Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

ONCE FIDELIS TOOK two mammoth steps and dropped the sheriff on the ground, to roars of laughter, the men began singing again. Now they sang rougher tunes to go with the rising level of their drunkenness and hilarity. They grew louder, desperately raucous, defiant. Death was watching them, through Eva’s eyes, from the pantry window. “Jimmy Crack Corn.” “The Wabash Cannonball.” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” German drinking songs. A sad, lugubrious ballad about the longing of a sailor’s wife. Delphine went back into the kitchen to fetch the solution for Eva. She opened the door of the icebox. Looked once, then rummaged with a searching hand. The morphine, which Fidelis had labored with vicious self-disregard to pay for and which Delphine had guarded jealously, was gone. The vial, the powder, the other syringe. She couldn’t believe it. Searched through once again, and then again. It wasn’t there, and already Eva restless in the next room.

Delphine rushed out and beckoned Fidelis away from the men. He was wiping his face and neck down, the sweat still pouring off of him.

“Eva’s medicine is gone.”

“Gone?”

He was not as drunk as she’d imagined, or maybe the effort of lifting the sheriff had sobered him.

“Gone. Nowhere. I’ve looked. Someone stole it.”

“Heiligeskreuz…” He whirled around. That was just the beginning of what he was going to say, and Delphine left before he went any further. She went back to Eva and gave her the rest of the opium wine that was hard on her stomach. Spoon by spoon it went down, in a flash it came back up. “What a mess,” said Eva faintly. “I’m worse than a puking baby.” She tried to laugh but it came out a surprised, hushed groan. And then Eva was gasping and taking the shallow panting breaths she used to keep from shrieking.

“Bitte…” Her eyes rolled back and she arched off the bed. She hoarsely shrieked, gestured for a rolled-up washcloth to set between her teeth. It was coming. It was coming like a mighty storm in her. No one could stop it from breaking. It would take hours for Delphine to get another batch through Doctor Heech, wherever he was celebrating the Fourth, and then find the pharmacist. Delphine shouted out the garden door to Fidelis and yelled at Cyprian to take the pies from the oven. She sped out the other way. As she ran, a thought jogged into her mind. She decided to act on it. Instead of steering straight for Heech she gunned the car and stopped short at Tante’s little closet of a house two blocks from the Lutheran church, where she prayed every Sunday that the deplorable Catholic her brother married desist from idolatry and saint worship, and return the boys to Lutheran ways.

“Was wollen Sie?”

Tante opened the door. Her face had all the knowledge in it and Delphine knew she had guessed right. Delphine remembered her clucking over the dose of the drug with her prayer friends in whispered consult as they pressed up crumbs of lemon pound cake with their fingers.

“Wo ist die medicin?” Delphine asked, at first in a normal tone of voice, only slightly panicked. When Tante gave a cold twist of a smile, she screamed. “Where is Eva’s medicine?”

“Ich weiss nicht.”

Tante affected ragged High German around Delphine and made great pretense of having trouble understanding her. Delphine stepped in the door, shoved past her, and went straight to the refrigerator. On the way there, an outraged Tante trailing, she passed a table with a long slim object wrapped in a handkerchief. Delphine grabbed on instinct, unrolled it, and nearly dropped the missing hypodermic.

“Where is it?” Delphine’s voice was deadly. She turned, jabbing the needle at Tante, and then found herself as in a stage play advancing with an air of threat. It was the feeling of being in a dramatic production that suddenly gave her leave to speak lines she wished were written for the moment.

“Come on, you rough old bitch, you don’t fool me. So you’re a habitual fiend on the sly!”

Delphine didn’t really think that, of course, but she wanted to make Tante so indignant that she would tell her where the morphine was; her aim was just to get the stuff and get it back to Eva. The hollow suffering in Eva’s eyes had burned into her. Tante gaped and couldn’t rally her wits to answer. Delphine rushed frantically back to Tante’s little icebox, rooted through it. With a savage permission, she tossed all of Tante’s food out, even breaking the eggs, and then she turned and confronted Tante. Her brain was swimming with desperation.

“Please, you’ve got to tell me. Where is it?”

Now Tante gained control. She even spoke English.

“You will owe me for those eggs.”

“All right,” said Delphine. “Just tell me.”

But Tante, with the upper hand, enjoyed her moment.

“They are saying that she is addicted. This cannot be. The wife of my brother? It is a shame on us.”

Delphine saw that she had been extremely stupid in allowing herself to antagonize the only person who could provide morphine quickly, by merely handing it over. She’d blown her cover, and now she would never get Tante to cooperate. She regretted her self-indulgence, grew meek, and tried to hide her panic and pride. She thought that perhaps if she humiliated herself Tante would be placated and let down her guard.

“I beg you,” she let a groan out. “Come, you know the truth. Our Eva is suffering. You only see her when she’s comfortable, so of course how can you possibly know how the agony builds? Tante, have mercy on your brother’s wife. There is no shame in keeping her comfortable, Tante, the doctor said so.”

“I think,” said Tante, her black figure precise, “the doctor doesn’t really know Eva the way I do. He feels too sorry for her, and she is addicted, that is for sure, my good friend Mrs. Orlen Sorven can tell this.”

“Tante, for the love of God…” Delphine truly begged from her heart at that moment. She thought of falling on her knees. Tante’s cold little mouth twitched and her eyes glowed with rigorous triumph.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, I have thrown it down the sinkhole.”

Delphine turned and saw that on the edge of Tante’s porcelain sink a clean-washed vial and the bottle that held the morphine were drying in the glower of sun. And when she saw this, she lost all control of her power. She was strong, of course, phenomenally strong, and when she grabbed Tante firmly by the bodice and jerked her forward and said, into her face, “Okay, you come and nurse her through this. You’ll see,” Tante found herself unable to resist, her struggles feeble against Delphine’s surging force as the younger woman dragged her to the car and stuffed her inside, then roared off. Dumped her at the house.

“I don’t have time to go in there. You help her. You stay with her. You,” Delphine shrieked, roaring the engine. Then she was gone and Tante, with the smug grimness of a woman who has at last been allowed to take charge, entered the back door of the house.

It did take hours, and in those hours, Delphine prayed and cursed, implored the devil, made bargains, came to tears at the thwarted junctures where she was directed one place and ended up another. It proved impossible either to track down Heech, or to find Sal Birdy, the drugstore keeper. Fidelis, she knew, was out searching, too, but she didn’t come across him. She was returning empty-handed, driving back to the house, slamming a fist on the dashboard, weeping tearlessly, when before her she saw her father stumbling along the road.

His pants sagged, his loose shirt flopped off his hunched, skinny shoulders. As she drew near, an all-seeing rage boiled up in Delphine. She looked around to see if anyone else was watching, for she had the sudden and breathless urge to run him over. She put the gear in low and crept after her father, thinking how simple it could be. There he was, drunk again — he’d hardly even notice! Then her life would be that much easier. But as she drew alongside him, instead of mowing him down, she was surprised to meet his eyes and see that they were clear. She realized he wasn’t drunk, yet, or very drunk anyway. He was trying to run in the same direction she was driving, to the butcher shop. As he shuffled anxiously around to the side door, she saw he must have had the usual purpose and despised him with the thought, Out snaking himself some hooch at a time like this… Only the bottle in his hand was not the usual schnapps or home brew. Roy held the bottle carefully in both hands, thrust it toward her. It was a brown square-shouldered medicine bottle labeled sulphate of morphia. To get it, he had broken into the drugstore and sawed through the lock of the cabinet where Sal kept the drugs he had to secure by law.