The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  The curtains parted. Cyprian and his partner stood barefooted, clad in tight black gymnasium suits, on great red rubber balls. Pedaling their feet, they do-si-doed around each other, speeding up until to much applause they hopped high in the air and exchanged places on the spinning balls. Vilhus Gast was very like in size and shape to Cyprian, though nondescript of feature, and he wore a very bad toupee that shifted as he moved.

  Suddenly, Gast stood quite still, precisely balanced, hands raised like a ballerina’s, and Cyprian began to bounce, the ball caught between his feet. With a giant catlike effort, Cyprian sprang off the ball and into the air, upended, coming down exactly in position to lock hands with Vilhus Gast. The men swayed, each powerful muscle defined, and nearly toppled. Amazingly, they righted themselves and balanced.

  Now, Gast began to dance the ball back and forth across the stage. To shouts and laughter, he pretended to have trouble holding Cyprian aloft. They balanced one-armed, one-legged, and then something wonderful and awful happened. The unattractive toupee that Vilhus Gast wore crept slowly off his head. To the delight of boys and the shrieks of ladies, the bad wig revealed itself to be a giant spider. Gingerly, horribly, the thing eased itself up Gast’s arm, felt its way to Cyprian’s elbow, and then, as Cyprian lowered himself, the spider embraced his bare skull and remained there. The men stood, pranced, held their arms out to receive mad clapping, hoots, and whistles. From a box on a small stand, then, Gast shook loose another, smaller, but equally hairy spider. The audience hushed. He coaxed it along his arm with a feather, then helped it up Cyprian’s throat. Delicately, the creature felt its way up the cliff of Cyprian’s chin and over his mouth. The spider curled into a square black mustache on Cyprian’s upper lip, in the warm breath from his nose.

  Along with the spiders, Cyprian also donned a swallowtail suit coat and polished black leather boots. His legs were still comically bare. He was Adolf Hitler, with intestinal gas. Every time an offstage tuba sounded, Cyprian’s muscular ass end popped between the tails of his formal jacket, danced, jigged, reacted with a life apart from the absurdly stern and hypnotic features of the Fuehrer, whose attempt to inspire the howling crowd was undone. Every time he called for the Nazi salute, the tuba squawked and his rear end explosively twitched. The spiders stayed attached to Cyprian’s head somehow. The audience discovered that they could make the Fuehrer fart by giving the salute themselves. They straight-armed, uproariously, until the tuba was one long groan and Hitler went zinging all around the stage like a flea on a hot griddle. The curtains shut to roars and howls. The first act was finished.

  Laughter hadn’t even died down when the curtains were flung wide again. An eight-or nine-foot leather valise with several handles was displayed upon four sawhorses. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast appeared, wearing jeweled turbans and dressed in strange and delicate transparent veils of fabric that ballooned around their legs, floated in the air beneath their arms, and drifted behind them as they walked. A tinny phonograph record played exotic whining music as the two men unlatched the valise and displayed something live, mottled, and very quiet, but with a vibrating energy that made people catch their breaths. The men coaxed the enormous snake from the case into their arms and announced the Dance of Death. They wound and unwound with the snake as it became more alert, tried to curl them into its coils and draw them close. Their dance was impromptu, graceful, and sensuously peaceful. Every member of the audience, believing that the python meant to devour the two men, was mesmerized with interest. Cyprian and Vilhus Gast danced the python down the center aisle. The crowd was allowed to touch the dry, charged skin. All saw the incongruously small head, an evil wedge of muscle. Its brilliant, cold, criminal’s eyes made them shudder so they were glad when Cyprian and Vilhus returned the snake to its leather case, resnapped the locks, and produced two sharp-toothed, gleaming handsaws, with which they proposed to reduce the python into stove lengths.

