“Sei ruhig,” he said to his sons, and in a manner rare to him, he set a hand on each of their shoulders. Then he turned without a word to Delphine, and he stalked back to the slaughterhouse. He gathered old freezer-burned meat, some that had turned in the cooler, molded scraps from a side of beef he was curing for the banker, and he then carried the pans of this out to the edge of the field, dumped it. The boys watched him, Delphine too now, and next they followed to see him enter the little room on the side of the slaughterhouse where he kept his rifles. He loaded both guns, then filled a pocket with extra bullets. He put a chair on his shoulder and he brought this chair outside and set it underneath a tree. He remembered something and went back to the cooler. From its sighing interior he took three beers. He took a loaf of bread, baloney, some cheese and apples. Then he returned to the shade of the tree, in sight of the meat scraps at the edge of the field. From the yard, the boys and Delphine saw him set both rifles across his knees. At last, he opened a dark bottle.
Delphine went back into the house. The bell on the door rang, and it was Step-and-a-Half looking for the usual pan of scraps. Fidelis had just dumped the pan out back to lure the dogs. Delphine looked carefully through the glass at the thickly marbled and perfect cuts of expensive meat, and chose a nice piece of beefsteak. She wrapped it in white paper and twine, and she handed the package over with no explanation.
Step-and-a-Half gave Delphine a strange, barren look and inspected the package, weighed it in her hand.
“Take it,” said Delphine, a little roughly.
Across the older woman’s elegantly cut features there passed a look of raw suspicion, and she asked, “How much?”
“Just take it!” Impatient with the odd scruples of the other woman, Delphine was perhaps too sharp.
“I don’t think so,” decided Step-and-a-Half. This was, Delphine understood, a little too close to charity for her stomach, a bit too rich. Step-and-a-Half rummaged brutally through layers of clothes and pockets, then set down a nickel on the counter. It was the first time she’d paid money in Delphine’s experience. Delphine scooped up the nickel, made change of three cents, and tried then to give the pennies to Step-and-a-Half.
“Keep the damn change!” she growled in an insulted huff, then turned to stride out the door, muttering about the terrible price of things.
OUTSIDE, THE BOYS were crouched in the sun on the topmost timbers of the stock pen. Delphine watched them from the kitchen window as they chewed the ends of grass and quietly watched their father. She was surprised to feel a stirring of excitement around her heart, and then guilty as she looked at Schatzie sitting alertly in the shade. In her agitation she prowled to the window repeatedly to see if the other dogs had appeared. As the fall sun rose higher, overhead, the boys came in to eat and she spread the rolls with sweet butter, then wedged in slices of chicken from the old hen she’d stewed yesterday. They took sandwiches to their father, and their own lunches back outside, and sat waiting. More hours passed than anyone would have thought. It seemed when you weren’t looking for them, the dogs were always skulking around the field’s edge. And then when you waited, they did not appear. Maybe part of the rage Fidelis felt was that in the past he pitied the scraggly pack and fed the mutts. They’d taken advantage of him — a thing he could not allow.
It was late afternoon, and the boys were nodding off in the shadows of the grapevines, when Delphine heard the first crack of a shot. Fidelis had waited, had watched the dogs gather, and now he was shooting steadily. Delphine ran out the back door, climbed the stock-pen sides along with the boys, and saw the dogs go down. First the big solid brown caught a bullet that spun him like a top. The gray took one neatly in the head, skidded to a puzzled halt and slowly toppled. Two medium-size with long, matted fur were hit and ran off howling, to die before they reached the woods. A red dog growled and bit the air before a bullet clipped its jugular. There was a dingy white that crept belly down in the grass. A bullet creased its spine. It stopped. Six more were felled. The last, a speedy gray, loped desperately off and Fidelis sighted carefully along its sinuous back and bore it to earth. The last shot echoed across the field. Fidelis turned and gestured to the boys.
“Pile ’em up,” was all he said, and the boys did as they were told, hunted down and carried back each dog and laid them together like a heap of rugs. One of them, Delphine noticed uneasily, was the big brown chow dog that had run wild on the Kozkas. Best, thought Delphine, to get rid of the evidence, and she said nothing. Fidelis came out of the shop with two tins of kerosene. He dribbled one can over the dogs and then he added pieces of wood, downed branches, refuse. When the bonfire was as tall as his shoulders, he poured the kerosene on the top of that. He made a torch of a long roll of paper and carefully tossed it onto the soaked wood.
There was a hollow pop, and the whole thing went up. The fire burned and burned, long into the dusk, and the boys kept adding junk. It smelled for a while like a regular fire and then smelled of roasting meat, then smelled of nothing. The hot fire consumed everything, and into the dark the boys, and Delphine, watched it dreamily, with an intensity they did not understand. For they didn’t want to take their eyes away; it was a mesmerizing thing. The timbers collapsed into coals so hot they consumed green wood. Even the bones of the dogs would be ash. There would be nothing left. The fire went on burning, they kept feeding it, and at last it grew so late that Delphine had to send the boys to bed.
Fidelis slept in a room across from the boys, but he slept hard and never woke. So every night, she gave the watch over to the dog, not Fidelis. She never said good-bye to Fidelis, or indeed, made it her business ever to be alone with him at any time. He was working late, now, to make up for his day under the box elder tree with the rifles. As she turned from the doorway to the boys’ room, after counting their sleeping breaths, she touched Schatzie and the dog looked up at her as always in agreement. Tired, she gazed a bit too long into the dog’s eyes and suddenly she couldn’t look away. She stood rooted, tears filling her own eyes, for it was Eva who stared back at her with an expression of extraordinary sympathy and calm.
Delphine’s back chilled. “I’m losing my damn mind,” she muttered out loud to break the spell. It seemed to work, although she didn’t dare look at the dog again. She turned her back on Schatzie and walked out into the yard, past the tangled garden where she’d harvested lumpy squash that day, down to the edge of the field. She stood there alone. All around her, the dark seethed with fall insect noise, with a humming life that rose and sank, surrounding her with inchoate music. She breathed deeply of the spice of weeds under the harsh smoke. “Oh hell, Eva,” she heard herself say. Then she was simply talking to her friend, nothing special. Laughing at the boys, the men, the customers. Speculating about the reasons people did things. Since the end, Delphine hadn’t wept, she had put all thoughts of Eva firmly from her mind, preferring to let the loss settle wordlessly into her. Tonight, as she stood talking in blackness, an alien sorrow that held some despairing comfort, too, bubbled into her, and she let herself cry with a lost, croaking, ugly sound, until the last coals collapsed into a dull, red foundation and the dark crept close to cover everything.