The Master Butcher's Singing Club

FOUR. The Cellar

AFTER THREE MONTHS on the road, Delphine and Cyprian had milked a startling amount of money from the broke and dusty towns they passed through with their show. Which proved, said Delphine, that even in the summer of 1934, when people were really hard up, they’d pay to get their minds off their misery. Still, even though they were doing good business, Delphine decided that she had to go home. First, though, she went to a second-rate jewelry shop and bought cheap rings for herself and Cyprian. There was no way she could appear back in Argus without at least the pretense of marriage.

“This does not mean crap,” she said, slipping on the wedding band, giving him a suspicious look. She waggled her finger.

“To you,” he countered.

“You either,” she warned. The band seemed tight already, and although it was smooth she’d heard of machines and car doors catching on rings and yanking off or breaking fingers. She’d never worn a ring before. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned. “I don’t make breakfast. I’m not ready to be a housewife, yet.”

“Fine,” said Cyprian. “I’ll cook.”

Delphine hooted. He’d never so much as buttered a piece of bread in her presence. In cafés, she did it as a little graceful and womanly thing to do for him, but maybe now, she reflected, she should quit taking care of him so much. He’d think she meant to take care of him forever. She twisted the ring around and around, a little piece of armor against the Lutheran ladies who would have their eyes on every move she made. The ring would help, but people would talk about her anyway. Her father always gave them reason. Of course, they didn’t know half of what went on in the farmhouse marooned in the tangle of box elders, out of town, where she’d grown up. The only kindness was that her father’s misery, thus hers, was usually out of the town’s direct line of sight.

She feared the urge to return was a mistake. Not only the fake marriage. Would her father make a drinking friend of Cyprian? Schnapps, he couldn’t handle. The stuff would wreck his balance. She had no choice, though, because she truly missed Roy Watzka and she suffered from an annoying intuition. A series of melodramatic pictures nagged her: he was dying, gasping for her like the father in the fairy tale with the beast and the beauty. Plunging headlong drunk into the muscle of the river out behind their house. Drowning himself.

Delphine and Cyprian drove south, toward Argus. The fabulous tallgrass that had once covered all beneath the sky still vigorously waved from the margins of certain fields, from the edges of the sloughs that they passed, and from the banks of the pleasant little river that sometimes flooded all along its length and wrecked half the town. The fields of stunted wheat, bald in patches that year, turned in an endless rush. Armyworms were thick, their nests like gray mesh in the trees. From time to time, they passed an empty-windowed house, or one with a brave and hopeless bit of paint splashed across its padlocked front door. There were gas stations, pumps fixed in front of shaky little stores, here and there a thatch of houses, a lightning-struck cottonwood. And always, there was the friendly monotony, the patient sky rainless and gray as a tarp.

As they passed Waldvogel’s butcher shop on the near edge of town, a solid built whitewashed place bounded by two fields, they saw two people running. One was a woman in a flowered wash dress, an apron, and high feminine heels. The other was a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, with the build of an athlete and a flap of shining dark hair. The two had come from the field and were racing for some finish line just beyond the dusty parking lot in front of the store. They were neck and neck, laughing as they pumped their arms. Then suddenly the woman seemed to leap forward, though her stride actually shortened. She’d gone up on her toes and was bounding to the finish. As the car passed the two, Delphine turned to watch. The woman’s hair burst from its twist and floated out behind her, a sudden red-gold banner that announced her triumph, for she’d touched the fence at the end of the lot first and beaten the boy. Delphine turned back to direct Cyprian.

“You should have seen that woman. Can she ever run! Turn there.”

They turned down a short and half-overgrown road.

“Slow down,” said Delphine.

The road was a ragged track, washed out in several spots, the dirt churned up and dried in pits and snarls. They drove up to the beaten little farmhouse — three dim rooms and a jutting porch — where Delphine had always lived with Roy.

Just as they arrived, Delphine’s father happened to be walking out the door. He was a pallid little crooked man with the fat nose of a sinister clown. When he saw Delphine, he removed his slouch hat, jammed it over his face, and began to weep into the crown, his whole body shaking with sobs. Every so often he’d lower the hat to show them his contorted mouth, then smack the hat on his face again. It was a masterly performance. Cyprian had never seen a man weep like that, even in the war, and he was horrified. He offered his hankie, pressed it into Roy’s hands, sat down with the old man on the porch. Delphine squared her shoulders, took a deep fortifying breath, and walked into the house.

She ran right out again, gulping air, but she didn’t say a word. The men were locked in a blubbering conversation. She ran back in and threw the windows open. Then went back out to the car. She removed a scarf from her suitcase, soaked it with Evening in Paris, and tied it over her mouth and nose. The depth of this horrible odor led her to believe, for the first time, that her father wasn’t just a common drunk — he was truly depraved. When she walked past the men she kicked at the leg of her father’s chair.

