The Master Butcher's Singing Club (37 page)

While the water was running she removed the knife from the sheriff, washed it clean. She covered him with an old bedspread, reached past him into the closet. From under her bed she drew a large brown suitcase. After she was clean, she would pack.

The next day was Christmas Eve and as Clarisse soaked she made her plans. The thing now was to act, not to feel anything. She’d have to visit the bank during the day, of course, and then she thought with sudden approval that it was a very good time to take out her money. People spent so much at Christmas on unexpected or extravagant gifts. The problem was that people also often died around Christmas, and there might be emergencies at work. After Christmas, though, people usually waited until after New Year’s to die. “Except for you,” she called to the sheriff across the hall. “You couldn’t wait.” After the bank, she thought, she’d get herself organized, pack some more, lightly but sensibly, and plan her route. With some satisfaction she realized that, if she was very efficient and if all worked out properly, she’d be able to go to Midnight Mass just as she always had, and then she could snatch a few hours of sleep, before she left on the morning train.

CYPRIAN KNEW
, but the knowing did not help him. Nothing was going to happen with Delphine. Christmas brought it all out in the open, which was not surprising. As both of them had long agreed anyway, that holiday was a booby trap. What made it worse was that Cyprian was trying to make it the first good Christmas ever. He had wanted to make up for the lack of Christmas in Delphine’s childhood. Maybe his, too. Their Christmases had never been anything more than occasions for
their parents to get spectacularly drunk. There were no special dinners, no little gifts, no garlands, no paper stars or candles in the window. Only the cold iron stove the children tried to stoke all by themselves. There was no school to divert them and no teacher to feed them from her own lunch pail, just bumbling adults reeling in at all hours and falling full length on the kitchen floor.

Remembering this, Cyprian went out and bought a goose from a Bohemian farmer who’d fattened it on corn and grain. And Delphine made strings of popcorn and paper chains with the boys and got Franz to take a hatchet out to the woods and cut two young pines. She’d decorated one for Fidelis and the boys, and tied the other to the hood of the car and brought it home. She had candles, too, in little tin holders with small reflecting shields behind the flames. Each of the boys had gifts, and there was one for Cyprian and one for Roy. Although Cyprian tried not to wonder if Delphine had bought or made a gift for Fidelis, too, he couldn’t help it. He did wonder. A few days ago, he had even dug into her dresser to see if he could find a wrapped suspicious object, but he found nothing except her clothes indifferently folded, and then his own gift, which looked like a scarf. What he did embarrassed him. He’d thought he wasn’t the sort of person who would rummage through a woman’s things,
but now it looked like he was. He’d gone out and bought her an extravagant ruby ring.

When he picked her up from work on Christmas Eve, she was brooding over something and said little on the way home.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Tired.” She told him that everybody had come in at the last minute for their goose or turkey or pork roasts or whatever they were having on the holiday, plus they’d wanted special cuts or trimmings of all kinds, and there were last-minute requests and then, too, she’d tried to make a stollen cake and that failed. After that she burned a batch of cookies for the boys. He tried not to think of Fidelis. Were those cookies really for him? Anyway, her tiredness was understandable, and he thought, trying to put it optimistically, it would make his surprise dinner for her all the better. He had just dropped Roy off at the back door of Step-and-a-Half’s
shop. She had a room over the store, which she had leased with the stashes of money that, it was rumored, she had kept buried in tin snuffboxes under rocks, trees, signs, fence posts all along the roads she traveled, far onto the plains. She was hardly ever at the shop, so Roy often kept the fire going when the temperature dropped. Cyprian and Delphine would be alone.

“You’re going to like what I cooked,” said Cyprian.

“You cooked?”

Her voice was polite, but listless. Cyprian looked at her, folded in the seat next to him. She seemed small that night, almost delicate, although he knew she was sturdy and her fragility was only a trick of the light, moving across the planes of her face, and the reflected blueness of the winter sky and earth. She seemed lonely, but he really couldn’t figure it, for he was there, ready to cook for her and sing if she wanted and give her the ring over which the jeweler had sighed, upon selling at that price, saying it was his favorite piece, and he really shouldn’t, but he needed Christmas money, too.

“Come on,” said Cyprian coaxingly, “I bought us a special bottle of brandy, real old. We’ll toast the holidays to come.”

