The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  It was his nature, however, to bring out everything within a situation. Usually, he got what he wanted by poking fun. This time, Fidelis didn’t want to joke around at all, his motivations were very different—he was simply feeling good. Also, without ever acknowledging it, he wanted to make up for the Gus Newhall story and the deafened Indian he’d laughed at in the telling. He wanted Cyprian to know he didn’t hold his being Indian against him and that even, if he were to tell the truth, that aspect interested Fidelis. He was curious about the whole way of life—he’d heard about that back in Germany and hadn’t seen much of it here. So instead of leaving Cyprian to himself, and letting the unsaid tension in their last meeting gradually release over a few days or weeks, Fidelis took two beers from the store’s cooler. He unlatched the beer caps from the tall dark amber bottles and a plume of cool smoke escaped each as he walked back outside.

  “Here,” he said, offering the beer to Cyprian. “It won’t kill you.”

  Cyprian took the beer, tipped it back, took one drink but said nothing. He found himself staring down, dumbly, at the churned muck of the delivery yard, examining with fake interest how the dirt had cemented itself in channels. He wondered at himself, why he couldn’t just say thanks and be easy with Fidelis. It would not happen. There was a huge rock in his chest. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. Even the beer going down didn’t help, but tasted sour to him. Then he surprised himself, watched his hand upend the bottle and pour the beer in a stream onto the hardened mud. The bloom of hops drenched the air between the two men for a few seconds, then faded. Fidelis went still, and put his own bottle down on the hood of the car. Now it was too late. Now a wave of affronted rage gripped him and he moved to stand within Cyprian’s line of vision. As he did so, he stepped back, out of reach of a sudden punch, and carefully untied his apron. He dropped the stained white cloth, rolled his sleeves up his arms.

  Cyprian was still watching the ground, the delicate tracery of the beer finding its way into the crust of earth. He frowned as though something in what he saw gripped his thoughts. He knew when he looked up that it would begin, and he was, now, in no hurry. He was lazy. He was filled with a glad black sense of this moment’s inevitability, so much so that he mumbled, in satisfaction, “It had to happen.”

  “So you want this, you get it,” said Fidelis, his voice flat.

  And at those words Cyprian walked sideways, away from the vehicle, and then slowly raised his head to stare again into the white-blue eyes. He removed his hat in the lock of their gaze, shrugged off his jacket, rolled his own sleeves up, too. And there the men stood now, arms loose and ready by their sides, the one dark and tense, his body lean with eager strength, the other solid with power. Their strengths were very different, and they planned accordingly, each thinking how to maneuver the other in order to use his own talents to the best effect, but that all came to nothing. Fidelis, for the second time that day, broke his pact with discipline. An unexpected blind fury took him at the thought of the wasted beer, and he lunged forward in a low crouch intending to simply grab Cyprian and smash him against the side of the car. But Cyprian had already decided that he wouldn’t let the butcher get that close. He crouched too, and with a sudden hook cracked Fidelis from under the jaw, giving the punch a spin to torque his neck, and then Cyprian danced backward to assess the damage.

  Not much. But the punch snapped Fidelis from his loose rage, restored his grip on his temper, and caused him to step back and gauge his next move with narrowed eyes. The two men circled with a fixed intensity now, not fury so much as a cold meditative watchfulness—for everything, for all the nothing, for something they would not admit to until it was over, for the shame of it, the foolishness of fighting over a woman neither of them had any claim on, or would admit to fighting over in the first place. And then right there, between that one punch and the next move that Fidelis made, between the intention and their half-realized urge, the boys’ thin yells of panic came to the men clear as birds’ cries across the dead grass of the fields. Seeing the men in the yard, the boys’ cries grew more desperate and shrill.

