Читать книгу Rock Island Line - David Rhodes - Страница 7

ONE

The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their gray Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands. They can remember as if just yesterday they had driven by the Montgomerys’ brownstone house and seen them sitting on their porch swing, Wilson rocking it slowly and conscientiously back and forth, Della smiling, her small feet only touching the floor on the back swing, both of them looking like careful, quiet children.

Della’s hands were so small they could be put into small-mouth jars. For many years she was their only schoolteacher, and, except for the younger ones, they all had her, and wanted desperately to do well with spelling and numbers to please her. Without fail, screaming children would hush and hum in her arms. It was thought, among the women, that it was not necessary to seek help or comfort in times of need, because Della would sense it in the air and come. The old people don’t talk of her now but what a shadow is cast over their faces and they seem to be talking about parts of themselves—not just that Della belonged to the old days, but that when she and Wilson were gone it was unnatural that anything else from back then should go on without them.

Wilson owned and managed a small grocery store in the middle of Sharon Center, where now old Highway 1 intersects with the blacktop to Hills at a three-way stop sign. (It has fallen in upon itself in neglect, bought finally by Eldon Sehr, an old German who would neither sell it, rent it nor use it, and who lived like a ghost in the house across the street.) The store front at that time extended by one oblong room out to the road. The Montgomerys lived in the house part in back for twenty-three years.

Della was in the store sometimes, but mostly it was just Wilson listening to his radio behind the counter. After several years he had noticed that on Saturday evening it was increasingly difficult to close the store, for the great number of people who came then to buy cereal and coffee, milk and such, and who all knew one another and were not the least hurried in leaving. They came in families. Taking note of this, Wilson hung up a new sign declaring that the store would be closed at three o’clock Saturday afternoon and reopened at seven, after dinner. At first no one would come at the later time, but Wilson had bought nearly a dozen chairs at an auction and scattered them here and there around the room and porch, and slowly those who would come found they could sit down and stay quite comfortably talking to their neighbors without feeling the least obligation to leave or buy anything they didn’t need. And besides, Della was there too and there was always something the women would want to talk to her about, and it was so easy to lure her away from straightening the things on the shelves. Wilson too was easy to draw aside and a quick exchange with him could bring you up to date on the current events of Sharon Center and vicinity, and a lengthy discussion was maybe more than you needed to know. But mostly he was behind the counter with his radio as the talking went on farther out in the room. And it was for that reason that it worked so well, because it wasn’t going visiting—imposing—it was going to the store. Yet even in winter, when only those within walking distance could really justify coming, it was just as full.

Della and Wilson had come to Sharon five years earlier in search of two of their relations—Nelson Hodge and David Montgomery, both by that time departed. It was assumed by George Barns, when he first saw them in his tiny store beside the doctor’s house, that they were hoping to acquire money by inheritance, and he treated them to his usually hostile personality. He explained that Nelson Hodge and David Montgomery, two confirmed and dedicated bachelors who had lived together for as long as anyone could remember, were dead, and that their small farm, along with whatever livestock and implements, had been sold for debt at a state auction. And if he were ever to meet them in the hereafter he might present them with an unpaid balance of $4.78 from his own meager business.

But the truth was that Della and Wilson were not after an inheritance. They were young and looking for a place to settle, and it was in their minds that their relatives might provide them a wedge for getting nestled in a new place. Neither was well traveled. Nelson and David had been their last hope of this plan’s success. Of course not all their relatives had been dead, but those who were living had proved to be better as springboards for moving on than as wedges.

So with the plan dissolved, they decided to go no farther, at least for now. They visited Wilson’s uncle’s farm and talked to the family that lived there, who insisted that they stay, if not in the little room upstairs, then in the barn—as it was still early September and not unduly cold. So it was from these people’s barn that Sharon Center began to learn of them—Della, whose soul seemed always to be reaching out, and Wilson, whose soul was like a net around the two of them, keeping hers from escaping. And by the time they rented the building from Stuzman across the road and almost next to George Barns’ store and began adding on a long oblong room, many people had already heard about them. George Barns, when he learned Wilson intended to start a grocery store, told everyone that they wouldn’t last long—and that even if Wilson’s father had been a grocer, there was more to running a business in a rural community than met the eye. What he meant by that of course was that Sharon Center would not allow outsiders to come in and take money away from solid community members. But it was just that attitude—Barns’ belief that everything and everyone was fixed—which made him so unpleasant; and it was more his unpleasantness that finally forced him out of business than the competition. The new couple was more accommodating. Even the meat man would rather deliver there because of the absence of complaining and because of Wilson’s keen interest in fishing and politics.

