Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  After a while Delphine knew it was no use to gather herself, to ask anything else. Real questions sat on her heart. Simple, undramatic. What was Minnie like? Had she been happy to have a daughter? Had she loved her? Loved Roy? Had he really felt such an extraordinary happiness with Minnie? Why had he used his loss of joy as a sorry excuse to make his daughter’s life miserable, not to mention waste his own? Would he now die happy, living on memory—was that his booze now? Was he telling the truth?

  He told her nothing else. When she asked him why he’d loved Minnie so much, what made her so wonderful that he still looked at her fuzzy pictures after all these years, or even what her personality was like, his answers were so general as to give her nothing. Or maybe he was selfish, maybe those private memories were all he had, and he couldn’t give them up, not even to her.

  Still, there were things he needed to say.

  Day by day, as he weakened, his voice softened to a fragile whisper. To hear him, Delphine always had to lean close, into the circle of his breath, which was not the sour alcohol rankness she had been familiar with all of her life, but a childish scent, milky and pure. His gaze was owlish, bewildered. He wanted to talk all the time, and his speech was often garbled—tenses collided, main facts were missing, characters loomed large but with no reference. He seemed to have lost the ability to sustain narrative, as though his lifetime of booze had eaten into every other cell of his brain and made his mind skip like a scratched record. There were occasional times, too, when he spoke with great clarity out of some protected corner of his thoughts. Delphine was never sure which it would be from one sentence to the next.

  “Stop looking at me,” he frowned at her one afternoon.

  She’d had her back turned, and now she did look at him.

  “Or I mean,” he sighed, “stop looking like you’re looking at me. I don’t know which. I never sang your part, you know, Chavers. Shut your damn trap.” He sighed calmly and then seemed to recognize Delphine. “I’ve had enough of him knocking on the floor. He’s never quit, you know. Banging, banging. I suppose he’s waiting for me on the other side. Him with his whole damn family—and I never knew they were there!”

  Roy’s voice was the frightened whine of a four-year-old.

  “I know you didn’t, Dad, you were looped out of your mind,” said Delphine in some annoyance. She didn’t want him to slide onto this mental track of self-pity and comfortable blame. She’d heard his lament many times. But then he said something different. His face grew solemn, then both crafty and confiding. “I could have justified Porky, though it took me a lifetime.”

  “What?” Delphine peered into the vague, watery, washed-out blue of his eyes. “Justified?”

  Roy grabbed her hand and spoke urgently. “I told him to get the ginger beer out of the cellar. And while he was at it, hunt around for the good stuff. And take a candle or two so you can read the French labels! Maybe old Chavers was looking for the king’s wine.”

  Roy twisted uncomfortably, winced, shut his eyes and continued then to speak with his eyes shut, perhaps to keep from seeing the effect of his words on Delphine. “Who knew the wife and kid went down there with him?”

  Delphine bent over and shook him lightly, but his body flopped like an old dog’s and she released him and he groaned on.

  “The kid, Ruthie. I don’t remember what happened, but it could be I shut the hatch! Maybe I shut the hatch. I remember what I yelled down at him. ‘Hey, Chavers, you can come up again after you quit singing over me in practice!’ You know, he was always puffing his chest and inching forward, singing over me.”

  Roy was silent, raptly watching the air between them.

  “You went away for three weeks. A long drunk,” said Delphine, her face stiff. A wave of sick unbelief dragged over her.

  “Longer,” Roy said in the faintest whisper. He went silent for several moments in which the wind boomed in the box elders and the windows shook lightly in their frames. Then he coughed a deep hacking cough, spoke clearly. “I came back to get the liquor in the cellar, went to find it. Saw them. After that, I stayed drunk until you showed up. You and Cyprian.” He looked up at her, his eyes glazed in hopeless appeal, then shut them when he saw her face and turned away. Drew the blanket over his head.

