The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “Oh, there will be,” said Franz. “Just you wait. I see it coming, and when it does I’m …” He made a skimming motion with his hand, like an airplane taking off. He buzzed his hand into the wild blue yonder and then he grinned at them all, nodding to encourage their approval. Fidelis hunched his shoulders in distress and left the room.

  “Do you have to be so happy about it?” said Delphine, annoyed with Franz for spoiling the announcement, but also suddenly aghast at his thirst for war.

  “I’m happy about it,” said Markus. “It’s like you already live here.”

  “Oh, that,” Franz said. “He can do what he wants.”

  “You know what I’m talking about!” said Delphine. “Can you go and sit with him at least?”

  “Dad wouldn’t want that.” Franz took a walnut from the bowl on the table, cracked it with his fingers, just like Fidelis. He tossed the meats up in the air and caught them on his tongue. “I’ll fly a Spitfire! We won’t get anywhere near German territory. I’ll be fighting other pilots—not Dad’s people. He knows that.”

  “You have no idea what a war means!” Delphine tried not to raise her voice or drive him off. But his willful ignorance was making her passionate. “Forget that I’m marrying your father. Be realistic, Franz. They could put you in the infantry.”

  “Me?” He looked incredulous, pityingly, at Delphine. “A bomber, maybe. But no. I’ll be a fighter pilot.” He made noises with his mouth and pretended to machine-gun Markus, who popped his lips back at him.

  “God, you’re a hard soul!” Delphine cried, overcome.

  “What do you want? The marriage is your business,” said Franz. He sulked. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Of course it matters,” said Delphine coaxingly.

  “Well then, I think I’m leaving,” said Franz. “Don’t take this personal, but I don’t want to think about it.” He got up and sauntered away, shoved his fists in the pockets of his poor, tattered, imitation flight jacket. As he passed out of Delphine’s sight, he swore hard, kicked the dust. His eyes watered. Then he laughed sarcastically at himself. He had never been so miserable in his life.

  *

  WHENEVER FRANZ passed the place where he and Mazarine had swung from the road to enter their special place underneath the pine, his throat burned. A tension collected around his heart. For hours after, he would think about the pine tree, his ribs tightening and his chest shutting out the air. It was hard to take a breath. And yet suddenly his breath came out in huge, deep, surprising sighs. Food went dry in his throat and the weight dropped off him. The bones of his wrists jutted out, his cheekbones sharpened. Nor could he sleep right. His dreams were of reckless bargains. Torrents of water swept him from Mazarine or tumbled her over cliffs and through culverts, just out of reach. Things had only gotten worse as it became apparent that Mazarine Shimek truly meant her no and would not have him back. Mazarine, in the new clothing he had never touched.

  She wore a soft plaid kilt of rust brown to school now—even Franz could tell that it was perfectly sewn. The hem swished just the right way around her legs when she walked, whirled softly when she turned. The colors of her pleated skirt were the browns and golds of the light that used to fall upon the two of them underneath the great pine tree. She wore crisp blouses that managed somehow to drape, as well, across her bird’s collarbone. The fabric joined across her chest with rich, glazed, mother-of-pearl buttons. She wore her hair in a braid now, twined through with a ribbon of heavy satin—sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. He could not help recording a list of these details—they were all he had of her right now. But Mazarine didn’t in any way return his regard. She didn’t speak to him, much less let him take her books from her arms and strap them onto her bicycle and give her rides, as though she were a much younger girl. He missed that the most, he thought. Even more than touching her he longed for the weight of her wobbling between his arms on the bicycle. Him steering and her laughing as she tried to balance. The farther away she kept herself, the more he knew this: he loved Mazarine—to the death, he thought wildly, beyond death.

  How stupid! He crashed his fists on his temples. At night, he thought of and rejected ways to make it up to her, ways to draw her to him. He would throw himself upon her mercy. Waylay her. Beg her. Buy her a hothouse rose and lay it on her bed at night. She needed him, didn’t she? Anyone could tell she was unhappy. Look how quiet she was, walking the school hallways, how serious. Look how her slender grace had become an alarming thinness. How she kept her hair, which had always swirled with her movements, stiffly locked into that one thick braid.