  “Is there a butcher in the house?” called Cyprian. Pete Kozka was given the saws to test. He pronounced them keen and effective. The men sawed up the python. It writhed horribly in the valise, its tail whipping through the unlatched end. Then they burned a fragrant substance and began to chant portentous syllables, made some signs over a pot of school glue, and stuck the python back together. The show continued. They put away the python and juggled lizards. Displayed a huge iguana still and blinkless as a stone carving. Once again introduced the talented arachnid, Mighty Tom, who played the part of Vilhus Gast’s toupee. They brought him down the aisle in a great round candy jar so that people could look aghast at him and marvel. They balanced cups, plates, and their curly-toed shoes on pates and noses. They did a few more acrobatic tricks and then bounced off, to wild applause and shrieks of encore! They came back out as twin Hitlers on unicycles that they rode while breaking wind and saluting and from which they nearly toppled when their farts grew boisterous. They juggled swastikas set on fire. They juggled hatchets, cleavers, knives. They juggled apples and snatched great bites from them until they juggled only cores. They were an enormous hit.

  For weeks after Cyprian and the Snake Man had vanished, Markus talked of nothing but the show, and people stopped Delphine in the street. They treated her with shy admiration. She received the deference of one who knows, or has access to, a great artist. They addressed her with respect. They wanted details, secrets.

  “The python, has it eaten anyone?”

  “Has the spider underneath Cyprian’s nose ever caused him to sneeze? If he did, what would happen?”

  “Where did he learn to juggle? To ride a unicycle?”

  “Will he return? Ever again?”

  Delphine couldn’t answer any of the questions except the last one. And she only answered it on instinct, though she was proved right.

  “No,” she said, “he won’t come back here.” And he never did.

  ROY SEEMED CONTENT to stay in bed next to the stove most of the day, courting sleep, soaked in sleep, washed in the pleasant duty of it. Because Doctor Heech had prescribed a prolonged rest in order to relieve his liver and keep his cough from turning to pneumonia, at first both Roy and Delphine counted each hour of his loss of consciousness as a healing virtue. However, after a time, she understood that it was something more. She could tell this sleep was different for Roy, not restorative, but some final preparation. He slept so earnestly. It was as though he was practicing. She began to fear he would die when she was out at work, and she put her hand on his face first thing when she returned every day, and first thing when she rose in the morning. Along with the overpowering sleep, he hardly ate. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of soup, then lay back and let sleep take him once again. She had to watch him. He was shrinking. Growing weaker and quieter. He’d asked for the pictures of her mother, Minnie, and set them on a shelf of the spice and flour counter, where he could see them from his bed.

  Delphine had asked Roy to tell her about Minnie, but he had surprisingly little information for one who so flamboyantly existed in a state of destructive long-term grief. She didn’t even have a gravestone to visit, and Roy would not say why that was or where she was buried. All Roy would say was that Minnie was the only one left to tell the tale.

  “What tale?” Delphine had always asked, but Roy had kept his mouth shut.

  Now that his tongue was somewhat loosened by the codeine, and he was bored, Delphine thought she might have better luck with her questions. One night she sat with him, speechlessly tending a little fire in the stove, lost in her own brooding. She slowly became aware that she was waiting for something, she was not even sure of what. Perhaps Roy was going to die this night. Her thoughts had become dispassionate, and she regarded him with detached affection. Poor Roy. He looked weary and his skin had gone fragile, soft, almost translucent. Blue blotches came up on his forearms, bruises that seemed to have surfaced from deep, invisible, interior blows. It was as though he was finally showing all the knocks life had dealt him. Delphine suddenly decided not to let him die with all of the secret
s that she had a perfect right to know.

  “All right. I want answers. Where was she from?” Delphine asked, pointing to Minnie’s picture.

  “She was from down there.” He waved vaguely south. “Then she came up here.”

  As usual, thought Delphine, he would give her nothing. But when she stared at him and said, “More. I want to know it all,” he seemed to reconsider, and spoke more alertly. “Actually, she was originally from way, way up there.” Roy rolled his eyes northward until the whites showed, then stared at Delphine in concentration, frowning. Perhaps he understood that in Delphine right now he had the perfect audience. The vagueness of sleep in his face cleared. As if an electrical wire was spliced, the old Roy came on, the one who told stories in bars and eased Eva Waldvogel into death by talking the secret language of wolves. Delphine hunched close to hear it all, and held her breath until he started speaking with such an eager intensity that she knew she was finally getting the story.

