Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  “Franz, he knows nothing about it,” gasped Eva suddenly. “His father was not Fidelis. His father’s name was Johannes Grunberg, a Jew. Quite a student, and so handsome, so tall and fair. In the war, dead.” Her lips worked. At last, she gathered another breath and went on. “Fidelis knows, but he never spoke of it.”

  Delphine poured out another bit of oil and worked it into the slack, dry skin of Eva’s forearm. This was the fourth time Eva had labored to tell her this. Usually, from this revelation she went on to give Delphine directions on when to marry Fidelis and how to care for the boys. But this time, she said something different, something she’d never said before. She said it with a clear simplicity.

  “I want you, only you, to handle my body. And please write to my Mutti. Tell her that you took care of me. Tell her this: I loved you.”

  Delphine looked into Eva’s eyes expecting to become hypnotized, but this time something gave way, she could feel it. Their thoughts had pushed through an invisible barrier, a magnetic field, and there was suddenly a lightness that lifted them giddily into a storm of calm. Later, Delphine was to think that she should have called Fidelis or the boys. But at the time it did not occur to her. Delphine didn’t look away from Eva’s face, even for a moment, because she knew that Eva was afraid. She did not let go of Eva’s hand, because she knew that Eva wanted her to hold her hand, just as a child would when it must enter a new and foreign place. Delphine did not move to adjust her friend when the sticks in her chest rattled again, even louder, three times. She did not pound Eva’s chest when the breathing stopped. Eva was still looking into Delphine’s eyes, and so, during the time when she might have taken another breath, Delphine saw the light go out behind that silver streak, like a crack behind the door.

  “STRUB’S FUNERARY, how may I be of service?”

  Benta’s voice was sleepy, but Delphine knew that they had kept track of the progress of Eva’s disease and had been waiting for a call.

  “I should have got hold of Clarisse, but I know if I did I’d break down,” said Delphine.

  “You think it’s hard, at first, that she’s your friend,” said Benta. Her voice now stronger, down-to-earth. “You’ll find Clarisse can be a great comfort to you. Can we come over together?”

  “Yes,” said Delphine, and then she sat in Eva’s kitchen listening to the boys and Fidelis, together in the other room, the murmur of their sorrow. One comforted the other, gained control, and another broke down. Delphine needed to hear them, for she felt very much alone. She couldn’t be with them, it wouldn’t be proper for her to enter that room now. She had washed Eva with her lilac soap, pinned a towel between her legs, smoothed her face into a calmer expression and closed her eyes before she called Fidelis. She thought that perhaps she should accompany the body back to Strub’s, too, as Eva had made that final request. But now everything seemed too much for her, out of her control, and somehow strange, as though with Eva gone it was no longer right for her to be there. It seemed a long time before the Strubs arrived, pulling up to the back door in their long, pearl gray hearse. Delphine answered at their knock and Clarisse entered, took hold of her with an embrace that radiated a practical kindness. The Strubs brought her effortlessly into the room where Fidelis and his sons sat with Eva. When the others entered, Fidelis bent down and picked up Eva in his arms. He looked so bewildered, then, holding his wife in the air with no place to take her, that no one could move until Aurelius put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Put her down, Fidelis, we’ll take good care of her.”

  Gently, Fidelis lowered Eva to the mattress. With a wild, rough cry, Markus broke away and stumbled to his mother’s side. He bent over and with a passionate gesture he kissed his mother’s ankle, just as his father had. He cradled her foot, closed his eyes, and touched his forehead to the place he had kissed. Franz stepped behind him, embarrassed, and was about to pull Markus away when Delphine stopped him. Just as she touched Franz, a sound emerged. It was a roar of grief, a loud, keening bellow, and it filled the room. It seemed to come from all of them, or no single one of them, or from the walls of the room itself. Delphine never was to know. The sound released everyone, as though from a spell, and they stepped away from Eva and left her.

