The Master Butcher's Singing Club (28 page)

DELPHINE ENTERED
the basement mortuary and Clarisse, at the sink, turned with a perfectly glowing look and said, “I’m so glad you’re here!”

When her work was successful, Clarisse was vivid with satisfaction, sparklingly fresh and alive. Her skin was satiny, pure white, not a freckle on it. Her lips were a deep unlipsticked red and her eyes transparent with delight at her friend’s visit.

“I’ve got to talk to you again,” said Delphine.

With a dancer’s flourish, Clarisse indicated her work area.

“I’ve got to show you someone!”

“Not now, Clarisse. Sometimes you get carried away,” said Delphine.

“This is the last view these parents will have of their child,” Clarisse answered, her face serious. “Is that carried away? Perhaps, well, I’ll tone down my manner, of course. I was just—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m overwrought, Clarisse. Roy’s in the jailhouse.”

“It’s that damn Hock,” said Clarisse. She shook her curls a little and handed Delphine a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Although, come to think, you must admit, it
was
his cellar. And he
was
very drunk that night, well . . .” She fluffed the hair out around her ears and shook her head, conveying sympathy without implicating herself. “I didn’t see a thing. I wish I had. Oh, look at you. You must get more rest! You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.” She took Delphine’s hand in her own, just the way they used to when they were girls together talking earnestly down by the river. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll think of a way to get Roy out.”

Delphine nearly shook her hand away.

“You
do
think he did it! He’s a souse, but he wouldn’t deliberately do anything that cruel. You know he’s been strictly on the wagon—”

“But when has he ever not fallen off and disappointed you?” asked Clarisse gently.

“Never,” Delphine said.

Clarisse looked at her solemnly, put her fingers up, and pinched her lips shut.

“I know what you’re trying not to say,” said Delphine.

Clarisse nodded. Then she unpinched her lips.

“I will say this, Delphine, you should get out of here. Just leave him be and go to secretary school. Be an actress. Anything. Take a train to the Cities.”

Delphine laughed. “With what money? And by the way,” she lowered her voice, “I buried your dress in the iris patch.”

Clarisse now looked very grave and thanked her for hiding it. “You’re on my side,” she said. “You’ve always been on my side.”

“Of course I am,” Delphine said. “I just wish I knew.”

“What?”

“Who locked them down there.”

“You just have to believe it wasn’t Roy, don’t you?” said Clarisse.

Delphine nodded.

“Then it wasn’t him,” Clarisse said. Reaching over, she put her arms around Delphine and held her head to her shoulder. Delphine’s breath ballooned up in her until she sighed. She let herself sag against her friend. Clarisse smelled of formalin and bath powder. There was coffee on her breath and blood on her shoe. From time to time, Delphine thought, life fooled her into thinking there was someone on earth she would be as close to as Clarisse. Then the person was hauled away, or died, or retreated, and it was just the two of them again. Odd women out. Unique girls. Strange.

HIDING A MAN
of his bulk was extremely difficult, but Sheriff Hock was used to assuming the disguises of the stage. His automobile would have been too conspicuous in the empty town streets, so he had borrowed a shabby buggy from a deputy’s barn and commandeered a tired old horse to draw it. Shortly after leaving the shop, he put on a farm hat and a torn canvas coat. He then drove the buggy to a safe distance for surveillance, pulled to the side of the road to let the horse crop grass, and put his head
down on his chest. From there, it was an easy matter. Following Delphine was simple—in the strictly platted town he could easily project her destination, and with no trouble keep her in sight down the wide dusty avenues and streets. The funeral home was no surprise to him. He thought of Clarisse in the tight, red, fabulously shiny stage dress. Was there some way to bring her back into the picture? Closer, so she would see what kind of man he really was? He put his hand to his cheek as if he could still feel the lump she had raised when she slugged him at her father’s rowdy wake. She was much too fierce for anyone else in this town, he thought. He was the only man who wasn’t afraid of her. He deserved her. And he was getting tired of the way she evaded him and put him off. Her excuses and protestations. If she would only, only, surrender her hard little nut of a heart! Let the shell crack! Reveal the love! He was positive it was there. It made him so angry with her. She was stubborn, wasting precious time. Youth was fleeting. They should be walking along the weedy riverbank and planning their future. Sheriff Hock set his teeth and felt his face harden. When this wave of frustration engulfed him, he wanted to shake her until she woke up, to yell into her face until he broke her composure, to crush her until she cried out his name in a pain that sounded like passion.

