Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“A stick, it becomes a gun. Our meat trays they slide down the hills. Once in a while a bat, a ball. You never know. Delphine, I just leave them out of my interest to see what they build.”

Delphine watched and indeed they made surprising things. Out of abandoned springs, wheels, crates, they put together a buggy that the dogs pulled. They rigged up a near lethal tree swing, which flung them from a branch near the road in an arc over the dirt where they could be hit by a passing car. Down near the river, they made rafts out of old lumber scraps. Swords from lathes, forts from packing-crate wood, guns that shot gravel, bombs of cow’s bladders filled with water. Yet, in spite of their rowdy play out in the world, they were quiet and subdued in the shop and around their father, especially. They worked hard on slaughtering days. When every hand was needed, even the two youngest pulled gizzards inside out and cleaned them of gravel. Once old enough, the boys learned to use knives without slicing off their hands. Fidelis had determined to train them all in his profession.

There was that — the profession. Delphine didn’t mind selling groceries, or even cutting headcheese, but butchering wasn’t her kind of work. Not only did she hate the brutish excitement of the killing, but its long and meticulous aftermath. The casings must be washed and rewashed, for sausage, and the gizzards turned inside out and carefully smoothed back together. Each product had an endless procedure and she thought some of the steps unnecessary, though Eva insisted they were not. Maybe, Delphine thought, she wouldn’t mind actually mixing the spices up into the ground meat and making the sausages, but that was Fidelis’s work and he was jealous of each step he took. Some steps were secret. He brooded over each batch like an alchemist.

Delphine would rather have spent her time on the stage, or even backstage, designing costumes and sewing them. She liked to build sets. She was good at everything that had to do with drama and most of all she liked dressing up in whatever composed a costume: feathers, wreaths, gowns, Victorian shirtwaists. Delphine had always loved making up shows. It was, in fact, their mutual passion for disguise that had first brought Clarisse and Delphine together while they were still in grade school. They had staged complicated shows in Clarisse’s backyard, using a sheet draped over a clothesline for a curtain, and playing all parts with complicated costume changes and stage directions, even lighting from an old captain’s lamp, the glow of which could be directed onto the grass as a kind of spotlight after dark. Their inventions, and the mingled derision and awe in which other children held them, had made them close as only children can be who are set apart. Their loyalty to each other had saved them. Over time, they had become invulnerable to teasing and gained a complex form of respect. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. So it began to happen with “those two girls”—an acceptance of their peculiar getups and an appreciation of their entertainment value.

Still, in their shared daydreams, Clarisse and Delphine had always seen themselves taking leave of Argus, moving off into the vague wilderness of cities and other people and even bona fide theaters. Although Delphine had, for a short time, pursued some form of their fantasy, she was disappointed that it had only been as a human table, a prop, the base of Cyprian’s flamboyant balancing. As for Clarisse, she’d never left at all, since her father and uncle required her in the business directly after high school. It was her fate to stay and to assist the town’s dead on their short journey into the earth. She didn’t mind, she told Delphine, she had accepted it. She had always known that she would step into her parents’ spot, but once she lost them the luxury of going to school or playing at drama was at an end. Besides, her aunt Benta said she had a natural aptitude for embalming, which was an art that went back to the Egyptians but was only now catching on in the Dakotas. Aurelius Strub had taken the course and earned his diploma from one of the first itinerant embalmers to enter the state. Since then, he had made steady technical improvements. Strub’s was getting first calls from people in towns at quite a distance, from people who had seen and found comfort in the serenity of the bodies that Strub’s prepared and displayed.

Clarisse moved her own grocery trade from Kozka’s market to Waldvogel’s, as soon as Delphine began to work there. She had inherited her parents’ house and often unwound from her day by cooking elaborate meals for herself in her mother’s kitchen. She was very finicky about her diet, and Delphine now saved the leanest cuts of meat for her. They were alone in the shop one afternoon, regarding a lavender-pink pork chop that Delphine had just laid on a piece of waxed paper.

“Trim off the fat, will you?” said Clarisse.

“There’s no fat on it,” said Delphine.

“Just that corner,” said Clarisse, pointing.

Delphine removed a bit of translucent flesh no bigger than a fingernail.

Clarisse nodded for her friend to wrap the rest. Her pinch-waisted brown suit of summer-weight wool and her crisp white blouse and white piped leather pumps looked good enough for city wear. Her philosophy, she’d informed Delphine, was not only to prepare the deceased as the guest of honor at a party, but to dress herself with an elegance that befit the grand going-away occasion. She had just come from the funeral of a thirty-four-year-old drowning victim, a man, and was pleased, though she merely hinted of this and only whispered the disagreeable term “floater,” that she had managed to nearly eliminate the awful red and purple blotches from his face and halt its typical rapid degradation.

“I would never have let him go out in front of people looking like that drowned boy who purged, right in the church, up in Fargo,” she said. “Sloppy work. Those poor parents. The wife of mine — you don’t know them, they’re new in town — anyway, his wife told me that she couldn’t believe the work we’d done. She thanked me. The family tried to give Benta extra money. We wouldn’t take it. How do you like this jacket?”

The two were the same size and Clarisse was generous with her clothing, so Delphine always took a possessive interest in her friend’s wardrobe. Even now, Clarise said pleasantly, “This would look swell on you.”

“I can’t think where I would actually wear it,” said Delphine.

“You and Cyprian go out, don’t you?”

“We’re living in a tent , Clarisse,” said Delphine, and then she laughed. So did Clarisse. Her sweet, fresh voice bubbled over the rumble of generators and the clash of meat grinders out in back. While they were laughing, Eva walked into the shop with a new roll of string for the spool that hung above the cash register. She gave Clarisse the smile Delphine knew as her formal smile, the one she used with customers she did not particularly know or like. Delphine wasn’t sure which category her friend fell into, and she experienced a sudden anxiety, a confusion of loyalties in which she wanted to please them both. But Eva swept immediately out and Clarisse, who hadn’t picked up on Eva’s formality and probably thought that she was merely busy, was frowning at her fingernails in a serious way that Delphine knew meant she was thinking of imparting some questionable piece of information.

“Come on,” Delphine said to her friend, though she felt guilty now, talking on the job, “business is slow. I’ve got a minute. Let’s hear it.”

“In a way, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before,” said Clarisse, pouting with vexation.