The Master Butcher's Singing Club (2 page)

Fidelis lifted his best friend’s fiancée into his arms and stood in the
doorway of the house, holding the woman effortlessly, as he would have held a sleeping child. He could have stood there with her for hours. The strength required to hold her was a minute portion of the strength he actually possessed. For he was one of those born in the phenomenon of strength. He’d always had it, from the beginning, and each year it increased.

It is said that some people absorb the cellular essence of a twin while still in the womb—perhaps Fidelis was one of those. Maybe he was simply of that old Germanic stock who roamed the forests and hung their god from the tree of life. There is also in some parts of Germany a belief that one who kills is at the moment of the other’s death entered by that victim’s essence. If so, that explained both the lightness and the gravity of Fidelis. He had seen the flash of a man’s smile through telescopic sights in the instant before his sniper’s bullet shattered the distant face. He had watched the blood pump through a man’s fingers on the throat he’d neatly creased. He’d dealt death out so accurately from his sandbagged and reinforced turret that the French and the British tried to clock his watches. They hated him, and they tried with near success to capture him, for they had planned how slowly they would kill him. Between him and them, the war was very personal. He accepted this. And he had not turned away from his task. He simply continued with a raptor’s perseverant ease to pluck men from that too shallow rift in the earth.

They’d dug down deeper to escape him, and yet he caught them anyway in a moment of foolish ease, pure tiredness, or fatal exuberance. Perhaps it was true that those souls flew unerringly across the drenched slime to lodge within him, for the quiet in Fidelis had deepened to a serene violence undisturbed by the roar of the big night guns. His fellow soldiers began to fear and then detest him as their misery increased. He drew enemy fire, so he was avoided. He slept, and slept. Shells fell near him, men shrieked in his ear. Fidelis only frowned a little, sighed with childish irritation, and kept on sleeping. He dreamed black dreams from which he woke with no memory. He meticulously oiled and cleaned the workings of his rifle. He ate the brot and wurst, the little packages of
dried peaches and apples he’d brought from home, and he dipped the finger he would set on the trigger, every morning, into a small pot of honey from his mother. He licked that finger and tasted the bee-sugar dark with forest bitterness. A childhood taste, sucked from the hidden blossoms of the densest stands of silver fir. He never licked all the honey quite off, and once he took the rifle up his finger never slipped.

Now, in the doorway, Fidelis waited until Eva’s mother came to investigate. When he brought Eva into her house and laid her down upon a faded rose pink sofa, he decided what he’d known already, what he’d promised his friend Johannes, who had died on the walk home from the war and in a shimmer of fractured musical notes. Fidelis would marry Eva. Later, when she agreed to his plan and when she kissed him, he tasted on her tongue and on the skin of her throat several layers of meaning. He tasted Johannes, whose forehead he’d kissed in death as though he were putting a little brother to sleep. That taste was the salt grief. Eva’s taste was different, and familiar. Hers was the bitter edge to the sweetness of forest honey, and her fragrance, as he lifted his face away from hers, possessed the fading sharp persistence of the secret flowers of the blackest pines.

Their wedding was a poor and scrabbled-together affair, she enormous with the child fathered in the war’s last insane and desperate season. But the priest, knowing all, blessed them, and they spent their first night together in Fidelis’s tiny bedroom, where he’d left his lead soldiers to patrol the sills. That night, she lay naked in the trembling light of a candle, her body covering the childish stain on the flannel-covered eiderdown. Her gold hair, shot with the same red as his, sprayed across the pillow. Her breasts were veined with blue fire, her nipples chapped and dark. He knelt before her, between her legs, put his hands on her, and felt the hot movement of the child. The powerful emotions that had accompanied his return had faded slowly, at last, to a sense of embarrassment at his survival. He now had no idea what to do about his life, but upon entering Eva’s body, clasping her hips to him, winding her legs behind his back, he moved from the dangerous quiet where he lived, into the unacceptable knowledge that in spite of
the dead weight of killed souls and what he’d learned in the last three years about the monstrous ground of existence and his own murderous efficiency, he was meant to love.

