Father and daughter climb the porch steps together and go in through the living room. Turtle vaults onto the counter and sets the knife down beside her. Martin strikes a match on his Levi’s to light the burner, takes down a frying pan, and begins to prepare dinner. Turtle sits at the counter’s edge. She unholsters the gun, racks the slide, and sinks four shots into a single mark. Martin looks up from cutting a squash and watches her empty the magazine. The slide locks back, smoking, and he returns his attention to the butcher block, smiling tiredly and lopsidedly, smiling so that she can see it.
“Is that your grandfather’s knife?” He dusts off his hands, holds one out.
Turtle hesitates.
“What?” he says, and she picks up the knife and hands it to him. He draws it from the sheath and walks around the counter to stand beside her, turning it to the light. He says, “When I was a kid, I can remember your grandfather sitting in his chair—he’d get in a mood and he’d drink bourbon and throw this knife at the door. Then he’d stand up and get it and sit down again, and he’d look at the door and then he’d throw the knife. It’d stick in the door and he’d walk over and get it. For hours, he’d do that.”
Turtle looks at Martin.
“Watch this,” he says.
“No,” she says, “wait.”
“It’s fine,” he says.
He walks to the hallway door beside the fireplace and closes it. He walks back and squares against the door. He says, “Watch this.”
She says, “It’s not a throwing knife.”
“The hell it isn’t,” he says.
She grabs on to his shirt. “Wait,” she says.
“Watch this,” he says, seeming to gauge the distance. He tosses the knife in the air and catches it by the spine. Turtle watches silently, putting her fingers in her mouth. Martin winds up and throws the knife and it ricochets off the door and strikes the hearthstones. Turtle lurches after it, but Martin is faster, shoving her aside and picking it off the river stone hearth and bending over it, putting his back between Turtle and the knife, saying, “Nah, it’s fine.”
“Give it back,” Turtle says.
Martin turns away from her, bent over the knife, saying, “It’s fine, kibble, it’s fine.”
“Give it back,” Turtle says.
“Just a moment,” he says. Turtle, hearing some dangerous note in his voice, steps back. “Just hold on just one goddamn moment,” he says, holding the knife to the light while Turtle waits, her jaw flexing in annoyance. “Well, fuck,” he says at last.
“What?”
“It’s this fucking carbon steel, kibble, it’s like glass.”
“Give it back to me,” she says, and he hands it back. The blade is chipped.
“It doesn’t matter,” Martin says.
“Fuck!” Turtle says.
“That high-carbon steel is worthless,” Martin says. “Like I told you, it’s like glass. That’s why they make knives out of stainless steel. That carbon steel, you just can’t trust it. Holds an edge like a motherfucker, but it shatters and it rusts. I don’t know how the man kept it like that, all through the war. Grease, I guess.”
“Fuck,” Turtle says, flushed with anger.
“Well, here, I’ll make it good.”
“Forget it,” Turtle says, “it doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. You’re mad about it, my love. I’ll make it good.”
“No, I don’t care,” she says.
“Kibble,” he says, “give me the knife, I’m not going to have you pissed at me because that knife is as fragile as a fucking toy. I made a mistake, and I can set that knife up just like you want it, good as new.”
Turtle says, “It’s something you have to care for.”
“Well, that’s fucked, because,” Martin says, laughing at her anger, “I thought a knife was supposed to take care of you. I thought that was the point.”
Turtle stands, looking down at the floorboards, feeling that she has flushed red to the roots of her hair.
“Give me the knife, kibble. A pass on the sharpener and that mark won’t even be there.”
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I can see on your face that it does matter, so give it to me, and let me make it right.”
Turtle gives him the knife and Martin opens the door and goes down the hall, past the bathroom, the foyer, and into the pantry, where there is a long wooden workbench along one wall, with clamps and vises and above that a wall of pegboard covered with mounted tools. The opposite walls are lined with gun safes, stainless-steel cabinets of reloading materials, stacked thousand-round boxes of 5.56 and .308. A spiral stairwell leads into a cellar, which is a room of damp, moldy earth filled with five-gallon buckets of dehydrated food. They have enough food stored down there to keep three people alive for three years.
Martin goes to a grinder bolted to the workbench and turns it on.
“No, wait,” Turtle says over the roar of the grinder.
Martin stands gauging the angle of the bevel by eye. “Fine,” he says, “it will be fine.” He passes the blade across the grindstone. It screams. He plunges it, hissing, into a coffee can of mineral oil, returns it to the wheel, holds it steady, his whole face intent, runs it across the grindstone, throwing a brilliant rooster tail of orange and white sparks, the edge feathering white, heat markings spreading across the steel. He lifts the blade away, plunges it again into oil, turns it over in his hand, and returns it to the grinder. He inspects it again, and stands testing it against his thumb, nodding and smiling to himself. He turns off the grinder and the grindstone begins to coast, some hitch in the mechanism so that the sound of the slowing grindstone has a faint irregularity, a whump-whump, whump-whump. He passes her the knife. The mirror polish of the razor edge is gone, the cutting edge scored and uneven. Turtle turns the knife to the light and the blade throws a thousand glinting sparks from chips and spurs in the edge.
“You’ve ruined it,” she says.
“Ruined it?” he says, hurt. “No, that’s just because— No, kibble, this is a hell of a lot better than whatever edge Grandpa put on there. That grindstone, it’ll put a perfect edge on that blade, a hundred microscopic serrations, that’s what really gives the blade a cutting edge. The razor edge you had on that before, that’s just the vanity of patient men—that’s no good for the real activity of cutting, kibble, which is to saw through things. A mirror polish like that—that’s only good for a push cut, you know what that is, kibble?”
Turtle knows what a push cut is, but Martin can’t resist.
He says, “A push cut, kibble, is the simplest kind of cut, when you lay the knife down on a steak and press without drawing the blade across it. But, kibble, you don’t just push the knife into a steak, you draw the knife across it. That, what you had before, was a glorified straight razor. In life, you drag a blade across something. That’s the business of cutting, kibble, a rough edge. That mirror polish is meant to distract from the knife’s purpose with its beauty. Do you see— Do you see—? That razor edge, it is a