Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

A FTER THREE MONTHS on the road, Delphine and Cyprian had milked a startling amount of money from the broke and dusty towns they passed through with their show. Which proved, said Delphine, that even in the summer of 1934, when people were really hard up, they’d pay to get their minds off their misery. Still, even though they were doing good business, Delphine decided that she had to go home. First, though, she went to a second-rate jewelry shop and bought cheap rings for herself and Cyprian. There was no way she could appear back in Argus without at least the pretense of marriage.

“This does not mean crap,” she said, slipping on the wedding band, giving him a suspicious look. She waggled her finger.

“To you,” he countered.

“You either,” she warned. The band seemed tight already, and although it was smooth she’d heard of machines and car doors catching on rings and yanking off or breaking fingers. She’d never worn a ring before. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned. “I don’t make breakfast. I’m not ready to be a housewife, yet.”

“Fine,” said Cyprian. “I’ll cook.”

Delphine hooted. He’d never so much as buttered a piece of bread in her presence. In cafés, she did it as a little graceful and womanly thing to do for him, but maybe now, she reflected, she should quit taking care of him so much. He’d think she meant to take care of him forever. She twisted the ring around and around, a little piece of armor against the Lutheran ladies who would have their eyes on every move she made. The ring would help, but people would talk about her anyway. Her father always gave them reason. Of course, they didn’t know half of what went on in the farmhouse marooned in the tangle of box elders, out of town, where she’d grown up. The only kindness was that her father’s misery, thus hers, was usually out of the town’s direct line of sight.

She feared the urge to return was a mistake. Not only the fake marriage. Would her father make a drinking friend of Cyprian? Schnapps, he couldn’t handle. The stuff would wreck his balance. She had no choice, though, because she truly missed Roy Watzka and she suffered from an annoying intuition. A series of melodramatic pictures nagged her: he was dying, gasping for her like the father in the fairy tale with the beast and the beauty. Plunging headlong drunk into the muscle of the river out behind their house. Drowning himself.

Delphine and Cyprian drove south, toward Argus. The fabulous tallgrass that had once covered all beneath the sky still vigorously waved from the margins of certain fields, from the edges of the sloughs that they passed, and from the banks of the pleasant little river that sometimes flooded all along its length and wrecked half the town. The fields of stunted wheat, bald in patches that year, turned in an endless rush. Armyworms were thick, their nests like gray mesh in the trees. From time to time, they passed an empty-windowed house, or one with a brave and hopeless bit of paint splashed across its padlocked front door. There were gas stations, pumps fixed in front of shaky little stores, here and there a thatch of houses, a lightning-struck cottonwood. And always, there was the friendly monotony, the patient sky rainless and gray as a tarp.

As they passed Waldvogel’s butcher shop on the near edge of town, a solid built whitewashed place bounded by two fields, they saw two people running. One was a woman in a flowered wash dress, an apron, and high feminine heels. The other was a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, with the build of an athlete and a flap of shining dark hair. The two had come from the field and were racing for some finish line just beyond the dusty parking lot in front of the store. They were neck and neck, laughing as they pumped their arms. Then suddenly the woman seemed to leap forward, though her stride actually shortened. She’d gone up on her toes and was bounding to the finish. As the car passed the two, Delphine turned to watch. The woman’s hair burst from its twist and floated out behind her, a sudden red-gold banner that announced her triumph, for she’d touched the fence at the end of the lot first and beaten the boy. Delphine turned back to direct Cyprian.

“You should have seen that woman. Can she ever run! Turn there.”

They turned down a short and half-overgrown road.

“Slow down,” said Delphine.

The road was a ragged track, washed out in several spots, the dirt churned up and dried in pits and snarls. They drove up to the beaten little farmhouse — three dim rooms and a jutting porch — where Delphine had always lived with Roy.

Just as they arrived, Delphine’s father happened to be walking out the door. He was a pallid little crooked man with the fat nose of a sinister clown. When he saw Delphine, he removed his slouch hat, jammed it over his face, and began to weep into the crown, his whole body shaking with sobs. Every so often he’d lower the hat to show them his contorted mouth, then smack the hat on his face again. It was a masterly performance. Cyprian had never seen a man weep like that, even in the war, and he was horrified. He offered his hankie, pressed it into Roy’s hands, sat down with the old man on the porch. Delphine squared her shoulders, took a deep fortifying breath, and walked into the house.

She ran right out again, gulping air, but she didn’t say a word. The men were locked in a blubbering conversation. She ran back in and threw the windows open. Then went back out to the car. She removed a scarf from her suitcase, soaked it with Evening in Paris, and tied it over her mouth and nose. The depth of this horrible odor led her to believe, for the first time, that her father wasn’t just a common drunk — he was truly depraved. When she walked past the men she kicked at the leg of her father’s chair.

“Don’t do that!” said Cyprian.

“Oh shut your mouth,” said Delphine from behind her scarf, as she bravely reentered the house.

Bad smells made her angry, they were a personal affront. She had dealt with her father’s messes before, but this was of a different order. He had created this one on purpose, she believed, to show her how helpless he was without her. On the floor, there was a layer of must, crumbly and black, for the clothing and food, the vomit and piss, had composted along with the knuckles of pig’s trotters and frail chicken bones. Perhaps a dog had crawled in there to die, too. There were layers of husks of insects, foul clumps of rat droppings, and a bushel of rotted, sprouting potatoes some kind neighbor had probably dropped off to keep Roy Watzka from starving. Over it all there had grown arcane scrawls of cheerful and reeking mold. Weak and sick, Delphine staggered out again onto the porch.

“I need a shovel,” she said, and she put her face into her hands and began to cry. She wept even harder than her father. Cyprian was completely astonished, for up until that moment she had behaved with a steady cynical kindness and he hadn’t known that she was even capable of feeling such intense sorrow. Nothing that Cyprian had done, even getting caught with the hardware store owner in Gorefield, Manitoba, had caused her to so much as mist over. Now the sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and then built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon. Cyprian couldn’t bear such a show of brutal emotion. He sat down on the porch steps right next to Delphine and carefully, with immense tenderness, put his arms around her shoulders. Until that moment he hadn’t realized what enormous respect he had for Delphine — her breaking up like this was very moving to him. He’d seen this in the war sometimes, the moment when the toughest ones go was always hardest. He began to rock Delphine back and forth, crooning to her.