Chapter VIII: Part 8

A pleasant sense of Frank gathered in and out of her sleep, Frank representative of something he was not, blended with the positive he signified and become one with it. A warmth as of life crept over her, memories that were symbols and dim anticipations. Half dreaming, her body knew that it would be renewed by his presence, that her beauty would be restored by his praise, that he would drape her scarf about her shoulders and set her hair to the way he liked. “It’s pretty this way, soft ripples in it,” a kind voice said, more kind than the voices of the dialogues. Kind voices were speaking now, voices of praise, giving warm life and the warm flow of blood through her members. The passage through the door receded and flattened to a mere saying, a doctrine. The kindness of Frank suffused her and the need of him ran over her. She knew clearly then the strength of his body as it was warm with life, his hands full of life-blood, his limbs rich with the throb of their joy. The odor of life was about him, the strength of people, of places, of people talking together.

* * * * *

A gentle rain had begun to fall and the snow of the day before would melt. She had waded to the wood-lot through the running snow and had brought in the last of the wood, six or eight pieces, piled now at the side of her hearth. A winter light lay on the running leaves of gray and silver and a winter apathy was settled deeply into the stilled vignettes at the border, the woodpeckers knocking at the recurring tendrils that spread about the faded roses. The day, Wednesday, seemed on tiptoe, aware of itself. She could scarcely remember whether she had been down to her aunt’s room for the noon meal or not. The light lying along the ceiling seemed to be an afternoon light, but the drifting of the rain across the air suggested morning. She tried to recall some detail of the descent for the food which would make the memory of it differ from every other descent. A picture of the old dog, Tilly, moving across the hearth near the baking pones of bread and lying down heavily on the stones beyond the hearth-rug came again and again. The dog had opened her mouth near the hot pone but she had drawn away, closing her mouth slowly with a yawn-spasm jerking her lower jaw, and just at that instant the clock on the mantel had begun to strike some hour.

THIRD VOICE: She’s already dead, already dead. She died one
night. Anyhow they found her on the old rags down before the
fire, dead, in the room with five old crazy hounds. Found her
on the floor rolled up in a knot, dead where she’d been asleep.
Five insane old dogs, half-starved, in the room all night. She
died on the floor with the dogs.

SECOND VOICE: This house, it’s full of devils, full of demons,
full of devils.

THIRD VOICE: Her bed had not been slept in for months on end.
Dust on the pillows. Dead, she is, already.

THEODOSIA: She didn’t have to continue in life if she didn’t
want to. She didn’t have to sleep in the bed either. She could
sleep any way she wanted to. She didn’t have to sleep in some
regular way to prove she was alive.

SECOND VOICE: This house, it’s full of devils. [_Screaming._]
Full of demons.

THIRD VOICE: “See,” they said. “Look, look, she ate the dog
bread.” What else is there around? Between her teeth a crust of
the dog bread.

THEODOSIA: And very good bread it is. Don’t be too light with
the dog bread.

FIRST VOICE: The foul breath of an old fox-killing bitch on a
hot pone and a clock strikes. That’s what time is. There is
nothing comparable to it on any other planet. Nothing like it.

THIRD VOICE: You are a murderer yourself. You, Theodosia. And
an adulteress. Which of the commandments have you not broken?

THEODOSIA: I thought that was finished, settled. I thought I’d
put that by.

THIRD VOICE: What honor did you show your father? Why didn’t
you honor him as he wanted to be honored? Easy to know and
lived in the same house.

Time was measured then by the walking of a dog over a hearth, but the day, Wednesday, stood apart from time as having some entity of its own, some extra faculty. She saw innumerable dogs walking in procession across a hearth, ticking time, yesterday and tomorrow, forever, as far back as memory could reach. A warmth then began to drown her memory of Tilly and she knew in some inner way that it was afternoon and that Frank would come. A pleasant sense of Frank stole over her. He would talk a little of his success in the courts and gossip of law secrets, wills, marriage settlements, threatened procedures, giving comradeship. Perhaps he would grow amorous, offering compliments. Through him she would touch the world again. The vignettes on the border were fading with the waning day, the birds being still, the sun set. She sat up in the bed suddenly, the act a sudden cry to the departing light. Except for a few patches of lit upland, the landscape was dark now, settling into the shadows where the hills arose, biting at the sky with sullen lines along the west hill rim. Weak from the strain of sitting up suddenly she sank into a momentary apathy, but her breathing was one continuous burden borne by the prophecy which was already clearly stated as fact. She arose from the bed as if some determination had come to her. She felt herself moving slowly, but with little forward rushes of settled opinion, going straight without dalliance. She mended the fire without stint of the wood and dressed herself in the first gown that came to her hand, the gray wool gown, and took the scarf to her shoulders. Her hands trembled with exhaustion, but she lit the lamp and carried it to the lower hall and set it on the table there.

