The Master Butcher's Singing Club

TEN. Earth Sickness

MARKUS FELL into an illness after he came out of the hill. It wasn’t just the broken arm, though that was an interestingly complicated break, said Heech, but some other nameless invader dragged him down, made him feverish and sleepy. Delphine called it earth sickness. In her mind, the ground had chilled him and its influence still drew him toward the sullen coldness where his mother slept. When he looked at Delphine sometimes, his stare was so calm and unflinching that she couldn’t meet his eyes. Then one day she understood that his stare was only the mysterious regard of a newborn baby, and she let him be. She stopped trying to distract him with poems or amuse him with games. It occurred to her that he needed to think. To grow back into his life. The pupils of his green-blue eyes remained dilated. Yet, if he was filled with an interior blackness, it wasn’t after all the deathly effect of his burial, but that he was emerging from a strange gestation.

One day she noticed that he’d begun to look more like Fidelis. It was the quality of penetrating silence, a place where he was comfortable. Though he seemed at once brand-new and older, she thought it best to treat him in some ways like a younger boy. She nursed him carefully along during the day, running back from the customers to make him eat the heavy dumpling soup that Eva had taught her to make for the boys when they were sick. She made him sit in the sun when there was sun. And when a dust of early snow fell over the bottom rails of the holding pens, and the back garden was a blue arrangement of frost, she made him stay near the window to get the reflection. She thought he needed light, constant light, bright light. She thought that he’d swallowed darkness in that hill.

MAZARINE WAS RIDING her bicycle when Betty Zumbrugge passed her, as she had many times before, driving her father’s fancy car. Only this time when Mazarine narrowed her eyes to gaze into the windows of the car as it passed, she saw Franz, and he saw her. He looked at her right across Betty’s back as she bent forward to steer. Their eyes met for that one second, and then he was gone. There was no message in his look that Mazarine could read. The neutral and almost foolish expression on his face shocked her — she’d never seen him look stupid before.

He turned back, upset, to gaze out the window. Seeing his distraction, Betty said, as if she didn’t know he had gone with Mazarine, “That’s Mazarine Shimek. She has one dress to her name.”

“That’s not true,” said Franz, his voice awkward and despairing.

He had not spoken to Mazarine since that last day beneath the pine, the time that made him obscurely responsible and her by extension, for the collapse of the hill. His thoughts veered off Mazarine and the wrongness of such happiness, which seemed to have been reckoned and judged by his brother’s near death. He looked over at Betty. Her face was tilted up to peer over the steering wheel, which gave her little pointed chin a charming shape. Her round cheeks were powdered and rouged, her red lips were drawn in a slick curve. Franz wondered what happened when you kissed a girl who was wearing lipstick. Would it get all over his own face? It was so shiny, like wet paint, dark as blood. The thought of his face smeared with red gave him a low thrill, and he shook his head suddenly to clear his thoughts.

“What’s with you,” said Betty.

“There’s a bee in the car,” said Franz, cranking open the window.

“Scared of getting stung?” Betty’s voice was amused and coy.

Franz shrugged uncomfortably, said nothing. He felt like grabbing Betty’s hands off the steering wheel, telling her to pull right over. Kissing her. At the same time, he thought that if she did pull over he’d jump right out the passenger’s side door and run like hell. Her hair was arranged so carefully he wondered how she ever slept — sitting up? There was a sharp smell of sweat when she lifted her arms. She couldn’t hide that. The feral scent made him shiver, as though he’d walked by the den of a fox.

“Come home with me,” she said. “I need help with mathematics.”

She smiled at the road, flying rough across a pothole. Franz wet his lips and told her he couldn’t go to her house, stumbled on explaining that he had to work. And right away. He was late in fact, his father would be waiting. The thought of all he had to do made him suddenly grateful. Betty shrugged and turned the car down his road. When she stopped before the shop, he jumped out. Safe, he rounded the hood and leaned down into her open window. From outside, he was able to laugh and apologize all at once in a natural way that he congratulated himself, later, for sustaining even while he ached to be alone.

