The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “It doesn’t matter anyway, I have thrown it down the sinkhole.”

  Delphine turned and saw that on the edge of Tante’s porcelain sink a clean-washed vial and the bottle that held the morphine were drying in the glower of sun. And when she saw this, she lost all control of her power. She was strong, of course, phenomenally strong, and when she grabbed Tante firmly by the bodice and jerked her forward and said, into her face, “Okay, you come and nurse her through this. You’ll see,” Tante found herself unable to resist, her struggles feeble against Delphine’s surging force as the younger woman dragged her to the car and stuffed her inside, then roared off. Dumped her at the house.

  “I don’t have time to go in there. You help her. You stay with her. You,” Delphine shrieked, roaring the engine. Then she was gone and Tante, with the smug grimness of a woman who has at last been allowed to take charge, entered the back door of the house.

  It did take hours, and in those hours, Delphine prayed and cursed, implored the devil, made bargains, came to tears at the thwarted junctures where she was directed one place and ended up another. It proved impossible either to track down Heech, or to find Sal Birdy, the drugstore keeper. Fidelis, she knew, was out searching, too, but she didn’t come across him. She was returning empty-handed, driving back to the house, slamming a fist on the dashboard, weeping tearlessly, when before her she saw her father stumbling along the road.

  His pants sagged, his loose shirt flopped off his hunched, skinny shoulders. As she drew near, an all-seeing rage boiled up in Delphine. She looked around to see if anyone else was watching, for she had the sudden and breathless urge to run him over. She put the gear in low and crept after her father, thinking how simple it could be. There he was, drunk again—he’d hardly even notice! Then her life would be that much easier. But as she drew alongside him, instead of mowing him down, she was surprised to meet his eyes and see that they were clear. She realized he wasn’t drunk, yet, or very drunk anyway. He was trying to run in the same direction she was driving, to the butcher shop. As he shuffled anxiously around to the side door, she saw he must have had the usual purpose and despised him with the thought, Out snaking himself some hooch at a time like this … Only the bottle in his hand was not the usual schnapps or home brew. Roy held the bottle carefully in both hands, thrust it toward her. It was a brown square-shouldered medicine bottle labeled sulphate of morphia. To get it, he had broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock of the cabinet where Sal kept the drugs he had to secure by law.

  AS DELPHINE SLAMMED the brakes, jumped from the truck, and ran to the house with the bottle, she heard it from outside—the high-pitched whooing keen of advanced agony, a white-silver whine. She rushed in, skidded across a litter of canning smashed down off the shelves, and entered the kitchen. There was Tante, white and sick in shock, slumped useless in the corner of the kitchen, on the floor. Markus and Franz, weeping and holding on to their mother as she rummaged in the drawer for a knife. The whole of her being was concentrated on the necessity. Even the strong Franz couldn’t hold her back.

  “Yes, yes,” said Delphine, entering the scene. She’d entered so many scenes of mayhem that now, as always, a cold flood of competence descended on her. With a swift step she stood before Eva. “My friend,” she plucked the knife away, saying, “not now. Soon enough. I’ve got the medicine. Don’t leave your boys like this.”

  Then Eva, still swooning and grunting as the waves hit and twisted in her, allowed herself to be lowered to the floor.

  “Get a blanket and a pillow,” said Delphine, kindly, to Franz. His tears dried at the relief of having something to do. “And you,” she said to Markus, “hold her hand while I make this up and keep saying to her, Mama, she’s making the medicine now. It will be soon. It will be soon.”

