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Understanding Accounting
Principles
Seventh edition

Colleen Fisher
MBS (Massey)
Senior Lecturer, Manukau Institute of Technology

Jon Moses
MCom (Hons), CA, FCIS, FFIN, M Ins Directors
Senior Lecturer, Manukau Institute of Technology

LexisNexis NZ Limited
Wellington
2014
 LexisNexis
NEW ZEALAND LexisNexis, PO Box 472, WELLINGTON
AUSTRALIA LexisNexis Butterworths, SYDNEY
ARGENTINA LexisNexis Argentina, BUENOS AIRES
AUSTRIA LexisNexis Verlag ARD Orac GmbH & Co KG,
VIENNA
BRAZIL LexisNexis Latin America, SAO PAULO
CANADA LexisNexis Canada, Markham, ONTARIO
CHILE LexisNexis Chile, SANTIAGO
CHINA LexisNexis China, BEIJING, SHANGHAI
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FRANCE LexisNexis SA, PARIS
GERMANY LexisNexis Germany, FRANKFURT
HONG KONG LexisNexis Hong Kong, HONG KONG
HUNGARY HVG-Orac, BUDAPEST
INDIA LexisNexis, NEW DELHI
ITALY Dott A Giuffrè Editore SpA, MILAN
JAPAN LexisNexis Japan KK, TOKYO
KOREA LexisNexis, SEOUL
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JAYA, SELANGOR
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SINGAPORE LexisNexis, SINGAPORE
SOUTH AFRICA LexisNexis Butterworths, DURBAN
 SWITZERLAND Staempfli Verlag AG, BERNE
TAIWAN LexisNexis, TAIWAN
UNITED KINGDOM LexisNexis UK, LONDON, EDINBURGH
USA LexisNexis Group, New York, NEW YORK
LexisNexis, Miamisburg, OHIO

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Fisher, Colleen.
Understanding Accounting Principles 7th edition.
Previous ed: 2010.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-927248-14-0 (pbk).
978-1-927248-44-7 (ebk).
I. Accounting. II. Moses, Jon. II. Series: Understanding series.
657.044—dc 23

Copyright © 2014 LexisNexis NZ Limited.

All rights reserved.
This book is entitled to the full protection given by the Copyright Act 1994 to the holders of the
copyright, and reproduction of any substantial passage from the book except for the educational
purposes specified in that Act is a breach of the copyright of the author and/or publisher. This
copyright extends to all forms of photocopying and any storing of material in any kind of information
retrieval system. All applications for reproduction in any form should be made to the publishers.
Disclaimer
Understanding Accounting Principles has been written, edited and published and is sold on the basis that
all parties involved in the publication exclude any liability, including negligence or defamation, for all
or any damages or liability in respect of or arising out of use, reliance or otherwise of this book. The
book should not be resorted to as a substitute for professional research or advice for any purpose.
Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
Visit LexisNexis NZ at www.lexisnexis.co.nz
 About the authors

Colleen Fisher currently lives in Auckland with her husband and enjoys the
company of her two adult children. She studied for the professional
accounting exams on a part-time basis during the 1970s and ’80s while
teaching at secondary school level. After she joined Manukau Institute of
Technology, she completed her Bachelor of Business (Accounting) degree
there, and obtained her Master of Business Studies from Massey University.
Colleen was involved in running a successful building business with her
husband for twenty-five years, where she was responsible for the
administrative side of the business, including the preparation of the business
accounts. This provided many practical accounting and taxation examples to
use in her teaching. Colleen is currently a senior lecturer at Manukau
Institute of Technology and specialises in teaching all levels of financial
accounting. She has recently stepped down from being the programme leader
for the Bachelor of Business degree at MIT, but still enjoys the challenge of
teaching accounting as well as travelling.
Jon Moses was born in Auckland and obtained his Master of Commerce
(Hons) from Auckland University. He commenced his employment with a
firm of chartered accountants in Auckland and subsequently travelled
extensively. He worked in London in a variety of accounting jobs, including
in the commodity futures industry at its inception in England. After travelling
extensively throughout Asia, he returned to New Zealand and worked as an
accountant in industry and thereafter as a chartered accountant. After
venturing into the corporate banking arena, he returned to the commercial
accounting sector, working as a financial controller and company secretary
for several large listed companies.
After a major accident in 1989, which required a year of recovery, Jon
joined the education sector and has worked as a senior lecturer at Manukau
Institute of Technology since 1990, specialising in financial accounting,
finance, and banking. Jon resides in Auckland with his wife and adult son. He
remains a chartered accountant and holds several other professional
qualifications.
 Preface

This seventh edition of Understanding Accounting Principles introduces a new

author, Jon Moses, in addition to the lead author, Colleen Fisher. Jon is a
senior lecturer at Manukau Institute of Technology and brings a wealth of
experience in the areas of financial accounting, finance, and management
accounting. Before Jon entered the education sector, he was a chartered
secretary and financial controller for several large companies in New Zealand
and worked in the corporate banking sector. He also worked as a chartered
accountant for PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Ernst & Young, and owns and
operates an investment portfolio with his wife.
While accounting principles is a core topic for most business diploma
and degree programmes, not all students will go on to study accounting in
depth. The approach of Understanding Accounting Principles is to cater for
students ranging from those who want to undertake a tourism or
management or marketing option, to those who wish to continue to major in
accounting. Therefore, multiple learning needs must be met. The book
focuses on both the preparer and user of accounting information, with the
link between correct classification and presentation of data, to the ability to
analyse and use the accounting information for decision-making processes,
being crucial.
In Appendix 3, we list the updated standards issued by the New Zealand
Qualifications Authority (NZQA) for accounting and set out where the
various unit standards are covered in this book. A copy of the prescription for
Accounting Principles 500, as prescribed by NZQA for the New Zealand
Diploma in Business, has been included as Appendix 4, the learning
outcomes of which are all encompassed in this book.
This edition includes updates of the current requirements of the NZ
Framework, and provides relevant information on the preparation and
presentation of financial statements. While the examples provided are more
appropriate for students’ first exposure to accounting, they are nonetheless
sufficiently advanced for students continuing further with their accounting
studies. Appendix 2, which details the practical components of the accounting
cycle (journals and ledgers), remains.
We have retained Chapter 6, which was developed for the sixth edition
to focus on cash management, the statement of cash flows, and relevant
internal control processes. This was in response to user comments, and also
recognised the continuing relevance of economic management post the 2007
global financial crisis, which has gradually improved in most parts of the
world, but continues to cause problems for some countries in the OECD. This
increased focus on cash flow reporting also reinforces the changing nature of
accounting practice.
As with previous editions, we have continued to deal with accounting
concepts in a practical way. The concepts are equally useful for business
people seeking a greater understanding of accounting and financial issues, as
for those wanting to continue with the practice of accounting. The aim of this
book is to focus on the skills required to become a business professional
through the use of real or realistic case studies.
Business professionals need a clear conceptual framework within which
to work. Consequently, we work towards developing a sound accounting and
decision-making knowledge base and, in addition, aim to foster a wide variety
of the skills necessary for potential future business professionals.
To achieve this level of skills, we have included a range of tasks and
activities to develop students’ communication skills (written, oral, reading,
and negotiating), critical thinking, and problem solving. Teaching resources
provided with this edition also work towards developing students’
comprehension of accounting principles, particularly within an accounting
and business context.
In each chapter, key words files contain definitions for key concepts and
resource files contain further case studies, articles, reports, and other material
which add depth to the text and breadth to the concepts covered. We have
endeavoured to provide up to date articles to illustrate points. Where we have
referred to older articles, it has been because we feel that the article is still
pertinent and relevant. In reading the resource files, students will come to
appreciate the complexity of the various topics, and start to see the complex
interrelationships between business needs for accounting information; they
will see the practical application of concepts to real business situations.
Students will also appreciate and understand how decisions impact on
peoples’ lives or the life of the business, and get a feel for the ethical
considerations, which have become an important factor in producing and
reporting financial information, and are required to run a successful business.
In order to deal with problems posed, students will need to select
relevant information from the key words and resource files, as well as review
the concepts in the particular chapter. They may also need to search for
information using various sources, such as libraries, online data bases,
internet, journals, or appropriate news articles. We have tried not to
compartmentalise the development of concepts or the tasks set.
Where students have to communicate the results, the audience is defined
so that they can choose the appropriate level or method of communication
for the particular audience. For example, they may be asked to write a letter to
a client or to the newspaper, or to draft notes for a talk to the class or a local
industry group.
We have aimed to provide an accounting text, which challenges both the
demonstrator and the student to reflect on the reality of accounting. We
acknowledge that no text book, whether it be introductory or advanced, can
attempt to cover every detail of a curriculum in the way that an individual
lecturer covers it. What we have intended to do is provide enough variables
and resources to build critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so as to
enable a student to easily transition to the workplace having some vital
understanding of the world of accounting.
On a personal basis, we both wish to thank our families for their support
in allowing us to spend time on producing this latest edition of
Understanding Accounting Principles. We also wish to acknowledge our
Publisher, LexisNexis, and our editors, Alex Wakelin, Jeanette Maree, and
their team.