“Oh,” said Delphine—unpleasantly, thought Cyprian. “Our future.” There was a note of contempt or derision in her voice that stabbed at his cheer, but he willed himself to ignore it and went on with his mental planning. Instead of talking, he whistled an old tune he thought, vaguely, might be a Christmas tune.

“Why are you whistling that?” said Delphine after a while.

“What?”

“’Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.’”

He said nothing, hurt.

“Oh,” she said after a while. Her dark mood surprised her. She couldn’t figure it. All day she’d struggled out of her low feelings only to sink back in. Now, she made a new effort, spoke kindly. “I get it . . . of the coming of the Lord. ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’ The birth of Jesus. Sure.”

“Right,” he said shortly, pulling up the road he’d shoveled that morning. He got out of the car, slammed the door a bit too hard, and breathed deeply of the cold, still, blue air. The purity of it hurt his lungs. He breathed until he’d recovered his equilibrium and then he thought of his attempt at baking gingerbread. Surely that would, at least, make her laugh. But when she walked in the door, she only said, “God, burnt gingerbread!” She dumped her things on the floor, kicked off her boots, and groaned as she eased herself into the chair across from the Christmas tree.

“I feel old,” she said, really to herself. “I feel a thousand years old tonight.”

“You’re just used to a lousy Christmas,” said Cyprian. “Here.” He handed her a piece of the stone-dry gingerbread, with the burnt part scraped off, wrapped in a clean dish towel, then he blew up the fire in the stove and stoked it with two logs. He shut the door tight and opened the flue all the way so that the fire would roar up inside and make a cozy crackling noise. He took out his box of matches and lighted the candles on the window, the candles on the tree. She was quiet when he did this, and although he didn’t turn to look at her he was sure it was because she was finally appreciating his efforts, feeling the peacefulness of the night, maybe tasting her gingerbread, getting used to the fact that he was taking care of her. But when he turned around, he saw that she’d fallen asleep with the gingerbread, still wrapped, on her knees.

“Oh, the hell with it,” he said, loud enough to wake her, but she didn’t wake. He blew out all the candles and went into the kitchen and fixed what he hoped was a passable oyster soup. When it was nice and hot, he poured the milky soup into a shallow bowl, stuck crackers all the way around it, and then peppered it and laid a lump of butter on top to melt. He brought the bowl in to her and set it on the floor. Kneeling beside the chair, he kissed her cheek, waked her gently. When she opened her eyes, he saw that she’d really not been asleep, she’d been crying, which he didn’t need. Not that night. He gave her the bowl of soup.

“Thanks, that’s nice,” she had the grace to say. “Where’s yours?”

“I’m getting it.” He went back to the kitchen, ladled his own soup out, and carried it before him while he dragged along a chair so he could sit down next to her.

“Hey,” he said, even though he knew he was in dangerous territory, “you know what they say about oysters.”

He was relieved when she didn’t come up with anything sarcastic, and hopeful when she said, “This tastes good.”

Before he ate, he put his soup down and quickly relighted all the candles. They flickered and glowed, shadowing the walls, and made the room into, he thought, a very beautiful and secret-looking place. He sat down with her and sipped at the hot, briny soup, and said nothing. Perhaps the peace of the room itself would get her into the mood he was trying to inspire.

“Say,” he said, “how about that tree? You see I got tinsel?”

She didn’t say anything. He was getting angry now. He could feel that cold trickle up the center of him, that shiver.

“I’m trying to make you happy.” His voice was tense, ready to rise out of control, but she didn’t seem to care if she pushed him over his limit. She shrugged and looked away from him.

He got up, snatched away her soup, spilling some on her dress, and brought the bowls into the kitchen. “Steady,” he said aloud, to himself, in a low voice, but there was pressure behind his eyes. His skull seemed to press on his brain, like a too tight hat, and he thought for a moment he should just step outside again into the black cold, but he didn’t, and he made the mistake of walking straight back into the room and glaring down at Delphine.

“Why the hell don’t you just go back to them, then?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know. Him. Them.” He was so choking mad that if he said the man’s name he knew he’d explode. And yet he was helpless because had no right to explode. He took the little green-and-red-wrapped box from his pants pocket and, just exactly the way he didn’t want to do it, he flung it at Delphine with a light movement of scorn. “Here,” he said, “I bought you a present.”

The tiny box landed in her lap. She didn’t pick it up. But she looked at it for a while. He breathed hard, standing in the doorway, and bit his lip so that he wouldn’t shout at her to open it. Finally she nudged it, though gently, with a finger.

