Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  It was not an easy question to answer. When he balanced, his whole body was a thought. He’d never put the balancing into words before, but perhaps because of the dark, and because she knew about him now, and because her voice wasn’t angry, he spoke, tentatively at first.

  “Some people think of it as a point, but it isn’t a point. There is no balancing point.”

  She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke into a white cloud over them. “So?”

  Cyprian was as clumsy with words as he was agile in other ways. Attempting to describe what happened when he balanced caused an almost physical hurt. Still, he reached far in his thoughts and made a desperate effort.

  “Say you have a dream.” He spoke earnestly. “In that dream you know that you are dreaming. If you become too aware of knowing you are dreaming, you wake up. But if you are just enough aware, you can influence your dream.”

  “So that’s balancing?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He breathed out, relieved and empty. She thought for a while.

  “And what is it,” she asked, at last, “when you fall?”

  Cyprian caught his breath back, almost despaired, but again—because, in spite of who he was, he loved Delphine—he dug for an answer. It took so long that Delphine almost fell asleep, but his mind was working furiously, shedding blue sparks.

  “When you fall,” he said, startling her awake, “you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless.”

  “I think I’ll leave you,” said Delphine.

  “Please don’t leave me,” said Cyprian.

  And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed.

  THREE

  The Bones

  THE TOWN OF ARGUS was the creation of the railroad, and the railroad had no right to be there. Yet once it crossed the river there was no stopping it from going on into the emptiness. What was hauled into the Argus elevators left on the train, going east or west, and what stayed became the town. First, there were the stores to supply the farmers with equipment and food, and then the banks to hold their money, and then more stores where bankers and store owners, too, could shop. Houses for the town people to live in were constructed. One church was raised, another. A school. More houses for the teachers and the railroad workers and the people who built houses. Taverns for their vices. A drugstore for their pains, and so on, until Argus became the county seat. After the courthouse was built, it looked as though Argus was as up-and-coming a place as anywhere in North Dakota.

  Fidelis found work at once with the local butcher, Kozka, and he hired out as well to concerns in surrounding small towns. Not only that, but he custom butchered right at people’s farms, as long as he was fetched. He hadn’t a car at first, though he was later to own a succession of delivery trucks. When he started working for the Kozkas, their trade increased, for Fidelis had his father’s talent for making sausage and he’d learned his father’s secrets. He was given them, in fact, on the eve before he left. The secret was extremely simple, said his father. There is no ingredient too humble. Use the finest of everything. Even the grade of salt matters. The garlic must be perfectly fresh, never dried out. The meat of course, and the casings, the transparent guts of sheep. Clean. They must be exquisitely fresh as well. Fidelis, following his father’s dictum when he made up his first batch of Swedish sausages for the Scandinavian trade, did not use just any potato in the filling, but sought the finest in the area. He triumphed. On Thursdays, his sausage-making days, customers began to gather in order to buy links hot from the kettle, before they were even smoked, which made Kozka happy because the sausages weighed more then. As for Fidelis, he lived off sausage ends and bruised fruit, stale cookies and suspect trimmings. He made his own beer, washed his own shirts and aprons, and lived altogether sparingly until he’d saved enough to rent a bigger place. With the rest of his hoard, plus a windfall from his parents, he brought Eva over the empty sea into the emptiness of sky and earth.

  She arrived on a wild spring day, along with the little boy, Franz, who walked off the train proud to carry his mother’s purse. Since the week Fidelis had come home from the war and heard the silky music of sunlight, he had not been afflicted with any similar confusion of the senses. And yet, as the result of extremely hard work at two jobs or even three at once, Fidelis had undergone the effects of sleep deprivation and found himself talking out loud when he thought he was merely thinking. In the excitement of their meeting, Fidelis spoke into the swirl of Eva’s hair. Alles, alles, he muttered without thinking, and Eva, knowing what he meant but appalled at her surroundings, could not help thinking, What “everything”? What was there? Even with the houses and shops, the land seemed barren as a moonscape. On the way to Argus, as the train took them cross-country, she had watched the signs of human presence diminish and felt a combination of horror and grief. Around dusk she had even thought that she saw, from the train window, wolves melting into the faltering shadows of small trees. She couldn’t be sure. But she did think that her husband’s offer of alles, everything, was farcical. Even in that moment that should have been sublime—their meeting, at last—her lips curled in disbelief. Yet she didn’t understand his meaning.

