DELPHINE WAS ALLOWED to sit upon a small rickety caned chair just outside the bars of her father’s cell. He was morose, “but at least it’s clean, now,” he said, nicking his frowzy head at the newly scrubbed floors, walls, and the bed, which was now outfitted in sheets that Delphine brought. Apple Newhall fixed the prisoners’ meals, and the contents varied according to her feeling for the prisoner. Roy was a favorite of hers, and for dinner he was given a plate of beans baked in tomato sauce, a large beer sausage, and half a sweet onion. Delphine watched him eat. Roy’s rough claw dipped the dark syrup from the beans. He chewed tentatively because of his frail old teeth. From time to time he stopped and sighed in the drama of his entrapment. He missed the picture of Minnie, his small personal shrine, and he dearly wished for the afghan he said that she had knitted, which Delphine had rescued from the grand stink and soaked clean in the river. It had become something of a security blanket to him ever since he’d sobered up. Why now, thought Delphine. Why now that he’s sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life? Perhaps she forgave too easily, or perhaps she wasn’t really able to recall, out of self-protection, what a failure of a father he really had been all along. She hated this pity that overwhelmed her and covered him. His failing physical state twisted her heart — she didn’t want to see how his hands shook, how he shuffled instead of stepped, how thoroughly the booze had unstrung him over the years.
She held one of his beat-up paws, “Dad, you didn’t do it, I know. You’ll soon be out. I’ll get a lawyer.”
“What lawyer?” Roy peered at her with an incredulous frown. “Of course I did it… everybody knows, they saw me. I had to.”
For a panicked moment Delphine hushed him. Sheriff Hock was standing near and now, having heard every word, he had stepped up behind her with a lightness surprising in a man so large. He was listening, Delphine suddenly knew it, to see if his trap would spring, listening to hear her next words, which she drew cautiously from a neutral store. “So Fidelis has offered to pay your bail, if there is—”
“Fidelis told Albert here what happened right off! Eva had to have the stuff and you can bet I was going to get it for her. I cared for that woman, she was a good and a kind person,” said Roy with great emotion. “Made a thick sandwich for a man and understood my thirst.”
At the mention of Eva’s name, Delphine’s picture radically shifted, and with some difficulty she responded to the changed scenario. She stumbled a bit, though, her brain connecting with the stolen morphine, before she turned to Sheriff Hock. “How come now?” she said, masking her relief with indignation. “If you were going to charge him, why didn’t you pick him up right after?”
Sheriff Hock, subtly disappointed, rocked back on his heels and lied that before he could get word to Sal Birdy, the drugstore owner had reported the theft to the state commission. Mr. Birdy very much regretted having done so, but now, to everyone’s annoyance, the commission had demanded a full investigation of the occurrence. Roy’s arrest was carried out to satisfy the record, and he’d be free as soon as all of the paperwork was finished.
“This is only a formality,” Sheriff Hock concluded, and walked off in an air of slight embarrassment.
“A formality!” Delphine’s voice let go — she tried not to sound too relieved, attempted the appropriate indignation. But she wanted to sink her face in her hands and breathe very deeply. Wanted to shed the low hysteria she’d felt at the prospects and plans that had whirled in her head — the lawyer, the trial, the jury, the judge… all of the implications of a murder charge. Now, she had only to sit still. So Delphine stayed with Roy for a while longer, listened to instructions regarding the various personalities and proclivities of his chickens. “I’ve got a Romeo and Juliet in the bunch,” he said. “Star-crossed banties. Don’t disturb the two black rosecombs that perch together. As for that loud dominicker, you can stew him for all I care. Let the little guy take over with the big reds. He can do the job.” Roy kept talking, clearly did not want to quit, didn’t want to face the moment when Delphine had to get up and leave him alone in the place where so often he’d slept unconscious but that he now, fully aware, occupied in a virgin state of shame.
DURING THOSE persistently dry years, the stock was less and less worth butchering, the cows were so bony and lean, fed on green thistle alone or the poorest scrapings of slough grass and even young cottonwood bark. But for the last week, Fidelis had sudden business. He worked late into the night, worked until his knee gave out on him and he had to put on the leather brace Heech had sketched and then ordered from a harness maker. Though his knee creaked and ached, Fidelis believed this brace and Heech’s sewing abilities had kept him from becoming entirely lame. For sure, it helped him work strange hours. Farmers sometimes didn’t get their animals in until just before dark. They had to kill by the light of torches, wrestling steers into the killing chute, then skinning and butchering until almost dawn. This morning, Fidelis had slept two hours, then jolted awake to get the boys out of bed for school. For a moment, he stared into the gray air, entranced by an unfinished dream in which he followed Eva down a certain street they both knew in Ludwigsruhe, and entered behind her into an unfamiliar shop.
The place was tiny, studded with merchandise of every type from pins and fabrics to pots of jam. It went on and on, back into the side of a hill, a catacomb of gray wooden corridors lit dimly by bare lightbulbs. She was wearing a dress of light plum cotton and it floated behind her as she swiftly turned corners. Suddenly, at the end of one cramped hallway, Eva turned around at his call and came toward him with a smile of surprise, as if to say, “What are you doing here?” And then he woke, of course, and although each cell of him wanted to lie still, to sleep on and on, through weeks, he must rise and wake his sons.
He stumbled out of his room and into theirs, shook Franz awake wordlessly, and then touched Markus. All he had to do was touch Markus, or even his bedpost. Emil and Erich must be awakened with more care. They’d doze off instantly if left a moment. He walked to the bathroom and drew a mug of water from the tap, rinsed his mouth out, pissed, took his pants off a hook on the door. Then he walked into the kitchen and set a kettle of water on the gas range for the watery morning chocolate he added to their milk. He warmed the milk in a pan. Into another pan of water he dumped some oats, then turned down the heat so they wouldn’t boil over. His eyelids kept flickering, shut. He filled the coffeepot with water, a handful of grounds, eggshells from a bowl of them he’d saved. Then he sat at the table with his hands cradling his head, and fell asleep. Wakened when Emil entered the kitchen wearing only one boot.
“Where’s your other boot?”
“Schatzie must have hid it in the night.”
The dog’s one awful habit.
“Find it,” ordered Fidelis, rising to tend the stove. Next, it was Markus, who said that pulling on his jacket he’d torn the sleeve half off. How could that happen? Fidelis examined the jacket. Impossible. “You were fighting yesterday?” Markus hung his head and couldn’t look at him. Fidelis flung the jacket back at him. “Tonight, you work. A liar works twice as hard in his life as an honest man.” Fidelis was certain that this wasn’t true, from what he had seen, but the phrase came out and sounded right. He pushed Markus toward the bathroom. “Get clean.”