Master Butchers Singing Club Page 22

  DURING THOSE persistently dry years, the stock was less and less worth butchering, the cows were so bony and lean, fed on green thistle alone or the poorest scrapings of slough grass and even young cottonwood bark. But for the last week, Fidelis had sudden business. He worked late into the night, worked until his knee gave out on him and he had to put on the leather brace Heech had sketched and then ordered from a harness maker. Though his knee creaked and ached, Fidelis believed this brace and Heech’s sewing abilities had kept him from becoming entirely lame. For sure, it helped him work strange hours. Farmers sometimes didn’t get their animals in until just before dark. They had to kill by the light of torches, wrestling steers into the killing chute, then skinning and butchering until almost dawn. This morning, Fidelis had slept two hours, then jolted awake to get the boys out of bed for school. For a moment, he stared into the gray air, entranced by an unfinished dream in which he followed Eva down a certain street they both knew in Ludwigsruhe, and entered behind her into an unfamiliar shop.

  The place was tiny, studded with merchandise of every type from pins and fabrics to pots of jam. It went on and on, back into the side of a hill, a catacomb of gray wooden corridors lit dimly by bare lightbulbs. She was wearing a dress of light plum cotton and it floated behind her as she swiftly turned corners. Suddenly, at the end of one cramped hallway, Eva turned around at his call and came toward him with a smile of surprise, as if to say, “What are you doing here?” And then he woke, of course, and although each cell of him wanted to lie still, to sleep on and on, through weeks, he must rise and wake his sons.

  He stumbled out of his room and into theirs, shook Franz awake wordlessly, and then touched Markus. All he had to do was touch Markus, or even his bedpost. Emil and Erich must be awakened with more care. They’d doze off instantly if left a moment. He walked to the bathroom and drew a mug of water from the tap, rinsed his mouth out, pissed, took his pants off a hook on the door. Then he walked into the kitchen and set a kettle of water on the gas range for the watery morning chocolate he added to their milk. He warmed the milk in a pan. Into another pan of water he dumped some oats, then turned down the heat so they wouldn’t boil over. His eyelids kept flickering, shut. He filled the coffeepot with water, a handful of grounds, eggshells from a bowl of them he’d saved. Then he sat at the table with his hands cradling his head, and fell asleep. Wakened when Emil entered the kitchen wearing only one boot.

  “Where’s your other boot?”

  “Schatzie must have hid it in the night.”

  The dog’s one awful habit.

  “Find it,” ordered Fidelis, rising to tend the stove. Next, it was Markus, who said that pulling on his jacket he’d torn the sleeve half off. How could that happen? Fidelis examined the jacket. Impossible. “You were fighting yesterday?” Markus hung his head and couldn’t look at him. Fidelis flung the jacket back at him. “Tonight, you work. A liar works twice as hard in his life as an honest man.” Fidelis was certain that this wasn’t true, from what he had seen, but the phrase came out and sounded right. He pushed Markus toward the bathroom. “Get clean.”

  Next Franz, no problems, but just being Franz there was always an intensity about his grooming—nobody must disturb his routine. “I found Emil’s boot,” he said, but it was clear he wanted to punch his little brother, and couldn’t, because he was a young man after all and had his dignity, so he brooded over his hair.

  “Essen.”

  Fidelis brought the pan of oatmeal, bowls, brown sugar, milk, his precious coffee, to the table. Now it was Erich’s turn. He wandered into the kitchen in his pajamas. “Where’s everybody?” He had crept into the bathtub and managed to fall asleep without anybody catching him.

  “Get back in there, get dressed!”

  Of course, he didn’t know where his clothes were, where anything was, and Fidelis felt his blood surge with irritation, and also sympathy. He ached for sleep, too, just the same. If only they two could crawl back into bed and curl in the blankets and snore like bears until Eva rocked the headboard and sang out for the lazybones to come and get their breakfast. Fidelis trudged back down the hall to the room. The clothing was still crumpled in a ball from last night, and faintly sour, but he made Erich put it all on. And his boots weren’t missing. By the time he got back to the kitchen, the coffee was beginning to stir his brain cells.