  Once more in her presence, Fidelis felt the emotion of love move through his body like a great, rough, startling beast. It came out of him and then its power wrapped them both. In its grip, he surrendered and gave everything he was or could possibly be to the woman in his arms. When a man of such strength lets himself be overcome, the earth of his being shudders. He is immensely alone. Eva might have understood Fidelis then, if he’d had the courage to elaborate, but since he didn’t, she merely smiled into his face, kissed him, and decided with a certain bravado that although there was not a damn thing of interest or value in sight, there would be. And she, Eva Waldvogel, would see to it.

  THE MAN WHO FIRST hired Fidelis Waldvogel became his chief and then only competitor in Argus. Pete Kozka was a good-natured but humorless block of a man, always in need of help since his ways were cheap and men quit. A tornado had touched down at his shop, once. Pennies from the change drawer had been driven neatly into the plaster wall. People came by just to see that. As rivalries go, that between the two butchers was amicable enough, based chiefly on pranks and boasts. Sometimes, though, things turned more serious. An ongoing joke that got out of control did a great deal, in fact, to sour relations between the two. This occurred after Fidelis left Kozka’s meat market and set up his own operation at the other end of town. Since Fidelis had never hidden his intention to do just that, Kozka suffered the move with a stoic shrug. At the time, too, it looked as though Argus might grow forever, even possibly become a major metropolis if the county itself continued to boom in land sales. Although it did not work out that way, when Fidelis made his move there was plenty of business to go around.

  With a bank loan and the money from the sale of his share of a building that the Waldvogel family owned back in Ludwigsruhe, Fidelis bought up an old farmstead on the opposite side of town, as far from the Kozkas as it was possible to be and still live in Argus. This mark of consideration also did a great deal to ameliorate any potential hard feelings, at first. Of course, Fidelis could not have anticipated that, when the main highway was rerouted to take the pressure of traffic off the town’s clogged main street, it would pass directly by the new storefront that he tacked on to the sturdy farmhouse. Yet it wasn’t even the jealousy over business gained, however inadvertently, that made things go bad. It was a different sort of jealousy entirely, and one more primary even than money.

  A dog’s love is something more or less complicated, according to the owner of the dog. Fidelis, for example, was faintly contemptuous of canine adoration, believing that it was based mostly on the dog’s stomach rather than the dog’s heart. Pete Kozka, on the other hand, held to the conviction that dogs, his own especially, were creatures of an unsurpassed fealty and that their loyalty was based on a personal love. Pete and his wife, Fritzie, raised pu
rebred chow dogs with coal-black tongues and bitter temperaments. The progenitor of their line, the father of them all, was a snuff brown champion named Hottentot. He bred alternately with his first dog wife, Nancy, and his second mate, Zig, short for Ziguenerin, named for her passion for music—she slept near Fritzie’s piano, and had a musical howl any child could prompt by singing nursery rhymes in a minor key.

  After Fidelis moved, what should have been an insignificant difference of opinion became another thing entirely when Hottentot began turning up at the back loading plank of Waldvogel’s Meats, where there were sometimes scraps. In addition to their differences over such things as the motivations of dogs, Pete and Fidelis also had a fundamental difference over the disposal of the waste, the odd bits, the offal and guts that are an important part of the butchering trade. While Pete kept every tiniest bit down to the tail’s tips in a barrel that he locked in the freezer and sold to a guts dealer each month, Fidelis’s way was to distribute the wastage, and he had, therefore, a commodious following of those who lived lightly on the earth—from dogs to itinerants and the hard-hit poor of Argus. The visitors at the back of his shop, as mentioned, included Hottentot.