AFTER THE CAR PASSED, Mazarine got back on her bicycle and rode the rest of the way home over frozen dirt, her head buzzing, but calm, not weeping. She cleaned up after her mother, who was resting, and looked around for something to make for dinner. There were a few cups of flour left at the bottom of a sagging sack, a little lard in an old brown jar, three fat golden turnips with purple smears where the sun had hit them. She boiled the turnips with their peels on, scraped them and salted them. She made biscuits with the flour and the lard. She left a biscuit beside her mother’s bed, and then she sat on the steps of the rough little house, waiting for Roman. She ate her share of the dinner, slowly, and saved the rest in a clean towel for her brother. As she sat there it suddenly occurred to her that Betty Zumbrugge had a z in her name too. When Mazarine thought of this she froze, staring at the bare tangle of young trees at the side of the yard. And then, with no warning, tears spurted up in her eyes, tipped over her cheeks, and ran straight down, hitting the tops of her hands.

A COUSIN OF Gus Newhall’s was married to a Braucher, a healing woman. This woman had some powerful healing secrets passed down from her family, he said, persuading Fidelis to let the woman visit Markus. In her own illness, Eva had been urged to see such a person, but as she had no time for Russian-Germans, she would not. “They wear out their women,” Eva had said, and recited a saying she’d heard from those western settlements.

Weiberschterba, koi Verderba

Pferdeverrecka, des brengt Shrecke.

“In other words,” she said, “when women die it is not a tragedy. But when horses die, it is a disaster!”

No one could deny now that the most renowned clinic in the Middle West had failed to do a thing for Eva. Besides that, it was well-known that the practice of Brauche was especially effective in dealing with children. Another customer’s family had allowed this Braucher woman to tie an egg to the stomach of their child, transfer an illness into the egg, and then burn the raw egg in the fire as she said the precise words to bind the illness in the burning yolk. She was also an accomplished Messerin, a measurer, who read tendencies to certain diseases in people’s measurements and knew the appropriate Brauche verse to repel harm from each part of the body. So the woman was sent for, and one day she showed herself at the door of the shop. She was not wearing a black head shawl/scarf of the Russian-Germans, as Delphine had expected, or a gathered apron-type skirt, nor was she even fat. She was a small, neat, sturdy little woman with short dark brown hair and ruddy, freckled skin.

“Wo ist das Kind?” she asked, all business.

Delphine brought her into the boys’ bedroom, where Markus lay sleeping underneath a pile of quilts, and called Fidelis, who came and stood in the doorway. From her handbag, the woman drew a length of blue string, which she wound on her hand as she drew the blankets away from Markus and gently awakened him. She spoke some quiet words to him in German, then asked him in English to please lie still on his back while she measured him. Still caught up in his dreams, Markus obediently stretched his arms out while she put the string to them. As she worked, his eyes widened, his face took on an expression of disbelief. The Braucher measured all of him — torso, thighs, neck, hands, feet, and head — and then she stared at him assessingly, put the string back upon him, measuring in the same sequence, only this time reciting German words in a calm firm voice every time she moved the string. By now Markus had gone rigid with an outraged fear, but neither Delphine nor Fidelis really noticed him. They were caught up in the drama of the measuring. When she was finished, the Braucher pulled the covers up around Markus’s neck, patted him gently, and turned away. On her way out, Fidelis paid the woman a shoulder picnic ham. Delphine was distracted by customers, and so she did not check back in on Markus. Meanwhile, he lay in his darkened room, thinking.

“Hello.” He suddenly appeared in the doorway that led into the shop. “I’m hungry,” he said for the first time in many weeks.

His voice was flat, suspicious, and he looked sideways at Delphine in a way she didn’t understand. “You feel better?” she asked, amazed at the Braucher’s success. She brought him back and sat him down at the kitchen table. Markus nodded, sullen and watchful. Slowly, he swallowed spoon after spoon of potato soup, sopped it up doggedly with bread. “I’m going to school,” he announced, and picked up his books with his good arm.

Delphine stopped him, put a hand on his forehead. He glowered up at her from underneath her fingers.

“You still have a bit of fever.”

“I don’t care.” He knocked her hand away and moved past her with stiff dignity. It was clear that he was terribly offended, but Delphine had no idea in what way until Franz asked, a few days later, “What’s this about Markus getting measured for a coffin?”

Delphine looked at him, speechless at first. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s telling all the kids in school, bragging sort of, that he was almost dead. That the undertaker’s wife came and measured him for a coffin.”

Delphine had meant to tell him the truth, but then, she feared suddenly, what if he were to simply crawl back into bed? And refuse to be roused this time at all? Whatever else, the Braucher’s visit had infused him with an indignant horror necessary to his sudden improvement. Markus did seem recovered, though he moved with an air of self-righteous injury and babied his arm. She waited for several weeks before she told Markus what had truly happened. By then, his nameless sickness had entirely passed, and he was firmly among the living.