Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

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