After Fidelis moved, what should have been an insignificant difference of opinion became another thing entirely when Hottentot began turning up at the back loading plank of Waldvogel’s Meats, where there were sometimes scraps. In addition to their differences over such things as the motivations of dogs, Pete and Fidelis also had a fundamental difference over the disposal of the waste, the odd bits, the offal and guts that are an important part of the butchering trade. While Pete kept every tiniest bit down to the tail’s tips in a barrel that he locked in the freezer and sold to a guts dealer each month, Fidelis’s way was to distribute the wastage, and he had, therefore, a commodious following of those who lived lightly on the earth — from dogs to itinerants and the hard-hit poor of Argus. The visitors at the back of his shop, as mentioned, included Hottentot.
The dog was a greedy, suspicious, evil-minded stud whose character amused Fidelis, as it proved his point about the heartless opportunism of dogs. Hottentot would fawn over anyone who held a bone or the hope of a tidbit, and he regarded the rest of humanity, those who didn’t feed him, with an ancient contempt. He had the tendency to snap, and even bite, and those who’d felt the splendor of his teeth detested him. He would have been poisoned, as happened often to offensive dogs in Argus, except that Pete and Fritzie were themselves so friendly. In spite of the fact that they gave no credit and charged money for their soup bones, they were well-liked people and had no enemies.
Fidelis took satisfaction in the fact that the dog, doted on by the Kozkas, made his way across the town to visit him. One day he showed up at the Waldvogels’ killing chute, his black eyes clever in a ball of bristling rust brown fur, a sneer on his velvet muzzle. Hottentot was granted all the scraps he could gulp, and then Fidelis gave him a huge cow bone and sent him back to Pete. That would have been all right if that was as far as Fidelis had taken it, but Fidelis had a teasing streak and did not know when to quit. Day after day the dog showed up, and Fidelis amused himself by providing it ever more gruesome skeletal remains — skulls, femurs, ribs. The spinal column of a heifer, trimmed out meticulously to allow the ligaments to maintain articulation, was the pièce de résistance that overthrew the Kozkas’ patience. When Hottentot dragged it proudly through the Argus streets, pausing here and there to gnaw a bit or improve his grip on the thing, everybody in the town got wind of what was going on — literally. The bones were ripe, and the warm and sunny entrance of the shop, where Hottentot brought it to chew on for half the morning, reeked by the time Pete discovered it.
Swearing, he bent over the dog to grab away its prize. When Hottentot growled menacingly, Pete grabbed the dog’s ears and forced his head back. “Just you try that,” he warned. “You’ll be a skin on the wall.”
“Save that thing,” said Fritzie, her arms folded in the doorway, “I’ve got an idea what to do with them. And tie up the dog.”
The dog was attached with a rope to the clothesline pole, but Hottentot was of a studied cleverness that made him impossible to control. By midafternoon, he chewed through the rope and returned to Fidelis to beg an evening meal. He was home by dark with a set of hooves roped together with tasty sinew. Pete chained him next, but Hottentot wound the chain until the links popped and was back at the Waldvogels’ place by morning. When Pete found his dog on the front stoop again slavering over an oozing boar’s skull, he was enraged past good sense. Grabbing for the skull, he put his arm in the way of Hottentot’s teeth. His arm was torn so savagely that Doctor Heech had to see him and closed the gash with no less than ten stitches. Heech also advised him to shoot the dog right on the spot. Most men would have walked home and done so, but Pete Kozka did not blame Hottentot. He believed that his dog’s loyalty had been corrupted by Fidelis.
“We’ll see, we’ll just see about it,” he muttered to himself that night, planning what he would do to get even with the man he’d taken in right off the street and hired and who now, as he decided to see it, had turned against him and even stolen the affections of his dog.
FIDELIS WAS NOT a religious man, except when it came to his knives. First thing every morning, after he’d taken his strong coffee from Eva’s hand and eaten his breakfast of cheese and bread and stewed prunes, he visited the slotted wooden block where his knives were kept. He took them out one by one and laid them in strict order on a flannel cloth. These were the same knives he’d brought in the suitcase with the sausages, from Germany, and they were of the finest quality — forged from the blade to the tang in a mold and then worked from spine to cutting edge to create a perfectly balanced tool. Fidelis kept them ferociously clean. He examined each for any minute sign of rust. Then he made what for him were the day’s most important decisions: which blades needed only to visit his sharpening steel, and which, if any, were in need of the graver attention of the stones. Most often, the knives required only the steel.
Fidelis’s long sharpening steel, now kept on an iron wall hook, was the same one that hung from his belt in the portrait that his parents had paid the finest photographer in Ludwigsruhe to take when he mastered the family trade. With a musical alacrity, he swiped across the steel the knives whose edges needed minimal attention, and then he set them back into the block. Fidelis was conservative. He never oversharpened, never wasted good steel by grinding it away. But a dull blade would mash the fibers of the meat and slip dangerously in the hand, so when a knife needed a fresh edge, he was ready. He removed the set of stones from a drawer beneath the wooden block, and then he arranged them in order next to the knife that waited on the flannel. The coarse black stone was first, to set the cut right, and then the stones became finer. There were six in all. The last was fine as paper. By the time Fidelis finished, his blade could split an eyelash.
Every morning, after the boys had left for school and after his ritual with the knives was accomplished, Eva opened up the store and went over the day’s schedule. While she was doing this, Fidelis habitually retired to the toilet at the back of the house, where he parted his hair with a surgical precision, combed it back, shaved meticulously, obeyed the prompting of the stewed prunes, and drank another cup of hot coffee. He had enlarged this toilet room, or bathroom, and made it comfortable in the German way. His family had always kept soft rugs and cheerful plants near the plumbing, as well as ashtrays and tobacco, books and newspapers on a shelf within easy reach. Over the tub, there hung an array of cleaning implements: a brush with a handle of polished maple wood to scrub the back, a smaller and brisker brush for the fingers, a large pumice stone for callused feet, and a tiny, hair-soft, blue-handled brush for the face. There was also a stash of soaps, from the harshest lye soap to the French-milled lilac ovals that Eva used. These soaps were kept in a square cedar box with a slatted floor to drain away excess water, so the soaps would last. Next to the tub on another wooden shelf, behind curtains made of ticking material, towels were stacked — the cloth worn thin, but bleached to a sunny whiteness. The entire room was painted a pleasant yellow, and, as its wide glass block window faced southeast, it caught the morning light. It was the comfortable and generous sort of room that would lead a person to think the Waldvogels were wealthy. They were not. It was Eva’s doing. She had a knack for saving money and making a good effect out of nothing.