“Don’t do that!” said Cyprian.

“Oh shut your mouth,” said Delphine from behind her scarf, as she bravely reentered the house.

Bad smells made her angry, they were a personal affront. She had dealt with her father’s messes before, but this was of a different order. He had created this one on purpose, she believed, to show her how helpless he was without her. On the floor, there was a layer of must, crumbly and black, for the clothing and food, the vomit and piss, had composted along with the knuckles of pig’s trotters and frail chicken bones. Perhaps a dog had crawled in there to die, too. There were layers of husks of insects, foul clumps of rat droppings, and a bushel of rotted, sprouting potatoes some kind neighbor had probably dropped off to keep Roy Watzka from starving. Over it all there had grown arcane scrawls of cheerful and reeking mold. Weak and sick, Delphine staggered out again onto the porch.

“I need a shovel,” she said, and she put her face into her hands and began to cry. She wept even harder than her father. Cyprian was completely astonished, for up until that moment she had behaved with a steady cynical kindness and he hadn’t known that she was even capable of feeling such intense sorrow. Nothing that Cyprian had done, even getting caught with the hardware store owner in Gorefield, Manitoba, had caused her to so much as mist over. Now the sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and then built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon. Cyprian couldn’t bear such a show of brutal emotion. He sat down on the porch steps right next to Delphine and carefully, with immense tenderness, put his arms around her shoulders. Until that moment he hadn’t realized what enormous respect he had for Delphine — her breaking up like this was very moving to him. He’d seen this in the war sometimes, the moment when the toughest ones go was always hardest. He began to rock Delphine back and forth, crooning to her.

“Don’t cry, little sister,” he said, and Delphine wept harder because he called her by this sweet name, and although she knew it meant his feelings for her were brotherly, not romantic, she was suddenly as happy as she was nauseated.

“I’ll be all right,” she heard herself blurt. She couldn’t help saying it, though she wasn’t all right and wanted to keep soaking up this delicious and unfamiliar male sympathy.

“I know you’ll be okay,” Cyprian said. “But you need help.”

He couldn’t have said a more perfect thing, and yet her experience of him so far was that he couldn’t do jack shit, except balance. If she depended on him, she was bound for disappointment, she thought, and yet the idea of purging the stink herself made her sob harder.

“I do need help,” she wailed.

Cyprian was gratified, and in that sweep of feeling he kissed her tenderly and passionately on her left temple, which throbbed hot red. He had come back lonely from the war and stayed that way, concentrating on his balance. His brothers had all moved far north into Cree country. His parents were drinkers. His grandparents had wandered off in disgust, headed for someplace where they could die in peace. Any uncles and aunts were living their own lives, the sort of lives he didn’t want to know about. He really was alone or had been until now. Things had gone past romance. At this moment things went deeper. He now had Delphine Watzka and Delphine’s father and also the terrible odor.

The smell emanated from the house as a solid presence. It lived there — an entity, an evil genie. For some reason, it did not cling to Roy Watzka. He smelled all right. Delphine and Cyprian loaded him into the car and drove back to town. They got a room at the hotel on the main street and left Roy there, curled happily around a pint of his favorite schnapps. It was no use trying to keep him away from the stuff, Delphine informed Cyprian. He would just go find it, and the search would put him into worse shape, get him into danger from which he was always difficult to rescue. The two of them bought a couple of shovels and a gallon of kerosene and went back to the house. They began to haul out the horrid junk, both swathing their faces in the scented scarves.

“I never liked this perfume,” Cyprian gasped, after he’d carried out the third shovel full of unidentifiable garbage.

“I’ll never wear it again, my love,” said Delphine. She could use these endearments, because now they both knew the grand passion between them was an affectionate joke. They were something else. They were not-quite-but-more-than family. And together, they stank. As though angry to be disturbed, the odor pounced on them. It wrestled with their stomachs. Every so often, one had to gag, which started the other going too. Delphine was an extremely determined person and Cyprian had been through the bowels of hell, but at one point, having penetrated to some sublimely sickening layer, they both rushed outside and had the same idea.

“Could we burn the whole place down?” Cyprian said, eyeing with longing the gallon of kerosene.

“Maybe we could,” said Delphine.

They dragged a couple of beer crates across the yard and had a long smoke. Eventually, they decided that they would persevere. In spite of the woozy atmosphere, Delphine was impressed by Cyprian’s ability to shovel and haul. They made a great heap of crud in the yard and set it immediately ablaze. The stuff gave off an acrid smoke and left a stinking ash, but the fire had a purifying effect on their spirits. They went to the work more cheerfully now, hauling, tossing, burning, without stopping to puke. By nightfall, they’d gone through a challenging strata of urine-soaked catalogues and newspapers. It appeared that Roy Watzka had invited his cronies over, and they’d used the pantry off the kitchen as a pissing parlor. One man could not have done so much, said Cyprian, but he got no agreement from Delphine.

