Chapter IX: Part 9

Lying on the upper porch, the small square upper stoop above the front doorway, she could look at the night sky between the trees, all the people now in their beds to rest. Outside the tree-grown garden the road ran past, and beyond the road lay the Burns pasture, the great barns in the middle vista, and often she could hear the cattle eat if they came near the roadway to crop the grass, for they ate at night when the moon shone. Lying thus, she would go out quietly across the powdered dark that was granulated with dull light, go with the incandescent insects and the firmaments of night-cries that set stars of sound into the mellow black. Midi, when her daughters were safely away, liked to talk about brothels and women selling for hire. She lay now on the porch to sleep, she, Theodosia, on the bed Midi had made for her; she had come house by house up the valley. Midi was kind, a little withering woman with a high voice and hard, nervous, knotty hands. She saw Midi acutely as she lay in the half-dark to rest, and she heard again her breathless, fearful stories and conjectures of what must pass in wicked places. She knew that the woman was thus because she was heightened by the going of her prolific age, by the passing of her fecund power. The fiddle was stilled that she might not awaken those asleep in the house, but her mind played at a crooked phrase, a distressed lack-melody that mounted with a perpetual question toward the constellations in the open sky above and in the grass below, Midi turned momentarily back upon herself in intense departure, and she reflected that a woman’s life is short and full of peril.

Or she would remember Sallie’s song. Sallie gathered strawberries from the garden, bobbing among the straw-lined rows as if she were a giant hop-toad. Rowena was her chief admonisher, and if she were admonished enough she would scrape the new potatoes out of their thin pinkish skins and wash them in readiness for the cooking. She brought the peas to Theodosia’s porch and shelled them there, and often she would remember a song about the peas, a singsong tune,

Who buttoned up the peasecod?
Who buttoned up the bean?
I’m sure I never buttoned any,
Although I’ve unbuttoned a many.

Caleb Burns had sung that song to her, she said, one day when he had come upon her as she shelled behind the house at the kitchen steps. She would laugh at the invisible buttons and drop the unbuttoned peas lazily into her pan.

* * * * *

They would sit about the doorway after sundown to rest and often a neighbor, come on an errand, would linger with them there. Sallie would have fastened the last of the chickens and turkeys into their small coops and she would sit in the grass, growing quiet now as she approached the necessity of sleep. On Saturday evenings the talk beside the door lasted until long after nightfall. Sometimes Theodosia would sit with them in the twilight, or again she would go to the upper gallery, her place, and play for them on her instrument if they desired this, or she would call down replies to them when she was questioned. Often Caleb Burns came, stopping but a little while if it were an evening before a busy day, or lingering an hour or more at the end of the week. Then he and Lucian West talked of their farming and recounted their experiments or offered proofs of this thing and that, or Burns fell into monologue while all sat still to hear him. Midi would be asked to confirm a date, or place rightly some distant sequence of incidents. She dated all happenings by the birth of some child, either her own or some other woman’s offspring. Her chronology was final and beyond dispute, her datings written with the indelibles, pain and new life. The men used history and memory and were often refuted, their method wanting.

Sitting on the small gallery above, their voices would come to Theodosia, but half attended, as the refrains from some flowing song into which she had gone and in which she lived. Caleb talked of the age when man followed after the herds as they roamed, to prey on their flesh, of the deep relation between man and these beasts, or another voice would give some reply. Man following after the herds.... Or, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn....” The Shorthorn, called formerly Durham, or Teeswater, or Holderness.... Used to be called the Patton stock in America, but new breeds imported of late.... This winter I fed corn silage with oat and clover hay and ground corn for a grain ration, mixed with bran and cottonseed meal, in proportions 200, 200, and 75.... Percentage of shrinkage in corn.... Mineral mixture for hogs.... Wood ashes and common salt. Ten parts of wood ashes to one part of salt.... Worms in hogs.... Internal parasites in sheep.... Grub-in-head, lung-worm, tape-worm, nodular disease, stomach-worms.... Drenchings.... Three-ounce doses of one per cent copper sulphate solution given three days in succession.... Drench your sheep twice a year.... Young lambs before and at weanen time.

