Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  Delphine’s back chilled. “I’m losing my damn mind,” she muttered out loud to break the spell. It seemed to work, although she didn’t dare look at the dog again. She turned her back on Schatzie and walked out into the yard, past the tangled garden where she’d harvested lumpy squash that day, down to the edge of the field. She stood there alone. All around her, the dark seethed with fall insect noise, with a humming life that rose and sank, surrounding her with inchoate music. She breathed deeply of the spice of weeds under the harsh smoke. “Oh hell, Eva,” she heard herself say. Then she was simply talking to her friend, nothing special. Laughing at the boys, the men, the customers. Speculating about the reasons people did things. Since the end, Delphine hadn’t wept, she had put all thoughts of Eva firmly from her mind, preferring to let the loss settle wordlessly into her. Tonight, as she stood talking in blackness, an alien sorrow that held some despairing comfort, too, bubbled into her, and she let herself cry with a lost, croaking, ugly sound, until the last coals collapsed into a dull, red foundation and the dark crept close to cover everything.

  THAT’S THE WAY it will be, she thought, driving home, her thoughts gloomy and exalted, when I, too, experience the end of things. Those last coals of light going out, extinguished, and then the dark creeping to the corners of her vision. As she turned, a shape on the road, red eyes reflecting her head lamps, leaped away in a ghost arc. A dog. Abruptly, Delphine laughed. Well, maybe even Fidelis could not rid the world of feral dogs, and maybe they would still howl in the dark around her house. And maybe they would even come for Roy’s chickens. For no good reason, the thought of one dog escaping Fidelis’s seamlessly accurate shooting cheered her and she found her mood oddly buoyant as she entered the yard of the house. Getting out of the car, she heard the rocking rumble of her father’s snore. There was a light on in the kitchen, probably Cyprian playing solitaire or reading the cheap drugstore crime and mystery pulps he favored, or even practicing, as he did every day, some small feat for the show he was concocting.

  Delphine walked in the door. None of these things. Cyprian was slumped on the table, waiting for her, sleeping in one lamp’s dull light. He was in his undershirt and she could see the lightning bolts of war scars, the tough shocks of muscles, the soft gold of his skin. Sleeping there, his face half in the dim glow, he was extraordinary. His face was of such a perfected geometry that he seemed a creature from a fabulous painting, a fallen hero in an ancient scene. Delphine put her hand on his back to wake him, and as he woke, he took her hand in his and held it to the side of his face. For a long while, he held it there, and then he spoke to her, telling her that if she married him she would never have another worry. He would never go with men, he would be faithful to her in the deepest way. The feelings, the things that drove him, that made him seek men, he would give those up. He would stop his thoughts. He would be different. And he could do it because he loved her, he said, and if she loved him back they would be happy.

  Delphine sat down next to him, not across from him where she’d have to look into his eyes, but right next to him where she could put her arms around his shoulders. There was nothing she could really say in the face of his trust—if she hadn’t seen him with the other man, maybe she could have believed what he said. But she had seen him, and what he did was—she couldn’t name it exactly, she couldn’t put it into words except clumsily—what she saw was him. Truly Cyprian. If someone had an essence, his was in that quick stirring between the two men, their energy and pleasure, his happiness, even, which she had sensed from her hiding place in the leaves and which was still there, changing swiftly as she stepped out into the open.

  Instead of answering his question, she told him what had happened that day, all about the morning’s discovery, the trap Fidelis had set. She felt him grow interested when she talked about the rifles lying calm across Fidelis’s lap, and she was encouraged and went on, distracting him. She told him about the long wait, and then about the shooting, how of a piece it was. Not one shot went astray and none was wasted. It was a great surprise to her, afterward, that Fidelis killed every dog with an ease and precision that she couldn’t register in the moment of it for the heat of the simple killing. Only afterward, she told Cyprian, she heard the shots as so regular and seamless they almost seemed one noise.

  Cyprian nodded, took in everything she said with a silent and compelled interest, heard about the bonfire and how it was made and the silence of the surprised dogs, and understood the fury of calm that was the killing. All the time that he was listening to Delphine she couldn’t know it, but he was thinking something very different from what she might have imagined.

