Master Butchers Singing Club

  “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?”

  Erich was further shocked at his sudden yell. “I don’t know what the hell I am, sir, but I’ve got no hair on my balls!”

  The Americans went crazy with laughing and his fellow Hitler Schule classmates, the two who were left, looked at Erich in mystified and sober wonder, deciding that he either possessed a hitherto unknown brilliance or had, under the pressure of battle, entirely lost his mind.

  * * *

  PERHAPS IT WORKED. Maybe the lead armies that Markus carefully
arranged before he left drew Erich back. Of course, Erich couldn’t have known it. He did think of his toys, as he thought of every aspect of his childhood, when the stripped-down American train car within which he and two hundred other prisoners rode, went north, as well as he could make out, because it was nighttime, toward somewhere around the Great Lakes, maybe Wisconsin or Michigan. He couldn’t remember anything about the map—he’d forgotten all he could about the States. After the shocking ignominy of his surrender, Erich had hidden that he knew and understood English perfectly. There were fervent Nazis in his group who’d vowed to punish any of the prisoners who collaborated. So he continued to affect a suspicious, withdrawn silence. All the way across the country he’d been nearly struck dumb anyway just looking out the train windows. So were the others. They were all waiting to gloat over the miles and miles of bombed-out cities, the devastated countryside, blackened crops, dead farms they were promised by the radio reports back in Germany. And yet, they had penetrated farther and farther into a curious, cheerful, teeming, spectacularly untouched country. The prisoners were tragically awed, bewildered. Later, some would feel betrayed. Others would choose excuses of their own invention. Erich did neither, for his brain was too busy, too desperate, too crammed with excited memories and despair.

  They kept traveling north, and north, into the pine forests. Here, those from the southwest of Germany felt at home and pointed and nodded at the great, dark, revolving stands of fir that shifted and bristled in the blue light of dawn. The train veered deeper into the trees and the forest seemed to close behind them. At a small station, their hands were linked to a chain and they filed out of the train cars and then walked a muddy road for miles. It was early summer and the blackflies were out. When one man reached for a stinging fly with his chain arm, the whole chain clanked and the others’ hands jerked, but the flies were so bad that the men couldn’t help swatting.

  “Where the hell are they gonna go?” said an American soldier guarding them. There were six guards altogether. “Let them off the chain.”

  “Nah,” said the officer, but not with much conviction. German prisoners of war did not escape in this country, they found cousins. Former village neighbors. They worked on farms and were paid good money for it. Nobody was supposed to talk with them, take their pictures, give them food, or even notice they were there, but plenty of people did.

  The line of prisoners kept moving, clanking and jerking, but the men were speechless until they reached an enclosure deep in the woods. Pine logs were stuck all around the camp, anchored deeply into the earth, and several different thicknesses of wire were nailed onto the logs. Barbed-wire rolls were set on the ground to either side. Yet because of the surrounding trees and the blue light of the sky, the place was not all that forbidding. They’d live in simple barracks cabins. In spite of his confusion and the burden of his memories, Erich entered with a lightness of feeling that nearly choked him. They lined up for blue work outfits emblazoned with PW. They were given overcoats, shoes, four pairs of socks, undershirts, drawers, even a wool shirt and a raincoat. They were given two blankets, toothbrushes, soap, one tiny towel each. Erich accepted each item and frowned at the involuntary satisfaction that he felt. Maybe it was the fresh air, he thought, working on his brain. Or the fact they were going to do forestry work—good hard mindless work, a thing his body craved. And then the food, served at once and ladled hot into their tin pans from great cauldrons in the central log house, was sweetly familiar. There were baked beans—he hadn’t tasted the tang of molasses, the heat of the powdered mustard, the smoked fat of pork, in this particular combination since he was a child. He suddenly thought of Delphine. Although famished, he ate slowly, with a combination of reverence and shame, wiping the plate with white bread sliced into a soft, square page.

  There was no meat but the fatback, but there was for each man a mound of creamed corn and a huge baked potato. Onto each plate, a slug of lard was tapped. There was a two-inch square of white cornbread with Karo syrup poured over it. Each man received the food, staring at it as though it would vanish. Some pocketed their potatoes, inhaled the sweet cornbread, or cleaned their whole plates before they even got to the tables. Inside the great hall there was utter silence from the men. Only the scrape of tin spoons. The animal wetness of their chewing. They were silent not only because they were famished but because, from the quality of the food, the amount, and that it was somehow carried to this remarkably remote place and actually fed to them—dregs, prisoners—they knew that Germany had lost the war.

