The Master Butcher's Singing Club

NINE. The Room in the Earth

A YEAR HAD PASSED since his mother’s death when Markus found himself fascinated by the idea of excavation. Raw or abandoned construction sites are magnets to children of a certain age. There was a place just on the other side of the pine and oak woods a mile or two behind the butcher shop where a grand house had been planned, the basement dug out, the dirt piled in a huge heap behind a mass of trees. The prospective owner of the place had run out of money early on. Not so much as one board had been set in place, nor had a rotting shed in the yard been pulled down and hauled away. Markus stumbled on this place one day when out hunting, which is what he called aimlessly wandering with a slingshot and a pocket of stones. He, of course, jumped down into the basement first, walked the gumbo bottom, then had trouble clawing his way out. Next he admired the scavenging possibilities of the broken-roofed shed. He ducked inside, kicked the mice berms, and poked the swallow nests to see if he could scare the birds out, but they had already flown south. He found rusted cans on the floor and, thrillingly, the head of an ax with a broken shank, which he hefted and carried out with him. Following a short, rutted trail, he then discovered the mound of earth removed from the basement. It was so high and new that it wasn’t even yet grassed over, just sprouting the coarsest weeds like a balding head. He clambered up the sides of the hill. At the top, he put down the precious ax head alongside his slingshot, lay down, and stared up at the sky.

While he was watching the pale streaks of clouds, it seemed to him that something moved beneath him, as though the earth shrugged a little. Perhaps it was the dirt pile rearranging itself, perhaps nothing, but the sensation of the earth’s living quality was very pleasant and he waited to feel it again. Nothing happened except, as often occurred during that first year, he found that he was crying without reason and without even being aware that it was starting. This weeping plagued him, it was very annoying, and he had to watch himself closely when at school, for fear that some of the other boys might see the tears. Several times he’d been forced to run to the outhouse as though he had the shits, just to gather himself. So it was a relief to be alone, with no witnesses, and just let the tears run down naturally, out of his eyes and down the sides of his temples, until they stopped, which they eventually did. When they quit flowing out, he sat up, grabbed his ax head and slingshot, and tried to slide down the hill over the slick weeds. That didn’t work so well, though he ripped up a lot of plants and made a crude tear in the earth.

At the bottom, sitting against the side of the hill, he again had the feeling that it moved, twisted against his back as though within it a giant had turned in its sleep. He wondered suddenly if it was hollow, like the hills he’d heard of in wonder tales. He turned, pressed his ear to the ground where it rose up behind him, and heard his own heartbeat bouncing off the solid, packed hillside. But it seemed there was something more the hill required of him. So he sat there a good while longer before, almost out of boredom, with no real outcome in mind, he began to dig against the side of it with the head of the ax.

The deeper he dug, the more earth he pulled away, the more exquisite the vision that developed in his mind. At first, he didn’t know what he was even imagining, or what he was starting, but as the hole got large enough to admit a shoulder, then his head, and as he chopped downward and finally effected a shallow, bowl-shaped groove, he understood that he was digging something into which he might fit. The ground was heavy, a crumbling black containing tiny white fragile snail shells and clamshells the size of fingernails; it was packed to a tight wall but sometimes he hit a space where it was softer, easier to dig. Sometimes clods of it fell from the upper side of the hole, and he pushed them out impatiently with his feet. When he had dug farther and scooped out a deep pocket in the earth, he backed himself underneath the overhang of ground and sat there. The dirt under him was soft, and he was very comfortable — he found he didn’t want to move although his stomach hurt, he knew that he was hungry. Which made him think that next time he came out, he’d bring some food, which made him realize there’d be a next time. He had only started on this thing.

That day, he sat there for a very long time. Surrounded by the smell of earth, those uncontrollable tears that plagued him with no warning came again. And when they came, he let them drip down indifferently, in fact he welcomed them. Into his mind there came the picture of his hand. In his hand was the clump of dirt he’d taken, just like his father, to throw down onto the lid of his mother’s coffin. He’d looked at his hand and the dirt in his hand, and then he had frozen over the lip of the grave. He regarded the white sprays of flowers as in a trance. Instead of opening, his fist shut tight. Franz had turned back to him. Franz had held his fist over the hole, pried his fingers apart, and shook out the dirt. Franz had dusted his palm. Grabbed his arm so he came away, stumbling, from that mysterious sight. And when he was well away, Franz had dropped his arm, and said nothing.

Nobody had said a thing all the way back from the graveyard and after that, it seemed to Markus, the silence had grown deeper, surrounding everything that had to do with his mother. His father never spoke of her, referred to things she did, or even mentioned objects that might remind anyone of her. All she owned seemed to vanish — her flowered wash dresses, her shoes, her fur-trimmed cloth coat. Only Delphine said her name. It was not as though his mother vanished, for then her things would be left to hold. It was more as though she’d never existed at all.

Not for Markus. In his thoughts, she was more powerful than ever, and stubbornly, he nursed words and pictures and spoke of her to himself. Others might let her go, but he didn’t have to, that was his choice.

The dirt sighed a little, sifted down his back. The hill was still shifting and rearranging itself, still settling mote by mote into its most compact shape. Markus closed his eyes and drifted. He actually fell asleep. When he woke in the shallow den, and came to consciousness without opening his eyes, he realized, before he knew where he was, that he felt wonderful, that he had the good feeling that he’d used to have in summers or looking forward to Christmas or his birthday, before his mother got ill. He had no idea what it was, this good thing that he anticipated, but as he gradually swam toward the surface of his thoughts, he knew that he would find it if he dug.

ONCE HE GOT HOME he couldn’t help telling Emil and Erich, the excitement of the find was too much. He thought as he talked, invented as he waxed eloquent — this fort, this tunnel, this stronghold, this cave they would dig could be reinforced just like a real miner’s mine with boards from the abandoned shack, and branches cut from the woods. It was Markus who thought of swearing people in, too, not allowing just anyone to tag along and join the construction. Having taken an oath of secrecy, made solemn by hot wax dripped on the inside of their wrists, the boys stole shovels, snatched sheets off clotheslines to haul the dirt out of the tunnels, cached away loaves of bread and hard apples, nuts, potatoes to roast, the ends of sausages for the ravenous gang to eat. After school, they gathered at the unfinished house site, worked at their task until dark and beyond dark, by the light of lanterns sneaked out of barns, the flames of candles snitched off their mothers’ bureaus and even, thanks to Roman Shimek, the worst boy in town, candles from the altar of the Catholic church, a disappearance that sent Father Clarence Marek into a fit of outraged sermonizing.

