The Master Butcher's Singing Club

SEVEN. The Paper Heart

MARKUS REMOVED from a hole in his pillow the tiny rolled notes, the dime flattened by a train into a shining disc, the small red crackling heart of store-bought paper, and the tin clicker painted like a cricket. All of these things were gifts from Ruthie Chavers. He had decided not to think of her as dead. She was somewhere else, safe and just out of reach. Duck feathers swirled out of the pillow with the objects, and he stuffed them back into the hole and then pinched the cloth shut. A piece of solid gold light slanted through the west-facing window onto his bed. He carefully unrolled her first note, which had been fixed around a pencil, and which he had kept in its original shape. The note said, Hi Markus, I got your letter, signed Ruthie. After that note, there was another, which told what she was doing after school and was signed Love, and a third note, which he felt was the most passionate, in which she said how much she liked the letter he had written her, and then there was the Valentine. He carefully smoothed out the shiny red paper and stared at the gleaming surface. It was coated with something that made little sparkles come out in the sun, and he’d never noticed that before. This was a new thing, and he tipped the heart side to side to get the full effect. He turned the paper over. There was that one word again, Love. After he had gone through everything again, clicking the clicker six times, as he always did, and rubbing the dime, he put Ruthie’s things back into his pillow and pinned the opening shut with a safety pin. He plumped the pillow up and put it at the head of his bed, then he left the room.

Sometimes at night, when he turned over a certain way, he clicked the toy and it awakened him. The noise always seemed very loud, but it never seemed to bother his hard-sleeping brothers. It always took him what seemed a long time, though it was at most half an hour, to fall asleep again after the clicker. While he waited for sleep to overcome him, he listened to the dog breathing lightly at the door to his room. Sometimes Schatzie whined a little in her dreams, or snuffed as though something intrigued her. Other times, his brothers talked, sometimes even sat up and argued with or commanded some invisible other. Once, Franz had pointed at Markus and said in a low, hysterical voice, you forgot to fix the fuel gauge. Because the noise from the clicker woke him, he came to know something that his brothers did not. He understood that his father sometimes stayed up half into the night and sang to his mother.

The first time he’d noticed the light down the hall and heard the low murmur, he’d been frightened to investigate. The next time, he realized that Schatzie was sound asleep, not even twitching, and he’d reasoned that if there were burglars or murderers about the dog would be at their throats. And anyway, she would protect him if he got up to see what the light was, and the sound. He felt compelled to find out now. Schatzie did exactly as he thought she would, rising as he passed and silently following him, her nails clicking softly on the green linoleum tiles. He shivered a little in his washed-thin striped pajamas and proceeded with infinite slowness. He didn’t want to be discovered, didn’t want to anger his father, whose voice he now recognized, and who fell silent just as Markus reached the door of the little pantry, where his mother slept.

Markus hardly breathed. Motioned for Schatzie to sit down behind him. Staying in the shadows, just out of the doorway’s shaft of quiet radiance, he peered into the room and was stilled by what he saw. There was his father, and he was kneeling at the side of his mother’s bed, holding on to her foot. Her foot was slim, waxen white, and almost glowed in the cool lamplight. Fidelis rested his forehead on the place where the foot curved into the ankle. His father’s back shook, and after a stunned moment Markus realized that his father was weeping in a soundless and terrible way, a way all the more frightening because it was sobless and tearless. He had never, ever, seen his father cry before. The most upsetting thing was that the movement of his father’s shoulders was so close to the movements of convulsive laughter. Then Markus thought that maybe it was laughter. Maybe his mother, who could be very funny, had just told his father a joke. But her face was quiet. He could hear her breathing, for her breaths were deep, rattling sighs. He watched a little longer, but then Fidelis put his head up and seemed to stare straight at him. A scared thrill ran through Markus. He froze. But his father was staring blindly at the shadowy wall and did not see him.

Slowly, his father straightened his back, still kneeling, and then he tenderly tucked the blanket around Eva’s feet. When he had done that, Markus wanted to go, frightened he’d be found out, but he still couldn’t move. His mother’s eyes had opened and she stared deeply at Fidelis, and then she smiled at him. It was a glorious smile, serene and full of joy, a softening thrill of her face that Markus would never forget. Fidelis sat in the chair wedged next to the narrow bed, took her hand. Without her asking, he began to sing to her the song she loved most, a song that Markus knew, the one about the water maidens on the river in Germany. His voice was warm and pure. Markus closed his eyes. His father’s voice brought the taste of smooth, brown caramel into his mind. With his father’s singing for cover, Markus made his way quickly to his own room. He crept into his bed, thrust his fingers through the rip in the pillow where the pin did not quite shut the gap. Then he fell asleep quickly, safe in the rise and fall of his father’s voice, with his fingers touching the paper heart.

* * *

DELPHINE BLEACHED the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. Their stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired them and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis’s thick white cotton shirts with starch, and rolled them up and laid them in the cooler. Every morning, she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the hopeless sweat, the shit and blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. The laundry itself was a full-time job, and Delphine had no idea how Eva had ever done it, plus so much else. But this laundry was a kind of good-bye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine was leaving, too. She’d already decided that to stay there in her old job, with no Eva, was impossible. It wasn’t just that people would talk, for they talked about her already. There was more, things she couldn’t say even to her private self. No, she couldn’t do it. Besides, there was another person chafing and eager to finally take over. Stepping in to care for the boys and her brother would be a perfect showcase for Tante’s pieties.

On the last birthday Eva would ever celebrate, Tante did come around, just in time for the cake. After the blur of useless presents and too cheerful toasts, while the celebrators craned over the large scrolled cake, Tante materialized in her usual black, and said to Delphine in her freezing nasal voice, “This is good cake. How much does my brother pay you extra for taking care of Eva?”

Unknown to Tante, Fidelis stepped behind his sister, so he heard Delphine’s reply.

“Not one flat dime, you hypocrite sow.”

Tante’s cheeks mottled red and white, as though she had been slapped. As for Fidelis, she could have sworn that a surprised smile flickered across his face. Delphine hadn’t yet told him that Tante had stolen Eva’s morphine. Part of her training in dealing with drunks was to hoard information, never to let go of a valuable nugget until it could be made to pay double its worth. There would come a time, thought Delphine, there would definitely come a time. Tante would pay, somehow, for Eva’s pain.

* * *

A TINY STREAM that mainly carried spring runoff down behind the house, through the field, had dried into a tough little path the boys used to travel into the woods. They spent most of their time there after their chores were done, looking for arrowheads, for pitted, gray fragments of pots, and little white seashells left from when a great ocean had covered all they saw. Markus sometimes thought about this ocean, which he’d learned about in school. The fact that he was walking on what was once an ocean’s bottom intrigued him. Sometimes he imagined the water going straight up, over him, just as the air did now. And all around him water creatures floating and diving. Markus and his two little brothers stopped, pulled from their pockets some of the fuzzed-over horehound drops that Tante always gave them, and spat as they sucked away the lint. They concentrated until they got to the actual candy, a somber, medicinal taste, but sweet. Their faces cleared.

“This used to be an ocean bottom,” Markus said, showing Emil a tiny brittle white scallop he’d picked up from the field. The shell was about the size of his little fingernail. His brother looked at the shell without much interest.

“Gimme that,” said Erich, and he inspected the little shell, then gave it back to Markus. “Is she dying now?” he asked.

Markus said, “I think so.”

