“If I hadn’t met you,” she told Eva, “maybe I’d have moved on. But now, the strange thing is, you took my ambitions and left me with your life. I have your life now. I kept on running things.”
Fidelis had bought a large cemetery plot, and he would lie next to Eva. Although Delphine had claimed his other side, she thought now that she would rather if Eva lay between the two of them. Beyond her was Roy’s place. At least I’ll have Roy at my shoulder for eternity, Delphine thought, telling rough jokes in my ear. But in that cool, rushing darkness she also felt the bottomless loneliness one can only feel from a childhood loss. That mother loss had made Delphine strong, but also caused her to live as a damaged person, a searcher with a hopeless quest, a practical-minded woman with a streak of dismay. Even now that she could count herself close to middle age, she missed her mother. Stroking the icy blades of grass over Eva’s grave with her hands, she had the sudden urge to lie down and listen to the ground, as if she would hear a great heart beating beneath her ear, as if she would be tranced like a baby by the humming of her mother’s blood.
ENTERING THE WARM KITCHEN, Delphine found her husband reading the paper, sitting in a chair with his feet in the bath. She’d made the water as hot as he would tolerate, but now the foot bath was cooled. She looked at him — he’d grown a mustache and it came out entirely pale gray, although his hair was the same roan as when she first knew him, shot only here and there with strands of age. She touched her own hair, just a little duller, thinner, in spite of the rich black walnut shampoo she bought from the supplier. Yet she had kept her looks — she knew that from the exasperation of the female customers who declared themselves jealous and then, she imagined, went off uttering words of condescending pity for the inability to conceive that enabled Delphine to stay so young, and was not worth it, in their opinion, given the joys they experienced with their children.
Delphine sat down on a little stool before Fidelis and took his feet into a towel on her lap. Fidelis’s feet were white and heavy as sink porcelain. The butcher’s defenselessness lay in the tender skin, the surprising arch, the square vulnerability of his toes. Delphine poured eucalyptus liniment into her hands from a big brown bottle, and rubbed her husband’s feet to aid the circulation, then she pared the nails, salted his feet with coarse sea salt and rubbed again to smooth their calluses. At last, she poured more liniment on her hands and rubbed harder. He put the paper down and groaned with relief as her hands worked, and he thanked her in a sheepish voice. This attention always slightly embarrassed him, but he couldn’t resist it. He had never recovered from the old war-time frostbite, and lately cramping pains and a numbness of the toes had begun to plague him.
When his feet were safely stuffed in woolen socks, he poured another highball, made with rum. He was trying to get used to it as whiskey from overseas was scarce. Delphine put away the foot bath, sat next to him. I’ve missed out on God, she thought. Still, I haven’t fooled myself. I still think God’s a drunken lout who hasn’t given the world a second thought since making it. Formerly a genius, yes, I’ll give God that, but a supremely careless artist who casts His most extraordinary paintings and sculptures and exquisite live works to hell and lets the devil shit on them.
“Just read between the lines,” she slapped the Fargo newspaper headlines. Guadalcanal. Stalingrad. “No divine presence would allow such evil mayhem. What kind of God is that?” she asked Fidelis.
Fidelis didn’t answer because he was used to her noisy newspaper reading, where she made anguished replies to the lists of the North Dakota fallen. He never minded her shooting wild ideas, funny stories, sorrows, and irritated opinions at him out of nowhere. Besides, when it came to God he agreed even though he prayed every night for his sons, just as he had prayed when under fire, knowing it was useless but having no other option but to apply to God for help. He bent across the space between himself and Delphine and kissed her forehead. It was a rare tenderness. His hands drifted down her neck. He tipped his face sideways and kissed her again, slowly, then drew away. She looked straight on at him and the knifepoint dimples on either side of her smile deepened. They got up. Ceremoniously, the dog trailing after them, they made the rounds of the house and shop testing door locks and dousing lights. Somewhere in the front of the shop Fidelis took her hand. Gouged, ripped, healed, their hands fit together like pieces of old pottery. They held hands as they walked down the hallway into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.
Left outside, the white dog moved up the hall with an old dog’s lumbering aches, and stood in the gloom of the shop, half blind, nose high, making certain that all was as it should be. When she was satisfied, she turned back down the hallway, nails clicking slowly on the linoleum tiles. At the bedroom door she paused a moment, and her ears, large points delicately furred inside, cocked forward with a concerned attention, and then relaxed. She turned around twice and lay down in a cool spot she cherished, shifted onto her side, her legs stretched in a running bound.
EMIL’S WAR WAS VERY SHORT. He didn’t have to lie about his age because the army became desperate for reinforcements and took the entire class from his Adolf Hitler Schule, including the teachers and platoon leaders. Both Emil and Erich were highly praised and singled out at the selection camp as officer material. They had planned to join the Hitler Jugend division of the Waffen SS and spend the whole war shoulder to shoulder. But Emil stepped on a mine planted in a sheep pasture, early on. His new uniform was blown apart before it was ever stained or dirtied. A swirl of green passed before his eyes, and he realized with wonder that he was upside-down in the air, looking down at the grass. He was dead before he landed on it. A picture of Tante soaked up blood in his pocket and a piece of honey candy cooled in his mouth. His grandmother made him bring the honey candy. Recalling that his father had survived the great war on honey, she’d hoped it would similarly protect the son.
Erich walked on though he was half gone, blown away from himself with his twin. He had vowed to fight to the death, and his expression never faltered, but he found that when the shelling was constant his bowels disobeyed him. His arms froze around a sandbag. His fingers numbed and locked into fists. The sacred oath he had sworn and the Kameradschaft he lived by were useless shelter from the rain of blood, guts, brains, and undifferentiated bits of meat or even, once, the marvel of a boy turned into a burst of red vapor. He hadn’t slept for four days and nights when he was captured, but he still, by some instinct, kept himself from croaking an answer in English when the GI who disarmed him said, “This one’s just a kid, probably doesn’t have fuzz on his balls yet.” What would he have said, anyway, he wondered, as the soldier was more or less right?
Later, he’d made a vague grab for the GI’s rifle and crumpled instantly when he was bashed over with a curse. “I hate these baby storm troopers. Bunch of little rattlesnakes.”
“They’re goddamn poison,” said another soldier. “We should kill ’em. Save the trouble. Where the hell, anyway, are we going to march them to?”
The first one stepped back, raised his M-1 and just as he might have fired Erich was horrified to hear himself scream, “Jesus Christ, sir, please don’t shoot me.”
“What the fuck?”
“I was born in North Dakota,” Erich choked out. “My dad still lives there.”
“I’ll be fucked. What are you doing here, you little pissant?”
“I got sent here before the war.”
“What the fuck are you then, a fucking Nazi or a fucking American?”