Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

SO MARKUS STAYED and helped Roy mow the yard and grub young trees and pull wild morning glories from a patch they wanted clean for a pasture. Roy was now ambitious to have a cow. Little by little, as Markus joined the checker games or made a quick study of Roy’s cribbage strategies, things came out. First, Markus would start to worry about the chinchillas. He’d wonder if Franz was changing their water or just adding to the old stuff in the dish, as Eva had directed them not to do. Then he’d fear the twins would torture the creatures by shoving sticks into the cages and chasing them here and there, which would damage their coats. After a while he’d shake his head and worry that Tante didn’t know the first thing about mixing their food. She couldn’t make food at all.

“What did you eat?” asked Delphine casually, hiding the speculative glee in her voice.

“She could make crackers,” said Markus.

“Oh, right from the barrel?”

He nodded solemnly, eyes sparking.

“Could she make cheese, too?”

“Right from the wax!” he crowed. “She mostly cleans.” He sobered down. “She cleans a lot, and then she yells, and then she cleans up some more. We got hungry so we ate a lot of green apples.”

“Did Emil and Erich get the shits?”

“Oh, did they!”

“So then she had to do more laundry.”

“I made her do more laundry, too.”

Delphine just nodded. She knew exactly what had been going on, ever since Markus had insisted on sleeping on the floor with just a blanket over him. And then, every morning, he got up before they did and she’d see the rag he’d used to clean up under himself drying on the line, already rinsed in the river, and his shorts put back on rinsed, too, still clammy and cleanly washed. There had been none of this before the death of Eva, so Delphine knew the cause, and she knew the cause for the beatings, and more than ever she had the fantasy of wringing Tante’s neck just like a chicken’s, or sending her flying with a kick. But what could she do except keep Markus here? And if the sheriff heard, there might be charges. But again, what could she do?

“By the way,” she said, “lay low if the sheriff drives up. Better yet, if you’re out in the field fade into the brush, then sneak down to the river. And meantime, if it will make you feel better,” she brushed his strawberry blond forelock of hair, the second time she’d ever touched him, “I’ll go check up on your live fur coat.”

She didn’t want him to forget they were supposed to kill the things. He was ahead of her, though. He brightened.

“There’s going to be about six babies, and the does need bone powder mixed in their food. I figure we have over three hundred dollars worth when we sell them this fall. Then we’ll keep the babies in the heated shed over winter, and make two thousand next year!”

“Who’s buying these things?” said Delphine.

“There’s a dealer. He’s a fur maker.”

“Well,” joked Delphine absently, “now I’ve heard of everything.”

But of course she hadn’t, and of course the creatures had no water when she got there, so she had to feed one or two with eye droppers to revive them. And then Tante wondered why she was not minding her own business.

“They were Eva’s rabbits,” said Tante, “not yours.”

“They’re not rabbits,” said Delphine. “They’re rodents, and where is Franz?”

“Where he always is these days,” said Tante. “With the airplanes.”

Ever since Tante started cooking for them, Franz had decided to eat with the aviators at the new airfield. Once he was done working in the shop, he now spent all of his time there, glued to his local heroes. He’d gone even more airplane crazy and he adored Lindbergh so much that he tried to dress like him. He followed every move “Slim” made and held forth on every last detail about the Spirit of St. Louis. The gas storage tanks’ placements in the nose, wing, rear. The wicker pilot’s chair. The touchy steering equipment that had helped keep Lindbergh wakeful. One of his scrapbooks was now devoted to Lindbergh alone, and it was filled with pasted clippings and pictures. Franz’s fanaticism was of a practical nature as well. He’d do anything to put an airplane together. He tinkered with the engines the way he’d worked on the stripped hulk of an old Model T out back by the stock pens.

“You’ve got to have the little boys mix the food up like this,” said Delphine to Tante, who puffed back into the house and sent Emil and Erich out to learn the routine. They appeared, strong as little bull calves in their short pants and ripped shirts, barefooted for the last weeks before school. Delphine smoothed their ragged hair into wings and crouched to their level.

“You can make some money from these animals,” she told them.

The boys nodded, bored with the idea.

“What are you going to do with your money?” Delphine asked.

They gave each other quizzical and amused looks, as though she had said something secretly hilarious.

“It could be a hundred dollars each, Markus thinks, maybe more. How much do your soldiers cost, each?”

This they knew, to the penny, and they knew how much each piece of equipment for their battlefields would cost, too, if they could get them, each horse and each cannon. Every rank of every officer was a different price, and these they recited to Delphine. Their armies were fighting wars of the last century. The officers they’d bought still reared heroically on caparisoned horses, instead of creeping belly down through mud. By the time Delphine finally made them understand that the chinchillas equaled money equaled soldiers, or lemon drops, licorice whips, and ice cream downtown at Birdy’s Drugstore, and that they would have shares in the profits equally with Markus provided they did not let Tante take over the cleaning and the feeding of these creatures, they were serious, determined, alight with calculating greed.

IN THE MIDDLE of the night Delphine shook Cyprian awake because the wild dogs were howling again. A pack of strays and leftovers, skimmed out of the town’s rich backyards, poor shacks, and middling main street shops, had banded together. Delphine had often seen them around the far edges of the butcher’s yard. Eva had pointed them out, gray shadows of every dog shape, some big and rangy and others small as whippets, a classless and breedless roaming menace led by that rogue stud Hottentot. They came around the butcher shop often, and had furtively lived off the occasional ball of guts that Fidelis flung out for them, or the forgotten mess of chicken heads nobody bothered to clean up in the tall weeds. They had never howled around the butcher’s shop. Because there was good pickings, they’d never give away their presence.

Out of town, on wild nights they rode the moon, howling themselves back to the shapes of wolves. Their song was gurgling and eerie, but without the coherence of urgent joy and sensible thought she’d heard in the voices of the real wolves, up north, where she and Cyprian had listened while camped outside a small two-bit town with no money, right before a show. She shook him awake anyway because the sound made her lonesome, and a little romantic, as it referred to their past in which there had been that single deep sexual interlude. Now he woke up, as he always did, completely alert and ready to talk if she wanted, or eat, or play cards. This was one of the nice and comfortable things about Cyprian. He liked waking up and was always obliging even in the first minutes, though not obliging in every way. Still, because she needed him and the dogs were out, howling, she said, her voice ragged, “Make love to me.”

Cyprian took his breath in sharply. He’d worried about this for a long time, wondering when she would get tired of him lying like the butcher’s dog, that’s what he’d heard it called, to sleep alongside your woman without taking advantage of her tenderness, her sex. Just the way the butcher’s dog never touches what it loves, but parks itself with trained indifference next to a juicy haunch. Knowing this time would come, he’d made his mind up to do something that he felt an ethical repugnance for — picture men. He’d even lined up the ones he’d use most effectively. Now, he mustered his collection. He summoned them. He got the picture of a pulsing throat, a chest, the whole works, and he kept the picture going, shifting, even though a breast got in the way, or her sighing voice, or whatever else. He did the act with desperation and no skill and he did it too fast, just to make sure he finished it, but then afterward he tried his best to make it up to her, to not fall asleep, but keep his hands moving, his mouth moving, until she arched under him and cried out and was dead silent.