The Master Butcher's Singing Club

EIGHT. The Burning of the Mutts

A FAMILY IN GRIEF has accidents and stumbles a lot. There are scabbed toes and the terror of eyes nearly put out. Falls off the roof, falls from bicycles, falls slipping in the sawdust of the meat-market floor. And too, the sorrow makes a path for every illness. Mysterious high fevers. Any local pox. Even the sturdy can catch diphtheria, pertussis, not to mention gross stomach flu and run-of-the-mill runs, plagues of snot or crusted eyes and infected ears, lice. Once it grew cold, it seemed that every possible small malady came the way of the boys and Delphine was hard-pressed to keep the hours she’d insisted on with Fidelis. Sometimes she just had to nurse them through a night. Sometimes she had to sleep at the foot of their beds. She became an expert at rendering a chicken into hot soup. She made a routine of daily checks behind their ears for eggs and nits. And even when they all were healthy and breathing hard in boys’ dead sleep, she stood in the doorway and worried. They had done this to her. Activated some primitive switch in her brain. She couldn’t turn it off. Sometimes before she left, with superstitious intensity, she counted their breaths and made sure they were breathing regularly. She counted exactly ten breaths each, then forced herself to turn and leave at that exact number, not one more or less.

Worry made more worry, made her restless. Sometimes at night she woke, beside Cyprian, and found that against her will her brain restored old scenes of shame or betrayal by girlfriends, boyfriends, long in the past. Or calamities her father’s drinking brought on the house. She relived them. Often, she woke Cyprian and made him talk to her, but she never told him that she’d waited with curiosity and daring all the next month after they’d made love, hoping and not hoping, imagining a child. And he never told her that he’d done the same, for with Markus around he couldn’t help thinking of it, and he’d always thought that he’d have children. He pictured himself with a son, a daughter, teaching them to add numbers, teaching them to balance, telling them where he was from, and all he knew. So when he talked to Delphine in the night, he thought he might ask whether she was pregnant, but did not, because it would raise the issue of sex, and he didn’t want the emotional complexity of that. He had to prepare himself, it required an effort. It was so much simpler to be neutral, and loving, and to stroke her face and hold her hand, to put her back to sleep with stories about his brothers and the stubborn old horse they shared. It was easier to be her brother, but he wanted children all the same, and he wanted to stay with Delphine. As the months passed, he knew she was not pregnant with his child, and so one night, in the moonless dark, staring up into a blackness that seemed a shaft into outer space, he asked her to marry him, for real, with a solid gold wedding band.

The darkness was so dense that night it swirled green around them, and for a long time she didn’t answer. But she wasn’t thinking it over, she was thinking how to tell him no. There was only one way.

“No.”

The long vowel floated over them.

* * *

THERE WERE GOOD THINGS. Delphine ran the shop with an almost joyous dispatch. She hadn’t known she’d like the work so much now that she was partly in charge. She didn’t mind the hard grind of cleaning, and she had the boys to sweep up and spread new sawdust, to scrub down the display cases and the floors, and Franz to wait trade when things were busy, after school. She began to take an almost embarrassing delight in selling things — a loop of the best liverwurst on this side of the Atlantic, or a piece of the Colby you couldn’t get just anywhere, or dried herring from a case recently cracked open, exuding brine and smoke. Eva had given Delphine the magical belief that everything that Fidelis made was unbested and every morsel the shop sold was of a superior quality only their own customers deserved.

This conviction was good for business, and Delphine had, as well, a shrewd eye for what would sell and when to knock down a price. She instituted a weekly drawing for one dollar worth of groceries, and that drew in customers. Except for the banker and the few other rich, who lived in green-lawned flamboyantly painted mansions on a bluff over which their unpredictable river had never yet risen, everyone was broke half the time. Many were worse off — so ravaged and destitute that they couldn’t afford any meat at all. Delphine was good at extracting money from the wealthy, and also good at trading carefully with the poor. She stocked barrels of dried beans, peas, made shrewd deals with farms and traded like a horse dealer for the items she was certain that she could sell. She began to deal with an ambitious wholesaler working out of the Cities, and stocked all sorts of new items that made people curious enough to stop in for a peek. Soaps she tried herself and could recommend, powdered health remedies, boxes of steel-cut oats, cider vinegar, walnut oil, pots of mustard. She had a dairy case set into the wall — before, they’d drawn milk from a can back in the cooler. Now she stocked cream, daily milk, butters of three grades, and fresh eggs from Roy’s chickens.

Roy was still not drinking. Perversely, this had begun to concern Delphine. Still, how could she quibble with the quiet work he did all around the house? He kept busy, even drove up north with Cyprian from time to time, and didn’t snitch from the stash they smuggled across the border and then sold. Sometimes Roy lied to her with a clear and listening expression — told the same sort of stories he’d once told Eva. How once he’d had a part in an Italian opera, or killed a bear, that he had learned to weave from a Navajo and could recite long prayers in Hebrew. Delphine thought she didn’t know him. Who was he, sober, anyway? Her father was a stranger, a man of whom she had no knowledge and did not know exactly how to approach. It used to be so easy. Their relationship consisted of times he’d crawl to her and beg for money, and she’d refuse. At least he still socialized with the other men in the singing club. Roy came to the shop after hours to sit around the table with the men and slice rounds of Fidelis’s sausage onto square crackers. Cyprian came too. They drove Delphine home after she finished in the kitchen. It was a routine, she later thought, she didn’t treasure enough. An even life, without any jumps or starts. No stalls either. It was the kind of life you didn’t know at the time you were living it was a happy life.

Every day now, Markus checked the chinchillas, for the fur buyer was due any time, and he wanted their coats in top condition. Delphine didn’t understand how Markus could name the creatures, how he could be so careful with them, not to startle them, how he even seemed to love them, and yet didn’t express the slightest compunction about their imminent deaths. Delphine guessed she was learning about the nature of a butcher’s kid — to see the animals come and go. The only creature exempted from this fatalism was Schatzie, who had lain at the foot of Eva’s bed and now slept on guard in the doorway to the boys’ room every night. The white German shepherd was serene and intelligent, but bristled with protective inquiry at a sudden noise. Delphine had seen the dog go rigid, growling with authority, at the intrusion of a strange deliveryman. Sometimes the dog looked at her with eyes of clear amber so alert and watchful that she experienced a shiver of recognition. There was no question, this dog was not to be considered on the same level as the other animals whose fates were concluded swiftly once they left the stock pen, or the ones raised for fur.

Markus gloated over figures that his chinchillas would bring, and figured and refigured profits with his younger brothers, pencils in their small, thick fingers, biting their lips. Franz had declared from the first that he was too old for such schemes, so among the three younger, they were to realize all of the money, and they concentrated on the splitting of it in myriad ways, making this and that argument over whether to pool their money for some grand object, or divide it, or if there would be enough to get a new bicycle for each of them. Meanwhile, the valuable gray little animals skittered here and there, unknowing, in their baskets of frail hardware cloth, in and out of their clumsily shaped nesting boxes, softly growing fur, until one Friday night.

