The Master Butcher's Singing Club (54 page)

“It’s going to be over soon,” said Mazarine. “I can feel it. Just read between the lines.”

As Delphine sat with her now, poring over the latest letter, the younger
woman rested her hand on the swell of her baby. The capacity of her thin body to expand so shockingly was alternately thrilling and tedious. Women told her horror stories of their pregnancies and she was grateful that she suffered only the normal discomforts—a boring nausea, stinging nipples, sleeplessness, backache. Harder for her than the physical changes were the unexpected sweeps of emotion. When she was caught up in those great nets of feeling, tears poured from her eyes. Ashamed of her uncontrollable weeping, she rushed to be alone and found relief in walking to the edge of town, where she stood in the presence of a raw sweep of sky. She checked on its changing incarnations. Great thunderclouds had piled darkly over the horizon that very morning, but although she could see the sheets of rain sweeping in a smokelike blur to the west, not a drop had yet fallen upon the town.

Mazarine touched the page in her pocket. Franz existed around the corner of each thought or occurrence. She tried to discipline herself to give in to her extremes of feeling only twice a day. At morning and in the evening, she gave herself leave to exist in the sharp reality of memory. Then, she would put away her wild imaginings about his safety. She would make imaginary love with him or reexchange their first words of truth or reargue the foolish arguments or resay their anguished, sexual, good-bye. At all other times, when he entered her mind, she tried to concentrate on anything else—on the housework or her mother or the classroom before her, or now, on sitting here in the sunlight with Delphine. Slowly, as Delphine read, Mazarine smoothed both hands over the flowers of her wide blouse. The baby rippled and rolled underneath her fingers and knocked its fist against her heart.

At last, Delphine folded the letter back into its envelope, and then rose and went to the refrigerated case, withdrew a half quart of milk and came back to sit with Mazarine. She put the bottle of milk on the table between them and pointed at it. Mazarine removed the cap and grinned at Delphine before she raised the bottle in a mocking toast.

“Where’s yours?” she asked, meaning of course the milk, but then she saw a thread of shadow pass behind the honey gold of Delphine’s eyes, and with a shock understood that Delphine was hurt, recovered,
went on, all in an instant. Mazarine might easily have missed this, were she not acutely tuned to that moment and to Delphine’s emotions. She saw a tiny flash of darkness, an intimate admission.

“I always hated milk,” said Mazarine.

Delphine just nodded, watching her drink it, stirred by satisfaction at providing nourishment, and desolation that she herself had never needed to take such pains.

FRANZ WAS ASSIGNED
to the 439th Troop Carrier Group. The fighters wore insignia patches embroidered with eagles, wolves, lions, lightning bolts and broken chains. Franz’s carrier group rallied behind the sign of an angry beaver. He wrote:

You have to wonder who the hell makes up the insignia—maybe someone like Markus. I like my beaver, though, he’s mean looking and has transport wings growing out of his shoulder blades. We fly under the sign of the Beaver Volant Proper, Incensed (holding a missile in his right paw). Mazarine, I go over that long ago time in my mind you know which time. I do not understand myself. She meant nothing to me, but you knew that. It was my weakness you could not endure. I suppose you could say of this man that he’s toughened up some but the beauty of it is that he looks upon the world from far above and it is a calm world, not a tortured one. He acknowledges a surrender in his heart. It is like the innocent love of a small boy. He was a youth when first he knew you. Flying is forever mixed with those mysterious hours.

Now we’ll have a boy or girl to tell that we loved each other ever since school days.

The war here is over and we are doing cleanup so don’t worry, the major peril we face is sunburn.