She went to her aunt’s room and lingered a little by the fire, taking a farewell of her by a quiet lingering, a few commonplace speeches passing between them, the old sayings of the months that were past. Of the two ordeals that lay before her she regarded Frank as the more difficult, for he and his disposal had not been predicted by prophecy or settled to an act, he being rather a menace within her own body where it reached toward life. The aunt settled to her book again, and Theodosia stood by the door of the room, waiting and listening, and presently there was a noise at the front door of the house. She went into the hall then, and, Old Mam and Tilly following after her, she let them come or she laid her hand on Old Mam’s neck to keep her at hand. Frank was coming into the hall, was standing at the door looking cautiously back into the gloom of the half-lit spaces beyond the stairs.

She held Old Mam by the collar and called to Tilly, keeping them near. At the foot of the stairs she spoke to Frank across the ten feet that lay between them and she moved backward toward the steps, mounting the first, taking the dogs with her, holding them fast. He was arguing, outraged and unbelieving, growing angry. “I hold no grudge against you,” she said. She kept the dogs close to her, holding their collars. “I will never see you again,” she said. “But I hold no grudge.” She had gone half-way up the steps now, but the ascent was difficult, the dogs unwilling to come. The dogs dragged her back; “They make it too hard,” she thought, half yielding to their strength at the point where her own strength failed. Frank was commanding, accusing, saying she had not been fair.

“Drive those devils away,” he shouted after her. “You drive those dogs off. I’m here now. I’ve come.”

She was pushed by the great bodies of the dogs until she glided along the wall, but she moved upward, and the dogs came with her, a part of her ascending motion now. She took the dogs to her room and closed the door. The tumult in her mind had increased, for Frank had brought a newer quality of argument, of rational approach to himself. Pity for Frank worked in her now. He had called after her, “I want to marry you, Theodosia. That’s what I want now in life.” Frank was still below; the front door was yet open; she knew this by the draught under her door that sang a loud thin cry as the air rushed through the wide crevice and made for the loosely fitted window. Trembling, knowing that Frank was below, she began to hiss at Tilly, the more evil-tempered of the brutes, until the dog growled and barked in great anger, until she ran to the window and leaped again and again at the door. There was nothing left now but to walk out at the door when the menace of Frank should depart. She hissed up Tilly’s anger whenever it abated. She sat relaxed in her chair, her muscles indifferent to their functions. Below-stairs other dogs were in an uproar now, the whole house of dogs in a mad stir. She passed into the remote barkings of the dogs, already as dead, indifferent to the air she continued to suck in and out with her habitual breathing, indifferent to the icy water of the pond where it would lay pain about her. Her hissing was continuous with the anger of the dogs.

The crying of the draught under the door had ceased now, and the cold had ceased to rush along the floor. Then it seemed that a long while since she had heard the door below when it slammed and she heard the motor start. She continued to hiss Tilly’s anger. Sitting indifferently in her chair, relaxed in every fiber, she lived only where the hissing breath came from her lips to stir the dogs. She had no relation to the bed in which she had lain formerly and no need or thought or memory of it, no possessive sense of it. The world became more and more dim as the fire sank lower, the air colored with a pink afterglow, and the dark crept nearer, a fact which she held somehow but to which she was indifferent. Old Tilly barked fitfully now, or lay exhausted in a corner of the room. She kept no relation to the fiddle as it lay on the table beyond the hearth, beyond the reach of the firelight; it was a darkened mass among the shadows of the table, holding a remote kindness for some being far apart from herself, identical with some abstract goodness that would never be stated. It gathered to a dim shadow that concentrated to a dull point and receded through elastic space to infinite depths of remoteness. She stared at the wall to the left of the fireplace, her vision having no function. Only one fact held truth in the singleness of prophecy. She saw herself leap from the chair suddenly and rush out at the door; a sudden start and she would be gone. She stared at the wall; the picture of her going, a felt picture, spread downward through her limbs that lay relaxed now, ready for the sudden spasm of movement.

* * * * *

At once a vivid appearance entered her mind, so brilliant and powerful that her consciousness was abashed. Larger than the world, more spacious than the universe, the new apparition spread through her members and tightened her hands so that they knotted suddenly together. It tightened her spine until she sat erect. Her recognition settled to a word, groped with words, settled again about a word, some word, catching at words with a net. The word was vivid, was like a new flower in a sunny place, and unable to say it she knew it with a rush of thanksgiving that out-ran all her recognition of it. The word she could not say, could only approach with reaching tentacles of memory and thought, erected a joy throughout her senses. Her body spread widely and expanded to its former reach, and the earth came back, herself acutely aware of it. A pleasure that she still lived to participate in this recognition caught her throat with a deep sob. She had shifted her gaze so that she looked now into the fire. She sat leaned forward, tense with new life, with the new world, and she penetrated the embers with her gaze and saw into the universe of the fire, the firmament of dimly glowing heat that receded, worlds on worlds, back into infinities, atoms, powers, all replete with their own abundance. She laughed in her joy and went with the fire, more living now than the coals in the heart of the red ash. The word let a happy substitute stand for itself, a delegate appearing clearly defined, a word experienced as a glow of pride in life and joy. “Tomorrow” was the utterance, clearly placed then. On the next day the peddler would come along the road. This homely, habitual fact had been the Arise-ye of her resurrection. “I’m still alive,” she sang under her breath, “I’m alive, I’m alive.” She leaned tensely near the hearth and spoke, or she smiled without speaking. Her eyes were dim with the new birth and the bloom of renascence slightly blurred her consciousness as yet. The loaned word grew more vivid, “Tomorrow,” substituted now for the unsaid word that receded, its mission accomplished. She leaned near the hearth.

