Fidelis readily took that up. “A deer or so, then Gus Newhall shot a bear up in the Minnesota northwoods. ‘Course he nearly brought down a goddamn Indian doing it, the guide was just ahead, as I hear it, Gus got overexcited and fired, nearly took the guide’s head off and—”
Cyprian froze with the beer half to his lips and slowly lowered the bottle, and then his black eyes looked into Fidelis’s light eyes, which was a dangerous thing, for now they couldn’t unstick their gaze from each other. Nor could they blink, for the first one who did would be obscurely beaten. Fidelis didn’t know what he’d done to land in the frozen deadlock, but there he was. He had learned not to blink during the war, looking through the sights of a rifle, so he wouldn’t miss the flicker of a careless instant of exposure, or ruin the steady press of his finger. And Cyprian had learned not to blink when he trained as a boxer, for that’s how two boxers sized each other up to start with. Stared into each other’s eyes. The best could move a deadly punch to the throat as fast as the eyelid dropped. So their stares held, and held, and as they did not move they breathed the harder. Their eyes dried out and burned and their noses stung. The tension grew immense, ridiculous, then unbearable. Delphine walked in just as, with a ringing report, Fidelis’s hand shattered the beer bottle he was holding. All three gazed down in astonishment at the spurt of bright blood. Fidelis said, “So Cyprian, what tornado were you in?”
And smooth as silk pie, Cyprian answered him, “Belleau Wood, where they burned the wheat and still we came on, blasted Germans from the trees. We kept coming, they couldn’t stop us. When those snipers hit the ground we finally got to use our bayonets.”
Delphine wanted to back out of the room, but instead she got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and dabbed the stuff on Fidelis’s hand while she talked to Cyprian. Lightly, she put things to rights. “I thought they declared an armistice way back when, so what’s all this about?”
Cyprian shrugged, and Fidelis, though he struggled with a sudden surge of anger, laughed and made a face at the sting of the alcohol. “Sure,” he said easily, suddenly feeling foolish at the degree of inexplicable hatred he’d felt for Cyprian, whom he had always liked fine up until this evening. “I wasn’t there at Belleau Wood. The war, that’s done with, finished.”
“Oh yeah,” said Cyprian, recovering his usual mildness. “All done with but for the beauty marks.” He tapped his throat, the roped white flesh.
LATER ON, when the two had returned to the farmhouse and settled into the bed, Delphine wearily unfolded herself, stretched her feet long underneath the quilt that Eva had sewed for her on her good days, tiny postage stamps of color. She was troubled by and wondered at the palpable strain in the kitchen—she’d felt it between the two men even before she entered, from the silence, and then there was the sharp explosion of the bottle, Fidelis’s hand slashed. And Cyprian had been poised on his chair as though he was cocked to explode. Now, he was breathing quietly beside her, quite sleepless.
“What were you two arguing about?” she asked.
“You,” he said, no hesitation in his voice.
“Well, that’s sure stupid,” said Delphine, feeling stupid herself.
“Maybe.”
Delphine laughed unpleasantly, surprised that he should be jealous when he treated her like his sister, and then obscurely angered that he thought he had any right over her at all. She simmered for a few minutes, her thoughts prickling.
“I think,” she finally said, though she had not actually thought this out herself, “we should stop sleeping together if you’re not going to love me like a woman. What do you think of that?”
As soon as he got up and left the bed, she missed the weight of him next to her, wanted to curve around his back and throw her arm over him. She always fell asleep in seconds if she took her breaths in unison with his. Restless, she lay for a time in the quiet darkness, and then she sighed and rose, wrapped her red robe around herself. She found him sitting at the kitchen table. “Oh hell. Please,” she said. “Come on back.” So Cyprian followed her back into the room and they lay together in the peace of the house, and in the blackness, Roy snoring beside the stove. But there was between them, even while they curled close as children, a sorrowing knowledge. Cyprian knew he had no right to his anger, and he knew as well that Delphine pitied him for it. What was he to do? And next to him, instead of falling asleep directly as she’d anticipated, Delphine was again restless. The inside polish of the fake wedding band on her finger was flaking away, and the base metal itched her finger. She couldn’t quite get comfortable. She turned and twisted, resented it when Cyprian’s breathing evened into a gentle rhythm, stayed awake a long time after he slept and listened to the quiet knocking of his breath.
FIDELIS WAS AWAKE overlong that night also. He had to shout from the kitchen three times for the boys to calm down and sleep—they were extra-excited about something. In the past, Eva would have found out what it was and told it to him. Fidelis wasn’t one to ask. They had their own lives and he didn’t pry into their business, nor did they come and tell him about the things they did. There was a wall of reserve between Fidelis and his sons, a formality that was part exhaustion and also the way things had always been in his own family. He had never spoken to his own father about personal things, not even when he was a grown man.
