Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “Can I help you with something else?” Delphine asked, uncertain. But Step-and-a-Half only continued to stare, taking Delphine in carefully. For her part, Delphine stared right back. That was when she noticed something new about Step-and-a-Half. Although her face was planed rough, her features, almost noble in their raw strength, could have been beautiful if suspicion had not pulled the corners of her mouth down so tightly that deep lines tied beneath her chin. Her eyes, that surprising color, were constantly narrowed. Suddenly, the older woman slapped the counter sharply with one hand. She grabbed the package with the other and without a word of thanks or gesture of common courtesy, she turned on her heel and swept out. The door jangled shut in that same fury with which she had entered.

  That was one of the customers, and there were others. Some paid money and some, like Step-and-a-Half, lived off the scraps. For the shop and the dead animals fed a complex range of beings—from the banker, his steak cooked perfectly and set before him every night, to those who bought the sausages, then the cheapest cuts; from the family of Dakota Sioux who were darker than Cyprian and dressed in old-fashioned calicos, wore strings of rose, blue, coral, and yellow beads, and traded wild meat or berries for flour and tea, to the ones who did not pay at all like Step-and-a-Half, Simpy Benson, the Shimeks, and the out-of-work fathers who had taken to Depression roads; and still on down to the dogs who gnawed the bones that Step-and-a-Half rejected and even further, to the plants that flourished on the crushed bones even the dogs could not chew to bits.

  There were also a number of customers who didn’t always buy but regularly came in to talk or to plan the meetings of the singing club—the fat bootlegger, Gus Newhall, and the courtly, stone-broke, but immaculate Tensid Bien, who always wore a tie and coat, who took forever to browse through the Sunshine Baking Company rack of cookies, from which he meekly sampled, and who bought one or two slices at a time of minced ham, occasionally an orange, a few cookies, a meager cut of the toughest beef, a turnip, a sparse rind of cheese. There was Pouty Mannheim of the Mannheim brothers, chubby and with rich-boy airs, and his confused perpetual girlfriend, Myrna. There was Chester Zumbrugge, who tried to put the moves on her. There were Scat Wilcomb and Mercedes Fox, Old Doctor Heech and his son, Young Doctor Heech, who was not a doctor at all but a dentist, and was that shocking thing, a vegetarian, and thus suspected to be a Communist. The only one of them all whom Delphine truly dreaded seeing, however, was Eva’s spoiled sister-in-law. Everyone just called her Tante because she otherwise insisted on her baptismal name, Maria Theresa, and no one wanted to add to her swellheadedness by using such a queenly title.

  Delphine did not call her Tante, she did not call her anything. She carefully did not address the woman who swept in with one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself were subdued by the woman’s sense of her own elegance and importance. On Delphine’s first day of work, Tante went right around to the sliding panel on the case that held the sausage, opening it with a clatter. She fished out a ring of baloney and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched Maria Theresa—actually, she stood back and envied the woman’s shoes. Those shoes were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather, and cleverly buttoned. They fit her long, narrow foot with a winsome precision. Tante might not have a captivating face, for in that she resembled Fidelis, she replicated his most aggressive features—the powerful neck and icy bold demeanor, a too stern chin, thinner lips and eyes of a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers. Still, Tante’s feet were slim and pretty. She was vain of them, and all her shoes were of the most expensive leather and make.

  “Who are you?” Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off without deigning to accept an answer. The question, insulting in the first place, since Delphine had already been introduced to the butcher’s sister, hung in the air. Who are you is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it between them, bounced but did not retrieve it, Delphine was left to consider the larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.

  Who are you, Delphine Watzka, you drunkard’s child and fairy’s whore, you vagabond, you motherless creature with a belly of steel and a lusting heart? Who are you, what are you, born a dirty Pole in a Polack’s dirt? You with a household cellar full of human rot and a man in your tent who has done the unimaginable to other men? Who are you, with a father seen sucking his bottle like a baby in its own shit? Who are you and what makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother, Fidelis, who is the master of all he does?

  DELPHINE WAS NOT CAPABLE of indulging in that sort of self-doubt without resenting the one who had introduced it into her heart. She hated Tante from the first and she imagined the woman’s overthrow. She would be ruthless in attaining at least one small eventual victory from which Tante never recovered. Tante even tried to lord it over Eva, for which, in her complicated, loyal heart, Delphine detested her. When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law’s fresh bread under her arm, and grabbed a bottle of milk besides without a by-your-leave, Delphine wrote it down on a slip. Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of baloney, and a loaf of bread. And she left it at that. She did not know there would be repercussions for even so slight an accounting, but there were, for Tante didn’t take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. Out of money left by her grandmother, whose favorite she was, Tante once gave her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment. Although he had paid her back, she continued to take her interest out in ways that would remind them all of her dutiful generosity.

  The boys, in particular Markus and Franz, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. They were foreign to her. She had not been around them often. Now, things were different. As these boys were children belonging to Eva, she was interested in who they were. She took note of them beginning with the oldest boy, Franz.

