Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  She didn’t want him to forget they were supposed to kill the things. He was ahead of her, though. He brightened.

  “There’s going to be about six babies, and the does need bone powder mixed in their food. I figure we have over three hundred dollars worth when we sell them this fall. Then we’ll keep the babies in the heated shed over winter, and make two thousand next year!”

  “Who’s buying these things?” said Delphine.

  “There’s a dealer. He’s a fur maker.”

  “Well,” joked Delphine absently, “now I’ve heard of everything.”

  But of course she hadn’t, and of course the creatures had no water when she got there, so she had to feed one or two with eye droppers to revive them. And then Tante wondered why she was not minding her own business.

  “They were Eva’s rabbits,” said Tante, “not yours.”

  “They’re not rabbits,” said Delphine. “They’re rodents, and where is Franz?”

  “Where he always is these days,” said Tante. “With the airplanes.”

  Ever since Tante started cooking for them, Franz had decided to eat with the aviators at the new airfield. Once he was done working in the shop, he now spent all of his time there, glued to his local heroes. He’d gone even more airplane crazy and he adored Lindbergh so much that he tried to dress like him. He followed every move “Slim” made and held forth on every last detail about the Spirit of St. Louis. The gas storage tanks’ placements in the nose, wing, rear. The wicker pilot’s chair. The touchy steering equipment that had helped keep Lindbergh wakeful. One of his scrapbooks was now devoted to Lindbergh alone, and it was filled with pasted clippings and pictures. Franz’s fanaticism was of a practical nature as well. He’d do anything to put an airplane together. He tinkered with the engines the way he’d worked on the stripped hulk of an old Model T out back by the stock pens.

  “You’ve got to have the little boys mix the food up like this,” said Delphine to Tante, who puffed back into the house and sent Emil and Erich out to learn the routine. They appeared, strong as little bull calves in their short pants and ripped shirts, barefooted for the last weeks before school. Delphine smoothed their ragged hair into wings and crouched to their level.

  “You can make some money from these animals,” she told them.

  The boys nodded, bored with the idea.

  “What are you going to do with your money?” Delphine asked.

  They gave each other quizzical and amused looks, as though she had said something secretly hilarious.

  “It could be a hundred dollars each, Markus thinks, maybe more. How much do your soldiers cost, each?”

  This they knew, to the penny, and they knew how much each piece of equipment for their battlefields would cost, too, if they could get them, each horse and each cannon. Every rank of every officer was a different price, and these they recited to Delphine. Their armies were fighting wars of the last century. The officers they’d bought still reared heroically on caparisoned horses, instead of creeping belly down through mud. By the time Delphine finally made them understand that the chinchillas equaled money equaled soldiers, or lemon drops, licorice whips, and ice cream downtown at Birdy’s Drugstore, and that they would have shares in the profits equally with Markus provided they did not let Tante take over the cleaning and the feeding of these creatures, they were serious, determined, alight with calculating greed.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night Delphine shook Cyprian awake because the wild dogs were howling again. A pack of strays and leftovers, skimmed out of the town’s rich backyards, poor shacks, and middling main street shops, had banded together. Delphine had often seen them around the far edges of the butcher’s yard. Eva had pointed them out, gray shadows of every dog shape, some big and rangy and others small as whippets, a classless and breedless roaming menace led by that rogue stud Hottentot. They came around the butcher shop often, and had furtively lived off the occasional ball of guts that Fidelis flung out for them, or the forgotten mess of chicken heads nobody bothered to clean up in the tall weeds. They had never howled around the butcher’s shop. Because there was good pickings, they’d never give away their presence.

  Out of town, on wild nights they rode the moon, howling themselves back to the shapes of wolves. Their song was gurgling and eerie, but without the coherence of urgent joy and sensible thought she’d heard in the voices of the real wolves, up north, where she and Cyprian had listened while camped outside a small two-bit town with no money, right before a show. She shook him awake anyway because the sound made her lonesome, and a little romantic, as it referred to their past in which there had been that single deep sexual interlude. Now he woke up, as he always did, completely alert and ready to talk if she wanted, or eat, or play cards. This was one of the nice and comfortable things about Cyprian. He liked waking up and was always obliging even in the first minutes, though not obliging in every way. Still, because she needed him and the dogs were out, howling, she said, her voice ragged, “Make love to me.”