  So Fidelis was a sniper. That was his thought. A German sniper. I wonder if he ever had me in his sights, without a helmet, my back turned. I wonder if he was the one who blew the brains out of Syszinski, or the hand off Malaterre, or the heart from the chest of the one I loved?

  FIDELIS WALDVOGEL and Cyprian Lazarre never spoke of the war that they shared, yet it lay between them very like the Belgium mud once terrible and now grassed and green. The trenches covered, the tunnels collapsed, the armies of men desperate to live sowed instead through the layers of the earth. Sometimes when they drank together, one of them would have a thought about the war, for neither of them ever passed a day or even several hours of the day without remembering the war. A picture, a sound, a word. Something would enter, and either one of them would pause, wage a small interior struggle, and go on. And the other would have felt the impact, like the aftershock of far distant shelling, and be content or relieved to make a joke or take a long draft of beer.

  Only once, when things were quiet of an evening, and Cyprian was waiting for Delphine to finish with some piece of her work, when he and Fidelis were sitting at the kitchen table, did any piece of their subterranean knowledge pass into the open.

  “You took fire,” said Fidelis, with a critical gaze at the scars radiating lightly upward from Cyprian’s throat, one line scored back of the ear to vanish in his shining, crow-black hair.

  “And you, clipped here.” Cyprian indicated on his own chin the shattered area, a pit of little more than an inch, where the bullet had glanced downward through Fidelis’s jaw. They both stopped there, already weary. They could have gone on. Fidelis could have showed him the very bullet, dug from his shoulder, which he wore on his watch chain. Or the saber cuts on his back and across his arm. The astounded flesh of his hip where the caisson went over him the time he was taken for dead. Both men had sustained injuries graver than the obvious ones, hidden by their clothes and hidden, also, by the men they now were. But neither of their experiences had been the kind men built into stories and repeated at drinking tables with other veterans. Those stories were of times behind the lines, usually, of women and of other men, and if there was action or killing involved it was short and glorious. Neither Fidelis nor Cyprian had known glory, and though both had known the grandeur of horror, there was nothing to say about it.

  TANTE WAS STEWING. Delphine could feel it like a waft of town sewer gas just down the street. Her standing in the town and among her Lutheran church group had diminished when her own brother asked her to leave his house and brought in this Delphine, a woman who—Tante was easily gathering up the information—was the daughter of the town drunk, under suspicion for murder, a Catholic, and even worse, a Pole, a woman married (if she was, and it was whispered she was not) to a too handsome foreign-looking man who shared her house, a former stage actress and need she say it, all but a blankety-blank. In addition to all of that, this Delphine had moved in on Eva’s sickness and befriended her because she knew a good chance when she saw one coming—an eligible widower with his own business and four bright sons—she knew what she wanted, said Tante with dark nods, oh yes, she knew what she wanted, that Delphine.

  Tante wrote and sent off a flurry of letters to Germany, full of dark summons, and right away there came back answers that she propped on the cash register and dared Fidelis to ignore. He did read them,
tightened his face, but said nothing. He was distracted. In his clothing drawer there was a cigar box containing a jumble of medals, including an Iron Cross. He had arrived in the country with only a suitcase full of sausages he sold and knives he kept, and he had worked fanatically. Only to see everything around him, here, falling into a collapse as devastating as German inflation, which caused his mother, so she had once said in a letter, to cart wheelbarrows of reichsmarks to the baker for her loaves. He’d left one Depression to encounter another. And then, after all, his parents had had a great stroke of luck. They managed in the worst year of all to recover a piece of property that was theirs before the war, a store building, and from the share that would have been his, they sent money.

  With that money, he had bought the farmstead in North Dakota and opened the shop. He had worked skinning steers and butchering hogs eighteen hours a day to bring Eva, Franz, and then Tante to abide with him. His forbearing, kind mother, and his father, strict and distant, he missed. And his brother, who now shared the family business. But there was work and more work, always more of it, always he was behind what should be done. There was no question, now, of leaving even to visit his family. He read their letters and set them aside before they penetrated to the still center of his person, where he could feel such a thing as loneliness.

