The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  MAZARINE HAD ALWAYS hated the smell of hospitals. They were no different in New York state. When she walked into the lobby, there was the staleness of cigarette smoke, and then the grim, overpowering scent of rubbing alcohol. The nurse came, and she stood up too quickly, juggling her baby’s diaper bag as he shifted in her embrace. Her purse spilled, but there was only a tube of lipstick, the train ticket, a neat little wallet, and a booklet of ration coupons stuck in the teeth of a comb. Mazarine wished there were more to pick up. She was trying to hold herself together, but parts of her took turns shaking, her hands, her knees, her heart. Delphine had accompanied her across the country on the train to help her with the baby but when they stood before the double doors of Franz’s ward, she had stepped to one side and remained in the hall.

  “You should see him first,” Delphine said, taking the baby from Mazarine’s arms. Her chest hurt with the tension. She could hardly breathe. “I’ll come in later.”

  She prodded Mazarine forward, and the younger woman entered the doors behind the wide, swishing businesslike white rear of the nurse. She walked toward Franz. Halfway down the row of men, some surrounded by curtains, some incurious, others whose glances clung to her, Mazarine realized that she was holding her breath. She gasped dizzily and took in too much air. The odor was worse here because it included everything that the disinfectants and germ-killing alcohol was meant to eradicate: the gamey-sweet smell of slowly healing flesh, the sharp scent of old piss, the sweat of desperation, the vinegar bleakness of resignation. And yet, she knew—for this was the reason she was here—these were the rescued. These were the men who would probably live. And then the nurse examined a chart and stopped before a bed. She drew open a curtain on a hoop around the bed to allow Mazarine to enter the makeshift room.

  As she passed between the folds of the curtain around Franz’s bed, Mazarine knew that she was leaving the before—where Franz existed in her memory and imagination—and entering the after. Until she looked directly at him, until her eyes took in the damage, he would still be perfect, a boy, a young man, and they would not have entered the world of grownup love, with all of its terrible compromises. I can’t do this, she thought. But she knew what she could or could not do didn’t matter. The man who inhabited the bed was lost in a drugged sleep. Her eyes began at the bottom of the tucked-in sheet and traveled slowly up the blanketed form, noting every detail, until she could no longer avoid his face.

  The man in the bed was still Franz while he was asleep, and so she sat with him tasting the illusion until it became unbearable. Still, she could not wake him. Franz breathed so slowly and slightly that she could not see his chest move. The hurt side of his head was swathed, and dark bruises flowed down his neck. There was no telling what would happen, how much would return, the doctor had said. Mazarine held Franz’s wrist, tightening and loosening her grip as if she could pump her own strength into him. She sat there, and she sat there. Around them the blank curtains were a closed screen upon which, more wrenching and more complex than death, their future spilled.

  FIFTEEN

  The Master Butchers

  Singing Club

  THE MONUMENT to the victims of the bombing of Ludwigsruhe was to be unveiled that afternoon, and all of the master butchers were gathering from the outlying villages and even more distant towns to sing. It was 1954, and all flesh of the war dead was earth. During the month of their visit to his hometown, Fidelis had been practicing with the ones who were left, those few men who had survived. While he was practicing, Delphine went walking through the town cemeteries, famous for their beauty, or she strolled along the charmless streets of blocky Marshall Plan stores and apartment houses, in and out of jewelry shops where imitation gold lockets could be had so cheaply, but were so finely made, and at last to the garden where her husband had played as a child and where the statue now stood wrapped in canvas and roped carefully so that the town officials could drop the veil in one tug.

