Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

AS DELPHINE SLAMMED the brakes, jumped from the truck, and ran to the house with the bottle, she heard it from outside — the high-pitched whooing keen of advanced agony, a white-silver whine. She rushed in, skidded across a litter of canning smashed down off the shelves, and entered the kitchen. There was Tante, white and sick in shock, slumped useless in the corner of the kitchen, on the floor. Markus and Franz, weeping and holding on to their mother as she rummaged in the drawer for a knife. The whole of her being was concentrated on the necessity. Even the strong Franz couldn’t hold her back.

“Yes, yes,” said Delphine, entering the scene. She’d entered so many scenes of mayhem that now, as always, a cold flood of competence descended on her. With a swift step she stood before Eva. “My friend,” she plucked the knife away, saying, “not now. Soon enough. I’ve got the medicine. Don’t leave your boys like this.”

Then Eva, still swooning and grunting as the waves hit and twisted in her, allowed herself to be lowered to the floor.

“Get a blanket and a pillow,” said Delphine, kindly, to Franz. His tears dried at the relief of having something to do. “And you,” she said to Markus, “hold her hand while I make this up and keep saying to her, Mama, she’s making the medicine now. It will be soon. It will be soon .”

M ARKUS REMOVED from a hole in his pillow the tiny rolled notes, the dime flattened by a train into a shining disc, the small red crackling heart of store-bought paper, and the tin clicker painted like a cricket. All of these things were gifts from Ruthie Chavers. He had decided not to think of her as dead. She was somewhere else, safe and just out of reach. Duck feathers swirled out of the pillow with the objects, and he stuffed them back into the hole and then pinched the cloth shut. A piece of solid gold light slanted through the west-facing window onto his bed. He carefully unrolled her first note, which had been fixed around a pencil, and which he had kept in its original shape. The note said, Hi Markus, I got your letter, signed Ruthie . After that note, there was another, which told what she was doing after school and was signed Love , and a third note, which he felt was the most passionate, in which she said how much she liked the letter he had written her, and then there was the Valentine. He carefully smoothed out the shiny red paper and stared at the gleaming surface. It was coated with something that made little sparkles come out in the sun, and he’d never noticed that before. This was a new thing, and he tipped the heart side to side to get the full effect. He turned the paper over. There was that one word again, Love . After he had gone through everything again, clicking the clicker six times, as he always did, and rubbing the dime, he put Ruthie’s things back into his pillow and pinned the opening shut with a safety pin. He plumped the pillow up and put it at the head of his bed, then he left the room.

Sometimes at night, when he turned over a certain way, he clicked the toy and it awakened him. The noise always seemed very loud, but it never seemed to bother his hard-sleeping brothers. It always took him what seemed a long time, though it was at most half an hour, to fall asleep again after the clicker. While he waited for sleep to overcome him, he listened to the dog breathing lightly at the door to his room. Sometimes Schatzie whined a little in her dreams, or snuffed as though something intrigued her. Other times, his brothers talked, sometimes even sat up and argued with or commanded some invisible other. Once, Franz had pointed at Markus and said in a low, hysterical voice, you forgot to fix the fuel gauge . Because the noise from the clicker woke him, he came to know something that his brothers did not. He understood that his father sometimes stayed up half into the night and sang to his mother.

The first time he’d noticed the light down the hall and heard the low murmur, he’d been frightened to investigate. The next time, he realized that Schatzie was sound asleep, not even twitching, and he’d reasoned that if there were burglars or murderers about the dog would be at their throats. And anyway, she would protect him if he got up to see what the light was, and the sound. He felt compelled to find out now. Schatzie did exactly as he thought she would, rising as he passed and silently following him, her nails clicking softly on the green linoleum tiles. He shivered a little in his washed-thin striped pajamas and proceeded with infinite slowness. He didn’t want to be discovered, didn’t want to anger his father, whose voice he now recognized, and who fell silent just as Markus reached the door of the little pantry, where his mother slept.

Markus hardly breathed. Motioned for Schatzie to sit down behind him. Staying in the shadows, just out of the doorway’s shaft of quiet radiance, he peered into the room and was stilled by what he saw. There was his father, and he was kneeling at the side of his mother’s bed, holding on to her foot. Her foot was slim, waxen white, and almost glowed in the cool lamplight. Fidelis rested his forehead on the place where the foot curved into the ankle. His father’s back shook, and after a stunned moment Markus realized that his father was weeping in a soundless and terrible way, a way all the more frightening because it was sobless and tearless. He had never, ever, seen his father cry before. The most upsetting thing was that the movement of his father’s shoulders was so close to the movements of convulsive laughter. Then Markus thought that maybe it was laughter. Maybe his mother, who could be very funny, had just told his father a joke. But her face was quiet. He could hear her breathing, for her breaths were deep, rattling sighs. He watched a little longer, but then Fidelis put his head up and seemed to stare straight at him. A scared thrill ran through Markus. He froze. But his father was staring blindly at the shadowy wall and did not see him.

Slowly, his father straightened his back, still kneeling, and then he tenderly tucked the blanket around Eva’s feet. When he had done that, Markus wanted to go, frightened he’d be found out, but he still couldn’t move. His mother’s eyes had opened and she stared deeply at Fidelis, and then she smiled at him. It was a glorious smile, serene and full of joy, a softening thrill of her face that Markus would never forget. Fidelis sat in the chair wedged next to the narrow bed, took her hand. Without her asking, he began to sing to her the song she loved most, a song that Markus knew, the one about the water maidens on the river in Germany. His voice was warm and pure. Markus closed his eyes. His father’s voice brought the taste of smooth, brown caramel into his mind. With his father’s singing for cover, Markus made his way quickly to his own room. He crept into his bed, thrust his fingers through the rip in the pillow where the pin did not quite shut the gap. Then he fell asleep quickly, safe in the rise and fall of his father’s voice, with his fingers touching the paper heart.

* * *

DELPHINE BLEACHED the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. Their stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired them and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis’s thick white cotton shirts with starch, and rolled them up and laid them in the cooler. Every morning, she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the hopeless sweat, the shit and blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. The laundry itself was a full-time job, and Delphine had no idea how Eva had ever done it, plus so much else. But this laundry was a kind of good-bye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine was leaving, too. She’d already decided that to stay there in her old job, with no Eva, was impossible. It wasn’t just that people would talk, for they talked about her already. There was more, things she couldn’t say even to her private self. No, she couldn’t do it. Besides, there was another person chafing and eager to finally take over. Stepping in to care for the boys and her brother would be a perfect showcase for Tante’s pieties.