Some time during those first years, before Della was asked to teach school, Wilson built swinging doors and compartments in his wagon, and a place for ice. Once a week he filled this huckster with food and delivered to nearly every house in Sharon Township, and two houses farther away (those of Floyd and Marvin Yoder). At the same time he would pick up the cream and eggs, dried beans and fruit, homemade foodstuffs like noodles and rolls, to carry back and sell. The coming of the Montgomerys’ huckster was something on the order of an occasion, and the full delivery route was seldom completed until long after dark. In the winter, in order to make his stops fewer, several families would gather at one home, bringing with them their butter or eggs and cream. The children hoped their fathers would be in festive moods and buy something more than what was absolutely necessary. And though it would take a very long severe winter to daunt the spirit of those Iowa women, this once-a-week social occasion offset many otherwise lonely, house-prisoned hours, and many days wherein no confessions were held to acknowledge secret morning terrors and evening tensions, where people lived together like enraged animals and the sound of families arguing and cursing wailed unobstructed over the frozen land, howling into other homes through brown cracks in the walls.

Wilson was young then, and was never known to be quick-tempered, threatening or anything short of good-natured. In fact, it was for the reason that he seemed so one-sidedly good-natured and so very careful not to consort with any of the darker emotions that he was looked upon as a bit of a mystery by those who believed a person should be more rounded out in temperament and that an occasional outburst of any kind was a healthy thing, which in Wilson’s history, so much as could be known, had happened only once, while delivering groceries in the winter.

Perry Bain and his family were being visited by relatives. A man who enjoyed nothing better than solitude, saving money and working himself into the ground, Perry found little pleasure in his new company and would have preferred walking all the way to Marvin Yoder’s house to meet Wilson’s huckster by himself, so that he could get down into the ditch and walk in the knee-deep snow, testing his endurance. But everyone wanted to go, and jumped at the chance to breathe fresh air; bundled up, the whole crew marched over to Marvin’s to meet the huckster, despite the bitter cold. Even the two young ones came, carried by rotation from shoulder to shoulder.

The Montgomerys’ wagon was there before them and they hurried inside, where nearly thirty people were gathered in the large kitchen and living room. There was much joking and talk of the ungodly weather. The Perry Bains and their visitors were quickly absorbed into the hubbub. The children played games on the kitchen table. The men occupied the living room, centered mostly around Wilson. It seemed so festive that Wendy Salinger went out to the wagon with Della and brought in a box of hard candy, put it down on the table and distributed one fat stick to each child. Della had one too, and they all began sucking on them with great relish. Soon thereafter the men came wandering back in to settle the matter of exchanging food and money. They progressed halfway to the table and stopped to talk again about the tax structure and the special benefits people had who didn’t really work for a living. Then Perry Bain broke away from the conversation and rushed across the room. Five-year-old Timmy Bain had just time to look up as his father jerked the candy from his hand, threw it back into the box and said, “Don’t you ever take nothin’ that don’t belong to you!”

The room began to shudder. Bain’s wife looked down at the floor. Timmy was trying not to cry. Everyone wished to heaven that they weren’t there. Della had taken her sucker out of her mouth, then put it back in and sucked on it, trying to pretend she still enjoyed it. No one talked. The room seemed electrically charged.

But then the character of the silent tension changed and changed, until everyone was aware that it was coming from Wilson’s eyes, which seemed to be seething with hate, and his face was completely white. He walked across the room and over to the box, took out the partially eaten piece of candy, threw it on the floor, busting it into many pieces, took out another and slid it across the table to Timmy, who was crying now. Then he looked over at Bain and the look in his eyes was so murderously hateful that no one there ever forgot it. “I’ll pay for that one,” he said. Bain walked back into the living room.

This was the first time Wilson ever outwardly displayed an intense or violent emotion. Many people talked to him about it later—hoping to find some glimmer of the hatred resounding behind his eyes—and he talked to them calmly and in his serious but shy fashion, explaining how suffering and injustice, although real, were wrong and were loathsome, and especially children, who everyone would admit had done nothing to deserve pain, should not have to endure it because of corruption and vanity, or even stupidity. Yes, everyone agreed to this. Jacob Amstide went one step further and maintained that not only children, but everyone was innocent and undeserving of suffering—which originated from mistakes and fears . . . and hell.

