The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “Your friend’s name,” said Delphine, softly now, stepping toward him. “What was it?”

  Beneath the raw sunburn, the boy’s face went white. What the question did to him astonished Delphine. His face turned to paper and his eyes burned. He blinked. He opened his mouth, passionately miserable.

  “Ruthie,” he croaked. “Ruthie Chavers.”

  Then he whirled and ran down the long hall, banged his way out into the white heat of the yard. Delphine stood there a moment, stunned. Ruthie! The girl’s name and the new information that she had, so far, avoided hit her. To escape her thoughts, she started using a scraper on the floor, gently scratching away at the places where the old wax had yellowed or clumped. As she worked the white squares whiter, she felt a numb satisfaction. The colored squares unstreaked and became again the original innocent green. As she moved with an increased dedication, the girl’s name tapped in and out of her mind. Ruthie. Ruth. Ruth meant mercy, Delphine knew. Yet not one bit of mercy had been shown to her. Delphine might have imagined that to find out that the child in the cellar was a girl would have struck her a blow, increased the unbearable mental picture of that suffering. But it didn’t, in the end, and at this Delphine wondered. The floor was drying before she found the explanation in her own heart.

  Her inner reasoning surprised her, mystified her, then depressed her. She found that she harbored a belief that girls were stronger and more enduring. Therefore more tough-minded about even such an unexpectedly evil destiny. And needful of less sympathy. A girl child would have a certain fatalism about the event. She would accept the end of her life, and merely sleep as much as possible until she fell asleep forever. Oddly, the closer Delphine identified with the girl’s suffering, the more she thought about it, the less sorry she felt for Ruthie Chavers. It was, in fact, as though she herself had sat in that cellar, endured the hunger, then the thirst, then weakened to the point of delirium, and froze, all in a dream.

  And died in her mother’s arms, she thought, her mother’s arms. Then customers began arriving, and Delphine put on a clean apron.

  At the end of the day, Delphine turned the cardboard sign in the entry window over from Open to Closed. She went over the floor again to take off the day’s footprints. She let the floor dry, and then, in a special bucket, she mixed up floor wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the entry so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick good-bye, and went home to swelter in the tent, alone. Early next morning, before the store opened she’d return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then between customers she’d polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and elbow grease. That’s what she planned, anyway, and all that she planned did occur, but over weeks of time and under radically different circumstances.

  ALREADY THE NEXT MORNING, while Delphine sat in the kitchen with the second coat of wax drying, the heat pushed at the walls. She was pleased because Eva had looked at the floor and declared it brand-new again. The strong black Turkish coffee sent Delphine into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva set on the table and blotted at her throat and temples with a dish towel.

  “Kuchmal hier,” Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. “I am not so good.”

  She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, and only answered with a moan of sympathy that somehow included herself, in this heat, waxing floors. But then Eva repeated herself exactly the same way, as though she did not remember what she’d said. “I am not so good,” Eva whispered again. She put her elbows on the table and curled her hands around the china cup. Her silence, as though she was listening for some deeper tone or word in the ordinary sounds around them, disquieted Delphine and she watched alertly as Eva stared into the oily depths of the liquid.

  “What do you mean, you don’t feel so good?”

  “It’s my stomach. I am all lumped up.” Beads of sweat trembled on Eva’s upper lip. “Pains come and go.”

  “Is it cramps?” asked Delphine.

  “It’s not that, or maybe.” Eva drew a deep breath and then held it, let it out. There. She took Delphine’s dish towel and pressed it to her face, dragged it off as though to remove her expression. She was breathing hard. “Like a cramp, but I never am quit the monthly … comes and goes, too.”

  “Maybe you’re just stopping early?”

  “I think yes,” said Eva. “My mother …” But then she shook her head and smiled wide, spoke in a high, thin abnormal voice. “Crying and whining is all forbidden here with me!”

