Louise Erdrich: The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Although they were tradesmen and master butchers, his family also prided themselves on acquiring a degree of learning and on a talent for producing male voices of special beauty that skipped from son to son. His older brother hadn’t much voice at all, for instance, but Fidelis had a singing tenor of such natural clarity and freshness that his last name, Waldvogel, might have been invented just for him. Waldvogel was such a common name in his town that he’d never thought of it, but in this new country, where Germans were Germans regardless of their regional origins, more than one person would remark upon it, and also note that Forestbird was an oddly gentle name for one whose profession was based in slaughter.

That was not how his family viewed it, of course; there was an art to a proper killing. The profession, acquired only through painstaking study and examination from a young age, was one of extraordinary precision and timing. A Metzgermeister’s diploma required working knowledge of every spice known to humankind, the arcane preparation of hundreds of varieties of wurst, and the ability to commit one’s knife edge to the animal’s created bulk and grain with a dreamlike intuition. His father, having practiced all his life, hardly seemed to move his hands as the animal fell into increasingly civilized circles and predictable shapes. On a block set before him, its creatureliness disappeared and it entered, as Fidelis saw it, a higher and more satisfactory form of being.

Fidelis thought of his father’s working grace as he stood for hours in lines, endured inspections, stamps, paperwork, the crush of impatient humans, and his own hunger. That he also managed, with that internal discipline of quiet he had learned at the rifle’s sights. For the smoked sausages in his suitcase were not for him to eat; they were his ticket west.

Walking toward the train station through milling throngs of people, those who had acquired a foothold in this place, Fidelis gave in to an extravagant loneliness. Those who passed him saw an erect and powerfully carved man, high-cheekboned, fair, with a straight and jutting nose and a mouth as perfectly shaped, though who around him knew, as the voice that could pour from it. That he was afflicted by the riptide of a recent and unexpected love was, of course, not apparent to those who noticed him in the crowd. He tapped his heart, which from time to time beat too anxiously behind the lapels of his suitcoat. The locket that Eva had given to Johannes, and which Fidelis had secretly kept, was lodged there, for Fidelis was both thrilled and terrified to find that, although he’d married Eva on the strength of a promise to his dying friend, he’d fallen through a trapdoor into blackness — a midnight of love that had grown like a bower of inky twigs over the baby’s defenseless beauty, over Eva’s prickly loveliness, her trim fortitude, her bullheaded, forthright, stubborn grace.

The train station’s massive brass-trimmed doors swallowed Fidelis with all the others. Easily, the current of people pulled him to the windows of the ticket counter. He waited again in line until he stood before a sharp-mouthed girl whose jaws moved in a rhythm peculiar to people in this city. Fidelis was unfamiliar with chewing gum and the motion of so many jaws made him uneasy. Her eyes brightened with an automatic greed, though, and the chewing stopped when he came before her.

“I wish to Seattle,” he said, gathering the words in his mouth, “to go.”

She told him the price of the ticket. He did not understand the click of numbers on her tongue, and mimed writing down her answer. She did so, and then, with a glance to one side, added her name and the words Come see me if you’re ever in town . Her lacquer-nailed fingertips presented the slip of paper to him. She made him tug just a little to get it. He thanked her, in German, and she replied with a manufactured tragic pout that he was too weary to notice. The amount was legible, anyway. He understood it, knew how much money he would have to add to the meager amount he still possessed. He put the paper in his pocket and then found a pillar against which to stand.

He took up this position, the back brim of his father’s hat just touching the grooved stone behind, and then he lifted the suitcase in his arms, unlatched the lid, and lowered it enough so that he could see just over the opened top. For the remaining hours of the day and then on into the dusk, during which the smoky radiance through the high windows intensified and then diminished to a feeble gray, he stood. Motionless, he seemed not so much rooted as suspended, as though he’d been lowered by strings that still held him poised. That was perhaps the visual effect of his hunger. For it crawled in him to lighten him, opened him from the inside. His gut yawned. Yet he remained impassive and somehow buoyant in the dark. He had rehearsed on the boat across the price he would ask for the sausages, and at once he sold seven, not perhaps because they were so irresistible but because, even in that city of every possible sight the image of the man holding open in his tireless arms the sausage-filled suitcase, which looked heavy by the way, arrested quite a few. From time to time, a shaft of the fading light plucked his calm and idealized features from the gloom. So he sold, just as he’d known he would, out of his depth of silence as much as the quality of what he carried, though he believed most certainly, and with a firm drama, that his father’s were, no argument, the best sausages upon the earth.

Maybe they were. The next morning some who bought one the day before came back for two. And more people that same afternoon. Other than sleeping on a platform bench with the closed suitcase in his lap, visiting the washroom, or drinking the surprisingly cold, sweet city water, Fidelis had remained at his post. Those who noticed, and there were a few among the swirling crowd, wondered at his endurance. How did his arms support that open suitcase hour after hour? The suitcase, which also contained his treasured knives, was heavier than it looked, yet he held it lightly. As the day went on, his stillness seemed an unquestionable form of self-torture. But it wasn’t, for Fidelis, the way it seemed to an observer. Standing there was not so difficult. It was almost a relief, after the constant motion of the sea. And the strength required to hold the suitcase in one position all that time was nothing to him, even though he was weakened by not eating.

Hunger had been with him forever, it seemed, and hunger was with him now. He’d learned its routine and knew, on the second day, not having eaten since the scrap of a last meal on the boat, that he must have food. No matter how reluctant he was to spend his money, the time had come. Fidelis shut the suitcase, from which sausages had noticeably disappeared, and he walked straight across the station, the familiar, famished buzz in his ears, to a small diner set into the side of a wall. There, at a stool, the suitcase clasped between his feet, he chose three bowls of the cheapest stew — tough beef, potatoes, carrots, gravy — and ate with the intent patience he’d developed when relieving a period of starvation. The waitress brought him extra bread, and when he indicated that he couldn’t pay for it and she insisted that he keep the bread, he thanked her with a gulp of surprise. The goodwill of most of the people here amazed him, but then, he reminded himself, they were neither starving in the main nor recently and thoroughly defeated and detested outside their diminished borders. So they could afford, he decided, the ordinary kindnesses, the gift of bread.

He paid, recalculating the slight diminishment toward his goal, and he went to the public washroom for his morning shave. He unwrapped a scrap of stolen soap that had grown almost transparent, and had a surreptitious wash using one of his two pocket handkerchiefs. If he’d had the chance, he would have rinsed out his other pair of undershorts, tucked into the back pocket of his pants, but there were other men in the room and he was embarrassed. From a breast pocket he removed a carved ivory toothbrush, the boar’s bristles softened and mashed with use. He’d had this with him all through the war. And the razor, too, thinned with years of stropping, the tiny comb, and the clever silver ear cleaner. All fit neatly back upon his person when he was finished. He lifted his suitcase and went back to his post.