Part 17

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.”

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.”

* * * * *