Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

The boy was there all right. At first he thought with a wave of terrified disappointment that the boy was dead. But then he felt along Markus’s body and with his fingertips touched the boy’s lips and was certain he felt a small burst of warmth. And further, at a right angle to the boy, he discovered a small space into which he could pass the earth he removed in small handfuls, for that was all he took away. One handful, another judicious handful, a scraping of dirt here, some brushed away and some plucked, as though he were an archaeologist uncovering an ancient and fragile treasure. Even so, twice, the earth seemed to shudder around them. He didn’t know that it was thunder from an approaching storm, a storm that would drench the watchers and cause ten of them to wrestle Fidelis to the ground when he dropped Delphine’s hand and tried to reenter the earth.

Cyprian concentrated only on each bit of dirt he pulled away, only that, until he was able to expose the boy sufficiently to unwedge him just by inches, to bend him slightly at the waist. As he’d worked incrementally, Cyprian had understood that he’d have to fold the boy out of the place where he was caught. So he continued, in complete blackness, to draw the earth methodically first from one limb, then the next, then to turn the boy, then to fold him at the waist. He wrapped Markus’s arms across his chest and then with the tenderest of little pulls, slowly, through the tiny aperture, he delivered Markus onto the passageway floor.

There was a flop of dirt as the boy came free; one of the boards gave way just where Markus had lain, and Cyprian put his hands around the boy’s face to shield it, but the tunnel did not give way entirely and the earth held around them once again.

It was good that the boy was unconscious, for Cyprian could feel that a bone was broken in one arm, and who knows what else, and he was afraid the boy might thrash around in pain if he came out of shock. So he roped the boy’s limbs, tied him up like a package, and he left a loop he could pull. He took that piece of rope in his teeth and edged backward, feet first, down the tunnel and out into the rain. And when the lights blazed over him, and the men roared at the sight of him, Markus came quietly and momentarily awake. Emerging from the narrow opening, blinking away the dark, the first face he saw was Delphine’s, in a circle of radiance, as she unlashed the ropes and drew him into her arms.

FRANZ AND MAZARINE had lain so long beneath the pine that on rising they felt half drunk, dizzy with a peaceful happiness. He could still feel the print of her face there, her breath cooling in the fabric of his clothes. Her hair was still smooth and alive underneath his hands when he finally arrived at home. Immediately, he saw that something was wrong. He knew that this was the night the men met to sing back of the shop, but the place was silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. The door to the shop was unlocked, the lights were on, and there was no one anywhere. Franz stood in the kitchen, saw the food set out on the table, the glasses of milk. He flexed his hands, sat at the kitchen chair, lifted a piece of cold meat off a plate as though there’d be a message written underneath. The first shock of finding no one at the shop and house wore off, and he knew for sure now that some disaster had occurred. But he didn’t know where to go, and he didn’t know what to do, and even the dog was gone. The storm moved in. The rain came bursting down.

Helpless, Franz prowled the inside of the place, then got drenched and cold outside, walked in again, lights blazing. And slowly, as he paced, as he thought of what he’d been doing while all the while something at home went wrong, he rubbed his hands on his shirt to erase the feeling of Mazarine’s hair. He felt a terrible fear for his father, for them all, mixed with a deep embarrassment that he had lost all sense of duty and of time and fallen half asleep with her against him. Whatever happened, he grew convinced, was his fault. He stood outside shifting nervously, made another desperate round of the place. And then, as he made out small wavering lights approaching over the fields, he began to run toward them, shouting.

M ARKUS FELL into an illness after he came out of the hill. It wasn’t just the broken arm, though that was an interestingly complicated break, said Heech, but some other nameless invader dragged him down, made him feverish and sleepy. Delphine called it earth sickness. In her mind, the ground had chilled him and its influence still drew him toward the sullen coldness where his mother slept. When he looked at Delphine sometimes, his stare was so calm and unflinching that she couldn’t meet his eyes. Then one day she understood that his stare was only the mysterious regard of a newborn baby, and she let him be. She stopped trying to distract him with poems or amuse him with games. It occurred to her that he needed to think. To grow back into his life. The pupils of his green-blue eyes remained dilated. Yet, if he was filled with an interior blackness, it wasn’t after all the deathly effect of his burial, but that he was emerging from a strange gestation.

One day she noticed that he’d begun to look more like Fidelis. It was the quality of penetrating silence, a place where he was comfortable. Though he seemed at once brand-new and older, she thought it best to treat him in some ways like a younger boy. She nursed him carefully along during the day, running back from the customers to make him eat the heavy dumpling soup that Eva had taught her to make for the boys when they were sick. She made him sit in the sun when there was sun. And when a dust of early snow fell over the bottom rails of the holding pens, and the back garden was a blue arrangement of frost, she made him stay near the window to get the reflection. She thought he needed light, constant light, bright light. She thought that he’d swallowed darkness in that hill.

MAZARINE WAS RIDING her bicycle when Betty Zumbrugge passed her, as she had many times before, driving her father’s fancy car. Only this time when Mazarine narrowed her eyes to gaze into the windows of the car as it passed, she saw Franz, and he saw her. He looked at her right across Betty’s back as she bent forward to steer. Their eyes met for that one second, and then he was gone. There was no message in his look that Mazarine could read. The neutral and almost foolish expression on his face shocked her — she’d never seen him look stupid before.

He turned back, upset, to gaze out the window. Seeing his distraction, Betty said, as if she didn’t know he had gone with Mazarine, “That’s Mazarine Shimek. She has one dress to her name.”

“That’s not true,” said Franz, his voice awkward and despairing.

He had not spoken to Mazarine since that last day beneath the pine, the time that made him obscurely responsible and her by extension, for the collapse of the hill. His thoughts veered off Mazarine and the wrongness of such happiness, which seemed to have been reckoned and judged by his brother’s near death. He looked over at Betty. Her face was tilted up to peer over the steering wheel, which gave her little pointed chin a charming shape. Her round cheeks were powdered and rouged, her red lips were drawn in a slick curve. Franz wondered what happened when you kissed a girl who was wearing lipstick. Would it get all over his own face? It was so shiny, like wet paint, dark as blood. The thought of his face smeared with red gave him a low thrill, and he shook his head suddenly to clear his thoughts.

“What’s with you,” said Betty.

“There’s a bee in the car,” said Franz, cranking open the window.

“Scared of getting stung?” Betty’s voice was amused and coy.