  She sat in the audience, alongside Tante, who craned stiffly toward the speakers and ignored her. All that Delphine could see of her was her foot, still elegant, cased now in a finely made blond leather pump. On the other side of Tante sat Fidelis’s brother and sister-in-law and their two grown children, and on the other side of them Erich with his new bride. When she and Fidelis had planned this visit, it was to be something of a much delayed honeymoon, but the trip had turned out very differently. Fidelis had suffered mysterious pains on the way across, and an X ray told them of an enlarged liver and a threatened heart. Chronic constipation had plagued them both, though they ate buckets of fresh strawberries to try to obtain relief. Delphine could understand nothing of the fast floods of language. Her mouth hurt from smiling, and she was tired of her own amiable nodding. Her isolation had become tedious. Yet some of the relatives would, it seemed, do anything for them—people from her husband’s past planned picnics and camping trips, hikes all through the forests, lavish dinners of wild game and local mushrooms, gave them handmade gifts, and kissed and hugged Fidelis with frantic joy.

  And yet Delphine felt bewildered, darkly helpless. What kind of people were these? Delphine looked around at the crowd seated expectantly, and watched them as the speeches rolled over, waves of language, sounds on sounds. Women wore small hats and drab gray or tan suits of outdated style, thick heels, rubbery stockings, no gloves. They wore dresses made of somber flowery material—purples and browns. Handbags were in their laps, the leather softly tanned, the colors muted and glowing. She put her own hand above her eyes, to view the scene. The sun moved in and out of puffy clouds. Everyone cast sharp, distinct shadows. The shadows cut across the women’s faces and lay hard beneath their hands and pooled under their feet. There were shadows around their purses and shadows glancing down the legs of the chairs. Cast by the backdrop of paper streamers, shadows striped the town officials. Germany was all darkness and light, bright flowers and drab summer gabardine. Delphine breathed the sweetness of a hothouse gardenia on some woman’s bosom, the sizzling fat fragrance of a portable wurst stand just behind the gathering. Below the thick German language sweeping over the crowd, she caught undertones and strained to hear what seemed a murmuring hum, the curious singing of some other crowd.

  That low sound became almost overpowering and then the butchers filed from their front seats to the podium, stepped into their formation, and began their songs. Most were large men, but not all. Some were thin and wiry. Their voices surged out, over the crowd. Sound sprang from their great chests and bellies. The music unsheaved out from the tight-muscled small men in a pour of energy. Those instruments, their voices, built a solid wall of melody. Delphine watched them, thoughts drifting. She began to listen past the singing. She didn’t hear singing, soon, at all, but only saw the mouths of the men opening and shutting in unison, in a roar, like some collection of animals in a zoo. For some reason, she saw her mother’s indistinct photograph, large and flickering, imposed on the cheerful scene. She thought of all that had happened here, the burning and the marching, an enormity beyond her, a terrible strangeness in which things unbelievable were done. And yet, now, here were these butchers singing. And the songs were lovely to the ear. Her own husband’s voice soared in German air.

  Delphine’s vision receded, she blinked dizzily. A sense of unreality was stealing over her, a ringing in which all sound was one. Then her eyelids were knocked upright. She saw what was really happening. As the veil was torn away, as the statue of the burned stood washed in pleasant sunlight, as the master butchers parted their lips in song, smoke and ash poured out of their mouth holes like chimneys. Their hearts were smoldering, she thought, disoriented. Their guts were on fire. Their lungs were hot bellows. Yet they kept on singing as though nothing was wrong at all. Nobody pointed, no children cried. Darkness continued to spiral up out of the men’s oven-box chests. Smoke swirled, ash drifted. Finally the singing ended. All the cloudy dark the men had belched disintegrated and was gone, except for the tarry residues of the shadows. People su
rrounding her smiled and nodded. Clapped their hands with a solid racking clatter that went on and on. So, thought Delphine, very tired, throwing her hands together along with everyone else, it was normal for black plumes to rise from the mouths of the singing butchers into the brilliant air of the garden. It was an ordinary thing to witness here.

  THERE WAS A knocking in Delphine’s dream. Loud, whispery, rapid. Then more urgent, tapping knocks, as though from just beyond a wall. Impatient knocks. When she woke, still in Germany and fitted beside her husband upon a narrow mattress of soft sheep’s wool, Delphine knew these sounds. She understood that Eva was asking for Fidelis. Delphine would have to return him very soon. Delphine knew that the knocking was Eva because she had heard the exact sound before. Long ago, the same tapping knocks had occurred in Delphine’s dream, and when she had awakened, back then, in Argus, she had known that Eva was dying.

