Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“I’ll have a kitchen like that someday,” she said out loud.

The sight of the sheriff’s car and the gangly boy-deputy, an undertaker’s hearse, and a couple of curious neighbors, as well as Cyprian disconsolately juggling in the corner of the far field, reminded her that day would not be coming soon.

THE TOWN FUNERAL DIRECTOR and mortician, Aurelius Strub, was in charge of hauling out the bodies, along with his wife, Benta, and his young niece and apprentice mortuary assistant, Delphine’s friend, Clarisse. Clarisse stood to inherit the business, Strub’s Funerary, the most advanced and well-respected funeral practice in that part of the state. Her future had complicated her high school relationships, as one by one her classmates realized that if they lived their lives in Argus, they would eventually wind up in the resolute, rubber-gloved hands of Clarisse Strub. Pretty Clarisse, who got an A+ in the dissection of a flatworm. Flirtatious Clarisse, who already knew the art of using makeup in the next life, as well as this one. Clarisse, whose brilliant and mocking glance had dimmed for a time when she suffered a secret and shocking infection, the cause of which was never determined. To cure the disease, which may have originated with a body whose syphilitic condition was unknown, for even then she had assisted in the embalming room from time to time, under her aunt’s supervision, Clarisse underwent a complex long-term treatment. Her cure was overseen by Doctor Heech, who insisted that a dead body could not possibly have transmitted the disease and viewed her infection with a sober suspicion. His method of treatment consisted of intravenous salvarsan and deep-tissue mercury injections, both extremely unpleasant. Clarisse was toughened to them, but Delphine had quailed to see her poked. She’d held her friend’s hand all through, nonetheless. The only day they’d not minded was the day when the treatments had made Clarisse’s gums bleed and Heech had conditioned them with a cocaine rub. Delphine was the only one besides Doctor Heech who knew what had happened, and the only person, other than family members, who was ever admitted into the sanctum of the Strub Funerary basement.

Clarisse wore a sacklike white gown, a green mask, gloves of india rubber, and smoked glasses, but her curly black hair gave her away, and even the hard realities of her vocation hadn’t dulled the singular light in her face. The sight of Delphine caused her to rip off her mask and gloves and then, torn between excitement at seeing her friend and the gravity of the situation, she threw out her hands and stepped closer. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, for the Strub family practiced resolute control and reverence in the presence of the dead, and she should not be seen joking about with a friend. Finding that they were alone, Clarisse screwed her face into a mask of hideous intensity. They had acted together in town theater as first and second witch in Macbeth .

“When shall we three meet again,” she hissed. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

“When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won,” Delphine went on.

The two could have gone on and on like this, for they knew practically the entire play as they’d understudied Lady Macbeth, and everyone else in the cast, but Aurelius appeared with a grim-looking package, and Clarisse made signs for talking later. Delphine mimed sympathy. They could communicate perfectly with facial expressions. Clarisse twisted up her face and from one side of her mouth croaked, “Like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”

Before she returned to her work, with a flash of intrigue, she pointed to Delphine’s tent, across the field, and at Cyprian, who with his shirt off was practicing his gymnastic exercises and his balances on a chair dragged from the kitchen. Clarisse winked over the hygienic green mask and then turned to continue with her difficult tasks. They were going to have to vat the bodies right in the yard, Delphine saw. A three-sided canvas screen had been set up just beyond the door and the smell of formalin and rubbing alcohol came from behind it. Jugs of distilled water were neatly lined up on the grass. There was a sense about the scene, now, of efficiency and seriousness. When the Strubs appeared to take charge of the dead, there always was a sense of relief. Clarisse was still regarded as a bit exuberant, but the Strubs generally developed the right temperament for the job, a matter-of-fact sympathy not at all unctuous, oily, or sweet. The town relied upon them. The dead were complicated in their helplessness, and made everyone around them helpless, too, except the Strubs.

As Delphine walked her packages out to the tent, she saw that Cyprian had made a little fireplace out of rocks. He was proving remarkably handy, she thought, in ways odd and wonderful. For instance, the fireplace was not a lazy round circle of rocks, it was carefully fit stone on mortared stone. There was a chimney, a little shelf. A hook set into the mortar. He was fixing up the chicken coop. And, too, there was his beauty.

As Cyprian turned toward her with a gentle sideways glance his profile caught her breath. His eyes were deeply set, a resinous coal, and his nose was a classical line with perfect teardrops of nostrils. There was a slight curve to his lips, and an eerie perfection to his teeth when he smiled. It was that last, the even whiteness of his teeth, she decided now, that might possibly make his face too handsome to be handsome. Yes, she imagined, regarding him more critically, there was something to that. Some imperfection makes a face much stronger looking, gives it points of interest. Or am I just jealous? Protecting my own heart?

She held out the packages. He took them from her and added them to his juggling routine, happily catching and tossing them before him and behind him, in the air, under a leg lifted straight out and pointy-toed like a ballerina’s, and then crooked to the side like a pissing dog’s.

How could one not love a man who juggled so cleverly? How not love a man who stuck by you while the sheriff and deputies and morticians hauled three bodies out of the cellar of your father’s house? She forgot her moment of critical thinking and merely decided to appreciate Cyprian. There was no question, he had done his best to make her comfortable. He had not only erected their own private tent, but rigged up another, a neatly constructed house of tarpaulin and blanket, for her father, and it was near the river. Near Roy Watzka’s inevitable root-bound stash. Far away so that they wouldn’t hear him snore.

After the three dead bodies were taken away, a traumatized exhaustion descended on Delphine and Cyprian. They sat long, staring in a numb trance, at the fire until it burned down to coals. A gentle snow of darkness fell upon them. There was no moon. Long into the night, they sipped fresh water and ate summer sausage, bread and lard, oranges for dessert, for Cyprian had caught no fish after all. The moonless night brought out the beams of stars. There was a gentle extravagance of light in the heavens. The air was so quiet they could hear the river flowing, and within its low sound Delphine at last shed a little of the horror and experienced a rare comfort.

An urgency to speak gripped her. The darkness covered her face; her father was drinking down in the bushes; Cyprian was sitting beside her. She decided to ask.

“That man by the river. You know what I’m saying.”

Cyprian’s heart thunked, a jolt of adrenaline buzzed his brain. He had been waiting for this moment, hoping it wouldn’t come. Long before, he had decided what his answer would be.

“You’re all I want out of life,” he said.

Delphine pondered this. In a way, this was exactly what she’d prayed for when much younger, trapped in her room while drunks roared in the yard and kitchen. Here was a good-looking man, very strong and with an odd, but surprisingly proven, source of income that consisted of balancing. A talented man. A man who professed that she was all he wanted out of life — that is, presumably he wanted to marry her. And yet, this man had what she now understood she’d heard referred to as an affliction. That was the polite way she’d heard it. Other than such references, this whole thing was sheer enigma.