Stone Fruit

For forty-one years Miloš cut meat on Husova in Kolín, pork on Tuesdays, beef when there was beef, and he ate the way the shop taught him, standing up, two bites and a swallow, the next customer already saying his name.

Now it's September on the wall behind his son's house and he's eating a plum the way the dentist told him to, slowly, side to side, a sound like somebody sanding a drawer that has always stuck, and Kuba, who is nine and eats like a lit fuse, says, Děda, you chew like a cow.

Cows go round, says Miloš. I go back and forth. Listen. And Kuba listens, because nobody has asked him to listen to a mouth before, the soft grating, the tongue finding the stone and turning it like a key that won't open anything, the flesh coming off it in the mouth and not later, somewhere dark, where you can't decide.

That's the whole trick, Miloš says. In here you can still change your mind. Down there it's already the government's.

He spits the stone over the fence into the strip of nobody's grass by the railway, and Kuba spits his and it lands on his own shoe, and they do that for an hour, two men from a long line of men who ate things standing up, sitting down now, keeping score in the dust with a stick.

Next June there's a stick of a tree by the railway, three leaves, then seven, and Kuba's father says the birds did it, and Kuba says no, Děda did, and Miloš says he didn't plant anything, he just wasn't hungry for the stone.

Did you mean to, Kuba asks him, and Miloš thinks about it properly, chewing nothing, and says, I meant to eat a plum. That's as far as I meant.

So Kuba takes the last plum in the bowl and eats it Miloš's way, slowly, side to side, the drawer sound, the key turning, and stands, and aims, and sends the stone hard and deliberate into the bare patch past the little tree, and turns round grinning, and his grandfather says, That's cheating, and is delighted.