  NOW ROY WATZKA passed into an unprecedented period of sobriety. Dry days passed into weeks. He was able to accomplish this because of the starkness of Eva’s death. And then, too, what had happened in the cellar came back to haunt him. At last something had unnerved him. In his periodic bouts of delirium, the dead had appeared. The Chavers came for him, snapping with beetles and sprouting grave moss. Their hands reached with insane stroking motions, dragging him to their cozy wormhole in the earth. This vision had plagued him since the discovery of the Chavers, and finally, when Eva died, the experience became unbearable. He found within his thoughts, for the first time, a horror to which even the terrors of withdrawal were preferable.

  For once, too, he didn’t farm out his wasted muscles to other people, but concentrated on his own house. Cyprian was astonished to return from a run up north to find not a Roy tooted happily down by the river, but an old, faded, quiet Roy calmly brushing the sides of the house with sunny yellow paint. The house was cheerful, the blue of the doors and windows restored. He even sanded down and varnished the floors. Filled the cellar in more thoroughly, and blacked the stove. Delphine had her hands full with the Waldvogel boys just after Eva’s death, and it came as a shock to her that Roy was capable of taking care of her in any way. In the mornings sometimes, he handily made breakfast. She would emerge from the room she shared with Cyprian, and there it would be, close to a miracle as home life had ever come. A bowl of oatmeal steaming hot, butter melting in a pool with a lump or two of dark brown sugar. Cream. Sometimes eggs or toast he made by holding the bread on a fork and passing it evenly before the gas—for with her money Delphine had bought a stove on timed payments. Cyprian got a delivery set up for a small icebox. Breakfast seemed a surprise compensation for all they had been through. The food laid out on a shined-up table, jelly quivering in her mother’s tiny cut-glass bowl Delphine thought for sure had long since been pawned or broken. Breakfast had helped her get through the storm of Eva’s dying and now through its aftermath. She expected Roy to relapse once she finally quit the shop, but instead his good behavior continued. He turned on the charm that he’d brought to Eva’s sickroom. He sang songs he learned in the hobo jungle by the river. “Blue Tail Fly.” “Joe Hill.” “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Soon there were actually chickens in the coop out back, big orange Rhode Islanders, and the back porch steps were nailed onto the back porch, not scattered all over the yard.

  “The dead have more power than we know,” said Delphine to Cyprian, sitting on those very back steps one evening in the last of summer.

  Cyprian shook his head. Did her statement refer to Eva or to the change affected in Roy by his waking dreams? Whatever it was, Cyprian was glad of the change as well and had even considered quitting his own shady line of work in order to pursue something on the up and up. Roy was setting weasel traps around the outside fence of the chicken run. The previous day, he’d tacked a light wire drapery on the top of the fence to foil the Cooper’s hawks. Roy was not the only one who’d improved the place, either. In the past two weeks, Delphine had turned the inside of the house into a golden haven. She set an eggshell pale yellow on all of the walls, and stuck the old furniture back together with horse-hoof glue, twine, and C-clamps. She’d restuffed a couple of chairs and accepted a fancy, tasseled lamp from Step-and-a-Half, who gave it to her in a seeming fit of bewilderment after Eva’s death. In their room she’d oiled the lacquer dresser and they bought a brand-new mattress, not that they took advantage of its spring. She told herself that life had been too sad for anything but comfort, but that was not true. There would have been plenty of comfort if Cyprian had thrown himself to her in thick desire. But they usually fell asleep touching hands. That was good enough. He held her like a sister and often, long into the
night, they talked.

  Now, as Roy turned from setting his traps and walked toward them, Delphine had the idea that she would make a Hungarian-style goulash that Eva had taught her, a thick stew of braised meat in paprika sauce, ladled over spaetzle. Sour cream topping it. As she turned to walk into the kitchen, a sense of the fugitive sweetness of the scene assailed her. It was like a gift from Eva when she died—all good things to follow. Her dad acting like one, Cyprian so attentive, playing checkers or cards with the old man and helping him stay off the sauce. As terribly as she missed Eva, there was also the relief of having done with the grand horror and the mess of death, the organized tedium, the vigilance and dragging heartbreak. She didn’t have to put up with men drinking underneath the clothesline or with the sharp wing of Tante’s scorn. She could smell the maples, the pine, the ooze of the river instead of the raw primitive cavernous smell of cows when they are split. And now, it was good to turn toward her cooking in the cool day’s remaining light, and to have in her new icebox both meat and butter. In her apple bin, apples. In the onion box, onions. So why, when she felt this goodness, did a wave of fear and sorrow pass through her? Why the sudden memory of looking down into the cellar, and the dead moving their mouths, their words rising toward her in flashes of green fire?

