The Master Butcher's Singing Club (18 page)

AFTER THE TWO
had come back to earth and Franz had carried her to bed, Eva had one of her final visions. She was propped up with pillows, drinking sips of water, shuddering with happiness and pain.

“Up in the sky, my brain was gulping new air,” she said to Delphine, “I am thinking so fast and furious. I see things.”

“What things?”

“Zum beispiel,”
Eva said, “this Argus was only a spot. We are spots. Spots in the spot. No matter. We specks are flying on our own power. We are not blown up there by wind! What does this inform you?”

She grabbed Delphine’s arm, her hand still had a strong grip. Delphine shook her head. “What?”

“There is plan,
eine grosse Idee,
bigger than the whole damn rules. And I always known it. Bigger than the candles in church. Bigger than confessionals, bigger than the Sacred Host.” She crossed herself. “I do not know what it is. But big. Much more big.”

Then she had Delphine call all of her sons into the room, and she spoke to them, too, and she told them that she had seen something very reassuring and that it didn’t have to do with church, even the One True Church. It didn’t have to do with taking communion or getting confirmed by the bishop.

“It don’t matter if you do these things now,” she said impatiently. “If you must need them, do them. But the plan is greater I am telling you. The plan knows the huge thing, and it accounts for the little fingernail.” Eva raised her pinkie in the air and held it out between them. Her eyes were just a bit glazed, and glittering with dangerous emerald lights. “If
I die, don’t take this too hard,” she counseled them, “death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.”

Her cheeks now took on just that suffusing rose color that Pouty had imagined his ride would inspire. She took a big gulp of water, coughed a little, and then abruptly her eyes shut. Franz reached forward after a moment, terrified and curious, and touched her face. “She’s sleeping,” said Franz, his fingers touching her lips. He gently shoved his younger brothers out. If she had died in that moment, it would have been a perfect piece of drama, thought Delphine from the doorway. Maybe Eva even wanted to, but maybe she stopped herself, knowing that to die immediately after that plane ride would get Franz in trouble.

“THE BOYS ARE PLAYING
in the orchard. The men are already half lit,” Delphine reported to Eva, who smiled faintly and struggled onto her elbows. Delphine helped her sit up and look out the window. She fell back, exhausted, nodding at the sight. The two women could hear the men singing, working their way through a set of patriotic songs, one after the next. Sheriff Hock was particularly good on the high parts of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His voice splintered eerily through the bright, heated air, giving Delphine chills.

“Men are so much fools,” Eva whispered. “They think they are so smart hiding the Everclear in the gooseberry bush.”

Even though the last few days had been nightmarish, Eva still refused to die in a morbid way and even preferred to suffer in a fashion that was strangely hilarious. She laughed freakishly at pain sometimes and made fun of her condition, more so now when the end was close. Delphine would later believe that the purchase of the chinchillas was a sign of that fast downhill turn. The way Eva got up on one of her last good days, sneaking the delivery truck out to the farm of a strange old biddy, and returning with the creatures. Now, beyond the men, who
were drinking underneath the clothesline, the thick-furred things panted, stinking gently in their flimsy network of cages.

Delphine sat beside her friend in the little room off the kitchen, a room filled with jars of canning. That was where Eva had asked Fidelis to set up her bed. A good-size window looked out of that room into the backyard, which was her reason for wanting to die in that tiny place. From there, she could watch the boys complete her chinchilla-moneymaking scheme. They had constructed the cages out of wire netting salvaged from other people’s failed coops, and pounded together nesting boxes out of scrap lumber. It was a diversion, Delphine thought now, with sudden understanding. Watching her friend drift into a short nap, she suddenly realized that the odd, rabbity creatures were a clever way to take the boys’ attention off their dying mother.

They’d closed the shop at noon for July 4. Now everyone in town was celebrating. Fidelis had the old chairs and table out there, and on the table he had laid out beer sausage and summer sausage, a watermelon, and bowls of crackers. Beer bottles sweat in a tub of ice underneath the tomato plants, beer to wash down the high-proof alcohol that Eva already knew they were hiding. It was funny, watching them sneak their arms into the gooseberry fronds and snake out the bottle. With a furtive look at the house, they tipped it to their lips. Even Fidelis, so powerful and purposed, acted like a guilty boy.

