The Master Butcher's Singing Club

THIRTEEN. The Snake People

WHEN DELPHINE had asked him the obvious question, Roy’s answer often was, “I drink to fill the emptiness.” Delphine hated that line. Once, she pushed him backward into a chair and yelled, “Hey, I’ve got news for you. Everyone does everything to fill the emptiness.” While it may or may not have been true, Roy was comforted to think that his personal emptiness was universal. He felt less special, especially when it came to the dark, fixed hole that his lost love had left in him, but he felt a kinship, too, with other empty souls. From then on, one of his favorite bottoms-up slogans was a toast to the great void. During the long sobriety that he enjoyed after Eva’s death, he’d taken Delphine’s remark as an earnest directive. Everything he’d done, he did to fill the emptiness. Unfortunately, nothing worked like alcohol.

“Nothing can fill the ache of the abyss,” he said one night to his singing cronies. The men were sitting on old crates and creaking chairs in the ruins of an arbor that grapevines had half pulled down with their quick-growing weight. Fidelis always kept them organized, singing song after song, practicing. When he was occupied elsewhere, as now, the men often drifted into gossip or even self-pitying monologues.

“Nothing can fill the nothing,” Roy went on lecturing, “except love or booze or a great religious impulse. And I ain’t got Minnie’s love anymore, or the lack of an imagination to believe in the God of the Lutherans or the Catholics! Nor do I got the depth to invent my own rattletrap version of the Lord Almighty.”

Everyone nodded, but no one answered for fear of setting him off on some other open-ended, infinite topic. “Nothing,” he said, pulling his nose. “God made schnapps for a reason and one reason only. He left a hole in us. Yes, He left a hole when He molded us from the clay. A cup. And then He felt sorry for us and He gave us fermented spirits to pour in the cup. Why do you think they’re called spirits?” He looked around fiercely. “Think about it.” They all should have known that Roy was heading for a relapse.

Gradually, first with small trickles of beer and then in an increasingly fabulous wash, Roy proceeded to fill the emptiness again with his favorite substance. He often lied to his daughter about working with Step-and-a-Half, when he was really swigging away down at the bum’s jungle or sitting on the back steps of the pool hall (he was not allowed inside anymore), or he was somewhere else, anywhere that would have him, getting juiced to the gills.

Hoping to keep Delphine unaware, as well as avoid another series of visits from the unruly dead, the drunk Roy stayed away from his house. The spirits of the piteous Chavers family left him alone as long as he avoided the scene of their undoing. He was still able to sober himself up for two or three days each week, and on those days he stayed with Delphine and was, perhaps, overly solicitous. He cooked heavy breakfasts and washed his own clothing. He scrubbed floors. It was his absence and his homely industry then, an exact pattern she’d never known in him, that kept Delphine in the dark for such a long time. She only discovered the truth once she returned from Chicago and started to look for work.

Delphine hurried over to Step-and-a-Half’s shop the next morning. Outside, on the skim of concrete and the beaten dirt of the entry, an arrangement of butter churns, their paddles worn by female hands, listed slightly one to the next. She stepped around washtubs, an old iron mangle, chipped jars, and dented or bunged pots. Eyed an array of gap-toothed rakes, dulled hoes, brooms worn to the binding of the straw. The spill of junk into the street, which Step-and-a-Half didn’t always bother to bring inside at night, was meant to entice customers. Instead, the stuff made a barrier that either tripped people or sent them off the walk into the street to skirt the mess. Delphine entered with the hope that she could have Tante’s old position, but she took a small step backward when the junk picker leaned across the scarred wood of the counter.

“Tante’s old job? I gave her a job because I felt sorry for that bag of bones. Why is it you high and mighties from the butcher shop always come to me?”

Delphine folded her arms. “Forget it, then! You could sure use me around this place, but I’m not going to beg to sell your ratty old crap.”

“That’s more like it!”

Step-and-a-Half smiled to herself and put a toothpick in her mouth. Cigarettes were becoming scarcer, expensive. The roll-your-own bags of Bull Durham made harsh smokes and she’d started chewing toothpicks instead of lighting up around the precious fabrics because the wools, especially, absorbed the stink. She began to shred the toothpick with her teeth. From time to time her eye opened wide to fix Delphine in a light of intrigue. At last she spoke.

“You don’t need the work. You should just get away from that damn old drunk. Leave him to pickle. You could go anywhere and get away from him. The whole damn town feels sorry for you.”

“What do you know about it?” Delphine was furious now.

“I know plenty,” said Step-and-a-Half. “I kicked him out of here just yesterday, soaked.”

“He’s not drinking!”

“Your head’s in the dirt. He’s an old wino, Delphine. They do not change.”

“They do so,” said Delphine. “He finally has changed. The pledge took this time. You should see him.”

“I did see him and I smelled him, too.”

“Bullshit,” said Delphine, although she knew she was hearing the truth. An immense, dispirited darkness of mood caved down on her as she took in the fact that she’d ignored the signs in Roy. Why was she such a realist in every other way except when it came to her father? She left the store without saying another word, walked home, and crawled into bed to catch up on the sleep she’d missed out on in Chicago. When she woke, the cloud descended again. Heavy-brained and still groggy, she stumbled to the kitchen to cook herself a pair of sunny-side up eggs.

“So the old man fell off again,” she mumbled to the spatula. Worry over her father quickly changed to the exhausting old fury. “What the hell do I even care for,” she fumed, forking the eggs up straight from the pan into her mouth. Her lonely greed and nervousness embarrassed her. She put the fork down and vowed, “I won’t go looking for him! I’ll check on Markus instead!” With resolute haste, she made up a quick pot of the same dumpling soup Markus had survived on after his near burial. She wrapped the pot of soup in a towel and drove to Waldvogel’s. On the way there, she realized that she had only ten dollars left to her name and, now that she couldn’t count on Roy for a contribution, no prospect of paying end-of-the-month bills. If she didn’t find another job within the week, she’d sell the car, she decided. The prospect steadied her panic.

THERE WAS A RICH SMELL of garlic in the air of the shop. Fidelis must be mixing up a batch of Italian sausage, Delphine thought, and then she began to notice things. The cream was not put away. Watch that, she pointed as Franz came out of the side cooler, it’ll spoil. Nobody had cleaned the fingerprint smudges off the case’s glass front. Delphine grabbed a rag and did it herself, then threw the rag down.

“Where’s Markus?” she asked.

Franz gestured her to the back rooms and she left all that was distressingly undone in the shop and went back there, concerned to find that Markus was still in bed, but glad at least he wasn’t any worse. Of course, he hadn’t changed out of the clothes he’d worn to Chicago, even down to the same socks.

“God, those stink!”

Delphine coaxed the socks off his feet.

“I feel good. I just can’t stand up! I fall over!” Markus laughed. He was a giddily cheerful patient, glad to be home. Delphine was drawn to stay with him. His face was eager, his pale, peach-bright hair stuck every which way in bent curls. Delphine rummaged through the meager supply of clean clothing, found an unmatched, ragged, clean pair of pajamas. He clutched them to his chest and walked, weaving, light-headed, to the bathroom to put them on. Delphine tightened his sheets and remade his bed. Fluffing his pillow, she felt a sharp object in the cheap feathers, reached in and drew out the bundle of mementos from Ruthie, the notes, the clicker. Delphine began to examine these things, then realized they were private and stuffed them back. Markus came in, slipped into the bed, shut his eyes against vertigo.

“Drink this soup,” said Delphine. The name signed on the bottom of the notes stuck in her heart. He must have loved Ruthie Chavers, as only children love, to keep her notes hidden in his pillow. Delphine helped Markus sit up and then tried to feed him a spoonful of soup from the pottery bowl she held. “I’m not a baby,” said Markus. He took the spoon from her hand, swallowed the soup in it, and held out his other hand for the bowl. He fed himself, slowly and carefully, sipping broth and holding each dumpling for a moment in his mouth, as though he was grateful for it, absorbing its taste. Watching him, Delphine breathed deeply and then felt a quietness descend between them. The air was still, the sounds from the shop hushed and far away. The dog on the floor whined lightly in her dream. The spoon clinked against the side of the bowl. The boy carefully swallowed. Delphine felt as if this eating of the healing soup by the ill and hungry boy, and her watching of it, could go on and on and she would not mind in the least. It was as though she were witnessing some sacrament. She was sorry when he put the bowl to his lips, drank the last drops, and handed back the spoon. She waved it in the air.

“More?”

With a sleepy, refusing nod, he gave her the bowl, too, and then slid down beneath the burst quilt. He closed his eyes with a great sigh of release. In moments, he was breathing deeply. His fair skin flushed a delicate rose from ear to ear. His lashes were thick and faintly red and his hair bristled pale against the tattered pillowcase. Delphine continued to sit in the chair, watching him, holding the empty bowl in her lap. She smoothed his hair back, but didn’t dare kiss him or tuck the covers up tight around him until he was asleep.

Walking out past some customers, Delphine overheard someone say that a bookkeeper’s job had opened at the lumberyard. It would be pleasant to work in the scent of fresh sawdust rather than raw blood, she thought as she left. Roy was still not home when she returned — that was perhaps a good thing. She locked the door, doused the lights, and went to sleep. The next morning, she put on her work dress, a somewhat worn hat, and her old coat. She did not want to appear in her very best — those things Cyprian had bought for her — since it wouldn’t look right. No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, she wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman, but not one who could not afford, say, a hat with a little green feather. A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.

The spring wind was a quiet and sustained moan, fluttering bits of paper and driving down needles of sleet. The skies were pale purple, the trees soft gray, leafless. There was a watery freshness to the morning light. Delphine’s mood lifted as she walked, for she had always loved this time of year, before the leaves came out, when the wind was wild. Clarisse, in her dramatic way, had had the opposite reaction. She had always fallen into a perverse and severe mystery and worn black to school. Traced her eyes with the soot from a burnt match, and rouged her cheeks, sometimes with circles so she looked clownishly tubercular. To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day — a hopeful time of the year. Walking down the nearly empty street, Delphine’s thoughts turned calmly optimistic. And that was good because when the creature stumbled toward her from the opposite direction, she was somehow prepared to deal with what she saw.