  Fidelis put his fists down with a sideways look of warning at Cyprian, and the two, their attention now completely riveted to the obvious sounds of some catastrophe, strode toward the children. Roman was hoarse and gasping, Emil bawled out something about the hill. Erich, white and stiff as a cutout of a boy, plunged along behind on his short, little sausage-fat legs. When the men neared, Fidelis suddenly experienced a wave of sick intuition and broke into a run. So he was kneeling with Emil as the boys tried to tell him everything—the fort, the hill, how the hill sagged, the room inside of it, Markus—and he didn’t at first understand. It was Cyprian who grasped it all and said, “Shovels—we’ve got to bring shovels.” And it was Cyprian who instructed Delphine, who came running after, to gather up as many men as could be found. It was Cyprian, also, who said to her, out of Fidelis’s hearing, to be quick about it, and bring the doctor, too, that he thought Markus was buried alive.

  ONLY IT DIDN’T feel like that from inside the earth. When the thunder of the hill’s collapse did not kill him, but wedged him in a fragment of space beneath two buckled boards, Markus felt very sleepy. The dirt had closed him in its fist. He wasn’t hurt, though he couldn’t move, and he wasn’t dying. Air seeped into his lungs but it was a sleeping gas, he thought, wearily passing into a dreamless fuzz of childish exhaustion. It was like when he was very small, the time his fever broke, and his mother curled around him in the cool blankets. She held her hand on his forehead and rocked him. He thought her hand was there now. And behind him the comfort of her great dark body. He was falling asleep. They were in the hull of a boat of silence, and blackness, and they were rocking to the end of the world.

  *

  THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH light for the men to see the shape of the hill, and to make out the doorway in the earth and see that it was shut. Fidelis threw himself forward at once and began to shovel with a maddened strength, but then Cyprian put his hands on his arms and stopped him. It took all of his strength to stop the butcher, to hold his arms. The men looked at each other in the shadow, Fidelis’s eye rolled white, and Cyprian said, clearly, urgently, “Don’t—you’ll bring down the rest of the hill. We must go very carefully.”

  He showed him the tools that the boys used, and put the broken hoe into Fidelis’s hands. Then he and Fidelis knelt and began to enlarge the tunnel by scratching at the earth with light, furious movements. As fast as Fidelis bit the earth away, Cyprian gathered and pulled it onto the canvas and hauled it out. And the boys in their silent terror dumped it somewhere and brought back the canvas. The dirt that had fallen in was easy to remove, but the men had to enlarge the opening to accommodate their larger selves and so, by the time Delphine and the lanterns and the rescue party got there, the two men had barely disappeared into the opening of the hill, and they were drenched in the sweat of effort. As Fidelis inched into the hill, working from his stomach, his great arms straining forward at the shut seams of ground, he called to Markus.

  Fidelis’s cries bounced off the dirt and struck Cyprian, but the other man did not take them in. He’d heard the sounds of the dying on the battlefield, the huge collective hell shrieks the mud gave after bloody encounters, and he did not react. From the past, he knew it was best not to let despair near, so he did not. Those outside the hill were not so disciplined. The whole singing club had gathered, and it was a terrible and useless meeting. The men could do nothing but mutter logistics and touch the hill on all sides and wonder whether there was another, better way to rescue the boy. They were unnerved and then worn down by the butcher’s constant hoarse cries to the point where some openly wept or turned away and put their foreheads against the trunks of the trees and waited—for that was all there was to do: just wait, and keep the lanterns going, and despair and speculate. The men inside the hill now would not quit or accept any relief.

  The boards that the boys had used were guides, and as they made their
tortuous way along, Cyprian righted the boards and set them up to bear, he hoped, the weight of the ground again. The top of the tunnel scraped along their backs, and if it should go they would not die instantly, he knew, but slowly feel the life and air crushed out of them. Still, he continued on behind the butcher into the center of the earth, until they entered a small passageway that had survived the collapse. They forced their bodies through it, now thoroughly inside the center of the hill, and Fidelis said, Gott Verdienst, and stretched his arm, strained his entire being forward, and touched the sole of Markus’s shoe.

