The Master Butcher's Singing Club (53 page)

Fidelis put his beer down with slow precision. He adjusted the glass on the table, then raised his head. He stared quizzically at Markus, and when his son looked back at him, biting his lip, nodding slightly, Fidelis hid his face in his hands. For a long time no one said a thing. There was a fuzzy quiet in the kitchen, and the cranking whine and then roar of the cooler generators across the yard underneath the wild grape vines. Schatzie appeared at the door and Delphine rose and let her in. Everyone watched the dog walk calmly through the room, straight to her post in the hall. Markus took a sip of his beer again, and then he spoke. “The guy said one other thing . . . I should tell you. He said this prisoner . . . he never talks, but sings. The guy can sing, this Waldvogel.”

Fidelis gripped his fingers together now, and his head began to nod up and down as he glared before him.

“I got us a clearance. It took some doing, but I’ve got the papers right here.” Markus patted his breast pocket. “So I’m heading up there tomorrow,” he said, very softly.

“I am going with you,” said Fidelis. “Can we get him released from this place?
Er ist ein Junge
.”

“I know,” said Markus, “but I doubt they’ll let him go. To tell the truth, I know they won’t, Dad, but we can visit him. That’s something. It’s a big thing, Dad—you don’t know how hard I worked, how many strings I pulled.”

Together, unspeaking, the two went out front to close the shop. They worked side by side, washing down equipment, checking the coolers, counting and securing the cash from the drawer.

Delphine let them go and stayed in the kitchen, began to clatter
dishes, wash pots. As she always did when things were troubled, she started to bake. Cookies, she thought distractedly, pouring out ingredients, sifting flour. Gingersnaps. Measuring and stirring helped her make sense of things. Going up there—she didn’t want to do it, just an instinct. She didn’t want to see the men shattered if the boy wasn’t Erich or Emil and also she didn’t even want to see if the boy was one of them. There was too much that would be answered, in too short a time. How he’d changed and how he had survived. How he got into the war in the first place, so young. And would he have news about his twin? Perhaps she was just protecting herself, she thought, putting the cookies in the oven. And she thought that again, the next morning, as she watched Markus and Fidelis drive out of the yard and down the road. Protecting herself. Perhaps her place was really to be sitting next to her husband, to hold his hand in the car as they drove along. But she couldn’t. For all those reasons. And then, too, there was a voice in her that asked a small and terrible question, a quiet question, one she would not ever speak aloud. For the news was all over the place, rumors and horrors coming out, and she had to wonder knowing what she read in magazines and papers if they had killed any . . . in her mind she said
innocent people
, or
civilians
, but in her heart she thought Jews.

AS THEY CLEARED
the flat North Dakota prairie and entered sandy pinelands and rolling prairie of central Minnesota, which they would drive all day, Markus had the childish urge to ask his father to sing to him in the car. His father had the side vent open and was smoking but letting the smoke out into the rush of air. Markus would have begun to sing himself, as a way of starting without directly asking his father, but he was embarrassed about the quality of his voice, the scratchy thin tunelessness of it, no melody, a talent he wished he’d inherited. Instead, he got his mother’s curious mind, he guessed, her drive to learn things and her oversensitive nature. He would have had a hard time of it in training if he hadn’t also learned from Delphine to talk back smart and keep his eye out for bullshit. If he hadn’t learned from his father’s
friends how to play a good game of poker. Thank God he played cards, kept himself in a man’s game, otherwise they would have stepped all over him.

The roadway was narrow, with potholes and near washouts, and the two traveled slowly north and then due east into the deepening forest. The former prison guard had drawn a map of the location, which he maybe thought he shouldn’t have done. Markus knew just about what he was looking for anyway. It wouldn’t be some big secret. The camp was set on the edge of state forest lands, which were marked. And there was just one fairly obvious train track that the highway followed for a long time.

They reached the place in the late afternoon, drove down the simple rut of a logging road, and parked at the barbed-wire-and-log entrance. There was just one man on duty, too casual in a rumpled uniform. He stopped them, took the papers from Markus, and shot a few questions at them. Nodded in surprised intrigue when he found out one of the prisoners might actually be American born.