Then she arose quickly and gathered her wraps and some clothing to a chair. She shut her fiddle into its case and placed the music in a pile beside it. Then she went below and hung a white cloth on the pillar of the portico, for she thought that the peddler might pass early. In her room again she found a piece of the coarse bread under her pillow and of this she ate sitting wrapped in the blanket of the bed, the room being cold now, the fire almost gone. Without undressing she lay in the bed, ready for her departure, a gladness singing through her thin blood where life still beat. Presently she was aware that it was morning and that she had slept happily. She bathed in the cold water, shaking with cold and joy, and she ate the last of the bread. When the peddler brought his car along the driveway she took her things into her arms and went down to the portico.

“I’d be plumb pleased to death,” he said when she asked her favor, although she told him she would have to ask him to wait for his pay. “I wouldn’t charge a young lady e’er a cent to ride along with me. Pay? Don’t say e’er word about pay. Would I charge a young lady to go a-riden with me? Sakes-alive!”

When he asked her where she wanted to go she had no answer ready, but she was joyous in her evasions, making questions and replies that kept the destination delicately poised at the brink of an answer. He would go here and stop there, naming farms, and he could come to Spring Run Valley by noon of the day, he said. Then he stopped at a farm, the house near the roadway, and called his wares to the farmer’s wife, who bought. She peered curiously at the front of the truck but she made no comment.

“Where did you say you aimed to go?” he asked when they were on the road again, and she answered, “Spring Run Valley.” Then he told her of the origin of the name, she having asked. “Spring Run is a creek that rises in a spring off a way to the north there.” He told the news of the countryside, of the dead, the sick, the new-born, the lucky. Along the roadside men were clearing the ditches, shoveling out drains for the roadway, and over the tops of the hills some crows were flying. The winter had blown the last leaf from every bush and every vine and the earth stood ready to be remade, the streams running cold under the little bridges, the water quick and yellow. The truck ran swiftly, and there were few sales made, for the people were busy with other matters, with the plant beds, the hen-houses, the early gardening or fencing. They would wave the liniment-man away with a greeting. “You know somebody in Spring Valley?” he asked. She did not know what she would say to that, and she waited for a reply to find its way to her mouth, her humor that of a bird waiting for its song. She saw her strange happiness going its unknown ways and she looked from afar, quaintly amused, as if place were a humorous adjunct to being, for if one is happy in being alive he has to have a place to be happy in. They could never take that away from happiness in being. That control of places kept in the hands of men, certain men, this seemed exquisitely droll.

“Miss Hettie, she up and married awhile back, took and married and went off right in the middle of the school. They haven’t got a teacher yet to the best of my belief and knowledge. Doc Bradley said to me they would be right put-to to find one so late in the term.” Bradley was the school trustee for the district, and the appointment of the teacher was his duty, he said.

She was weary in body, aching from the long ride, and a vertigo seized her now and then, induced by the unaccustomed motion of the truck and the swift passage, but her pleasure ran still with the slipping countryside as it opened before her and with the flocking of the crows as they made off toward some farther hill. She had waited for her replies as a bird might wait, but finally she made known her mission as it appeared to her. She would ask to be allowed to teach the Spring Run Valley school for the three months remaining. “So that’s were you’re bound for,” he said. “Well I vum! They’ll be right glad to get you, that I know.” He would let her down at Dr. Bradley’s house, he said. “I’m bound straight for that very place.”

Then he took a package from his coat pocket and said that it was a snack of lunch his wife always wrapped up for him, that he never could tell where he would be for his dinner and she always tied him up a little snack to be on the safe side.

“I’m a mind to eat it now, to get shed of it,” he said. “I’ll be in Spring Valley to dinner, that I well see, and I always eat my dinner with Doc Bradley when I pass. I’m a mind to eat the bite I got here now, and maybe you’ll have a bite along with me, just to keep me company.”

He unrolled a paper from about the food and offered her one of the sandwiches in his hands. Then the juices of her vitals leaped like hungry serpents at the sight of the food and her hand reached for it, afraid it might be withdrawn, her hand trembling. She took the food out of his hand, her eyes smiling, her mind joyous, the serpent of her maw beating with anticipation, reaching forward with craving, and she knew that her way was strange as she took the bread into her hand, that even he, unobserving and eager to talk, one of his hands on the steering-wheel of the wagon, knew that her manner was biased, deflected from the ways of women. In her fingers the food was seen to be pieces of well-baked bread buttered richly, between the pieces bits of tender meat delicately salted, the flesh of cattle made ready for food. At the first moment a sickness arose as she swallowed, but she ate slowly, a rich repast, two pieces of buttered bread and the meat. When she had fed she drowsed slightly, and she let the morning spend itself as it would, let it run past her unhindered, noted but unguided.

