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?”