  Delphine got up and walked from the house, out onto the small front porch. She sat down on the top step and folded her arms around herself. From time to time, she slapped away mosquitoes or shook from her hair the seeds falling from the trees in a gentle snow. They were delicate, tiny beads sealed in a papery, brown, transparent case. She brushed the seeds off her skirt. Occasionally, she felt the zing of a mosquito bite, but she didn’t want to go back indoors. As soon as Roy died, she would sell the house, she decided. She would leave the butcher shop and Fidelis and move away to the city. Chicago. Get a job in the theater even if it was only selling tickets. I won’t think about Markus. Ruthie! She touched her fingers to her temples, then clenched her fists and kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She pictured the apartment she would live in, small and efficient. Near a park where she could take short walks, a library, maybe an art museum. She’d learn everything, stuff her brain, become a teacher. Write for a newspaper. She pictured herself at a typewriter, a cigarette burning at one elbow. She was wearing a crisp white blouse and a tight gray skirt, heels. Or no, one shoe was off. She was thinking.

  She pictured herself thinking.

  I’ll never do it, she thought. I’ll never really think. I’m not thinking now, I’m just fantasizing. That’s a much different thing than to play in the free openness of your own mind. She felt the keen sense of something escaping, bright as silver. Then she couldn’t remember the last thing she’d held in her mind, just the sharpness of it. Who gives a damn anyway, she went on. What’s done is finished, and Roy’s his own punishment. I should not hold myself responsible for his drunk sins. And oh yes, I’m a married woman. I’m good at doing business, at holding up my end of the bargain. I’m good at taking care of kids that aren’t even mine. She felt her mind stuttering, searching a way out of guilt and horror. She closed her eyes and saw the hulks in the cellar. One resolved and became an immaculately dressed little girl with a shrewd mouth and snapping eyes. She wore a small, round hat and stood with her fists on her hips, frowning. Her eyes opened slightly, as though she’d noticed Delphine watching her. Tossing her chin up, the little girl laughed in a mocking, unpleasant way. Her laugh was acid with sarcasm and when she turned away Delphine saw snakes twirling off her shoulders and down her arms and the backs of her legs.

  “Leave me alone,” Delphine whispered.

  You are alone, the snake child mocked, more alone than you know. Your husband’s from a foreign country and you haven’t got a child. Your father’s dying and you don’t know the face of your mother. You are different from everyone else living in the town. You think you’re smarter, that you read more. The truth is you just feel sorrier for yourself. Poor Delphine. Poor girl Polack. Poor butcher’s wife!

  Poor me, poor me, Delphine started to laugh and it felt so good that she didn’t stop even when Roy called out in a hopeful voice for his teaspoon of whiskey.

  THE COUNTY VISITING NURSE found Roy Watzka, wide-awake dead sitting up and staring at the obscure and illegible pictures of Minnie placed just before him on the counter edge of the flour cupboard. She set down her bag on the kitchen floor, opened it, put on her stethoscope, and listened for a heartbeat. There was none so she took off the instrument, folded it back into the bag. She uncapped a pen, next, wrote down the exact time of day, and a sentence or two about the condition of the body and her own conjecture on the reason for his death. She recorded the eerie, composed death stare that compounded the legendary nature of his love. The nurse composed his limbs, shut his eyes, lay him down, and contacted Delphine. While waiting, she used the telephone and broadcast the news of Roy’s stare all around the town.

  Roy’s funeral was well attended. The wives of the bankers and landowners came, those
who perhaps longed for similar devotion to the very death. There were fragile rafts of flowers in the church, many flourishes of hankies, and a general clucking at the photographs laid facedown in the coffin, over his heart as he had instructed. There was a dinner afterward in the church hall, a gymnasium that had been the scene of a basketball game the night before.

  Delphine walked over once Roy was buried, and stood in the corner of the gym. The place smelled faintly of stale excitement, old sweat, and salted popcorn. The tables set up for the funeral dinner were decorated with small pots of flowers—African violets, ferns, sweet potato sprouts, taken off the windowsills of the parish ladies’ homes. There was creamed chicken, creamed corn and spinach, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and just plain cream for coffee. Pies and cookies were set out on doilies cut of white paper. The dinner was served by an interdenominational bunch who for the first time seemed to Delphine more kind than curious, more eager to please than to gawk, somehow of slightly more genuine feeling. Still, their solicitous care overwhelmed Delphine with a simple claustrophobia.

  In the swirl of food and sympathy, Delphine abruptly stood with Mazarine Shimek.