“Caleb, he’s a queer man,” Rowena had said. She was seen churning the cream in a rocking churn, her moist hands soft on the handle as she tilted it forward and back. She worked on the stone-paved terrace at the back of the house, in the north shade of the early morning, not far from the milk house where the cream was kept. Often Lester Weakley came to speak to her there, looking into her soft face. She was moist and fresh, was but more of the sweet butter she churned, garnered fat become flesh. “Caleb, he’s queer. I don’t know another like Caleb.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about Caleb,” West had said as he passed, stopping a little on the stones to talk. “I’ll tell you how he is. He don’t make clear much money, maybe, but he makes mighty good Shorthorns, mighty good.”

“In his talk he’s queer,” Rowena said. “He says out loud anything that might come into his head. He says out all those little things that come in your head, things you never heard about, or heard anybody speak about, or never read about in a book.”

“He raises mighty good Shorthorn cows, now,” the other said. “I don’t know anybody raises better. In debt, he is, they say, and it’s true, and he may go broke yet. Makes no mint of money, but by golly he makes mighty good cows.”

“It’s not because he’s got book-sense, either,” Rowena said, following her own. “Old Mr. Tumey, he’s got book-sense, and he’s not a thing on earth like Caleb Burns. Caleb, it seems like he says out all those little things that come in head, that you wouldn’t think to say. That nobody else says. That lay in your mind, you might say. He’s queer like that. I never saw another like him. You’re bound to give in he’s queer. But I reckon he does raise right good stock.”

To the small gallery, the voices. Fine milk and beef cattle, that they are. Three times a day we milk. Twice a day for us is enough.... Oh, tirra-lirra, joy come thither.... Betty Hawthorne, 17,768.6 pounds of milk in a twelve months and out of it 581.4 pounds of butter fat. How about Queen?... 16,990-and-over pounds of milk, or Mollie, 14,000 pounds and over.... Or Princess.... Betty Hawthorne and Princess carry the blood of Julia 16, and so does Good Boy 11, and there never was a better transmitten sire than Good Boy.... Their names all written in the Shorthorn Herd Book, registered cows.... Pure-bred Shorthorns are a good stock, as fine as there is, I reckon. We ship the cream and let the calves and pigs take up the skim.... Did you notice the papers today? What’s the quotation?... I always keep the run of the market.... I could almost tell you her registered number, Betty Hawthorne’s, three six six five eight nine something, I forget the exact figures. Or Mollie.... My aim is to people the pasture with good cows.... Her name written in the Shorthorn Book of Herds.... Or there’s Prudence. I expect you’ll get big figures out of Prudence.... When she comes to the milken age. Second calf of Mollie’s. Mollie’s first was a bull and we butchered it.

Is my name written there,
On that page white and fair....

Milk cows ought to have a legume hay, clover, alfalfa, or maybe peas or soy beans. But sorghum hay can be used, but then the grain feed will have to be more liberal. The leaves make a pleasant coolness when they fan the night air and the nightjars dart through the sky with opened mouths to drain the insects out of the dark. The mid-summer insects were crying a week ago and the longest day in the year has passed. The voices below, speaking forth and back:

“What year did Jones run for Congress, now?”

“About ninety-nine or ninety-eight.”

“Jones? No, about ninety-two that was. I’ll tell you for why I think so....”

“It was eighteen ninety-six,” Midi said. “Eighteen ninety-six it was and no mistakes made.”

“Before ninety-six, I’ll bet my last dollar on it. I’m under a doubt that it was as late as that, Midi.”

“It was ninety-six. I know. It was the same year Rowena was borned. I have a way of knowen. I recall. We all know what year Rowena was borned in. How old are you, Rowena? Just ask Rowena how old she is and you get the answer to how long it’s been.”

“I’m nineteen now.”

“Nineteen. That’s how long it’s been. Ninety-six, it was.”