The Waldvogel boys, because they didn’t go to church anymore — not the Catholic church since their mother died and not the Lutheran church, even though Tante waged a campaign with Fidelis — never heard the sermons on the missing candles. They did hear about the sermons from the other boys. In the past they might have been worried, even felt the need for confession. Now they puffed with pride. Felt badness swell in them. Swaggered. For without their mother they felt entirely forsaken and therefore godless. Why should they believe in a God who could so easily and with total indifference to their prayers take her away? They scoffed at God, then, made wax signs on their wrists, took oaths of blood, and licked the rusty ax head. Fidelis knew none of this, and Delphine had only a suspicion.

ONE SATURDAY, Franz brought Mazarine home on her bike. She sprang off the handlebars as the bicycle slowed and then walked beside him, waited as he leaned it against the side of the house. She gazed up at him with a steady smile, trying to hide her nervousness. Franz’s father was a forbidding person and she was sure that he didn’t like her. When she’d visited before, Fidelis hadn’t said a word, hadn’t teased her, hadn’t even given her the kind of neutral but appreciative glance that grown men gave her now. Sometimes their looks were much more obvious, and she wasn’t asking for that. The fact that Mr. Waldvogel didn’t acknowledge her at all was unnerving. She hesitated a little, then followed Franz into the shop and watched him put on his apron. She heard Fidelis out in the farthest corner of the slaughtering room but his voice was muffled and she was glad he didn’t come into the shop to greet them.

“This is Mazarine,” said Franz, when Delphine appeared, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Both of you have z’s in your names,” said Delphine.

Mazarine looked at Franz with a startled little bolt of delight. For all her fooling with their names on the back pages of her notebooks at school, she’d never made anything of the z that they had in common. And now this woman had given her a brand-new piece of old information. Z. Delphine laughed a bit, noticing the pleasure in the girl’s eyes. She turned away, but she had already softened because she could see that this Mazarine, who wore boys’ shoes and had one dress to her name, whose family was dirt-poor with that one bicycle their only wealth and with a bill run up they’d never pay, and whose brother Roman was a little hell-raiser, loved Franz. Why not? Any girl would, it was true. Franz was the type for whom girls developed easy crushes. He had the rich girls after him, doing errands at the shop for their mothers and craning their heads to see if he was working out in back. Delphine knew that Franz didn’t have the capacity for similarly shallow feelings. As he’d carried his mother to her room from the plane ride, she’d seen how much he loved Eva. From that, she had also seen that his attachment to his first love would be deep, maybe even dangerous.

Delphine thought that she’d have to strangle any girl who ever hurt one of the boys. It was seeing them so helpless and lost after Eva died. Even then, she had the thought that anything a woman did would echo back into the sorrow and love they felt for Eva. After she had given this Mazarine the once-over, she asked for a hand with some chores, just to ascertain if she was steady. There was an order to be wrapped for the freezer. Delphine showed the girl how to tear off just the right amount of paper, how to make the crisp folds, then draw down the string from the spool that hung from a hook on the ceiling and secure the package with a flourish. Mazarine did everything carefully and efficiently, and then asked whether there was more that she could do. So Delphine had her wipe down the shelves out front and clean off the canned goods. She did that. And came back again for more work.

“Mazarine, are you hungry?” said Delphine.

“Oh no,” she waved her hand, but gulped. There was hesitation, and Delphine realized that she shouldn’t have asked. It was probably a matter of pride with her to have eaten.

“Come back here with me,” said Delphine. She led the girl back to the kitchen, and heard a little intake of breath as Mazarine paused at the doorway. The afternoon light was slanting through the windows, falling richly on the blue bread bowls and picking out the luster of the polished copper trim on the bins of flour. The tablecloth with the fruits in the squares was on the table, just washed, the colors quiet and cheerful. There were apples in a wicker basket. Delphine remembered how she had felt the first time she had entered Eva’s kitchen, and a wave of feeling for Mazarine flooded through her. She made a meat sandwich, put a doughnut on the plate, an apple beside, poured the girl a tall glass of milk.

“Eat anyway,” she said.

Ten minutes later, when Mazarine returned to the shop, she asked if she could do something else.

“You don’t quit, do you.” Delphine grinned.

“No,” said Mazarine. Her voice was shy, but firm. Delphine remembered things she’d heard about the girl’s father, a roamer with something of a name for his bad temper. And the mother, pendulously fat in spite of the lack of food and laid up with sick headaches people said was lazy nervousness. The girl probably knew that the mother had run up a bill here, and this could be her way of doing what she could about it. Or maybe she was just trying to impress Franz. Or be close to him on the days he had to work. Maybe, thought Delphine, there would be some of Eva’s clothes from the trunks upstairs that could fit Mazarine. But then again, that might bother Franz. At the end of the afternoon, she gave the girl a package of smoked turkey drumsticks and some bacon, all wrapped together, and also told her casually, privately, that she’d taken money off her family’s bill. Mazarine flushed, but then raised her head and nodded sharply.

Maybe the girl could use some of her things, too. She had a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right, but they might look good on Mazarine. As the girl walked out the door with Franz, Delphine realized that she was starting to rescue Mazarine. Maybe she saw in the girl a capacity for self-sacrifice similar to her own and wanted to call out a warning. I should stop myself, thought Delphine. The girl really hadn’t asked for it. Plus she had a mother, however half-baked.

ON THE WAY HOME to the Shimeks, they stopped and hid Mazarine’s bicycle, walked through the high brush and into the trees, then up a slight rise to their pine tree. “We should bring a blanket here,” said Franz.

“I can just see us, a blanket on the back fender of the bicycle — try to explain that!”

Franz began to kiss her. He could smell the apple on her breath. Some grains of sugar clung to the dip in her throat just above the lavender collar of her dress. When he licked the sugar from her throat, Mazarine looked up into the branches and tried to hold herself together. She didn’t want to be the first to tell him how she loved him, so she bit her lip. When she felt as though she’d burst, she pushed Franz fiercely over and stared into his eyes a moment. Slowly, she brought her lips down far enough just to graze his. Then she pinched him, let him grab for her. When she fell in a sprawl, she let him lie on top of her, but only until his breath came quick and hoarse. While he still had his eyes closed she rolled away and ran, mocking him, hair flying, toward the road.

IN THE YEAR after her father was released from jail, it seemed to Delphine as though he was being slowly erased. He thinned all over. His skin softened to a ripe peachiness, his eyes blurred. His hair was a candy pale floss sticking straight up on his head. Roy diminished, became almost gamine in his appearance like a small, ancient boy. Those strange unfocused eyes regarded the world with too mutely affable a gaze. Before, the drink made him bold and loquacious. Now, he was dreamy, slow, forgetful and often disturbingly at peace.

