“Sure, they’re not the fun uv squirrels t’ chase nohow,” the dog agreed.
The old man stared at the visitor. Boardman’s ramrod stiffness gilded the fear it tried to conceal.
“Scared to death, that one,” said the dog and licked the offered knuckles.
“Come in and set, then, John Boardman,” Old Nathan said with enough of a pause that his visitor could see there had been one. “I got coffee.”
The coffee boiled on the coals in an enameled iron pot. Old Nathan had roasted the green beans in his frying pan the night before and had ground them at dawn when he rose. He lifted the pot’s wire handle with a billet of lightwood while the dog padded in quickly to snuffle the interior of the cabin and the Boardman boy followed more gingerly.
“I will claw yer eyes out!” shrieked the cat from the roofbeam, reaching down with one hooked paw in a pantomime of intention.
“Bag it, now, damn ye!” snarled Old Nathan from the chimney alcove, twisting to face the cat and add the weight of his glare to his tone, as savage as that of the animal itself.
The cat subsided, muttering. Boardman’s bitch slurped water from the tub in the corner of the single room and curled herself beside the rocking chair.
Five china cups with a blue pattern about the rim rested upside down on the mantlepiece. Boardman got a hold of himself enough to fetch two of the cups down so that the older man did not have to straighten to get them. They were neither chipped nor cracked, and the visitor said approvingly, “Fine as we have at home,” as he watched Old Nathan pour.
“Fine as your daddy has,” Old Nathan corrected. He gestured Boardman toward the straight chair, near the table which still held the remains of breakfast. He himself took the rocker and reached down absently to stroke the dog’s fur with his long knobby fingers.
Boardman seated himself on the front of the chair like a child preparing for an interrogation with a whipping at the end of it. “I thought you didn’t like dogs,” he ventured with a doubtful glance at his bitch, lifting to nuzzle the hand that rumpled her fur. “I’d heard that.”
“Don’t doubt ye heard worse damned nonsense ‘n that about me,” Old Nathan replied, his green eyes slitting and the coffee cup frozen an inch short of his lips. “I don’t choose t’ eat red meat nor keep it in the house. That ‘un”—he lifted his black beard to the cat, now licking his belly fur on the beam with all his foreclaws extended—”fetches his own, as a dog would not . . . so I don’t keep a dog.”
All that was the truth, and it concealed the greater truth that Old Nathan would no more have hunted down the animals he talked with than he would have waylaid human travellers and butchered them for his larder. There were fish in good plenty, with milk, grains, and his garden. Enough for him, enough for any man, though others could go their own way and the cat—the cat would go the way of his kind, in grinning slaughter as natural as the fall of rain from heaven.
“Hit may be,” the old man continued as he sipped his coffee, hot and bitter and textured with floating grounds, “thet ye’ve come fer yer curiosity and no business uv mine. In sich case, boy, you’ll take yerself off now before the toe t’ my boot helps ye.”
“I have business with ye,” Boardman said, setting his cup on the table so sharply that the fluid sloshed over the rim. “You may hev heard I’m fixin’ to be married?”
“I may and I may not,” said Old Nathan, rocking slowly. He wasn’t as much a part of the casual gossip of the community as most of those settled hereabouts, but when folk came to consult him he heard things from their hearts which a spouse of forty years would never learn. He recalled being told that Sally Ann Hewitt, the storekeeper’s daughter from Advance, was being courted by rich Newt Boardman’s boy among others. “Say on, say on.”