The Master Butcher's Singing Club

FIVE. The Butcher’s Wife

THE FIRST MEETING of their minds was over lard. Delphine was a faceless customer standing in the entryway of Waldvogel’s Meats, breathing the odor of fir sawdust, coriander, pepper, and apple-wood-smoked pork, a rich odor, clean and bloody and delicious. She walked forward eagerly and put her strong fingers on the counter.

“One quarter pound of bacon. I’m going to fry some fish in the grease.”

“What kind of fish?” asked Eva pleasantly. Her accent was heavy, but she didn’t stumble over words. She always started conversations with new customers, and this young woman, though familiar, was neither a regular customer nor an acquaintance. She stood behind the shining display cooler filled with every mood of red — twenty or thirty cuts of meat, summer sausage, liver sausage, beer sausage, veal, blood, Swedish, Italian and smoked pepper sausage, glistening hearts and liver and pale calf thymus, sweetbreads, as well as a great box of the delicately spiced, unsmoked, boiled wieners for which people stood in line on the days Fidelis made them fresh.

“Don’t know yet,” said Delphine. “They’re still swimming in the river.” She immediately recognized the woman behind the counter as the same woman who’d won the race in the dirt lot two days before. She felt familiar with her, and spoke with more assurance than she might have otherwise. “One strip is for bait. Then I figure that if we don’t catch the fish, we at least eat the rest of the bacon.”

“This plan is wise,” said Eva, weighing out the best pieces of lean bacon. With a new customer, she was always very careful with quality, and gave a small present as an enticement to return.

“Try this lard,” she insisted. “For fish, it is good. Very cheap and to save it you let the cracklings settle and pour off the top. Get your bacon for tomorrow. Now, there is lard and there is lard.”

Eva reached into the glass case cooled by an electric fan. “My husband was back in Germany a master butcher — not like Kozka, who no more than was a war cook — my Fidelis has learned a secret process to render fat. Taste,” she commanded. “Schmeckt gut!”

Eva held out a small blue pan of the stuff, and Delphine swiped a bit on the end of her finger.

“Pure as butter!”

“Hardly no salt,” Eva whispered, as though this was not for just anyone to overhear. “But you must have an icebox to keep it good.”

“I don’t have one,” Delphine admitted. “Well, I did, but while I was gone my dad sold it.”

“I seen you here, I seen you there,” said Eva, “but still I cannot place. If you please, your father’s name?”

Delphine liked Eva’s direct but polite manners and admired her thick bun of golden red hair stuck through with two yellow lead pencils. Eva’s eyes were a heated green striated with silver. There was, in one eye, an odd gleaming streak that would turn to a black line when the life left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door. At present, those eyes narrowed as the question of the lard, the icebox, the father who sold the icebox, were forming a picture in Eva’s mind. She waited for more information.

“Roy Watzka,” Delphine said slowly.

Eva nodded as she wrapped and secured the package all in one expert sweep, and took Delphine’s money. She counted the change into Delphine’s hand. The name told her all that she needed to know. “Come with me.” Eva swept her arm around back of the counter. “Here I will teach you to make a mincemeat pie better than you ever ate. It’s all in the goddamn suet.”

“Where did you learn to speak English?” asked Delphine.

“Close listening to the butchers,” said Eva.

As Delphine came back around the counter and followed Eva down the hall, she peeked at the office cascading with papers and bills, at the little cupboards that held the men’s clothes and who knows what, at the knickknack shelf set into the wall and displaying figures made of German porcelain. These figures were of little children — one picked roses, another led a small white goat. They entered the kitchen, which was full of light from big windows set into thick walls, placed over the sink. Here, for Delphine, all time stopped. She took in the room.

There was a shelf for big clay bread bowls and a pull-out bin containing flour. Wooden cupboards painted an astounding green matched the floor’s linoleum. Bolted to the counter was a heavy polished meat grinder. The table, round, was covered with a piece of oilcloth printed with squares. In each red-trimmed square there was printed a bunch of blue grapes, or a fat pink-gold peach, an apple or a delicate green pear. There were no curtains on the window, but pots of geraniums bloomed, scarlet and ferociously cheerful. The whole place smelled generously of fresh rolls.

Upon walking into Eva’s kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she’d settled like a bird. She sat in the sort of solid square-backed chair that Cyprian favored for balancing while Eva spooned coffee beans out of a Redwing crock, into a grinder, and then began to turn a little iron hand crank on a set of gears that gnashed the roasted beans. The grinding made a lot of noise, so Eva just raised her eyebrows at Delphine over the little mahogany box as she cranked. A wonderful fragrance emerged. Delphine took a huge breath. Eva, hands quick and certain, dumped the thin wooden drawer full of fresh grounds into a coffeepot made of gray enamel speckled with black and white. She opened a handle on her sink faucet and got the water out of that, not a pump, and then she put the coffeepot on the stove and lighted the burner of a stunning white gas range trimmed with chrome swirled into the title Magic Chef.

“My God,” Delphine exhaled. She didn’t have a word to say. But that was fine, for Eva had already whipped a pencil out of her hair and grabbed a pad of paper to set down the mincemeat recipe. Eva’s writing was of the old, ornate German style, and she was an awful speller, at least in English. The last tiny shortcoming made Delphine grateful — in fact, it was a great help to her, for Eva appeared so fantastically skilled a being, so assured, the mother also (she soon learned) of four sturdy and intelligent sons, the wife of a master butcher, that she would have been an unapproachable paragon to Delphine otherwise. Delphine — who never had a mother, who cleaned up shameful things in her father’s house, who toughened on cold and hunger, and whose lover balanced six chairs and himself upon her stomach, Delphine who was regarded as beneath notice by Argus’s best society, and yet could spell — stole confidence from the misspelled recipe. At that moment, she made a strategic decision.

Since sooner or later this Eva, whom she already dearly wished to have as a friend, would learn of what happened in the house of Roy Watzka, Delphine decided to tell. True, she would be immediately associated in Eva’s mind with a sordid mess, but the older woman would know anyway, soon enough. Delphine understood, moreover, that she was in possession of a valuable thing. A story, a source of gossip, perhaps even the making of town myth, was hers. Hers to give to Eva, who could always say, First thing the girl came to me half undone, the poor kid, and she told me…. And so, exhausted and dispirited though she was, and still disgusted by what she had been through during the past three days, Delphine related to Eva all she’d just experienced. With the understanding that it was a prime piece of town gossip, she said offhandedly, only, “you’re the first to know.”

Eva heard the story with a prelate’s fearless gaze, and although she was not asked for absolution, provided it in the form of the fresh coffee and a cinnamon bun exquisitely dotted with raisins and sugar and butter. Because the horror was just beginning to seep into Delphine’s own mind, it filled her with gratitude to be treated in a very simple, human way. It was only when one of Eva’s youngest sons, a strong little boy of five or six years, round-faced with brown curls, ran into the kitchen, asked for and got a roll, and ran back out, that Delphine burst into tears. All along, she had been shielding her mind from the actuality of that child in the cellar. She hoped they’d kept him drunk, or that in some way he’d found comfort in being with his parents at the last. Face to face with his unthinkable end, Delphine felt again the old shocking powerlessness. The little house she’d grown up in seemed determined to teach her just how cruel life was, and always to spare her so that she could ponder.

This is shameful, she thought, her face in her hands as she sobbed, to come to this woman’s house and cry my heart out! But Eva seemed used to people crying at her table. That or she was lost in knowledge of the events that Delphine had recounted. Eva murmured, “Shoosh.” From time to time she put a hand on Delphine’s shoulder and provided more coffee.

“You weep seldom,” she said, which made Delphine feel somehow impossibly strong and heroic.

“True,” said Delphine, though it was the second time she’d wept since her return to this town, where her father would always be known, now, as the man too drunk to hear three people dying in his cellar.

LEAVING THE BUTCHER SHOP with a chunk of wrapped lard, the bacon, three oranges, six onions, bread, and a stick of summer sausage, Delphine thought it might be possible for her to face her father once again. She drove toward the house, bumping clumsily along, skirting the larger pits and holes. Meeting Eva had put her into a dreamy state — it was much like being in love but it was also very different. That Eva had taken notice of her, even taken her into the kitchen, that Eva had given every sign of wanting to know Delphine, it was all too sudden a pleasure. By the time Delphine turned down the long, sorry curve and caught first sight of the little house, she decided it was probably a one-time thing, a kindness on Eva’s part. Or that her weeping would have surely frightened her off. Even so, she was very grateful that Eva had invited her into her kitchen.