After a short appetizer of sheep’s offal, the wild dogs leaped and squeezed through the back fence. Schatzie barked in the front of the store. While Fidelis searched for burglars and tried the locks, the wild dogs feasted. They overturned the long line of cages, and plucked out the chinchillas one by one. They gulped them down or tore them to shreds, and then were gone, silently as always around the butcher’s house, but leaving their scrambled tracks.

“DELPHINE!” It was Markus, and she thought later with slight shame that it was a compliment he came to her first thing on the next morning, just as she entered the shop. His face was broken, sobs were tamped in his chest, a scrap of fur hung limp in his fist. “They got them, they killed them!”

She ran out back with the other two boys and saw it was true. The cages whirled all over the ground, ripped open like shopping bags, and there was not a chinchilla to be seen. Markus’s tattered scrap was the only remaining piece of evidence the dogs had left, and he held it now with an attitude of disbelief. He walked forward a little, staggered with the loss. There was the pie in the sky of big money, but also, Delphine now saw, these were in a way Eva’s odd legacy to the boys, the project she’d started, and whether they knew it and acknowledged it or not these creatures were of her own making. Wild dogs should not have had them. And Delphine could see, when Fidelis surveyed the ruin, that a similar feeling was building in him, an obscure anger that started low and crept over him like a heavy cape until he bowed his head a little, looked up from under his brows, and made a decision.

“Sei ruhig,” he said to his sons, and in a manner rare to him, he set a hand on each of their shoulders. Then he turned without a word to Delphine, and he stalked back to the slaughterhouse. He gathered old freezer-burned meat, some that had turned in the cooler, molded scraps from a side of beef he was curing for the banker, and he then carried the pans of this out to the edge of the field, dumped it. The boys watched him, Delphine too now, and next they followed to see him enter the little room on the side of the slaughterhouse where he kept his rifles. He loaded both guns, then filled a pocket with extra bullets. He put a chair on his shoulder and he brought this chair outside and set it underneath a tree. He remembered something and went back to the cooler. From its sighing interior he took three beers. He took a loaf of bread, baloney, some cheese and apples. Then he returned to the shade of the tree, in sight of the meat scraps at the edge of the field. From the yard, the boys and Delphine saw him set both rifles across his knees. At last, he opened a dark bottle.

Delphine went back into the house. The bell on the door rang, and it was Step-and-a-Half looking for the usual pan of scraps. Fidelis had just dumped the pan out back to lure the dogs. Delphine looked carefully through the glass at the thickly marbled and perfect cuts of expensive meat, and chose a nice piece of beefsteak. She wrapped it in white paper and twine, and she handed the package over with no explanation.

Step-and-a-Half gave Delphine a strange, barren look and inspected the package, weighed it in her hand.

“Take it,” said Delphine, a little roughly.

Across the older woman’s elegantly cut features there passed a look of raw suspicion, and she asked, “How much?”

“Just take it!” Impatient with the odd scruples of the other woman, Delphine was perhaps too sharp.

“I don’t think so,” decided Step-and-a-Half. This was, Delphine understood, a little too close to charity for her stomach, a bit too rich. Step-and-a-Half rummaged brutally through layers of clothes and pockets, then set down a nickel on the counter. It was the first time she’d paid money in Delphine’s experience. Delphine scooped up the nickel, made change of three cents, and tried then to give the pennies to Step-and-a-Half.

“Keep the damn change!” she growled in an insulted huff, then turned to stride out the door, muttering about the terrible price of things.

OUTSIDE, THE BOYS were crouched in the sun on the topmost timbers of the stock pen. Delphine watched them from the kitchen window as they chewed the ends of grass and quietly watched their father. She was surprised to feel a stirring of excitement around her heart, and then guilty as she looked at Schatzie sitting alertly in the shade. In her agitation she prowled to the window repeatedly to see if the other dogs had appeared. As the fall sun rose higher, overhead, the boys came in to eat and she spread the rolls with sweet butter, then wedged in slices of chicken from the old hen she’d stewed yesterday. They took sandwiches to their father, and their own lunches back outside, and sat waiting. More hours passed than anyone would have thought. It seemed when you weren’t looking for them, the dogs were always skulking around the field’s edge. And then when you waited, they did not appear. Maybe part of the rage Fidelis felt was that in the past he pitied the scraggly pack and fed the mutts. They’d taken advantage of him — a thing he could not allow.

It was late afternoon, and the boys were nodding off in the shadows of the grapevines, when Delphine heard the first crack of a shot. Fidelis had waited, had watched the dogs gather, and now he was shooting steadily. Delphine ran out the back door, climbed the stock-pen sides along with the boys, and saw the dogs go down. First the big solid brown caught a bullet that spun him like a top. The gray took one neatly in the head, skidded to a puzzled halt and slowly toppled. Two medium-size with long, matted fur were hit and ran off howling, to die before they reached the woods. A red dog growled and bit the air before a bullet clipped its jugular. There was a dingy white that crept belly down in the grass. A bullet creased its spine. It stopped. Six more were felled. The last, a speedy gray, loped desperately off and Fidelis sighted carefully along its sinuous back and bore it to earth. The last shot echoed across the field. Fidelis turned and gestured to the boys.

“Pile ’em up,” was all he said, and the boys did as they were told, hunted down and carried back each dog and laid them together like a heap of rugs. One of them, Delphine noticed uneasily, was the big brown chow dog that had run wild on the Kozkas. Best, thought Delphine, to get rid of the evidence, and she said nothing. Fidelis came out of the shop with two tins of kerosene. He dribbled one can over the dogs and then he added pieces of wood, downed branches, refuse. When the bonfire was as tall as his shoulders, he poured the kerosene on the top of that. He made a torch of a long roll of paper and carefully tossed it onto the soaked wood.

There was a hollow pop, and the whole thing went up. The fire burned and burned, long into the dusk, and the boys kept adding junk. It smelled for a while like a regular fire and then smelled of roasting meat, then smelled of nothing. The hot fire consumed everything, and into the dark the boys, and Delphine, watched it dreamily, with an intensity they did not understand. For they didn’t want to take their eyes away; it was a mesmerizing thing. The timbers collapsed into coals so hot they consumed green wood. Even the bones of the dogs would be ash. There would be nothing left. The fire went on burning, they kept feeding it, and at last it grew so late that Delphine had to send the boys to bed.

Fidelis slept in a room across from the boys, but he slept hard and never woke. So every night, she gave the watch over to the dog, not Fidelis. She never said good-bye to Fidelis, or indeed, made it her business ever to be alone with him at any time. He was working late, now, to make up for his day under the box elder tree with the rifles. As she turned from the doorway to the boys’ room, after counting their sleeping breaths, she touched Schatzie and the dog looked up at her as always in agreement. Tired, she gazed a bit too long into the dog’s eyes and suddenly she couldn’t look away. She stood rooted, tears filling her own eyes, for it was Eva who stared back at her with an expression of extraordinary sympathy and calm.