  Cyprian felt the shock ripple through the butcher’s body, and he grabbed the man’s ankle. Wait, he said, wait, for the earth was coming down in tiny clumps around them, threatening to give, and if the butcher pulled hard the boy, who was probably dead after all, and whose body might be entirely buried, could dislodge the entire frail board system. Or say the boy was alive. Then they’d all be buried together. Wait, said Cyprian. Just feel for his position. And so the butcher edged forward, pushed more dirt aside, made a narrow slot for him to straighten his shaking arm. He stretched to feel along the boy’s side, groped gingerly until he ascertained, with a wild gasp, that Markus had breath. But also that the boy was halfway buried and that the margin of space in which he survived was held up by only the flimsiest means, board on board, an accident of the collapse. And when the butcher understood how perilously close the boards were to giving, Cyprian felt the shock and fear communicate itself through Fidelis’s body.

  Trembling and sweating, soaking wet at the earth’s heart, the top of the passage pressing down already on his spine, Cyprian breathed away the panic that communicated from the butcher’s body with a quick electric buzz. Slow, Cyprian said. His voice surprised him with its gentle firmness. Slow and easy. Fidelis was using all his strength to move his hands, just his hands. Ich weiss nicht, Cyprian heard the butcher say. And then he heard himself tell the butcher in that same calm and compelling voice that he could do it, that Fidelis must back out of the hole with him, that he must let Cyprian go back in alone.

  “I have done this before,” said Cyprian. His voice told a calm, kind, reasonable lie. As though it were an everyday thing to fetch a boy from a crack deep in a mound of earth. He didn’t know how he caused his voice to sound so persuasive, except that he knew Fidelis would listen to nothing less than an utterly convincing argument. He must be given no way to argue back. “You’re too big—you could kill him if you try to drag him out. I’m trained for this. I can get the boy out. For your boy’s sake, come out with me now. Come out.”

  And like one tranced and obedient, Fidelis did as he was told at that moment. Their antagonism had abruptly turned to a magnetic loyalty. The two men inched backward, crawled slowly back out the passageway into the blaze of lanterns. When Cyprian’s boots appeared, men rushed forward to help and he screamed them back again.

  At his terrible yell, they did fall back and crouched in a circle around the entrance that looked impossibly small for two grown men to have gone into it, disappeared as though the hill had swallowed and then in some act of peristalsis conducted them to its center. Cyprian edged out and then gently, bit by bit, the butcher emerged. Kneeling in the white light, both men entirely blackened by the wet dirt, gasped their lungs full. Cyprian called for rope.

  “I must go back,” the butcher said, lunging toward the hill. It was unbearable to have left the boy. Cyprian tackled Fidelis and held him around the waist, wrestled him backward, called out, “Delphine, Delphine, tell him.” The light blazed around them in a slick radiance. The air was cold and wet with the first drops of a blowing rain.

  “Cyprian can do it,” Delphine said evenly, seeing the shape of things. She held the butcher’s eyes in her gaze. “Let him go.”

  Those who watched said, later, how Cyprian seemed to dive into the earth, plow himself in as though he’d suddenly grown into a boneless earth swallower, a great human night crawler. He disappeared. And Fidelis, stunned and shaking his great head, his eyes wide and white in his mud-crusted face, stayed behind. He slumped in the dirt, waved the other men off with a violence they understood at once. They fell back, away from him, took the lanterns aside and left him in darkness as he wished. Only Delphine had no fear of him and did not leave his side. He seemed of the earth itself, waiting there, his breath ragged. Although she was too lost in her own suspense of terror to dwell on Fidelis, she did wonder whether he was praying. She never had known him to pray before, and although she released what she felt were foolish, beseeching, desperate words from her mind, she knew even as she thought these words that her prayers were not prayers. She should have listened to Step-and-a-Half. Now her pleas were no more effective with the powers that made the earth than the protesting bellows of cows prodded into killing chutes. Still, she begged despairingly for the rain to hold off, for the earth to mesh, for the flimsy tunnel to hold. Perhaps she muttered something out loud, for the butcher reached over and grasped her hand as though to quiet her, or perhaps himself, or maybe he didn’t know what he was doing at all with Delphine’s hand, or that he even had hold of it as the two of them knelt like petitioners at the entrance.