“I’ll have a kitchen like that someday,” she said out loud.

The sight of the sheriff’s car and the gangly boy-deputy, an undertaker’s hearse, and a couple of curious neighbors, as well as Cyprian disconsolately juggling in the corner of the far field, reminded her that day would not be coming soon.

THE TOWN FUNERAL DIRECTOR and mortician, Aurelius Strub, was in charge of hauling out the bodies, along with his wife, Benta, and his young niece and apprentice mortuary assistant, Delphine’s friend, Clarisse. Clarisse stood to inherit the business, Strub’s Funerary, the most advanced and well-respected funeral practice in that part of the state. Her future had complicated her high school relationships, as one by one her classmates realized that if they lived their lives in Argus, they would eventually wind up in the resolute, rubber-gloved hands of Clarisse Strub. Pretty Clarisse, who got an A+ in the dissection of a flatworm. Flirtatious Clarisse, who already knew the art of using makeup in the next life, as well as this one. Clarisse, whose brilliant and mocking glance had dimmed for a time when she suffered a secret and shocking infection, the cause of which was never determined. To cure the disease, which may have originated with a body whose syphilitic condition was unknown, for even then she had assisted in the embalming room from time to time, under her aunt’s supervision, Clarisse underwent a complex long-term treatment. Her cure was overseen by Doctor Heech, who insisted that a dead body could not possibly have transmitted the disease and viewed her infection with a sober suspicion. His method of treatment consisted of intravenous salvarsan and deep-tissue mercury injections, both extremely unpleasant. Clarisse was toughened to them, but Delphine had quailed to see her poked. She’d held her friend’s hand all through, nonetheless. The only day they’d not minded was the day when the treatments had made Clarisse’s gums bleed and Heech had conditioned them with a cocaine rub. Delphine was the only one besides Doctor Heech who knew what had happened, and the only person, other than family members, who was ever admitted into the sanctum of the Strub Funerary basement.

Clarisse wore a sacklike white gown, a green mask, gloves of india rubber, and smoked glasses, but her curly black hair gave her away, and even the hard realities of her vocation hadn’t dulled the singular light in her face. The sight of Delphine caused her to rip off her mask and gloves and then, torn between excitement at seeing her friend and the gravity of the situation, she threw out her hands and stepped closer. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, for the Strub family practiced resolute control and reverence in the presence of the dead, and she should not be seen joking about with a friend. Finding that they were alone, Clarisse screwed her face into a mask of hideous intensity. They had acted together in town theater as first and second witch in Macbeth.

“When shall we three meet again,” she hissed. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

“When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won,” Delphine went on.

The two could have gone on and on like this, for they knew practically the entire play as they’d understudied Lady Macbeth, and everyone else in the cast, but Aurelius appeared with a grim-looking package, and Clarisse made signs for talking later. Delphine mimed sympathy. They could communicate perfectly with facial expressions. Clarisse twisted up her face and from one side of her mouth croaked, “Like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”

Before she returned to her work, with a flash of intrigue, she pointed to Delphine’s tent, across the field, and at Cyprian, who with his shirt off was practicing his gymnastic exercises and his balances on a chair dragged from the kitchen. Clarisse winked over the hygienic green mask and then turned to continue with her difficult tasks. They were going to have to vat the bodies right in the yard, Delphine saw. A three-sided canvas screen had been set up just beyond the door and the smell of formalin and rubbing alcohol came from behind it. Jugs of distilled water were neatly lined up on the grass. There was a sense about the scene, now, of efficiency and seriousness. When the Strubs appeared to take charge of the dead, there always was a sense of relief. Clarisse was still regarded as a bit exuberant, but the Strubs generally developed the right temperament for the job, a matter-of-fact sympathy not at all unctuous, oily, or sweet. The town relied upon them. The dead were complicated in their helplessness, and made everyone around them helpless, too, except the Strubs.

As Delphine walked her packages out to the tent, she saw that Cyprian had made a little fireplace out of rocks. He was proving remarkably handy, she thought, in ways odd and wonderful. For instance, the fireplace was not a lazy round circle of rocks, it was carefully fit stone on mortared stone. There was a chimney, a little shelf. A hook set into the mortar. He was fixing up the chicken coop. And, too, there was his beauty.

As Cyprian turned toward her with a gentle sideways glance his profile caught her breath. His eyes were deeply set, a resinous coal, and his nose was a classical line with perfect teardrops of nostrils. There was a slight curve to his lips, and an eerie perfection to his teeth when he smiled. It was that last, the even whiteness of his teeth, she decided now, that might possibly make his face too handsome to be handsome. Yes, she imagined, regarding him more critically, there was something to that. Some imperfection makes a face much stronger looking, gives it points of interest. Or am I just jealous? Protecting my own heart?

She held out the packages. He took them from her and added them to his juggling routine, happily catching and tossing them before him and behind him, in the air, under a leg lifted straight out and pointy-toed like a ballerina’s, and then crooked to the side like a pissing dog’s.

How could one not love a man who juggled so cleverly? How not love a man who stuck by you while the sheriff and deputies and morticians hauled three bodies out of the cellar of your father’s house? She forgot her moment of critical thinking and merely decided to appreciate Cyprian. There was no question, he had done his best to make her comfortable. He had not only erected their own private tent, but rigged up another, a neatly constructed house of tarpaulin and blanket, for her father, and it was near the river. Near Roy Watzka’s inevitable root-bound stash. Far away so that they wouldn’t hear him snore.

After the three dead bodies were taken away, a traumatized exhaustion descended on Delphine and Cyprian. They sat long, staring in a numb trance, at the fire until it burned down to coals. A gentle snow of darkness fell upon them. There was no moon. Long into the night, they sipped fresh water and ate summer sausage, bread and lard, oranges for dessert, for Cyprian had caught no fish after all. The moonless night brought out the beams of stars. There was a gentle extravagance of light in the heavens. The air was so quiet they could hear the river flowing, and within its low sound Delphine at last shed a little of the horror and experienced a rare comfort.

An urgency to speak gripped her. The darkness covered her face; her father was drinking down in the bushes; Cyprian was sitting beside her. She decided to ask.

“That man by the river. You know what I’m saying.”

Cyprian’s heart thunked, a jolt of adrenaline buzzed his brain. He had been waiting for this moment, hoping it wouldn’t come. Long before, he had decided what his answer would be.

“You’re all I want out of life,” he said.

Delphine pondered this. In a way, this was exactly what she’d prayed for when much younger, trapped in her room while drunks roared in the yard and kitchen. Here was a good-looking man, very strong and with an odd, but surprisingly proven, source of income that consisted of balancing. A talented man. A man who professed that she was all he wanted out of life — that is, presumably he wanted to marry her. And yet, this man had what she now understood she’d heard referred to as an affliction. That was the polite way she’d heard it. Other than such references, this whole thing was sheer enigma.

“Why do you do it?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“I have to know.”

As usual, and Cyprian could have predicted this, she would not accept an easy answer or even one that allowed him to keep his dignity. Even an evasion that might ensure their happiness was unacceptable. Nothing he’d heard about his desire matched the feelings that he had when he was experiencing this form of love. Then, at those times, it was simply the most basic joy he’d ever felt. He’d always hoped that he would never, ever, have to explain it, especially to a woman. But, he thought, looking at the ruby firelight on Delphine’s face, if he had to tell a woman he was glad it was she. The way he felt about Delphine Watzka was an utter surprise to him, something he’d never expected in his life. He loved the things she said, her amusing directness, the strength she had dismissed until he taught her to develop it, and now, the kindness she showed toward this scroungy old bastard of a father. Even her insistence that he tell her the truth about this hidden side of himself was a part of her true charm.

Still, he didn’t know how to put it, and she was determined to obtain the whole truth and nothing less.

“You’re not a Pole with a name like Lazarre,” she sidetracked.

“I am not,” he admitted.

“So then what are you?”

“I’m French.”

“Plus what else?”

Cyprian paused. “Well,” he said at last. “I’m Chippewa. Ojibwe. The word my grandpa used was Anishinaabeg — the humans. Same thing.”

“That makes you an Indian.”