* * * * *

She would not go to look at his cattle although Midi invited her, offered to take her there. The harvesters came to the wheat, and the cut field, laid up in orderly bundles, row after row, was increased in size, multiplied or enhanced by the elasticity of lines spreading two ways over a rolling land. The harvest hands were lusty feeders, sitting heartily to the food Midi and Rowena and Susan prepared, pouring great goblets of soured milk from the tall white pitcher or helping themselves again to the roasted meat that was piled high on the platter. Some voice at the cattle barns beyond the road and the pasture sang from mid-summer forward. Sallie found two saddles for as many old brood mares that were unemployed in the fields, and she and Theodosia rode back through the farm paths into remote land and explored a tangle of twiggy glades to find the spring that gave the first water to Spring Run, and they lay to rest all through the heat of the day in the cool woodland. The oat harvest followed the wheat, the voice at the distant barn singing now and then, Caleb Burns singing over the heads of his cattle, some phrase as “We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion,” phrases that intoned well before the great barn and fitted well to the voice as it hollowed richly before the resonant walls, the lay of the hills lending assistance.

We’re marching upward to Zion,
The beautiful city of God....

In the dusk before the house door, he had looked at her once, his eyes pointed with some distress. “I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler,” he said. His face had been in that moment pointed, like the face of a fox, drawn to a sharp focus by its troubled interval, “I saw you the day you came here.”

* * * * *

“Now I’ll tell you-all what my idea is about a sugar-cured ham. Meat, now, ought to be allowed to take salt a day and a half for every pound in the piece. A ham weighen eighteen pounds ought to stay in the salt twenty-seven days. Twenty pounds, if your ham weighs, then thirty days in the salt ...” The refrains hung over the summer country and settled to the distant groves of locust that grew in the places where the hills crumpled together. The tomato vines in the garden were hanging thick now with great green fruits which Midi, when they were turning toward a pale white for ripening, laid in rows on an outer shelf or on the stringers of the fence where they flushed daily more red. The odors of cooking tomato relishes savored the house and the yard when Midi made ready for the winter. Lucian West took three of his sugar-cured hams from the luscious, feathery dark of his meat house where they had ripened, and sold them to someone in the town.

In him, Caleb, there was a sense of the whole country, of the rolling farms as owned up and down the watercourses and farther, including the town, Anneville and beyond, other towns, Lester, Quincy, all the reach of the entire region. With a gesture he included all, fearless, comprehending, or he spoke of the people of Anneville, knowing them, of the history of the place and how each street was named, Hill Street, Jackson, Simon, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane.... The buying of seeds and the summer faced toward the new year.... I see where I can get.... Frost-proof cabbage.... Bermuda onion plants.... Unhulled white-blossom sweet clover, six dollars.... It was still summer, the nightjars crying in the sky, the fireflies making jeweled streaks in the dark, moving upward. Caleb’s voice, saying man looks forward toward a city, always looks forward to a city, a place, streets of gold, jasper walls, but looks backward to a garden, Eden. “Looken back he sees a garden. Well?...”

“It’s been about twelve years since the first automobiles came into this country,” Lucian West said. “Fully twelve, and look how many people still hold a prejudice against ...”

“Hardly twelve, I’d say, although I don’t exactly recollect.”

“It’s been twelve if it’s been a day, and look how headstrong some keep....”

“Nine, it’s been,” Midi said. “Nine exactly. It was the year Julie Judson was—the year little Sadie Judson was borned. I know. I recall. You can’t get that outen my head. I recall what a hard time Julie had all spring and I recall Dr. Bradley a-sitten in Julie’s room a-talken about the first automobile that went through the road, and it was that very day, that day it went past, and a-talken about what a stir it made. Theodosia can tell you how old Sadie Johnson is. She kept the roll-call at the schoolhouse.”

“Midi’s right. It’s been nine years,” Theodosia said. “Nine is on the roll book.”

Where did the people of this country come from? The question was asked and some reply given—from Virginia. Long ago. The garden spot of the earth. They came through the Wilderness Trace. The voices about the door flowed backward toward ultimate beginnings and settled slowly around their sad maxims and histories. Before dark had fallen she had seen his eyes as he, Caleb Burns, had greeted her, and she had seen that there were flakes of amber in their brown parts and that the lids were heavy as if they could not rest entirely. The talk dwelt on the town again, Anneville, named for a woman, Anne Montford. “Your great-great-grandmother,” he said. He knew of them, speaking of them tenderly now. “Mother to Theodosia Montford, grandmother to Anthony Bell....”