  SEVEN

  The Paper Heart

  MARKUS REMOVED from a hole in his pillow the tiny rolled notes, the dime flattened by a train into a shining disc, the small red crackling heart of store-bought paper, and the tin clicker painted like a cricket. All of these things were gifts from Ruthie Chavers. He had decided not to think of her as dead. She was somewhere else, safe and just out of reach. Duck feathers swirled out of the pillow with the objects, and he stuffed them back into the hole and then pinched the cloth shut. A piece of solid gold light slanted through the west-facing window onto his bed. He carefully unrolled her first note, which had been fixed around a pencil, and which he had kept in its original shape. The note said, Hi Markus, I got your letter, signed Ruthie. After that note, there was another, which told what she was doing after school and was signed Love, and a third note, which he felt was the most passionate, in which she said how much she liked the letter he had written her, and then there was the Valentine. He carefully smoothed out the shiny red paper and stared at the gleaming surface. It was coated with something that made little sparkles come out in the sun, and he’d never noticed that before. This was a new thing, and he tipped the heart side to side to get the full effect. He turned the paper over. There was that one word again, Love. After he had gone through everything again, clicking the clicker six times, as he always did, and rubbing the dime, he put Ruthie’s things back into his pillow and pinned the opening shut with a safety pin. He plumped the pillow up and put it at the head of his bed, then he left the room.

  Sometimes at night, when he turned over a certain way, he clicked the toy and it awakened him. The noise always seemed very loud, but it never seemed to bother his hard-sleeping brothers. It always took him what seemed a long time, though it was at most half an hour, to fall asleep again after the clicker. While he waited for sleep to overcome him, he listened to the dog breathing lightly at the door to his room. Sometimes Schatzie whined a little in her dreams, or snuffed as though something intrigued her. Other times, his brothers talked, sometimes even sat up and argued with or commanded some invisible other. Once, Franz had pointed at Markus and said in a low, hysterical voice, you forgot to fix the fuel gauge. Because the noise from the clicker woke him, he came to know something that his brothers did not. He understood that his father sometimes stayed up half into the night and sang to his mother.

  The first time he’d noticed the light down the hall and heard the low murmur, he’d been frightened to investigate. The next time, he realized that Schatzie was sound asleep, not even twitching, and he’d reasoned that if there were burglars or murderers about the dog would be at their throats. And anyway, she would protect him if he got up to see what the light was, and the sound. He felt compelled to find out now. Schatzie did exactly as he thought she would, rising as he passed and silently following him, her nails clicking softly on the green linoleum tiles. He shivered a little in his washed-thin striped pajamas and proceeded with infinite slowness. He didn’t want to be discovered, didn’t want to anger his father, whose voice he now recognized, and who fell silent just as Markus reached the door of the little pantry, where his mother slept.

  Markus hardly breathed. Motioned for Schatzie to sit down behind him. Staying in the shadows, just out of the doorway’s shaft of quiet radiance, he peered into the room and was stilled by what he saw. There was his father, and he was kneeling at the side of his mother’s bed, holding on to her foot. Her foot was slim, waxen white, and almost glowed in the cool lamplight. Fidelis rested his forehead on the place where the foot curved into the ankle. His father’s back shook, and after a stunned moment Markus realized that his father was weeping in a soundless and terrible way, a way all the more frightening because it was sobless and tearless. He had never, ever, seen his father cry before. The most upsetting thing was that the movement of his father’s shoulders was so close to the movements of convulsive laughter. Then Markus thought that maybe it was laughter. Maybe his mother, who could be very funny, had just told his father a joke. But her face was quiet. He could hear her breathing, for her breaths were deep, rattling sighs. He watched a little longer, but then Fidelis put his head up and seemed to stare straight at him. A scared thrill ran t
hrough Markus. He froze. But his father was staring blindly at the shadowy wall and did not see him.

  Slowly, his father straightened his back, still kneeling, and then he tenderly tucked the blanket around Eva’s feet. When he had done that, Markus wanted to go, frightened he’d be found out, but he still couldn’t move. His mother’s eyes had opened and she stared deeply at Fidelis, and then she smiled at him. It was a glorious smile, serene and full of joy, a softening thrill of her face that Markus would never forget. Fidelis sat in the chair wedged next to the narrow bed, took her hand. Without her asking, he began to sing to her the song she loved most, a song that Markus knew, the one about the water maidens on the river in Germany. His voice was warm and pure. Markus closed his eyes. His father’s voice brought the taste of smooth, brown caramel into his mind. With his father’s singing for cover, Markus made his way quickly to his own room. He crept into his bed, thrust his fingers through the rip in the pillow where the pin did not quite shut the gap. Then he fell asleep quickly, safe in the rise and fall of his father’s voice, with his fingers touching the paper heart.

