. The terrible drama of it stood it before her eyes as a passing design. Her picturing mind went back to it, detail by detail, fascinated and frightened. She put it together and took it apart, dwelling on each terrible picture, and saw the dreary women in procession, laboring forward, and then the man infinitely furnished, and then herself guarding her self from the sight. She went back to the beginning and stated it anew, bringing the pageant into play slowly. The women marched in their long drab garments, walking without music, laboring forward. The man then, and the blare of horns.

She walked to the opened door and looked at Anthony where he lay stretched out to die, covered as she had covered him. He was sleeping profoundly, his breath continuing. The evening was early as yet; later she would look for others to come, Frank and a friend or two of Horace’s. She went back to her seat by the fire, and Horace was still speaking.

“Then I recollect we set-to to finish up the job Mike proposed for us, to walk down every street and alley in town. ‘We’ll slight not one,’ Mike said. ‘No alley or by-way so humble it would be said we wouldn’t walk on it,’ Mike said. That’s how I ever got in the alley back of the jail, I reckon. ‘I drink to the health of the unborn,’ Mike said, up in Tom’s room before we went over to the Christmas tree, and had you in mind, you understand. Mike was always a good friend of mine. I’ve been richly endowed with friendship all my life, good friends as any you’ll ever see any man have.... That my father should ’a’ come you might say to poverty in his old age, to actual poverty. Those sneaken, low-down, three-times-damned hounds that got his property. I’ll do something about it yet. Put up Les Robinson for governor and all the low-down sharks in the state got the pickens of his purse. They’re not done with me yet, not by a jugful. That my father, Anthony Bell, should.... The old man adored you, always from the start. I could see it, you no bigger than two years old. Believed in you. ‘She’s got a rare musical talent,’ he said. Used to get warmed up over it, you no bigger than that high. What’ll become of us now, we two the only ones left? We’ll have to console each other, get near together. The world, it’ll be a lonesome place for me and you without the old man.”

Theodosia was distraught when he began to weep. She walked to the inner door again, but when she returned his head was in his hands, his body bowed forward. Retelling all that he had said of Anthony he cried aloud, “A fine old man. I’ll be a bereft man now,” turning his mind toward self-pity. “Come to your father’s arms, Dosia. My heart, it’s broken. Come kiss your poor old father.”

She kept in her place. “I’ll stay where I am,” she said.

She had moved to a chair toward the table, toward her grandfather’s door, and sat erect. The large heavy sideboard reached beyond her, too near, as if she were crowded into its shadow, as if she were something living that was being expelled from the dark, dead mass of the furniture, pushed outward into a quivering point of pain. She stared at the dim pattern in the carpet, or she moved and stood before the sideboard, her arms folded together. Her tears were gone now and she gathered herself together in the act of folding her arms. Expelled from the entire room, from all the history of the place, she turned about without guidance and stood near the wall.

“You poor child. Come to my arms,” he said, coming near to her.

“Your hands off me. I’ll stay where I am.” She felt herself to be diminished to a point of denial, concentrated to negation, and his grief continued.

“Over your grandfather’s dead body, around his deathbed, you wouldn’t kiss your own father. She’s hard, a hard girl....”

His tears dwindled to a close, lingering while she, feeling a summons, walked toward the inner door. She stood beside Anthony’s bed listening to his long, slow breathing, each breath fixed into a space of quiet. She opened the window to give him fresh cold air for his labored inhalations. One or two came, friends of Horace, and later Frank came. Theodosia sat by the bed alone, but now and then one of the men from the parlor would come to stay with her for a little. At midnight the night-lamp which Anthony liked to have near at hand burned out and she called Siver to carry it away and renew the oil. When he returned with it rubbed clean and restored, he set it on the table and stood beside the bed, charmed by the enactment there, and presently it appeared that Anthony would not breathe again, that one of the slowly breathed sobs that had quietly shaken his body had been his last breath. They, Theodosia and Siver, stood beside the bed, she making her farewell of the beloved cadaver. Siver found two silver pieces from his pocket and held them in his hand, uncertainly, or he showed them to her, and they seemed for the moment appropriate, as if they gave some sign or made some charm. Then Siver made as if he would lay them across Anthony’s eyelids and she consented. When he had done this she adjusted the coins with her own hands, and thus they closed his eyes. Then she called the men from the parlor.

* * * * *

After the funeral Horace went to Paducah to attend court. Mr. Reed called on Theodosia, his blank kindly face looking at her from across the parlor while she settled to her chair. He seemed weary of his mission before he had begun, knowing the end from the beginning. Anthony had made a will seven years earlier making her his sole heir. The formality of unfolding papers and citing memoranda was scarcely necessary, for there was nothing left. He might at any moment have forgotten to proceed, to have summed all with a sigh.

