The Master Butcher's Singing Club

SIX. The Night Garden

EVERY BUG LAST summer’s drought killed or dried up had laid sacs and sacs of eggs destined to hatch this June. Delphine and Eva sat together on broken chairs in Eva’s garden, each with a bottle of Fidelis’s earth-dark home-brewed beer held tight between their feet. Delphine wore a wash dress and apron, Eva wore a nightgown and a light woolen shawl. The slugs were naked. Tough curls of antlered jelly, with many young, the slugs lived in the thickness of hay and shredded newspapers that Eva had put down for mulch. They had already eaten many of the new seedlings from the tenderest topmost leaves down to the ground, and Eva had vowed to destroy them.

“The last feast,” said Eva, gesturing at her bean plants as she dribbled a little beer into the pie plate. “Now they are doomed.”

The beer was chill from the glass refrigerator case in the store, newly installed, for Fidelis was one of the first Argus merchants to obtain a liquor license. From time to time, distantly, the doorbell jangled as customers straggled in for an item or two. It was dinnertime and there were no real shoppers. Franz could handle them. Eva poured the top quarter of the next bottle into her mouth before she poured a little more into the pie plate that she had buried level with the ground. It seemed a shame to waste the coldness of the beer on pests.

Slowly, the two women sipped the rich, bitter stuff as the sun slanted through the margins of the stock pens. The tin siding of the cooler gave off heat, and they smelled the scorched brown vines of last year’s blue grapes.

“Maybe we should simply have shriveled these creatures with salt,” said Delphine. But then she had a thought: We are close to Eva’s own death, and can afford to make death easy on the helpless. She said nothing, but did touch Eva’s hand. Since Eva’s illness had taken this turn, Fidelis had slaughtered twice a week, worked round the clock to make the doctor bills. The loamy soil inside the stock pens, enriched with shit and fear, churned with growing power. The margins already sprouted weeds so thick and vigorous they looked as though they could pull up their roots like skirts and vault the fence. Here, however, thought Delphine, sipping at her bottle, there would not be all that much room for them to live.

Eva’s garden, Delphine had decided, reflected the dark underside of her organizational genius. The garden was everything raw and wild that Eva’s house was not. It had grown rich on junk. Pot scrapings, tea leaves, and cucumber peelings all went into the dirt, buried haphazardly, sometimes just piled. Everything rotted down beneath the blistering North Dakota sun. And then the seeds in the garbaged cucumbers, the pumpkin rinds, and even the old tomatoes volunteered themselves in scattered flourishes. Her method was to have no method. Give nature its way. She had apple trees that grew from cores here. Rosebushes, bristling near the runnel that collected steers’ blood, were covered with blooms so fat and hearty they looked sinister. Eva’s favorite flower was the marigold, and she headed them in fall and scattered their seeds everywhere. The high tang of their foliage was in the air. Birds too. She fed them oatmeal.

So far in life, Delphine had never gardened, never bothered to attract birds, never known to care about things that her friend turned into rituals. Since she’d known Eva Waldvogel, and also traveled here and there with Cyprian, she had started to understand how a woman’s attention could succeed in making sense of man’s blind chaos, and yet women needed their own wildness. It was here. All ran riot. The garden and weedy yard would wax fuller until it turned into a jungle of unhitched vines and rusty birdbaths made of ham tins. Eva’s dog, the white shepherd, Schatzie, dug up old bones the former dog had buried and refused to rebury them. It would be awful, Delphine felt, when the leaves withered in the fall, to see the litter of femurs and clavicles, the knobs and knuckles. As if the scattered dead, rising to meet the Judgment, had to change and swap their parts to fit. Until then, the broad leaves would hide the bones the dog had spread through creation.

Delphine’s tendency to dwell on fate was triggered constantly by Eva’s sickness. Mortality was always before her, and she marveled how anyone lived at all, for any amount of time. Life was a precious feat of daring, she saw, improbable as Cyprian balancing, strange as a feast of slugs.

Eva bent over, flipped out a small pocket of earth with her trowel, and tamped in her quarter-full beer bottle as a trap. “Die happy,” she encouraged. Delphine handed her own three-fourths-drunk bottle, too. This one Eva planted by a hill of squash that would overpower all the rest of the garden by fall, though she would not see it. Great, lumpy, hybrid Hubbards would roll out from under the green pads of leaves. Delphine would harvest them, piling the warty, irregular globes beside the back door, then packing them in hay. Eva settled against the crisscrossed canvas webbing of her chair, forked open another bottle. It was a good day, a very good day for her.

The sun’s last rays were warm and the breeze was strong enough to keep off the deerflies and mosquitoes. Delphine’s head began to feel big and wobbly on her neck. But light. It seemed to balloon above the rest of her. The plants looked fresh. The garden flourished green. Delphine’s continual watering had swelled the hollyhocks in bud that gently batted Eva’s walls. Her columbines spread full as bushes, trailing complicated spikes. The sharp yellow marigold blossoms spiced the air. Why shouldn’t life surge forth, thought Delphine, get better?

“There is no hope,” Eva said as though her friend had spoken all she thought out loud, “because there’s just too damn many, and they’re too dumb to find the bottles anyway.”