Some people were standing in an old doorway talking together, and they shook their heads when the peddler called out to them, sufficient in themselves, joyous over some departure, waving hands as two went down a path. At a small gate beside a bridge a woman was driving a great turkey-gobbler, guiding it skilfully into the small entry, and her passing set a bright glow of color against the brown of the earth and the faint yellow that lay over the bushes, her shawl dull blue plaided with gray. Some children loitered at the side of the road making a seesaw of a fallen board and two larger girls came idly down the road under the lacery of stripped boughs, a renewed token that school did not keep. Her joy lasted and the journey came to an end. The truck went slowly down the village road between the small houses, scattering the hens from its path, calling the men to the door of the blacksmith’s shop, curving its path to the curving way.

SIX

From her window she could see that the houses in the hamlet were close together, huddled about the blacksmith’s shop and the store. The noises of the lane were near at hand, the voices intimate. She was in an upper chamber in Bradley’s house to rest, for she had asked for two weeks’ time. She had been sick, she said, but she was now recovering. In two weeks she would begin to teach the children. The doctor said finally:

“I expect your aunt, old Miss Doe, lives right close and stingy now. She’s half starved you maybe.”

“I’ve been sick. But I’ll be well now,” she said.

She would board with the doctor’s family two weeks, resting. After that time she would be given her board, week by week, among the patrons of the school, as the custom was, for the pay was small. Her work at the Seminary had given her the teacher’s credential. “I got no uneasiness but you’ll be able to teach those youngones a right smart,” Dr. Bradley said. “First we must put a little meat on your bones.”

The food was set on the table by the doctor’s wife, a large, breathy woman who sank comfortably into her ampleness and formed a bulwark against which their children leaned. She talked habitually of her work, of the food she prepared. Theodosia saw that she stilled her curiosity about herself, saw that she turned it into delicate sauces and the creamy essence of meats, nourishment for the body. The woman set upon each preparation diligently, carefully choosing an egg, rejecting a cream, tasting, studying, whipping, shredding, kneading, stirring, each dish brought to the board with a gesture of deep concern as she slightly leaned toward it to give it a last scrutiny. These attitudes were her habitual replies to her husband. The table was laid in the kitchen, for the days were cool and here was the most snug warmth. The doctor came from his office, a little room at the end of the yard, and sat at the head of the table. Sometimes he brought a patient with him, or a traveler, for there was always an extra place prepared. The heavy savors would arise and mingle sweetly with their hungers, with the faint odor of smoke from the cooking fire where the wood burned away now that it was no longer wanted. The doctor brought a breath of cold air with him and this lingered about his clothing and spread through the odorous warmth. When he was seated he bowed his head briefly and asked a blessing in a psalm-like sentence, and the little children would suck at their spoons and put their hands into their empty plates, an ear attentive to the blessing, of which they understood nothing but the amen, their hungers like the hungers of some small gentle beasts. The ceremony of carving and of passing plates was swiftly over, subordinated to their cravings. “Begin on your plate while it’s hot,” the doctor would say. “No waiten. No use to make any more fuss. Eat your victuals while they’re warm.”

The men in the village road knew one another intimately, calling “John” or “Bill” or “Thad” back and forth, shouting orders or suggestions. Lee Cummings worked somewhere on a farm, but he came home with his team at nightfall, the empty wagon rattling through the roadway. Or beyond the vapors of her sleep she would hear a night-passer, the wheels of a buggy or a car on the road which lay but a few feet from the house. In the early morning the village cows were driven to common waste pasture which was indifferently owned, along the creek, and the boys who drove them would loiter to swap knives or to boast of some personal excellence. A man’s voice would call out a command or a threat and a boy would move after his cow, simulating hurry. Thad sold goods at the store. He would stand in the sun in the early morning waiting for trade to come to his door, shifting his feet, waiting to see what the weather would offer before he predicted the business of the day. Chickens ran in the road and plucked at the grain that dropped from passing wagons, but when feeding times came they gathered at old Oscar Turner’s door. Thad would call out a jest or a truism to passing friends.

“Yes, the rich they have their ice in summer, but the poor they have their’n in winter, and everything hit’s all evened up all round,” he called after some leaving companion, closing some tale or argument. He took credit to himself as a philosopher. Or again, as a prophet:

“Hit’ll rain all day, you may as well get ready for hit. See them-there hens out eaten grass in the rain? When you see hens out in the morning eaten grass in the rain, that’s a sure sign hit’ll rain all day.”