All that week, whenever they woke up, Delphine fed them carelessly, old bread or stiff oatmeal, and then forgot to check whether their chores were finished. She allowed them to play wherever they wanted. She was in the other world of the two that existed side by side. One world was of those who would go on living. The other was centered on the one who would die. Usually, the boys stayed outside all day. After dinner, they went in to see their mother before bed, to kiss her good-night. Her face was gray and sunken, almost like a headhunter’s shriveled trophy. Suddenly, her face was full of lines and folds. Wrinkles had appeared around her mouth. Her breathing was so slow it seemed forever between breaths. Her eyes were large and staring, but the boys were not afraid of her. They’d gotten used to her. Markus found that when he kissed her, he felt absolutely nothing except that her taste was a strange taste, earthen and moldy, not human anymore. As soon as he left his mother, crawled between the covers of his bed, and laid his head on his pillow, a numb buzzing noise started in his ears and he fell immediately asleep. He never even woke when Emil crawled into bed beside him on some nights. In the morning, he was groggy and fuzzy, and he had trouble nudging his brother out of his bed.

“My foot’s asleep again,” said Emil, yawning.

It was happening to them, too, Markus had noticed. Whenever they sat still too long, his little brothers complained, their limbs went odd and prickly. He could see how their eyes drooped. Even now, though it was full daylight and they had precious time to play, they were drowsy. Markus pointed to the riffle of woods just ahead.

“Let’s go there,” he said. He pictured the soft mat of fallen leaves underneath the scrub birch and maples, how nice it would be to rest there for a while. They each took another horehound drop and spat lint while they walked to the woods. They sat down in a deep pile of crackling, dust-smelling leaves. Then they lay back and looked at the green leaves on the branches turning and flickering. Their eyes grew heavy and Erich began to snore, a light whining sound. The air was dreamy and hot. Ants crawled over Markus’s hand and he flicked them off. It was like being underwater just then with the green and changeable light falling through the woods onto them. What if they were lying at the bottom of the ocean? Markus thought of great storms and waves passing over, high above. On the tranquil bed, way down here with nothing to bother them, they lay undisturbed.

Emil was stretched out next to him, half asleep. Markus felt his brother inch a little closer. He pushed him away, once, then he let him draw near again. Soon, with an adult sigh of irritated indulgence, he let Emil hold onto the bottom of his shirt, put his thumb in his mouth, and sleep. Markus stayed awake a little longer and even, once, rubbed his brother’s hair in the distracted way he rubbed the dog’s head. He missed the dog. But these days she did not come with them on their daily rounds, or out into the fields and woods. Schatzie preferred to stay near his mother, just outside her door. She was guarding Eva and she was waiting patiently to haul her across the deep spaces of the night, the black spaces, to the other side.

THERE WAS NO BEFORE and no after. Days had melted together. Eva’s long dying was the ground and the air. For a week now, she’d taken only sips of lukewarm water. Her hair stood up in a peaked cap despite Delphine’s attempts to comb it down. Her elbows and knees were knobs and her bones jutted from her flesh. She’d absorbed morphine like water. It made no difference. Her body would not die and would not live. Her eyes were unearthly. She stared through everything, saw nothing. She had taught Delphine to look into her eyes straight on, and when she did the world dropped away. There flowed between them an odd and surprising electricity. Their gaze was a power — comforting, frightening. Delphine was pulled somewhere fast, yanked right out of her skin. With their eyes locked they rushed through the air, ecstatic, hearts lurching.

The night Eva finally died, Delphine woke to the knocking, and knew. She cast off the quilt she’d wrapped herself in at the foot of Eva’s bed. Eva’s arms were flailing like a backstroker’s and her fists rapped the headboard. Delphine grappled with the bedposts and got to her knees, then stumbled blearily to the side of the bed. She hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time for days, and now she hardly knew whether she was sleeping or awake as she tried to catch Eva’s arms. But Eva was running in place now, her bone-thin legs kicking, her arms pumping up and down at her sides. She was running in her high heels. Again, she was running against Franz and her breath came urgently, gravelly and harsh, as though she was nearing the end of a race. She gritted her teeth and seemed to strain for the invisible finish line. The cords in her neck pulled taut, her face twisted, and then she breathed deeply and a sound like sticks rattling came from inside of her chest. Her arms fell to her sides. Her breath went out and she did not retrieve it.

“Can you hear me?” Delphine said. “Are you there?”

Eva’s eyes opened and she took a little air. She said nothing, but looked steadily at Delphine. Her face had become beautiful once again, austere, the flesh pulled across stark bones, the graceful lines of her eye sockets and her skull. After a while, she whispered, for Delphine to light the lamps.

Delphine lighted the lamp and then caught Eva’s fist and held it. Delphine’s head fell forward and her eyes closed in a swimming heaviness. She jerked awake, took a round, amber bottle of almond oil from a little shelf beside the bed. She poured a small amount into her left palm. Sleepily, she rubbed the oil into Eva’s skin until the fist slowly began to relax.

“Franz, he knows nothing about it,” gasped Eva suddenly. “His father was not Fidelis. His father’s name was Johannes Grunberg, a Jew. Quite a student, and so handsome, so tall and fair. In the war, dead.” Her lips worked. At last, she gathered another breath and went on. “Fidelis knows, but he never spoke of it.”

Delphine poured out another bit of oil and worked it into the slack, dry skin of Eva’s forearm. This was the fourth time Eva had labored to tell her this. Usually, from this revelation she went on to give Delphine directions on when to marry Fidelis and how to care for the boys. But this time, she said something different, something she’d never said before. She said it with a clear simplicity.

“I want you, only you, to handle my body. And please write to my Mutti. Tell her that you took care of me. Tell her this: I loved you.”

Delphine looked into Eva’s eyes expecting to become hypnotized, but this time something gave way, she could feel it. Their thoughts had pushed through an invisible barrier, a magnetic field, and there was suddenly a lightness that lifted them giddily into a storm of calm. Later, Delphine was to think that she should have called Fidelis or the boys. But at the time it did not occur to her. Delphine didn’t look away from Eva’s face, even for a moment, because she knew that Eva was afraid. She did not let go of Eva’s hand, because she knew that Eva wanted her to hold her hand, just as a child would when it must enter a new and foreign place. Delphine did not move to adjust her friend when the sticks in her chest rattled again, even louder, three times. She did not pound Eva’s chest when the breathing stopped. Eva was still looking into Delphine’s eyes, and so, during the time when she might have taken another breath, Delphine saw the light go out behind that silver streak, like a crack behind the door.

“STRUB’S FUNERARY, how may I be of service?”

Benta’s voice was sleepy, but Delphine knew that they had kept track of the progress of Eva’s disease and had been waiting for a call.

“I should have got hold of Clarisse, but I know if I did I’d break down,” said Delphine.

“You think it’s hard, at first, that she’s your friend,” said Benta. Her voice now stronger, down-to-earth. “You’ll find Clarisse can be a great comfort to you. Can we come over together?”

“Yes,” said Delphine, and then she sat in Eva’s kitchen listening to the boys and Fidelis, together in the other room, the murmur of their sorrow. One comforted the other, gained control, and another broke down. Delphine needed to hear them, for she felt very much alone. She couldn’t be with them, it wouldn’t be proper for her to enter that room now. She had washed Eva with her lilac soap, pinned a towel between her legs, smoothed her face into a calmer expression and closed her eyes before she called Fidelis. She thought that perhaps she should accompany the body back to Strub’s, too, as Eva had made that final request. But now everything seemed too much for her, out of her control, and somehow strange, as though with Eva gone it was no longer right for her to be there. It seemed a long time before the Strubs arrived, pulling up to the back door in their long, pearl gray hearse. Delphine answered at their knock and Clarisse entered, took hold of her with an embrace that radiated a practical kindness. The Strubs brought her effortlessly into the room where Fidelis and his sons sat with Eva. When the others entered, Fidelis bent down and picked up Eva in his arms. He looked so bewildered, then, holding his wife in the air with no place to take her, that no one could move until Aurelius put his hand on his shoulder.