Delphine’s back chilled. “I’m losing my damn mind,” she muttered out loud to break the spell. It seemed to work, although she didn’t dare look at the dog again. She turned her back on Schatzie and walked out into the yard, past the tangled garden where she’d harvested lumpy squash that day, down to the edge of the field. She stood there alone. All around her, the dark seethed with fall insect noise, with a humming life that rose and sank, surrounding her with inchoate music. She breathed deeply of the spice of weeds under the harsh smoke. “Oh hell, Eva,” she heard herself say. Then she was simply talking to her friend, nothing special. Laughing at the boys, the men, the customers. Speculating about the reasons people did things. Since the end, Delphine hadn’t wept, she had put all thoughts of Eva firmly from her mind, preferring to let the loss settle wordlessly into her. Tonight, as she stood talking in blackness, an alien sorrow that held some despairing comfort, too, bubbled into her, and she let herself cry with a lost, croaking, ugly sound, until the last coals collapsed into a dull, red foundation and the dark crept close to cover everything.

THAT’S THE WAY it will be, she thought, driving home, her thoughts gloomy and exalted, when I, too, experience the end of things. Those last coals of light going out, extinguished, and then the dark creeping to the corners of her vision. As she turned, a shape on the road, red eyes reflecting her head lamps, leaped away in a ghost arc. A dog. Abruptly, Delphine laughed. Well, maybe even Fidelis could not rid the world of feral dogs, and maybe they would still howl in the dark around her house. And maybe they would even come for Roy’s chickens. For no good reason, the thought of one dog escaping Fidelis’s seamlessly accurate shooting cheered her and she found her mood oddly buoyant as she entered the yard of the house. Getting out of the car, she heard the rocking rumble of her father’s snore. There was a light on in the kitchen, probably Cyprian playing solitaire or reading the cheap drugstore crime and mystery pulps he favored, or even practicing, as he did every day, some small feat for the show he was concocting.

Delphine walked in the door. None of these things. Cyprian was slumped on the table, waiting for her, sleeping in one lamp’s dull light. He was in his undershirt and she could see the lightning bolts of war scars, the tough shocks of muscles, the soft gold of his skin. Sleeping there, his face half in the dim glow, he was extraordinary. His face was of such a perfected geometry that he seemed a creature from a fabulous painting, a fallen hero in an ancient scene. Delphine put her hand on his back to wake him, and as he woke, he took her hand in his and held it to the side of his face. For a long while, he held it there, and then he spoke to her, telling her that if she married him she would never have another worry. He would never go with men, he would be faithful to her in the deepest way. The feelings, the things that drove him, that made him seek men, he would give those up. He would stop his thoughts. He would be different. And he could do it because he loved her, he said, and if she loved him back they would be happy.

Delphine sat down next to him, not across from him where she’d have to look into his eyes, but right next to him where she could put her arms around his shoulders. There was nothing she could really say in the face of his trust — if she hadn’t seen him with the other man, maybe she could have believed what he said. But she had seen him, and what he did was — she couldn’t name it exactly, she couldn’t put it into words except clumsily — what she saw was him. Truly Cyprian. If someone had an essence, his was in that quick stirring between the two men, their energy and pleasure, his happiness, even, which she had sensed from her hiding place in the leaves and which was still there, changing swiftly as she stepped out into the open.

Instead of answering his question, she told him what had happened that day, all about the morning’s discovery, the trap Fidelis had set. She felt him grow interested when she talked about the rifles lying calm across Fidelis’s lap, and she was encouraged and went on, distracting him. She told him about the long wait, and then about the shooting, how of a piece it was. Not one shot went astray and none was wasted. It was a great surprise to her, afterward, that Fidelis killed every dog with an ease and precision that she couldn’t register in the moment of it for the heat of the simple killing. Only afterward, she told Cyprian, she heard the shots as so regular and seamless they almost seemed one noise.

Cyprian nodded, took in everything she said with a silent and compelled interest, heard about the bonfire and how it was made and the silence of the surprised dogs, and understood the fury of calm that was the killing. All the time that he was listening to Delphine she couldn’t know it, but he was thinking something very different from what she might have imagined.

So Fidelis was a sniper. That was his thought. A German sniper. I wonder if he ever had me in his sights, without a helmet, my back turned. I wonder if he was the one who blew the brains out of Syszinski, or the hand off Malaterre, or the heart from the chest of the one I loved?

FIDELIS WALDVOGEL and Cyprian Lazarre never spoke of the war that they shared, yet it lay between them very like the Belgium mud once terrible and now grassed and green. The trenches covered, the tunnels collapsed, the armies of men desperate to live sowed instead through the layers of the earth. Sometimes when they drank together, one of them would have a thought about the war, for neither of them ever passed a day or even several hours of the day without remembering the war. A picture, a sound, a word. Something would enter, and either one of them would pause, wage a small interior struggle, and go on. And the other would have felt the impact, like the aftershock of far distant shelling, and be content or relieved to make a joke or take a long draft of beer.

Only once, when things were quiet of an evening, and Cyprian was waiting for Delphine to finish with some piece of her work, when he and Fidelis were sitting at the kitchen table, did any piece of their subterranean knowledge pass into the open.

“You took fire,” said Fidelis, with a critical gaze at the scars radiating lightly upward from Cyprian’s throat, one line scored back of the ear to vanish in his shining, crow-black hair.

“And you, clipped here.” Cyprian indicated on his own chin the shattered area, a pit of little more than an inch, where the bullet had glanced downward through Fidelis’s jaw. They both stopped there, already weary. They could have gone on. Fidelis could have showed him the very bullet, dug from his shoulder, which he wore on his watch chain. Or the saber cuts on his back and across his arm. The astounded flesh of his hip where the caisson went over him the time he was taken for dead. Both men had sustained injuries graver than the obvious ones, hidden by their clothes and hidden, also, by the men they now were. But neither of their experiences had been the kind men built into stories and repeated at drinking tables with other veterans. Those stories were of times behind the lines, usually, of women and of other men, and if there was action or killing involved it was short and glorious. Neither Fidelis nor Cyprian had known glory, and though both had known the grandeur of horror, there was nothing to say about it.

TANTE WAS STEWING. Delphine could feel it like a waft of town sewer gas just down the street. Her standing in the town and among her Lutheran church group had diminished when her own brother asked her to leave his house and brought in this Delphine, a woman who — Tante was easily gathering up the information — was the daughter of the town drunk, under suspicion for murder, a Catholic, and even worse, a Pole, a woman married (if she was, and it was whispered she was not) to a too handsome foreign-looking man who shared her house, a former stage actress and need she say it, all but a blankety-blank. In addition to all of that, this Delphine had moved in on Eva’s sickness and befriended her because she knew a good chance when she saw one coming — an eligible widower with his own business and four bright sons — she knew what she wanted, said Tante with dark nods, oh yes, she knew what she wanted, that Delphine.

Tante wrote and sent off a flurry of letters to Germany, full of dark summons, and right away there came back answers that she propped on the cash register and dared Fidelis to ignore. He did read them, tightened his face, but said nothing. He was distracted. In his clothing drawer there was a cigar box containing a jumble of medals, including an Iron Cross. He had arrived in the country with only a suitcase full of sausages he sold and knives he kept, and he had worked fanatically. Only to see everything around him, here, falling into a collapse as devastating as German inflation, which caused his mother, so she had once said in a letter, to cart wheelbarrows of reichsmarks to the baker for her loaves. He’d left one Depression to encounter another. And then, after all, his parents had had a great stroke of luck. They managed in the worst year of all to recover a piece of property that was theirs before the war, a store building, and from the share that would have been his, they sent money.