Colleen Fisher Jon Moses

September 2014 September
2014
 Contents

Detailed contents
About the authors
Preface

Chapter 1 Accounting and the New Zealand business environment

Chapter 2 Starting up a business
Chapter 3 Determining profit
Chapter 4 Issues in income determination and asset valuation
Chapter 5 Tracking cash and controlling assets
Chapter 6 The internal focus
Chapter 7 Analysing financial reports

Appendix 1 Extracts from Xero Limited’s 2013 Annual Report

Appendix 2 The accounting cycle — journals and ledgers
Appendix 3 NZQA unit standards for accounting
Appendix 4 NZQA prescription for Accounting Principles
Glossary
Index
 Detailed contents

Contents
About the authors
Preface

Chapter 1 Accounting and the New Zealand business environment

1.1 Introduction
1.2 Accounting — a personal view
1.2.1 Xero Limited as a case study
1.2.2 Business history — what is business about?
1.2.3 What is accounting?
1.3 Financial accounting — a professional view
1.3.1 What is financial accounting?
1.3.2 Development of accounting practice — accounting as a
profession
1.3.3 Development of accounting practice — legal impacts
1.3.4 Development of accounting practice — taxation impacts
1.3.5 Development of accounting practice — the New Zealand
Framework
1.3.6 Objectives, assumptions, and qualitative characteristics of
financial statements
1.4 Preliminary look at financial reports
1.4.1 Balance sheet
1.4.2 Statement of changes in equity
1.4.3 Income statement
1.4.4 Statement of cash flows
1.4.5 Notes to the accounts
1.5 Management accounting
1.5.1 Tasks of management accountants
1.5.2 Management accounting failures
1.6 Limitations of accounting
1.7 Conclusion
1.8 Key words 1
1.9 Resource file 1
1.9.1 Accounting scandals
1.9.2 Comparisons
1.9.3 Goods and services tax
1.9.4 Purpose of business
1.10 Mastering accounting — questions
1.10.1 Short answer questions
1.10.2 Paragraph answers
1.10.3 Discussion questions
1.10.4 Writing exercise
1.11 Mastering accounting — solutions
1.11.1 Short answer questions
1.11.2 Paragraph answers

Chapter 2 Starting up a business

2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Case study — Tearaway Paper Recycling
 2.1.2 Considerations for business start up
2.2 Most common forms of business ownership
2.2.1 Partnerships
2.2.2 Companies
2.2.3 Sole traders
2.2.4 Some questions for discussion in relation to the case
study
2.3 Business professional view
2.3.1 A closer look at the resourcing decision — long-term view
2.3.2 A closer look at the resourcing decision — working capital
2.3.3 The circulation of resources
2.3.4 A closer look at profit
2.4 An information system — the accounting equation
2.4.1 What does the accounting equation tell us?
2.4.2 Changes in the accounting equation
2.4.3 Placing values on assets and liabilities
2.4.4 Purchasing assets
2.5 Detailing what happens in the owner’s equity section
2.6 Conclusion
2.7 Key words 2
2.8 Resource file 2
2.8.1 Case study — Wade Waiwater: A change in the wind …
from crew to skipper
2.8.2 Accounting policies
2.9 Mastering accounting — questions
2.9.1 Short answer questions
2.9.2 Paragraph answers
2.9.3 Discussion questions
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
several months anyhow. Playing would put too much strain on the
arms and chest. The town had its spring season, the birds in the
trees. Her windows were always opened wide.
“You had better go to your Aunt Doe’s, in the country,” Dr. Muir
said. “A long rest, fresh air, food. That’s all you need.”
She had better sell the house and let the mortgages be paid, the
doctor said; she had better close her life there in the town. She was
unable to continue her teaching. He went into the facts about her
inheritance and weighed each in her presence, asking questions,
making judgments. She had better sell all, he advised, and turn
away the creditors, had better relieve herself of all worry. She had
better go. In the heart of this remote death into which she had
passed she stirred a little, remembering the great sweep of rolling
land as it was to be seen from the upper windows at the farm.
Some light sorrel horses had stood by a fence, and the queen-
anne’s-lace-handkerchief was spreading white beyond the creek
path. “Oh, it’s a good morning. I someways like a day just like this,”
the words arose and flowed back into the mingled picture—a path
along a cornfield where sweet hot weeds gave out their savors in the
sunshine of noon, the man in the low field plowing all day, the horse
and the plow and the figure of the dark creature that bent over the
plow-handles making an even pattern of dark lines that crept slowly
over the earth and continued all day, pleasant to see and of no effort
to herself. The high cackle and clatter of the feeding times soon
after dawn when the poultry and the geese and the guinea-fowls
sang their food cries through the baaing of the calves and the low
grunting of the swine, and she had turned on her pillow to sleep
again, lulled by the sweet blended clatter. The hill field sometimes
plowed but mainly left in pasture grass. Out the upper window the
land had rolled away a hundred miles, two hundred, never to be
measured, beyond hills and fields, insufficient even where the last
frail tree stood on the most removed hilltop, beyond two farms.
She would go. Frank came to sit with her frequently or he brought
passages to read, tribute to her convalescing hours. “Good old
Frank,” her tears surprised her in saying once when his departure
clicked the latch of the gate.
A dealer in old furniture came from Lester and bargained for the
pieces. A crier sold the house from the gallery steps one noisy court
day in May. The archaic hatchets and flints were dispersed, culled
over by a collector from Louisville, some of them rejected and
thrown into a large basket. Theodosia saved for herself Anthony’s
books, and she had them packed into boxes to be hauled to the
farm. Dr. Muir had been to call upon her aunt and to ask hospitality
for the invalid. All was arranged. She would go. The way was sunny
and long on the day of the journey, the road heavy to go, distorted
with shadows, the hedges standing back far and the woods vistas
spacious to the point of giving pain. As if bandage had been
removed from a recent hurt or fracture, the confines of the town
taken away, she spread painfully out through the hills and fields,
through the ways to go. She closed her eyes and the car slipped
lightly, too lightly, among the road windings.
 FIVE