  It was because she must have known even then that more was coming. She must have known that there would never be an end of it. No peace. For even now, as she made her way dreamily toward the cooking, the boy, bruised and aching, slipped out his back door. He had decided to run to her. She stirred more flour and an extra egg into the spaetzle, cut two more onions into the goulash. Used all the meat. For some reason she made extra. It was as though she knew that by the time he figured out the back roads and cut through the corn, the sand pickers, the ditches and the pastures, he would be tired. He would be ready to drop. He would be hungry, that Markus.

  * * *

  LOOKING CLOSELY at Tante’s face as she complained about Markus the next morning, Delphine picked out each one of Fidelis’s features. On his face they were precisely placed with a level and a ruler. On her face the angels had been less attentive to their work. Every feature was off—the frozen blue eyes too far apart on the skull, the nose thicker and too short, the upper lip much thinner than the lower, and the whole mouth so small that Delphine wondered how so many words came out of it, or how she ate more than one pea at a time. Delphine had to examine the talking face to remove herself from the words it said. If I listen to the meaning, I’ll paste Tante right in the chops, she thought. So she calmly watched the odd concoction of flesh and bone, then she shrugged and said, “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Lie!” said Tante, but she didn’t leave the little front porch. Delphine, in the doorway, folded her arms. Tante understood with disappointment that she wouldn’t be asked in for a piece of that astounding cinnamon cake she smelled, and she swallowed hard as Delphine dusted flour off her blouse. Or maybe it was powdered sugar. Tante clamped her teeth together and bit back her hunger.

  Delphine had been successful in not listening to all of the specific details of the diatribe, but she did know that it was a self-serving lecture that might explain his bruises. A calculated effort to undermine his innocence, for Tante repeatedly made reference to the contrast between his frail looks and devilish wiry ways. She’d had to switch him, then beat him, and then for some reason he ran off. Delphine said again, yawning, “Haven’t seen him.”

  “If Fidelis was here . . .” Tante muttered. But Fidelis had the truck, packed with sausage, out on a wide sweep of deliveries to various grocery stores.

  “The kid’s no dummy,” said Delphine. “He’ll find a place to hole up for a while. At least until his dad gets back. Don’t worry about him.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about him,” said Tante. “But what does his dad do when he comes home and finds the boy is gone?”

  “What,” said Delphine, “are you scared Fidelis’ll take down the bull’s pizzle and give you a good whacking?”

  Tante reared back, not certain whether she should be severely offended or laugh at Delphine’s joke. She did try to laugh, but as always the chuckle came out thin from her tiny mouth. The bull’s pizzle was a homemade switch, a dried bull’s penis that hung on the backside of the door to the shop. Used with disciplinary intent, it was painful but it left no marks. Eva had once told Delphine that Fidelis almost never used it on the boys—twice on Franz for dipping into the till, and he had used it on the little boys for setting the outhouse on fire, never on Markus. The existence of the pizzle, its customary threat, was enough.

  “I’ll be going then,” said Tante. “Got to feed Erich and Emil. Those two eat like little pigs.” She swirled off in her rusty black. As though her leaving were an insult and not a blessing, thought Delphine. Satisfied, she retreated into the house and watched the car jounce around the road’s bend.

  “Come on out,” she said to the bedroom door.

  Markus slipped out and ran to the window.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “I doubt it.”

  For some reason, he’d put his best clothes on to come to her last night. This morning, they were all he had to wear. They were the same clothes he’d worn at the funeral, the store-bought shirt with the front pockets and the notched collar. Short itchy brown pants, which he hated, good wool socks with no holes in them and Franz’s formal hand-me-down, lace-up shoes, still too big but shined up nicely.

