Read The Master Butcher's Singing Club for Free Online Page B

the area. He triumphed. On Thursdays, his sausage-making days, customers began to gather in order to buy links hot from the kettle, before they were even smoked, which made Kozka happy because the sausages weighed more then. As for Fidelis, he lived off sausage ends and bruised fruit, stale cookies and suspect trimmings. He made his own beer, washed his own shirts and aprons, and lived altogether sparingly until he’d saved enough to rent a bigger place. With the rest of his hoard, plus a windfall from his parents, he brought Eva over the empty sea into the emptiness of sky and earth.
    She arrived on a wild spring day, along with the little boy, Franz, who walked off the train proud to carry his mother’s purse. Since the week Fidelis had come home from the war and heard the silky music of sunlight, he had not been afflicted with any similar confusion of the senses. And yet, as the result of extremely hard work at two jobs or even three at once, Fidelis had undergone the effects of sleep deprivation and found himself talking out loud when he thought he was merely thinking. In the excitement of their meeting, Fidelis spoke into the swirl of Eva’s hair. Alles, alles , he muttered without thinking, and Eva, knowing what he meant but appalled at her surroundings, could not help thinking, What “everything”? What was there? Even with the houses and shops, the land seemed barren as a moonscape. On the way to Argus, as the train took them cross-country, she had watched the signs ofhuman presence diminish and felt a combination of horror and grief. Around dusk she had even thought that she saw, from the train window, wolves melting into the faltering shadows of small trees. She couldn’t be sure. But she did think that her husband’s offer of alles , everything, was farcical. Even in that moment that should have been sublime—their meeting, at last—her lips curled in disbelief. Yet she didn’t understand his meaning.
    Once more in her presence, Fidelis felt the emotion of love move through his body like a great, rough, startling beast. It came out of him and then its power wrapped them both. In its grip, he surrendered and gave everything he was or could possibly be to the woman in his arms. When a man of such strength lets himself be overcome, the earth of his being shudders. He is immensely alone. Eva might have understood Fidelis then, if he’d had the courage to elaborate, but since he didn’t, she merely smiled into his face, kissed him, and decided with a certain bravado that although there was not a damn thing of interest or value in sight, there would be. And she, Eva Waldvogel, would see to it.
    THE MAN WHO FIRST hired Fidelis Waldvogel became his chief and then only competitor in Argus. Pete Kozka was a good-natured but humorless block of a man, always in need of help since his ways were cheap and men quit. A tornado had touched down at his shop, once. Pennies from the change drawer had been driven neatly into the plaster wall. People came by just to see that. As rivalries go, that between the two butchers was amicable enough, based chiefly on pranks and boasts. Sometimes, though, things turned more serious. An ongoing joke that got out of control did a great deal, in fact, to sour relations between the two. This occurred after Fidelis left Kozka’s meat market and set up his own operation at the other end of town. Since Fidelis had never hidden his intention to do just that, Kozka suffered the move with a stoic shrug. At the time, too, it looked as though Argus might grow forever, even possibly become a major metropolis if the county itself continued to boom in land sales. Although it did not work out that way, when Fidelis made his move there was plenty of business to go around.
    With a bank loan and the money from the sale of his share of a building that the Waldvogel family owned back in Ludwigsruhe, Fidelis bought up an old farmstead on the opposite side of town, as far from the Kozkas as it was possible