Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

He stood there for a long while, either battling his stomach or collecting his wits. The others waited, silent, at a short distance.

“Before I can allow you to reinhabit your house,” the sheriff finally said to Roy, “I will have to interview the other guests who attended your house on the fatal night. Since, in your understandable zeal,” he now addressed Delphine and Cyprian, “you have probably both seen and destroyed any evidence of foul play, I will have to insist that you remain in town as potential witnesses.”

Both agreed, and the sheriff drove off. Roy informed the two that he needed a spot of solitude, and walked down to the bank of the river. Delphine tipped her thumb to her lips to indicate that he always stashed a bottle in the roots of trees near the bank. She and Cyprian proceeded to unload their DeSoto and to pitch their sleeping tent upwind and as far away from the house as possible. Then Delphine directed Cyprian to stay with Roy and make sure he didn’t take it into his head to go swimming once he got good and schnockered. She, meanwhile, would drive to town and gather supplies.

HERE’S AN ODD and paradoxical truth: a man’s experience of happiness can later kill him. Though he gave every sign of being no more than an everyday drunk, Roy Watzka was more. He was a dangerous romantic. In his life he had loved deeply, even selflessly, with all the profound gratitude of a surprised Pole. The woman he loved was the woman everyone supposed was Delphine’s mother, Minnie. No one ever saw her except in Roy’s pictures, or knew much about her except from Roy’s stories. Those stories, however, made her vivid in town memory. Perhaps she had had a secret self who loved Roy back with a singular passion, for there was little in Minnie’s indistinct photographs to indicate a romantic spirit. She was half turned away from the camera in one picture, her mouth clenched in a frown that might have been suspicion or just the shadow cast by direct sun. Another photograph caught her in a sudden movement, so she was blurred, her face trapped within an indistinct gray wash of light. In yet another, a chicken had flapped up and she’d reached suddenly to catch it so that her features were obscured by wings and hair.

Yet after she was gone, Roy indulged in a worship of those pictures. Some nights, he lighted a line of votive candles on the dresser and drank steadily, and spoke to her, until from deep in his cups she answered. Then, as candles played across the old photographs that Roy reverenced and he saw Minnie’s face clearly, he remembered her eyes transformed and softened by words he’d spoken. But what could Roy do with bliss remembered? Where could he put such a thing when he could no longer experience its power? During the first years after Minnie took her leave, a sorrow about which Roy would never speak and a time when Delphine was no more than a baby, Roy bounced in and out of drink with the resilience of a man with a healthy liver. He remained remarkably sloshed, even through Prohibition, by becoming ecumenical. Hair tonic, orange flower water, cough syrups of all types, even women’s monthly elixirs, fueled his grieving rituals. Gradually, he destroyed the organ he’d mistaken for his heart.

As her father began to drink out of a need produced increasingly by alcohol and less by her mother’s memory, Delphine reached her tenth year. After that, she knew her father mainly as a pickled wreck while her mother remained youthful and mysterious in the pictures on the dresser. The blur of movement, the obscuring chicken, made her look so lively. Just what killed her, Roy would never say. Delphine thought it a wonder nobody in the town ever drew her aside and took the satisfaction of whispering that secret in her ear. But since no one did, she concluded that no one knew. In that void of knowledge, Delphine’s mind had darted forward constructing fantasies, shaping her mother’s story out of common objects, daydreaming her features in shadows of leaves and shapes of clouds.

Delphine was sure, for instance, though Roy had never verified her theory, that the objects in her own tiny closet of a room once belonged to Minnie. The lacquer bureau, the picture of a wave crashing on a rock. Her prize was a wooden box. In it, she kept a small, white stone wrapped in the end of a ripped muslin scarf. Sometimes, when longing gripped her, she opened the cigar box, which still gave off a sweet and fleeting aroma of tobacco and cedar. Ceremoniously, often in the late afternoon when sun slanted through the western window of her tiny room, Delphine wound the scarf around her wrist and put the white stone in her mouth. She lay there sucking on the stone, memorizing its blunt edges with her tongue, wrapping and unwrapping the scarf from her wrist in a white haze of comfort.

When she was twelve years old, she put the stone back in the box and simply quit the habit. She replaced it with a more grown-up awareness of what she’d missed. Watching other girls with their mothers sometimes made her head swim, her neck ache, but she’d borne it. She had always been too stubborn and shy to approach an older woman — a teacher, the mother of a friend — with her need. But it had been there all along, sometimes buried, sometimes urgent, especially in times of difficulty. Now, as Delphine drove the car into town, she was glad that in their desperate struggle with the smell she and Cyprian hadn’t burned down the house, because she missed the photographs of her mother that Roy kept stashed in the top drawer of the black lacquer bureau. She wanted to look at them, to sit with the familiar mystery. She was afflicted with a sudden and almost physical need to open the cigar box, too, and remove the white stone. She stared ahead at the road and wished an old, pure, useless wish: that just once, for a moment, she’d had the gift of a clear look at her mother’s face. It was in that fit of longing to see the face of her mother, then, that Delphine entered Waldvogel’s Meats, and met Eva Waldvogel.

T HE FIRST MEETING of their minds was over lard. Delphine was a faceless customer standing in the entryway of Waldvogel’s Meats, breathing the odor of fir sawdust, coriander, pepper, and apple-wood-smoked pork, a rich odor, clean and bloody and delicious. She walked forward eagerly and put her strong fingers on the counter.

“One quarter pound of bacon. I’m going to fry some fish in the grease.”

“What kind of fish?” asked Eva pleasantly. Her accent was heavy, but she didn’t stumble over words. She always started conversations with new customers, and this young woman, though familiar, was neither a regular customer nor an acquaintance. She stood behind the shining display cooler filled with every mood of red — twenty or thirty cuts of meat, summer sausage, liver sausage, beer sausage, veal, blood, Swedish, Italian and smoked pepper sausage, glistening hearts and liver and pale calf thymus, sweetbreads, as well as a great box of the delicately spiced, unsmoked, boiled wieners for which people stood in line on the days Fidelis made them fresh.

“Don’t know yet,” said Delphine. “They’re still swimming in the river.” She immediately recognized the woman behind the counter as the same woman who’d won the race in the dirt lot two days before. She felt familiar with her, and spoke with more assurance than she might have otherwise. “One strip is for bait. Then I figure that if we don’t catch the fish, we at least eat the rest of the bacon.”

“This plan is wise,” said Eva, weighing out the best pieces of lean bacon. With a new customer, she was always very careful with quality, and gave a small present as an enticement to return.

“Try this lard,” she insisted. “For fish, it is good. Very cheap and to save it you let the cracklings settle and pour off the top. Get your bacon for tomorrow. Now, there is lard and there is lard.”