The darkness was so dense that night it swirled green around them, and for a long time she didn’t answer. But she wasn’t thinking it over, she was thinking how to tell him no. There was only one way.
“No.”
The long vowel floated over them.
* * *
THERE WERE GOOD THINGS. Delphine ran the shop with an almost joyous dispatch. She hadn’t known she’d like the work so much now that she was partly in charge. She didn’t mind the hard grind of cleaning, and she had the boys to sweep up and spread new sawdust, to scrub down the display cases and the floors, and Franz to wait trade when things were busy, after school. She began to take an almost embarrassing delight in selling things — a loop of the best liverwurst on this side of the Atlantic, or a piece of the Colby you couldn’t get just anywhere, or dried herring from a case recently cracked open, exuding brine and smoke. Eva had given Delphine the magical belief that everything that Fidelis made was unbested and every morsel the shop sold was of a superior quality only their own customers deserved.
This conviction was good for business, and Delphine had, as well, a shrewd eye for what would sell and when to knock down a price. She instituted a weekly drawing for one dollar worth of groceries, and that drew in customers. Except for the banker and the few other rich, who lived in green-lawned flamboyantly painted mansions on a bluff over which their unpredictable river had never yet risen, everyone was broke half the time. Many were worse off — so ravaged and destitute that they couldn’t afford any meat at all. Delphine was good at extracting money from the wealthy, and also good at trading carefully with the poor. She stocked barrels of dried beans, peas, made shrewd deals with farms and traded like a horse dealer for the items she was certain that she could sell. She began to deal with an ambitious wholesaler working out of the Cities, and stocked all sorts of new items that made people curious enough to stop in for a peek. Soaps she tried herself and could recommend, powdered health remedies, boxes of steel-cut oats, cider vinegar, walnut oil, pots of mustard. She had a dairy case set into the wall — before, they’d drawn milk from a can back in the cooler. Now she stocked cream, daily milk, butters of three grades, and fresh eggs from Roy’s chickens.
Roy was still not drinking. Perversely, this had begun to concern Delphine. Still, how could she quibble with the quiet work he did all around the house? He kept busy, even drove up north with Cyprian from time to time, and didn’t snitch from the stash they smuggled across the border and then sold. Sometimes Roy lied to her with a clear and listening expression — told the same sort of stories he’d once told Eva. How once he’d had a part in an Italian opera, or killed a bear, that he had learned to weave from a Navajo and could recite long prayers in Hebrew. Delphine thought she didn’t know him. Who was he, sober, anyway? Her father was a stranger, a man of whom she had no knowledge and did not know exactly how to approach. It used to be so easy. Their relationship consisted of times he’d crawl to her and beg for money, and she’d refuse. At least he still socialized with the other men in the singing club. Roy came to the shop after hours to sit around the table with the men and slice rounds of Fidelis’s sausage onto square crackers. Cyprian came too. They drove Delphine home after she finished in the kitchen. It was a routine, she later thought, she didn’t treasure enough. An even life, without any jumps or starts. No stalls either. It was the kind of life you didn’t know at the time you were living it was a happy life.
Every day now, Markus checked the chinchillas, for the fur buyer was due any time, and he wanted their coats in top condition. Delphine didn’t understand how Markus could name the creatures, how he could be so careful with them, not to startle them, how he even seemed to love them, and yet didn’t express the slightest compunction about their imminent deaths. Delphine guessed she was learning about the nature of a butcher’s kid — to see the animals come and go. The only creature exempted from this fatalism was Schatzie, who had lain at the foot of Eva’s bed and now slept on guard in the doorway to the boys’ room every night. The white German shepherd was serene and intelligent, but bristled with protective inquiry at a sudden noise. Delphine had seen the dog go rigid, growling with authority, at the intrusion of a strange deliveryman. Sometimes the dog looked at her with eyes of clear amber so alert and watchful that she experienced a shiver of recognition. There was no question, this dog was not to be considered on the same level as the other animals whose fates were concluded swiftly once they left the stock pen, or the ones raised for fur.
Markus gloated over figures that his chinchillas would bring, and figured and refigured profits with his younger brothers, pencils in their small, thick fingers, biting their lips. Franz had declared from the first that he was too old for such schemes, so among the three younger, they were to realize all of the money, and they concentrated on the splitting of it in myriad ways, making this and that argument over whether to pool their money for some grand object, or divide it, or if there would be enough to get a new bicycle for each of them. Meanwhile, the valuable gray little animals skittered here and there, unknowing, in their baskets of frail hardware cloth, in and out of their clumsily shaped nesting boxes, softly growing fur, until one Friday night.
After a short appetizer of sheep’s offal, the wild dogs leaped and squeezed through the back fence. Schatzie barked in the front of the store. While Fidelis searched for burglars and tried the locks, the wild dogs feasted. They overturned the long line of cages, and plucked out the chinchillas one by one. They gulped them down or tore them to shreds, and then were gone, silently as always around the butcher’s house, but leaving their scrambled tracks.
“DELPHINE!” It was Markus, and she thought later with slight shame that it was a compliment he came to her first thing on the next morning, just as she entered the shop. His face was broken, sobs were tamped in his chest, a scrap of fur hung limp in his fist. “They got them, they killed them!”
She ran out back with the other two boys and saw it was true. The cages whirled all over the ground, ripped open like shopping bags, and there was not a chinchilla to be seen. Markus’s tattered scrap was the only remaining piece of evidence the dogs had left, and he held it now with an attitude of disbelief. He walked forward a little, staggered with the loss. There was the pie in the sky of big money, but also, Delphine now saw, these were in a way Eva’s odd legacy to the boys, the project she’d started, and whether they knew it and acknowledged it or not these creatures were of her own making. Wild dogs should not have had them. And Delphine could see, when Fidelis surveyed the ruin, that a similar feeling was building in him, an obscure anger that started low and crept over him like a heavy cape until he bowed his head a little, looked up from under his brows, and made a decision.