“My father could,” she said, as they rested before the fire. Mercifully, the odor finally seemed to have blasted out their sense of smell. Nothing bothered them. They had no hunger or thirst. Nor aches or pains. They felt invincible. The house was nearly cleared out — step one.

The next step was more complicated. They believed that the source of the stink was burned to flakes of black tar, but the smell would surely linger in the boards and wallpaper, in the furniture. What substance would remove, not commingle, with such a thing? They had to retreat. After the fire went out, they went back to the hotel, sneaked in because they knew they carried with them the loathsome stench. In the room, Roy was already passed out.

With great foresight, extravagantly, they had rented a room with a private bath. Now Cyprian said gallantly, “You go first.”

“I can’t,” said Delphine.

“Shall we share a hot bath?” said Cyprian. They both felt very kindly toward each other. So Delphine ran the bath and dumped in a little bottle of fragrant hair soap. They got in together and soaped each other up and washed their hair. Cyprian leaned, sighing, against the backrest with Delphine between his legs. Together, they soaked. With her big toe, Delphine occasionally let some water out. Added more hot water. It was erotic, but not sexual, a kind of animal acceptance. Both took comfort in the ease they experienced being naked in the other’s presence. Plus, they were very grateful to be clean, though the stink lingered in their memory. They could feel the odor, and were both worried that they’d lost their smell-perspective. Maybe it had somehow entered them. Maybe they’d be kicked out of the breakfast café, where they planned to eat the next morning. Maybe they’d be ostracized in the street. They completely forgot about Roy until they’d dried off, and then Cyprian was startled by the rumbling bray from the next room.

“He snores,” said Delphine.

“That too?”

“Oh,” said Delphine. She looked at him, worried, and Cyprian looked back at her, standing unashamedly naked before him. Her body was compact, graceful, and tough. Her breasts were very beautiful. As if she was part fox, thought Cyprian, like a woman in one of his grandmother’s old stories. Her breasts were perfect golden cones with neat honey-colored nipples. He didn’t want to do anything, though — he just enjoyed looking at her.

“I wish I was an artist,” he said. “I’d draw you.” He began to dry her with a stiff towel. “God, your dad’s loud. Maybe I’ll sleep outside the door.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Delphine said. “You’ll be surprised. Just think of it as something in nature.”

“His snoring?”

“Like a storm, a big lake. Trees.”

The spluttering and thrashing that Cyprian now heard did not seem natural, and he doubted that he could take Delphine’s advice. But once he lay down and curled around her, he fell directly into a fabulous well of sleep in which he dreamed phenomenally. He dreamed of trees with their limbs cracked and creaking in wind, of hopping from ice floe to floe in a roaring torrent, of a sneaky gunpowder booby trap that blew up every time he tried to talk.

In the dream, he spoke freely to Delphine between the blasts of noise.

And what did I say, he wondered, waking slightly before he was sucked again into the black current of unconsciousness. What did I tell her? What does she know? For he hadn’t yet dared raise the subject of what she had seen or not seen back by the river in Manitoba. And it had happened so soon after that night — they’d never talked about that either — when they looked into each other’s eyes and their bodies had moved together in a way beyond anything they could have wished. Were they in love now, or had things drastically changed? Was she really his little sister, and the noisy drunk next bed over his new father? Perhaps, he thought, bobbing to the surface well before dawn, the smell had addled them all. Perhaps they were affected by the smell’s range and power. They would see. They would contend with it come morning.

THE SMELL CAME AT THEM as they slowly approached down the road. It seemed to have settled in a tent about the house. They went inside to battle it and immediately rushed back out. It was as though they hadn’t even touched the place yet, or worse, as though they’d only succeeded in lifting the lid off the source of the odor, which still emanated, Cyprian thought, from the cleared-off floor.

“Or maybe the cellar,” said Delphine with a childlike shudder.

The cellar was no more than a large pit in the earth, underneath the pantry. There was a hole cut in the floor and a hinged door with a ring that turned to lock it shut, but Delphine never opened it in the first place, if she could help it. She and Roy had hardly ever accumulated a surplus of food to store there, though often enough Roy had stashed his booze on the rough shelves cut into the sides of earth. Once upon a time, she remembered, there were potatoes in a large bin or maybe turnips. Otherwise, it was a ghastly place filled with spiders. It was probably the source of the bugs and rat droppings.

“I don’t want to look,” said Delphine.

“I don’t either,” said Cyprian.

“Now is the time to burn the place,” she decided.