With that money, he had bought the farmstead in North Dakota and opened the shop. He had worked skinning steers and butchering hogs eighteen hours a day to bring Eva, Franz, and then Tante to abide with him. His forbearing, kind mother, and his father, strict and distant, he missed. And his brother, who now shared the family business. But there was work and more work, always more of it, always he was behind what should be done. There was no question, now, of leaving even to visit his family. He read their letters and set them aside before they penetrated to the still center of his person, where he could feel such a thing as loneliness.

Tante took the letters back and slipped them into her purse with a grimace of dissatisfaction. She concentrated even harder on making him aware of her list of shocking true facts about Delphine. He waved her off. She bit her lip at his defense of the Polish woman. Fumed with frustration. To other people, she couldn’t go too far in her criticisms, she could not include her brother, lest his business be spoiled and his customers frequent the butcher on the other side of town. Some of her resentful angers had to simmer; then, as stews do, they thickened. She brooded on the grave injustice dealt her by her brother and fantasized returning to Ludwigsruhe. These imaginings, also, grew thick with detail and brimmed with improbable incidents. For instance, into her mind there came the picture of her return complete with boys — well, maybe not Markus, but the other three. Or the twins alone. That could be done.

The way she saw it, she could not return to Germany alone, having failed to find a husband in this new land of men unwinnowed by war. She had to return with something. Motherless children would do. As the heroic guardian of her brother’s children, she could reenter town life as their aunt, not an old maid aunt but an aunt with dependents. She would have some status. Otherwise, what was there?

Sometimes, in her spare little house, her sitting room dominated by the cheap teacher’s desk she’d bought secondhand at that, her mind jumped like a rat in a cage. She couldn’t keep doing bookwork like this, drying up a little more every day, becoming brittle as the pages she wrote on and stiff as the figures she added and subtracted. And yet, if the truth be known, what was all that attractive and important about having a husband? Her friends each had one, and all they did was complain about their men’s dingy remarks, their gross habits, their absences, or boast about the types of foods and quantities they ate. There wasn’t any real use that she could see in a husband, unless he was rich. And without a rich husband, she had only the books of three struggling concerns to balance — Krohn Hardware, Olson’s Café, and the butcher shop — and they could hardly pay her the pittance she asked. So it seemed to her that the only way out of her stark room was to find a rich husband, or to get rid of Delphine and somehow wangle Emil and Erich away from their father while they were still young enough to charm others and not so old as to give her any trouble.

Of course, there was another way. She could, herself, make money. She thought about it. Make money. Nothing occurred to her. She thought about it some more and came to believe it was her only hope. The wish for money began to turn in her brain with a frantic compulsion. She dreamed dollars, dreamed oceans, dreamed of walking off a steamer back to Germany wearing a fur coat. Money danced behind steel bars at night, just out of her reach. One afternoon, over her pale meal of bread and one white veal sausage, a thought struck her that seemed so crazy and outlandish she put it aside. But it came back. She found herself unable to think of anything else.

By the time she got up the next morning, Tante had decided to sell the last remaining piece of her grandmother’s jewelry, a cameo that her grandmother had left her, a large and spectacularly carved profile of a woman both demure and sensual. The carving was very fine, and the face sensitive and yet a little wild, the cream hair flowing into the pink of the shell. Tante had admired the cameo as a child, and when she took it from its hiding place, a tiny aperture in the wall behind her dresser, she remembered how she had touched it, softly, pinned to lace at her grandmother’s throat on a sunny day at a garden picnic. Times long past. For her it represented all that was secure and comfortable, all that was irreproachable and solid about her life in Germany before the war. She wore it often, too often, to remind herself. To give it up was no small thing. But she was determined. She put the cameo inside a sock and put the sock in her purse. She would sell it, and with the money she would buy a new and fashionable suit. Wearing that suit, she would go to the bank and not leave until she had a job that would eventually, somehow, because it was situated near a large amount of cash, all the money in the town, make her rich.

DELPHINE NEARLY FELL over when she saw Tante, later that week, wearing not the black dress she had inhabited like a second skin, but a skirted suit welded from some fabric of an unusual metallic sheen and stiffness. The thing looked to have been cut and soldered together much like an armor. Tante looked invincible, which was her intention. As she walked to the bank owned and run by the only man in town she knew could afford steaks every night of the week, she felt that things were going to change for her. The suit would do it, she was positive. As she sat outside his office, waiting, and even as she looked at all the bank tellers and clerks, younger, all young men, she still had faith in the material of the suit she wore. The suit’s glazed weave sustained her. And even when she was refused a position of any type at the bank, the suit helped her not to lose her belief. She decided to walk down the street, up the street, all over town, and not to quit until she had a position that would bring her money — whatever it might be. Whoever might hire her. The suit would find the place. The suit would bring her there.

So maybe, said Delphine to Cyprian later, the thing was magnetic. It looked it. How else should it happen that Tante should be struck by a car that looked to have been made of the same substance as what she wore? Dragging her feet, worrying the one dime in her purse, Tante crossed the street without looking and was hit by the car of Gus Newhall, the former bootlegger who now sold patent medicines, just coming from the bank, where he’d made a substantial deposit. The car upended Tante in the dust and rolled her sideways into a tree trunk, but didn’t do actual, serious damage to her person that could be seen from the outside anyway. The suit wasn’t even dusty, but when smoothed gave off the same luster as before. Tante righted herself, pushed away the arms of alarmed witnesses, and would have told Gus Newhall that he was a reckless fool, a swine, a dog’s blood cur, only he was a good customer to Fidelis. So she shut her mouth and staggered off, already aching. She made her way to her house. In her front room, on a thick oval of braided rag rug, she lay down. Steadily and with a German effectiveness and efficiency that surprised even herself, she cursed everyone she’d met that day starting with the jeweler who had bought her beloved cameo and who would not, she was certain, trade it back for the suit that had betrayed her.

FRANZ WAS RIDING Mazarine Shimek’s bicycle and Mazarine was balancing. Her rear end fit into the U of the curved handlebars, and Franz held tight to the rubber grips on either end. He tried to peer over her shoulder, under her lightly sweatered arm, onto the road before them. He tried not to look at the way the lilac-flowered material of her dress stretched over what rested on the handlebars. Her feet, knees together, white anklets and heavy boy’s tie shoes, were carefully placed on the front fender. Her light brown hair was long and curled out of the dull, frayed ribbon she used to hold it back. Strands of it brushed the end of Franz’s nose, or touched the top of his lip, or grazed his cheek, as they rode into a light breezy wind on their way to the airfield.

Mazarine liked airplanes, too, or said she did, and collected pictures of pilots and race flights for Franz’s scrapbook. She also came along with him to watch the airplanes and sat in the shade of the barn when one of the pilots who kept their machines either in the barn, or who had landed there for the day, allowed Franz to work on his engine. While Franz worked with the men, she got a book from the strap on the rear of her bicycle and did her sums or geography lessons. Sometimes, when she got bored, she did Franz’s homework, too. When it was done, she got up and walked around and around the barn peering critically at the airplanes until finally Franz was ready to go home. But they didn’t go home right away. They had been going together as sweethearts for months now. They stopped just before the turnoff to the shop. Franz slipped Mazarine’s bicycle behind some weeds. Holding hands, they walked to a little spot underneath a pine tree where the branches came down all around them.