“Put her down, Fidelis, we’ll take good care of her.”

Gently, Fidelis lowered Eva to the mattress. With a wild, rough cry, Markus broke away and stumbled to his mother’s side. He bent over and with a passionate gesture he kissed his mother’s ankle, just as his father had. He cradled her foot, closed his eyes, and touched his forehead to the place he had kissed. Franz stepped behind him, embarrassed, and was about to pull Markus away when Delphine stopped him. Just as she touched Franz, a sound emerged. It was a roar of grief, a loud, keening bellow, and it filled the room. It seemed to come from all of them, or no single one of them, or from the walls of the room itself. Delphine never was to know. The sound released everyone, as though from a spell, and they stepped away from Eva and left her.

NOW ROY WATZKA passed into an unprecedented period of sobriety. Dry days passed into weeks. He was able to accomplish this because of the starkness of Eva’s death. And then, too, what had happened in the cellar came back to haunt him. At last something had unnerved him. In his periodic bouts of delirium, the dead had appeared. The Chavers came for him, snapping with beetles and sprouting grave moss. Their hands reached with insane stroking motions, dragging him to their cozy wormhole in the earth. This vision had plagued him since the discovery of the Chavers, and finally, when Eva died, the experience became unbearable. He found within his thoughts, for the first time, a horror to which even the terrors of withdrawal were preferable.

For once, too, he didn’t farm out his wasted muscles to other people, but concentrated on his own house. Cyprian was astonished to return from a run up north to find not a Roy tooted happily down by the river, but an old, faded, quiet Roy calmly brushing the sides of the house with sunny yellow paint. The house was cheerful, the blue of the doors and windows restored. He even sanded down and varnished the floors. Filled the cellar in more thoroughly, and blacked the stove. Delphine had her hands full with the Waldvogel boys just after Eva’s death, and it came as a shock to her that Roy was capable of taking care of her in any way. In the mornings sometimes, he handily made breakfast. She would emerge from the room she shared with Cyprian, and there it would be, close to a miracle as home life had ever come. A bowl of oatmeal steaming hot, butter melting in a pool with a lump or two of dark brown sugar. Cream. Sometimes eggs or toast he made by holding the bread on a fork and passing it evenly before the gas — for with her money Delphine had bought a stove on timed payments. Cyprian got a delivery set up for a small icebox. Breakfast seemed a surprise compensation for all they had been through. The food laid out on a shined-up table, jelly quivering in her mother’s tiny cut-glass bowl Delphine thought for sure had long since been pawned or broken. Breakfast had helped her get through the storm of Eva’s dying and now through its aftermath. She expected Roy to relapse once she finally quit the shop, but instead his good behavior continued. He turned on the charm that he’d brought to Eva’s sickroom. He sang songs he learned in the hobo jungle by the river. “Blue Tail Fly.” “Joe Hill.” “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Soon there were actually chickens in the coop out back, big orange Rhode Islanders, and the back porch steps were nailed onto the back porch, not scattered all over the yard.

“The dead have more power than we know,” said Delphine to Cyprian, sitting on those very back steps one evening in the last of summer.

Cyprian shook his head. Did her statement refer to Eva or to the change affected in Roy by his waking dreams? Whatever it was, Cyprian was glad of the change as well and had even considered quitting his own shady line of work in order to pursue something on the up and up. Roy was setting weasel traps around the outside fence of the chicken run. The previous day, he’d tacked a light wire drapery on the top of the fence to foil the Cooper’s hawks. Roy was not the only one who’d improved the place, either. In the past two weeks, Delphine had turned the inside of the house into a golden haven. She set an eggshell pale yellow on all of the walls, and stuck the old furniture back together with horse-hoof glue, twine, and C-clamps. She’d restuffed a couple of chairs and accepted a fancy, tasseled lamp from Step-and-a-Half, who gave it to her in a seeming fit of bewilderment after Eva’s death. In their room she’d oiled the lacquer dresser and they bought a brand-new mattress, not that they took advantage of its spring. She told herself that life had been too sad for anything but comfort, but that was not true. There would have been plenty of comfort if Cyprian had thrown himself to her in thick desire. But they usually fell asleep touching hands. That was good enough. He held her like a sister and often, long into the night, they talked.

Now, as Roy turned from setting his traps and walked toward them, Delphine had the idea that she would make a Hungarian-style goulash that Eva had taught her, a thick stew of braised meat in paprika sauce, ladled over spaetzle. Sour cream topping it. As she turned to walk into the kitchen, a sense of the fugitive sweetness of the scene assailed her. It was like a gift from Eva when she died — all good things to follow. Her dad acting like one, Cyprian so attentive, playing checkers or cards with the old man and helping him stay off the sauce. As terribly as she missed Eva, there was also the relief of having done with the grand horror and the mess of death, the organized tedium, the vigilance and dragging heartbreak. She didn’t have to put up with men drinking underneath the clothesline or with the sharp wing of Tante’s scorn. She could smell the maples, the pine, the ooze of the river instead of the raw primitive cavernous smell of cows when they are split. And now, it was good to turn toward her cooking in the cool day’s remaining light, and to have in her new icebox both meat and butter. In her apple bin, apples. In the onion box, onions. So why, when she felt this goodness, did a wave of fear and sorrow pass through her? Why the sudden memory of looking down into the cellar, and the dead moving their mouths, their words rising toward her in flashes of green fire?

It was because she must have known even then that more was coming. She must have known that there would never be an end of it. No peace. For even now, as she made her way dreamily toward the cooking, the boy, bruised and aching, slipped out his back door. He had decided to run to her. She stirred more flour and an extra egg into the spaetzle, cut two more onions into the goulash. Used all the meat. For some reason she made extra. It was as though she knew that by the time he figured out the back roads and cut through the corn, the sand pickers, the ditches and the pastures, he would be tired. He would be ready to drop. He would be hungry, that Markus.

* * *

LOOKING CLOSELY at Tante’s face as she complained about Markus the next morning, Delphine picked out each one of Fidelis’s features. On his face they were precisely placed with a level and a ruler. On her face the angels had been less attentive to their work. Every feature was off — the frozen blue eyes too far apart on the skull, the nose thicker and too short, the upper lip much thinner than the lower, and the whole mouth so small that Delphine wondered how so many words came out of it, or how she ate more than one pea at a time. Delphine had to examine the talking face to remove herself from the words it said. If I listen to the meaning, I’ll paste Tante right in the chops, she thought. So she calmly watched the odd concoction of flesh and bone, then she shrugged and said, “I haven’t seen him.”

“Lie!” said Tante, but she didn’t leave the little front porch. Delphine, in the doorway, folded her arms. Tante understood with disappointment that she wouldn’t be asked in for a piece of that astounding cinnamon cake she smelled, and she swallowed hard as Delphine dusted flour off her blouse. Or maybe it was powdered sugar. Tante clamped her teeth together and bit back her hunger.

Delphine had been successful in not listening to all of the specific details of the diatribe, but she did know that it was a self-serving lecture that might explain his bruises. A calculated effort to undermine his innocence, for Tante repeatedly made reference to the contrast between his frail looks and devilish wiry ways. She’d had to switch him, then beat him, and then for some reason he ran off. Delphine said again, yawning, “Haven’t seen him.”

“If Fidelis was here…” Tante muttered. But Fidelis had the truck, packed with sausage, out on a wide sweep of deliveries to various grocery stores.

“The kid’s no dummy,” said Delphine. “He’ll find a place to hole up for a while. At least until his dad gets back. Don’t worry about him.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about him,” said Tante. “But what does his dad do when he comes home and finds the boy is gone?”

“What,” said Delphine, “are you scared Fidelis’ll take down the bull’s pizzle and give you a good whacking?”