She walked through the lane toward the creek or returned to sit on Bradley’s doorstep, or she walked along the highroad past the store and the grist-mill, knowing no surprise that she should be there rather than anywhere else, and no surprise at the replies of the people that fell the one against another, as they talked of their tasks, every man knowing the other’s needs or peculiar quality. One of old Oscar Turner’s hens laid her eggs in an overturned barrel beside Thad’s door.

“I looked to see if she was on,” a man said, drawing back from the barrel.

“Is she on?”

“I wonder if old Oscar he’ll set her there.”

“A right public place.”

“That old domernik hen, she don’t mind, she’s got no shame.”

They were new with the beginning of the earth, beyond the reach of truism, fresh and uncertain, the dew of new-birth on every saying. They were of the world and the world was new. They were free of all but the bare statement of themselves as standing out before time, before running duration. Kate Hull driving to the grist-mill with a sack of old corn to have it cracked for her pullets escaped truism as entirely as did Thad’s voice and demeanor as he uttered his philosophies, as she drove awkwardly into the setting and sat dejectedly above the corn sacks. A man, Caleb Burns, rode down from the upper-lying farmland, riding a brown horse that had three white feet. A child named Sallie West, unknown to her as yet, sent her a handful of wild crocuses. A girl, at the door of the store, buying baking soda and lemon extract, invited her to a party. A woman standing by a gate, her hand stayed on the latch, said to her as she passed, “I heard you playen on your violin last night. I heard it when I was on my way to bed. It was a fair sound.”

* * * * *

She met the children at the school on the appointed day. There were twenty-three, boys and girls. The schoolhouse stood near the creek at the end of the village, under a shade of beech and sycamore trees. Some of the children rode down from the upper valley each day in a buckboard cart, or a boy or two came horseback. Susan West, who drove the buckboard cart, would take the old horse from the shaves and hitch it under a great beech tree, and at noon one of the boys would, as his duty, without asking leave, take the eight ears of corn from under the buggy seat and feed the old nag in a wooden box that was nailed to the tree. Old Oscar’s hens would gather about the horse’s feet to catch the wasted grains of corn. She began her progress up the valley, living first at the houses that were nearest to the school and moving week by week farther away, Cummings’s first, and then Fishman’s place, and Baker’s.

The farmers had formed a beef company, a group of six or eight men who killed a beef every ten days or two weeks and shared in the meat by a carefully drawn contract. Each man furnished a yearling steer in turn and each man was given a part in turn. One or two of the men sold their portions, peddling it from house to house in the hamlet, or others used all, having many at hand to feed. The slaughter-house was a dull shed at the back of a small enclosure near the beginning of the village, removed from the schoolhouse by the whole length of the village, but Theodosia saw it as she walked in the late afternoon, and on the killing days she saw the men gathered there. A constant stench floated out from the place, and toward the back of the shed were scattered quantities of bones, the heads and feet of cattle that had been gnawed by the dogs until they were clean, some of them weathered white by the rains. Often the dogs fought there all night, their yelpings heard through her sleep, and the day after the night of the snarling dogs there was fresh meat on every table up and down the lane and the road, and fresh meat to eat with the bread for the school lunches. It was sweet to taste, good to the mouth and satisfying to the want of the inner hunger. With the meat was buttered bread and apples from some cellar or apple house, or there was honey that had been saved from the past year’s garnering, or conserve. Sometimes a sheep was slaughtered on one of the farms, or if these animals were lacking there were fowls to be baked and served in their richly buttered sauces.

At playtime the children played a game, singing,

I went to the door and picked up a pin,
And asked if Mistress Jones was in,
She neither was in she neither was out,
She’s up in the garret a-hoppen about.

Theodosia heard the song without surprise, heard the strange quality of the singing as it rang and hollowed broadly under the great beech trees along the creek. Here the cries of the birds were the more broadly dispersed as tone, richly amplified. The children were, in general, attentive to their lessons and eager to progress, to atone for their long vacation. If they were dull, Theodosia, in her distress at this, played for them on the fiddle. The day little Johnnie Turner could not learn to spell “hitching” she played a _Romance_ and an _Adagio_, a pensive wailing, until all the children were happy and they leaned forward on their desks, a-tiptoe, to hear. She heard their song game while she sat under the beech tree at noon not far from Susan’s nag, not far from old Oscar’s hens, she eating her lunch, the food some village wife had prepared for her. The names the children called as they walked away, beginning conversations, lay out under the great beeches as aliens, as belonging to the farms up the valley, and she accepted the names for tone without questioning the owner as to whether he were man or child or woman—the names, Shirley Bond, Betty Hawthorne, Rose Hines, Lum Brown. The little girls were equal in importance, none seeming to dominate the rest, the child, Sallie West, always giving, supplying the others, making the others safe or comfortable at the game, a talkative child. A voice said one day, receding down to the end of the playground where the little children kept, “Betty Hawthorne has got a blue ribbon,” or another said again, “Mollie has got a silver cup.” There were rainy days when the beech trees dripped their dejected wet. Sometimes she called the children to their books by playing a jig. They had their sayings; they would talk of leaving kisses in the drinking dipper, or they called water left in the dipper after one had drunk “slobbers.” “Let me have your slobbers,” a little boy said to his favorite among the girls. Or another, “I bid for Susan’s slobbers.” Susan and Sallie were the West girls; they came from the top of the valley, Susan a strong, well-rounded girl, misty and vague with her first flowering, neither child nor woman. “She takes after Mammy,” Sallie said. “She’s a liven image of....” she called some strange name. They liked to dwell upon whom they took after, each child designating himself and trying to discover himself. The lessons in the books were remote from them, were unknown gods to be appeased with offerings of study. Their learnings were ceremonials far apart from their richer flow of living. They measured their height at a door-post and compared this year with last, and they watched one another. Their words, coming to her from the end of a game, while they sat to rest:

