The Master Butcher's Singing Club (15 page)

After an hour or two, anyway, Eva woke to a frenzy of energy and pushed herself again.

They mopped down the floors of the killing room with bleach every single day. The meat cases were run on full cold, yet they were lukewarm and the meat within had to be checked constantly for rot. A noisy
generator was hooked up to power the meat locker and that thick-walled closet was jam-packed with all they were afraid to lose. They bought only the slightest amount of milk to sell because it often soured just from the drive to the store. The cream turned, too, but Eva tried to culture it and use it in her cooking. They stored almost no butter or lard. The heat hardened to a cruel intensity. The boys slept outside on the roof in just their undershorts. Eva dragged a mattress and sheets up there as well and slept with them while Fidelis slept downstairs.

As a gesture, perhaps, of reconciliation, the Kozkas gave Fidelis a dog. She was not a chow, for they’d had too many disappointments with the breed—Hottentot now ran wild, his offspring showed no respect for their masters, and all of his puppies sank their teeth into their buyers. The Kozkas had gone into a steadier line of dogs. They gave Fidelis a white German shepherd of ferocious energy. The dog roamed the downstairs halls all night and chewed happily all day on great green bones. The dog immediately loved Eva like a sister, and though it was tied outside the door most of the time, its ears pricked when she passed by in the house. When Eva freed the dog, it wildly bounded about, racing and leaping in astonishing arcs. When it had released its puppy nature, it walked gravely to Eva and stood near her. It didn’t beg or gaze at her longing for scraps. The dog was very dignified and treated Eva as its peer. Clearly, the dog considered Eva her colleague, her mate in the task of protecting the dim-witted sheep, the men, from blundering into danger. Eva didn’t pat the dog absently, but scratched the dog in places it couldn’t reach. Even used an old hairbrush to untangle its fur when it matted. Delphine watched Eva look into the dog’s eyes, listened to the way she crooned to it, and thought that her friend’s behavior was remarkable. She’d never known anyone who thought that dogs were much. Eva’s sensitivity to this animal, as well as the way she treated the outcasts and oddballs who came to the shop, including Step-and-a-Half, convinced Delphine that Eva was a person of rare qualities, and she loved her all the more.

Every day, the sky went dark, the dry heat sucked the leaves brown
and nothing happened. Rain hung painfully near in the iron gray sheet stretched across the sky, but nothing moved. No breeze. No air. On the mornings she came from Roy’s, Delphine walked through the back door sopping wet, washed her face, and donned the limp apron by the door. The air was already stiff and metallic. The dew burned off in moments. There was the promise of more heat. If it broke, it would break violent, Delphine thought as she filled a bucket. She didn’t care how the heat broke—bring on the twister, bring on the volcano, the mighty wind of a hurricane—only make it cease.

She began stripping the wax off the linoleum on the floor in order to reapply a new coat. She had finished with that, and was about to open the shop, when out of the wringing wet-hot air walked Sheriff Hock.

Either it’s news of the dead, thought Delphine, squeezing an ammonia-drenched rag out and draping it on the side of the bucket, or he wants to talk about Clarisse.

“Would it be better for me to visit you out at the house?”

For the moment, the place was silent.

“Nobody’s here,” said Delphine. “Go ahead.”

As it happened, she entirely forgot about Eva’s son Markus, up early in the heat as well. He was going over the books just on the other side of the counter. He was so quiet, his pencil moving among the columns of debts and credits. Young though he was, Eva had him check her work and he was proud to do it. Delphine was unnerved by the presence of the sheriff, or she might have remembered that Markus could hear all that was said. Maybe the heat, or a low level of panic, dulled her thoughts. She wanted to get the talking over with.

Sheriff Hock nodded sharply; his features pinched inside the frame of firm, thick fat. He removed a sharp pencil from a case in his pocket, and flipped a page over on the hard surface of his notepad. He had the exquisite budded lips of a courtesan, and when he spoke it was hard not to watch them move, just as a rose might if it were to speak. He told Delphine that he had a few questions, and since she was willing to answer them, he went down a predictable list. They were not particularly
intrusive questions, having to do mainly with her life with Roy and Cyprian. Apparently, their answers matched up, because he seemed to take no exception to anything she said. Not until he came to a question about the red beads pasted into the floor of the pantry.

