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46. [Louise Erdrich] The Butcher_s Wife.doc
The New Yorker, October 15, 2001
The Butcher's Wife
by Louise Erdrich
Here's an odd and paradoxical truth: a man's experience of happiness can later kill him. Though he appeared to be no more than an everyday drunk, Delphine Watzka's father, Roy, was more. He was a dangerous romantic. In his life, he had loved deeply, even selflessly, with all the profound gratitude of a surprised Pole. But the woman he had loved and married, Minnie Watzka, née Kust, now existed only in the person of her daughter, Delphine, and in photographs. Minnie had died when Delphine was very young, and afterward
During the first years after Minnie's death,
As Delphine walked into town for supplies, she thought of her mother. She possessed only one tiny locket photo of Minnie, and while she was away she had found herself missing the other photographs. It was in that fit of longing to see her mother's face that Delphine entered Waldvogel's Meats, and met Eva Waldvogel.
The first true meeting of their minds was over lard.
"I'll take half a pound," Delphine said. She was mentally worn out by her father's insistence that since he was dying anyway he might as well kill himself more pleasurably with schnapps. All day long he'd been drunk underneath the mulberry trees, laughing to himself and trying to catch the fruit in his mouth. He was now stained purple with the juice.
"There's lard and there is lard." Eva reached into the glass case that was cooled by an electric fan. "My husband was trained back in
"Pure as butter!"
"We don't salt it much," Eva whispered, as though this were not for just anyone to overhear. "But it won't keep unless you have an icebox."
"I don't have one," Delphine admitted. "Well, I did, but my dad sold it while I was away."
"Who is he, may I ask?"
Delphine liked Eva's direct but polite manners and admired her thick bun of bronze-red hair stuck through with two yellow lead pencils. Eva's eyes were a very pale, washed-out blue with flecks of green. There was, in one eye, an odd golden streak that would turn black when the life finally left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door.
"Roy Watzka," Delphine said slowly.
Eva nodded. The name seemed to tell her all that she needed to know. "Come back here." Eva swept her arm around the counter. "I'll teach you to make a mincemeat pie better than you've ever eaten. It's all in the goddam suet."
Delphine went behind the counter, past an office cascading with papers and bills, past little cupboards full of clean aprons and rags, and a knickknack shelf displaying figures made of German porcelain. She and Eva entered the kitchen, which was full of light from big windows set into the thick walls. Here, for Delphine, all time stopped. As she took in the room, she experienced a profound and fabulous expansion of being.
There was a shelf for big clay bread bowls and a pull-out bin containing flour. Wooden cupboards painted an astounding green matched the floor's linoleum. A heavy, polished meat grinder was bolted to the counter. The round table was covered with a piece of oilcloth with squares. In each red-trimmed square was printed a bunch of blue grapes or a fat pink-gold peach, an apple or a delicate green pear. On the window sills, pots of geraniums bloomed, scarlet and ferociously cheerful.
Suddenly extremely happy, Delphine sat in a solid, square-backed chair while Eva spooned roasted coffee beans into a grinder and then began to grind them. A wonderful fragrance emerged. Delphine took a huge breath. Eva, her hands quick and certain, dumped the thin wooden drawer full of fresh grounds into a pale-blue speckled enamel coffeepot. She got water from a faucet in her sink, instead of from a pump, and then she put the coffee on the stove and lit the burner of a stunning white gas range with chrome trim swirled into the words "Magic Chef."
"My God," Delphine breathed. She couldn't speak. But that was fine, for Eva had already whipped one of the pencils out of her hair and taken up a pad of paper to set down the mincemeat recipe. Eva spoke English very well but her writing was of the old, ornate German style, and she wasn't a good speller. Delphine was grateful for this tiny flaw, for Eva appeared so fantastically skilled a being, so assured—she was also the mother of two sturdy and intelligent sons—that she would have been an unapproachable paragon to Delphine otherwise. Delphine—who had never really had a mother, much less a sister, who cleaned up shameful things in her father's house, who had been toughened by cold and hunger and was regarded as beneath notice by the town's best society, and yet could spell—stole confidence from the misspelled recipe.
The next time Delphine visited the Waldvogels' store, she noted the jangle of a cheerful shop bell. She imagined that it was only the first of many times that she would ring the bell as she entered the shop. This did not prove to be the case. By the next time Delphine came to the shop, she had already attained a status so familiar that she entered by the back door.