  The only thing that really diverted him was the airfield. Sometimes, Franz looked at the other men who worked around him, and wondered if they’d ever had such feelings. He doubted it—none of them looked as if they could ever have been in love with anything but their machines. At first he scorned such limitations. Then they made sense to him. To actually fix a touchy engine was a relief. So whenever Fidelis let him out of the shop, Franz worked on airplanes. In payment, Pouty Mannheim began to teach him how to fly.

  Each time they went up, Franz felt the same roaring physical release from the earth that had charmed him when he first watched, from the field behind the house, the plane take off and lift over the windbreak. Only it was better to be in the plane itself. Better now as he understood exactly how to control the flight, read the wind, the signs in the clouds small and large. On their eighth flight, Pouty let him have a chance at the controls. For weeks, they practiced taking off, touching down, and then gradually added a beginning barnstormer’s repertoire of stalls, spins, easy wingovers and gentle loops. When Pouty finally let him take the plane up solo, Franz experienced a startling lightness. The plane flew at a touchy and thrilling balance with just him in it. He focused on the town grain elevator, a thin mark on the horizon, kept his nose directed at it and did a slow point roll. Then a more complicated hesitation roll, a loop, a difficult spin. The earth tipped over him. Concentrate, or die. Things were simple upside down. By the time he landed, he was absolutely at peace. After that, he thought that maybe he would survive the loss of Mazarine if only he could spend his life up in the air.

  NO GUESTS, no cake, no flowers. After she married Fidelis and Franz left to start his tests for the air corps, Delphine continued to divide her time between the butcher shop and her house, nursing Roy. She kept part of her filing job, kept reading her books, tried to keep as much of her old routine as she could. Still, the past with its horrors, complexities, and incompletions intruded. Although she was married, the background to her new life seemed unfinished, like a jumbled stage set. She wished that she could file her past the way she filed the papers at the courthouse. Then Cyprian returned.

  He was sitting on the front steps of Delphine’s house one early evening, wearing a hat. He squinted out at the road and nodded, cool and self-contained, as Delphine drove the car into the yard. Then he took off the hat, and Delphine saw that he was utterly bald. He looked even more attractive, exotic, like someone from a prehistoric world jolted into pants and shirt and shoes. The head made you think of him naked. Her heart jolted when she saw him. She took a deep, ragged breath to calm herself as she stopped the car and took in his presence through the windshield. So here he was. She smiled, an involuntary reflex, before she thought of Clarisse, then realized that she could find out what happened to Clarisse. The smile altered but stayed on her face. In spite of everything, she was glad to see Cyprian.

  As she opened the driver’s door, jumped out, and nearly ran toward him, Delphine was surprised to experience a sudden uncomfortable pang. Was Fidelis watching? Irrationally, she glanced to all sides. She tried to shrug the discomfort off her shoulders like a cape, but her uneasiness persisted. Her greeting was tentative, and she stood before Cyprian in the bent sun of early dusk, shifting her weight, hoping he’d not come into the house with her. Again, this sense that she was doing something wrong although there was no wrong in it, but there was the intimi
dating certainty of Fidelis. The realization that she was now susceptible to a man’s jealousy irritated her. From under the porch and the stillness of the grass, mosquitoes started to whine. Cyprian tipped his head to the side and fanned away the bugs with his hat. They sat down on the porch steps.

  “Light up a cigarette, will you, to keep off the bloodsuckers?” She accepted a cigarette from Cyprian and allowed it to burn down between her fingers.

  “I’m not even going to talk to you,” she said in a low voice, finally, “until you tell me what happened to Clarisse.”

  “I didn’t know about Hock,” Cyprian offered.

  “I know what the hell happened to Hock. I asked you what happened to her.”

  “All she said to me was this: ‘I’ll go where my work is necessary, and appreciated.’”

  “That actually sounds like her,” said Delphine. “I’ll bet she went south, New Orleans … no, farther. The Yucatan or maybe even farther down, Brazil. I can see it.” She sighed and shook herself. She couldn’t see it. Missing Clarisse was still a daily habit, like drinking coffee or turning on the radio. She didn’t stop to ache or wonder or brood over Clarisse anymore. She just missed her and then was done with it and went on to the next thing. And that is the kindness of time, she thought.