  THEY USED crosscut saws for the big trees, Swedish saws to trim the branches on the trails. They used chain drags, a couple of heavy trucks, and for the remote trees they had two mules they named Max and Moritz. One of the supervising soldiers spoke passable German and had the job of censoring the little newspaper that the men put together on a handset printing press. Although years before it was thought that none of the Waldvogel boys had inherited their father’s voice, Erich’s had developed once he hit adolescence. He’d opened his mouth one day to hum tunelessly, then snapped his jaws shut in surprise when a rich sound boomed forth. To kill time now, in that beautiful place, he began to sing and soon others sang with him, swapped the words to songs, made of the singing a nightly event to cut the tedium.

  The songs acted on their emotions, entered their dreams. At night in the bunkhouses, men cried out in their sleep, coughed, farted, snored, snuffled, and sometimes moaned tunelessly into the darkness. Erich heard them every night, since he was wakeful, as he listened to the sounds from the outside. The smooth mutter of pines, the owls calling back and forth, curious and hollow. He longed to go back to Ludwigsruhe, wondered if he’d ever see his grandfather, whom he adored, or eat the sausages he’d stolen at night to share with Emil in their bed. He thought of his brother, but with dispassion. He’d made his heart numb. He avoided and then shut out all thoughts of his family here. It might have cost him his life to make the specifics of his identity known, or take advantage of his American upbringing. There were rumors of German POWs sawed to bits and burned and scattered through the woods by the Heiligen Geist. They disappeared if they got too friendly with the Americans, it was said. No one had actually known, or seen, or spoken with anyone who knew this for certain. But some of the older prisoners put dread into the hearts of those who weren’t loyal enough to Germany. As for Erich, in a fierce crush of training and in the years of his formation, he had become in his deepest person thoroughly German. Or what he thought of as German. That is, he’d replaced his childhood with a new wash of purity. Belief, death loyalty, hatred of the weak. He lived simply, by one great consuming oath.

  MAZARINE WENT OUT behind the house and emptied her mother’s night bucket, then walked slowly back and set the galvanized pail on the broken back stairway. The unpainted wood of the little house still sagged, and great clumps of thistle and burdock had thrust up around the outhouse. That didn’t matter. The weeds were full of twittering birds—tiny golden throated warblers, green finches, drab sparrows. Let it just cave in, thought Mazarine. Who cared? Certainly not her mother, who now called weakly from her bed for a cup of water. Mazarine ignored her. Growing against the side of the teetering steps a lilac bush, one she’d planted herself from a tiny sprig long ago, lifted a fat cone of fragrance. Mazarine pulled the branch against her face, breathed the sweetness that always filled her with a sweeping nostalgia. Lilac dew crawled down her neck. The sun was already warm in the grass. Mazarine wasn’t much good with a hammer and nails, but the day before she’d found both and now she turned and fit the snow-warped boards into place and attempted, as best she could, to repair the winter’s damage. She hammered over her mother’s repetitive cries, over the creak of protest as her mother rose and began to move about in the kitchen, drawing her own water from the indoor pump, perhaps even stirring up a little fire to cook herself some oatmeal.

  Mazarine had gone to teacher’s training college in Moorhead, and now she had a grade school certification. She
had returned when Roman was wounded in the war and got his medals. Her mother took to bed and did not rise, so Mazarine stayed. The Argus school needed her to fill a temporary position anyway, so she’d taken over a fourth-grade class. It had been six months now and Mazarine thought that her mother would probably stay in bed until the house collapsed all around her. She could see it happening—the mice chewing down the flimsy walls, the lilacs growing up to her bedside, painted swallows and woodpeckers nesting just over her mother’s head and learning instead of their own bird calls to imitate her mother’s faint cries, Mazarine? Mazarine? as the light sifted through the tattered shingles.

  She steadied the lowest step with a rock lugged from against the side of the house, and then sat down again on the weathered wood. The smell of sun on the wood reminded her of the salty, dusty, summer boy smell of her brother’s hair. She pulled down a bunch of flowers and breathed deep. The lilac had benefited from her mother’s laziness—she tossed her wash water out the window instead of walking to the door. As the spring sun rose the fragrance intensified. Mazarine touched the side of her skirt and stirred the crackle of the letter in her pocket.