Unseen, mysterious, the young had moved onto the leaves, almost translucent. They did not seem so much living things as bits of jelled fluid. They were voracious. On some of the leaves, the tough veins alone were left, lacework outlines. It was only the richness of Eva’s garden that salvaged it from ruin. There was simply too much for them to devour. And now, from the edges of the grass, from underneath stones and drainpipes and out of the tiles of the gutters, moved snakes. The black ribbon snakes were striped with hot orange, liquid green, and their bellies were pale gold as melted butter. Delphine thought she heard them sliding through the seams of the boiling earth and knew they uncoiled from beneath the hot clumps of straw and hay. Snakes were everywhere, feeding on the tiny slugs; a toad hopped into the waning light blinking its old-woman wrinkled eyes.

“I’m going,” said Delphine, but she continued to sit with Eva through sunset and on into the rising dark. It was as though they knew that no peace would be in their lives through the next weeks and that they both would, in fearful nights, remember these hours. How the air turned blue around them and the moths came out, invisible and sightless, flapping against the shuttered lamp at the other end of the yard. They were protected by citronella burning in a bucket, and sprigs of basil, which Eva had snapped off and thrust into their hair. Eva’s feet were cool in thin leather sandals. Delphine’s gripped the moist, fetid earth.

On a calm night, after work, after she had settled Eva, Delphine would normally have returned to the house she shared with Cyprian and Roy. She would have lost herself in a book, or cooked something to relax, or fixed whatever she could find that needed repair in the house. But tonight she was unfamiliar to herself and did not move. She let the beer wear off gently as the night grew deeper, thicker, black all around them. They were silent. Nothing occurred to them to talk about and at last each beer bottle was planted. They were not waiting for anything particular to happen. Time went by, and yet they did not stir. They had no thoughts, except that Delphine imagined all the bones were hitching in the ground. The dog moaned in its sleep by Eva’s foot, and Delphine’s eyes shut.

When she shut her eyes, her mind grew alert. Her senses opened. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. How there was so much blind feeling. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. Unheard, unnoticed, the blood dropped into her hands and feet, so that she was anchored. Which she was glad for, because the light was so feeble and the blackness so strong that she felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress.

“I wish it is true, what I read, that the mind stays put. The eyes. The brain to read with.”

She heard Eva’s voice.

Delphine had sometimes thought that her friend didn’t care if she became an animal or a plant, if her heart was cycled into the kingdom of nutrients, if all of this thinking and figuring and selling of pork and blood meal was wasted effort. Eva had treated her death with offhand scorn or ridicule, but with that statement she revealed a certain fear she’d never shown before. Or a wishfulness. Her words cut Delphine deeply with an instant sorrow.

“Your mind stays itself,” said Delphine, as lightly as she could, “so there you’ll be, strumming on your harp, looking down on all the foolish crap people do.”

“I could never play the harp,” said Eva, “I think they’ll give me a damn kazoo.”

“Save me a cloud and I’ll play a tune with you,” said Delphine.

“It’s a deal,” said Eva, “and you bring your handsome husband. Think you can persuade him?”

They laughed too hard, they laughed until tears started in their eyes, then they gasped and fell utterly silent. For a long time, now, they’d both pretended to believe in a ridiculous heaven, and promised to meet on its grassy slopes.

FOR ALL THAT he was a truly unbearable souse, no one in town disliked Roy Watzka. There were several reasons. First, his gross slide into abandon was caused by loss. That he repeatedly claimed to have loved to the point of self-destruction fed a certain reflex feature in many a female heart, and he got handouts easily when strapped. Women even made him lunches, a sandwich of pork or cold beans, and wrapped it carefully for him to eat coming off a binge. Next reason was that Roy Watzka, during those short, rare times that he was sober, had the capacity for intense bouts of hard labor. He could work phenomenally, doing what he did best, farmwork, and he was happy doing it. He’d milk or pitch out stalls or stack hay out of sheer spiritual guilt, and sometimes he’d take no pay hoping to ensure his next liquor source but also creating the sense that he was, in his own way, generous. And whatever his condition he told a good tale, which drew people. Nor was he a mean drunk or a rampager, and it was well-known that although she certainly put up with more than a daughter ever should have to, he did love Delphine.

Eva liked him, or felt sorry for him anyway, and she was one of those who had always given him a meal when he came around her kitchen. Now that she was in trouble, Roy showed up at the butcher shop for a different purpose. He came almost every afternoon, sometimes stinking of sweat-out schnapps. But once there, he’d do anything. Work dog hard. He’d move the outhouse to the new hole he’d dug for it, shovel guts. Before he left, he’d sit with Eva and tell her crazy stories about the things that had happened to him as a young man in the gold fields or the pet hog he’d trained to read or other things: how to extract the venom from a rattlesnake, an actual wolf man he knew and words in the Lycanthropian language, or the Latin names of flowers and where they came from, recipes for exquisite wines and what the French did with the vinasse. Listening sometimes, Delphine was both glad for Roy’s adept distractions and resentful. She knew he was a fountain of odd bits of knowledge. Where had he learned these things? In bars, he said, and out of the battered dictionary that was the only book in the house until Delphine grew old enough to acquire books herself. Yet, she’d cleaned up after him all of her life, and never had he sat and talked to her like this, with such gravity and kindness, such a goodwilled attempt to distract and entertain. Worst of all, his efforts almost convinced Delphine that there was hope for him.

