Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  THIRTEEN

  The Snake People

  WHEN DELPHINE had asked him the obvious question, Roy’s answer often was, “I drink to fill the emptiness.” Delphine hated that line. Once, she pushed him backward into a chair and yelled, “Hey, I’ve got news for you. Everyone does everything to fill the emptiness.” While it may or may not have been true, Roy was comforted to think that his personal emptiness was universal. He felt less special, especially when it came to the dark, fixed hole that his lost love had left in him, but he felt a kinship, too, with other empty souls. From then on, one of his favorite bottoms-up slogans was a toast to the great void. During the long sobriety that he enjoyed after Eva’s death, he’d taken Delphine’s remark as an earnest directive. Everything he’d done, he did to fill the emptiness. Unfortunately, nothing worked like alcohol.

  “Nothing can fill the ache of the abyss,” he said one night to his singing cronies. The men were sitting on old crates and creaking chairs in the ruins of an arbor that grapevines had half pulled down with their quick-growing weight. Fidelis always kept them organized, singing song after song, practicing. When he was occupied elsewhere, as now, the men often drifted into gossip or even self-pitying monologues.

  “Nothing can fill the nothing,” Roy went on lecturing, “except love or booze or a great religious impulse. And I ain’t got Minnie’s love anymore, or the lack of an imagination to believe in the God of the Lutherans or the Catholics! Nor do I got the depth to invent my own rattletrap version of the Lord Almighty.”

  Everyone nodded, but no one answered for fear of setting him off on some other open-ended, infinite topic. “Nothing,” he said, pulling his nose. “God made schnapps for a reason and one reason only. He left a hole in us. Yes, He left a hole when He molded us from the clay. A cup. And then He felt sorry for us and He gave us fermented spirits to pour in the cup. Why do you think they’re called spirits?” He looked around fiercely. “Think about it.” They all should have known that Roy was heading for a relapse.

  Gradually, first with small trickles of beer and then in an increasingly fabulous wash, Roy proceeded to fill the emptiness again with his favorite substance. He often lied to his daughter about working with Step-and-a-Half, when he was really swigging away down at the bum’s jungle or sitting on the back steps of the pool hall (he was not allowed inside anymore), or he was somewhere else, anywhere that would have him, getting juiced to the gills.

  Hoping to keep Delphine unaware, as well as avoid another series of visits from the unruly dead, the drunk Roy stayed away from his house. The spirits of the piteous Chavers family left him alone as long as he avoided the scene of their undoing. He was still able to sober himself up for two or three days each week, and on those days he stayed with Delphine and was, perhaps, overly solicitous. He cooked heavy breakfasts and washed his own clothing. He scrubbed floors. It was his absence and his homely industry then, an exact pattern she’d never known in him, that kept Delphine in the dark for such a long time. She only discovered the truth once she returned from Chicago and started to look for work.

  Delphine hurried over to Step-and-a-Half’s shop the next morning. Outside, on the skim of concrete and the beaten dirt of the entry, an arrangement of butter churns, their paddles worn by female hands, listed slightly one to the next. She stepped around washtubs, an old iron mangle, chipped jars, and dented or bunged pots. Eyed an array of gap-toothed rakes, dulled hoes, brooms worn to the binding of the straw. The spill of junk into the street, which Step-and-a-Half didn’t always bother to bring inside at night, was meant to entice customers. Instead, the stuff made a barrier that either tripped people or sent them off the walk into the street to skirt the mess. Delphine entered with the hope that she could have Tante’s old position, but she took a small step backward when the junk picker leaned across the scarred wood of the counter.

  “Tante’s old job? I gave her a job because I felt sorry for that bag of bones. Why is it you high and mighties from the butcher shop always come to me?”

  Delphine folded her arms. “Forget it, then! You could sure use me around this place, but I’m not going to beg to sell your ratty old crap.”

  “That’s more like it!”

  Step-and-a-Half smiled to herself and put a toothpick in her mouth. Cigarettes were becoming scarcer, expensive. The roll-your-own bags of Bull Durham made harsh smokes and she’d started chewing toothpicks instead of lighting up around the precious fabrics because the wools, especially, absorbed the stink. She began to shred the toothpick with her teeth. From time to time her eye opened wide to fix Delphine in a light of intrigue. At last she spoke.

