Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Eva reached into the glass case cooled by an electric fan. “My husband was back in Germany a master butcher — not like Kozka, who no more than was a war cook — my Fidelis has learned a secret process to render fat. Taste,” she commanded. “Schmeckt gut!”

Eva held out a small blue pan of the stuff, and Delphine swiped a bit on the end of her finger.

“Pure as butter!”

“Hardly no salt,” Eva whispered, as though this was not for just anyone to overhear. “But you must have an icebox to keep it good.”

“I don’t have one,” Delphine admitted. “Well, I did, but while I was gone my dad sold it.”

“I seen you here, I seen you there,” said Eva, “but still I cannot place. If you please, your father’s name?”

Delphine liked Eva’s direct but polite manners and admired her thick bun of golden red hair stuck through with two yellow lead pencils. Eva’s eyes were a heated green striated with silver. There was, in one eye, an odd gleaming streak that would turn to a black line when the life left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door. At present, those eyes narrowed as the question of the lard, the icebox, the father who sold the icebox, were forming a picture in Eva’s mind. She waited for more information.

“Roy Watzka,” Delphine said slowly.

Eva nodded as she wrapped and secured the package all in one expert sweep, and took Delphine’s money. She counted the change into Delphine’s hand. The name told her all that she needed to know. “Come with me.” Eva swept her arm around back of the counter. “Here I will teach you to make a mincemeat pie better than you ever ate. It’s all in the goddamn suet.”

“Where did you learn to speak English?” asked Delphine.

“Close listening to the butchers,” said Eva.

As Delphine came back around the counter and followed Eva down the hall, she peeked at the office cascading with papers and bills, at the little cupboards that held the men’s clothes and who knows what, at the knickknack shelf set into the wall and displaying figures made of German porcelain. These figures were of little children — one picked roses, another led a small white goat. They entered the kitchen, which was full of light from big windows set into thick walls, placed over the sink. Here, for Delphine, all time stopped. She took in the room.

There was a shelf for big clay bread bowls and a pull-out bin containing flour. Wooden cupboards painted an astounding green matched the floor’s linoleum. Bolted to the counter was a heavy polished meat grinder. The table, round, was covered with a piece of oilcloth printed with squares. In each red-trimmed square there was printed a bunch of blue grapes, or a fat pink-gold peach, an apple or a delicate green pear. There were no curtains on the window, but pots of geraniums bloomed, scarlet and ferociously cheerful. The whole place smelled generously of fresh rolls.

Upon walking into Eva’s kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she’d settled like a bird. She sat in the sort of solid square-backed chair that Cyprian favored for balancing while Eva spooned coffee beans out of a Redwing crock, into a grinder, and then began to turn a little iron hand crank on a set of gears that gnashed the roasted beans. The grinding made a lot of noise, so Eva just raised her eyebrows at Delphine over the little mahogany box as she cranked. A wonderful fragrance emerged. Delphine took a huge breath. Eva, hands quick and certain, dumped the thin wooden drawer full of fresh grounds into a coffeepot made of gray enamel speckled with black and white. She opened a handle on her sink faucet and got the water out of that, not a pump, and then she put the coffeepot on the stove and lighted the burner of a stunning white gas range trimmed with chrome swirled into the title Magic Chef.

“My God,” Delphine exhaled. She didn’t have a word to say. But that was fine, for Eva had already whipped a pencil out of her hair and grabbed a pad of paper to set down the mincemeat recipe. Eva’s writing was of the old, ornate German style, and she was an awful speller, at least in English. The last tiny shortcoming made Delphine grateful — in fact, it was a great help to her, for Eva appeared so fantastically skilled a being, so assured, the mother also (she soon learned) of four sturdy and intelligent sons, the wife of a master butcher, that she would have been an unapproachable paragon to Delphine otherwise. Delphine — who never had a mother, who cleaned up shameful things in her father’s house, who toughened on cold and hunger, and whose lover balanced six chairs and himself upon her stomach, Delphine who was regarded as beneath notice by Argus’s best society, and yet could spell — stole confidence from the misspelled recipe. At that moment, she made a strategic decision.

Since sooner or later this Eva, whom she already dearly wished to have as a friend, would learn of what happened in the house of Roy Watzka, Delphine decided to tell. True, she would be immediately associated in Eva’s mind with a sordid mess, but the older woman would know anyway, soon enough. Delphine understood, moreover, that she was in possession of a valuable thing. A story, a source of gossip, perhaps even the making of town myth, was hers. Hers to give to Eva, who could always say, First thing the girl came to me half undone, the poor kid, and she told me …. And so, exhausted and dispirited though she was, and still disgusted by what she had been through during the past three days, Delphine related to Eva all she’d just experienced. With the understanding that it was a prime piece of town gossip, she said offhandedly, only, “you’re the first to know.”

Eva heard the story with a prelate’s fearless gaze, and although she was not asked for absolution, provided it in the form of the fresh coffee and a cinnamon bun exquisitely dotted with raisins and sugar and butter. Because the horror was just beginning to seep into Delphine’s own mind, it filled her with gratitude to be treated in a very simple, human way. It was only when one of Eva’s youngest sons, a strong little boy of five or six years, round-faced with brown curls, ran into the kitchen, asked for and got a roll, and ran back out, that Delphine burst into tears. All along, she had been shielding her mind from the actuality of that child in the cellar. She hoped they’d kept him drunk, or that in some way he’d found comfort in being with his parents at the last. Face to face with his unthinkable end, Delphine felt again the old shocking powerlessness. The little house she’d grown up in seemed determined to teach her just how cruel life was, and always to spare her so that she could ponder.

This is shameful, she thought, her face in her hands as she sobbed, to come to this woman’s house and cry my heart out! But Eva seemed used to people crying at her table. That or she was lost in knowledge of the events that Delphine had recounted. Eva murmured, “Shoosh.” From time to time she put a hand on Delphine’s shoulder and provided more coffee.

“You weep seldom,” she said, which made Delphine feel somehow impossibly strong and heroic.

“True,” said Delphine, though it was the second time she’d wept since her return to this town, where her father would always be known, now, as the man too drunk to hear three people dying in his cellar.

LEAVING THE BUTCHER SHOP with a chunk of wrapped lard, the bacon, three oranges, six onions, bread, and a stick of summer sausage, Delphine thought it might be possible for her to face her father once again. She drove toward the house, bumping clumsily along, skirting the larger pits and holes. Meeting Eva had put her into a dreamy state — it was much like being in love but it was also very different. That Eva had taken notice of her, even taken her into the kitchen, that Eva had given every sign of wanting to know Delphine, it was all too sudden a pleasure. By the time Delphine turned down the long, sorry curve and caught first sight of the little house, she decided it was probably a one-time thing, a kindness on Eva’s part. Or that her weeping would have surely frightened her off. Even so, she was very grateful that Eva had invited her into her kitchen.