Delphine placed her order, as before, and, as before, Eva asked her to come in and sit down for a coffee. There was no cleanser on Eva's shelf that would be strong enough for the work Delphine had to do to make
"First off, a good vinegar-and-water washdown. Then I should order the industrial-strength ammonia for you, only be careful with the fumes. Maybe, if that doesn't work, a very raw lye."
Delphine shook her head. She was smitten with shame, and could not tell Eva that she was afraid her father might try to drink the stuff. Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, in the shape of a figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch down the risen dough. As Delphine watched, a strange notion popped into her head, the idea that perhaps the most strongly experienced moments—such as this one, when Eva turned, and the sun met her hair, and for that one instant the symbol blazed out—those particular moments were eternal. They actually went somewhere—into a file of moments that existed beyond time's range and could not be pilfered by God.
Well, it was God, wasn't it, Delphine went on stubbornly, who had made time and thereby created the end of everything? Tell me this, Delphine wanted to say to her new friend, why are we given the curse of imagining eternity when we can't experience it, when we ourselves are so finite? She wanted to say it, but suddenly grew shy, and it was in that state of concentrated inattention that she first met Eva's husband, Fidelis Waldvogel, Master Butcher.
Before she actually met him, she sensed him, like a surge of electric power in the air when the clouds are low. Then she felt a heaviness. A field of gravity moved through her body. She was trying to rise, to shake the feeling, when he suddenly filled the doorway.
It was not his size. He was not extraordinarily tall or broad. But he shed power, as though there were a bigger man crammed into him. One thick hand hung down at his side like a hook; the other balanced on his shoulder a slab of meat. That cow's haunch weighed perhaps a hundred pounds or double that. He held it lightly, although the veins in his neck throbbed, heavy-blooded as a bull's. He looked at Delphine, and his eyes were white-blue. Their stares locked. Delphine's cheeks went fever red, and she looked down first. Clouds moved across the sun, and the red mouths of the geraniums on the windowsill yawned. The shock of his gaze caused her to pick up one of Eva's cigarettes. To light it. He looked away from her and conversed with his wife. Then he left without asking to be introduced.
That abruptness, though rude, was more than fine with Delphine. Already, she didn't want to know him. She hoped that she could avoid him. It didn't matter, so long as she could still be friends with Eva, and hold the job that she soon was offered, waiting on customers.
So it was. From then on, Delphine used the back door, which led past the furnace and the washtubs, the shelves of tools, the bleached aprons slowly drying on racks and hooks. She walked down the hallway cluttered with papers and equipment and lifted from a hook by the shop door the apron Eva had given her, blue with tiny white flowers. From then on, she heard the customer bell ring from the other side of the counter.
Within a week, Delphine had met most of the regular customers. Then she met Tante Marie-Christine, who was not a customer but Fidelis's sister. One afternoon, Tante swept in with just one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself had been muted by her elegance. She went right around to the case that held the sausage, wrenched it open, fished out a ring of the best bologna, and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched—actually, she stood back and envied the woman's shoes. They were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather and were cleverly buttoned. They fit Tante's rather long, narrow feet with a winsome precision. She might not have had a captivating face—for she resembled her brother, replicated his powerful neck and too stern chin, and the eyes that on him were commanding on her were a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers—but her feet were slim and pretty. She was vain about them, and all her shoes were made of the most expensive leather.
"Who are you?" Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off in her fur coat without deigning to accept an answer. The question hung in the air long after Tante had gone back to invade Eva's kitchen. "Who are you?" is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it in the air like that, Delphine was left to consider its larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.
Who are you, Delphine Watzka, you drunkard's child, you dropout secretary, you creature with a belly of steel and a heart that longs for a mother? Who are you, what are you—born a dirty Pole in a Polack's dirt? You with a cellar full of empty bottles and a stewed father lying on the floor? What makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother Fidelis, who is the master of all that he does?
When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law's fresh bread under her arm, and grabbed a bottle of milk, Delphine wrote it all down on a slip: "Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of number-one bologna, and a loaf of bread." And she left it at that. When Tante found out that Delphine had written the items down, she was furious. Tante didn't take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. She had once given her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment, and although he had paid her back she continued to take the interest out in ways that were intended to remind him of her dutiful generosity.