DELPHINE HEARD IT
first from a customer who got it from the radio that morning. By that night they had the evening edition out of Fargo
with the headline ATOM BOMB HITS NIPS. They spread the paper out on the kitchen table and pored over all the front-page stories. Terror Missile Has 2,000 Times More Blast Than Blockbuster. Sun Power Holds Key to Explosive. Churchill Says Germans Had Some Secrets. Kitchen Dream a Reality—Combined Clothes, Dishwasher, Potato Peeler Due in 1946. Quadruple Amputee PFC James Wilson Uses Artificial Limbs. Husband Shoots Wife, Kills Self While They Are Dancing. Delphine read: “’Truman revealed this great scientific achievement today and warned the Japanese that they now face “a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”’”

Fidelis leaned forward in his chair. “Read everything,” he said. “Everything on the page.” So Delphine continued: “’Mr. Truman said that despite the vast multiplied potency of the bomb, “the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is harnessing the basic power of the universe.”’

“And over here,” said Delphine, “right beside that story, listen to this. ‘Realization of a housewife’s dream—a combination clothes washer, potato peeler and dishwasher, with the addition of a butter churn and ice cream freezer—was near today.’”

“Just near?” said Mazarine. Dazed, she was dancing her baby back and forth in the bouncing sway new mothers automatically acquire. “You mean we’ve harnessed the power of the universe and not perfected the potato peeler?”

“Apparently,” Delphine said. “And listen to this. ‘Friends told police the tragedy occurred in the dimly lit basement of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wojcik, who were giving a homecoming party for their son, Edwin, an army sergeant back from England. Other guests said three couples were dancing when two shots echoed through the apartment. “Are you shot, honey,” Rzeazutko was heard to ask. “Yes,” his wife replied. “Then, I might as well finish the job,” he said, and fired a third bullet into his head.’”

“Oh Christ, read back to that stuff about the bomb,” said Fidelis.

“One bomb equals 1,228 pounds of TNT for every man, woman, and child living in Fargo,” Delphine reported.

“Stop reading,” said Mazarine.

“The war’s over,” said Fidelis, very softly and with a surge of emotion in his voice that was startling to the others.

Delphine put down the paper and the three sat absorbed in their own thoughts and listening intensely. The refrigerator hummed on, and a fly threw itself against the outside door screen. The water ticked, dripping into the sink strainer. Sparrows argued in the grape arbor, twittering, busy. These ordinary sounds provoked great feeling in Delphine. It was as though they held a meaning, representing a cipher of daily pursuits. A script emblematic of a greater whole. If she could only read the pattern, if she could discover more, if she could force her mind to thread the connections. But her thoughts swung disturbingly between horror and relief. She thought she should weep. She wanted to shout. She left the others, walked outside, and worked for a long while in the hot and ordered chaos of the garden, pulling and piling great handfuls of rag- and pigweed until her brain was filled with the fresh acid fragrance of broken stems and crushed leaves. Screwing her fingers deep to tug the taproot of a vigorous dandelion,
she touched the knob end of what she knew was a bone. They were all down there, still, the ones the dog hid, the bones that Eva buried, the mice, snails, birds that died there on their own, the tiny deaths and the huge deaths, all the swirl and complexity of life, one feeding on the other. Forever and ever amen, she thought, dragging out the root with the bone. Both were thick, stained, vigorous, brown. She tossed them into her weed pile and continued until her hands hurt and her thoughts were no more than a weary hum.
They will be safe now. Coming home.

AS A BOY
, Franz always pictured himself dying heroically, if he had to die at all, in a Spitfire, after a thrilling battle to the death, shot down by a German Focke-Wulf 190, his favorite enemy craft—dark blue as a lightning storm and pale as sunrise, with virgin yellow cowling, deadly and sunny and fair. He would, of course, shoot the Focke-Wulf down, too, as he chose to face vengeful immolation in a final burst of fire. They’d salute each other as they spiraled straight down, together. In some corner of his mind he’d held on to some childish vision of triumph
through the boredom, terror, the tedium of daily survival in the real war. He would have been surprised that it came down to a stupid mistake of timing. A hungover mechanic. A snapped cable.