  Now, as Delphine woke again to that rapid knocking, she knew that Fidelis was hiding his illness. Time was an army marching like the butchers onto the stage. Time was a singing club whose music was smoke and ash. Delphine moved close to Fidelis and held him in his sleep, felt the even sigh of breath, the humming blood, the troubled beating of his heart.

  In her last letter from Europe to North Dakota, she wrote Markus:

  He is not very well and I think we should get the doctor to give him a good once-over. Please watch our new help and take note of when they arrive at work. We are too well fed (sauerbraten everywhere we go, or forest venison, pastry like I never knew about) and I can’t wait to get home for good. Tell Mazarine to kiss Johannes, if he’ll stand still long enough, and to give her mother charcoal pills for the gas.

  STEPPING FROM the USS Bremen into the milling New York crowd, Fidelis ached with the unfamiliar exhaustion he had battled all the way across the ocean, sleeping twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch, napping in the afternoons, too. The tiredness was bewildering—it had come upon him gradually and now it was beyond his control. He didn’t know it, but his heart had begun to fail ten years before. When his son had marched past him in the woods of Minnesota, choosing a gated prison house rather than his father, Fidelis had felt the first intimations of the weakening disease that would eventually clog and then destroy his heart. When he received the telegram telling of Franz’s injury and then the letter about Emil, he had felt his heart shredding. He tore up the papers, roaring. When Franz had come home only to fade from life in bewildered anger, part of Fidelis had gone out raging with him. But to one born in the phenomenon of strength, weakness is an alien lie. Fidelis would not accept the news that he was ill. He ignored his body, despised its needs, kept his old habits as though they would bring back his power.

  Now, although his lungs were tight and aching, he lighted a Turkish cigarette, one of those he’d bought in Germany. As he breathed out the smoke and waited at the customs gate for their clearance, shuffling slowly behind Delphine, toward the officer’s booth, he remembered standing in the same line those many years before. He recalled how the memory of his father had come to him then—his father boiling the sausages in the great copper sausage kettle, his heavy red forearms lifting the links in and out of the steam. Again, Fidelis saw his father’s huge face above it all, calm and disciplined and sweating. He mopped his brow with a heavy cotton handkerchief and braced his feet so that he could continue to stand there unsteadily, feeling heavier, growing slightly dizzy. The tailored coat he had bought in Ludwigsruhe was too heavy for this weather. The now and then of things was colliding. The days between his first arrival and this one were like an innumerable pack of cards laid out upon a great table, each of a predictable suit and color. Suddenly they were swept up in a stern hand and tapped neatly into a suffocating deck. The days collapsed, one on the next.

  The cigarette dropped from his numb fingers. He followed its curious trajectory as it bounced, still lit, off his shoe. And then, he did not know how, he smelled the rich smoke of it burning just under his nose, and he was looking at a floor of stained and smeared tan linoleum that reached to either side of him forever. As when he had first come home from the war, he experienced, once again, the strange singing of the light. It gleamed in fragments of a rich song off the floor’s farther reaches, where no one was allowed, and the tiles still bore their original morning polish. Fidelis wondered at the music, the familiar croon of voices. He was on his hands and knees, kneeling there on the floor like an animal. This was the way the animals suddenly collapsed, but, he thought, wearily, this is an arrival gate and not a killing chute. He felt himself rising and dusting off his coat, walking a few steps forward, and so he was surprised to find that he had not moved at all, and was still looking at the floor.