He told her how she might stay certain creditors and hold the house for a short time. “Until you can look about you a little,” he said. He had taken his hat from the table and had placed the memoranda on the piano. She might rent a part of the house, retaining a part of it for herself, he suggested. “Until you get used to things and can look about you a little.” She had already floated far from the hour and the interview in her apathy, in the numbness following the acceptance of the disclosures. He would give her any advice he could, he said; she might always apply to him. Apply for what? she wondered, and she closed the house door, looking intently at the door-frame, at the latch, at the baseboard and the floor, seeing them for the first time, seeing them as her possessions.

Horace did not return from Paducah. Time passed. He wrote once hurriedly asking her to send his clothing, or again, much later, he expressed affection and said that he had entered a law firm. In his final letter he said, “My practice needs new life and this city offers a splendid field. I shall start life anew. I shall grow younger every day in this new field. The broad river spreads out before me as I pen these lines.”

She walked through the house day after day, her house, experiencing ownership, making certain her knowledge of the place through which she had moved since first she could remember. She saw the stairway intently each time she mounted it, and saw the cabinets where the Indian hatchets and flints lay. She owned the house with a deep passion, possessed it, brick laid on brick in the chimney, the sagging floor of the upper gallery, the upper chambers. She had rented a part of it to a small family, retaining the parlor and the chamber above, and she had her meals at the renters’ table.

Frank looked at her complacently now across the space of the parlor. She saw the deeply subordinated admiration in his eyes which had their advice from his life design. He would sit at ease in his chair beside the lamp, Albert’s place, and listen to her playing, more at ease now that Albert and Conway were gone. His large, rugged, unbalanced face induced a thought of solid strength, of simplicity. “You could work him out by a formula,” she thought, as she saw him appropriate her music to his hour of relaxation. He had an office in the court square of the town and his talk was of wills, deeds, farms, contracts, or foreclosures, unless he remembered to quote from his favorite poets. He remembered the poets often. As a formula he sat now, out before the walls of the parlor, detached from her determination to keep her house, her inheritance.

The house was lost, but she was determined to regain it. It was hers by the deeply imbedded elements of memory, hers by all the fragrant, richly toned ideas that had grown with her own growth. She looked now at her first memory of the earth and saw in it its enhanced qualities as they had come to her first-seeing. She knew that she had been born at the farm, Linden Hill, but that she had been brought to the town house a few months after her birth, when Linden Hill had passed to other hands. She saw, as if it were a super-drama where time and event are enlarged, herself at play as a little child at the foot of the large rough stone chimney in the east wall, and she knew the soil there intimately with her eyes and with her fingertips, for in the drama she had dug into it with a small spade and had shaped it with her hands. A few herbs such as sorrel and dwarf mint grew there, and a little beyond, away from the damp of the wall, were the first clover blossoms. She saw her hand prodding into the earth to find out its way, her head bent low to see and to smell the crumpled soil. Her mind was fixed now to regain the visible sign of the old play, to keep the trail that led back to her first-knowledge.

She saw how the great trunk of the elm tree came out of the earth, deeply wrinkled and gray or black, as the light fell. Among the floating festoons of leaves overhead, a sharp sudden cry, remembered, so real and vivid as to be cruelly felt, had struck her with a quick and joyous pleasure which was like a recognition—and she had heard her first bird-song. “At these points I am attached to the earth,” she thought, looking at her moving hands, her feet, her memories, at the sorrel and ivy of memory. Aunt Bet had gone to another place without regret or outcry, and Siver was gone. She taught her class with fervor. “I perceive the earth, myself imbedded into it, attached to it at all points,” she thought, “sinking at each moment into it.”

* * * * *

It was spring then, the beginning, a new beginning, she reflected. Infinities of springs were crouched back under the earth waiting to come out in their turns, a spring and then another, flowering momentarily, annually. “Who am I that I should know?” she asked. She walked out the Johntown pike in the mildness of sunset, the hills and the pastures faintly tinged with the first green, a mere wash of delicate light over the top of the pasture, and the color went with the setting of the sun. It is the beginning of the beginning, she reflected anew, the first of the first, the before that stands before itself, the quiver of a closed eyelid. The roads were drained now of their winter mud and slop. A stillness was settled over the creek where the frogs would cry later when the nights were warm. The thing would give birth to itself out of itself, the color of the picture would grow out of the picture, dawning up from within the thing itself. The streets of the town, when she had returned to them, had no sign of that which she had seen on the pastures in the light of sunset, but they had their own token. It was Sunday night, the night after the festival at the hall in Hill Street.

