Next Franz, no problems, but just being Franz there was always an intensity about his grooming — nobody must disturb his routine. “I found Emil’s boot,” he said, but it was clear he wanted to punch his little brother, and couldn’t, because he was a young man after all and had his dignity, so he brooded over his hair.
“Essen.”
Fidelis brought the pan of oatmeal, bowls, brown sugar, milk, his precious coffee, to the table. Now it was Erich’s turn. He wandered into the kitchen in his pajamas. “Where’s everybody?” He had crept into the bathtub and managed to fall asleep without anybody catching him.
“Get back in there, get dressed!”
Of course, he didn’t know where his clothes were, where anything was, and Fidelis felt his blood surge with irritation, and also sympathy. He ached for sleep, too, just the same. If only they two could crawl back into bed and curl in the blankets and snore like bears until Eva rocked the headboard and sang out for the lazybones to come and get their breakfast. Fidelis trudged back down the hall to the room. The clothing was still crumpled in a ball from last night, and faintly sour, but he made Erich put it all on. And his boots weren’t missing. By the time he got back to the kitchen, the coffee was beginning to stir his brain cells.
The numbness of sleep left his face. He stretched and groaned as the boys secured their books with bookstraps, and grabbed their lard pails of the lunch that Delphine had made the previous afternoon. A cold potato, a piece of meat. An apple or a carrot. Sometimes she fried great rings of doughnuts or made a thick gingerbread. They piled on their coats and then pitched out the door. By the time they left, Fidelis was on his second cup of coffee. He’d learned to make that right. He brought the coffee into the bathroom and set it on the windowsill, added a good long dribble of Fornie’s Alpenkrauter. Then he mixed a lather in his shaving mug, and soaped his face with the silver-handled boar’s-hair brush that Eva had given him, along with a matching hairbrush and razor, as a wedding gift. After shaving, he patted his face with a towel, then rubbed his chin and cheeks with bay rum, and at last walked out into the shop.
The sun streamed through the heavy windows onto the wood-block tables and counters. The wood was hacked, scored, blackened in the marks and seams, but the tables’ surfaces were scoured white. The blaze lighted his block of knives. He examined his knives, blearily clung to his careful selection for the sharpening. Next, he brought from the cooled back room halves of pig, scalded and gutted and hung yesterday. As he worked, diminishing the pork with economical clarity and swiftness of motion into perfect cutlets and medallions, he felt the leaden numbness that ran up his fingers diminish. The muscles in his arms grew limber, and he used the knife to cunning effect. All the while that his body moved, of its own will, his mind grew heavier with the need for oblivion until about eleven, having worked and cut steadily with only a short break, he had to stop. The sleep pressed behind his eyes with such an intensity that only a brisk turn outside in the yard would help. Again, he shook the sleep off, and then returned to his work until late in the afternoon, when Delphine told him to go back and lie down. She said that his eyes were bloodshot. She said it rudely.
“Get out of here,” she ordered. “I will handle things.”
For the first part of his life, Fidelis had been taught to read only crude signs from women, but Eva had instructed him in looking for subtler clues from her sex. So he knew that Delphine was careful to show no hint of sympathy, allowed not even a personal word of kindness to pass her lips, because she did not want to begin something between them that she considered impossible. And he, too, was immaculately impersonal in his behavior toward her. Every word referred to the business, or to the children. He and she were strangers living parallel lives, working alongside each other every day. Between them, they had put up an invisible wall. Fidelis knew it had to stay intact or something would crash down around him, around them all. He sensed the power of what their strict rules held back and kept himself from wondering at the nature of the force, its shape, its name. It was just a thing that must be left alone. He went back into his bedroom, shut the door, and took off his shoes. He lay down on the bed, and when he did, he felt his bones through his flesh and his muscles, unstringing, and he stretched immediately into a sleep so black it was like being dead.
He slept for hours, then started awake the way he had that morning, staring at the ceiling. Only this time, his body half lifting in the bed with that buzzing sensation of pleasure in having truly rested, he lingered in the warm sheets because of the unfamiliar sensuousness of that relief. These were the times he would, in the past, turn to Eva and begin the slow lovemaking that they’d learned from each other. Over the years, they had added to their private love — unlike others, he suspected, who did what they did to get the need over with. Other men joked or complained about the length of time their wives gave them — a little longer, maybe, if they behaved well that day. Fidelis never said a word when men got into those sorts of conversations. He knew things were different between himself and Eva, that there was something greater than the thing the other men discussed. That something had its own grandeur mixed inevitably with loss. When she died and was truly gone, the day he, and then each of the boys, threw the first clods of earth upon her casket after it was lowered into the ground, he’d had the sense of some beautiful immensity passing overhead in the heavens, away from him forever, and he’d gone very still. He’d tried not to move. The other mourners had seen a man rooted to the earth, standing like a block, dumb as a turnip. He’d become embarrassed at the picture he made and forced himself to step away. But some part of himself never did leave, he thought now; he was still standing at the edge of her grave. He was still feeling the blood squeeze through his heart, the hum of his brain, the clutch of his fingers, the earth drying in the cracks of his palms. He was helplessly alive, wholly divided into life, powerfully different from Eva. Sometimes he still felt the wonder of it.
DELPHINE DID EVERYTHING she could to distract herself from the fact that she had to thank Fidelis, had to talk to him about having freed her father on bail. She transferred all the meat from one case to the next, and scrubbed out the first air-cooled case with a sharp mixture of vinegar and water. Then she arranged all of the meats in the case again, placing between each tray the careful decorations, cut of green waxed paper, that set off the pork chops and sausages and steaks. While she was finishing, she thought of all of the other jobs she could do, but even as she added them up she grew irritated with herself. Why not talk to him this very minute? In the middle of dunking a rag to make another swipe at the glass and enamel, she wrung it out instead and laid it on the steel counter. Closed the sliding doors.
“Fidelis”—she stood behind him and he turned from his task— “you paid the bail for my father.”
He nodded, wiping his hands on his apron.
“Yes.” He acknowledged Delphine, then tried to turn back to the meat he was grinding and spicing, but there was more.
“You’ll get it back.”
“Sure,” said Fidelis.
“I will pay you back,” said Delphine. “If he…”
“But he won’t leave.”
This was going to force him to say more, and he knew it, and all that morning he had thought it out. But it was still hard for him to say what he had to say to this woman. He took a huge breath, and made the attempt. “What you did for Eva, and then what Roy did…” But that was as far as he could go.