Gray, naked, hairless, more ghostly animal than human, the wild shape flitted around the corner of the drugstore. Then it jumped from the alley, howling, and threw itself down, clutching at the frozen mud. In the hoarse call it made, she recognized her father. He clambered toward her on his knees and then hopped up as if pulled by strings. He was blown against a storefront like a ball of Russian thistle. He twirled off a front stoop to sprawl in the runnel of a rain gutter. Delphine ran for him, but he saw her and with a start of horror stumbled backward, then turned and ran, streaking crazily back and forth across the street. His legs and arms were skinny and wasted, but his belly was round and frog white. His genitalia were small purple decorations underneath. He didn’t bother to hide them, or seem aware at all that he wasn’t wearing a stitch. He just wanted to run. It didn’t matter where. And he was quick and clever in delirium, Delphine knew. He was always very hard to catch.

Delphine chased her father up the main street, then he cut behind the Lutheran church. She chased him all the way around the building, hoping to trap him in the pastor’s yard. Cutting through a patch of blazing forsythia, he nearly ran down Mrs. Orlen Sorven, who threw her round arms up and hollered for help. They left her bellowing cries behind. Roy leaped a primrose gate and sprinted over to the little town park by the river. There, he vaulted picnic tables, sped around the swings. Luckily there were no children of an impressionable age, though a woman with a toddler hid its eyes and dropped her jaw wide. “He’s harmless,” called Delphine. Panting now, she chased Roy up the winding hill. Roy darted from there toward the fire station, then veered north probably to climb the water tower. Delphine closed in. She had the youth, the stamina, but was hampered by her respectable, job-seeking heels. When he eluded her, swinging around the gas pumps again on main street, weeping in terror at what his brain showed him, she reluctantly took off the shoes. She set them near the pump and then gave chase in stockinged feet, chagrined that her last pair would be ruined. Delphine tackled her father as he ran toward the town grade school. She bore him to earth and then the gym teacher ran outside with a towel around his neck and sat on Roy, putting the towel down first. Roy’s legs were streaked with filth and shit. Once caught, he was meek. Delphine took off her coat. She and the gym teacher threaded his arms into the coat’s arms and buttoned it down the front. Children and teachers gaped at the scene from the windows as Roy swayed to his feet and let himself be led along, step by step, toward home.

Once there, Delphine gave her father some water with sugar and salt sprinkled into it, put him to bed. She rolled him up in a sheet, and, although he hated to be confined, she safety pinned the sheet together in back and laid him on his side. She called Doctor Heech, who agreed to come and see him when he’d finished with his appointments. When she was sure that Roy was deeply asleep, she walked back to the lumberyard only to find that the job was filled just this morning, very sorry. And could you make sure your father doesn’t sleep again in the lumber piles? We’re afraid he’ll take a match to the pallets, build a fire. That’s a hazard, you understand.

“IF WE WERE to take a nice, sharp, carving knife and slice you open,” said Doctor Heech, drawing a line with his finger up Roy’s stomach to the breastbone from the groin, “and if we were to push aside your stomach and your guts and take hold of your liver… say we ripped it out and showed you the poor, abused, pulsating organ, we would surely find you’ve done tremendous violence to it.”

Doctor Heech shook his lank silver curls, touched his eyebrows, almost whispered in his reverence for the liver. He went on talking to Roy in a gloomy, dreamy, tone. “This piteous, innocent, earnest helpmeet. What you’ve done is quite unforgivable. Liquefied in places, surely reeking, here petrified, there pickled. Just by gently palpating…” With a faraway frown Heech jammed his fingers into Roy’s side and closed them on something deep in his midsection, causing Roy to yelp, then sob. “I can tell this noble liver of yours is kaput.”

“Leave it alone,” groaned Roy, pushing the doctor’s hands away. “God knows I tried.”

Doctor Heech huffed in disdain and turned to regard Delphine. “I heard you ran a fast fifty-yard dash this morning.”

“It was more like ten miles,” said Delphine. “Will he live?”

“He defies all physical laws,” said Heech, “so I would be foolish to make a prediction. But I don’t know how it is he keeps the flame burning in the wreckage as it is.” Heech looked down at Roy. Suddenly his assessing forbearance turned to rage and he roared out, “By God, you will live! I’ve put too much effort into your damn old carcass for you to die before you show consistent goodness to Delphine.” He jabbed a finger at Roy’s wasted face. “You will not die now! It would be disrespectful! I won’t allow it.”

“Taper him off,” he said to Delphine. “I don’t have to tell you how to do it. And give him this for the cough.” He handed her a bottle of strong cherry bright syrup. Then he put his hand on her shoulder for a moment and said to her, making sure Roy paid attention, “When he does croak, bury him in a packing crate. Don’t give him much of a funeral. Use the money on yourself.”

NOT THAT PEOPLE aren’t kind, thought Delphine, but when they say no, do they mean because they really don’t have work, or because I’m me? She didn’t know, just kept looking, and eventually to her great relief, for she was down to the last two dollars in her purse, she got a temporary job. Tensid Bien, the precise old man who sampled Sunshine cookies, who must have known she’d often given him an extra slice of baloney for his nickel, put in a good word for her. She was hired to file papers for the county offices in the courthouse. So her days became as dry as the wind outside. She worked in a back file room on an accumulation of boxes filled with old land settlements and myriad complaints. Nobody else really broke the tedium — one secretary took calls and worked up current papers on her smart black typewriter. Since she considered herself too important to be bothered by conversation with a file clerk, Delphine hardly ever addressed her and after a while she could not remember the woman’s name. Delphine rarely saw a county official in the flesh — they seemed busy doing county business somewhere else. It was a sleepy job. When she got home, she dosed Roy from the bottles of syrup and schnapps she carried with her and never left alone with him. Once he slept, his cough quieted, his breathing was so calm he didn’t even snore. Delphine made herself dinner and went to sleep, too.

Sleep fell over everything, monotonous and soft. Snowy fluff burst off the cottonwood trees and collected in the grass. Delphine moved slowly through the mild wind and hush of spring green, drugged with sleep like her father. She felt herself sinking away from the grind of life as she crept from her warm bed, through the astonishing light, to the dim rooms of dry papers where she worked. It was a kind of hibernation that she thought might last for the rest of her life. She grew fond of the boredom, the routine, and she wouldn’t have given it up for just anyone at all — but there was Markus. And behind him, or before him, she didn’t know which, massive in the new wheat, stuffed with the strength of many, there was also Fidelis.

IT WAS USUALLY Markus’s task to shred cabbage across the big wooden shredder, a thick paddle-shaped board inset with a sharp blade, easy to set over the wooden washtub that Fidelis used for mixing and fermenting his sauerkraut. He’d had Markus shred the stuff for hours after school already, but after seeing how white his face was and how slowly he moved, even a month after Chicago, Fidelis had taken pity on the boy. He sent Markus to bed. After supper, Fidelis finished the job. He took a cabbage head out of the crate and began to saw it lightly against the blade. Using just the right amount of pressure, he reduced it swiftly underneath his hand until there was only the thickness of a leaf between his palm and the metal. He tossed aside the leaf and took up a new, tightly packed whitish green head, began on that, stopped halfway down arrested by the sudden sensation of having recalled a tremendous task that he had left undone. That was his conviction of what oppressed him, anyway. The problem was, he couldn’t think what this task was at all. He picked up the cabbage again, but the impression in his mind only grew stronger. At length, he was so severely haunted by it that he threw down his apron and went outdoors.

There, in the spring-frosted meadow of the front yard, under a quarter moon that blazed in a fresh black sky, he remembered — it was not a task, but very definitely it was something he hadn’t finished. The question was, he thought now, was whether it ever could be finished. If he took it up again, would it go on forever? Also, did he have the courage? Did he dare go and see her?

DELPHINE WAS READING and dozing over a thick Book-of-the-Month Club novel she’d got from the little lending library run by some schoolteachers out of the courthouse basement. The plot was intimate, British, and safely romantic, one of those in which she had confidence she’d not be left for days with heartache. She had always been a reader, especially since she lost Clarisse. But now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next. She read Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Dos Passos, George Eliot, and for comfort Jane Austen. The pleasure of this sort of life — bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life — had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. She read E. M. Forster, the Brontë sisters, John Steinbeck. That she kept her father drugged on his bed next to the kitchen stove, that she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

When she came to the end of a novel, and put it down and with reluctance left its world, sometimes she thought of herself as a character in the book of her own life. She regarded the ins and outs, the possibilities and strangeness of her narrative. What would she do next? Leave town? Her father would die without her, a failed thread of plot. The lives of the Waldvogels would simply proceed on in the absence of her observation, without the question mark of her presence. A new story would develop. Delphine’s story. Could she bear it? Maybe after all she’d live her story out right here. Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn’t exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days. She did not mind living with poor decrepit Roy on the forsaken edge of a forgotten town beneath a sky that punished or blessed at whim. Contentment. The word itself seemed square and solid in her mind as the little house — Roy’s — that she thought of as her own house. Her house at the end of the world. Horizon to all sides. You could see the soft, ancient line of it by stepping out the door. From the west, later and later every night, flame reflected up into the bursting clouds. Skeins of fire and the vast black fields.

After she watched the sun go down, she lighted the lamps, picked up her latest book. Before she dove into the words, she sat and looked at the walls of her quiet room. This was her nightly ritual: she read, she dozed, she roused herself, refreshed and a little dizzy, she made herself a cup of strong tea and began again. Sometimes she read until three or four a.m., knowing that she could take a nap behind the file cabinet the next day. Several times a night she carefully looked around her, pleased at the details of her surroundings. The pinkish light from the expensive lamp that Step-and-a-Half had inexplicably given to her glowed on the pale gold walls. Delphine had hung forest pictures cut from calendars and framed with scraps of birch wood. Gazing into those leafy prints, she entered a peaceful and now familiar state of suspension. A radio that Roy had acquired from Step-and-a-Half and fixed played soothing, tinny orchestra music. There was no heater, but she had the quilt that Eva made for her draped up to her waist. Sometimes she traced the pinched little stitches that her friend had taken, and thought strangely that the stitches might as well have been taken in her own skin, and Eva pulling them. She was reminded of Eva many times a day. She still retained the imprint of her friend’s personality, and in that way, another comfort, she liked to think she kept her alive.

Eva would like this room, she thought. There was a small, ornate, feminine, wooden desk where Delphine paid the bills. A huge padlocked sea-trunk of bent blond pine, secured with iron bands, held two more quilts used on very cold nights. A small oval rag rug gave warmth, she believed, to the center of the plain board floor. She hadn’t decided whether the figurine of a dog, set on a rickety table pushed up underneath a window, was ugly or elegant. It didn’t matter. All of these shabby objects were bathed in the kind light of the rose-shaded lamp. In that light, Delphine gazed upon them with a warm satisfaction and shut her ears to the cold, subterranean creaking of the earth.

