There was an awful, raging argument on the quiet veranda after the mistress had driven away and the last rattle of her car slapped harmlessly against the dark and bony mountains. The pastor raised his voice so loud and thundered such fury that cows began to low deep in the distant pastures. Precious should not have said that she had slept with the dog unless she really had slept with the dog, and she had sworn to him that she had not slept with the dog. How could he woo a woman who had just confessed that she had killed a dog with her pum-pum? Precious should have boxed the face of that nasty American woman and ordered her off her porch. She should have flung the freeze-dried dog in her face to carry back to America.
Precious sat still and stony and raised her head occasionally to ask what business did he have to eavesdrop on her personal conversation? and who told him to listen? and please not to raise his voice and make her ears ring in the lateness of the night for she had to work tomorrow.
The pastor was beside himself with vexation. He stomped over to her chair, thrust his face provokingly near her nose, seared her with a fiery glare, and bellowed, “Did you or did you not grind de dog?”
Precious got up with disdain and moved out of range of ministerial exhale.
“I did not,” she said with dignity.
“But you tell dat woman dat my future wife not only grind her dog, but grind him to death! Now I can never migrate to America!”
He said more. He bellowed up and down the chromatic scale of fit and fury. And when he was spent and wasted and reduced to a quivering mass of impotent rage, Precious got up and calmly announced that she was retiring to-bed.
“Precious, just answer me one question,” he begged from the top of the veranda stairs as she prepared to latch the door. “Why in heaven’s name did you tell dat woman dat you grind de dog to death if you didn’t even grind de dog?”
Precious squinted hard and long at him. She shrugged and said, “N-E-N.”
Then she went defiantly, unrepentantly, to her empty bed.