POUTY MANNHEIM HAD developed a fascination with flight, bought a war-surplus Jenny, and spent his spare time fiddling with her engine or practicing rolls and dives and fancy curlicue maneuvers. He liked to buzz low over the shop, waving down at the boys. Fidelis had given him leave to land in the flat field behind the house, and every time he did so Franz threw off his apron and raced out. As soon as Pouty emerged and walked to the house to visit, Franz climbed into the cockpit. He didn’t do anything while Mannheim talked to his father, except run his hands over the controls and examine the official-looking log that Mannheim kept of his flights, his fueling, his hours in the air. And when Pouty Mannheim returned, Franz proudly and eagerly acted as what he imagined was a sort of ground crew, turning the prop, uttering the stand-clear. As the plane made its run, gathering speed, the sway of it triggered an excitement Franz didn’t understand in himself. He was a reserved boy, but when the plane began to move he always ran, chased it, shouted, threw his cap after the plane when it lifted from the field. There was something about the actual moment that the flimsy-looking wheels left earth, seeing the space between ground and the craft itself enlarge, that dazzled him, filled him with a sense he could never have described, not in the language of his mother and father or in the language of his schoolmates; it was a wordless, wild, tremendous, unbearably physical release of tension that left him almost in tears.

After Pouty had disappeared into the sky, Franz stood very still for a few minutes, quietly gathering himself, before he dared face other people. His mother was the only person, he felt, who even remotely understood what he experienced when the airplane left the ground. In her illness, she had become a grateful listener and he sometimes found himself after Mannheim’s visits sitting long with her and talking on and on, as he did with no one else, about the various makes of aircraft and their advantages one over the other, their disparities, all of the quirks and details that he collected from newspapers and magazines. He had a stack of papers, and pictures carefully cut and pasted on the wall around his bed. There was a detailed and graceful Fokker Eindekker, a black cross on its wings and tail, and blurred photos of Immelmann, the Eagle of Lille, of Rickenbacker and “the Ace of Aces,” a recent news photo of Charles Lindbergh, and the badges and emblems of the RAF. A homemade banner that read “Beware the Hun in the Sun,” and a laboriously copied poem called “The Young Aviator.” Franz had drawn a fashionable French Nieuport 11 fighter with its machine gun mounted over the pilot and a screaming Indian chief painted on the hull. His favorite was the Albatros, a German fighter with a big red nose, a heart, a white swastika, and the usual black cross. He had modeled a Sopwith Camel of cardboard and pins, drawn its red, white, and blue bull’s-eye carefully with crayons he’d swiped from school. Eva had given him a huge scrapbook and in it he’d pasted news of barnstormers and their photos cut carefully from the newspaper or saved from posted handbills. He read descriptions of their tricks out loud to her when she was restless. On one of these afternoons, while he sat with her, she asked, “What do you think it’s like, I mean, over the clouds?”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Franz. “It looks like you could step right onto them and bounce.”

She regarded him skeptically, but with a kind of pride that he could invent such a thing. Which is when it suddenly struck him that he had to go up into the air with his mother.

“We’re going to fly,” he announced to her right there, and the look of wondering pleasure that crossed her face at the idea convinced him that he had to make it come true.

Pouty had to fly them, he decided, even though Fidelis had forbidden that he ever take Franz with him on his flights. This was different. This was a ride with a noble purpose. Very quickly the impulse he had to take his mother in the air became an urgent and serious commitment. He thought, staring at Eva, that there were some things that simply had to happen. She had to go into the sky. He had to be there when she did, even though they wouldn’t see over the clouds. He went to bed with the conviction, and the next day, working next to his father, all he could think of was how to persuade Pouty Mannheim to take them up in his airplane.

POUTY KEPT HIS PLANE in a barn north of town, a good long walk from the house, and Franz had to make an excuse to go find Pouty right away because he didn’t know when he’d happen by. And Franz’s sense was this had to happen now, not that he anticipated in his mind how terribly his mother would weaken. He borrowed Mazarine Shimek’s bicycle, even though it was a girl’s bicycle, and he pedaled the miles quickly. He felt such a stern compulsion about the project that when he talked to Pouty, he couldn’t help his voice from rising, his hands from moving, and even from pleading and harassing Pouty once he trundled away to grab a tool he needed from the barn.

“She’s sick,” Pouty finally said, scrubbing at his round apple-shiny chin.

“That’s why,” said Franz.

“Fidelis won’t let her,” said Pouty.

“Which is why you can’t tell him,” said Franz.

Although Pouty Mannheim wasn’t especially thoughtful or even interested in most people other than himself, and although he had very little experience of affection for his own mother, something in the way Franz behaved impressed him. He thought it over while he checked his controls, tightened his equipment, and replaced a bit of paint on the body of his plane, and then he said yes.

EARLY ON THE DAY that Fidelis made his deliveries, Pouty landed his plane in the field behind the shop. It was warm already, and the sky was very blue, but not with that oppressive and metallic blueness that signaled a dust storm. The day was milder than in quite some time, and a fugitive freshness still lingered in the grass, in the leaves, the taste of early dew. Franz ran into his mother’s room, quieted himself, and touched her arm. She was awake and already dressed for the ride in a gauzy white housedress with full-blown roses all over it, some pink, some a deeper red in the creases of the petals. Delicate leaves of a subdued green floated everywhere in the folds of the material. Her hair, damaged by the treatments, sprang short and fine off her head in curls of fluff. She’d shakily put on a light coat of lipstick and gargled, he noticed, with a sweet-scented lilac water. Some days her breath smelled of a sad cellar rot, from what was happening inside, she said, and she hated it. She liked to keep very clean. Her eyes were beautiful, Franz thought, slanting green in her thin and paper-white face.