Yes, they were still down there, the Chavers. Not their bones but some vestige of their desperation. Half asleep, sometimes, Delphine talked to them, tried to explain. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have. I am so sorry. Go away.

When she heard someone knock on the door, she started and thought first of Ruthie. Then contained herself. It was just that they never had visitors. Though the town was growing, few came out that way, certainly no one ever at night. Delphine looked through the window before she opened the door and saw that Fidelis stood hunched into his woolen greatcoat. He was heavily scarved against the sharp spring wind and booted against the mud. For some reason he had walked. Delphine’s heart leaped suddenly in worry for Markus, and she lunged to open the door. Fidelis stepped in with a swirl of night air, and she swiftly shut the door behind him.

“Markus?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” said Fidelis, untying his heavy work boots. “He’s not sick, er ist sehr müde.”

He left the boots behind him on some newspapers set near the door.

“Dad’s asleep in the kitchen,” she explained, “so come, let’s sit in here.”

Obediently, he walked in his wool-stockinged feet to the chair. The socks were gray, the heels and the toes bright red, childish looking in a way that might have endeared Fidelis to Delphine, if she didn’t pinch off such a thought before it formed. Without asking if he’d like some, she put the water on the stove, for mint tea, and came back in to sit with him while she waited for it to boil. Fidelis told her there had been a letter from Germany. The boys had started school and were involved in a government youth group that Tante said was extremely hard to get selected for. She implied that she had had to use money that Fidelis sent with her to bribe government officials to admit the boys, though they had passed some rigorous tests. As for Tante, she had at first conducted sewing demonstrations with her American model machine. Then she’d realized it was inferior to the German model.

“That’s enough,” said Delphine. “I’m not interested in your sister.” She began to quiz him about the boys at home. Were they eating well? Washing? And the business. Were the people he had credited paying their bills? Some. Not enough. Were the suppliers giving him good prices? Obviously, from his answers, he did not have the time to spend with them in wangling better profit margins. Delphine frowned. “One or two percent here and there will make or break us,” she said, “you’ll find out!” She slapped the arm of her chair to hide her slip. Us? What was she saying?

“Just tea again.” She mocked his disappointed look, and said, “You drink too much beer anyway.” She rose and went into the kitchen, stepped around the sleeping Roy, and swirled mint leaves into the boiling water in her heavy brown teapot. She took out cups and put a lump of sugar in the bottom of each one. She brought the pot and the two cups, balanced, back into the living room and set them by the china figurine of the dog.

“Have you ever seen a dog like this?” she asked Fidelis.

It had long floppy black ears, white and black markings, a pointed muzzle, and sat alertly upon a green porcelain cushion.

Fidelis picked the dog up and turned it this way and that, almost playfully. “I don’t think another like this dog exists on earth,” he finally said, putting it back.

Delphine said nothing. She was startled by the frivolous tone in his voice. There was an awkward, flirtatious quality about him. It was upsetting for her to hear him say anything that was not tied to the store. She addressed him on safer topics, and for a while they managed to skate a comfortable surface. Then Fidelis asked with no warning whether she knew, yet, if Cyprian was coming back.

“No!” said Delphine, her voice caught in reluctance to be thrown, so suddenly, into the personal.

Fidelis leaned back now and looked directly at her. The rose light polished his features, lent to the whole of him an incongruous sweetness. He’d hung his jacket on the chair behind him and was now in his shirt sleeves. The light picked up the bronze of the hair on his forearms and she gazed down a bit dizzily at his heavy-boned wrists. He glanced at the darkened door of the kitchen, hitched his chair a little closer to hers.

“I gave Cyprian enough time,” he said. His voice thudded. The statement seemed ridiculous. But when he leaned forward, Delphine smelled the spice of him — white pepper and red, a little ginger and caraway. And the male scent of him, the wool and the linen of his shirt. The tart shaving tonic. She knew he rubbed cigar ashes on his teeth to whiten them and then brushed with baking soda. Knew he lathered his whiskers with Eva’s old bars of hand-milled French lilac soap. All of these little things about him were hers to know because she’d kept his house while his wife died. Then she’d cared for his sons. She’d told herself all along that these things had nothing to do with him, Fidelis himself, but now here he was, removed from the intimacy of his family. And yet she knew his habits while he’d hardly seen the inside of her house. He knew little of her. Nothing so personal as the type of soap she used. And what was she to make of this giving Cyprian time?

“Gave him? What do you mean, ‘gave’ him?

“Time,” said Fidelis, “to come back.”

“Well, yes,” said Delphine. His meaning dawned on her. A contrary ticklish energy seized her. She wanted to make things difficult for Fidelis. Why not? Why should he come here so easily and overfill the small pale gold room, her private nest? So she began to laugh, as though he’d said something very funny, and then she calmed herself and took a drink of her tea.

“Did you think he had deserted me?” She would never give away the reason they had parted. She would never tell that he’d left much earlier than people thought. “So like a man, to think that.” Perhaps she was a little under the influence of one of her drawing-room novels, in which people sparred over such topics as love, for it delighted her suddenly to be in the position she was in, to have Fidelis here trying to explain himself and her believing that she finally read his heart. So he had waited for her!

“Fidelis.” She shook her head, the curls of her brown hair lashed her shoulders, and she raised her eyes to his with a lazy knowledge. But when she looked into his face his expression was of such helpless ardor that she forgot her small artifice.

IT WOULD SEEM for months afterward that there had been a great collision, that two glaciers had through slow force smashed together, at last, and buckled. The two were dazed, a bit slow with other people, forgetful. Delphine kept her job at the courthouse, but cut the hours back and came into the shop to wait on customers each afternoon. She came to be near Fidelis. As before, she tended the kitchen and, if she had time, did laundry for the boys — not Fidelis. Since she’d left, he’d begun to iron his own shirts with a soldierly precision.

One afternoon, she found him at it when she arrived. That day, for some reason the whole place was quiet. She walked into the cold concrete-floored utility room, where the water was piped out of the wall into a double soapstone tub. There he stood, chilled in the loop of his undershirt, arms moving above the wooden board covered with a padded cloth. He had bought a modern plug-in iron, and was putting a crease in the starched, sizzling shoulder of a sleeve.

To watch him in his power doing work women did so often filled Delphine with a low electricity, and she brushed the side of his arm, above his elbow. Her hand was still in its glove. He put the iron down. Took her hand in his hand and then pulled off each finger of her glove while looking into her eyes with a steady gravity. When the glove was off, he lifted her hand in both of his and regarded it intently. He stroked her knuckles, scored with white scars, and at last, tentatively, brought her hand to his lips. He fit his mouth over the crease where her fingers came together at the palm.

Then he moved too quickly, in a way she didn’t like, with an arrogant sweep, and tried to pull her to him. She sidestepped his rough gesture and walked out of the room, still breathing the heady scorched scent of clean ironing. That was the first time they’d ever touched, or kissed, though it was more than a kiss and not yet a kiss. Walking home later on, she thought of his eyes as he pulled her glove off, and then she was suddenly home. She realized that she’d walked, tranced, down the long road, without seeing a thing around her. She had no memory of how she got to her door. And yet, though she couldn’t stop thinking of him in this new way, she avoided him. For when they were around each other now the stage was bare, all the scenery pulled away, and there was only the full burden of their attraction. It was too much, to let it happen all at once. They came together by the smallest incremental movements.

Weeks later, they still hadn’t kissed, hadn’t let their mouths touch. And yet one day in the dusty office filled with paperwork, Fidelis knelt before Delphine and with his hands smoothed the insides of her legs up to the tops of her heavy silk stockings, felt where they were hooked with metal garters, traced the slices of material up underneath her skirt. He spread her legs apart so wide she was embarrassed, there in the leather chair, and then he kissed the insides of her knees. She caught his hair back in both fists, pulled so hard it must have stung, but only stared down at him, his face immobile between her legs. She shoved him away with all of her strength, and pressed down her skirt.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.” He rose in one subdued, brutal motion and dusted himself off with broad unnecessary whacks at the legs of his pants. “Around you, I get these ideas.” He tried to recover his dignity, folded his arms, then unfolded them, sat down, and rifled the desk for a cigarette. When he couldn’t find one his threw up his hands as though to say, See? I can’t get anything I want? And Delphine finally laughed.

MANY DAYS, they couldn’t bear the tension and ignored each other entirely. They set a date four months away on which they would be married. At first it seemed a very long time to wait, and then it seemed to Delphine far too short a time and she thought maybe she would put it off. Fidelis bought their wedding license in the courthouse, showed her the paper casually, and they both signed their names with a dispassionate alacrity, as though they were signing banking documents. They were good at working together — quick and respectful and efficient. Delphine took over the bookkeeping and the ordering again, and she began to bring religion to the dusty office careening with papers.

One afternoon when Franz and Markus were eating in the kitchen, Delphine brought Fidelis in and pushed his shoulder. “Tell them,” she commanded.

Franz paused, frozen, his hand to his mouth, waiting for his father’s announcement. Markus continued eating, chewing serenely. Nodding, he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.” He took another bite, and asked the next important question.

“So does that mean Emil and Erich are coming home?”

“I wrote and sent money,” said Fidelis, with assurance. “Tante will make the arrangements.”

“Tell them,” said Delphine, again, shaking his arm.

Fidelis gathered himself, but before he could open his mouth, Franz beat him.

“Oh, I get it,” said Franz. “You two are getting married.” He forked half of a baked apple into his mouth, chewed it all up. “And as long as we’re making announcements, I’m going into the air corps. I’m enlisting.”

“There is no war!” Fidelis’s low voice nearly cracked with intensity — he still had his hopes. But Franz didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, there will be,” said Franz. “Just you wait. I see it coming, and when it does I’m…” He made a skimming motion with his hand, like an airplane taking off. He buzzed his hand into the wild blue yonder and then he grinned at them all, nodding to encourage their approval. Fidelis hunched his shoulders in distress and left the room.

“Do you have to be so happy about it?” said Delphine, annoyed with Franz for spoiling the announcement, but also suddenly aghast at his thirst for war.

“I’m happy about it,” said Markus. “It’s like you already live here.”

“Oh, that,” Franz said. “He can do what he wants.”

“You know what I’m talking about!” said Delphine. “Can you go and sit with him at least?”

“Dad wouldn’t want that.” Franz took a walnut from the bowl on the table, cracked it with his fingers, just like Fidelis. He tossed the meats up in the air and caught them on his tongue. “I’ll fly a Spitfire! We won’t get anywhere near German territory. I’ll be fighting other pilots — not Dad’s people. He knows that.”

