Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Sheriff Hock nodded sharply; his features pinched inside the frame of firm, thick fat. He removed a sharp pencil from a case in his pocket, and flipped a page over on the hard surface of his notepad. He had the exquisite budded lips of a courtesan, and when he spoke it was hard not to watch them move, just as a rose might if it were to speak. He told Delphine that he had a few questions, and since she was willing to answer them, he went down a predictable list. They were not particularly intrusive questions, having to do mainly with her life with Roy and Cyprian. Apparently, their answers matched up, because he seemed to take no exception to anything she said. Not until he came to a question about the red beads pasted into the floor of the pantry.

“Do you remember them, there in the pantry?”

“Of course I do.” The quality of the brittle substance that sealed the cellar door shut was extremely memorable, and Delphine had wondered at that one particular ingredient.

“The stuff was so hard to chip that I wondered if it wasn’t some kind of glue.”

“I wondered the same,” said Sheriff Hock, very solemnly. “I am currently having it tested in the state laboratory.”

What state laboratory? thought Delphine, but she tried to humor him.

“Red beads, off a dress? Red beads at a wake?” she said with a dutifully mystified expression.

“Exactly.”

“Have you asked my dad?”

“He’s vague about it.”

“He’s… not well,” said Delphine, coughing discreetly.

Sheriff Hock folded his notebook, tucked it underneath his arm, and took one of Eva’s doughnuts from the glass case. The heat weighed on his bulk. He moved with a palpable weariness, and his shirt was darkened with sweat down the spine and below the arms. He ate the doughnut in tiny bites, lost in physical misery and abstract thinking, then he asked. “Where does your father obtain his whiskey?”

“I buy it for him,” said Delphine.

“I don’t mean the stuff you buy,” the sheriff said. “I mean the supply he kept in the cellar.”

“I don’t know.”

“Delphine, you’re protecting him now,” said Sheriff Hock, shaking his head. “I suspect that the answer to the tragedy lies in the fact that the cellar was littered with empty bottles.”

“I suppose,” said Delphine, seeing her ruse was useless, “he might have saved the bottles for Step-and-a-Half. She would resell them for home brew.”

The sheriff nodded sagely. “Was your father a friend of the Chavers?”

“Well, you know he was, as well as I do,” said Delphine.

“For the record,” said the sheriff.

“Okay, yes, he was.”

“Was he horrified? Shocked?”

Delphine became animated by the question, perhaps because she could rightly answer it. “What do you think? After he learned the Chavers’ identities, my father was wild. You should have seen him. He pulled the last pathetic tufts of hair off his head and rolled around on the floor like a baby. Well, you know Roy. He kept howling something about believing the family had gone down to Arizona. I thought, you know, for the winter.” Delphine finished in a subdued voice.

“Winter was nearly over when they were locked in.”

Fidelis’s voice boomed suddenly from down the hallway, and Sheriff Hock turned his attention away from Delphine. Much to her relief. For she was suddenly gripped with an anxiety for her father, and the fear that he had done something to set the deaths in his cellar into motion. Still, having already questioned him about the red beads and in some desperation asked him everything he knew or could think of about the three who died, she was at a loss. Roy Watzka had seemed as bewildered by the dead as anyone, entirely unprepared to provide any useful knowledge.

Fidelis and the sheriff went out back, humming the melody to a song they were complicating with contrasting harmonies, probably over a jar of Fidelis’s dark, cold, homemade beer. Delphine’s throat ached for a swig of it. Just as she bent over to squeeze out the mop again, Delphine heard a low rustle of paper, the creak of the chair at the desk in the corner, and she straightened up in time to see Markus stepping quietly away from the account books.

“You heard?”

Markus turned to look at Delphine. His thin cheeks had been recently and fiercely burned by the sun, and they still glowed hot red. In the long pause as he looked at her, Delphine gazed clearly back at Markus and saw in his face Eva’s steel. He wouldn’t speak. For some reason, Delphine was later to think, the boy knew all that was to come. He understood the future, knew why she was there, fathomed the reason that her place in his life would so drastically change. Knowing all of this, he was closed to her, sealed.

“You must be very smart,” said Delphine. “You’re only eight years old and your mother trusts you to check the accounts.”

“I’m nine. She does the math,” said Markus, poker-faced.

“But you are smart,” Delphine persisted. His indifference was a challenge, and she wanted him at least to admit what he’d just heard, if only so that she could prepare Eva for any questions that he might have. “You’re a smart boy, so you know that the sheriff was asking me questions only to figure out the truth.”

Markus now looked down at the floor.

“I didn’t do anything!” Delphine blurted out, surprising herself. It was only after Markus turned back to her and stared from the perfect mixture of the greens and blues of his mother’s and father’s eyes that she realized that the boy in the cellar was his age and that of course Markus must have known him.

“Your friend’s name,” said Delphine, softly now, stepping toward him. “What was it?”

Beneath the raw sunburn, the boy’s face went white. What the question did to him astonished Delphine. His face turned to paper and his eyes burned. He blinked. He opened his mouth, passionately miserable.

“Ruthie,” he croaked. “Ruthie Chavers.”

Then he whirled and ran down the long hall, banged his way out into the white heat of the yard. Delphine stood there a moment, stunned. Ruthie! The girl’s name and the new information that she had, so far, avoided hit her. To escape her thoughts, she started using a scraper on the floor, gently scratching away at the places where the old wax had yellowed or clumped. As she worked the white squares whiter, she felt a numb satisfaction. The colored squares unstreaked and became again the original innocent green. As she moved with an increased dedication, the girl’s name tapped in and out of her mind. Ruthie. Ruth. Ruth meant mercy, Delphine knew. Yet not one bit of mercy had been shown to her. Delphine might have imagined that to find out that the child in the cellar was a girl would have struck her a blow, increased the unbearable mental picture of that suffering. But it didn’t, in the end, and at this Delphine wondered. The floor was drying before she found the explanation in her own heart.

Her inner reasoning surprised her, mystified her, then depressed her. She found that she harbored a belief that girls were stronger and more enduring. Therefore more tough-minded about even such an unexpectedly evil destiny. And needful of less sympathy. A girl child would have a certain fatalism about the event. She would accept the end of her life, and merely sleep as much as possible until she fell asleep forever. Oddly, the closer Delphine identified with the girl’s suffering, the more she thought about it, the less sorry she felt for Ruthie Chavers. It was, in fact, as though she herself had sat in that cellar, endured the hunger, then the thirst, then weakened to the point of delirium, and froze, all in a dream.

And died in her mother’s arms, she thought, her mother’s arms. Then customers began arriving, and Delphine put on a clean apron.