Chapter VII: Part 7

Her grandfather’s books were in their boxes in the hall, half-unpacked, tumbled together as she had searched among them. In the east room she looked at the walls her grandfather had seen when he lay in Doe Singleton’s house, herself across the hall then in the room with Annie. The likenesses of the Bells and the Trotters stood in stiff frames, awkwardly placed along the walls, and once, indifferent to what she did, she arose and rearranged the small frames to a happier proportion, driving the small tacks with the poker from the fireplace. She was often insulated from her own thought by pain in her head, in her abdomen and loins. The autumn was bright and long, lingering warmly after the leaves had fallen.

She would fasten her eyes upon the ship, a chromo picture framed in old gilt, a dull brown mounting. A great still ship, caught on the upward wash of a wave and tilted with the wind, frozen forever with one stayed moment. Its great sail lay out on the current of the air and its round keel swelled high out of the plume of water from which it had arisen and on which it now hung. Frank was turned away from the door by the same reiterated cheerfulness that responded to the food. “You better come again when she’s up and down-stairs. Come again, young man.”

She wondered if she could still count ten rightly and she began to mark the days on an old calendar. Insulated by pain, she would turn to the driveway and walk minutely down imagined paths through the first light snow. She brought wood from her aunt’s hearth and built fires on her own. The required ten days fell in the end of November and she walked weakly a little way under the trees among the fallen leaves. Later she brought wood each day from the old wood-lot behind the garden, the journey to the woodpile becoming her daily measure of exercise. An old pile of cut wood was stored there under a small shed, a pile of which her aunt seemed to have no knowledge. The wood the tenant man brought to her aunt’s room was scarcely enough now for the one fire below-stairs. She had heard her aunt give an order, had heard her complain to the tenant of the waste.

“No use to waste the wood so. Eight pieces a day is enough, now.” The words had come above mingled with the tumbled wood as it fell, or mingled again with the retreating steps of the man as they fell stiffly on the pavement.

* * * * *

Doe Singleton sat all day reading her books. She would bring an armful of novels from the front room, the room where she had lived with Tom Singleton, and she would set herself upon them, one after the other. They were books she had read in her youth and had reread many times since. Theodosia would hear her come to the room below, a dull monotony of steps and of books plucked about in the bookcases, and hear her return, the door closed, the journeys irregularly placed as her demands required. In the back room she would read all day, and, going down for food, Theodosia would see her book where it had been laid aside and would mark her swift progress through the pages. The food was kept in the storeroom behind the chamber, and the old pageant of the aunt handing out the supplies from this doorway, Prudie waiting with full hands, would arise. The door was locked as in the former time, the key hidden away. Miss Doe would bend over the fireplace in the chamber, cooking there. One day Theodosia, leaving after a meal, went into the dining-room and thus to the kitchen where Prudie had cooked. The range was gone from its place, but she recognized a part of it in a mass of broken iron behind the door. She stared at the stale cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in a dusty fringe, and she sickened at the odors of mice, her mind contemptuous of the sickness in her throat and her mouth. She looked again and again for some token of Prudie and the ancient bustle and order of the house, her eyes clinging to an old felt hat, some man’s headwear, thrown down in the corner of the pantry and defiled by mice and mould.

At her aunt’s table she would talk of one thing and another, asking questions of the past, of Aunt Deesie, of Prudie. Where had they gone? Was her uncle’s grave marked by a stone? She would walk out there some day when she had grown stronger.

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

“About the same, one as the other. A good love-story is what I like best. Want more bread?”

There was bread and milk and a bit of meat sometimes. A pie baked before the open fire or a bit of a pudding.

“When I’m better maybe you’ll have the kitchen fixed up and I’ll run it, Aunt Doe. Or we could have somebody to cook. There’s a heap to do in a farm kitchen, I know. I’ll take the bother of it any time you want....”

“I’m well enough off as I am. I don’t want a big rumpus inside the house.”

She dwelt on the kitchen as Prudie had kept it, the busy mornings there, the kettles steaming on the stove, to try to make it reappear as a part of a pleasant way. She remembered some droll sayings of Prudie’s talk and restored Lucas with a swiftly sketched picture.

“Remember how Prudie used to say, ‘But stick inside your shirt-tail, Lucas, afore you go in to wait on white folks. Shirt-tail always out.’ Remember Prudie?”

“But I like the way I got now. No bother. All I need is right here. I’m well enough off to suit me,” Miss Doe said.

* * * * *

The journey up the stairs required several pauses for rest on the way, and, this accomplished, she was glad to sink into the kindness of the bed. Her flesh was soft like wax. She would look at her strange hands and listen to her fluttering breath. It was spring, she reflected, seeing the swelling buds on the linden tree and hearing the birds at morning. At night the up-and-down seesaw of the frogs in the pond came to her if the breeze were drifting in from the east. Frank came sometimes, always in the late afternoons. She would talk with him on the portico where she would sit wrapped well in shawls. She worked feebly, a little at a time, and rid the parlor of its cobwebs and dust.

