The Master Butcher's Singing Club (44 page)

“IF WE WERE
to take a nice, sharp, carving knife and slice you open,” said Doctor Heech, drawing a line with his finger up Roy’s stomach to the breastbone from the groin, “and if we were to push aside your stomach and your guts and take hold of your liver . . . say we ripped it out and showed you the poor, abused, pulsating organ, we would surely find you’ve done tremendous violence to it.”

Doctor Heech shook his lank silver curls, touched his eyebrows, almost whispered in his reverence for the liver. He went on talking to Roy in a gloomy, dreamy, tone. “This piteous, innocent, earnest helpmeet. What you’ve done is quite unforgivable. Liquefied in places, surely reeking, here petrified, there pickled. Just by gently palpating . . .” With a faraway frown Heech jammed his fingers into Roy’s side and closed
them on something deep in his midsection, causing Roy to yelp, then sob. “I can tell this noble liver of yours is kaput.”

“Leave it alone,” groaned Roy, pushing the doctor’s hands away. “God knows I tried.”

Doctor Heech huffed in disdain and turned to regard Delphine. “I heard you ran a fast fifty-yard dash this morning.”

“It was more like ten miles,” said Delphine. “Will he live?”

“He defies all physical laws,” said Heech, “so I would be foolish to make a prediction. But I don’t know how it is he keeps the flame burning in the wreckage as it is.” Heech looked down at Roy. Suddenly his assessing forbearance turned to rage and he roared out, “By God, you
will
live! I’ve put too much effort into your damn old carcass for you to die before you show consistent goodness to Delphine.” He jabbed a finger at Roy’s wasted face. “You will not die now! It would be disrespectful! I won’t allow it.”

“Taper him off,” he said to Delphine. “I don’t have to tell you how to do it. And give him this for the cough.” He handed her a bottle of strong cherry bright syrup. Then he put his hand on her shoulder for a moment and said to her, making sure Roy paid attention, “When he does croak, bury him in a packing crate. Don’t give him much of a funeral. Use the money on yourself.”

NOT THAT PEOPLE
aren’t kind, thought Delphine, but when they say no, do they mean because they really don’t have work, or because I’m me? She didn’t know, just kept looking, and eventually to her great relief, for she was down to the last two dollars in her purse, she got a temporary job. Tensid Bien, the precise old man who sampled Sunshine cookies, who must have known she’d often given him an extra slice of baloney for his nickel, put in a good word for her. She was hired to file papers for the county offices in the courthouse. So her days became as dry as the wind outside. She worked in a back file room on an accumulation of boxes filled with old land settlements and myriad complaints. Nobody else really broke the tedium—one secretary took calls and worked up
current papers on her smart black typewriter. Since she considered herself too important to be bothered by conversation with a file clerk, Delphine hardly ever addressed her and after a while she could not remember the woman’s name. Delphine rarely saw a county official in the flesh—they seemed busy doing county business somewhere else. It was a sleepy job. When she got home, she dosed Roy from the bottles of syrup and schnapps she carried with her and never left alone with him. Once he slept, his cough quieted, his breathing was so calm he didn’t even snore. Delphine made herself dinner and went to sleep, too.

Sleep fell over everything, monotonous and soft. Snowy fluff burst off the cottonwood trees and collected in the grass. Delphine moved slowly through the mild wind and hush of spring green, drugged with sleep like her father. She felt herself sinking away from the grind of life as she crept from her warm bed, through the astonishing light, to the dim rooms of dry papers where she worked. It was a kind of hibernation that she thought might last for the rest of her life. She grew fond of the boredom, the routine, and she wouldn’t have given it up for just anyone at all—but there was Markus. And behind him, or before him, she didn’t know which, massive in the new wheat, stuffed with the strength of many, there was also Fidelis.

IT WAS USUALLY
Markus’s task to shred cabbage across the big wooden shredder, a thick paddle-shaped board inset with a sharp blade, easy to set over the wooden washtub that Fidelis used for mixing and fermenting his sauerkraut. He’d had Markus shred the stuff for hours after school already, but after seeing how white his face was and how slowly he moved, even a month after Chicago, Fidelis had taken pity on the boy. He sent Markus to bed. After supper, Fidelis finished the job. He took a cabbage head out of the crate and began to saw it lightly against the blade. Using just the right amount of pressure, he reduced it swiftly underneath his hand until there was only the thickness of a leaf between his palm and the metal. He tossed aside the leaf and took up a new, tightly packed whitish green head, began on that, stopped halfway down arrested by the sudden sensation of having recalled a
tremendous task that he had left undone. That was his conviction of what oppressed him, anyway. The problem was, he couldn’t think what this task was at all. He picked up the cabbage again, but the impression in his mind only grew stronger. At length, he was so severely haunted by it that he threw down his apron and went outdoors.

There, in the spring-frosted meadow of the front yard, under a quarter moon that blazed in a fresh black sky, he remembered—it was not a task, but very definitely it was something he hadn’t finished. The question was, he thought now, was whether it ever could be finished. If he took it up again, would it go on forever? Also, did he have the courage? Did he dare go and see her?

