Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “I wish it is true, what I read, that the mind stays put. The eyes. The brain to read with.”

  She heard Eva’s voice.

  Delphine had sometimes thought that her friend didn’t care if she became an animal or a plant, if her heart was cycled into the kingdom of nutrients, if all of this thinking and figuring and selling of pork and blood meal was wasted effort. Eva had treated her death with offhand scorn or ridicule, but with that statement she revealed a certain fear she’d never shown before. Or a wishfulness. Her words cut Delphine deeply with an instant sorrow.

  “Your mind stays itself,” said Delphine, as lightly as she could, “so there you’ll be, strumming on your harp, looking down on all the foolish crap people do.”

  “I could never play the harp,” said Eva, “I think they’ll give me a damn kazoo.”

  “Save me a cloud and I’ll play a tune with you,” said Delphine.

  “It’s a deal,” said Eva, “and you bring your handsome husband. Think you can persuade him?”

  They laughed too hard, they laughed until tears started in their eyes, then they gasped and fell utterly silent. For a long time, now, they’d both pretended to believe in a ridiculous heaven, and promised to meet on its grassy slopes.

  FOR ALL THAT he was a truly unbearable souse, no one in town disliked Roy Watzka. There were several reasons. First, his gross slide into abandon was caused by loss. That he repeatedly claimed to have loved to the point of self-destruction fed a certain reflex feature in many a female heart, and he got handouts easily when strapped. Women even made him lunches, a sandwich of pork or cold beans, and wrapped it carefully for him to eat coming off a binge. Next reason was that Roy Watzka, during those short, rare times that he was sober, had the capacity for intense bouts of hard labor. He could work phenomenally, doing what he did best, farmwork, and he was happy doing it. He’d milk or pitch out stalls or stack hay out of sheer spiritual guilt, and sometimes he’d take no pay hoping to ensure his next liquor source but also creating the sense that he was, in his own way, generous. And whatever his condition he told a good tale, which drew people. Nor was he a mean drunk or a rampager, and it was well-known that although she certainly put up with more than a daughter ever should have to, he did love Delphine.

  Eva liked him, or felt sorry for him anyway, and she was one of those who had always given him a meal when he came around her kitchen. Now that she was in trouble, Roy showed up at the butcher shop for a different purpose. He came almost every afternoon, sometimes stinking of sweat-out schnapps. But once there, he’d do anything. Work dog hard. He’d move the outhouse to the new hole he’d dug for it, shovel guts. Before he left, he’d sit with Eva and tell her crazy stories about the things that had happened to him as a young man in the gold fields or the pet hog he’d trained to read or other things: how to extract the venom from a rattlesnake, an actual wolf man he knew and words in the Lycanthropian language, or the Latin names of flowers and where they came from, recipes for exquisite wines and what the French did with the vinasse. Listening sometimes, Delphine was both glad for Roy’s adept distractions and resentful. She knew he was a fountain of odd bits of knowledge. Where had he learned these things? In bars, he said, and out of the battered dictionary that was the only book in the house until Delphine grew old enough to acquire books herself. Yet, she’d cleaned up after him all of her life, and never had he sat and talked to her like this, with such gravity and kindness, such a goodwilled attempt to distract and entertain. Worst of all, his efforts almost convinced Delphine that there was hope for him.

  POUTY MANNHEIM HAD developed a fascination with flight, bought a war-surplus Jenny, and spent his spare time fiddling with her engine or practicing rolls and dives and fancy curlicue maneuvers. He liked to buzz low over the shop, waving down at the boys. Fidelis had given him leave to land in the flat field behind the house, and every time he did so Franz threw off his apron and raced out. As soon as Pouty emerged and walked to the house to visit, Franz climbed into the cockpit. He didn’t do anything while Mannheim talked to his father, except run his hands over the controls and examine the official-looking log that Mannheim kept of his flights, his fueling, his hours in the air. And when Pouty Mannheim returned, Franz proudly and eagerly acted as what he imagined was a sort of ground crew, turning the prop, uttering the stand-clear. As the plane made its run, gathering speed, the sway of it triggered an excitement Franz didn’t understand in himself. He was a reserved boy, but when the plane began to move he always ran, chased it, shouted, threw his cap after the plane when it lifted from the field. There was something about the actual moment that the flimsy-looking wheels left earth, seeing the space between ground and the craft itself enlarge, that dazzled him, filled him with a sense he could never have described, not in the language of his mother and father or in the language of his schoolmates; it was a wordless, wild, tremendous, unbearably physical release of tension that left him almost in tears.