A sweet smell of cut grass spread over the farm. The white-top was standing over the clover among the high heads of straying timothy, and then the field was mowed for hay. The oat field was green, and shaken in the breeze it was broken like lace. The rye had turned yellow. The two men, Walter and Abe Bland, had finished setting the tobacco in the field along the creek, and her mind’s eye knew how their plows went there although this field was beyond the hill’s rise and thus beyond her vision. Across the road were two neighboring farms and the matrons there sometimes called on Miss Doe in the fine weather. Seen distantly these houses were full of the busy appearances of life. People came and went from the white house where the Bernards lived, and Miss Alice Bernard, the wife and mistress of the place, would tell of the goings and comings among all the farms, of the berries she had canned and the jams she had made. Miss Doe would acquiesce, remotely smiling; they would be sitting in the shade of the portico. Seen from the upper window, the house where Miss Alice lived presented a remote drama. The shutters, green against the white wall, were opened and closed daily, and people went hurrying down the driveway to the highroad and thus away to the town. In the other house, far to the left, there were two young girls. “They think of me as being very old,” Theodosia thought. She would see them at morning riding their horses, cantering along the road.

She had learned to lift the bow and the fiddle above her breast and to hold them there. Looking out on the earth from the portico where she rested almost all day in an old reclining chair, she would play airs from an overture or a caprice or a sonata, bending the tune to the outspread fertility of the fields and the high tide of mid-summer with herself apart, insulated by the wax-like softness of her flesh and dispossessed by the penurious withdrawals of the house. Out before the wall, in the light of summer, seeing the richness of the fields and the lush plenty of the days, she would surround herself with thin spectral music from which passion had been withdrawn. She kept a sense of hush to her own past.

* * * * *

She could walk now to the stile going over the fence, the way the tenant man, Walter, took in going to and from the house. It was a rude stile that some farmhand had constructed of such plunder as he had found, a log split and a board on end. Sitting on the slab of the log she could look down the pasture where some unbroken colts ran.

“Them colts is too braysh,” Walter said one day as he passed by the stile. “They need a plow line, them fillies.” He passed down the path mumbling his grievance.

She sat on the stile and searched his rough speech after his departure. He was a strong man, past middle life, sturdy and wind-stained, a hardness in the muscles of his face and some austerity in his eyes. His teeth were broken and yellowed with tobacco. He would look past her when he spoke, drawing his eyes as if to see afar, but when he looked back at her his face would gather to a sum of its severity. He lived with his brother in Aunt Deesie’s cabin, and neither he nor the brother had a wife.

She would walk a little farther each day and sit to rest on the stile. Beyond the fence the ricks for feeding cattle had once stood, and she remembered the dogs on the day they had set upon her and little Annie, and she wondered if the dogs that were now about the house were, any of them, the same. An intense desire to have her former strength drove her to walk her distances several times a day, but she often sank wearily to the ground under some tree and lay there for an hour. As she lay thus on the ground she knew that Walter walked through the farm, his rough shoes brushing the low weeds, and that his brother Abe kept in the lower fields near the tobacco barn. She would gaze up at the insecure sky where the clouds turned on the horizon and watch the hazardous trees shake lightly in the wind and lose now a leaf and now another, or in the later summer two or three would fall. She knew that Walter knew that she lay to rest there; sometimes she would see his sullen face set forward as he tramped across the pasture rim.

At long intervals her aunt hung a signal on the pillar of the portico and the liniment-man brought his truck to the door to sell her sugar, coffee, and tea. These days were always Thursdays. Sometimes she would walk to the truck and look in at the bottles and spice cans, all labeled in yellow, all lettered with the name of the brand. He would chant his tale again to try to tempt her buying. Spices, baking powders, ointments, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator, flavors, perfumery, cake color, ice-cream powder, sage.

“Here’s something to take the eye of a young lady. Perfumery and face powder. The best there is. Both in one box. Fifty cents to a dollar.”

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

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

“Does it take an ice-cream freezer,” Theodosia asked. “And some ice, maybe? Or just the powder?”

“Of course it takes a freezer. Or say, here’s a little something for a young lady that’s nice and particular.”

He would run through the list of his wares again and when the buying was determined he would give some news of the farther valley. Caleb Burns had lost a fine cow, and a fine cow on Burns’s place was a sure-enough fine one. Registered Shorthorns. His dark vigor made a violence about him and his tall strong legs beat on the gravel as he stepped quickly about. His hands were strong on the door of the truck when he slammed it. His nails were untended and he would pluck at his nose with his thumb, remembering his handkerchief afterward. She would go back to the portico, delicately amused, rejecting him pleased with the incident, and he would climb into his vehicle and set it in motion, making a bow toward her in his departure.