Eva's two boys, Franz and Louis, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. She had not been around them often. But, as these boys belonged to Eva, she was interested in who they were.
At fourteen, Franz was strong and athletic, with one of those proud, easygoing American temperaments that are simultaneously transparent and opaque. His inner thoughts and feelings were either nonevident or nonexistent; she couldn't tell which. He always smiled at her and said hello, with only the faintest of German accents. He played football and was, in fact, a local hero. The second boy was more reclusive. Louis had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he'd play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his interests. He had inherited his mother's long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks, and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as if to say, What an idiotic spectacle. Louis was polite, though more restrained than his brother. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted on his mother. Eva often stroked his hair, so like her own, with its curls clipped. When she held him close and kissed him, he pulled away, as boys had to, but did it gently, to show that he didn't want to hurt her feelings.
Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of extremes. That winter,
They mopped down the floors of the slaughter room with bleach every single day. The meat cases were run on full cold, yet they were lukewarm and the meat within had to be checked constantly for rot. They bought only the smallest amount of milk to sell because it often soured during the drive to the store. They kept little butter or lard. The heat kept getting worse. The boys slept outside on the roof in just their undershorts. Eva dragged a mattress and sheets up there, too, and slept with them while Fidelis stayed downstairs, near his gun, for fear of a break-in.
When Delphine walked to work, just an hour after sunrise, the air was already stiff and metallic. If it broke, it would break violently, Fidelis said, to no one in particular. As he systematically sharpened the blades of his knives and saws, his back turned, he started singing, and Delphine realized, with a strange shock, that his voice was very beautiful. The heat made her flustered, and his voice dismayed her, so pure in a room that was slippery with blood. Sharply, she banged a ham down on the metal counter, and he went silent. It was a relief not to have to listen.
The sky went dark, the leaves turned brown, and nothing happened. Rain hung painfully nearby in an iron-gray sheet that stretched across the sky, but nothing moved. No breeze. No air. Delphine washed her face and donned the limp apron by the door. Late in the day, she stripped the wax off the linoleum in order to apply a new coat. The floor was already dry when she flipped the cardboard sign in the entry window from "Open" to "Closed." Now, in a special bucket, she mixed the wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the doorway so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick goodbye, and went home to swelter. Early the next morning, before the store opened, she'd return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then, between customers, she'd polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and elbow grease. That's what she had planned, anyway, and all that she had planned did occur, but over weeks and under radically different circumstances.
The next morning, while Delphine sat in the kitchen, the heat pushed at the walls. The strong black coffee sent her into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva had set on the table.
"Listen." Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. "I don't feel so good."
She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, but then she repeated herself as though she did not remember having said it. "I don't feel so good," Eva whispered. She put her elbows on the table and her hands curled around her china cup.
"What do you mean you don't feel so good?"
"It's my stomach. I get pains. I'm all lumped up." Beads of sweat trembled on her upper lip. "They come and go." Eva drew a deep breath and held it, then let it out. There. She pressed a dish towel to her face, blotted away the sweat. "Like a cramp, but I'm never quite over the monthly . . . That comes and goes, too."
"Maybe you're just stopping early?"
"I think so," Eva said. "My mother . . ." But then she shook her head and smiled, spoke in a high, thin voice. "Don't you hate a whiner?"
She jumped up awkwardly, banging herself against the counter, but then she bustled to the oven, moved swiftly through the kitchen, as though motion would cure whatever it was that had gripped her. Within moments, she seemed to have turned back into the unworried, capable Eva.
"I'm going out front to start polishing the floor," Delphine said. "By now, in this heat, it's surely dry."
"That's good," Eva said, but as Delphine passed her to put her coffee cup in the gray soapstone sink, the butcher's wife took one of Delphine's hands in hers. Lightly, her voice a shade too careless, she said the words that even in the heat chilled her friend.
"Take me to the doctor."
Then she smiled as though this were a great joke, lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and did not move.
Fidelis had left early on a delivery, and he could not be found. He wasn't home, either, when Delphine returned from the doctor's. By then, she had Eva drugged with morphine in the back seat, and a sheaf of instructions telling her whom to seek. What could possibly be done. Old Dr. Heech was telephoning the clinic to tell a surgeon he knew there to prepare for a patient named Eva Waldvogel.