It was no small thing to admit this in the town where the two now lived openly together as though married, but he did at last.

“You have light skin.”

“My dad was half French and my mom was part French, too. Have you ever heard of michifs or métis?” Cyprian peered at her, then shrugged and looked away. “I guess not, but if you had, you’d have heard of my famous ancestor, Louis Riel, who died a martyr to the great vision of a mixed-blood nation — not a loose band or bunch of hunters. A place with boundaries and an actual government taking up a big chunk of Manitoba. There’s lots of us who still do dream about it! I’m descended of a famous man, Delphine, for your information. Riel. You can find him in the books of history.”

“Was he a good balancer?”

Cyprian cocked his head to the side and smiled. “He was an excellent balancer, but they hung him anyway. I guess the light side of my relatives came out in me, if not their heroics, though I did fight a decent war. All my cousins, two of my brothers, they’re brown.”

“But now I see it,” said Delphine, softening toward him and his fantasy of lost glory and a hero’s inheritance, “in your eyes and all, or maybe in your hair.” Still, she was not to be diverted by Cyprian’s sudden burst of information. “Tell me about the man beside the river.”

Her voice was patient, and Cyprain lost any hope of diverting her. His breath came short and he attempted to find the right words to describe what came over him when he knew it was going to happen with another man. He couldn’t, and was relieved when she finally asked him a question.

“Did it start in the war?”

“It started in the war!’

He said this with a surge of hope, for it was an explanation that he hadn’t thought of yet. Yes, his thoughts knit quickly. This could be another freak effect of wartime life, a consequence of living so closely with other men, a side effect of getting gassed, or of the other things, septic wounds, a trench disease, a fear-borne germ. As he scrambled about with these explanations in his mind, he knew that they were not enough. During the war he had, in fact, fallen devoutly in love with another man, whose death he still grieved. And the love itself had not been a surprise. For he’d always known. It was perfectly apparent to him that he had the feelings for men that men usually expressed for girls, then women. What could be more obvious? No, the war had done far worse things than deciding whom he could or couldn’t love.

Even thinking of it exhausted him.

“Look,” he finally said, wearily, “ask yourself the same question. Why you like to do it with men? Your answer is the same as my answer.”

Delphine nibbled some bread, poked the fire into a stronger blaze, and considered. After thinking of it for some time, she decided that she now felt a kinship with him that was more female than male. It seemed as though she could tell him anything that went on in her woman’s heart, and he would understand it, he would know the truth of it, having felt it in his own. So she was satisfied with his answer although it meant that truly, for good and all, they would not be lovers. She did not know if they would even travel anymore, putting on their show. After all, they were stuck for a time, right here, according to their pledge to Sheriff Hock. What they needed to think about, especially in the face of the money they’d been forced to spend on the hotel, schnapps for Roy, cleaning supplies and new blankets, was work. They had to think just how they would acquire work.

THIS TIME, Delphine walked over to the meat shop, a distance of about four miles. She and Cyprian had decided not to waste gasoline. Also, she needed to exercise her leg muscles in case they did resume their show — perhaps they should put it on here for a weekend or two just to raise enough to purchase a new mattress for Roy, not to mention buy a concoction that would remove the still raging stink from the floor and walls of the house. When Delphine walked into Waldvogel’s she noted the jangle of a cheerful shop bell and thought how pleasant it would be to hear it from deep in the house.

Delphine made known the purchases she sought, as before, and as before, Eva asked her to come sit down for a coffee. There was not a product on Eva’s household cleaning shelf that would serve as a strong enough cleanser for the job Delphine required, and Eva wanted to concoct something of her own.

“Believe me, I have the experience,” she said. “This type of stink is a hell of a problem. Most difficult to destroy.

“First off, a good vinegar and water wash down. Then I should order the industrial strength ammonia for you — only be careful with the fumes of it. Maybe, if that doesn’t work good enough yet, raw lye. From the first, Delphine, I suggest to fill that cellar in, not just sprinkling with lime, but packing her up with a good mixture of wood ash and dirt. You will not be going to use it?”

Delphine vigorously shook her head.

“Then good. Fill it up.” Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, the sides rolled in smooth twists, the knot itself in the shape of the figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch some risen dough and cover it with towels. As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time’s range and could not be pilfered by God.

Well, it was God, wasn’t it, Delphine’s thoughts went on stubbornly, who made time and created the end of everything? Tell me this, Delphine wanted to say to her new friend, why are we given the curse of imagining eternity when we know we can’t experience it, when we ourselves are so finite? She wanted to say it, but suddenly grew shy, and it was in that state of concentrated inattention that she met Eva’s husband, Fidelis Waldvogel, master butcher.

Before she met him, she sensed him, like a surge of electric power in the air when the clouds are low and lightning bounds across the earth. Then she felt a heaviness. A field of gravity moved through her body. She tried to rise, to shake the feeling, when he suddenly filled the doorway. Then entered, and filled the room.

It was not his size. He was not extraordinarily tall, not broad. But he shed power, as though there was a bigger man crammed into him. Or could it have been that he was stuffed with the cries of animals? Maybe it was his muscled shoulders, or his watchful quiet. One thick red and punished hand hung down at his side like a hook; the other balanced on his shoulder a slab of meat. That cow’s haunch weighed a hundred pounds or double that. He held it lightly, although the veins in his neck throbbed, heavy-blooded as a bull’s. He looked at Delphine and his eyes were white blue. Their stares locked. Delphine’s cheeks went fever hot and she looked down first. Clouds flew across the sun. Light shuddered in and out of the room, and the red mouths of the geraniums on the windowsill yawned. The shock of his gaze caused her to pick up one of Eva’s cigarettes. To light it. He looked away from her and conversed with his wife.

Then he left without asking to be introduced.

That abruptness, though rude, was more than fine with Delphine. Already, she didn’t want to know him. She hoped she could avoid him. It didn’t matter, as long as she could still be friends with Eva, or even hold the job that she soon was offered, waiting trade.

“When?”

Delphine was immediately happy with the thought of working in the shop and sitting for her breaks in Eva’s kitchen every day.

“Starting tomorrow.”

“I’ll be right here when you open,” said Delphine.

“At six.”

From the next day on Delphine used the back door that led past the furnace and washtubs, the shelves of tools, the bleached aprons slowly drying on racks and hooks. Leaving the utility room, she walked down the hallway cluttered with papers and equipment. Lifted from a hook by the shop door Eva’s own apron, blue with tiny white flowers. From now on, she would hear the customer bell ring from the other side of the counter. She would know the slaughterhouse, the scalding tub, the tracks and hooks that held unbroken quarters of beef and half hogs. There was a cooler. Open the steel lever and the air lock broke, the thick door sighed open. She gulped the scent of spice and cheese. The deep freeze had a grimmer odor. Both were fitted with tracks, hooks, bins, and shelves. Between the slaughtering room and the store was a small smoking room, and piled beside it logs of hickory or apple wood and buckets of brine. Set to the side of the little smoking room was the busy processing room fitted out with butcher blocks, stubby tables where the quarters were broken. There were steel-sheeted tabletops around the saw where steaks and roasts were cut. The floor of that room was spread with fresh sawdust every morning to soak up blood and absorb the dust of bones that the meat saws spewed and the bits and pieces of gristle and suet that were flung off the blocks when they were cleaned with heavy, rectangular steel brushes. Aprons smeared with blood hung by the doors. It was Delphine’s job to assist in the shop laundry. Every day, she collected the stained aprons and rags and brought them back to the concrete-floored laundry room. Eva let her bring her own laundry, too. Not that Eva ever said so, but no matter how hard Delphine washed, it felt to her as though the smell of Roy’s house lingered — maybe in the seams of her dress, in the green and gray checks, the vines of the print, the stitched hem. Only gradually would that scent be replaced by the smell of the shop. Raw blood, congealed fat, sharp pepper, and sawdust. Delphine put on a fresh clean dress nearly every day. She washed her hair in the river at night. Still, the smell of meat clung to her, and bothered her until she finally grew used to it and didn’t smell it anymore.

