Eva’s fatal illness

Eva’s fatal illness culminates in her death, which Fidelis remembers as the loss of a love whose depth exceeded ordinary marital convention. The illness also frames a later turn toward Brauche: after the Mayo Clinic has failed to help Eva, a local healer is invited to treat Markus, while Eva’s earlier refusal of such treatment remains a measure of her own skepticism and of the gendered attitudes attached to women’s care.

Illness and the limits of treatment

Eva had been urged to consult a Braucher during her illness but refused, saying she had no time for Russian-Germans. Her sharp recollection of a saying from western settlements held that women’s deaths were not considered a tragedy, while the loss of horses was a disaster. The saying places her refusal within a world where women’s suffering could be discounted even as they were expected to endure and care for others.

After Eva’s death, the failure of the Mayo Clinic to help her becomes part of the reasoning for seeking another form of care for Markus. A cousin of Gus Newhall persuades Fidelis to allow a Braucher, described as a healing woman with family secrets, to visit the boy. The healer’s arrival thus follows both a practical hope—Brauche was considered especially effective with children—and the painful precedent of Eva’s illness, for which conventional treatment had offered no remedy.

Brauche and the healer’s methods

The account describes the healer’s practices through examples rather than through a cure for Eva. In one family, a Braucher tied an egg to a child’s stomach, transferred the illness into it, and burned the raw egg while speaking words intended to bind the illness in the yolk. The healer summoned for Markus was also a Messerin, or measurer: she read bodily measurements as signs of susceptibility to particular diseases and knew verses meant to repel harm from different parts of the body.

Delphine expected the woman to resemble her image of a Russian-German healer, complete with a black head covering and gathered apron-like skirt. Instead, she saw a small, neat, sturdy woman with short dark-brown hair and freckled skin. That contrast makes the healer concrete without resolving whether her practices will succeed; the evidence establishes the community’s reasons for calling her, not an outcome for Markus.

Fidelis’s memory of Eva

Fidelis’s recollection of Eva’s death returns to the burial, when he and each of the boys threw the first clods of earth onto her lowered casket. He had experienced her loss as a beautiful immensity passing overhead and had stood so still that the mourners saw him as rooted to the earth. Embarrassed by how he appeared, he forced himself to move away, yet later felt that some part of him had never left the edge of her grave.

That memory is joined to the physical awareness of being alive: his heart, mind, hands, and the earth in his palms remain present in recollection. The passage makes grief neither a completed farewell nor a simple absence. Eva is gone, but the moment of burial persists within Fidelis as a division between his continuing life and the life he shared with her.

Marriage, intimacy, and loss

After waking from a long sleep, Fidelis remembers the private intimacy he and Eva had developed over the years. He contrasts it with the casual way other men spoke about sex with their wives, believing that what he shared with Eva had a greater dimension, one inseparable from the possibility of loss. Her death therefore marks more than the end of a marriage: it destroys a particular bond that Fidelis understood as singular and difficult to explain.

That memory also illuminates his restraint toward Delphine. He and Delphine maintain strictly impersonal relations, speaking only about the business or the children and preserving an invisible boundary. In the wake of Eva’s death, Fidelis recognizes the force held back by that boundary without naming it or acting upon it. Eva’s illness and death thus remain active in the present: her absence shapes both his recollection of love and his conduct toward the woman working beside him.