  Cyprian took his breath in sharply. He’d worried about this for a long time, wondering when she would get tired of him lying like the butcher’s dog, that’s what he’d heard it called, to sleep alongside your woman without taking advantage of her tenderness, her sex. Just the way the butcher’s dog never touches what it loves, but parks itself with trained indifference next to a juicy haunch. Knowing this time would come, he’d made his mind up to do something that he felt an ethical repugnance for—picture men. He’d even lined up the ones he’d use most effectively. Now, he mustered his collection. He summoned them. He got the picture of a pulsing throat, a chest, the whole works, and he kept the picture going, shifting, even though a breast got in the way, or her sighing voice, or whatever else. He did the act with desperation and no skill and he did it too fast, just to make sure he finished it, but then afterward he tried his best to make it up to her, to not fall asleep, but keep his hands moving, his mouth moving, until she arched under him and cried out and was dead silent.

  “Delphine,” he whispered, after some time had passed, “are you hungry?”

  She did not answer, and he felt sure she was pretending to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. The whole thing made him conscious of his mess—what he called the thing that was the truest desire in his life. But it was a mess, because what was he going to do with it and where would it all end up? For sure, there was no future in living with a man. In setting up a house. He’d never heard of that, except for in the cities, and he imagined they were different than he was. They didn’t get along with regular men, he thought. All that aside, there was Delphine herself. He never talked to men the way he did to Delphine, or had such good times, or felt this sweet impulse to protect. Yet his hands in dreams fit themselves around men’s hard shoulders, and their faces, and God, the way they smelled and the way they sounded. And so much else in the deep-red world he had just summoned. Now he couldn’t help think of those things once more, and guilty at his hardness and his excitement, he turned Delphine over and began with a blind abandon to make her shudder, to make her swear in a whisper next to his ear, to make her feel the damage in his heart, to shut her up, to kill some little man inside himself angry that she was a woman, and then, when she battled him back, biting his lips and in a silent struggle pinned him, Cyprian lay back in careless luxury.

  The dogs came close to the house. They seemed to howl right underneath the window. He forgot just what she was, man or woman, and felt the simple dark of lust for a moment, the ease and pleasure of being drawn out to his length in her mouth. He stroked her hair and touched her lips, tight around him, and then he lost himself, and when she was finished he put his hands on her face, smoothing her cheekbones, wiping her mouth, for some reason murmuring, “You poor thing, you poor thing,” until she began to laugh at him.

  SO THERE THEY WERE, in the middle of the night, frying up a single pork cutlet, arguing how to split it, when Markus stumbled out in his little-boy shorts.

  “Now we have to spli
t the damn thing three ways,” laughed Cyprian. What had happened in the bedroom made him light-headed, he felt drunk and a stranger to himself. How had she done that, made him forget, for a second, what she was? She could have been a wolf. Now the little boy looked embarrassed at himself until Cyprian said, “Just sit down and let the table cover it.” Markus sat down grinning.

  Delphine was wearing a Chinese robe, a floating brilliant red with apple blossoms on a long stem embroidered on the back, and her feet were bare. First, she held it shut, then she pinned it so she could use both hands chopping potatoes.

  “We might as well just eat,” she said, and fried an onion. Put some water on to boil for chamomile tea. “After this, I’m drinking this sleep tea. It’s an herb. I’m looking for work tomorrow and I’m getting my beauty rest.”

  The dogs were gone, their howling had stopped as soon as the lights went on. Roy had made a bed for himself in a small summer shack right beside the chicken coop. He’d fixed it up for himself with a little pallet set in the wall, even stuffed a mattress and dragged out an old bedspread and a pillow that Eva had given to Delphine when she told her, long ago, how they’d had to burn every single thing in the house. He had slept out there since so as not to disturb the two of them, he said. They had let him.