She wished for some other contact beside Frank, who came now every week or two. She remembered too vividly his face, his gestures, his presence after his departure. She was lying on the ground under the linden tree, seeing the pods of the linden that hung under each leaf by a slender stem of green. Walter and Abe would be cutting the tobacco in the lower field. The wild horses ran roughly up and down their pasture, their hoof-heavy tread thundering, the young stallion stopping to paw the grass until the dust rose from beneath it. She could scarcely divide this year from last year except by some memory of herself lying in the bed above the stairs, counting days to achieve ten unfevered. Now she lay on the rough grass and herbs under the linden tree not far from the pine, not far from the portico. She remembered Frank from time to time, or he welled upward from within her own being, his hands that seemed strong now as set beside no other hands. She remembered his face, his gray eyes, his still brow, his scrutinizing stare, a picture of his throat, his hand on his thigh.

“I must have some other people,” she said, stirring as she lay to dispel the too-acute picture. “If I could walk to some other house. Go anywhere....”

* * * * *

The cow at the tenant house was dry now and there was no milk. “Now let’s see,” she thought, turning her mind again and again to the problem. Miss Doe had grown weary. She leaned all day over the novels, her eyes in a dim trance when she was called. There was milk on the neighboring farms, Theodosia thought, but she had no money. “You’ve got as much to eat as I’ve got,” Miss Doe said. “You’ve got as much milk and eggs as you see me eat.”

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

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

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

The great pones lay over hot coals to bake, the flying ashes dusting over them. The books were piled on the deep window sill. The bed in the back of the room was spread with a dark pieced quilt of some old design. Dust had settled over the quilt and over the pillows that were laid in funeral rigidity at the top of the bed. Walking near the bed to examine the design of the quilt, Theodosia suspected that her aunt did not sleep in the bed.

“Is this the sunshine-and-shade quilt?” she asked. “Did you piece it? You bought it from an old woman. It’s pretty and faded now, the colors blended. They’re pretty, faded together like that....”

The dust on the quilt and on the pillows made her know they were never disturbed. The quilt was clean under the pillows and the bed was always plumped carefully, the quilt on it in the same way. It was never used, she surmised, and she wondered where her aunt lay to sleep. There was a roll of old quilts thrown into the storeroom where the food was kept.

Miss Doe brought out a small leather cake of wheat bread she had cooked by the fire and a bit of conserve that was old and dry. A few brown crackers.

* * * * *

On her way to the wood-lot in the first cold of a November day when the wind was whipping the trees and shrubs and the leaves were falling in mad disaster, “A woman, I am, walking to gather firewood in a wild storm,” she said. In a wind-whipped bush she found a song-sparrow’s nest, revealed now to sight by the upturned branches and the dispersing leaves. She broke the nest from the bush and carried it away. It was made of fine twigs rounded and woven with perfect care, the wooded ends and strands growing more delicate as they approached the center, the pool where the eggs had lain. This cup was lined with human hair, soft and red-brown, laid in an exquisite hollow to make a lining, her own hair. Walking back through the angry air that twisted her garments and beat her steps from the path, a wind that would cry “It is done, make a swift end then,” and would tear life out of the trees and wrench summer off from the sagging vine on the house wall, a fervor of joy welled in her senses and spread backward to some quiet inner part. She had had this ineffable relation with the bird. Unknown to her, the nest had lain on the bough of the old lilac bush all summer, had been built in the spring. The wind slammed the door on the outside violence and she was free of bodily struggle, ribbons of exhaustion and pain unwinding upward into her thighs and back. She placed the nest on her table and looked at it from time to time, picking it delicately apart to try to discover its order.

In the untended pastures the withered white-top and frost-flowers, rejected by the horses, shook stiffly in the cold gusts. The silkweed puffs had blown and their shards were left standing above the dried sweet-fern and the bittersweet. It was now the dark season when night comes on at the earliest hour.

She turned away from her thin face, seen quickly in a mirror, and fear that had crouched in her thought leaped to become a pain in her breast. She was losing what she had gained, the little she had so carefully built together. It was difficult now to walk her small round, through the trees, along the fence to the stile, to the wood-lot, back up the stair. A dragging weariness which she thought would be hunger gnawed at her body. She had talked of it to her aunt, saying, “When I am stronger I will go.” A curious smile had settled to the dim eyes that were glassed over with the fantasies of books.

She was walking out toward the stile in the cold of a December day, the wind blowing her dress and beating through her thin blood, changing her breath to a quivering chill. It came to her as she neared the stile that she would go to the tenant man, Walter Bland, and say, “I must have food, every day; I will sell something. My books are all I have. How will I do it? What shall I do?” She would say, “As a human being and a neighbor, tell me what I’d better do. You know yourself how Aunt Doe lives. We are all here together on the farm. Now what must I do?” He would be rude and rough in his speech, but he would suggest some plan. He would do something.

She climbed over the stile with a new strength and went down the pasture slowly, stopping to regain her panting breath. She was glad that she had decided to do this. A strength greater than she had came to her with the determination and the satisfaction in her plan. She thought that Bland might want some of the books for himself, and she began to name in mind such of the books as might be within his reach. Walter came suddenly out of the brush at the foot of the pasture, just where she entered the field. Her hand was reached to the loop of the wire that held the field gate in place. He came out of the cherry brush suddenly and stood ten feet away. A hard voice accompanied his approach, spreading through the cherry glades and meeting the cold of the wind on the briars.