Still, he was industrious enough. He spent his mornings at the shop, doing whatever came his way to be done. And then, taking as his pay ten cents and a slice of sausage, he went on to his afternoon position. He began helping Step-and-a-Half with her sortings and haulings, assisted her in picking through town leavings. Together, they ranged across the town plucking scraps from back porches. Step-and-a-Half and he had occasionally worked together between his binges. Now they saw each other every day. They made a strikingly odd pair — she tall and heron-proud, fierce-beaked, fabulous in her collection of skins and rags and he stooped and pale with the roses of shot veins, old whiskey in his cheeks, his skin ever more translucent and fine except for the purple onion of his nose. He began to improve her equipment. Roy constructed a clever light cart out of broken crates, bent hardware, and bicycle tires. One would push and the other holler as they passed up and down the streets collecting all there was to collect, which in those times was dire stuff unless you knew, as Step-and-a-Half did, the banker’s cook, and were accepted at the back doors of the greater and the lesser rich — the former bonanza farms swallowed into the town limits and the shop owners, who stayed in business by only the slimmest margins. By reason of her long-standing fidelity to her trade, she was welcome in these places, and so, now, was Roy Watzka.

Step-and-a-Half’s collaboration with Roy was an irritation to Delphine. She knew that she should have been glad that her father had joined in the pursuit of an honest trade. But to align himself with such a strange character, and thus make himself the subject of more talk, was hard to bear cheerfully, though she made a good show. And, as well, Delphine was sure that Step-and-a-Half disliked her for the mere fact that she had to all appearances taken Eva’s place behind the counter.

Yet there came a day when Step-and-a-Half spoke to her. She came into the shop for her pickings one morning, and didn’t leave after the small ceremony in which Delphine handed her the sausage ends and trimmings. She picked through them with her usual discernment, then Delphine took her choices and wrapped them neatly. There was a kind of snobbishness about her, Delphine thought, an insistence on choosing the best of the worst. And why was she still standing there with the package in her hand, glaring, clearing her throat with a rusty scrape? Step-and-a-Half had a sharp, camphor-ridden, wolfish but not exactly unpleasant smell. This day she wore a fabulous scarf, a broad band of turquoise velvet, in a sort of turban around her head.

“Found a cat,” said Step-and-a-Half.

“Roy told me.”

Apparently, now, she kept a kitten in her stuffed cabin, a little gray thing with tiny fierce teeth. Maybe she wanted milk, thought Delphine. She asked Step-and-a-Half to wait, went to the cooler, and dipped a bit of milk into a cream bottle.

Returning, she handed the bottle across the counter. But Step-and-a-Half only took it with a small nod of incredulous thanks, as though offended by Delphine’s extravagance. She did not turn to leave. For a few moments, she squinted at Fidelis’s ornate diploma from Germany, as though she was reading it. The diploma hung in a heavy, carved wood frame on the wall behind the counter, but the words were German script and too small to make out. Finally, Step-and-a-Half dipped her regal head, crowned with the velvet wrap, and stated directly to Delphine, “They’re making a tunnel down to China.”

Delphine, startled, understood now that Step-and-a-Half was making crazy small talk.

“They’re digging their own graves. You better stop them.”

“All right,” said Delphine carefully, “I’ll stop them. I don’t want any trouble.”

Step-and-a-Half agreed with a sage look. Suddenly she lunged halfway across the counter and peered into Delphine’s face.

“I know his family, the Lazarres. Bunch of no-goods. You watch yourself around that Cyprian and hang on to your money.”

“Who asked you?” said Delphine, mystified. “And I’m the one taking his money, for your information.” She added the last just to stump the other woman, but it didn’t work.

“So you think,” said Step-and-a-Half, turning on her heel. With a swish of robes and a clatter of her man’s boots, she strode banging out the door.

AS THE DAYS grew short, Cyprian appeared at the shop every night and most often had a beer with Fidelis around dinnertime before Delphine finished with her work. Sometimes the three of them ate together after the boys came home — their faces flushed and ruddy with cold, wringing their chapped hands, sweaty from running, dirt sifting from their shoes. While the boys took their baths, Delphine would clear their plates and replace them with new. Then the three grownups would eat whatever Delphine had the time that day to make — riced potatoes, goulash, maybe a cake if she had the eggs. Unsold meat that wouldn’tlast, on the verge, she cooked up, too. Often, Tante joined them, and sometimes Clarisse came around, or Roy or any number of Fidelis’s friends and members of the singing club. Delphine and Cyprian usually left Fidelis and some assortment of people at the table, unless they were practicing, which meant they all stayed late. One ordinary night, as she was in the middle of a shop inventory and had a hundred small items to reorder swirling in her head, Delphine left just the two men, Fidelis and Cyprian, sitting together over the remnants of kidney gravy and mashed potato pie with nothing to distract them from each other but the bottles in their hands.

When Delphine left the room for the office, both of the men felt a sudden itch of a tension. After a silence, Fidelis said he wanted to try flying in an airplane, like Franz, and Cyprian answered that the automobile was good enough for him. Then they each took a drink and didn’t say anything for a while.

“But I wouldn’t want to be in a tornado again,” said Cyprian.

Fidelis nodded, but pointedly didn’t ask when Cyprian had been in a tornado before. The tornado suddenly seemed too loaded a topic to discuss, as did the merits of various makes of automobiles, Roosevelt’s visit to Grand Forks, the CWA, milk prices, whether there’d be anything to butcher if the drought continued or the liquor tax or the burning of a neighboring town’s opera house. The only topic that seemed safe was the food, what was left of it, so Fidelis said the kidneys weren’t too bad.

“’Not too bad,’” said Cyprian. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, she fixed them good.”

“Damn right,” said Cyprian, as though he’d won some challenge from Fidelis, put him under, or at least his remark. Fidelis couldn’t help it, a shiver of anger twitched up his back. He took a long drink, and so did Cyprian, and then the two laughed uncomfortably to try to right the disagreeable feeling that had suddenly grown between them.

“Did you read about the damn eclipse?” said Cyprian, hopeful, feeling that the heavens were the only subject that could save them.

“No,” said Fidelis, trying to keep his voice neutral.

“Supposed to be a dark one,” muttered Cyprian, who knew nothing of it himself. Then he came up with what seemed like an inspired path to follow, one that wouldn’t give out. “So the leaves are off the trees,” he said, “you getting much game in to butcher here?”

