The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “She’s not coming back,” Delphine said, making certain.

  Fidelis slightly inclined his head, his eyes dull blue, a little bloodshot.

  “Look here, Fidelis,” she said, hesitant, for indeed she didn’t know that she wanted to return, “I won’t do much better than your sister.”

  Fidelis looked as though he very much doubted that was true. Delphine turned away from him, considered. Her world right now was orderly and peaceful, the first time in her life it had ever been so. As a telephone operator she would be able to make connections, tell time, give numbers, and come home at the same time every night. More peace and routine. Probably more money, too. But then she thought of the boys, how Eva had taught her to handle things, and how she could make the household run smoothly while managing the store. Eva had showed her the tricks, the shortcuts, the patience with details, all of the skills she had gathered through painstaking trials and mistakes. Eva had given her a whole life’s worth of knowledge, had trained her, and she’d accepted, because she loved her—very simply, she had loved Eva. She remembered very well all of the times Eva had instructed her about Fidelis and the boys. Near the end, she had been wildly determined that Delphine would take her place. It had helped her to concentrate on lists and habits and little eccentricities of diet for Delphine to note. What had Eva told Fidelis? What had he promised? What did he think? Delphine opened her mouth to ask, but the words stuck.

  So she just said, “All right, but here’s how it goes. I’ll be there eight each morning. I’ll work the busy hours and make lunch, then dinner. I’ll stay through six each night.” She made the terms. She set the rules in a firm, indifferent voice. Waited for his nod of agreement and when she got it, like a man would, she stuck out her hand to shake.

  EIGHT

  The Burning

  of the Mutts

  A FAMILY IN GRIEF has accidents and stumbles a lot. There are scabbed toes and the terror of eyes nearly put out. Falls off the roof, falls from bicycles, falls slipping in the sawdust of the meat-market floor. And too, the sorrow makes a path for every illness. Mysterious high fevers. Any local pox. Even the sturdy can catch diphtheria, pertussis, not to mention gross stomach flu and run-of-the-mill runs, plagues of snot or crusted eyes and infected ears, lice. Once it grew cold, it seemed that every possible small malady came the way of the boys and Delphine was hard-pressed to keep the hours she’d insisted on with Fidelis. Sometimes she just had to nurse them through a night. Sometimes she had to sleep at the foot of their beds. She became an expert at rendering a chicken into hot soup. She made a routine of daily checks behind their ears for eggs and nits. And even when they all were healthy and breathing hard in boys’ dead sleep, she stood in the doorway and worried. They had done this to her. Activated some primitive switch in her brain. She couldn’t turn it off. Sometimes before she left, with superstitious intensity, she counted their breaths and made sure they were breathing regularly. She counted exactly ten breaths each, then forced herself to turn and leave at that exact number, not one more or less.

  Worry made more worry, made her restless. Sometimes at night she woke, beside Cyprian, and found that against her will her brain restored old scenes of shame or betrayal by girlfriends, boyfriends, long in the past. Or calamities her father’s drinking brought on the house. She relived them. Often, she woke Cyprian and made him talk to her, but she never told him that she’d waited with curiosity and daring all the next month after they’d made love, hoping and not hoping, imagining a child. And he never told her that he’d done the same, for with Markus around he couldn’t help thinking of it, and he’d always thought that he’d have children. He pictured himself with a son, a daughter, teaching them to add numbers, teaching them to balance, telling them where he was from, and all he knew. So when he talked to Delphine in the night, he thought he might ask whether she was pregnant, but did not, because it would raise the issue of sex, and he didn’t want the emotional complexity of that. He had to prepare himself, it required an effort. It was so much simpler to be neutral, and loving, and to stroke her face and hold her hand, to put her back to sleep with stories about his brothers and the stubborn old horse they shared. It was easier to be her brother, but he wanted children all the same, and he wanted to stay with Delphine. As the months passed, he knew she was not pregnant with his child, and so one night, in the moonless dark, staring up into a blackness that seemed a shaft into outer space, he asked her to marry him, for real, with a solid gold wedding band.

