The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “You should have seen that woman. Can she ever run! Turn there.”

  They turned down a short and half-overgrown road.

  “Slow down,” said Delphine.

  The road was a ragged track, washed out in several spots, the dirt churned up and dried in pits and snarls. They drove up to the beaten little farmhouse—three dim rooms and a jutting porch—where Delphine had always lived with Roy.

  Just as they arrived, Delphine’s father happened to be walking out the door. He was a pallid little crooked man with the fat nose of a sinister clown. When he saw Delphine, he removed his slouch hat, jammed it over his face, and began to weep into the crown, his whole body shaking with sobs. Every so often he’d lower the hat to show them his contorted mouth, then smack the hat on his face again. It was a masterly performance. Cyprian had never seen a man weep like that, even in the war, and he was horrified. He offered his hankie, pressed it into Roy’s hands, sat down with the old man on the porch. Delphine squared her shoulders, took a deep fortifying breath, and walked into the house.

  She ran right out again, gulping air, but she didn’t say a word. The men were locked in a blubbering conversation. She ran back in and threw the windows open. Then went back out to the car. She removed a scarf from her suitcase, soaked it with Evening in Paris, and tied it over her mouth and nose. The depth of this horrible odor led her to believe, for the first time, that her father wasn’t just a common drunk—he was truly depraved. When she walked past the men she kicked at the leg of her father’s chair.

  “Don’t do that!” said Cyprian.

  “Oh shut your mouth,” said Delphine from behind her scarf, as she bravely reentered the house.

  Bad smells made her angry, they were a personal affront. She had dealt with her father’s messes before, but this was of a different order. He had created this one on purpose, she believed, to show her how helpless he was without her. On the floor, there was a layer of must, crumbly and black, for the clothing and food, the vomit and piss, had composted along with the knuckles of pig’s trotters and frail chicken bones. Perhaps a dog had crawled in there to die, too. There were layers of husks of insects, foul clumps of rat droppings, and a bushel of rotted, sprouting potatoes some kind neighbor had probably dropped off to keep Roy Watzka from starving. Over it all there had grown arcane scrawls of cheerful and reeking mold. Weak and sick, Delphine staggered out again onto the porch.

  “I need a shovel,” she said, and she put her face into her hands and began to cry. She wept even harder than her father. Cyprian was completely astonished, for up until that moment she had behaved with a steady cynical kindness and he hadn’t known that she was even capable of feeling such intense sorrow. Nothing that Cyprian had done, even getting caught with the hardware store owner in Gorefield, Manitoba, had caused her to so much as mist over. Now the sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and then built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon. Cyprian couldn’t bear such a show of brutal emotion. He sat down on the porch steps right next to Delphine and carefully, with immense tenderness, put his arms around her shoulders. Until that moment he hadn’t realized what enormous respect he had for Delphine—her breaking up like this was very moving to him. He’d seen this in the war sometimes, the moment when the toughest ones go was always hardest. He began to rock Delphine back and forth, crooning to her.

  “Don’t cry, little sister,” he said, and Delphine wept harder because he called her by this sweet name, and although she knew it meant his feelings for her were brotherly, not romantic, she was suddenly as happy as she was nauseated.

  “I’ll be all right,” she heard herself blurt. She couldn’t help saying it, though she wasn’t all right and wanted to keep soaking up this delicious and unfamiliar male sympathy.

  “I know you’ll be okay,” Cyprian said. “But you need help.”

  He couldn’t have said a more perfect thing, and yet her experience of him so far was that he couldn’t do jack shit, except balance. If she depended on him, she was bound for disappointment, she thought, and yet the idea of purging the stink herself made her sob harder.

  “I do need help,” she wailed.

  Cyprian was gratified, and in that sweep of feeling he kissed her tenderly and passionately on her left temple, which throbbed hot red. He had come back lonely from the war and stayed that way, concentrating on his balance. His brothers had all moved far north into Cree country. His parents were drinkers. His grandparents had wandered off in disgust, headed for someplace where they could die in peace. Any uncles and aunts were living their own lives, the sort of lives he didn’t want to know about. He really was alone or had been until now. Things had gone past romance. At this moment things went deeper. He now had Delphine Watzka and Delphine’s father and also the terrible odor.

  The smell emanated from the house as a solid presence. It lived there—an entity, an evil genie. For some reason, it did not cling to Roy Watzka. He smelled all right. Delphine and Cyprian loaded him into the car and drove back to town. They got a room at the hotel on the main street and left Roy there, curled happily around a pint of his favorite schnapps. It was no use trying to keep him away from the stuff, Delphine informed Cyprian. He would just go find it, and the search would put him into worse shape, get him into danger from which he was always difficult to rescue. The two of them bought a couple of shovels and a gallon of kerosene and went back to the house. They began to haul out the horrid junk, both swathing their faces in the scented scarves.

  “I never liked this perfume,” Cyprian gasped, after he’d carried out the third shovel full of unidentifiable garbage.