  Eva jumped up. Awkwardly, she banged herself against the counter, but then she bustled to the oven, moved swiftly all through the kitchen as though unending motion would cure whatever gripped her. Within moments, she seemed to have turned back into the unworried, capable Eva. She lifted two great pans of rolls out of the oven. She wielded a spatula and quickly emptied the pans. Then she pushed dough through the round of her thumb and first finger, filled two more pans and popped them back in the oven to bake. Delphine watched her in concern, but then relaxed. There was no trace of weakness in that series of swift and economical motions.

  “I’m going out front and start polishing the floor,” said Delphine. “By now in this heat it’s surely dry.”

  “Very good,” said Eva, but as Delphine passed her to put her coffee cup in the gray soapstone sink, the wife of the butcher touched one of Delphine’s hands. Lightly, her voice a shade too careless, she said the words that even in the heat chilled her friend.

  “Take me to the doctor.”

  Then Eva smiled as though this was a great joke, and she lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and did not move.

  FIDELIS HAD ALREADY gone out to look at stock with a farmer, and he could not be found when Delphine returned from Doctor Heech’s house. By then, she had Eva drugged with morphine in the backseat of the delivery car, and a sheaf of medical orders in her hands stating whom to seek, what possibly could be done. Furious and sorrowing, Doctor Heech was telephoning down to the clinic and speaking with a surgeon he knew, telling him to prepare for a patient named Eva Waldvogel, who was suffering from a tumor that pressed immediately on her vitals and would cause her death within days if not removed.

  Fidelis gone, Franz and the little boys at a ball game, only Markus was home to take the message.

  “I will write a note,” said Delphine, his mother’s suitcase at her feet. “Make sure that your father gets it. I am taking your mother to the doctor.”

  Markus handed her a piece of paper, dropped it, picked it up, his lithe boy’s fingers for once clumsy with fright. He ran straight out to the car and crawled into the backseat, which was where Delphine found him, stroking Eva’s hair as she sighed in the fervent relief of the drug. She was so pleasantly composed that Markus was reassured and Delphine was able to lead him carefully away, afraid that Eva would suddenly wake, before the boy, into recognition of her pain. From what Delphine had gathered so far, Eva must have been hiding a substantial suffering for many months now. Her illness was dangerously advanced, and Heech in his alarm as well as his care for Eva, for he was fond of her, scolded her in the despair of a doctor wrathful at his helplessness.

  “You should have had the brains to come to me,” he said over and over. “You should have come to me.”

  As she led Eva’s son to the house, Delphine tried to stroke Markus’s hair. He jerked away in terror at the unfamiliar tenderness. It was, of course, a sign to him that something was truly, desperately, wrong with his mother. Delphine snatched her hand back and spoke offhandedly as she could. Markus, his face and neck flushed brightly, did not look at her, mumbled something she couldn’t make out, and was gone.

  Delphine finished her note for Fidelis:

  I have taken Eva to the clinic south of the Cities called
the Mayo, where Heech says emergency help will be found. She passed out this morning. It is a cancer. You can talk to Heech and make your own way down when things are arranged in the shop. Find Cyprian Lazarre if you can. Maybe he’ll be out in the tent on my dad’s land. Lazarre is a good man and can manage things.

  ON THE DRIVE DOWN to the Mayo Clinic, Delphine first heard the butcher sing, only it was in her mind. She replayed it like a comforting record on a phonograph, as she kept her foot evenly on the gas pedal of the truck and calmly caused the speedometer to hover right near one hundred miles per hour. The world blurred. Fields turned like spoked wheels. She caught the flash of houses, cows, horses, barns. Then there was the long stop and go of the city. All through that drive, she replayed the song that she hadn’t really listened to Fidelis sing just the morning before in the stained concrete of the slaughtering room. She had been too crushed by the heat to marvel at the buoyant mildness of his tenor. His singing, at the time, hardly registered. Now she heard it. “Die Gedanken sind Frei,” he sang, and the walls spun each note higher as beneath the dome of a beautiful church. Who would think a slaughterhouse would have the sacred acoustics of a cathedral? Fidelis was practicing his pieces for the men’s chorus, those he’d learned back in Germany, when he’d belonged to the Gesangverein.

