The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  She had to contain herself, had to control the jolting of her heart, but the awful sense of outrage was too rich a soil. Instant, snaky, quick-growing weeds were bolting up inside her. She wrung her hands together, suddenly giving way. Catching hold of herself again, she calmly left the sight of the sheriff in her bedroom, and she walked down the stairs. She kept her hand on the railing, so as not to trip. Why should she be the one to trip and fall? Perhaps he would trip, Sheriff Hock. She imagined his huge bulk slipping and windmilling down the first flight, breaking in two pieces at the landing, and then in quarters at the bottom like a china pig. She almost laughed at the sight. The picture lightened her frame of mind. Maybe she’d step outdoors, have a rare smoke to calm herself. After all, what was there to find? The dress was gone—dug up and disposed of in a clever way. She congratulated herself, and then she thought of how, once ripped by Hock, the damn thing dripped beads. She remembered the broken threads, the thousands of broken threads, and there was suddenly an icy little whirl in her chest.

  Clarisse walked rigidly down the steps to where she kept her cigarettes—in the kitchen, on a shelf, in a little airtight can right above the knives. And the knives, she stored them safely in a drawer where knives should always be kept—safe from little hands. Hers were the only little hands in the house. Suddenly she found that instead of removing a cigarette from the can, she was opening the drawer. Then she was examining her favorite knife, a long, slender carving knife. It was a beautiful, tempered blade with a slight curve to it. Clarisse tested the blade with her thumb, then removed a small whetstone from the drawer. Sharpening the blade was routine—she kept her knives very keen. She tested the edge again and it still drew no blood. She paused a moment, then leaned into the work and made the blade edgier yet. As she was sharpening the knife to a whisper, she thought how it was a shame that so many people—even her best friend, Delphine, and Sheriff Hock, for certain—underestimated her. She wouldn’t kill him, of course, but she could scare him off. He’d have to leave and once he was gone she’d bolt the doors. She’d get a lawyer, not one in Zumbrugge’s pocket. A real lawyer. Maybe one from Minneapolis. She’d tell all to her uncle, though she was ashamed. Together they’d make certain that a Strub was not threatened and chased around and made to endure invasions of personal underwear drawers. She would have to burn every slip, bra, and panty he had touched, Sheriff Hock, and they were nice things. She spent a lot of money on slips, especially, real silk.

  She wished she had the red dress. She’d felt invincible that time she put it on and wore it to the wake underneath a somber black coat. That dress had given her the courage to accept that her father was gone. The rustle of blood-red beads had assisted her in saying good-bye to him. The knife wavered. The unholy nerve of Hock to corner her at her own father’s wake! Maybe, if only he hadn’t put his mouth on her, she wouldn’t have slugged him so hard. He had tried to take away the purity of her own grief, and no one knew better than she what a sacred and precious thing true grief was. He pretended he was comforting her. Well, maybe he actually believed that! Carefully, she straightened the blade and made certain she hadn’t put a small nick in the edge. But it was persnickety sharp now. She thought of Delphine, then of the Scottish play, a black primer for my quailing heart. She’d lost fear. She gave the knife an extra razor’s edge, imagining that it was by now so sharp the sheriff might not feel it, at first.

  When she entered her own bedroom, and told him to leave again, she gave him fair warning. She kept the knife behind her back, but said, with only the slightest tremor in her voice, “I’m warning you, Sheriff Hock. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to hurt you.”

  He stood. He had the nerve to smile at her, and then to try to engage her in a long look, to penetrate her defenses.

  “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,” he said gently. “I warned you, too.”

  He gave a small laugh, his lips budding modestly. “Why not me, Clarisse? There’s nothing unacceptable about me, I have a good job, prestigious even. I do not drink. I do not sleep with other women and I never will. Take a look at yourself. You’re pretty as an angel, but you’re an undertaker. Men are scared off by your line of work. Not me.”

  Hock held his arms out, and his smile was feral, his eyes filled with an ignorant and innocent greed. When Clarisse did not step toward him, he dropped his arms slowly. He reached into his pocket and plucked out a piece of paper with one red glass bead folded into it.

