Master Butchers Singing Club

by Louise Erdrich

  As she walked the brown and white tiles, toward the door of stained pine that divided the shop from the rest of the house, she had the odd sense that the walls had squeezed slightly in and the passageway was longer than she remembered. All along the walls the stuff of running a business was hung on iron hooks or stuffed in cupboards. Stained aprons, towels, wooden bins of screws and bolts and extra nails. Tools for fixing the coolers and building new shelves. Catalogues and flyers and price lists. Samples and trial labels. Invoice forms and rolls of waxed paper. Halfway down the corridor, in the dimmest part of the hall, she stopped and took a deep breath of air scented with dried blood and old paper. Spices, hair oil, fresh milk, clean floor. It was all there. She breathed the peace of the order she’d achieved. A powerful wave of pleasure filled her. And then the customer bell rang out front, and she walked swiftly forward to take her place behind the counter.

  THE SCHMIDTS had already changed their name to Smith and the Buchers were now Mr. and Mrs. Book. The Germans hung American flags by their doorways or in their windows, and they spoke as much English as they knew. Into the joking fellowship of the singers there entered an uneasiness. The men were out back of Fidelis’s kitchen, sitting around a rough wood table on the pounded grass underneath the clothesline. A galvanized tin washtub held ice and cold beer. A shallow barrel held warm. Fidelis thought cold beer was bad for the stomach, and he drank his only after the sun had thoroughly caressed the bottle. He opened one bottle now as he listened. Chester Zumbrugge was concerned that the singing in German might be construed as treasonous activity.

  “Not that it could be considered a real crime. Not that we’d be prosecuted! However, I think we’ve got town sentiment to consider.”

  “Those Krauts beat the beans out of the damn Polacks,” said Newhall. “I don’t care what you say, they’re a war machine.”

  “They’re a bunch of damn butchers,” said Fidelis, and the others laughed. Fidelis tried to crack a walnut between his fingers, but his fingers slipped. He tried three times before he shelled the nut and tossed the meat into his mouth. He cracked another walnut, this time with a swift crunch of his fingers. But he said nothing else. Pete Kozka walked into the yard.

  “Look who’s here!” said Pouty. He handed Kozka a beer with one hand and shook Kozka’s hand with the other. Sal Birdy slapped him on the back. Newhall nodded happily, and pulled a chair out. They’d lost Chavers, and then Sheriff Hock. Not that long ago Roy Watzka. Their number was dwindling and it was good when one of their old company appeared. The men cleared their throats, found their pitch, smoothed their way into the songs with beer. They leaned toward one another in concentration and let the music carry them.

  I was standing by my window in the early morning

  Feeling no worry and feeling no care

  I greeted the postman who smiled with no warning

  And told me the day would be fair.

  The air glowing warm on the grass of the lawn

  He handed me the mail in a stack

  Little did he know as he turned and was gone

  He had brought me a letter edged in black.

  Oh mother, mother, I am coming . . .

  “Do we have to sing that one? I call it morbid, and I think that we should be singing more uplifting tunes,” said Newhall.

  “For instance?” said Zumbrugge. “Name me one uplifting song that isn’t a dirty drinking song.”

  “America songs,” said Fidelis, uncapping another bottle of beer. They sang every patriotic song they knew, but these were getting boring now that they sang them over and over at every meeting. Roy’s legacy of songs he’d learned in the hobo jungle usually saved them, and now they started on the one that began “When I was single my pockets did jingle,” and moved on to a series of murdered-girl ballads that they accomplished in a moving and lugubrious harmony, which gave them enormous satisfaction, and always made Delphine laugh. IWW songs that Roy had taught them ran out well before the beer and they moved on to what Kozka called the Polish national anthem, but had become an American song, the favorite song of troops on the move: “Roll Out the Barrel.” Then to a song that they had learned from Cyprian, a métis waltzing tune called “The Bottle Song” that they always sang with huge gusts of imitation French eye rolling and fake savoir faire.

  Je suis le garcon moins heureux moins dans ce monde.

  J’ai ma brune. Je ne peux pas lui parler.