  The song wheeled in her thoughts, and using what ragtag German she knew, Delphine made out the words, “Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, Sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.” The mind is free … thoughts like shadows of the night… . The dead crops turned row by row in the fields, the vent blew the hot air hotter, and the wind boomed in the rolled-down windows. Even when it finally started to rain, Delphine did not roll the windows back up. They were moving so fast that the drops stung like BBs on the side of her face. The fierce drops kept her alert. She knew that occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine as well as dulling her pain loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a high-pitched icy moan that could have belonged to Eva. A scream like the shriek of tires. A growling as though her pain were an animal that she wrestled to earth.

  SIX

  The Night Garden

  EVERY BUG LAST summer’s drought killed or dried up had laid sacs and sacs of eggs destined to hatch this June. Delphine and Eva sat together on broken chairs in Eva’s garden, each with a bottle of Fidelis’s earth-dark home-brewed beer held tight between their feet. Delphine wore a wash dress and apron, Eva wore a nightgown and a light woolen shawl. The slugs were naked. Tough curls of antlered jelly, with many young, the slugs lived in the thickness of hay and shredded newspapers that Eva had put down for mulch. They had already eaten many of the new seedlings from the tenderest topmost leaves down to the ground, and Eva had vowed to destroy them.

  “The last feast,” said Eva, gesturing at her bean plants as she dribbled a little beer into the pie plate. “Now they are doomed.”

  The beer was chill from the glass refrigerator case in the store, newly installed, for Fidelis was one of the first Argus merchants to obtain a liquor license. From time to time, distantly, the doorbell jangled as customers straggled in for an item or two. It was dinnertime and there were no real shoppers. Franz could handle them. Eva poured the top quarter of the next bottle into her mouth before she poured a little more into the pie plate that she had buried level with the ground. It seemed a shame to waste the coldness of the beer on pests.

  Slowly, the two women sipped the rich, bitter stuff as the sun slanted through the margins of the stock pens. The tin siding of the cooler gave off heat, and they smelled the scorched brown vines of last year’s blue grapes.

  “Maybe we should simply have shriveled these creatures with salt,” said Delphine. But then she had a thought: We are close to Eva’s own death, and can afford to make death easy on the helpless. She said nothing, but did touch Eva’s hand. Since Eva’s illness had taken this turn, Fidelis had slaughtered twice a week, worked round the clock to make the doctor bills. The loamy soil inside the stock pens, enriched with shit and fear, churned with growing power. The margins already sprouted weeds so thick and vigorous they looked as though they could pull up their roots like skirts and vault the fence. Here, however, thought Delphine, sipping at her bottle, there would not be all that much room for them to live.

  Eva’s garden, Delphine had decided, reflected the dark underside of her organizational genius. The garden was everything raw and wild that Eva’s house was not. It had grown rich on junk. Pot scrapings, tea leaves, and cucumber peelings all went into the dirt, buried haphazardly, sometimes just piled. Everything rotted down beneath the blistering North Dakota sun. And then the seeds in the garbaged cucumbers, the pumpkin rinds, and even the old tomatoes volunteered themselves in scattered flourishes. Her method was to have no method. Give nature its way. She had apple trees that grew from cores here. Rosebushes, bristling near the runnel that collected steers’ blood, were covered with blooms so fat and hearty they looked sinister. Eva’s favorite flower was the marigold, and she headed them in fall and scattered their seeds everywhere. The high tang of their foliage was in the air. Birds too. She fed them oatmeal.

  So far in life, Delphine had never gardened, never bothered to attract birds, never known to care about things that her friend turned into rituals. Since she’d known Eva Waldvogel, and also traveled here and there with Cyprian, she had started to understand how a woman’s attention could succeed in making sense of man’s blind chaos, and yet women needed their own wildness. It was here. All ran riot. The garden and weedy yard would wax fuller until it turned into a jungle of unhitched vines and rusty birdbaths made of ham tins. Eva’s dog, the white shepherd, Schatzie, dug up old bones the former dog had buried and refused to rebury them. It would be awful, Delphine felt, when the leaves withered in the fall, to see the litter of femurs and clavicles, the knobs and knuckles. As if the scattered dead, rising to meet the Judgment, had to change and swap their parts to fit. Until then, the broad leaves would hide the bones the dog had spread through creation.