  At fifteen years he was extremely strong and athletic with a proud, easygoing American temperament perfectly transparent and opaque at the same time. His inner thoughts and moods were either nonexistent or hidden, she couldn’t tell. He always smiled at her. He always said hello with only the faintest German accent. He was always cheerful and he was unfailingly polite. As time went on, she would see that he was the product of Fidelis’s insuperable patience and also his controlled rage. Franz’s strength coupled with his mother’s wire-frame tenacity made him a formidable athlete. He played football, basketball, and baseball, all with powerful grace, and was, in fact, something of a town hero.

  The next boy was more reclusive. Markus was barely nine but already it was clear that he had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he’d play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his own interests. He had inherited his mother’s long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as though to say, What an idiotic spectacle. Markus was also polite, though more restrained. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted to the last degree upon his mother. He was named after her beloved father. His mother often stroked his hair, so like her own, the curls clipped. She often pulled him close and kissed him. He pulled away, as boys had to, but in a gentle way that showed he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  The two youngest boys, Erich and Emil, were five-year-old twins, bull strong, morose when hungry, perfectly happy once they ate their fill, simple of heart and devoted to their stick guns and homemade sets of clay and twig armies that eternally strove in combat across the floor of their back room. Those armies, which included those that once had belonged to Fidelis, and a few more modern soldiers bought with precious pennies, were just about the only toys in evidence around the house. Once, when Delphine wondered what boys played with, Eva told her that they played with everything around them, inventing it into something else.

  “A stick
, it becomes a gun. Our meat trays they slide down the hills. Once in a while a bat, a ball. You never know. Delphine, I just leave them out of my interest to see what they build.”

  Delphine watched and indeed they made surprising things. Out of abandoned springs, wheels, crates, they put together a buggy that the dogs pulled. They rigged up a near lethal tree swing, which flung them from a branch near the road in an arc over the dirt where they could be hit by a passing car. Down near the river, they made rafts out of old lumber scraps. Swords from lathes, forts from packing-crate wood, guns that shot gravel, bombs of cow’s bladders filled with water. Yet, in spite of their rowdy play out in the world, they were quiet and subdued in the shop and around their father, especially. They worked hard on slaughtering days. When every hand was needed, even the two youngest pulled gizzards inside out and cleaned them of gravel. Once old enough, the boys learned to use knives without slicing off their hands. Fidelis had determined to train them all in his profession.

  There was that—the profession. Delphine didn’t mind selling groceries, or even cutting headcheese, but butchering wasn’t her kind of work. Not only did she hate the brutish excitement of the killing, but its long and meticulous aftermath. The casings must be washed and rewashed, for sausage, and the gizzards turned inside out and carefully smoothed back together. Each product had an endless procedure and she thought some of the steps unnecessary, though Eva insisted they were not. Maybe, Delphine thought, she wouldn’t mind actually mixing the spices up into the ground meat and making the sausages, but that was Fidelis’s work and he was jealous of each step he took. Some steps were secret. He brooded over each batch like an alchemist.

  Delphine would rather have spent her time on the stage, or even backstage, designing costumes and sewing them. She liked to build sets. She was good at everything that had to do with drama and most of all she liked dressing up in whatever composed a costume: feathers, wreaths, gowns, Victorian shirtwaists. Delphine had always loved making up shows. It was, in fact, their mutual passion for disguise that had first brought Clarisse and Delphine together while they were still in grade school. They had staged complicated shows in Clarisse’s backyard, using a sheet draped over a clothesline for a curtain, and playing all parts with complicated costume changes and stage directions, even lighting from an old captain’s lamp, the glow of which could be directed onto the grass as a kind of spotlight after dark. Their inventions, and the mingled derision and awe in which other children held them, had made them close as only children can be who are set apart. Their loyalty to each other had saved them. Over time, they had become invulnerable to teasing and gained a complex form of respect. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. So it began to happen with “those two girls”—an acceptance of their peculiar getups and an appreciation of their entertainment value.

  Still, in their shared daydreams, Clarisse and Delphine had always seen themselves taking leave of Argus, moving off into the vague wilderness of cities and other people and even bona fide theaters. Although Delphine had, for a short time, pursued some form of their fantasy, she was disappointed that it had only been as a human table, a prop, the base of Cyprian’s flamboyant balancing. As for Clarisse, she’d never left at all, since her father and uncle required her in the business directly after high school. It was her fate to stay and to assist the town’s dead on their short journey into the earth. She didn’t mind, she told Delphine, she had accepted it. She had always known that she would step into her parents’ spot, but once she lost them the luxury of going to school or playing at drama was at an end. Besides, her aunt Benta said she had a natural aptitude for embalming, which was an art that went back to the Egyptians but was only now catching on in the Dakotas. Aurelius Strub had taken the course and earned his diploma from one of the first itinerant embalmers to enter the state. Since then, he had made steady technical improvements. Strub’s was getting first calls from people in towns at quite a distance, from people who had seen and found comfort in the serenity of the bodies that Strub’s prepared and displayed.

  Clarisse moved her own grocery trade from Kozka’s market to Waldvogel’s, as soon as Delphine began to work there. She had inherited her parents’ house and often unwound from her day by cooking elaborate meals for herself in her mother’s kitchen. She was very finicky about her diet, and Delphine now saved the leanest cuts of meat for her. They were alone in the shop one afternoon, regarding a lavender-pink pork chop that Delphine had just laid on a piece of waxed paper.

