The Master Butcher's Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  IT WAS USUALLY Markus’s task to shred cabbage across the big wooden shredder, a thick paddle-shaped board inset with a sharp blade, easy to set over the wooden washtub that Fidelis used for mixing and fermenting his sauerkraut. He’d had Markus shred the stuff for hours after school already, but after seeing how white his face was and how slowly he moved, even a month after Chicago, Fidelis had taken pity on the boy. He sent Markus to bed. After supper, Fidelis finished the job. He took a cabbage head out of the crate and began to saw it lightly against the blade. Using just the right amount of pressure, he reduced it swiftly underneath his hand until there was only the thickness of a leaf between his palm and the metal. He tossed aside the leaf and took up a new, tightly packed whitish green head, began on that, stopped halfway down arrested by the sudden sensation of having recalled a tremendous task that he had left undone. That was his conviction of what oppressed him, anyway. The problem was, he couldn’t think what this task was at all. He picked up the cabbage again, but the impression in his mind only grew stronger. At length, he was so severely haunted by it that he threw down his apron and went outdoors.

  There, in the spring-frosted meadow of the front yard, under a quarter moon that blazed in a fresh black sky, he remembered—it was not a task, but very definitely it was something he hadn’t finished. The question was, he thought now, was whether it ever could be finished. If he took it up again, would it go on forever? Also, did he have the courage? Did he dare go and see her?

  DELPHINE WAS READING and dozing over a thick Book-of-the-Month Club novel she’d got from the little lending library run by some schoolteachers out of the courthouse basement. The plot was intimate, British, and safely romantic, one of those in which she had confidence she’d not be left for days with heartache. She had always been a reader, especially since she lost Clarisse. But now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next. She read Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Dos Passos, George Eliot, and for comfort Jane Austen. The pleasure of this sort of life—bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life—had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. She read E. M. Forster, the Brontë sisters, John Steinbeck. That she kept her father drugged on his bed next to the kitchen stove, that she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

  When she came to the end of a novel, and put it down and with reluctance left its world, sometimes she thought of herself as a character in the book of her own life. She regarded the ins and outs, the possibilities and strangeness of her narrative. What would she do next? Leave town? Her father would die without her, a failed thread of plot. The lives of the Waldvogels would simply proceed on in the absence of her observation, without the question mark of her presence. A new story would develop. Delphine’s story. Could she bear it? Maybe after all she’d live her story out right here. Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn’t exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days. She did not mind living with poor decrepit Roy on the forsaken edge of a forgotten town beneath a sky that punished or blessed at whim. Contentment. The word itself seemed square and solid in her mind as the little house—Roy’s—that she thought of as her own house. Her house at the end of the world. Horizon to all sides. You could see the soft, ancient line of it by stepping out the door. From the west, later and later every night, flame reflected up into the bursting clouds. Skeins of fire and the vast black fields.

  After she watched the sun go down, she lighted the lamps, picked up her latest book. Before she dove into the words, she sat and looked at the walls of her quiet room. This was her nightly ritual: she read, she dozed, she roused herself, refreshed and a little dizzy, she made herself a cup of strong tea and began again. Sometimes she read until three or four a.m., knowing that she could take a nap behind the file cabinet the next day. Several times a night she carefully looked around her, pleased at the details of her surroundings. The pinkish light from the expensive lamp that Step-and-a-Half had inexplicably given to her glowed on the pale gold walls. Delphine had hung forest pictures cut from calendars and framed with scraps of birch wood. Gazing into those leafy prints, she entered a peaceful and now familiar state of suspension. A radio that Roy had acquired from Step-and-a-Half and fixed played soothing, tinny orchestra music. There was no heater, but she had the quilt that Eva made for her draped up to her waist. Sometimes she traced the pinched little stitches that her friend had taken, and thought strangely that the stitches might as well have been taken in her own skin, and Eva pulling them. She was reminded of Eva many times a day. She still retained the imprint of her friend’s personality, and in that way, another comfort, she liked to think she kept her alive.

  Eva would like this room, she thought. There was a small, ornate, feminine, wooden desk where Delphine paid the bills. A huge padlocked sea-trunk of bent blond pine, secured with iron bands, held two more quilts used on very cold nights. A small oval rag rug gave warmth, she believed, to the center of the plain board floor. She hadn’t decided whether the figurine of a dog, set on a rickety table pushed up underneath a window, was ugly or elegant. It didn’t matter. All of these shabby objects were bathed in the kind light of the rose-shaded lamp. In that light, Delphine gazed upon them with a warm satisfaction and shut her ears to the cold, subterranean creaking of the earth.

  Yes, they were still down there, the Chavers. Not their bones but some vestige of their desperation. Half asleep, sometimes, Delphine talked to them, tried to explain. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have. I am so sorry. Go away.