Tante reared back, not certain whether she should be severely offended or laugh at Delphine’s joke. She did try to laugh, but as always the chuckle came out thin from her tiny mouth. The bull’s pizzle was a homemade switch, a dried bull’s penis that hung on the backside of the door to the shop. Used with disciplinary intent, it was painful but it left no marks. Eva had once told Delphine that Fidelis almost never used it on the boys — twice on Franz for dipping into the till, and he had used it on the little boys for setting the outhouse on fire, never on Markus. The existence of the pizzle, its customary threat, was enough.

“I’ll be going then,” said Tante. “Got to feed Erich and Emil. Those two eat like little pigs.” She swirled off in her rusty black. As though her leaving were an insult and not a blessing, thought Delphine. Satisfied, she retreated into the house and watched the car jounce around the road’s bend.

“Come on out,” she said to the bedroom door.

Markus slipped out and ran to the window.

“Is she coming back?”

“I doubt it.”

For some reason, he’d put his best clothes on to come to her last night. This morning, they were all he had to wear. They were the same clothes he’d worn at the funeral, the store-bought shirt with the front pockets and the notched collar. Short itchy brown pants, which he hated, good wool socks with no holes in them and Franz’s formal hand-me-down, lace-up shoes, still too big but shined up nicely.

“We should put you in some overalls,” said Delphine, and she directed Cyprian to go buy a pair in town.

“Now,” she pointed to the kitchen, “let’s get you some breakfast.” And she made him what she’d made the others, a stack of pancakes studded with the last of the sweet wild blue saskatoons. Dabbed butter on the top. Drizzled on a little maple syrup that Cyprian had traded for with a Chippewa up north on his last run. She carefully put the tin jug back in the icebox. Then she poured herself a cup of hot coffee and sat down while Markus ate. She talked while his mouth was full, not expecting him to answer her. Last night, he’d simply appeared, eaten, his eyes drooping while he chewed. He’d gone limp and let them tuck him into bed. She hadn’t had the heart to ask him a single thing.

“You’re going to stay with us, here, until your dad gets back,” she said now. His eyes went round and he nodded quickly, relieved. Delphine kept talking.

“I don’t need to know how come you left, though you can tell me if you want. Or you can tell Cyprian. Don’t tell my dad, Roy, though. He blabs. What I do want to know is this: Why did you come to me?”

The boy stopped chewing, suddenly, swallowed and looked at her with his fork and his knife poised. The roan freckles stood out on his pale face. He bit his lip, uncertain, and his eyes… there was all the sadness in the world in his eyes, thought Delphine. All the sadness there could possibly be. And as they were Eva’s eyes, for a moment she swam into them and then he spoke, and his words were clear, though very low.

“You took care of her.”

He started eating again, his face darkening, going hot and red while Delphine blinked and stirred the coffee round in her cup. So what the boy said — that meant Delphine could take care of Markus, too? Or was it his way of saying that since Delphine loved the mother, she would love and defend the son? She watched him eat with some satisfaction. He shoveled the food into his mouth as though he’d seen no food for over a week, and soon Delphine got up and made him more pancakes.

SO MARKUS STAYED and helped Roy mow the yard and grub young trees and pull wild morning glories from a patch they wanted clean for a pasture. Roy was now ambitious to have a cow. Little by little, as Markus joined the checker games or made a quick study of Roy’s cribbage strategies, things came out. First, Markus would start to worry about the chinchillas. He’d wonder if Franz was changing their water or just adding to the old stuff in the dish, as Eva had directed them not to do. Then he’d fear the twins would torture the creatures by shoving sticks into the cages and chasing them here and there, which would damage their coats. After a while he’d shake his head and worry that Tante didn’t know the first thing about mixing their food. She couldn’t make food at all.

“What did you eat?” asked Delphine casually, hiding the speculative glee in her voice.

“She could make crackers,” said Markus.

“Oh, right from the barrel?”

He nodded solemnly, eyes sparking.

“Could she make cheese, too?”

“Right from the wax!” he crowed. “She mostly cleans.” He sobered down. “She cleans a lot, and then she yells, and then she cleans up some more. We got hungry so we ate a lot of green apples.”

“Did Emil and Erich get the shits?”

“Oh, did they!”

“So then she had to do more laundry.”

“I made her do more laundry, too.”

Delphine just nodded. She knew exactly what had been going on, ever since Markus had insisted on sleeping on the floor with just a blanket over him. And then, every morning, he got up before they did and she’d see the rag he’d used to clean up under himself drying on the line, already rinsed in the river, and his shorts put back on rinsed, too, still clammy and cleanly washed. There had been none of this before the death of Eva, so Delphine knew the cause, and she knew the cause for the beatings, and more than ever she had the fantasy of wringing Tante’s neck just like a chicken’s, or sending her flying with a kick. But what could she do except keep Markus here? And if the sheriff heard, there might be charges. But again, what could she do?

“By the way,” she said, “lay low if the sheriff drives up. Better yet, if you’re out in the field fade into the brush, then sneak down to the river. And meantime, if it will make you feel better,” she brushed his strawberry blond forelock of hair, the second time she’d ever touched him, “I’ll go check up on your live fur coat.”

She didn’t want him to forget they were supposed to kill the things. He was ahead of her, though. He brightened.

“There’s going to be about six babies, and the does need bone powder mixed in their food. I figure we have over three hundred dollars worth when we sell them this fall. Then we’ll keep the babies in the heated shed over winter, and make two thousand next year!”

“Who’s buying these things?” said Delphine.

“There’s a dealer. He’s a fur maker.”

“Well,” joked Delphine absently, “now I’ve heard of everything.”

But of course she hadn’t, and of course the creatures had no water when she got there, so she had to feed one or two with eye droppers to revive them. And then Tante wondered why she was not minding her own business.

“They were Eva’s rabbits,” said Tante, “not yours.”

“They’re not rabbits,” said Delphine. “They’re rodents, and where is Franz?”

“Where he always is these days,” said Tante. “With the airplanes.”

Ever since Tante started cooking for them, Franz had decided to eat with the aviators at the new airfield. Once he was done working in the shop, he now spent all of his time there, glued to his local heroes. He’d gone even more airplane crazy and he adored Lindbergh so much that he tried to dress like him. He followed every move “Slim” made and held forth on every last detail about the Spirit of St. Louis. The gas storage tanks’ placements in the nose, wing, rear. The wicker pilot’s chair. The touchy steering equipment that had helped keep Lindbergh wakeful. One of his scrapbooks was now devoted to Lindbergh alone, and it was filled with pasted clippings and pictures. Franz’s fanaticism was of a practical nature as well. He’d do anything to put an airplane together. He tinkered with the engines the way he’d worked on the stripped hulk of an old Model T out back by the stock pens.

“You’ve got to have the little boys mix the food up like this,” said Delphine to Tante, who puffed back into the house and sent Emil and Erich out to learn the routine. They appeared, strong as little bull calves in their short pants and ripped shirts, barefooted for the last weeks before school. Delphine smoothed their ragged hair into wings and crouched to their level.

“You can make some money from these animals,” she told them.

The boys nodded, bored with the idea.

“What are you going to do with your money?” Delphine asked.

They gave each other quizzical and amused looks, as though she had said something secretly hilarious.

“It could be a hundred dollars each, Markus thinks, maybe more. How much do your soldiers cost, each?”

This they knew, to the penny, and they knew how much each piece of equipment for their battlefields would cost, too, if they could get them, each horse and each cannon. Every rank of every officer was a different price, and these they recited to Delphine. Their armies were fighting wars of the last century. The officers they’d bought still reared heroically on caparisoned horses, instead of creeping belly down through mud. By the time Delphine finally made them understand that the chinchillas equaled money equaled soldiers, or lemon drops, licorice whips, and ice cream downtown at Birdy’s Drugstore, and that they would have shares in the profits equally with Markus provided they did not let Tante take over the cleaning and the feeding of these creatures, they were serious, determined, alight with calculating greed.