  “Trim off the fat, will you?” said Clarisse.

  “There’s no fat on it,” said Delphine.

  “Just that corner,” said Clarisse, pointing.

  Delphine removed a bit of translucent flesh no bigger than a fingernail.

  Clarisse nodded for her friend to wrap the rest. Her pinch-waisted brown suit of summer-weight wool and her crisp white blouse and white piped leather pumps looked good enough for city wear. Her philosophy, she’d informed Delphine, was not only to prepare the deceased as the guest of honor at a party, but to dress herself with an elegance that befit the grand going-away occasion. She had just come from the funeral of a thirty-four-year-old drowning victim, a man, and was pleased, though she merely hinted of this and only whispered the disagreeable term “floater,” that she had managed to nearly eliminate the awful red and purple blotches from his face and halt its typical rapid degradation.

  “I would never have let him go out in front of people looking like that drowned boy who purged, right in the church, up in Fargo,” she said. “Sloppy work. Those poor parents. The wife of mine—you don’t know them, they’re new in town—anyway, his wife told me that she couldn’t believe the work we’d done. She thanked me. The family tried to give Benta extra money. We wouldn’t take it. How do you like this jacket?”

  The two were the same size and Clarisse was generous with her clothing, so Delphine always took a possessive interest in her friend’s wardrobe. Even now, Clarise said pleasantly, “This would look swell on you.”

  “I can’t think where I would actually wear it,” said Delphine.

  “You and Cyprian go out, don’t you?”

  “We’re living in a tent, Clarisse,” said Delphine, and then she laughed. So did Clarisse. Her sweet, fresh voice bubbled over the rumble of generators and the clash of meat grinders out in back. While they were laughing, Eva walked into the shop with a new roll of string for the spool that hung above the cash register. She gave Clarisse the smile Delphine knew as her formal smile, the one she used with customers she did not particularly know or like. Delphine wasn’t sure which category her friend fell into, and she experienced a sudden anxiety, a confusion of loyalties in which she wanted to please them both. But Eva swept immediately out and Clarisse, who hadn’t picked up on Eva’s formality and probably thought that she was merely busy, was frowning at her fingernails in a serious way that Delphine knew meant she was thinking of imparting some questionable piece of information.

  “Come on,” Delphine said to her friend, though she felt guilty now, talking on the job, “business is slow. I’ve got a minute. Let’s hear it.”

  “In a way, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before,” said Clarisse, pouting with vexation.

  “Give it over,” said Delphine firmly.

  Clarisse tipped her head down and eyed her friend almost angrily from beneath her brows.

  “Hock came to my house last night, late. He stood on the porch, talking of this and that, trying to pretend like we shared some secret until I wanted to scream. I shut the door in his face and stood behind it. He must have stepped up to the door because I heard him whisper like it was right in my ear, then I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down.”

  Clarisse had a talent for looking truly miserable. Her face fell into the slack lines of a much older woman, and she bit the lipstick off her lips, nervously, so that it smeared onto her teeth. She li
fted the gloved hand that held the wrapped pork chop, squinted her eyes shut, pressed the pork chop to her forehead.

  “Nothing I say or do makes a goddamn bit of difference,” she said vehemently. “He turns it around to hear what he wants.”

  “What are you supposed to be, his tender little pig?”

  “Ha!” Clarisse held the pork chop out at arm’s length, and spoke to it.

  “I suppose you’re fed up with me always pitching a moan over Hock. Well, I’m sick of me, too. I’d move away if I could, that’s how tired I am of it. But I have a duty here, and more than that. I’m good at my profession. Heech says I know as much as he does about anatomy, and I have been experimenting with a new pump that . . . oh, I’ll spare you the details. I’ve got pride in my work, and he can’t ruin things for me.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Delphine. “We’ll get together and knock off the big boy. We’ll murther’m.”

  “Oh,” said Clarisse, wistful. “That would be so nice!”

  NORTH DAKOTA WILTED in a brutal heat. For Delphine, the summer weather, hot, hotter, unbearably hot the second week of her new job, meant that this was the summer of ongoing terrible odors. The slaughterhouse of course began to smell like slaughter. The scrap pile went green and the rank smell of flesh was everywhere. Of course, she couldn’t escape the bad smells after work. No sooner was the cellar of her house filled in and the floor scrubbed down, new mattresses, clean blankets and sheets put out, the walls sprayed with vinegar and then vigorously wiped, no sooner was the house fit to live in than the heat crushed the air. She and Cyprian decided to stay in the tent for other reasons, as they attempted to catch some sleep in the night’s wet furnace.

  A slight breeze flowed off the dwindling water of the river just around three a.m., and Cyprian positioned the tent flaps just so in order to take advantage of it. But that breeze also turned the mud sour and came laden with whining fronds of mosquitoes. The insects batted the canvas of the tent with a tiny insane lust. All night, the whining built and diminished, sometimes so loud it sounded like air raid sirens, sometimes low and insistent, but always constant and without letup.