“But assuming that’s true,” said Wilson, “then it was wrong for me to interfere. Isn’t that what you mean?”

“No,” Jacob answered. “You’re innocent too.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Wilson, “about suffering coming from hell, or from mistakes, or from anywhere. It’s merely here, and we must deal with it. There’s right and there’s wrong.”

Naturally, everyone believed that. For instance, Merle Brown had compiled a mental list of atrocities that he felt proved the absurdity of the world, and after loosing these examples on his neighbors like a swarm of biting flies, asked how could God be just. That’s not the issue, they told him. They were concerned with Wilson’s character. Here was a man who everyone thought had no dark side. Then it was reported that he did—to the extent that he would shame another man before his family—challenging him physically almost . . . and then the next day have not the slightest trace of the emotion left in him. It was like a man possessed by something and then turned loose. It interested them.

But it was for the most part soon forgotten. After all, how odd is it really to have a momentary temper flare, where all the petty grievances of several months come together in a perfect pinnacle of outrage, actualize, exorcise, and afterward leave no trace? How odd is that? Not so very. Indeed, what would married life be without just such instantaneous outbursts, where a few spoken words become a symbol for absolute, incorrigible evil? It was Wilson’s sameness that was of more interest. It seemed he had no alternative selves and was either completely open or completely closed (depending on how it seemed to you) toward everyone. Even the government, how it was conducted and the quality of the laws that managed to squirm out of it, didn’t seem to alter his outlook. He had no interest in women other than his wife.

Della began teaching school jointly with old Mrs. Fitch, the two of them making a comic pair standing side by side in the schoolyard supervising games; small Della, pretty, and quick as a yellow warbler, looked as though she were about ready to run off and get in the circle, her hair and clothes buffeted around her by the wind, while old Mrs. Fitch, dressed in heavy gray cotton, her hair coarse, bound into tight curls, did not seem as if she could ever move.

All the children were taught in the same room, through the eighth grade. The only difference between the younger and the older ones was that they carried different books. So while talking out loud with the fifth-graders about history, it was necessary to have the others busy with something that did not demand the teacher’s attention. It couldn’t always be done, and Della, as a way of learning the profession, quietly (and sometimes, under Eleanor Fitch’s disapproving frown, not so quietly) watched over those grades of students and answered their individual questions.

Some things could be communicated to all, like reading stories of pirates and buried treasure, animals that could talk and dark forests. These times they traded off, though mostly they belonged to Eleanor, who seemed to Della to be possessive of them and only let her read the books of little emotional consequence.

While Eleanor read, Della sat in the back of the room next to the doors, and once, as the old practiced voice told of the death of Brighty of the Grand Canyon, she began to cry, and hid her face in her hands. Eleanor looked up and saw her, then quickly looked down again to the book, thinking privately between the next sentences that there was nothing wrong with it in itself, but it was something to be kept from the children, who could not understand that some people never completely grow up but that that didn’t make them less than grownups. Except Eleanor suspected that in some way it did—in some way there should be a drawn line between feeling like crying when the burro dies and outwardly doing it. Later, in her house, she pondered this question, and decided that feelings had a reality of their own and that actions had little to do with them. Remember, she was very old, and soon retired from teaching, leaving Della there by herself.

But Eleanor came back for visits, and would arrive at the schoolroom unannounced, usually in the morning, bursting in through the door as though she owned it, and begin talking right away. Sometimes she brought her two canaries, Ebeneezer and Melissa, and talked about their habits. These visits saddened Della, because she knew Mrs. Fitch was lonely and that she needed a place where there was life—where she could talk of dress, and manners, and the great scholars, nature, numbers and the romantic imagination—a place where things mattered and were of consequence—a place full of meaning.

Eleanor had tenacity, and her brittle old bones hung on to life and refused to give up; and her mind refused to be dissolved into spirit and fastened like a many-tentacled bloodsucker onto reason. Her thinking remained clear, her memories intact. She continued her visits to the school, even when all of the students who could remember her as a teacher were gone into high school and, bashing in through the front door with her canaries, they would look up and think, Here she is again, the old weird woman. And Della was saddened, and many evenings took Wilson with her over to Eleanor’s house to visit. But Eleanor didn’t care about that. She loved children.