Doe Singleton said that she might choose any room above-stairs that
pleased her, and she chose the one in which she and Annie had
stayed, the west room. The high bed leaped at her unpleasantly and
receded suddenly into diminished perceptions as she spread the
sheets and quilts over it to prepare it for occupation. It funneled
down suddenly into a very small object, a familiar pattern, a bed,
when she focused her attention upon it, but left uncentered it
bulged suddenly to unapprehended proportions, divided, proportion
at war with proportion and quality. She opened the windows to the
south sun and lay in the bed.
There was no one in the house but the aunt, whose muffled,
uncertain noises fell after undetermined intervals, and herself, who,
lying in the bed, was subtracted from the content of the walls,
length, breadth, and thickness therein contained, and extended as
continuing in a running movement through history, past and future.
The second day she noticed the leaves of the linden tree and how
each one carried two small buds or pods held to the leaf by a
slender green wire. At regular intervals the voice of her aunt called
from below.
“It’s ready now. You can come.”
Below-stairs there would be food on a small table in a back room,
her aunt’s bedroom. The bed stood pompously against the wall
opposite the great fireplace, and the dogs came and went or rested
before the open fire, lying down stiffly or arising. There was no
servant and the dining-room across the hall was mouldy and dark.
The food was always on the table when she came down the stairs,
bread and meat and milk. There was coffee in a silver coffeepot.
 “I don’t myself keep any cows now,” Miss Doe said. “I got the milk
for you from the tenant man on the place.”
“Don’t you keep any cows any more?”
“No use, just for me, me not very partial to milk in my diet. I eat
mostly the same all the time, but you say the doctor said milk for
you and I got Bland to fetch up some.”
“That was very kind of you, Aunt Doe.”
As she lay again in the bed the avenue ran down to the stone wall
and turned sweetly to the gate, which was perpetually white. Slowly
in mind she walked down the avenue, step by step, stopping to look
at each minute occurrence, as the wild fern by the side of the drive,
the small gray imagined birds that flocked over the stems of the low
pasture weeds and took imagined flight at her step. Her foot
twitched lightly under the quilts. When the birds had flown she
passed on, going slowly, undetermined whether the way should
slope downward or extend outward, shaping it to her will. She would
step slowly to make the walk last the longer. The clover at the side
of the path was white and rank, and the grass and weeds of the
pasture ready for cutting. The path she went ran along the side of
the drive although from the window she could see that there was no
path there now, for none ever walked that way. There were wagon
prints on the drive, however, marks of tires, and she shuffled her toe
in the faintly marked rut and wondered what habitual coming had
made it. Each day she prepared the walk, clinging to it with fervor,
returning to it as to a consolation. After five days no wheels had
sounded on the stone and gravel of the way.
The great hounds would come to her room each day, now one and
again another, and they would sniff at the bed or turn about lazily on
the carpet. She would call the names until some flicker of
recognition would denote that the beast had been rightly called—
Roscoe, Nomie, Tim, Speed, Old Mam, Tilly, True. There were some
younger dogs, unnamed and unbroken, but these came little to the
house. She would hear them running on the hills and hunting their
prey. She clung to the daily walk to the gate and back and built the
path minutely for comfort, gathering herself out of a running slant of
historic actuality to the more comforting actuality of the path beside
the drive where the ruts of some never-heard wagon wheels
threaded constantly down to the highway. One day it was the shade
of the elms that was intensely realized, or another the sounds of the
beetles and crickets, until, being minutely sensed, the path brought
her to the white flowers, queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief, clustered
in tall masses before the stone wall. The old dogs walked up and
down the stairs, sniffing at her bed. True brought her stiff old limbs
laboriously up the hall and turned about on the carpet to lie down at
the foot of her bed. Below on the hearth in Doe Singleton’s room
some great pones of cornbread were perpetually cooking on rough
old iron pans, bread for the old dogs.

One morning after the journey below had been accomplished, while
she lay resting from the difficult ascent of the stairs, a low purr of
muffled noises flowed through the hallways, and the front door was
opened and closed. Then a white cloth was hung on the vine by the
door and the steps receded and became the uncertain tread of her
aunt on the pavement beside the house wall. The hour was long and
sunny, undefined, mingled now with some anticipated event which
pointed to the white cloth that hung by the pillar. Later a yellow
truck came up under the elms, fitting its wheels to the ruts, and the
words, Perkins’ Liniments, grew, boldly defined, on the yellow sides of
the car which backed about at the door. Leaning on her elbow she
took a gayety from the yellow of the wagon and the bold design of
the printed words and from the brisk man who sold packages to her
aunt with a clatter of good-will and gossip. Tea in packages, coffee,
sugar—the best cane—and did she need any spices this trip?
Liniment, salve, mange cure, soap, oil, baking powders, ointment,
camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator—for hens,
cures mites, chiggers. Any extracts? flavors? perfumery? cake color?
ice-cream powders? sage?
 “The coffee and sugar is all.”
“A sight of rain over in the creek country. Water outen bounds.”
“Anybody drowned?”
“Nobody drowned, but a heap of swollen branches and some stock
washed off. Old Man Tumey’s chickens, and Lige Smith lost a calf.
They say prices are a-goen high this time, money for everybody.
Corn sold this week for around two dollars. Old Miss Bee Beach is
right sick, they say. Bound to die, I reckon.”
He shouted his words before the house and his rough voice struck
the corners of the room above and quickened life where it had
declined in her breast. His steps were rough and strong on the
gravel of the roadway. When the purchase had been made he ran
quickly through his list again and closed the rear door of the truck
with a crash. Then he swept off his hat to mop his head with a dim
handkerchief of some yellowed silk, sponging his face and neck. He
plunged the handkerchief inside his collar-band, and he stretched his
legs and his back, a tall man with a dark vigor about him. Theodosia
leaned on her arm to watch him, amused at the painted words on
the car, the long rheumatic letters that spelled the liniment to the
afflicted of the county. His vigor reached her where she lay crumpled
under the bed clothing, and she had a quick vision of herself, arisen,
going about her ways of life. She watched every gesture as he
climbed into the car and set it in motion, she concentrated to his
burning darkness, her throat dilated in response to the
unaccustomed man’s voice. When he was gone she sank weakly
back to the bed and presently she made the minute journey to the
roadside gate, step by step, negotiating intricately with the roadside
birds and grasses.
Some days later she heard the throb of another car on the
driveway and presently a voice spoke to Doe Singleton at the door,
the voice turning away, saying that it would come again. This would
be Frank, she reflected. Her aunt would not bring him to her room
because she was in bed and the aunt moved among a few old signs
and tokens. None but the old dogs ever walked on the stairway
except when she herself replied to the call from below, “Come on
now, it’s ready.” Summer having advanced, the night-noises made a
great swinging water, a vast throbbing sea of sound beating
continually and arising in shrill waves, the crickets, the frogs, the
toads, the treetoads, the katydids. An old voice then, a joyous rise
and skurry of man’s speech, acutely remembered in all its inflections.
“Ladybug, when you hear a katydid, it’s then six weeks till frost.
Yessir. Six weeks. I often took notice to a katydid that-away. It’s a
forerunner to frost for fair.... Oh, it’s a good morning.... Someways I
always liked a hilltop....”