  Delphine’s tendency to dwell on fate was triggered constantly by Eva’s sickness. Mortality was always before her, and she marveled how anyone lived at all, for any amount of time. Life was a precious feat of daring, she saw, improbable as Cyprian balancing, strange as a feast of slugs.

  Eva bent over, flipped out a small pocket of earth with her trowel, and tamped in her quarter-full beer bottle as a trap. “Die happy,” she encouraged. Delphine handed her own three-fourths-drunk bottle, too. This one Eva planted by a hill of squash that would overpower all the rest of the garden by fall, though she would not see it. Great, lumpy, hybrid Hubbards would roll out from under the green pads of leaves. Delphine would harvest them, piling the warty, irregular globes beside the back door, then packing them in hay. Eva settled against the crisscrossed canvas webbing of her chair, forked open another bottle. It was a good day, a very good day for her.

  The sun’s last rays were warm and the breeze was strong enough to keep off the deerflies and mosquitoes. Delphine’s head began to feel big and wobbly on her neck. But light. It seemed to balloon above the rest of her. The plants looked fresh. The garden flourished green. Delphine’s continual watering had swelled the hollyhocks in bud that gently batted Eva’s walls. Her columbines spread full as bushes, trailing complicated spikes. The sharp yellow marigold blossoms spiced the air. Why shouldn’t life surge forth, thought Delphine, get better?

  “There is no hope,” Eva said as though her friend had spoken all she thought out loud, “because there’s just too damn many, and they’re too dumb to find the bottles anyway.”

  Unseen, mysterious, the young had moved onto the leaves, almost translucent. They did not seem so much living things as bits of jelled fluid. They were voracious. On some of the leaves, the tough veins alone were left, lacework outlines. It was only the richness of Eva’s garden that salvaged it from ruin. There was simply too much for them to devour. And now, from the edges of the grass, fr
om underneath stones and drainpipes and out of the tiles of the gutters, moved snakes. The black ribbon snakes were striped with hot orange, liquid green, and their bellies were pale gold as melted butter. Delphine thought she heard them sliding through the seams of the boiling earth and knew they uncoiled from beneath the hot clumps of straw and hay. Snakes were everywhere, feeding on the tiny slugs; a toad hopped into the waning light blinking its old-woman wrinkled eyes.

  “I’m going,” said Delphine, but she continued to sit with Eva through sunset and on into the rising dark. It was as though they knew that no peace would be in their lives through the next weeks and that they both would, in fearful nights, remember these hours. How the air turned blue around them and the moths came out, invisible and sightless, flapping against the shuttered lamp at the other end of the yard. They were protected by citronella burning in a bucket, and sprigs of basil, which Eva had snapped off and thrust into their hair. Eva’s feet were cool in thin leather sandals. Delphine’s gripped the moist, fetid earth.

  On a calm night, after work, after she had settled Eva, Delphine would normally have returned to the house she shared with Cyprian and Roy. She would have lost herself in a book, or cooked something to relax, or fixed whatever she could find that needed repair in the house. But tonight she was unfamiliar to herself and did not move. She let the beer wear off gently as the night grew deeper, thicker, black all around them. They were silent. Nothing occurred to them to talk about and at last each beer bottle was planted. They were not waiting for anything particular to happen. Time went by, and yet they did not stir. They had no thoughts, except that Delphine imagined all the bones were hitching in the ground. The dog moaned in its sleep by Eva’s foot, and Delphine’s eyes shut.

  When she shut her eyes, her mind grew alert. Her senses opened. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. How there was so much blind feeling. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. Unheard, unnoticed, the blood dropped into her hands and feet, so that she was anchored. Which she was glad for, because the light was so feeble and the blackness so strong that she felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress.