The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  Helpless, Franz prowled the inside of the place, then got drenched and cold outside, walked in again, lights blazing. And slowly, as he paced, as he thought of what he’d been doing while all the while something at home went wrong, he rubbed his hands on his shirt to erase the feeling of Mazarine’s hair. He felt a terrible fear for his father, for them all, mixed with a deep embarrassment that he had lost all sense of duty and of time and fallen half asleep with her against him. Whatever happened, he grew convinced, was his fault. He stood outside shifting nervously, made another desperate round of the place. And then, as he made out small wavering lights approaching over the fields, he began to run toward them, shouting.

  TEN

  Earth Sickness

  MARKUS FELL into an illness after he came out of the hill. It wasn’t just the broken arm, though that was an interestingly complicated break, said Heech, but some other nameless invader dragged him down, made him feverish and sleepy. Delphine called it earth sickness. In her mind, the ground had chilled him and its influence still drew him toward the sullen coldness where his mother slept. When he looked at Delphine sometimes, his stare was so calm and unflinching that she couldn’t meet his eyes. Then one day she understood that his stare was only the mysterious regard of a newborn baby, and she let him be. She stopped trying to distract him with poems or amuse him with games. It occurred to her that he needed to think. To grow back into his life. The pupils of his green-blue eyes remained dilated. Yet, if he was filled with an interior blackness, it wasn’t after all the deathly effect of his burial, but that he was emerging from a strange gestation.

  One day she noticed that he’d begun to look more like Fidelis. It was the quality of penetrating silence, a place where he was comfortable. Though he seemed at once brand-new and older, she thought it best to treat him in some ways like a younger boy. She nursed him carefully along during the day, running back from the customers to make him eat the heavy dumpling soup that Eva had taught her to make for the boys when they were sick. She made him sit in the sun when there was sun. And when a dust of early snow fell over the bottom rails of the holding pens, and the back garden was a blue arrangement of frost, she made him stay near the window to get the reflection. She thought he needed light, constant light, bright light. She thought that he’d swallowed darkness in that hill.

  MAZARINE WAS RIDING her bicycle when Betty Zumbrugge passed her, as she had many times before, driving her father’s fancy car. Only this time when Mazarine narrowed her eyes to gaze into the windows of the car as it passed, she saw Franz, and he saw her. He looked at her right across Betty’s back as she bent forward to steer. Their eyes met for that one second, and then he was gone. There was no message in his look that Mazarine could read. The neutral and almost foolish expression on his face shocked her—she’d never seen him look stupid before.

  He turned back, upset, to gaze out the window. Seeing his distraction, Betty said, as if she didn’t know he had gone with Mazarine, “That’s Mazarine Shimek. She has one dress to her name.”

  “That’s not true,” said Franz, his voice awkward and despairing.

  He had not spoken to Mazarine since that last day beneath the pine, the time that made him obscurely responsible and her by extension, for the collapse of the hill. His thoughts veered off Mazarine and the wrongness of such happiness, which seemed to have been reckoned and judged by his brother’s near death. He looked over at Betty. Her face was tilted up to peer over the steering wheel, which gave her little pointed chin a charming shape. Her round cheeks were powdered and rouged, her red lips were drawn in a slick curve. Franz wondered what happened when you kissed a girl who was wearing lipstick. Would it get all over his own face? It was so shiny, like wet paint, dark as blood. The thought of his face smeared with red gave him a low thrill, and he shook his head suddenly to clear his thoughts.

  “What’s with you,” said Betty.

  “There’s a bee in the car,” said Franz, cranking open the window.

  “Scared of getting stung?” Betty’s voice was amused and coy.

  Franz shrugged uncomfortably, said nothing. He felt like grabbing Betty’s hands off the steering wheel, telling her to pull right over. Kissing her. At the same time, he thought that if she did pull over he’d jump right out the passenger’s side door and run like hell. Her hair was arranged so carefully he wondered how she ever slept—sitting up? There was a sharp smell of sweat when she lifted her arms. She couldn’t hide that. The feral scent made him shiver, as though he’d walked by the den of a fox.