“It’s pretty,” she said, “what is it, a ring?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice cracking a little, his anger changing all of a sudden to a longing so precise and painful he felt his heart squeezing, hot, in his chest, as though her initials were branded on it. The skin on his face prickled and he wanted to throw himself at her feet. She looked up at him from where she sat in the chair, the little box in her lap, and her foxlike face blazed in the light of candles. The flames jumped in her eyes and her hair sprang out in a dim aureole from her warm, flushed cheeks—she smiled at him but it wasn’t the smile he wanted, it was a weary sort of smile. He sagged a bit against the entrance and looked down at his feet.

As for Delphine, sitting there in the flare of Cyprian’s hopeful candles with the ring box in her lap, she thought back to their balancing act. The secretive light sent her into a strange, reflective, obstinate mood. Again, she saw herself walk out before the crowd in her long red skirt. There was the tea tray, set on her torso. She became the human table. Only in her mind, instead of chairs one by one men came out and balanced on her flint hard stomach. A stack of boys and men. Cyprian and Fidelis. The twins, Emil and Erich. Then Franz, and Markus, at last her father. All were precariously balanced on her phenomenally tough midsection. And she was down there, thinking what thoughts, feeling what feelings? What could she say? One word and they all might topple. One word could throw them off. So she didn’t say anything, but her arms and legs started to shake.

“Delphine,” said Cyprian, quietly now, his voice neutral and impassive, “why don’t you just go to bed?”

But she was still looking down at the little box. She was staring at it as though she could see through the wrappings into the velvet case. So he picked it up out of her lap, put it back in his pocket, and left her.

* * *

CYPRIAN GOT INTO THE CAR
, sat for a moment gathering his thoughts and then he started the car up violently and roared down the road into town. He felt slightly better as he entered the pool hall, and much better as he made himself exquisitely drunk. He left the pool hall in the blackness before dawn, already feeling the whiskey fade. Immediately, he drove to the house of Delphine’s friend, Clarisse. He knocked too loudly, pounded really, with a drunken indignation.

Clarisse jumped off the couch where she was sleeping, ran to the door to shut up the racket. She opened the door suspiciously, blinking sleep from her eyes. She was wearing a flimsy gown in which she seemed quite bitterly cold. Her usually rosy face was pale, her lips almost blue. Shivering, she let him in. There was a large, packed suitcase on a mat next to the door, and a smart red hatbox sitting on a chair. While he stomped his feet and rubbed his hands, she took her time, walked away from him, as if she didn’t know he could see her ass and legs through the thin pink material. She picked up a fluffy blue blanket from her sofa, but didn’t wrap it around herself until she’d passed from his sight.

“Come on in,” she said, beckoning him toward the kitchen. He sat down at her table. Suddenly, she seemed all recovered—toasty looking. Her cheeks glowed and her curls gleamed. She spun around holding the blanket on with one hand. She said she’d make him some coffee. Once she prepared the coffeepot and left it to boil, she sat across from him, rubbed her eyes with soft little kitten fists. Yawning pertly, shaking her head as if to clear it, but really making her curls bounce charmingly, she said, her voice a dreamy pout, “So, what is it?”

“Merry Christmas,” he said as he slowly pushed, across her kitchen table, the tiny green box.

THE CRATE FROM GERMANY
, which the boys had waited until Christmas to open, contained extraordinary things. For Franz, there was a coat made of top-grade wool, beautifully sewn and lined with the heavy sort of satin Fidelis remembered from his youth. The boys each had a pair of leather boots, and the boots fit, thanks to Tante, who had kept her mother updated as to the boys’ sizes in her letters. There were
small things—carved and brilliantly painted tops, the books
Max und Moritz
and
Der Struwwelpeter
, and small horses with legs that moved. For the twins, vast regiments of soldiers in every pose and their equipment, too. For Markus, a thick hat and knitted sweater. Tante received an embroidered shawl, which she pretended was a scarf. A shawl was an old person’s gift. Fidelis, a meerschaum pipe and Turkish tobacco. Everything was packed in great wads of worthless old
reichsmarks
—a trillion to the dollar. On the top, there were a few precious newspapers which Fidelis and Tante fought over good-naturedly as they ate their burnt cookies and sweet stollen and drank cups of strong coffee.