She could feel the tension of the street as it was left from the passion of the night before, as it centered now in the church, in small groups that gathered in doorways or moved swiftly by. There was little gayety left. The leavings of the night before were summed up now in unfinished and unappeased emotions. These were the first mild February nights when a soft balm sifted in from the south. The dim lights began to appear behind the stained windows of the church entry. She pushed open Lethe’s door, without knocking, and went quietly inside. Stig was there with them in the gloom. He was sitting on the bed beside Americy, and in a moment Theodosia saw that Americy was quite drunk, that she laughed and wept in turn, tears on her face.

“Where’s the light?” Theodosia asked. “Why not have the lamp?”

She lit a match and made a light in the small lamp on the shelf. Then she saw that Lethe was sitting beside the table that stood near the fireplace. On the table there was a small bit of food, untasted, but this had been swept back toward the farther edge of the board. Before Lethe’s hand lay a knife. It was sharpened to a keen edge and the point was well tapered. It was such a knife as was used to cut leather, to mend harness, and she knew that Stig had brought it to the cabin.

“What knife is that?” she asked.

“A good knife. A right good blade,” Stig said.

Americy was dressed in her best garments, a silk dress and a scarf brilliantly dyed. Her stockings were torn, the color faded and spotted with abuse, and her low shoes were defiled. Her clothing had not been changed since the day before and her hair had not been set in order since she had slept last.

“I wanted a drink,” Stig said, “but nobody wouldn’t give me none. Stingy.”

Stig was less ragged than he had formerly been, and Theodosia thought that Americy had probably given him the necktie he wore. He munched at something which he carried in his coat pocket, nuts or hard candy, and his hand would go to his pocket from time to time.

“You know Lou Trainer? Did you ever see Lou Trainer anywheres?” Lethe asked, and she turned toward Theodosia slightly, asking her.

“I know Lou. A dark girl. Thin. Walks fast. Yes. I saw her since dark.”

“Where’d you see Lou Trainer since dark?”

“Just now. Out the Johntown pike a little piece.”

A cry like a wail came from Lethe’s mouth and was mingled with her words which were at first undistinguished. “Out that way. Let me get a hold on her throat. I’ll strangle her breath outen her body.”

Americy had begun to sing, or to hum unevenly, some song that was used in the church. As she sang she rocked herself back and forth. Her tune ran with a long slow measure and she intoned the words as if she thought of an organ accompaniment. The song,

Comen home, comen home,
Lord, I’m comen home.
Open wide thine arms, Oh, God,
Lord, I’m comen home.

Each word was slowly pronounced and widely slurred, as if Americy heard a great throng singing. Lethe arose and walked twice up and down the chamber, but she came back to her seat before the table, and presently she broke into another outcry which put a swift stop upon Americy’s song.

“I said if he spends one quarter on Lou, or if he walks with her one time in the dark, I’d cut her clean open with this-here knife. I’ll knife her, and Ross he knows I will.”

Stig laughed a great burst of ill-balanced laughter and began to cry out, “She’s done it, she’s done it. Afore now. A whole lot. God’s sake. Lou Trainer. God knows. I want be there when you-all cuts her guts out. See old Lou Trainer’s insides drip out.”

Lethe’s words were set widely apart, dispersed by hate. She pushed the knife back with a careless unseeing gesture, or she rested her hands on the edge of the table, leaning hard upon her palms. “I said I would and I will,” she continued to say, or she made her oath. Her words were set against Stig’s sudden laughter and Americy’s singing or weeping, or from time to time there would be a space of quiet when no one spoke.

“There’s singen in the church. I got to go. Where’s my hat. I got to go,” Americy said. She got up from the bed and walked around the room, but she forgot the hat when it did not come to hand and settled again to the bed, and presently she sang, as before intoning the words slowly.

I wandered far away from God,
Lord, I’m comen home.
The paths of sin no more I’ll trod,
Lord, I’m comen home....

“Oh, for God’s sake let me get my hands once ahold onto her throat. Let me get my hand in her face. I’ll stab to kill. I’ll learn her what I mean.”

“There’s singen in the church. Let all you-all sing now. Let all you sing. All together. Stand and sing the song of the invitation. I see the new Jerusalem and the glory of the Lord. Come sinner, Halleluiah!”

“One time, I said, one time. If she goes a night with him once. I’ll get my hand aholt on her....”