  “We should put you in some overalls,” said Delphine, and she directed Cyprian to go buy a pair in town.

  “Now,” she pointed to the kitchen, “let’s get you some breakfast.” And she made him what she’d made the others, a stack of pancakes studded with the last of the sweet wild blue saskatoons. Dabbed butter on the top. Drizzled on a little maple syrup that Cyprian had traded for with a Chippewa up north on his last run. She carefully put the tin jug back in the icebox. Then she poured herself a cup of hot coffee and sat down while Markus ate. She talked while his mouth was full, not expecting him to answer her. Last night, he’d simply appeared, eaten, his eyes drooping while he chewed. He’d gone limp and let them tuck him into bed. She hadn’t had the heart to ask him a single thing.

  “You’re going to stay with us, here, until your dad gets back,” she said now. His eyes went round and he nodded quickly, relieved. Delphine kept talking.

  “I don’t need to know how come you left, though you can tell me if you want. Or you can tell Cyprian. Don’t tell my dad, Roy, though. He blabs. What I do want to know is this: Why did you come to me?”

  The boy stopped chewing, suddenly, swallowed and looked at her with his fork and his knife poised. The roan freckles stood out on his pale face. He bit his lip, uncertain, and his eyes . . . there was all the sadness in the world in his eyes, thought Delphine. All the sadness there could possibly be. And as they were Eva’s eyes, for a moment she swam into them and then he spoke, and his words were clear, though very low.

  “You took care of her.”

  He started eating again, his face darkening, going hot and red while Delphine blinked and stirred the coffee round in her cup. So what the boy said—that meant Delphine could take care of Markus, too? Or was it his way of saying that since Delphine loved the mother, she would love and defend the son? She watched him eat with some satisfaction. He shoveled the food into his mouth as though he’d seen no food for over a week, and soon Delphine got up and made him more pancakes.

  SO MARKUS STAYED and helped Roy mow the yard and grub young trees and pull wild morning glories from a patch they wanted clean for a pasture. Roy was now ambitious to have a cow. Little by little, as Markus joined the checker games or made a quick study of Roy’s cribbage strategies, things came out. First, Markus would start to worry about the chinchillas. He’d wonder if Franz was changing their water or just adding to the old stuff in the dish, as Eva had directed them not to do. Then he’d fear the twins would torture the creatures by shoving sticks into the cages and chasing the
m here and there, which would damage their coats. After a while he’d shake his head and worry that Tante didn’t know the first thing about mixing their food. She couldn’t make food at all.

  “What did you eat?” asked Delphine casually, hiding the speculative glee in her voice.

  “She could make crackers,” said Markus.

  “Oh, right from the barrel?”

  He nodded solemnly, eyes sparking.

  “Could she make cheese, too?”

  “Right from the wax!” he crowed. “She mostly cleans.” He sobered down. “She cleans a lot, and then she yells, and then she cleans up some more. We got hungry so we ate a lot of green apples.”

  “Did Emil and Erich get the shits?”

  “Oh, did they!”

  “So then she had to do more laundry.”

  “I made her do more laundry, too.”

  Delphine just nodded. She knew exactly what had been going on, ever since Markus had insisted on sleeping on the floor with just a blanket over him. And then, every morning, he got up before they did and she’d see the rag he’d used to clean up under himself drying on the line, already rinsed in the river, and his shorts put back on rinsed, too, still clammy and cleanly washed. There had been none of this before the death of Eva, so Delphine knew the cause, and she knew the cause for the beatings, and more than ever she had the fantasy of wringing Tante’s neck just like a chicken’s, or sending her flying with a kick. But what could she do except keep Markus here? And if the sheriff heard, there might be charges. But again, what could she do?

  “By the way,” she said, “lay low if the sheriff drives up. Better yet, if you’re out in the field fade into the brush, then sneak down to the river. And meantime, if it will make you feel better,” she brushed his strawberry blond forelock of hair, the second time she’d ever touched him, “I’ll go check up on your live fur coat.”