  *

  DELPHINE BLEACHED the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. Their stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired them and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis’s thick white cotton shirts with starch, and rolled them up and laid them in the cooler. Every morning, she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the hopeless sweat, the shit and blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. The laundry itself was a full-time job, and Delphine had no idea how Eva had ever done it, plus so much else. But this laundry was a kind of good-bye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine was leaving, too. She’d already decided that to stay there in her old job, with no Eva, was impossible. It wasn’t just that people would talk, for they talked about her already. There was more, things she couldn’t say even to her private self. No, she couldn’t do it. Besides, there was another person chafing and eager to finally take over. Stepping in to care for the boys and her brother would be a perfect showcase for Tante’s pieties.

  On the last birthday Eva would ever celebrate, Tante did come around, just in time for the cake. After the blur of useless presents and too cheerful toasts, while the celebrators craned over the large scrolled cake, Tante materialized in her usual black, and said to Delphine in her freezing nasal voice, “This is good cake. How much does my brother pay you extra for taking care of Eva?”

  Unknown to Tante, Fidelis stepped behind his sister, so he heard Delphine’s reply.

  “Not one flat dime, you hypocrite sow.”

  Tante’s cheeks mottled red and white, as though she had been slapped. As for Fidelis, she could have sworn that a surprised smile flickered across his face. Delphine hadn’t yet told him that Tante had stolen Eva’s morphine. Part of her training in dealing with drunks was to hoard information, never to let go of a valuable nugget until it could be made to pay double its worth. There would come a time, thought Delphine, there would definitely come a time. Tante would pay, somehow, for Eva’s pain.

  *

  A TINY STREAM that mainly carried spring runoff down behind the house, through the field, had dried into a tough little path the boys used to travel into the woods. They spent most of their time there after their chores were done, looking for arrowheads, for pitted, gray fragments of pots, and little white seashells left from when a great ocean had covered all they saw. Markus sometimes thought about this ocean, which he’d learned about in school. The fact that he was walking on what was once an ocean’s bottom intrigued him. Sometimes he imagined the water going straight up, over him, just as the air did now. And all around him water creatures floating and diving. Markus and his two little brothers stopped, pulled from their pockets some of the fuzzed-over horehound drops that Tante always gave them, and spat as they sucked away the lint. They concentrated until they got to the actual candy, a somber, medicinal taste, but sweet. Their faces cleared.

  “This used to be an ocean bottom,” Markus said, showing Emil a tiny brittle white scallop he’d picked up from the field. The shell was about the size of his little fingernail. His brother looked at the shell without much interest.

  “Gimme that,” said Erich, and he inspected the little shell, then gave it back to Markus. “Is she dying now?” he asked.

  Markus said, “I think so.”

  All that week, whenever they woke up, Delphine fed them carelessly, old bread or stiff oatmeal, and then forgot to check whether their chores were finished. She allowed them to play wherever they wanted. She was in the other world of the two that existed side by side. One world was of those who would go on living. The other was centered on the one who would die. Usually, the boys stayed outside all day. After dinner, they went in to see their mother before bed, to kiss her good-night. Her face was gray and sunken, almost like a headhunter’s shriveled trophy. Suddenly, her face was full of lines and folds. Wrinkles had appeared around her mouth. Her breathing was so slow it seemed forever between breaths. Her eyes were large and staring, but the boys were not afraid of her. They’d gotten used to her. Markus found that when he kissed her, he felt absolutely nothing except that her taste was a strange taste, earthen and moldy, not human anymore. As soon as he left his mother, crawled between the covers of his bed, and laid his head on his pillow, a numb buzzing noise started in his ears and he fell immediately asleep. He never even woke when Emil crawled into bed beside him on some nights. In the morning, he was groggy and fuzzy, and he had trouble nudging his brother out of his bed.