“Do you remember them, there in the pantry?”

“Of course I do.” The quality of the brittle substance that sealed the cellar door shut was extremely memorable, and Delphine had wondered at that one particular ingredient.

“The stuff was so hard to chip that I wondered if it wasn’t some kind of glue.”

“I wondered the same,” said Sheriff Hock, very solemnly. “I am currently having it tested in the state laboratory.”

What state laboratory? thought Delphine, but she tried to humor him.

“Red beads, off a dress? Red beads at a wake?” she said with a dutifully mystified expression.

“Exactly.”

“Have you asked my dad?”

“He’s vague about it.”

“He’s . . . not well,” said Delphine, coughing discreetly.

Sheriff Hock folded his notebook, tucked it underneath his arm, and took one of Eva’s doughnuts from the glass case. The heat weighed on his bulk. He moved with a palpable weariness, and his shirt was darkened with sweat down the spine and below the arms. He ate the doughnut in tiny bites, lost in physical misery and abstract thinking, then he asked. “Where does your father obtain his whiskey?”

“I buy it for him,” said Delphine.

“I don’t mean the stuff you buy,” the sheriff said. “I mean the supply he kept in the cellar.”

“I don’t know.”

“Delphine, you’re protecting him now,” said Sheriff Hock, shaking his head. “I suspect that the answer to the tragedy lies in the fact that the cellar was littered with empty bottles.”

“I suppose,” said Delphine, seeing her ruse was useless, “he might have saved the bottles for Step-and-a-Half. She would resell them for home brew.”

The sheriff nodded sagely. “Was your father a friend of the Chavers?”

“Well, you know he was, as well as I do,” said Delphine.

“For the record,” said the sheriff.

“Okay, yes, he was.”

“Was he horrified? Shocked?”

Delphine became animated by the question, perhaps because she could rightly answer it. “What do you think? After he learned the Chavers’ identities, my father was wild. You should have seen him. He pulled the last pathetic tufts of hair off his head and rolled around on the floor like a baby. Well, you know Roy. He kept howling something about believing the family had gone down to Arizona. I thought, you know, for the winter.” Delphine finished in a subdued voice.

“Winter was nearly over when they were locked in.”

Fidelis’s voice boomed suddenly from down the hallway, and Sheriff Hock turned his attention away from Delphine. Much to her relief. For she was suddenly gripped with an anxiety for her father, and the fear that he had done something to set the deaths in his cellar into motion. Still, having already questioned him about the red beads and in some desperation asked him everything he knew or could think of about the three who died, she was at a loss. Roy Watzka had seemed as bewildered by the dead as anyone, entirely unprepared to provide any useful knowledge.

Fidelis and the sheriff went out back, humming the melody to a song they were complicating with contrasting harmonies, probably over a jar of Fidelis’s dark, cold, homemade beer. Delphine’s throat ached for a swig of it. Just as she bent over to squeeze out the mop again, Delphine heard a low rustle of paper, the creak of the chair at the desk in the corner, and she straightened up in time to see Markus stepping quietly away from the account books.

“You heard?”

Markus turned to look at Delphine. His thin cheeks had been recently and fiercely burned by the sun, and they still glowed hot red. In the long pause as he looked at her, Delphine gazed clearly back at Markus and saw in his face Eva’s steel. He wouldn’t speak. For some reason, Delphine was later to think, the boy knew all that was to come. He understood the future, knew why she was there, fathomed the reason that her place in his life would so drastically change. Knowing all of this, he was closed to her, sealed.

“You must be very smart,” said Delphine. “You’re only eight years old and your mother trusts you to check the accounts.”

“I’m nine. She does the math,” said Markus, poker-faced.