  “Come with me,” she said to the girl. And they left the church hall to stand in a little plot of blistered grass behind the church kitchen.

  “If I smoked anymore, I’d smoke now,” said Delphine, pushing her hair away from her face. She’d had it trimmed and set, but the curls wouldn’t mind her brush and sprang out every which way. Another thing she had in common with Mazarine, whose hair possessed so much unruly life.

  Mazarine told her that she was sorry.

  “Me too,” Delphine muttered, but actually she was very tired, and hopelessly angry. She was mad at the long waste of his life and his waste of her affection. As soon as Roy died, she had experienced the stupid and desperate love she’d had for him as a child. Tears suddenly choked her and she tried to wave them off. She’d prepared herself for years to lose him and when he’d exasperated her, had even looked forward to the day. She couldn’t explain just why she felt such a deep, blind, stirring of emotion. This is not grief, she said to herself, this is not fear of loneliness, this is not even exhaustion or relief. It’s existential, she decided, and straightened her back, taking courage from the word. Mazarine was standing next to her, one hand on the brick wall, patient and humble.

  “I want to tell you something,” said Delphine, recovering her voice. Without knowing exactly what it was she wanted to say, she realized that she had something urgent to impart to the young girl, something that her father’s death, embroidered though it was by wishful romance, made plain. “We all die,” she found herself saying to Mazarine. “Franz loves you. You love him. Why not write to him? Why not tell him?”

  WHILE SHE WAS cleaning out the house a few days later, Delphine heard the familiar footsteps and opened the door. A shaft of light fell out on the grass and Fidelis walked into it, shuffling at the threshold, stamping his feet as he entered. Delphine brought beer and then sat with him. He took the wooden rocking chair across from her reading chair. “I’m going to keep my house,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll stay here.” Fidelis opened his fist and closed it, but said nothing. They sat in silence for a long while, listening to the wind sweep and groan in the eaves of the house. Tree branches scraped together and tapped the roof. All of a sudden, Fidelis rose and in one motion picked up Delphine from the chair and carried her into her bedroom.

  He carefully pushed the door closed after them, with his heel, and then lowered her onto the cold, slippery, yellow-gold bedcover. He hadn’t known that he was going to bring her there and now she lay before him in the light of a bedside lamp, staring at him with a cat’s self-possession, her eyes the same color as the fabric behind her. The small glass clock on the dresser ticked with a simple insistence. Above her bed, there was a clumsily painted picture of waves bursting over rocks. Draped on the bedside table, an orange velvet scarf. His blood roared in his ears. The wood of the bed was recently polished with beeswax. He could smell sun on the bedsheets as he leaned down toward her. He breathed an earthen scent of her warm skin as she moved toward him, just a fraction, but then all of a sudden she rolled away. She sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Listen,” she said, and then she felt her heart pumping too quickly, “I’ve got to tell you something.” Her mouth went dry and she tasted rust. She cast about for something else to say, nervous, wishing suddenly she hadn’t thought that she must tell him about Roy. She had thought this out, imagined it, written it out in her mind. She winced and made herself blurt it out, no matter that it sounded like a false reading of a line in a play. “I am the daughter of a murderer!”

  Bewildered at the sudden change in direction, he sat up, a little stunned, thinking maybe he’d gotten trapped and snarled in the English language. Maybe she’d said something very different. He waited, listened as she went on with a dramatic explanation and re-creation of all Roy had admitted to before his death, and how she had reacted to his revelation. As she spoke, agonizing over what was or was not in her father’s mind, and taking on blame, then rejecting it, he could not help his own pictures from appearing.

  One after the other, Fidelis saw the faces of the men he’d destroyed, as in an album or a keepsake book of death. He could no more stop his brain from paging through them, once it started, than he could stop the wind from blowing across the plains. As Delphine’s voice surged around him, he lay back on the bed, closed his eyes against their banal formality, but the pictures invaded his darkness and grew more detailed. He opened his eyes and focused on Delphine’s face, but now he couldn’t hear a word she spoke. He saw his fifth kill. A blond man who looked a lot like Pouty Mannheim reached across a sandbag for what . . . a cup of tea maybe . . . a tin cup in a friend’s hand. Then he’d opened his mouth and thrown back his head as if to belt out the beginning of a song. The bullet had smashed into his face and now Fidelis saw that face, as he did so often. Blond hair, a dark red hole, a nothing. Ears. He saw that no-face. It lived on. The no-face knew him and it never died. The others, too. He saw them all whenever the album opened.