  When she heard someone knock on the door, she started and thought first of Ruthie. Then contained herself. It was just that they never had visitors. Though the town was growing, few came out that way, certainly no one ever at night. Delphine looked through the window before she opened the door and saw that Fidelis stood hunched into his woolen greatcoat. He was heavily scarved against the sharp spring wind and booted against the mud. For some reason he had walked. Delphine’s heart leaped suddenly in worry for Markus, and she lunged to open the door. Fidelis stepped in with a swirl of night air, and she swiftly shut the door behind him.

  “Markus?” she asked.

  “Sleeping,” said Fidelis, untying his heavy work boots. “He’s not sick, er ist sehr müde.”

  He left the boots behind him on some newspapers set near the door.

  “Dad’s asleep in the kitchen,” she explained, “so come, let’s sit in here.”

  Obediently, he walked in his wool-stockinged feet to the chair. The socks were gray, the heels and the toes bright red, childish looking in a way that might have endeared Fidelis to Delphine, if she didn’t pinch off such a thought before it formed. Without asking if he’d like some, she put the water on the stove, for mint tea, and came back in to sit with him while she waited for it to boil. Fidelis told her there had been a letter from Germany. The boys had started school and were involved in a government youth group that Tante said was extremely hard to get selected for. She implied that she had had to use money that Fidelis sent with her to bribe government officials to admit the boys, though they had passed some rigorous tests. As for Tante, she had at first conducted sewing demonstrations with her American model machine. Then she’d realized it was inferior to the German model.
/>   “That’s enough,” said Delphine. “I’m not interested in your sister.” She began to quiz him about the boys at home. Were they eating well? Washing? And the business. Were the people he had credited paying their bills? Some. Not enough. Were the suppliers giving him good prices? Obviously, from his answers, he did not have the time to spend with them in wangling better profit margins. Delphine frowned. “One or two percent here and there will make or break us,” she said, “you’ll find out!” She slapped the arm of her chair to hide her slip. Us? What was she saying?

  “Just tea again.” She mocked his disappointed look, and said, “You drink too much beer anyway.” She rose and went into the kitchen, stepped around the sleeping Roy, and swirled mint leaves into the boiling water in her heavy brown teapot. She took out cups and put a lump of sugar in the bottom of each one. She brought the pot and the two cups, balanced, back into the living room and set them by the china figurine of the dog.

  “Have you ever seen a dog like this?” she asked Fidelis.

  It had long floppy black ears, white and black markings, a pointed muzzle, and sat alertly upon a green porcelain cushion.

  Fidelis picked the dog up and turned it this way and that, almost playfully. “I don’t think another like this dog exists on earth,” he finally said, putting it back.

  Delphine said nothing. She was startled by the frivolous tone in his voice. There was an awkward, flirtatious quality about him. It was upsetting for her to hear him say anything that was not tied to the store. She addressed him on safer topics, and for a while they managed to skate a comfortable surface. Then Fidelis asked with no warning whether she knew, yet, if Cyprian was coming back.

  “No!” said Delphine, her voice caught in reluctance to be thrown, so suddenly, into the personal.

  Fidelis leaned back now and looked directly at her. The rose light polished his features, lent to the whole of him an incongruous sweetness. He’d hung his jacket on the chair behind him and was now in his shirt sleeves. The light picked up the bronze of the hair on his forearms and she gazed down a bit dizzily at his heavy-boned wrists. He glanced at the darkened door of the kitchen, hitched his chair a little closer to hers.

  “I gave Cyprian enough time,” he said. His voice thudded. The statement seemed ridiculous. But when he leaned forward, Delphine smelled the spice of him—white pepper and red, a little ginger and caraway. And the male scent of him, the wool and the linen of his shirt. The tart shaving tonic. She knew he rubbed cigar ashes on his teeth to whiten them and then brushed with baking soda. Knew he lathered his whiskers with Eva’s old bars of hand-milled French lilac soap. All of these little things about him were hers to know because she’d kept his house while his wife died. Then she’d cared for his sons. She’d told herself all along that these things had nothing to do with him, Fidelis himself, but now here he was, removed from the intimacy of his family. And yet she knew his habits while he’d hardly seen the inside of her house. He knew little of her. Nothing so personal as the type of soap she used. And what was she to make of this giving Cyprian time?

  “Gave him? What do you mean, ‘gave’ him?

  “Time,” said Fidelis, “to come back.”

  “Well, yes,” said Delphine. His meaning dawned on her. A contrary ticklish energy seized her. She wanted to make things difficult for Fidelis. Why not? Why should he come here so easily and overfill the small pale gold room, her private nest? So she began to laugh, as though he’d said something very funny, and then she calmed herself and took a drink of her tea.