  “Come home with me,” she said. “I need help with mathematics.”

  She smiled at the road, flying rough across a pothole. Franz wet his lips and told her he couldn’t go to her house, stumbled on explaining that he had to work. And right away. He was late in fact, his father would be waiting. The thought of all he had to do made him suddenly grateful. Betty shrugged and turned the car down his road. When she stopped before the shop, he jumped out. Safe, he rounded the hood and leaned down into her open window. From outside, he was able to laugh and apologize all at once in a natural way that he congratulated himself, later, for sustaining even while he ached to be alone.

  AFTER THE CAR PASSED, Mazarine got back on her bicycle and rode the rest of the way home over frozen dirt, her head buzzing, but calm, not weeping. She cleaned up after her mother, who was resting, and looked around for something to make for dinner. There were a few cups of flour left at the bottom of a sagging sack, a little lard in an old brown jar, three fat golden turnips with purple smears where the sun had hit them. She boiled the turnips with their peels on, scraped them and salted them. She made biscuits with the flour and the lard. She left a biscuit beside her mother’s bed, and then she sat on the steps of the rough little house, waiting for Roman. She ate her share of the dinner, slowly, and saved the rest in a clean towel for her brother. As she sat there it suddenly occurred to her that Betty Zumbrugge had a z in her name too. When Mazarine thought of this she froze, staring at the bare tangle of young trees at the side of the yard. And then, with no warning, tears spurted up in her eyes, tipped over her cheeks, and ran straight down, hitting the tops of her hands.

  A COUSIN OF Gus Newhall’s was married to a Braucher, a healing woman. This woman had some powerful healing secrets passed down from her family, he said, persuading Fidelis to let the woman visit Markus. In her own illness, Eva had been urged to see such a person, but as she had no time for Russian-Germans, she would not. “They wear out their women,” Eva had said, and recited a saying she’d heard from those western settlements.

  Weiberschterba, koi Verderba

  Pferdeverrecka, des brengt Shrecke.

  “In other words,” she said, “when women die it is not a tragedy. But when horses die, it is a disaster!”

  No one could deny now that the most renowned clinic in the Middle West had failed to do a thing for Eva. Besides that, it was well-known that the practice of Brauche was especially effective in dealing with children. Another customer’s family had allowed this Braucher woman to tie an egg to the stomach of their child, transfer an illness into the egg, and then burn the raw egg in the fire as she said the precise words to bind the illness in the burning yolk. She was also an accomplished Messerin, a measurer, who read tendencies to certain diseases in people’s measurements and knew the appropriate Brauche verse to repel harm from each part of the body. So the woman was sent for, and one day she showed herself at the door of the shop. She was not wearing a black head shawl/scarf of the Russian-Germans, as Delphine had expected, or a gathered apron-type skirt, nor was she even fat. She was a small, neat, sturdy little woman with short dark brown hair and ruddy, freckled skin.

  “Wo ist das Kind?” she asked, all business.

  Delphine brought her into the boys’ bedroom, where Markus lay sleeping underneath a pile of quilts, and called Fidelis, who came and stood in the doorway. From her handbag, the woman drew a length of blue string, which she wound on her hand as she drew the blankets away f
rom Markus and gently awakened him. She spoke some quiet words to him in German, then asked him in English to please lie still on his back while she measured him. Still caught up in his dreams, Markus obediently stretched his arms out while she put the string to them. As she worked, his eyes widened, his face took on an expression of disbelief. The Braucher measured all of him—torso, thighs, neck, hands, feet, and head—and then she stared at him assessingly, put the string back upon him, measuring in the same sequence, only this time reciting German words in a calm firm voice every time she moved the string. By now Markus had gone rigid with an outraged fear, but neither Delphine nor Fidelis really noticed him. They were caught up in the drama of the measuring. When she was finished, the Braucher pulled the covers up around Markus’s neck, patted him gently, and turned away. On her way out, Fidelis paid the woman a shoulder picnic ham. Delphine was distracted by customers, and so she did not check back in on Markus. Meanwhile, he lay in his darkened room, thinking.