“One time?” Stig said, and he broke into a burst of laughter. “One time. Oh, God’s sake! Skeeter Shoots says to me, he says, ‘Ross, now,’ he says. ‘Ain’t Ross he Lethe’s man? God’s sake! Thought Ross,’ Skeeter Shoots says, ‘thought Ross were Lethe’s man. Thought Ross took up along with Lethe a long while ago,’ Skeet Shoots says.”

Americy looked at Stig amorously and began to kiss his face, her own face wet with tears. Or she would stop in her caressing and, with hands on his shoulders, she would sing again, always the same tune. Theodosia had been sitting near the middle of the floor in the chair she had always used when she had been there before. It was drawn near to Lethe’s chair now, and thus she sat, but presently she arose and walked to the door or she returned to stand a moment over Lethe. In Lethe hate was apotheosized, a hungry god, ravenous, beside an altar waiting for food. Lethe’s breath was fluted and broken, timed to the beating of her heart, marked by regular sobs that were softly voiced now and then. Her eyes were beyond seeing, turned glassy with their own inner sight. She was unaware of the presence of Stig and Americy, and after her first questioning of Theodosia she had seemed shut from any recognition of her. Theodosia pushed her chair near the table and bent one knee into it, standing uncertainly, looking about at the dim walls, at Americy’s weeping. She stood over Lethe, leaning slightly forward, and her breath became hard, fluted with the beating of her own heart where anger began to arise and was timed to Lethe’s panting breath.

“I’ll kill. I’ll stab her afore daylight,” Lethe said with her shaking breath.

“Lou? What for? Lou?” Theodosia asked.

“Oh, I’ll kill. I said kill.”

“Ross,” Theodosia said. “Didn’t he look at Lou? Didn’t he want Lou? What call have you got to let Ross go? Where’s Ross?”

“Lou. My hand on her heart. I’ll tear her guts outen her side.”

Theodosia walked to the door and looked out into the dark, but she returned again and stood as she had stood before. Her breast and her throat were shaking in a sobbing rush of ineffectual hate, her teeth chattering when she ceased to speak. She could hear Stig’s taunting laughter that came in strange, high-pitched bursts of feminine tone as he recounted the surmises of his friends and the opinions of the hands at the stable.

“Ross,” she said.

“Lou. I’ll stab to the heart of her. I’m not afeared. I’ll stab fitten to kill.”

“Did Ross bring Lou to see you? Did he ever? You see how it is with me. Did he?”

“Oh, I’ll kill. Ross he knows I’m no tame woman. He knows.”

“‘I brought her here so’s you’d see for your own self,’ he says. ‘The easiest way. No fuss.’”

“Oh, I’ll kill. Afore day I will.”

“He said ‘You see how it is with me, Dosia. I brought her here.’ It’s all the same. He brought her in the door of the hall, before all the people, came inside the door with her, his hand ahold of her arm, before your eyes, came inside the hall of the festival.”

“Oh, I can’t bear not to. I’ll kill, kill....”

“‘I brought her here so’s you’d see for your own self.’ ... Then he bought her a treat at the counter where the things to eat were. His hand on her arm and on her shoulder. His hand on her back.”

“Kill, I will. I couldn’t bear not to.”

Theodosia felt her body slipping into the chair and leaning nearer. She wanted justice. She leaned close to Lethe’s body, her hands on the edge of the table beside Lethe’s hands. She was shut into a complete stillness and she was mingled with Lethe’s anger and hate.

“Ross,” she said.

“Lou. I’ll rip her open. I’ll stab inside.”

“Did Ross bring Lou to see you? ‘You see how it is with me,’ he said. Did he ever?”

“Oh, I’ll kill her. She knows. She ought to know.”

“‘I brought her here so’s you’d see for yourself,’ he said.”

“Oh, I’ll kill. Afore day, I will.”

“‘She’s out at the gate to wait for me. I brought her here so’s you’d see. For yourself.’”

“Oh, God, I aim to kill. He knows I mean what I say.”

“Kill Ross. Who’s he to go free?”

“Lou. She’s already dead now.”

“He said, ‘You see how it is with me....’ He brought her in the hall of the festival. He came inside the door with her.”

“Oh, I can’t bear not....”

“‘I brought her here so’s you’d see for your own self.’”

Suddenly Lethe turned upon her and threw her arms about her neck, holding her in a deep and tender embrace for a long instant, a powerful maternal caress. Theodosia could feel the impact of the stiffened muscles when, after relaxation, they leaped to renewed force, and she could hear the deep sob of hate where it arose and shook Lethe’s bosom with a force that beat with pain upon her own more slender body. When Lethe turned away toward the table again she sat leaning upon it as before. She seemed to have sunk into a dream.