Franz was walking into a supply locker, a kind of big metal closet, when the plane took off behind him. One of the ground crew had forgotten to unhook a heavy steel cable and it played out behind the plane as it lifted. The other men ducked and scattered. If Franz had walked just a little faster, or even slower, he would have been out of reach when the cable flicked out like a bullwhip. With its last touch before it was dragged into the air, it caught Franz neatly across the side of the head. It tapped like a finger, neatly brushing his temple. His hand kept opening the door, but the rest of him couldn’t step through it. He had no thought. No moment of surprise. He hadn’t the faintest notion. He was still looking at the scarred steel frame of the door.

MAZARINE HAD ALWAYS
hated the smell of hospitals. They were no different in New York state. When she walked into the lobby, there was the staleness of cigarette smoke, and then the grim, overpowering scent of rubbing alcohol. The nurse came, and she stood up too quickly, juggling her baby’s diaper bag as he shifted in her embrace. Her purse spilled, but there was only a tube of lipstick, the train ticket, a neat little wallet, and a booklet of ration coupons stuck in the teeth of a comb. Mazarine wished there were more to pick up. She was trying to hold herself together, but parts of her took turns shaking, her hands, her knees, her heart. Delphine had accompanied her across the country on the train to help her with the baby but when they stood before the double doors of Franz’s ward, she had stepped to one side and remained in the hall.

“You should see him first,” Delphine said, taking the baby from Mazarine’s arms. Her chest hurt with the tension. She could hardly breathe. “I’ll come in later.”

She prodded Mazarine forward, and the younger woman entered the doors behind the wide, swishing businesslike white rear of the nurse. She walked toward Franz. Halfway down the row of men, some surrounded
by curtains, some incurious, others whose glances clung to her, Mazarine realized that she was holding her breath. She gasped dizzily and took in too much air. The odor was worse here because it included everything that the disinfectants and germ-killing alcohol was meant to eradicate: the gamey-sweet smell of slowly healing flesh, the sharp scent of old piss, the sweat of desperation, the vinegar bleakness of resignation. And yet, she knew—for this was the reason she was here—these were the rescued. These were the men who would probably live. And then the nurse examined a chart and stopped before a bed. She drew open a curtain on a hoop around the bed to allow Mazarine to enter the makeshift room.

As she passed between the folds of the curtain around Franz’s bed, Mazarine knew that she was leaving the before—where Franz existed in her memory and imagination—and entering the after. Until she looked directly at him, until her eyes took in the damage, he would still be perfect, a boy, a young man, and they would not have entered the world of grown-up love, with all of its terrible compromises. I can’t do this, she thought. But she knew what she could or could not do didn’t matter. The man who inhabited the bed was lost in a drugged sleep. Her eyes began at the bottom of the tucked-in sheet and traveled slowly up the blanketed form, noting every detail, until she could no longer avoid his face.

The man in the bed was still Franz while he was asleep, and so she sat with him tasting the illusion until it became unbearable. Still, she could not wake him. Franz breathed so slowly and slightly that she could not see his chest move. The hurt side of his head was swathed, and dark bruises flowed down his neck. There was no telling what would happen, how much would return, the doctor had said. Mazarine held Franz’s wrist, tightening and loosening her grip as if she could pump her own strength into him. She sat there, and she sat there. Around them the blank curtains were a closed screen upon which, more wrenching and more complex than death, their future spilled.

T
HE MONUMENT
to the victims of the bombing of Ludwigsruhe was to be unveiled that afternoon, and all of the master butchers were gathering from the outlying villages and even more distant towns to sing. It was 1954, and all flesh of the war dead was earth. During the month of their visit to his hometown, Fidelis had been practicing with the ones who were left, those few men who had survived. While he was practicing, Delphine went walking through the town cemeteries, famous for their beauty, or she strolled along the charmless streets of blocky Marshall Plan stores and apartment houses, in and out of jewelry shops where imitation gold lockets could be had so cheaply, but were so finely made, and at last to the garden where her husband had played as a child and where the statue now stood wrapped in canvas and roped carefully so that the town officials could drop the veil in one tug.