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.