Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“Spit in your eye.”

Her curse wasn’t much, it didn’t register the depth of her feeling, but at least she was not a hypocrite. Why should she even pretend to pray? That was Tante’s field — she’d mustered a host of pious Lutheran ladies and they come around every few afternoons to try to do their business on a Catholic. When Eva became too weak to chase them off, Delphine tried, but as her position was inferior to Tante’s own she had great trouble at it and used other strategies, whatever she could think of, to keep them from crowding around the bed like a flock of turkey vultures and pressing together their bony claws in a gloating, sucking prayer circle. Even now, Delphine thought, she’d bake a sugar cake while Eva was sleeping, in case the mealy-mouths showed up. Feeding them was actually her best strategy, for they filed out quickly when they knew there was grub in the kitchen for the taking. Tante, with crumbs on her mouth, led them away after they’d gorged on Eva’s pain and her signature linzertorte, which she’d now given Delphine instructions to prepare, one small step at a time.

Outside, it was a perfect day, sunny and with a slight, cool breeze. Sure to bring Tante out, though Delphine hoped her goody-goody cohort would be dishing out potato salad and slicing watermelon at some civic function. The men’s voices rose and fell, rumbling with laughter at the big tales, stern with argument at the outrages committed by the government, and sometimes they even fell silent, or stuporous, and gazed into the tangled foliage of Eva’s garden blank with speculation. As always, Fidelis was the center of these gatherings, prodding slightly bolder stories out of the men or challenging them to feats of strength.

In the kitchen, sun calm in the window, Delphine cut cold butter into flour for a pastry. She had decided to make pies for the Fourth of July supper, which the men would need to cut the booze. Potatoes were boiling now. She had a crock of beans laced with hot mustard, brown sugar and black-strap molasses. There were of course more sausages. Delphine added a pinch of salt, rolled her dough in oiled muslin, and set it in the icebox. Then she started on the fruit, slicing thin moons of yellow-green rhubarb, peeling off the toughest bits of rosy skin. It’s nearly time, she thought, nearly time. She was thinking of Eva’s pain. Her own sense of time passing had to do with the length of a dose of opium wine, a cup of it flavored with cloves and cinnamon, or a stronger dose of morphine that Doctor Heech had taught her to administer, though not too much, lest by the end, he said, even the morphine lose its effect.

He’d taught her to make up Magendie’s solution fresh to eliminate the development of any fungus, and now, hearing Eva stir, Delphine straightaway set aside her pie makings. She put some water on to boil, to sterilize the hypodermic needle. The night before she had prepared a vial and set it in the icebox, the one-to-thirty solution, which Heech had told her she was better than any nurse at giving to Eva. Delphine was proud of this. The more so because she hated needles, abhorred them, grew sickly hollow when she filled the syringe and felt the penetration of her own flesh when she gave the dose to Eva. Without being asked, she knew when Eva needed the dose. She did not go by the time elapsed, but by the lucid shock of agony in Eva’s stare. Her mouth was half open, her brows clenched. She would need the relief very soon, as soon as the water boiled. Delphine thought to divert her friend by massaging her sore hands.

“Ah,” Eva groaned lightly as Delphine worked the dips between her knuckles. Eva’s forehead smoothed, her translucent eyelids closed over, she began to breathe more peacefully and said, faintly, “How are the damn fools?”

Delphine glanced out the window and observed that they were in an uproar. Sheriff Hock was holding forth and Fidelis was standing, gesturing, laughing at the big man’s belly. “We are potched!” she heard him roar in good humor. Then they were all comparing their bellies. Cyprian’s was the flattest one. Delphine knew that his stomach, as her own, was divided into hard and even ridges of muscle that he, anyway, could flex like a keyboard. In the lengthening afternoon light, Cyprian’s face was slightly agape with the unaccustomed drink and the fellowship of other men, too, for he was used to being isolated on the farm with Roy or out on the road. There was a sheet pinned on the clothesline and the bellies were pale falls of flesh in its shade.

“They’re showing off their big guts to each other,” said Delphine.

“At least not the thing below,” croaked Eva.

“Oh, for shame!” Delphine laughed. “No, they kept their peckers in. But something’s going on. Here, I’m going to prop you up. They’re better than burlesque.”

She took down extra pillows and quilts from the shelves, shoved the bed up to the window, and propped Eva where she would see the doings in the yard. She went back, put one syringe in the water, finished up the pies and put them in the oven, then brought a little tepid water in a cup for Eva to drink. She did drink, which was good, and her color was up. Her eyes brighter.

“Come on,” Eva said, “sit down here.” Her hand flopped on the bed. “I think they are up to nothing good!”

Now it looked as if they were making and taking bets. Bills were waved, laughingly. They weren’t stumbling drunk, but loud drunk. Roaring with jokes. The boys appeared, clambering up the rails of the stock pens to take in the men’s action.

“Eva, do you see?” Delphine pointed to them. Nodding, Eva made a face. What examples! These men! All of a sudden, with a clatter, the men cleared the glasses and bottles, the crackers and the sticks of sausage, the bits of Cheddar and the plates, off the table. And when the table was clear, to a great burst of hilarity, Sheriff Hock lay down upon it. He lay on his back. The table didn’t reach down his whole length, so he was a boatlike hulk, balanced there in dry dock, his booted feet absurdly sticking straight up and his head extended off the other side. His stomach made a mound and now on the other side of the table, directly before Eva’s window, Fidelis stood. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons of his white shirt and rolled his sleeves up over his thick forearms. His suspenders were unstrapped and his grin was huge, tossing back a jeer.

Suddenly, Fidelis bent over Sheriff Hock in a weight lifter’s crouch and threw his arms fiercely straight out to either side with a showman’s flair. Delicately, firmly, he grasped in his jaws a loop that the women now saw was specially created for this purpose in the thick belt of Sheriff Hock.

There was a moment in which everything went still. Nothing happened. A huge thing happened. Fidelis gathered his power. It was as if the ground itself flowed up through Fidelis and flexed. His face and neck went thick with a brute, red darkness. His jaws flared bone white on the belt loop, his arms tightened in the air, his neck and shoulders swelled impossibly, and he lifted Sheriff Hock off the table. By the belt loop in his teeth, just a fraction of an inch, he moved the town’s Falstaff. Then, the women saw it, Fidelis paused. His whole being surged with a blind, suffusing ease. He jerked the sheriff higher, balancing now, half out of the crouch.

In that moment of tremendous effort, Delphine saw the true face of the butcher — the animal face, the ears flaming with heat, the neck cords popping, and finally the deranged eye straining out of its socket, rolled up to the window, to see if Eva was watching. Delphine felt a thud of awful sympathy. He was doing this for Eva. He was trying to distract her, and from that, Delphine understood Fidelis loved her with a helpless and fierce canine devotion that made him do things that seemed foolish. Lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth. A stupid thing. Showing clearly that all his strength was nothing. Against her sickness, he was weak as a child.