“What color is Betty Hawthorne’s hair?”

“It’s red.”

“It is not so.”

“It’s brown and red mixed. I looked close at it one time.”

“Roan color is what it is. I heard my pap say one time it was roan color.”

“You think your pap knows everything. Your pap, he don’t own the earth.”

“I touched Betty Hawthorne one time.”

“I laid my eyes on her. That’s as close as ever I got to her.”

“I touched her.”

“Where’d you touch her?”

“I touched her on the leg.”

They were singing the game again, the voices blended to a high thin shouting that spread widely under the great trees and out before the creek.

Down she came as soft as silk,
A rose in her bosom as white as milk.
She took off her glove and showed me her ring,
Tomorrow, tomorrow the wedding begins.

Oh, mercy on me what have I done!
I’ve married the father instead of the son.
His back’s as crooked as an old tin pan,
And they’re all a-laughen at my old man.

Theodosia wrote sums on the board and made history questions and outlines or searched out stories to read and made maps with chalk; and felt a slight and very inward jealousy of Betty Hawthorne as holding the interest and affection of the small girls and boys. Betty Hawthorne might wear her blue ribbons and knot up her roan-colored hair for all she cared, and she played a capricious dance tune at the end of the noon hour to state her jealousy of this creature, a careless air barbed with subtle darts that deflected it from its kept rhythm, that jerked it hither and yon under the implied three-four of the measure, her lips smiling. All about the men were planting the corn. All day, looking across the creek from the windows of the schoolhouse, she could see the drills working up and down making exact rows through the broken soil. Everywhere the gardens were being planted, rows of seeds put into the soil in orderly ways to yield them food.

“My own hair, it might be called roan-colored too,” she said, “but a dark roan. A rose in her bosom as white as milk is no matter. I’m a dark roan myself....”

* * * * *

The men were taking a cow through the road toward the slaughter-pen, a fattened heifer to be killed for beef. She came from Burns’s farm at the head of the creek valley.

“What does he kill a heifer for?” one asked at the door of the store. “What for does he kill a heifer?”

“No good, she is. Wouldn’t calve.”

The beast had run past the slaughter-yard and come to the creekside, and four men were not able to drive her. She would go uncertainly forward a few feet or turn and run back, all the men after her with staves, or she broke through hedges and jumped fences, mad to get away. After two hours of struggle she was back by the creek again running in the school-yard. She was a well-marked creature, fattened for the slaughter, but alert and sinewy. She broke one of her horns on Bradley’s gate, but she did not consent to go where the men meant to take her, and she leaped the hedge again. Lee Cummings was after her, and Will Judson, and Lum Brown, the black man who worked with the Burns cattle, who always shot the beef with his shotgun. The heifer’s hair was all on end now and her eyes were wild, her side bleeding where she had scraped against some broken gate hinge, her feet cut and her left horn gone. The children at the school could scarcely attend to their books, knowing how the struggle went forward, although two or three of the boys wanted to join in the fight.

“Would you expect her, though, to walk gentle up to the slaughter-pen and put her head inside the door?” Thad asked. He was standing at noon by the school-yard gate. “That’s how a man expects a critter he aims to butcher to act. Walk right up in front of the shotgun and stand straight.”

The conflict ended at noon when the beast was entrapped in the slaughter-house, but Lum Brown would not go inside to shoot. Hearing the lessons during the afternoon, Theodosia knew the end of the struggle, and the children knew, and a mingled satisfaction and distress made them mindful of their books, abstracted and attentive to the printed sayings of their pages. Lum Brown had been obliged to push the barrel of the gun through a crack in the boarded wall and shoot the heifer from without. There was no answer to the question raised by the unwilling heifer. The answers in the books were easily found.

* * * * *

She had moved up the valley and spring was well at hand. She sat in Judson’s house on a cold green afternoon in late April. The stones of the hearth tilted away from the fireplace and sloped off to the floor, which gave unevenly toward the rear right corner of the room. A jar of cream had been set to sour beside the fender. The children were climbing over one another and over their mother’s feet, asking the words in their books. The mother with a baby in her arms was slowly rocking, was mending a garment, was giving the child her breast. Her hair was marked with gray as if a veil of light were spread under its darkness, and her great bosom was without flesh, was powerful with brawn and gland and bone. This would be her last child, and a quiet in her spent body said, “I am glad; I had enough.” The door to the front bedroom was opened and in the other room, that for the guest, a new fire burned coldly in the grate.