“Let’s have a smoke.”

They went back to the beer crates and lighted up. From behind, the house was so small and pathetic looking that it seemed impossible for it to harbor such a fierce animosity of odor. Long ago, Delphine had painted the doors and window frames blue because she’d heard that certain tribes believed that blue scared off ghosts. What she’d really wanted was a color to scare off drunks. But there wasn’t such a color. They came anyway, all through her childhood and on into her clever adolescence, during which she’d won a state spelling contest. Her winning word was syzygy. She spelled it on instinct and had to look the meaning up afterward.

The truth was, Delphine was smart — in fact, she was the smartest girl in school. She could have had a scholarship to a Catholic college, but she dropped out early. It was the planets, aligned as in her spelling word, casting their shadows indifferently here and there. Malign influence. She slowly became convinced, due to her association with her father’s cronies, that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold.

She had learned of it in that house with the blue-framed doors and windows, where the drunks crashed, oblivious to warding-off charms and dizzy indigo. Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life — disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

Perhaps the early loss of her mother had caused her to undergo a period of intolerable sensitivity. Although the actual mishaps struck visitors, friends, acquaintances, strangers, Delphine experienced the feelings that accompanied their awful misfortunes. A child down the road was struck blind. For weeks Delphine found herself groping her way through the nightmare in which she was told she was blind as well. Or abandoned by her husband, as was the cheerful and sordid Mrs. Vashon, who tried to kill herself at the prospect of raising nine children alone, did not succeed, but ever after bore the rope’s dark scorch mark around her neck. Or her best friend from high school, Clarisse Strub, who was victimized by a secret disease. These things happened with such regularity that Delphine developed a nervous twitch in her brain. A knee-jerk response that rejected hope and light.

Not that she ever railed at God. From the time she’d understood God wouldn’t give her her mother back, she knew that was a waste of time. Because it offended her to swallow as many as twenty or thirty lies per day, she quit school in her final year. God was all good. Lie! God was all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie. All seeing? Had He really the time to watch what her hands did beneath the covers at night? Did God really invade her brain and weep at her impure thoughts? And if so, why had He concentrated on such trivia rather than curing her mother of her illness? What sort of choice was that? Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and to bring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.

Her father was pleased enough. As soon as he learned she’d quit school, he quit life and proceeded to pursue his own serious drinking, while Delphine went to work. Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been so smart, she admitted. Maybe better to endure the tyranny of lies than the series of jobs she had then, briefly, held. She had wrapped butter in the Ogg Dairy. She had worked cracking eggs, gasping at the sulfur whiplash of the rotten ones. For a while she had sorted cookies into metal troughs, survived on the crumbs. Ran a buttonholer in a dress shop. She ironed. Blistered her hands in bleach laundering sheets. All these jobs were tedious and low-paying. Besides, since she lived at home, her father tried to appropriate half her money.

The first time she split her pay cash, he quietly used it to drink somewhere else. The next time, he brought his buddies home. She arrived home — lame, dusty, exhausted, from sorting bricks at the brickworks — to find them drinking a case of skin tonic. Although she tried her best to ignore them, they made a ruckus, ate every morsel, even the last bit of the ham, and in a half stupor blundered into her bedroom, which was her only haven. She took a broom to them, cracking the handle against their legs. When they guffawed and refused to leave, a storm of white dots fell across her vision. At long last, she decided to clear them out. She walked out to the woodpile, yanked the ax from its block, strode back into the kitchen.

Hey, Roy’s baby…, one of them mocked her.

She lifted the ax high overhead and brought it down, split the just dealt ace of diamonds, then tugged the ax from the wood and lifted it again. Her father yelped. She shook the ax and screeched back at him, which caused him to jump backward in boozy dismay, scattering the poker deck, and to declare that she had gone haywire. Mightily affected, he raced out the door, gasping for breath, flanked by his companions. Somewhere in the night he fell through thin ice and from his dousing got pneumonia, almost died, so that Delphine had to quit the brickworks and nurse him. The ax was the first time she had turned on him, and he couldn’t get over it. All of his bluster had collapsed at the sight of her, striding through the door in her white rag of a nightgown, hollering bloody murder, as he put it, weak and feverish. That had been the gist of Delphine’s life, that and more of the same. Still, she could not burn the house. It was the house where she’d grown up and where, according to at least one version of Roy’s story, her mother had given birth to her. He said it happened right in the kitchen, by the stove, where it was warm.

