The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  Fidelis then made the mistake of clambering over the side of the chute, carrying his rifle, and dropping into the confined area along with the pig. He touched down lightly on the other side. As he turned to face the sow, meaning simply to walk up to her and kill her as he’d done with so many others, she charged him. Screaming, she bolted down the narrow incline, broke his kneecap with her crooked brow, and sank her teeth into the flesh just above. As she ripped down, shredding Fidelis’s canvas trousers, and skin to bone, Fidelis gave an anguished roar that, along with the shrill, keening attack shrieks of the pig, brought Franz bolting to the side of the chute. For one endless moment he thought that the sow, whose clenched teeth had parted when Fidelis brought the butt of his rifle down upon her head, would close in again and devour his father. She did have the advantage. While Fidelis lurched back trying to turn the rifle around to shoot, the pig charged again, destroying what was left of his knee with another lurching bite. She then repaired to her corner, red-eyed, bleary with hatred, sobbing. And all this time the eager barks of Hottentot, hungry, goaded her, as though the dog were capable of communicating to the pig a twisted fatalism. She tried to charge again, but this time Franz managed to jam a board between her and Fidelis. Temporarily thwarted, she backed off and in that moment of hesitation Fidelis was able to push the barrel of his gun between her eyes and pull the trigger.

  There was a huge blast of noise, which delighted Hottentot and dazzled Franz. The sow collapsed with a murmur of sorrow, and straightway Fidelis hobbled over to chain her to the winch and haul her to the iron tub. As he did so, a sudden strangeness boiled up in him, a load of nameless feeling unconnected to his physical pain. This was mental, it was sorrow, he wanted to lie down in the muck and weep. Hot tears poured in a shocking stream from his eyes and dripped down his face. Abruptly, he ordered Franz away. He was bewildered, since he had not cried since he was a boy, and even during the war hadn’t broken down like this. But in spite of his attempt to control himself, he wept, angry at his helpless grief, and was all the more horrified to realize that he wept for the sow. How could that be? He had killed men. He had seen them die. His best friend had died beside him. No tears. What sort of man was he to weep, now, for a pig? Angry, he stayed with the creature after that, tending to every detail of her butchering. Although his knee was an agonizing rip of information—he knew it would never be the same—he kept moving. If he stopped to let the knee stiffen, he would be crippled, he thought, and so only late into the afternoon did he quit and then only because Eva forced him. His last act before leaving for Doctor Heech’s office was to provide Hottentot with the stomach of the pig and a huge intestinal wad that the dog, unable to eat all at once, dragged back home.

  SITTING ON A sheet-covered bench in the examining room, Fidelis absently hummed a mocking song to take his mind off the agony in his knee. “Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart.” Heech raised his sleek brows, frowned, and said, “I know that song. ‘Ich mache dass die Blinden gehen und dass die Lahmen wieder sehen.’” Fidelis tried to laugh but the sound came out a gasp. The lame will see, the blind will walk. He’d bound his knee, tight, in an apron and used the strings to secure the improvised bandage.

  “Let’s see what you’ve done now,” muttered Heech, cutting the knotted strings. Fidelis almost asked Heech to save the apron, but realized that Heech would have ignored him, or even taken it as an insult. With sure hands, the doctor unwound the mutilated fabric, and sighed when a thick flap of Fidelis’s flesh stuck to the last fold. “A miracle of engineering,” he shook his head. He was prone to lecturing. “Kaput.” A favorite word of his. Heech frowned in concentration and began a close examination of the wound. The doctor had beautiful hair, of which he was slightly vain. Thick and glossy curls flopped down over his forehead. He loved anatomy and his walls were decorated with painstaking watercolors of the muscles, bones, and digestive and reproductive systems, pictures that he himself had painted. As he assessed Fidelis’s shattered knee and the ripped musculature that had kept the cap in place, he planned how to fix the rips and tears just as a woman does when thrown a half-destroyed pair of boy’s pants. Fidelis was looking at his own knee, too. His thoughts were different. They were a butcher’s observations. Here, he’d slice. There, he’d skin, use the edge of the knife, the point. In no time he’d have a modest dinner joint with just enough fat to lard the meat. Fidelis banged his skull with his hand to clear it and nearly passed out. The song he’d been singing to himself screamed in his brain. Heech helped him to lie back on the bench.