IN THE MIDDLE of the night Delphine shook Cyprian awake because the wild dogs were howling again. A pack of strays and leftovers, skimmed out of the town’s rich backyards, poor shacks, and middling main street shops, had banded together. Delphine had often seen them around the far edges of the butcher’s yard. Eva had pointed them out, gray shadows of every dog shape, some big and rangy and others small as whippets, a classless and breedless roaming menace led by that rogue stud Hottentot. They came around the butcher shop often, and had furtively lived off the occasional ball of guts that Fidelis flung out for them, or the forgotten mess of chicken heads nobody bothered to clean up in the tall weeds. They had never howled around the butcher’s shop. Because there was good pickings, they’d never give away their presence.

Out of town, on wild nights they rode the moon, howling themselves back to the shapes of wolves. Their song was gurgling and eerie, but without the coherence of urgent joy and sensible thought she’d heard in the voices of the real wolves, up north, where she and Cyprian had listened while camped outside a small two-bit town with no money, right before a show. She shook him awake anyway because the sound made her lonesome, and a little romantic, as it referred to their past in which there had been that single deep sexual interlude. Now he woke up, as he always did, completely alert and ready to talk if she wanted, or eat, or play cards. This was one of the nice and comfortable things about Cyprian. He liked waking up and was always obliging even in the first minutes, though not obliging in every way. Still, because she needed him and the dogs were out, howling, she said, her voice ragged, “Make love to me.”

Cyprian took his breath in sharply. He’d worried about this for a long time, wondering when she would get tired of him lying like the butcher’s dog, that’s what he’d heard it called, to sleep alongside your woman without taking advantage of her tenderness, her sex. Just the way the butcher’s dog never touches what it loves, but parks itself with trained indifference next to a juicy haunch. Knowing this time would come, he’d made his mind up to do something that he felt an ethical repugnance for — picture men. He’d even lined up the ones he’d use most effectively. Now, he mustered his collection. He summoned them. He got the picture of a pulsing throat, a chest, the whole works, and he kept the picture going, shifting, even though a breast got in the way, or her sighing voice, or whatever else. He did the act with desperation and no skill and he did it too fast, just to make sure he finished it, but then afterward he tried his best to make it up to her, to not fall asleep, but keep his hands moving, his mouth moving, until she arched under him and cried out and was dead silent.

“Delphine,” he whispered, after some time had passed, “are you hungry?”

She did not answer, and he felt sure she was pretending to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. The whole thing made him conscious of his mess — what he called the thing that was the truest desire in his life. But it was a mess, because what was he going to do with it and where would it all end up? For sure, there was no future in living with a man. In setting up a house. He’d never heard of that, except for in the cities, and he imagined they were different than he was. They didn’t get along with regular men, he thought. All that aside, there was Delphine herself. He never talked to men the way he did to Delphine, or had such good times, or felt this sweet impulse to protect. Yet his hands in dreams fit themselves around men’s hard shoulders, and their faces, and God, the way they smelled and the way they sounded. And so much else in the deep-red world he had just summoned. Now he couldn’t help think of those things once more, and guilty at his hardness and his excitement, he turned Delphine over and began with a blind abandon to make her shudder, to make her swear in a whisper next to his ear, to make her feel the damage in his heart, to shut her up, to kill some little man inside himself angry that she was a woman, and then, when she battled him back, biting his lips and in a silent struggle pinned him, Cyprian lay back in careless luxury.

The dogs came close to the house. They seemed to howl right underneath the window. He forgot just what she was, man or woman, and felt the simple dark of lust for a moment, the ease and pleasure of being drawn out to his length in her mouth. He stroked her hair and touched her lips, tight around him, and then he lost himself, and when she was finished he put his hands on her face, smoothing her cheekbones, wiping her mouth, for some reason murmuring, “You poor thing, you poor thing,” until she began to laugh at him.

SO THERE THEY WERE, in the middle of the night, frying up a single pork cutlet, arguing how to split it, when Markus stumbled out in his little-boy shorts.

“Now we have to split the damn thing three ways,” laughed Cyprian. What had happened in the bedroom made him light-headed, he felt drunk and a stranger to himself. How had she done that, made him forget, for a second, what she was? She could have been a wolf. Now the little boy looked embarrassed at himself until Cyprian said, “Just sit down and let the table cover it.” Markus sat down grinning.

Delphine was wearing a Chinese robe, a floating brilliant red with apple blossoms on a long stem embroidered on the back, and her feet were bare. First, she held it shut, then she pinned it so she could use both hands chopping potatoes.

“We might as well just eat,” she said, and fried an onion. Put some water on to boil for chamomile tea. “After this, I’m drinking this sleep tea. It’s an herb. I’m looking for work tomorrow and I’m getting my beauty rest.”

The dogs were gone, their howling had stopped as soon as the lights went on. Roy had made a bed for himself in a small summer shack right beside the chicken coop. He’d fixed it up for himself with a little pallet set in the wall, even stuffed a mattress and dragged out an old bedspread and a pillow that Eva had given to Delphine when she told her, long ago, how they’d had to burn every single thing in the house. He had slept out there since so as not to disturb the two of them, he said. They had let him.

“Listen,” said Markus, now, his eyes very wide. “There’s something out there.”

Over the sizzle in the pan they heard it — the rhythmical growls and the sudden snorts and the high-pitched whimpers.

“That’s Roy snoring.”

The old man was perfectly clear, even from across the yard and locked up in his tiny house. Delphine shook the skillet. What would they do when it got cold out, come winter? Having grown up with it, she was used to the sound the way people get used to living next to train yards. But poor Cyprian would be kept awake tossing all night. The thought, coming to her as she turned over the brown, crusted potatoes, was the first for a long time she’d had in which she imagined a future with Cyprian. And all because they’d had this one night. Well, that was stupid! She knew what was going on, him with his eyes closed tight. What was he seeing in his head? She turned the potatoes back and then used the spatula to set a heap on each plate. She set the plate before him, touched the side of his face with the back of her hand, wishing to know the answers, but already protecting herself. It might not happen, after all, for another eight months or a year, and what the hell did she really think, anyway, was going on during his trips up north?

* * *

DELPHINE WAS OUT BACK setting new straw down on her potato beds when Fidelis drove up in the meat-market truck. She straightened, brushed her sweaty brown curls back from her forehead, narrowed her eyes although she didn’t think they’d have a run-in. She’d expected that he would come out looking for Markus when he returned. School was starting soon. He walked toward her, his arms motionless as hooks at his sides, his face quiet. He wore a rumpled plaid shirt — she’d never seen such a thing on him. And his pants were stained on the thighs where he’d wiped blood off his hands. Fidelis was usually immaculate, but of course that had been Eva’s doing and then her own. As she walked toward him, she added another secret piece of gloating to her store. Tante couldn’t keep up with the laundry. They stopped with about three feet of space between them and stood without speaking. Delphine cocked her head to the side. The sun was behind her and full in his face, a ravaging white sun that blotted out his features.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked.

“Running around like a fart on a lantern,” he said, “I come for Markus. Where is he?”

“Like a fart on a lantern, huh,” said Delphine. “That’s no excuse!” Her temper flared, her heart caught. She suddenly missed Eva and that lonely pang turned to anger. “Of course he’s here. Do you think I’d let that bitch of a sister of yours beat him black and blue?”

Fidelis grew very serious, though he didn’t look surprised. He looked down at his feet in the tough steel-toed slaughterhouse boots, and he frowned so hard at them that Delphine looked down, too. There was nothing to see but that cracked leather planted in the soil.