  “You want to know? Of course you want to know. I’ll tell you, too. So go on, take notes. Put these things down for posterity or posteriority, what have you. Minnie. She wasn’t no ordinary, everyday, woman. She wasn’t just a person you would walk past. She wasn’t forgettable. Not Minnie. She had something else in her—the blood of her forefathers, and foremothers, too, and that blood was not just any blood either, but I’m telling you she was of the great nation of the Indians up north called the Crees and Ojibways who mixed with the French, of whom she was descended of kings. That’s right. Her great grandpa was the bastard of the Sun King himself, or so he said, and had escaped across the ocean to lead a clean life skinning pelts. While from the south, she was an adopted second cousin to old Crazy Horse or could have been, though she was almost tragically destroyed. I set this up so you’ll realize that from all sides and all directions there was royal lines simmering and boiling and knocking up against one another in the blood of this woman, your mother. And don’t, no, don’t start diverting me with other questions. Let me go on. Let me speak. For what you now will hear I’ve told no other, and for good reason. It is a story so sad and incredible I don’t like to think of it myself. It is better forgot. It is the story of who your mother became at the age of eight years and why thereafter she grew into someone who could never be tamed by the likes of old Roy Watzka, not me!”

  Roy sat up, gestured for some pillows to prop at his back, took a sip of the water into which Delphine had mixed a bit of ginger to calm his stomach and help the blood flow quicker to his heart.

  “Picture a Christmas service in a snug built church deep in the heart of plains country!” Roy spread his fingers wide before him. Eyes narrowing, he stared into the back of his hand as though it were made of prophesying crystal. “A ragtag bunch of starved and freezing Minneconjou Lakotas—what the layman will call Siouxs—rap humbly at the door of this Christian house of worship. They’re on the run, mostly women and little children, and a few wore-down warriors half mad from their strivings and their defeats. Their chief is dying in a wagon they got dragged by two racks of horse bones that used to be war ponies. They have seen Sitting Bull betrayed and their everyday survival shot to hell. They have this idea they can dance the world back, sing to the dead and the dead will hear them and all will rise and live. They are very lonesome people, is all, and I know about lonesome. Just ask me. They want to see the faces of the ones they love. It is Christmas on the plains, mind you. These poor folks come begging for a handout, a little mercy. And do they get it?” Roy glared blindly at the scene in his head. “What do you think?”

  “Well from how you set it up,” said Delphine, “no.”

  “No,” said Roy. “It’s the God’s truth. They were turned away.” He was breathing quickly, his storytelling tongue on fire. “Among them there is a girl from the Indians I have mentioned, those Indians up north who blended with the French. Her daddy is a Cree who was sent down by his people to learn of this new method of dancing to bring back the dead. He is supposed to report back and tell the old people of his own tribe if it works—so far, he has seen no resurrections. On this trip, he took his favorite, his youngest, his daughter. The others are left behind. This girl and her father traveled first to the camp of the Hunkpapa Lakota, where folks are leaving for the village of Chief Hump, to the south. They meet up with a Minneconjou bunch there and walk deeper into the Badlands territory with the remnants of the believers, who at this point are just trying to go home. Pretty soon they got nothing, food nor shelter, except the steep bluffs of a place called Medicine Root Creek. It is there that they entertain an army major of the notorious, inglorious, Seventh Cavalry, Major Samuel M. Whitside. At Porcupine Butte he convinces them to follow underneath the white flag of surrender to a military camp near a place called in Lakota something unpronounceable by me, and in the English language, Wounded Knee.”

  Roy paused for a long moment, squinting into the darkest corner of the room, moving his tongue across his lips as if to find a word or two caught there like a crumb. With a jerk of energy, he roused himself and continued.