One morning she arrived in her buggy while Della and her students were sitting in a corner of the schoolyard, picking along the ground as though searching for a lost ring. Eleanor tied her horse (named Perseus, and left her by her husband, who had bought him because he was afraid of him, and there was no faster or more high-strung horse in Sharon Township) and hurried over to take control, in case they were not aware of the proper way to hunt for lost things in the grass—everyone not to move, and to look carefully around him. Moving around causes the grass to be trampled and it is possible for the object to become pushed down into the dirt, where it will be impossible to find. What she found was that they were engaged in searching for four-leaf clovers, all of them down on their hands and knees, pushing their fingers through the green clover heads. They said hello to her, and Della began to get up, but Eleanor motioned for her not to bother—that she would simply watch for a while. It was a lovely day, and the warm, fall air felt good on her face, and she thought privately, Ah, only we old ones know what it is like to breathe this and feel fully alive. Then she was taken up with watching the hunt. One of the youngest girls had the classroom dictionary, and it was her job to press the lucky clovers in between the pages. The hunters fanned out and began covering more ground, finding very few, though searching with a solemn devotion. “We’ll never find enough for all of us,” moaned one child. “Here’s one!” screamed another. “Look! There’s a snake!” “A snake!” “Leave him alone and he won’t hurt you.” “He won’t hurt anyway. I catch ’em all the time. Where is he?” “He’s gone.” “Here’s one!” “Let’s see.” “That’s not a real one. It’s just busted.” “It is too.” “I can’t find any.” “Here’s one! Oh, never mind.” “Go look in your own place.” “Don’t step there.”

But as she watched, Eleanor became increasingly amazed at what was happening within the excited hunt, and could not move her eyes away. Della was carefully, quietly taking up four-and five-leaf clovers and passing them unnoticed over to be stuck in the dictionary. Everywhere she turned would be another, as though she did not have to look, but merely reach her hand down and one would crop up to be tugged out of the ground. Even in places where the children had already searched. But they were not noticing. Della was finding them and pushing down the clovers around them so that they stood out; then she would walk away, and later the children would find them and begin screaming, “I got one! I got one!”

Eleanor, inside her heavy dress beneath her old face, thought, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s uncommon. What can it mean? Does it mean anything? No one can be that lucky. She merely knows how to hunt for them and is practical—No! It’s uncommon.

Della was finally forced to take hold of one first-grade child (the only student left who had not found a clover himself and was on the verge of tears) and lead him over to a place where she had several located and waiting; and even then he stepped on one and only found the other by Della suggesting he not stoop over, but get down on all fours—helping him in such a way that both hands were on either side of a five-leafed one as big around as a golf ball. He picked it and took it over to the dictionary. “Here’s another one,” he said in an unconcerned way, but watched the older girl press it into place and gave a little jump when she slammed the book shut.

Della said it was time to go in, and then hollered that it was time, because sounds travel poorly through children. It was only then that she noticed Eleanor’s eyes bent upon her. She told the older ones to monitor a study time, and together she and Eleanor watched them clear the yard and disappear into the building. Della turned to her, smiled and began to speak, but was interrupted.

“Magic,” said Eleanor. Then she paused, took off her hat, patted her hair and put it back on. Della looked away and wondered if she were going to finish, or begin, or if the word was at the tail end of a private thought and had escaped by mistake. Some old people she had known had been like that.

“Sometimes I’ve wondered if there’s anything reasonable about magic,” Eleanor continued. “I mean, if it’s real.” Then she bent her eyes down on Della again.

“Well, I don’t know if it’s real or not. . . . Maybe. . . . What do you mean by magic?”

“You know, magic. Not black magic or superstition. White magic. Is there such a thing as white magic?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anyway, I’m sure there is. Its study is not for evil purposes. It reveals luck. It’s a kind of preparation that makes you lucky. Do you know anything about it?”

“What kind of study?”

“I don’t know for sure. Yes, incantations and such.”

“I guess I don’t know anything about it.”

“Forgive me,” Eleanor said, and stepped several feet closer toward the schoolhouse, her shoes hidden in the clover. “I’m not being precise enough.” Then she began again. “When I was young—much younger than you . . . How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

There was a pause. Eleanor began again. “Actually age means nothing to me. Understand that no one ever ceases being . . . expectant of life. Now tell me quite simply, how were you able to find those clovers so easily?”