“You keep on back up the hill. Don’t you be a-comen down here now. You keep on back up where you belong.”

She tried to say what she had come to say, her words entangled until they were meaningless. The voice spoke out steadily over her struggle to speak.

“You keep on back up to the house.” He glanced fearfully toward the field and the way of the cabin. “You got no business here. You go on back.”

Her words rushed out upon her breath and were shaken with the chill of her body. Her plan would not yield to his uncomprehended speech, and she stood against the gray weathered gate. She drew the flying ends of her bright scarf from before her eyes and stated again her errand. He spoke over her words, trampling them out with his rough voice.

“You keep on back up the hill.... Where you stay.... Anything happens, who is’t gets strung up to a limb? Not you. You go on back. Don’t you be a-comen down this-here way. On back.... You go on, I say.”

She was climbing the rise again, walking along the path, facing the wind now, moaning softly as she went. The cold cut her garments apart and entered her flesh, past her chilled blood. She labored with the low hill and came at last to the stile.

She was drowsed by fatigue and dulled by the cold. She went to the evening bit of food, her life stilled, scarcely knowing when she had eaten the last of the leather cake. When this was done she built a fire on the parlor hearth with wood she had brought there some days earlier and made the wood stand high over the blaze. There would be a great glow, a holiday burning of the demon sticks she had carried, two and two, from the wood-lot. A dozen now went on the flame. She put on a soft gray dress she had saved from her former wardrobe and twined a warm rose-and-yellow scarf about her shoulders.

She sat in the parlor before the high fire and felt the color gather richly above her scarfed breast. The sofa on which she sat ran before the fire in a retreating curve of black, and her mind caught in the irony of warmth and the color that wrapped her throat. Frank came, opening the door for himself, knocking softly and entering, rubbing his hands for their cold, eager for the fire, for the color, eager for herself. He sat beside her and presently he began to kiss her face and her throat and to whisper strange words, but she stared into the blaze and turned his caresses aside with her ironic mind where yes and no functioned identically. His hands were on her body beneath the glowing scarf, were feeding her body, and the fire was food again, these foods rich in their insufficiency. Frank was a kindness at her side, at her ear, at her mouth, and it appeared to her that she would ask him for help. She turned toward him crying with her broken breath close to his ear, “Frank, I’m so hungry. I’m hungry. I never have enough. I’m hungry. Aunt Doe ... I never have real food. I’ll starve.” He warmed her with his caresses, murmuring some pleasure in his bestowal, and she floated out of life, warmed, and presently was appeased and comforted.

She had fallen into a deep inner reverie from which nothing could arouse her. She heard as a long way off the monotony of Frank as he talked. He sat apart from her now, or he had gone, had kissed her in the moment of his departure. He would come back, she could be sure of that, some voice had said. The night would be cold, was cold. Daylight came late. It was winter now, snow on the ground, on the wood in the pile at the back of the wood-lot. The noise of the woodpeckers was strange against the snow, was flattened by the snow. A day was but little different from a night, she observed under the fog of her reverie, one being light, the other dark, a mere difference. Sleep, wake, sleep. The journey to the woodpile was the one link that bound her to that strange and foregone experience, the ways people go and the things people do.

* * * * *

At this time she began to hear voices speaking to her. In the dark of the night or in the cold bright days when she lay in her bed, the windows opened wide, she would stare at the faded rose and pearl of the ceiling or the faded gray of the walls, and the winter knocking of the woodpeckers among the trees about the house would fit into her sense of light and become identical with it. She would lie in an apathy, scarcely breathing, divided in mind, uncoördinated by hunger and unintegrated by pain. Lying thus one day, looking at the woodpecker’s cry as it lay along the ceiling and was interlaced with the faded rose and pearl of the vignettes there, a first voice spoke to her, saying, “The categories of the flesh....” The words receded when they had been said, leaving ripples of flat tone behind, flat words that rode on some rhythm. When the words had receded beyond the reach of hearing and her ears were dulled with listening to their spent rhythms, the voice spoke suddenly again.

FIRST VOICE: The categories of the flesh.

“What are they?” she asked, her own voice as real as that which had spoken and as earnest. She began to turn the saying about to see what it would give. Then another voice spoke sharply, swiftly, a hard voice blurting out its rough saying.

SECOND VOICE: The hunger of the mouth.

An inner voice spoke then, a third speaker, more, subtle and persuasive, saying, “And then there’s Frank.”

FIRST VOICE: A category too. He is.

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

She was dull to Frank, to any reminder of him. She stirred wearily in the bed and drew her knees together, crossing her feet.

FIRST VOICE: The intense will to continue is centered in the
individual organism, and thus, or for this, the matter of
continuation is entrusted to the instance.

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

THEODOSIA: The genteel poor. I’ve always heard it said they
were the greatest sufferers on the earth.

FIRST VOICE: And suppose, as Science says, it’s unlikely that
there’s anything comparable to human life on any other planets.
Human life, then, lonely in the great space of the sky,
swinging around through space without greeting, without advice
or sympathy, afraid.