  “Breathe,” said Heech, “but do not pass out on me.” He fit an india rubber cup over the butcher’s face.

  Fidelis plunged into a dry, spinning, spark-infested faraway place from which he knew, heard, and even felt all that Heech did with his needle. Nothing bothered him, although he knew in the abstract that Heech’s every move was painful. It made things worse that the doctor hummed annoyingly while he sewed, but his bedside manner was unpredictable, the whole town knew it. Sometimes he scolded, sometimes he wept, and sometimes, as now, Heech seemed to enjoy his work in an undoctorly way. As he stitched, he burst into the maudlin “Aura Lee.” Fidelis grew intrigued with the tune and began to pick it up. He sang the chorus with Heech, then Heech started over again so that Fidelis could learn the verses. Once he started singing, nothing worried Fidelis, although it was clear from the extent of the damage that he might be crippled. Nothing angered him, either, for he’d taken out his embarrassed and sorrowing rage on the sow by slicing her up with a savage precision. The song did please him, as it pleased Doctor Heech, so that by the last note and stitch they were quite friendly and Heech kept him fifteen minutes longer as he sketched out a brace that would allow Fidelis some range of motion while keeping the knee in place until it healed.

  “ENOUGH!” CRIED FRITZIE when she saw the mess that Hottentot guarded at their shop’s entrance, a disgusting sight that caused potential customers to veer away from the door and made the Kozkas, most certainly, the butt of town laughter.

  She marched her husband to the greening bone pile, stuffed the bones in a gunnysack, and shoved them at him, telling him what he should do. In his turn, Pete took the bones and slung them off the back trunk of his car, and then he drove over to Waldvogel’s Meats. He intended only to dump the bones on the front stoop of the shop and then retreat, but when he arrived he was surprised to find the Closed sign up and the place deserted. He was immediately convinced that his rival had such a thriving concern that he could actually afford to take a little vacation. The thought galled him. The outraged envy that he felt, along with the sense of self-righteous pain at his betrayal, caused him to do a thing uncharacteristically vengeful. He took the bones, moldered and stained, the marrow reeking and the knobbed or broken ends foul, and he went around back of the shop and entered the house. Argus was not a place where one locked doors (though for a while afterward Eva set the locks to with an angry click each night and even bought a set of bolts that fastened from inside). Pete Kozka was able to put the bones where he chose—of course he chose unwisely, upped the ante, gave the prank a vengeful twist. He went into Fidelis and Eva’s bedroom. There, he ripped down the immaculate white eiderdown, the heavily starched and delicately embroidered sheets that were part of Eva’s Old World dowry chest, and dumped in the bones. Then covered up the bones. Bits of the stuff from the bones soaked into the mattress and blended with the fabric and the down inside the comforter.

  Ever after that time, Eva had no pity on the Kozkas. If she could drive them out of business entirely, she said she would. Or she would make their lives unhappy. She was not the forgiving sort. What the Kozkas did bothered her beyond the bounds of her husband’s ridiculous rivalry, and she would have cause to brood upon it in the future. Eva’s household, which she strictly divided off from the butcher shop, was based on order, rich baking scents, cleanliness, and life. Death’s rot and stink had now been introduced, and was not easily expunged, though she tried every trick she knew—bleach, lye
soap, vinegar, sunlight, and lavender. Essence of orange. Lemon juice. No matter what, no way around it, the faint odor of the bones stayed in the sheets.

