For once, too, he didn’t farm out his wasted muscles to other people, but concentrated on his own house. Cyprian was astonished to return from a run up north to find not a Roy tooted happily down by the river, but an old, faded, quiet Roy calmly brushing the sides of the house with sunny yellow paint. The house was cheerful, the blue of the doors and windows restored. He even sanded down and varnished the floors. Filled the cellar in more thoroughly, and blacked the stove. Delphine had her hands full with the Waldvogel boys just after Eva’s death, and it came as a shock to her that Roy was capable of taking care of her in any way. In the mornings sometimes, he handily made breakfast. She would emerge from the room she shared with Cyprian, and there it would be, close to a miracle as home life had ever come. A bowl of oatmeal steaming hot, butter melting in a pool with a lump or two of dark brown sugar. Cream. Sometimes eggs or toast he made by holding the bread on a fork and passing it evenly before the gas — for with her money Delphine had bought a stove on timed payments. Cyprian got a delivery set up for a small icebox. Breakfast seemed a surprise compensation for all they had been through. The food laid out on a shined-up table, jelly quivering in her mother’s tiny cut-glass bowl Delphine thought for sure had long since been pawned or broken. Breakfast had helped her get through the storm of Eva’s dying and now through its aftermath. She expected Roy to relapse once she finally quit the shop, but instead his good behavior continued. He turned on the charm that he’d brought to Eva’s sickroom. He sang songs he learned in the hobo jungle by the river. “Blue Tail Fly.” “Joe Hill.” “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Soon there were actually chickens in the coop out back, big orange Rhode Islanders, and the back porch steps were nailed onto the back porch, not scattered all over the yard.
“The dead have more power than we know,” said Delphine to Cyprian, sitting on those very back steps one evening in the last of summer.
Cyprian shook his head. Did her statement refer to Eva or to the change affected in Roy by his waking dreams? Whatever it was, Cyprian was glad of the change as well and had even considered quitting his own shady line of work in order to pursue something on the up and up. Roy was setting weasel traps around the outside fence of the chicken run. The previous day, he’d tacked a light wire drapery on the top of the fence to foil the Cooper’s hawks. Roy was not the only one who’d improved the place, either. In the past two weeks, Delphine had turned the inside of the house into a golden haven. She set an eggshell pale yellow on all of the walls, and stuck the old furniture back together with horse-hoof glue, twine, and C-clamps. She’d restuffed a couple of chairs and accepted a fancy, tasseled lamp from Step-and-a-Half, who gave it to her in a seeming fit of bewilderment after Eva’s death. In their room she’d oiled the lacquer dresser and they bought a brand-new mattress, not that they took advantage of its spring. She told herself that life had been too sad for anything but comfort, but that was not true. There would have been plenty of comfort if Cyprian had thrown himself to her in thick desire. But they usually fell asleep touching hands. That was good enough. He held her like a sister and often, long into the night, they talked.
Now, as Roy turned from setting his traps and walked toward them, Delphine had the idea that she would make a Hungarian-style goulash that Eva had taught her, a thick stew of braised meat in paprika sauce, ladled over spaetzle. Sour cream topping it. As she turned to walk into the kitchen, a sense of the fugitive sweetness of the scene assailed her. It was like a gift from Eva when she died — all good things to follow. Her dad acting like one, Cyprian so attentive, playing checkers or cards with the old man and helping him stay off the sauce. As terribly as she missed Eva, there was also the relief of having done with the grand horror and the mess of death, the organized tedium, the vigilance and dragging heartbreak. She didn’t have to put up with men drinking underneath the clothesline or with the sharp wing of Tante’s scorn. She could smell the maples, the pine, the ooze of the river instead of the raw primitive cavernous smell of cows when they are split. And now, it was good to turn toward her cooking in the cool day’s remaining light, and to have in her new icebox both meat and butter. In her apple bin, apples. In the onion box, onions. So why, when she felt this goodness, did a wave of fear and sorrow pass through her? Why the sudden memory of looking down into the cellar, and the dead moving their mouths, their words rising toward her in flashes of green fire?
It was because she must have known even then that more was coming. She must have known that there would never be an end of it. No peace. For even now, as she made her way dreamily toward the cooking, the boy, bruised and aching, slipped out his back door. He had decided to run to her. She stirred more flour and an extra egg into the spaetzle, cut two more onions into the goulash. Used all the meat. For some reason she made extra. It was as though she knew that by the time he figured out the back roads and cut through the corn, the sand pickers, the ditches and the pastures, he would be tired. He would be ready to drop. He would be hungry, that Markus.
* * *
LOOKING CLOSELY at Tante’s face as she complained about Markus the next morning, Delphine picked out each one of Fidelis’s features. On his face they were precisely placed with a level and a ruler. On her face the angels had been less attentive to their work. Every feature was off — the frozen blue eyes too far apart on the skull, the nose thicker and too short, the upper lip much thinner than the lower, and the whole mouth so small that Delphine wondered how so many words came out of it, or how she ate more than one pea at a time. Delphine had to examine the talking face to remove herself from the words it said. If I listen to the meaning, I’ll paste Tante right in the chops, she thought. So she calmly watched the odd concoction of flesh and bone, then she shrugged and said, “I haven’t seen him.”
“Lie!” said Tante, but she didn’t leave the little front porch. Delphine, in the doorway, folded her arms. Tante understood with disappointment that she wouldn’t be asked in for a piece of that astounding cinnamon cake she smelled, and she swallowed hard as Delphine dusted flour off her blouse. Or maybe it was powdered sugar. Tante clamped her teeth together and bit back her hunger.
Delphine had been successful in not listening to all of the specific details of the diatribe, but she did know that it was a self-serving lecture that might explain his bruises. A calculated effort to undermine his innocence, for Tante repeatedly made reference to the contrast between his frail looks and devilish wiry ways. She’d had to switch him, then beat him, and then for some reason he ran off. Delphine said again, yawning, “Haven’t seen him.”
“If Fidelis was here…” Tante muttered. But Fidelis had the truck, packed with sausage, out on a wide sweep of deliveries to various grocery stores.
“The kid’s no dummy,” said Delphine. “He’ll find a place to hole up for a while. At least until his dad gets back. Don’t worry about him.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about him,” said Tante. “But what does his dad do when he comes home and finds the boy is gone?”
“What,” said Delphine, “are you scared Fidelis’ll take down the bull’s pizzle and give you a good whacking?”
Tante reared back, not certain whether she should be severely offended or laugh at Delphine’s joke. She did try to laugh, but as always the chuckle came out thin from her tiny mouth. The bull’s pizzle was a homemade switch, a dried bull’s penis that hung on the backside of the door to the shop. Used with disciplinary intent, it was painful but it left no marks. Eva had once told Delphine that Fidelis almost never used it on the boys — twice on Franz for dipping into the till, and he had used it on the little boys for setting the outhouse on fire, never on Markus. The existence of the pizzle, its customary threat, was enough.