  “Did you think he had deserted me?” She would never give away the reason they had parted. She would never tell that he’d left much earlier than people thought. “So like a man, to think that.” Perhaps she was a little under the influence of one of her drawing-room novels, in which people sparred over such topics as love, for it delighted her suddenly to be in the position she was in, to have Fidelis here trying to explain himself and her believing that she finally read his heart. So he had waited for her!

  “Fidelis.” She shook her head, the curls of her brown hair lashed her shoulders, and she raised her eyes to his with a lazy knowledge. But when she looked into his face his expression was of such helpless ardor that she forgot her small artifice.

  IT WOULD SEEM for months afterward that there had been a great collision, that two glaciers had through slow force smashed together, at last, and buckled. The two were dazed, a bit slow with other people, forgetful. Delphine kept her job at the courthouse, but cut the hours back and came into the shop to wait on customers each afternoon. She came to be near Fidelis. As before, she tended the kitchen and, if she had time, did laundry for the boys—not Fidelis. Since she’d left, he’d begun to iron his own shirts with a soldierly precision.

  One afternoon, she found him at it when she arrived. That day, for some reason the whole place was quiet. She walked into the cold concrete-floored utility room, where the water was piped out of the wall into a double soapstone tub. There he stood, chilled in the loop of his undershirt, arms moving above the wooden board covered with a padded cloth. He had bought a modern plug-in iron, and was putting a crease in the starched, sizzling shoulder of a sleeve.

  To watch him in his power doing work women did so often filled Delphine with a low electricity, and she brushed the side of his arm, above his elbow. Her hand was still in its glove. He put the iron down. Took her hand in his hand and then pulled off each finger of her glove while looking into her eyes with a steady gravity. When the glove was off, he lifted her hand in both of his and regarded it intently. He stroked her knuckles, scored with white scars, and at last, tentatively, brought her hand to his lips. He fit his mouth over the crease where her fingers came together at the palm.

  Then he moved too quickly, in a way she didn’t like, with an arrogant sweep, and tried to pull her to him. She sidestepped his rough gesture and walked out of the room, still breathing the heady scorched scent of clean ironing. That was the first time they’d ever touched, or kissed, though it was more than a kiss and not yet a kiss. Walking home later on, she thought of his eyes as he pulled her glove off, and then she was suddenly home. She realized that she’d walked, tranced, down the long road, without seeing a thing around her. She had no memory of how she got to her door. And yet, though she couldn’t stop thinking of him in this new way, she avoided him. For when they were around each other now the stage was bare, all the scenery pulled away, and there was only the full burden of their attraction. It was too much, to let it happen all at once. They came together by the smallest incremental movements.

  Weeks later, they still hadn’t kissed, hadn’t let their mouths touch. And yet one day in the dusty office filled with paperwork, Fidelis knelt before Delphine and with his hands smoothed the insides of her legs up to the tops of her heavy silk stockings, felt where they were hooked with metal garters, traced the slices of material up underneath her skirt. He spread her legs apart so wide she was embarrassed, there in the leather chair, and then he kissed the insides of her knees. She caught his hair back in both fists, pulled so hard it must have stung, but only stared down at him, his face immobile between her legs. She shoved him away with all of her strength, and pressed down her skirt.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.” He rose in one subdued, brutal motion and dusted himself off with broad unnecessary whacks at the legs of his pants. “Around you, I get these ideas.” He tried to recover his dignity, folded his arms, then unfolded them, sat down, and rifled the desk for a cigarette. When he couldn’t find one his threw up his hands as though to say, See? I can’t get anything I want? And Delphine finally laughed.

  MANY DAYS, they couldn’t bear the tension and ignored each other entirely. They set a date four months away on which they would be married. At first it seemed a very long time to wait, and then it seemed to Delphine far too short a time and she thought maybe she would put it off. Fidelis bought their wedding license in the courthouse, show
ed her the paper casually, and they both signed their names with a dispassionate alacrity, as though they were signing banking documents. They were good at working together—quick and respectful and efficient. Delphine took over the bookkeeping and the ordering again, and she began to bring religion to the dusty office careening with papers.

  One afternoon when Franz and Markus were eating in the kitchen, Delphine brought Fidelis in and pushed his shoulder. “Tell them,” she commanded.

  Franz paused, frozen, his hand to his mouth, waiting for his father’s announcement. Markus continued eating, chewing serenely. Nodding, he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.” He took another bite, and asked the next important question.

  “So does that mean Emil and Erich are coming home?”

  “I wrote and sent money,” said Fidelis, with assurance. “Tante will make the arrangements.”

  “Tell them,” said Delphine, again, shaking his arm.

  Fidelis gathered himself, but before he could open his mouth, Franz beat him.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Franz. “You two are getting married.” He forked half of a baked apple into his mouth, chewed it all up. “And as long as we’re making announcements, I’m going into the air corps. I’m enlisting.”

  “There is no war!” Fidelis’s low voice nearly cracked with intensity—he still had his hopes. But Franz didn’t seem to notice.