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I don't know why it surprised me that Zeb, and for that matter Vile, had a last name. "Sure," I said. I wasn't adverse to calling Zeb "Mister." Hadn't I always been taught to respect my elders? Whatever else Zeb was or was not, he was my elder. "Where's Mister Finch?"
"No need to be sassy." There was obviously no way to get it right. She gave my pine-bough bed the once-over. "Made yourself right at home, I see."
"As a matter of fact—"
"Yeah, I know. You own it." She sighed and went over to the cooking pot, looked in, and gave a deeper sigh. Starting for the door, she tripped on Zeb's quilt and nearly fell. She gave the quilt a kick. "If you was really at home here, you wouldn't leave everything in such a mess."
I opened my mouth to protest but caught myself. I might have to be here as long as two days. I didn't fancy sleeping in the woods. "You want me to pitch that stuff out in the trees someplace?" I said, waving my hand at the pot.
"What? The chicken? No. We got to get a couple more days of soup out of that." A couple more days? My stomach lurched at the thought.
"I could make a fire," I said, getting up, tucking my shirt in.
She turned in the doorway to study me. "Since when did you get so helpful all of a sudden?"
I could feel my ears tingling. Tarnation. Couldn't I do anything without turning red all over?
"Here," she said, handing me her puny dace. "You do the fish."
I hate to clean fish. Especially small ones. There wouldn't be much left of these once the head, fins, and tail were gone. I reached out to take them, then remembered that my pocketknife was at the bottom of Cutter's Pond. "I—I must have forgot my knife again," I said.
She pulled the horn-handled jackknife out of her pocket and threw it at me. I made a try at catching it in my left hand and failed. She giggled.
Outside, we both set to work. Vile was getting wood for the fire. She had a pile of dead branches she must have dragged from the woods earlier in the day. She stepped on these and broke them into fireplace lengths. When she had an armful, she carried them into the cabin and came back to prepare more. I'd never seen a girl so handy at man's work. I guess she had to be or starve. Zeb didn't strike me as the industrious type. When she'd finished breaking up all the branches, she began to arrange the last bits teepee style for an outdoor fire.
Meantime, I'd found a flat rock where I could cut off the heads, fins, and tails of the little silvery fish. These I pitched into the woods. I scaled them best I could. The rock shone like it was set with slimy mica. Then I slit their bellies and pulled out the offal. My hands were slimy, too.
"Don't throw nothing away," she called to me without looking up from her work.
"Nothing?"
"Good for soup," she said.
I looked at the offal clinging to my hands. It wasn't going into any soup I was eating. I wiped myself as best I could on the dry leaves around the rock. Now bits of leaves stuck to the mess on my hands. I gave Vile the fish and went to the spring to wash.
She had the fire going and the dace browning on a green stick when Zeb came stumbling into sight. Vile straightened up from the fire and faced him accusingly. "You been at it again," she said.
"How could I," he asked pitifully, "when I ain't got a copper penny to my name?"
"I don't know how you manage it," she said. "But you been at the booze. No need to lie."
"Them leetle fish smell mighty good," he said.
"Oh, you're sweet, ain't you, now you got a little juice inside you?" She went back to her cooking, turning the fish until they were crisp. My mouth was fairly watering over those two tiny dace. Were we going to have to share them with the old drunkard, who hadn't done a lick of the work of catching or preparing?
"Go down to the spring and wash yourself up," she ordered him. "You look like a tramp."
His giggle was almost as girllike as her own. I thought he might protest, but he stumbled off in the direction of the spring.
"What am I going to do with him?" she asked, more to herself than to me.
When Zeb returned, his face was redder but no cleaner than it had been when he left, and his smell, if anything, was stronger. The three of us sat on the ground around the dying fire. Vile
broke up the fish and portioned it out on three maple leaves. I couldn't help but think of the miracle in the Bible when Jesus fed five thousand with five loaves of bread and two small fish. Only this time there wasn't any miracle.
I tried to make my puny share last as long as I could. Even with no salt, the fish tasted fine, crisp and black on the outside and flaky inside. Zeb stuffed his portion into his mouth all at once, then looked around for more. Vile passed him her leaf with her last bite. He stuffed that in, too. White fish meat fell from his greedy lips to his shirt front. He fumbled to retrieve it, succeeding only in knocking it first to his trouser leg and then to the ground, where it was lost in the dead leaves on which we sat. I wanted to hit him for taking her food that way—not even spending the time to taste it proper, then wasting it in his drunken clumsiness.
When he realized there was nothing more to eat, he struggled to his feet and lumbered into the cabin. Before long we could hear his drunken snoring.
