Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Delphine lighted the lamp and then caught Eva’s fist and held it. Delphine’s head fell forward and her eyes closed in a swimming heaviness. She jerked awake, took a round, amber bottle of almond oil from a little shelf beside the bed. She poured a small amount into her left palm. Sleepily, she rubbed the oil into Eva’s skin until the fist slowly began to relax.

“Franz, he knows nothing about it,” gasped Eva suddenly. “His father was not Fidelis. His father’s name was Johannes Grunberg, a Jew. Quite a student, and so handsome, so tall and fair. In the war, dead.” Her lips worked. At last, she gathered another breath and went on. “Fidelis knows, but he never spoke of it.”

Delphine poured out another bit of oil and worked it into the slack, dry skin of Eva’s forearm. This was the fourth time Eva had labored to tell her this. Usually, from this revelation she went on to give Delphine directions on when to marry Fidelis and how to care for the boys. But this time, she said something different, something she’d never said before. She said it with a clear simplicity.

“I want you, only you, to handle my body. And please write to my Mutti. Tell her that you took care of me. Tell her this: I loved you.”

Delphine looked into Eva’s eyes expecting to become hypnotized, but this time something gave way, she could feel it. Their thoughts had pushed through an invisible barrier, a magnetic field, and there was suddenly a lightness that lifted them giddily into a storm of calm. Later, Delphine was to think that she should have called Fidelis or the boys. But at the time it did not occur to her. Delphine didn’t look away from Eva’s face, even for a moment, because she knew that Eva was afraid. She did not let go of Eva’s hand, because she knew that Eva wanted her to hold her hand, just as a child would when it must enter a new and foreign place. Delphine did not move to adjust her friend when the sticks in her chest rattled again, even louder, three times. She did not pound Eva’s chest when the breathing stopped. Eva was still looking into Delphine’s eyes, and so, during the time when she might have taken another breath, Delphine saw the light go out behind that silver streak, like a crack behind the door.

“STRUB’S FUNERARY, how may I be of service?”

Benta’s voice was sleepy, but Delphine knew that they had kept track of the progress of Eva’s disease and had been waiting for a call.

“I should have got hold of Clarisse, but I know if I did I’d break down,” said Delphine.

“You think it’s hard, at first, that she’s your friend,” said Benta. Her voice now stronger, down-to-earth. “You’ll find Clarisse can be a great comfort to you. Can we come over together?”

“Yes,” said Delphine, and then she sat in Eva’s kitchen listening to the boys and Fidelis, together in the other room, the murmur of their sorrow. One comforted the other, gained control, and another broke down. Delphine needed to hear them, for she felt very much alone. She couldn’t be with them, it wouldn’t be proper for her to enter that room now. She had washed Eva with her lilac soap, pinned a towel between her legs, smoothed her face into a calmer expression and closed her eyes before she called Fidelis. She thought that perhaps she should accompany the body back to Strub’s, too, as Eva had made that final request. But now everything seemed too much for her, out of her control, and somehow strange, as though with Eva gone it was no longer right for her to be there. It seemed a long time before the Strubs arrived, pulling up to the back door in their long, pearl gray hearse. Delphine answered at their knock and Clarisse entered, took hold of her with an embrace that radiated a practical kindness. The Strubs brought her effortlessly into the room where Fidelis and his sons sat with Eva. When the others entered, Fidelis bent down and picked up Eva in his arms. He looked so bewildered, then, holding his wife in the air with no place to take her, that no one could move until Aurelius put his hand on his shoulder.

“Put her down, Fidelis, we’ll take good care of her.”

