Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

E VERY BUG LAST summer’s drought killed or dried up had laid sacs and sacs of eggs destined to hatch this June. Delphine and Eva sat together on broken chairs in Eva’s garden, each with a bottle of Fidelis’s earth-dark home-brewed beer held tight between their feet. Delphine wore a wash dress and apron, Eva wore a nightgown and a light woolen shawl. The slugs were naked. Tough curls of antlered jelly, with many young, the slugs lived in the thickness of hay and shredded newspapers that Eva had put down for mulch. They had already eaten many of the new seedlings from the tenderest topmost leaves down to the ground, and Eva had vowed to destroy them.

“The last feast,” said Eva, gesturing at her bean plants as she dribbled a little beer into the pie plate. “Now they are doomed.”

The beer was chill from the glass refrigerator case in the store, newly installed, for Fidelis was one of the first Argus merchants to obtain a liquor license. From time to time, distantly, the doorbell jangled as customers straggled in for an item or two. It was dinnertime and there were no real shoppers. Franz could handle them. Eva poured the top quarter of the next bottle into her mouth before she poured a little more into the pie plate that she had buried level with the ground. It seemed a shame to waste the coldness of the beer on pests.

Slowly, the two women sipped the rich, bitter stuff as the sun slanted through the margins of the stock pens. The tin siding of the cooler gave off heat, and they smelled the scorched brown vines of last year’s blue grapes.

“Maybe we should simply have shriveled these creatures with salt,” said Delphine. But then she had a thought: We are close to Eva’s own death, and can afford to make death easy on the helpless. She said nothing, but did touch Eva’s hand. Since Eva’s illness had taken this turn, Fidelis had slaughtered twice a week, worked round the clock to make the doctor bills. The loamy soil inside the stock pens, enriched with shit and fear, churned with growing power. The margins already sprouted weeds so thick and vigorous they looked as though they could pull up their roots like skirts and vault the fence. Here, however, thought Delphine, sipping at her bottle, there would not be all that much room for them to live.

Eva’s garden, Delphine had decided, reflected the dark underside of her organizational genius. The garden was everything raw and wild that Eva’s house was not. It had grown rich on junk. Pot scrapings, tea leaves, and cucumber peelings all went into the dirt, buried haphazardly, sometimes just piled. Everything rotted down beneath the blistering North Dakota sun. And then the seeds in the garbaged cucumbers, the pumpkin rinds, and even the old tomatoes volunteered themselves in scattered flourishes. Her method was to have no method. Give nature its way. She had apple trees that grew from cores here. Rosebushes, bristling near the runnel that collected steers’ blood, were covered with blooms so fat and hearty they looked sinister. Eva’s favorite flower was the marigold, and she headed them in fall and scattered their seeds everywhere. The high tang of their foliage was in the air. Birds too. She fed them oatmeal.

So far in life, Delphine had never gardened, never bothered to attract birds, never known to care about things that her friend turned into rituals. Since she’d known Eva Waldvogel, and also traveled here and there with Cyprian, she had started to understand how a woman’s attention could succeed in making sense of man’s blind chaos, and yet women needed their own wildness. It was here. All ran riot. The garden and weedy yard would wax fuller until it turned into a jungle of unhitched vines and rusty birdbaths made of ham tins. Eva’s dog, the white shepherd, Schatzie, dug up old bones the former dog had buried and refused to rebury them. It would be awful, Delphine felt, when the leaves withered in the fall, to see the litter of femurs and clavicles, the knobs and knuckles. As if the scattered dead, rising to meet the Judgment, had to change and swap their parts to fit. Until then, the broad leaves would hide the bones the dog had spread through creation.

Delphine’s tendency to dwell on fate was triggered constantly by Eva’s sickness. Mortality was always before her, and she marveled how anyone lived at all, for any amount of time. Life was a precious feat of daring, she saw, improbable as Cyprian balancing, strange as a feast of slugs.

Eva bent over, flipped out a small pocket of earth with her trowel, and tamped in her quarter-full beer bottle as a trap. “Die happy,” she encouraged. Delphine handed her own three-fourths-drunk bottle, too. This one Eva planted by a hill of squash that would overpower all the rest of the garden by fall, though she would not see it. Great, lumpy, hybrid Hubbards would roll out from under the green pads of leaves. Delphine would harvest them, piling the warty, irregular globes beside the back door, then packing them in hay. Eva settled against the crisscrossed canvas webbing of her chair, forked open another bottle. It was a good day, a very good day for her.

The sun’s last rays were warm and the breeze was strong enough to keep off the deerflies and mosquitoes. Delphine’s head began to feel big and wobbly on her neck. But light. It seemed to balloon above the rest of her. The plants looked fresh. The garden flourished green. Delphine’s continual watering had swelled the hollyhocks in bud that gently batted Eva’s walls. Her columbines spread full as bushes, trailing complicated spikes. The sharp yellow marigold blossoms spiced the air. Why shouldn’t life surge forth, thought Delphine, get better?

“There is no hope,” Eva said as though her friend had spoken all she thought out loud, “because there’s just too damn many, and they’re too dumb to find the bottles anyway.”

Unseen, mysterious, the young had moved onto the leaves, almost translucent. They did not seem so much living things as bits of jelled fluid. They were voracious. On some of the leaves, the tough veins alone were left, lacework outlines. It was only the richness of Eva’s garden that salvaged it from ruin. There was simply too much for them to devour. And now, from the edges of the grass, from underneath stones and drainpipes and out of the tiles of the gutters, moved snakes. The black ribbon snakes were striped with hot orange, liquid green, and their bellies were pale gold as melted butter. Delphine thought she heard them sliding through the seams of the boiling earth and knew they uncoiled from beneath the hot clumps of straw and hay. Snakes were everywhere, feeding on the tiny slugs; a toad hopped into the waning light blinking its old-woman wrinkled eyes.

“I’m going,” said Delphine, but she continued to sit with Eva through sunset and on into the rising dark. It was as though they knew that no peace would be in their lives through the next weeks and that they both would, in fearful nights, remember these hours. How the air turned blue around them and the moths came out, invisible and sightless, flapping against the shuttered lamp at the other end of the yard. They were protected by citronella burning in a bucket, and sprigs of basil, which Eva had snapped off and thrust into their hair. Eva’s feet were cool in thin leather sandals. Delphine’s gripped the moist, fetid earth.

On a calm night, after work, after she had settled Eva, Delphine would normally have returned to the house she shared with Cyprian and Roy. She would have lost herself in a book, or cooked something to relax, or fixed whatever she could find that needed repair in the house. But tonight she was unfamiliar to herself and did not move. She let the beer wear off gently as the night grew deeper, thicker, black all around them. They were silent. Nothing occurred to them to talk about and at last each beer bottle was planted. They were not waiting for anything particular to happen. Time went by, and yet they did not stir. They had no thoughts, except that Delphine imagined all the bones were hitching in the ground. The dog moaned in its sleep by Eva’s foot, and Delphine’s eyes shut.