“It’s gonna get cold here pretty soon,” Mazarine said, settling herself on the soft, rust brown needles, “then what?” She pushed Franz’s hand away from her knee. He sat back a little and waited. Once, she had taken hold of his hand very carefully, and set it on her breast, the left one, and then said, “Go in circles.” He tried that, but soon she frowned and flung his hand off, and said, “That doesn’t even feel half good.” He kept his hand still, just in case she should want him to try again. Her upper lip was thin, but curved provocatively. He liked the way one curve, the left again, was a little higher than the other and rode up a fraction over her teeth. And her lower lip was full, a deep berry color. Franz knew her lips very well, and her ears, too. She always let him kiss her ears and then go down her throat to just below the delicate ridge of her collarbone. Her eyelashes were so long they made shadows, and she said the other girls envied her. They were lush brown, like her eyes, and much darker than her heavy sun-streaked hair, springing out over her shoulders.

He touched her hair, even dared tug it gently, and moved closer. She moved right next to him and sat in the curve of his arm. They were resting against the base of the pine, and had to be careful always to leave before it got dark, so that they could pick sap and pine needles off each other’s back. He turned his face to hers. She closed her eyes like an obedient child, opened them when he finally drew his mouth away from hers. She licked her lips, looked at him mockingly, then thrust her hand right between the buttons of his shirt and up the side of his chest, scratching her nails lightly along each rib. Mazarine had simple rules. Franz was allowed only to do the precise things she permitted. She, on the other hand, could do anything she wanted to him, provided he stayed still and didn’t grab for her. And that, Franz found, was very difficult when what she did became unbearable.

SHERIFF HOCK WORKED late into the evening, by the intense light of a green-shaded banker’s lamp, putting his files in order. Most all of the crimes he dealt with were petty, small thefts or disorderly conduct, saloon troubles or domestic fights, or so large as to fall beyond his influence. Of the latter category, which included acts of God and automobile accidents, he dreaded most presiding at farm auctions and foreclosures. Even though Governor Langer had ordered the banks to cease, Zumbrugge managed one or two every year, and it was the sheriff’s job to keep the peace at the event. Sheriff Hock had been approached several times in regard to auctions that would have stripped Roy Watzka of his farmstead. Yet each time the bank came near to foreclosing, Roy would at the last minute come up with the money on his loan — no one had any idea where the money came from. But he would pay the money and then drink until the next payment was due, at which time the entire process would repeat itself.

For the first time in many years, Roy had paid the bank on time. Sheriff Hock stared at the brown cardboard file in the pool of light. Surely, he thought, Roy’s prompt fiscal responsibility had to do with Delphine’s return. He wanted very much to close the case, to name the incident a terrible mistake — after all, the wake had been disorganized and people did get locked in cellars. But then there was the strangeness of it, the horror of the death. The weird glue of peach juice and ornamental beads and dog crap. The damn beads. Clarisse! He passed his hands across his face, recalling the old humiliation and Delphine’s contempt for his pain. Helpless before the memory, he cringed in his chair and diverted his thoughts. But they all led back to Clarisse. He thought of her all the time, even when he wasn’t thinking of her. She was the background to his every minute, everything he did. His best method of evading her was to imagine himself locking her in a closet. Stuffing her in. Tenderly kissing her. Turning the key. It always took her hours to get out and while she was struggling he could focus on other concerns.

There was the odd fact of Roy’s deafness to the noises underneath his house. Sheriff Hock wished that he could feel the certainty that some in town, anyway, felt about the guilt of Roy Watzka. But he had the sense that Roy was honest, if soused half the time, and basically as harmless as his daughter insisted. Sheriff Hock was, he liked to say, a man of instinct, and his gut feeling was that something was missing, some information. He wasn’t at all certain that this information had to do with Roy, and yet he saw before him, in another unclosed file, a chance to set a certain event into motion that might shake loose a fact or two. From that file, he smoothed a document which he read over slowly, nodding at the words. Deciding, he slapped his hand on the paper. Then he folded it neatly and lifted it to his front pocket. The paper crackled as he turned off the lamp.

IT WAS A BRISK gold afternoon and leaves were swirling through the air when Sheriff Hock arrested Roy Watzka for the theft of the morphine. Although the theft was way back when and Fidelis had immediately gone to the sheriff, just afterward, and explained the entire situation, Hock behaved as though he’d just begun the investigation. Fidelis had been paying Sal Birdy a little each month for the medicine, and Sal had easily accepted that. Nevertheless, Sheriff Hock made the arrest. Roy went along peacefully and seemed resigned to his jailing. He went to the cell he’d often inhabited before, only then he’d been immune to his surroundings, drunk and snoring, and hadn’t cared about the tattered blanket or the stained walls or the faintly reeking piss bucket. He walked in, as usual, closed the door behind him. This time, things were different. As a sober man, Roy had become surprisingly finicky. The first thing he did, to the amazement of Sheriff Hock, was request a certain pine-scented ammonia he’d used to make the chicken house habitable, along with a mop and bucket, water, a brush and rags. He stuffed the old blanket through the bars and tried to pound the bugs out of the mattress. And all without even asking whether his plight was yet known to his daughter. Sheriff Hock took it upon himself to go to Waldvogel’s and inform her, but first he made certain preparations to ensure that he could spy on her actions following his news.

The moment Sheriff Hock walked into the shop, Delphine knew with a sick clarity that Roy was in trouble. She knew all of the good and calm times she’d feared too good to last had been indeed too good to last. They were over. The news would be humiliating, because of course Tante was in the shop, too, talking to Fidelis just around the corner. Delphine prayed their conversation would turn into a long involved argument, that they wouldn’t step into the shop. Of course, if they shut up, they could hear everything from right where they were.

What Sheriff Hock had to say would not be good because he wore his stage manner. He couldn’t help play the part, Deliverer of Bad Tidings. The drama on his face was heavy as stage makeup. Delphine had that disengaged feeling, the same she’d had when confronting Tante with the needle, that she was playing a part, too, and that she knew all he would say and all that she would say, that this moment had been rehearsed since the beginning of time.

Just as the sheriff opened his mouth, the voices on the other side of the door ceased, so of course Tante heard what the sheriff said. It would be repeated all through the town in minutes.

“I’ve arrested your father.”

“I want to see him.” Delphine’s voice was very calm. Wearily, she blocked herself from imagining the gloating shock that had just appeared on Tante’s face. She asked the amount of bail and Sheriff Hock told her that would be determined by the town judge, Roland Zumbrugge, brother of Chester, and that she was free to pay it and get him out, although, he also said, Roy was settling in very well.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s perfectly at home there,” said Delphine, her voice twisting with as much sarcasm as she could muster. Then her part called for sincerity, and she gazed into the cushion-cheeked but sharp-nosed face of the sheriff. “You know he didn’t do it,” she suddenly blurted. “He’s a harmless person.”