The tenant would come about the house talking noisily, his voice
striking the wall with a token of life in the fields. Cuttings of hay,
stand of wheat, stand of rye, prime good crop of burley this time,
“fair good corn if it turns out well in the shock at plucken time”—
these were his cries as they smote the upper wall and rolled in at
the open windows. There would be money from Doe Singleton’s
acres to augment her bank account and her securities. Once her
banker called, making a low clatter of steps and voice as he went in
and out. One of the dogs, old True, died in the upper hallway,
stretched out stiff when the morning food called Theodosia down the
stairs, laid out across the carpet. Later one of the tenant men
dragged her away, the body pulled by a rope making a dull stiff
cluttering of noises on the hard stair. The strong sour odor of her
death pervaded the hall for many days after.
Theodosia did not keep the count with the katydid, but the frost
came, the leaves richly responding. The katydids had sung their own
well-timed requiem. After the season of the first frost the rains set
in, plodding heavily on the old walls, wetting the ceilings where the
roof leaked. The drip of the water made a continuous impertinence
upon her carpeted floor. She arose and set several basins under the
drips and climbed shivering back into the bed. In the morning after a
continued rainfall of many hours her bed stood under a new drip.
“The roof upstairs leaks everywhere, Aunt Doe,” she said. “There’s
hardly a dry place left. Maybe you never noticed it, but the roof
ought to be mended. The plaster might fall.”
Doe Singleton was tall and straight, a fantasy of old age, her
movements hurried and uncertain. Her hair, white now, had turned
coarse and frizzled with its graying. When the report of the roof
came to her, her mouth became straighter and more thin. She
dipped her bread into her coffee and ate slowly, saying nothing.
“Want more bread?” she said after a little, a curious cheerfulness,
reiterated each mealtime over the food.
Theodosia moved to the east room, across the hall, for there were
fewer leaks there and the bed could be kept dry. She set three
basins under the drips in her new quarters and closed the door of
the west room upon its wet misery. When she had lain ten days
without fever at any time during the day she might arise and walk a
few steps into the yard. This was the doctor’s suggestion when he
came in the autumn, his last visit, and found her lung healed. It was
difficult to achieve the ten in consecutive occurrence, and with each
failure she must begin the count anew.

Her grandfather’s books were in their boxes in the hall, half-

unpacked, tumbled together as she had searched among them. In
the east room she looked at the walls her grandfather had seen
when he lay in Doe Singleton’s house, herself across the hall then in
the room with Annie. The likenesses of the Bells and the Trotters
stood in stiff frames, awkwardly placed along the walls, and once,
indifferent to what she did, she arose and rearranged the small
frames to a happier proportion, driving the small tacks with the
poker from the fireplace. She was often insulated from her own
thought by pain in her head, in her abdomen and loins. The autumn
was bright and long, lingering warmly after the leaves had fallen.
She would fasten her eyes upon the ship, a chromo picture framed
in old gilt, a dull brown mounting. A great still ship, caught on the
upward wash of a wave and tilted with the wind, frozen forever with
one stayed moment. Its great sail lay out on the current of the air
and its round keel swelled high out of the plume of water from
which it had arisen and on which it now hung. Frank was turned
away from the door by the same reiterated cheerfulness that
responded to the food. “You better come again when she’s up and
down-stairs. Come again, young man.”
She wondered if she could still count ten rightly and she began to
mark the days on an old calendar. Insulated by pain, she would turn
to the driveway and walk minutely down imagined paths through the
first light snow. She brought wood from her aunt’s hearth and built
fires on her own. The required ten days fell in the end of November
and she walked weakly a little way under the trees among the fallen
leaves. Later she brought wood each day from the old wood-lot
behind the garden, the journey to the woodpile becoming her daily
measure of exercise. An old pile of cut wood was stored there under
a small shed, a pile of which her aunt seemed to have no
knowledge. The wood the tenant man brought to her aunt’s room
was scarcely enough now for the one fire below-stairs. She had
heard her aunt give an order, had heard her complain to the tenant
of the waste.
“No use to waste the wood so. Eight pieces a day is enough, now.”
The words had come above mingled with the tumbled wood as it
fell, or mingled again with the retreating steps of the man as they
fell stiffly on the pavement.

Doe Singleton sat all day reading her books. She would bring an
armful of novels from the front room, the room where she had lived
with Tom Singleton, and she would set herself upon them, one after
the other. They were books she had read in her youth and had
reread many times since. Theodosia would hear her come to the
room below, a dull monotony of steps and of books plucked about in
the bookcases, and hear her return, the door closed, the journeys
irregularly placed as her demands required. In the back room she
would read all day, and, going down for food, Theodosia would see
her book where it had been laid aside and would mark her swift
progress through the pages. The food was kept in the storeroom
behind the chamber, and the old pageant of the aunt handing out
the supplies from this doorway, Prudie waiting with full hands, would
arise. The door was locked as in the former time, the key hidden
away. Miss Doe would bend over the fireplace in the chamber,
cooking there. One day Theodosia, leaving after a meal, went into
the dining-room and thus to the kitchen where Prudie had cooked.
The range was gone from its place, but she recognized a part of it in
a mass of broken iron behind the door. She stared at the stale
cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in a dusty fringe, and she
sickened at the odors of mice, her mind contemptuous of the
sickness in her throat and her mouth. She looked again and again
for some token of Prudie and the ancient bustle and order of the
house, her eyes clinging to an old felt hat, some man’s headwear,
thrown down in the corner of the pantry and defiled by mice and
mould.
At her aunt’s table she would talk of one thing and another, asking
questions of the past, of Aunt Deesie, of Prudie. Where had they
gone? Was her uncle’s grave marked by a stone? She would walk out
there some day when she had grown stronger.
“Which do you like best, Dickens or Scott or Cooper?” she asked.
“About the same, one as the other. A good love-story is what I like
best. Want more bread?”
There was bread and milk and a bit of meat sometimes. A pie
baked before the open fire or a bit of a pudding.
 “When I’m better maybe you’ll have the kitchen fixed up and I’ll
run it, Aunt Doe. Or we could have somebody to cook. There’s a
heap to do in a farm kitchen, I know. I’ll take the bother of it any
time you want....”
“I’m well enough off as I am. I don’t want a big rumpus inside the
house.”
She dwelt on the kitchen as Prudie had kept it, the busy mornings
there, the kettles steaming on the stove, to try to make it reappear
as a part of a pleasant way. She remembered some droll sayings of
Prudie’s talk and restored Lucas with a swiftly sketched picture.
“Remember how Prudie used to say, ‘But stick inside your shirt-
tail, Lucas, afore you go in to wait on white folks. Shirt-tail always
out.’ Remember Prudie?”
“But I like the way I got now. No bother. All I need is right here.
I’m well enough off to suit me,” Miss Doe said.