“You gotta wait, they’re out burning slash,” he told them.

So Markus and Fidelis sat in the car, the doors open, breathing the green air of pines and eating some chocolate bars Markus had bought back at his PX. They weren’t the kind that could be bought almost anywhere else. They saved one. Then they tried not to smoke too many cigarettes or to say too many times, “I wonder if it’s one of them,” or “it’s probably not.” They tried to keep a lucid conversation going, but without Delphine their meanings tangled and finally it was best to simply sit there, silently, letting their thoughts drift, lighting and stubbing out cigarettes.

They tried not to jump up when the men came back, but couldn’t help it, and stood on one side of the car scanning the men intently as the work crew neared from down the road. At once, they recognized Erich. He was still strong, bull-chested, ruddy, and had the same gold lights in brown hair. He was wearing an old rumpled uniform jacket, the blue POW clothing, and a pair of washed-out dungarees. He saw them too, right away, startled by their shouts. They could tell he knew them
from the involuntary wildness in his eyes, a shock he covered as he looked away from them both. Erich gazed straight ahead at the entrance, kept a rigid profile as they rushed toward him, didn’t turn when they were held away from the men by the American guards. As Erich passed, they talked to him, called out to him, names and anxious questions. But he locked his features, narrowed his stony eyes, jammed his hands in his pockets when they started to shake.

Something in Erich’s boy stubbornness, so like his own, sent Fidelis over the slippery edge of worry and relief into a blood bent rage. So immediate was his anger that he opened his mouth and roared, at the back of his retreating son, an old threat he’d used when Erich was a child. Then he swore his full swear, which always stopped everyone around him and made the boys shrink away and go still.
HeilundKreuzmillionenDonnerwetternocheinmal!

Some of the other prisoners did stop, and one or two of them smiled in startled recognition, as though at their own fathers’ oath, but Erich did not turn to look. He kept on walking. His hands hardened and his mouth twitched slightly with derision. He gathered himself, his thoughts. He wasn’t about to put himself in danger for reasons of mere sentiment. Besides, he was not who they thought he was, not at all. His father was an old man now and ruined, lost, foolish to have come here looking for someone whom he thought was Erich. This man who had sold his sausage all the way to North Dakota—now he looked bony and defeated. Not heroic or even strong. What he’d come to here was nothing, and the man was nothing, thought Erich. What absurd threats, too, as though he could hurt a trained soldier far more powerful in body and cunning in mind than Erich believed Fidelis Waldvogel ever had been in his life. As though anything that Fidelis roared could possibly affect Erich. He almost laughed, thinking of the bull’s pizzle hung on a nail behind the door—that used to frighten him. Now it seemed stupid, almost benign. His father’s arm had once been hot iron. His father’s blue glare had ruled him. And the gentleness, occasionally, that his father showed had made his sons slaves to its possibility. No more. Erich strode on, did not even turn when they cried out Emil’s name
again. So they didn’t know yet!
Ist gestorben
, he thought angrily. Killed by one of your land mines.
Leck’ mich am Arsch
, he wanted to scream. They’d killed his brother, the other half of him. What did they want now? But after all he had been trained not to show his reaction and reminded himself that this was still war. Unlike most of the other men around him, Erich hadn’t swallowed Germany’s defeat with either the abundance of food or the friendliness of the people in the nearby town or even the American guards, with whom they spoke German. Erich’s fanaticism was that of the culturally insecure. He’d struggled to be a German, and not even captivity was going to destroy what he’d gone through when shipped off to Ludwigsruhe. Erich’s new father was a boundary on a map, a feeling for a certain song, a scrap of forest, a street. It was a romance as enduring as the spilled blood of his brother or the longing of Fidelis or the pains of this war. It was an idea that kept him walking through the prison gates.

FIDELIS WAS SILENT
as Markus backed the car into the road, then turned around and steered down the way they had come. They drove south through the pine and then the mixed birch, maple, and popple groves of second- and third-growth trees. They passed through the small towns, each with its orderly main street layout of church, post office, grocery, hardware store, and café. Once or twice, Markus opened his mouth to say something to his father, but then lost the impulse and continued on and on in a meditative state of sadness, until they were low on gas.

