“Oh, I think so, probably. But if you decide not to enroll, then don’t bother learning. No yonega would fool around with a thing that’s this much trouble.”
“Maybe I oughtn’t to, then, and just go on letting you do all the work.” Alice is startled to hear what she’s just said, words that contain a presumption about the future. If Cash is in any way riled, he doesn’t show it. He dumps the nuts with a clatter into a dented metal bucket and pounds them deftly with a wooden club, making a steady gritch-gritch like a cow chewing. The pounding club resembles a sawed-off baseball bat. Alice saw one in Sugar’s kitchen and had no earthly notion what kind of cooking implement it might be.
It looked so forceful.
“You pound it till it’s powder, that’s the way you start out,” Cash instructs. “Then you roll it into balls about yay big.” He holds up his right fist, wrist forward, to show her, looking to see that she has understood. “There’s enough oil in it so it holds together good.” He turns back to pounding, and goes on talking with a slightly breathless rhythm over the nutty gritching sound, which has now gone to more of a hiss. “When you get ready to fix it, you just break off a piece of the ball and add it to boiling water, and then you strain it through a good clean sock to get out the little bits of shell, and you mix it with rice, or hominy. It’s kindly a soupy consistency.”
“Sounds good,” Alice says, reverently. In her life she has experienced neither men who talk a lot nor men who cook, and here is one doing both at once. She would have paid money to witness this, and not been disappointed.
“I love it with hominy,” he adds. “It kindly puts you in the mood of fall, when you smell kunutche.”
“Did your wife teach you how to make it?”
“Well, now,” he pauses and stares at the wall calendar. “I guess my mama did. My wife did the cooking, mostly, but I always pounded up the kunutche. She said all that grinding hurt her bones.”
Alice stands up and wanders the length of the cabin, wishing for family pictures or some other hint of what Cash belongs to. Her eyes rest on his toothbrush, which seems small and stranded up there, and his gun. “You shoot anything with that rifle?”
“Oh, a squirrel now and then, if he’ll set still long enough to get hit. My eyes isn’t what they was. Usually I’ll miss three or four time, and then one’ll keel over and die of a heart attack.”
Alice wants to give him a hug. If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world. She touches her earrings, whose tiny beads shiver away from her fingers. They were delivered to her one morning in an envelope marked only, “From a secret admirer.” Sugar, who had stood breathing on Alice’s head while she ripped open the envelope, instantly identified the turquoise-and-silver beadwork as Cash’s. She said he had been selling earrings just like that to the trading post at the Heritage Center.
Alice sent Cash back a note that said, “Many thanks and a special hug from your mystery date.” She gave it to Sugar to mail at the P.O., and was mortified later to find that Sugar had run into Letty in town and asked her to hand-deliver it.
“Sugar says you do beadwork for the trading post. That a fact?”
“I do a little. It relaxes me at night.”
“Somebody sent me these earrings. Can you imagine?
Some fellow must think he can knock me over with a feather.”
Cash grins. “I got your note.”
“I’ll bet Letty opened it up and read it first.”
“Looked like it. She’s not as professional as she used to be.” Cash’s face broadens under the eyes with a smile that seems to be settling in and getting comfortable.
“I guess I ought to try my hand at that,” she says, coming over to stand next to him. “Either that, or sing for my supper.
Of the two I think you’d ruther me mash nuts.”
He positions her hands on the club, then stands back to watch. “I don’t know about that. You got a real nice talking voice. I was thinking the other day; if I had a telephone I’d call up Alice just to listen at her voice. I bet you could sing like a bird.”
“A turkey buzzard,” Alice says.
“Now, you stop right there, I don’t believe you. I’d pay a dollar to hear you sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ Or ‘Don’t set Under the Apple Tree.’ Here, it helps sometimes if you put more shoulder into it.”
He stands behind her with his arms over hers, gripping her hands gently and pushing downward. The precise hissing sound returns to the kitchen, nut Powder against metal. Alice feels a similar sound in her chest.