“You have no idea what a war means!” Delphine tried not to raise her voice or drive him off. But his willful ignorance was making her passionate. “Forget that I’m marrying your father. Be realistic, Franz. They could put you in the infantry.”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, pityingly, at Delphine. “A bomber, maybe. But no. I’ll be a fighter pilot.” He made noises with his mouth and pretended to machine-gun Markus, who popped his lips back at him.

“God, you’re a hard soul!” Delphine cried, overcome.

“What do you want? The marriage is your business,” said Franz. He sulked. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Of course it matters,” said Delphine coaxingly.

“Well then, I think I’m leaving,” said Franz. “Don’t take this personal, but I don’t want to think about it.” He got up and sauntered away, shoved his fists in the pockets of his poor, tattered, imitation flight jacket. As he passed out of Delphine’s sight, he swore hard, kicked the dust. His eyes watered. Then he laughed sarcastically at himself. He had never been so miserable in his life.

* * *

WHENEVER FRANZ passed the place where he and Mazarine had swung from the road to enter their special place underneath the pine, his throat burned. A tension collected around his heart. For hours after, he would think about the pine tree, his ribs tightening and his chest shutting out the air. It was hard to take a breath. And yet suddenly his breath came out in huge, deep, surprising sighs. Food went dry in his throat and the weight dropped off him. The bones of his wrists jutted out, his cheekbones sharpened. Nor could he sleep right. His dreams were of reckless bargains. Torrents of water swept him from Mazarine or tumbled her over cliffs and through culverts, just out of reach. Things had only gotten worse as it became apparent that Mazarine Shimek truly meant her no and would not have him back. Mazarine, in the new clothing he had never touched.

She wore a soft plaid kilt of rust brown to school now — even Franz could tell that it was perfectly sewn. The hem swished just the right way around her legs when she walked, whirled softly when she turned. The colors of her pleated skirt were the browns and golds of the light that used to fall upon the two of them underneath the great pine tree. She wore crisp blouses that managed somehow to drape, as well, across her bird’s collarbone. The fabric joined across her chest with rich, glazed, mother-of-pearl buttons. She wore her hair in a braid now, twined through with a ribbon of heavy satin — sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. He could not help recording a list of these details — they were all he had of her right now. But Mazarine didn’t in any way return his regard. She didn’t speak to him, much less let him take her books from her arms and strap them onto her bicycle and give her rides, as though she were a much younger girl. He missed that the most, he thought. Even more than touching her he longed for the weight of her wobbling between his arms on the bicycle. Him steering and her laughing as she tried to balance. The farther away she kept herself, the more he knew this: he loved Mazarine — to the death, he thought wildly, beyond death.

How stupid! He crashed his fists on his temples. At night, he thought of and rejected ways to make it up to her, ways to draw her to him. He would throw himself upon her mercy. Waylay her. Beg her. Buy her a hothouse rose and lay it on her bed at night. She needed him, didn’t she? Anyone could tell she was unhappy. Look how quiet she was, walking the school hallways, how serious. Look how her slender grace had become an alarming thinness. How she kept her hair, which had always swirled with her movements, stiffly locked into that one thick braid.

The only thing that really diverted him was the airfield. Sometimes, Franz looked at the other men who worked around him, and wondered if they’d ever had such feelings. He doubted it — none of them looked as if they could ever have been in love with anything but their machines. At first he scorned such limitations. Then they made sense to him. To actually fix a touchy engine was a relief. So whenever Fidelis let him out of the shop, Franz worked on airplanes. In payment, Pouty Mannheim began to teach him how to fly.

Each time they went up, Franz felt the same roaring physical release from the earth that had charmed him when he first watched, from the field behind the house, the plane take off and lift over the windbreak. Only it was better to be in the plane itself. Better now as he understood exactly how to control the flight, read the wind, the signs in the clouds small and large. On their eighth flight, Pouty let him have a chance at the controls. For weeks, they practiced taking off, touching down, and then gradually added a beginning barnstormer’s repertoire of stalls, spins, easy wingovers and gentle loops. When Pouty finally let him take the plane up solo, Franz experienced a startling lightness. The plane flew at a touchy and thrilling balance with just him in it. He focused on the town grain elevator, a thin mark on the horizon, kept his nose directed at it and did a slow point roll. Then a more complicated hesitation roll, a loop, a difficult spin. The earth tipped over him. Concentrate, or die. Things were simple upside down. By the time he landed, he was absolutely at peace. After that, he thought that maybe he would survive the loss of Mazarine if only he could spend his life up in the air.

NO GUESTS, no cake, no flowers. After she married Fidelis and Franz left to start his tests for the air corps, Delphine continued to divide her time between the butcher shop and her house, nursing Roy. She kept part of her filing job, kept reading her books, tried to keep as much of her old routine as she could. Still, the past with its horrors, complexities, and incompletions intruded. Although she was married, the background to her new life seemed unfinished, like a jumbled stage set. She wished that she could file her past the way she filed the papers at the courthouse. Then Cyprian returned.

He was sitting on the front steps of Delphine’s house one early evening, wearing a hat. He squinted out at the road and nodded, cool and self-contained, as Delphine drove the car into the yard. Then he took off the hat, and Delphine saw that he was utterly bald. He looked even more attractive, exotic, like someone from a prehistoric world jolted into pants and shirt and shoes. The head made you think of him naked. Her heart jolted when she saw him. She took a deep, ragged breath to calm herself as she stopped the car and took in his presence through the windshield. So here he was. She smiled, an involuntary reflex, before she thought of Clarisse, then realized that she could find out what happened to Clarisse. The smile altered but stayed on her face. In spite of everything, she was glad to see Cyprian.

As she opened the driver’s door, jumped out, and nearly ran toward him, Delphine was surprised to experience a sudden uncomfortable pang. Was Fidelis watching? Irrationally, she glanced to all sides. She tried to shrug the discomfort off her shoulders like a cape, but her uneasiness persisted. Her greeting was tentative, and she stood before Cyprian in the bent sun of early dusk, shifting her weight, hoping he’d not come into the house with her. Again, this sense that she was doing something wrong although there was no wrong in it, but there was the intimidating certainty of Fidelis. The realization that she was now susceptible to a man’s jealousy irritated her. From under the porch and the stillness of the grass, mosquitoes started to whine. Cyprian tipped his head to the side and fanned away the bugs with his hat. They sat down on the porch steps.

“Light up a cigarette, will you, to keep off the bloodsuckers?” She accepted a cigarette from Cyprian and allowed it to burn down between her fingers.

“I’m not even going to talk to you,” she said in a low voice, finally, “until you tell me what happened to Clarisse.”

“I didn’t know about Hock,” Cyprian offered.

“I know what the hell happened to Hock. I asked you what happened to her.”

“All she said to me was this: ‘I’ll go where my work is necessary, and appreciated.’”

“That actually sounds like her,” said Delphine. “I’ll bet she went south, New Orleans… no, farther. The Yucatan or maybe even farther down, Brazil. I can see it.” She sighed and shook herself. She couldn’t see it. Missing Clarisse was still a daily habit, like drinking coffee or turning on the radio. She didn’t stop to ache or wonder or brood over Clarisse anymore. She just missed her and then was done with it and went on to the next thing. And that is the kindness of time, she thought.

She looked at Cyprian. “So you didn’t know about Hock. Until when?”

“Until she told me.”

“Which was when?”

“Right away, on the trip to Minneapolis.”

“Didn’t it occur to you, then, that somebody might connect the two of you? Think you were in on it?”

“Sure it did,” said Cyprian, “which is one reason why I parted ways with her.”

“Why did you come back here?”

Cyprian turned his hat around and around in his hands — it was a smooth clay brown fedora with a wide brown grosgrain band. Expensive looking. He pinched the brim, his fingers careful, choosing his words.

“I’m passing through,” he said finally. “But I just had to see if you love him.”

“Of course I do.”

“The hell you do!”

Suddenly they turned, their eyes locked in outrage, and they stared at each other. Their exasperation was so exactly matched that it struck them both, at the same time, as ludicrous. They turned away, each unwilling to let the other see any softening, or smile. Delphine fiddled with the cigarette, sharpening its ash on the wood of the steps, waving it slowly around her to make a smoke barrier.

“So you came back not knowing if you’d get picked up for murder, just to see if I love Fidelis.”

Cyprian didn’t answer for a moment, then he nicked his head. “Like I said, I have other reasons.” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. His eyes were sharply lovely.

“Come in then,” she said at last. “Roy’s in bed. He needs a good laugh.”

Cyprian jammed his hat on his head, then took it off, and followed her across the bare porch and into the house. Inside, he took off his hat and held it over his stomach as he walked into the kitchen, where Roy slept. Cyprian sat down by the bed and waited for Roy to wake. For a long time, Roy lay still, hands on the quilt, eyes shut. Eventually, he opened one eye just a crack, took in Cyprian’s presence, and shut his eyes again with an elaborate fluttering of lids. Delphine was surprised to find that she was cheered to see this deception, this hint of the old Roy, and she pulled her chair up, too.

“Hey, Dad,” she said softly, “you have a visitor.”

Roy lay mum, deciding whether to retreat from consciousness or seek out communion with the living. His brows knit and he worked his jaws in little chewing motions. Finally, he gave a decisive jerk and let his eyelids flap up to display great, staring, milky-blue rounds of iris.

“Cyprian! Cyprian the Bald!”

Cyprian grasped Roy’s bony, spectral, age-freckled hand. Once he’d decided to join the living, Roy became energized by possibilities.

“Oh for a beer,” he cried. “A little sip of schnapps. Could you see your way clear to wet my whistle?’

“Dad…”

“Yes, yes, assuredly, I know there is compelling evidence that it might kill me.” Roy made brushing motions in the air as if swiping off the warnings. “But a very tiny amount might actually be beneficial, serve as an inoculation, if you will.”

“We’re down to a teaspoon or two every few hours,” said Delphine. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have your teaspoon.”

“Now we’re talking!” crowed Roy. He patted Cyprian’s arm. “Would you care to join me? Give this man a teaspoon!” Roy swept his arm grandly toward the little cutlery drawer.

“He can have a glass, Dad.” She unclipped a set of keys from her belt, took a glass outside to the car. She unlocked the trunk and then used another key to unlock a toolbox padlocked into the trunk. From the box, she removed a pint bottle of brandy. She poured the glass half full, set the glass on the roof of the car, locked everything back up, and brought the glass of brandy back to Roy’s bedside. She poured a bit of the glass into a bottle cap and dipped in a teaspoon.

