Secret Ingredients (78 page)

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-f 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. Roy was out there, trying to nurse along a beer, not gulp. As always, Fidelis was at the center of the gathering, prodding ever-bolder stories out of the men or challenging them to feats of strength.

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 1:30 solution, which Heech had told her she was better than any nurse at giving to Eva. Delphine was proud of this. The more so because she secretly hated needles, abhorred them, grew sickly hollow when she filled the syringe, and felt the prick in her own flesh when she gave the dose to Eva.

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 weight lifter’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, “Okay. 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.