The journey up the stairs required several pauses for rest on the
way, and, this accomplished, she was glad to sink into the kindness
of the bed. Her flesh was soft like wax. She would look at her
strange hands and listen to her fluttering breath. It was spring, she
reflected, seeing the swelling buds on the linden tree and hearing
the birds at morning. At night the up-and-down seesaw of the frogs
in the pond came to her if the breeze were drifting in from the east.
Frank came sometimes, always in the late afternoons. She would
talk with him on the portico where she would sit wrapped well in
shawls. She worked feebly, a little at a time, and rid the parlor of its
cobwebs and dust.
A sweet smell of cut grass spread over the farm. The white-top
was standing over the clover among the high heads of straying
timothy, and then the field was mowed for hay. The oat field was
green, and shaken in the breeze it was broken like lace. The rye had
turned yellow. The two men, Walter and Abe Bland, had finished
setting the tobacco in the field along the creek, and her mind’s eye
knew how their plows went there although this field was beyond the
hill’s rise and thus beyond her vision. Across the road were two
neighboring farms and the matrons there sometimes called on Miss
Doe in the fine weather. Seen distantly these houses were full of the
busy appearances of life. People came and went from the white
house where the Bernards lived, and Miss Alice Bernard, the wife
and mistress of the place, would tell of the goings and comings
among all the farms, of the berries she had canned and the jams
she had made. Miss Doe would acquiesce, remotely smiling; they
would be sitting in the shade of the portico. Seen from the upper
window, the house where Miss Alice lived presented a remote
drama. The shutters, green against the white wall, were opened and
closed daily, and people went hurrying down the driveway to the
highroad and thus away to the town. In the other house, far to the
left, there were two young girls. “They think of me as being very
old,” Theodosia thought. She would see them at morning riding their
horses, cantering along the road.
She had learned to lift the bow and the fiddle above her breast
and to hold them there. Looking out on the earth from the portico
where she rested almost all day in an old reclining chair, she would
play airs from an overture or a caprice or a sonata, bending the tune
to the outspread fertility of the fields and the high tide of mid-
summer with herself apart, insulated by the wax-like softness of her
flesh and dispossessed by the penurious withdrawals of the house.
Out before the wall, in the light of summer, seeing the richness of
the fields and the lush plenty of the days, she would surround
herself with thin spectral music from which passion had been
withdrawn. She kept a sense of hush to her own past.

She could walk now to the stile going over the fence, the way the
tenant man, Walter, took in going to and from the house. It was a
rude stile that some farmhand had constructed of such plunder as
he had found, a log split and a board on end. Sitting on the slab of
the log she could look down the pasture where some unbroken colts
ran.
“Them colts is too braysh,” Walter said one day as he passed by
the stile. “They need a plow line, them fillies.” He passed down the
path mumbling his grievance.
She sat on the stile and searched his rough speech after his
departure. He was a strong man, past middle life, sturdy and wind-
stained, a hardness in the muscles of his face and some austerity in
his eyes. His teeth were broken and yellowed with tobacco. He
would look past her when he spoke, drawing his eyes as if to see
afar, but when he looked back at her his face would gather to a sum
of its severity. He lived with his brother in Aunt Deesie’s cabin, and
neither he nor the brother had a wife.
She would walk a little farther each day and sit to rest on the stile.
Beyond the fence the ricks for feeding cattle had once stood, and
she remembered the dogs on the day they had set upon her and
little Annie, and she wondered if the dogs that were now about the
house were, any of them, the same. An intense desire to have her
former strength drove her to walk her distances several times a day,
but she often sank wearily to the ground under some tree and lay
there for an hour. As she lay thus on the ground she knew that
Walter walked through the farm, his rough shoes brushing the low
weeds, and that his brother Abe kept in the lower fields near the
tobacco barn. She would gaze up at the insecure sky where the
clouds turned on the horizon and watch the hazardous trees shake
lightly in the wind and lose now a leaf and now another, or in the
later summer two or three would fall. She knew that Walter knew
that she lay to rest there; sometimes she would see his sullen face
set forward as he tramped across the pasture rim.
At long intervals her aunt hung a signal on the pillar of the portico
and the liniment-man brought his truck to the door to sell her sugar,
coffee, and tea. These days were always Thursdays. Sometimes she
would walk to the truck and look in at the bottles and spice cans, all
labeled in yellow, all lettered with the name of the brand. He would
chant his tale again to try to tempt her buying. Spices, baking
powders, ointments, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice
eradicator, flavors, perfumery, cake color, ice-cream powder, sage.
“Here’s something to take the eye of a young lady. Perfumery and
face powder. The best there is. Both in one box. Fifty cents to a
dollar.”
“She’s not much hand to fix up,” Miss Doe said.
“Or ice-cream powders. Makes fine ice-cream. Freezes twice as
fast too.”
“Does it take an ice-cream freezer,” Theodosia asked. “And some
ice, maybe? Or just the powder?”
“Of course it takes a freezer. Or say, here’s a little something for a
young lady that’s nice and particular.”
He would run through the list of his wares again and when the
buying was determined he would give some news of the farther
valley. Caleb Burns had lost a fine cow, and a fine cow on Burns’s
place was a sure-enough fine one. Registered Shorthorns. His dark
vigor made a violence about him and his tall strong legs beat on the
gravel as he stepped quickly about. His hands were strong on the
door of the truck when he slammed it. His nails were untended and
he would pluck at his nose with his thumb, remembering his
handkerchief afterward. She would go back to the portico, delicately
amused, rejecting him pleased with the incident, and he would climb
into his vehicle and set it in motion, making a bow toward her in his
departure.
She wished for some other contact beside Frank, who came now
every week or two. She remembered too vividly his face, his
gestures, his presence after his departure. She was lying on the
ground under the linden tree, seeing the pods of the linden that
hung under each leaf by a slender stem of green. Walter and Abe
would be cutting the tobacco in the lower field. The wild horses ran
roughly up and down their pasture, their hoof-heavy tread
thundering, the young stallion stopping to paw the grass until the
dust rose from beneath it. She could scarcely divide this year from
last year except by some memory of herself lying in the bed above
the stairs, counting days to achieve ten unfevered. Now she lay on
the rough grass and herbs under the linden tree not far from the
pine, not far from the portico. She remembered Frank from time to
time, or he welled upward from within her own being, his hands that
seemed strong now as set beside no other hands. She remembered
his face, his gray eyes, his still brow, his scrutinizing stare, a picture
of his throat, his hand on his thigh.
“I must have some other people,” she said, stirring as she lay to
dispel the too-acute picture. “If I could walk to some other house.
Go anywhere....”