ON HER SECOND DAY of work, Delphine was arranging loops of wieners in the cooler when she heard the bell jangle, then jangle again, then jangle with a truly furious commotion. Who was this who could not wait a few seconds? Who was it who entered in a stormy tantrum? Irritated, Delphine stepped out of the cool locker into the presence of a woman known in town as Step-and-a-Half. She was a rangy stray dog of a woman who was probably still young — she looked between thirty and forty — and yet moved with an air of ancient bitterness. Step-and-a-Half lived alone, when she lived in Argus at all, and made her living trading in rags. Roy spoke to her sometimes, and Delphine remembered times as a child when Step-and-a-Half had thrust a stick of candy or a coin into her hands. Times when the woman had appeared, from nowhere, and drunks in the house had melted off as though into the earth. She was intimidating. The name Step-and-a-Half was hers because the length of her stride was phenomenal. She loved the night and could be seen, her beanpole figure in a trance of forward movement, walking the town streets and checking back porches to see whether anyone had left out a worn skirt, a piecemeal assortment of shirts and blouses, or maybe even a coat. Now, since she ate the town’s leavings as well as gathered them, she’d come for tripe. Or snouts, though Eva mainly used them in a salad that she believed was especially nutritious for boys. Today bones were also available for Step-and-a-Half. Delphine knew this because already Eva had set them aside.

The bones, cut generously and hung with scraps of meat, lay collected in a pan underneath a towel. Delphine shook them into waxed, white paper, wrapped and secured them in string she pulled down from a roll suspended from the ceiling. She pushed the package impatiently across the counter, expecting Step-and-a-Half to snatch it. But the older woman threw back her racklike shoulders, stood tall, and glared down at the package in quizzical silence. She carefully unwrapped it. Wordless, she smoothed out the white paper between them, and displayed the dull, fat-smeared bones. Step-and-a-Half examined the bones as though they told the future.

“This one’s for shit.” She pushed a knobbed legbone aside. “And I don’t take necks.”

Step-and-a-Half inspected the rest, smiled approvingly at an oxtail, exercised over the scraps the meticulous discernment of a banker’s wife critically comparing the marbling on expensive steaks. When done, she waved the bones back. Delphine ceremoniously retied the package and gave them to the woman with a respectful flourish. She understood that this was the way Eva did things. Satisfied now with her treatment, Step-and-a-Half reached into an inner pocket of her voluminous man’s trench coat and pulled out a neatly cut pile of dust rags.

“Give ’em to Eva,” she ordered, as though she thought that Delphine would keep the rags. Her eyes were a brilliant and searching black. Her gaze had at first seemed powered by a sharp, cryptic hatred, but now suddenly she shifted, looked at Delphine with an unreadable expression of melancholy.

“Can I help you with something else?” Delphine asked, uncertain. But Step-and-a-Half only continued to stare, taking Delphine in carefully. For her part, Delphine stared right back. That was when she noticed something new about Step-and-a-Half. Although her face was planed rough, her features, almost noble in their raw strength, could have been beautiful if suspicion had not pulled the corners of her mouth down so tightly that deep lines tied beneath her chin. Her eyes, that surprising color, were constantly narrowed. Suddenly, the older woman slapped the counter sharply with one hand. She grabbed the package with the other and without a word of thanks or gesture of common courtesy, she turned on her heel and swept out. The door jangled shut in that same fury with which she had entered.

That was one of the customers, and there were others. Some paid money and some, like Step-and-a-Half, lived off the scraps. For the shop and the dead animals fed a complex range of beings — from the banker, his steak cooked perfectly and set before him every night, to those who bought the sausages, then the cheapest cuts; from the family of Dakota Sioux who were darker than Cyprian and dressed in old-fashioned calicos, wore strings of rose, blue, coral, and yellow beads, and traded wild meat or berries for flour and tea, to the ones who did not pay at all like Step-and-a-Half, Simpy Benson, the Shimeks, and the out-of-work fathers who had taken to Depression roads; and still on down to the dogs who gnawed the bones that Step-and-a-Half rejected and even further, to the plants that flourished on the crushed bones even the dogs could not chew to bits.

There were also a number of customers who didn’t always buy but regularly came in to talk or to plan the meetings of the singing club — the fat bootlegger, Gus Newhall, and the courtly, stone-broke, but immaculate Tensid Bien, who always wore a tie and coat, who took forever to browse through the Sunshine Baking Company rack of cookies, from which he meekly sampled, and who bought one or two slices at a time of minced ham, occasionally an orange, a few cookies, a meager cut of the toughest beef, a turnip, a sparse rind of cheese. There was Pouty Mannheim of the Mannheim brothers, chubby and with rich-boy airs, and his confused perpetual girlfriend, Myrna. There was Chester Zumbrugge, who tried to put the moves on her. There were Scat Wilcomb and Mercedes Fox, Old Doctor Heech and his son, Young Doctor Heech, who was not a doctor at all but a dentist, and was that shocking thing, a vegetarian, and thus suspected to be a Communist. The only one of them all whom Delphine truly dreaded seeing, however, was Eva’s spoiled sister-in-law. Everyone just called her Tante because she otherwise insisted on her baptismal name, Maria Theresa, and no one wanted to add to her swellheadedness by using such a queenly title.

Delphine did not call her Tante, she did not call her anything. She carefully did not address the woman who swept in with one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself were subdued by the woman’s sense of her own elegance and importance. On Delphine’s first day of work, Tante went right around to the sliding panel on the case that held the sausage, opening it with a clatter. She fished out a ring of baloney and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched Maria Theresa — actually, she stood back and envied the woman’s shoes. Those shoes were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather, and cleverly buttoned. They fit her long, narrow foot with a winsome precision. Tante might not have a captivating face, for in that she resembled Fidelis, she replicated his most aggressive features — the powerful neck and icy bold demeanor, a too stern chin, thinner lips and eyes of a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers. Still, Tante’s feet were slim and pretty. She was vain of them, and all her shoes were of the most expensive leather and make.

“Who are you?” Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off without deigning to accept an answer. The question, insulting in the first place, since Delphine had already been introduced to the butcher’s sister, hung in the air. Who are you is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it between them, bounced but did not retrieve it, Delphine was left to consider the larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.

Who are you, Delphine Watzka, you drunkard’s child and fairy’s whore, you vagabond, you motherless creature with a belly of steel and a lusting heart? Who are you, what are you, born a dirty Pole in a Polack’s dirt? You with a household cellar full of human rot and a man in your tent who has done the unimaginable to other men? Who are you, with a father seen sucking his bottle like a baby in its own shit? Who are you and what makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother, Fidelis, who is the master of all he does?

DELPHINE WAS NOT CAPABLE of indulging in that sort of self-doubt without resenting the one who had introduced it into her heart. She hated Tante from the first and she imagined the woman’s overthrow. She would be ruthless in attaining at least one small eventual victory from which Tante never recovered. Tante even tried to lord it over Eva, for which, in her complicated, loyal heart, Delphine detested her. When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law’s fresh bread under her arm, and grabbed a bottle of milk besides without a by-your-leave, Delphine wrote it down on a slip. Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of baloney, and a loaf of bread. And she left it at that. She did not know there would be repercussions for even so slight an accounting, but there were, for Tante didn’t take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. Out of money left by her grandmother, whose favorite she was, Tante once gave her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment. Although he had paid her back, she continued to take her interest out in ways that would remind them all of her dutiful generosity.

The boys, in particular Markus and Franz, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. They were foreign to her. She had not been around them often. Now, things were different. As these boys were children belonging to Eva, she was interested in who they were. She took note of them beginning with the oldest boy, Franz.

At fifteen years he was extremely strong and athletic with a proud, easygoing American temperament perfectly transparent and opaque at the same time. His inner thoughts and moods were either nonexistent or hidden, she couldn’t tell. He always smiled at her. He always said hello with only the faintest German accent. He was always cheerful and he was unfailingly polite. As time went on, she would see that he was the product of Fidelis’s insuperable patience and also his controlled rage. Franz’s strength coupled with his mother’s wire-frame tenacity made him a formidable athlete. He played football, basketball, and baseball, all with powerful grace, and was, in fact, something of a town hero.

The next boy was more reclusive. Markus was barely nine but already it was clear that he had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he’d play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his own interests. He had inherited his mother’s long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as though to say, What an idiotic spectacle. Markus was also polite, though more restrained. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted to the last degree upon his mother. He was named after her beloved father. His mother often stroked his hair, so like her own, the curls clipped. She often pulled him close and kissed him. He pulled away, as boys had to, but in a gentle way that showed he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

The two youngest boys, Erich and Emil, were five-year-old twins, bull strong, morose when hungry, perfectly happy once they ate their fill, simple of heart and devoted to their stick guns and homemade sets of clay and twig armies that eternally strove in combat across the floor of their back room. Those armies, which included those that once had belonged to Fidelis, and a few more modern soldiers bought with precious pennies, were just about the only toys in evidence around the house. Once, when Delphine wondered what boys played with, Eva told her that they played with everything around them, inventing it into something else.