Delphine found Louis and gave him a note for Fidelis. Louis dropped it, picked it up, his lithe boy's fingers for once clumsy with fright. He ran straight out to the car and climbed into the back seat, which was where Delphine found him, holding Eva as she sighed in the fervent relief of the drug. She was so serene that Louis was reassured and Delphine was able to lead him carefully away, terrified that Eva would suddenly wake, in front of the boy, and recognize her pain. From what Delphine had gathered so far, Eva must have been suffering for many months now. Her illness was remarkably advanced, and Heech in his alarm, as well as his fondness for Eva, scolded her with the violent despair of a doctor who knows he is helpless.
As Delphine led Louis back to the house, she tried to stroke his hair. He jerked away in terror at the unfamiliar tenderness. It was, of course, a sign to him that something was really wrong with Eva.
"Fidelis," Delphine had written in the note, "I have taken Eva to the clinic to the south called the Mayo, where Heech says emergency help will be found. She passed out this morning. It is a cancer. You can talk to Heech."
It was on the drive down to the Mayo Clinic that Delphine first really listened to the butcher's singing; only this time it was in her mind. She replayed it like a comforting record on a phonograph as she kept her foot calmly on the gas pedal of Dr. Heech's DeSoto and the speedometer hovered near eighty miles an hour. The world blurred. Fields turned like spoked wheels. She caught the flash of houses, cows, horses, barns. Then there was the long stop-and-go of the city. All through the drive, she replayed the song that Fidelis had sung just the morning before, in the concrete of the slaughter room, when she had been too crushed by the heat to marvel at the buoyant mildness of his tenor. "Die Gedanken sind frei," he had sung, and the walls had spun each note higher, as if he were singing beneath the dome of a beautiful church. Who would think that a slaughterhouse would have the acoustics of a cathedral?
The song wheeled in her thoughts as she drove, and using what ragtag German she knew, Delphine made out the words: "Die Gedanken sind frei, / Wer kann sie erraten, / Sie fliehen vorbei, / Wie nächtliche Schatten"—"Thoughts are free . . . they fly around like shadows of the night." The dead crops turned, row by row, in the fields, the vent blew the hot air hotter, and the wind boomed into the open windows. Even when it finally started to rain, Delphine did not roll the windows back up. The car was moving so fast that the drops stung like BBs on the side of her face and kept her alert. Occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine, as well as dulling her pain, had loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a moan that could have come from Eva. A growling, as though her pain were an animal she had wrestled to earth.
The first treatment after Eva's surgery consisted of inserting into her uterus several hollow metal bombs, cast of German silver, containing radium. During the weeks that Eva spent in the hospital, the tubes were taken out, refilled, and reinserted several times. By the time she was sent home, she smelled like a blackened pot roast.
"I smell burned," she said, "like bad cooking. Get some lilac at the drugstore." Delphine bought a great purple bottle of flower water to wash her with, but it didn't help. For weeks, Eva passed charcoal and blood, and the smell lingered. The cancer spread. Next, Dr. Heech gave her monthly treatments of radium via long twenty-four-karat-gold needles, tipped with iridium, that he pushed into the new tumor with forceps so as not to burn his fingers. She took those treatments in his office, strapped to a table, dosed with ether for the insertion, then, after she woke, with a hypodermic of morphine. Delphine sat with her, for the needles had to stay in place for six hours.
"I'm a damn pincushion now," Eva said once, rousing slightly. Then she dropped back into her restless dream. Delphine tried to read, but shooting pains stabbed her own stomach when the needles went in; she even had a sympathetic morphine sweat. But she kept on going, and as she approached the house each day she said the prayer to God that she'd selected as the most appropriate to the situation: "Spit in your eye." The curse wasn't much, it didn't register the depth of her feeling, but at least she was not a hypocrite. Why should she even pretend to pray? That was Tante's field.
Tante had mustered a host of pious Lutheran ladies, and they came around every few afternoons to try to convert Eva, who was Catholic. Once Eva became too weak to chase them off, Delphine did whatever she could think of to keep them from crowding around the bed like a flock of turkey vultures in a gloating prayer circle. Feeding them was her best strategy, for they filed out quickly enough when they knew that there was grub in the kitchen. After they'd gorged on Eva's pain and her signature Linzer torte, the recipe for which she'd given to Delphine, Tante would lead them away one small step at a time.
