The morphine crisis in Eva's sickroom

The morphine crisis in Eva's sickroom turns a painful medical emergency into a contest over who gets to decide what care Eva may receive. When Tante secretly removes the medicine on the belief that Eva is addicted, Delphine must face not only the scarcity of morphine but also the peril of having another person’s judgment imposed on a woman in agony. Roy’s illegal recovery of a replacement dose reverses the immediate danger: the father Delphine has long associated with alcohol becomes the person who brings the medicine that may quiet Eva’s suffering.

The medicine disappears

The crisis unfolds during a Fourth of July gathering at the Waldvogel home. The men have been drinking and singing—German drinking songs alongside “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”—while Fidelis entertains them by lifting Sheriff Hock by the belt loop with his teeth. Delphine sees the effort as an attempt to distract Eva from her illness, a gesture of fierce devotion that also exposes how helpless Fidelis is against her sickness.

When Delphine goes to fetch Eva’s medicine, she searches the icebox and finds that the morphine is gone. Fidelis had labored to pay for it, and Delphine had guarded it carefully; now the vial, powder, and other syringe are missing. Eva is already restless. Delphine tells Fidelis someone has stolen the medicine, then gives Eva the remaining opium wine. Eva vomits it back up and struggles to contain her pain, asking for a rolled washcloth to bite as she gasps and arches off the bed.

Delphine confronts Tante

There is no quick replacement. It will take hours to obtain another batch through Doctor Heech and then locate the pharmacist, and Delphine fears the wait while Eva’s suffering intensifies. She drives not to the doctor first but to Tante’s house, two blocks from the Lutheran church. Delphine recalls Tante’s quiet discussions with her prayer companions about Eva’s dose, and reads the older woman’s expression at the door as confirmation that she has guessed correctly.

Tante pretends not to understand Delphine’s question about the medicine. Delphine pushes past her and searches the refrigerator; on a table she spots a long object wrapped in a handkerchief. It is the missing hypodermic. Holding the needle, she confronts Tante, accusing her of secretly using drugs herself. The accusation comes amid a desperate effort to recover the medicine, not as a settled account of Tante’s habits.

Tante says that Doctor Heech does not really know Eva as she does, claims that Eva is addicted, and invokes her friend Mrs. Orlen Sorven as confirmation. Then she says she has thrown the medicine down the sinkhole. The sight of a clean-washed vial and the morphine bottle drying beside Tante’s porcelain sink shows Delphine that the medicine has been deliberately disposed of. Delphine grabs Tante by the bodice, tells her to come and nurse Eva through what follows, and drags her to the car. She takes Tante back to the house and leaves her there with Eva before driving away to seek a replacement.

The search and Roy’s return

Delphine spends hours trying to find Doctor Heech and Sal Birdy, the drugstore keeper, but neither is available. Fidelis is searching too, though Delphine does not encounter him. Her repeated failure to secure medicine leaves her returning toward home empty-handed, furious and in tears. Along the road she sees Roy, disheveled and stumbling, and briefly imagines running him over. She then recognizes that his eyes are clear and that he is headed toward the butcher shop.

Roy is carrying a brown, square-shouldered bottle labeled sulphate of morphia, not the liquor Delphine expects. He has broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock on the cabinet where Sal keeps the drugs that must be secured by law. His theft is illegal, but in this emergency it supplies the medicine Delphine has been unable to obtain. The bottle changes Delphine’s immediate expectation: the father she despises and fears may fail her has returned with the precise thing Eva needs.

Eva’s agony and the medicine’s arrival

As Delphine brakes, jumps from the truck, and hurries into the house with Roy’s bottle, she hears Eva’s high, keening cry. Inside, smashed canning litters the kitchen. Tante is slumped on the floor, white and shocked; Franz and Markus are crying and holding on to their mother as Eva rummages in a drawer for a knife. Her attention has narrowed to the necessity of ending her agony, and even Franz cannot restrain her.

Delphine enters with the bottle and responds with the practiced competence she has summoned in other scenes of mayhem. She takes the knife away and tells Eva not now, urging her not to leave her boys. The immediate crisis is not a cure for Eva’s illness: it is a struggle to get her through a wave of pain without letting that pain claim her before the medicine can be prepared.

Delphine gives the children concrete tasks. She asks Franz for a blanket and pillow, then tells Markus to hold Eva’s hand and keep telling her that the medicine is being made and will come soon. Franz’s tears dry as he gains something to do. The scene shifts from the helpless spectacle of Eva’s suffering to a fragile, shared act of care: Delphine prepares the medicine while the boys stay physically and verbally close to their mother.

Care, authority, and reversal

The crisis places competing ideas of care in direct opposition. Tante presents withholding the drug as protection from addiction and claims personal knowledge of Eva that the doctor supposedly lacks. Delphine’s response is grounded in the visible emergency before her: the prescribed medicine is gone, the opium wine cannot stay down, and Eva is in such pain that she reaches for a knife. Tante’s intervention does not relieve that suffering; it forces Delphine to spend crucial hours trying to replace what has been destroyed.

The episode also reverses the family roles Delphine expects. Fidelis’s performance for the men briefly makes him look physically powerful, but Delphine recognizes that his strength cannot touch Eva’s disease. Roy, by contrast, appears at first as the familiar drunk whose presence provokes Delphine’s anger; then his clear eyes and the stolen morphine bottle reveal an urgent act that helps preserve Eva’s immediate safety. The medicine moves through a sequence of loss, confrontation, and illicit recovery, while care itself passes among Delphine, Roy, and the children. Delphine remains the person who must turn those separate actions into practical help: she finds the vial, searches for a lawful supply, brings Roy’s bottle inside, removes the knife, and gives each boy a way to stay with Eva.