  Je m’en irai dans un bois solitaire finir mes jours à l’abris d’un rocher.

  Dans ce rocher avec une haie, claire fontaine . . .

  J’avais bon dieu, j’avais bon.

  Ah! mon enfant, j’aimerais ton coeur si je savais être aimé.

  Ah! amis, buvons. Caressons la bouteille.

  Non. Personne ne peut prédire l’amour.

  I am the unhappiest fellow in this world.

  I have a girlfriend to whom I cannot speak.

  I am going to go away to a hidden woods to finish my days in the shelter of a rock

  with a hedge and a quiet spring.

  There I will be all right.

  Ah! my child, I would love your heart if I knew

  how to be loved.

  Ah! friends, let’s drink and lift our bottles.

  No. No one can predict love.

  After the men left, Fidelis sat alone in the yard. As the dark came down he finished off the beer and sang to himself, practicing old tunes that no one else knew, all in German. The moon came up, a brilliant gold disk that slowly tarnished to silver and brightened again as it moved upward. His voice melted to a growling croon. The garden, Eva’s overgrown garden half tended by Delphine, whispered and rustled all around him. Grasshopper music surged on and off in waves. Somewhere a frog croaked, hoarse with longing. Pigs mumbled in the killing pen. He thought of Franz, Markus, Erich, Emil, recalled the moments he had held each boy for the first time in his arms. He was going soft on himself. Sobs tightened his lungs and his eyes burned. His voice trembled as he sang the reproachful song of the enemy, “Lili Marlene,” and he grew angry. They were his enemies and his sons would fight them and rescue their brothers. “Lili Marlene.” Even the tune of the sentimental old piece of tripe filled him with shame. A disastrous need to see the faces of his parents took hold of him and he carefully quashed the feelings with a deep gulp of beer.

  FOURTEEN

  The Army of

  the Silver Firs

  DELPHINE HAD always known that her body would not be inclined to grant her children, not after what she’d seen in the cellar of her father’s house. She felt the lack less than other women might, perhaps, because she’d helped raise Eva’s boys. Markus especially bore the force of her maternal attention. Delphine had observed that after his resurrection from the earth, Markus was a very different boy from the one who had dug the tunnels and fought ecstatic boy wars and smashed himself into trees in go-carts and tumbled off sleds. Lying in the grip of earth had quieted his mind and cooled his blood. He became a reader, developed a studious quiz-bowl intelligence, bought himself a record player. Squeaking horns, the human moans of saxophones, smooth backwards scrolls of music spurted from his room. Some of his teachers sent home glowing reports and others said that he was arrogant, lipped off, and was a troublemaker in the classroom with all of his criticisms and his questions.

  When he was younger, Delphine scolded Markus for losing mittens, and then knit him new pairs. Developed strategies of feeding to combat his thinness, which did not work. As he grew older, she helped him study and celebrated the awards that he won in school. Consoled him when he was forced into eyeglasses and made him wear them, hoping secretly that they would keep him from acceptance into the army. By cheating on the vision tests (she was sure) he schemed his way in anyhow.

  The day he told her, she was prepared.

  “Markus, sit down with me.”

  He sat down eagerly at the kitchen table, confident and excited, indulging her. Delphine knew already that he wasn’t going to listen to her or bel
ieve her, but she was determined to make some impression.

  “Markus, it’s not like in the movies where they shoot you in the shoulder or even if you die it is neat. Drilled through the heart. Men get ripped limb from limb. Torn up like so many pieces of paper. And half the time it’s out of some mistake and our own side kills its men by accident. Whatever you do, Markus, I am begging you, for Eva’s sake and your father’s sake and even though I’m not your blood mother, my own sake, too. Don’t get yourself put in the thick of it. Nobody says what it’s really like, Markus, to the young men. No one says boys get mangled.”

  “Mangled!” Markus looked at her in patronizing surprise. “Where did you learn all this?”

  “Reading, and common sense.” She could feel herself becoming desperate with irritation at his superior attitude. “What do you think bombs do? Pick out the Germans and Japanese? Make distinctions when they fall close to our lines? And then neatly and invisibly do away with you? They’re meat grinders.”