“I suppose we should clean out the cellar,” she sighed.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” said Cyprian, but his voice was cheerful. He stubbed out his cigarette, slapped his pants, and laughed at the puffs of dust that swallowed his hands. Delphine wanted to tell him that she admired his capacity for brute labor. It was a thing people in the town valued, and she herself was proud of her own endurance. If she said as much, though, would she be admitting she’d once thought of him as a useless lug who couldn’t so much as grow a plant? Maybe, she revised in her mind as they walked toward the house, she’d had it all wrong to begin with. He was an artist. A balancing artist. Maybe while doing the show his whole being had concentrated on that one thing. Maybe now that he wasn’t balancing, he could display his more ordinary talents.

TO GET TO THE RING in the floor, they had to chip away a seal of shattered jars of canned peaches, the turds of some stray locked-up dog, and strange handfuls of spilled red beads mortared into the peach juice. Once they had pried off this layer, they hammered on the stuck ring. Gradually, the sky grew dark and they had to stop, find a lantern. They stalled, took some time filling it with kerosene. Cyprian fussily trimmed the wick, finally lighted it. By now, they were determined to finish what they’d started. They used a crowbar and a can opener to pry up the hinged hatch in the floor.

Thinking back later, Delphine had the sensation that the door had blasted off, but of course, that couldn’t have been the case. It was just that they had been mistaken about the mighty odor they’d fought. That smell was only an olfactory shadow. Now came forth the real smell, the djinn, the source. Both of them dived through the back door and rolled, addled, in the scroungy backyard grass.

“What the hell was that?” said Cyprian, once they’d crawled to the beer crates and lighted their cigarettes with rubbery fingers. It was as though they’d been thrown from the house by a poltergeist. They could not even recall exactly whether they had actually lifted off the hatch.

“I think we did,” Delphine said.

“I do too,” said Cyprian.

“There’s someone down there.” Delphine breathed out a long smoky sigh.

“Who?”

“Someone dead.”

She was right. There was someone, plus another someone, and maybe another person, too. It was hard to tell. They were kind of mixed together, said Cyprian later. Afraid of the consequences of calling up the sheriff — what had Roy done? — they gathered every particle of traumatized energy and ventured back. They raced in holding their breaths, grabbed the lantern, leaned over the open hatch, looked down, and bolted back outside, all without breathing. Far from the house, they stopped and gasped.

“Did you get a good look?”

“Yeah.”

“It was a person, right?”

“Monsters.”

Which was exactly what those pitiable bodies had become — huge of tongue and pop-eyed, brain blasted, green, bloated, iridescent with fungal energy, unforgettably inhabited by a vast array of busy creatures. The bodies were stuffed upright in the cellar surrounded by many empty bottles.

What had Roy done?

“Now is it time to burn the house?” Delphine was panicked.

“We can’t. If we do, it means that we suspected foul play. There’s no way if we burn the house the sheriff won’t come investigate, or the fire chief. There’s no way to burn up the basement — I mean, what if even fire won’t destroy what’s down there? Then we’ll really be in trouble.”

Even at such a moment, Delphine was touched by his casual use of we. He could have ditched her right then, left her to handle her father and the stinking house and the bodies generating strange life in the cellar. But he stuck with her, uttered not a single word of exasperation with the mess. Besides this new competence, he is even loyal, thought Delphine, I would marry him if he did not have to do what he did with other men. It was an odd time to take his measure as a potential husband, perhaps, but as Cyprian faced this great challenge beside her, his brow furrowed in grave thought, Delphine observed that he had never looked more handsome. The planes of his sculpted cheeks were drawn and his eyes were somber. She liked this weighty, serious, considered quality he now displayed. She liked his patience with the problem.

“We will have to go back and tell Roy about the bodies,” he stated. “We need more information, Delphine.”

ROY BAWLED in a helpless rage at the two of them upon their return. He’d inadvertently rolled himself up tightly in the bedsheets and believed that they had put him into a rudimentary straitjacket. He’d been through the d.t.’s in a sanitarium once, and as part of his treatment the staff had fastened him in a cold wet sheet. They had tightly pinned together the edges seam to seam. He was left to experience whatever he would experience. It had been lonely snaking out in a soundproof padded room. Spiders had leaked from the walls and giant lice had crawled underneath his skin. The experience itself had driven him back to drink, he said, and he never even contemplated quitting again. His mind couldn’t take its own power.

“Can you take this?” said Delphine, unrolling him. “There’s dead people in your cellar.”

“Release me! I implore you!” Roy begged. As usual, his manner was a mixture of pretension, low need, and melodrama. “I need a blast here. Can you get me a good blast?”

With a resigned gesture, Delphine directed Cyprian to offer her father a sip of the whiskey they’d bought for him on the way.

“We’re going to let you down slow, Dad,” she said. “You’re going to have to talk to us. There’s dead people in your cellar,” she repeated.

“And who might they be?” he asked huffily.

“Well, we don’t know who.”

“Perhaps you could describe them.” Roy’s eye gleamed with a mad fire upon the pint of whiskey. He grew slyly meek. “What, may I ask, do they look like?”