  “Listen,” said Markus, now, his eyes very wide. “There’s something out there.”

  Over the sizzle in the pan they heard it—the rhythmical growls and the sudden snorts and the high-pitched whimpers.

  “That’s Roy snoring.”

  The old man was perfectly clear, even from across the yard and locked up in his tiny house. Delphine shook the skillet. What would they do when it got cold out, come winter? Having grown up with it, she was used to the sound the way people get used to living next to train yards. But poor Cyprian would be kept awake tossing all night. The thought, coming to her as she turned over the brown, crusted potatoes, was the first for a long time she’d had in which she imagined a future with Cyprian. And all because they’d had this one night. Well, that was stupid! She knew what was going on, him with his eyes closed tight. What was he seeing in his head? She turned the potatoes back and then used the spatula to set a heap on each plate. She set the plate before him, touched the side of his face with the back of her hand, wishing to know the answers, but already protecting herself. It might not happen, after all, for another eight months or a year, and what the hell did she really think, anyway, was going on during his trips up north?

  * * *

  DELPHINE WAS OUT BACK setting new straw down on her potato beds when Fidelis drove up in the meat-market truck. She straightened, brushed her sweaty brown curls back from her forehead, narrowed her eyes although she didn’t think they’d have a run-in. She’d expected that he would come out looking for Markus when he returned. School was starting soon. He walked toward her, his arms motionless as hooks at his sides, his face quiet. He wore a rumpled plaid shirt—she’d never seen such a thing on him. And his pants were stained on the thighs where he’d wiped blood off his hands. Fidelis was usually immaculate, but of course that had been Eva’s doing and then her own. As she walked toward him, she added another secret piece of gloating to her store. Tante couldn’t keep up with the laundry. They stopped with about three feet of space between them and stood without speaking. Delphine cocked her head to the side. The sun was behind her and full in his face, a ravaging white sun that blotted out his features.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked.

  “Running around like a fart on a lantern,” he said, “I come for Markus. Where is he?”

  “Like a fart on a lantern, huh,” said Delphine. “That’s no excuse!” Her temper flared, her heart caught. She suddenly missed Eva and that lonely pang turned to anger. “Of course he’s here. Do you think I’d let that bitch of a sister of yours beat him black and blue?”

  Fidelis grew very serious, though he didn’t look surprised. He looked down at his feet in the tough steel-toed slaughterhouse boots, and he frowned so hard at them that Delphine looked down, too. There was nothing to see but that cracked leather planted in the soil.

  “I come to get him,” said Fidelis in a low voice. Delphine waited for him to say something more. Thank you wouldn’t be out of the question, she thought. But he held his silence, which annoyed her enough so that she asked an abrupt question.

  “Are you going to give him a whipping?”

  “Why should I?” said Fidelis, then raised his eyes and looked full on at Delphine. Even through the blast of sun she could feel the power of his pale gaze. As on the first day she met him, she felt a jolt of strangeness. Not fear, just an instinct that there was more, much more, happening in that moment than she could grasp. He was withholding an energy composed of menace and promise. Tons of power were behind his slightest gesture and she thought of a great smooth-faced dam.

  “Come in, take a load off, and I’ll pour you some iced tea. Roy and Markus are down at the river, but I think it’s too hot for the fish to bite. They’ll be back any minute.”

  She was stalling, trying to find a diplomatic way not to send Markus back. Fidelis came into the house, still darkly cool as she’d kept the windows shut against the growing heat. She now opened the windows, sensing that undertone of cellar rot that crept in elusively and smelled to her of despair. There were six green ash trees outside that changed the air around in the late afternoon. The rooms would cool. The place was clean, scrubbed to a finish. Earlier, she’d cut a lemon into a jug of clear brown tea and stirred in the sugar, then set it right next to the ice block. Now she poured the tea into the glass beer mugs. The sides of the glasses filmed over and sweat. Fidelis looked at the tea a little sadly.