Delphine bleached the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. The boys' stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis's thick white cotton shirts with starch and every morning she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the sweat, the shit, and the blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. Doing this laundry was a kind of goodbye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine would be leaving, too. Fidelis had others to help him. Tante, Delphine was sure, would find stepping in to care for the boys and her brother a perfect showcase for her pieties.
For all that he was a truly unbearable souse, no one in town disliked Roy Watzka. There were several reasons for this. First, his gross slide into abandon had been triggered by loss. That he had loved to the point of self-destruction fed a certain reflex feature in many a female heart, and he got handouts easily when strapped. Women made him sandwiches of pork or cold beans, and wrapped them carefully for him to eat when coming off a binge. Another reason was that Roy Watzka, during those short, rare times when he was sober, had a capacity for intense bouts of hard labor. He could work phenomenally. Plus, he told a good tale. He was not a mean drunk or a rampager, and it was well known that, although she certainly put up with more than a daughter should ever have to, he did love Delphine.
Eva liked him, or felt sorry for him, anyway, and she was one of those who had always given him a meal. Now that she was in trouble,
Delphine and Eva sat together on broken chairs in Eva's garden, each with a bottle of Fidelis's earth-dark, home-brewed beer held tight between their feet. They were protected from the mosquitos by citronella burning in a bucket, and sprigs of basil which Eva snapped off and thrust into their hair. Delphine wore a wash dress and an apron and a pair of low green pumps. Eva wore a nightgown and a light woollen shawl, with her feet bare in Japanese thongs. The slugs were naked. Antlered and feeble, they lived in the thickness of hay and the shredded newspapers that Eva had put down for mulch. They had already eaten many of the new seedlings from the topmost leaves down to the ground, and Eva had vowed to destroy them.
"Their last feast," she said, gesturing at her bean plants as she poured a little beer into a pie plate. "Now they are doomed."
The beer was chilled from the glass refrigerator case in the store, newly installed. It seemed a shame to waste it on slugs. The two women sipped it slowly as the sun slanted through the margins of the stock pens.
"Maybe we should simply have shrivelled them with salt," Delphine said. But then she had a thought: We are close to Eva's own death, and can afford to make death easy on the helpless. She said nothing.
Eva's garden, Delphine had decided, reflected the dark underside of her organizational genius. It was everything raw and wild that Eva was not. It had grown rich on junk. Pot scrapings, tea leaves, and cucumber peelings all went into the dirt, buried haphazardly, sometimes just piled. Everything rotted down beneath the blistering
Delphine had always had a tendency to think about fate, but she did so more often now that Eva's sickness put her constantly in mind of mortality, and also made her marvel at how anyone managed to live at all. Life was a precious feat of daring, she saw, improbable, as strange as a feast of slugs.
Eva bent over, flipped out a small pocket of earth with her trowel, and tamped in her quarter-full beer bottle as a trap. "Die happy," she encouraged. Delphine handed over her own three-quarters-drunk bottle, too. This one Eva planted by a hill of squash that would overpower the rest of the garden by fall, though she would not be there to see it. She settled back against the crisscrossed canvas webbing of her chair and forked open another bottle. It was a good day, a very good day for her.
"I'm going," Delphine said, but she continued to sit with Eva through sunset and on into the rising dark. It was as if they knew that no moment of the weeks to come would be this peaceful and that they would both, in fearful nights, remember these hours. How the air turned blue around them and the moths came out, invisible and sightless, flapping against the shuttered lamp at the other end of the yard.
Delphine shut her eyes, and her mind grew alert. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. She felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress and worn green shoes.
She heard Eva's voice.
"I wish it were true, what I read—that the mind stays intact. The brain. The eyes to read with."
Delphine had sometimes thought that her friend didn't care if she became an animal or a plant, if all this thinking and figuring and selling of pork and blood meal were wasted effort. She treated her death with scorn or ridicule. But with that statement Eva revealed a certain fear she'd never shown before. Or a wistfulness.
"Your mind stays itself," Delphine said, as lightly as she could. "There you'll be, strumming on your harp, looking down on all the foolish crap people do."
"I could never play the harp," Eva said. "I think they'll give me a kazoo."
"Save me a cloud and I'll play a tune with you," Delphine said.
It wasn't very funny, so they laughed all the harder, laughed until tears started in their eyes, then they gasped and fell utterly silent.