  “You don’t need the work. You should just get away from that damn old drunk. Leave him to pickle. You could go anywhere and get away from him. The whole damn town feels sorry for you.”

  “What do you know about it?” Delphine was furious now.

  “I know plenty,” said Step-and-a-Half. “I kicked him out of here just yesterday, soaked.”

  “He’s not drinking!”

  “Your head’s in the dirt. He’s an old wino, Delphine. They do not change.”

  “They do so,” said Delphine. “He finally has changed. The pledge took this time. You should see him.”

  “I did see him and I smelled him, too.”

  “Bullshit,” said Delphine, although she knew she was hearing the truth. An immense, dispirited darkness of mood caved down on her as she took in the fact that she’d ignored the signs in Roy. Why was she such a realist in every other way except when it came to her father? She left the store without saying another word, walked home, and crawled into bed to catch up on the sleep she’d missed out on in Chicago. When she woke, the cloud descended again. Heavy-brained and still groggy, she stumbled to the kitchen to cook herself a pair of sunny-side up eggs.

  “So the old man fell off again,” she mumbled to the spatula. Worry over her father quickly changed to the exhausting old fury. “What the hell do I even care for,” she fumed, forking the eggs up straight from the pan into her mouth. Her lonely greed and nervousness embarrassed her. She put the fork down and vowed, “I won’t go looking for him! I’ll check on Markus instead!” With resolute haste, she made up a quick pot of the same dumpling soup Markus had survived on after his near burial. She wrapped the pot of soup in a towel and drove to Waldvogel’s. On the way there, she realized that she had only ten dollars left to her name and, now that she couldn’t count on Roy for a contribution, no prospect of paying end-of-the-month bills. If she didn’t find another job within the week, she’d sell the car, she decided. The prospect steadied her panic.

  THERE WAS A RICH SMELL of garlic in the air of the shop. Fidelis must be mixing up a batch of Italian sausage, Delphine thought, and then she began to notice things. The cream was not put away. Watch that, she pointed as Franz came out of the side cooler, it’ll spoil. Nobody had cleaned the fingerprint smudges off the case’s glass front. Delphine grabbed a rag and did it herself, then threw the rag down.

  “Where’s Markus?” she asked.

  Franz gestured her to the back rooms and she left all that was distressingly undone in the shop and went back there, concerned to find that Markus was still in bed, but glad at least he wasn’t any worse. Of course, he hadn’t changed out of the clothes he’d worn to Chicago, even down to the same socks.

  “God, those stink!”

  Delphine coaxed the socks off his feet.

  “I feel good. I just can’t stand up! I fall over!” Markus laughed. He was a giddily cheerful patient, glad to be home. Delphine was drawn to stay with him. His face was eager, his pale, peach-bright hair stuck every which way in bent curls. Delphine rummaged through the meager supply of clean clothing, found an unmatched, ragged, clean pair of pajamas. He clutched them to his chest and walked, weaving, light-headed, to the bathroom to put them on. Delphine tightened his sheets and remade his bed. Fluffing his pillow, she felt a sharp object in the cheap feathers, reached in and drew out the bundle of mementos from Ruthie,
the notes, the clicker. Delphine began to examine these things, then realized they were private and stuffed them back. Markus came in, slipped into the bed, shut his eyes against vertigo.

  “Drink this soup,” said Delphine. The name signed on the bottom of the notes stuck in her heart. He must have loved Ruthie Chavers, as only children love, to keep her notes hidden in his pillow. Delphine helped Markus sit up and then tried to feed him a spoonful of soup from the pottery bowl she held. “I’m not a baby,” said Markus. He took the spoon from her hand, swallowed the soup in it, and held out his other hand for the bowl. He fed himself, slowly and carefully, sipping broth and holding each dumpling for a moment in his mouth, as though he was grateful for it, absorbing its taste. Watching him, Delphine breathed deeply and then felt a quietness descend between them. The air was still, the sounds from the shop hushed and far away. The dog on the floor whined lightly in her dream. The spoon clinked against the side of the bowl. The boy carefully swallowed. Delphine felt as if this eating of the healing soup by the ill and hungry boy, and her watching of it, could go on and on and she would not mind in the least. It was as though she were witnessing some sacrament. She was sorry when he put the bowl to his lips, drank the last drops, and handed back the spoon. She waved it in the air.