  “I found it here,” he said. “State’s evidence.”

  “State’s evidence? Oh, for God sake’s, don’t be ridiculous. Let me see that.” Clarisse snatched at the paper with her free hand.

  “Uh, uh, uh,” he gave an awful, playful croon. Then he tucked the bead back into the paper, folded the paper into the breast pocket of his shirt, opened his arms, and lunged.

  Her arm thrust forward on its own.

  He didn’t know what had happened, not at first. He turned away in shock, and in turning he even did some of the work for her. He wrenched around so that she could see in her mind’s eye the keen blade slide along inside of him, lopping apart viscera. The stuff that spilled out inside of him would kill him, but much too slowly. Quick is better, she thought, and she reacted only to her thoughts, which remained steady and rational. She had to use the knife as a saw. Fast as she could, she cut right across his midsection as he threw up his hand and tried to struggle away. She bobbed side to side without letting go the wooden handle. She had to use both hands and avoid his flailing clutch. He was tougher than she’d thought, but through her work she had developed a shocking strength in her grip. How very surprised he was to see the knife move along his belly with such speed, parting the threads of his shirt. Absurd phrases formed in her head. Her thoughts were strange and far away. He is distinctly not pleased! He was, she saw, extremely troubled at this unexpected development. His brows knit and he seemed unable to say a word. Just stared at her, mystified. He did not expect this, after all, and she had some sympathy—surprises were not for her, either, and this was a very big one.

  “Sit down,” she said, her voice neutral and informative. “It won’t take long.”

  He thumped backward, rattling her closet door on its hinges, soaking her silken slips and puddling blood in her shoes. Quickly, she snatched her favorites from beneath him. With a grim satisfaction she saw, too, that he had used his pocketknife to pry another red glass bead from a crack in the floor. So much for that! She plucked the bead up, showed it to him, opened her mouth and swallowed it. He looked very dull now, even stupid. After a while, checking his pulse, she felt it slow to a terminal pump and then with clinical care she watched the pupils of his eyes become stuck and unresponsive. Nobody home, she finally said. She realized she’d hardly breathed. Standing, she put one hand on her chest and the other on her abdomen, drew in new air from the lowest point of her midsection, just like in voice class. Thought of hiding him. But what was the point, anyway, of standing him up in her closet? That would hardly do the trick for long. She threw a tantrum—tears and wild, sobbing groans that she could hear from a place outside herself. The noises she made filled the room, alarming her. Shut up now, she counseled, or you’ll never stop. She crossed the hall to draw herself a bath.

  While the water was running she removed the knife from the sheriff, washed it clean. She covered him with an old bedspread, reached past him into the closet. From under her bed she drew a large brown suitcase. After she was clean, she would pack.

  The next day was Christmas Eve and as Clarisse soaked she made her plans. The thing now was to act, not to feel anything. She’d have to visit the bank during the day, of course, and then she thought with sudden approval that it was a very good time to take out her money. People spent so much at Christmas on unexpected or extravagant gifts. The problem was that people also often died around Christmas, and there might be emergencies at work. After Christmas, though, people usually waited until after New Year’s to die. “Except for you
,” she called to the sheriff across the hall. “You couldn’t wait.” After the bank, she thought, she’d get herself organized, pack some more, lightly but sensibly, and plan her route. With some satisfaction she realized that, if she was very efficient and if all worked out properly, she’d be able to go to Midnight Mass just as she always had, and then she could snatch a few hours of sleep, before she left on the morning train.

  CYPRIAN KNEW, but the knowing did not help him. Nothing was going to happen with Delphine. Christmas brought it all out in the open, which was not surprising. As both of them had long agreed anyway, that holiday was a booby trap. What made it worse was that Cyprian was trying to make it the first good Christmas ever. He had wanted to make up for the lack of Christmas in Delphine’s childhood. Maybe his, too. Their Christmases had never been anything more than occasions for their parents to get spectacularly drunk. There were no special dinners, no little gifts, no garlands, no paper stars or candles in the window. Only the cold iron stove the children tried to stoke all by themselves. There was no school to divert them and no teacher to feed them from her own lunch pail, just bumbling adults reeling in at all hours and falling full length on the kitchen floor.