"The boys are playing in the orchard. The men are already half lit," Delphine reported. It was the first weekend in September, a holiday. Eva struggled and Delphine helped her to sit up and look out the window of the little room off the kitchen where Fidelis had set up her bed. Eva smiled faintly, then fell back, nodding at the sight.
"Men are such fools," she whispered. "They think they're so smart hiding the Everclear in the gooseberry bush."
There was no saving her. They were well beyond that now. But even though the last few days were nightmarish Eva refused to die in a morbid way. She sometimes laughed freakishly at pain and made fun of her condition, more so now when the end was close.
They'd closed the shop at noon. Now everyone in town was celebrating. Fidelis had the old chairs and table out in the yard and on the table he had a summer sausage and a beer sausage, a watermelon, bowls of crackers, and beer in a tub of ice underneath the tomato plants, to wash down the high-proof alcohol that Eva knew he was hiding. Over and over the men sneaked their arms into the gooseberry fronds. With a furtive look at the house, they'd tip the bottle to their lips. Even Fidelis, normally so powerful and purposeful, acted like a guilty boy.
The men's voices rose and fell, rumbling with laughter at the tall tales they told, stern with argument at the outrages committed by the government, and sometimes they even fell silent and gazed stuporously into the tangled foliage.
In the kitchen, Delphine cut cold butter into flour for a pastry. She had decided to make pies for the holiday supper—the men would need them to counteract the booze. The potatoes were boiling now, and she had a crock of beans laced with hot mustard, brown sugar, and blackstrap molasses. There were, of course, sausages. Delphine added a pinch of salt, rolled her dough in waxed paper, and set it in the icebox. Then she started on the fruit, slicing thin moons from the crate of peaches, peeling out the brownest bits of rosy flesh. It's nearly time, she thought, nearly time. She was thinking of Eva's pain. Delphine's sense of time passing had to do only with the duration of a dose of opium wine, flavored with cloves and cinnamon, or of the morphine that Dr. Heech had taught her to administer, though he warned her not to give too much, lest by the end even the morphine lose its effect.
Hearing Eva stir, Delphine set aside her pie makings. She put some water on to boil, to sterilize the hypodermic needle. Last night, she'd prepared a vial and set it in the icebox, the
Now she knew, when she checked on Eva, not so much by the time elapsed as by the lucid shock of agony in Eva's stare, her mouth half open, her brows clenched, that she would need the relief very soon, as soon as the water had boiled. Delphine thought to divert her friend by massaging her sore hands.
Eva groaned as Delphine worked the dips between her knuckles, and then her forehead smoothed, her translucent eyelids closed over, she began to breathe more peacefully and said, softly, "How are the damn fools?"
Delphine glanced out the window and observed that they were in an uproar. Sheriff Hock had now joined them, and Fidelis was standing, gesturing, laughing at the big man's belly. Then they were all comparing their bellies. In the lengthening afternoon light, Fidelis's face was slightly fuzzy with the unaccustomed drink, and with the fellowship of other men, too, for lately he had been isolated in Eva's struggle to die.
"They're showing off their big guts to each other," Delphine said.
"At least not the thing below," Eva croaked.
"Oh, for shame!" Delphine laughed. "No, they've kept their peckers in. But something's going on. Here, I'm going to prop you up. They're better than burlesque."
She took down extra pillows from the shelves, shoved the bed up to the window, and propped Eva where she would see the doings in the yard. Now it looked like they were making and taking bets. Bills were waved. The men weren't stumbling drunk, but loud drunk. Roaring with jokes. All of a sudden, with a clatter, the men cleared the glasses and bottles, the crackers and the sticks of sausage, the bits of cheddar and the plates off the table. And then the Sheriff, a former actor who'd played large characters in local productions, lay down upon it on his back. He was longer than the table, and he balanced there, like a boat in dry dock, his booted feet sticking absurdly straight up and his head extended off the other end. His stomach made a mound. Now on the other side of the table, directly beneath Eva's window, stood Fidelis. He'd unbuttoned the top buttons of his white shirt and rolled his sleeves up over his solid forearms.
Suddenly, Fidelis bent over Sheriff Hock in a weightlifter's crouch and threw his arms fiercely out to either side. Delicately, firmly, he grasped in his jaws a loop that the women now saw had been specially created for this purpose in Sheriff Hock's thick belt.