“Mama,” he said, shy and proud, “your plane’s here.”

“Hilf mir,” she said, eagerly turning to him, and he helped her straighten her legs and sit on the side of the bed. She smoothed back her hair and then rose, weak, and put one foot and then the next into her lace-up brown leather shoes. She was breathing deeply, to gather strength and also to contain her excitement. The other boys were out in the front of the store with Delphine, who’d been taken into the plan and who had pledged to distract them long enough for the two to get out to Pouty’s airplane. Eva tried to step along, not shamble, as she walked beside Franz, but as they made their way into the side yard he stopped her.

With a huge sweep of his arms, he scooped her up and simply carried her out into the field. She laughed with surprise, then put her arm around his neck, thinking to herself, My son, my little son. And when they reached the plane and he carefully set her inside, in the seat behind the pilot, she thought of the boy’s father, and realized that when she’d known Johannes he’d not been much older than Franz was now. And the thought pierced her with sorrow for that boy she’d known, and wonder at all that had happened since his death, things that would have so astonished him, and she couldn’t help think of heaven and question just how it would be if those assurances of her priest were actually true. Would Johannes really be standing there, on the other side, with all of the dead of her own family, to greet her? How old would he be? And then, what would she say, and what would happen on that day in the future when Fidelis entered heaven as well? Which one would she stay with?

Father Clarence was absolutely stumped on this issue, and Eva enjoyed shaking his confidence. Eva smiled and let the sun hit her face full on as Pouty climbed into the front. Franz spun the propeller mightily and then, when the engine caught, and the body of the plane shook like a wet dog, Franz jumped into the space just behind Eva’s seat and grabbed her around the waist.

“Are you holding her in?” yelled Pouty.

“Got her!”

The machine jerked forward. With a bounding rush, an eager gathering of speed and a quickening of power, they hopped into the air. Franz filled his mouth with the wind. He let the moment balloon inside of him. And then he flew, for the first time, holding on to his mother’s waist. They rose in what seemed an impossibly steep climb and forgot to breathe, then Pouty calmed down and leveled off and flew due west with the sun behind them. He wanted to fly up along the river, scare up a few herons and maybe some fish hawks for Eva to see. Over the course of the night, as he’d contemplated the ride for Eva, he’d decided it made a sort of hero out of him to give this dying woman the pleasure of a ride. He would explain it to Fidelis later as a duty of some sort — he hadn’t worked it out yet, but anyway he was quite sure that when Eva landed with pink cheeks and feeling all that much improved, Fidelis would be glad. In fact, Pouty went even further and imagined that the plane ride might result in a complete medical cure. Such things had happened, and such was his faith in the power of flight.

Perhaps Franz possessed a similar faith, because as he held his mother in the seat he imagined that the wind, whipping the skin flat across their faces, was scouring them smooth and pure as they buzzed down along the gleaming gray snake of the river. They gained altitude and the water became a string of mercury, the dusty green trees puffs beside, the roads black threads in the drought-sick fields. They bounced over the hot drifts of air, turned gently when the river shifted, circled an oxbow, and swooped down low over a farm where Mannheim knew the people. They saw all there was to see and flew until Pouty yelled he was getting low on fuel and must go back to the field. All the while she’d waited for the flight, Eva had the hope that during it, because of the thrill of it, her pain would vanish. That did not exactly happen — in some ways the pain grew more intense, but that was because the joy had, too, not just the physical joy of being up in the sky, she would later tell Delphine, but the mental joy.

AFTER THE TWO had come back to earth and Franz had carried her to bed, Eva had one of her final visions. She was propped up with pillows, drinking sips of water, shuddering with happiness and pain.

“Up in the sky, my brain was gulping new air,” she said to Delphine, “I am thinking so fast and furious. I see things.”

“What things?”

“Zum beispiel,” Eva said, “this Argus was only a spot. We are spots. Spots in the spot. No matter. We specks are flying on our own power. We are not blown up there by wind! What does this inform you?”

She grabbed Delphine’s arm, her hand still had a strong grip. Delphine shook her head. “What?”

“There is plan, eine grosse Idee, bigger than the whole damn rules. And I always known it. Bigger than the candles in church. Bigger than confessionals, bigger than the Sacred Host.” She crossed herself. “I do not know what it is. But big. Much more big.”

Then she had Delphine call all of her sons into the room, and she spoke to them, too, and she told them that she had seen something very reassuring and that it didn’t have to do with church, even the One True Church. It didn’t have to do with taking communion or getting confirmed by the bishop.

“It don’t matter if you do these things now,” she said impatiently. “If you must need them, do them. But the plan is greater I am telling you. The plan knows the huge thing, and it accounts for the little fingernail.” Eva raised her pinkie in the air and held it out between them. Her eyes were just a bit glazed, and glittering with dangerous emerald lights. “If I die, don’t take this too hard,” she counseled them, “death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.”

