Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “I suppose we should clean out the cellar,” she sighed.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” said Cyprian, but his voice was cheerful. He stubbed out his cigarette, slapped his pants, and laughed at the puffs of dust that swallowed his hands. Delphine wanted to tell him that she admired his capacity for brute labor. It was a thing people in the town valued, and she herself was proud of her own endurance. If she said as much, though, would she be admitting she’d once thought of him as a useless lug who couldn’t so much as grow a plant? Maybe, she revised in her mind as they walked toward the house, she’d had it all wrong to begin with. He was an artist. A balancing artist. Maybe while doing the show his whole being had concentrated on that one thing. Maybe now that he wasn’t balancing, he could display his more ordinary talents.

  TO GET TO THE RING in the floor, they had to chip away a seal of shattered jars of canned peaches, the turds of some stray locked-up dog, and strange handfuls of spilled red beads mortared into the peach juice. Once they had pried off this layer, they hammered on the stuck ring. Gradually, the sky grew dark and they had to stop, find a lantern. They stalled, took some time filling it with kerosene. Cyprian fussily trimmed the wick, finally lighted it. By now, they were determined to finish what they’d started. They used a crowbar and a can opener to pry up the hinged hatch in the floor.

  Thinking back later, Delphine had the sensation that the door had blasted off, but of course, that couldn’t have been the case. It was just that they had been mistaken about the mighty odor they’d fought. That smell was only an olfactory shadow. Now came forth the real smell, the djinn, the source. Both of them dived through the back door and rolled, addled, in the scroungy backyard grass.

  “What the hell was that?” said Cyprian, once they’d crawled to the beer crates and lighted their cigarettes with rubbery fingers. It was as though they’d been thrown from the house by a poltergeist. They could not even recall exactly whether they had actually lifted off the hatch.

  “I think we did,” Delphine said.

  “I do too,” said Cyprian.

  “There’s someone down there.” Delphine breathed out a long smoky sigh.

  “Who?”

  “Someone dead.”

  She was right. There was someone, plus another someone, and maybe another person, too. It was hard to tell. They were kind of mixed together, said Cyprian later. Afraid of the consequences of calling up the sheriff—what had Roy done?—they gathered every particle of traumatized energy and ventured back. They raced in holding their breaths, grabbed the lantern, leaned over the open hatch, looked down, and bolted back outside, all without breathing. Far from the house, they stopped and gasped.

  “Did you get a good look?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was a person, right?”

  “Monsters.”

  Which was exactly what those pitiable bodies had become—huge of tongue and pop-eyed, brain blasted, green, bloated, iridescent with fungal energy, unforgettably inhabited by a vast array of busy creatures. The bodies were stuffed upright in the cellar surrounded by many empty bottles.

  What had Roy done?

  “Now is it time to burn the house?” Delphine was panicked.

  “We can’t. If we do, it means that we suspected foul play. There’s no way if we burn the house the sheriff won’t come investigate, or the fire chief. There’s no way to burn up the basement—I mean, what if even fire won’t destroy what’s down there? Then we’ll really be in trouble.”

  Even at such a moment, Delphine was touched by his casual use of we. He could have ditched her right then, left her to handle her father and the stinking house and the bodies generating strange life in the cellar. But he stuck with her, uttered not a single word of exasperation with the mess. Besides this new competence, he is even loyal, thought Delphine, I would marry him if he did not have to do what he did with other men. It was an odd time to take his measure as a potential husband, perhaps, but as Cyprian faced this great challenge beside her, his brow furrowed in grave thought, Delphine observed that he had never looked more handsome. The planes of his sculpted cheeks were drawn and his eyes were somber. She liked this weighty, serious, considered quality he now displayed. She liked his patience with the problem.

  “We will have to go back and tell Roy about the bodies,” he stated. “We need more information, Delphine.”