There was a moment in which everything went still. Nothing happened. Then, a huge thing happened. Fidelis gathered his power. It was as if the ground itself flowed up through him, and flexed. His jaws flared bone-white around the belt loop, his arms tightened in the air, his neck and shoulders swelled impossibly, and he lifted Sheriff Hock off the table. With the belt loop in his teeth, he moved the town's Falstaff. Just a fraction of an inch. Then Fidelis paused. His whole being surged with a blind, suffusing ease. He jerked the Sheriff higher, balancing now, half out of the crouch.
In that moment of tremendous effort, Delphine saw the butcher's true face—his animal face, his ears flaming with heat, his neck cords popping—and then his deranged eye, straining out of its socket, rolled up to the window to see if Eva was watching. That's when Delphine felt a thud of awful sympathy. He was doing this for Eva. He was trying to distract her, and Delphine suddenly understood that Fidelis loved Eva with a helpless and fierce canine devotion, which made him do things that seemed foolish. Lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth. A stupid thing. Showing clearly that all his strength was nothing. Against her sickness, he was weak as a child.
Once Fidelis had dropped the Sheriff, to roars of laughter, Delphine went back into the kitchen to fetch the medicine. She opened the door of the icebox. Looked once, then rummaged with a searching hand. The morphine that Fidelis had labored with vicious self-disregard to pay for and which Delphine had guarded jealously was gone. The vial, the powder, the other syringe. She couldn't believe it. Searched once again, and then again. It wasn't there, and already Eva was restless in the next room.
Delphine rushed out and beckoned Fidelis away from the men. He was wiping down his face and neck, the sweat still pouring off him.
"Eva's medicine is gone."
"Gone?"
He was not as drunk as she'd imagined, or maybe the effort of lifting the Sheriff had sobered him.
"Gone. Nowhere. I've looked. Someone stole it."
"Heiliges Kreuz Donnerwetter . . ." he began, whirling around. That was just the beginning of what he had to say, but Delphine left before he got any further. She went back to Eva and gave her the rest of the opium wine. Spoon by spoon it went down; in a flash it came back up. "What a mess," Eva said. "I'm worse than a puking baby." She tried to laugh, but it came out a surprised, hushed groan. And then she was gasping, taking the shallow panting breaths she used to keep herself from shrieking.
"Bitte . . ." Her eyes rolled back and she arched off the bed. She gestured for a rolled-up washcloth to set between her teeth. It was coming. It was coming like a mighty storm in her. No one could stop it from breaking. It would take hours for Delphine to get another prescription from Dr. Heech, wherever he happened to be celebrating the holiday, and then to find the pharmacist. Delphine yelled out the garden door to Fidelis, and then sped out the other way. As she ran, a thought came into her mind. She decided to act on it. Instead of steering straight for Heech she gunned the shop's truck and stopped short at Tante's little closet of a house, two blocks from the Lutheran church, where Tante prayed every Sunday that the deplorable Catholic her brother had married desist from idolatry—saint worship—before her two nephews were confirmed.
"Was wollen Sie?"
When Tante opened the door to Delphine, her face had all the knowledge in it, and Delphine knew she'd guessed right. Delphine had remembered her clucking over the dose of the drug with her prayer friends in whispered consultation as they pressed up crumbs of lemon pound cake with their fingers.
"Wo ist die Medizin?" Delphine said, first in a normal tone of voice.
Tante affected Hochdeutsch around Delphine and made great pretense of having trouble understanding her. When Tante gave only a cold twist of a smile, Delphine screamed: "Where is Eva's medicine?" Delphine stepped in the door, shoved past Tante, and dashed to the refrigerator. On the way there, with an outraged Tante trailing, she passed a table with a long slim object wrapped in a handkerchief. Delphine grabbed for it on instinct, unrolled it, and nearly dropped the missing hypodermic.
"Where is it?" Delphine's voice was deadly. She turned, jabbing the needle at Tante, and then found herself as in a stage play advancing with an air of threat. The feeling of being in a dramatic production gave her leave to speak the lines she wished had been written for the moment.
"Come on, you rough old bitch, you don't fool me. So you're a habitual fiend on the sly!"