Then Della understood the reason for Eleanor’s concern with her. Her eyes lit up, she smiled and made a motion as if she were going to clap her hands. “Oh, that,” she said. “That’s just me and finding things. I’ve always been able to do that. Wilson always says that he can never—”

“Do you mean you knew, when you came out here with them, that you would be able to find them so easily?”

“Well, yes and no. First of all, I guess I never think about it. Then there have to be some to find. Once Wilson lost one of his nails he uses for putting tobacco in his pipe and was so sure it was in the store that he made me look for it there. It’s a very special nail. But I knew it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t.”

“How did you know? And aren’t you saying that even before you came out with the children, you had a fairly good idea that there would be some of those four- and five-leafed clovers out here?”

“No, no,” exclaimed Della. “I know what you’re thinking now, and it’s not true. I know it looks that way, but it isn’t. I assure you, it isn’t. It’s only my way. I find things. It’s the way I’ve always been. When I was a little girl, I found things. If you were me, everything would be common and very ordinary.”

“This seems so odd, Mrs. Montgomery, to be talking like this, if you know what I mean, about such things. But, truly, you must sometimes feel that there are great forces. Yet what must it be to feel that and still know the way you do about, well, magic. It must be a mystery partially revealed.”

“No, no, you didn’t understand me.”

“Yes. You were trying to tell me that life for you is dull, and that’s not true, but I know why you’re trying to say it. You think I’m foolish.”

“No. I think there is only the feeling—the feeling of mystery about what you know nothing about. Those things you understand are no good to you for that feeling. I imagine, Eleanor, when I watch you drive up, what it must be to control such an animal, and how proud you must feel knowing you can do it without any help. And what it must be to be so tall and straight.”

“It doesn’t seem the same thing. Those things are . . . ordinary.”

“Do you mean to say—” Smiling.

“No, life is not ordinary, Mrs. Montgomery, and I feel that I am making a spectacle of my own narrow nature. But before we stop—and I don’t wish you to do anything but answer—tell me of other things that you know about, like finding things.”

“That’s all.”

“I don’t believe it. I’ve always felt that you were very special.”

“No, no, please—”

“Stop. We will talk no more of it. There’s no excuse for leaving the children alone so long. It makes demands on them that they aren’t ready for. They can only be quiet so long—and they want to be good—but they are forced by their natures to become unruly, and the conflict isn’t good for them.”

She turned and began walking toward the schoolhouse, through the clover, which hid her thin ankles.

Wilson arrived at the schoolyard five minutes before four, and waited until the door was thrown open and students scattered across into the road like bats from the small mouth of a cave. Their noise followed them around the corner and they were hidden by the green-and-gold corn. Della fitted the key to its lock, turned it, tossed her shawl one final time onto her shoulder and came to the wagon. Wilson lifted her up and they set off toward home. The humidity, together with the afternoon heat, wrung beads of sweat out of their bodies and into their clothes. Wilson remarked that he felt “clammy” and that, breathe as he might, he could not seem to get enough air, because he was suffocating all over. White, soapy lather formed between their horse and her harness straps and breast plate. The sounds of her steel shoes on the dirt were perfect thuds—thud, thud, thud—accompanied by the creaks and shudders of the weather-swelled buckboard. Tiny chips of mud clung to the wheels and fell away.

“What we need, you know,” said Wilson, “is one good gully-washer, and enough of this drizzling. It’s almost like not rain at all—just the air becoming so sticky and wet that loud noises shake water out of it. Oh, by the way, did you know that the amount of water in the air and on the ground never changes? I read that the other day. Doesn’t that seem amazing, that it’s always the same? But of course when you think about it, then you see it’s obvious.”

“Obvious things are always the most amazing.”

“Come on now, there you go again.”

“Wilson, that’s different. There’s some truth in that. It’s not one of my usual generalizations.”

“Oh no,” laughed Wilson. “Just because it’s got some truth in it doesn’t mean it’s true. Besides, all generalizations contain some truth, or they’d be complete nonsense and you couldn’t understand them.”

“What makes you think, Wilson, you can be the judge of how much truth is enough? That seems pretty presumptuous. Why does it have to be so hot today?”

“That’s what makes it so hot, because it doesn’t have to be. There can’t be any reason for it. And even if there was a reason, it couldn’t be a good enough one.”