  Tante took the letters back and slipped them into her purse with a grimace of dissatisfaction. She concentrated even harder on making him aware of her list of shocking true facts about Delphine. He waved her off. She bit her lip at his defense of the Polish woman. Fumed with frustration. To other people, she couldn’t go too far in her criticisms, she could not include her brother, lest his business be spoiled and his customers frequent the butcher on the other side of town. Some of her resentful angers had to simmer; then, as stews do, they thickened. She brooded on the grave injustice dealt her by her brother and fantasized returning to Ludwigsruhe. These imaginings, also, grew thick with detail and brimmed with improbable incidents. For instance, into her mind there came the picture of her return complete with boys—well, maybe not Markus, but the other three. Or the twins alone. That could be done.

  The way she saw it, she could not return to Germany alone, having failed to find a husband in this new land of men unwinnowed by war. She had to return with something. Motherless children would do. As the heroic guardian of her brother’s children, she could reenter town life as their aunt, not an old maid aunt but an aunt with dependents. She would have some status. Otherwise, what was there?

  Sometimes, in her spare little house, her sitting room dominated by the cheap teacher’s desk she’d bought secondhand at that, her mind jumped like a rat in a cage. She couldn’t keep doing bookwork like this, drying up a little more every day, becoming brittle as the pages she wrote on and stiff as the figures she added and subtracted. And yet, if the truth be known, what was all that attractive and important about having a husband? Her friends each had one, and all they did was complain about their men’s dingy remarks, their gross habits, their absences, or boast about the types of foods and quantities they ate. There wasn’t any real use that she could see in a husband, unless he was rich. And without a rich husband, she had only the books of three struggling concerns to balance—Krohn Hardware, Olson’s Café, and the butcher shop—and they could hardly pay her the pittance she asked. So it seemed to her that the only way out of her stark room was to find a rich husband, or to get rid of Delphine and somehow wangle Emil and Erich away from their father while they were still young enough to charm others and not so old as to give her any trouble.

  Of course, there was another way. She could, herself, make money. She thought about it. Make money. Nothing occurred to her. She thought about it some more and came to believe it was her only hope. The wish for money began to turn in her brain with a frantic compulsion. She dreamed dollars, dreamed oceans, dreamed of walking off a steamer back to Germany wearing a fur coat. Money danced behind steel bars at night, just out of her reach. One afternoon, over her pale meal of bread and one white veal sausage, a thought struck her that seemed so crazy and outlandish she put it aside. But it came back. She found herself unable to think of anything else.

  By the time she got up the next morning, Tante had decided to sell the last remaining piece of her grandmother’s jewelry, a cameo that her grandmother had left her, a large and spectacularly carved profile of a woman both demure and sensual. The carving was very fine, and the face sensitive and yet a little wild, the cream hair flowing into the pink of the shell. Tante had admired the cameo as a child, and when she took it from its hiding place, a tiny aperture in the wall behind her dresser, she remembered how she had touched it, softly, pinned to lace at her grandmother’s throat on a sunny day at a garden picnic. Times long past. For her it represented all that was secure and comfortable, all that was irreproachable and solid about her life in Germany before the war. She wore it often, too often, to remind herself. To give it up was no small thing. But she was determined. She put the cameo inside a sock and put the sock in her purse. She would sell it, and with the money she would buy a new and fashionable suit. Wearing that suit, she would go to the bank and not leave until she had a job that would eventually, somehow, because it was situated near a large amount of cash, all the money in the town, make her rich.