  The darkness was so dense that night it swirled green around them, and for a long time she didn’t answer. But she wasn’t thinking it over, she was thinking how to tell him no. There was only one way.

  “No.”

  The long vowel floated over them.

  *

  THERE WERE GOOD THINGS. Delphine ran the shop with an almost joyous dispatch. She hadn’t known she’d like the work so much now that she was partly in charge. She didn’t mind the hard grind of cleaning, and she had the boys to sweep up and spread new sawdust, to scrub down the display cases and the floors, and Franz to wait trade when things were busy, after school. She began to take an almost embarrassing delight in selling things—a loop of the best liverwurst on this side of the Atlantic, or a piece of the Colby you couldn’t get just anywhere, or dried herring from a case recently cracked open, exuding brine and smoke. Eva had given Delphine the magical belief that everything that Fidelis made was unbested and every morsel the shop sold was of a superior quality only their own customers deserved.

  This conviction was good for business, and Delphine had, as well, a shrewd eye for what would sell and when to knock down a price. She instituted a weekly drawing for one dollar worth of groceries, and that drew in customers. Except for the banker and the few other rich, who lived in green-lawned flamboyantly painted mansions on a bluff over which their unpredictable river had never yet risen, everyone was broke half the time. Many were worse off—so ravaged and destitute that they couldn’t afford any meat at all. Delphine was good at extracting money from the wealthy, and also good at trading carefully with the poor. She stocked barrels of dried beans, peas, made shrewd deals with farms and traded like a horse dealer for the items she was certain that she could sell. She began to deal with an ambitious wholesaler working out of the Cities, and stocked all sorts of new items that made people curious enough to stop in for a peek. Soaps she tried herself and could recommend, powdered health remedies, boxes of steel-cut oats, cider vinegar, walnut oil, pots of mustard. She had a dairy case set into the wall—before, they’d drawn milk from a can back in the cooler. Now she stocked cream, daily milk, butters of three grades, and fresh eggs from Roy’s chickens.

  Roy was still not drinking. Perversely, this had begun to concern Delphine. Still, how could she quibble with the quiet work he did all around the house? He kept busy, even drove up north with Cyprian from time to time, and didn’t snitch from the stash they smuggled across the border and then sold. Sometimes Roy lied to her with a clear and listening expression—told the same sort of stories he’d once told Eva. How once he’d had a part in an Italian opera, or killed a bear, that he had learned to weave from a Navajo and could recite long prayers in Hebrew. Delphine thought she didn’t know him. Who was he, sober, anyway? Her father was a stranger, a man of whom she had no knowledge and did not know exactly how to approach. It used to be so easy. Their relationship consisted of times he’d crawl to her and beg for money, and she’d refuse. At least he still socialized with the other men in the singing club. Roy came to the shop after hours to sit around the table with the men and slice rounds of Fidelis’s sausage onto square crackers. Cyprian came too. They drove Delphine home after she finished in the kitchen. It was a routine, she later thought, she didn’t treasure enough. An even life, without any jumps or starts. No stalls either. It was the kind of life you didn’t know at the time you were living it was a happy life.

  Every day now, Markus checked the chinchillas, for the fur buyer was due any time, and h
e wanted their coats in top condition. Delphine didn’t understand how Markus could name the creatures, how he could be so careful with them, not to startle them, how he even seemed to love them, and yet didn’t express the slightest compunction about their imminent deaths. Delphine guessed she was learning about the nature of a butcher’s kid—to see the animals come and go. The only creature exempted from this fatalism was Schatzie, who had lain at the foot of Eva’s bed and now slept on guard in the doorway to the boys’ room every night. The white German shepherd was serene and intelligent, but bristled with protective inquiry at a sudden noise. Delphine had seen the dog go rigid, growling with authority, at the intrusion of a strange deliveryman. Sometimes the dog looked at her with eyes of clear amber so alert and watchful that she experienced a shiver of recognition. There was no question, this dog was not to be considered on the same level as the other animals whose fates were concluded swiftly once they left the stock pen, or the ones raised for fur.

