“I’ll be going then,” said Tante. “Got to feed Erich and Emil. Those two eat like little pigs.” She swirled off in her rusty black. As though her leaving were an insult and not a blessing, thought Delphine. Satisfied, she retreated into the house and watched the car jounce around the road’s bend.
“Come on out,” she said to the bedroom door.
Markus slipped out and ran to the window.
“Is she coming back?”
“I doubt it.”
For some reason, he’d put his best clothes on to come to her last night. This morning, they were all he had to wear. They were the same clothes he’d worn at the funeral, the store-bought shirt with the front pockets and the notched collar. Short itchy brown pants, which he hated, good wool socks with no holes in them and Franz’s formal hand-me-down, lace-up shoes, still too big but shined up nicely.
“We should put you in some overalls,” said Delphine, and she directed Cyprian to go buy a pair in town.
“Now,” she pointed to the kitchen, “let’s get you some breakfast.” And she made him what she’d made the others, a stack of pancakes studded with the last of the sweet wild blue saskatoons. Dabbed butter on the top. Drizzled on a little maple syrup that Cyprian had traded for with a Chippewa up north on his last run. She carefully put the tin jug back in the icebox. Then she poured herself a cup of hot coffee and sat down while Markus ate. She talked while his mouth was full, not expecting him to answer her. Last night, he’d simply appeared, eaten, his eyes drooping while he chewed. He’d gone limp and let them tuck him into bed. She hadn’t had the heart to ask him a single thing.
“You’re going to stay with us, here, until your dad gets back,” she said now. His eyes went round and he nodded quickly, relieved. Delphine kept talking.
“I don’t need to know how come you left, though you can tell me if you want. Or you can tell Cyprian. Don’t tell my dad, Roy, though. He blabs. What I do want to know is this: Why did you come to me?”
The boy stopped chewing, suddenly, swallowed and looked at her with his fork and his knife poised. The roan freckles stood out on his pale face. He bit his lip, uncertain, and his eyes… there was all the sadness in the world in his eyes, thought Delphine. All the sadness there could possibly be. And as they were Eva’s eyes, for a moment she swam into them and then he spoke, and his words were clear, though very low.
“You took care of her.”
He started eating again, his face darkening, going hot and red while Delphine blinked and stirred the coffee round in her cup. So what the boy said — that meant Delphine could take care of Markus, too? Or was it his way of saying that since Delphine loved the mother, she would love and defend the son? She watched him eat with some satisfaction. He shoveled the food into his mouth as though he’d seen no food for over a week, and soon Delphine got up and made him more pancakes.
SO MARKUS STAYED and helped Roy mow the yard and grub young trees and pull wild morning glories from a patch they wanted clean for a pasture. Roy was now ambitious to have a cow. Little by little, as Markus joined the checker games or made a quick study of Roy’s cribbage strategies, things came out. First, Markus would start to worry about the chinchillas. He’d wonder if Franz was changing their water or just adding to the old stuff in the dish, as Eva had directed them not to do. Then he’d fear the twins would torture the creatures by shoving sticks into the cages and chasing them here and there, which would damage their coats. After a while he’d shake his head and worry that Tante didn’t know the first thing about mixing their food. She couldn’t make food at all.
“What did you eat?” asked Delphine casually, hiding the speculative glee in her voice.
“She could make crackers,” said Markus.
“Oh, right from the barrel?”
He nodded solemnly, eyes sparking.
“Could she make cheese, too?”
“Right from the wax!” he crowed. “She mostly cleans.” He sobered down. “She cleans a lot, and then she yells, and then she cleans up some more. We got hungry so we ate a lot of green apples.”
“Did Emil and Erich get the shits?”
“Oh, did they!”
“So then she had to do more laundry.”
“I made her do more laundry, too.”
Delphine just nodded. She knew exactly what had been going on, ever since Markus had insisted on sleeping on the floor with just a blanket over him. And then, every morning, he got up before they did and she’d see the rag he’d used to clean up under himself drying on the line, already rinsed in the river, and his shorts put back on rinsed, too, still clammy and cleanly washed. There had been none of this before the death of Eva, so Delphine knew the cause, and she knew the cause for the beatings, and more than ever she had the fantasy of wringing Tante’s neck just like a chicken’s, or sending her flying with a kick. But what could she do except keep Markus here? And if the sheriff heard, there might be charges. But again, what could she do?
“By the way,” she said, “lay low if the sheriff drives up. Better yet, if you’re out in the field fade into the brush, then sneak down to the river. And meantime, if it will make you feel better,” she brushed his strawberry blond forelock of hair, the second time she’d ever touched him, “I’ll go check up on your live fur coat.”
She didn’t want him to forget they were supposed to kill the things. He was ahead of her, though. He brightened.
“There’s going to be about six babies, and the does need bone powder mixed in their food. I figure we have over three hundred dollars worth when we sell them this fall. Then we’ll keep the babies in the heated shed over winter, and make two thousand next year!”
“Who’s buying these things?” said Delphine.
“There’s a dealer. He’s a fur maker.”
“Well,” joked Delphine absently, “now I’ve heard of everything.”
But of course she hadn’t, and of course the creatures had no water when she got there, so she had to feed one or two with eye droppers to revive them. And then Tante wondered why she was not minding her own business.
“They were Eva’s rabbits,” said Tante, “not yours.”
“They’re not rabbits,” said Delphine. “They’re rodents, and where is Franz?”
“Where he always is these days,” said Tante. “With the airplanes.”
Ever since Tante started cooking for them, Franz had decided to eat with the aviators at the new airfield. Once he was done working in the shop, he now spent all of his time there, glued to his local heroes. He’d gone even more airplane crazy and he adored Lindbergh so much that he tried to dress like him. He followed every move “Slim” made and held forth on every last detail about the Spirit of St. Louis. The gas storage tanks’ placements in the nose, wing, rear. The wicker pilot’s chair. The touchy steering equipment that had helped keep Lindbergh wakeful. One of his scrapbooks was now devoted to Lindbergh alone, and it was filled with pasted clippings and pictures. Franz’s fanaticism was of a practical nature as well. He’d do anything to put an airplane together. He tinkered with the engines the way he’d worked on the stripped hulk of an old Model T out back by the stock pens.