Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

She grabbed Delphine’s arm, her hand still had a strong grip. Delphine shook her head. “What?”

“There is plan, eine grosse Idee, bigger than the whole damn rules. And I always known it. Bigger than the candles in church. Bigger than confessionals, bigger than the Sacred Host.” She crossed herself. “I do not know what it is. But big. Much more big.”

Then she had Delphine call all of her sons into the room, and she spoke to them, too, and she told them that she had seen something very reassuring and that it didn’t have to do with church, even the One True Church. It didn’t have to do with taking communion or getting confirmed by the bishop.

“It don’t matter if you do these things now,” she said impatiently. “If you must need them, do them. But the plan is greater I am telling you. The plan knows the huge thing, and it accounts for the little fingernail.” Eva raised her pinkie in the air and held it out between them. Her eyes were just a bit glazed, and glittering with dangerous emerald lights. “If I die, don’t take this too hard,” she counseled them, “death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.”

Her cheeks now took on just that suffusing rose color that Pouty had imagined his ride would inspire. She took a big gulp of water, coughed a little, and then abruptly her eyes shut. Franz reached forward after a moment, terrified and curious, and touched her face. “She’s sleeping,” said Franz, his fingers touching her lips. He gently shoved his younger brothers out. If she had died in that moment, it would have been a perfect piece of drama, thought Delphine from the doorway. Maybe Eva even wanted to, but maybe she stopped herself, knowing that to die immediately after that plane ride would get Franz in trouble.

“THE BOYS ARE PLAYING in the orchard. The men are already half lit,” Delphine reported to Eva, who smiled faintly and struggled onto her elbows. Delphine helped her sit up and look out the window. She fell back, exhausted, nodding at the sight. The two women could hear the men singing, working their way through a set of patriotic songs, one after the next. Sheriff Hock was particularly good on the high parts of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His voice splintered eerily through the bright, heated air, giving Delphine chills.

“Men are so much fools,” Eva whispered. “They think they are so smart hiding the Everclear in the gooseberry bush.”

Even though the last few days had been nightmarish, Eva still refused to die in a morbid way and even preferred to suffer in a fashion that was strangely hilarious. She laughed freakishly at pain sometimes and made fun of her condition, more so now when the end was close. Delphine would later believe that the purchase of the chinchillas was a sign of that fast downhill turn. The way Eva got up on one of her last good days, sneaking the delivery truck out to the farm of a strange old biddy, and returning with the creatures. Now, beyond the men, who were drinking underneath the clothesline, the thick-furred things panted, stinking gently in their flimsy network of cages.

Delphine sat beside her friend in the little room off the kitchen, a room filled with jars of canning. That was where Eva had asked Fidelis to set up her bed. A good-size window looked out of that room into the backyard, which was her reason for wanting to die in that tiny place. From there, she could watch the boys complete her chinchilla-moneymaking scheme. They had constructed the cages out of wire netting salvaged from other people’s failed coops, and pounded together nesting boxes out of scrap lumber. It was a diversion, Delphine thought now, with sudden understanding. Watching her friend drift into a short nap, she suddenly realized that the odd, rabbity creatures were a clever way to take the boys’ attention off their dying mother.

They’d closed the shop at noon for July 4. Now everyone in town was celebrating. Fidelis had the old chairs and table out there, and on the table he had laid out beer sausage and summer sausage, a watermelon, and bowls of crackers. Beer bottles sweat in a tub of ice underneath the tomato plants, beer to wash down the high-proof alcohol that Eva already knew they were hiding. It was funny, watching them sneak their arms into the gooseberry fronds and snake out the bottle. With a furtive look at the house, they tipped it to their lips. Even Fidelis, so powerful and purposed, acted like a guilty boy.

Delphine watched Cyprian stroll through the rickety back gate. Laughing, he set his own offering beside the sausages. Aged whiskey, probably from a recent border trip. Cyprian was an occasional visitor ever since he’d run the store that first week, when Fidelis and Delphine were down at the Mayo consulting with the doctors. He did all right with the store and nothing disappeared, so Fidelis wanted to hire him, but Cyprian said the meat business wasn’t for him. He’d had enough blood and guts in the war. Anyway, he was much better at running liquor and it paid better, he told Delphine, who didn’t like it but what was she to do since the car was half his and he was after all a grown man?

He had joined the singing club, though his voice was average. A slightly singed baritone. And he had set himself up to look like a traveling salesman. He even had samples of his supposed wares — hairbrushes, floor brushes, dog fur brushes, horse brushes, long broom brushes, potato brushes — stashed in his car to foil the inspectors at the border and answer the questions of neighbors. Sometimes they bought the brushes, too. Mainly, he was paid by criminals. Dangerous men out of Minneapolis. Delphine not only didn’t like that he took the risk, but hated that he dealt in the despised substance. Still, as he didn’t drink it much himself for fear of losing his balancing skills, which he still practiced between runs, she let it go. Besides, she was caught up in helping Eva die.

There was no saving her, they were well beyond that now. The first treatment, after her surgery, consisted of inserting into her uterus hollow metal bombs, cast of German silver, containing radium. Over the weeks Eva spent in the hospital the tubes were taken out, refilled, and put back several times. Once she was sent home, she smelled like a blackened pot roast.

“I smell burned,” she said, “like bad cooking. Get some lilac at the drugstore.” And Delphine had bought a great purple bottle of flower water to wash her with, but it hadn’t helped much. For days, she’d passed charcoal and blood, and the roasted smell lingered. Also, the treatment hadn’t worked. The cancer spread. Doctor Heech then gave her monthly treatments of radium via long twenty-four-carat gold needles, tipped with iridium, that he pushed into the new tumor with a forceps so as not to burn his fingers. She took those treatments in his office on Sundays, strapped to a table, dosed with ether for the insertion, then after she woke, a hypodermic of morphine. Doctor Heech became so angry at himself when he gave her the treatments, which he feared were useless, that he left the room cursing under his breath. Delphine stayed to sit with her, for the needles had to stay in place for six hours. Threaded with black waxed string, they made a spoked wheel poking into her stomach.

“I’m a damn pincushion now,” Eva said once, rousing slightly. Then she dropped back into her restless dream. Delphine read, or dozed and knitted, for she couldn’t always read. It was the old thing happening, as with the drunks and her childhood neighbors. Again she witnessed great suffering she could not stop. This time her body tried to share the agony: shooting pains in her own stomach as the needles went in, even a sympathetic morphine sweat. A bleak heaviness that accompanied Eva’s passages of charcoaled flesh. Dull aches that overcame her sometimes and made her want to lie down forever and be done with things. But she kept on going, never let up, never showed her sorrowing pains. As she approached the house now, each day, she said the prayer to God she used as the most appropriate to the situation.