“Salut!” Roy opened his mouth and then closing it around the spoon.

Cyprian nicked his glass at the old man.

“What are you up to now?” Roy’s tone was convivial, but his eyes glittered, full of sudden tears. “Are you casting around for a job and looking for a wife? Did you come here as a dog returns to a place it’s once been fed?”

Cyprian took a large swallow of the brandy, and Roy went on speculating. “There’s always farmwork around here, of course, but that is both brutal and seasonal. I speak from much experience. Now there’s our thriving main street, all those shops lined up raking in cash. Clerking. Perhaps you could learn to barber. Oly Myhra’s getting old. His pole needs painting. Hah hah! His pole needs painting! My pole”—he nudged Cyprian—“hasn’t been painted for the last twenty-six years. What about yours?”

Cyprian looked at Delphine. She raised her eyebrows but kept her face impassive.

“The paint’s fresh on mine,” said Cyprian. “What do you hear from the rest of the club?”

“Mannheim is still aloft,” said Roy. “And Fidelis married the woman you skipped out on, that is”—he nodded at Delphine with affection—“her Royal Obstinacy. Once again, she has nursed me back from the brink of the abyss. I had flung myself headlong into the drink, you know, and made of myself something of an embarrassment to her. Still, she loves her old dad. She tapered me off. How about that second teaspoon?”

“Live it up,” said Delphine. Roy closed his eyes and opened his mouth. She put the spoon in.

“I didn’t run out on her,” said Cyprian, giving Delphine a meaningful look. “I offered her an engagement ring. A real nice one. She turned me down.”

“Watch out,” said Delphine. “I know all about where that ring ended up.”

“Ah,” gasped Roy. He had taken the spoon from Delphine’s fingers and was sucking on it like a happy child. “The disappointments of love lie heavier each year. Time does not, as the philosopher’s wishful thinking goes, time does not heal all wounds. When I fell, I fell hard,” said Roy proudly. “I fell through the center of the world.”

“You’ve milked your love martyrdom far enough,” said Delphine. “I’m tired of it. She was my mother you know, I’m the one who really got the raw deal here. And ended up taking care of you, you booze hound, all of these years!”

“And hasn’t it been a grand old time!” cried Roy. He was always encouraged and cheered when Delphine joined him in his bantering. “I believe that the sacred love I have borne these many years is a love that has sucked me straight into the vortex, the omphalos of the universe, and there I have seen such things my friends. Such things!…” Roy let his voice trail off and his gaze unfocus, as though he were reliving a vision. “Mostly though”—he shook his head, jolting back—“I have seen a lot of hooch disappear.”

“Dad’s mistaken the navel of the universe,” said Delphine, “for the dimple at the bottom of the schnapps bottle.”

“Well, be that as it may, I am actually here,” said Cyprian, with an air of setting things right at last, “to play an engagement.”

“A what?” Roy’s mouth dropped in delight.

“That’s right,” said Cyprian. “I’m not really looking for a job. I’m part of the lyceum series. I travel with the Snake Man now.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a roll of pink cardboard tickets. “How many would you like?”

“The Snake Man?” said Delphine, a little wounded somehow, maybe even a bit jealous. “You could have written. Does he double as your human table?”

“It didn’t have the same effect,” said Cyprian, “with two men, though we did work out a few other balancing tricks. He owns his own python, brings it onstage in a leather case on wheels. He’s got an assortment of reptiles,” Cyprian paused, “and one arachnid.”

“What’s his name?” said Delphine.

“Mighty Tom.”

“A good name for a performer.”

“No, that’s the spider. My partner’s name is Vilhus Gast.”

So that, thought Delphine, was that.

“What’s he like?” she asked.

“Well, he’s a lot like me,” said Cyprian. “A performer, you know. He made it over here from Lithuania and he’s a Jew. I was a real curiosity to him at first. I took him home with me.” Cyprian laughed. “Boy was he surprised.”

“How come?”

“There’s no Jews on the reservation, I mean to speak of. I never knew one when I was growing up, any more than he’d know an Indian. Except he did know about us and said he believed we were one of the lost tribes of Israel doomed to wander, too, like his people. Always to be on the edge of things. Hounded and hunted, he said. ‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘So let’s roam around together.’ So we got this act up and since then we’ve been playing it steady.”

DELPHINE AND MARKUS arrived early at the school gymnasium the next night and took a seat in the first row of creaky wooden folding chairs. There would be talk. Cyprian would be recognized and his shaven head remarked with wonder, maybe derision. People, customers, old schoolmates, would turn to crane at Delphine. If she sat in the back, she would have to endure their shielded or open curiosity. Sitting in the first row, she had her back to them. They could gawk and whisper to their heart’s content. Delphine would ignore them. She intended to enjoy the show.

The curtains parted. Cyprian and his partner stood barefooted, clad in tight black gymnasium suits, on great red rubber balls. Pedaling their feet, they do-si-doed around each other, speeding up until to much applause they hopped high in the air and exchanged places on the spinning balls. Vilhus Gast was very like in size and shape to Cyprian, though nondescript of feature, and he wore a very bad toupee that shifted as he moved.

Suddenly, Gast stood quite still, precisely balanced, hands raised like a ballerina’s, and Cyprian began to bounce, the ball caught between his feet. With a giant catlike effort, Cyprian sprang off the ball and into the air, upended, coming down exactly in position to lock hands with Vilhus Gast. The men swayed, each powerful muscle defined, and nearly toppled. Amazingly, they righted themselves and balanced.

Now, Gast began to dance the ball back and forth across the stage. To shouts and laughter, he pretended to have trouble holding Cyprian aloft. They balanced one-armed, one-legged, and then something wonderful and awful happened. The unattractive toupee that Vilhus Gast wore crept slowly off his head. To the delight of boys and the shrieks of ladies, the bad wig revealed itself to be a giant spider. Gingerly, horribly, the thing eased itself up Gast’s arm, felt its way to Cyprian’s elbow, and then, as Cyprian lowered himself, the spider embraced his bare skull and remained there. The men stood, pranced, held their arms out to receive mad clapping, hoots, and whistles. From a box on a small stand, then, Gast shook loose another, smaller, but equally hairy spider. The audience hushed. He coaxed it along his arm with a feather, then helped it up Cyprian’s throat. Delicately, the creature felt its way up the cliff of Cyprian’s chin and over his mouth. The spider curled into a square black mustache on Cyprian’s upper lip, in the warm breath from his nose.

Along with the spiders, Cyprian also donned a swallowtail suit coat and polished black leather boots. His legs were still comically bare. He was Adolf Hitler, with intestinal gas. Every time an offstage tuba sounded, Cyprian’s muscular ass end popped between the tails of his formal jacket, danced, jigged, reacted with a life apart from the absurdly stern and hypnotic features of the Fuehrer, whose attempt to inspire the howling crowd was undone. Every time he called for the Nazi salute, the tuba squawked and his rear end explosively twitched. The spiders stayed attached to Cyprian’s head somehow. The audience discovered that they could make the Fuehrer fart by giving the salute themselves. They straight-armed, uproariously, until the tuba was one long groan and Hitler went zinging all around the stage like a flea on a hot griddle. The curtains shut to roars and howls. The first act was finished.

Laughter hadn’t even died down when the curtains were flung wide again. An eight- or nine-foot leather valise with several handles was displayed upon four sawhorses. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast appeared, wearing jeweled turbans and dressed in strange and delicate transparent veils of fabric that ballooned around their legs, floated in the air beneath their arms, and drifted behind them as they walked. A tinny phonograph record played exotic whining music as the two men unlatched the valise and displayed something live, mottled, and very quiet, but with a vibrating energy that made people catch their breaths. The men coaxed the enormous snake from the case into their arms and announced the Dance of Death. They wound and unwound with the snake as it became more alert, tried to curl them into its coils and draw them close. Their dance was impromptu, graceful, and sensuously peaceful. Every member of the audience, believing that the python meant to devour the two men, was mesmerized with interest. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast danced the python down the center aisle. The crowd was allowed to touch the dry, charged skin. All saw the incongruously small head, an evil wedge of muscle. Its brilliant, cold, criminal’s eyes made them shudder so they were glad when Cyprian and Vilhus returned the snake to its leather case, resnapped the locks, and produced two sharp-toothed, gleaming handsaws, with which they proposed to reduce the python into stove lengths.

“Is there a butcher in the house?” called Cyprian. Pete Kozka was given the saws to test. He pronounced them keen and effective. The men sawed up the python. It writhed horribly in the valise, its tail whipping through the unlatched end. Then they burned a fragrant substance and began to chant portentous syllables, made some signs over a pot of school glue, and stuck the python back together. The show continued. They put away the python and juggled lizards. Displayed a huge iguana still and blinkless as a stone carving. Once again introduced the talented arachnid, Mighty Tom, who played the part of Vilhus Gast’s toupee. They brought him down the aisle in a great round candy jar so that people could look aghast at him and marvel. They balanced cups, plates, and their curly-toed shoes on pates and noses. They did a few more acrobatic tricks and then bounced off, to wild applause and shrieks of encore! They came back out as twin Hitlers on unicycles that they rode while breaking wind and saluting and from which they nearly toppled when their farts grew boisterous. They juggled swastikas set on fire. They juggled hatchets, cleavers, knives. They juggled apples and snatched great bites from them until they juggled only cores. They were an enormous hit.

For weeks after Cyprian and the Snake Man had vanished, Markus talked of nothing but the show, and people stopped Delphine in the street. They treated her with shy admiration. She received the deference of one who knows, or has access to, a great artist. They addressed her with respect. They wanted details, secrets.

“The python, has it eaten anyone?”

“Has the spider underneath Cyprian’s nose ever caused him to sneeze? If he did, what would happen?”

“Where did he learn to juggle? To ride a unicycle?”

“Will he return? Ever again?”

Delphine couldn’t answer any of the questions except the last one. And she only answered it on instinct, though she was proved right.

“No,” she said, “he won’t come back here.” And he never did.