  “Camped at this place they are headed for is an army of men which has declared themselves a shelter for the Lakota, the Siouxs if you will, should they be so desperate as to approach. With their chief, old Big Foot, dying of pneumonia in that wagon bed and with no food, starving mainly, these people beg protection. They give up their guns and set up camp where they are told. Minnie’s father has an old piece of bannock in his pocket, their last food, which he shares with a woman who has invited them into her tent. She has a baby tied to her and no man in sight. After it is eaten, they have nothing. But the woman picked up something thrown to her by a member of the congregation in the church way back there. It is a tough one-legged gingerbread figure. This, she offers to share with them. She divides it crumb by crumb. They eat it, and fall asleep in her tent. That next morning, the woman fills a pot with snow and puts the little pot upon a fire of twigs. The woman takes a bundle of roots from the bodice of her dress and she stews one of those roots in the pot of melted snow. She tends the pot with the root like it was something special, watching it so careful, hushing her baby, testing the potency of her brew with a finger, withdrawing the root and examining it from time to time. She removes the little pot from the fire, eventually, and she allows the tea to cool just enough. Then she motions to Minnie to drink it. And just as she is drinking this tea, there is a shot fired outside the tent.

  “Well, you can read about this in the history books if you want to, though rarely is the full extent of its pity told or believed. Minnie’s father, running out of the tent, is gunned down right off, for that accidental shot brings down thunder. A great, crackling ripple of sound! Smoke and brimstone! Bullets ripping through the cloth, Minnie plunges from the tent with this woman, who grabs her arm and steers her for the white peace flag of surrender. They stand underneath it, shots whizzing and whining in swarms. The woman still has her baby at her breast, tucked in a tied shawl, at her nipple. Again, that thunder rolls! It is Hotchkiss guns trained down straight on the camp of women and on the children and on the white flag of surrender, too. This lady, she keeps nursing. Even as she’s struck and killed, she slumps down with that baby still drinking and now covered in its own mother’s blood. And Minnie’s father, she curls next to him a moment, just in time to receive his last words, a message, and to feel the life go out of him. Which is when Minnie walks right off, through it all, just mystified. She scrambles down a ravine, where she sees sights that she never can get out of her mind. She sees grown soldiers ride down women and then fire their guns point-blank as the women hold their little babies in the air. She climbs out of the dry wash and under a wire fence. From there, she watches a grown soldier on horseback chase down a skinny, weeping, stumbling boy. Another strips a dead girl naked for her figured shirt. The soldiers leave Minnie alone, maybe because she wears a farmer dress and farmer coat, not a blanket, or maybe they see her lighter brownish hair or her skin paler than the skin of those Lakota or th
ey see her French eyes. She walks out of there and zigzags behind some others who are fleeing too. She walks through snow, following the tracks of those others when she falls too far behind to see them anymore. Their tracks save her. She puts her feet in them and never quits walking until she reaches a mission run by an old priest named Jutz. That’s all that happens. I can’t tell you no more.”

  *

  DELPHINE STARED at Roy in a fit of skepticism. There was suddenly a big noise in her head. It was too much, and just like Roy to give her this strange and terrible information, and then to quit just as soon as the scene had unrolled in her mind. She thought she’d heard of the place he mentioned, but had long forgotten the how and why of what happened there. She hadn’t known any Indians well, except Cyprian, to whom, if she believed Roy, she might now be related.

  Delphine’s suspicious reception of his story disappointed Roy. He waited for some sign of appreciation for his efforts and lost interest when Delphine continued blinking at him and drumming at her lips with a finger, deciding whether or not to believe the story. He shut up, turned away, and stared at Minnie’s blurred photograph. His eyes glazed over, his face grew peaceful.

  After a while Delphine knew it was no use to gather herself, to ask anything else. Real questions sat on her heart. Simple, undramatic. What was Minnie like? Had she been happy to have a daughter? Had she loved her? Loved Roy? Had he really felt such an extraordinary happiness with Minnie? Why had he used his loss of joy as a sorry excuse to make his daughter’s life miserable, not to mention waste his own? Would he now die happy, living on memory—was that his booze now? Was he telling the truth?