  After Pouty had disappeared into the sky, Franz stood very still for a few minutes, quietly gathering himself, before he dared face other people. His mother was the only person, he felt, who even remotely understood what he experienced when the airplane left the ground. In her illness, she had become a grateful listener and he sometimes found himself after Mannheim’s visits sitting long with her and talking on and on, as he did with no one else, about the various makes of aircraft and their advantages one over the other, their disparities, all of the quirks and details that he collected from newspapers and magazines. He had a stack of papers, and pictures carefully cut and pasted on the wall around his bed. There was a detailed and graceful Fokker Eindekker, a black cross on its wings and tail, and blurred photos of Immelmann, the Eagle of Lille, of Rickenbacker and “the Ace of Aces,” a recent news photo of Charles Lindbergh, and the badges and emblems of the RAF. A homemade banner that read “Beware the Hun in the Sun,” and a laboriously copied poem called “The Young Aviator.” Franz had drawn a fashionable French Nieuport 11 fighter with its machine gun mounted over the pilot and a screaming Indian chief painted on the hull. His favorite was the Albatros, a German fighter with a big red nose, a heart, a white swastika, and the usual black cross. He had modeled a Sopwith Camel of cardboard and pins, drawn its red, white, and blue bull’s-eye carefully with crayons he’d swiped from school. Eva had given him a huge scrapbook and in it he’d pasted news of barnstormers and their photos cut carefully from the newspaper or saved from posted handbills. He read descriptions of their tricks out loud to her when she was restless. On one of these afternoons, while he sat with her, she asked, “What do you think it’s like, I mean, over the clouds?”

  “Oh, I can tell you that,” said Franz. “It looks like you could step right onto them and bounce.”

  She regarded him skeptically, but with a kind of pride that he could invent such a thing. Which is when it suddenly struck him that he had to go up into the air with his mother.

  “We’re going to fly,” he announced to her right there, and the look of wondering pleasure that crossed her face at the idea convinced him that he had to make it come true.

  Pouty had to fly them, he decided, even though Fidelis had forbidden that he ever take Franz with him on his flights. This was different. This was a ride with a noble purpose. Very quickly the impulse he had to take his mother in the air became an urgent and serious commitment. He thought, staring at Eva, that there were some things that simply had to happen. She had to go into the sky. He had to be there when she did, even though they wouldn’t see over the clouds. He went to bed with the conviction, and the next day, working next to his father, all he could think of was how to persuade Pouty Mannheim to take them up in his airplane.

  POUTY KEPT HIS PLANE in a barn north of town, a good long walk from the house, and Franz had to make an excuse to go find Pouty right away because he didn’t know when he’d happen by. And Franz’s sense was this had to happen now, not that he anticipated in his mind how terribly his mother would weaken. He borrowed Mazari
ne Shimek’s bicycle, even though it was a girl’s bicycle, and he pedaled the miles quickly. He felt such a stern compulsion about the project that when he talked to Pouty, he couldn’t help his voice from rising, his hands from moving, and even from pleading and harassing Pouty once he trundled away to grab a tool he needed from the barn.

  “She’s sick,” Pouty finally said, scrubbing at his round apple-shiny chin.

  “That’s why,” said Franz.

  “Fidelis won’t let her,” said Pouty.

  “Which is why you can’t tell him,” said Franz.