  “My foot’s asleep again,” said Emil, yawning.

  It was happening to them, too, Markus had noticed. Whenever they sat still too long, his little brothers complained, their limbs went odd and prickly. He could see how their eyes drooped. Even now, though it was full daylight and they had precious time to play, they were drowsy. Markus pointed to the riffle of woods just ahead.

  “Let’s go there,” he said. He pictured the soft mat of fallen leaves underneath the scrub birch and maples, how nice it would be to rest there for a while. They each took another horehound drop and spat lint while they walked to the woods. They sat down in a deep pile of crackling, dust-smelling leaves. Then they lay back and looked at the green leaves on the branches turning and flickering. Their eyes grew heavy and Erich began to snore, a light whining sound. The air was dreamy and hot. Ants crawled over Markus’s hand and he flicked them off. It was like being underwater just then with the green and changeable light falling through the woods onto them. What if they were lying at the bottom of the ocean? Markus thought of great storms and waves passing over, high above. On the tranquil bed, way down here with nothing to bother them, they lay undisturbed.

  Emil was stretched out next to him, half asleep. Markus felt his brother inch a little closer. He pushed him away, once, then he let him draw near again. Soon, with an adult sigh of irritated indulgence, he let Emil hold onto the bottom of his shirt, put his thumb in his mouth, and sleep. Markus stayed awake a little longer and even, once, rubbed his brother’s hair in the distracted way he rubbed the dog’s head. He missed the dog. But these days she did not come with them on their daily rounds, or out into the fields and woods. Schatzie preferred to stay near his mother, just outside her door. She was guarding Eva and she was waiting patiently to haul her across the deep spaces of the night, the black spaces, to the other side.

  THERE WAS NO BEFORE and no after. Days had melted together. Eva’s long dying was the ground and the air. For a week now, she’d taken only sips of lukewarm water. Her hair stood up in a peaked cap despite Delphine’s attempts to comb it down. Her elbows and knees were knobs and her bones jutted from her flesh. She’d absorbed morphine like water. It made no difference. Her body would not die and would not live. Her eyes were unearthly. She stared through everything, saw nothing. She had taught Delphine to look into her eyes straight on, and when she did the world dropped away. There flowed between them an odd and surprisin
g electricity. Their gaze was a power—comforting, frightening. Delphine was pulled somewhere fast, yanked right out of her skin. With their eyes locked they rushed through the air, ecstatic, hearts lurching.

  The night Eva finally died, Delphine woke to the knocking, and knew. She cast off the quilt she’d wrapped herself in at the foot of Eva’s bed. Eva’s arms were flailing like a backstroker’s and her fists rapped the headboard. Delphine grappled with the bedposts and got to her knees, then stumbled blearily to the side of the bed. She hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time for days, and now she hardly knew whether she was sleeping or awake as she tried to catch Eva’s arms. But Eva was running in place now, her bone-thin legs kicking, her arms pumping up and down at her sides. She was running in her high heels. Again, she was running against Franz and her breath came urgently, gravelly and harsh, as though she was nearing the end of a race. She gritted her teeth and seemed to strain for the invisible finish line. The cords in her neck pulled taut, her face twisted, and then she breathed deeply and a sound like sticks rattling came from inside of her chest. Her arms fell to her sides. Her breath went out and she did not retrieve it.

  “Can you hear me?” Delphine said. “Are you there?”

  Eva’s eyes opened and she took a little air. She said nothing, but looked steadily at Delphine. Her face had become beautiful once again, austere, the flesh pulled across stark bones, the graceful lines of her eye sockets and her skull. After a while, she whispered, for Delphine to light the lamps.

  Delphine lighted the lamp and then caught Eva’s fist and held it. Delphine’s head fell forward and her eyes closed in a swimming heaviness. She jerked awake, took a round, amber bottle of almond oil from a little shelf beside the bed. She poured a small amount into her left palm. Sleepily, she rubbed the oil into Eva’s skin until the fist slowly began to relax.