  Remembering this, Cyprian went out and bought a goose from a Bohemian farmer who’d fattened it on corn and grain. And Delphine made strings of popcorn and paper chains with the boys and got Franz to take a hatchet out to the woods and cut two young pines. She’d decorated one for Fidelis and the boys, and tied the other to the hood of the car and brought it home. She had candles, too, in little tin holders with small reflecting shields behind the flames. Each of the boys had gifts, and there was one for Cyprian and one for Roy. Although Cyprian tried not to wonder if Delphine had bought or made a gift for Fidelis, too, he couldn’t help it. He did wonder. A few days ago, he had even dug into her dresser to see if he could find a wrapped suspicious object, but he found nothing except her clothes indifferently folded, and then his own gift, which looked like a scarf. What he did embarrassed him. He’d thought he wasn’t the sort of person who would rummage through a woman’s things, but now it looked like he was. He’d gone out and bought her an extravagant ruby ring.

  When he picked her up from work on Christmas Eve, she was brooding over something and said little on the way home.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Tired.” She told him that everybody had come in at the last minute for their goose or turkey or pork roasts or whatever they were having on the holiday, plus they’d wanted special cuts or trimmings of all kinds, and there were last-minute requests and then, too, she’d tried to make a stollen cake and that failed. After that she burned a batch of cookies for the boys. He tried not to think of Fidelis. Were those cookies really for him? Anyway, her tiredness was understandable, and he thought, trying to put it optimistically, it would make his surprise dinner for her all the better. He had just dropped Roy off at the back door of Step-and-a-Half’s shop. She had a room over the store, which she had leased with the stashes of money that, it was rumored, she had kept buried in tin snuffboxes under rocks, trees, signs, fence posts all along the roads she traveled, far onto the plains. She was hardly ever at the shop, so Roy often kept the fire going when the temperature dropped. Cyprian and Delphine would be alone.

  “You’re going to like what I cooked,” said Cyprian.

  “You cooked?”

  Her voice was polite, but listless. Cyprian looked at her, folded in the seat next to him. She seemed small that night, almost delicate, although he knew she was sturdy and her fragility was only a trick of the light, moving across the planes of her face, and the reflected blueness of the winter sky and earth. She seemed lonely, but he really couldn’t figure it, for he was there, ready to cook for her and sing if she wanted and give her the ring over which the jeweler had sighed, upon selling at that price, saying it was his favorite piece, and he really shouldn’t, but he needed Christmas money, too.

  “Come on,” said Cyprian coaxingly, “I bought us a special bottle of brandy, real old. We’ll toast the holidays to come.”

  “Oh,” said Delphine—unpleasantly, thought Cyprian. “Our future.” There was a note of contempt or derision in her voice that stabbed at his cheer, but he willed himself to ignore it and went on with his mental planning. Instead of talking, he whistled an old tune he thought, vaguely, might be a Christmas tune.

  “Why are you whistling that?” said Delphine after a while.

  “What?”

  “’Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.’”

  He said nothing, hurt.

  “Oh,” she said after a while. Her dark mood surprised her. She couldn’t figure it. All day she’d struggled out of her low feelings only to sink back in. Now, she made a new effort, spoke kindly. “I get it … of the coming of the Lord. ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’ The birth of Jesus. Sure.”

  “Right,” he said shortly, pulling up the road he’d shoveled that morning. He got out of the car, slammed the door a bit too hard, and breathed deeply of the cold, still, blue air. The purity of it hurt his lungs. He breathed until he’d recovered his equilibrium and then he thought of his attempt at baking gingerbread. Surely that would, at least, make her laugh. But when she walked in the door, she only said, “God, burnt gingerbread!” She dumped her things on the floor, kicked off her boots, and groaned as she eased herself into the chair across from the Christmas tree.

