But then the character of the silent tension changed and changed, until everyone was aware that it was coming from Wilson’s eyes, which seemed to be seething with hate, and his face was completely white. He walked across the room and over to the box, took out the partially eaten piece of candy, threw it on the floor, busting it into many pieces, took out another and slid it across the table to Timmy, who was crying now. Then he looked over at Bain and the look in his eyes was so murderously hateful that no one there ever forgot it. “I’ll pay for that one,” he said. Bain walked back into the living room.
This was the first time Wilson ever outwardly displayed an intense or violent emotion. Many people talked to him about it later—hoping to find some glimmer of the hatred resounding behind his eyes—and he talked to them calmly and in his serious but shy fashion, explaining how suffering and injustice, although real, were wrong and were loathsome, and especially children, who everyone would admit had done nothing to deserve pain, should not have to endure it because of corruption and vanity, or even stupidity. Yes, everyone agreed to this. Jacob Amstide went one step further and maintained that not only children, but everyone was innocent and undeserving of suffering—which originated from mistakes and fears . . . and hell.
“But assuming that’s true,” said Wilson, “then it was wrong for me to interfere. Isn’t that what you mean?”
“No,” Jacob answered. “You’re innocent too.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Wilson, “about suffering coming from hell, or from mistakes, or from anywhere. It’s merely here, and we must deal with it. There’s right and there’s wrong.”
Naturally, everyone believed that. For instance, Merle Brown had compiled a mental list of atrocities that he felt proved the absurdity of the world, and after loosing these examples on his neighbors like a swarm of biting flies, asked how could God be just. That’s not the issue, they told him. They were concerned with Wilson’s character. Here was a man who everyone thought had no dark side. Then it was reported that he did—to the extent that hewould shame another man before his family—challenging him physically almost . . . and then the next day have not the slightest trace of the emotion left in him. It was like a man possessed by something and then turned loose. It interested them.
But it was for the most part soon forgotten. After all, how odd is it really to have a momentary temper flare, where all the petty grievances of several months come together in a perfect pinnacle of outrage, actualize, exorcise, and afterward leave no trace? How odd is that? Not so very. Indeed, what would married life be without just such instantaneous outbursts, where a few spoken words become a symbol for absolute, incorrigible evil? It was Wilson’s sameness that was of more interest. It seemed he had no alternative selves and was either completely open or completely closed (depending on how it seemed to you) toward everyone. Even the government, how it was conducted and the quality of the laws that managed to squirm out of it, didn’t seem to alter his outlook. He had no interest in women other than his wife.
Della began teaching school jointly with old Mrs. Fitch, the two of them making a comic pair standing side by side in the schoolyard supervising games; small Della, pretty, and quick as a yellow warbler, looked as though she were about ready to run off and get in the circle, her hair and clothes buffeted around her by the wind, while old Mrs. Fitch, dressed in heavy gray cotton, her hair coarse, bound into tight curls, did not seem as if she could ever move.
All the children were taught in the same room, through the eighth grade. The only difference between the younger and the older ones was that they carried different books. So while talking out loud with the fifth-graders about history, it was necessary to have the others busy with something that did not demand the teacher’s attention. It couldn’t always be done, and Della, as a way of learning the profession, quietly (and sometimes, under Eleanor Fitch’s disapproving frown, not so quietly) watched over those grades of students and answered their individual questions.
Some things could be communicated to all, like reading stories of pirates and buried treasure, animals that could talk and dark forests. These times they traded off, though mostly they belonged to Eleanor, who seemed to Della to be possessive of them and only let her read the books of little emotional consequence.
While Eleanor read, Della sat in the back of the room next to the doors, and once, as the old practiced voice told of the death of Brighty of the Grand Canyon, she began to cry, and hid her face in her hands. Eleanor looked up and saw her, then quickly looked down again to the book, thinking privately between the next sentences that there was nothing wrong with it in itself, but it was something to be kept from the children, who could not understand that some people never completely grow up but that that didn’t make them less than grownups. Except Eleanor suspected that in some way it did—in some way there should be a drawn line between feeling like crying when the burro dies and outwardly doing it. Later, in her house, she pondered this question, and decided that feelings had a reality of their own and that actions had little to do with them. Remember, she was very old, and soon retired from teaching, leaving Della there by herself.
But Eleanor came back for visits, and would arrive at the schoolroom unannounced, usually in the morning, bursting in through the door as though she owned it, and begin talking right away. Sometimes she brought her two canaries, Ebeneezer and Melissa, and talked about their