  “I don’t have beer,” said Delphine.

  Fidelis took a long drink, and Delphine refilled. Then he put his mug down and asked, “When are you coming back?”

  Delphine mulled that one over, and then thought, Here’s my bargaining point. “That’s a hell of a question,” she said.

  Fidelis leaned forward and hunched his shoulders as though he was going to say something very difficult, but all he said was, “Tante can’t run things alone.”

  Delphine realized that it was a form of betrayal for him to make even the mildest critical statement regarding his sister. That was the way of those old German families. Tante was the only family he had over here. She wrote descriptions of whatever he did in endless script letters. Tante was always mailing off a stack, foreign postage. It was said that Tante wanted to go back to their pretty town in Germany, Ludwigsruhe, if only it weren’t for Fidelis. She couldn’t just leave him in this country, especially now, with those boys. Still, his troubled frown, and obvious discomfort, annoyed Delphine.

  “I suppose I could think about coming back to help out—that is, if you’d tell her to pack her bags and get.”

  Fidelis looked like he’d been knocked on the head with a sheep mallet. Such a thing must not have occurred to him, and Delphine had to laugh.

  “She can’t cook. You’re losing business because she’s snotty to the customers. Your clothes look like hell. Your boys are running wild. And I won’t come back if she’s there, you can bet!”

  Fidelis gave a cool nod and closed up. He wasn’t going any further with that, Delphine could tell. Maybe she should have been amazed that for such a big man he was such a coward before his sister, but she understood a lot more about him now.

  “Look,” she said, pretending to soften. “I guess it’s tough. I like your boys, so I’ll think about it. Just leave Markus with us another couple weeks. He can start school from here. Cyprian can drive him in. He’s too much trouble for Tante, and he’s good help to us.”

  Fidelis agreed to that, and when Markus came back Delphine watched very closely to see how he acted with his father, whether he was eager to return. But Markus was wary when he saw his father’s truck in the yard, and he seemed relieved to stay on with Delphine. She brought a lemon pound cake to the table, and tension eased up quickly. Fi
delis ate the cake with great attention. Eva’s recipe, he knew. He experienced a wave of feeling when he gathered the last crumbs, and he made a ceremony of putting down his fork, slowly lowering it to the table. Delphine felt his sorrow, then, as a current of energy. Leaving, Fidelis nodded in approval at the good-size fish his boy had caught despite the heat, and took the fish as a gift. Markus put his shoulders back and strutted a little, which made Delphine laugh because he was such a skinny, unassuming boy. Yes, he had to stay. There was no doubt about it. She had to teach him a few things before she let him face Tante, and she had plans how to do it.

  * * *

  DELPHINE STILL OCCASIONALLY dreamed of getting a show together, a large-scale drama production, or of putting the balancing act somewhere in the plot of the thing. To do that, they’d have to take it on the road because the town could not support a cast of professional players. But Delphine no longer wanted to leave. Not with Roy behaving and with Markus near. Losing Eva had taken something out of her, too, and she began to spend more time with Clarisse. Another reason to stay in Argus. Still, the question lingered whether she and Cyprian were still essential to the investigation. Nothing had come of the sheriff’s plan to solve the Chavers’ deaths, nothing that she had heard, anyway. Delphine thought that she would like to know where things stood. She was curious. It struck her that she should pay a visit to the sheriff. So she left Roy napping in the shade one afternoon, and as Cyprian had driven the car up north, she walked to town.

  By the time she got there, she was wringing in the unseasonable heat. Usually by now they had a break in the weather. Not this year. Sweat darkened her armpits and her neck was damp, her hair springing out of the pins she’d fastened in wet tendrils. In town, with the wide reflecting streets and the puny trees, the sun shone hotter. The sheriff’s dim office offered some relief. He had a ceiling fan going, and on his desk a little, black, official-looking fan whirred as well. The brick walls were insulating and the inside of his office was cool and peaceful. Sheriff Hock was doing paperwork when she entered, and he looked glad for a diversion.