Delphine watched Cyprian stroll through the rickety back gate. Laughing, he set his own offering beside the sausages. Aged whiskey, probably from a recent border trip. Cyprian was an occasional visitor ever since he’d run the store that first week, when Fidelis and Delphine were down at the Mayo consulting with the doctors. He did all right with the store and nothing disappeared, so Fidelis wanted to hire him, but Cyprian said the meat business wasn’t for him. He’d had enough blood and guts in the war. Anyway, he was much better at running liquor and it paid better, he told Delphine, who didn’t like it but what was she to do since the car was half his and he was after all a grown man?

He had joined the singing club, though his voice was average. A slightly singed baritone. And he had set himself up to look like a
traveling salesman. He even had samples of his supposed wares—hairbrushes, floor brushes, dog fur brushes, horse brushes, long broom brushes, potato brushes—stashed in his car to foil the inspectors at the border and answer the questions of neighbors. Sometimes they bought the brushes, too. Mainly, he was paid by criminals. Dangerous men out of Minneapolis. Delphine not only didn’t like that he took the risk, but hated that he dealt in the despised substance. Still, as he didn’t drink it much himself for fear of losing his balancing skills, which he still practiced between runs, she let it go. Besides, she was caught up in helping Eva die.

There was no saving her, they were well beyond that now. The first treatment, after her surgery, consisted of inserting into her uterus hollow metal bombs, cast of German silver, containing radium. Over the weeks Eva spent in the hospital the tubes were taken out, refilled, and put back several times. Once 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.” And Delphine had bought a great purple bottle of flower water to wash her with, but it hadn’t helped much. For days, she’d passed charcoal and blood, and the roasted smell lingered. Also, the treatment hadn’t worked. The cancer spread. Doctor Heech then gave her monthly treatments of radium via long twenty-four-carat gold needles, tipped with iridium, that he pushed into the new tumor with a forceps so as not to burn his fingers. She took those treatments in his office on Sundays, strapped to a table, dosed with ether for the insertion, then after she woke, a hypodermic of morphine. Doctor Heech became so angry at himself when he gave her the treatments, which he feared were useless, that he left the room cursing under his breath. Delphine stayed to sit with her, for the needles had to stay in place for six hours. Threaded with black waxed string, they made a spoked wheel poking into her stomach.

“I’m a damn pincushion now,” Eva said once, rousing slightly. Then she dropped back into her restless dream. Delphine read, or dozed and knitted, for she couldn’t always read. It was the old thing happening, as with the drunks and her childhood neighbors. Again she witnessed great
suffering she could not stop. This time her body tried to share the agony: shooting pains in her own stomach as the needles went in, even a sympathetic morphine sweat. A bleak heaviness that accompanied Eva’s passages of charcoaled flesh. Dull aches that overcame her sometimes and made her want to lie down forever and be done with things. But she kept on going, never let up, never showed her sorrowing pains. As she approached the house now, each day, she said the prayer to God she used as the most appropriate to the situation.

“Spit in your eye.”

Her 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—she’d mustered a host of pious Lutheran ladies and they come around every few afternoons to try to do their business on a Catholic. When Eva became too weak to chase them off, Delphine tried, but as her position was inferior to Tante’s own she had great trouble at it and used other strategies, whatever she could think of, to keep them from crowding around the bed like a flock of turkey vultures and pressing together their bony claws in a gloating, sucking prayer circle. Even now, Delphine thought, she’d bake a sugar cake while Eva was sleeping, in case the mealy-mouths showed up. Feeding them was actually her best strategy, for they filed out quickly when they knew there was grub in the kitchen for the taking. Tante, with crumbs on her mouth, led them away after they’d gorged on Eva’s pain and her signature linzertorte, which she’d now given Delphine instructions to prepare, one small step at a time.

