When Delphine left the room for the office, both of the men felt a sudden itch of a tension. After a silence, Fidelis said he wanted to try flying in an airplane, like Franz, and Cyprian answered that the automobile was good enough for him. Then they each took a drink and didn’t say anything for a while.
“But I wouldn’t want to be in a tornado again,” said Cyprian.
Fidelis nodded, but pointedly didn’t ask when Cyprian had been in a tornado before. The tornado suddenly seemed too loaded a topic to discuss, as did the merits of various makes of automobiles, Roosevelt’s visit to Grand Forks, the CWA, milk prices, whether there’d be anything to butcher if the drought continued or the liquor tax or the burning of a neighboring town’s opera house. The only topic that seemed safe was the food, what was left of it, so Fidelis said the kidneys weren’t too bad.
“’Not too bad,’” said Cyprian. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, she fixed them good.”
“Damn right,” said Cyprian, as though he’d won some challenge from Fidelis, put him under, or at least his remark. Fidelis couldn’t help it, a shiver of anger twitched up his back. He took a long drink, and so did Cyprian, and then the two laughed uncomfortably to try to right the disagreeable feeling that had suddenly grown between them.
“Did you read about the damn eclipse?” said Cyprian, hopeful, feeling that the heavens were the only subject that could save them.
“No,” said Fidelis, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“Supposed to be a dark one,” muttered Cyprian, who knew nothing of it himself. Then he came up with what seemed like an inspired path to follow, one that wouldn’t give out. “So the leaves are off the trees,” he said, “you getting much game in to butcher here?”
Fidelis readily took that up. “A deer or so, then Gus Newhall shot a bear up in the Minnesota northwoods. ‘Course he nearly brought down a goddamn Indian doing it, the guide was just ahead, as I hear it, Gus got overexcited and fired, nearly took the guide’s head off and—”
Cyprian froze with the beer half to his lips and slowly lowered the bottle, and then his black eyes looked into Fidelis’s light eyes, which was a dangerous thing, for now they couldn’t unstick their gaze from each other. Nor could they blink, for the first one who did would be obscurely beaten. Fidelis didn’t know what he’d done to land in the frozen deadlock, but there he was. He had learned not to blink during the war, looking through the sights of a rifle, so he wouldn’t miss the flicker of a careless instant of exposure, or ruin the steady press of his finger. And Cyprian had learned not to blink when he trained as a boxer, for that’s how two boxers sized each other up to start with. Stared into each other’s eyes. The best could move a deadly punch to the throat as fast as the eyelid dropped. So their stares held, and held, and as they did not move they breathed the harder. Their eyes dried out and burned and their noses stung. The tension grew immense, ridiculous, then unbearable. Delphine walked in just as, with a ringing report, Fidelis’s hand shattered the beer bottle he was holding. All three gazed down in astonishment at the spurt of bright blood. Fidelis said, “So Cyprian, what tornado were you in?”
And smooth as silk pie, Cyprian answered him, “Belleau Wood, where they burned the wheat and still we came on, blasted Germans from the trees. We kept coming, they couldn’t stop us. When those snipers hit the ground we finally got to use our bayonets.”
Delphine wanted to back out of the room, but instead she got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and dabbed the stuff on Fidelis’s hand while she talked to Cyprian. Lightly, she put things to rights. “I thought they declared an armistice way back when, so what’s all this about?”
Cyprian shrugged, and Fidelis, though he struggled with a sudden surge of anger, laughed and made a face at the sting of the alcohol. “Sure,” he said easily, suddenly feeling foolish at the degree of inexplicable hatred he’d felt for Cyprian, whom he had always liked fine up until this evening. “I wasn’t there at Belleau Wood. The war, that’s done with, finished.”
“Oh yeah,” said Cyprian, recovering his usual mildness. “All done with but for the beauty marks.” He tapped his throat, the roped white flesh.
LATER ON, when the two had returned to the farmhouse and settled into the bed, Delphine wearily unfolded herself, stretched her feet long underneath the quilt that Eva had sewed for her on her good days, tiny postage stamps of color. She was troubled by and wondered at the palpable strain in the kitchen — she’d felt it between the two men even before she entered, from the silence, and then there was the sharp explosion of the bottle, Fidelis’s hand slashed. And Cyprian had been poised on his chair as though he was cocked to explode. Now, he was breathing quietly beside her, quite sleepless.
“What were you two arguing about?” she asked.
“You,” he said, no hesitation in his voice.
“Well, that’s sure stupid,” said Delphine, feeling stupid herself.
“Maybe.”
Delphine laughed unpleasantly, surprised that he should be jealous when he treated her like his sister, and then obscurely angered that he thought he had any right over her at all. She simmered for a few minutes, her thoughts prickling.
“I think,” she finally said, though she had not actually thought this out herself, “we should stop sleeping together if you’re not going to love me like a woman. What do you think of that?”
As soon as he got up and left the bed, she missed the weight of him next to her, wanted to curve around his back and throw her arm over him. She always fell asleep in seconds if she took her breaths in unison with his. Restless, she lay for a time in the quiet darkness, and then she sighed and rose, wrapped her red robe around herself. She found him sitting at the kitchen table. “Oh hell. Please,” she said. “Come on back.” So Cyprian followed her back into the room and they lay together in the peace of the house, and in the blackness, Roy snoring beside the stove. But there was between them, even while they curled close as children, a sorrowing knowledge. Cyprian knew he had no right to his anger, and he knew as well that Delphine pitied him for it. What was he to do? And next to him, instead of falling asleep directly as she’d anticipated, Delphine was again restless. The inside polish of the fake wedding band on her finger was flaking away, and the base metal itched her finger. She couldn’t quite get comfortable. She turned and twisted, resented it when Cyprian’s breathing evened into a gentle rhythm, stayed awake a long time after he slept and listened to the quiet knocking of his breath.
FIDELIS WAS AWAKE overlong that night also. He had to shout from the kitchen three times for the boys to calm down and sleep — they were extra-excited about something. In the past, Eva would have found out what it was and told it to him. Fidelis wasn’t one to ask. They had their own lives and he didn’t pry into their business, nor did they come and tell him about the things they did. There was a wall of reserve between Fidelis and his sons, a formality that was part exhaustion and also the way things had always been in his own family. He had never spoken to his own father about personal things, not even when he was a grown man.