It was the same everywhere with a slight difference, the slow fire of the afternoon in the snug room. At Baker’s there were no infants, but three grown girls came in with embroidery pieces and sat stitching. “Shadow-work” they called what they did. At Sayre’s there was an unborn child. Mr. Fishman would come into his house in the mid-afternoon and fumble awhile at a closet with the faint muffled sound of a bottle and a glass. Lee Cummings had counted on his fingers and marked the foaling of an animal on the calendar that hung beside the mantel. This was the world. She knew no surprise of it and no surprise for herself as being there. Red clover and orchard grass were together in the meadows, growing higher every week. Faint lines of green were crisscrossing the cornfields, going two ways in orderly processions, opening out and closing together as she went by. The men called their sayings from about the shop and the store or the women called from doorways, and she heard the noises a wagon made as it went empty along the road, the noise of wood beating on wood, of wood on iron, of iron on iron, of iron on stone, horse-iron on stone. The voices of the little children came to her as she sat to eat her food at noon under the greatest beech tree, as they were bent to their play at making farms and highroads through the moist earth, and their words, “Queen ... Mollie ... Shirley Bond ... the silo ... Betty Hawthorne ... the cut-up-corn machine,” would arise to speech in their disputes or blend again to the flow of some remote water in their purring acquiescences and contents.

“Betty Hawthorne has got a calf,” one said.

“Is it Betty Hawthorne’s calf, or Caleb Burns’s calf?”

“It’s both of um’s together.”

“Betty Hawthorne has got a silver cup, two cups. I saw Betty Hawthorne’s cups last week.”

“I touched Betty Hawthorne myself.”

“Where’d you touch ’er?”

“I touched her on the tit. Where would I be a-touchen ’er?”

“Did you ever milk Betty Hawthorne?”

“Milk? A girl couldn’t milk Betty Hawthorne, or Mollie either. She gives a whole water-bucket full. Your wrist would in a manner break off in the bones. It takes Shirley Bond to milk.”

* * * * *

Or Tom Yancey gathered up the lambs, his flock, with his cries, cries the sheep knew from long use, and carried them with him down the pasture. A woman once said, “If a young lamb is lost from its mother and is off in some far part of the field, I’ll tell you what he can do. Two hundred lambs he’s got, and over, and you’d think they all look just alike. He can pick up the lamb and carry it across the field amongst a hundred-and-over ewes, and set it down alongside its own mother.” He was seen walking down a field carrying a young lamb in his arms. Or on another day he took all the sheep across two farms, down lanes and turnings, taking them to newer eatage. He would walk at the head of the flock, sometimes calling gently, and all the sheep walked close about him. His form stood high out of the sheep. A woman standing in a doorway, seeing him pass, the tall man that he was with the low sheep following and flowing around his feet, said, “The Good Shepherd. Look! How he’s got them gentled!” and another voice, “They confidence him, the sheep.” And, “See, there goes the Good Shepherd, goen past.”

Theodosia saw them flow about his feet like dull yellow-gray waves of water when he took them from pasture to pasture to feed. But one day, June, he sold them to the trader, and then he led them down the road, past the shop, past the store, beyond the schoolhouse and over the creek, along the stony road, himself walking ahead and calling with low cries if the sheep lagged, but they lagged but seldom, for they flowed evenly after him, crowding for near places and hurdling up toward his shadow, running up the stony lane toward the shipping pen. They were seen intently long after they were gone from the way, seen moving along the highroads and farther.

* * * * *

One morning when she came to the school she saw that the little children were huddled together before the coalhouse at the back of the yard as if they were afraid, clustered together as fowls afraid of a hawk. Two larger boys played with a ball along the creekside. When she went inside she found the blackboards and walls written over with obscene words, her name among them. The little children had been inside the house to leave their books and their food, but she knew that they had not written on the walls, and that it was unlikely that the boys throwing the ball before the creek had written. She erased the words slowly, carefully, without anger, thinking of how they belonged to the entire country, valley and upland and the farms beyond, the town, all towns and cities. They belonged to Thad and his wisdoms and gallantries, himself stepping about his store quickly to get her yards of cloth wrapped into a neat yellow bundle. They belonged to Anne Sawyer and her unborn child and to Johnnie Turner weeping over his multiplication tables, and to the man Caleb Burns riding down from the upper fields on his neat horse with three white feet, as much to Caleb Burns as if he had written them himself, and equally to Mary Judson holding her last infant to her great bosom. She erased the words, seeing them, unafraid of them. They named the excretions of the body and the acts of excretion, she observed. If one is to name the discharges of the body he should name them all, she thought, looking at the last of the words as she erased. Name them all, slighting none. Among these words should be written the omitted word, a true juice of the human frame, _tear_. Spelled with four letters, as were the other words, she ruminated, belonging with the others entirely. Let the boy, whoever he was, who wrote for the whole people of the community, let him write the last word; he would write it in time, this supreme juice from the body of man, the point where he stands above himself, where he outdoes the cattle.