People were passing, voices talking softly, steps falling unevenly on the rough road. Americy had fallen into a state of quiet weeping, her arms about Stig’s shoulders. Then Lethe lifted her head suddenly as if she were hearing something from without. Her hand leaped to the knife-handle with such suddenness and such force that Theodosia’s hand was swept off the board. Then Lethe had sprung from her place and had rushed out at the door. Theodosia sat bowed over the table, staring at the place where Lethe’s hand had been, or her eyes would dart about over the board, looking for the knife, expecting to see the knife where it had lain. A remote footstep went by in the street or another paused at the gate, or drifted on. She accepted these as a part of the night outside.

After a long while she moved in her seat, her body pained with its long, stiff pose, and after she had stared at her own hands and had stretched them on the top of the table and turned them about, searching for some sign or recognition, she arose and stood beside Lethe’s chair where it had been pushed roughly back and overturned. It was a token of Lethe’s going. Lethe was gone. The knife was gone. She walked to the door and looked out, up and down the quiet street, but the church was dark now and the houses were shut and quiet. Once she called “Lethe!” from the doorway, but there was no answer and she heard no footfalls anywhere in the dark.

When she came back to the room again Americy was caressing Stig with a deeply amorous intent and he had ceased to cry out his taunts after Lethe’s going. He was laughing in a hideous way, returning Americy’s caresses. She stopped before them, standing before the bed where they sat.

“Come on now, Stig, and go with me. It’s time to go now,” she said.

“Me, I don’t aim to go,” he said. “I don’t live in stable no more.”

“Come on, Stig. It’s time to go now.”

“I live along with Americy.” He laughed uncertainly, unable to talk farther.

“Americy,” she said. “Don’t you know what Stig is? Stig’s your brother. Wake up and know what I say. Your brother.”

“I’m your sister,” Americy mumbled as if she were asleep. “I always knowed I was your sister.”

“And Stig’s our brother. Our brother.”

Their replies were not articulated. Stig’s response became a low, monstrous laughter, falling rhythmically, like the bleat of some great animal, pleading laughter, crying to be appeased. Americy had fallen into a semi-sleep. Theodosia stood over them, trying to awaken Americy, calling to her, drawing at her arm. But Americy clung the closer to Stig and Theodosia came swiftly away.

* * * * *

It was late when she reached her room, near midnight. She sat on the edge of her bed staring at the wall, looking with horror at what she had left in Lethe’s cabin. Lethe had gone somewhere in the dark with the knife in her strong hand, and she would plunge the knife into hated flesh. Her hand would feel the dull resistance of human bone and it would rain up and down, stabbing deeper with each blow, letting out the blood, tearing through flesh until her hate had eased itself. She looked at the two, Lethe and Americy, and their two ways met and became one horror that dazed her mind and drowsed her eyes so that, moving back from it, she sank quickly into a deep sleep. She lay in the heart of evil and slept all the night, lying as if she had been drugged, uncovered to the cool air that came in at the open windows. She lay on the outside of the bed, as she had first fallen, deeply shut into sleep, and the chill damp air that came with a dense fog at dawn did not appraise her of anything, nor did the ringing of the morning angelus.

Late in the morning she stirred slightly and was aware of herself as the residue of disaster, the leavings of tragedy, the nothing of the evil hereafter. A faint cry for pity hushed itself on her lips. Then she began to chill in the cold and she slowly aroused herself to sit on the side of the bed. Her body was shaking in curious rhythms that built upward toward a climax and subsided only to arise again, a compound rhythm of quivering flesh. She reached for a warm dressing-gown and covered herself in the bed, but the chill persisted. Later the woman who had rented the house came bringing some food.

“I thought you might be sick,” she said. “I do believe you got a chill.”

She set the tray she had brought on the table and began to build a fire in the grate, talking meanwhile about her morning work, suggesting remedies for the cold she said Theodosia had caught. There had been a tragedy in the town during the night, she said. A man had been killed—Ross. She asked Theodosia if she knew a black man named Ross. He had been killed the night before. When she had told this news Theodosia cried out that she had killed him, and the woman was frightened as she came away from the fireplace and stood over the bed.

“You must be real sick,” she said. “Is your throat sore maybe? What hurts you?”

“Oh, I killed him,” Theodosia cried out again. She could feel the strange rhythms tearing her body in orderly stabs of pain. “I stabbed his throat with a harness knife. I cut his throat.”