  “I’ll never wear it again, my love,” said Delphine. She could use these endearments, because now they both knew the grand passion between them was an affectionate joke. They were something else. They were not-quite-but-more-than family. And together, they stank. As though angry to be disturbed, the odor pounced on them. It wrestled with their stomachs. Every so often, one had to gag, which started the other going too. Delphine was an extremely determined person and Cyprian had been through the bowels of hell, but at one point, having penetrated to some sublimely sickening layer, they both rushed outside and had the same idea.

  “Could we burn the whole place down?” Cyprian said, eyeing with longing the gallon of kerosene.

  “Maybe we could,” said Delphine.

  They dragged a couple of beer crates across the yard and had a long smoke. Eventually, they decided that they would persevere. In spite of the woozy atmosphere, Delphine was impressed by Cyprian’s ability to shovel and haul. They made a great heap of crud in the yard and set it immediately ablaze. The stuff gave off an acrid smoke and left a stinking ash, but the fire had a purifying effect on their spirits. They went to the work more cheerfully now, hauling, tossing, burning, without stopping to puke. By nightfall, they’d gone through a challenging strata of urine-soaked catalogues and newspapers. It appeared that Roy Watzka had invited his cronies over, and they’d used the pantry off the kitchen as a pissing parlor. One man could not have done so much, said Cyprian, but he got no agreement from Delphine.

  “My father could,” she said, as they rested before the fire. Mercifully, the odor finally seemed to have blasted out their sense of smell. Nothing bothered them. They had no hunger or thirst. Nor aches or pains. They felt invincible. The house was nearly cleared out—step one.

  The next step was more complicated. They believed that the source of the stink was burned to flakes of black tar, but the smell would surely linger in the boards and wallpaper, in the furniture. What substance would remove, not commingle, with such a thing? They had to retreat. After the fire went out, they went back to the hotel, sneaked in because they knew they carried with them the loathsome stench. In the room, Roy was already passed out.

  With great foresight, extravagantly, they had rented a room with a private bath. Now Cyprian said gallantly, �
�You go first.”

  “I can’t,” said Delphine.

  “Shall we share a hot bath?” said Cyprian. They both felt very kindly toward each other. So Delphine ran the bath and dumped in a little bottle of fragrant hair soap. They got in together and soaped each other up and washed their hair. Cyprian leaned, sighing, against the backrest with Delphine between his legs. Together, they soaked. With her big toe, Delphine occasionally let some water out. Added more hot water. It was erotic, but not sexual, a kind of animal acceptance. Both took comfort in the ease they experienced being naked in the other’s presence. Plus, they were very grateful to be clean, though the stink lingered in their memory. They could feel the odor, and were both worried that they’d lost their smell-perspective. Maybe it had somehow entered them. Maybe they’d be kicked out of the breakfast café, where they planned to eat the next morning. Maybe they’d be ostracized in the street. They completely forgot about Roy until they’d dried off, and then Cyprian was startled by the rumbling bray from the next room.

  “He snores,” said Delphine.

  “That too?”

  “Oh,” said Delphine. She looked at him, worried, and Cyprian looked back at her, standing unashamedly naked before him. Her body was compact, graceful, and tough. Her breasts were very beautiful. As if she was part fox, thought Cyprian, like a woman in one of his grandmother’s old stories. Her breasts were perfect golden cones with neat honey-colored nipples. He didn’t want to do anything, though—he just enjoyed looking at her.

  “I wish I was an artist,” he said. “I’d draw you.” He began to dry her with a stiff towel. “God, your dad’s loud. Maybe I’ll sleep outside the door.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Delphine said. “You’ll be surprised. Just think of it as something in nature.”

  “His snoring?”

  “Like a storm, a big lake. Trees.”

  The spluttering and thrashing that Cyprian now heard did not seem natural, and he doubted that he could take Delphine’s advice. But once he lay down and curled around her, he fell directly into a fabulous well of sleep in which he dreamed phenomenally. He dreamed of trees with their limbs cracked and creaking in wind, of hopping from ice floe to floe in a roaring torrent, of a sneaky gunpowder booby trap that blew up every time he tried to talk.

  In the dream, he spoke freely to Delphine between the blasts of noise.

  And what did I say, he wondered, waking slightly before he was sucked again into the black current of unconsciousness. What did I tell her? What does she know? For he hadn’t yet dared raise the subject of what she had seen or not seen back by the river in Manitoba. And it had happened so soon after that night—they’d never talked about that either—when they looked into each other’s eyes and their bodies had moved together in a way beyond anything they could have wished. Were they in love now, or had things drastically changed? Was she really his little sister, and the noisy drunk next bed over his new father? Perhaps, he thought, bobbing to the surface well before dawn, the smell had addled them all. Perhaps they were affected by the smell’s range and power. They would see. They would contend with it come morning.

  THE SMELL CAME AT THEM as they slowly approached down the road. It seemed to have settled in a tent about the house. They went inside to battle it and immediately rushed back out. It was as though they hadn’t even touched the place yet, or worse, as though they’d only succeeded in lifting the lid off the source of the odor, which still emanated, Cyprian thought, from the cleared-off floor.

  “Or maybe the cellar,” said Delphine with a childlike shudder.