SECOND VOICE: Drunk to get more of itself!

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

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

THEODOSIA: Nothing comparable to life on any other.... Human
life, that is. It must look strange from the outside, this one,
when you see the whole lot come in a whirl around the sun.
Mercury first, then Venus, then the one with life on it. Maybe
it makes it look different. Pain, try-to-do, try-again. Stuff
that can look up and down on it, stuff that can say, “God, God!”

FIRST VOICE: And God took up a handful of dust from the ground
and mixed it with his own spittle and formed man. A God-handful
of dust and the spittle out of the mouth of God.

SECOND VOICE: In the beginning was the spittle of God, and the
spittle was with God. Must have a different smell, the one with
life on it. “Phew!” they’d say, “here comes that stinken one.”

THEODOSIA: I’ll begin back at the first. Take it all over
again. Run through the first scale lessons. Bow practice.
Where’s the book of duos? As soon as I’m strong enough, the
trills.

SECOND VOICE: As soon as you’re strong enough! Love of God!
How’ll you get strong on three bites of leather hoecake?

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

A melody came beating lightly through the noise of her thought, inconsequential, irresponsible to any remembered design of song, under the melody a thud of irregular rhythms delaying it with intricate patterns of silence. Her fingers twitched toward the shelf where the fiddle lay, pointing without motion, drawn under the covering of the bed, her hands folded into her armpits for warmth. The melody lived as a fragile pattern creeping from key to key, spontaneously erecting itself out of some inward repository of dancing, sinking and rising, repeating itself in its own shadow when it fell away, becoming then the still rhythmic nothing of anti-song. Returning afterward, it tapped even more lightly with whisper music that broke upon a faint up-and-down, a mountain ascending and descending, contrived and defeated in a slow design, regular, living each moment and dying in succession, her own breathing. Her breath pushing in and out upon the air, denting the air.

* * * * *

She was sitting in the parlor before the fire which burned the wood she had carried stick by stick from the wood-lot. Dark had long since come. The wind among the trees made a noise like the rush of water in a river, and the night was very dark outside. Once she looked from the window, leaning against the cold glass and bending her neck to see overhead. Back at the fireside again, the whining of the wind in the chimney and the crack of the dry burning logs was a clicking of summer insects shut into winter, imprisoned in frost.

The old bitch, Old Mam, had littered in a bedroom at the end of the upper hallway, three weak puppies in a writhing heap on a bed of rags. They would die of the cold. It would be cold above-stairs, she reflected, her fire untended, the sour odor of cold cleaving the air, rising from the window ledges and gathering at last to the bed. It would be cold beyond the walls of the house, beyond the reach of her fire; all night the air would grow more and more dense with cold. The pond down by the creek would be frozen, a thick sheet of ice to be broken in the morning by some axe. To lie all night on the ground ten feet from the place where she sat would be death to life, the end of all vigor. She would lie on the frozen grass, willing, she predicted, and the wind would search out her thin dress, her thin blood. Determination would hold her there. Pain would wrap around her, fixed into her limbs and her body and her brain, and finally she would become drowsed. All would recede, the all meaning her memory of life. “Was it for this?” something would ask, saying, “You were saved at birth by care, some care, and were taught, praised, kept—a curious thing—for this.” A black irony. Drowsiness would settle nearer. It was for this. Morning would come and she would lie still, frozen, ten feet from the spot in which she now sat, her hands bent, her body stiff, the waters of her flesh congealed, ice in her mouth.

She moved nearer to the fire with a sharp cry and held her hands to the flame, leaning her body nearer. She looked at her hands as she rubbed them well into the warmth of the fire’s radiance, her thin narrow hands moving with life, blood in their channels, and she loved her hands.

Frank was coming in at the hallway, closing the front door, whistling. In the next instant came a great clutter of leaping feet, confused thought, cries, growls, oaths, blows. A rush of animal feet on the stairway and more outcries. She went to the door of the parlor and opened it wide, and Frank was there trying to defend himself from two dogs, another dog coming down the stair. He was kicking at the beast that was at his feet, but another was at his breast, leaping.

She drove the dog, Old Mam, from his breast, ordered her back with a sharp command. There were four dogs now in the dim hallway, one coming from the region beyond the stair.

“This house, it’s full of devils,” Frank cried out. He was drawing back toward the door. “This whole damn place is a den of demons. For God’s sake keep that dog off me!”

The dogs went away sullenly, Old Mam above to her whelps, Tilly to lie at Miss Doe’s door until it opened for her tapping.

“This house, it’s full of devils.” He was coming striding across the carpet toward the fire, indignation scarcely waning. He opened the door to the dining-room and gazed into the blackness beyond, listening. “Ugh! devils, demons, ghouls!” He slammed the door quickly. “You wouldn’t catch me out there. I wouldn’t go out that door.... You couldn’t bribe me to go.”