  ROY BAWLED in a helpless rage at the two of them upon their return. He’d inadvertently rolled himself up tightly in the bedsheets and believed that they had put him into a rudimentary straitjacket. He’d been through the d.t.’s in a sanitarium once, and as part of his treatment the staff had fastened him in a cold wet sheet. They had tightly pinned together the edges seam to seam. He was left to experience whatever he would experience. It had been lonely snaking out in a soundproof padded room. Spiders had leaked from the walls and giant lice had crawled underneath his skin. The experience itself had driven him back to drink, he said, and he never even contemplated quitting again. His mind couldn’t take its own power.

  “Can you take this?” said Delphine, unrolling him. “There’s dead people in your cellar.”

  “Release me! I implore you!” Roy begged. As usual, his manner was a mixture of pretension, low need, and melodrama. “I need a blast here. Can you get me a good blast?”

  With a resigned gesture, Delphine directed Cyprian to offer her father a sip of the whiskey they’d bought for him on the way.

  “We’re going to let you down slow, Dad,” she said. “You’re going to have to talk to us. There’s dead people in your cellar,” she repeated.

  “And who might they be?” he asked huffily.

  “Well, we don’t know who.”

  “Perhaps you could describe them.” Roy’s eye gleamed with a mad fire upon the pint of whiskey. He grew slyly meek. “What, may I ask, do they look like?”

  “Hard to describe,” said Cyprian, with a helpless glance at Delphine. “One had on a porkpie hat, I think. There was a bow tie, or maybe it was something else . . . you know, come to think of it, one was wearing a suit.”

  “A black suit?” Roy was suddenly alert.

  “Delphine, do you think one was wearing a black suit?”

  Delphine paced the floor, shut her eyes to recover the hideous picture in her mind. “I do think so. A black suit,” she faintly agreed.

  Roy jumped up in a sudden fit of energy. He grabbed the whiskey from Cyprian’s hand before the other man could react, and he swilled as much as he could before, with a struggle, Delphine and Cyprian wrested the bottle back from him.

  “Oh God, oh God!” Roy swiped his sleeve across his mouth and staggered around the room twice before he stood before them, hands thrown wide. “It’s Doris and Porky and their little kid, too!”

  “What? What?” Delphine grabbed his shoulders and shook him so hard his head snapped back and forth.

  “Hold off!” Roy slumped onto the bed, held his hand out for the whiskey bottle, which Cyprian put instead to his own lips. With a feral swift movement Roy tried to grab the flask, but Cyprian plucked it out of his reach and brandished it high.

  “Who are Doris and Porky?”

  “And their little . . . what . . . boy?” added Delphine. She knew the family, but not that well. Her friend Clarisse was a relative. In fact, Clarisse had told her a few things about Portland “Porky” Chavers, Delphine now remembered. Things so bad that she couldn’t feel sorry for him, at least.

  “They were guests,” Roy said in a tranced voice. “At the funeral party.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “Your girlfriend Clarisse’s dad. Friend of mine too, of course. He wanted a party, not a funeral, because he’s a Strub. I was the only one who would throw him a party instead of your typical funeral proceedings, which he’d attended all his life. I was the only one who would do it.” Roy paused, then spoke rather pompously. “You could call it an act of corporeal mercy.”

  “Only you would think of that,” said D
elphine.

  “I was an extremely gracious host. We had tubs of beer,” Roy said in a longing, confessional hush.

  “Bought with the rent money,” said Delphine in utter fury.

  “It doesn’t matter about the beer,” said Cyprian. “Tell us about Doris and Porky.”

  Roy gulped like a dutiful and panicked child, nodded, and went on.

  “Weeks after, we did notice they were gone.”

  “We who? Your stinking hobo friends?”

  Roy gave Delphine a look of deceitfully gentle reproach, but he was too much in shock to carry out a more detailed act.

  “Kozka and Waldvogel, Mannheim and Zumbrugge, all of those. Of course we wondered where they went. Porky wasn’t at the singing club. They just left everything. Their house was abandoned. Everything. Even their dog . . . it came back looking for them. It wouldn’t leave the pantry. Oh God! Now I know why!”

  Roy bent double and began to weep, though with a soft intensity for which he needed no audience. “And here we thought they went down to Arizona,” he said softly, over and over.