“Hard to describe,” said Cyprian, with a helpless glance at Delphine. “One had on a porkpie hat, I think. There was a bow tie, or maybe it was something else… you know, come to think of it, one was wearing a suit.”

“A black suit?” Roy was suddenly alert.

“Delphine, do you think one was wearing a black suit?”

Delphine paced the floor, shut her eyes to recover the hideous picture in her mind. “I do think so. A black suit,” she faintly agreed.

Roy jumped up in a sudden fit of energy. He grabbed the whiskey from Cyprian’s hand before the other man could react, and he swilled as much as he could before, with a struggle, Delphine and Cyprian wrested the bottle back from him.

“Oh God, oh God!” Roy swiped his sleeve across his mouth and staggered around the room twice before he stood before them, hands thrown wide. “It’s Doris and Porky and their little kid, too!”

“What? What?” Delphine grabbed his shoulders and shook him so hard his head snapped back and forth.

“Hold off!” Roy slumped onto the bed, held his hand out for the whiskey bottle, which Cyprian put instead to his own lips. With a feral swift movement Roy tried to grab the flask, but Cyprian plucked it out of his reach and brandished it high.

“Who are Doris and Porky?”

“And their little… what… boy?” added Delphine. She knew the family, but not that well. Her friend Clarisse was a relative. In fact, Clarisse had told her a few things about Portland “Porky” Chavers, Delphine now remembered. Things so bad that she couldn’t feel sorry for him, at least.

“They were guests,” Roy said in a tranced voice. “At the funeral party.”

“Whose funeral?”

“Your girlfriend Clarisse’s dad. Friend of mine too, of course. He wanted a party, not a funeral, because he’s a Strub. I was the only one who would throw him a party instead of your typical funeral proceedings, which he’d attended all his life. I was the only one who would do it.” Roy paused, then spoke rather pompously. “You could call it an act of corporeal mercy.”

“Only you would think of that,” said Delphine.

“I was an extremely gracious host. We had tubs of beer,” Roy said in a longing, confessional hush.

“Bought with the rent money,” said Delphine in utter fury.

“It doesn’t matter about the beer,” said Cyprian. “Tell us about Doris and Porky.”

Roy gulped like a dutiful and panicked child, nodded, and went on.

“Weeks after, we did notice they were gone.”

“We who? Your stinking hobo friends?”

Roy gave Delphine a look of deceitfully gentle reproach, but he was too much in shock to carry out a more detailed act.

“Kozka and Waldvogel, Mannheim and Zumbrugge, all of those. Of course we wondered where they went. Porky wasn’t at the singing club. They just left everything. Their house was abandoned. Everything. Even their dog… it came back looking for them. It wouldn’t leave the pantry. Oh God! Now I know why!”

Roy bent double and began to weep, though with a soft intensity for which he needed no audience. “And here we thought they went down to Arizona,” he said softly, over and over.

Delphine and Cyprian felt themselves thump down like wooden beings, right on the bed, felt the breath leave their bodies. They tried to retrieve some sense, but it was too soon. Their nerves were shot. Cyprian went into the hotel bathroom, turned the bathwater on, and motioned to Delphine to enter. He tossed the whiskey bottle out to Roy and then they locked the door shut on him.

“Let’s not think,” Delphine counseled.

Cyprian didn’t even answer. He made the bath very, very hot, and he added some strawberry bubbles that he’d bought at the dime store. While the water was getting good and deep he took off all Delphine’s clothes, then he took off his own. As he balled them up and laid them in the corner, he said, “We’re going to burn these.” They got in and with great care and speechless tenderness they washed each other, then they soaked themselves sitting cupped together for comfort. They kept the water going in and out. Their skin got very soft, then spongy white, wrinkled as a toad’s. Once Roy knocked, but then he mumbled some vague apology and went away.

“I never want to leave this tub,” said Delphine.

Cyprian added more strawberry bubbles, more hot water, and they sat there and sat there until the water drained out, then they sat there some more.

NOW THEY HAD the problem of who to tell and what to do — there was family, there must be family for Doris and Porky, and, unbearable to contemplate, their child. And there was the infuriating prospect of getting the entire story out of Roy. They questioned him the next morning. He gave out bits and pieces. They learned, for instance, that he’d wandered off during the wake itself and slept in the abandoned coop that once housed the black rosecomb bantams that Delphine used to keep. In his grief over Cornelius Strub, father to Clarisse, he’d gone to live in the bum’s jungle down by the railroad tracks. Weeks had passed there, he thought, and when he returned he was so wrecked he was hallucinating. So he may have actually heard pounding, even awful noises coming from the walls and floors of his house, but at the same time, as he was plagued by the usual visions of snakes uncoiling from the lamps and dripping from the walls, he disregarded these noises.