Her cheeks now took on just that suffusing rose color that Pouty had imagined his ride would inspire. She took a big gulp of water, coughed a little, and then abruptly her eyes shut. Franz reached forward after a moment, terrified and curious, and touched her face. “She’s sleeping,” said Franz, his fingers touching her lips. He gently shoved his younger brothers out. If she had died in that moment, it would have been a perfect piece of drama, thought Delphine from the doorway. Maybe Eva even wanted to, but maybe she stopped herself, knowing that to die immediately after that plane ride would get Franz in trouble.

“THE BOYS ARE PLAYING in the orchard. The men are already half lit,” Delphine reported to Eva, who smiled faintly and struggled onto her elbows. Delphine helped her sit up and look out the window. She fell back, exhausted, nodding at the sight. The two women could hear the men singing, working their way through a set of patriotic songs, one after the next. Sheriff Hock was particularly good on the high parts of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His voice splintered eerily through the bright, heated air, giving Delphine chills.

“Men are so much fools,” Eva whispered. “They think they are so smart hiding the Everclear in the gooseberry bush.”

Even though the last few days had been nightmarish, Eva still refused to die in a morbid way and even preferred to suffer in a fashion that was strangely hilarious. She laughed freakishly at pain sometimes and made fun of her condition, more so now when the end was close. Delphine would later believe that the purchase of the chinchillas was a sign of that fast downhill turn. The way Eva got up on one of her last good days, sneaking the delivery truck out to the farm of a strange old biddy, and returning with the creatures. Now, beyond the men, who were drinking underneath the clothesline, the thick-furred things panted, stinking gently in their flimsy network of cages.

Delphine sat beside her friend in the little room off the kitchen, a room filled with jars of canning. That was where Eva had asked Fidelis to set up her bed. A good-size window looked out of that room into the backyard, which was her reason for wanting to die in that tiny place. From there, she could watch the boys complete her chinchilla-moneymaking scheme. They had constructed the cages out of wire netting salvaged from other people’s failed coops, and pounded together nesting boxes out of scrap lumber. It was a diversion, Delphine thought now, with sudden understanding. Watching her friend drift into a short nap, she suddenly realized that the odd, rabbity creatures were a clever way to take the boys’ attention off their dying mother.

They’d closed the shop at noon for July 4. Now everyone in town was celebrating. Fidelis had the old chairs and table out there, and on the table he had laid out beer sausage and summer sausage, a watermelon, and bowls of crackers. Beer bottles sweat in a tub of ice underneath the tomato plants, beer to wash down the high-proof alcohol that Eva already knew they were hiding. It was funny, watching them sneak their arms into the gooseberry fronds and snake out the bottle. With a furtive look at the house, they tipped it to their lips. Even Fidelis, so powerful and purposed, acted like a guilty boy.

Delphine watched Cyprian stroll through the rickety back gate. Laughing, he set his own offering beside the sausages. Aged whiskey, probably from a recent border trip. Cyprian was an occasional visitor ever since he’d run the store that first week, when Fidelis and Delphine were down at the Mayo consulting with the doctors. He did all right with the store and nothing disappeared, so Fidelis wanted to hire him, but Cyprian said the meat business wasn’t for him. He’d had enough blood and guts in the war. Anyway, he was much better at running liquor and it paid better, he told Delphine, who didn’t like it but what was she to do since the car was half his and he was after all a grown man?

He had joined the singing club, though his voice was average. A slightly singed baritone. And he had set himself up to look like a traveling salesman. He even had samples of his supposed wares — hairbrushes, floor brushes, dog fur brushes, horse brushes, long broom brushes, potato brushes — stashed in his car to foil the inspectors at the border and answer the questions of neighbors. Sometimes they bought the brushes, too. Mainly, he was paid by criminals. Dangerous men out of Minneapolis. Delphine not only didn’t like that he took the risk, but hated that he dealt in the despised substance. Still, as he didn’t drink it much himself for fear of losing his balancing skills, which he still practiced between runs, she let it go. Besides, she was caught up in helping Eva die.

There was no saving her, they were well beyond that now. The first treatment, after her surgery, consisted of inserting into her uterus hollow metal bombs, cast of German silver, containing radium. Over the weeks Eva spent in the hospital the tubes were taken out, refilled, and put back several times. Once she was sent home, she smelled like a blackened pot roast.

“I smell burned,” she said, “like bad cooking. Get some lilac at the drugstore.” And Delphine had bought a great purple bottle of flower water to wash her with, but it hadn’t helped much. For days, she’d passed charcoal and blood, and the roasted smell lingered. Also, the treatment hadn’t worked. The cancer spread. Doctor Heech then gave her monthly treatments of radium via long twenty-four-carat gold needles, tipped with iridium, that he pushed into the new tumor with a forceps so as not to burn his fingers. She took those treatments in his office on Sundays, strapped to a table, dosed with ether for the insertion, then after she woke, a hypodermic of morphine. Doctor Heech became so angry at himself when he gave her the treatments, which he feared were useless, that he left the room cursing under his breath. Delphine stayed to sit with her, for the needles had to stay in place for six hours. Threaded with black waxed string, they made a spoked wheel poking into her stomach.

“I’m a damn pincushion now,” Eva said once, rousing slightly. Then she dropped back into her restless dream. Delphine read, or dozed and knitted, for she couldn’t always read. It was the old thing happening, as with the drunks and her childhood neighbors. Again she witnessed great suffering she could not stop. This time her body tried to share the agony: shooting pains in her own stomach as the needles went in, even a sympathetic morphine sweat. A bleak heaviness that accompanied Eva’s passages of charcoaled flesh. Dull aches that overcame her sometimes and made her want to lie down forever and be done with things. But she kept on going, never let up, never showed her sorrowing pains. As she approached the house now, each day, she said the prayer to God she used as the most appropriate to the situation.