  The numbness of sleep left his face. He stretched and groaned as the boys secured their books with bookstraps, and grabbed their lard pails of the lunch that Delphine had made the previous afternoon. A cold potato, a piece of meat. An apple or a carrot. Sometimes she fried great rings of doughnuts or made a thick gingerbread. They piled on their coats and then pitched out the door. By the time they left, Fidelis was on his second cup of coffee. He’d learned to make that right. He brought the coffee into the bathroom and set it on the windowsill, added a good long dribble of Fornie’s Alpenkrauter. Then he mixed a lather in his shaving mug, and soaped his face with the silver-handled boar’s-hair brush that Eva had given him, along with a matching hairbrush and razor, as a wedding gift. After shaving, he patted his face with a towel, then rubbed his chin and cheeks with bay rum, and at last walked out into the shop.

  The sun streamed through the heavy windows onto the wood-block tables and counters. The wood was hacked, scored, blackened in the marks and seams, but the tables’ surfaces were scoured white. The blaze lighted his block of knives. He examined his knives, blearily clung to his careful selection for the sharpening. Next, he brought from the cooled back room halves of pig, scalded and gutted and hung yesterday. As he worked, diminishing the pork with economical clarity and swiftness of motion into perfect cutlets and medallions, he felt the leaden numbness that ran up his fingers diminish. The muscles in his arms grew limber, and he used the knife to cunning effect. All the while that his body moved, of its own will, his mind grew heavier with the need for oblivion until about eleven, having worked and cut steadily with only a short break, he had to stop. The sleep pressed behind his eyes with such an intensity that only a brisk turn outside in the yard would help. Again, he shook the sleep off, and then returned to his work until late in the afternoon, when Delphine told him to go back and lie down. She said that his eyes were bloodshot. She said it rudely.

  “Get out of here,” she ordered. “I will handle things.”

  For the first part of his life, Fidelis had been taught to read only crude signs from women, but Eva had instructed him in looking for subtler clues from her sex. So he knew that Delphine was careful to show no hint of sympathy, allowed not even a personal word of kindness to pass her lips, because she did not want to begin something between them that she considered impossible. And he, too, was immaculately impersonal in his behavior toward her. Every word referred to the business, or to the children. He and she were strangers living parallel lives, working alongside each other every day. Between them, they had put up an invisible wall. Fidelis knew it had to stay intact or something would crash down around him, around them all. He sensed the power of what their strict rules held back and kept himself from wondering at the nature of the force, its shape, its name. It was just a thing that must be left alone. He went back into his bedroom, shut the door, and took off his shoes. He lay down on the bed, and when he did, he felt his bones through his flesh and his muscles, unstringing, and he stretched immediately into a sleep so black it was like being dead.

  He slept for hours, then started awake the way he had that morning, staring at the ceiling. Only this time, his body half lifting in the bed with that buzzing sensation of pleasure in having truly rested, he lingered in the warm sheets because of the unfamiliar sensuousness of that relief. These were the times he would, in the past, turn to Eva and begin the slow lovemaking that they’d learned from each other. Over the years, they had added to their private love—unlike others, he suspected, who did what they did to get the need over with. Other men joked or complained about the length of time their wives gave them—a little longer, maybe, if they behave
d well that day. Fidelis never said a word when men got into those sorts of conversations. He knew things were different between himself and Eva, that there was something greater than the thing the other men discussed. That something had its own grandeur mixed inevitably with loss. When she died and was truly gone, the day he, and then each of the boys, threw the first clods of earth upon her casket after it was lowered into the ground, he’d had the sense of some beautiful immensity passing overhead in the heavens, away from him forever, and he’d gone very still. He’d tried not to move. The other mourners had seen a man rooted to the earth, standing like a block, dumb as a turnip. He’d become embarrassed at the picture he made and forced himself to step away. But some part of himself never did leave, he thought now; he was still standing at the edge of her grave. He was still feeling the blood squeeze through his heart, the hum of his brain, the clutch of his fingers, the earth drying in the cracks of his palms. He was helplessly alive, wholly divided into life, powerfully different from Eva. Sometimes he still felt the wonder of it.