  “More?”

  With a sleepy, refusing nod, he gave her the bowl, too, and then slid down beneath the burst quilt. He closed his eyes with a great sigh of release. In moments, he was breathing deeply. His fair skin flushed a delicate rose from ear to ear. His lashes were thick and faintly red and his hair bristled pale against the tattered pillowcase. Delphine continued to sit in the chair, watching him, holding the empty bowl in her lap. She smoothed his hair back, but didn’t dare kiss him or tuck the covers up tight around him until he was asleep.

  Walking out past some customers, Delphine overheard someone say that a bookkeeper’s job had opened at the lumberyard. It would be pleasant to work in the scent of fresh sawdust rather than raw blood, she thought as she left. Roy was still not home when she returned—that was perhaps a good thing. She locked the door, doused the lights, and went to sleep. The next morning, she put on her work dress, a somewhat worn hat, and her old coat. She did not want to appear in her very best—those things Cyprian had bought for her—since it wouldn’t look right. No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, she wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman, but not one who could not afford, say, a hat with a little green feather. A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.

  The spring wind was a quiet and sustained moan, fluttering bits of paper and driving down needles of sleet. The skies were pale purple, the trees soft gray, leafless. There was a watery freshness to the morning light. Delphine’s mood lifted as she walked, for she had always loved this time of year, before the leaves came out, when the wind was wild. Clarisse, in her dramatic way, had had the opposite reaction. She had always fallen into a perverse and severe mystery and worn black to school. Traced her eyes with the soot from a burnt match, and rouged her cheeks, sometimes with circles so she looked clownishly tubercular. To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day—a hopeful time of the year. Walking down the nearly empty street, Delphine’s thoughts turned calmly optimistic. And that was good because when the creature stumbled toward her from the opposite direction, she was somehow prepared to deal with what she saw.

  Gray, naked, hairless, more ghostly animal than human, the wild shape flitted around the corner of the drugstore. Then it jumped from the alley, howling, and threw itself down, clutching at the frozen mud. In the hoarse call it made, she recognized her father. He clambered toward her on his knees and then hopped up as if pulled by strings. He was blown against a storefront like a ball of Russian thistle. He twirled off a front stoop to sprawl in the runnel of a rain gutter. Delphine ran for him, but he saw her and with a start of horror stumbled backward, then turned and ran, streaking crazily back and forth across the street. His legs and arms were skinny and wasted, but his belly was round and frog white. His genitalia were small purple decorations underneath. He didn’t bother to hide them, or seem aware at all that he wasn’t wearing a stitch. He just wanted to run. It didn’t matter where. And he was quick and clever in delirium, Delphine knew. He was always very hard to catch.

  Delphine chased her father up the main street, then he cut behind the Lutheran church. She chased him all the way around the building, hoping to trap him in the pastor’s yard. Cutting through a patch of blazing forsythia, he nearly ran down Mrs. Orlen Sorven, who threw her round arms up and hollered for help. They left her bellowing cries behind. Roy leaped a primrose gate and sprinted over to the little town park by the river. There, he vaulted picnic tables, sped around the swings. Luckily there were no children of an impressionable age, though a woman with a toddler hid its eyes and dropped her jaw wide. “He’s harmless,” called Delphine. Panting now, she chased Roy up the winding hill. Roy darted from there toward the fire station, then veered north probably to climb the water tower. Delphine closed in. She had the youth, the stamina, but was hampered by her respectable, job-seeking heels. When he eluded her, swinging around the gas pumps again on main street, weeping in terror at what his brain showed him, she reluctantly took off the shoes. She set them near the pump and then gave chase in stockinged feet, chagrined that her last pair would be ruined. Delphine tackled her father as he ran toward the town grade school. She bore him to earth and then the gym teacher ran outside with a towel around his neck and sat on Roy, putting the towel down first. Roy’s legs were streaked with filth and shit. Once caught, he was meek. Delphine took off her coat. She and the gym teacher threaded his arms into the coat’s arms and buttoned it down the front. Children and teachers gaped at the scene from the windows as Roy swayed to his feet and let himself be led along, step by step, toward home.