ROY SEEMED CONTENT to stay in bed next to the stove most of the day, courting sleep, soaked in sleep, washed in the pleasant duty of it. Because Doctor Heech had prescribed a prolonged rest in order to relieve his liver and keep his cough from turning to pneumonia, at first both Roy and Delphine counted each hour of his loss of consciousness as a healing virtue. However, after a time, she understood that it was something more. She could tell this sleep was different for Roy, not restorative, but some final preparation. He slept so earnestly. It was as though he was practicing. She began to fear he would die when she was out at work, and she put her hand on his face first thing when she returned every day, and first thing when she rose in the morning. Along with the overpowering sleep, he hardly ate. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of soup, then lay back and let sleep take him once again. She had to watch him. He was shrinking. Growing weaker and quieter. He’d asked for the pictures of her mother, Minnie, and set them on a shelf of the spice and flour counter, where he could see them from his bed.

Delphine had asked Roy to tell her about Minnie, but he had surprisingly little information for one who so flamboyantly existed in a state of destructive long-term grief. She didn’t even have a gravestone to visit, and Roy would not say why that was or where she was buried. All Roy would say was that Minnie was the only one left to tell the tale.

“What tale?” Delphine had always asked, but Roy had kept his mouth shut.

Now that his tongue was somewhat loosened by the codeine, and he was bored, Delphine thought she might have better luck with her questions. One night she sat with him, speechlessly tending a little fire in the stove, lost in her own brooding. She slowly became aware that she was waiting for something, she was not even sure of what. Perhaps Roy was going to die this night. Her thoughts had become dispassionate, and she regarded him with detached affection. Poor Roy. He looked weary and his skin had gone fragile, soft, almost translucent. Blue blotches came up on his forearms, bruises that seemed to have surfaced from deep, invisible, interior blows. It was as though he was finally showing all the knocks life had dealt him. Delphine suddenly decided not to let him die with all of the secrets that she had a perfect right to know.

“All right. I want answers. Where was she from?” Delphine asked, pointing to Minnie’s picture.

“She was from down there.” He waved vaguely south. “Then she came up here.”

As usual, thought Delphine, he would give her nothing. But when she stared at him and said, “More. I want to know it all,” he seemed to reconsider, and spoke more alertly. “Actually, she was originally from way, way up there.” Roy rolled his eyes northward until the whites showed, then stared at Delphine in concentration, frowning. Perhaps he understood that in Delphine right now he had the perfect audience. The vagueness of sleep in his face cleared. As if an electrical wire was spliced, the old Roy came on, the one who told stories in bars and eased Eva Waldvogel into death by talking the secret language of wolves. Delphine hunched close to hear it all, and held her breath until he started speaking with such an eager intensity that she knew she was finally getting the story.

“You want to know? Of course you want to know. I’ll tell you, too. So go on, take notes. Put these things down for posterity or posteriority, what have you. Minnie. She wasn’t no ordinary, everyday, woman. She wasn’t just a person you would walk past. She wasn’t forgettable. Not Minnie. She had something else in her — the blood of her forefathers, and foremothers, too, and that blood was not just any blood either, but I’m telling you she was of the great nation of the Indians up north called the Crees and Ojibways who mixed with the French, of whom she was descended of kings. That’s right. Her great grandpa was the bastard of the Sun King himself, or so he said, and had escaped across the ocean to lead a clean life skinning pelts. While from the south, she was an adopted second cousin to old Crazy Horse or could have been, though she was almost tragically destroyed. I set this up so you’ll realize that from all sides and all directions there was royal lines simmering and boiling and knocking up against one another in the blood of this woman, your mother. And don’t, no, don’t start diverting me with other questions. Let me go on. Let me speak. For what you now will hear I’ve told no other, and for good reason. It is a story so sad and incredible I don’t like to think of it myself. It is better forgot. It is the story of who your mother became at the age of eight years and why thereafter she grew into someone who could never be tamed by the likes of old Roy Watzka, not me!”

Roy sat up, gestured for some pillows to prop at his back, took a sip of the water into which Delphine had mixed a bit of ginger to calm his stomach and help the blood flow quicker to his heart.

“Picture a Christmas service in a snug built church deep in the heart of plains country!” Roy spread his fingers wide before him. Eyes narrowing, he stared into the back of his hand as though it were made of prophesying crystal. “A ragtag bunch of starved and freezing Minneconjou Lakotas — what the layman will call Siouxs — rap humbly at the door of this Christian house of worship. They’re on the run, mostly women and little children, and a few wore-down warriors half mad from their strivings and their defeats. Their chief is dying in a wagon they got dragged by two racks of horse bones that used to be war ponies. They have seen Sitting Bull betrayed and their everyday survival shot to hell. They have this idea they can dance the world back, sing to the dead and the dead will hear them and all will rise and live. They are very lonesome people, is all, and I know about lonesome. Just ask me. They want to see the faces of the ones they love. It is Christmas on the plains, mind you. These poor folks come begging for a handout, a little mercy. And do they get it?” Roy glared blindly at the scene in his head. “What do you think?”

“Well from how you set it up,” said Delphine, “no.”

“No,” said Roy. “It’s the God’s truth. They were turned away.” He was breathing quickly, his storytelling tongue on fire. “Among them there is a girl from the Indians I have mentioned, those Indians up north who blended with the French. Her daddy is a Cree who was sent down by his people to learn of this new method of dancing to bring back the dead. He is supposed to report back and tell the old people of his own tribe if it works — so far, he has seen no resurrections. On this trip, he took his favorite, his youngest, his daughter. The others are left behind. This girl and her father traveled first to the camp of the Hunkpapa Lakota, where folks are leaving for the village of Chief Hump, to the south. They meet up with a Minneconjou bunch there and walk deeper into the Badlands territory with the remnants of the believers, who at this point are just trying to go home. Pretty soon they got nothing, food nor shelter, except the steep bluffs of a place called Medicine Root Creek. It is there that they entertain an army major of the notorious, inglorious, Seventh Cavalry, Major Samuel M. Whitside. At Porcupine Butte he convinces them to follow underneath the white flag of surrender to a military camp near a place called in Lakota something unpronounceable by me, and in the English language, Wounded Knee.”

Roy paused for a long moment, squinting into the darkest corner of the room, moving his tongue across his lips as if to find a word or two caught there like a crumb. With a jerk of energy, he roused himself and continued.

“Camped at this place they are headed for is an army of men which has declared themselves a shelter for the Lakota, the Siouxs if you will, should they be so desperate as to approach. With their chief, old Big Foot, dying of pneumonia in that wagon bed and with no food, starving mainly, these people beg protection. They give up their guns and set up camp where they are told. Minnie’s father has an old piece of bannock in his pocket, their last food, which he shares with a woman who has invited them into her tent. She has a baby tied to her and no man in sight. After it is eaten, they have nothing. But the woman picked up something thrown to her by a member of the congregation in the church way back there. It is a tough one-legged gingerbread figure. This, she offers to share with them. She divides it crumb by crumb. They eat it, and fall asleep in her tent. That next morning, the woman fills a pot with snow and puts the little pot upon a fire of twigs. The woman takes a bundle of roots from the bodice of her dress and she stews one of those roots in the pot of melted snow. She tends the pot with the root like it was something special, watching it so careful, hushing her baby, testing the potency of her brew with a finger, withdrawing the root and examining it from time to time. She removes the little pot from the fire, eventually, and she allows the tea to cool just enough. Then she motions to Minnie to drink it. And just as she is drinking this tea, there is a shot fired outside the tent.

“Well, you can read about this in the history books if you want to, though rarely is the full extent of its pity told or believed. Minnie’s father, running out of the tent, is gunned down right off, for that accidental shot brings down thunder. A great, crackling ripple of sound! Smoke and brimstone! Bullets ripping through the cloth, Minnie plunges from the tent with this woman, who grabs her arm and steers her for the white peace flag of surrender. They stand underneath it, shots whizzing and whining in swarms. The woman still has her baby at her breast, tucked in a tied shawl, at her nipple. Again, that thunder rolls! It is Hotchkiss guns trained down straight on the camp of women and on the children and on the white flag of surrender, too. This lady, she keeps nursing. Even as she’s struck and killed, she slumps down with that baby still drinking and now covered in its own mother’s blood. And Minnie’s father, she curls next to him a moment, just in time to receive his last words, a message, and to feel the life go out of him. Which is when Minnie walks right off, through it all, just mystified. She scrambles down a ravine, where she sees sights that she never can get out of her mind. She sees grown soldiers ride down women and then fire their guns point-blank as the women hold their little babies in the air. She climbs out of the dry wash and under a wire fence. From there, she watches a grown soldier on horseback chase down a skinny, weeping, stumbling boy. Another strips a dead girl naked for her figured shirt. The soldiers leave Minnie alone, maybe because she wears a farmer dress and farmer coat, not a blanket, or maybe they see her lighter brownish hair or her skin paler than the skin of those Lakota or they see her French eyes. She walks out of there and zigzags behind some others who are fleeing too. She walks through snow, following the tracks of those others when she falls too far behind to see them anymore. Their tracks save her. She puts her feet in them and never quits walking until she reaches a mission run by an old priest named Jutz. That’s all that happens. I can’t tell you no more.”

* * *

DELPHINE STARED at Roy in a fit of skepticism. There was suddenly a big noise in her head. It was too much, and just like Roy to give her this strange and terrible information, and then to quit just as soon as the scene had unrolled in her mind. She thought she’d heard of the place he mentioned, but had long forgotten the how and why of what happened there. She hadn’t known any Indians well, except Cyprian, to whom, if she believed Roy, she might now be related.

Delphine’s suspicious reception of his story disappointed Roy. He waited for some sign of appreciation for his efforts and lost interest when Delphine continued blinking at him and drumming at her lips with a finger, deciding whether or not to believe the story. He shut up, turned away, and stared at Minnie’s blurred photograph. His eyes glazed over, his face grew peaceful.

After a while Delphine knew it was no use to gather herself, to ask anything else. Real questions sat on her heart. Simple, undramatic. What was Minnie like? Had she been happy to have a daughter? Had she loved her? Loved Roy? Had he really felt such an extraordinary happiness with Minnie? Why had he used his loss of joy as a sorry excuse to make his daughter’s life miserable, not to mention waste his own? Would he now die happy, living on memory — was that his booze now? Was he telling the truth?

He told her nothing else. When she asked him why he’d loved Minnie so much, what made her so wonderful that he still looked at her fuzzy pictures after all these years, or even what her personality was like, his answers were so general as to give her nothing. Or maybe he was selfish, maybe those private memories were all he had, and he couldn’t give them up, not even to her.

Still, there were things he needed to say.