  All his life, the day for slaughter had arrived every week, and Fidelis had always been there to carry out death’s chores. Now it was his time—he knew that when he looked into the swirl of the grimy floor. Who was there to do the same for him? His arms splayed out, his legs stiffened, he went down flat. Someone turned him on his side. Someone took his hand. Delphine’s face wavered into his line of vision and she bent over him, crouching, looking down at him and moving her mouth in a familiar pattern. He knew what she was saying and wanted to respond, but he couldn’t. To his surprise, his mouth wouldn’t open. His hands wouldn’t move. Nothing about him would do his bidding. His heart seized. A stunning rip of anguish widened his eyes in shock. Delphine’s face blurred. The light dimmed, the singing stopped.

  SIXTEEN

  Step-and-a-Half

  WHEN STEP-AND-A-HALF was a very old woman she at last became beautiful, in the way a wind-shaped rock or the whitened bones of deer are beautiful. The starkness of age revealed the underlying symmetry of the planes of her face, the antique but sturdy ivory of her teeth, her graceful hands and straight legs and arms. Even her hair turned to a whiteness of unusual purity and formed two majestic waves that vaulted off her smooth forehead. Age, the ownership of her junk store, and the insomnia that still plagued Step-and-a-Half forced her often into a state of reflection that she had been able to avoid when in motion. Before she came to Argus, she had wandered the long North Dakota roads. She had slept in the ditches and the fringes of trees along the rivers, in the occasional barn or porch. She’d walked. Nobody knew how far she walked—she didn’t know herself. Her long stride ate up twenty, thirty miles a day, and the distances were easy, the space a soothing mesmerization. Once she’d arrived at a place she often couldn’t remember getting there. Arrival was its own enigma—how did she know she’d arrived when she had nowhere to go? Yet Argus had long ago become an arrival. And because she began to arrive there more and more often, and then to stay in that town, she began to collect its truth.

  Now, when she looked at the streets around her and all the people, she saw them from a junker’s point of view. She saw them from the alleys where they burned their garbage and from the back porches of their houses, where they left rags—not the front steps, kept so tidy. She knew them not from what they wore or the façade they showed to the world, but from what they tossed out, discarded, thought worthless. She knew them by their scraps, and their scraps told their stories.

  The bottles in Gus Newhall’s trash bin told the common secret of his income back in the bootleg days. The Bouchards had a habit of throwing plates when they fought, and were a source of shards that often could be fitted back together with more success, as it happened, than their marriage, which fell apart. Pouty Mannheim threw out both socks when one toe frayed—he never darned them, being a bachelor, and he didn’t keep the widowed sock, for which he earned her respect. Yet his proud and profligate sock habit also told her that he would one day fail in business. As for his mother, candy wrappers told her secret vice. Though she remained slim enough, her teeth dropped out. Step-and-a-Half was not surprised. She found awful things—pet carcasses, ripped-up love letters, bedding soaked with death, blood, illness, waste. She found good things—books and sheet music, which she kept though she did not read, toys that children had a
ccidentally lost, which she cleaned and set on windowsills. She found a prosthetic wooden hand and an eyeball made of glass. A tin filled with weird blue seeds, all of which she planted in a coffee can of dirt, one of which sprouted a fat white flower shaped like a comical soldier’s helmet and smelling of sex and cinnamon. Razors to sharpen, tires that could be mended, engine parts as well as the stacks of clothing the resale of which as rags bought the flour that made her bread, and sometimes grease to butter it. She’d found a gold pocket watch, a radio, a music box that played a few bars of an elusive tune that Eva once told her was composed by Mozart. She’d found a perfectly good pot roast, a box of foil-wrapped chocolates, six bars of brand-new fragrant pink soap. She’d found peppermints and crackers and fancy stuffed pillows that suffered only from a bit of mildew. She found these things in trash heaps and burning barrels and along the river, down the sides of ditches, in the street and here and there. There was no question, however, that her most spectacular find was fished from the hole of Mrs. Shimek’s outhouse.

  It was a find that had defined her life, a discovery that had circumscribed her wanderings, given shape to her thoughts, and provided her with an emotion that she never quite recognized but upon which she acted, again and again. Although it had happened more than forty years ago, the drama of it was still with her, and the consequences, which she’d seen played out before her as on a mystery stage.