FIDELIS SOON FOUND
that he was also meant to travel. He became convinced that he should go to America because he saw, from that place, a slice of bread. This sighting occurred in the public square of Ludwigsruhe. Crossing it one day shortly after he married Eva, he noticed people grouped around a neighbor well-known to his parents. This man held something white and square in his hand that Fidelis took at first to be a picture of some sort, but it was blank. When he saw that it was bread, shaped with a precision that could only be the work of fanatics, Fidelis entered the circle of men to examine it. The thing was sent in a package from distant relatives, from a far coastal city, as an example of what such a commonplace item as a bread loaf became in the hands of inventive people. Machines had kneaded and baked and then sliced it. Or were these everyday American bakers? That was the argument. Fidelis inspected the bread when, passed hand to hand, it came around to him. He noted the fine texture and wondered at the treatment of the yeast, observed the sharp edge of the cut, shook his head at the strangely even gold brown of the crust. It seemed an impossible thing, to him, an artifact from some place that must adhere to an impossibly rigid order. Later that day, visiting the neighbor, he got the name of the place it was sent from, spelled it out on a scrap of paper, and kept it with him through the next months, until it changed from being the source of a small marvel to an actual destination.

STEPPING OFF THE RMS
Mauretania
into the harbor chaos of New York City with a suitcase full of his father’s miraculous smoked sausage, Fidelis was directed through the swirl of massed arrival by his power of quiet. It was 1922 and Eva’s baby was three years old. His talent for stillness had carried Fidelis through the war’s aftermath of want, in which he’d been forced to enter a treacherous black market. Now, in the suitcase that Fidelis carried was massed the wealth of his entire
family. All of their remaining trinkets, including the cuff-links, and their best woolens had bought his ticket and kept him from selling his knives. His own carefully hoarded bullets and hidden-away rifle had poached the wild boar from which were made the sausages that would carry him across this new country. He spoke only the English that he had learned on the ship, words specific to his intent—
train
,
train station
,
west
,
best sausage
,
master butcher
,
work
,
money
,
land
. His family’s fortunes now lay solely with him and, as he saw it, his ability to maintain a watchful silence.

In his calm immobility, it was true, there was a power. But that was complicated by the restless sweep of his eyes, which were of a blue so transparent that his skull seemed lighted from within. His thick roan-blond hair, crushed underneath his father’s prewar dress hat, needed cutting. He was clean shaven, though, and he wore clean underwear. The inside pockets of his father’s suit held all he needed. The suit was of the fine Bavarian quality of the hat. His family, who were emphatically not Bavarian, in fact distrusted people from the south and believed them of a coarser quality than their woolens.

Although they were tradesmen and master butchers, his family also prided themselves on acquiring a degree of learning and on a talent for producing male voices of special beauty that skipped from son to son. His older brother hadn’t much voice at all, for instance, but Fidelis had a singing tenor of such natural clarity and freshness that his last name, Waldvogel, might have been invented just for him. Waldvogel was such a common name in his town that he’d never thought of it, but in this new country, where Germans were Germans regardless of their regional origins, more than one person would remark upon it, and also note that Forestbird was an oddly gentle name for one whose profession was based in slaughter.

That was not how his family viewed it, of course; there was an art to a proper killing. The profession, acquired only through painstaking study and examination from a young age, was one of extraordinary precision and timing. A Metzgermeister’s diploma required working knowledge of every spice known to humankind, the arcane preparation of
hundreds of varieties of wurst, and the ability to commit one’s knife edge to the animal’s created bulk and grain with a dreamlike intuition. His father, having practiced all his life, hardly seemed to move his hands as the animal fell into increasingly civilized circles and predictable shapes. On a block set before him, its creatureliness disappeared and it entered, as Fidelis saw it, a higher and more satisfactory form of being.