“A stick, it becomes a gun. Our meat trays they slide down the hills. Once in a while a bat, a ball. You never know. Delphine, I just leave them out of my interest to see what they build.”

Delphine watched and indeed they made surprising things. Out of abandoned springs, wheels, crates, they put together a buggy that the dogs pulled. They rigged up a near lethal tree swing, which flung them from a branch near the road in an arc over the dirt where they could be hit by a passing car. Down near the river, they made rafts out of old lumber scraps. Swords from lathes, forts from packing-crate wood, guns that shot gravel, bombs of cow’s bladders filled with water. Yet, in spite of their rowdy play out in the world, they were quiet and subdued in the shop and around their father, especially. They worked hard on slaughtering days. When every hand was needed, even the two youngest pulled gizzards inside out and cleaned them of gravel. Once old enough, the boys learned to use knives without slicing off their hands. Fidelis had determined to train them all in his profession.

There was that — the profession. Delphine didn’t mind selling groceries, or even cutting headcheese, but butchering wasn’t her kind of work. Not only did she hate the brutish excitement of the killing, but its long and meticulous aftermath. The casings must be washed and rewashed, for sausage, and the gizzards turned inside out and carefully smoothed back together. Each product had an endless procedure and she thought some of the steps unnecessary, though Eva insisted they were not. Maybe, Delphine thought, she wouldn’t mind actually mixing the spices up into the ground meat and making the sausages, but that was Fidelis’s work and he was jealous of each step he took. Some steps were secret. He brooded over each batch like an alchemist.

Delphine would rather have spent her time on the stage, or even backstage, designing costumes and sewing them. She liked to build sets. She was good at everything that had to do with drama and most of all she liked dressing up in whatever composed a costume: feathers, wreaths, gowns, Victorian shirtwaists. Delphine had always loved making up shows. It was, in fact, their mutual passion for disguise that had first brought Clarisse and Delphine together while they were still in grade school. They had staged complicated shows in Clarisse’s backyard, using a sheet draped over a clothesline for a curtain, and playing all parts with complicated costume changes and stage directions, even lighting from an old captain’s lamp, the glow of which could be directed onto the grass as a kind of spotlight after dark. Their inventions, and the mingled derision and awe in which other children held them, had made them close as only children can be who are set apart. Their loyalty to each other had saved them. Over time, they had become invulnerable to teasing and gained a complex form of respect. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. So it began to happen with “those two girls”—an acceptance of their peculiar getups and an appreciation of their entertainment value.

Still, in their shared daydreams, Clarisse and Delphine had always seen themselves taking leave of Argus, moving off into the vague wilderness of cities and other people and even bona fide theaters. Although Delphine had, for a short time, pursued some form of their fantasy, she was disappointed that it had only been as a human table, a prop, the base of Cyprian’s flamboyant balancing. As for Clarisse, she’d never left at all, since her father and uncle required her in the business directly after high school. It was her fate to stay and to assist the town’s dead on their short journey into the earth. She didn’t mind, she told Delphine, she had accepted it. She had always known that she would step into her parents’ spot, but once she lost them the luxury of going to school or playing at drama was at an end. Besides, her aunt Benta said she had a natural aptitude for embalming, which was an art that went back to the Egyptians but was only now catching on in the Dakotas. Aurelius Strub had taken the course and earned his diploma from one of the first itinerant embalmers to enter the state. Since then, he had made steady technical improvements. Strub’s was getting first calls from people in towns at quite a distance, from people who had seen and found comfort in the serenity of the bodies that Strub’s prepared and displayed.

Clarisse moved her own grocery trade from Kozka’s market to Waldvogel’s, as soon as Delphine began to work there. She had inherited her parents’ house and often unwound from her day by cooking elaborate meals for herself in her mother’s kitchen. She was very finicky about her diet, and Delphine now saved the leanest cuts of meat for her. They were alone in the shop one afternoon, regarding a lavender-pink pork chop that Delphine had just laid on a piece of waxed paper.

“Trim off the fat, will you?” said Clarisse.

“There’s no fat on it,” said Delphine.

“Just that corner,” said Clarisse, pointing.

Delphine removed a bit of translucent flesh no bigger than a fingernail.

Clarisse nodded for her friend to wrap the rest. Her pinch-waisted brown suit of summer-weight wool and her crisp white blouse and white piped leather pumps looked good enough for city wear. Her philosophy, she’d informed Delphine, was not only to prepare the deceased as the guest of honor at a party, but to dress herself with an elegance that befit the grand going-away occasion. She had just come from the funeral of a thirty-four-year-old drowning victim, a man, and was pleased, though she merely hinted of this and only whispered the disagreeable term “floater,” that she had managed to nearly eliminate the awful red and purple blotches from his face and halt its typical rapid degradation.

“I would never have let him go out in front of people looking like that drowned boy who purged, right in the church, up in Fargo,” she said. “Sloppy work. Those poor parents. The wife of mine — you don’t know them, they’re new in town — anyway, his wife told me that she couldn’t believe the work we’d done. She thanked me. The family tried to give Benta extra money. We wouldn’t take it. How do you like this jacket?”

The two were the same size and Clarisse was generous with her clothing, so Delphine always took a possessive interest in her friend’s wardrobe. Even now, Clarise said pleasantly, “This would look swell on you.”

“I can’t think where I would actually wear it,” said Delphine.

“You and Cyprian go out, don’t you?”

“We’re living in a tent, Clarisse,” said Delphine, and then she laughed. So did Clarisse. Her sweet, fresh voice bubbled over the rumble of generators and the clash of meat grinders out in back. While they were laughing, Eva walked into the shop with a new roll of string for the spool that hung above the cash register. She gave Clarisse the smile Delphine knew as her formal smile, the one she used with customers she did not particularly know or like. Delphine wasn’t sure which category her friend fell into, and she experienced a sudden anxiety, a confusion of loyalties in which she wanted to please them both. But Eva swept immediately out and Clarisse, who hadn’t picked up on Eva’s formality and probably thought that she was merely busy, was frowning at her fingernails in a serious way that Delphine knew meant she was thinking of imparting some questionable piece of information.

“Come on,” Delphine said to her friend, though she felt guilty now, talking on the job, “business is slow. I’ve got a minute. Let’s hear it.”

“In a way, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before,” said Clarisse, pouting with vexation.

“Give it over,” said Delphine firmly.

Clarisse tipped her head down and eyed her friend almost angrily from beneath her brows.

“Hock came to my house last night, late. He stood on the porch, talking of this and that, trying to pretend like we shared some secret until I wanted to scream. I shut the door in his face and stood behind it. He must have stepped up to the door because I heard him whisper like it was right in my ear, then I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down.”

Clarisse had a talent for looking truly miserable. Her face fell into the slack lines of a much older woman, and she bit the lipstick off her lips, nervously, so that it smeared onto her teeth. She lifted the gloved hand that held the wrapped pork chop, squinted her eyes shut, pressed the pork chop to her forehead.

“Nothing I say or do makes a goddamn bit of difference,” she said vehemently. “He turns it around to hear what he wants.”

“What are you supposed to be, his tender little pig?”

“Ha!” Clarisse held the pork chop out at arm’s length, and spoke to it.

“I suppose you’re fed up with me always pitching a moan over Hock. Well, I’m sick of me, too. I’d move away if I could, that’s how tired I am of it. But I have a duty here, and more than that. I’m good at my profession. Heech says I know as much as he does about anatomy, and I have been experimenting with a new pump that… oh, I’ll spare you the details. I’ve got pride in my work, and he can’t ruin things for me.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Delphine. “We’ll get together and knock off the big boy. We’ll murther’m.”

“Oh,” said Clarisse, wistful. “That would be so nice!”