* * * * *

Five large pones of coarse bread, unsifted meal stirred with water and set in skillets of hot grease to bake before the fire, this was the food for the old dogs. Miss Doe mixed it with her hands or with a spoon that was never cleaned. It baked on the hearth all morning, not far from the place where Tilly and Old Mam lay. While it cooked Tilly would sometimes sniff at each hot pone, impatient for the heat to do its work. The thick vapors and gases from the dogs spread through the room, and Theodosia ate her small leather wheat cake quickly and went back to her chamber to lie weakly down. The voices began to ply, issuing and receding.

FIRST VOICE: The receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. Said
Anthony hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred and
released, and by these presents doth give, grant, bargain,
sell, transfer and release unto said Goodwin a certain tract of
land situated, lying and being in the county aforesaid on the
south side of Casey Run....

THEODOSIA: Situated, lying and being. Theodosia, born a Bell,
now situated, lying and being. Here. Herself.

FIRST VOICE: Could a woman butcher a hog?

SECOND VOICE: How many hogs has Frank butchered for you? Did
Frank ever offer you a hog?

THIRD VOICE: Come, let us butcher a hog together. The celestial
hog. A sea hog that swims in the river of forgetfulness. Easy
to know and lived in a lonely place.

SECOND VOICE: Took the trouble to look into the matter of the
old lady’s will. Peeped around and made old Daniels talk. How
about the Singleton farm, old lady Singleton, Miss Doe, they
call her? Does anybody know how old Miss Doe is a-leaven her
estate? Horace Bell and Theodosia are her natural heirs.... If
Theodosia is to get the farm.... Easy to do.

She settled her whole mind upon some event, long past, selected at random from the nothingness of all forgotten events and brought forward to be examined minutely. It was the meeting, some meeting, of the literary society at the Seminary—quotations, addresses, papers, debates. She began to recite carefully, dwelling on each phrase with humorous interest, sucking from each its last degree of pleasure.

And, “Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able
By means of secret charms to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun,
That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me as you never saw!
And I chiefly use my charm
On creatures that do people harm,
The mole, the toad, the newt, the viper;
And people call me the Pied Piper.”

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

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

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

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

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

SECOND VOICE: Knock it in the head with the axe. Then watch it
bleed. Stick its throat and catch the blood in a dish. Blood
is good to drink. Blood pudding. Cut it open along the bacon.
Cut out the melt first. Hog liver fried in fat is good. A
little onion. Pepper. Makes your mouth water.

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

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

SECOND VOICE: What was she out to kill?

FOURTH VOICE: She helped Lethe kill Ross.

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

THEODOSIA: Where was I? Oh, yes.

And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying
As if impatient to be playing
Upon his pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.

THIRD VOICE: She wanted to kill. There was a night when she had
kill inside her. She helped Lethe do her work.

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

THEODOSIA:

As if impatient to be playing
Upon his pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.

SECOND VOICE: Her hand went with Lethe’s. Into Ross. All night
blood ran out.

FOURTH VOICE: Too bad it wasn’t a hog. Melts fried in fat make
a right good dish. Onion. A little butter.

THEODOSIA:

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.

SECOND VOICE: She likes to forget it. All night Ross bled out
his life. A man, he was, what they call life in his body, and
then he went out, a slash in his throat.

THEODOSIA:

And as for what your brain bewilders,
If I can rid your town of rats,
Will you give me a thousand gilders?

THIRD VOICE: Took the trouble to find out about the will.
Peeped around and quizzed old Daniels. How now, is old Miss Doe
a-leaven her farm? Too bad. Told her the second time he’d had
her. Too bad. Left it all to some charity, every cent. Some
kind of hospitals away off somewhere, a long way off. In trust
to some board.

THEODOSIA:

The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter Little Prig.
The former called the latter....

SECOND VOICE: Told her after he’d had her. Sat back afterward,
cool, to smoke a little. Said old Daniels gave him to know. Too
bad. Not a cent to any niece. All to some hospital. Away off
somewhere.

THEODOSIA:

To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it’s no disgrace
To occupy my place.

FIRST VOICE: She remembers Ross. A big man, he was. Dug ditches
for the town. Whenever there was a heavy load or a big job....

SECOND VOICE: Then she ate a snake.

FIRST VOICE: Where’s Lethe now? In the prison. Among the women.
She works all day in a room with iron over the windows. Twenty
years. When she comes out she’ll be over fifty.

THEODOSIA: He is a fool that destourbeth the moder to wepen in
the death of her child, til she have wept hir fille, as for a
certein tyme....

FIRST VOICE: They sew all day, to make clothes for the men
prisoners to wear. Over and over, a stitch, the same, over and
over, never done.

THEODOSIA: You have to let her weep out her litter of tears.
That’s all there is to it.

THIRD VOICE: No more lovers, no more men. She killed her man.
Theodosia helping.

FIRST VOICE: Why don’t you tell Frank to bring you down food?
F—o—o—d. A beefsteak. Give an order. Speak plain this time.
Say, “See here....”

SECOND VOICE, _a retreating laughter_:

That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me as you never saw!

THEODOSIA: I’ll tell him nothing.

SECOND VOICE:

By means of secret charms to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun.