At once, the sheriff’s face became slightly more watchful. As he’d hoped, Delphine had just assumed the charge was related to the three dead in her father’s cellar, and now Sheriff Hock cautiously hedged, in case she should make some slip in her state of false assumption, some small mistake that would afford him more information. “Nobody, in my experience,” said the sheriff, “is completely harmless when drunk. It would probably be best to find a good lawyer.”

“And where,” asked Delphine, now bitter, “am I to find the money to pay a good lawyer?”

Sheriff Hock’s girlish smile pursed, then twitched, and again his eyes got that twinkle in them that Delphine thought very menacing in an officer of the law.

“Our friend Cyprian could probably raise a little extra money on his trips up north,” the sheriff suggested.

Delphine wished an immediate stroke of deafness on Tante’s flaring ears and maintained a blank expression with great difficulty. Inside, her heart surged; she turned her face aside as though mystified by Hock’s reference. “I have no idea what you’re referring to,” she coldly said. After that, there were no lines to follow, no script at all. So she quickly returned to familiar ground.

“When can I visit my father?”

“Any time.”

She kept herself from automatically saying thank you, turned on her heel, and slapped her apron on the counter in order to alert Tante and Fidelis, the eavesdroppers.

“You heard it,” she said to Tante as she passed, “shut your damn mouth.”

Tante remade her delighted indignation into a pout of false distress. Fidelis had already removed himself and followed Sheriff Hock. Maybe he can find something out, thought Delphine. Out the back door, in the cold and brilliant sun, Delphine breathed hard and went over the exchange. Her mind kept sticking on the part about the evidence. What evidence? Where did it come from? Whom? If they had enough to haul Roy in, there had to be a witness, or at least a set of circumstantial facts that would be set out before a judge. Panicked, she went to find Clarisse.

DELPHINE ENTERED the basement mortuary and Clarisse, at the sink, turned with a perfectly glowing look and said, “I’m so glad you’re here!”

When her work was successful, Clarisse was vivid with satisfaction, sparklingly fresh and alive. Her skin was satiny, pure white, not a freckle on it. Her lips were a deep unlipsticked red and her eyes transparent with delight at her friend’s visit.

“I’ve got to talk to you again,” said Delphine.

With a dancer’s flourish, Clarisse indicated her work area.

“I’ve got to show you someone!”

“Not now, Clarisse. Sometimes you get carried away,” said Delphine.

“This is the last view these parents will have of their child,” Clarisse answered, her face serious. “Is that carried away? Perhaps, well, I’ll tone down my manner, of course. I was just—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m overwrought, Clarisse. Roy’s in the jailhouse.”

“It’s that damn Hock,” said Clarisse. She shook her curls a little and handed Delphine a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Although, come to think, you must admit, it was his cellar. And he was very drunk that night, well…” She fluffed the hair out around her ears and shook her head, conveying sympathy without implicating herself. “I didn’t see a thing. I wish I had. Oh, look at you. You must get more rest! You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.” She took Delphine’s hand in her own, just the way they used to when they were girls together talking earnestly down by the river. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll think of a way to get Roy out.”

Delphine nearly shook her hand away.

“You do think he did it! He’s a souse, but he wouldn’t deliberately do anything that cruel. You know he’s been strictly on the wagon—”

“But when has he ever not fallen off and disappointed you?” asked Clarisse gently.

“Never,” Delphine said.

Clarisse looked at her solemnly, put her fingers up, and pinched her lips shut.

“I know what you’re trying not to say,” said Delphine.

Clarisse nodded. Then she unpinched her lips.

“I will say this, Delphine, you should get out of here. Just leave him be and go to secretary school. Be an actress. Anything. Take a train to the Cities.”

Delphine laughed. “With what money? And by the way,” she lowered her voice, “I buried your dress in the iris patch.”

Clarisse now looked very grave and thanked her for hiding it. “You’re on my side,” she said. “You’ve always been on my side.”

“Of course I am,” Delphine said. “I just wish I knew.”

“What?”

“Who locked them down there.”

“You just have to believe it wasn’t Roy, don’t you?” said Clarisse.

Delphine nodded.

“Then it wasn’t him,” Clarisse said. Reaching over, she put her arms around Delphine and held her head to her shoulder. Delphine’s breath ballooned up in her until she sighed. She let herself sag against her friend. Clarisse smelled of formalin and bath powder. There was coffee on her breath and blood on her shoe. From time to time, Delphine thought, life fooled her into thinking there was someone on earth she would be as close to as Clarisse. Then the person was hauled away, or died, or retreated, and it was just the two of them again. Odd women out. Unique girls. Strange.

HIDING A MAN of his bulk was extremely difficult, but Sheriff Hock was used to assuming the disguises of the stage. His automobile would have been too conspicuous in the empty town streets, so he had borrowed a shabby buggy from a deputy’s barn and commandeered a tired old horse to draw it. Shortly after leaving the shop, he put on a farm hat and a torn canvas coat. He then drove the buggy to a safe distance for surveillance, pulled to the side of the road to let the horse crop grass, and put his head down on his chest. From there, it was an easy matter. Following Delphine was simple — in the strictly platted town he could easily project her destination, and with no trouble keep her in sight down the wide dusty avenues and streets. The funeral home was no surprise to him. He thought of Clarisse in the tight, red, fabulously shiny stage dress. Was there some way to bring her back into the picture? Closer, so she would see what kind of man he really was? He put his hand to his cheek as if he could still feel the lump she had raised when she slugged him at her father’s rowdy wake. She was much too fierce for anyone else in this town, he thought. He was the only man who wasn’t afraid of her. He deserved her. And he was getting tired of the way she evaded him and put him off. Her excuses and protestations. If she would only, only, surrender her hard little nut of a heart! Let the shell crack! Reveal the love! He was positive it was there. It made him so angry with her. She was stubborn, wasting precious time. Youth was fleeting. They should be walking along the weedy riverbank and planning their future. Sheriff Hock set his teeth and felt his face harden. When this wave of frustration engulfed him, he wanted to shake her until she woke up, to yell into her face until he broke her composure, to crush her until she cried out his name in a pain that sounded like passion.

DELPHINE WAS ALLOWED to sit upon a small rickety caned chair just outside the bars of her father’s cell. He was morose, “but at least it’s clean, now,” he said, nicking his frowzy head at the newly scrubbed floors, walls, and the bed, which was now outfitted in sheets that Delphine brought. Apple Newhall fixed the prisoners’ meals, and the contents varied according to her feeling for the prisoner. Roy was a favorite of hers, and for dinner he was given a plate of beans baked in tomato sauce, a large beer sausage, and half a sweet onion. Delphine watched him eat. Roy’s rough claw dipped the dark syrup from the beans. He chewed tentatively because of his frail old teeth. From time to time he stopped and sighed in the drama of his entrapment. He missed the picture of Minnie, his small personal shrine, and he dearly wished for the afghan he said that she had knitted, which Delphine had rescued from the grand stink and soaked clean in the river. It had become something of a security blanket to him ever since he’d sobered up. Why now, thought Delphine. Why now that he’s sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life? Perhaps she forgave too easily, or perhaps she wasn’t really able to recall, out of self-protection, what a failure of a father he really had been all along. She hated this pity that overwhelmed her and covered him. His failing physical state twisted her heart — she didn’t want to see how his hands shook, how he shuffled instead of stepped, how thoroughly the booze had unstrung him over the years.