Fidelis readily took that up. “A deer or so, then Gus Newhall shot a bear up in the Minnesota northwoods. ‘Course he nearly brought down a goddamn Indian doing it, the guide was just ahead, as I hear it, Gus got overexcited and fired, nearly took the guide’s head off and—”

Cyprian froze with the beer half to his lips and slowly lowered the bottle, and then his black eyes looked into Fidelis’s light eyes, which was a dangerous thing, for now they couldn’t unstick their gaze from each other. Nor could they blink, for the first one who did would be obscurely beaten. Fidelis didn’t know what he’d done to land in the frozen deadlock, but there he was. He had learned not to blink during the war, looking through the sights of a rifle, so he wouldn’t miss the flicker of a careless instant of exposure, or ruin the steady press of his finger. And Cyprian had learned not to blink when he trained as a boxer, for that’s how two boxers sized each other up to start with. Stared into each other’s eyes. The best could move a deadly punch to the throat as fast as the eyelid dropped. So their stares held, and held, and as they did not move they breathed the harder. Their eyes dried out and burned and their noses stung. The tension grew immense, ridiculous, then unbearable. Delphine walked in just as, with a ringing report, Fidelis’s hand shattered the beer bottle he was holding. All three gazed down in astonishment at the spurt of bright blood. Fidelis said, “So Cyprian, what tornado were you in?”

And smooth as silk pie, Cyprian answered him, “Belleau Wood, where they burned the wheat and still we came on, blasted Germans from the trees. We kept coming, they couldn’t stop us. When those snipers hit the ground we finally got to use our bayonets.”

Delphine wanted to back out of the room, but instead she got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and dabbed the stuff on Fidelis’s hand while she talked to Cyprian. Lightly, she put things to rights. “I thought they declared an armistice way back when, so what’s all this about?”

Cyprian shrugged, and Fidelis, though he struggled with a sudden surge of anger, laughed and made a face at the sting of the alcohol. “Sure,” he said easily, suddenly feeling foolish at the degree of inexplicable hatred he’d felt for Cyprian, whom he had always liked fine up until this evening. “I wasn’t there at Belleau Wood. The war, that’s done with, finished.”

“Oh yeah,” said Cyprian, recovering his usual mildness. “All done with but for the beauty marks.” He tapped his throat, the roped white flesh.

LATER ON, when the two had returned to the farmhouse and settled into the bed, Delphine wearily unfolded herself, stretched her feet long underneath the quilt that Eva had sewed for her on her good days, tiny postage stamps of color. She was troubled by and wondered at the palpable strain in the kitchen — she’d felt it between the two men even before she entered, from the silence, and then there was the sharp explosion of the bottle, Fidelis’s hand slashed. And Cyprian had been poised on his chair as though he was cocked to explode. Now, he was breathing quietly beside her, quite sleepless.

“What were you two arguing about?” she asked.

“You,” he said, no hesitation in his voice.

“Well, that’s sure stupid,” said Delphine, feeling stupid herself.

“Maybe.”

Delphine laughed unpleasantly, surprised that he should be jealous when he treated her like his sister, and then obscurely angered that he thought he had any right over her at all. She simmered for a few minutes, her thoughts prickling.

“I think,” she finally said, though she had not actually thought this out herself, “we should stop sleeping together if you’re not going to love me like a woman. What do you think of that?”

As soon as he got up and left the bed, she missed the weight of him next to her, wanted to curve around his back and throw her arm over him. She always fell asleep in seconds if she took her breaths in unison with his. Restless, she lay for a time in the quiet darkness, and then she sighed and rose, wrapped her red robe around herself. She found him sitting at the kitchen table. “Oh hell. Please,” she said. “Come on back.” So Cyprian followed her back into the room and they lay together in the peace of the house, and in the blackness, Roy snoring beside the stove. But there was between them, even while they curled close as children, a sorrowing knowledge. Cyprian knew he had no right to his anger, and he knew as well that Delphine pitied him for it. What was he to do? And next to him, instead of falling asleep directly as she’d anticipated, Delphine was again restless. The inside polish of the fake wedding band on her finger was flaking away, and the base metal itched her finger. She couldn’t quite get comfortable. She turned and twisted, resented it when Cyprian’s breathing evened into a gentle rhythm, stayed awake a long time after he slept and listened to the quiet knocking of his breath.

FIDELIS WAS AWAKE overlong that night also. He had to shout from the kitchen three times for the boys to calm down and sleep — they were extra-excited about something. In the past, Eva would have found out what it was and told it to him. Fidelis wasn’t one to ask. They had their own lives and he didn’t pry into their business, nor did they come and tell him about the things they did. There was a wall of reserve between Fidelis and his sons, a formality that was part exhaustion and also the way things had always been in his own family. He had never spoken to his own father about personal things, not even when he was a grown man.

Late as it was, Fidelis had to rifle through the stacks of bills from his suppliers, figuring out which to fend off, which to string along, which needed immediate payment. He was dividing up the tiny amount of cash he had available to see whether he could figure or refigure a sum that would satisfy the lot. After he figured, he’d go back and reduce the amount on each bill, resign another to the bottom of the pile. Every so often, he put his fists on either temple, stared blindly at the mass of paper. Then he’d make some inner calculation, and adjust the bills into yet another mysterious order. As for the money that was owed to him, he’d given the job of collecting it to Tante. She was better at squeezing blood from rock, that’s what bill collecting and bill paying was all about during those desperate years.

The animosity he’d felt for the man who had turned out to be a sturdy, respectable baritone, and whom he thought of as Delphine’s husband, was still disturbing to him, too. At one point, weary of his piddling calculations, he stood up and paced around the kitchen. Four steps took him across the floor, and four back. Frustrated by the smallness of the room, he thought of walking the hallway outside, but he didn’t want to wake the boys now that they had finally settled themselves. So he continued his striding back and forth along the short course of kitchen tiles. Then in the center of the room Fidelis stopped, abruptly. He put his hand on his head and laughed.

So that was it! That was the thing about Cyprian! There was something. He had always known there was something about the man. And he hadn’t caught it. Not until they sat across from one another and stared their unblinking challenges into each other’s eyes. Thinking of that now tipped off Fidelis. Plus the way he had described Gus Newhall’s bear hunting. Fidelis recalled the staring match. The man’s eyes, that pitch black, the pupil melted into the iris, the flint-black stare. The deafened guide. It came to him. An Indian. Cyprian was an Indian. That’s all it was, all along, that uneasy feeling. Somehow he’d known and not known, the man was different. Thinking of Cyprian as an Indian now made things all right. Or almost so, for Fidelis also understood that the sudden antipathy between them was also and most strangely based on Delphine’s absence, or presence, or maybe sheer existence.