  ALTHOUGH THE JOKE on the Kozkas had turned ugly, Fidelis did not give up on it. He possessed an implacable loyalty to the joke itself, as though it were a work of art or a story he must finish no matter what. He also blamed the dog’s hysteria for the crazed behavior of the sow and wanted to goad the Kozkas, perhaps, into making an escape-proof pen for their dog. The next time Hottentot slipped his leash and waited at the back entrance of the shop, Fidelis threw the dog a braid of chicken feet that he’d been saving and adding to for the past month. The dog, of course, brought the feet directly home. Hottentot trotted proudly past Sal Birdy’s drugstore, where those who sat in the wood-paneled booths or at the counter witnessed the gift and wondered just where in the Waldvogel house that scaly, stinking item might turn up. Having desecrated the most intimate place in the Waldvogel house, Pete Kozka was stumped as to what was next. He had done something intended to annihilate the joke and stop the situation, and yet, by treating the joke as though it had not escalated, Fidelis managed to push the Kozkas into a frustrated acceptance. They did build a wire pen, at last, which the dog managed only rarely to escape.

  Still, every time Hottentot got away and dragged home some piece of a carcass from Waldvogel’s, Pete Kozka swore he’d get even by some means. The dog was such a nuisance that Eva Waldvogel darkly spoke of going to the law. She told a dozen women at least that she personally held the dog responsible for the fact that her husband was forced to wear a brace and undergo painful adjustments for his knee. For a time, the two butcher shops divided the town between them, just as the Catholic and Lutheran churches did.

  During this time of estrangement, Fidelis started what was to become a town institution. He missed the old singing club he had belonged to back in Ludwigsruhe. Although the one there was composed solely of master butchers, it dawned upon him shortly after he sang with Doctor Heech that in America there was no need to segregate a singing club by profession.

  The first meeting took place in Waldvogel’s slaughtering room, which had a high ceiling and walls that bounced the sound back with a gratifying effect. The bank loan officer and one of his clerks, the bootlegger, the town sheriff, the doctor, on occasion, and the town drunk all showed up—a perfect mix. Portland Chavers, the bank employee, and Zumbrugge, the banker, bought the beer from Newhall, the bootlegger, and were happily ignored and excused by the sheriff, Hock. Although Heech disapproved he resigned himself to keeping careful watch on their intake, though his sharp gaze wavered if they happened to persuade him to drink a few drops himself. The town drunk, who happened to be Delphine Watzka’s father, Roy, had his fill more than once. And to them all, Fidelis provided crackers, cheese, summer sausage, and a constant supply of good humor, for in song he was a happy man. There was no darkness in him, no heaviness. He was weightless light, all music. That first night, with an air of exquisite discovery, the men drank beer and sang until dawn. They sang their favorites to one another, taught each other the words. Their voices rose singly and then by the second chorus swept in fervent unison through the night. On the more familiar melodies, they instinctively harmonized. Sheriff Hock possessed a heartrending falsetto. Zumbrugge’s baritone had a cello-like depth and expression surprising in the author of so many heartless foreclosures. As long as he had a glass of schnapps in one hand, Roy Watzka could sing all parts with equal conviction, but he found that his voice was so similar to Chavers’ that they sometimes dueled instead of harmonized. Eva fell asleep, as she would once a week from then on, to the sound of the men’s voices. The singing club became the most popular meeting in town and began to include listeners, those of ragged or pitchless voice, who came to sit on the outskirts of the core group and listen.

  Sadly, of all the men who lived in Argus, the club probably appealed most to Pete Kozka, who had his own passion for song. He felt left out and moped to Fritzie that he’d start his own club except that all the town’s men with good voices were taken by Fidelis. The singing club was one of the reasons that the two butchers resumed their damaged friendship. After some time, Pete simply couldn’t bear not to be included, and he showed up one night as though nothing had happened. Fidelis didn’t turn a hair. Once the two butchers sang together, the incident was almost set to rest.

  People still talked, attempting to keep the interesting rivalry going, but gradually the rancor between the butchers became an old topic and people moved on to newer subjects of absurdity or distress. For of course, every so often the town received a great shock. It seemed that just as people grew into a false assurance, believed for instance that their prayers worked and that evil was kept at bay, or thoughtlessly celebrated the quiet of their community with a street dance, a parade, or any kind of energetic complacence, something happened. Someone turned up dead. A child smothered in a load of grain. There was a pregnant woman, then one day she wasn’t pregnant anymore. People knew she killed her baby but there was no proof. A young man, perhaps drunk, was shot and killed in a jealous fit. There was a vicious rape, and the girl was sent to the mental unit while the man walked the streets. Then the man disappeared. A bank robbery. Car wreck. A boy chopped to pieces in a threshing accident. The children’s favorite schoolteacher blew his head off. Once again the town would be reminded that even though it was populated by an army of decent people, even though a majority counted themselves pious churchgoers, even though Argus prided itself on civic participation, it was not immune. Strub’s Funerary stood flourishing, a testament to the fact that death liked Argus just as much as anywhere else. And evil, though it was not condoned by the city council, flourished nonetheless, here and there, in surprising and secret pockets.