  Once there, Delphine gave her father some water with sugar and salt sprinkled into it, put him to bed. She rolled him up in a sheet, and, although he hated to be confined, she safety pinned the sheet together in back and laid him on his side. She called Doctor Heech, who agreed to come and see him when he’d finished with his appointments. When she was sure that Roy was deeply asleep, she walked back to the lumberyard only to find that the job was filled just this morning, very sorry. And could you make sure your father doesn’t sleep again in the lumber piles? We’re afraid he’ll take a match to the pallets, build a fire. That’s a hazard, you understand.

  “IF WE WERE to take a nice, sharp, carving knife and slice you open,” said Doctor Heech, drawing a line with his finger up Roy’s stomach to the breastbone from the groin, “and if we were to push aside your stomach and your guts and take hold of your liver . . . say we ripped it out and showed you the poor, abused, pulsating organ, we would surely find you’ve done tremendous violence to it.”

  Doctor Heech shook his lank silver curls, touched his eyebrows, almost whispered in his reverence for the liver. He went on talking to Roy in a gloomy, dreamy, tone. “This piteous, innocent, earnest helpmeet. What you’ve done is quite unforgivable. Liquefied in places, surely reeking, here petrified, there pickled. Just by gently palpating . . .” With a faraway frown Heech jammed his fingers into Roy’s side and closed them on something deep in his midsection, causing Roy to yelp, then sob. “I can tell this noble liver of yours is kaput.”

  “Leave it alone,” groaned Roy, pushing the doctor’s hands away. “God knows I tried.”

  Doctor Heech huffed in disdain and turned to regard Delphine. “I heard you ran a fast fifty-yard dash this morning.”

  “It was more like ten miles,” said Delphine. “Will he live?”

  “He defies all physical laws,” said Heech, “so I would be foo
lish to make a prediction. But I don’t know how it is he keeps the flame burning in the wreckage as it is.” Heech looked down at Roy. Suddenly his assessing forbearance turned to rage and he roared out, “By God, you will live! I’ve put too much effort into your damn old carcass for you to die before you show consistent goodness to Delphine.” He jabbed a finger at Roy’s wasted face. “You will not die now! It would be disrespectful! I won’t allow it.”

  “Taper him off,” he said to Delphine. “I don’t have to tell you how to do it. And give him this for the cough.” He handed her a bottle of strong cherry bright syrup. Then he put his hand on her shoulder for a moment and said to her, making sure Roy paid attention, “When he does croak, bury him in a packing crate. Don’t give him much of a funeral. Use the money on yourself.”

  NOT THAT PEOPLE aren’t kind, thought Delphine, but when they say no, do they mean because they really don’t have work, or because I’m me? She didn’t know, just kept looking, and eventually to her great relief, for she was down to the last two dollars in her purse, she got a temporary job. Tensid Bien, the precise old man who sampled Sunshine cookies, who must have known she’d often given him an extra slice of baloney for his nickel, put in a good word for her. She was hired to file papers for the county offices in the courthouse. So her days became as dry as the wind outside. She worked in a back file room on an accumulation of boxes filled with old land settlements and myriad complaints. Nobody else really broke the tedium—one secretary took calls and worked up current papers on her smart black typewriter. Since she considered herself too important to be bothered by conversation with a file clerk, Delphine hardly ever addressed her and after a while she could not remember the woman’s name. Delphine rarely saw a county official in the flesh—they seemed busy doing county business somewhere else. It was a sleepy job. When she got home, she dosed Roy from the bottles of syrup and schnapps she carried with her and never left alone with him. Once he slept, his cough quieted, his breathing was so calm he didn’t even snore. Delphine made herself dinner and went to sleep, too.