THE ENTRANCE to the boys’ dirt fort had become a grand thing, shored up out of the bed of an old wagon box, a horseshoe even nailed to a lintel constructed of a short piece of beam found underneath the sagging shack. The first part of the tunnel was reinforced, too, with boards knocked from the walls of the place and dragged through the short riffle of woods. There was a die-hard bunch who had remained with the construction — Markus, the twins, Emil and Erich, Grizzy Morris, and Roman Shimek. The others had fallen away, but that was fine with the core crew. They were at the best part. They had achieved the center of the hill and now were engaged in the satisfying toil of hollowing out their den, their clubhouse, their mighty chamber, their secret room.

The tunnel was a belly-wiggler for about twenty feet before the entrance to the room. The secret interior of the fort was at first extremely small. Markus used their tool of first attack, the blade of a hoe, and scraped out a slightly larger round than the tunnel. Roman Shimek had stolen a big square piece of canvas, and the boys used it to shovel the dirt into and then drag it out. Markus worked the hardest, digging away and hauling the dirt out himself even when the others sat in the grass resting or trying to figure out how to smoke the rust brown fake tobacco plants, rolling the stuff up in newspaper. He didn’t admonish them, reproach them, or care if they sat around outside the hill. What he was doing so absorbed him that it didn’t matter if they were in on it or not. To crouch and enter the impressive doorway, then crawl into the black heart of the earth, and to enter a chamber so quiet that he heard his blood sigh in his lungs, his heart’s rush and clench, his ears fizz with a humming and electric silence, this gave Markus a deep and almost violent satisfaction. When they left for home he was calm, and a little silly, and he slept the nights through for the first time since he had lost his mother.

No one discovered exactly what they were doing. It was, for sure, a wonder that the boys were not filthier when they came home, but it was a dry early November and most of the visible dust that filtered into their clothes and hair could be brushed away or smacked out or somehow disguised. And then, first thing they did upon returning was sneak past their parents, or, in Markus and his brothers’ case, Delphine. Sometimes she wasn’t even there, as she often left at her regular time each night. She drove home with Cyprian and left the boys’ dinners warming in the oven. Their father, working in the shop or at his cluttered desk, or drinking a beer or two with other men in the kitchen, didn’t notice them until they were cleaned up for the night. And then he noticed them in a way other than to really notice them. They were upright, breathing, not in any visible distress. In his exhaustion, this was enough.

Though the sky went dark sooner and the earth was colder every day, the boys went out to the hill and burrowed into it with the eagerness of gophers anxious to hibernate. Slowly, incrementally, they enlarged the inner room so one boy could kneel, then stand inside it. Two could squeeze into it, soon. Then three. And then it rained.

IT WAS A COLD, gray, pounding November rain and it lasted three days, wore the skies out, flooded the ditches and then the town’s sewers, topped the river, filled the sloughs, made running streams of the streets and a great square pool of the unfinished, clay-bottomed basement of the abandoned house where the boys had their fort in the hill behind. Then suddenly as it had poured the sky cleared, the sun blazed weakly and a cool wind dried the surface of the fields from black to gray. After school, the boys met as they’d agreed, and ran out to the hill anxious to see whether their work was damaged, which of course it was, and yet not so badly as they’d feared. A few boards sagged down, the hill itself was eroded where they’d liked to climb for the lookout, but as the tunnel had been dug at a slight upward angle the inside itself, even the secret interior room far inside the hill, was surprisingly, deceptively, dry. For the earth above was saturated with water and many times heavier than when they’d first begun.

Eagerly, the boys began working on repairs.

“Drag the boards over here,” Markus commanded, “we’re gonna reinforce.” He liked the grown-up sound of that last word and said it several times; it was a word that sounded right for the job, a word that smacked of the professional. He’d lifted a crowbar from his father’s tools — no one had noticed yet, and with it the boys pried several more boards from the old shed. Sun fell through the sides of the shack in brilliant slats now. The air smelled clean from the rain, washed, and the boys worked efficiently, knowing that they had only an hour or more of sunlight left in the late fall day. The earth that had fallen in where the boards collapsed was wet and clumped, which should have told them something, for it was much harder to drag the wet stuff out than it had been the dry. But the day itself was so windy, the air sucked moisture into it. They cleared the entry out all the way back to the room, which was only partly supported by a flimsy board framework.

“It’s gonna get dark,” said Roman nervously, as Markus dragged a board in behind him, “I gotta go.”

“Just wait a minute. Help me push this board in.”

Roman pushed the board along the tunnel as far as he could, but only one boy at a time could fit through the narrow aperture. Markus forced his way in through the half-collapsed part of the tunnel, pushed his head through the space, wiggled one shoulder into the opening, and then the other. If his shoulders got through, the rest of him was easy. In the blackness he felt his way forward, reaching back with his feet, gripping the board. He knew that Roman had fallen back now, and he breathed a sudden dampness of air inside the middle of the hill. He shouted for the others to follow along, bring the hoe and the piece of canvas, but he didn’t really care. In his pocket, he had a candle stub, and matches, for he meant to give himself a bit of light to see by in order to place the board he’d dragged along just so. Yet, he didn’t light the candle right away. The blackness seemed friendly, welcoming. The silence soaked up around him, comforting and pure. He felt the walls of the room, reassuringly dry. Deciding that he needed no light to put the board where he wanted it to go, he wedged it by feel up on top of two other boards that he’d stuck upright along the sides of the wall. He’d buried the ends of those boards a foot deep in the ground to stabilize them, and so he was able to fasten the first board up pretty well, and the next, too. He crawled back for one more and took it from Roman’s fingertips halfway down the tunnel.

“I’m going home,” gasped Roman. “It’s almost dark out there. C’mon!”

“Yeah,” Markus said, “soon’s I get this last part reinforced.” There, he’d said it again, and with the board in one hand he now wiggled backward through the damaged part of the passageway into the room. He had just succeeded in forcing that board up into the ceiling as well, when the boys outside the hill witnessed a strange thing. They had all left the entrance and were trudging back to the broken shed to grapple out one more board before they left for home, when something soundless but palpable, some earthen energy, made them turn and look, curious, at the hill. At which point, with a sound like nothing else, a dull interior whomph, the hill relaxed. One moment it was a high domed shape. The next, its top sagged. It took the boys in their astonishment several minutes to remember Markus was still in it.

