Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

When she shut her eyes, her mind grew alert. Her senses opened. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. How there was so much blind feeling. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. Unheard, unnoticed, the blood dropped into her hands and feet, so that she was anchored. Which she was glad for, because the light was so feeble and the blackness so strong that she felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress.

“I wish it is true, what I read, that the mind stays put. The eyes. The brain to read with.”

She heard Eva’s voice.

Delphine had sometimes thought that her friend didn’t care if she became an animal or a plant, if her heart was cycled into the kingdom of nutrients, if all of this thinking and figuring and selling of pork and blood meal was wasted effort. Eva had treated her death with offhand scorn or ridicule, but with that statement she revealed a certain fear she’d never shown before. Or a wishfulness. Her words cut Delphine deeply with an instant sorrow.

“Your mind stays itself,” said Delphine, as lightly as she could, “so there you’ll be, strumming on your harp, looking down on all the foolish crap people do.”

“I could never play the harp,” said Eva, “I think they’ll give me a damn kazoo.”

“Save me a cloud and I’ll play a tune with you,” said Delphine.

“It’s a deal,” said Eva, “and you bring your handsome husband. Think you can persuade him?”

They laughed too hard, they laughed until tears started in their eyes, then they gasped and fell utterly silent. For a long time, now, they’d both pretended to believe in a ridiculous heaven, and promised to meet on its grassy slopes.

FOR ALL THAT he was a truly unbearable souse, no one in town disliked Roy Watzka. There were several reasons. First, his gross slide into abandon was caused by loss. That he repeatedly claimed to have loved to the point of self-destruction fed a certain reflex feature in many a female heart, and he got handouts easily when strapped. Women even made him lunches, a sandwich of pork or cold beans, and wrapped it carefully for him to eat coming off a binge. Next reason was that Roy Watzka, during those short, rare times that he was sober, had the capacity for intense bouts of hard labor. He could work phenomenally, doing what he did best, farmwork, and he was happy doing it. He’d milk or pitch out stalls or stack hay out of sheer spiritual guilt, and sometimes he’d take no pay hoping to ensure his next liquor source but also creating the sense that he was, in his own way, generous. And whatever his condition he told a good tale, which drew people. Nor was he a mean drunk or a rampager, and it was well-known that although she certainly put up with more than a daughter ever should have to, he did love Delphine.

Eva liked him, or felt sorry for him anyway, and she was one of those who had always given him a meal when he came around her kitchen. Now that she was in trouble, Roy showed up at the butcher shop for a different purpose. He came almost every afternoon, sometimes stinking of sweat-out schnapps. But once there, he’d do anything. Work dog hard. He’d move the outhouse to the new hole he’d dug for it, shovel guts. Before he left, he’d sit with Eva and tell her crazy stories about the things that had happened to him as a young man in the gold fields or the pet hog he’d trained to read or other things: how to extract the venom from a rattlesnake, an actual wolf man he knew and words in the Lycanthropian language, or the Latin names of flowers and where they came from, recipes for exquisite wines and what the French did with the vinasse. Listening sometimes, Delphine was both glad for Roy’s adept distractions and resentful. She knew he was a fountain of odd bits of knowledge. Where had he learned these things? In bars, he said, and out of the battered dictionary that was the only book in the house until Delphine grew old enough to acquire books herself. Yet, she’d cleaned up after him all of her life, and never had he sat and talked to her like this, with such gravity and kindness, such a goodwilled attempt to distract and entertain. Worst of all, his efforts almost convinced Delphine that there was hope for him.

POUTY MANNHEIM HAD developed a fascination with flight, bought a war-surplus Jenny, and spent his spare time fiddling with her engine or practicing rolls and dives and fancy curlicue maneuvers. He liked to buzz low over the shop, waving down at the boys. Fidelis had given him leave to land in the flat field behind the house, and every time he did so Franz threw off his apron and raced out. As soon as Pouty emerged and walked to the house to visit, Franz climbed into the cockpit. He didn’t do anything while Mannheim talked to his father, except run his hands over the controls and examine the official-looking log that Mannheim kept of his flights, his fueling, his hours in the air. And when Pouty Mannheim returned, Franz proudly and eagerly acted as what he imagined was a sort of ground crew, turning the prop, uttering the stand-clear. As the plane made its run, gathering speed, the sway of it triggered an excitement Franz didn’t understand in himself. He was a reserved boy, but when the plane began to move he always ran, chased it, shouted, threw his cap after the plane when it lifted from the field. There was something about the actual moment that the flimsy-looking wheels left earth, seeing the space between ground and the craft itself enlarge, that dazzled him, filled him with a sense he could never have described, not in the language of his mother and father or in the language of his schoolmates; it was a wordless, wild, tremendous, unbearably physical release of tension that left him almost in tears.

After Pouty had disappeared into the sky, Franz stood very still for a few minutes, quietly gathering himself, before he dared face other people. His mother was the only person, he felt, who even remotely understood what he experienced when the airplane left the ground. In her illness, she had become a grateful listener and he sometimes found himself after Mannheim’s visits sitting long with her and talking on and on, as he did with no one else, about the various makes of aircraft and their advantages one over the other, their disparities, all of the quirks and details that he collected from newspapers and magazines. He had a stack of papers, and pictures carefully cut and pasted on the wall around his bed. There was a detailed and graceful Fokker Eindekker, a black cross on its wings and tail, and blurred photos of Immelmann, the Eagle of Lille, of Rickenbacker and “the Ace of Aces,” a recent news photo of Charles Lindbergh, and the badges and emblems of the RAF. A homemade banner that read “Beware the Hun in the Sun,” and a laboriously copied poem called “The Young Aviator.” Franz had drawn a fashionable French Nieuport 11 fighter with its machine gun mounted over the pilot and a screaming Indian chief painted on the hull. His favorite was the Albatros, a German fighter with a big red nose, a heart, a white swastika, and the usual black cross. He had modeled a Sopwith Camel of cardboard and pins, drawn its red, white, and blue bull’s-eye carefully with crayons he’d swiped from school. Eva had given him a huge scrapbook and in it he’d pasted news of barnstormers and their photos cut carefully from the newspaper or saved from posted handbills. He read descriptions of their tricks out loud to her when she was restless. On one of these afternoons, while he sat with her, she asked, “What do you think it’s like, I mean, over the clouds?”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Franz. “It looks like you could step right onto them and bounce.”

She regarded him skeptically, but with a kind of pride that he could invent such a thing. Which is when it suddenly struck him that he had to go up into the air with his mother.