Fidelis thought of his father’s working grace as he stood for hours in lines, endured inspections, stamps, paperwork, the crush of impatient humans, and his own hunger. That he also managed, with that internal discipline of quiet he had learned at the rifle’s sights. For the smoked sausages in his suitcase were not for him to eat; they were his ticket west.

Walking toward the train station through milling throngs of people, those who had acquired a foothold in this place, Fidelis gave in to an extravagant loneliness. Those who passed him saw an erect and powerfully carved man, high-cheekboned, fair, with a straight and jutting nose and a mouth as perfectly shaped, though who around him knew, as the voice that could pour from it. That he was afflicted by the riptide of a recent and unexpected love was, of course, not apparent to those who noticed him in the crowd. He tapped his heart, which from time to time beat too anxiously behind the lapels of his suitcoat. The locket that Eva had given to Johannes, and which Fidelis had secretly kept, was lodged there, for Fidelis was both thrilled and terrified to find that, although he’d married Eva on the strength of a promise to his dying friend, he’d fallen through a trapdoor into blackness—a midnight of love that had grown like a bower of inky twigs over the baby’s defenseless beauty, over Eva’s prickly loveliness, her trim fortitude, her bullheaded, forthright, stubborn grace.

The train station’s massive brass-trimmed doors swallowed Fidelis with all the others. Easily, the current of people pulled him to the windows of the ticket counter. He waited again in line until he stood before a sharp-mouthed girl whose jaws moved in a rhythm peculiar to people in this city. Fidelis was unfamiliar with chewing gum and the motion of
so many jaws made him uneasy. Her eyes brightened with an automatic greed, though, and the chewing stopped when he came before her.

“I wish to Seattle,” he said, gathering the words in his mouth, “to go.”

She told him the price of the ticket. He did not understand the click of numbers on her tongue, and mimed writing down her answer. She did so, and then, with a glance to one side, added her name and the words
Come see me if you’re ever in town
. Her lacquer-nailed fingertips presented the slip of paper to him. She made him tug just a little to get it. He thanked her, in German, and she replied with a manufactured tragic pout that he was too weary to notice. The amount was legible, anyway. He understood it, knew how much money he would have to add to the meager amount he still possessed. He put the paper in his pocket and then found a pillar against which to stand.

He took up this position, the back brim of his father’s hat just touching the grooved stone behind, and then he lifted the suitcase in his arms, unlatched the lid, and lowered it enough so that he could see just over the opened top. For the remaining hours of the day and then on into the dusk, during which the smoky radiance through the high windows intensified and then diminished to a feeble gray, he stood. Motionless, he seemed not so much rooted as suspended, as though he’d been lowered by strings that still held him poised. That was perhaps the visual effect of his hunger. For it crawled in him to lighten him, opened him from the inside. His gut yawned. Yet he remained impassive and somehow buoyant in the dark. He had rehearsed on the boat across the price he would ask for the sausages, and at once he sold seven, not perhaps because they were so irresistible but because, even in that city of every possible sight the image of the man holding open in his tireless arms the sausage-filled suitcase,
which looked heavy by the way, arrested quite a few. From time to time, a shaft of the fading light plucked his calm and idealized features from the gloom. So he sold, just as he’d known he would, out of his depth of silence as much as the quality of what he carried, though he believed most certainly, and with a firm drama, that his father’s were, no argument, the best sausages upon the earth.

Maybe they were. The next morning some who bought one the day
before came back for two. And more people that same afternoon. Other than sleeping on a platform bench with the closed suitcase in his lap, visiting the washroom, or drinking the surprisingly cold, sweet city water, Fidelis had remained at his post. Those who noticed, and there were a few among the swirling crowd, wondered at his endurance. How did his arms support that open suitcase hour after hour? The suitcase, which also contained his treasured knives, was heavier than it looked, yet he held it lightly. As the day went on, his stillness seemed an unquestionable form of self-torture. But it wasn’t, for Fidelis, the way it seemed to an observer. Standing there was not so difficult. It was almost a relief, after the constant motion of the sea. And the strength required to hold the suitcase in one position all that time was nothing to him, even though he was weakened by not eating.