She held one of his beat-up paws, “Dad, you didn’t do it, I know. You’ll soon be out. I’ll get a lawyer.”

“What lawyer?” Roy peered at her with an incredulous frown. “Of course I did it… everybody knows, they saw me. I had to.”

For a panicked moment Delphine hushed him. Sheriff Hock was standing near and now, having heard every word, he had stepped up behind her with a lightness surprising in a man so large. He was listening, Delphine suddenly knew it, to see if his trap would spring, listening to hear her next words, which she drew cautiously from a neutral store. “So Fidelis has offered to pay your bail, if there is—”

“Fidelis told Albert here what happened right off! Eva had to have the stuff and you can bet I was going to get it for her. I cared for that woman, she was a good and a kind person,” said Roy with great emotion. “Made a thick sandwich for a man and understood my thirst.”

At the mention of Eva’s name, Delphine’s picture radically shifted, and with some difficulty she responded to the changed scenario. She stumbled a bit, though, her brain connecting with the stolen morphine, before she turned to Sheriff Hock. “How come now?” she said, masking her relief with indignation. “If you were going to charge him, why didn’t you pick him up right after?”

Sheriff Hock, subtly disappointed, rocked back on his heels and lied that before he could get word to Sal Birdy, the drugstore owner had reported the theft to the state commission. Mr. Birdy very much regretted having done so, but now, to everyone’s annoyance, the commission had demanded a full investigation of the occurrence. Roy’s arrest was carried out to satisfy the record, and he’d be free as soon as all of the paperwork was finished.

“This is only a formality,” Sheriff Hock concluded, and walked off in an air of slight embarrassment.

“A formality!” Delphine’s voice let go — she tried not to sound too relieved, attempted the appropriate indignation. But she wanted to sink her face in her hands and breathe very deeply. Wanted to shed the low hysteria she’d felt at the prospects and plans that had whirled in her head — the lawyer, the trial, the jury, the judge… all of the implications of a murder charge. Now, she had only to sit still. So Delphine stayed with Roy for a while longer, listened to instructions regarding the various personalities and proclivities of his chickens. “I’ve got a Romeo and Juliet in the bunch,” he said. “Star-crossed banties. Don’t disturb the two black rosecombs that perch together. As for that loud dominicker, you can stew him for all I care. Let the little guy take over with the big reds. He can do the job.” Roy kept talking, clearly did not want to quit, didn’t want to face the moment when Delphine had to get up and leave him alone in the place where so often he’d slept unconscious but that he now, fully aware, occupied in a virgin state of shame.

DURING THOSE persistently dry years, the stock was less and less worth butchering, the cows were so bony and lean, fed on green thistle alone or the poorest scrapings of slough grass and even young cottonwood bark. But for the last week, Fidelis had sudden business. He worked late into the night, worked until his knee gave out on him and he had to put on the leather brace Heech had sketched and then ordered from a harness maker. Though his knee creaked and ached, Fidelis believed this brace and Heech’s sewing abilities had kept him from becoming entirely lame. For sure, it helped him work strange hours. Farmers sometimes didn’t get their animals in until just before dark. They had to kill by the light of torches, wrestling steers into the killing chute, then skinning and butchering until almost dawn. This morning, Fidelis had slept two hours, then jolted awake to get the boys out of bed for school. For a moment, he stared into the gray air, entranced by an unfinished dream in which he followed Eva down a certain street they both knew in Ludwigsruhe, and entered behind her into an unfamiliar shop.

The place was tiny, studded with merchandise of every type from pins and fabrics to pots of jam. It went on and on, back into the side of a hill, a catacomb of gray wooden corridors lit dimly by bare lightbulbs. She was wearing a dress of light plum cotton and it floated behind her as she swiftly turned corners. Suddenly, at the end of one cramped hallway, Eva turned around at his call and came toward him with a smile of surprise, as if to say, “What are you doing here?” And then he woke, of course, and although each cell of him wanted to lie still, to sleep on and on, through weeks, he must rise and wake his sons.

He stumbled out of his room and into theirs, shook Franz awake wordlessly, and then touched Markus. All he had to do was touch Markus, or even his bedpost. Emil and Erich must be awakened with more care. They’d doze off instantly if left a moment. He walked to the bathroom and drew a mug of water from the tap, rinsed his mouth out, pissed, took his pants off a hook on the door. Then he walked into the kitchen and set a kettle of water on the gas range for the watery morning chocolate he added to their milk. He warmed the milk in a pan. Into another pan of water he dumped some oats, then turned down the heat so they wouldn’t boil over. His eyelids kept flickering, shut. He filled the coffeepot with water, a handful of grounds, eggshells from a bowl of them he’d saved. Then he sat at the table with his hands cradling his head, and fell asleep. Wakened when Emil entered the kitchen wearing only one boot.

“Where’s your other boot?”

“Schatzie must have hid it in the night.”

The dog’s one awful habit.

“Find it,” ordered Fidelis, rising to tend the stove. Next, it was Markus, who said that pulling on his jacket he’d torn the sleeve half off. How could that happen? Fidelis examined the jacket. Impossible. “You were fighting yesterday?” Markus hung his head and couldn’t look at him. Fidelis flung the jacket back at him. “Tonight, you work. A liar works twice as hard in his life as an honest man.” Fidelis was certain that this wasn’t true, from what he had seen, but the phrase came out and sounded right. He pushed Markus toward the bathroom. “Get clean.”

Next Franz, no problems, but just being Franz there was always an intensity about his grooming — nobody must disturb his routine. “I found Emil’s boot,” he said, but it was clear he wanted to punch his little brother, and couldn’t, because he was a young man after all and had his dignity, so he brooded over his hair.

“Essen.”

Fidelis brought the pan of oatmeal, bowls, brown sugar, milk, his precious coffee, to the table. Now it was Erich’s turn. He wandered into the kitchen in his pajamas. “Where’s everybody?” He had crept into the bathtub and managed to fall asleep without anybody catching him.

“Get back in there, get dressed!”

Of course, he didn’t know where his clothes were, where anything was, and Fidelis felt his blood surge with irritation, and also sympathy. He ached for sleep, too, just the same. If only they two could crawl back into bed and curl in the blankets and snore like bears until Eva rocked the headboard and sang out for the lazybones to come and get their breakfast. Fidelis trudged back down the hall to the room. The clothing was still crumpled in a ball from last night, and faintly sour, but he made Erich put it all on. And his boots weren’t missing. By the time he got back to the kitchen, the coffee was beginning to stir his brain cells.

The numbness of sleep left his face. He stretched and groaned as the boys secured their books with bookstraps, and grabbed their lard pails of the lunch that Delphine had made the previous afternoon. A cold potato, a piece of meat. An apple or a carrot. Sometimes she fried great rings of doughnuts or made a thick gingerbread. They piled on their coats and then pitched out the door. By the time they left, Fidelis was on his second cup of coffee. He’d learned to make that right. He brought the coffee into the bathroom and set it on the windowsill, added a good long dribble of Fornie’s Alpenkrauter. Then he mixed a lather in his shaving mug, and soaped his face with the silver-handled boar’s-hair brush that Eva had given him, along with a matching hairbrush and razor, as a wedding gift. After shaving, he patted his face with a towel, then rubbed his chin and cheeks with bay rum, and at last walked out into the shop.