“I come to get him,” said Fidelis in a low voice. Delphine waited for him to say something more. Thank you wouldn’t be out of the question, she thought. But he held his silence, which annoyed her enough so that she asked an abrupt question.

“Are you going to give him a whipping?”

“Why should I?” said Fidelis, then raised his eyes and looked full on at Delphine. Even through the blast of sun she could feel the power of his pale gaze. As on the first day she met him, she felt a jolt of strangeness. Not fear, just an instinct that there was more, much more, happening in that moment than she could grasp. He was withholding an energy composed of menace and promise. Tons of power were behind his slightest gesture and she thought of a great smooth-faced dam.

“Come in, take a load off, and I’ll pour you some iced tea. Roy and Markus are down at the river, but I think it’s too hot for the fish to bite. They’ll be back any minute.”

She was stalling, trying to find a diplomatic way not to send Markus back. Fidelis came into the house, still darkly cool as she’d kept the windows shut against the growing heat. She now opened the windows, sensing that undertone of cellar rot that crept in elusively and smelled to her of despair. There were six green ash trees outside that changed the air around in the late afternoon. The rooms would cool. The place was clean, scrubbed to a finish. Earlier, she’d cut a lemon into a jug of clear brown tea and stirred in the sugar, then set it right next to the ice block. Now she poured the tea into the glass beer mugs. The sides of the glasses filmed over and sweat. Fidelis looked at the tea a little sadly.

“I don’t have beer,” said Delphine.

Fidelis took a long drink, and Delphine refilled. Then he put his mug down and asked, “When are you coming back?”

Delphine mulled that one over, and then thought, Here’s my bargaining point. “That’s a hell of a question,” she said.

Fidelis leaned forward and hunched his shoulders as though he was going to say something very difficult, but all he said was, “Tante can’t run things alone.”

Delphine realized that it was a form of betrayal for him to make even the mildest critical statement regarding his sister. That was the way of those old German families. Tante was the only family he had over here. She wrote descriptions of whatever he did in endless script letters. Tante was always mailing off a stack, foreign postage. It was said that Tante wanted to go back to their pretty town in Germany, Ludwigsruhe, if only it weren’t for Fidelis. She couldn’t just leave him in this country, especially now, with those boys. Still, his troubled frown, and obvious discomfort, annoyed Delphine.

“I suppose I could think about coming back to help out — that is, if you’d tell her to pack her bags and get.”

Fidelis looked like he’d been knocked on the head with a sheep mallet. Such a thing must not have occurred to him, and Delphine had to laugh.

“She can’t cook. You’re losing business because she’s snotty to the customers. Your clothes look like hell. Your boys are running wild. And I won’t come back if she’s there, you can bet!”

Fidelis gave a cool nod and closed up. He wasn’t going any further with that, Delphine could tell. Maybe she should have been amazed that for such a big man he was such a coward before his sister, but she understood a lot more about him now.

“Look,” she said, pretending to soften. “I guess it’s tough. I like your boys, so I’ll think about it. Just leave Markus with us another couple weeks. He can start school from here. Cyprian can drive him in. He’s too much trouble for Tante, and he’s good help to us.”

Fidelis agreed to that, and when Markus came back Delphine watched very closely to see how he acted with his father, whether he was eager to return. But Markus was wary when he saw his father’s truck in the yard, and he seemed relieved to stay on with Delphine. She brought a lemon pound cake to the table, and tension eased up quickly. Fidelis ate the cake with great attention. Eva’s recipe, he knew. He experienced a wave of feeling when he gathered the last crumbs, and he made a ceremony of putting down his fork, slowly lowering it to the table. Delphine felt his sorrow, then, as a current of energy. Leaving, Fidelis nodded in approval at the good-size fish his boy had caught despite the heat, and took the fish as a gift. Markus put his shoulders back and strutted a little, which made Delphine laugh because he was such a skinny, unassuming boy. Yes, he had to stay. There was no doubt about it. She had to teach him a few things before she let him face Tante, and she had plans how to do it.

* * *

DELPHINE STILL OCCASIONALLY dreamed of getting a show together, a large-scale drama production, or of putting the balancing act somewhere in the plot of the thing. To do that, they’d have to take it on the road because the town could not support a cast of professional players. But Delphine no longer wanted to leave. Not with Roy behaving and with Markus near. Losing Eva had taken something out of her, too, and she began to spend more time with Clarisse. Another reason to stay in Argus. Still, the question lingered whether she and Cyprian were still essential to the investigation. Nothing had come of the sheriff’s plan to solve the Chavers’ deaths, nothing that she had heard, anyway. Delphine thought that she would like to know where things stood. She was curious. It struck her that she should pay a visit to the sheriff. So she left Roy napping in the shade one afternoon, and as Cyprian had driven the car up north, she walked to town.

By the time she got there, she was wringing in the unseasonable heat. Usually by now they had a break in the weather. Not this year. Sweat darkened her armpits and her neck was damp, her hair springing out of the pins she’d fastened in wet tendrils. In town, with the wide reflecting streets and the puny trees, the sun shone hotter. The sheriff’s dim office offered some relief. He had a ceiling fan going, and on his desk a little, black, official-looking fan whirred as well. The brick walls were insulating and the inside of his office was cool and peaceful. Sheriff Hock was doing paperwork when she entered, and he looked glad for a diversion.

“So,” said Delphine, after they’d complained to each other about the heat, “what have you found out about the Chavers? Roy and I are wondering.” She didn’t mention Cyprian, for it struck her that Sheriff Hock might ask where Cyprian traveled off to from time to time, and she wanted to avoid the story about his being a brush salesman. But Hock didn’t seem at all interested in Cyprian’s excursions; he was, he said, interested in talking to her. Just lately, he said, he’d been wanting to ask about costumes.

“Costumes?”

“What you and Cyprian wore when doing your shows, your balancing acts. What did you have on?”

“We wore regular clothes. Cyprian said that part of the surprise of what we did was that we looked so normal, then our act was all the more unusual. Besides, at first we couldn’t afford anything fancy, no sequins.”

“Or red beads?” said Hock.

Delphine understood, thinking of the pantry floor. “Oh, now I see what you’re getting at. Are you saying that we could be suspects?”

“Well,” said Hock, “you know the beads. They’re still the odd component. Your dad says that nobody at the wake wore anything like a sequin or a bead or anything fancy that he remembers.”

“Not that he would have noticed, stewed as he got.”

“Likely,” said Sheriff Hock. “So I’ve also gone through the props department of our local company. You probably don’t think I remember!” He wagged a finger at her, twinkling his eyes in a way she didn’t like to see on a sheriff’s face. “I know you and Clarisse had a good time with that witch scene. I have a feeling either one of you’d have made an excellent Lady Macbeth.”

“We just understudied the part,” said Delphine carefully. She didn’t know if Hock was veiling an accusation. She attempted to lighten the moment. “Why don’t we revive”—she was careful not to tempt bad luck by saying the actual title—“the Scottish play!”

“Sadly, I am bound to my profession. I haven’t the time anymore, and anyway, do you think that the people of this town want to see their sheriff as, say, the eponymous murderer? I would lose their confidence.”

“People wouldn’t think… or you could always play Banquo.”

“No, no, no, to many, art is life. I am the sheriff, so I must play the sheriff round the clock. To accept any other role while wearing the badge would only confuse people.” Sheriff Hock squeezed his chin in his fist now, frowning. In a low voice he asked, “How is Clarisse?”

“She’s busy.” Delphine said this quickly to disguise her jolt of unease.

“Is she really?” Hock said in a light, menacing voice. “Busy? Or is she just avoiding her destiny? I like to think of myself as inevitable.”

His sly self-assurance tripped a wire in Delphine. “Inevitable!” she cried. “You’re a mental wreck. She hates you. I don’t care if you are the sheriff, you should leave her alone.”

