Master Butchers Singing Club Read online

  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?”