Day by day, as he weakened, his voice softened to a fragile whisper. To hear him, Delphine always had to lean close, into the circle of his breath, which was not the sour alcohol rankness she had been familiar with all of her life, but a childish scent, milky and pure. His gaze was owlish, bewildered. He wanted to talk all the time, and his speech was often garbled — tenses collided, main facts were missing, characters loomed large but with no reference. He seemed to have lost the ability to sustain narrative, as though his lifetime of booze had eaten into every other cell of his brain and made his mind skip like a scratched record. There were occasional times, too, when he spoke with great clarity out of some protected corner of his thoughts. Delphine was never sure which it would be from one sentence to the next.

“Stop looking at me,” he frowned at her one afternoon.

She’d had her back turned, and now she did look at him.

“Or I mean,” he sighed, “stop looking like you’re looking at me. I don’t know which. I never sang your part, you know, Chavers. Shut your damn trap.” He sighed calmly and then seemed to recognize Delphine. “I’ve had enough of him knocking on the floor. He’s never quit, you know. Banging, banging. I suppose he’s waiting for me on the other side. Him with his whole damn family — and I never knew they were there!”

Roy’s voice was the frightened whine of a four-year-old.

“I know you didn’t, Dad, you were looped out of your mind,” said Delphine in some annoyance. She didn’t want him to slide onto this mental track of self-pity and comfortable blame. She’d heard his lament many times. But then he said something different. His face grew solemn, then both crafty and confiding. “I could have justified Porky, though it took me a lifetime.”

“What?” Delphine peered into the vague, watery, washed-out blue of his eyes. “Justified?”

Roy grabbed her hand and spoke urgently. “I told him to get the ginger beer out of the cellar. And while he was at it, hunt around for the good stuff. And take a candle or two so you can read the French labels! Maybe old Chavers was looking for the king’s wine.”

Roy twisted uncomfortably, winced, shut his eyes and continued then to speak with his eyes shut, perhaps to keep from seeing the effect of his words on Delphine. “Who knew the wife and kid went down there with him?”

Delphine bent over and shook him lightly, but his body flopped like an old dog’s and she released him and he groaned on.

“The kid, Ruthie. I don’t remember what happened, but it could be I shut the hatch! Maybe I shut the hatch. I remember what I yelled down at him. ‘Hey, Chavers, you can come up again after you quit singing over me in practice!’ You know, he was always puffing his chest and inching forward, singing over me.”

Roy was silent, raptly watching the air between them.

“You went away for three weeks. A long drunk,” said Delphine, her face stiff. A wave of sick unbelief dragged over her.

“Longer,” Roy said in the faintest whisper. He went silent for several moments in which the wind boomed in the box elders and the windows shook lightly in their frames. Then he coughed a deep hacking cough, spoke clearly. “I came back to get the liquor in the cellar, went to find it. Saw them. After that, I stayed drunk until you showed up. You and Cyprian.” He looked up at her, his eyes glazed in hopeless appeal, then shut them when he saw her face and turned away. Drew the blanket over his head.

Delphine got up and walked from the house, out onto the small front porch. She sat down on the top step and folded her arms around herself. From time to time, she slapped away mosquitoes or shook from her hair the seeds falling from the trees in a gentle snow. They were delicate, tiny beads sealed in a papery, brown, transparent case. She brushed the seeds off her skirt. Occasionally, she felt the zing of a mosquito bite, but she didn’t want to go back indoors. As soon as Roy died, she would sell the house, she decided. She would leave the butcher shop and Fidelis and move away to the city. Chicago. Get a job in the theater even if it was only selling tickets. I won’t think about Markus. Ruthie! She touched her fingers to her temples, then clenched her fists and kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She pictured the apartment she would live in, small and efficient. Near a park where she could take short walks, a library, maybe an art museum. She’d learn everything, stuff her brain, become a teacher. Write for a newspaper. She pictured herself at a typewriter, a cigarette burning at one elbow. She was wearing a crisp white blouse and a tight gray skirt, heels. Or no, one shoe was off. She was thinking.

She pictured herself thinking.

I’ll never do it, she thought. I’ll never really think. I’m not thinking now, I’m just fantasizing. That’s a much different thing than to play in the free openness of your own mind. She felt the keen sense of something escaping, bright as silver. Then she couldn’t remember the last thing she’d held in her mind, just the sharpness of it. Who gives a damn anyway, she went on. What’s done is finished, and Roy’s his own punishment. I should not hold myself responsible for his drunk sins. And oh yes, I’m a married woman. I’m good at doing business, at holding up my end of the bargain. I’m good at taking care of kids that aren’t even mine. She felt her mind stuttering, searching a way out of guilt and horror. She closed her eyes and saw the hulks in the cellar. One resolved and became an immaculately dressed little girl with a shrewd mouth and snapping eyes. She wore a small, round hat and stood with her fists on her hips, frowning. Her eyes opened slightly, as though she’d noticed Delphine watching her. Tossing her chin up, the little girl laughed in a mocking, unpleasant way. Her laugh was acid with sarcasm and when she turned away Delphine saw snakes twirling off her shoulders and down her arms and the backs of her legs.

“Leave me alone,” Delphine whispered.

You are alone, the snake child mocked, more alone than you know. Your husband’s from a foreign country and you haven’t got a child. Your father’s dying and you don’t know the face of your mother. You are different from everyone else living in the town. You think you’re smarter, that you read more. The truth is you just feel sorrier for yourself. Poor Delphine. Poor girl Polack. Poor butcher’s wife!

Poor me, poor me, Delphine started to laugh and it felt so good that she didn’t stop even when Roy called out in a hopeful voice for his teaspoon of whiskey.

THE COUNTY VISITING NURSE found Roy Watzka, wide-awake dead sitting up and staring at the obscure and illegible pictures of Minnie placed just before him on the counter edge of the flour cupboard. She set down her bag on the kitchen floor, opened it, put on her stethoscope, and listened for a heartbeat. There was none so she took off the instrument, folded it back into the bag. She uncapped a pen, next, wrote down the exact time of day, and a sentence or two about the condition of the body and her own conjecture on the reason for his death. She recorded the eerie, composed death stare that compounded the legendary nature of his love. The nurse composed his limbs, shut his eyes, lay him down, and contacted Delphine. While waiting, she used the telephone and broadcast the news of Roy’s stare all around the town.

Roy’s funeral was well attended. The wives of the bankers and landowners came, those who perhaps longed for similar devotion to the very death. There were fragile rafts of flowers in the church, many flourishes of hankies, and a general clucking at the photographs laid facedown in the coffin, over his heart as he had instructed. There was a dinner afterward in the church hall, a gymnasium that had been the scene of a basketball game the night before.

Delphine walked over once Roy was buried, and stood in the corner of the gym. The place smelled faintly of stale excitement, old sweat, and salted popcorn. The tables set up for the funeral dinner were decorated with small pots of flowers — African violets, ferns, sweet potato sprouts, taken off the windowsills of the parish ladies’ homes. There was creamed chicken, creamed corn and spinach, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and just plain cream for coffee. Pies and cookies were set out on doilies cut of white paper. The dinner was served by an interdenominational bunch who for the first time seemed to Delphine more kind than curious, more eager to please than to gawk, somehow of slightly more genuine feeling. Still, their solicitous care overwhelmed Delphine with a simple claustrophobia.

In the swirl of food and sympathy, Delphine abruptly stood with Mazarine Shimek.

“Come with me,” she said to the girl. And they left the church hall to stand in a little plot of blistered grass behind the church kitchen.

“If I smoked anymore, I’d smoke now,” said Delphine, pushing her hair away from her face. She’d had it trimmed and set, but the curls wouldn’t mind her brush and sprang out every which way. Another thing she had in common with Mazarine, whose hair possessed so much unruly life.

Mazarine told her that she was sorry.

“Me too,” Delphine muttered, but actually she was very tired, and hopelessly angry. She was mad at the long waste of his life and his waste of her affection. As soon as Roy died, she had experienced the stupid and desperate love she’d had for him as a child. Tears suddenly choked her and she tried to wave them off. She’d prepared herself for years to lose him and when he’d exasperated her, had even looked forward to the day. She couldn’t explain just why she felt such a deep, blind, stirring of emotion. This is not grief, she said to herself, this is not fear of loneliness, this is not even exhaustion or relief. It’s existential, she decided, and straightened her back, taking courage from the word. Mazarine was standing next to her, one hand on the brick wall, patient and humble.

“I want to tell you something,” said Delphine, recovering her voice. Without knowing exactly what it was she wanted to say, she realized that she had something urgent to impart to the young girl, something that her father’s death, embroidered though it was by wishful romance, made plain. “We all die,” she found herself saying to Mazarine. “Franz loves you. You love him. Why not write to him? Why not tell him?”

WHILE SHE WAS cleaning out the house a few days later, Delphine heard the familiar footsteps and opened the door. A shaft of light fell out on the grass and Fidelis walked into it, shuffling at the threshold, stamping his feet as he entered. Delphine brought beer and then sat with him. He took the wooden rocking chair across from her reading chair. “I’m going to keep my house,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll stay here.” Fidelis opened his fist and closed it, but said nothing. They sat in silence for a long while, listening to the wind sweep and groan in the eaves of the house. Tree branches scraped together and tapped the roof. All of a sudden, Fidelis rose and in one motion picked up Delphine from the chair and carried her into her bedroom.

He carefully pushed the door closed after them, with his heel, and then lowered her onto the cold, slippery, yellow-gold bedcover. He hadn’t known that he was going to bring her there and now she lay before him in the light of a bedside lamp, staring at him with a cat’s self-possession, her eyes the same color as the fabric behind her. The small glass clock on the dresser ticked with a simple insistence. Above her bed, there was a clumsily painted picture of waves bursting over rocks. Draped on the bedside table, an orange velvet scarf. His blood roared in his ears. The wood of the bed was recently polished with beeswax. He could smell sun on the bedsheets as he leaned down toward her. He breathed an earthen scent of her warm skin as she moved toward him, just a fraction, but then all of a sudden she rolled away. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Listen,” she said, and then she felt her heart pumping too quickly, “I’ve got to tell you something.” Her mouth went dry and she tasted rust. She cast about for something else to say, nervous, wishing suddenly she hadn’t thought that she must tell him about Roy. She had thought this out, imagined it, written it out in her mind. She winced and made herself blurt it out, no matter that it sounded like a false reading of a line in a play. “I am the daughter of a murderer!”