The words were all erased now and her hands dusted free of the chalk. She was thinking of the men of the countryside as she knew them, as she had seen them about. She called the roll of them with a swift thought as she stood there, appraising them, measuring their quality, at first in one mass and later as one by one. Will Judson was busy, intent on his children and his business, scarcely aware of his wife, at whom he never looked. He was a pleasant, abstracted man of middle age, too deeply married to his wife ever to see her again. Thad was a kind, cheerful, conceited yokel. Fishman was married to his bottle, coupled by way of his beloved glass. Lee Cummings went then down the frieze of the roll and passed quickly by, for he had the odor of a goat or of a discarded kidney thrown behind the slaughter-house ten days. “It may be the corduroy he wears,” she said, and he passed with the calling of his name. Charlie Johns then, a gay youth, given to cock-fighting and over-dressing on Sundays, a lightness of touch in his goings and comings. The eldest Weakley boy was solid matter and was devoted to Rowena West, as was said, devoted finally and without departure. The Baker girls, sitting over their shadow-work, had told her this. West came then, Lucian West. He had been to visit the school with his daughters, Susan and Sallie, to see how they did. He was Rowena’s father, husband to their mother. He was full of kindly feeling and full of the goodness of life, and he went with brisk steps along the road, giving cheerful good-mornings to all the men and women alike, but the women would like him best. Beyond, in the next farm, past West, came Caleb Burns and his men, Shirley Bond and Lum Brown, the negro who shot the beef cattle. Lum Brown came and went on loaded wagons, a large man firmly put together, a large kindly mouth that turned easily with its utterances. Shirley Bond she knew of from the West child, Sallie; he rode away out of the country every Sunday to see some woman somewhere. He was a great sunburnt man, a giant upstanding to take the red of the sun on his face and on his neck, and he belonged with the Shorthorn cows in the pastures and breeding pens. Caleb Burns, then, the master of the Shorthorns, seen going along the road on the top of a wagon piled with old hay. He was the owner of the cows, Mollie, Queen, and Betty Hawthorne, and of the one Sallie had been taught not to dare name, the one she called the “male cow,” Good Boy. He rode down into the village on a trim horse with three white feet. “He’s a queer one,” Thad said to her once, explaining him after his departure, “but it takes all sorts to make up this-here world. He’s a queer one, but we-all got used to his ways a long while back, and we hardly notice how queer he might seem to a new-comer in our midst.” There had been a woman about him once, but Sallie was vaguely informed of her. He was a sun-browned man with dark hair, a gaunt man. His lips seemed always prepared for speech, he seemed always about to speak or to have just spoken, and he talked to everybody as if they knew all he meant. “He’s a smart man underneath it all, as smart as ever I saw in life, and it’s his book-sense, I reckon, makes him so he seems different,” Thad said. Beyond, going far, vaguely merged with outlying farms, were vague names, Bose Hines, Farley Penn, and Washington Tandy, names gathered back into the fields and distances. This was the list of the valley as it reached upward toward the farms and frayed into the hills.

* * * * *

The tenth week she stayed at Alfred Kirk’s place and rode back and forth morning and evening with Susan and Sallie in the buckboard behind the large-boned old horse, and the eleventh week she stayed at Si Weakley’s and rode with Susan and Sallie again. “Next week and you’ll get to know Rowena,” Sallie promised her, offering Rowena with pride. The twelfth week brought her to the top of the valley.

The house at West’s place stood sharply defined at the head of the rise of land, but lying away to the south were rolling levels of fields that were of one elevation. The grassy yard before the house was without a path although feet walked there freely and the front door was opened for use. There was a square porch before the house with pillars above and below, the wood of the pillars white against the dull red brick wall. A pet goose came to the doorstep and begged for attention. There were only two rooms above-stairs, a diminished house that belied the spacious doorway. There were no boys in the household and it was Susan who fed the old nag and carried in the water.

It was the busy season with the farmers, and all went early to bed, Lucian West rising stiffly from his chair after supper, drawing himself up slowly as his limbs cried out their protest at the fields; but on his feet he walked away briskly, making no compromises with his hurts. Neighbors came to borrow tools or to beg seeds or plants, or to grind tools at the stone. Si Weakley’s oldest boy came to talk with Rowena a little before he rested for the night. Lucian West and the girls called the mother by some name which had been kept from Rowena’s first prattlings, “Meedee,” or “Midi”—they could not say how it should be spelled.

Then Theodosia asked leave to stay at the farm during the summer, boarding, for she had saved the money she had earned, and their consent pleased the small child, Sallie, very well. Lucian West proposed that her bed be made on the upper porch.

“Couldn’t you, Midi? I’ve heard it said it’s a prime thing to sleep out for a body that’s been out of health for a spell.”