Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Before she met him, she sensed him, like a surge of electric power in the air when the clouds are low and lightning bounds across the earth. Then she felt a heaviness. A field of gravity moved through her body. She tried to rise, to shake the feeling, when he suddenly filled the doorway. Then entered, and filled the room.

It was not his size. He was not extraordinarily tall, not broad. But he shed power, as though there was a bigger man crammed into him. Or could it have been that he was stuffed with the cries of animals? Maybe it was his muscled shoulders, or his watchful quiet. One thick red and punished hand hung down at his side like a hook; the other balanced on his shoulder a slab of meat. That cow’s haunch weighed a hundred pounds or double that. He held it lightly, although the veins in his neck throbbed, heavy-blooded as a bull’s. He looked at Delphine and his eyes were white blue. Their stares locked. Delphine’s cheeks went fever hot and she looked down first. Clouds flew across the sun. Light shuddered in and out of the room, and the red mouths of the geraniums on the windowsill yawned. The shock of his gaze caused her to pick up one of Eva’s cigarettes. To light it. He looked away from her and conversed with his wife.

Then he left without asking to be introduced.

That abruptness, though rude, was more than fine with Delphine. Already, she didn’t want to know him. She hoped she could avoid him. It didn’t matter, as long as she could still be friends with Eva, or even hold the job that she soon was offered, waiting trade.

“When?”

Delphine was immediately happy with the thought of working in the shop and sitting for her breaks in Eva’s kitchen every day.

“Starting tomorrow.”

“I’ll be right here when you open,” said Delphine.

“At six.”

From the next day on Delphine used the back door that led past the furnace and washtubs, the shelves of tools, the bleached aprons slowly drying on racks and hooks. Leaving the utility room, she walked down the hallway cluttered with papers and equipment. Lifted from a hook by the shop door Eva’s own apron, blue with tiny white flowers. From now on, she would hear the customer bell ring from the other side of the counter. She would know the slaughterhouse, the scalding tub, the tracks and hooks that held unbroken quarters of beef and half hogs. There was a cooler. Open the steel lever and the air lock broke, the thick door sighed open. She gulped the scent of spice and cheese. The deep freeze had a grimmer odor. Both were fitted with tracks, hooks, bins, and shelves. Between the slaughtering room and the store was a small smoking room, and piled beside it logs of hickory or apple wood and buckets of brine. Set to the side of the little smoking room was the busy processing room fitted out with butcher blocks, stubby tables where the quarters were broken. There were steel-sheeted tabletops around the saw where steaks and roasts were cut. The floor of that room was spread with fresh sawdust every morning to soak up blood and absorb the dust of bones that the meat saws spewed and the bits and pieces of gristle and suet that were flung off the blocks when they were cleaned with heavy, rectangular steel brushes. Aprons smeared with blood hung by the doors. It was Delphine’s job to assist in the shop laundry. Every day, she collected the stained aprons and rags and brought them back to the concrete-floored laundry room. Eva let her bring her own laundry, too. Not that Eva ever said so, but no matter how hard Delphine washed, it felt to her as though the smell of Roy’s house lingered — maybe in the seams of her dress, in the green and gray checks, the vines of the print, the stitched hem. Only gradually would that scent be replaced by the smell of the shop. Raw blood, congealed fat, sharp pepper, and sawdust. Delphine put on a fresh clean dress nearly every day. She washed her hair in the river at night. Still, the smell of meat clung to her, and bothered her until she finally grew used to it and didn’t smell it anymore.

ON HER SECOND DAY of work, Delphine was arranging loops of wieners in the cooler when she heard the bell jangle, then jangle again, then jangle with a truly furious commotion. Who was this who could not wait a few seconds? Who was it who entered in a stormy tantrum? Irritated, Delphine stepped out of the cool locker into the presence of a woman known in town as Step-and-a-Half. She was a rangy stray dog of a woman who was probably still young — she looked between thirty and forty — and yet moved with an air of ancient bitterness. Step-and-a-Half lived alone, when she lived in Argus at all, and made her living trading in rags. Roy spoke to her sometimes, and Delphine remembered times as a child when Step-and-a-Half had thrust a stick of candy or a coin into her hands. Times when the woman had appeared, from nowhere, and drunks in the house had melted off as though into the earth. She was intimidating. The name Step-and-a-Half was hers because the length of her stride was phenomenal. She loved the night and could be seen, her beanpole figure in a trance of forward movement, walking the town streets and checking back porches to see whether anyone had left out a worn skirt, a piecemeal assortment of shirts and blouses, or maybe even a coat. Now, since she ate the town’s leavings as well as gathered them, she’d come for tripe. Or snouts, though Eva mainly used them in a salad that she believed was especially nutritious for boys. Today bones were also available for Step-and-a-Half. Delphine knew this because already Eva had set them aside.

The bones, cut generously and hung with scraps of meat, lay collected in a pan underneath a towel. Delphine shook them into waxed, white paper, wrapped and secured them in string she pulled down from a roll suspended from the ceiling. She pushed the package impatiently across the counter, expecting Step-and-a-Half to snatch it. But the older woman threw back her racklike shoulders, stood tall, and glared down at the package in quizzical silence. She carefully unwrapped it. Wordless, she smoothed out the white paper between them, and displayed the dull, fat-smeared bones. Step-and-a-Half examined the bones as though they told the future.

“This one’s for shit.” She pushed a knobbed legbone aside. “And I don’t take necks.”

Step-and-a-Half inspected the rest, smiled approvingly at an oxtail, exercised over the scraps the meticulous discernment of a banker’s wife critically comparing the marbling on expensive steaks. When done, she waved the bones back. Delphine ceremoniously retied the package and gave them to the woman with a respectful flourish. She understood that this was the way Eva did things. Satisfied now with her treatment, Step-and-a-Half reached into an inner pocket of her voluminous man’s trench coat and pulled out a neatly cut pile of dust rags.

“Give ’em to Eva,” she ordered, as though she thought that Delphine would keep the rags. Her eyes were a brilliant and searching black. Her gaze had at first seemed powered by a sharp, cryptic hatred, but now suddenly she shifted, looked at Delphine with an unreadable expression of melancholy.

“Can I help you with something else?” Delphine asked, uncertain. But Step-and-a-Half only continued to stare, taking Delphine in carefully. For her part, Delphine stared right back. That was when she noticed something new about Step-and-a-Half. Although her face was planed rough, her features, almost noble in their raw strength, could have been beautiful if suspicion had not pulled the corners of her mouth down so tightly that deep lines tied beneath her chin. Her eyes, that surprising color, were constantly narrowed. Suddenly, the older woman slapped the counter sharply with one hand. She grabbed the package with the other and without a word of thanks or gesture of common courtesy, she turned on her heel and swept out. The door jangled shut in that same fury with which she had entered.