THE PINE NEEDLE BED was dry on top but still wet underneath, and for a while Mazarine and Franz didn’t do anything at all but talk together, sitting on a low shelf of stone near their tree. Lately, because of his football playing, Franz was getting an increased amount of attention from Betty Zumbrugge, and it upset Mazarine in a way she could hardly admit to herself. Betty drove her father’s car to school, wore a different dress for every day of the week, and silk stockings. Her hair was very blond, maybe too blond said some girls, and she wore a brilliant scarlet lipstick they said she’d bought in Minneapolis. Betty stopped Franz in the hallways and offered him rides after school. She tried anything, to the point of looking foolish, said Mazarine’s friends. So far, Franz had not responded, and Mazarine was too proud to say a word to him about it. For his part, he was unaware that anything that Betty did could possibly bother Mazarine. He looked at her in the dappled piney light.

“Come here,” he said, easing down onto the soft needles.

“They’re damp,” she shook her head.

“We’ll dry off before we get home,” said Franz. “Don’t worry about it.” So she slid down the side of the rock and curled beside him, looking up the spiked tower of the pine, from along the powerful trunk, into the sky. Franz leaned over and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. The line of her hair could have been drawn with a fine pen, it sprang so evenly away around her face. He kissed her eyebrows — brown and straight, very much like his own — and then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her mouth, deeply, his heart pounding thick in his chest. The rain had brought out the scent of pine and the feral earthen odor of mold from the dead leaves. She smelled of harsh school soap, of paper, of the salt of her own body. He leaned back and held her hand carefully, desperately hoping that she’d place his hand on her breast again. This time he would not touch in a rough circle. But she did not.

With an electric movement, swift as an eel, a rustle of purposeful motion that stilled him, she twisted from his arms and knelt beside him. She reached forward and then slowly, with a firm calm, she slid the end of his belt out of the first loop, smiled at him and drew it from the hook, tugging it toward herself. He lay back in a state of wonder. She pushed away the two sides of the belt and rubbed the button on the top of his pants. He bit his lips and his whole brain begged Please. And she undid the button. Then with a mocking motherly care she slid the next button from its buttonhole, and the next, all the way down. She opened his pants and then she lay down next to him. She put her cheek on the thin cotton of his undershorts and he surged up toward her, aching. She put her arms around his hips. He fit alongside the curve of her throat. Reaching down, he held her shoulders, put his hands underneath her hair on the back of her neck, and murmured their private words to her. Her face was hot against him, heavy, her hair seemed molten trailing up his arms. A light wind came into the pines and made a rushing sound.

THE RAIN HAD BEEN extremely good for business — farmers used the rain as reason for a town visit, and during their dealings with Fidelis more than a few had decided to butcher a dozen old laying hens, say, a milked-out cow, even a fat enough pig or a steer so as not to feed it through the winter. He had a few busy and profitable weeks lined up and, in his mind, the pile of bills on his desk would happily shrink. He would be able to see the grain of the wood beneath, maybe, and even afford some new boots for the boys this winter. Things looked that much better. He had sold a bit more than usual on his rounds to the neighboring town grocery and general stores, and Zumbrugge had paid his outstanding account. So the constant nagging undertow of worry about money, a current that pulled on his strength, was weakened and he felt an unusual ease with the whole of life. When he greeted Cyprian, who was lounging in the yard on the hood of the DeSoto, waiting for Delphine, he offered him a beer and invited him in to take a load off, just as though nothing odd had occurred in their last meeting. Cyprian thanked him, politely enough, his tones neutral, and said he’d just wait with the car. That was when Fidelis should have left well enough alone.

It was his nature, however, to bring out everything within a situation. Usually, he got what he wanted by poking fun. This time, Fidelis didn’t want to joke around at all, his motivations were very different — he was simply feeling good. Also, without ever acknowledging it, he wanted to make up for the Gus Newhall story and the deafened Indian he’d laughed at in the telling. He wanted Cyprian to know he didn’t hold his being Indian against him and that even, if he were to tell the truth, that aspect interested Fidelis. He was curious about the whole way of life — he’d heard about that back in Germany and hadn’t seen much of it here. So instead of leaving Cyprian to himself, and letting the unsaid tension in their last meeting gradually release over a few days or weeks, Fidelis took two beers from the store’s cooler. He unlatched the beer caps from the tall dark amber bottles and a plume of cool smoke escaped each as he walked back outside.

“Here,” he said, offering the beer to Cyprian. “It won’t kill you.”

Cyprian took the beer, tipped it back, took one drink but said nothing. He found himself staring down, dumbly, at the churned muck of the delivery yard, examining with fake interest how the dirt had cemented itself in channels. He wondered at himself, why he couldn’t just say thanks and be easy with Fidelis. It would not happen. There was a huge rock in his chest. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. Even the beer going down didn’t help, but tasted sour to him. Then he surprised himself, watched his hand upend the bottle and pour the beer in a stream onto the hardened mud. The bloom of hops drenched the air between the two men for a few seconds, then faded. Fidelis went still, and put his own bottle down on the hood of the car. Now it was too late. Now a wave of affronted rage gripped him and he moved to stand within Cyprian’s line of vision. As he did so, he stepped back, out of reach of a sudden punch, and carefully untied his apron. He dropped the stained white cloth, rolled his sleeves up his arms.

Cyprian was still watching the ground, the delicate tracery of the beer finding its way into the crust of earth. He frowned as though something in what he saw gripped his thoughts. He knew when he looked up that it would begin, and he was, now, in no hurry. He was lazy. He was filled with a glad black sense of this moment’s inevitability, so much so that he mumbled, in satisfaction, “It had to happen.”

“So you want this, you get it,” said Fidelis, his voice flat.

And at those words Cyprian walked sideways, away from the vehicle, and then slowly raised his head to stare again into the white-blue eyes. He removed his hat in the lock of their gaze, shrugged off his jacket, rolled his own sleeves up, too. And there the men stood now, arms loose and ready by their sides, the one dark and tense, his body lean with eager strength, the other solid with power. Their strengths were very different, and they planned accordingly, each thinking how to maneuver the other in order to use his own talents to the best effect, but that all came to nothing. Fidelis, for the second time that day, broke his pact with discipline. An unexpected blind fury took him at the thought of the wasted beer, and he lunged forward in a low crouch intending to simply grab Cyprian and smash him against the side of the car. But Cyprian had already decided that he wouldn’t let the butcher get that close. He crouched too, and with a sudden hook cracked Fidelis from under the jaw, giving the punch a spin to torque his neck, and then Cyprian danced backward to assess the damage.