  IT REALLY WAS a matter of finding his balance, only not in air, but inside the earth. When Cyprian went back in, he eased himself into the ever narrower tunnel with a swift intention he hoped would carry him past the point, halfway through, where panic came up, shutting down his brain, racing his heart. It was natural, this fear, like the stillness he encountered nearing the top of a flagpole where he’d actually stood. He saw a yellow screen of lights, breathed in an even whistle to control what he knew, from the war and from his more dangerous tricks. His first limit. He had a benchmark where he encountered the first level of his fear, and he knew he could get beyond that initial sick drop of his guts by thinking only of one breath, the next, then the next. By balancing along his own interior wire. And so he breathed himself through the tightest center of the passageway, and he crawled deeper. At last, he came to the place where Fidelis had reached up into the tiny hatch of space.

  The boy was there all right. At first he thought with a wave of terrified disappointment that the boy was dead. But then he felt along Markus’s body and with his fingertips touched the boy’s lips and was certain he felt a small burst of warmth. And further, at a right angle to the boy, he discovered a small space into which he could pass the earth he removed in small handfuls, for that was all he took away. One handful, another judicious handful, a scraping of dirt here, some brushed away and some plucked, as though he were an archaeologist uncovering an ancient and fragile treasure. Even so, twice, the earth seemed to shudder around them. He didn’t know that it was thunder from an approaching storm, a storm that would drench the watchers and cause ten of them to wrestle Fidelis to the ground when he dropped Delphine’s hand and tried to reenter the earth.

  Cyprian concentrated only on each bit of dirt he pulled away, only that, until he was able to expose the boy sufficiently to unwedge him just by inches, to bend him slightly at the waist. As he’d worked incrementally, Cyprian had understood that he’d have to fold the boy out of the place where he was caught. So he continued, in complete blackness, to draw the earth methodically first from one limb, then the next, then to turn the boy, then to fold him at the waist. He wrapped Markus’s arms across his chest and then with the tenderest of little pulls, slowly, through the tiny aperture, he delivered Markus onto the passageway floor.

  There was a flop of dirt as the boy came free; one of the boards gave way just where Markus had lain, and Cyprian put his hands around the boy’s face to shield it, but the tunnel did not give way entirely and the earth held around them once again.

  It was good that the boy was unconscious, for Cyprian could feel that a bone was broken in one arm, and who knows what else, and he was afraid the boy might thrash around in pain if he came out of shock. So he roped the boy’s limbs, tied him up like a package, and he left a loop he could pull. He took that piece of rop
e in his teeth and edged backward, feet first, down the tunnel and out into the rain. And when the lights blazed over him, and the men roared at the sight of him, Markus came quietly and momentarily awake. Emerging from the narrow opening, blinking away the dark, the first face he saw was Delphine’s, in a circle of radiance, as she unlashed the ropes and drew him into her arms.

  FRANZ AND MAZARINE had lain so long beneath the pine that on rising they felt half drunk, dizzy with a peaceful happiness. He could still feel the print of her face there, her breath cooling in the fabric of his clothes. Her hair was still smooth and alive underneath his hands when he finally arrived at home. Immediately, he saw that something was wrong. He knew that this was the night the men met to sing back of the shop, but the place was silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. The door to the shop was unlocked, the lights were on, and there was no one anywhere. Franz stood in the kitchen, saw the food set out on the table, the glasses of milk. He flexed his hands, sat at the kitchen chair, lifted a piece of cold meat off a plate as though there’d be a message written underneath. The first shock of finding no one at the shop and house wore off, and he knew for sure now that some disaster had occurred. But he didn’t know where to go, and he didn’t know what to do, and even the dog was gone. The storm moved in. The rain came bursting down.