“Poor Wilson,” said Della and laughed.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” said Wilson, looking as though he were trying to be brave about his suffering. “You shouldn’t belittle someone trying to find peace, and unable to because of the weather.”

“Oh no,” said Della, laughing much louder now. “What a terrible thing I’ve done. If I only could have known. Wilson, can you ever forgive me?”

“My own family, mocking me.”

“I’m sorry, Wilson.”

“My own wife yet. Oh, it’s terrible.”

“Wilson.” Della was reaching over to him, shaking in laughter. “Please . . .

“No,” he complained, “I’ll be all right. In time. I’ll forget someday.” They were driving into town now. Women were raking grass cuttings out of their yards and piling them along the road, watching the Montgomerys pass and listening to them. Della waved, and continued trying to appease Wilson, who was hot and would not forgive. After the Montgomerys’ voices were gone, still Della’s laughing cut through the sound of the wishing rakes. Pulling a stuck stick from hers, Mrs. Miller resumed humming.

At home, Wilson opened up the store for Mrs. Wecksler and sold her some buttons and a spool of thread, though in her own sly way she complained of not having a better color selection to choose from, which Wilson accepted, but he got a little mad and indulged, after she left, in a prolonged moment of self-satisfying spite. He straightened a new display of pipes that he had bought from a salesman a week before—pipes that were made by a doctor and could be broken down into three parts. The doctor himself was pictured in the display, with a beard, and explaining that his pipe was a “remarkable scientific discovery—a modern, scientific adaptation of age-old principles, handed down from the aboriginal knowledge of good smoking enjoyment.” Then Wilson locked the front door, turned the sign in the window around so that it read closed and went back into his house. Up from the basement with a bottle of homemade beer, he sat at the table and talked to Della as she worried over a slow-bubbling stew and ate soda crackers one at a time.

“Did that Byron Bernard come back and pay his bill yet?” she asked.

“No, but he’ll come.”

“I don’t trust him much. He’s supposed to owe money to a lot of people. Joan Taylor says Mark isn’t going to sell seed to him any more.”

“I’ll bet he does.”

“Why should he? Why should others have to pay for him.”

“I’ll still bet he does. Anyway, it hasn’t been that long. Besides, he’s forgetful.”

“He wouldn’t be forgetful if you owed him money. Those kind of people always expect to be paid themselves right away—those stupids.”

“Whew,” whistled Wilson, and ducked. “That one nearly hit me on the way out.”

“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 make any sense to me.”

“Of course it does. You’re just not thinking about it right. See, it doesn’t behave like anything else—anything. There’s nothing so thoroughly, painfully destructive. It makes no sense in the scheme of nature—it serves no function.”

“I agree with that,” said Della. “But just for those reasons I would think it would seem all that more unnatural among gods, who were supposed to live in a more beautiful world. Don’t eat so fast.”

“Once it finally gets down to the right temperature it’s driven your hunger within an inch of its life,” he said, and continued, “but think how uncivilized it would be without fire. Everything we think of as being refined is in direct correspondence with our not having to live in the snow.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being civilized. And you can’t either,” said Della.

“So it’s gotten to that!” cried Wilson.

“Go ahead and eat as fast as you want.”

Wilson went back into the store and returned with a honeydew melon, which they nearly devoured before the water on the stove began making sounds like tiny hammer blows on the sides of the pot. Wilson managed to talk her into carrying the coffee outside to the porch swing. Duke met them and tried to jump his 125 pounds up against Della’s 95. Wilson wrestled him down the steps and ran off into the yard with him, looking for something he could put between them and pull. Della looked out at the pale blue sky, the thin stratus clouds in the distance, the flat bottom parts lit golden and the rounded tops shaded dusty gray from the invisible sun below the horizon. The trees in the distance were beginning to fade into each other. Duke growled as he tried to pull an old shirt spotted with paint away from Wilson. Then they gave it up and began fighting with each other, Duke growling and Wilson laughing. I love you, she thought and her feelings rushed inside her. She tried momentarily to keep them in, then felt herself dissolve outward, farther than the yard, farther than the horizon, and as far as she could see into the sky, but his net drew her back.

