Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

And it was true. He didn’t understand — none of them did. She looked on most other people as upon a species different from herself. For certain, she knew, they couldn’t experience what she did inside and live one day, the next and the next, without needing to outwalk their thoughts. If she stopped for very long she might see the trust of the baby, eyes shut, nursing faithfully at the breast of its killed mother. She might see the little boy throw his arms to his face, a toddler who thought the gesture would make him invisible. The gunfire cut him in half. Later on she’d heard that there was one baby who had lived three days, lived through a blizzard, and been rescued although frozen in a sheet of its mother’s blood. It wore a tiny cap beaded with a bright American flag. Who wouldn’t try, for a whole life, to walk off such memories? For that was what it came to and why she did it — walking was the only way to outdistance all that she remembered and did not remember, and the space into which she walked was comfortingly empty of human cruelty. An unfeeling sky, brutal wind, cold, and the indifferent broil of the sun she could accept. The rush of wind in her ears drowned out the sounds of that fizzling and sifting Lakota language, and the other language, her first language, which she spoke with her father. Into her old age she still saw his surprising smile, as they looked into each other’s eyes, where they lay on that snow-hard ground, beneath a roof of bullets. She heard his words, “Go home, gewehn, n’dawnis. Tell them it is over.” The roar of clouds drowned out his silence after that as well as the silence of unspirited bodies sprawling in the slippery gullies, where the wind boomed for days until its voice, too, was gradually choked with snow.

Who wouldn’t walk? Who could ever stay in one place?

Ever since, she had paced the earth. Roy couldn’t expect her not to walk. She knew that eventually she’d leave him with the baby, but she didn’t know that she’d feel compelled to return, again and again, that she’d give him her money to keep the child secure and that, at times, she’d attempt to tend the growing girl in small and clumsy ways. She didn’t yet know that Roy had taken her own picture. She hardly knew what a photograph was. Nor did she understand that she was beautiful, at that time, as she would be again when old and remembering.

NOW, IN THE LITTLE ROOM behind her small shop on an Argus side street, she could seldom muster more than the strength to travel in and out onto the ground before the windows. Only occasionally did she walk the roads, and then the miles that melted away her flesh still temporarily soothed her old torment and put off her reflections. More and more, she rested. Every afternoon she crept upstairs to nap in a bed with blankets quilted out of her best finds of fabrics — thick and figured velvets, heavy satins and fragile silk. Before she fell asleep underneath that crazy quilt of all her pickings and wanderings, scenes assembled. Her brain bothered her back into startling and vivid moments that she’d already lived through and thought she’d finished with in memory.

Again she passed the butcher, Fidelis, whose suitcase she’d imagined entirely empty from the way he tossed it hand to hand as he walked into town, way back then, looking for work. She found out later it held his fancy knives. The suitcase would be filled again, though not with knives or sausages either. The suitcase would go back to Germany. She saw the tender arrangement of boys belonging to Eva, and lived again the surprise and the sorrow of her friend’s death. She saw the boy unsealed from the hill of dirt. The boy who climbed into the clouds, then fell in love with Delphine’s little sister. She saw Roy, and was glad he’d taken those pictures of her to the grave with him, so that there would be nothing left of her to walk upon this earth. She remembered how he’d claimed, early on, that he drank to show her that he couldn’t live without her. To which she answered, “That’s a load of bull crap,” and stepped out the door.

Step-and-a-Half remembered Delphine playing in the dirt that day, swirling it into piles as she passed her, and then the girl, too small to recall this, toddling after her and calling out, just that once, Mama? And Step-and-a-Half remembered breaking her stride at that and kneeling down so that she could look directly into the child’s face, the eyes too beautiful to meet, the cheeks fresh and open, blazing with purity. Step-and-a-Half’s heart squeezed in fear, and then she heard herself saying to the child, “Your mother is dead.” The little face, only beginning to know what dead was, had frozen shut suddenly, then recovered and looked straight at Step-and-a-Half with kindred, bold, shrewd, survivor’s eyes. Delphine then had reached out a swift small fist and rapped Step-and-a-Half on the forehead with her knuckles, as hard as she could. Step-and-a-Half rubbed her head and said, “Good. The tough ones live.”

“My mother will come back,” Delphine stated, as though dead were a place just like heaven or road and she had convinced herself that her mother would return.

Well, dead is a place right around the corner, but she didn’t have to convince herself of anything, thought Step-and-a-Half. Delphine’s mother had never left. She persisted right down the road from Delphine even now. She would live forever, messy as a haystack, her shack outlined against the huge and lowering clouds. But Delphine would live forever, too. Step-and-a-Half took pleasure from the picture of Delphine and her sister in the plant shop they had renovated. Two curly-headed old women surrounded by hothouse trees, refrigerated flowers, and bedding plants grown in the rich stockyard dirt. Sleep tugged Step-and-a-Half underneath the quilted scraps of Argus days and Argus years. She gave up and entered the wide pull of dreams. She could see one square of sky from her window. Step-and-a-Half slowly released her weight into the mattress and let herself be carried into that blueness. The blanket was comforting and familiar against her face. One of the pieces sewed into the quilt was a piece of ragged shirt the good Sioux lady had given her to wear beneath her coat, so long ago.

Step-and-a-Half had kept a scrap of the ghost shirt ever since, a bit of yellowed muslin and tattered fringe. She touched its faded painting of a crow, eyes bright, beak open, and pressed her cheek to the horned white moon. Some said the ghost dancers believed that those shirts would protect them against bullets, but Step-and-a-Half knew the dancers were neither stupid nor deluded. They just knew something that is, from time to time, forgotten except by the wind. How close the dead are. One song away from the living. She had heard the soldiers bawl their drinking songs the night before the great guns sounded. Sometimes rough, sometimes smooth as whiskey, the harmonies of male voices had seemed mellow and oval in the freezing December air. “Aura Lee.” “Auld Lang Syne.” “Calpurnia, the Faithful.” From across the tent, she had heard the mournful sweetness of the lullaby that the mother crooned into her baby’s soft swirl of black hair. No, the dancers understood just what was happening. They were told. The cloth of the shirt allowed the wearer to visit the dead and to draw comfort from their singing.

From underneath the crazy quilt now, Step-and-a-Half heard them, outside. Wild keening of women. Men exercising their voices. Up and down the scales. La-la-la. Foghorns of chords. Adeline est morte. Elle est morte et enterrée . Ina’he’kuwo’ Ina’he’kuwo’. Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten. The air scoured the fields, then hit the telephone wires and trees. It entered and was funneled through the streets and around the sides of buildings in Argus. The singing flowed over rooftops and rammed down chimneys, trapped itself in alleys or bent the tree branches in a muted off-key roar. Sometimes it was all joy and bluster! Foolish ballads, strict anthems, German sailor’s songs and the paddling songs of voyageurs, patriotic American songs. Other times, Cree lullabies, sweat lodge summons, lost ghost dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns to the snow. Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled. Step-and-a-Half hummed in her sleep and sank deeper into her own tune, a junker’s pile of tattered courting verse and hunter’s wisdom and the utterances of itinerants or words that sprang from a bit of grass or a scrap of cloud or a prophetic pig’s knuckle, in a world where butchers sing like angels.