  She looked at Cyprian. “So you didn’t know about Hock. Until when?”

  “Until she told me.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Right away, on the trip to Minneapolis.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you, then, that somebody might connect the two of you? Think you were in on it?”

  “Sure it did,” said Cyprian, “which is one reason why I parted ways with her.”

  “Why did you come back here?”

  Cyprian turned his hat around and around in his hands—it was a smooth clay brown fedora with a wide brown grosgrain band. Expensive looking. He pinched the brim, his fingers careful, choosing his words.

  “I’m passing through,” he said finally. “But I just had to see if you love him.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “The hell you do!”

  Suddenly they turned, their eyes locked in outrage, and they stared at each other. Their exasperation was so exactly matched that it struck them both, at the same time, as ludicrous. They turned away, each unwilling to let the other see any softening, or smile. Delphine fiddled with the cigarette, sharpening its ash on the wood of the steps, waving it slowly around her to make a smoke barrier.

  “So you came back not knowing if you’d get picked up for murder, just to see if I love Fidelis.”

  Cyprian didn’t answer for a moment, then he nicked his head. “Like I said, I have other reasons.” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. His eyes were sharply lovely.

  “Come in then,” she said at last. “Roy’s in bed. He needs a good laugh.”

  Cyprian jammed his hat on his head, then took it off, and followed her across the bare porch and into the house. Inside, he took off his hat and held it over his stomach as he walked into the kitchen, where Roy slept. Cyprian sat down by the bed and waited for Roy to wake. For a long time, Roy lay still, hands on the quilt, eyes shut. Eventually, he opened one eye just a crack, took in Cyprian’s presence, and shut his eyes again with an elaborate fluttering of lids. Delphine was surprised to find that she was cheered to see this deception, this hint of the old Roy, and she pulled her chair up, too.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said softly, “you have a visitor.”

  Roy lay mum, deciding whether to retreat from consciousness or seek out communion with the living. His brows knit and he worked his jaws in little chewing motions. Finally, he gave a decisive jerk and let his eyelids flap up to display great, staring, milky-blue rounds of iris.

  “Cyprian! Cyprian the Bald!”

  Cyprian grasped Roy’s bony, spectral, age-freckled hand. Once he’d decided to join the living, Roy became energized by possibilities.

  “Oh for a beer,” he cried. “A little sip of schnapps. Could you see your way clear to wet my whistle?’

  “Dad …”

  “Yes, yes, assuredly, I know there is compelling evidence that it might kill me.” Roy made brushing motions in the air as if swiping off the warnings. “But a very tiny amount might actually be beneficial, serve as an inoculation, if you will.”

  “We’re down to a teaspoon or two every few hours,” said Delphine. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have your teaspoon.”

  “Now we’re talking!” crowed Roy. He patted Cyprian’s arm. “Would you care to join me? Give this man a teaspoon!” Roy swept his arm grandly toward the little cutlery drawer.

  “He can have a glass, Dad.” She unclipped a set of keys from her belt, took a glass outside to the car. She unlocked the trunk and then used another key to unlock a toolbox padlocked into the trunk. From the box, she removed a pint bottle of brandy. She poured the glass half full, set the glass on the roof of the car, locked everything back up, and brought the glass of brandy back to Roy’s bedside. She poured a bit of the glass into a bottle cap and dipped in a teaspoon.

  “Salut!” Roy opened his mouth and then closing it around the spoon.

  Cyprian nicked his glass at the old man.

  “What are you up to now?” Roy’s tone was convivial, but his eyes glittered, full of sudden tears. “Are you casting around for a job and looking for a wife? Did you come here as a dog returns to a place it’s once been fed?”

  Cyprian took a large swallow of the brandy, and Roy went on speculating. “There’s always farmwork around here, of course, but that is both brutal and seasonal. I speak from much experience. Now there’s our thriving main street, all those shops lined up raking in cash. Clerking. Perhaps you could learn to barber. Oly Myhra’s getting old. His pole needs painting. Hah hah! His pole needs painting! My pole”—he nudged Cyprian—“hasn’t been painted for the last twenty-six years. What about yours?”

