“‘Wells Fargo Never Forgets.’ Well, that’s a slogan, and all you need to know about that company. How could you forget it? And who would want to transgress them? To be outside the law?
“What does it mean to be outside the law?” Frank thought. “Might one not take extraordinary pleasure from it? What must it be to loose the constrictions of the daily life—to be bound only by those one chose to observe, all this offset by just one thing: that one was hunted.
“If I could excise the conscience,” he thought, “all that would be left would be the fear—no, it need not be fear—no, the ‘fact.’ The ‘fact’ of being hunted. Like the dog.
“That would be my life.”
The dog had been coming to the porch of the hotel, nights.
Some said it was a wolf; some said a coyote; but both terms signified only a wild canine, and what was the difference, he thought, between the terms and the dog, who lay there dead?
Nothing at all.
The dog’s domestication was an illusion. An illusion. He was as much a beast as the coyote or the wolf. There was nothing that he would not do—nothing he had not done.
So, what did it avail to think of him as a “dog”?
If he would come, as he came, night after night, and steal; if he would kill, as he had killed, the smaller animals around the hotel; if he would stand and, cornered, attack, as he had done, when trapped in the barn?
And now he lay shotgunned, dead, in the kitchen yard, nothing about him domestic.
He was wild. He had lived and died wild, and the rest was an illusion. Where he found it comfortable, necessary, where he found it convenient, or through lack of choice, he had lived in a house, and took scraps and obeyed masters who called it love.
When he turned from them, when he escaped, when he left, the world was his for the one price: to accept being hunted.
“Could I have as little conscience as the dog?” he asked.
“And now, you see, he traded A for B,” Morris said.
“And there you have it?”
Morris walked through the dooryard with Frank. The women sat on the veranda.
“What do they talk of?” Frank wondered. “And why has Morris seen fit to comment on the dog? Yes, to assert his superiority.”
And now the dog was dead, and Morris was saying that, as the dog should have known, his was a losing battle, and that that not given in love would be redressed in blood.
Was that true? That one’s only choice was to obey or die?
“He would have died in any case,” Frank said.
“I don’t get you,” Morris said.
“Well,” Frank said, “it’s not deep.” They watched the dog lifted up with a shovel.
A large black man was called out of the kitchen. He came wiping his hands on a filthy apron. Morris and Frank walked away
He saw the groundsman gesturing to the dog, and the black man bobbing his head. He was handed a large coal shovel.
He scooped the dog into it. As Frank looked back, he saw the man with the shovel walking toward the margin of the woods.
“No. That’s the wrong tool for the job,” he thought, “if he intends to bury him.”
Morris began to speak. “Yeaauh,” he said. “Abrams’s expanding.”
“Is he?” Frank said.
Morris nodded. “Boston. Providence. Philadelphia.”
“I hope he does well.”
“Well, if he does well we do well,” Morris said.
“That follow?”
“I think it does. To the extent that we are willing to go up against him.”
“What does Jack say?”
“Haven’t talked to Jack,” Morris said. “But I intend to. Next time I …” He stopped to light his cigar. He motioned “wait a moment,” and he bent over the cigar, shielding it, through habit, from a wind that did not exist that day.
“Y’ever notice?” he said between puffs. “Y’ever notice, cup the match such that, were it to catch on the book, it would flare up in your face?” He sighed. “… the matchbook.
“And as many times as I’ve remarked it, over the years, still I hold it in the selfsame way. Lighting the seegar.”
“Well, you’re human,” Frank said.
“Ain’t it the truth?”
They walked on, and Morris glanced at him, to say, “Now what the hell was I talking about?”
“Jack Fine,” Frank said.
“Jack Fine. I said, ‘The lifeblood of trade’s competition.’ ‘I’ve always thought so,’ Jack said. ‘That being the case,’ I said, ‘’come you’ve never gone into New York?’”
Here Morris paused. He raised his eyebrows to show that the point of the story’d come.
“‘Because,’ Jack said, ‘I go into a place, I want to know I am the smartest Jew there.’” Morris shook his head and grinned. Frank grinned.
“Yessir,” Morris said, “lifeblood of trade.” They walked on.
“Things the factory?” he said.
Frank looked to gauge the intent of the question. He saw nothing, and shrugged. “Up six percent, twenty-seven months.”
“… they say New York?” Morris said.
“Lloyd?”
“Mm.”
Frank smiled. “Say very little.”
“What have they turned, thankful?” Morris said.
The two men walked on.
“Wells Fargo Never Forgets,” Frank thought. And he could not forget his thought of the shovel and the dog.
“Will I go to my grave,” he thought, “with this uppermost in my mind, each moment of the day?”
In the courtroom, Frank heard the Judge drone on. And his eyes rested on the carved piece of denticulation in the cornice in the corner of the room. Soft, buttery wood, brown and, for some reason which he could not plumb but for which he was thankful, restful.
His gaze slipped, more and more now, to that point on the wall. And each time it did, he expected its calmative powers to’ve dissipated; and each time, upon discovery that they had not, he was grateful. But he would not stop thinking of the shovel and the dog.
“It was the wrong instrument,” he thought again. “Either to carry the dog or to dig a hole—or, still, to dismember it. It was a coal shovel,” he thought, “for God’s sake. Did the man not know that?”