  Although Pouty Mannheim wasn’t especially thoughtful or even interested in most people other than himself, and although he had very little experience of affection for his own mother, something in the way Franz behaved impressed him. He thought it over while he checked his controls, tightened his equipment, and replaced a bit of paint on the body of his plane, and then he said yes.

  EARLY ON THE DAY that Fidelis made his deliveries, Pouty landed his plane in the field behind the shop. It was warm already, and the sky was very blue, but not with that oppressive and metallic blueness that signaled a dust storm. The day was milder than in quite some time, and a fugitive freshness still lingered in the grass, in the leaves, the taste of early dew. Franz ran into his mother’s room, quieted himself, and touched her arm. She was awake and already dressed for the ride in a gauzy white housedress with full-blown roses all over it, some pink, some a deeper red in the creases of the petals. Delicate leaves of a subdued green floated everywhere in the folds of the material. Her hair, damaged by the treatments, sprang short and fine off her head in curls of fluff. She’d shakily put on a light coat of lipstick and gargled, he noticed, with a sweet-scented lilac water. Some days her breath smelled of a sad cellar rot, from what was happening inside, she said, and she hated it. She liked to keep very clean. Her eyes were beautiful, Franz thought, slanting green in her thin and paper-white face.

  “Mama,” he said, shy and proud, “your plane’s here.”

  “Hilf mir,” she said, eagerly turning to him, and he helped her straighten her legs and sit on the side of the bed. She smoothed back her hair and then rose, weak, and put one foot and then the next into her lace-up brown leather shoes. She was breathing deeply, to gather strength and also to contain her excitement. The other boys were out in the front of the store with Delphine, who’d been taken into the plan and who had pledged to distract them long enough for the two to get out to Pouty’s airplane. Eva tried to step along, not shamble, as she walked beside Franz, but as they made their way into the side yard he stopped her.

  With a huge sweep of his arms, he scooped her up and simply carried her out into the field. She laughed with surprise, then put her arm around his neck, thinking to herself, My son, my little son. And when they reached the plane and he carefully set her inside, in the seat behind the pilot, she thought of the boy’s father, and realized that when she’d known Johannes he’d not been much older than Franz was now. And the thought pierced her with sorrow for that boy she’d known, and wonder at all that had happened since his death, things that would have so astonished him, and she couldn’t help think of heaven and question just how it would be if those assurances of her priest were actually true. Would Johannes really be standing there, on the other side, with all of the dead of her own family, to greet her? How old would he be? And then, what would she say, and what would happen on that day in the future when Fidelis entered heaven as well? Which one would she stay with?

  Father Clarence was absolutely stumped on this issue, and Eva enjoyed shaking his confidence. Eva smiled and let the sun hit her face full on as Pouty climbed into the front. Franz spun the propeller mightily and then, when the engine caught, and the body of the plane shook like a wet dog, Franz jumped into the space just behind Eva’s seat and grabbed her around the waist.

  “Are you holding her in?” yelled Pouty.

  “Got her!”

  The machine jerked forward. With a bounding rush, an eager gathering of speed and a quickening of power, they hopped into the air. Franz filled his mouth with the wind. He let the moment balloon inside of him. And then he flew, for the first time, holding on to his mother’s waist. They rose in what seemed an impossibly steep climb and forgot to breathe, then Pouty calmed down and leveled off and flew due west with the sun behind them. He wanted to fly up along the river, scare up a few herons and maybe some fish hawks for Eva to see. Over the course of the night, as he’d contemplated the ride for Eva, he’d decided it made a sort of hero out of him to give this dying woman the pleasure of a ride. He would explain it to Fidelis later as a duty of some sort—he hadn’t worked it out yet, but anyway he was quite sure that when Eva landed with pink cheeks and feeling all that much improved, Fidelis would be glad. In fact, Pouty went even further and imagined that the plane ride might result in a complete medical cure. Such things had happened, and such was his faith in the power of flight.