  The cellar was no more than a large pit in the earth, underneath the pantry. There was a hole cut in the floor and a hinged door with a ring that turned to lock it shut, but Delphine never opened it in the first place, if she could help it. She and Roy had hardly ever accumulated a surplus of food to store there, though often enough Roy had stashed his booze on the rough shelves cut into the sides of earth. Once upon a time, she remembered, there were potatoes in a large bin or maybe turnips. Otherwise, it was a ghastly place filled with spiders. It was probably the source of the bugs and rat droppings.

  “I don’t want to look,” said Delphine.

  “I don’t either,” said Cyprian.

  “Now is the time to burn the place,” she decided.

  “Let’s have a smoke.”

  They went back to the beer crates and lighted up. From behind, the house was so small and pathetic looking that it seemed impossible for it to harbor such a fierce animosity of odor. Long ago, Delphine had painted the doors and window frames blue because she’d heard that certain tribes believed that blue scared off ghosts. What she’d really wanted was a color to scare off drunks. But there wasn’t such a color. They came anyway, all through her childhood and on into her clever adolescence, during which she’d won a state spelling contest. Her winning word was syzygy. She spelled it on instinct and had to look the meaning up afterward.

  The truth was, Delphine was smart—in fact, she was the smartest girl in school. She could have had a scholarship to a Catholic college, but she dropped out early. It was the planets, aligned as in her spelling word, casting their shadows indifferently here and there. Malign influence. She slowly became convinced, due to her association with her father’s cronies, that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold.

  She had learned of it in that house with the blue-framed doors and windows, where the drunks crashed, oblivious to warding-off charms and dizzy indigo. Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life—disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

  Perhaps the early loss of her mother had caused her to undergo a period of intolerable sensitivity. Although the actual mishaps struck visitors, friends, acquaintances, strangers, Delphine experienced the feelings that accompanied their awful misfortunes. A child down the road was struck blind. For weeks Delphine found herself groping her way through the nightmare in which she was told she was blind as well. Or abandoned by her husband, as was the cheerful and sordid Mrs. Vashon, who tried to kill herself at the prospect of raising nine children alone, did not succeed, but ever after bore the rope’s dark scorch mark around her neck. Or her best friend from high school, Clarisse Strub, who was victimized by a secret disease. These things happened with such regularity that Delphine developed a nervous twitch in her brain. A knee-jerk response that rejected hope and light.

  Not that she ever railed at God. From the time she’d understood God wouldn’t give her her mother back, she knew that was a waste of time. Because it offended her to swallow as many as twenty or thirty lies per day, she quit school in her final year. God was all good. Lie! God was all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie. All seeing? Had He really the time to watch what her hands did beneath the covers at night? Did God really invade her brain and weep at her impure thoughts? And if so, why had He concentrated on such trivia rather than curing her mother of her illness? What sort of choice was that? Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and to bring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.

  Her father was pleased enough. As soon as he learned she’d quit school, he quit life and proceeded to pursue his own serious drinking, while Delphine went to work. Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been so
smart, she admitted. Maybe better to endure the tyranny of lies than the series of jobs she had then, briefly, held. She had wrapped butter in the Ogg Dairy. She had worked cracking eggs, gasping at the sulfur whiplash of the rotten ones. For a while she had sorted cookies into metal troughs, survived on the crumbs. Ran a buttonholer in a dress shop. She ironed. Blistered her hands in bleach laundering sheets. All these jobs were tedious and low-paying. Besides, since she lived at home, her father tried to appropriate half her money.

  The first time she split her pay cash, he quietly used it to drink somewhere else. The next time, he brought his buddies home. She arrived home—lame, dusty, exhausted, from sorting bricks at the brickworks—to find them drinking a case of skin tonic. Although she tried her best to ignore them, they made a ruckus, ate every morsel, even the last bit of the ham, and in a half stupor blundered into her bedroom, which was her only haven. She took a broom to them, cracking the handle against their legs. When they guffawed and refused to leave, a storm of white dots fell across her vision. At long last, she decided to clear them out. She walked out to the woodpile, yanked the ax from its block, strode back into the kitchen.

  Hey, Roy’s baby … , one of them mocked her.

  She lifted the ax high overhead and brought it down, split the just dealt ace of diamonds, then tugged the ax from the wood and lifted it again. Her father yelped. She shook the ax and screeched back at him, which caused him to jump backward in boozy dismay, scattering the poker deck, and to declare that she had gone haywire. Mightily affected, he raced out the door, gasping for breath, flanked by his companions. Somewhere in the night he fell through thin ice and from his dousing got pneumonia, almost died, so that Delphine had to quit the brickworks and nurse him. The ax was the first time she had turned on him, and he couldn’t get over it. All of his bluster had collapsed at the sight of her, striding through the door in her white rag of a nightgown, hollering bloody murder, as he put it, weak and feverish. That had been the gist of Delphine’s life, that and more of the same. Still, she could not burn the house. It was the house where she’d grown up and where, according to at least one version of Roy’s story, her mother had given birth to her. He said it happened right in the kitchen, by the stove, where it was warm.