  “Hello.” He suddenly appeared in the doorway that led into the shop. “I’m hungry,” he said for the first time in many weeks.

  His voice was flat, suspicious, and he looked sideways at Delphine in a way she didn’t understand. “You feel better?” she asked, amazed at the Braucher’s success. She brought him back and sat him down at the kitchen table. Markus nodded, sullen and watchful. Slowly, he swallowed spoon after spoon of potato soup, sopped it up doggedly with bread. “I’m going to school,” he announced, and picked up his books with his good arm.

  Delphine stopped him, put a hand on his forehead. He glowered up at her from underneath her fingers.

  “You still have a bit of fever.”

  “I don’t care.” He knocked her hand away and moved past her with stiff dignity. It was clear that he was terribly offended, but Delphine had no idea in what way until Franz asked, a few days later, “What’s this about Markus getting measured for a coffin?”

  Delphine looked at him, speechless at first. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s telling all the kids in school, bragging sort of, that he was almost dead. That the undertaker’s wife came and measured him for a coffin.”

  Delphine had meant to tell him the truth, but then, she feared suddenly, what if he were to simply crawl back into bed? And refuse to be roused this time at all? Whatever else, the Braucher’s visit had infused him with an indignant horror necessary to his sudden improvement. Markus did seem recovered, though he moved with an air of self-righteous injury and babied his arm. She waited for several weeks before she told Markus what had truly happened. By then, his nameless sickness had entirely passed, and he was firmly among the living.

  ELEVEN

  The Christmas Sun

  THE SNOW FELL as a bitter powder all December, light dustings that did not soften the earth’s iron. The sky was clear. Day after day the sun rose, attended by two fierce sun dogs, glittering with collars of rainbows, cold fire. Where the snow was blown aside, the old plow marks and grooves in the earth sprouted a miserable stubble of wheat and cornstalks. In some places, where the crops had entirely failed, the dirt had drifted up against some lone tree or the occasional fence line. The dirt went so deep it would not be lost, it would always be there, but already it was clear that a great deal of the life was sucked from it. In higher places, the soil had leached an anemic whitish gray, like an old man’s pallor. The stuff mixed with the snow to make a gritty and punishing substance that polished the paint from the houses in Argus, and painfully scoured the cheeks of schoolchildren, who walked to school backward with their arms tucked up in their sleeves, in little groups, taking turns as lookouts. Snow is a blessing when it softens the edges of the world, when it falls like a blanket trapping warm pockets of air. This snow was the opposite—it outlined the edges of things and made the town look meaner, bereft, merely tedious, like a mistake set down upon the earth and only half erased.

  TANTE DID NOT GIVE UP when the suit betrayed her, she couldn’t, not even when that first day she was nearly run over in it. Not even when she was sneered at and glared through in the county offices. She made the rounds. She went back to the bank so often that the tellers rolled their eyes at her approach. She even considered for a brief, mad moment approaching the owner of the pool hall and asking if he needed someone to clean. She got as close as the back entrance. But the smell of stale beer, sweat, piss, and worse, as well as the knowledge of what she’d find there for trash, was too revolting. What awful something might be hers to scrub and wash, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t overcome even the phantom of her disgust. So she went on searching. And to its credit, the suit held up. The fibers of the weave did not wilt or fray. The suit carried itself around her like a shield. Even when she’d failed for the day and dragged herself toward home, and some scrap of a meal, the suit rallied her and stiffened her resolve. Instead of starving that night, she went to her brother’s and straightened her back before she entered, swept in as she always had, snatched the food as though it was her due, grandly, because she had to claim it without humility, or she could not claim it at all, not in front of Delphine, whom she both depended upon and hated.

