“Tomorrow,” she told him, “I am going to try getting a job as a telephone operator. Do you think I have a good voice?”
“Everything is good about you,” said Cyprian, sighing over his full stomach and the good feeling of lounging around a fire in the gathering dusk. He really meant what he said. He was glad to be back. Outside the crackle of the flames, the mourning doves uttered their delicate, cool, evening chant. A catbird went through its repertory, song after complicated song, and brush-stroke clouds scattered across the green sky. After a short time, Roy, who had the stamina and routine of a mere mortal now that he was sober, dragged himself off to his little sleeping shack. Markus sagged and then toppled over, dead asleep, and Cyprian carried him into the house. When he returned, Delphine asked a question.
“The way you like men,” she said, “do you like boys too?”
Cyprian gaped at her in the firelight, and made a grotesque face. “No!”
“Don’t act so shocked,” said Delphine, “I had to ask. You sprang that other on me. How was I to know? Anyway, I have this idea I need your help with. Markus. You have to teach him to piss.”
Cyprian had just driven twelve hours straight, and he thought that maybe he was hearing things.
“I mean it,” said Delphine, “he doesn’t know how.”
“He sure does know!” said Cyprian.
“Not good enough.” Delphine was adamant. “You have to teach him self-control, then the fancy stuff to do with his pecker, like write his name in the sand. You have to teach him to turn the faucet off without touching the spigot. That kind of thing. Otherwise I can’t send him back to the aunt.”
Now Cyprian got the picture. He knew about the floor and the boy’s routine on rising every morning. He nodded slowly as Delphine’s intent came clear and then he looked at her with some respect. How many women would think of this? Not a one in all creation, which was why he loved her. It might work. So he agreed to it, and then, the very next morning Delphine made two pitchers of lemonade. One for each. She sent them out behind the henhouse with the lemonade, and every morning after that she did the same. They practiced, and by the end of the week, Markus was dry in the morning. But that was only the beginning of what she felt she had to teach him about survival.
DELPHINE DIDN’T HAVE the chance to go on to the next phase of her teaching plan — how to deal with a raging Tante Maria Theresa. Her idea was to teach Markus to throw a convincing and horrifying epileptic fit. He could learn to roll his eyes back to the whites and bubble spit between his lips. That would fix Tante. Before she could start his lessons, the meat-market truck pulled into the yard, and once again Fidelis stepped out in his rumpled shirt. This time, his pants were oddly shrunken and he wore no socks. There was a tired gloom about him; the skin underneath his eyes was soft and bruised looking, and he was very quiet. Some of his power was sucked away. That was exactly it. He looked as though he’d been deflated, and then Delphine realized that he’d grown almost thin. His raw bones came to the surface, knobs of wrists and knuckles, and his cheeks had slightly hollowed. This time he stood outside the door and refused to come inside even for a glass of water. It was plain that he needed to say something.
“Please.”
He wasn’t one to say this word, to anyone, not a woman or a man, and he especially wasn’t one to say it with the aching quality she heard in his voice. Delphine wondered right then if she’d ever hear the word again, from Fidelis, and she let it sit between them like a small monument.
“I told my sister to leave the place.”
Delphine cupped her hand to the curve of her neck and gazed at him, and then took her hand away and stuck it on her hip. She looked out over the field, past the chicken coop. This was something very big. Fidelis had chosen her over his own sister. She took a deep breath and acknowledged that she now had an even more implacable enemy in Tante. Where she had been simply hostile, rigid in her convictions, mouthy, now Tante would need revenge. Getting rid of his own sister was a sacrifice Fidelis had made to get Delphine back into his life. And for it, Tante would surely turn his family against him. Plus now he might act as though she owed him, Delphine thought suspiciously. But his look was only weary.
“She’s not coming back,” Delphine said, making certain.
Fidelis slightly inclined his head, his eyes dull blue, a little bloodshot.