“Spit in your eye.”

Her curse wasn’t much, it didn’t register the depth of her feeling, but at least she was not a hypocrite. Why should she even pretend to pray? That was Tante’s field — she’d mustered a host of pious Lutheran ladies and they come around every few afternoons to try to do their business on a Catholic. When Eva became too weak to chase them off, Delphine tried, but as her position was inferior to Tante’s own she had great trouble at it and used other strategies, whatever she could think of, to keep them from crowding around the bed like a flock of turkey vultures and pressing together their bony claws in a gloating, sucking prayer circle. Even now, Delphine thought, she’d bake a sugar cake while Eva was sleeping, in case the mealy-mouths showed up. Feeding them was actually her best strategy, for they filed out quickly when they knew there was grub in the kitchen for the taking. Tante, with crumbs on her mouth, led them away after they’d gorged on Eva’s pain and her signature linzertorte, which she’d now given Delphine instructions to prepare, one small step at a time.

Outside, it was a perfect day, sunny and with a slight, cool breeze. Sure to bring Tante out, though Delphine hoped her goody-goody cohort would be dishing out potato salad and slicing watermelon at some civic function. The men’s voices rose and fell, rumbling with laughter at the big tales, stern with argument at the outrages committed by the government, and sometimes they even fell silent, or stuporous, and gazed into the tangled foliage of Eva’s garden blank with speculation. As always, Fidelis was the center of these gatherings, prodding slightly bolder stories out of the men or challenging them to feats of strength.

In the kitchen, sun calm in the window, Delphine cut cold butter into flour for a pastry. She had decided to make pies for the Fourth of July supper, which the men would need to cut the booze. Potatoes were boiling now. She had a crock of beans laced with hot mustard, brown sugar and black-strap molasses. There were of course more sausages. Delphine added a pinch of salt, rolled her dough in oiled muslin, and set it in the icebox. Then she started on the fruit, slicing thin moons of yellow-green rhubarb, peeling off the toughest bits of rosy skin. It’s nearly time, she thought, nearly time. She was thinking of Eva’s pain. Her own sense of time passing had to do with the length of a dose of opium wine, a cup of it flavored with cloves and cinnamon, or a stronger dose of morphine that Doctor Heech had taught her to administer, though not too much, lest by the end, he said, even the morphine lose its effect.

He’d taught her to make up Magendie’s solution fresh to eliminate the development of any fungus, and now, hearing Eva stir, Delphine straightaway set aside her pie makings. She put some water on to boil, to sterilize the hypodermic needle. The night before she had prepared a vial and set it in the icebox, the one-to-thirty solution, which Heech had told her she was better than any nurse at giving to Eva. Delphine was proud of this. The more so because she hated needles, abhorred them, grew sickly hollow when she filled the syringe and felt the penetration of her own flesh when she gave the dose to Eva. Without being asked, she knew when Eva needed the dose. She did not go by the time elapsed, but by the lucid shock of agony in Eva’s stare. Her mouth was half open, her brows clenched. She would need the relief very soon, as soon as the water boiled. Delphine thought to divert her friend by massaging her sore hands.

“Ah,” Eva groaned lightly as Delphine worked the dips between her knuckles. Eva’s forehead smoothed, her translucent eyelids closed over, she began to breathe more peacefully and said, faintly, “How are the damn fools?”

Delphine glanced out the window and observed that they were in an uproar. Sheriff Hock was holding forth and Fidelis was standing, gesturing, laughing at the big man’s belly. “We are potched!” she heard him roar in good humor. Then they were all comparing their bellies. Cyprian’s was the flattest one. Delphine knew that his stomach, as her own, was divided into hard and even ridges of muscle that he, anyway, could flex like a keyboard. In the lengthening afternoon light, Cyprian’s face was slightly agape with the unaccustomed drink and the fellowship of other men, too, for he was used to being isolated on the farm with Roy or out on the road. There was a sheet pinned on the clothesline and the bellies were pale falls of flesh in its shade.

“They’re showing off their big guts to each other,” said Delphine.

“At least not the thing below,” croaked Eva.

“Oh, for shame!” Delphine laughed. “No, they kept their peckers in. But something’s going on. Here, I’m going to prop you up. They’re better than burlesque.”

She took down extra pillows and quilts from the shelves, shoved the bed up to the window, and propped Eva where she would see the doings in the yard. She went back, put one syringe in the water, finished up the pies and put them in the oven, then brought a little tepid water in a cup for Eva to drink. She did drink, which was good, and her color was up. Her eyes brighter.

“Come on,” Eva said, “sit down here.” Her hand flopped on the bed. “I think they are up to nothing good!”

Now it looked as if they were making and taking bets. Bills were waved, laughingly. They weren’t stumbling drunk, but loud drunk. Roaring with jokes. The boys appeared, clambering up the rails of the stock pens to take in the men’s action.

