The Master Butcher's Singing Club (24 page)

“All right,” said Clarisse. “I’m all ears. Now, what is it, really?”

Of course, an afternoon visit signaled some emergency, inner or outer, and Delphine got immediately to the point.

“What costume did you wear when you played the lady in
The Lady and the Tiger
?” asked Delphine.

“It was a cute little number, all—”

“Red, pink, peach flapper beads, those tube iridescent kind.”

“I sewed a million on that dress, remember? It was practically a work of art.”

Clarisse was, in fact, a clever seamstress and used a variation of her
stitching to create perfect hidden sutures in her clients, even using two crisscrossing needles sometimes and hiding the knots. Even underneath the clothing, where no one would ever see, her work was perfect and she scorned lock stitch or bridge sutures—
That’s just sewing
, she’d say.

“Where is it?”

“I think it’s in my closet somewhere,” said Clarisse, easily. “Why?”

“Get rid of it,” said Delphine.

“After all that work I put into it?” Clarisse dropped her jaw in false outrage.

“Listen, I got wind of the way Sheriff Hock is thinking. You know the cellar door at my house was pasted shut with this awful solid goop and in it there were beads just like your beads.”

Clarisse opened her mouth, but then a look of pain and panic suffused her face, and she put her hands to her pretty cheeks. Her little oval nails whitened with the pressure of her fingers, “Oh God, Delphine! I told you that Sheriff Hock practically ripped the dress off me that night . . .”

“I have this feeling that Hock’s cooking something up in his fat, fevered head.”

“Hock is baiting me,” said Clarisse. “He’s . . . impossible. I can’t reason with him. He’ll use this coincidence—the dress, poor Ruthie and Doris . . . how can he? There was a little girl down there!” She burst into quick, frustrated tears, but after a few moments, she took down her hands and said, “No, no, I’ll not let him get the better of me. He should lay off. I’m a professional and I have to finish Mr. Pletherton by five, and he’s a really difficult case.” She suddenly drooped, very tired, frowned at Delphine, and then shook her curls. “Hey, would you be a real girl pal and grab that dress from my closet? Just go home and throw the damn dress in the fire.”

Delphine said yes in the conspiratorial intensity of the moment and walked out the door in a blur. When she reached her friend’s house and opened the back door, she realized that she was doing something stupid. It would look terrible if Sheriff Hock caught Delphine removing the dress from her friend’s closet or in fact found her anywhere near the
dress at all. And anyway, what was she supposed to do with it? The beads might melt but it looked as though they wouldn’t burn up and disappear. Swiftly, worried, she walked up the stairs to the room in which she’d stayed over often with her friend. She had treasured those nights, normal family dinners, an easygoing family life, all she didn’t have. No wonder the Strubs liked their jobs so much—no emotional surprises from the dead, though Delphine knew very well they often presented difficulties. The only joke Aurelius Strub had ever permitted himself, and it might have been simply an exhausted mistake, was to refer to the boy who went through the corn picker as a grave challenge.

Delphine entered Clarisse’s room—childishly messy—her friend needed some place to let her hair down, after all. What to do with the dress, the dress that she knew, already, from a hollow feeling in her chest, would be composed of the same color of apricot and sweet pink and red beads she remembered pasted into the pantry floor? Delphine argued with herself, but eventually she walked smoothly out the door with the dress in a sack and ducked around the back of the house. She couldn’t fulfill her promise to Clarisse to the letter, she decided. If she brought the dress home the piece of evidence, realistically she had to call it that, was in her hands. There would be no explaining it away. She could just see the beads glittering in the ashes of the outdoor fireplace. Delphine got a shovel from the shed beside the house and began gardening instead. She worked for about half an hour. In case anyone should see her, she thought it best that she just be thinning her friend’s iris bed, taking some extra perennials home for herself. In the process, she dug a deep hole and then very quickly stuffed the dress down into it. She shook the bag out, making certain every single bead was in the ground. She put some iris roots into the bag, a few crowded daylilies, and then returned the shovel to its place and walked home.