  “Mom,” said Markus, “calm down.” As if he were dealing with a crazy person.

  “Are we all a bunch of stupid suckers?” Delphine burst out passionately. It wasn’t even the war that made her so angry, it was the hypocrisy, the cheerful façade, the lies. She grabbed a magazine and leafed to an ad for toothpaste that exhorted the reader to send a tube to their boys in the front lines. “As if the worst you’ll suffer is a toothache! And this!” An ad for gum implying that a stick in every letter would counter loneliness and even sharpen the troops’ observational skills.

  “That’s how we are in this country,” she cried. “Destruction is a way to sell gum!” She put the magazine down, nearly weeping.

  “I know, Mom.” Markus put his hands on her shoulders now and patted gingerly. He spoke quietly, dropping the cocksure tone. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let anybody shoot me or mangle me. I’m not like Franz, you know. He was a trained pilot when he went in. Me . . . they probably won’t even ship me overseas.” He said this kindly, to comfort her, but although she was grateful she could tell he both thought and hoped otherwise.

  She put her face in her hands as Markus continued to pat her, awkwardly. She knew he wished that he were somewhere else. She felt her heart splitting right in her chest. “Go, get out of here. It’s your last night home,” she finally said, wiping her face with her apron. “Go tear up the town.”

  “There’s nobody here to tear it up with anymore,” he said. “I’m gonna take a walk, buy a newspaper. Then I’m reading myself to sleep.”

  HIS BROTHERS’ ARMIES still ranged across the room, along the top of the dresser, on the windowsill. Markus had long outgrown the set, but he didn’t take down the display. In fact, after he’d taken his walk, unable to sleep, he spent his last evening at home perfecting the battle. Even though it was stupid, sentimental, Markus righted the tiny horses and toppled lieutenants, rearranged a charge and fortified a stand. As he fiddled around, he grew absorbed by the boy’s play. He surrounded a motley reconnaissance group with the wooden rocks and trees the twins had sawed of lumberyard scraps and painted in crude woodland colors years ago. He arranged the armored vehicles, with real rubber treads and tin flags. The soldiers had tiny helmets that could be blown right off their heads. And the horses, and the cavalry, they were obviously no match and easily reared over backward, hit, when, in a moment of fascination, Markus ranged their homemade machine-gun nests before them and made a sweep, and then sent in the tanks. Anyone could see that it was romantically insane to send mounted horsemen against armored divisions, as the Poles did when Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army drove eastward against Lodz, but Markus meticulously arranged the seated horsemen with the rearing officer at their head.

  When Delphine and his father first married, Markus had hidden behind the door of the office listening to his father on the telephone. From thinly disguised talk between Fidelis and Delphine, he understood the truth that his brothers weren’t coming home. That was when he decided that he wouldn’t put the toy soldiers away. He would never put them away. He would have to keep their toys prepared. And so, as though the passionate games they’d played for hours, lost in their careful arrangements, would of their own force and incompletion draw his brothers back home, Markus had wiped the dust off the infantry and set them into a new and stricter formation. He’d kept them looking sharp ever since. Now, he took a step backward, frowned, then swept some down with a finger to lie with their rifles pointing at the ceiling. His action suddenly frightened him. Superstitious, he set the soldiers up again.

  THE NEXT DAY, MARKUS left on the bus to Fort Snelling and Delphine baked until midnight. Then she sat at the table, reading mindlessly down a stack of popular novels she’d lugged home from the town library and eating half the cookies she meant to send in his first package. At two a.m. she baked another batch and when she finally fell asleep she dreamed, for the first time in many years, of those dead in her cellar, of Ruthie, who rose toward her spitting clouds of white moths.