Not much. But the punch snapped Fidelis from his loose rage, restored his grip on his temper, and caused him to step back and gauge his next move with narrowed eyes. The two men circled with a fixed intensity now, not fury so much as a cold meditative watchfulness — for everything, for all the nothing, for something they would not admit to until it was over, for the shame of it, the foolishness of fighting over a woman neither of them had any claim on, or would admit to fighting over in the first place. And then right there, between that one punch and the next move that Fidelis made, between the intention and their half-realized urge, the boys’ thin yells of panic came to the men clear as birds’ cries across the dead grass of the fields. Seeing the men in the yard, the boys’ cries grew more desperate and shrill.

Fidelis put his fists down with a sideways look of warning at Cyprian, and the two, their attention now completely riveted to the obvious sounds of some catastrophe, strode toward the children. Roman was hoarse and gasping, Emil bawled out something about the hill. Erich, white and stiff as a cutout of a boy, plunged along behind on his short, little sausage-fat legs. When the men neared, Fidelis suddenly experienced a wave of sick intuition and broke into a run. So he was kneeling with Emil as the boys tried to tell him everything — the fort, the hill, how the hill sagged, the room inside of it, Markus — and he didn’t at first understand. It was Cyprian who grasped it all and said, “Shovels — we’ve got to bring shovels.” And it was Cyprian who instructed Delphine, who came running after, to gather up as many men as could be found. It was Cyprian, also, who said to her, out of Fidelis’s hearing, to be quick about it, and bring the doctor, too, that he thought Markus was buried alive.

ONLY IT DIDN’T feel like that from inside the earth. When the thunder of the hill’s collapse did not kill him, but wedged him in a fragment of space beneath two buckled boards, Markus felt very sleepy. The dirt had closed him in its fist. He wasn’t hurt, though he couldn’t move, and he wasn’t dying. Air seeped into his lungs but it was a sleeping gas, he thought, wearily passing into a dreamless fuzz of childish exhaustion. It was like when he was very small, the time his fever broke, and his mother curled around him in the cool blankets. She held her hand on his forehead and rocked him. He thought her hand was there now. And behind him the comfort of her great dark body. He was falling asleep. They were in the hull of a boat of silence, and blackness, and they were rocking to the end of the world.

* * *

THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH light for the men to see the shape of the hill, and to make out the doorway in the earth and see that it was shut. Fidelis threw himself forward at once and began to shovel with a maddened strength, but then Cyprian put his hands on his arms and stopped him. It took all of his strength to stop the butcher, to hold his arms. The men looked at each other in the shadow, Fidelis’s eye rolled white, and Cyprian said, clearly, urgently, “Don’t — you’ll bring down the rest of the hill. We must go very carefully.”

He showed him the tools that the boys used, and put the broken hoe into Fidelis’s hands. Then he and Fidelis knelt and began to enlarge the tunnel by scratching at the earth with light, furious movements. As fast as Fidelis bit the earth away, Cyprian gathered and pulled it onto the canvas and hauled it out. And the boys in their silent terror dumped it somewhere and brought back the canvas. The dirt that had fallen in was easy to remove, but the men had to enlarge the opening to accommodate their larger selves and so, by the time Delphine and the lanterns and the rescue party got there, the two men had barely disappeared into the opening of the hill, and they were drenched in the sweat of effort. As Fidelis inched into the hill, working from his stomach, his great arms straining forward at the shut seams of ground, he called to Markus.

Fidelis’s cries bounced off the dirt and struck Cyprian, but the other man did not take them in. He’d heard the sounds of the dying on the battlefield, the huge collective hell shrieks the mud gave after bloody encounters, and he did not react. From the past, he knew it was best not to let despair near, so he did not. Those outside the hill were not so disciplined. The whole singing club had gathered, and it was a terrible and useless meeting. The men could do nothing but mutter logistics and touch the hill on all sides and wonder whether there was another, better way to rescue the boy. They were unnerved and then worn down by the butcher’s constant hoarse cries to the point where some openly wept or turned away and put their foreheads against the trunks of the trees and waited — for that was all there was to do: just wait, and keep the lanterns going, and despair and speculate. The men inside the hill now would not quit or accept any relief.

The boards that the boys had used were guides, and as they made their tortuous way along, Cyprian righted the boards and set them up to bear, he hoped, the weight of the ground again. The top of the tunnel scraped along their backs, and if it should go they would not die instantly, he knew, but slowly feel the life and air crushed out of them. Still, he continued on behind the butcher into the center of the earth, until they entered a small passageway that had survived the collapse. They forced their bodies through it, now thoroughly inside the center of the hill, and Fidelis said, Gott Verdienst, and stretched his arm, strained his entire being forward, and touched the sole of Markus’s shoe.

Cyprian felt the shock ripple through the butcher’s body, and he grabbed the man’s ankle. Wait, he said, wait, for the earth was coming down in tiny clumps around them, threatening to give, and if the butcher pulled hard the boy, who was probably dead after all, and whose body might be entirely buried, could dislodge the entire frail board system. Or say the boy was alive. Then they’d all be buried together. Wait, said Cyprian. Just feel for his position. And so the butcher edged forward, pushed more dirt aside, made a narrow slot for him to straighten his shaking arm. He stretched to feel along the boy’s side, groped gingerly until he ascertained, with a wild gasp, that Markus had breath. But also that the boy was halfway buried and that the margin of space in which he survived was held up by only the flimsiest means, board on board, an accident of the collapse. And when the butcher understood how perilously close the boards were to giving, Cyprian felt the shock and fear communicate itself through Fidelis’s body.

Trembling and sweating, soaking wet at the earth’s heart, the top of the passage pressing down already on his spine, Cyprian breathed away the panic that communicated from the butcher’s body with a quick electric buzz. Slow, Cyprian said. His voice surprised him with its gentle firmness. Slow and easy. Fidelis was using all his strength to move his hands, just his hands. Ich weiss nicht, Cyprian heard the butcher say. And then he heard himself tell the butcher in that same calm and compelling voice that he could do it, that Fidelis must back out of the hole with him, that he must let Cyprian go back in alone.

“I have done this before,” said Cyprian. His voice told a calm, kind, reasonable lie. As though it were an everyday thing to fetch a boy from a crack deep in a mound of earth. He didn’t know how he caused his voice to sound so persuasive, except that he knew Fidelis would listen to nothing less than an utterly convincing argument. He must be given no way to argue back. “You’re too big — you could kill him if you try to drag him out. I’m trained for this. I can get the boy out. For your boy’s sake, come out with me now. Come out.”

