Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

At the end of the day, Delphine turned the cardboard sign in the entry window over from Open to Closed. She went over the floor again to take off the day’s footprints. She let the floor dry, and then, in a special bucket, she mixed up floor wax and with a long brush painted the floor, back to front, in perfect swipes. She painted herself right up to the counter, put a box in the entry so that the boys would not ruin the drying surface. She retreated. Hung up her apron, said a quick good-bye, and went home to swelter in the tent, alone. Early next morning, before the store opened she’d return and apply another coat. Let it dry while she drank her morning coffee with Eva. Then between customers she’d polish that linoleum to a mighty finish with a buffing rag and elbow grease. That’s what she planned, anyway, and all that she planned did occur, but over weeks of time and under radically different circumstances.

ALREADY THE NEXT MORNING, while Delphine sat in the kitchen with the second coat of wax drying, the heat pushed at the walls. She was pleased because Eva had looked at the floor and declared it brand-new again. The strong black Turkish coffee sent Delphine into a sweat. She drank from a pitcher of water that Eva set on the table and blotted at her throat and temples with a dish towel.

“Kuchmal hier,” Eva had been awake most of the night, doing her weekly baking in the thread of cool air. “I am not so good.”

She said this in such an offhand way that Delphine hardly registered the words, and only answered with a moan of sympathy that somehow included herself, in this heat, waxing floors. But then Eva repeated herself exactly the same way, as though she did not remember what she’d said. “I am not so good,” Eva whispered again. She put her elbows on the table and curled her hands around the china cup. Her silence, as though she was listening for some deeper tone or word in the ordinary sounds around them, disquieted Delphine and she watched alertly as Eva stared into the oily depths of the liquid.

“What do you mean, you don’t feel so good?”

“It’s my stomach. I am all lumped up.” Beads of sweat trembled on Eva’s upper lip. “Pains come and go.”

“Is it cramps?” asked Delphine.

“It’s not that, or maybe.” Eva drew a deep breath and then held it, let it out. There. She took Delphine’s dish towel and pressed it to her face, dragged it off as though to remove her expression. She was breathing hard. “Like a cramp, but I never am quit the monthly… comes and goes, too.”

“Maybe you’re just stopping early?”

“I think yes,” said Eva. “My mother…” But then she shook her head and smiled wide, spoke in a high, thin abnormal voice. “Crying and whining is all forbidden here with me!”

Eva jumped up. Awkwardly, she banged herself against the counter, but then she bustled to the oven, moved swiftly all through the kitchen as though unending motion would cure whatever gripped her. Within moments, she seemed to have turned back into the unworried, capable Eva. She lifted two great pans of rolls out of the oven. She wielded a spatula and quickly emptied the pans. Then she pushed dough through the round of her thumb and first finger, filled two more pans and popped them back in the oven to bake. Delphine watched her in concern, but then relaxed. There was no trace of weakness in that series of swift and economical motions.

“I’m going out front and start polishing the floor,” said Delphine. “By now in this heat it’s surely dry.”

“Very good,” said Eva, but as Delphine passed her to put her coffee cup in the gray soapstone sink, the wife of the butcher touched one of Delphine’s hands. Lightly, her voice a shade too careless, she said the words that even in the heat chilled her friend.

“Take me to the doctor.”

Then Eva smiled as though this was a great joke, and she lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and did not move.

FIDELIS HAD ALREADY gone out to look at stock with a farmer, and he could not be found when Delphine returned from Doctor Heech’s house. By then, she had Eva drugged with morphine in the backseat of the delivery car, and a sheaf of medical orders in her hands stating whom to seek, what possibly could be done. Furious and sorrowing, Doctor Heech was telephoning down to the clinic and speaking with a surgeon he knew, telling him to prepare for a patient named Eva Waldvogel, who was suffering from a tumor that pressed immediately on her vitals and would cause her death within days if not removed.

Fidelis gone, Franz and the little boys at a ball game, only Markus was home to take the message.

“I will write a note,” said Delphine, his mother’s suitcase at her feet. “Make sure that your father gets it. I am taking your mother to the doctor.”

Markus handed her a piece of paper, dropped it, picked it up, his lithe boy’s fingers for once clumsy with fright. He ran straight out to the car and crawled into the backseat, which was where Delphine found him, stroking Eva’s hair as she sighed in the fervent relief of the drug. She was so pleasantly composed that Markus was reassured and Delphine was able to lead him carefully away, afraid that Eva would suddenly wake, before the boy, into recognition of her pain. From what Delphine had gathered so far, Eva must have been hiding a substantial suffering for many months now. Her illness was dangerously advanced, and Heech in his alarm as well as his care for Eva, for he was fond of her, scolded her in the despair of a doctor wrathful at his helplessness.

“You should have had the brains to come to me,” he said over and over. “You should have come to me.”

As she led Eva’s son to the house, Delphine tried to stroke Markus’s hair. He jerked away in terror at the unfamiliar tenderness. It was, of course, a sign to him that something was truly, desperately, wrong with his mother. Delphine snatched her hand back and spoke offhandedly as she could. Markus, his face and neck flushed brightly, did not look at her, mumbled something she couldn’t make out, and was gone.

Delphine finished her note for Fidelis:

I have taken Eva to the clinic south of the Cities called the Mayo, where Heech says emergency help will be found. She passed out this morning. It is a cancer. You can talk to Heech and make your own way down when things are arranged in the shop. Find Cyprian Lazarre if you can. Maybe he’ll be out in the tent on my dad’s land. Lazarre is a good man and can manage things.

ON THE DRIVE DOWN to the Mayo Clinic, Delphine first heard the butcher sing, only it was in her mind. She replayed it like a comforting record on a phonograph, as she kept her foot evenly on the gas pedal of the truck and calmly caused the speedometer to hover right near one hundred miles per hour. The world blurred. Fields turned like spoked wheels. She caught the flash of houses, cows, horses, barns. Then there was the long stop and go of the city. All through that drive, she replayed the song that she hadn’t really listened to Fidelis sing just the morning before in the stained concrete of the slaughtering room. She had been too crushed by the heat to marvel at the buoyant mildness of his tenor. His singing, at the time, hardly registered. Now she heard it. “ Die Gedanken sind Frei ,” he sang, and the walls spun each note higher as beneath the dome of a beautiful church. Who would think a slaughterhouse would have the sacred acoustics of a cathedral? Fidelis was practicing his pieces for the men’s chorus, those he’d learned back in Germany, when he’d belonged to the Gesangverein.

The song wheeled in her thoughts, and using what ragtag German she knew, Delphine made out the words, “Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, Sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.” The mind is free… thoughts like shadows of the night…. The dead crops turned row by row in the fields, the vent blew the hot air hotter, and the wind boomed in the rolled-down windows. Even when it finally started to rain, Delphine did not roll the windows back up. They were moving so fast that the drops stung like BBs on the side of her face. The fierce drops kept her alert. She knew that occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine as well as dulling her pain loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a high-pitched icy moan that could have belonged to Eva. A scream like the shriek of tires. A growling as though her pain were an animal that she wrestled to earth.