  Markus gloated over figures that his chinchillas would bring, and figured and refigured profits with his younger brothers, pencils in their small, thick fingers, biting their lips. Franz had declared from the first that he was too old for such schemes, so among the three younger, they were to realize all of the money, and they concentrated on the splitting of it in myriad ways, making this and that argument over whether to pool their money for some grand object, or divide it, or if there would be enough to get a new bicycle for each of them. Meanwhile, the valuable gray little animals skittered here and there, unknowing, in their baskets of frail hardware cloth, in and out of their clumsily shaped nesting boxes, softly growing fur, until one Friday night.

  After a short appetizer of sheep’s offal, the wild dogs leaped and squeezed through the back fence. Schatzie barked in the front of the store. While Fidelis searched for burglars and tried the locks, the wild dogs feasted. They overturned the long line of cages, and plucked out the chinchillas one by one. They gulped them down or tore them to shreds, and then were gone, silently as always around the butcher’s house, but leaving their scrambled tracks.

  “DELPHINE!” It was Markus, and she thought later with slight shame that it was a compliment he came to her first thing on the next morning, just as she entered the shop. His face was broken, sobs were tamped in his chest, a scrap of fur hung limp in his fist. “They got them, they killed them!”

  She ran out back with the other two boys and saw it was true. The cages whirled all over the ground, ripped open like shopping bags, and there was not a chinchilla to be seen. Markus’s tattered scrap was the only remaining piece of evidence the dogs had left, and he held it now with an attitude of disbelief. He walked forward a little, staggered with the loss. There was the pie in the sky of big money, but also, Delphine now saw, these were in a way Eva’s odd legacy to the boys, the project she’d started, and whether they knew it and acknowledged it or not these creatures were of her own making. Wild dogs should not have had them. And Delphine could see, when Fidelis surveyed the ruin, that a similar feeling was building in him, an obscure anger that started low and crept over him like a heavy cape until he bowed his head a little, looked up from under his brows, and made a decision.

  “Sei ruhig,” he said to his sons, and in a manner rare to him, he set a hand on each of their shoulders. Then he turned without a word to Delphine, and he stalked back to the slaughterhouse. He gathered old freezer-burned meat, some that had turned in the cooler, molded scraps from a side of beef he was curing for the banker, and he then carried the pans of this out to the edge of the field, dumped it. The boys watched him, Delphine too now, and next they followed to see him enter the little room on the side of the slaughterhouse where he kept his rifles. He loaded both guns, then filled a pocket with extra bullets. He put a chair on his shoulder and he brought this chair outside and set it underneath a tree. He remembered something and went back to the cooler. From its sighing interior he took three beers. He took a loaf of bread, baloney, some cheese and apples. Then he returned to the shade of the tree, in sight of the meat scraps at the edge of the field. From the yard, the boys and Delphine saw him set both rifles across his knees. At last, he opened a dark bottle.

  Delphine went back into the house. The bell on the door rang, and it was Step-and-a-Half looking for the usual pan of scraps. Fidelis had just dumped the pan out back to lure the dogs. Delphine looked carefully through the glass at the thickly marbled and perfect cuts of expensive meat, and chose a nice piece of beefsteak. She wrapped it in white paper and twine, and she handed the package over with no explanation.

  Step-and-a-Half gave Delphine a strange, barren look and inspected the package, weighed it in her hand.

  “Take it,” said Delphine, a little roughly.

  Across the older woman’s elegantly cut features there passed a look of raw suspicion, and she asked, “How much?”

  “Just take it!” Impatient with the odd scruples of the other woman, Delphine was perhaps too sharp.

