Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“We’re going to fly,” he announced to her right there, and the look of wondering pleasure that crossed her face at the idea convinced him that he had to make it come true.

Pouty had to fly them, he decided, even though Fidelis had forbidden that he ever take Franz with him on his flights. This was different. This was a ride with a noble purpose. Very quickly the impulse he had to take his mother in the air became an urgent and serious commitment. He thought, staring at Eva, that there were some things that simply had to happen. She had to go into the sky. He had to be there when she did, even though they wouldn’t see over the clouds. He went to bed with the conviction, and the next day, working next to his father, all he could think of was how to persuade Pouty Mannheim to take them up in his airplane.

POUTY KEPT HIS PLANE in a barn north of town, a good long walk from the house, and Franz had to make an excuse to go find Pouty right away because he didn’t know when he’d happen by. And Franz’s sense was this had to happen now, not that he anticipated in his mind how terribly his mother would weaken. He borrowed Mazarine Shimek’s bicycle, even though it was a girl’s bicycle, and he pedaled the miles quickly. He felt such a stern compulsion about the project that when he talked to Pouty, he couldn’t help his voice from rising, his hands from moving, and even from pleading and harassing Pouty once he trundled away to grab a tool he needed from the barn.

“She’s sick,” Pouty finally said, scrubbing at his round apple-shiny chin.

“That’s why,” said Franz.

“Fidelis won’t let her,” said Pouty.

“Which is why you can’t tell him,” said Franz.

Although Pouty Mannheim wasn’t especially thoughtful or even interested in most people other than himself, and although he had very little experience of affection for his own mother, something in the way Franz behaved impressed him. He thought it over while he checked his controls, tightened his equipment, and replaced a bit of paint on the body of his plane, and then he said yes.

EARLY ON THE DAY that Fidelis made his deliveries, Pouty landed his plane in the field behind the shop. It was warm already, and the sky was very blue, but not with that oppressive and metallic blueness that signaled a dust storm. The day was milder than in quite some time, and a fugitive freshness still lingered in the grass, in the leaves, the taste of early dew. Franz ran into his mother’s room, quieted himself, and touched her arm. She was awake and already dressed for the ride in a gauzy white housedress with full-blown roses all over it, some pink, some a deeper red in the creases of the petals. Delicate leaves of a subdued green floated everywhere in the folds of the material. Her hair, damaged by the treatments, sprang short and fine off her head in curls of fluff. She’d shakily put on a light coat of lipstick and gargled, he noticed, with a sweet-scented lilac water. Some days her breath smelled of a sad cellar rot, from what was happening inside, she said, and she hated it. She liked to keep very clean. Her eyes were beautiful, Franz thought, slanting green in her thin and paper-white face.

“Mama,” he said, shy and proud, “your plane’s here.”

“Hilf mir,” she said, eagerly turning to him, and he helped her straighten her legs and sit on the side of the bed. She smoothed back her hair and then rose, weak, and put one foot and then the next into her lace-up brown leather shoes. She was breathing deeply, to gather strength and also to contain her excitement. The other boys were out in the front of the store with Delphine, who’d been taken into the plan and who had pledged to distract them long enough for the two to get out to Pouty’s airplane. Eva tried to step along, not shamble, as she walked beside Franz, but as they made their way into the side yard he stopped her.

With a huge sweep of his arms, he scooped her up and simply carried her out into the field. She laughed with surprise, then put her arm around his neck, thinking to herself, My son, my little son. And when they reached the plane and he carefully set her inside, in the seat behind the pilot, she thought of the boy’s father, and realized that when she’d known Johannes he’d not been much older than Franz was now. And the thought pierced her with sorrow for that boy she’d known, and wonder at all that had happened since his death, things that would have so astonished him, and she couldn’t help think of heaven and question just how it would be if those assurances of her priest were actually true. Would Johannes really be standing there, on the other side, with all of the dead of her own family, to greet her? How old would he be? And then, what would she say, and what would happen on that day in the future when Fidelis entered heaven as well? Which one would she stay with?

Father Clarence was absolutely stumped on this issue, and Eva enjoyed shaking his confidence. Eva smiled and let the sun hit her face full on as Pouty climbed into the front. Franz spun the propeller mightily and then, when the engine caught, and the body of the plane shook like a wet dog, Franz jumped into the space just behind Eva’s seat and grabbed her around the waist.

“Are you holding her in?” yelled Pouty.

“Got her!”

The machine jerked forward. With a bounding rush, an eager gathering of speed and a quickening of power, they hopped into the air. Franz filled his mouth with the wind. He let the moment balloon inside of him. And then he flew, for the first time, holding on to his mother’s waist. They rose in what seemed an impossibly steep climb and forgot to breathe, then Pouty calmed down and leveled off and flew due west with the sun behind them. He wanted to fly up along the river, scare up a few herons and maybe some fish hawks for Eva to see. Over the course of the night, as he’d contemplated the ride for Eva, he’d decided it made a sort of hero out of him to give this dying woman the pleasure of a ride. He would explain it to Fidelis later as a duty of some sort — he hadn’t worked it out yet, but anyway he was quite sure that when Eva landed with pink cheeks and feeling all that much improved, Fidelis would be glad. In fact, Pouty went even further and imagined that the plane ride might result in a complete medical cure. Such things had happened, and such was his faith in the power of flight.

Perhaps Franz possessed a similar faith, because as he held his mother in the seat he imagined that the wind, whipping the skin flat across their faces, was scouring them smooth and pure as they buzzed down along the gleaming gray snake of the river. They gained altitude and the water became a string of mercury, the dusty green trees puffs beside, the roads black threads in the drought-sick fields. They bounced over the hot drifts of air, turned gently when the river shifted, circled an oxbow, and swooped down low over a farm where Mannheim knew the people. They saw all there was to see and flew until Pouty yelled he was getting low on fuel and must go back to the field. All the while she’d waited for the flight, Eva had the hope that during it, because of the thrill of it, her pain would vanish. That did not exactly happen — in some ways the pain grew more intense, but that was because the joy had, too, not just the physical joy of being up in the sky, she would later tell Delphine, but the mental joy.

AFTER THE TWO had come back to earth and Franz had carried her to bed, Eva had one of her final visions. She was propped up with pillows, drinking sips of water, shuddering with happiness and pain.

“Up in the sky, my brain was gulping new air,” she said to Delphine, “I am thinking so fast and furious. I see things.”

“What things?”

“Zum beispiel,” Eva said, “this Argus was only a spot. We are spots. Spots in the spot. No matter. We specks are flying on our own power. We are not blown up there by wind! What does this inform you?”