Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Delphine ached with the one sleeping position she had to hold so that she would not bump against Tante. Carefully, she shifted. Tried to rearrange her limbs slightly. Tante’s hand flopped over and Delphine carefully folded it back onto Tante’s stomach.

“Nein,” said Tante, “gib’ mir deinen Finger.”

She was talking in her sleep and her voice came out of the muffler, but what Tante said was what the witch in the fairy tale said to Hansel, which seemed an alarming omen to Delphine. She made herself breathe deeply, let her limbs go soft, shut down her mind, and waited for sleep.

THE BOY HIMSELF took care of the whole problem of telling Tante, by becoming extraordinarily ill in the night. It was to Markus himself a great and secret triumph, one he’d not even willed, not that he knew, although in the years that followed he wondered if his hidden self had predicted what would have happened to him if he had boarded that train to New York, then the ship to Germany. On waking that morning they were to leave, his cheeks were brilliant, his eyes glazed. He tossed in a fever so high that Fidelis tapped on the door before sunrise, and asked Delphine to stay in the room with the boy while he went out looking for a pharmacy. She entered, sat down next to Markus on the tiny cot. The twins were sleepily dressing, pulling on socks between yawns, and she could feel their gathering excitement. But Markus was dry with the heat of his fever, and his lips were a vivid bruised plum. His temples were white and his breath was short. She felt for the pulse in his wrist — it raced unsteadily. His face contorted.

Delphine swiped the wash basin smoothly from the boys and held his head over it. After he felt better, she took the wash basin down the hall. She cleaned it out scrupulously, and put a little cold water in the bottom, wet her handkerchief in the water when she brought it back and began to wipe his forehead, his thin high delicately freckled cheekbones, his throat, his ears, his slender wrists, his forearms. And all the while she looked carefully and pityingly down at him, she inwardly marveled and also feared that his illness would pass as suddenly as it had begun. But it did not.

When the aspirin only made Markus rave, Delphine said firmly that he could not leave, and no one challenged her. There was no use for it but Tante thought it terrible to waste a ticket and determined to find a way to sell it. She barely concealed her own relief that Markus wouldn’t be joining them. She held her hand before her face and said good-bye to him from the doorway. Delphine leaned into the embrace of the twins, held their scratchy coats for a moment, breathed their dusty boy hair. She held their rough hands as they kissed her, smoothed their foreheads. They tugged away from her, their eyes bright with excitement at their adventure. Then they were gone, the two of them, out of her life.

EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON, Fidelis drove the car to the hotel entrance and then carried Markus, limp and burning, down to the lobby. Delphine followed with the luggage, such as it was, and they packed the bags into the trunk. Put the boy into the backseat, and laid the car blankets over him. He threw them off restlessly, and anxiously asked, as he had over and over, where they were going.

“We’re going back to Argus. Going home,” said Delphine, as she tucked the light wool robes around Markus again. He looked up into her face with such a luminous joy that she was startled, then worried about delirium, that perhaps his fever had taken a dangerous turn. While Fidelis paid a tip to the manager for letting them stay longer in the room, she checked Markus carefully and thought that the worst might have passed. Maybe he just felt the way she did, light with hunger and the surprise of reprieve.

Fidelis drove and Delphine directed him out of the city. Soon they were on the highway north. They said nothing for several hours, except to murmur about the way the fields reminded them of the Dakotas, then farther on how it looked more like Minnesota. How big the barns were, how well-kept. Like they were through with the Depression down this way. Some threatening clouds came up over the horizon and they mentioned those, speculated about a possible storm. When it didn’t come to pass they switched their attention to Markus, stopped several times to check his fever and to make certain that he drank a little ginger beer from a bottle Fidelis bought. He slept as though drugged. All that day, while the sun was out, they managed to stay on safe and neutral topics of conversation. Or they fell silent, took turns driving, slept in the passenger’s seat. Once the afternoon light waned and the shadows grew long and then smudged into the general darkness, their efforts failed. Silence collected, became uncomfortable. Their quiet became waiting, then suspense.

During the day, an interior restlessness had plagued Delphine, an itch to say what must be said. It wasn’t like her not to blurt out the truth as she saw it, and she had realized that the avoidance and the careful maneuvering was wearing on her. She didn’t like the thin invisible path she had to tread around Fidelis. She drew a deep, stubborn breath and then held it so long she almost burst. When she let it out, her heart beat slower and she was calm. She had decided to provide an explanation whether or not Fidelis wanted one.

“Listen here,” she burst out. “Cyprian is like a brother to me. We’re not married and we don’t do anything together. He doesn’t want to.”

“Want to?” Fidelis swerved a bit. His brain had fixed on a war wound that robbed Cyprian of manhood. It was hard to turn his thinking from that. He didn’t want to? Cyprian didn’t want to? She could think what she liked, but he was sure that Cyprian did want to. What else could Cyprian say, and keep his dignity? Fidelis shook his head, but to enter into an argument or obtain more details was beyond both his English and his emotional reach. He stared straight forward. There was no other car on the road. They were going fifty. He tried to think of some way to advance the conversation, but nothing occurred.

Delphine crossed her legs, then folded her arms, sank her head down so that she lounged in her seat like a sulky boy. She was embarrassed at having volunteered so much, and maintained a stubborn silence. After a time, Fidelis spoke.

“What does it matter?” he said, low. “Cyprian saved Markus. He risked his life, dragged him out of the earth.”

Delphine considered that for a while, and tried to see the structure of Fidelis’s thoughts. For if he’d held himself back because of Cyprian, it must mean that he had feelings for her by the very definition of his resolve. And yet, too, the possibility of Cyprian could be the excuse Fidelis had for not acting toward her as in fact he did not want to. He may have sensed that she was possibly open — even she did not know if she truly was — and neatly banished the issue by conceiving of this species of honor that would divide them from each other and keep them excused from facing what shivered between them.

“I doubt he’s coming back,” she said. “If he does, it won’t be to live with me.”

He took that in for several miles, the headlamps cutting through falling darkness now. Her answer left him without assurance, left the whole weight of the situation upon him. Did that mean she was open to him, or that she was simply through with Cyprian? Would loving her, if Cyprian chose not to, betray the man who had saved his son? His thoughts turned this way and that. When he’d come to Eva just after the war, things had been so clear. Carnage and sorrow had made all questions of the heart too simple, maybe, but the way was strictly laid out. No ambiguities, no doubts. He had delivered his death message, she had fallen into his arms. He had visited her to help her get over her shock, comforted her, and in that storm of open emotion, it had been easy to move forward, straight into each other. Here, however, the situation was a maze. It seemed to Fidelis that there were too many people involved, but then it struck him, suddenly, that it was only repetition. Here was Delphine — the best friend of Eva as he’d been the best friend of Johannes, both dead — and now the whole entire set of events was repeating itself because Delphine could rescue him, his boys, the same way he had rescued Eva and Franz.