  DELPHINE DID EVERYTHING she could to distract herself from the fact that she had to thank Fidelis, had to talk to him about having freed her father on bail. She transferred all the meat from one case to the next, and scrubbed out the first air-cooled case with a sharp mixture of vinegar and water. Then she arranged all of the meats in the case again, placing between each tray the careful decorations, cut of green waxed paper, that set off the pork chops and sausages and steaks. While she was finishing, she thought of all of the other jobs she could do, but even as she added them up she grew irritated with herself. Why not talk to him this very minute? In the middle of dunking a rag to make another swipe at the glass and enamel, she wrung it out instead and laid it on the steel counter. Closed the sliding doors.

  “Fidelis”—she stood behind him and he turned from his task— “you paid the bail for my father.”

  He nodded, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “Yes.” He acknowledged Delphine, then tried to turn back to the meat he was grinding and spicing, but there was more.

  “You’ll get it back.”

  “Sure,” said Fidelis.

  “I will pay you back,” said Delphine. “If he . . .”

  “But he won’t leave.”

  This was going to force him to say more, and he knew it, and all that morning he had thought it out. But it was still hard for him to say what he had to say to this woman. He took a huge breath, and made the attempt. “What you did for Eva, and then what Roy did . . .” But that was as far as he could go.

  “She was my friend, and good to my dad. I didn’t do it for you.” Delphine had decided to speak plainly.

  Fidelis shrugged to say that didn’t matter, but she preempted this.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t want people to start saying things. And Tante, her especially.”

  “She doesn’t know I paid.”

  “But she will. She does your books. And then so will everybody else in town.”

  Fidelis frowned, considering this, but remained stubborn.

  “So if they do,” he said, “they’ll think of what you and Roy did for Eva.”

  “I don’t want people thinking about that.” Delphine tried to keep her voice low, but it rose beyond her, sharp. “I know what they think already, I’ve heard it, and I know that your sister feeds those rumors with her gossip. I want an end to it. But I’m glad . . .” Here she stumbled a little, for it was hard for her to say this, and her voice dropped, low and shamed. “Thank you for getting him out. I never knew my father sober before this. It was hard on him, getting locked up, and in real trouble, after he’d finally taken the pledge.”

  This was more than she’d ever said to Fidelis here, or revealed to him in this shop and in Eva’s house. It had been easier to speak her mind to him on her ground back at the farm. They turned away, both relieved and exhausted. Delphine wanted to go home and sleep. Fidelis felt a heaviness pressing on his chest. For a while that day, everything they did seemed twice as difficult, but gradually, as they ignored each other or spoke only in the most necessary monosyllables, things returned to normal. Any stranger walking into the shop would think the two disliked one another, but the truth was, neither of them could bear the danger of displaying any hint of the weight of tension each lived with regarding the other. So their rude, clipped interactions were safe ground where they could calmly coexist.

  There were times bound to arise after that unprecedented exchange of words, even whole sentences, where the same might easily happen again. Not long after they spoke, Delphine became convinced that Eva’s boys were going to kill themselves. She told Fidelis, but he shrugged and said, “They are boys.” She had dealt, already, with their summer shake-ups, the near drownings, and the damned swing that, if they failed to jump off in time, smashed them headfirst into the tree trunk. Now that the leaves were off the trees and the snow had not yet fallen for them to slide on and, doubtless, to devise cunning ways to kill themselves rushing downhill, she didn’t think they’d have much else to do but hammer their thumbs or crash the homemade car they raced downhill. Thank God that Fidelis hadn’t the money to buy them guns. She could not have anticipated what they did come up with, what obsessed them, what began to run their lives after school in the late afternoons. She only had a sense of it, some tension and excitement in their doings. There were arguments and conspiratorial noises that stopped abruptly when she entered rooms. Tools were mysteriously missing. She found a great deal of dirt in the creases and the pockets of their clothing.

  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, thou
gh 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.