  Sometimes in his mind it worked for Fidelis to stand on the black cover and hold the book shut underneath the same hobnailed boots he had worn then. He tried closing the book, now, concentrating until he sweat. Muck oozed up around his boots. He smelled shit and death. He’d been cold-blooded, invincible, bringing down the enemy’s personal, vengeful fire upon himself and everyone around him. No wonder the other men had hated him and feared him, except Johannes.

  “Are you all right?” Delphine was shaken. He knew she had told him something that she felt was terribly important, but he didn’t remember much of what she’d said. He must divert her. He took her face in his hands and concentrated fiercely upon her features.

  “Es macht nichts,” he said, speaking German in the hope that Delphine would interpret what he said in the way most comforting to her. Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.

  WALKING AWAY FROM the little house much later, in the middle of the night, through the brilliant blue air, Fidelis knew that something had shifted. Up and down the center of his body he could feel the movement of his blood for the first time, as though agitated molecules boiled slowly top to bottom. Several times, as though drunk, he nearly lost his footing. The strange inclination took him at one point to shout aloud, and he did, in the booming dark wind, the cropped black wheat stubble stretching for miles around him. New wheat coming up. There was nothing to throw back his voice, no echo, only blurred horizon. He imagined that perhaps the sound traveled all the way around the world, the faded vowels bouncing back on his shoulders before he moved, and he laughed. It was the shout, the sound, that told him later as he entered the lights of the town’s outskirts and drew near to his o
wn door, what had happened to him. He’d lost his stillness, his capacity for utter cessation, the talent he’d once possessed for slowing his heart and drawing only the slightest breath. That was disarranged. He couldn’t do it anymore. That was finished. And yet it didn’t matter, he thought, there was no need anymore for that sort of quiet, that stillness, that absence, to survive.

  THE WALLS OF THE bedroom Fidelis had shared with Eva were a pale maple-colored plaster. After Eva died, Tante had taken her clothes to distribute among the needy. She had claimed Eva’s porcelain figurines, her jewelry, and packed away what was worthless, too personal, or even sinister: Eva’s tortoiseshell combs, letters from her family, a few books interleaved with personal notes, holy cards of angels, virgins, saints, and Catholic martyrs. After it was cleared out, Fidelis had slept in the bedroom. But it was clear that he had just endured the space, used it only because there was nowhere else to sleep. He’d gone unconscious there and then awakened with little interest in his surroundings. The one deep, long window’s sill was piled with motor parts, beer bottles, broken cups, full ashtrays, and dead plants.

  One day when things at the shop were slow, Delphine cleaned out the room. She divided the junk into piles that she would deposit in proper places or discard. There were still a few things of Eva’s—a jacket, a forgotten shoe, some powder and a drawer of underslips that she packed carefully away into a cardboard carton. Fidelis had put the old bed he’d shared with Eva in the boys’ room and bought a new one, in a plainer style, and a dresser to match it, both stained a deep cherry red-brown. Delphine had bought a bedcover for the bed, and now she spread it across. It was woven with intense red and purple threads, deep and beautiful colors. She stood back, looked at the bed glowing in the room. She rubbed almond oil into the wood of the new dresser and polished the mirror. When she met her own eyes in the mirror, though, she had to stop and sit down on the side of the bed. She was breathing quickly, in a panic, not at all from exertion. Her heart surged and her chest tightened. Did she love Fidelis too much or did she love him at all? Her eyes looked hollow with greed. No good would come of it. She had no control over what he could do to her and where it would end. And what if he should die someday—that would be the limit! Her throat burned. Tears ached behind her eyes. She put her face into her hands and breathed the blackness behind her palms. When she lifted her face, she thought she might tell him that they should not have married. She could still go away. The thought loosened the tightness in her chest and she breathed more easily. Yes, she could walk straight out of his life! But all she did was walk out of the bedroom into a slightly longer hallway, and then down that hall toward the shop.