NORTH DAKOTA WILTED in a brutal heat. For Delphine, the summer weather, hot, hotter, unbearably hot the second week of her new job, meant that this was the summer of ongoing terrible odors. The slaughterhouse of course began to smell like slaughter. The scrap pile went green and the rank smell of flesh was everywhere. Of course, she couldn’t escape the bad smells after work. No sooner was the cellar of her house filled in and the floor scrubbed down, new mattresses, clean blankets and sheets put out, the walls sprayed with vinegar and then vigorously wiped, no sooner was the house fit to live in than the heat crushed the air. She and Cyprian decided to stay in the tent for other reasons, as they attempted to catch some sleep in the night’s wet furnace.

A slight breeze flowed off the dwindling water of the river just around three a.m., and Cyprian positioned the tent flaps just so in order to take advantage of it. But that breeze also turned the mud sour and came laden with whining fronds of mosquitoes. The insects batted the canvas of the tent with a tiny insane lust. All night, the whining built and diminished, sometimes so loud it sounded like air raid sirens, sometimes low and insistent, but always constant and without letup.

Cyprian bought mosquito netting for the two of them. Draped around their army cots, it allowed them enough rest to see straight the next day. At first they thought they would go mad listening to the bugs clustered an inch deep at the tiny holes through which their warm-blooded scent must have exuded, tantalizing. The next week they bought cotton wax from the pharmacist and pressed it into their ears. No sooner had they solved the problem of the mosquitoes than they were infested with a plague of armyworms. If you looked at just one, it wasn’t bad… olive brown with an intricate racing band of blue dots. It was their numbers that made them horrible. The worms crept up and down the trees in such thick droves that the bark seemed to be moving. They inched across the tent roof by the thousands and it was impossible to keep them off the ground cloth or even out of their blankets, no matter how tightly Delphine and Cyprian pegged down the tent’s bottom. She got used to walking on them, an awful carpet, and leaving footprints of slime when she stepped into the shop. As for Roy, he slept half in the river some nights or on the starry banks, in grass, and all bugs left him alone, perhaps because his blood was eighty proof, said Delphine.

“You’d think the mosquitoes would bite him, at least, I mean, to get drunk themselves. Roy’s a walking party bar,” she complained one night, irritated that her father could sleep peacefully in that infested heat. She and Cyprian were sweating safely underneath their nets. Lying side by side, before they agreed to lose consciousness, they rolled the cotton wax between their fingers and argued over whether Cyprian should use the DeSoto to run some liquor out of Canada. Avoiding the slap of sales tax was not only a very common thing to do, it was patriotic if you were German, or supplied the liquor to them. No one had hated Prohibition like the Germans, who were convinced it was a law passed as a direct comment on their tradition of Zechkunst, the art of friendly drinking. Since Prohibition was over, heavy taxes on liquor were the new source of resentment and no one took such pleasure as Germans in thwarting the government. On a recent visit up north, even Tante had filled hot water bottles with whiskey and worn them as a bosom in her dress, smiling regally at the customs man as she sailed across the border.

“I’d rather stay legal,” said Cyprian, “but the offer’s good.”

“That means I walk to work one whole week.”

“That’s not what gets you.”

“Damn right.”

“I will not, and I mean this,” Cyprian said, propping himself up on one arm and staring at her intently, “get caught.”

“Scares the hell out of me to think you would,” Delphine offered.

“Does?”

“For what it’s worth.”

Even then, Cyprian just didn’t feel like kissing her, but he loved her so much at that moment he nearly overcame his reluctance. It seemed to him that since the end of their traveling show, and since the house was cleaned and fumigated, things were slowing down to normal. He missed balancing, and the travel, but not the insecurity of where to perform and how to set up shows. He wanted things predictable but he also wanted something else. It was a problem with men who had come back from the war, he’d heard, normal wasn’t good enough. They had to jack up every situation. Make it dangerous. Maybe he was like that. Or it could be that Delphine’s job made him jealous. Not only because she was so tight with Clarisse and then Eva, but because she now bought everything, their food, their clothes, Roy’s whiskey. He did feel as though the man should make the money.

“I’m gonna do it.”

“Oh God,” said Delphine.

“I’m not bad with a engine.” Cyprian tried to placate her. “I learned a lot in the war. When I finish this, tell you what, I’ll get a job. Maybe set myself up to fix automobiles.”

“What do I tell the sheriff?”

“I’ll get back here before he even knows….”

His reassurance was cut off by Roy’s wild hollering, and the two of them pushed aside their nets and jumped out of bed. Gingerly slipping along a rutted path, they made their way toward Roy’s drinking camp down along the river. Delphine carried a small kerosene lamp that cast a pool of light just before them, so she was the first to see, when she reached the source of the panicked howls, why Roy was in hysterics. He had finally been discovered. The armyworms had come across him during a long drunken sleep, and they’d settled in, perhaps to feed on his clothing, or maybe just to rest on their way toward a banquet of leaves. His hair was packed. They dripped from his ears. Not a fraction of an inch of a wormless Roy was visible and he was, indeed, a supremely horrifying sight. So it was a surprise when at Delphine’s voice he calmed down pathetically.

“I need a hair of the dog if you please,” he said, blinking through aveil of strings of dripping worms. “I got the shakes, little daughter, got the deliriums. Need the whiskey. I know it’s not real, but I could swear that worms are covering me.”

“You’ll be all right, Dad, just stand still,” said Delphine, knocking pads of worms from his arms, his shoulders, and then tugging him forward. Cyprian clawed handfuls away, tried to comb the hordes from Roy’s head, to shake them off his trousers and gently pluck them from his ears.

“Just stand still and you’ll get your whiskey,” he echoed Delphine.

“They’re in your head,” she told him, “stay still. They’re all in your mind.”

IT WAS TRUE that Cyprian was good with engines. By now, Delphine had totally revised her view of him and touted him to Eva as outstanding for his practical abilities. Repairing cars wasn’t as satisfying to him as balancing, but still he had a knack for mechanical work. He babied the DeSoto, and it ran so clean it purred, as he said, like a kitten in a butter dish. Before he left the next day, to reassure Delphine, he did a free once-over on the shiny brown delivery car Eva was so proud of—Waldvogel’s Meats, it said on the side. The Freshest. The Finest. Old World Quality.

Old World Quality. Eva was most proud of that, for it was true that in this country you could simply not get sausages prepared with the simplicity and perfection common in the German street. And she missed that. Other things, too, were impossible to find, she said, and when she said so she sounded a bit like Tante. Marzipan. Herring. Pickles with the right degree of spice. Rolls as soft. Down beds as deep. Fur as lustrous. Cream as thick.

Well, she often admitted, they couldn’t do everything. They could only make the sausages. Pity about the bread, she often teased Fidelis. He had come to this country on the evidence of bread, machine bread, a slice of it sent in a package as an example of an everyday American marvel. He’d never tasted that preserved slice, of course. She despised the stuff — it was thin and salty. It crumbled. You could not get it fresh and it turned hard by noon if by chance you did. It wasn’t real bread. The crusts were soft and the interior tough. Everything about the bread was backward, said Eva, so she made her bread herself. She sold loaves when she made extra, and sometimes pastries too, from a tall glass case that she rubbed transparent with a sheet of newsprint wetted with vinegar.

Eva prided herself on triumphing over anything that circumstance brought her way, yet she could not keep the butcher shop functioning in the heat with the efficiency she usually demanded. As the heat wave and the drought wore on, the glass collected steam and the counters and floors were slippery with melted grease. Everything was more difficult, for Delphine, too. Nights alone in the tent without Cyprian were unpleasant. It was harder to watch Roy destroy himself down by the river with two buddies who now slept with him in sour comfort. Delphine felt vulnerable in the open, and was afraid to plug her ears for fear one of the drunks might sneak up on her. So she endured the mad whining of the bugs until sleep took her and still, within sleep, she woke restlessly from time to time. It occurred to her that Cyprian had left in order to make her miss him. If so, enough. She did. They were like an old married couple, except that the romance of their youth had lasted about six hours. To get some sleep herself, and help out in the crisis, Delphine started sleeping on Eva’s couch every two or three nights. Waking early, Delphine could put in a couple of hours cleaning before the crush of heat.

Now that she was around her friend from early morning on, Delphine could see how Eva suffered. Eva’s face was pale with daily effort, and sometimes she declared she had to lie down, just for a minute, and rest. When Delphine checked on her, she found Eva in such a sunken dead shock of slumber that she hadn’t the heart to wake her.

After an hour or two, anyway, Eva woke to a frenzy of energy and pushed herself again.