DELPHINE WAS READING
and dozing over a thick Book-of-the-Month Club novel she’d got from the little lending library run by some schoolteachers out of the courthouse basement. The plot was intimate, British, and safely romantic, one of those in which she had confidence she’d not be left for days with heartache. She had always been a reader, especially since she lost Clarisse. But now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next. She read Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Dos Passos, George Eliot, and for comfort Jane Austen. The pleasure of this sort of life—bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life—had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. She read E. M. Forster, the Brontë sisters, John Steinbeck. That she kept her father drugged on his bed next to the kitchen stove,
that she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

When she came to the end of a novel, and put it down and with reluctance left its world, sometimes she thought of herself as a character in the book of her own life. She regarded the ins and outs, the possibilities and strangeness of her narrative. What would she do next? Leave town? Her father would die without her, a failed thread of plot.
The lives of the Waldvogels would simply proceed on in the absence of her observation, without the question mark of her presence. A new story would develop. Delphine’s story. Could she bear it? Maybe after all she’d live her story out right here. Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn’t exactly feared the word
contentment
, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days. She did not mind living with poor decrepit Roy on the forsaken edge of a forgotten town beneath a sky that punished or blessed at whim. Contentment. The word itself seemed square and solid in her mind as the little house—Roy’s—that she thought of as her own house. Her house at the end of the world. Horizon to all sides. You could see the soft, ancient line of it by stepping out the door. From the west, later and later every night, flame reflected up into the bursting clouds. Skeins of fire and the vast black fields.

After she watched the sun go down, she lighted the lamps, picked up her latest book. Before she dove into the words, she sat and looked at the walls of her quiet room. This was her nightly ritual: she read, she dozed, she roused herself, refreshed and a little dizzy, she made herself a cup of strong tea and began again. Sometimes she read until three or four a.m., knowing that she could take a nap behind the file cabinet the next day. Several times a night she carefully looked around her, pleased at the details of her surroundings. The pinkish light from the expensive lamp that Step-and-a-Half had inexplicably given to her glowed on the pale gold walls. Delphine had hung forest pictures cut from calendars and framed with scraps of birch wood. Gazing into those leafy prints, she entered a peaceful and now familiar state of suspension. A radio that Roy had acquired from Step-and-a-Half and fixed played soothing,
tinny orchestra music. There was no heater, but she had the quilt that Eva made for her draped up to her waist. Sometimes she traced the pinched little stitches that her friend had taken, and thought strangely that the stitches might as well have been taken in her own skin, and Eva pulling them. She was reminded of Eva many times a day. She still retained the imprint of her friend’s personality, and in that way, another comfort, she liked to think she kept her alive.

Eva would like this room, she thought. There was a small, ornate, feminine, wooden desk where Delphine paid the bills. A huge padlocked sea-trunk of bent blond pine, secured with iron bands, held two more quilts used on very cold nights. A small oval rag rug gave warmth, she believed, to the center of the plain board floor. She hadn’t decided whether the figurine of a dog, set on a rickety table pushed up underneath a window, was ugly or elegant. It didn’t matter. All of these shabby objects were bathed in the kind light of the rose-shaded lamp. In that light, Delphine gazed upon them with a warm satisfaction and shut her ears to the cold, subterranean creaking of the earth.

Yes, they were still down there, the Chavers. Not their bones but some vestige of their desperation. Half asleep, sometimes, Delphine talked to them, tried to explain.
I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have. I am so sorry. Go away.

When she heard someone knock on the door, she started and thought first of Ruthie. Then contained herself. It was just that they never had visitors. Though the town was growing, few came out that way, certainly no one ever at night. Delphine looked through the window before she opened the door and saw that Fidelis stood hunched into his woolen greatcoat. He was heavily scarved against the sharp spring wind and booted against the mud. For some reason he had walked. Delphine’s heart leaped suddenly in worry for Markus, and she lunged to open the door. Fidelis stepped in with a swirl of night air, and she swiftly shut the door behind him.

“Markus?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” said Fidelis, untying his heavy work boots. “He’s not sick,
er ist sehr müde
.”

He left the boots behind him on some newspapers set near the door.

“Dad’s asleep in the kitchen,” she explained, “so come, let’s sit in here.”

Obediently, he walked in his wool-stockinged feet to the chair. The socks were gray, the heels and the toes bright red, childish looking in a way that might have endeared Fidelis to Delphine, if she didn’t pinch off such a thought before it formed. Without asking if he’d like some, she put the water on the stove, for mint tea, and came back in to sit with him while she waited for it to boil. Fidelis told her there had been a letter from Germany. The boys had started school and were involved in a government youth group that Tante said was extremely hard to get selected for. She implied that she had had to use money that Fidelis sent with her to bribe government officials to admit the boys, though they had passed some rigorous tests. As for Tante, she had at first conducted sewing demonstrations with her American model machine. Then she’d realized it was inferior to the German model.

“That’s enough,” said Delphine. “I’m not interested in your sister.” She began to quiz him about the boys at home. Were they eating well? Washing? And the business. Were the people he had credited paying their bills? Some. Not enough. Were the suppliers giving him good prices? Obviously, from his answers, he did not have the time to spend with them in wangling better profit margins. Delphine frowned. “One or two percent here and there will make or break us,” she said, “you’ll find out!” She slapped the arm of her chair to hide her slip. Us? What was she saying?

“Just tea again.” She mocked his disappointed look, and said, “You drink too much beer anyway.” She rose and went into the kitchen, stepped around the sleeping Roy, and swirled mint leaves into the boiling water in her heavy brown teapot. She took out cups and put a lump of sugar in the bottom of each one. She brought the pot and the two cups, balanced, back into the living room and set them by the china figurine of the dog.

“Have you ever seen a dog like this?” she asked Fidelis.

It had long floppy black ears, white and black markings, a pointed muzzle, and sat alertly upon a green porcelain cushion.

Fidelis picked the dog up and turned it this way and that, almost playfully. “I don’t think another like this dog exists on earth,” he finally said, putting it back.

Delphine said nothing. She was startled by the frivolous tone in his voice. There was an awkward, flirtatious quality about him. It was upsetting for her to hear him say anything that was not tied to the store. She addressed him on safer topics, and for a while they managed to skate a comfortable surface. Then Fidelis asked with no warning whether she knew, yet, if Cyprian was coming back.