The cow at the tenant house was dry now and there was no milk.
“Now let’s see,” she thought, turning her mind again and again to
the problem. Miss Doe had grown weary. She leaned all day over the
novels, her eyes in a dim trance when she was called. There was
milk on the neighboring farms, Theodosia thought, but she had no
money. “You’ve got as much to eat as I’ve got,” Miss Doe said.
“You’ve got as much milk and eggs as you see me eat.”
She was in the back room at the hour of food, waiting. The pones
for the dogs baked on the hearth.
“Let me help, Aunt Doe,” she said. “Let me help you do
something.”
“I’ll mind my own house. Just keep your seat whilst I manage my
own.”
The great pones lay over hot coals to bake, the flying ashes
dusting over them. The books were piled on the deep window sill.
The bed in the back of the room was spread with a dark pieced quilt
of some old design. Dust had settled over the quilt and over the
pillows that were laid in funeral rigidity at the top of the bed.
Walking near the bed to examine the design of the quilt, Theodosia
suspected that her aunt did not sleep in the bed.
“Is this the sunshine-and-shade quilt?” she asked. “Did you piece
it? You bought it from an old woman. It’s pretty and faded now, the
colors blended. They’re pretty, faded together like that....”
The dust on the quilt and on the pillows made her know they were
never disturbed. The quilt was clean under the pillows and the bed
was always plumped carefully, the quilt on it in the same way. It was
never used, she surmised, and she wondered where her aunt lay to
sleep. There was a roll of old quilts thrown into the storeroom where
the food was kept.
Miss Doe brought out a small leather cake of wheat bread she had
cooked by the fire and a bit of conserve that was old and dry. A few
brown crackers.

On her way to the wood-lot in the first cold of a November day when
the wind was whipping the trees and shrubs and the leaves were
falling in mad disaster, “A woman, I am, walking to gather firewood
in a wild storm,” she said. In a wind-whipped bush she found a
song-sparrow’s nest, revealed now to sight by the upturned
branches and the dispersing leaves. She broke the nest from the
bush and carried it away. It was made of fine twigs rounded and
woven with perfect care, the wooded ends and strands growing
more delicate as they approached the center, the pool where the
eggs had lain. This cup was lined with human hair, soft and red-
brown, laid in an exquisite hollow to make a lining, her own hair.
Walking back through the angry air that twisted her garments and
beat her steps from the path, a wind that would cry “It is done,
make a swift end then,” and would tear life out of the trees and
wrench summer off from the sagging vine on the house wall, a
fervor of joy welled in her senses and spread backward to some
quiet inner part. She had had this ineffable relation with the bird.
Unknown to her, the nest had lain on the bough of the old lilac bush
all summer, had been built in the spring. The wind slammed the door
on the outside violence and she was free of bodily struggle, ribbons
of exhaustion and pain unwinding upward into her thighs and back.
She placed the nest on her table and looked at it from time to time,
picking it delicately apart to try to discover its order.
In the untended pastures the withered white-top and frost-
flowers, rejected by the horses, shook stiffly in the cold gusts. The
silkweed puffs had blown and their shards were left standing above
the dried sweet-fern and the bittersweet. It was now the dark
season when night comes on at the earliest hour.
She turned away from her thin face, seen quickly in a mirror, and
fear that had crouched in her thought leaped to become a pain in
her breast. She was losing what she had gained, the little she had so
carefully built together. It was difficult now to walk her small round,
through the trees, along the fence to the stile, to the wood-lot, back
up the stair. A dragging weariness which she thought would be
hunger gnawed at her body. She had talked of it to her aunt, saying,
“When I am stronger I will go.” A curious smile had settled to the
dim eyes that were glassed over with the fantasies of books.
She was walking out toward the stile in the cold of a December
day, the wind blowing her dress and beating through her thin blood,
changing her breath to a quivering chill. It came to her as she
neared the stile that she would go to the tenant man, Walter Bland,
and say, “I must have food, every day; I will sell something. My
books are all I have. How will I do it? What shall I do?” She would
say, “As a human being and a neighbor, tell me what I’d better do.
You know yourself how Aunt Doe lives. We are all here together on
the farm. Now what must I do?” He would be rude and rough in his
speech, but he would suggest some plan. He would do something.
She climbed over the stile with a new strength and went down the
pasture slowly, stopping to regain her panting breath. She was glad
that she had decided to do this. A strength greater than she had
came to her with the determination and the satisfaction in her plan.
She thought that Bland might want some of the books for himself,
and she began to name in mind such of the books as might be
within his reach. Walter came suddenly out of the brush at the foot
of the pasture, just where she entered the field. Her hand was
reached to the loop of the wire that held the field gate in place. He
came out of the cherry brush suddenly and stood ten feet away. A
hard voice accompanied his approach, spreading through the cherry
glades and meeting the cold of the wind on the briars.
“You keep on back up the hill. Don’t you be a-comen down here
now. You keep on back up where you belong.”
She tried to say what she had come to say, her words entangled
until they were meaningless. The voice spoke out steadily over her
struggle to speak.
“You keep on back up to the house.” He glanced fearfully toward
the field and the way of the cabin. “You got no business here. You
go on back.”
Her words rushed out upon her breath and were shaken with the
chill of her body. Her plan would not yield to his uncomprehended
speech, and she stood against the gray weathered gate. She drew
the flying ends of her bright scarf from before her eyes and stated
again her errand. He spoke over her words, trampling them out with
his rough voice.
“You keep on back up the hill.... Where you stay.... Anything
happens, who is’t gets strung up to a limb? Not you. You go on
back. Don’t you be a-comen down this-here way. On back.... You go
on, I say.”
She was climbing the rise again, walking along the path, facing
the wind now, moaning softly as she went. The cold cut her
garments apart and entered her flesh, past her chilled blood. She
labored with the low hill and came at last to the stile.
She was drowsed by fatigue and dulled by the cold. She went to
the evening bit of food, her life stilled, scarcely knowing when she
had eaten the last of the leather cake. When this was done she built
a fire on the parlor hearth with wood she had brought there some
days earlier and made the wood stand high over the blaze. There
would be a great glow, a holiday burning of the demon sticks she
had carried, two and two, from the wood-lot. A dozen now went on
the flame. She put on a soft gray dress she had saved from her
former wardrobe and twined a warm rose-and-yellow scarf about her
shoulders.
She sat in the parlor before the high fire and felt the color gather
richly above her scarfed breast. The sofa on which she sat ran
before the fire in a retreating curve of black, and her mind caught in
the irony of warmth and the color that wrapped her throat. Frank
came, opening the door for himself, knocking softly and entering,
rubbing his hands for their cold, eager for the fire, for the color,
eager for herself. He sat beside her and presently he began to kiss
her face and her throat and to whisper strange words, but she
stared into the blaze and turned his caresses aside with her ironic
mind where yes and no functioned identically. His hands were on her
body beneath the glowing scarf, were feeding her body, and the fire
was food again, these foods rich in their insufficiency. Frank was a
kindness at her side, at her ear, at her mouth, and it appeared to her
that she would ask him for help. She turned toward him crying with
her broken breath close to his ear, “Frank, I’m so hungry. I’m
hungry. I never have enough. I’m hungry. Aunt Doe ... I never have
real food. I’ll starve.” He warmed her with his caresses, murmuring
some pleasure in his bestowal, and she floated out of life, warmed,
and presently was appeased and comforted.
She had fallen into a deep inner reverie from which nothing could
arouse her. She heard as a long way off the monotony of Frank as
he talked. He sat apart from her now, or he had gone, had kissed
her in the moment of his departure. He would come back, she could
be sure of that, some voice had said. The night would be cold, was
cold. Daylight came late. It was winter now, snow on the ground, on
the wood in the pile at the back of the wood-lot. The noise of the
woodpeckers was strange against the snow, was flattened by the
snow. A day was but little different from a night, she observed under
the fog of her reverie, one being light, the other dark, a mere
difference. Sleep, wake, sleep. The journey to the woodpile was the
one link that bound her to that strange and foregone experience, the
ways people go and the things people do.

