Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

That was one of the customers, and there were others. Some paid money and some, like Step-and-a-Half, lived off the scraps. For the shop and the dead animals fed a complex range of beings — from the banker, his steak cooked perfectly and set before him every night, to those who bought the sausages, then the cheapest cuts; from the family of Dakota Sioux who were darker than Cyprian and dressed in old-fashioned calicos, wore strings of rose, blue, coral, and yellow beads, and traded wild meat or berries for flour and tea, to the ones who did not pay at all like Step-and-a-Half, Simpy Benson, the Shimeks, and the out-of-work fathers who had taken to Depression roads; and still on down to the dogs who gnawed the bones that Step-and-a-Half rejected and even further, to the plants that flourished on the crushed bones even the dogs could not chew to bits.

There were also a number of customers who didn’t always buy but regularly came in to talk or to plan the meetings of the singing club — the fat bootlegger, Gus Newhall, and the courtly, stone-broke, but immaculate Tensid Bien, who always wore a tie and coat, who took forever to browse through the Sunshine Baking Company rack of cookies, from which he meekly sampled, and who bought one or two slices at a time of minced ham, occasionally an orange, a few cookies, a meager cut of the toughest beef, a turnip, a sparse rind of cheese. There was Pouty Mannheim of the Mannheim brothers, chubby and with rich-boy airs, and his confused perpetual girlfriend, Myrna. There was Chester Zumbrugge, who tried to put the moves on her. There were Scat Wilcomb and Mercedes Fox, Old Doctor Heech and his son, Young Doctor Heech, who was not a doctor at all but a dentist, and was that shocking thing, a vegetarian, and thus suspected to be a Communist. The only one of them all whom Delphine truly dreaded seeing, however, was Eva’s spoiled sister-in-law. Everyone just called her Tante because she otherwise insisted on her baptismal name, Maria Theresa, and no one wanted to add to her swellheadedness by using such a queenly title.

Delphine did not call her Tante, she did not call her anything. She carefully did not address the woman who swept in with one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself were subdued by the woman’s sense of her own elegance and importance. On Delphine’s first day of work, Tante went right around to the sliding panel on the case that held the sausage, opening it with a clatter. She fished out a ring of baloney and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched Maria Theresa — actually, she stood back and envied the woman’s shoes. Those shoes were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather, and cleverly buttoned. They fit her long, narrow foot with a winsome precision. Tante might not have a captivating face, for in that she resembled Fidelis, she replicated his most aggressive features — the powerful neck and icy bold demeanor, a too stern chin, thinner lips and eyes of a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers. Still, Tante’s feet were slim and pretty. She was vain of them, and all her shoes were of the most expensive leather and make.

“Who are you?” Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off without deigning to accept an answer. The question, insulting in the first place, since Delphine had already been introduced to the butcher’s sister, hung in the air. Who are you is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it between them, bounced but did not retrieve it, Delphine was left to consider the larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.

Who are you , Delphine Watzka, you drunkard’s child and fairy’s whore, you vagabond, you motherless creature with a belly of steel and a lusting heart? Who are you, what are you, born a dirty Pole in a Polack’s dirt? You with a household cellar full of human rot and a man in your tent who has done the unimaginable to other men? Who are you, with a father seen sucking his bottle like a baby in its own shit? Who are you and what makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother, Fidelis, who is the master of all he does?

DELPHINE WAS NOT CAPABLE of indulging in that sort of self-doubt without resenting the one who had introduced it into her heart. She hated Tante from the first and she imagined the woman’s overthrow. She would be ruthless in attaining at least one small eventual victory from which Tante never recovered. Tante even tried to lord it over Eva, for which, in her complicated, loyal heart, Delphine detested her. When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law’s fresh bread under her arm, and grabbed a bottle of milk besides without a by-your-leave, Delphine wrote it down on a slip. Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of baloney, and a loaf of bread. And she left it at that. She did not know there would be repercussions for even so slight an accounting, but there were, for Tante didn’t take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. Out of money left by her grandmother, whose favorite she was, Tante once gave her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment. Although he had paid her back, she continued to take her interest out in ways that would remind them all of her dutiful generosity.

The boys, in particular Markus and Franz, did not like Tante. Delphine could see that. Not that she knew all that much about children. They were foreign to her. She had not been around them often. Now, things were different. As these boys were children belonging to Eva, she was interested in who they were. She took note of them beginning with the oldest boy, Franz.

At fifteen years he was extremely strong and athletic with a proud, easygoing American temperament perfectly transparent and opaque at the same time. His inner thoughts and moods were either nonexistent or hidden, she couldn’t tell. He always smiled at her. He always said hello with only the faintest German accent. He was always cheerful and he was unfailingly polite. As time went on, she would see that he was the product of Fidelis’s insuperable patience and also his controlled rage. Franz’s strength coupled with his mother’s wire-frame tenacity made him a formidable athlete. He played football, basketball, and baseball, all with powerful grace, and was, in fact, something of a town hero.

The next boy was more reclusive. Markus was barely nine but already it was clear that he had a philosophical bent and a monkish nature, though he’d play with tough abandon when he could. His grades were perfect for one year, and abysmal the next, according to his own interests. He had inherited his mother’s long hands, her floss of red-gold hair, her thin cheeks and eyes that looked out sometimes with a sad curiosity and amusement, as though to say, What an idiotic spectacle. Markus was also polite, though more restrained. He anxiously accomplished errands for his father, but he clearly doted to the last degree upon his mother. He was named after her beloved father. His mother often stroked his hair, so like her own, the curls clipped. She often pulled him close and kissed him. He pulled away, as boys had to, but in a gentle way that showed he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

The two youngest boys, Erich and Emil, were five-year-old twins, bull strong, morose when hungry, perfectly happy once they ate their fill, simple of heart and devoted to their stick guns and homemade sets of clay and twig armies that eternally strove in combat across the floor of their back room. Those armies, which included those that once had belonged to Fidelis, and a few more modern soldiers bought with precious pennies, were just about the only toys in evidence around the house. Once, when Delphine wondered what boys played with, Eva told her that they played with everything around them, inventing it into something else.