  The dog was a greedy, suspicious, evil-minded stud whose character amused Fidelis, as it proved his point about the heartless opportunism of dogs. Hottentot would fawn over anyone who held a bone or the hope of a tidbit, and he regarded the rest of humanity, those who didn’t feed him, with an ancient contempt. He had the tendency to snap, and even bite, and those who’d felt the splendor of his teeth detested him. He would have been poisoned, as happened often to offensive dogs in Argus, except that Pete and Fritzie were themselves so friendly. In spite of the fact that they gave no credit and charged money for their soup bones, they were well-liked people and had no enemies.

  Fidelis took satisfaction in the fact that the dog, doted on by the Kozkas, made his way across the town to visit him. One day he showed up at the Waldvogels’ killing chute, his black eyes clever in a ball of bristling rust brown fur, a sneer on his velvet muzzle. Hottentot was granted all the scraps he could gulp, and then Fidelis gave him a huge cow bone and sent him back to Pete. That would have been all right if that was as far as Fidelis had taken it, but Fidelis had a teasing streak and did not know when to quit. Day after day the dog showed up, and Fidelis amused himself by providing it ever more gruesome skeletal remains—skulls, femurs, ribs. The spinal column of a heifer, trimmed out meticulously to allow the ligaments to maintain articulation, was the pièce de résistance that overthrew the Kozkas’ patience. When Hottentot dragged it proudly through the Argus streets, pausing here and there to gnaw a bit or improve his grip on the thing, everybody in the town got wind of what was going on—literally. The bones were ripe, and the warm and sunny entrance of the shop, where Hottentot brought it to chew on for half the morning, reeked by the time Pete discovered it.

  Swearing, he bent over the dog to grab away its prize. When Hottentot growled menacingly, Pete grabbed the dog’s ears and forced his head back. “Just you try that,” he warned. “You’ll be a skin on the wall.”

  “Save that thing,” said Fritzie, her arms folded in the doorway, “I’ve got an idea what to do with them. And tie up the dog.”

  The dog was attached with a rope to the clothesline pole, but Hottentot was of a studied cleverness that made him impossible to control. By midafternoon, he chewed through the rope and returned to Fidelis to beg an evening meal. He was home by dark with a set of hooves roped together with tasty sinew. Pete chained him next, but Hottentot wound the chain until the links popped and was back at the Waldvogels’ place by morning. When Pete found his dog on the front stoop again slavering over an oozing boar’s skull, he was enraged past good sense. Grabbing for the skull, he put his arm in the way of Hottentot’s teeth. His arm was torn so savagely that Doctor Heech had to see him and closed the gash with no less than ten stitches. Heech also advised him to shoot the dog right on the spot. Most men would have walked home and done so, but Pete Kozka did not blame Hottentot. He believed that his dog’s loyalty had been corrupted by Fidelis.

  “We’ll see, we’ll just see about it,” he muttered to himself that night, planning what he would do to get even with the man he’d taken in right off the street and hired and who now, as he decided to see it, had turned against him and even stolen the affections of his dog.

  FIDELIS WAS NOT a religious man, except when it came to his knives. First thing every morning, after he’d taken his strong coffee from Eva’s hand and eaten his breakfast of cheese and bread and stewed prunes, he visited the slotted wooden block where his knives were kept. He took them out one by one and laid them in strict order on a flannel cloth. These were the same knives he’d brought in the suitcase with the sausages, from Germany, and they were of the finest quality—forged from the blade to the tang in a mold and then worked from spine to cutting edge to create a perfectly balanced tool. Fidelis kept them ferociously clean. He examined each for any minute sign of rust. Then he made what for him were the day’s most important decisions: which blades needed only to visit his sharpening steel, and which, if any, were in need of the graver attention of the stones. Most often, the knives required only the steel.

  Fidelis’s long sharpening steel, now kept on an iron wall hook, was the same one that hung from his belt in the portrait that his parents had paid the finest photographer in Ludwigsruhe to take when he mastered the family trade. With a musical alacrity, he swiped across the steel the knives whose edges needed minimal attention, and then he set them back into the block. Fidelis was conservative. He never oversharpened, never wasted good steel by grinding it away. But a dull blade would mash the fibers of the meat and slip dangerously in the hand, so when a knife needed a fresh edge, he was ready. He removed the set of stones from a drawer beneath the wooden block, and then he arranged them in order next to the knife that waited on the flannel. The coarse black stone was first, to set the cut right, and then the stones became finer. There were six in all. The last was fine as paper. By the time Fidelis finished, his blade could split an eyelash.

