“Here, eat a cracker.” She tossed him a square, and it landed intact beside his glass of beer. He picked it up and nibbled on it with his front teeth.
“Something very strange happened today.”
“What?”
“I’d taken the children out to hunt four-leafed clovers, and we were in the corner next to the beans—just east of the schoolhouse. Eleanor drove up in her carriage and tied Perseus and came over. Then she stood there watching, and right away I forgot about her being there at all, because more and more she comes in now. She doesn’t start right off talking, but sits in the back of the room just watching. Sometimes for hours. So I’ve gotten used to her. But today, after a while, I could tell by the funny way she was looking at me that something was troubling her. I could tell, but I didn’t have the least idea what it could be. Not the least—”
“And she was amazed at your divinatory arts.” This was how Wilson always referred to Della’s talents.
“How did you know?”
“That’s easy. Just about every time someone looks at you in a funny way and you don’t have the least idea what’s going on in their heads, it turns out to be your divinatory arts.”
“That’s not true. There you go again.”
“Tell me any other time someone looked at you in a way you didn’t understand in the least.”
“OK. Wait a minute. Let me think.”
Wilson drank from the bottom of his glass, and confirmed again the fact that he had out of blind, inexcusable ignorance put in too much beer malt. It had the same bad taste as a very cheap wine, improperly fermented.
“I know,” she began again. “That time Mike Brown came in and bought cheese and I knew he was worried, but I didn’t know he’d taken his wife to the hospital. And he didn’t tell me either—you found out.”
“That isn’t the same thing. Sorry, you lose. He wasn’t even looking at you, and it didn’t have anything to do with you. Wait a minute,” said Wilson. He got up, poured the rest of the beer into the sink and went into the pantry, returning with the coffee grinder. He carried it, with the bean canister, back to the table. Wilson liked to grind coffee. “OK,” he said.
Della bit off the corner of her present cracker. “I could tell she resented me—though I think she would have denied it even if she put the question to herself. But she talked for a long time about what she referred to as magic forces. Doesn’t that seem odd, Mrs. Fitch talking about magic forces? I didn’t know what to say.”
“Why did you have to say anything? You always think you have to say something.”
“Well, I couldn’t just stand there like a ninny. You can just say that because you weren’t there. It wasn’t as though she was talking to herself. Then it was that I seemed to feel the resentment.”
“You just imagined that,” said Wilson, and emptied the little drawer from the bottom of the coffee grinder onto a page of newspaper spread across the tabletop. He repeated: “You just imagined that. Those feelings never existed in Mrs. Fitch. You thought so because you felt nervous, and feeling nervous makes you vulnerable to suspicious thoughts.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.” Wilson put the drawer back, fed in another handful of beans and resumed grinding.
Della put the cracker away and peeked in under the lid of the stew—then poked a fork into a potato and let the lid back down.
“That’s enough coffee, Wilson.”
“Just twenty-five more beans.” He began putting them in one by one. “Then let’s go sit outside.”
“It’ll be time to eat pretty soon.”
“Well, then, let’s go outside now.”
“After dinner. Then we can sit till it gets dark.”
“All right . . . but I’m going to get another dog.”
A short silence ensued.
“No. No more dogs. One is enough. No more dogs. We decided on that.”
“I know we decided on no more normal dogs. But this one isn’t normal, Midget. This one’s unnatural. He’s a fishing dog. Lewis was in today and said that it’s his neighbor’s dog and that he sees it out with him all the time in the boat, sitting up in front quietly as can be—or along the bank. Not at all like our dogs. This one’s a coon dog too. He’ll put old Duke to shame.”
“Then get rid of Duke.”
“Get rid of Duke!”
“We’re not going to have two dogs. The last time we had two dogs, they—”
“That was different. It was Jumbo’s fault. She was never very moral or responsible—but that was because of her childhood. Anyway, you shouldn’t hold grudges. It’s unfair.” Wilson began putting in more beans, and a kind of hostility came into his eyes as he began grinding, and a ripple of anger lined thinly across his forehead. I could have killed him, he thought. I could kill him now. He had no proof it was her.
“I’m sorry, Wilson. Don’t think about it, please.”
“When I think about it, it still makes me mad. He had no proof. It could have been a pack of other dogs. He didn’t see it! He didn’t see it and he couldn’t know. He had no right to shoot her.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“Damn it, I want to think about it, I tell you. I want to. I’m going to think about it until I can hate him into a little shriveledup bean and grind him up.”
“Stop it, you stupid. You don’t hate anybody.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You want a punch in the nose, or a pot of stew on your head?”
“Stop making jokes.”
Della took out a cracker, broke it into an oblong, and put it between her teeth and lips, frowned, opened her mouth into a false smile and said, “Grrrr.”
“Stupid,” said Wilson, but the hostility passed out of his eyes, hid for several moments in his tightened jaw and then disappeared back into the dungeon of his feelings where he kept it nailed to the wall.
Della let the cracker dissolve, then swallowed it. She opened the lid, poked the fork in at the potato lumps and took the lid off. “All ready,” she said. “Get that messy thing off the table.”
Wilson took the grinder back into the pantry. He picked the paper up by two sides and let the coffee slide down into a container marked ground. Not quite all of it would fit in, and he sheepishly poured the rest into a jar lid and set it on the iron stove top above the heated water. He lifted the fire cover and stuffed the newspaper into the heart of the stove, where the flames danced around it for several moments as if wondering what kind of an object it was and if it was capable of burning, then savagely set upon it and reduced it in a matter of no time at all into a thin crust of ash, worthless and without weight. Wilson put the lid down.
“Fire is brutal,” he said.
Della lifted giant spoons of stew out of the iron skillet and filled up the plates.
“Yes,” said Della. “It seems so ruthless and terrible.”
“I’m famished,” said Wilson. “And besides that it’s easy to see how they thought in mythologies that it was stolen from the gods.”
They began to eat.
“I wouldn’t think that. That doesn’t