* * * * *

But one day she went to see the cattle, Midi having been asked by Caleb to bring her, and with Midi and Sallie she walked down the road that curved once toward the south and turned in at the large gate where the driveway began. As they walked back through the pasture they were met half-way by Caleb, and Shirley Bond left his mowing and came toward the barns to bring the cattle to be viewed. Mollie and Queen were on the rise of the hill near the haw tree and Theodosia walked there with Caleb and Midi and Sallie, and she laid her hands on the animal’s shoulders and looked at her, Queen, at her great hard eyes with their murky veins, at her thick shoulders and her falling dewlap and low brisket. There was a great fullness beginning at her middle under part and extending backward and downward, the great sack where the milk vein emptied the milk for storage. Her teats, hanging to her shanks, almost to her feet, were tight and full of life, delicately pink with blood. The hairs of her coat, viewed closely, were red and white, salted together in varying degrees of one on the other so that she was spotted with white or roan spots that shaded to red about her face and neck or again about her feet. Mollie was less quiet and she moved nervously away to find eatage at the other side of the pasture, where her pale sides and flanks sank into the bright play of sun and shadows from a locust tree.

Betty Hawthorne stood in the shade of a sugar tree chewing her cud, half sleeping, her eyes fixed on the barn at the end of the field. She was redder than Queen and larger in frame, her udders even more ripe and low-drooping. Her horns curved slightly above her eyes and her large jaws showed the veins that branched under the heavy skin. She was dreamily set to the business of chewing, her great body having succumbed to the tyranny of milk. Princess was beautifully marked with white spots that were balanced, side for side. The long straight line of her back that curved upward slightly at the base of her head drew the design into form.

The calves were penned in a smaller pasture beside the barn, five or six heifers. They played together, trying to use their horns, or one or two bawled at the fence, but their mothers were undisturbed. “She’s well enough off,” Princess said through her indifference as she bent her straight back slightly to take a bite of clover. Betty Hawthorne too had an offspring among the young in the calf pen. Caleb pointed it out.

“I’ll raise it to a year old or so and put it on the market. Weaned now. He’s a good calf but he’s not marked right and so he’ll have to go for beef.”

The great white sire, Good Boy, stood in a pen beyond the lower barn, fenced by rails that were strung high above his head. He was larger than his cows and his coat was creamy white, soft and pliable, in the fine pink of health and life. His horns were short and slightly drooped downward. He had left the grass of his enclosure and stood complacently beside the fence, chewing sleepily. The great ring through his nose scarcely moved as he opened his mouth, and when he swallowed he fell momentarily asleep, but another pellet of unchewed matter, arising from below with a spasmodic movement, would awaken him.

She walked among his cattle, these great beasts that had been brought to serve the needs of men, that had been deflected from their own ends by husbandry, and she admired their shining coats of fine red-and-white hair and their great bodies. The calves were restless now, crying now and then, some of them giving deeply matured cries, others the bleat of the young. This disturbance made a pleasant din that settled over the pasture and brought nearer the milking hour. Only one, Mollie, was nervous and wild, and she had run to the end of the pasture where she gamboled with some others, her necessity upon her, but the great quiet sire was unaware of her as yet.

Walking beside Theodosia, keeping always at her elbow, Caleb Burns told her the good qualities of each beast, offering figures in proof, pointing out this and that. Midi was as quiet as a dove, or she would ask a question of the flow of milk or the age of a heifer, shy of the great male and willing to turn away from his pen.

Theodosia knew the intensities of Midi as she walked up the pasture toward the rise of the low hill, going now to view Prudence, two years old, not yet come to the age of milk, but beautifully marked and deeply characterized by the qualities her author had devised for her. The intensities of Midi contrasted the quiet of the herd at this hour, the hour before milking time, when the lush plenty of the grass and the filled rumen induced quiet, but the force of intense life lay back of the animals in the power of their great bodies and of the young that were gathered in the calf pens. Or walking along the grass toward the middle of the pasture, Caleb talked about the beginning of the breed near the river Tees at Croft and about the first Duchess, man borrowing and shaping a little the power under the earth.