AS SOON AS
she got back to the farm, Delphine made a quick outdoor cooking fire in the fireplace, let it burn down to a perfect bed of coals. She rolled some potatoes into the glowing embers, next, put the grill over the coals, and built a bit of a fire over the ashes to pan-fry some fish in
bacon grease. She took a second picking of beans from the icebox, where she had left them to marinate all day. They were cold and sweet and vinegary. Outside in the cool of the evening, the mosquitoes quelled by the smoke, Roy, Markus, and she ate. Delphine took out the cream she’d bought in town and the raspberries Markus picked. That cream was a luxury. She had to admit she liked the money that Cyprian brought back—he gave her most of what he made—because it gave them leave to eat like kings and she had fixed up the house. Still, she was hit with a wave of irritated relief when he drove up as they were finishing, for although she kept him in the back of her thoughts, his absence had been a nagging worry. She hated to admit how glad she was to see him safe, and she grabbed him, hugged him, and shook him, all at the same time.

“You’re staying,” she said.

He kissed her hand and slowly lifted his hot black eyes to hers. He could flirt, even worn out, with great conviction—had he learned it as a kind of protection for his secret, or was it just in his blood?

There was plenty of fried fish left, and she heated up the string beans in more bacon grease. She prodded a baked potato from the edge of the coals, juggled it from hand to hand before she forked it open on his plate. A jet of steam rose from the potato, and she spooned bacon drippings into the soft meal. He made a grateful sound.

“Tomorrow,” she told him, “I am going to try getting a job as a telephone operator. Do you think I have a good voice?”

“Everything is good about you,” said Cyprian, sighing over his full stomach and the good feeling of lounging around a fire in the gathering dusk. He really meant what he said. He was glad to be back. Outside the crackle of the flames, the mourning doves uttered their delicate, cool, evening chant. A catbird went through its repertory, song after complicated song, and brush-stroke clouds scattered across the green sky. After a short time, Roy, who had the stamina and routine of a mere mortal now that he was sober, dragged himself off to his little sleeping shack. Markus sagged and then toppled over, dead asleep, and Cyprian carried him into the house. When he returned, Delphine asked a question.

“The way you like men,” she said, “do you like boys too?”

Cyprian gaped at her in the firelight, and made a grotesque face. “No!”

“Don’t act so shocked,” said Delphine, “I had to ask. You sprang that other on me. How was I to know? Anyway, I have this idea I need your help with. Markus. You have to teach him to piss.”

Cyprian had just driven twelve hours straight, and he thought that maybe he was hearing things.

“I mean it,” said Delphine, “he doesn’t know how.”

“He sure does know!” said Cyprian.

“Not good enough.” Delphine was adamant. “You have to teach him self-control, then the fancy stuff to do with his pecker, like write his name in the sand. You have to teach him to turn the faucet off without touching the spigot. That kind of thing. Otherwise I can’t send him back to the aunt.”

Now Cyprian got the picture. He knew about the floor and the boy’s routine on rising every morning. He nodded slowly as Delphine’s intent came clear and then he looked at her with some respect. How many women would think of this? Not a one in all creation, which was why he loved her. It might work. So he agreed to it, and then, the very next morning Delphine made two pitchers of lemonade. One for each. She sent them out behind the henhouse with the lemonade, and every morning after that she did the same. They practiced, and by the end of the week, Markus was dry in the morning. But that was only the beginning of what she felt she had to teach him about survival.

DELPHINE DIDN’T HAVE
the chance to go on to the next phase of her teaching plan—how to deal with a raging Tante Maria Theresa. Her idea was to teach Markus to throw a convincing and horrifying epileptic fit. He could learn to roll his eyes back to the whites and bubble spit between his lips. That would fix Tante. Before she could start his lessons, the meat-market truck pulled into the yard, and once again Fidelis stepped out in his rumpled shirt. This time, his pants were oddly shrunken and he wore no socks. There was a tired gloom about him; the skin underneath his eyes was soft and bruised looking, and he was very
quiet. Some of his power was sucked away. That was exactly it. He looked as though he’d been deflated, and then Delphine realized that he’d grown almost thin. His raw bones came to the surface, knobs of wrists and knuckles, and his cheeks had slightly hollowed. This time he stood outside the door and refused to come inside even for a glass of water. It was plain that he needed to say something.