  When she woke in the streaming light, Delphine knew that she’d have to take unusual measures to ensure her sanity and contain her anxious grief. An assessment was in order. She must be strict with herself. She was thirty-five years old and the one she’d called her son was grown and gone. What had happened to the two younger boys in Germany was quite unknown. Her husband had dragged from her a sort of love. Not romance, after all. The weight of it once all their feelings had settled was enormous, like a rug to sleep beneath instead of a goose-down quilt. It was a love full of everyday business, full of selling and killing and hemming pants. They slept heavily, deeply, and probably both snored. He still ironed his own shirts. She bought a sharp French perfume and badgered him about his touchy digestion. Theirs was a tolerable and functional love, and precious to her because it did not have the power over her that she had feared.

  More and more, Delphine liked the work of grocering and butchering and figuring accounts. Keeping track of the store’s inventory satisfied a streak of mania for detail. And then there were civic duties that befit her position. To her bewilderment, by simply marrying, following a daily schedule, attending to details and minding her own business, she became one of the town’s most stable and respected women. Her advice was asked. Her solutions were quoted. Her sagacity with cheap cuts of meat and her saving ways with money were admired. She knew when to spend a dime on advertising or equipment and when to save it or buy a war bond. And she read—that was something, too. People followed her appraisals or withdrew books from the library that displayed her neat and forthright signature on the cards tucked into cardboard pockets inside the back cover.

  Lately, she had less time to read, less time for everything. The war was changing the business in a startling rush. Suddenly, they were behind orders. Customers came out of nowhere. Jewish synagogues from Minneapolis sought out Fidelis for custom kosher work. At the same time as business boomed, shortages plagued them. Although Fidelis possessed a much coveted C sticker for the delivery truck, they were always low on gasoline. Coffee disappeared. The government requisitioned butter from the dairies, so she sold blocks of oleomargarine with little pats of yellow dye. Her distributor could supply only the lowest grade of canned goods, then none. No eggs. They were all being powdered for the soldiers, apparently, as Markus wrote to say that powdered eggs were their breakfast staple. He lived for Clark candy bars and any fresh fruit he could get, and he was desperately bored. Delphine bought a dozen Modern Library paperbacks and mailed them two by two. Dos Passos. Faulkner. Cather. She seemed busier than ever, and yet the restlessness that had assailed her as soon as Markus left continued.

  Delphine wrangled with suppliers, argued about rationing, made up clever advertisements containing jokes, like the picture of the cow and its slogan, “Our Only Dissatisfied Customer.” She worked long hours in the shop, hoping to exhaust herself. But every night she woke at precisely four and could not still her brain. Sometimes she felt Fidelis awake beside her, thinking about the twins. “They’re to
o young,” she said to him, thousands of times. She waited until he slept again, and as soon as his breathing deepened, she tossed and turned. She tried to write, to keep a diary, but her attempts irritated and then bored her. For a while she took up sewing and then grew impatient with seams and patterns. At last, she began taking night walks before bedtime.

  While Fidelis prepared himself for sleep by listening to the radio and soaking his feet in a hot Epsom salt bath that she prepared for him after he drank his first highball, Delphine walked the town streets. Passing the serenely lighted houses in the cool of dark, she wondered whether she had absorbed the insomniacal heron-stride of Step-and-a-Half. Perhaps she would be known as similarly eccentric. Perhaps at night, people in their houses would hear her pass by and say, “There goes that old Delphine.”

  As she passed by the graveyard where her father lay, and Eva too, she often turned through the gate to visit. Even at night, the cemetery with its blunt square stones was a welcoming and ordinary place with nothing of death’s majesty or mess. All was neatly laid out, measured inch by inch. Hock’s grave with its severe black spike of granite (he’d already picked it out, way back then) was no more than a sad curiosity. Roy’s grave smelled to her faintly of schnapps. Eva had chosen to be buried in Argus and not shipped back to Germany. But it had pained her sometimes to think of staying forever in such a new country, far from her mother and father’s graves, parentless. Delphine had planted a small pine tree behind Eva’s gravestone, leaving room for it to grow. She found comfort in imagining that by now the roots had twined down to cradle her friend. One night, although the ground was cold, Delphine wrapped her coat around herself and sat beneath the pine. She listened to the soft wind rushing in its needles, and pretended that the sound traveled down the long roots so that Eva could hear the beauty of it, too.