And like one tranced and obedient, Fidelis did as he was told at that moment. Their antagonism had abruptly turned to a magnetic loyalty. The two men inched backward, crawled slowly back out the passageway into the blaze of lanterns. When Cyprian’s boots appeared, men rushed forward to help and he screamed them back again.

At his terrible yell, they did fall back and crouched in a circle around the entrance that looked impossibly small for two grown men to have gone into it, disappeared as though the hill had swallowed and then in some act of peristalsis conducted them to its center. Cyprian edged out and then gently, bit by bit, the butcher emerged. Kneeling in the white light, both men entirely blackened by the wet dirt, gasped their lungs full. Cyprian called for rope.

“I must go back,” the butcher said, lunging toward the hill. It was unbearable to have left the boy. Cyprian tackled Fidelis and held him around the waist, wrestled him backward, called out, “Delphine, Delphine, tell him.” The light blazed around them in a slick radiance. The air was cold and wet with the first drops of a blowing rain.

“Cyprian can do it,” Delphine said evenly, seeing the shape of things. She held the butcher’s eyes in her gaze. “Let him go.”

Those who watched said, later, how Cyprian seemed to dive into the earth, plow himself in as though he’d suddenly grown into a boneless earth swallower, a great human night crawler. He disappeared. And Fidelis, stunned and shaking his great head, his eyes wide and white in his mud-crusted face, stayed behind. He slumped in the dirt, waved the other men off with a violence they understood at once. They fell back, away from him, took the lanterns aside and left him in darkness as he wished. Only Delphine had no fear of him and did not leave his side. He seemed of the earth itself, waiting there, his breath ragged. Although she was too lost in her own suspense of terror to dwell on Fidelis, she did wonder whether he was praying. She never had known him to pray before, and although she released what she felt were foolish, beseeching, desperate words from her mind, she knew even as she thought these words that her prayers were not prayers. She should have listened to Step-and-a-Half. Now her pleas were no more effective with the powers that made the earth than the protesting bellows of cows prodded into killing chutes. Still, she begged despairingly for the rain to hold off, for the earth to mesh, for the flimsy tunnel to hold. Perhaps she muttered something out loud, for the butcher reached over and grasped her hand as though to quiet her, or perhaps himself, or maybe he didn’t know what he was doing at all with Delphine’s hand, or that he even had hold of it as the two of them knelt like petitioners at the entrance.

IT REALLY WAS a matter of finding his balance, only not in air, but inside the earth. When Cyprian went back in, he eased himself into the ever narrower tunnel with a swift intention he hoped would carry him past the point, halfway through, where panic came up, shutting down his brain, racing his heart. It was natural, this fear, like the stillness he encountered nearing the top of a flagpole where he’d actually stood. He saw a yellow screen of lights, breathed in an even whistle to control what he knew, from the war and from his more dangerous tricks. His first limit. He had a benchmark where he encountered the first level of his fear, and he knew he could get beyond that initial sick drop of his guts by thinking only of one breath, the next, then the next. By balancing along his own interior wire. And so he breathed himself through the tightest center of the passageway, and he crawled deeper. At last, he came to the place where Fidelis had reached up into the tiny hatch of space.

The boy was there all right. At first he thought with a wave of terrified disappointment that the boy was dead. But then he felt along Markus’s body and with his fingertips touched the boy’s lips and was certain he felt a small burst of warmth. And further, at a right angle to the boy, he discovered a small space into which he could pass the earth he removed in small handfuls, for that was all he took away. One handful, another judicious handful, a scraping of dirt here, some brushed away and some plucked, as though he were an archaeologist uncovering an ancient and fragile treasure. Even so, twice, the earth seemed to shudder around them. He didn’t know that it was thunder from an approaching storm, a storm that would drench the watchers and cause ten of them to wrestle Fidelis to the ground when he dropped Delphine’s hand and tried to reenter the earth.

Cyprian concentrated only on each bit of dirt he pulled away, only that, until he was able to expose the boy sufficiently to unwedge him just by inches, to bend him slightly at the waist. As he’d worked incrementally, Cyprian had understood that he’d have to fold the boy out of the place where he was caught. So he continued, in complete blackness, to draw the earth methodically first from one limb, then the next, then to turn the boy, then to fold him at the waist. He wrapped Markus’s arms across his chest and then with the tenderest of little pulls, slowly, through the tiny aperture, he delivered Markus onto the passageway floor.

There was a flop of dirt as the boy came free; one of the boards gave way just where Markus had lain, and Cyprian put his hands around the boy’s face to shield it, but the tunnel did not give way entirely and the earth held around them once again.

It was good that the boy was unconscious, for Cyprian could feel that a bone was broken in one arm, and who knows what else, and he was afraid the boy might thrash around in pain if he came out of shock. So he roped the boy’s limbs, tied him up like a package, and he left a loop he could pull. He took that piece of rope in his teeth and edged backward, feet first, down the tunnel and out into the rain. And when the lights blazed over him, and the men roared at the sight of him, Markus came quietly and momentarily awake. Emerging from the narrow opening, blinking away the dark, the first face he saw was Delphine’s, in a circle of radiance, as she unlashed the ropes and drew him into her arms.

FRANZ AND MAZARINE had lain so long beneath the pine that on rising they felt half drunk, dizzy with a peaceful happiness. He could still feel the print of her face there, her breath cooling in the fabric of his clothes. Her hair was still smooth and alive underneath his hands when he finally arrived at home. Immediately, he saw that something was wrong. He knew that this was the night the men met to sing back of the shop, but the place was silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. The door to the shop was unlocked, the lights were on, and there was no one anywhere. Franz stood in the kitchen, saw the food set out on the table, the glasses of milk. He flexed his hands, sat at the kitchen chair, lifted a piece of cold meat off a plate as though there’d be a message written underneath. The first shock of finding no one at the shop and house wore off, and he knew for sure now that some disaster had occurred. But he didn’t know where to go, and he didn’t know what to do, and even the dog was gone. The storm moved in. The rain came bursting down.

Helpless, Franz prowled the inside of the place, then got drenched and cold outside, walked in again, lights blazing. And slowly, as he paced, as he thought of what he’d been doing while all the while something at home went wrong, he rubbed his hands on his shirt to erase the feeling of Mazarine’s hair. He felt a terrible fear for his father, for them all, mixed with a deep embarrassment that he had lost all sense of duty and of time and fallen half asleep with her against him. Whatever happened, he grew convinced, was his fault. He stood outside shifting nervously, made another desperate round of the place. And then, as he made out small wavering lights approaching over the fields, he began to run toward them, shouting.