“Please.”

He wasn’t one to say this word, to anyone, not a woman or a man, and he especially wasn’t one to say it with the aching quality she heard in his voice. Delphine wondered right then if she’d ever hear the word again, from Fidelis, and she let it sit between them like a small monument.

“I told my sister to leave the place.”

Delphine cupped her hand to the curve of her neck and gazed at him, and then took her hand away and stuck it on her hip. She looked out over the field, past the chicken coop. This was something very big. Fidelis had chosen her over his own sister. She took a deep breath and acknowledged that she now had an even more implacable enemy in Tante. Where she had been simply hostile, rigid in her convictions, mouthy, now Tante would need revenge. Getting rid of his own sister was a sacrifice Fidelis had made to get Delphine back into his life. And for it, Tante would surely turn his family against him. Plus now he might act as though she owed him, Delphine thought suspiciously. But his look was only weary.

“She’s not coming back,” Delphine said, making certain.

Fidelis slightly inclined his head, his eyes dull blue, a little bloodshot.

“Look here, Fidelis,” she said, hesitant, for indeed she didn’t know that she wanted to return, “I won’t do much better than your sister.”

Fidelis looked as though he very much doubted that was true. Delphine turned away from him, considered. Her world right now was orderly and peaceful, the first time in her life it had ever been so. As a telephone operator she would be able to make connections, tell time, give numbers, and come home at the same time every night. More
peace and routine. Probably more money, too. But then she thought of the boys, how Eva had taught her to handle things, and how she could make the household run smoothly while managing the store. Eva had showed her the tricks, the shortcuts, the patience with details, all of the skills she had gathered through painstaking trials and mistakes. Eva had given her a whole life’s worth of knowledge, had trained her, and she’d accepted, because she loved her—very simply, she had loved Eva. She remembered very well all of the times Eva had instructed her about Fidelis and the boys. Near the end, she had been wildly determined that Delphine would take her place. It had helped her to concentrate on lists and habits and little eccentricities of diet for Delphine to note. What had Eva told Fidelis? What had he promised? What did he think? Delphine opened her mouth to ask, but the words stuck.

So she just said, “All right, but here’s how it goes. I’ll be there eight each morning. I’ll work the busy hours and make lunch, then dinner. I’ll stay through six each night.” She made the terms. She set the rules in a firm, indifferent voice. Waited for his nod of agreement and when she got it, like a man would, she stuck out her hand to shake.

A
FAMILY IN GRIEF
has accidents and stumbles a lot. There are scabbed toes and the terror of eyes nearly put out. Falls off the roof, falls from bicycles, falls slipping in the sawdust of the meat-market floor. And too, the sorrow makes a path for every illness. Mysterious high fevers. Any local pox. Even the sturdy can catch diphtheria, pertussis, not to mention gross stomach flu and run-of-the-mill runs, plagues of snot or crusted eyes and infected ears, lice. Once it grew cold, it seemed that every possible small malady came the way of the boys and Delphine was hard-pressed to keep the hours she’d insisted on with Fidelis. Sometimes she just had to nurse them through a night. Sometimes she had to sleep at the foot of their beds. She became an expert at rendering a chicken into hot soup. She made a routine of daily checks behind their ears for eggs and nits. And even when they all were healthy and breathing hard in boys’ dead sleep, she stood in the doorway and worried. They had done this to her. Activated some
primitive switch in her brain. She couldn’t turn it off. Sometimes before she left, with superstitious intensity, she counted their breaths and made sure they were breathing regularly. She counted exactly ten breaths each, then forced herself to turn and leave at that exact number, not one more or less.