Late as it was, Fidelis had to rifle through the stacks of bills from his suppliers, figuring out which to fend off, which to string along, which needed immediate payment. He was dividing up the tiny amount of cash he had available to see whether he could figure or refigure a sum that would satisfy the lot. After he figured, he’d go back and reduce the amount on each bill, resign another to the bottom of the pile. Every so often, he put his fists on either temple, stared blindly at the mass of paper. Then he’d make some inner calculation, and adjust the bills into yet another mysterious order. As for the money that was owed to him, he’d given the job of collecting it to Tante. She was better at squeezing blood from rock, that’s what bill collecting and bill paying was all about during those desperate years.
The animosity he’d felt for the man who had turned out to be a sturdy, respectable baritone, and whom he thought of as Delphine’s husband, was still disturbing to him, too. At one point, weary of his piddling calculations, he stood up and paced around the kitchen. Four steps took him across the floor, and four back. Frustrated by the smallness of the room, he thought of walking the hallway outside, but he didn’t want to wake the boys now that they had finally settled themselves. So he continued his striding back and forth along the short course of kitchen tiles. Then in the center of the room Fidelis stopped, abruptly. He put his hand on his head and laughed.
So that was it! That was the thing about Cyprian! There was something. He had always known there was something about the man. And he hadn’t caught it. Not until they sat across from one another and stared their unblinking challenges into each other’s eyes. Thinking of that now tipped off Fidelis. Plus the way he had described Gus Newhall’s bear hunting. Fidelis recalled the staring match. The man’s eyes, that pitch black, the pupil melted into the iris, the flint-black stare. The deafened guide. It came to him. An Indian. Cyprian was an Indian. That’s all it was, all along, that uneasy feeling. Somehow he’d known and not known, the man was different. Thinking of Cyprian as an Indian now made things all right. Or almost so, for Fidelis also understood that the sudden antipathy between them was also and most strangely based on Delphine’s absence, or presence, or maybe sheer existence.
THE ENTRANCE to the boys’ dirt fort had become a grand thing, shored up out of the bed of an old wagon box, a horseshoe even nailed to a lintel constructed of a short piece of beam found underneath the sagging shack. The first part of the tunnel was reinforced, too, with boards knocked from the walls of the place and dragged through the short riffle of woods. There was a die-hard bunch who had remained with the construction—Markus, the twins, Emil and Erich, Grizzy Morris, and Roman Shimek. The others had fallen away, but th
at was fine with the core crew. They were at the best part. They had achieved the center of the hill and now were engaged in the satisfying toil of hollowing out their den, their clubhouse, their mighty chamber, their secret room.
The tunnel was a belly-wiggler for about twenty feet before the entrance to the room. The secret interior of the fort was at first extremely small. Markus used their tool of first attack, the blade of a hoe, and scraped out a slightly larger round than the tunnel. Roman Shimek had stolen a big square piece of canvas, and the boys used it to shovel the dirt into and then drag it out. Markus worked the hardest, digging away and hauling the dirt out himself even when the others sat in the grass resting or trying to figure out how to smoke the rust brown fake tobacco plants, rolling the stuff up in newspaper. He didn’t admonish them, reproach them, or care if they sat around outside the hill. What he was doing so absorbed him that it didn’t matter if they were in on it or not. To crouch and enter the impressive doorway, then crawl into the black heart of the earth, and to enter a chamber so quiet that he heard his blood sigh in his lungs, his heart’s rush and clench, his ears fizz with a humming and electric silence, this gave Markus a deep and almost violent satisfaction. When they left for home he was calm, and a little silly, and he slept the nights through for the first time since he had lost his mother.
No one discovered exactly what they were doing. It was, for sure, a wonder that the boys were not filthier when they came home, but it was a dry early November and most of the visible dust that filtered into their clothes and hair could be brushed away or smacked out or somehow disguised. And then, first thing they did upon returning was sneak past their parents, or, in Markus and his brothers’ case, Delphine. Sometimes she wasn’t even there, as she often left at her regular time each night. She drove home with Cyprian and left the boys’ dinners warming in the oven. Their father, working in the shop or at his cluttered desk, or drinking a beer or two with other men in the kitchen, didn’t notice them until they were cleaned up for the night. And then he noticed them in a way other than to really notice them. They were upright, breathing, not in any visible distress. In his exhaustion, this was enough.
Though the sky went dark sooner and the earth was colder every day, the boys went out to the hill and burrowed into it with the eagerness of gophers anxious to hibernate. Slowly, incrementally, they enlarged the inner room so one boy could kneel, then stand inside it. Two could squeeze into it, soon. Then three. And then it rained.
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 grownup 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 li
ne 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.
The Master Butcher's Singing Club Page 24