“But you are smart,” Delphine persisted. His indifference was a challenge, and she wanted him at least to admit what he’d just heard, if only so that she could prepare Eva for any questions that he might have. “You’re a smart boy, so you know that the sheriff was asking me questions only to figure out the truth.”

Markus now looked down at the floor.

“I didn’t do anything!” Delphine blurted out, surprising herself. It was only after Markus turned back to her and stared from the perfect mixture of the greens and blues of his mother’s and father’s eyes that she realized that the boy in the cellar was his age and that of course Markus must have known him.

“Your friend’s name,” said Delphine, softly now, stepping toward him. “What was it?”

Beneath the raw sunburn, the boy’s face went white. What the question did to him astonished Delphine. His face turned to paper and his eyes burned. He blinked. He opened his mouth, passionately miserable.

“Ruthie,” he croaked. “Ruthie Chavers.”

Then he whirled and ran down the long hall, banged his way out into the white heat of the yard. Delphine stood there a moment, stunned. Ruthie! The girl’s name and the new information that she had, so far, avoided hit her. To escape her thoughts, she started using a scraper on the floor, gently scratching away at the places where the old
wax had yellowed or clumped. As she worked the white squares whiter, she felt a numb satisfaction. The colored squares unstreaked and became again the original innocent green. As she moved with an increased dedication, the girl’s name tapped in and out of her mind. Ruthie. Ruth. Ruth meant mercy, Delphine knew. Yet not one bit of mercy had been shown to her. Delphine might have imagined that to find out that the child in the cellar was a girl would have struck her a blow, increased the unbearable mental picture of that suffering. But it didn’t, in the end, and at this Delphine wondered. The floor was drying before she found the explanation in her own heart.

Her inner reasoning surprised her, mystified her, then depressed her. She found that she harbored a belief that girls were stronger and more enduring. Therefore more tough-minded about even such an unexpectedly evil destiny. And needful of less sympathy. A girl child would have a certain fatalism about the event. She would accept the end of her life, and merely sleep as much as possible until she fell asleep forever. Oddly, the closer Delphine identified with the girl’s suffering, the more she thought about it, the less sorry she felt for Ruthie Chavers. It was, in fact, as though she herself had sat in that cellar, endured the hunger, then the thirst, then weakened to the point of delirium, and froze, all in a dream.

And died in her mother’s arms, she thought, her mother’s arms. Then customers began arriving, and Delphine put on a clean apron.

At the end of the day, Delphine turned the cardboard sign in the entry window over from Open to Closed. She went over the floor again to take off the day’s footprints. She let the floor dry, and then, in a special bucket, she mixed up floor wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the entry so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick good-bye, and went home to swelter in the tent, alone. Early next morning, before the store opened she’d return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then between customers she’d polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and
elbow grease. That’s what she planned, anyway, and all that she planned did occur, but over weeks of time and under radically different circumstances.

ALREADY THE NEXT MORNING
, while Delphine sat in the kitchen with the second coat of wax drying, the heat pushed at the walls. She was pleased because Eva had looked at the floor and declared it brand-new again. The strong black Turkish coffee sent Delphine into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva set on the table and blotted at her throat and temples with a dish towel.

“Kuchmal hier,”
Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. “I am not so good.”

She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, and only answered with a moan of sympathy that somehow included herself, in this heat, waxing floors. But then Eva repeated herself exactly the same way, as though she did not remember what she’d said. “I am not so good,” Eva whispered again. She put her elbows on the table and curled her hands around the china cup. Her silence, as though she was listening for some deeper tone or word in the ordinary sounds around them, disquieted Delphine and she watched alertly as Eva stared into the oily depths of the liquid.

“What do you mean, you don’t feel so good?”

“It’s my stomach. I am all lumped up.” Beads of sweat trembled on Eva’s upper lip. “Pains come and go.”

“Is it cramps?” asked Delphine.

“It’s not that, or maybe.” Eva drew a deep breath and then held it, let it out. There. She took Delphine’s dish towel and pressed it to her face, dragged it off as though to remove her expression. She was breathing hard. “Like a cramp, but I never am quit the monthly . . . comes and goes, too.”