They mopped down the floors of the killing room with bleach every single day. The meat cases were run on full cold, yet they were lukewarm and the meat within had to be checked constantly for rot. A noisy generator was hooked up to power the meat locker and that thick-walled closet was jam-packed with all they were afraid to lose. They bought only the slightest amount of milk to sell because it often soured just from the drive to the store. The cream turned, too, but Eva tried to culture it and use it in her cooking. They stored almost no butter or lard. The heat hardened to a cruel intensity. The boys slept outside on the roof in just their undershorts. Eva dragged a mattress and sheets up there as well and slept with them while Fidelis slept downstairs.

As a gesture, perhaps, of reconciliation, the Kozkas gave Fidelis a dog. She was not a chow, for they’d had too many disappointments with the breed — Hottentot now ran wild, his offspring showed no respect for their masters, and all of his puppies sank their teeth into their buyers. The Kozkas had gone into a steadier line of dogs. They gave Fidelis a white German shepherd of ferocious energy. The dog roamed the downstairs halls all night and chewed happily all day on great green bones. The dog immediately loved Eva like a sister, and though it was tied outside the door most of the time, its ears pricked when she passed by in the house. When Eva freed the dog, it wildly bounded about, racing and leaping in astonishing arcs. When it had released its puppy nature, it walked gravely to Eva and stood near her. It didn’t beg or gaze at her longing for scraps. The dog was very dignified and treated Eva as its peer. Clearly, the dog considered Eva her colleague, her mate in the task of protecting the dim-witted sheep, the men, from blundering into danger. Eva didn’t pat the dog absently, but scratched the dog in places it couldn’t reach. Even used an old hairbrush to untangle its fur when it matted. Delphine watched Eva look into the dog’s eyes, listened to the way she crooned to it, and thought that her friend’s behavior was remarkable. She’d never known anyone who thought that dogs were much. Eva’s sensitivity to this animal, as well as the way she treated the outcasts and oddballs who came to the shop, including Step-and-a-Half, convinced Delphine that Eva was a person of rare qualities, and she loved her all the more.

Every day, the sky went dark, the dry heat sucked the leaves brown and nothing happened. Rain hung painfully near in the iron gray sheet stretched across the sky, but nothing moved. No breeze. No air. On the mornings she came from Roy’s, Delphine walked through the back door sopping wet, washed her face, and donned the limp apron by the door. The air was already stiff and metallic. The dew burned off in moments. There was the promise of more heat. If it broke, it would break violent, Delphine thought as she filled a bucket. She didn’t care how the heat broke — bring on the twister, bring on the volcano, the mighty wind of a hurricane — only make it cease.

She began stripping the wax off the linoleum on the floor in order to reapply a new coat. She had finished with that, and was about to open the shop, when out of the wringing wet-hot air walked Sheriff Hock.

Either it’s news of the dead, thought Delphine, squeezing an ammonia-drenched rag out and draping it on the side of the bucket, or he wants to talk about Clarisse.

“Would it be better for me to visit you out at the house?”

For the moment, the place was silent.

“Nobody’s here,” said Delphine. “Go ahead.”

As it happened, she entirely forgot about Eva’s son Markus, up early in the heat as well. He was going over the books just on the other side of the counter. He was so quiet, his pencil moving among the columns of debts and credits. Young though he was, Eva had him check her work and he was proud to do it. Delphine was unnerved by the presence of the sheriff, or she might have remembered that Markus could hear all that was said. Maybe the heat, or a low level of panic, dulled her thoughts. She wanted to get the talking over with.

Sheriff Hock nodded sharply; his features pinched inside the frame of firm, thick fat. He removed a sharp pencil from a case in his pocket, and flipped a page over on the hard surface of his notepad. He had the exquisite budded lips of a courtesan, and when he spoke it was hard not to watch them move, just as a rose might if it were to speak. He told Delphine that he had a few questions, and since she was willing to answer them, he went down a predictable list. They were not particularly intrusive questions, having to do mainly with her life with Roy and Cyprian. Apparently, their answers matched up, because he seemed to take no exception to anything she said. Not until he came to a question about the red beads pasted into the floor of the pantry.

“Do you remember them, there in the pantry?”

“Of course I do.” The quality of the brittle substance that sealed the cellar door shut was extremely memorable, and Delphine had wondered at that one particular ingredient.

“The stuff was so hard to chip that I wondered if it wasn’t some kind of glue.”

“I wondered the same,” said Sheriff Hock, very solemnly. “I am currently having it tested in the state laboratory.”

What state laboratory? thought Delphine, but she tried to humor him.

“Red beads, off a dress? Red beads at a wake?” she said with a dutifully mystified expression.

“Exactly.”

“Have you asked my dad?”

“He’s vague about it.”

“He’s… not well,” said Delphine, coughing discreetly.

Sheriff Hock folded his notebook, tucked it underneath his arm, and took one of Eva’s doughnuts from the glass case. The heat weighed on his bulk. He moved with a palpable weariness, and his shirt was darkened with sweat down the spine and below the arms. He ate the doughnut in tiny bites, lost in physical misery and abstract thinking, then he asked. “Where does your father obtain his whiskey?”

“I buy it for him,” said Delphine.

“I don’t mean the stuff you buy,” the sheriff said. “I mean the supply he kept in the cellar.”

“I don’t know.”

“Delphine, you’re protecting him now,” said Sheriff Hock, shaking his head. “I suspect that the answer to the tragedy lies in the fact that the cellar was littered with empty bottles.”

“I suppose,” said Delphine, seeing her ruse was useless, “he might have saved the bottles for Step-and-a-Half. She would resell them for home brew.”

The sheriff nodded sagely. “Was your father a friend of the Chavers?”

“Well, you know he was, as well as I do,” said Delphine.

“For the record,” said the sheriff.

“Okay, yes, he was.”

“Was he horrified? Shocked?”

Delphine became animated by the question, perhaps because she could rightly answer it. “What do you think? After he learned the Chavers’ identities, my father was wild. You should have seen him. He pulled the last pathetic tufts of hair off his head and rolled around on the floor like a baby. Well, you know Roy. He kept howling something about believing the family had gone down to Arizona. I thought, you know, for the winter.” Delphine finished in a subdued voice.

“Winter was nearly over when they were locked in.”

Fidelis’s voice boomed suddenly from down the hallway, and Sheriff Hock turned his attention away from Delphine. Much to her relief. For she was suddenly gripped with an anxiety for her father, and the fear that he had done something to set the deaths in his cellar into motion. Still, having already questioned him about the red beads and in some desperation asked him everything he knew or could think of about the three who died, she was at a loss. Roy Watzka had seemed as bewildered by the dead as anyone, entirely unprepared to provide any useful knowledge.

Fidelis and the sheriff went out back, humming the melody to a song they were complicating with contrasting harmonies, probably over a jar of Fidelis’s dark, cold, homemade beer. Delphine’s throat ached for a swig of it. Just as she bent over to squeeze out the mop again, Delphine heard a low rustle of paper, the creak of the chair at the desk in the corner, and she straightened up in time to see Markus stepping quietly away from the account books.

“You heard?”

Markus turned to look at Delphine. His thin cheeks had been recently and fiercely burned by the sun, and they still glowed hot red. In the long pause as he looked at her, Delphine gazed clearly back at Markus and saw in his face Eva’s steel. He wouldn’t speak. For some reason, Delphine was later to think, the boy knew all that was to come. He understood the future, knew why she was there, fathomed the reason that her place in his life would so drastically change. Knowing all of this, he was closed to her, sealed.

“You must be very smart,” said Delphine. “You’re only eight years old and your mother trusts you to check the accounts.”

“I’m nine. She does the math,” said Markus, poker-faced.

“But you are smart,” Delphine persisted. His indifference was a challenge, and she wanted him at least to admit what he’d just heard, if only so that she could prepare Eva for any questions that he might have. “You’re a smart boy, so you know that the sheriff was asking me questions only to figure out the truth.”

Markus now looked down at the floor.

“I didn’t do anything!” Delphine blurted out, surprising herself. It was only after Markus turned back to her and stared from the perfect mixture of the greens and blues of his mother’s and father’s eyes that she realized that the boy in the cellar was his age and that of course Markus must have known him.

“Your friend’s name,” said Delphine, softly now, stepping toward him. “What was it?”