“Caramel?” Hock extended a dish that had lain beneath some papers. He unwrapped one from its waxed paper and slowly fitted it between his lips.

Delphine shook her head and turned to leave. Already she regretted having lost her temper. Insulting Hock was a bad idea.

She stopped by the drugstore and bought a phosphate, drank it quickly to calm herself. Then she walked straight to the funeral home.

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE Strubs’ establishment was tasteful — painted gray and trimmed in dark maroon; even the awnings on the windows were made of matching, striped canvas. The porch was railed with turned cast iron. The lawn was a perfect swatch of muted green and the flowers in the summer garden were hushed lilac and mauve hollyhocks, white petunias, delicate blue bachelor’s buttons, nothing too colorful. The back door, also painted a calm gray, was fitted with a modern electric bell. Delphine pushed it, heard a pleasant stroke of music from inside. She looked nervously around to see whether she had been followed. When Clarisse came to the door, Delphine gestured at her to quickly let her in.

“Is it Roy?” said Clarisse, in an anxious, knowing way that temporarily unnerved Delphine.

“No!” she cried out.

“I’m sorry,” said Clarisse. “What was I thinking? Come in, come in. How stupid of me.” She put her arms around Delphine and led her into a soothing little back entry room.

“We have to talk now. Where can we talk?” asked Delphine.

“I can take you downstairs,” said Clarisse. “I’m working with Mr. Pletherton.”

Delphine nodded. The basement was a carefully planned space, cool in summer, heated minimally in winter, always just the right temperature for work. There, Clarisse and her uncle and Benta concentrated their attentions on the town’s dead. Delphine knew that she was privileged to be permitted to enter — no one else, except Doctor Heech and, in a case of suspected foul play, the sheriff, was allowed downstairs. Delphine had never been particularly bothered, and now she found the Strubs’ preparation room much less upsetting than the back cooler of the slaughterhouse. And for sure, anything they said there would go no further. So she went down the back stairs, following her friend, who wore a crisp white coat and now peeled off her gloves with a snap.

“I thought I had a date with a guy from South Dakota, but he stood me up,” Clarisse’s voice floated back. It seemed that her profession was still as unsettling to potential boyfriends as it had been in high school. The boy had quickly made it clear that if she wanted to date him, she’d have to quit. For a while she and Delphine talked the way they used to, exchanging news of the states of their emotions. Clarisse said she wondered how she could respect a man who was afraid of her job.

“He called me an undertaker, Delphine. You know how I hate that! He’s like the others. None of them would probably come down here, even if I asked them. They’re chicken.” Her expression shifted to a startling mask, and she hunched and croaked, “They fear I’ll drain them dry as hay.”

Delphine laughed, although Clarisse’s sudden transformation, in the basement surroundings, slightly unsettled her. In one corner, a phonograph record played lovely, swelling opera music. Clarisse played the music not only for herself, but also, she claimed, the notes had a soothing effect upon the flesh of the bodies she was working on, causing them somehow to absorb the fluids she pumped into them more evenly. She swore it was true, but perhaps her current client did not appreciate opera music. The place was brilliantly lit and Mr. Pletherton, whom Clarisse paused to regard critically before she wheeled him back into the cooler, looked gray and actually dead. Perhaps Clarisse was still trying to get the quality of dye right. She was constantly experimenting, trying to choose the exact right mixture of arterial solution for the peculiarities of each body. “They’re all so different.” Clarisse gave his arm a clinical stroke as she put him away and there was a small crackling sound. She frowned and muttered, “Postmortem emphysema.

“I’m having a lot of trouble with him, Delphine. He died of food poisoning. Fargo restaurant.” There was a whisper of distress in her voice. “Tissue gas.”

The north wall was outfitted with glass-fronted cabinets, the top shelves neatly decked with small tubs of lip pins, mouth and eye cement, bandages, and glue. There was a small box of leftover calling cards from visitations. Benta kept the cards to dip in paraffin and she used them instead of cotton to make a durable barrier between the gums and lips. There was Bon Ami, used as a tooth polish, massage cream and lemon juice, vinegar and soap. Piles of clean towels. Hand brushes, hairbrushes, nail files, and clear lacquer. The broad lower shelves were stocked with serviceable gallon bottles of methanol or wood alcohol, ethanol, arsenic solution, formalin, and smaller bottles of oil of cloves, sassafras, wintergreen, benzaldehyde, oil of orange flower, lavender, and rosemary. Aurelius Strub’s original embalmer’s diploma, the first awarded west of Minneapolis and east of Spokane, hung from the wall in an elaborate frame. Although the basement was always cool, the general heat was wreaking havoc with the burials. Amid all of this Clarisse maintained her cheerful curved smile and her graceful prettiness. She suddenly put Delphine in mind of Malcolm’s line, Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, yet grace must still look so. She pushed the quote from her head.

There were two nice plush chairs in the corner, and even a tiny electric stove and a pot for brewing coffee.

“All right,” said Clarisse. “I’m all ears. Now, what is it, really?”

Of course, an afternoon visit signaled some emergency, inner or outer, and Delphine got immediately to the point.

“What costume did you wear when you played the lady in The Lady and the Tiger?” asked Delphine.

“It was a cute little number, all—”

“Red, pink, peach flapper beads, those tube iridescent kind.”

“I sewed a million on that dress, remember? It was practically a work of art.”

Clarisse was, in fact, a clever seamstress and used a variation of herstitching to create perfect hidden sutures in her clients, even using two crisscrossing needles sometimes and hiding the knots. Even underneath the clothing, where no one would ever see, her work was perfect and she scorned lock stitch or bridge sutures—That’s just sewing, she’d say.

“Where is it?”

“I think it’s in my closet somewhere,” said Clarisse, easily. “Why?”

“Get rid of it,” said Delphine.

“After all that work I put into it?” Clarisse dropped her jaw in false outrage.

“Listen, I got wind of the way Sheriff Hock is thinking. You know the cellar door at my house was pasted shut with this awful solid goop and in it there were beads just like your beads.”

Clarisse opened her mouth, but then a look of pain and panic suffused her face, and she put her hands to her pretty cheeks. Her little oval nails whitened with the pressure of her fingers, “Oh God, Delphine! I told you that Sheriff Hock practically ripped the dress off me that night…”

“I have this feeling that Hock’s cooking something up in his fat, fevered head.”

“Hock is baiting me,” said Clarisse. “He’s… impossible. I can’t reason with him. He’ll use this coincidence — the dress, poor Ruthie and Doris… how can he? There was a little girl down there!” She burst into quick, frustrated tears, but after a few moments, she took down her hands and said, “No, no, I’ll not let him get the better of me. He should lay off. I’m a professional and I have to finish Mr. Pletherton by five, and he’s a really difficult case.” She suddenly drooped, very tired, frowned at Delphine, and then shook her curls. “Hey, would you be a real girl pal and grab that dress from my closet? Just go home and throw the damn dress in the fire.”

Delphine said yes in the conspiratorial intensity of the moment and walked out the door in a blur. When she reached her friend’s house and opened the back door, she realized that she was doing something stupid. It would look terrible if Sheriff Hock caught Delphine removing the dress from her friend’s closet or in fact found her anywhere near the dress at all. And anyway, what was she supposed to do with it? The beads might melt but it looked as though they wouldn’t burn up and disappear. Swiftly, worried, she walked up the stairs to the room in which she’d stayed over often with her friend. She had treasured those nights, normal family dinners, an easygoing family life, all she didn’t have. No wonder the Strubs liked their jobs so much — no emotional surprises from the dead, though Delphine knew very well they often presented difficulties. The only joke Aurelius Strub had ever permitted himself, and it might have been simply an exhausted mistake, was to refer to the boy who went through the corn picker as a grave challenge.