The sun streamed through the heavy windows onto the wood-block tables and counters. The wood was hacked, scored, blackened in the marks and seams, but the tables’ surfaces were scoured white. The blaze lighted his block of knives. He examined his knives, blearily clung to his careful selection for the sharpening. Next, he brought from the cooled back room halves of pig, scalded and gutted and hung yesterday. As he worked, diminishing the pork with economical clarity and swiftness of motion into perfect cutlets and medallions, he felt the leaden numbness that ran up his fingers diminish. The muscles in his arms grew limber, and he used the knife to cunning effect. All the while that his body moved, of its own will, his mind grew heavier with the need for oblivion until about eleven, having worked and cut steadily with only a short break, he had to stop. The sleep pressed behind his eyes with such an intensity that only a brisk turn outside in the yard would help. Again, he shook the sleep off, and then returned to his work until late in the afternoon, when Delphine told him to go back and lie down. She said that his eyes were bloodshot. She said it rudely.

“Get out of here,” she ordered. “I will handle things.”

For the first part of his life, Fidelis had been taught to read only crude signs from women, but Eva had instructed him in looking for subtler clues from her sex. So he knew that Delphine was careful to show no hint of sympathy, allowed not even a personal word of kindness to pass her lips, because she did not want to begin something between them that she considered impossible. And he, too, was immaculately impersonal in his behavior toward her. Every word referred to the business, or to the children. He and she were strangers living parallel lives, working alongside each other every day. Between them, they had put up an invisible wall. Fidelis knew it had to stay intact or something would crash down around him, around them all. He sensed the power of what their strict rules held back and kept himself from wondering at the nature of the force, its shape, its name. It was just a thing that must be left alone. He went back into his bedroom, shut the door, and took off his shoes. He lay down on the bed, and when he did, he felt his bones through his flesh and his muscles, unstringing, and he stretched immediately into a sleep so black it was like being dead.

He slept for hours, then started awake the way he had that morning, staring at the ceiling. Only this time, his body half lifting in the bed with that buzzing sensation of pleasure in having truly rested, he lingered in the warm sheets because of the unfamiliar sensuousness of that relief. These were the times he would, in the past, turn to Eva and begin the slow lovemaking that they’d learned from each other. Over the years, they had added to their private love — unlike others, he suspected, who did what they did to get the need over with. Other men joked or complained about the length of time their wives gave them — a little longer, maybe, if they behaved well that day. Fidelis never said a word when men got into those sorts of conversations. He knew things were different between himself and Eva, that there was something greater than the thing the other men discussed. That something had its own grandeur mixed inevitably with loss. When she died and was truly gone, the day he, and then each of the boys, threw the first clods of earth upon her casket after it was lowered into the ground, he’d had the sense of some beautiful immensity passing overhead in the heavens, away from him forever, and he’d gone very still. He’d tried not to move. The other mourners had seen a man rooted to the earth, standing like a block, dumb as a turnip. He’d become embarrassed at the picture he made and forced himself to step away. But some part of himself never did leave, he thought now; he was still standing at the edge of her grave. He was still feeling the blood squeeze through his heart, the hum of his brain, the clutch of his fingers, the earth drying in the cracks of his palms. He was helplessly alive, wholly divided into life, powerfully different from Eva. Sometimes he still felt the wonder of it.

DELPHINE DID EVERYTHING she could to distract herself from the fact that she had to thank Fidelis, had to talk to him about having freed her father on bail. She transferred all the meat from one case to the next, and scrubbed out the first air-cooled case with a sharp mixture of vinegar and water. Then she arranged all of the meats in the case again, placing between each tray the careful decorations, cut of green waxed paper, that set off the pork chops and sausages and steaks. While she was finishing, she thought of all of the other jobs she could do, but even as she added them up she grew irritated with herself. Why not talk to him this very minute? In the middle of dunking a rag to make another swipe at the glass and enamel, she wrung it out instead and laid it on the steel counter. Closed the sliding doors.

“Fidelis”—she stood behind him and he turned from his task— “you paid the bail for my father.”

He nodded, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Yes.” He acknowledged Delphine, then tried to turn back to the meat he was grinding and spicing, but there was more.

“You’ll get it back.”

“Sure,” said Fidelis.

“I will pay you back,” said Delphine. “If he…”

“But he won’t leave.”

This was going to force him to say more, and he knew it, and all that morning he had thought it out. But it was still hard for him to say what he had to say to this woman. He took a huge breath, and made the attempt. “What you did for Eva, and then what Roy did…” But that was as far as he could go.

“She was my friend, and good to my dad. I didn’t do it for you.” Delphine had decided to speak plainly.

Fidelis shrugged to say that didn’t matter, but she preempted this.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t want people to start saying things. And Tante, her especially.”

“She doesn’t know I paid.”

“But she will. She does your books. And then so will everybody else in town.”

Fidelis frowned, considering this, but remained stubborn.

“So if they do,” he said, “they’ll think of what you and Roy did for Eva.”

“I don’t want people thinking about that.” Delphine tried to keep her voice low, but it rose beyond her, sharp. “I know what they think already, I’ve heard it, and I know that your sister feeds those rumors with her gossip. I want an end to it. But I’m glad…” Here she stumbled a little, for it was hard for her to say this, and her voice dropped, low and shamed. “Thank you for getting him out. I never knew my father sober before this. It was hard on him, getting locked up, and in real trouble, after he’d finally taken the pledge.”

This was more than she’d ever said to Fidelis here, or revealed to him in this shop and in Eva’s house. It had been easier to speak her mind to him on her ground back at the farm. They turned away, both relieved and exhausted. Delphine wanted to go home and sleep. Fidelis felt a heaviness pressing on his chest. For a while that day, everything they did seemed twice as difficult, but gradually, as they ignored each other or spoke only in the most necessary monosyllables, things returned to normal. Any stranger walking into the shop would think the two disliked one another, but the truth was, neither of them could bear the danger of displaying any hint of the weight of tension each lived with regarding the other. So their rude, clipped interactions were safe ground where they could calmly coexist.

There were times bound to arise after that unprecedented exchange of words, even whole sentences, where the same might easily happen again. Not long after they spoke, Delphine became convinced that Eva’s boys were going to kill themselves. She told Fidelis, but he shrugged and said, “They are boys.” She had dealt, already, with their summer shake-ups, the near drownings, and the damned swing that, if they failed to jump off in time, smashed them headfirst into the tree trunk. Now that the leaves were off the trees and the snow had not yet fallen for them to slide on and, doubtless, to devise cunning ways to kill themselves rushing downhill, she didn’t think they’d have much else to do but hammer their thumbs or crash the homemade car they raced downhill. Thank God that Fidelis hadn’t the money to buy them guns. She could not have anticipated what they did come up with, what obsessed them, what began to run their lives after school in the late afternoons. She only had a sense of it, some tension and excitement in their doings. There were arguments and conspiratorial noises that stopped abruptly when she entered rooms. Tools were mysteriously missing. She found a great deal of dirt in the creases and the pockets of their clothing.