DELPHINE WAS ALLOWED
to sit upon a small rickety caned chair just outside the bars of her father’s cell. He was morose, “but at least it’s clean, now,” he said, nicking his frowzy head at the newly scrubbed floors, walls, and the bed, which was now outfitted in sheets that Delphine brought. Apple Newhall fixed the prisoners’ meals, and the contents varied according to her feeling for the prisoner. Roy was a favorite of hers, and for dinner he was given a plate of beans baked in tomato sauce, a large beer sausage, and half a sweet onion. Delphine watched him eat. Roy’s rough claw dipped the dark syrup from the beans. He chewed tentatively because of his frail old teeth. From time to time he stopped and sighed in the drama of his entrapment. He missed the picture of Minnie, his small personal shrine, and he dearly wished for the afghan he said that she had knitted, which Delphine had rescued from
the grand stink and soaked clean in the river. It had become something of a security blanket to him ever since he’d sobered up. Why now, thought Delphine. Why now that he’s sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life? Perhaps she forgave too easily, or perhaps she wasn’t really able to recall, out of self-protection, what a failure of a father he really had been all along. She hated this pity that overwhelmed her and covered him. His failing physical state twisted her heart—she didn’t want to see how his hands shook, how he shuffled instead of stepped, how thoroughly the booze had unstrung him over the years.

She held one of his beat-up paws, “Dad, you didn’t do it, I know. You’ll soon be out. I’ll get a lawyer.”

“What lawyer?” Roy peered at her with an incredulous frown. “Of course I did it . . . everybody knows, they saw me. I had to.”

For a panicked moment Delphine hushed him. Sheriff Hock was standing near and now, having heard every word, he had stepped up behind her with a lightness surprising in a man so large. He was listening, Delphine suddenly knew it, to see if his trap would spring, listening to hear her next words, which she drew cautiously from a neutral store. “So Fidelis has offered to pay your bail, if there is—”

“Fidelis told Albert here what happened right off! Eva had to have the stuff and you can bet I was going to get it for her. I cared for that woman, she was a good and a kind person,” said Roy with great emotion. “Made a thick sandwich for a man and understood my thirst.”

At the mention of Eva’s name, Delphine’s picture radically shifted, and with some difficulty she responded to the changed scenario. She stumbled a bit, though, her brain connecting with the stolen morphine, before she turned to Sheriff Hock. “How come now?” she said, masking her relief with indignation. “If you were going to charge him, why didn’t you pick him up right after?”

Sheriff Hock, subtly disappointed, rocked back on his heels and lied that before he could get word to Sal Birdy, the drugstore owner had reported the theft to the state commission. Mr. Birdy very much regretted having done so, but now, to everyone’s annoyance, the commission
had demanded a full investigation of the occurrence. Roy’s arrest was carried out to satisfy the record, and he’d be free as soon as all of the paperwork was finished.

“This is only a formality,” Sheriff Hock concluded, and walked off in an air of slight embarrassment.

“A formality!” Delphine’s voice let go—she tried not to sound too relieved, attempted the appropriate indignation. But she wanted to sink her face in her hands and breathe very deeply. Wanted to shed the low hysteria she’d felt at the prospects and plans that had whirled in her head—the lawyer, the trial, the jury, the judge . . . all of the implications of a murder charge. Now, she had only to sit still. So Delphine stayed with Roy for a while longer, listened to instructions regarding the various personalities and proclivities of his chickens. “I’ve got a Romeo and Juliet in the bunch,” he said. “Star-crossed banties. Don’t disturb the two black rosecombs that perch together. As for that loud dominicker, you can stew him for all I care. Let the little guy take over with the big reds. He can do the job.” Roy kept talking, clearly did not want to quit, didn’t want to face the moment when Delphine had to get up and leave him alone in the place where so often he’d slept unconscious but that he now, fully aware, occupied in a virgin state of shame.

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.