  “I don’t think so,” decided Step-and-a-Half. This was, Delphine understood, a little too close to charity for her stomach, a bit too rich. Step-and-a-Half rummaged brutally through layers of clothes and pockets, then set down a nickel on the counter. It was the first time she’d paid money in Delphine’s experience. Delphine scooped up the nickel, made change of three cents, and tried then to give the pennies to Step-and-a-Half.

  “Keep the damn change!” she growled in an insulted huff, then turned to stride out the door, muttering about the terrible price of things.

  OUTSIDE, THE BOYS were crouched in the sun on the topmost timbers of the stock pen. Delphine watched them from the kitchen window as they chewed the ends of grass and quietly watched their father. She was surprised to feel a stirring of excitement around her heart, and then guilty as she looked at Schatzie sitting alertly in the shade. In her agitation she prowled to the window repeatedly to see if the other dogs had appeared. As the fall sun rose higher, overhead, the boys came in to eat and she spread the rolls with sweet butter, then wedged in slices of chicken from the old hen she’d stewed yesterday. They took sandwiches to their father, and their own lunches back outside, and sat waiting. More hours passed than anyone would have thought. It seemed when you weren’t looking for them, the dogs were always skulking around the field’s edge. And then when you waited, they did not appear. Maybe part of the rage Fidelis felt was that in the past he pitied the scraggly pack and fed the mutts. They’d taken advantage of him—a thing he could not allow.

  It was late afternoon, and the boys were nodding off in the shadows of the grapevines, when Delphine heard the first crack of a shot. Fidelis had waited, had watched the dogs gather, and now he was shooting steadily. Delphine ran out the back door, climbed the stock-pen sides along with the boys, and saw the dogs go down. First the big solid brown caught a bullet that spun him like a top. The gray took one neatly in the head, skidded to a puzzled halt and slowly toppled. Two medium-size with long, matted fur were hit and ran off howling, to die before they reached the woods. A red dog growled and bit the air before a bullet clipped its jugular. There was a dingy white that crept belly down in the grass. A bullet creased its spine. It stopped. Six more were felled. The last, a speedy gray, loped desperately off and Fidelis sighted carefully along its sinuous back and bore it to earth. The last shot echoed across the field. Fidelis turned and gestured to the boys.

  “Pile ’em up,” was all he said, and the boys did as they were told, hunted down and carried back each dog and laid them together like a heap of rugs. One of them, Delphine noticed uneasily, was the big brown chow dog that had run wild on the Kozkas. Best, thought Delphine, to get rid of the evidence, and she said nothing. Fidelis came out of the shop with two tins of kerosene. He dribbled one can over the dogs and then he added pieces of wood, downed branches, refuse. When the bonfire was as tall as his shoulders, he poured the kerosene on the top of that. He made a torch of a long roll of paper and carefully tossed it onto the soaked wood.

  There was
a hollow pop, and the whole thing went up. The fire burned and burned, long into the dusk, and the boys kept adding junk. It smelled for a while like a regular fire and then smelled of roasting meat, then smelled of nothing. The hot fire consumed everything, and into the dark the boys, and Delphine, watched it dreamily, with an intensity they did not understand. For they didn’t want to take their eyes away; it was a mesmerizing thing. The timbers collapsed into coals so hot they consumed green wood. Even the bones of the dogs would be ash. There would be nothing left. The fire went on burning, they kept feeding it, and at last it grew so late that Delphine had to send the boys to bed.

  Fidelis slept in a room across from the boys, but he slept hard and never woke. So every night, she gave the watch over to the dog, not Fidelis. She never said good-bye to Fidelis, or indeed, made it her business ever to be alone with him at any time. He was working late, now, to make up for his day under the box elder tree with the rifles. As she turned from the doorway to the boys’ room, after counting their sleeping breaths, she touched Schatzie and the dog looked up at her as always in agreement. Tired, she gazed a bit too long into the dog’s eyes and suddenly she couldn’t look away. She stood rooted, tears filling her own eyes, for it was Eva who stared back at her with an expression of extraordinary sympathy and calm.