  Delphine and Cyprian felt themselves thump down like wooden beings, right on the bed, felt the breath leave their bodies. They tried to retrieve some sense, but it was too soon. Their nerves were shot. Cyprian went into the hotel bathroom, turned the bathwater on, and motioned to Delphine to enter. He tossed the whiskey bottle out to Roy and then they locked the door shut on him.

  “Let’s not think,” Delphine counseled.

  Cyprian didn’t even answer. He made the bath very, very hot, and he added some strawberry bubbles that he’d bought at the dime store. While the water was getting good and deep he took off all Delphine’s clothes, then he took off his own. As he balled them up and laid them in the corner, he said, “We’re going to burn these.” They got in and with great care and speechless tenderness they washed each other, then they soaked themselves sitting cupped together for comfort. They kept the water going in and out. Their skin got very soft, then spongy white, wrinkled as a toad’s. Once Roy knocked, but then he mumbled some vague apology and went away.

  “I never want to leave this tub,” said Delphine.

  Cyprian added more strawberry bubbles, more hot water, and they sat there and sat there until the water drained out, then they sat there some more.

  NOW THEY HAD the problem of who to tell and what to do—there was family, there must be family for Doris and Porky, and, unbearable to contemplate, their child. And there was the infuriating prospect of getting the entire story out of Roy. They questioned him the next morning. He gave out bits and pieces. They learned, for instance, that he’d wandered off during the wake itself and slept in the abandoned coop that once housed the black rosecomb bantams that Delphine used to keep. In his grief over Cornelius Strub, father to Clarisse, he’d gone to live in the bum’s jungle down by the railroad tracks. Weeks had passed there, he thought, and when he returned he was so wrecked he was hallucinating. So he may have actually heard pounding, even awful noises coming from the walls and floors of his house, but at the same time, as he was plagued by the usual visions of snakes uncoiling from the lamps and dripping from the walls, he disregarded these noises.

  “The noises finally went away,” he said in a small, flat voice that trailed off weakly. “As noises will do . . . and I said to myself I must be coming out of the delirium!”

  “That’s it, we’d better go to the sheriff,” said Cyprian, grim-faced.

  “Won’t they arrest Dad?”

  “As long as he didn’t lock them in . . . you didn’t lock them in the cellar, did you?”

  Roy sat bolt upright, rigid. His mouth fell open and he looked so vacant that for a moment Delphine was sure he was falling into a fit. Then he snapped his mouth shut suddenly and stated that he positively knew he had done no such thing.

  “I don’t think they’ll prosecute. It looks to me, anyway, as though the whole thing was an accident. Maybe Doris and Porky got curious and went down there to show the old cellar hole to their”—Cyprian shut his eyes saying it—“little boy. Someone knocked those jars off the shelves and hit the ring in the floor. They got sealed in sometime at the wake.”

  “I didn’t have a drop down there,” said Roy. “Not a single drop.”

  “Well, who knows, then.”

  The three ate a very tense, morose breakfast before walking over to the sheriff’s office.

  SHERIFF ALBERT HOCK was a striking combination of fragility and mass. His delicate features were surrounded by great soft rings of flesh plumped into cheeks and chins. The pale brown hair on top of his head was a thin froth but the hair on his face was vigorous. His beard sprouted into stubble as soon as he shaved it. His mouth was grubby as a little boy’s and often smeared with juice or chocolate, but he had a precise way of putting things. The spinning hysteria of Roy Watzka caused him to tip away from his desk and go still in the wheeled chair. Impassive, his face was a mask of patient contempt, although when he blinked at Delphine his look was tender as an old dog’s.

  “I want those bodies out of there!” said Roy in outrage.

  From his attitude, one would have imagined the pitiful hulks in his cellar had invaded on purpose and died there to spite him. He glared at the sheriff as if Hock himself were responsible, which was, Cyprian thought, a very bad ploy.

  “Here, sit down,” Cyprian advised Roy, whispering into his ear that he should also shut up. “We’d best go over this from the beginning.”