  “I feel old,” she said, really to herself. “I feel a thousand years old tonight.”

  “You’re just used to a lousy Christmas,” said Cyprian. “Here.” He handed her a piece of the stone-dry gingerbread, with the burnt part scraped off, wrapped in a clean dish towel, then he blew up the fire in the stove and stoked it with two logs. He shut the door tight and opened the flue all the way so that the fire would roar up inside and make a cozy crackling noise. He took out his box of matches and lighted the candles on the window, the candles on the tree. She was quiet when he did this, and although he didn’t turn to look at her he was sure it was because she was finally appreciating his efforts, feeling the peacefulness of the night, maybe tasting her gingerbread, getting used to the fact that he was taking care of her. But when he turned around, he saw that she’d fallen asleep with the gingerbread, still wrapped, on her knees.

  “Oh, the hell with it,” he said, loud enough to wake her, but she didn’t wake. He blew out all the candles and went into the kitchen and fixed what he hoped was a passable oyster soup. When it was nice and hot, he poured the milky soup into a shallow bowl, stuck crackers all the way around it, and then peppered it and laid a lump of butter on top to melt. He brought the bowl in to her and set it on the floor. Kneeling beside the chair, he kissed her cheek, waked her gently. When she opened her eyes, he saw that she’d really not been asleep, she’d been crying, which he didn’t need. Not that night. He gave her the bowl of soup.

  “Thanks, that’s nice,” she had the grace to say. “Where’s yours?”

  “I’m getting it.” He went back to the kitchen, ladled his own soup out, and carried it before him while he dragged along a chair so he could sit down next to her.

  “Hey,” he said, even though he knew he was in dangerous territory, “you know what they say about oysters.”

  He was relieved when she didn’t come up with anything sarcastic, and hopeful when she said, “This tastes good.”

  Before he ate, he put his soup down and quickly relighted all the candles. They flickered and glowed, shadowing the walls, and made the room into, he thought, a very beautiful and secret-looking place. He sat down with her and sipped at the hot, briny soup, and said nothing. Perhaps the peace of the room itself would get her into the mood he was trying to inspire.

  “Say,” he said, “how about that tree? You see I got tinsel?”

  She didn’t say anything. He was getting angry now. He could feel that cold trickle up the center of him, that shiver.

  “I’m trying to make you happy.” His voice was
tense, ready to rise out of control, but she didn’t seem to care if she pushed him over his limit. She shrugged and looked away from him.

  He got up, snatched away her soup, spilling some on her dress, and brought the bowls into the kitchen. “Steady,” he said aloud, to himself, in a low voice, but there was pressure behind his eyes. His skull seemed to press on his brain, like a too tight hat, and he thought for a moment he should just step outside again into the black cold, but he didn’t, and he made the mistake of walking straight back into the room and glaring down at Delphine.

  “Why the hell don’t you just go back to them, then?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know. Him. Them.” He was so choking mad that if he said the man’s name he knew he’d explode. And yet he was helpless because had no right to explode. He took the little green-and-red-wrapped box from his pants pocket and, just exactly the way he didn’t want to do it, he flung it at Delphine with a light movement of scorn. “Here,” he said, “I bought you a present.”

  The tiny box landed in her lap. She didn’t pick it up. But she looked at it for a while. He breathed hard, standing in the doorway, and bit his lip so that he wouldn’t shout at her to open it. Finally she nudged it, though gently, with a finger.

  “It’s pretty,” she said, “what is it, a ring?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice cracking a little, his anger changing all of a sudden to a longing so precise and painful he felt his heart squeezing, hot, in his chest, as though her initials were branded on it. The skin on his face prickled and he wanted to throw himself at her feet. She looked up at him from where she sat in the chair, the little box in her lap, and her foxlike face blazed in the light of candles. The flames jumped in her eyes and her hair sprang out in a dim aureole from her warm, flushed cheeks—she smiled at him but it wasn’t the smile he wanted, it was a weary sort of smile. He sagged a bit against the entrance and looked down at his feet.