  Cyprian looked at Delphine. She raised her eyebrows but kept her face impassive.

  “The paint’s fresh on mine,” said Cyprian. “What do you hear from the rest of the club?”

  “Mannheim is still aloft,” said Roy. “And Fidelis married the woman you skipped out on, that is”—he nodded at Delphine with affection—“her Royal Obstinacy. Once again, she has nursed me back from the brink of the abyss. I had flung myself headlong into the drink, you know, and made of myself something of an embarrassment to her. Still, she loves her old dad. She tapered me off. How about that second teaspoon?”

  “Live it up,” said Delphine. Roy closed his eyes and opened his mouth. She put the spoon in.

  “I didn’t run out on her,” said Cyprian, giving Delphine a meaningful look. “I offered her an engagement ring. A real nice one. She turned me down.”

  “Watch out,” said Delphine. “I know all about where that ring ended up.”

  “Ah,” gasped Roy. He had taken the spoon from Delphine’s fingers and was sucking on it like a happy child. “The disappointments of love lie heavier each year. Time does not, as the philosopher’s wishful thinking goes, time does not heal all wounds. When I fell, I fell hard,” said Roy proudly. “I fell through the center of the world.”

  “You’ve milked your love martyrdom far enough,” said Delphine. “I’m tired of it. She was my mother you know, I’m the one who really got the raw deal here. And ended up taking care of you, you booze hound, all of these years!”

  “And hasn’t it been a grand old time!” cried Roy. He was always encouraged and cheered when Delphine joined him in his bantering. “I believe that the sacred love I have borne these many years is a love that has sucked me straight into the vortex, the omphalos of the universe, and there I have seen such things my friends. Such things! …” Roy let his voice trail off and his gaze unfocus, as though he were reliving a vision. “Mostly though”—he shook his head, jolting back—“I have seen a lot of hooch disappear.”

  “Dad’s mistaken the navel of the universe,” said Delphine, “for the dimple at
the bottom of the schnapps bottle.”

  “Well, be that as it may, I am actually here,” said Cyprian, with an air of setting things right at last, “to play an engagement.”

  “A what?” Roy’s mouth dropped in delight.

  “That’s right,” said Cyprian. “I’m not really looking for a job. I’m part of the lyceum series. I travel with the Snake Man now.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a roll of pink cardboard tickets. “How many would you like?”

  “The Snake Man?” said Delphine, a little wounded somehow, maybe even a bit jealous. “You could have written. Does he double as your human table?”

  “It didn’t have the same effect,” said Cyprian, “with two men, though we did work out a few other balancing tricks. He owns his own python, brings it onstage in a leather case on wheels. He’s got an assortment of reptiles,” Cyprian paused, “and one arachnid.”

  “What’s his name?” said Delphine.

  “Mighty Tom.”

  “A good name for a performer.”

  “No, that’s the spider. My partner’s name is Vilhus Gast.”

  So that, thought Delphine, was that.

  “What’s he like?” she asked.

  “Well, he’s a lot like me,” said Cyprian. “A performer, you know. He made it over here from Lithuania and he’s a Jew. I was a real curiosity to him at first. I took him home with me.” Cyprian laughed. “Boy was he surprised.”

  “How come?”

  “There’s no Jews on the reservation, I mean to speak of. I never knew one when I was growing up, any more than he’d know an Indian. Except he did know about us and said he believed we were one of the lost tribes of Israel doomed to wander, too, like his people. Always to be on the edge of things. Hounded and hunted, he said. ‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘So let’s roam around together.’ So we got this act up and since then we’ve been playing it steady.”

  DELPHINE AND MARKUS arrived early at the school gymnasium the next night and took a seat in the first row of creaky wooden folding chairs. There would be talk. Cyprian would be recognized and his shaven head remarked with wonder, maybe derision. People, customers, old schoolmates, would turn to crane at Delphine. If she sat in the back, she would have to endure their shielded or open curiosity. Sitting in the first row, she had her back to them. They could gawk and whisper to their heart’s content. Delphine would ignore them. She intended to enjoy the show.