“You never did no such thing. You’re clean out of your head. I better send for Dr. Muir.”

“I stabbed his throat with a harness knife.”

“How do you know it was a harness knife? How comes it you know so much about it?”

“I did it,” Theodosia said. She sank back to the bed then.

“It’s curious you know how it happened. But it was a black woman, Lethe, stabbed him. Everybody knows it.”

“Lethe stabbed Lou, but I killed Ross. I cut his throat open.”

“Lethe tells how it happened. She’s in jail now. She’s confessed and there’s no question about who did it. She did it. She went after Lou, seems like, but when Ross defended Lou she killed him. Out at the brick-yard it happened, about midnight they say. Lethe’s in jail now and she’ll maybe go to prison for ten years or so. Ross was her husband, but he went off after Lou, and so the court will likely give her a light sentence, they say. Ten years or fifteen, but that’s not light, goodness knows. Anyway she won’t hang, or is not likely, they say.”

“I did it,” Theodosia cried out again, sitting up in bed again. “I’ll go to prison ten years, fifteen maybe. Hang maybe. I don’t want to be hung. But I did it....”

The strength of the chill multiplied and the rhythms flowed in a strange complexity, short rhythms fitted into the long flow of the heavier beat. Later the fever came and she was still again.

* * * * *

A month later Theodosia sat for a little while each day in the sunshine on the south side of her room. Dr. Muir had come every day to listen to her breathing through a stethoscope. She had let life bring her back to life if it would, lending little aid herself to the return. Her fiddle had been shut securely into its case.

She would have to rest for a long while, Dr. Muir said, and she would have to live in the country and have much rich food. She was shut into some remote death although breath came and went in her throat. The doctor’s suggestions became a law that moved over her, having its way without protest. Abundant food regularly taken, more than was desired—it came to her bed. Presently it would be owed for, but now it was merely there, to be eaten, the last caloric measure. She would not be playing the fiddle, Dr. Muir said, not for several months anyhow. Playing would put too much strain on the arms and chest. The town had its spring season, the birds in the trees. Her windows were always opened wide.

“You had better go to your Aunt Doe’s, in the country,” Dr. Muir said. “A long rest, fresh air, food. That’s all you need.”

She had better sell the house and let the mortgages be paid, the doctor said; she had better close her life there in the town. She was unable to continue her teaching. He went into the facts about her inheritance and weighed each in her presence, asking questions, making judgments. She had better sell all, he advised, and turn away the creditors, had better relieve herself of all worry. She had better go. In the heart of this remote death into which she had passed she stirred a little, remembering the great sweep of rolling land as it was to be seen from the upper windows at the farm.

Some light sorrel horses had stood by a fence, and the queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief was spreading white beyond the creek path. “Oh, it’s a good morning. I someways like a day just like this,” the words arose and flowed back into the mingled picture—a path along a cornfield where sweet hot weeds gave out their savors in the sunshine of noon, the man in the low field plowing all day, the horse and the plow and the figure of the dark creature that bent over the plow-handles making an even pattern of dark lines that crept slowly over the earth and continued all day, pleasant to see and of no effort to herself. The high cackle and clatter of the feeding times soon after dawn when the poultry and the geese and the guinea-fowls sang their food cries through the baaing of the calves and the low grunting of the swine, and she had turned on her pillow to sleep again, lulled by the sweet blended clatter. The hill field sometimes plowed but mainly left in pasture grass. Out the upper window the land had rolled away a hundred miles, two hundred, never to be measured, beyond hills and fields, insufficient even where the last frail tree stood on the most removed hilltop, beyond two farms.

She would go. Frank came to sit with her frequently or he brought passages to read, tribute to her convalescing hours. “Good old Frank,” her tears surprised her in saying once when his departure clicked the latch of the gate.

A dealer in old furniture came from Lester and bargained for the pieces. A crier sold the house from the gallery steps one noisy court day in May. The archaic hatchets and flints were dispersed, culled over by a collector from Louisville, some of them rejected and thrown into a large basket. Theodosia saved for herself Anthony’s books, and she had them packed into boxes to be hauled to the farm. Dr. Muir had been to call upon her aunt and to ask hospitality for the invalid. All was arranged. She would go. The way was sunny and long on the day of the journey, the road heavy to go, distorted with shadows, the hedges standing back far and the woods vistas spacious to the point of giving pain. As if bandage had been removed from a recent hurt or fracture, the confines of the town taken away, she spread painfully out through the hills and fields, through the ways to go. She closed her eyes and the car slipped lightly, too lightly, among the road windings.