“Look here, Fidelis,” she said, hesitant, for indeed she didn’t know that she wanted to return, “I won’t do much better than your sister.”
Fidelis looked as though he very much doubted that was true. Delphine turned away from him, considered. Her world right now was orderly and peaceful, the first time in her life it had ever been so. As a telephone operator she would be able to make connections, tell time, give numbers, and come home at the same time every night. More peace and routine. Probably more money, too. But then she thought of the boys, how Eva had taught her to handle things, and how she could make the household run smoothly while managing the store. Eva had showed her the tricks, the shortcuts, the patience with details, all of the skills she had gathered through painstaking trials and mistakes. Eva had given her a whole life’s worth of knowledge, had trained her, and she’d accepted, because she loved her — very simply, she had loved Eva. She remembered very well all of the times Eva had instructed her about Fidelis and the boys. Near the end, she had been wildly determined that Delphine would take her place. It had helped her to concentrate on lists and habits and little eccentricities of diet for Delphine to note. What had Eva told Fidelis? What had he promised? What did he think? Delphine opened her mouth to ask, but the words stuck.
So she just said, “All right, but here’s how it goes. I’ll be there eight each morning. I’ll work the busy hours and make lunch, then dinner. I’ll stay through six each night.” She made the terms. She set the rules in a firm, indifferent voice. Waited for his nod of agreement and when she got it, like a man would, she stuck out her hand to shake.
EIGHT. The Burning of the Mutts
A FAMILY IN GRIEF has accidents and stumbles a lot. There are scabbed toes and the terror of eyes nearly put out. Falls off the roof, falls from bicycles, falls slipping in the sawdust of the meat-market floor. And too, the sorrow makes a path for every illness. Mysterious high fevers. Any local pox. Even the sturdy can catch diphtheria, pertussis, not to mention gross stomach flu and run-of-the-mill runs, plagues of snot or crusted eyes and infected ears, lice. Once it grew cold, it seemed that every possible small malady came the way of the boys and Delphine was hard-pressed to keep the hours she’d insisted on with Fidelis. Sometimes she just had to nurse them through a night. Sometimes she had to sleep at the foot of their beds. She became an expert at rendering a chicken into hot soup. She made a routine of daily checks behind their ears for eggs and nits. And even when they all were healthy and breathing hard in boys’ dead sleep, she stood in the doorway and worried. They had done this to her. Activated some primitive switch in her brain. She couldn’t turn it off. Sometimes before she left, with superstitious intensity, she counted their breaths and made sure they were breathing regularly. She counted exactly ten breaths each, then forced herself to turn and leave at that exact number, not one more or less.
Worry made more worry, made her restless. Sometimes at night she woke, beside Cyprian, and found that against her will her brain restored old scenes of shame or betrayal by girlfriends, boyfriends, long in the past. Or calamities her father’s drinking brought on the house. She relived them. Often, she woke Cyprian and made him talk to her, but she never told him that she’d waited with curiosity and daring all the next month after they’d made love, hoping and not hoping, imagining a child. And he never told her that he’d done the same, for with Markus around he couldn’t help thinking of it, and he’d always thought that he’d have children. He pictured himself with a son, a daughter, teaching them to add numbers, teaching them to balance, telling them where he was from, and all he knew. So when he talked to Delphine in the night, he thought he might ask whether she was pregnant, but did not, because it would raise the issue of sex, and he didn’t want the emotional complexity of that. He had to prepare himself, it required an effort. It was so much simpler to be neutral, and loving, and to stroke her face and hold her hand, to put her back to sleep with stories about his brothers and the stubborn old horse they shared. It was easier to be her brother, but he wanted children all the same, and he wanted to stay with Delphine. As the months passed, he knew she was not pregnant with his child, and so one night, in the moonless dark, staring up into a blackness that seemed a shaft into outer space, he asked her to marry him, for real, with a solid gold wedding band.