  DELPHINE NEARLY FELL over when she saw Tante, later that week, wearing not the black dress she had inhabited like a second skin, but a skirted suit welded from some fabric of an unusual metallic sheen and stiffness. The thing looked to have been cut and soldered together much like an armor. Tante looked invincible, which was her intention. As she walked to the bank owned and run by the only man in town she knew could afford steaks every night of the week, she felt that things were going to change for her. The suit would do it, she was positive. As she sat outside his office, waiting, and even as she looked at all the bank tellers and clerks, younger, all young men, she still had faith in the material of the suit she wore. The suit’s glazed weave sustained her. And even when she was refused a position of any type at the bank, the suit helped her not to lose her belief. She decided to walk down the street, up the street, all over town, and not to quit until she had a position that would bring her money—whatever it might be. Whoever might hire her. The suit would find the place. The suit would bring her there.

  So maybe, said Delphine to Cyprian later, the thing was magnetic. It looked it. How else should it happen that Tante should be struck by a car that looked to have been made of the same substance as what she wore? Dragging her feet, worrying the one dime in her purse, Tante crossed the street without looking and was hit by the car of Gus Newhall, the former bootlegger who now sold patent medicines, just coming from the bank, where he’d made a substantial deposit. The car upended Tante in the dust and rolled her sideways into a tree trunk, but didn’t do actual, serious damage to her person that could be seen from the outside anyway. The suit wasn’t even dusty, but when smoothed gave off the same luster as before. Tante righted herself, pushed away the arms of alarmed witnesses, and would have told Gus Newhall that he was a reckless fool, a swine, a dog’s blood cur, only he was a good customer to Fidelis. So she shut her mouth and staggered off, already aching. She made her way to her house. In her front room, on a thick oval of braided rag rug, she lay down. Steadily and with a German effectiveness and efficiency that surprised even herself, she cursed everyone she’d met that day starting with the jeweler who had bought her beloved cameo and who would not, she was certain, trade it back for the suit that had betrayed her.

  FRANZ WAS RIDING Mazarine Shimek’s bicycle and Mazarine was balancing. Her rear end fit into the U of the curved handlebars, and Franz held tight to the rubber grips on either end. He tried to peer over her shoulder, under her lightly sweatered arm, onto the road before them. He tried not to look at the way the lilac-flowered material of her dress stretched over what rested on the handlebars. Her feet, knees together, white anklets and heavy boy’s tie shoes, were carefully placed on the front fender.
Her light brown hair was long and curled out of the dull, frayed ribbon she used to hold it back. Strands of it brushed the end of Franz’s nose, or touched the top of his lip, or grazed his cheek, as they rode into a light breezy wind on their way to the airfield.

  Mazarine liked airplanes, too, or said she did, and collected pictures of pilots and race flights for Franz’s scrapbook. She also came along with him to watch the airplanes and sat in the shade of the barn when one of the pilots who kept their machines either in the barn, or who had landed there for the day, allowed Franz to work on his engine. While Franz worked with the men, she got a book from the strap on the rear of her bicycle and did her sums or geography lessons. Sometimes, when she got bored, she did Franz’s homework, too. When it was done, she got up and walked around and around the barn peering critically at the airplanes until finally Franz was ready to go home. But they didn’t go home right away. They had been going together as sweethearts for months now. They stopped just before the turnoff to the shop. Franz slipped Mazarine’s bicycle behind some weeds. Holding hands, they walked to a little spot underneath a pine tree where the branches came down all around them.

  “It’s gonna get cold here pretty soon,” Mazarine said, settling herself on the soft, rust brown needles, “then what?” She pushed Franz’s hand away from her knee. He sat back a little and waited. Once, she had taken hold of his hand very carefully, and set it on her breast, the left one, and then said, “Go in circles.” He tried that, but soon she frowned and flung his hand off, and said, “That doesn’t even feel half good.” He kept his hand still, just in case she should want him to try again. Her upper lip was thin, but curved provocatively. He liked the way one curve, the left again, was a little higher than the other and rode up a fraction over her teeth. And her lower lip was full, a deep berry color. Franz knew her lips very well, and her ears, too. She always let him kiss her ears and then go down her throat to just below the delicate ridge of her collarbone. Her eyelashes were so long they made shadows, and she said the other girls envied her. They were lush brown, like her eyes, and much darker than her heavy sun-streaked hair, springing out over her shoulders.