Wilson soon returned and they drank their coffee together, watching the darkening evening. There were too few clouds to keep the light herded around into view, and because the moon had not yet risen, stars quickly began to come, as though a pin were sticking tiny holes into the black cloth covering, letting small streams of light down from far above in a place where it was never dark. Soon they could see Boötes and Hercules with his four-star club, his right leg winding around in a circle. The Great Bear stalked across the horizon in all his sidereal glory. Above him, nearly at the zenith, the two milky streams of the Milky Way intersected.

“What do you suppose the constellations mean?” asked Wilson.

Della began, “My father used to think you could smell panthers.”

“How so?” asked Wilson, finding it difficult to keep his thoughts from wandering.

“He said they smelled sweet and warm—that if you were walking at night—especially if you were afraid, because animals have a haunting sense of fear—and you smelled a sweet, warm smell which as it grew in strength made you forget your fear and drew you toward it—that was a panther. Also he said they sound just like a woman screaming, and they only scream at night, and sometimes scream from the tops of trees in order to drive you mad with fear. He told me panthers love blood, and in the moonlight they cast a shadow of a man on the ground, and that if they died a normal death then an evil child would be born, but if they were killed then their souls could rest. He said the smell was a mixture of sweet clover and animal warmth, with sometimes a little clove. He shot one once.”

They remained long after they had set the empty cups away from them on the porch floor. Della got up once to begin the dishes, but Wilson drew her back and promised to do them himself, tomorrow. He suspected Della knew more about her father than she was willing to share with him; but as they grew older and their faces looked more alike, each time he asked her about him she would offer more. He already knew of the smell of panthers, though she had forgotten telling him, and was waiting, as she talked, for something he hadn’t heard. He thought momentarily about life and its problems but his thoughts wandered, and before devoting himself completely to a new theme that he had come upon, he acknowledged that, no, he didn’t care as much for the problems and questions of life as he had when he was younger, though he felt it was not that he was incapable (that his wits had slowed), but that it seemed increasingly of little consequence and a full life could be accomplished just as well without them. “If it’s all right,” he said, “I’m going to go fishing Saturday night with Sam and Dave.”

“Where are you going?”

“Down to the English River, I guess . . . for catfish.”

“Fine,” she said. “Can you take me over to Clara’s before you go?”

“We’re going to be out almost all night. We’ve got Dave’s boat and we’re going to use bank lines.”

“Good. Then I can ask Clara to come stay with me. I want to find out if something’s wrong at their house. I get a feeling from Meg that things aren’t going well. The poor girl seems to sulk all day and never talks to the other kids.” She went inside. Wilson remained for another half-hour talking to Duke and thinking of flatheads lying in mud-bottom holes in the river. In the morning Della saw a tree covered with Monarchs bunched for migration, so thick that the tree, except for the trunk, did not exist at all, and was only butterflies.

Wilson left early in the evening, before Clara Hocksteader arrived, though Della had made her promise to come before dark. He wondered if he shouldn’t go a mile and a half out of his way to the river to make sure she was on her way, so if she wasn’t coming, he could return home and tell his wife, because sooner or later she would begin to worry. But he didn’t. He took his team out of the cover of Sharon’s trees, exposed them to the face of the twilight sky and watched the mouth of the road to the Hocksteaders’ yawn open on his left, beckoning him to be sure first of all of Della’s feelings, and he went past it, forgiving himself at the same moment because of his tearing desire to be in the boat. The night grew darker. He put on a jacket and felt to see if he had brought matches for his pipe. He breathed the heavy air, and lay imaginative plans for the crafty big fish. His team went at a slow trot, and felt Wilson tug back on them every now and then, though Sam and Dave were already there waiting. Purposely he was going slowly because he was putting himself ready to fish. Thinking slow, deliberate thoughts, moving with extreme caution and exacting precision, he was trying to think like a flathead. Sam and Dave, waiting for him at the water, were not talking, but were, like Wilson, fixing themselves to fish. It was late enough in the fall so that the mosquitoes and biting flies, gnats and chiggers were gone. In the timber, barred owls sounded like a dinner table of laughing, howling dwarfs.