FIVE

Doe Singleton said that she might choose any room above-stairs that pleased her, and she chose the one in which she and Annie had stayed, the west room. The high bed leaped at her unpleasantly and receded suddenly into diminished perceptions as she spread the sheets and quilts over it to prepare it for occupation. It funneled down suddenly into a very small object, a familiar pattern, a bed, when she focused her attention upon it, but left uncentered it bulged suddenly to unapprehended proportions, divided, proportion at war with proportion and quality. She opened the windows to the south sun and lay in the bed.

There was no one in the house but the aunt, whose muffled, uncertain noises fell after undetermined intervals, and herself, who, lying in the bed, was subtracted from the content of the walls, length, breadth, and thickness therein contained, and extended as continuing in a running movement through history, past and future. The second day she noticed the leaves of the linden tree and how each one carried two small buds or pods held to the leaf by a slender green wire. At regular intervals the voice of her aunt called from below.

“It’s ready now. You can come.”

Below-stairs there would be food on a small table in a back room, her aunt’s bedroom. The bed stood pompously against the wall opposite the great fireplace, and the dogs came and went or rested before the open fire, lying down stiffly or arising. There was no servant and the dining-room across the hall was mouldy and dark. The food was always on the table when she came down the stairs, bread and meat and milk. There was coffee in a silver coffeepot.

“I don’t myself keep any cows now,” Miss Doe said. “I got the milk for you from the tenant man on the place.”

“Don’t you keep any cows any more?”

“No use, just for me, me not very partial to milk in my diet. I eat mostly the same all the time, but you say the doctor said milk for you and I got Bland to fetch up some.”

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

As she lay again in the bed the avenue ran down to the stone wall and turned sweetly to the gate, which was perpetually white. Slowly in mind she walked down the avenue, step by step, stopping to look at each minute occurrence, as the wild fern by the side of the drive, the small gray imagined birds that flocked over the stems of the low pasture weeds and took imagined flight at her step. Her foot twitched lightly under the quilts. When the birds had flown she passed on, going slowly, undetermined whether the way should slope downward or extend outward, shaping it to her will. She would step slowly to make the walk last the longer. The clover at the side of the path was white and rank, and the grass and weeds of the pasture ready for cutting. The path she went ran along the side of the drive although from the window she could see that there was no path there now, for none ever walked that way. There were wagon prints on the drive, however, marks of tires, and she shuffled her toe in the faintly marked rut and wondered what habitual coming had made it. Each day she prepared the walk, clinging to it with fervor, returning to it as to a consolation. After five days no wheels had sounded on the stone and gravel of the way.

The great hounds would come to her room each day, now one and again another, and they would sniff at the bed or turn about lazily on the carpet. She would call the names until some flicker of recognition would denote that the beast had been rightly called—Roscoe, Nomie, Tim, Speed, Old Mam, Tilly, True. There were some younger dogs, unnamed and unbroken, but these came little to the house. She would hear them running on the hills and hunting their prey. She clung to the daily walk to the gate and back and built the path minutely for comfort, gathering herself out of a running slant of historic actuality to the more comforting actuality of the path beside the drive where the ruts of some never-heard wagon wheels threaded constantly down to the highway. One day it was the shade of the elms that was intensely realized, or another the sounds of the beetles and crickets, until, being minutely sensed, the path brought her to the white flowers, queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief, clustered in tall masses before the stone wall. The old dogs walked up and down the stairs, sniffing at her bed. True brought her stiff old limbs laboriously up the hall and turned about on the carpet to lie down at the foot of her bed. Below on the hearth in Doe Singleton’s room some great pones of cornbread were perpetually cooking on rough old iron pans, bread for the old dogs.

* * * * *

One morning after the journey below had been accomplished, while she lay resting from the difficult ascent of the stairs, a low purr of muffled noises flowed through the hallways, and the front door was opened and closed. Then a white cloth was hung on the vine by the door and the steps receded and became the uncertain tread of her aunt on the pavement beside the house wall. The hour was long and sunny, undefined, mingled now with some anticipated event which pointed to the white cloth that hung by the pillar. Later a yellow truck came up under the elms, fitting its wheels to the ruts, and the words, PERKINS’ LINIMENTS, grew, boldly defined, on the yellow sides of the car which backed about at the door. Leaning on her elbow she took a gayety from the yellow of the wagon and the bold design of the printed words and from the brisk man who sold packages to her aunt with a clatter of good-will and gossip. Tea in packages, coffee, sugar—the best cane—and did she need any spices this trip? Liniment, salve, mange cure, soap, oil, baking powders, ointment, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator—for hens, cures mites, chiggers. Any extracts? flavors? perfumery? cake color? ice-cream powders? sage?

