Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“Give it over,” said Delphine firmly.

Clarisse tipped her head down and eyed her friend almost angrily from beneath her brows.

“Hock came to my house last night, late. He stood on the porch, talking of this and that, trying to pretend like we shared some secret until I wanted to scream. I shut the door in his face and stood behind it. He must have stepped up to the door because I heard him whisper like it was right in my ear, then I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down .”

Clarisse had a talent for looking truly miserable. Her face fell into the slack lines of a much older woman, and she bit the lipstick off her lips, nervously, so that it smeared onto her teeth. She lifted the gloved hand that held the wrapped pork chop, squinted her eyes shut, pressed the pork chop to her forehead.

“Nothing I say or do makes a goddamn bit of difference,” she said vehemently. “He turns it around to hear what he wants.”

“What are you supposed to be, his tender little pig?”

“Ha!” Clarisse held the pork chop out at arm’s length, and spoke to it.

“I suppose you’re fed up with me always pitching a moan over Hock. Well, I’m sick of me, too. I’d move away if I could, that’s how tired I am of it. But I have a duty here, and more than that. I’m good at my profession. Heech says I know as much as he does about anatomy, and I have been experimenting with a new pump that… oh, I’ll spare you the details. I’ve got pride in my work, and he can’t ruin things for me.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Delphine. “We’ll get together and knock off the big boy. We’ll murther’m.”

“Oh,” said Clarisse, wistful. “That would be so nice!”

NORTH DAKOTA WILTED in a brutal heat. For Delphine, the summer weather, hot, hotter, unbearably hot the second week of her new job, meant that this was the summer of ongoing terrible odors. The slaughterhouse of course began to smell like slaughter. The scrap pile went green and the rank smell of flesh was everywhere. Of course, she couldn’t escape the bad smells after work. No sooner was the cellar of her house filled in and the floor scrubbed down, new mattresses, clean blankets and sheets put out, the walls sprayed with vinegar and then vigorously wiped, no sooner was the house fit to live in than the heat crushed the air. She and Cyprian decided to stay in the tent for other reasons, as they attempted to catch some sleep in the night’s wet furnace.

A slight breeze flowed off the dwindling water of the river just around three a.m., and Cyprian positioned the tent flaps just so in order to take advantage of it. But that breeze also turned the mud sour and came laden with whining fronds of mosquitoes. The insects batted the canvas of the tent with a tiny insane lust. All night, the whining built and diminished, sometimes so loud it sounded like air raid sirens, sometimes low and insistent, but always constant and without letup.

Cyprian bought mosquito netting for the two of them. Draped around their army cots, it allowed them enough rest to see straight the next day. At first they thought they would go mad listening to the bugs clustered an inch deep at the tiny holes through which their warm-blooded scent must have exuded, tantalizing. The next week they bought cotton wax from the pharmacist and pressed it into their ears. No sooner had they solved the problem of the mosquitoes than they were infested with a plague of armyworms. If you looked at just one, it wasn’t bad… olive brown with an intricate racing band of blue dots. It was their numbers that made them horrible. The worms crept up and down the trees in such thick droves that the bark seemed to be moving. They inched across the tent roof by the thousands and it was impossible to keep them off the ground cloth or even out of their blankets, no matter how tightly Delphine and Cyprian pegged down the tent’s bottom. She got used to walking on them, an awful carpet, and leaving footprints of slime when she stepped into the shop. As for Roy, he slept half in the river some nights or on the starry banks, in grass, and all bugs left him alone, perhaps because his blood was eighty proof, said Delphine.

“You’d think the mosquitoes would bite him, at least, I mean, to get drunk themselves. Roy’s a walking party bar,” she complained one night, irritated that her father could sleep peacefully in that infested heat. She and Cyprian were sweating safely underneath their nets. Lying side by side, before they agreed to lose consciousness, they rolled the cotton wax between their fingers and argued over whether Cyprian should use the DeSoto to run some liquor out of Canada. Avoiding the slap of sales tax was not only a very common thing to do, it was patriotic if you were German, or supplied the liquor to them. No one had hated Prohibition like the Germans, who were convinced it was a law passed as a direct comment on their tradition of Zechkunst, the art of friendly drinking. Since Prohibition was over, heavy taxes on liquor were the new source of resentment and no one took such pleasure as Germans in thwarting the government. On a recent visit up north, even Tante had filled hot water bottles with whiskey and worn them as a bosom in her dress, smiling regally at the customs man as she sailed across the border.

“I’d rather stay legal,” said Cyprian, “but the offer’s good.”

“That means I walk to work one whole week.”

“That’s not what gets you.”

“Damn right.”

“I will not, and I mean this,” Cyprian said, propping himself up on one arm and staring at her intently, “get caught.”

“Scares the hell out of me to think you would,” Delphine offered.

“Does?”

“For what it’s worth.”

Even then, Cyprian just didn’t feel like kissing her, but he loved her so much at that moment he nearly overcame his reluctance. It seemed to him that since the end of their traveling show, and since the house was cleaned and fumigated, things were slowing down to normal. He missed balancing, and the travel, but not the insecurity of where to perform and how to set up shows. He wanted things predictable but he also wanted something else. It was a problem with men who had come back from the war, he’d heard, normal wasn’t good enough. They had to jack up every situation. Make it dangerous. Maybe he was like that. Or it could be that Delphine’s job made him jealous. Not only because she was so tight with Clarisse and then Eva, but because she now bought everything, their food, their clothes, Roy’s whiskey. He did feel as though the man should make the money.

“I’m gonna do it.”

“Oh God,” said Delphine.

“I’m not bad with a engine.” Cyprian tried to placate her. “I learned a lot in the war. When I finish this, tell you what, I’ll get a job. Maybe set myself up to fix automobiles.”

“What do I tell the sheriff?”

“I’ll get back here before he even knows….”

His reassurance was cut off by Roy’s wild hollering, and the two of them pushed aside their nets and jumped out of bed. Gingerly slipping along a rutted path, they made their way toward Roy’s drinking camp down along the river. Delphine carried a small kerosene lamp that cast a pool of light just before them, so she was the first to see, when she reached the source of the panicked howls, why Roy was in hysterics. He had finally been discovered. The armyworms had come across him during a long drunken sleep, and they’d settled in, perhaps to feed on his clothing, or maybe just to rest on their way toward a banquet of leaves. His hair was packed. They dripped from his ears. Not a fraction of an inch of a wormless Roy was visible and he was, indeed, a supremely horrifying sight. So it was a surprise when at Delphine’s voice he calmed down pathetically.