At the bridge, Wilson got out and dropped the shaft away from the team and took them down into the ditch, where his first thought was to leave them in harness; then he decided there was no excuse for that and went back to the buggy for the halters and tethering rope. Returning the harness to behind the seat, he took out the leeches and one hand pole and was aware, while climbing down beneath the bridge, of the still unbroken reflection of the moon on the water, like an unblinking eye. Below the wooden planks in the shadows along the bank were Sam and Dave, their gray hats muting their faces, straight sharp gold hooks and spoons sunk farther than the barb into their blocked crowns. Around his neck Dave had lengths of line, some longer than others, and some weighted with shot, making a kind of mane falling down-below his waist. When he moved, the hooks rattled faintly together like frozen teeth. Sam had the gaff and a lantern, and he held it up above his head in order to help Wilson make his way along the bank through the brown stalks of weeds. The water seemed to be not moving at all.

But once in the boat and away from the hard mud, a strong, deep current caught ahold of the bottom of the boat and carried them downstream. And still the surface seemed unruffled. The moon’s reflection stretched out into a thin yellow line in front of them, coming to one end of the johnboat and disappearing. They fought with the oars and rowed slowly upstream, no faster than a walking dog. Sam had put the lantern in the bow, lighting only the ends of the plants along one bank. Deep, silent strokes of the oars, making noise only from the creaking oarlocks. They passed up the river, around Four-Mile Corner. No talking or moving except for the oars. Here they could hear the shallows. Once in them, the water noise was deafening. Then they kept to the south bank, where it was deeper, and went on. One hundred yards upstream the river broadened and there was a gravel bank extending halfway across. Wrinkled circles of swirling water were lit by the lamp. The noise of the shallows was gone. Wilson, sitting in the stern, saw Dave light a cigar, and every time he inhaled Wilson could see his face.

At first Wilson had felt he would rather not have the lamp, because on the ride from home he’d had the pleasant sensation of slipping unobserved through the night, drawn by sounds which were not his own. At first he’d felt that the light was not fitting and, at the very point where it became of use, became too bright and destroyed the feeling of selflessness and unity. But by the time they had cleared the shallows he’d decided that the light was better—that it was more honest for three men on a river to carry a lantern, confessing their intrusion and adding something which, viewed from a distance, was impelling, mysterious and beautiful. It was a way of offering themselves for inspection, and though they were not, and could never be, part of the natural world of night, by doing it they could feel accepted. It is better to admit that, thought Wilson, and to stay away from fantasy. They heard several ducks get up from an unseen backwater, and a whippoorwill. Bats flying above the surface of the water passed through the wingspread of their yellow light, searching frantically for what remained of the summer’s insects.

A creek willow stood out over the water, and onto several of its branches they tied weighted lines, baited with leeches which smaller fish could chew on without damaging them and without hooking themselves. They broke off three dozen branches of varying lengths, and as Dave rowed on farther upstream in the silent, quick water, Wilson and Sam tied on the lines and threaded the brown leeches. Then in places Dave would pull over close to the shore and Sam and Wilson would jab the thick end of one of the limber poles a half-foot into the bank so that the line fell into the water just at the edge. One quarter-mile upstream they were out of poles and lines. They pulled the bow of the johnboat up onto a sandbar and several minutes later had a fire burning next to the water. All of them smoked, sitting on logs. The wood was dry (shag-bark hickory) and it burned clear and bright, and the pockets of air exploding in the dead cells of the wood, sending sparks upward, was the only sound they could hear. The moon was below the trees on the opposite side of the river.

Then downstream a channel cat broke water, and its thrashing filled the silence. Wilson got into the boat and Sam pushed him away from the bank and he floated downstream. The lantern still burned resolutely in the front. He found the fish, anchored, and brought him in with the help of the gaff, unfastened the hook from his mouth and threw the undisturbed leech and line back into the water. Being careful to avoid the horns, he fastened the fish onto the stringer and tossed him into the water. Maybe three pounds, he thought, or maybe less. Then another began thrashing twenty yards upstream and he got that one too, rebaited the line, reset the pole in a new area of the bank and rowed back toward the fire, where he soon saw Sam and Dave, both of them nearly sixty, sitting and looking at the orange fire. The whippoorwill again, then a screech owl, then two. I should do this more often, thought Wilson, it’s foolish not to when the experience is so satisfying.

Dave pulled him back up on shore, and they fastened the stringer to the bank. He had barely sat down when another, louder, thrashing began. Dave took this one, and Wilson watched him floating effortlessly down the dark water until he could no longer see him or the lantern, and Sam sat down and they began to talk about famous dogs, their courage and resourcefulness. Sam regretted the death of Jumbo, and they recalled several nights of running fox. The light of the fire enclosed them like a room.