“The noises finally went away,” he said in a small, flat voice that trailed off weakly. “As noises will do… and I said to myself I must be coming out of the delirium!”

“That’s it, we’d better go to the sheriff,” said Cyprian, grim-faced.

“Won’t they arrest Dad?”

“As long as he didn’t lock them in… you didn’t lock them in the cellar, did you?”

Roy sat bolt upright, rigid. His mouth fell open and he looked so vacant that for a moment Delphine was sure he was falling into a fit. Then he snapped his mouth shut suddenly and stated that he positively knew he had done no such thing.

“I don’t think they’ll prosecute. It looks to me, anyway, as though the whole thing was an accident. Maybe Doris and Porky got curious and went down there to show the old cellar hole to their”—Cyprian shut his eyes saying it—“little boy. Someone knocked those jars off the shelves and hit the ring in the floor. They got sealed in sometime at the wake.”

“I didn’t have a drop down there,” said Roy. “Not a single drop.”

“Well, who knows, then.”

The three ate a very tense, morose breakfast before walking over to the sheriff’s office.

SHERIFF ALBERT HOCK was a striking combination of fragility and mass. His delicate features were surrounded by great soft rings of flesh plumped into cheeks and chins. The pale brown hair on top of his head was a thin froth but the hair on his face was vigorous. His beard sprouted into stubble as soon as he shaved it. His mouth was grubby as a little boy’s and often smeared with juice or chocolate, but he had a precise way of putting things. The spinning hysteria of Roy Watzka caused him to tip away from his desk and go still in the wheeled chair. Impassive, his face was a mask of patient contempt, although when he blinked at Delphine his look was tender as an old dog’s.

“I want those bodies out of there!” said Roy in outrage.

From his attitude, one would have imagined the pitiful hulks in his cellar had invaded on purpose and died there to spite him. He glared at the sheriff as if Hock himself were responsible, which was, Cyprian thought, a very bad ploy.

“Here, sit down,” Cyprian advised Roy, whispering into his ear that he should also shut up. “We’d best go over this from the beginning.”

“Please do,” said Sheriff Hock, pulling himself back to the small wooden desk. He drew a brown paper blotter toward himself and folded his beautiful fingers around a pen. He smoothed his left hand over a record book bound in moss green fabric, into which he jotted information that people from the town brought to him. “You may proceed.” He nodded, opening the book.

Delphine took up the story. She and Cyprian then alternated the facts, relating everything in as much detail as they could recall, pausing politely as the sheriff copied their words. He seemed prepared to take down every single nuance and waited while they sought the best, most accurate, way to describe each step of their experience. With his hand poised, arrested in the air, and his eyebrows lush as sandy caterpillars, drawn in thought, he listened. The quality of his attention brought things out — the exact time of day, the light sources, the peculiar power of the odor, their own theories, their concern over Roy. By the time they took the sheriff up to the present moment, Delphine and Cyprian felt that they had participated in a monumental task. They were exhausted, and yet there was still so much before them.

As Sheriff Hock rose with tedious majesty, Delphine recalled that prior to his successful bid for the sheriff’s position, he had triumphed as King Henry VIII and also played a Falstaff legendary in the town. She regarded him with a complex respect mixed with pity. He was cruelly and hopelessly infatuated with Clarisse Strub, and everyone who knew it also knew she angrily despised him. He had chased her for years and written many a poem of self-pity. His passion had become a stale joke, but as he was the sheriff no one told him.

“We now commence the investigation,” he stated, walking to the back of his office. A small room held the signal tools of his status. Pistol, measuring tapes, red flags for stopping traffic, more notebooks and files, a rack bearing several rifles. He carefully grasped a selection of things he needed and then, leaving a copiously worded note for his deputy, ushered them out.

“Roy will ride with me,” he stated. Aclatter all at once with a combination of privilege and fear, Roy hopped into the passenger’s seat. Cyprian and Delphine followed, at a somber distance. When they reached the house and got out of the car, Delphine was impressed to see that the sheriff had included a quarantine mask in his kit, and that now he donned it as he entered the house. He wasted no energy speaking to them. His bulk passed swiftly and daintily between small rooms, and he soon blotted out the pantry door. Sheriff Hock opened the hatch in the floor. He made some cursory notes, propped the hatch open, and then stepped out the back door into the yard.

He stood there for a long while, either battling his stomach or collecting his wits. The others waited, silent, at a short distance.

“Before I can allow you to reinhabit your house,” the sheriff finally said to Roy, “I will have to interview the other guests who attended your house on the fatal night. Since, in your understandable zeal,” he now addressed Delphine and Cyprian, “you have probably both seen and destroyed any evidence of foul play, I will have to insist that you remain in town as potential witnesses.”

