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