“Eva, do you see?” Delphine pointed to them. Nodding, Eva made a face. What examples! These men! All of a sudden, with a clatter, the men cleared the glasses and bottles, the crackers and the sticks of sausage, the bits of Cheddar and the plates, off the table. And when the table was clear, to a great burst of hilarity, Sheriff Hock lay down upon it. He lay on his back. The table didn’t reach down his whole length, so he was a boatlike hulk, balanced there in dry dock, his booted feet absurdly sticking straight up and his head extended off the other side. His stomach made a mound and now on the other side of the table, directly before Eva’s window, Fidelis stood. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his white shirt and rolled his sleeves up over his thick forearms. His suspenders were unstrapped and his grin was huge, tossing back a jeer.

Suddenly, Fidelis bent over Sheriff Hock in a weight lifter’s crouch and threw his arms fiercely straight out to either side with a showman’s flair. Delicately, firmly, he grasped in his jaws a loop that the women now saw was specially created for this purpose in the thick belt of Sheriff Hock.

There was a moment in which everything went still. Nothing happened. A huge thing happened. Fidelis gathered his power. It was as if the ground itself flowed up through Fidelis and flexed. His face and neck went thick with a brute, red darkness. His jaws flared bone white on the belt loop, his arms tightened in the air, his neck and shoulders swelled impossibly, and he lifted Sheriff Hock off the table. By the belt loop in his teeth, just a fraction of an inch, he moved the town’s Falstaff. Then, the women saw it, Fidelis paused. His whole being surged with a blind, suffusing ease. He jerked the sheriff higher, balancing now, half out of the crouch.

In that moment of tremendous effort, Delphine saw the true face of the butcher — the animal face, the ears flaming with heat, the neck cords popping, and finally the deranged eye straining out of its socket, rolled up to the window, to see if Eva was watching. Delphine felt a thud of awful sympathy. He was doing this for Eva. He was trying to distract her, and from that, Delphine understood Fidelis loved her with a helpless and fierce canine devotion that made him do things that seemed foolish. Lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth. A stupid thing. Showing clearly that all his strength was nothing. Against her sickness, he was weak as a child.

ONCE FIDELIS TOOK two mammoth steps and dropped the sheriff on the ground, to roars of laughter, the men began singing again. Now they sang rougher tunes to go with the rising level of their drunkenness and hilarity. They grew louder, desperately raucous, defiant. Death was watching them, through Eva’s eyes, from the pantry window. “Jimmy Crack Corn.” “The Wabash Cannonball.” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” German drinking songs. A sad, lugubrious ballad about the longing of a sailor’s wife. Delphine went back into the kitchen to fetch the solution for Eva. She opened the door of the icebox. Looked once, then rummaged with a searching hand. The morphine, which Fidelis had labored with vicious self-disregard to pay for and which Delphine had guarded jealously, was gone. The vial, the powder, the other syringe. She couldn’t believe it. Searched through once again, and then again. It wasn’t there, and already Eva restless in the next room.

Delphine rushed out and beckoned Fidelis away from the men. He was wiping his face and neck down, the sweat still pouring off of him.

“Eva’s medicine is gone.”

“Gone?”

He was not as drunk as she’d imagined, or maybe the effort of lifting the sheriff had sobered him.

“Gone. Nowhere. I’ve looked. Someone stole it.”

“Heiligeskreuz…” He whirled around. That was just the beginning of what he was going to say, and Delphine left before he went any further. She went back to Eva and gave her the rest of the opium wine that was hard on her stomach. Spoon by spoon it went down, in a flash it came back up. “What a mess,” said Eva faintly. “I’m worse than a puking baby.” She tried to laugh but it came out a surprised, hushed groan. And then Eva was gasping and taking the shallow panting breaths she used to keep from shrieking.

“Bitte…” Her eyes rolled back and she arched off the bed. She hoarsely shrieked, gestured for a rolled-up washcloth to set between her teeth. It was coming. It was coming like a mighty storm in her. No one could stop it from breaking. It would take hours for Delphine to get another batch through Doctor Heech, wherever he was celebrating the Fourth, and then find the pharmacist. Delphine shouted out the garden door to Fidelis and yelled at Cyprian to take the pies from the oven. She sped out the other way. As she ran, a thought jogged into her mind. She decided to act on it. Instead of steering straight for Heech she gunned the car and stopped short at Tante’s little closet of a house two blocks from the Lutheran church, where she prayed every Sunday that the deplorable Catholic her brother married desist from idolatry and saint worship, and return the boys to Lutheran ways.

“Was wollen Sie?”

Tante opened the door. Her face had all the knowledge in it and Delphine knew she had guessed right. Delphine remembered her clucking over the dose of the drug with her prayer friends in whispered consult as they pressed up crumbs of lemon pound cake with their fingers.

“Wo ist die medicin?” Delphine asked, at first in a normal tone of voice, only slightly panicked. When Tante gave a cold twist of a smile, she screamed. “Where is Eva’s medicine?”

“Ich weiss nicht.”

Tante affected ragged High German around Delphine and made great pretense of having trouble understanding her. Delphine stepped in the door, shoved past her, and went straight to the refrigerator. On the way there, an outraged Tante trailing, she passed a table with a long slim object wrapped in a handkerchief. Delphine grabbed on instinct, unrolled it, and nearly dropped the missing hypodermic.

“Where is it?” Delphine’s voice was deadly. She turned, jabbing the needle at Tante, and then found herself as in a stage play advancing with an air of threat. It was the feeling of being in a dramatic production that suddenly gave her leave to speak lines she wished were written for the moment.