“The coffee and sugar is all.”

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

“Anybody drowned?”

“Nobody drowned, but a heap of swollen branches and some stock washed off. Old Man Tumey’s chickens, and Lige Smith lost a calf. They say prices are a-goen high this time, money for everybody. Corn sold this week for around two dollars. Old Miss Bee Beach is right sick, they say. Bound to die, I reckon.”

He shouted his words before the house and his rough voice struck the corners of the room above and quickened life where it had declined in her breast. His steps were rough and strong on the gravel of the roadway. When the purchase had been made he ran quickly through his list again and closed the rear door of the truck with a crash. Then he swept off his hat to mop his head with a dim handkerchief of some yellowed silk, sponging his face and neck. He plunged the handkerchief inside his collar-band, and he stretched his legs and his back, a tall man with a dark vigor about him. Theodosia leaned on her arm to watch him, amused at the painted words on the car, the long rheumatic letters that spelled the liniment to the afflicted of the county. His vigor reached her where she lay crumpled under the bed clothing, and she had a quick vision of herself, arisen, going about her ways of life. She watched every gesture as he climbed into the car and set it in motion, she concentrated to his burning darkness, her throat dilated in response to the unaccustomed man’s voice. When he was gone she sank weakly back to the bed and presently she made the minute journey to the roadside gate, step by step, negotiating intricately with the roadside birds and grasses.

Some days later she heard the throb of another car on the driveway and presently a voice spoke to Doe Singleton at the door, the voice turning away, saying that it would come again. This would be Frank, she reflected. Her aunt would not bring him to her room because she was in bed and the aunt moved among a few old signs and tokens. None but the old dogs ever walked on the stairway except when she herself replied to the call from below, “Come on now, it’s ready.” Summer having advanced, the night-noises made a great swinging water, a vast throbbing sea of sound beating continually and arising in shrill waves, the crickets, the frogs, the toads, the treetoads, the katydids. An old voice then, a joyous rise and skurry of man’s speech, acutely remembered in all its inflections.

“Ladybug, when you hear a katydid, it’s then six weeks till frost. Yessir. Six weeks. I often took notice to a katydid that-away. It’s a forerunner to frost for fair.... Oh, it’s a good morning.... Someways I always liked a hilltop....”

* * * * *

The tenant would come about the house talking noisily, his voice striking the wall with a token of life in the fields. Cuttings of hay, stand of wheat, stand of rye, prime good crop of burley this time, “fair good corn if it turns out well in the shock at plucken time”—these were his cries as they smote the upper wall and rolled in at the open windows. There would be money from Doe Singleton’s acres to augment her bank account and her securities. Once her banker called, making a low clatter of steps and voice as he went in and out. One of the dogs, old True, died in the upper hallway, stretched out stiff when the morning food called Theodosia down the stairs, laid out across the carpet. Later one of the tenant men dragged her away, the body pulled by a rope making a dull stiff cluttering of noises on the hard stair. The strong sour odor of her death pervaded the hall for many days after.

Theodosia did not keep the count with the katydid, but the frost came, the leaves richly responding. The katydids had sung their own well-timed requiem. After the season of the first frost the rains set in, plodding heavily on the old walls, wetting the ceilings where the roof leaked. The drip of the water made a continuous impertinence upon her carpeted floor. She arose and set several basins under the drips and climbed shivering back into the bed. In the morning after a continued rainfall of many hours her bed stood under a new drip.

“The roof upstairs leaks everywhere, Aunt Doe,” she said. “There’s hardly a dry place left. Maybe you never noticed it, but the roof ought to be mended. The plaster might fall.”

Doe Singleton was tall and straight, a fantasy of old age, her movements hurried and uncertain. Her hair, white now, had turned coarse and frizzled with its graying. When the report of the roof came to her, her mouth became straighter and more thin. She dipped her bread into her coffee and ate slowly, saying nothing.

“Want more bread?” she said after a little, a curious cheerfulness, reiterated each mealtime over the food.

Theodosia moved to the east room, across the hall, for there were fewer leaks there and the bed could be kept dry. She set three basins under the drips in her new quarters and closed the door of the west room upon its wet misery. When she had lain ten days without fever at any time during the day she might arise and walk a few steps into the yard. This was the doctor’s suggestion when he came in the autumn, his last visit, and found her lung healed. It was difficult to achieve the ten in consecutive occurrence, and with each failure she must begin the count anew.

* * * * *