Outside, it was a perfect day, sunny and with a slight, cool breeze. Sure to bring Tante out, though Delphine hoped her goody-goody cohort would be dishing out potato salad and slicing watermelon at some civic function. The men’s voices rose and fell, rumbling with laughter at the big tales, stern with argument at the outrages committed by the government, and sometimes they even fell silent, or stuporous, and gazed into the tangled foliage of Eva’s garden blank with speculation. As always, Fidelis was the center of these gatherings, prodding slightly bolder stories out of the men or challenging them to feats of strength.

In the kitchen, sun calm in the window, Delphine cut cold butter into flour for a pastry. She had decided to make pies for the Fourth of July supper, which the men would need to cut the booze. Potatoes were boiling now. She had a crock of beans laced with hot mustard, brown sugar and black-strap molasses. There were of course more sausages. Delphine added a pinch of salt, rolled her dough in oiled muslin, and set it in the icebox. Then she started on the fruit, slicing thin moons of yellow-green rhubarb, peeling off the toughest bits of rosy skin. It’s nearly time, she thought, nearly time. She was thinking of Eva’s pain. Her own sense of time passing had to do with the length of a dose of opium wine, a cup of it flavored with cloves and cinnamon, or a stronger dose of morphine that Doctor Heech had taught her to administer, though not too much, lest by the end, he said, even the morphine lose its effect.

He’d taught her to make up Magendie’s solution fresh to eliminate the development of any fungus, and now, hearing Eva stir, Delphine straightaway set aside her pie makings. She put some water on to boil, to sterilize the hypodermic needle. The night before she had prepared a vial and set it in the icebox, the one-to-thirty 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 hated needles, abhorred them, grew sickly hollow when she filled the syringe and felt the penetration of her own flesh when she gave the dose to Eva. Without being asked, she knew when Eva needed the dose. She did not go by the time elapsed, but by the lucid shock of agony in Eva’s stare. Her mouth was half open, her brows clenched. She would need the relief very soon, as soon as the water boiled. Delphine thought to divert her friend by massaging her sore hands.

“Ah,” Eva groaned lightly as Delphine worked the dips between her knuckles. Eva’s forehead smoothed, her translucent eyelids closed over, she began to breathe more peacefully and said, faintly, “How are the damn fools?”

Delphine glanced out the window and observed that they were in an uproar. Sheriff Hock was holding forth and Fidelis was standing,
gesturing, laughing at the big man’s belly. “We are potched!” she heard him roar in good humor. Then they were all comparing their bellies. Cyprian’s was the flattest one. Delphine knew that his stomach, as her own, was divided into hard and even ridges of muscle that he, anyway, could flex like a keyboard. In the lengthening afternoon light, Cyprian’s face was slightly agape with the unaccustomed drink and the fellowship of other men, too, for he was used to being isolated on the farm with Roy or out on the road. There was a sheet pinned on the clothesline and the bellies were pale falls of flesh in its shade.

“They’re showing off their big guts to each other,” said Delphine.

“At least not the thing below,” croaked Eva.

“Oh, for shame!” Delphine laughed. “No, they 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 and quilts from the shelves, shoved the bed up to the window, and propped Eva where she would see the doings in the yard. She went back, put one syringe in the water, finished up the pies and put them in the oven, then brought a little tepid water in a cup for Eva to drink. She did drink, which was good, and her color was up. Her eyes brighter.

“Come on,” Eva said, “sit down here.” Her hand flopped on the bed. “I think they are up to nothing good!”

Now it looked as if they were making and taking bets. Bills were waved, laughingly. They weren’t stumbling drunk, but loud drunk. Roaring with jokes. The boys appeared, clambering up the rails of the stock pens to take in the men’s action.

“Eva, do you see?” Delphine pointed to them. Nodding, Eva made a face. What examples! These men! 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 when the table was clear, to a great burst of hilarity, Sheriff Hock lay down upon it. He lay on his back. The table didn’t reach down his whole length, so he was a boatlike hulk, balanced there in dry dock, his booted feet absurdly sticking straight up and his head extended off the other side. His stomach made a mound and now on the other side of the table, directly before Eva’s window, Fidelis stood. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his white shirt and rolled his sleeves up over his thick forearms. His
suspenders were unstrapped and his grin was huge, tossing back a jeer.