At this time she began to hear voices speaking to her. In the dark of
the night or in the cold bright days when she lay in her bed, the
windows opened wide, she would stare at the faded rose and pearl
of the ceiling or the faded gray of the walls, and the winter knocking
of the woodpeckers among the trees about the house would fit into
her sense of light and become identical with it. She would lie in an
apathy, scarcely breathing, divided in mind, uncoördinated by
hunger and unintegrated by pain. Lying thus one day, looking at the
woodpecker’s cry as it lay along the ceiling and was interlaced with
the faded rose and pearl of the vignettes there, a first voice spoke to
her, saying, “The categories of the flesh....” The words receded when
they had been said, leaving ripples of flat tone behind, flat words
that rode on some rhythm. When the words had receded beyond the
reach of hearing and her ears were dulled with listening to their
spent rhythms, the voice spoke suddenly again.
First Voice: The categories of the flesh.
“What are they?” she asked, her own voice as real as that which
had spoken and as earnest. She began to turn the saying about to
see what it would give. Then another voice spoke sharply, swiftly, a
hard voice blurting out its rough saying.
Second Voice: The hunger of the mouth.
An inner voice spoke then, a third speaker, more, subtle and
persuasive, saying, “And then there’s Frank.”
First Voice: A category too. He is.
Theodosia: Well, then, well? An occurrence—one happening....
She was dull to Frank, to any reminder of him. She stirred wearily
in the bed and drew her knees together, crossing her feet.
First Voice: The intense will to continue is centered in the
individual organism, and thus, or for this, the matter of
continuation is entrusted to the instance.
Third Voice: Brain turned into a walnut and then got a worm
in it....
Theodosia: The genteel poor. I’ve always heard it said they
were the greatest sufferers on the earth.
First Voice: And suppose, as Science says, it’s unlikely that
there’s anything comparable to human life on any other
planets. Human life, then, lonely in the great space of
the sky, swinging around through space without greeting,
without advice or sympathy, afraid.
Second Voice: Drunk to get more of itself!
Third Voice: What if.... Suppose she got more. She.
Theodosia.
Second Voice: Love of God! What would it be?
Theodosia: Nothing comparable to life on any other.... Human
life, that is. It must look strange from the outside, this
one, when you see the whole lot come in a whirl around
the sun. Mercury first, then Venus, then the one with life
on it. Maybe it makes it look different. Pain, try-to-do,
try-again. Stuff that can look up and down on it, stuff
that can say, “God, God!”
First Voice: And God took up a handful of dust from the
ground and mixed it with his own spittle and formed
man. A God-handful of dust and the spittle out of the
mouth of God.
Second Voice: In the beginning was the spittle of God, and the
spittle was with God. Must have a different smell, the one
with life on it. “Phew!” they’d say, “here comes that
stinken one.”
 Theodosia: I’ll begin back at the first. Take it all over again.
Run through the first scale lessons. Bow practice.
Where’s the book of duos? As soon as I’m strong
enough, the trills.
Second Voice: As soon as you’re strong enough! Love of God!
How’ll you get strong on three bites of leather hoecake?
First Voice: And half the time she throws the queer stuff up.
A melody came beating lightly through the noise of her thought,
inconsequential, irresponsible to any remembered design of song,
under the melody a thud of irregular rhythms delaying it with
intricate patterns of silence. Her fingers twitched toward the shelf
where the fiddle lay, pointing without motion, drawn under the
covering of the bed, her hands folded into her armpits for warmth.
The melody lived as a fragile pattern creeping from key to key,
spontaneously erecting itself out of some inward repository of
dancing, sinking and rising, repeating itself in its own shadow when
it fell away, becoming then the still rhythmic nothing of anti-song.
Returning afterward, it tapped even more lightly with whisper music
that broke upon a faint up-and-down, a mountain ascending and
descending, contrived and defeated in a slow design, regular, living
each moment and dying in succession, her own breathing. Her
breath pushing in and out upon the air, denting the air.

She was sitting in the parlor before the fire which burned the wood
she had carried stick by stick from the wood-lot. Dark had long since
come. The wind among the trees made a noise like the rush of
water in a river, and the night was very dark outside. Once she
looked from the window, leaning against the cold glass and bending
her neck to see overhead. Back at the fireside again, the whining of
the wind in the chimney and the crack of the dry burning logs was a
clicking of summer insects shut into winter, imprisoned in frost.
 The old bitch, Old Mam, had littered in a bedroom at the end of
the upper hallway, three weak puppies in a writhing heap on a bed
of rags. They would die of the cold. It would be cold above-stairs,
she reflected, her fire untended, the sour odor of cold cleaving the
air, rising from the window ledges and gathering at last to the bed.
It would be cold beyond the walls of the house, beyond the reach of
her fire; all night the air would grow more and more dense with
cold. The pond down by the creek would be frozen, a thick sheet of
ice to be broken in the morning by some axe. To lie all night on the
ground ten feet from the place where she sat would be death to life,
the end of all vigor. She would lie on the frozen grass, willing, she
predicted, and the wind would search out her thin dress, her thin
blood. Determination would hold her there. Pain would wrap around
her, fixed into her limbs and her body and her brain, and finally she
would become drowsed. All would recede, the all meaning her
memory of life. “Was it for this?” something would ask, saying, “You
were saved at birth by care, some care, and were taught, praised,
kept—a curious thing—for this.” A black irony. Drowsiness would
settle nearer. It was for this. Morning would come and she would lie
still, frozen, ten feet from the spot in which she now sat, her hands
bent, her body stiff, the waters of her flesh congealed, ice in her
mouth.
She moved nearer to the fire with a sharp cry and held her hands
to the flame, leaning her body nearer. She looked at her hands as
she rubbed them well into the warmth of the fire’s radiance, her thin
narrow hands moving with life, blood in their channels, and she
loved her hands.
Frank was coming in at the hallway, closing the front door,
whistling. In the next instant came a great clutter of leaping feet,
confused thought, cries, growls, oaths, blows. A rush of animal feet
on the stairway and more outcries. She went to the door of the
parlor and opened it wide, and Frank was there trying to defend
himself from two dogs, another dog coming down the stair. He was
kicking at the beast that was at his feet, but another was at his
breast, leaping.
 She drove the dog, Old Mam, from his breast, ordered her back
with a sharp command. There were four dogs now in the dim
hallway, one coming from the region beyond the stair.
“This house, it’s full of devils,” Frank cried out. He was drawing
back toward the door. “This whole damn place is a den of demons.
For God’s sake keep that dog off me!”
The dogs went away sullenly, Old Mam above to her whelps, Tilly
to lie at Miss Doe’s door until it opened for her tapping.
“This house, it’s full of devils.” He was coming striding across the
carpet toward the fire, indignation scarcely waning. He opened the
door to the dining-room and gazed into the blackness beyond,
listening. “Ugh! devils, demons, ghouls!” He slammed the door
quickly. “You wouldn’t catch me out there. I wouldn’t go out that
door.... You couldn’t bribe me to go.”