Delphine entered Clarisse’s room — childishly messy — her friend needed some place to let her hair down, after all. What to do with the dress, the dress that she knew, already, from a hollow feeling in her chest, would be composed of the same color of apricot and sweet pink and red beads she remembered pasted into the pantry floor? Delphine argued with herself, but eventually she walked smoothly out the door with the dress in a sack and ducked around the back of the house. She couldn’t fulfill her promise to Clarisse to the letter, she decided. If she brought the dress home the piece of evidence, realistically she had to call it that, was in her hands. There would be no explaining it away. She could just see the beads glittering in the ashes of the outdoor fireplace. Delphine got a shovel from the shed beside the house and began gardening instead. She worked for about half an hour. In case anyone should see her, she thought it best that she just be thinning her friend’s iris bed, taking some extra perennials home for herself. In the process, she dug a deep hole and then very quickly stuffed the dress down into it. She shook the bag out, making certain every single bead was in the ground. She put some iris roots into the bag, a few crowded daylilies, and then returned the shovel to its place and walked home.

AS SOON AS she got back to the farm, Delphine made a quick outdoor cooking fire in the fireplace, let it burn down to a perfect bed of coals. She rolled some potatoes into the glowing embers, next, put the grill over the coals, and built a bit of a fire over the ashes to pan-fry some fish in bacon grease. She took a second picking of beans from the icebox, where she had left them to marinate all day. They were cold and sweet and vinegary. Outside in the cool of the evening, the mosquitoes quelled by the smoke, Roy, Markus, and she ate. Delphine took out the cream she’d bought in town and the raspberries Markus picked. That cream was a luxury. She had to admit she liked the money that Cyprian brought back — he gave her most of what he made — because it gave them leave to eat like kings and she had fixed up the house. Still, she was hit with a wave of irritated relief when he drove up as they were finishing, for although she kept him in the back of her thoughts, his absence had been a nagging worry. She hated to admit how glad she was to see him safe, and she grabbed him, hugged him, and shook him, all at the same time.

“You’re staying,” she said.

He kissed her hand and slowly lifted his hot black eyes to hers. He could flirt, even worn out, with great conviction — had he learned it as a kind of protection for his secret, or was it just in his blood?

There was plenty of fried fish left, and she heated up the string beans in more bacon grease. She prodded a baked potato from the edge of the coals, juggled it from hand to hand before she forked it open on his plate. A jet of steam rose from the potato, and she spooned bacon drippings into the soft meal. He made a grateful sound.

“Tomorrow,” she told him, “I am going to try getting a job as a telephone operator. Do you think I have a good voice?”

“Everything is good about you,” said Cyprian, sighing over his full stomach and the good feeling of lounging around a fire in the gathering dusk. He really meant what he said. He was glad to be back. Outside the crackle of the flames, the mourning doves uttered their delicate, cool, evening chant. A catbird went through its repertory, song after complicated song, and brush-stroke clouds scattered across the green sky. After a short time, Roy, who had the stamina and routine of a mere mortal now that he was sober, dragged himself off to his little sleeping shack. Markus sagged and then toppled over, dead asleep, and Cyprian carried him into the house. When he returned, Delphine asked a question.

“The way you like men,” she said, “do you like boys too?”

Cyprian gaped at her in the firelight, and made a grotesque face. “No!”

“Don’t act so shocked,” said Delphine, “I had to ask. You sprang that other on me. How was I to know? Anyway, I have this idea I need your help with. Markus. You have to teach him to piss.”

Cyprian had just driven twelve hours straight, and he thought that maybe he was hearing things.

“I mean it,” said Delphine, “he doesn’t know how.”

“He sure does know!” said Cyprian.

“Not good enough.” Delphine was adamant. “You have to teach him self-control, then the fancy stuff to do with his pecker, like write his name in the sand. You have to teach him to turn the faucet off without touching the spigot. That kind of thing. Otherwise I can’t send him back to the aunt.”

Now Cyprian got the picture. He knew about the floor and the boy’s routine on rising every morning. He nodded slowly as Delphine’s intent came clear and then he looked at her with some respect. How many women would think of this? Not a one in all creation, which was why he loved her. It might work. So he agreed to it, and then, the very next morning Delphine made two pitchers of lemonade. One for each. She sent them out behind the henhouse with the lemonade, and every morning after that she did the same. They practiced, and by the end of the week, Markus was dry in the morning. But that was only the beginning of what she felt she had to teach him about survival.

DELPHINE DIDN’T HAVE the chance to go on to the next phase of her teaching plan — how to deal with a raging Tante Maria Theresa. Her idea was to teach Markus to throw a convincing and horrifying epileptic fit. He could learn to roll his eyes back to the whites and bubble spit between his lips. That would fix Tante. Before she could start his lessons, the meat-market truck pulled into the yard, and once again Fidelis stepped out in his rumpled shirt. This time, his pants were oddly shrunken and he wore no socks. There was a tired gloom about him; the skin underneath his eyes was soft and bruised looking, and he was very quiet. Some of his power was sucked away. That was exactly it. He looked as though he’d been deflated, and then Delphine realized that he’d grown almost thin. His raw bones came to the surface, knobs of wrists and knuckles, and his cheeks had slightly hollowed. This time he stood outside the door and refused to come inside even for a glass of water. It was plain that he needed to say something.

“Please.”

He wasn’t one to say this word, to anyone, not a woman or a man, and he especially wasn’t one to say it with the aching quality she heard in his voice. Delphine wondered right then if she’d ever hear the word again, from Fidelis, and she let it sit between them like a small monument.

“I told my sister to leave the place.”

Delphine cupped her hand to the curve of her neck and gazed at him, and then took her hand away and stuck it on her hip. She looked out over the field, past the chicken coop. This was something very big. Fidelis had chosen her over his own sister. She took a deep breath and acknowledged that she now had an even more implacable enemy in Tante. Where she had been simply hostile, rigid in her convictions, mouthy, now Tante would need revenge. Getting rid of his own sister was a sacrifice Fidelis had made to get Delphine back into his life. And for it, Tante would surely turn his family against him. Plus now he might act as though she owed him, Delphine thought suspiciously. But his look was only weary.

“She’s not coming back,” Delphine said, making certain.

Fidelis slightly inclined his head, his eyes dull blue, a little bloodshot.

“Look here, Fidelis,” she said, hesitant, for indeed she didn’t know that she wanted to return, “I won’t do much better than your sister.”

Fidelis looked as though he very much doubted that was true. Delphine turned away from him, considered. Her world right now was orderly and peaceful, the first time in her life it had ever been so. As a telephone operator she would be able to make connections, tell time, give numbers, and come home at the same time every night. More peace and routine. Probably more money, too. But then she thought of the boys, how Eva had taught her to handle things, and how she could make the household run smoothly while managing the store. Eva had showed her the tricks, the shortcuts, the patience with details, all of the skills she had gathered through painstaking trials and mistakes. Eva had given her a whole life’s worth of knowledge, had trained her, and she’d accepted, because she loved her — very simply, she had loved Eva. She remembered very well all of the times Eva had instructed her about Fidelis and the boys. Near the end, she had been wildly determined that Delphine would take her place. It had helped her to concentrate on lists and habits and little eccentricities of diet for Delphine to note. What had Eva told Fidelis? What had he promised? What did he think? Delphine opened her mouth to ask, but the words stuck.

So she just said, “All right, but here’s how it goes. I’ll be there eight each morning. I’ll work the busy hours and make lunch, then dinner. I’ll stay through six each night.” She made the terms. She set the rules in a firm, indifferent voice. Waited for his nod of agreement and when she got it, like a man would, she stuck out her hand to shake.