He pulled into a rowdy-looking little station attached to a tavern. The attendant came out to pump the gas, and Markus and his father looked at the doorway of the bar. It was a battered red door surrounded by a bristling trim of deer antlers. There were no windows in the place.

“Let’s get ourselves a drink,” said Fidelis.

Markus parked the car and then the two walked through the odd, fanged door, into a dark little bar of wooden booths. Amber light glowed in the early evening calm from small candle-shaped wall lamps. Each ordered an expensive whiskey. Fidelis tossed his back and put out his
shot glass for another. Markus asked for a ham sandwich and gestured for the bartender to bring one to his father, who was frowning at the tabletop and taking his second whiskey and then his third drink, a cheaper beer, more slowly. They still hadn’t said a word about the visit. Maybe they wouldn’t, thought Markus. The comforting darkness of the bar enveloped them. There were no other customers, and no sounds except for the soothing, muted clink of dishes and glasses being washed out in back. Markus looked steadily at his father, then looked away. Fidelis’s hands, cupping the glass between them, were startlingly pale in the barlight, and Markus had noticed that under all the nicks and roped scars and red callus those hands were rebelling from Fidelis’s control. He was careful not to show any sign of clumsiness, and firmly steadied his fingers on the table. Still, at one point he nearly knocked the glass over. Another time, he absently grasped at his drink and missed—the sight filled Markus with a stricken awe and he was glad when the sandwiches came to occupy their hands and mouths.

It was a beautiful, prewar sandwich. The bread was fresh and heavy, just baked. Country bread thickly spread with real sweet butter. The ham was perfectly smoked, cured, and cut fresh in a generous slab. There was a plate of crisp dill pickles alongside, sliced into thin green spears. They ate with slow gratitude. Fidelis said, “He must have thought he lost his mind when he saw the two of us.”

“I bet,” said Markus.

“We should write him, get him used to the idea,” Fidelis went on, growing optimistic as the beer and whiskey smoothed his thoughts. “Let him know we’re coming back.”

“We’re coming back?”

“He’s stubborn, but we’ll break his stubborn.”

Now that Markus knew how to play it, he laughed a little. “He thinks he can play stubborn. Well, fine. We’ll play stubborn, too.”

Fidelis asked for another beer now and drank it with a pleasantly congenial air now, addressing his son like a conspirator.

“We’ll kidnap the little son of a bitch.”

“Damn right,” said Markus.

His father drank the rest of the beer in a long, smooth gulp, and then he rose to find the men’s room and take a piss. He had to steady himself on the booth’s table as he cleared the space. Markus noticed that his father’s hand groped for the backs of the chairs as he passed among the tables, and that, as he reached the end of the bar, he staggered and righted himself, then proceeded with a slow formality that nearly hid the fact that he was drunk.

“FRANZ WROTE MORE
than a page—that proves he’s crazy for you,” said Delphine to Mazarine, who came by to sit with her in the store. “In fact, six whole pages.”

“Well, actually, it’s seven,” said Mazarine, only a bit self-conscious. Her baby curved seven months over her thighs now, underneath a flowered and foolish maternity dress top with a spanking white bow. She had taught school up until the previous week, and there were some who said that she should not be seen in that condition, not be influencing children. At least they couldn’t say all they would have liked to include in the gossip. Early on, when Mazarine had told her about the baby, Delphine had taken care of things. She’d gone to a jeweler up in Fargo, bought a wedding ring in Mazarine’s size, and gave it to her, saying, “This will shut them up.” And then Franz had an engagement diamond delivered to her, so she had one for either hand. She wore them both and let people speculate, though who cared, thought Mazarine, when there was the war. Wasn’t it enough that there be one new life?

Delphine raised her eyebrows. “And you kept the last page in your pocket.”

Mazarine had brought the long letter from Franz—all except the last page, in which he concentrated all that was private between them. He knew that Mazarine and his parents shared all of the letters they received from Franz because he couldn’t write often. They existed in a state of suspense that wore into months and showed mostly in Mazarine’s eyes.