Five large pones of coarse bread, unsifted meal stirred with water
and set in skillets of hot grease to bake before the fire, this was the
food for the old dogs. Miss Doe mixed it with her hands or with a
spoon that was never cleaned. It baked on the hearth all morning,
not far from the place where Tilly and Old Mam lay. While it cooked
Tilly would sometimes sniff at each hot pone, impatient for the heat
to do its work. The thick vapors and gases from the dogs spread
through the room, and Theodosia ate her small leather wheat cake
quickly and went back to her chamber to lie weakly down. The
voices began to ply, issuing and receding.
First Voice: The receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged. Said
Anthony hath given, granted, bargained, sold, transferred
and released, and by these presents doth give, grant,
bargain, sell, transfer and release unto said Goodwin a
certain tract of land situated, lying and being in the
county aforesaid on the south side of Casey Run....
 Theodosia: Situated, lying and being. Theodosia, born a Bell,
now situated, lying and being. Here. Herself.
First Voice: Could a woman butcher a hog?
Second Voice: How many hogs has Frank butchered for you?
Did Frank ever offer you a hog?
Third Voice: Come, let us butcher a hog together. The celestial
hog. A sea hog that swims in the river of forgetfulness.
Easy to know and lived in a lonely place.
Second Voice: Took the trouble to look into the matter of the
old lady’s will. Peeped around and made old Daniels talk.
How about the Singleton farm, old lady Singleton, Miss
Doe, they call her? Does anybody know how old Miss
Doe is a-leaven her estate? Horace Bell and Theodosia
are her natural heirs.... If Theodosia is to get the farm....
Easy to do.
She settled her whole mind upon some event, long past, selected
at random from the nothingness of all forgotten events and brought
forward to be examined minutely. It was the meeting, some
meeting, of the literary society at the Seminary—quotations,
addresses, papers, debates. She began to recite carefully, dwelling
on each phrase with humorous interest, sucking from each its last
degree of pleasure.

And, “Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able

By means of secret charms to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun,
That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me as you never saw!
And I chiefly use my charm
On creatures that do people harm,
The mole, the toad, the newt, the viper;
And people call me the Pied Piper.”
Second Voice: The murderer. Murder in her hands. A snake in
her belly.
A Fourth Voice, screaming: She eats murder and snakes.
First Voice: Frank. She asked him for bread and he gave her a
snake.
Second Voice: If you had a hog to kill for food, could you
butcher a hog? Would you?
Theodosia: I’d have no idea how to go about it.
Second Voice: Knock it in the head with the axe. Then watch it
bleed. Stick its throat and catch the blood in a dish.
Blood is good to drink. Blood pudding. Cut it open along
the bacon. Cut out the melt first. Hog liver fried in fat is
good. A little onion. Pepper. Makes your mouth water.
Theodosia: But the hog is still alive. Where is the hog now?
First Voice: You asked him for bread and he gave you a
serpent.
Second Voice: What was she out to kill?
Fourth Voice: She helped Lethe kill Ross.
Second Voice: She wanted to kill. Kill! kill! Why didn’t she kill a
hog?
Theodosia: Where was I? Oh, yes.

And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying

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

Third Voice: She wanted to kill. There was a night when she
had kill inside her. She helped Lethe do her work.
Second Voice: Why isn’t she in prison then? Where’s Lethe?
Theodosia:

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

Second Voice: Her hand went with Lethe’s. Into Ross. All night
blood ran out.
Fourth Voice: Too bad it wasn’t a hog. Melts fried in fat make
a right good dish. Onion. A little butter.
Theodosia:

Upon his pipe, as low it dangled

Over his vesture so old-fangled.

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

And as for what your brain bewilders,

If I can rid your town of rats,
Will you give me a thousand gilders?

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

The mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter Little Prig.
 The former called the latter....
Second Voice: Told her after he’d had her. Sat back afterward,
cool, to smoke a little. Said old Daniels gave him to
know. Too bad. Not a cent to any niece. All to some
hospital. Away off somewhere.
Theodosia:

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

First Voice: She remembers Ross. A big man, he was. Dug

ditches for the town. Whenever there was a heavy load
or a big job....
Second Voice: Then she ate a snake.
First Voice: Where’s Lethe now? In the prison. Among the
women. She works all day in a room with iron over the
windows. Twenty years. When she comes out she’ll be
over fifty.
Theodosia: He is a fool that destourbeth the moder to wepen
in the death of her child, til she have wept hir fille, as for
a certein tyme....
First Voice: They sew all day, to make clothes for the men
prisoners to wear. Over and over, a stitch, the same, over
and over, never done.
Theodosia: You have to let her weep out her litter of tears.
That’s all there is to it.
Third Voice: No more lovers, no more men. She killed her
man. Theodosia helping.
First Voice: Why don’t you tell Frank to bring you down food?
F—o—o—d. A beefsteak. Give an order. Speak plain this
 time. Say, “See here....”
Second Voice, a retreating laughter:

That creep or swim or fly or run,

After me as you never saw!

Theodosia: I’ll tell him nothing.

Second Voice:

By means of secret charms to draw

All creatures living beneath the sun.

First Voice, arguing: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an old
friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”
Theodosia: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.
Second Voice: Last night while you were asleep a great black
face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody
throat, came swimming, tonight will come swimming
close into your eyes, into the very light of your brain.
Swims up into your sight.
She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid
dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold
lace against the sky. Across the steep ledge of dull light some crows
were moving on stiff wings, the movements of the birds and the
birds being two separate things, unrelated. When the birds were
gone the movement remained, sobbing against the wall of light.

A morning in January cut across the air in a different way from a

morning in some former month, she observed. The sky beyond the
matted twigs of the trees crowded outward in unequal grays, but the
twigs bore upward their January buds that were swollen in spite of
the cold. She began to think of the Promethean substance, fire,
diligently admired by man and guarded. First a few bits of thin wood
at the end of a match, a faint sulphurous odor, a frail burning daintily
coaxed to life and tenderly nursed by the shaded palm of a hand.
The smoke would arise heavily, unwarmed as yet, and the blaze
would spread and lie cautiously, perilously, buried under the damp
smouldering wood. Another splinter and another, and then the blaze
grows slowly, spreading laterally, having consumed the first splint
and turned it to a bent cinder of red ash. Wood is laid across the
steady blaze now and the fire laps lovingly around it. The cold slips
back from the hearth and the breast reaches toward the warmth, the
hands feel for it, outstretched. One is glad for it, grateful to it. In the
northern zones man could not live without it. His life is owed to it. If
the Promethean spell is lost man would shrink down toward the
tropics, though the men might venture into the cold regions to hunt.
Woman and fire are married now forever; she would have to have
fire for herself and for the young.
She drew her hands under the coverlet to warm them and looked
across at the dead hearth where the last of the wood was burnt. The
pile in the wood-lot, saved for the evenings with the fiddle, would
last, she thought, for four more burnings, and her picturing mind
slipped along the stack as it had stood in autumn in the wood-yard,
the knotted edges of the hickory protruding, the lichened beech
sticks that were weathered and aerated, phantoms now. A few dry
flakes of snow were falling, passing the opened window in a slanted
line. Once man had got it he could never live without the
Promethean gift, she thought, her gaze not lifted from the passing
snow to the dead hearth but seeing both in one widespread plane of
vision without focus.
Accustomed-unaccustomed sounds came from somewhere below.
The liniment-man was at the door, the aunt crouching under an old
cape receiving her purchases from the portico. His voice:
“Sakes-alive! It’s weatheren outside today. A right hard winter it is,
I reckon. But it won’t be long now. No teacher yet for the Spring
Valley school. Folks over there is right put-to to find a teacher. Miss
Hettie up and married in the middle of the term and went off,