Delphine didn't really think that, but she wanted to make Tante so indignant that she would tell her where the morphine was. But when Tante gaped and couldn't rally her wits to answer, Delphine, disgusted, went to the little icebox, rooted frantically through it. With a savage permission, she tossed out all of Tante's food, even the eggs, and then she turned and confronted Tante. Her brain was swimming with desperation.
"Please, you've got to tell me. Where is it?"
Now Tante had gained control. She even spoke English.
"You will owe me for those eggs."
"All right," Delphine said. "Just tell me."
But Tante, with the upper hand, enjoyed her moment.
"They are saying that she is addicted. This cannot be. The wife of my brother? It is a great shame on us."
Delphine now saw that she had been stupid to antagonize the only person who could provide morphine quickly. She'd blown her cover and now she regretted her self-indulgence, grew meek.
"Oh, Tante," she sighed, "you know the truth, don't you? Tante, our Eva will probably not make it, and she is suffering terribly. You see her only when she's comfortable, so of course how can you possibly know how the agony builds? Tante, have mercy on your brother's wife. There is no shame in keeping her comfortable—the doctor has said so."
"I think," Tante said, her black figure precise, "the doctor doesn't really know. He feels too sorry for her, and she is addicted, that is for sure, my good friend Mrs. Orlen Sorven can tell this."
"Tante, Tante, for the love of God . . ." Delphine begged from her heart. She thought of falling on her knees. Tante's frozen little mouth twitched.
"It doesn't matter, anyway. I have thrown it down the sinkhole."
Delphine turned and saw that on the edge of Tante's porcelain sink a clean-washed vial and the bottle that had held the powder were drying in the glow of sun. And when she saw this, she lost all control and didn't quite know what she was doing. She was strong, suddenly phenomenally strong, and when she grabbed Tante by the bodice, jerked her forward, and said, into her face, "O.K. You come and nurse her through this. You'll see," Tante found herself unable to resist, her struggles feeble against Delphine's surging force as she dragged her to the car, stuffed her inside, then roared off and dumped her at the house.
"I don't have time to go in there. You help her. You stay with her. You," she shrieked, roaring the engine. Then she was gone and Tante, with the smug grimness of a woman who has at last been allowed to take charge, entered the back door.
It did take hours, and in those hours, Delphine did pray. She prayed as though she meant what she said. She prayed her heart out, cussed and swore, implored the devil, made bargains, came to tears at the thwarted junctures where she was directed to one place and ended up at another. It proved impossible to track down either Heech or the pharmacist. She was returning empty-handed, driving back to the house, weeping angrily, when she saw her father stumbling along the road, his pants sagging, his loose shirt flopping off his hunched, skinny shoulders. As she drew near, she looked around to see if anyone else was watching, for an all-seeing rage had boiled up in her and she suddenly wanted to run him over. She put the truck in low gear and followed him, thinking how simple it would be. He was drunk again and wouldn't even notice. Then her life would be that much easier. But as she drew alongside him, she was surprised to meet his eyes and see that they were clear. He shuffled anxiously around to the side door, she saw that he had a purpose: out snaking himself booze at a time like this. Only the bottle in his hand was not the usual schnapps but a brown square-shouldered medicine bottle labelled "Sulphate of Morphia," for which he'd broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock of the cabinet where the pharmacist kept the drugs he had to secure by law.
As Delphine slammed on the brakes, jumped from the truck, and ran to the house, she heard it from outside, the high-pitched keen of advanced agony, a white-silver whine. She rushed in, skidded across a litter of canning smashed down off the shelves, and entered the kitchen. There was Tante, white and sick with shock, slumped useless in the corner of the kitchen, on the floor. Louis and Franz, weeping and holding on to their mother as she rummaged in the drawer for a knife. The whole of her being was concentrated on the necessity. Even young, strong Franz couldn't hold her back.
"Yes, yes," Delphine said, entering the scene. She'd come upon so many scenes of mayhem in her own house that now a cold flood of competence descended on her. With a swift step, she stood before Eva. "My friend," she said, plucking the knife away, "not now. Soon enough. I've got the medicine. Don't leave your boys like this."
Then Eva, still swooning and grunting as the waves of pain hit and twisted in her, allowed herself to be lowered to the floor.
"Get a blanket and a pillow," Delphine said, kindly, to Franz. "And you," she said to Louis, "hold her hand while I make this up and keep saying to her, 'Mama, she's making the medicine now. It will be soon. It will be soon.' "
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