  FOUR

  The Cellar

  AFTER THREE MONTHS on the road, Delphine and Cyprian had milked a startling amount of money from the broke and dusty towns they passed through with their show. Which proved, said Delphine, that even in the summer of 1934, when people were really hard up, they’d pay to get their minds off their misery. Still, even though they were doing good business, Delphine decided that she had to go home. First, though, she went to a second-rate jewelry shop and bought cheap rings for herself and Cyprian. There was no way she could appear back in Argus without at least the pretense of marriage.

  “This does not mean crap,” she said, slipping on the wedding band, giving him a suspicious look. She waggled her finger.

  “To you,” he countered.

  “You either,” she warned. The band seemed tight already, and although it was smooth she’d heard of machines and car doors catching on rings and yanking off or breaking fingers. She’d never worn a ring before. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned. “I don’t make breakfast. I’m not ready to be a housewife, yet.”

  “Fine,” said Cyprian. “I’ll cook.”

  Delphine hooted. He’d never so much as buttered a piece of bread in her presence. In cafés, she did it as a little graceful and womanly thing to do for him, but maybe now, she reflected, she should quit taking care of him so much. He’d think she meant to take care of him forever. She twisted the ring around and around, a little piece of armor against the Lutheran ladies who would have their eyes on every move she made. The ring would help, but people would talk about her anyway. Her father always gave them reason. Of course, they didn’t know half of what went on in the farmhouse marooned in the tangle of box elders, out of town, where she’d grown up. The only kindness was that her father’s misery, thus hers, was usually out of the town’s direct line of sight.

  She feared the urge to return was a mistake. Not only the fake marriage. Would her father make a drinking friend of Cyprian? Schnapps, he couldn’t handle. The stuff would wreck his balance. She had no choice, though, because she truly missed Roy Watzka and she suffered from an annoying intuition. A series of melodramatic pictures nagged her: he was dying, gasping for her like the father in the fairy tale with the beast and t
he beauty. Plunging headlong drunk into the muscle of the river out behind their house. Drowning himself.

  Delphine and Cyprian drove south, toward Argus. The fabulous tallgrass that had once covered all beneath the sky still vigorously waved from the margins of certain fields, from the edges of the sloughs that they passed, and from the banks of the pleasant little river that sometimes flooded all along its length and wrecked half the town. The fields of stunted wheat, bald in patches that year, turned in an endless rush. Armyworms were thick, their nests like gray mesh in the trees. From time to time, they passed an empty-windowed house, or one with a brave and hopeless bit of paint splashed across its padlocked front door. There were gas stations, pumps fixed in front of shaky little stores, here and there a thatch of houses, a lightning-struck cottonwood. And always, there was the friendly monotony, the patient sky rainless and gray as a tarp.

  As they passed Waldvogel’s butcher shop on the near edge of town, a solid built whitewashed place bounded by two fields, they saw two people running. One was a woman in a flowered wash dress, an apron, and high feminine heels. The other was a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, with the build of an athlete and a flap of shining dark hair. The two had come from the field and were racing for some finish line just beyond the dusty parking lot in front of the store. They were neck and neck, laughing as they pumped their arms. Then suddenly the woman seemed to leap forward, though her stride actually shortened. She’d gone up on her toes and was bounding to the finish. As the car passed the two, Delphine turned to watch. The woman’s hair burst from its twist and floated out behind her, a sudden red-gold banner that announced her triumph, for she’d touched the fence at the end of the lot first and beaten the boy. Delphine turned back to direct Cyprian.