FIRST VOICE, _arguing_: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an
old friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”

THEODOSIA: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.

SECOND VOICE: Last night while you were asleep a great black
face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody throat, came
swimming, tonight will come swimming close into your eyes, into
the very light of your brain. Swims up into your sight.

She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold lace against the sky. Across the steep ledge of dull light some crows were moving on stiff wings, the movements of the birds and the birds being two separate things, unrelated. When the birds were gone the movement remained, sobbing against the wall of light.

* * * * *

A morning in January cut across the air in a different way from a morning in some former month, she observed. The sky beyond the matted twigs of the trees crowded outward in unequal grays, but the twigs bore upward their January buds that were swollen in spite of the cold. She began to think of the Promethean substance, fire, diligently admired by man and guarded. First a few bits of thin wood at the end of a match, a faint sulphurous odor, a frail burning daintily coaxed to life and tenderly nursed by the shaded palm of a hand. The smoke would arise heavily, unwarmed as yet, and the blaze would spread and lie cautiously, perilously, buried under the damp smouldering wood. Another splinter and another, and then the blaze grows slowly, spreading laterally, having consumed the first splint and turned it to a bent cinder of red ash. Wood is laid across the steady blaze now and the fire laps lovingly around it. The cold slips back from the hearth and the breast reaches toward the warmth, the hands feel for it, outstretched. One is glad for it, grateful to it. In the northern zones man could not live without it. His life is owed to it. If the Promethean spell is lost man would shrink down toward the tropics, though the men might venture into the cold regions to hunt. Woman and fire are married now forever; she would have to have fire for herself and for the young.

She drew her hands under the coverlet to warm them and looked across at the dead hearth where the last of the wood was burnt. The pile in the wood-lot, saved for the evenings with the fiddle, would last, she thought, for four more burnings, and her picturing mind slipped along the stack as it had stood in autumn in the wood-yard, the knotted edges of the hickory protruding, the lichened beech sticks that were weathered and aerated, phantoms now. A few dry flakes of snow were falling, passing the opened window in a slanted line. Once man had got it he could never live without the Promethean gift, she thought, her gaze not lifted from the passing snow to the dead hearth but seeing both in one widespread plane of vision without focus.

Accustomed-unaccustomed sounds came from somewhere below. The liniment-man was at the door, the aunt crouching under an old cape receiving her purchases from the portico. His voice:

“Sakes-alive! It’s weatheren outside today. A right hard winter it is, I reckon. But it won’t be long now. No teacher yet for the Spring Valley school. Folks over there is right put-to to find a teacher. Miss Hettie up and married in the middle of the term and went off, resigned and went. Old Ronnie Beam’s wife has got a fine new girl up there, ten pounder, they say. I’ll tell you this-here, it’s weather. But it won’t be long now.”

The noises below sank to the usual delicate click and remote thump of silence, the front door having long since been closed and the steps having gone uncertainly back into the hallway.

SECOND VOICE: Old Ronnie Beam. Heaven sake! Father Time has
begotten. There’s no end to it. Seventy years old.

FIRST VOICE: Why didn’t she take some clean meal and make a
mush over her fire? Eat it hot with salt.

SECOND VOICE: The habit of the locked storeroom.

THIRD VOICE: Thank God she hasn’t got lice. What would she do
to get rid of vermin?

THEODOSIA: Coal-oil out of the lamp. Kills, they say.

THIRD VOICE: A ten-pound girl. I tell you that-there, it’s
weather.

FIRST VOICE: The dog bread is not bad bread to eat; a little
ashy, perhaps. Unsifted meal. Slobbered over by the two
bitches, Tilly and Old Mam.

SECOND VOICE, _softly_: She eats the dog bread.

THIRD VOICE: A small musical talent. A limited achievement in
music.

THEODOSIA: Small talents should not be allowed. Small talents
are treason. They shouldn’t be.

In the night she lay half asleep, running with the dogs as they hunted in the wooded slopes back of the fields. Young Blix, Nomie, Speed, Congo, they were on the trail of a hare, of a fox. She ran with them down the woods and pounded the earth of the plowed field, keen to the scent. She howled with them when the smell of the fox was renewed where the fence crossed the track. Congo turned toward her beyond the water of the creek when they had lashed swiftly over, clattering the rocks and dashing the spray. She ran neck to neck with Congo, seeing into his red mouth, feeling his flying breath, his wide jaw. At the foot of the walnut tree they were on the varmint, all their teeth in his side, in his flank, leaping over him, tearing at his hide, emptying out his entrails, her teeth in his flesh.

* * * * *

One day after the evening meal below-stairs she turned to the hearth and broke a piece of one of the corn-pones that lay there withering under the heat since morning. She carried the bread to her room and ate a part of it as she sat before the cold hearth. The sticks were sacred to the fiddle and she did not burn one that night. Later there was speaking.

FIRST VOICE: This is the whole story of the earth. He made love
like a tomcat. Cat guts make fiddle strings. Cat guts hale
souls out of men’s bodies.

THIRD VOICE: The daughter of the Don Juan of the Kentucky
villages. God knows!