  Ever since the hill, Tante had found that Fidelis was more sympathetic to her ideas about bringing the boys back to be raised in Germany. She couldn’t help pointing out that Fidelis’s sons had gotten themselves into tremendous danger. What might happen next? It could be worse! And they were boys, hell-bent, saint-worshiping, furiously happy, danger-loving boys, no doubt about that. They would get into trouble if they could. Tante felt it her duty to tell Fidelis that she doubted that, even with Delphine there for part of the day, he could keep a close enough eye on his sons. They were not safe. They were running wild and swatting themselves with the sign of the cross. And with the wages he had to pay in the shop he could barely keep shoes on their feet. You could see the newspaper linings inside of their old boots. She went on in this way until Fidelis left the room, but she could see that she’d made an impression of some sort. She played on his guilt over what might have happened, what came so close. Markus buried in the hill.

  In the suit, the sun glancing off it in the afternoons, a heavy set of woolen underwear beneath keeping her snug, Tante made her way through the town, thickening her skin for the inevitable refusals. She went out. She asked for work. And then one day she actually got hired.

  The place had just opened, whatever it was. At first it was hard to tell what exactly was sold there. A jumble of baskets and tobacco cans spilled out onto the sidewalk. A wide front window held bolts of new fabric and neatly cut piles of old, a large tin sieve with half-moon handles carved of horn, some handmade lace, rickrack, ribbons, and a brand-new sewing machine. A placard on the door said merely Notions. Tante stepped close, entered. On the other side of the half-painted, half-scraped door, there was a battered dressmaker’s dummy, more bolts of fabric—all sorts, from wools to calico—and a display of brilliant hat trims. There were also baskets of dyed feathers, ten kinds of machine lace, a fur collar that would have looked very fine sewed to her old black coat. There were used mason jars, odd pieces of silverware, rolls of chicken wire in a corner, a perfectly good rake hanging on the wall. Squash, cucumber and pumpkin vine seeds. Scrap paper. The variety of things for sale was bewildering, cheerful, a bold mishmash. Tante walked around the small shop once and then addressed a stern and orderly-looking woman behind the counter, asked her usual question. Whether there was work to be had. The woman walked out from behind the counter, hugely pregnant, and said, “I got to stop for a while. Can you sell?”

  “I can sell!” said Tante, her voice stout and grim.

  “Then just a minute,” said the woman. “I’ll get my boss.”

  She went behind a muslin curtain, spoke to someone, and then out walked Step-and-a-Half.

  At first, Tante didn’t register the situation, and she gave Step-and-a-Half the irritated once-over, the condescending twitch of her mouth, that, at best, she gave her at Waldvogel’s when Step-and-a-
Half claimed her scraps. And she waited, staring past the saleswoman, for the boss to appear. Then she looked back at the woman behind the counter, and at Step-and-a-Half, who was regarding her with a tigerish amusement.

  “Well?” said Step-and-a-Half.

  “I’m here to see the boss,” said Tante, her eyes flicking all around the little room.

  “You’re looking at the boss,” said Step-and-a-Half.

  Tante heard that. Her head swiveled, and the complicated knots of her hair fairly writhed at her sharp movement. She thought that she couldn’t have heard right, and gave a short, barking laugh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This here is my place.”

  The woman behind the counter blew the air out her cheeks impatiently. “Well you said you was looking for work, didn’t you?”

  Tante still couldn’t take it in, but she nodded dumbly in the affirmative. Then cleared her throat and said in meek puzzlement, “Yes.”

  “Can you sell?” Step-and-a-Half asked the question now.

  Somehow an affirmative answer emerged from Tante.

  “And do you know a damn thing about all this stuff?” Step-and-a-Half swept her arm around the festooned store walls. The supercilious grandeur that had always seemed absurd when she was a scrap hauler now seemed more appropriate for the owner of sumptuous bolts of fabric, the huge variety of extraordinary pickings and leavings stacked in piles and lovingly displayed on nails or set off in a celebratory way on shelves.

  Though she still had not emerged from her shock, Tante took up the challenge. “I know much!”

  “And do you have to wear that thing?”