  Perhaps Franz possessed a similar faith, because as he held his mother in the seat he imagined that the wind, whipping the skin flat across their faces, was scouring them smooth and pure as they buzzed down along the gleaming gray snake of the river. They gained altitude and the water became a string of mercury, the dusty green trees puffs beside, the roads black threads in the drought-sick fields. They bounced over the hot drifts of air, turned gently when the river shifted, circled an oxbow, and swooped down low over a farm where Mannheim knew the people. They saw all there was to see and flew until Pouty yelled he was getting low on fuel and must go back to the field. All the while she’d waited for the flight, Eva had the hope that during it, because of the thrill of it, her pain would vanish. That did not exactly happen—in some ways the pain grew more intense, but that was because the joy had, too, not just the physical joy of being up in the sky, she would later tell Delphine, but the mental joy.

  AFTER THE TWO had come back to earth and Franz had carried her to bed, Eva had one of her final visions. She was propped up with pillows, drinking sips of water, shuddering with happiness and pain.

  “Up in the sky, my brain was gulping new air,” she said to Delphine, “I am thinking so fast and furious. I see things.”

  “What things?”

  “Zum beispiel,” Eva said, “this Argus was only a spot. We are spots. Spots in the spot. No matter. We specks are flying on our own power. We are not blown up there by wind! What does this inform you?”

  She grabbed Delphine’s arm, her hand still had a strong grip. Delphine shook her head. “What?”

  “There is plan, eine grosse Idee, bigger than the whole damn rules. And I always known it. Bigger than the candles in church. Bigger than confessionals, bigger than the Sacred Host.” She crossed herself. “I do not know what it is. But big. Much more big.”

  Then she had Delphine call all of her sons into the room, and she spoke to them, too, and she told them that she had seen something very reassuring and that it didn’t have to do with church, even the One True Church. It didn’t have to do with taking communion or getting confirmed by the bishop.

  “It don’t matter if you do these things now,” she said impatiently. “If you must need them, do them. But the plan is greater I am telling you. The plan knows the huge thing, and it accounts for the little fingernail.” Eva raised her pinkie in the air and held it out between them. Her eyes were just a bit glazed, and glittering with dangerous emerald lights. “If I die, don’t take this too hard,” she counseled them, “death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.”

  Her cheeks now took on just that suffusing rose color that Pouty had imagined his ride would inspire. She took a big gulp of water, coughed a little, and then abruptly her eyes shut. Franz reached forward afte
r a moment, terrified and curious, and touched her face. “She’s sleeping,” said Franz, his fingers touching her lips. He gently shoved his younger brothers out. If she had died in that moment, it would have been a perfect piece of drama, thought Delphine from the doorway. Maybe Eva even wanted to, but maybe she stopped herself, knowing that to die immediately after that plane ride would get Franz in trouble.

  “THE BOYS ARE PLAYING in the orchard. The men are already half lit,” Delphine reported to Eva, who smiled faintly and struggled onto her elbows. Delphine helped her sit up and look out the window. She fell back, exhausted, nodding at the sight. The two women could hear the men singing, working their way through a set of patriotic songs, one after the next. Sheriff Hock was particularly good on the high parts of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His voice splintered eerily through the bright, heated air, giving Delphine chills.

  “Men are so much fools,” Eva whispered. “They think they are so smart hiding the Everclear in the gooseberry bush.”

  Even though the last few days had been nightmarish, Eva still refused to die in a morbid way and even preferred to suffer in a fashion that was strangely hilarious. She laughed freakishly at pain sometimes and made fun of her condition, more so now when the end was close. Delphine would later believe that the purchase of the chinchillas was a sign of that fast downhill turn. The way Eva got up on one of her last good days, sneaking the delivery truck out to the farm of a strange old biddy, and returning with the creatures. Now, beyond the men, who were drinking underneath the clothesline, the thick-furred things panted, stinking gently in their flimsy network of cages.