Both agreed, and the sheriff drove off. Roy informed the two that he needed a spot of solitude, and walked down to the bank of the river. Delphine tipped her thumb to her lips to indicate that he always stashed a bottle in the roots of trees near the bank. She and Cyprian proceeded to unload their DeSoto and to pitch their sleeping tent upwind and as far away from the house as possible. Then Delphine directed Cyprian to stay with Roy and make sure he didn’t take it into his head to go swimming once he got good and schnockered. She, meanwhile, would drive to town and gather supplies.

HERE’S AN ODD and paradoxical truth: a man’s experience of happiness can later kill him. Though he gave every sign of being no more than an everyday drunk, Roy Watzka was more. He was a dangerous romantic. In his life he had loved deeply, even selflessly, with all the profound gratitude of a surprised Pole. The woman he loved was the woman everyone supposed was Delphine’s mother, Minnie. No one ever saw her except in Roy’s pictures, or knew much about her except from Roy’s stories. Those stories, however, made her vivid in town memory. Perhaps she had had a secret self who loved Roy back with a singular passion, for there was little in Minnie’s indistinct photographs to indicate a romantic spirit. She was half turned away from the camera in one picture, her mouth clenched in a frown that might have been suspicion or just the shadow cast by direct sun. Another photograph caught her in a sudden movement, so she was blurred, her face trapped within an indistinct gray wash of light. In yet another, a chicken had flapped up and she’d reached suddenly to catch it so that her features were obscured by wings and hair.

Yet after she was gone, Roy indulged in a worship of those pictures. Some nights, he lighted a line of votive candles on the dresser and drank steadily, and spoke to her, until from deep in his cups she answered. Then, as candles played across the old photographs that Roy reverenced and he saw Minnie’s face clearly, he remembered her eyes transformed and softened by words he’d spoken. But what could Roy do with bliss remembered? Where could he put such a thing when he could no longer experience its power? During the first years after Minnie took her leave, a sorrow about which Roy would never speak and a time when Delphine was no more than a baby, Roy bounced in and out of drink with the resilience of a man with a healthy liver. He remained remarkably sloshed, even through Prohibition, by becoming ecumenical. Hair tonic, orange flower water, cough syrups of all types, even women’s monthly elixirs, fueled his grieving rituals. Gradually, he destroyed the organ he’d mistaken for his heart.

As her father began to drink out of a need produced increasingly by alcohol and less by her mother’s memory, Delphine reached her tenth year. After that, she knew her father mainly as a pickled wreck while her mother remained youthful and mysterious in the pictures on the dresser. The blur of movement, the obscuring chicken, made her look so lively. Just what killed her, Roy would never say. Delphine thought it a wonder nobody in the town ever drew her aside and took the satisfaction of whispering that secret in her ear. But since no one did, she concluded that no one knew. In that void of knowledge, Delphine’s mind had darted forward constructing fantasies, shaping her mother’s story out of common objects, daydreaming her features in shadows of leaves and shapes of clouds.

Delphine was sure, for instance, though Roy had never verified her theory, that the objects in her own tiny closet of a room once belonged to Minnie. The lacquer bureau, the picture of a wave crashing on a rock. Her prize was a wooden box. In it, she kept a small, white stone wrapped in the end of a ripped muslin scarf. Sometimes, when longing gripped her, she opened the cigar box, which still gave off a sweet and fleeting aroma of tobacco and cedar. Ceremoniously, often in the late afternoon when sun slanted through the western window of her tiny room, Delphine wound the scarf around her wrist and put the white stone in her mouth. She lay there sucking on the stone, memorizing its blunt edges with her tongue, wrapping and unwrapping the scarf from her wrist in a white haze of comfort.

When she was twelve years old, she put the stone back in the box and simply quit the habit. She replaced it with a more grown-up awareness of what she’d missed. Watching other girls with their mothers sometimes made her head swim, her neck ache, but she’d borne it. She had always been too stubborn and shy to approach an older woman — a teacher, the mother of a friend — with her need. But it had been there all along, sometimes buried, sometimes urgent, especially in times of difficulty. Now, as Delphine drove the car into town, she was glad that in their desperate struggle with the smell she and Cyprian hadn’t burned down the house, because she missed the photographs of her mother that Roy kept stashed in the top drawer of the black lacquer bureau. She wanted to look at them, to sit with the familiar mystery. She was afflicted with a sudden and almost physical need to open the cigar box, too, and remove the white stone. She stared ahead at the road and wished an old, pure, useless wish: that just once, for a moment, she’d had the gift of a clear look at her mother’s face. It was in that fit of longing to see the face of her mother, then, that Delphine entered Waldvogel’s Meats, and met Eva Waldvogel.