FIRST VOICE: The first to be born as far as is known at present
was Lethe. River of forgetfulness. Her name shall be Lethe,
saying, I forgot myself. A careless brown wench in a love mood
and I forgot myself.

THIRD VOICE: Then Americy. A whole continent to name an
incontinent hour.

THEODOSIA: A sad, kind-voiced creature. Given to religious
practices.

THIRD VOICE: Then Theodosia, given the surname Bell, the first
so honored. Named for Theodosia Singleton, born Bell, sister to
the Old War Horse. Godmother sucks all day at the sugar-tit of
books, turns back again to the nipple to avoid knowledge.

SECOND VOICE: I drink to the health of the unbegotten!

THIRD VOICE: Then Stiggins. Curious eyes bent down at the
corners. Slobbery mouth. A steel-cunning in his hand. Elastic
speed, recoil and reach.

FIRST VOICE: Man is a nervous system. I once saw a picture of a
man, a real likeness.

SECOND VOICE: I drink to the health of the unbegotten!
[_Shouting._] I drink to the health!

FIRST VOICE: He looked like something you might expect to see
under a microscope. A ten-thousand-footed octopus, a rigmarole,
a many-fanged serpent. A real likeness.

THEODOSIA: Something you might see under a microscope?

SECOND VOICE: A cunning in his hand, sewed up in a dull fist.
Speed, recoil, reach. Stands above it a slobbery mouth.

FIRST VOICE: Annie, then. Fifth child. White, delicate. Fair
hair, gray eyes, a frail body.

THEODOSIA: An angel among the white angels of the graves. All
the sweetness of the earth brought into one frame. A tired
little child, used to call to me to wait, gentled by sickness
and pain maybe. Her little mouth with the fresh dew of God on
it.

FIRST VOICE: She was a nervous system, like all the others.

SECOND VOICE: Something you might expect to see under a
microscope.

THIRD VOICE: James Henry Burden, then, sixth child born to
Horace and first male heir to the house of Burden. I baptize
thee, James Henry Burden, in the name of the.... Second male
in the house of Bell, as far as is known. Easy to know. Sweet,
blonde languors among the cushions in a portico.

FIRST VOICE: I saw the picture of a man, a real speaking
likeness. It was a ten-thousand-footed octopus.

THEODOSIA: What color was it?

FIRST VOICE: White and gray. They called the stuff white matter
and gray matter.

THEODOSIA: Excellent names.

FIRST VOICE: A ten-thousand-footed serpent, every foot a feeler
out to feel something.

SECOND VOICE: A maw in the middle of it, the chief part, the
chief part set in the middle, a hungry enlargement in the
alimentary gut.

THIRD VOICE: Another maw in the lower middle, the chiefest
chief part, another hungry entrail, if you don’t like the short
word.

FIRST VOICE: A little knob, a very little knob on the top. I
saw the true likeness. An infinite number of feelers running
out all ways, shaped like a serpent, and a very little knob on
the top.

THEODOSIA: You couldn’t blaspheme the human mind, you couldn’t
ever. To try to lower yourself by your own bootstraps. It
wouldn’t operate, that’s all. You might try ever so hard, but
you couldn’t do it. Stumble? Fall over your own boots and
stumble, yes, but if you did you’d never know it. What you
didn’t know couldn’t happen.

SECOND VOICE: Oh talk! Which of the commandments have you not
broken? Every last God’s ten of the lot.

FIRST VOICE: There ought to be more than ten, ought to be about
ten thousand more commandments. One for every nerve-end.

THIRD VOICE: A man could keep all ten and still be a writhing
devil in hell.

SECOND VOICE: The whole thing draws itself inside its own maw,
lies down to sleep in its snake’s nest, replete, when it has
enough.

FIRST VOICE: Yellow hair, Annie, and gentle ways. Loved
everybody. The angel whiteness of the grave on her from the
first. “How He took little children as lambs to His fold.” The
song.

THIRD VOICE: Your mother was dark, but this child was fair.
Your father’s own child. The one most like your father. Your
father’s own, then.

THEODOSIA: Oh, God, I believe, and there’s nothing to believe.

She thought again and again of the pond below the hill in the creek bottom. The water would be fresh and sweet after the long winter rains and it would stand high along the banks. In the morning someone would find her body there, water-soaked, lying in the clean mud at the bottom of the water, stones tied to her feet. It would be easy to go out the door some night and never come back. Once she had gone out the door the rest would be inevitable, the door having become the line between to go and not to go. The front door seemed necessary, and she could not think tenderly of the morning, of any morning, of the stones that would be tied to her feet. All circumstances were set toward this departure. The days of the week, distantly comprehended, did not differ, one from another; Tuesday or Monday, Friday, all sank into a flat mass and were approached without emotion. She felt her hand as it was folded into the other hand and knew the feel of the bones and their bent articulations and the texture of skin as felt by itself. Prophecy gathered vaguely about the facts which were already well stated. One fact more remained as the act of departure. She slept lightly, her sleep weighted by the act, burdened by it.