  “Please do,” said Sheriff Hock, pulling himself back to the small wooden desk. He drew a brown paper blotter toward himself and folded his beautiful fingers around a pen. He smoothed his left hand over a record book bound in moss green fabric, into which he jotted information that people from the town brought to him. “You may proceed.” He nodded, opening the book.

  Delphine took up the story. She and Cyprian then alternated the facts, relating everything in as much detail as they could recall, pausing politely as the sheriff copied their words. He seemed prepared to take down every single nuance and waited while they sought the best, most accurate, way to describe each step of their experience. With his hand poised, arrested in the air, and his eyebrows lush as sandy caterpillars, drawn in thought, he listened. The quality of his attention brought things out—the exact time of day, the light sources, the peculiar power of the odor, their own theories, their concern over Roy. By the time they took the sheriff up to the present moment, Delphine and Cyprian felt that they had participated in a monumental task. They were exhausted, and yet there was still so much before them.

  As Sheriff Hock rose with tedious majesty, Delphine recalled that prior to his successful bid for the sheriff’s position, he had triumphed as King Henry VIII and also played a Falstaff legendary in the town. She regarded him with a complex respect mixed with pity. He was cruelly and hopelessly infatuated with Clarisse Strub, and everyone who knew it also knew she angrily despised him. He had chased her for years and written many a poem of self-pity. His passion had become a stale joke, but as he was the sheriff no one told him.

  “We now commence the investigation,” he stated, walking to the back of his office. A small room held the signal tools of his status. Pistol, measuring tapes, red flags for stopping traffic, more notebooks and files, a rack bearing several rifles. He carefully grasped a selection of things he needed and then, leaving a copiously worded note for his deputy, ushered them out.

  “Roy will ride with me,” he stated. Aclatter all at once with a combination of privilege and fear, Roy hopped into the passenger’s seat. Cyprian and Delphine followed, at a somber distance. When they reached the house and got out of the car, Delphine was impressed to see that the sheriff had included a quarantine mask in his kit, and that now he donned it as he entered the house. He wasted no energy speaking to them. His bulk passed swiftly and daintily between small rooms, and he soon blotted out the pantry door. Sheriff Hock opened the hatch in the floor. He made some cursory notes, propped the hatch open, and then stepped
out the back door into the yard.

  He stood there for a long while, either battling his stomach or collecting his wits. The others waited, silent, at a short distance.

  “Before I can allow you to reinhabit your house,” the sheriff finally said to Roy, “I will have to interview the other guests who attended your house on the fatal night. Since, in your understandable zeal,” he now addressed Delphine and Cyprian, “you have probably both seen and destroyed any evidence of foul play, I will have to insist that you remain in town as potential witnesses.”

  Both agreed, and the sheriff drove off. Roy informed the two that he needed a spot of solitude, and walked down to the bank of the river. Delphine tipped her thumb to her lips to indicate that he always stashed a bottle in the roots of trees near the bank. She and Cyprian proceeded to unload their DeSoto and to pitch their sleeping tent upwind and as far away from the house as possible. Then Delphine directed Cyprian to stay with Roy and make sure he didn’t take it into his head to go swimming once he got good and schnockered. She, meanwhile, would drive to town and gather supplies.

  HERE’S AN ODD and paradoxical truth: a man’s experience of happiness can later kill him. Though he gave every sign of being no more than an everyday drunk, Roy Watzka was more. He was a dangerous romantic. In his life he had loved deeply, even selflessly, with all the profound gratitude of a surprised Pole. The woman he loved was the woman everyone supposed was Delphine’s mother, Minnie. No one ever saw her except in Roy’s pictures, or knew much about her except from Roy’s stories. Those stories, however, made her vivid in town memory. Perhaps she had had a secret self who loved Roy back with a singular passion, for there was little in Minnie’s indistinct photographs to indicate a romantic spirit. She was half turned away from the camera in one picture, her mouth clenched in a frown that might have been suspicion or just the shadow cast by direct sun. Another photograph caught her in a sudden movement, so she was blurred, her face trapped within an indistinct gray wash of light. In yet another, a chicken had flapped up and she’d reached suddenly to catch it so that her features were obscured by wings and hair.