“Come on, you rough old bitch, you don’t fool me. So you’re a habitual fiend on the sly!”

Delphine didn’t really think that, of course, but she wanted to make Tante so indignant that she would tell her where the morphine was; her aim was just to get the stuff and get it back to Eva. The hollow suffering in Eva’s eyes had burned into her. Tante gaped and couldn’t rally her wits to answer. Delphine rushed frantically back to Tante’s little icebox, rooted through it. With a savage permission, she tossed all of Tante’s food out, even breaking the eggs, and then she turned and confronted Tante. Her brain was swimming with desperation.

“Please, you’ve got to tell me. Where is it?”

Now Tante gained control. She even spoke English.

“You will owe me for those eggs.”

“All right,” said Delphine. “Just tell me.”

But Tante, with the upper hand, enjoyed her moment.

“They are saying that she is addicted. This cannot be. The wife of my brother? It is a shame on us.”

Delphine saw that she had been extremely stupid in allowing herself to antagonize the only person who could provide morphine quickly, by merely handing it over. She’d blown her cover, and now she would never get Tante to cooperate. She regretted her self-indulgence, grew meek, and tried to hide her panic and pride. She thought that perhaps if she humiliated herself Tante would be placated and let down her guard.

“I beg you,” she let a groan out. “Come, you know the truth. Our Eva is suffering. You only see her when she’s comfortable, so of course how can you possibly know how the agony builds? Tante, have mercy on your brother’s wife. There is no shame in keeping her comfortable, Tante, the doctor said so.”

“I think,” said Tante, her black figure precise, “the doctor doesn’t really know Eva the way I do. He feels too sorry for her, and she is addicted, that is for sure, my good friend Mrs. Orlen Sorven can tell this.”

“Tante, for the love of God…” Delphine truly begged from her heart at that moment. She thought of falling on her knees. Tante’s cold little mouth twitched and her eyes glowed with rigorous triumph.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, I have thrown it down the sinkhole.”

Delphine turned and saw that on the edge of Tante’s porcelain sink a clean-washed vial and the bottle that held the morphine were drying in the glower of sun. And when she saw this, she lost all control of her power. She was strong, of course, phenomenally strong, and when she grabbed Tante firmly by the bodice and jerked her forward and said, into her face, “Okay, you come and nurse her through this. You’ll see,” Tante found herself unable to resist, her struggles feeble against Delphine’s surging force as the younger woman dragged her to the car and stuffed her inside, then roared off. Dumped her at the house.

“I don’t have time to go in there. You help her. You stay with her. You,” Delphine shrieked, roaring the engine. Then she was gone and Tante, with the smug grimness of a woman who has at last been allowed to take charge, entered the back door of the house.

It did take hours, and in those hours, Delphine prayed and cursed, implored the devil, made bargains, came to tears at the thwarted junctures where she was directed one place and ended up another. It proved impossible either to track down Heech, or to find Sal Birdy, the drugstore keeper. Fidelis, she knew, was out searching, too, but she didn’t come across him. She was returning empty-handed, driving back to the house, slamming a fist on the dashboard, weeping tearlessly, when before her she saw her father stumbling along the road.

His pants sagged, his loose shirt flopped off his hunched, skinny shoulders. As she drew near, an all-seeing rage boiled up in Delphine. She looked around to see if anyone else was watching, for she had the sudden and breathless urge to run him over. She put the gear in low and crept after her father, thinking how simple it could be. There he was, drunk again — he’d hardly even notice! Then her life would be that much easier. But as she drew alongside him, instead of mowing him down, she was surprised to meet his eyes and see that they were clear. She realized he wasn’t drunk, yet, or very drunk anyway. He was trying to run in the same direction she was driving, to the butcher shop. As he shuffled anxiously around to the side door, she saw he must have had the usual purpose and despised him with the thought, Out snaking himself some hooch at a time like this… Only the bottle in his hand was not the usual schnapps or home brew. Roy held the bottle carefully in both hands, thrust it toward her. It was a brown square-shouldered medicine bottle labeled sulphate of morphia. To get it, he had broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock of the cabinet where Sal kept the drugs he had to secure by law.

AS DELPHINE SLAMMED the brakes, jumped from the truck, and ran to the house with the bottle, she heard it from outside — the high-pitched whooing keen of advanced agony, a white-silver whine. She rushed in, skidded across a litter of canning smashed down off the shelves, and entered the kitchen. There was Tante, white and sick in shock, slumped useless in the corner of the kitchen, on the floor. Markus and Franz, weeping and holding on to their mother as she rummaged in the drawer for a knife. The whole of her being was concentrated on the necessity. Even the strong Franz couldn’t hold her back.

“Yes, yes,” said Delphine, entering the scene. She’d entered so many scenes of mayhem that now, as always, a cold flood of competence descended on her. With a swift step she stood before Eva. “My friend,” she plucked the knife away, saying, “not now. Soon enough. I’ve got the medicine. Don’t leave your boys like this.”

Then Eva, still swooning and grunting as the waves hit and twisted in her, allowed herself to be lowered to the floor.

“Get a blanket and a pillow,” said Delphine, kindly, to Franz. His tears dried at the relief of having something to do. “And you,” she said to Markus, “hold her hand while I make this up and keep saying to her, Mama, she’s making the medicine now. It will be soon. It will be soon.”