Midi and the child, Sallie, were gone now, had walked away toward the road after they had stopped to gather a few wild berries from the briars. Some little birds that were flocked in a clump of haws then began to sing, all in harmony, twittering together as a burst of high song out of a bush, as if it were to celebrate the coming of Aphrodite among the herds, to announce the beginnings of fine desires and the passing of Aphrodite among the pastures. They passed the haw trees and came then to a walnut sapling, but they turned back again and came the way they had gone. The insufficient summer twilight was beginning to settle to the pasture and the abundant but inadequate thorn bushes kept their singing, a burst of loud high twittering. The cows had been gathered to the barns. Caleb Burns, his hands touching her hands, was talking, had been talking from moment to moment. “I’ve dreamed about you so long, my arms fitted around you, seems, now you’re here I’m afraid, as if my mind would burst open. What will we do?... The moon tonight will be a petal from an old flower.” They were walking back toward the sugar tree, toward the highroad. “It’ll go, maybe, and we’ll never know what way it went. Between two summers and it’ll be gone, this drunkenness. I’ll have you then, maybe, the way Lucian West has Midi, unable to come to the house without I find you and have something to say about a gate-post or a milk can, God knows!... I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler....”

Night then, in the upper gallery, and she was trying to picture Caleb’s face, to restore it entirely now that it was not by. A hard pointed face, sharpened to a moment of anxiety, or diffused to a general scrutiny as he looked at Queen’s offspring, searching for blemishes, looked back then at her face. She saw him as a vague shape against the haw bushes. “I’m a-goen to give you Betty Hawthorne. The best cow I’ve got. If you’ll be so good as to have her until I can make you a better.”

“No, not Betty Hawthorne. No. A sprig of hawthorn flower in the spring from the bushes at the top of the pasture, or a handful of bright red haws in the fall. I’ll string a string of beads out of them, or I’ll eat the little haw-apples. A handful of haws.”

“Betty Hawthorne, I aim to give you, if you’ll be so good as to take her. The finest cow I ever owned, and the prettiest. Sister to Princess, full sister, and half-sister to Queen. She’s taken three premiums at the state fair and not yet come to her prime. If you’ll be so good as to take her.”

She reheard the argument, their voices falling together, one over the other or waiting for a reply, one voice for a moment stilled but answering in turn with swifter fervor. “Whenever I touch you,” his voice making the saying, “I have to take a deeper breath to accommodate the new life that’s grown in me.” He had marks—what kind of marks? she questioned—beside his mouth. They were deep marks, put there by a woman, or perhaps they had been put there by the cows in their failures to fulfil the promises he devised for them.

Then she remembered hell. A clear sharp memory, acutely realized, the more acutely realized in that it fell in this moment of pleasure. Self appeared, saturated with memory-realization, herself subtracted from the earth and elevated to a pinnacle of searching, her body hungering, seeing itself slipping into decay. All the disconnections operating, everything was lost then but Frank. Frank in her hands and her fingers, her shoulders, her name, her sight, her sleep. Pure and excruciating distress shook her as if it were a chill and she called to her grandfather, Anthony Bell, but when she was more quiet again, the memory receding, she called in mind the newer name.

She heard the noises of the night, the treefrogs and crickets, the frogs at the wet place beyond the milk house. The frogs set themselves against the night as if to saw a hole into the dark, but when they were done there was a season of quiet. The night was warm and the people indoors slept noisily, their breathing and their sighs in sleep a protest against the heat. She heard them faintly as they moved or threshed at their beds or sucked inward at the hot close air. Outside the purity of the night spread over the cut fields and the cows were laid down on the open pasture-top near the ragged tree. Steps came off the farther slope, man’s steps, sublimated and hollowed by the distance, feet walking through the grass, about the barns, off to the farther end of the pasture. They were lost then and denied as being delusion, an impossible. The night was warm and all but herself were asleep, drugged by the heat indoors. She saw them laid out to sleep or crumpled into relaxed postures, in their beds, up and down the countryside, from farm to farm, abstracted, a man asleep. Man lies down to rest, but the cows rest half kneeling, their crumpled forefeet ready to arise. She saw Caleb Burns asleep.

The leaves of the poplar tree lifted and turned, swayed outward and all quivered together, holding the night coolness. The steps returned to the pasture, going unevenly and stopping, going again, restless. They went across the hollow place and came back again toward the rise where the cows lay. They walked among the sleeping cows, but these did not stir for it was a tread they knew.

THE END