Eva's morphine

Eva's morphine is both a carefully managed medicine and the focus of a crisis that exposes the costs of care in the Waldvogel household. Delphine learns to prepare and administer it for her dying friend, judging the need for relief by Eva's expression rather than by a schedule. When Tante removes the supply in an attempt to control Eva's treatment, the loss leaves Eva in acute pain and drives Delphine and Roy into desperate action. The medicine's later role in Roy's arrest makes the bottle a material record of competing claims to care, authority, and responsibility.

Preparation and Care

Doctor Heech teaches Delphine to make Magendie's solution fresh, so fungus will not develop, and instructs her to sterilize the hypodermic needle. Before a Fourth of July gathering, Delphine has already prepared a vial of the one-to-thirty solution and stored it in the icebox. She boils water for the needle and recognizes that Eva needs another dose from the lucid shock in her friend's stare, her half-open mouth, and clenched brows—not simply from the time since the previous injection.

The work is intimate but difficult for Delphine. She hates needles and feels sick and hollow when filling the syringe or piercing her own flesh to give Eva a dose, yet takes pride in being, as Heech tells her, better than any nurse at administering it. She also attends to Eva's hands, massaging their sore joints while waiting for the water to boil. Morphine is thus embedded in a wider practice of care: close observation, preparation, physical comfort, and Delphine's willingness to perform a task that frightens her.

Delphine's stewardship extends to protecting the drug and its means of administration. The vial, powder, and another syringe are kept in the icebox, a location she searches repeatedly when she discovers they are gone. The supply represents not an abstract treatment but the next dose on which Eva's relief depends; its disappearance immediately changes the household's practical and emotional balance.

The Missing Supply and Eva's Crisis

During the Fourth of July celebration, the men resume singing after Fidelis has lifted Sheriff Hock by the belt loop with his teeth. Delphine goes to the icebox for Eva's morphine and finds the vial, powder, and syringe missing. Eva is already restless in the adjoining room. Delphine tells Fidelis that someone has stolen the medicine, then gives Eva the remaining opium wine, which Eva vomits almost at once.

Eva's pain escalates into gasping, shallow breaths and a scream. She asks for a rolled washcloth to bite, while Delphine understands that another batch cannot be obtained from Doctor Heech and the pharmacist for hours. The contrast is stark: the gathering's raucous songs continue outside, while in the sickroom Eva endures pain that the medicine had been controlling. Delphine leaves to find a replacement, first diverting to Tante's house because she suspects her of taking the supply.

At Tante's, Delphine finds the missing hypodermic wrapped in a handkerchief and demands to know where Eva's medicine is. Tante says she does not know, then argues that Heech feels too sorry for Eva and that Eva is addicted. Delphine sees the cleaned vial and morphine bottle drying beside the porcelain sink. Tante says she has thrown the medicine down the sinkhole, but the objects on the sink contradict her claim that it has been destroyed. Delphine grabs Tante by the bodice, forces her into the car, and takes her back to the house to nurse Eva while Delphine searches for more medicine.

Roy's Replacement and Its Cost

Delphine cannot find Heech or Sal Birdy, the drugstore keeper. Returning empty-handed, furious and tearless, she sees her father, Roy, stumbling along the road toward the butcher shop. At first she assumes he is after alcohol; then she notices that he is carrying a brown, square-shouldered bottle in both hands. Its label identifies the contents as sulphate of morphia. Roy has broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock on the cabinet where Sal keeps legally controlled drugs to obtain it.

Delphine rushes the bottle to the house. Inside, Eva is in such agony that she is searching a drawer for a knife, while Markus and Franz weep and try to restrain her; Tante has collapsed in shock. Delphine takes the knife from Eva and tells her not to act yet, because she has brought the medicine. The bottle's return makes relief possible, but the rescue comes through an illegal break-in and at a moment when Eva's suffering has stripped the household's ordinary routines of meaning.

The theft does not remain private. Fidelis goes to Sheriff Hock soon afterward and explains the circumstances; he also pays Sal Birdy a little each month for the medicine, and Sal accepts the arrangement. Even so, Hock later arrests Roy for the old theft, behaving as though he has only just begun the investigation. Roy goes peacefully to the jail cell he had often occupied while drunk, but sobriety changes his response to confinement: he asks for pine-scented ammonia, a mop, bucket, water, brush, and rags, and tries to clean the cell and beat bugs out of the mattress.

Meaning and Aftermath

The morphine's plot significance rests on a collision between medical care and control. Delphine follows Heech's instructions, monitors Eva's pain, and guards the prepared doses; Tante distrusts the doctor and interprets the treatment as addiction, withholding a medicine Eva depends on. The conflict is not merely over possession of a bottle: Tante's intervention forces Delphine to choose between finding a new supply and leaving Eva in the care of the person who has taken it.

Roy's actions reverse Delphine's first judgment of him. In the midst of the crisis she sees him approaching the shop and briefly assumes that he is seeking schnapps, but the bottle he carefully carries is morphine for Eva. His choice to obtain it by breaking into the drugstore exposes him to arrest, while Fidelis's repayment and explanation do not prevent Sheriff Hock from taking him into custody. The object therefore links a moment of rescue to a later punishment, and turns Roy's care for Eva into a public offense.

The episode also gives the medicine a recurring afterlife beyond Eva's immediate sickroom. The theft becomes the basis for Roy's arrest, despite Fidelis having disclosed the circumstances and made payments to Sal. What had first been an instrument of relief is recast in legal terms as stolen property. Across these events, Eva's morphine marks the distance between the care people try to provide and the institutions and family authorities that claim the right to regulate it.