The Master Butcher's Singing Club (32 page)

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.