Bewildered at the sudden change in direction, he sat up, a little stunned, thinking maybe he’d gotten trapped and snarled in the English language. Maybe she’d said something very different. He waited, listened as she went on with a dramatic explanation and re-creation of all Roy had admitted to before his death, and how she had reacted to his revelation. As she spoke, agonizing over what was or was not in her father’s mind, and taking on blame, then rejecting it, he could not help his own pictures from appearing.

One after the other, Fidelis saw the faces of the men he’d destroyed, as in an album or a keepsake book of death. He could no more stop his brain from paging through them, once it started, than he could stop the wind from blowing across the plains. As Delphine’s voice surged around him, he lay back on the bed, closed his eyes against their banal formality, but the pictures invaded his darkness and grew more detailed. He opened his eyes and focused on Delphine’s face, but now he couldn’t hear a word she spoke. He saw his fifth kill. A blond man who looked a lot like Pouty Mannheim reached across a sandbag for what… a cup of tea maybe… a tin cup in a friend’s hand. Then he’d opened his mouth and thrown back his head as if to belt out the beginning of a song. The bullet had smashed into his face and now Fidelis saw that face, as he did so often. Blond hair, a dark red hole, a nothing. Ears. He saw that no-face. It lived on. The no-face knew him and it never died. The others, too. He saw them all whenever the album opened.

Sometimes in his mind it worked for Fidelis to stand on the black cover and hold the book shut underneath the same hobnailed boots he had worn then. He tried closing the book, now, concentrating until he sweat. Muck oozed up around his boots. He smelled shit and death. He’d been cold-blooded, invincible, bringing down the enemy’s personal, vengeful fire upon himself and everyone around him. No wonder the other men had hated him and feared him, except Johannes.

“Are you all right?” Delphine was shaken. He knew she had told him something that she felt was terribly important, but he didn’t remember much of what she’d said. He must divert her. He took her face in his hands and concentrated fiercely upon her features.

“Es macht nichts,” he said, speaking German in the hope that Delphine would interpret what he said in the way most comforting to her. Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.

WALKING AWAY FROM the little house much later, in the middle of the night, through the brilliant blue air, Fidelis knew that something had shifted. Up and down the center of his body he could feel the movement of his blood for the first time, as though agitated molecules boiled slowly top to bottom. Several times, as though drunk, he nearly lost his footing. The strange inclination took him at one point to shout aloud, and he did, in the booming dark wind, the cropped black wheat stubble stretching for miles around him. New wheat coming up. There was nothing to throw back his voice, no echo, only blurred horizon. He imagined that perhaps the sound traveled all the way around the world, the faded vowels bouncing back on his shoulders before he moved, and he laughed. It was the shout, the sound, that told him later as he entered the lights of the town’s outskirts and drew near to his own door, what had happened to him. He’d lost his stillness, his capacity for utter cessation, the talent he’d once possessed for slowing his heart and drawing only the slightest breath. That was disarranged. He couldn’t do it anymore. That was finished. And yet it didn’t matter, he thought, there was no need anymore for that sort of quiet, that stillness, that absence, to survive.

THE WALLS OF THE bedroom Fidelis had shared with Eva were a pale maple-colored plaster. After Eva died, Tante had taken her clothes to distribute among the needy. She had claimed Eva’s porcelain figurines, her jewelry, and packed away what was worthless, too personal, or even sinister: Eva’s tortoiseshell combs, letters from her family, a few books interleaved with personal notes, holy cards of angels, virgins, saints, and Catholic martyrs. After it was cleared out, Fidelis had slept in the bedroom. But it was clear that he had just endured the space, used it only because there was nowhere else to sleep. He’d gone unconscious there and then awakened with little interest in his surroundings. The one deep, long window’s sill was piled with motor parts, beer bottles, broken cups, full ashtrays, and dead plants.

One day when things at the shop were slow, Delphine cleaned out the room. She divided the junk into piles that she would deposit in proper places or discard. There were still a few things of Eva’s — a jacket, a forgotten shoe, some powder and a drawer of underslips that she packed carefully away into a cardboard carton. Fidelis had put the old bed he’d shared with Eva in the boys’ room and bought a new one, in a plainer style, and a dresser to match it, both stained a deep cherry red-brown. Delphine had bought a bedcover for the bed, and now she spread it across. It was woven with intense red and purple threads, deep and beautiful colors. She stood back, looked at the bed glowing in the room. She rubbed almond oil into the wood of the new dresser and polished the mirror. When she met her own eyes in the mirror, though, she had to stop and sit down on the side of the bed. She was breathing quickly, in a panic, not at all from exertion. Her heart surged and her chest tightened. Did she love Fidelis too much or did she love him at all? Her eyes looked hollow with greed. No good would come of it. She had no control over what he could do to her and where it would end. And what if he should die someday — that would be the limit! Her throat burned. Tears ached behind her eyes. She put her face into her hands and breathed the blackness behind her palms. When she lifted her face, she thought she might tell him that they should not have married. She could still go away. The thought loosened the tightness in her chest and she breathed more easily. Yes, she could walk straight out of his life! But all she did was walk out of the bedroom into a slightly longer hallway, and then down that hall toward the shop.

As she walked the brown and white tiles, toward the door of stained pine that divided the shop from the rest of the house, she had the odd sense that the walls had squeezed slightly in and the passageway was longer than she remembered. All along the walls the stuff of running a business was hung on iron hooks or stuffed in cupboards. Stained aprons, towels, wooden bins of screws and bolts and extra nails. Tools for fixing the coolers and building new shelves. Catalogues and flyers and price lists. Samples and trial labels. Invoice forms and rolls of waxed paper. Halfway down the corridor, in the dimmest part of the hall, she stopped and took a deep breath of air scented with dried blood and old paper. Spices, hair oil, fresh milk, clean floor. It was all there. She breathed the peace of the order she’d achieved. A powerful wave of pleasure filled her. And then the customer bell rang out front, and she walked swiftly forward to take her place behind the counter.

THE SCHMIDTS had already changed their name to Smith and the Buchers were now Mr. and Mrs. Book. The Germans hung American flags by their doorways or in their windows, and they spoke as much English as they knew. Into the joking fellowship of the singers there entered an uneasiness. The men were out back of Fidelis’s kitchen, sitting around a rough wood table on the pounded grass underneath the clothesline. A galvanized tin washtub held ice and cold beer. A shallow barrel held warm. Fidelis thought cold beer was bad for the stomach, and he drank his only after the sun had thoroughly caressed the bottle. He opened one bottle now as he listened. Chester Zumbrugge was concerned that the singing in German might be construed as treasonous activity.

“Not that it could be considered a real crime. Not that we’d be prosecuted! However, I think we’ve got town sentiment to consider.”

“Those Krauts beat the beans out of the damn Polacks,” said Newhall. “I don’t care what you say, they’re a war machine.”

“They’re a bunch of damn butchers,” said Fidelis, and the others laughed. Fidelis tried to crack a walnut between his fingers, but his fingers slipped. He tried three times before he shelled the nut and tossed the meat into his mouth. He cracked another walnut, this time with a swift crunch of his fingers. But he said nothing else. Pete Kozka walked into the yard.

“Look who’s here!” said Pouty. He handed Kozka a beer with one hand and shook Kozka’s hand with the other. Sal Birdy slapped him on the back. Newhall nodded happily, and pulled a chair out. They’d lost Chavers, and then Sheriff Hock. Not that long ago Roy Watzka. Their number was dwindling and it was good when one of their old company appeared. The men cleared their throats, found their pitch, smoothed their way into the songs with beer. They leaned toward one another in concentration and let the music carry them.

I was standing by my window in the early morning

Feeling no worry and feeling no care

I greeted the postman who smiled with no warning

And told me the day would be fair.

The air glowing warm on the grass of the lawn

He handed me the mail in a stack

Little did he know as he turned and was gone

He had brought me a letter edged in black.

Oh mother, mother, I am coming…

“Do we have to sing that one? I call it morbid, and I think that we should be singing more uplifting tunes,” said Newhall.

“For instance?” said Zumbrugge. “Name me one uplifting song that isn’t a dirty drinking song.”

“America songs,” said Fidelis, uncapping another bottle of beer. They sang every patriotic song they knew, but these were getting boring now that they sang them over and over at every meeting. Roy’s legacy of songs he’d learned in the hobo jungle usually saved them, and now they started on the one that began “When I was single my pockets did jingle,” and moved on to a series of murdered-girl ballads that they accomplished in a moving and lugubrious harmony, which gave them enormous satisfaction, and always made Delphine laugh. IWW songs that Roy had taught them ran out well before the beer and they moved on to what Kozka called the Polish national anthem, but had become an American song, the favorite song of troops on the move: “Roll Out the Barrel.” Then to a song that they had learned from Cyprian, a métis waltzing tune called “The Bottle Song” that they always sang with huge gusts of imitation French eye rolling and fake savoir faire.

Je suis le garcon moins heureux moins dans ce monde.

J’ai ma brune. Je ne peux pas lui parler.

Je m’en irai dans un bois solitaire finir mes jours à l’abris d’un rocher.

Dans ce rocher avec une haie, claire fontaine…

J’avais bon dieu, j’avais bon.

Ah! mon enfant, j’aimerais ton coeur si je savais être aimé.

Ah! amis, buvons. Caressons la bouteille.

Non. Personne ne peut prédire l’amour.

I am the unhappiest fellow in this world.

I have a girlfriend to whom I cannot speak.

I am going to go away to a hidden woods to finish my days in the shelter of a rock

with a hedge and a quiet spring.

There I will be all right.

Ah! my child, I would love your heart if I knew

how to be loved.

Ah! friends, let’s drink and lift our bottles.

No. No one can predict love.

After the men left, Fidelis sat alone in the yard. As the dark came down he finished off the beer and sang to himself, practicing old tunes that no one else knew, all in German. The moon came up, a brilliant gold disk that slowly tarnished to silver and brightened again as it moved upward. His voice melted to a growling croon. The garden, Eva’s overgrown garden half tended by Delphine, whispered and rustled all around him. Grasshopper music surged on and off in waves. Somewhere a frog croaked, hoarse with longing. Pigs mumbled in the killing pen. He thought of Franz, Markus, Erich, Emil, recalled the moments he had held each boy for the first time in his arms. He was going soft on himself. Sobs tightened his lungs and his eyes burned. His voice trembled as he sang the reproachful song of the enemy, “Lili Marlene,” and he grew angry. They were his enemies and his sons would fight them and rescue their brothers. “Lili Marlene.” Even the tune of the sentimental old piece of tripe filled him with shame. A disastrous need to see the faces of his parents took hold of him and he carefully quashed the feelings with a deep gulp of beer.