Gently, Fidelis lowered Eva to the mattress. With a wild, rough cry, Markus broke away and stumbled to his mother’s side. He bent over and with a passionate gesture he kissed his mother’s ankle, just as his father had. He cradled her foot, closed his eyes, and touched his forehead to the place he had kissed. Franz stepped behind him, embarrassed, and was about to pull Markus away when Delphine stopped him. Just as she touched Franz, a sound emerged. It was a roar of grief, a loud, keening bellow, and it filled the room. It seemed to come from all of them, or no single one of them, or from the walls of the room itself. Delphine never was to know. The sound released everyone, as though from a spell, and they stepped away from Eva and left her.

NOW ROY WATZKA passed into an unprecedented period of sobriety. Dry days passed into weeks. He was able to accomplish this because of the starkness of Eva’s death. And then, too, what had happened in the cellar came back to haunt him. At last something had unnerved him. In his periodic bouts of delirium, the dead had appeared. The Chavers came for him, snapping with beetles and sprouting grave moss. Their hands reached with insane stroking motions, dragging him to their cozy wormhole in the earth. This vision had plagued him since the discovery of the Chavers, and finally, when Eva died, the experience became unbearable. He found within his thoughts, for the first time, a horror to which even the terrors of withdrawal were preferable.

For once, too, he didn’t farm out his wasted muscles to other people, but concentrated on his own house. Cyprian was astonished to return from a run up north to find not a Roy tooted happily down by the river, but an old, faded, quiet Roy calmly brushing the sides of the house with sunny yellow paint. The house was cheerful, the blue of the doors and windows restored. He even sanded down and varnished the floors. Filled the cellar in more thoroughly, and blacked the stove. Delphine had her hands full with the Waldvogel boys just after Eva’s death, and it came as a shock to her that Roy was capable of taking care of her in any way. In the mornings sometimes, he handily made breakfast. She would emerge from the room she shared with Cyprian, and there it would be, close to a miracle as home life had ever come. A bowl of oatmeal steaming hot, butter melting in a pool with a lump or two of dark brown sugar. Cream. Sometimes eggs or toast he made by holding the bread on a fork and passing it evenly before the gas — for with her money Delphine had bought a stove on timed payments. Cyprian got a delivery set up for a small icebox. Breakfast seemed a surprise compensation for all they had been through. The food laid out on a shined-up table, jelly quivering in her mother’s tiny cut-glass bowl Delphine thought for sure had long since been pawned or broken. Breakfast had helped her get through the storm of Eva’s dying and now through its aftermath. She expected Roy to relapse once she finally quit the shop, but instead his good behavior continued. He turned on the charm that he’d brought to Eva’s sickroom. He sang songs he learned in the hobo jungle by the river. “Blue Tail Fly.” “Joe Hill.” “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Soon there were actually chickens in the coop out back, big orange Rhode Islanders, and the back porch steps were nailed onto the back porch, not scattered all over the yard.

“The dead have more power than we know,” said Delphine to Cyprian, sitting on those very back steps one evening in the last of summer.

Cyprian shook his head. Did her statement refer to Eva or to the change affected in Roy by his waking dreams? Whatever it was, Cyprian was glad of the change as well and had even considered quitting his own shady line of work in order to pursue something on the up and up. Roy was setting weasel traps around the outside fence of the chicken run. The previous day, he’d tacked a light wire drapery on the top of the fence to foil the Cooper’s hawks. Roy was not the only one who’d improved the place, either. In the past two weeks, Delphine had turned the inside of the house into a golden haven. She set an eggshell pale yellow on all of the walls, and stuck the old furniture back together with horse-hoof glue, twine, and C-clamps. She’d restuffed a couple of chairs and accepted a fancy, tasseled lamp from Step-and-a-Half, who gave it to her in a seeming fit of bewilderment after Eva’s death. In their room she’d oiled the lacquer dresser and they bought a brand-new mattress, not that they took advantage of its spring. She told herself that life had been too sad for anything but comfort, but that was not true. There would have been plenty of comfort if Cyprian had thrown himself to her in thick desire. But they usually fell asleep touching hands. That was good enough. He held her like a sister and often, long into the night, they talked.