Late as it was, Fidelis had to rifle through the stacks of bills from his suppliers, figuring out which to fend off, which to string along, which needed immediate payment. He was dividing up the tiny amount of cash he had available to see whether he could figure or refigure a sum that would satisfy the lot. After he figured, he’d go back and reduce the amount on each bill, resign another to the bottom of the pile. Every so often, he put his fists on either temple, stared blindly at the mass of paper. Then he’d make some inner calculation, and adjust the bills into yet another mysterious order. As for the money that was owed to him, he’d given the job of collecting it to Tante. She was better at squeezing blood from rock, that’s what bill collecting and bill paying was all about during those desperate years.
The animosity he’d felt for the man who had turned out to be a sturdy, respectable baritone, and whom he thought of as Delphine’s husband, was still disturbing to him, too. At one point, weary of his piddling calculations, he stood up and paced around the kitchen. Four steps took him across the floor, and four back. Frustrated by the smallness of the room, he thought of walking the hallway outside, but he didn’t want to wake the boys now that they had finally settled themselves. So he continued his striding back and forth along the short course of kitchen tiles. Then in the center of the room Fidelis stopped, abruptly. He put his hand on his head and laughed.
So that was it! That was the thing about Cyprian! There was something. He had always known there was something about the man. And he hadn’t caught it. Not until they sat across from one another and stared their unblinking challenges into each other’s eyes. Thinking of that now tipped off Fidelis. Plus the way he had described Gus Newhall’s bear hunting. Fidelis recalled the staring match. The man’s eyes, that pitch black, the pupil melted into the iris, the flint-black stare. The deafened guide. It came to him. An Indian. Cyprian was an Indian. That’s all it was, all along, that uneasy feeling. Somehow he’d known and not known, the man was different. Thinking of Cyprian as an Indian now made things all right. Or almost so, for Fidelis also understood that the sudden antipathy between them was also and most strangely based on Delphine’s absence, or presence, or maybe sheer existence.
THE ENTRANCE to the boys’ dirt fort had become a grand thing, shored up out of the bed of an old wagon box, a horseshoe even nailed to a lintel constructed of a short piece of beam found underneath the sagging shack. The first part of the tunnel was reinforced, too, with boards knocked from the walls of the place and dragged through the short riffle of woods. There was a die-hard bunch who had remained with the construction — Markus, the twins, Emil and Erich, Grizzy Morris, and Roman Shimek. The others had fallen away, but that was fine with the core crew. They were at the best part. They had achieved the center of the hill and now were engaged in the satisfying toil of hollowing out their den, their clubhouse, their mighty chamber, their secret room.
The tunnel was a belly-wiggler for about twenty feet before the entrance to the room. The secret interior of the fort was at first extremely small. Markus used their tool of first attack, the blade of a hoe, and scraped out a slightly larger round than the tunnel. Roman Shimek had stolen a big square piece of canvas, and the boys used it to shovel the dirt into and then drag it out. Markus worked the hardest, digging away and hauling the dirt out himself even when the others sat in the grass resting or trying to figure out how to smoke the rust brown fake tobacco plants, rolling the stuff up in newspaper. He didn’t admonish them, reproach them, or care if they sat around outside the hill. What he was doing so absorbed him that it didn’t matter if they were in on it or not. To crouch and enter the impressive doorway, then crawl into the black heart of the earth, and to enter a chamber so quiet that he heard his blood sigh in his lungs, his heart’s rush and clench, his ears fizz with a humming and electric silence, this gave Markus a deep and almost violent satisfaction. When they left for home he was calm, and a little silly, and he slept the nights through for the first time since he had lost his mother.
No one discovered exactly what they were doing. It was, for sure, a wonder that the boys were not filthier when they came home, but it was a dry early November and most of the visible dust that filtered into their clothes and hair could be brushed away or smacked out or somehow disguised. And then, first thing they did upon returning was sneak past their parents, or, in Markus and his brothers’ case, Delphine. Sometimes she wasn’t even there, as she often left at her regular time each night. She drove home with Cyprian and left the boys’ dinners warming in the oven. Their father, working in the shop or at his cluttered desk, or drinking a beer or two with other men in the kitchen, didn’t notice them until they were cleaned up for the night. And then he noticed them in a way other than to really notice them. They were upright, breathing, not in any visible distress. In his exhaustion, this was enough.
Though the sky went dark sooner and the earth was colder every day, the boys went out to the hill and burrowed into it with the eagerness of gophers anxious to hibernate. Slowly, incrementally, they enlarged the inner room so one boy could kneel, then stand inside it. Two could squeeze into it, soon. Then three. And then it rained.
IT WAS A COLD, gray, pounding November rain and it lasted three days, wore the skies out, flooded the ditches and then the town’s sewers, topped the river, filled the sloughs, made running streams of the streets and a great square pool of the unfinished, clay-bottomed basement of the abandoned house where the boys had their fort in the hill behind. Then suddenly as it had poured the sky cleared, the sun blazed weakly and a cool wind dried the surface of the fields from black to gray. After school, the boys met as they’d agreed, and ran out to the hill anxious to see whether their work was damaged, which of course it was, and yet not so badly as they’d feared. A few boards sagged down, the hill itself was eroded where they’d liked to climb for the lookout, but as the tunnel had been dug at a slight upward angle the inside itself, even the secret interior room far inside the hill, was surprisingly, deceptively, dry. For the earth above was saturated with water and many times heavier than when they’d first begun.
Eagerly, the boys began working on repairs.
“Drag the boards over here,” Markus commanded, “we’re gonna reinforce.” He liked the grown-up sound of that last word and said it several times; it was a word that sounded right for the job, a word that smacked of the professional. He’d lifted a crowbar from his father’s tools — no one had noticed yet, and with it the boys pried several more boards from the old shed. Sun fell through the sides of the shack in brilliant slats now. The air smelled clean from the rain, washed, and the boys worked efficiently, knowing that they had only an hour or more of sunlight left in the late fall day. The earth that had fallen in where the boards collapsed was wet and clumped, which should have told them something, for it was much harder to drag the wet stuff out than it had been the dry. But the day itself was so windy, the air sucked moisture into it. They cleared the entry out all the way back to the room, which was only partly supported by a flimsy board framework.
“It’s gonna get dark,” said Roman nervously, as Markus dragged a board in behind him, “I gotta go.”
“Just wait a minute. Help me push this board in.”
Roman pushed the board along the tunnel as far as he could, but only one boy at a time could fit through the narrow aperture. Markus forced his way in through the half-collapsed part of the tunnel, pushed his head through the space, wiggled one shoulder into the opening, and then the other. If his shoulders got through, the rest of him was easy. In the blackness he felt his way forward, reaching back with his feet, gripping the board. He knew that Roman had fallen back now, and he breathed a sudden dampness of air inside the middle of the hill. He shouted for the others to follow along, bring the hoe and the piece of canvas, but he didn’t really care. In his pocket, he had a candle stub, and matches, for he meant to give himself a bit of light to see by in order to place the board he’d dragged along just so. Yet, he didn’t light the candle right away. The blackness seemed friendly, welcoming. The silence soaked up around him, comforting and pure. He felt the walls of the room, reassuringly dry. Deciding that he needed no light to put the board where he wanted it to go, he wedged it by feel up on top of two other boards that he’d stuck upright along the sides of the wall. He’d buried the ends of those boards a foot deep in the ground to stabilize them, and so he was able to fasten the first board up pretty well, and the next, too. He crawled back for one more and took it from Roman’s fingertips halfway down the tunnel.