Beneath the raw sunburn, the boy’s face went white. What the question did to him astonished Delphine. His face turned to paper and his eyes burned. He blinked. He opened his mouth, passionately miserable.

“Ruthie,” he croaked. “Ruthie Chavers.”

Then he whirled and ran down the long hall, banged his way out into the white heat of the yard. Delphine stood there a moment, stunned. Ruthie! The girl’s name and the new information that she had, so far, avoided hit her. To escape her thoughts, she started using a scraper on the floor, gently scratching away at the places where the old wax had yellowed or clumped. As she worked the white squares whiter, she felt a numb satisfaction. The colored squares unstreaked and became again the original innocent green. As she moved with an increased dedication, the girl’s name tapped in and out of her mind. Ruthie. Ruth. Ruth meant mercy, Delphine knew. Yet not one bit of mercy had been shown to her. Delphine might have imagined that to find out that the child in the cellar was a girl would have struck her a blow, increased the unbearable mental picture of that suffering. But it didn’t, in the end, and at this Delphine wondered. The floor was drying before she found the explanation in her own heart.

Her inner reasoning surprised her, mystified her, then depressed her. She found that she harbored a belief that girls were stronger and more enduring. Therefore more tough-minded about even such an unexpectedly evil destiny. And needful of less sympathy. A girl child would have a certain fatalism about the event. She would accept the end of her life, and merely sleep as much as possible until she fell asleep forever. Oddly, the closer Delphine identified with the girl’s suffering, the more she thought about it, the less sorry she felt for Ruthie Chavers. It was, in fact, as though she herself had sat in that cellar, endured the hunger, then the thirst, then weakened to the point of delirium, and froze, all in a dream.

And died in her mother’s arms, she thought, her mother’s arms. Then customers began arriving, and Delphine put on a clean apron.

At the end of the day, Delphine turned the cardboard sign in the entry window over from Open to Closed. She went over the floor again to take off the day’s footprints. She let the floor dry, and then, in a special bucket, she mixed up floor wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the entry so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick good-bye, and went home to swelter in the tent, alone. Early next morning, before the store opened she’d return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then between customers she’d polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and elbow grease. That’s what she planned, anyway, and all that she planned did occur, but over weeks of time and under radically different circumstances.

ALREADY THE NEXT MORNING, while Delphine sat in the kitchen with the second coat of wax drying, the heat pushed at the walls. She was pleased because Eva had looked at the floor and declared it brand-new again. The strong black Turkish coffee sent Delphine into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva set on the table and blotted at her throat and temples with a dish towel.

“Kuchmal hier,” Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. “I am not so good.”

She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, and only answered with a moan of sympathy that somehow included herself, in this heat, waxing floors. But then Eva repeated herself exactly the same way, as though she did not remember what she’d said. “I am not so good,” Eva whispered again. She put her elbows on the table and curled her hands around the china cup. Her silence, as though she was listening for some deeper tone or word in the ordinary sounds around them, disquieted Delphine and she watched alertly as Eva stared into the oily depths of the liquid.

“What do you mean, you don’t feel so good?”

“It’s my stomach. I am all lumped up.” Beads of sweat trembled on Eva’s upper lip. “Pains come and go.”

“Is it cramps?” asked Delphine.

“It’s not that, or maybe.” Eva drew a deep breath and then held it, let it out. There. She took Delphine’s dish towel and pressed it to her face, dragged it off as though to remove her expression. She was breathing hard. “Like a cramp, but I never am quit the monthly… comes and goes, too.”

“Maybe you’re just stopping early?”

“I think yes,” said Eva. “My mother…” But then she shook her head and smiled wide, spoke in a high, thin abnormal voice. “Crying and whining is all forbidden here with me!”

Eva jumped up. Awkwardly, she banged herself against the counter, but then she bustled to the oven, moved swiftly all through the kitchen as though unending motion would cure whatever gripped her. Within moments, she seemed to have turned back into the unworried, capable Eva. She lifted two great pans of rolls out of the oven. She wielded a spatula and quickly emptied the pans. Then she pushed dough through the round of her thumb and first finger, filled two more pans and popped them back in the oven to bake. Delphine watched her in concern, but then relaxed. There was no trace of weakness in that series of swift and economical motions.

“I’m going out front and start polishing the floor,” said Delphine. “By now in this heat it’s surely dry.”

“Very good,” said Eva, but as Delphine passed her to put her coffee cup in the gray soapstone sink, the wife of the butcher touched one of Delphine’s hands. Lightly, her voice a shade too careless, she said the words that even in the heat chilled her friend.

“Take me to the doctor.”

Then Eva smiled as though this was a great joke, and she lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and did not move.

FIDELIS HAD ALREADY gone out to look at stock with a farmer, and he could not be found when Delphine returned from Doctor Heech’s house. By then, she had Eva drugged with morphine in the backseat of the delivery car, and a sheaf of medical orders in her hands stating whom to seek, what possibly could be done. Furious and sorrowing, Doctor Heech was telephoning down to the clinic and speaking with a surgeon he knew, telling him to prepare for a patient named Eva Waldvogel, who was suffering from a tumor that pressed immediately on her vitals and would cause her death within days if not removed.

Fidelis gone, Franz and the little boys at a ball game, only Markus was home to take the message.

“I will write a note,” said Delphine, his mother’s suitcase at her feet. “Make sure that your father gets it. I am taking your mother to the doctor.”

Markus handed her a piece of paper, dropped it, picked it up, his lithe boy’s fingers for once clumsy with fright. He ran straight out to the car and crawled into the backseat, which was where Delphine found him, stroking Eva’s hair as she sighed in the fervent relief of the drug. She was so pleasantly composed that Markus was reassured and Delphine was able to lead him carefully away, afraid that Eva would suddenly wake, before the boy, into recognition of her pain. From what Delphine had gathered so far, Eva must have been hiding a substantial suffering for many months now. Her illness was dangerously advanced, and Heech in his alarm as well as his care for Eva, for he was fond of her, scolded her in the despair of a doctor wrathful at his helplessness.

“You should have had the brains to come to me,” he said over and over. “You should have come to me.”

As she led Eva’s son to the house, Delphine tried to stroke Markus’s hair. He jerked away in terror at the unfamiliar tenderness. It was, of course, a sign to him that something was truly, desperately, wrong with his mother. Delphine snatched her hand back and spoke offhandedly as she could. Markus, his face and neck flushed brightly, did not look at her, mumbled something she couldn’t make out, and was gone.

Delphine finished her note for Fidelis:

I have taken Eva to the clinic south of the Cities called the Mayo, where Heech says emergency help will be found. She passed out this morning. It is a cancer. You can talk to Heech and make your own way down when things are arranged in the shop. Find Cyprian Lazarre if you can. Maybe he’ll be out in the tent on my dad’s land. Lazarre is a good man and can manage things.

ON THE DRIVE DOWN to the Mayo Clinic, Delphine first heard the butcher sing, only it was in her mind. She replayed it like a comforting record on a phonograph, as she kept her foot evenly on the gas pedal of the truck and calmly caused the speedometer to hover right near one hundred miles per hour. The world blurred. Fields turned like spoked wheels. She caught the flash of houses, cows, horses, barns. Then there was the long stop and go of the city. All through that drive, she replayed the song that she hadn’t really listened to Fidelis sing just the morning before in the stained concrete of the slaughtering room. She had been too crushed by the heat to marvel at the buoyant mildness of his tenor. His singing, at the time, hardly registered. Now she heard it. “Die Gedanken sind Frei,” he sang, and the walls spun each note higher as beneath the dome of a beautiful church. Who would think a slaughterhouse would have the sacred acoustics of a cathedral? Fidelis was practicing his pieces for the men’s chorus, those he’d learned back in Germany, when he’d belonged to the Gesangverein.

The song wheeled in her thoughts, and using what ragtag German she knew, Delphine made out the words, “Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, Sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.” The mind is free… thoughts like shadows of the night…. The dead crops turned row by row in the fields, the vent blew the hot air hotter, and the wind boomed in the rolled-down windows. Even when it finally started to rain, Delphine did not roll the windows back up. They were moving so fast that the drops stung like BBs on the side of her face. The fierce drops kept her alert. She knew that occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine as well as dulling her pain loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a high-pitched icy moan that could have belonged to Eva. A scream like the shriek of tires. A growling as though her pain were an animal that she wrestled to earth.