  Every morning, after the boys had left for school and after his ritual with the knives was accomplished, Eva opened up the store and went over the day’s schedule. While she was doing this, Fidelis habitually retired to the toilet at the back of the house, where he parted his hair with a surgical precision, combed it back, shaved meticulously, obeyed the prompting of the stewed prunes, and drank another cup of hot coffee. He had enlarged this toilet room, or bathroom, and made it comfortable in the German way. His family had always kept soft rugs and cheerful plants near the plumbing, as well as ashtrays and tobacco, books and newspapers on a shelf within easy reach. Over the tub, there hung an array of cleaning implements: a brush with a handle of polished maple wood to scrub the back, a smaller and brisker brush for the fingers, a large pumice stone for callused feet, and a tiny, hair-soft, blue-handled brush for the face. There was also a stash of soaps, from the harshest lye soap to the French-milled lilac ovals that Eva used. These soaps were kept in a square cedar box with a slatted floor to drain away excess water, so the soaps would last. Next to the tub on another wooden shelf, behind curtains made of ticking material, towels were stacked—the cloth worn thin, but bleached to a sunny whiteness. The entire room was painted a pleasant yellow, and, as its wide glass block window faced southeast, it caught the morning light. It was the comfortable and generous sort of room that would lead a person to think the Waldvogels were wealthy. They were not. It was Eva’s doing. She had a knack for saving money and making a good effect out of nothing.

  One summer morning after all of these small but essential rituals were accomplished, Fidelis began the primary business of that day—he was to kill a prize sow belonging to the Mecklenbergs and de-create her into rib chops, tenderloin, hams, hocks, pickled feet, fatback, bacon, and sausages. The sow had spent the night in the holding pen and was at present in a rage of hunger. For the first time in her life her morning squeals did not
bring a bucket of slops. Instead, of course, she would be killed. The pig was more intelligent than the dog, Hottentot, who waited just beyond the fence to snatch whatever of her was left after the humans took her apart. The pig would certainly have learned a great deal from the coming encounter, but pigs get only one chance to experience the great perfidy of humans. And the betrayal is so swift and final that it comes upon each one of them as though it were the first ever to suffer such a surprising fate. Still, as this sow was perhaps smarter than most, she had more than an inkling that things were not right. Perhaps other sows and boars before her had written final messages in scent. Perhaps she read the avid air of Hottentot. Or maybe the entire unprecedented situation made her uneasy and then more belligerent than usual, because, when Fidelis entered the pen with his 32-20 rifle, which he intended to press directly to her skull, she trotted, huge on tiny legs but still surprisingly agile, to the opposite side of the pen.

  From there, she eyed the man, who carried no food, with bleak suspicion. Fidelis cursed in exasperation, and called Franz to help him drive the pig up the chute, where she would be confined, killed, winched into a tub for scalding, scraped, cooled, split, and eviscerated. Knowing all that was to come, Hottentot began a maddened, frenzied barking that set the pig into a rage of horror to escape. Poked through the fence by Franz’s stick, she minced forward a few nervous steps. Fidelis jumped behind her and let out an awful bellow that was meant to drive her into the narrow confinement of the chute. She didn’t go there, but cleverly circled all the way around the pen to a place, this time, where no stick from behind would reach. There she stood her ground, shuddering, understanding now that something was very wrong. The comfortable life she’d led so far had not prepared her for the strangeness of the situation, but her prize-winning heritage made her cunning. Fidelis prodded sideways at her, but she moaned savagely back at him, and evaded his kick. He spent his breath chasing her through the muck. He slipped, covered himself in slime, swore viciously, recovered. Fidelis rushed at the pig, flapping his apron. Startled, she sidled away. He got the upper hand by continuing to flourish the cloth, mystifying her, driving her where he wanted her to go. Then suddenly she entered the chute and he slammed down the gate.