Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

By the time dusk began to throb in the windows again, he’d made more than half of what he needed. Now, as he counted his money, an idea occurred to him. Why not board the train with what he had, ride as far as he could get, and sell the sausages to the other passengers captured in the train cars? He went back to the ticket booth, encountered this time an impatient and elderly gentleman, and bought a ticket that would take him somewhere into the beginning of the Middle West. Then he went back to his post, sold one more sausage, closed his suitcase, and walked to the numbered platform with his ticket in his inside breast pocket. Among the boarding passengers wallowing in long good-byes or traveling with others, he entered the coach, settled himself, and waited patiently until the train began to rock, away from the hateful ocean, away from New York.

THE SAUSAGES TOOK HIM through Minneapolis and rolling prairie country into the sudden sweep of plains, vast sky, into North Dakota, where he sold the last link. He left the train and walked along the edge of a small town railroad platform. The town was a huddle of cheerful squat buildings, some framed with false half-story fronts on top of awnings and display windows, one or two of limestone and at least three of sturdy brick. Against the appalling flatness, the whole place looked defenseless and foolish, he thought, completely open to attack and, with its back against a river, nowhere to flee. It looked to him like a temporary place, almost a camp, that one great storm or war could level. He read the sign Argus aloud and memorized the sound. He turned in a circle to get his bearings, brushed off his father’s suit, assessed the fact that he’d arrived with thirty-five cents and a suitcase, now empty of sausages, that contained six knives, a sharpening steel, and graduated whetstones. There was horizon to the west and horizon to the south. There were streets of half-grown trees and solid-looking houses to the north. A new limestone bank building and a block of ornately bricked stores on the principal street stretched down to the east. The wind boomed around Fidelis with a vast indifference he found both unbearable and comforting.

He didn’t know that he would never leave. Fidelis simply thought that he would have to stay here, and work here, using the tools of his trade, until he made enough money to travel on to the destination he’d picked out for the severity of its bread. Now he wondered where the bread was made in this town, where the beer might come from, where the milk and the butter were kept cold, where the sausages were stuffed and the pork chops sliced and cleaved and the meat killed. Nothing gave him a clue. All directions looked the same. So he adjusted his father’s hat, shrugged down his pants cuffs, picked up the suitcase.

I N A SMALL TOWN on the headwaters of the Mississippi River and in a room rented solely for the purpose of making love, a man and woman, unclothed and in bed, paused in apprehension. For several months before this hour, they had been comfortably well acquainted, even friends. They had met doing town theater in Argus, North Dakota. Inevitably, they both became curious whether there was more and they set off together. Could they make a living with a traveling act? Were they in love? The man reached out and the woman, Delphine Watzka, raised her penciled eyebrows as though to judge. His hand swerved. “You have,” he said, “very strong stomach muscles.” He swept her torso lightly with his knuckles, then the tips of his fingers. With a thump, Delphine turned over onto her back, threw the covers off, and pounded herself on the stomach. “My arms are strong, my legs are strong. My stomach’s tough. Why not? I am not ashamed I grew up on a goddamn farm. I’m strong all over. Not that I know what to do with it…”

“I have an idea,” said the man.

She thought for a moment that the man, whose name was Cyprian Lazarre, and who was of a tremendous tensile strength, would put his idea into immediate action. She hoped that his purpose would overcome lack of nerve. That did not exactly happen. Enthusiasm for the plan in his brain gripped him, but instead of leaping passionately upon Delphine, he knelt, upright, on the sagging mattress and regarded her thoughtfully. Welts of soldered skin fanned across his shoulders. He was thirty-two years old, and his body was flint hard, perfectly muscled because of his gymnastic practice. She thought that he looked just like one of those statues dug out of the wrecked ancient city of Troy, even to the damage of war and time.

Along with a cousin and a buddy, Cyprian had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, survived his training and perhaps the most dangerous part of the war, exposure to Spanish flu, to find himself plunging ahead in the fourth wave at Belleau Wood, where he was burned in the wheat. During that last year of the Great War, chlorine gas blinded him, the split barrel of a machine gun nearly took his hand off, dysentery unmanned him, his sense of humor failed, and he very much regretted his zeal. He came home before it even occurred to him that, as an Ojibwe, he was not yet a U.S. citizen. During his slow recuperation, he couldn’t vote.

With a slight bounce, he went from his knees to standing and then hopped off the bed. There was a chair in the tiny room. Eyes flashing with performance fire, he gripped the bowed back, twisted the balls of his feet for purchase on the wooden boards, and then kicked up into a handstand. The chair wobbled just a bit, then steadied. “Bravo!” he breathed to himself. With his back to her, head down, sculptured buttocks and pointed toes, he was an ideal picture of manliness. Delphine was glad she couldn’t see around to the front of him. She was also hoping that no one outside in the street opposite this rooming house happened to glance up into the curtainless second-floor window, when she heard a scream from outside. Cyprian ignored it.

“This will be the finale,” he said, “I’ll be ten feet in the air, and you’ll be holding me up here with your stomach muscles!”

Another scream outside was followed by a shudder of voices in the street below.

“Oh, will I?”

Delphine’s voice was muffled by the neck of her blouse. One of Delphine’s talents was to dress very quickly. She had learned it changing costumes in the repertory theater, where they’d all played two or three roles at once. She was dressed, even to her stockings and shoes, and the covers were pulled up on the bed before Cyprian even grasped what was happening in the street below. He was, in fact, still talking and planning as he practiced the handstand, when she slipped out the door and hurried down the stairs. She stopped at the very bottom, cooled her thoughts. With a composed air she stepped out the door and went straight up to the landlady, who was already purple.

“Mrs. Watzka!”

“I know,” Delphine sighed, her face a mask of resigned calm. “Back in the war, you know, he was gassed .” She tapped her temple as the landlady’s mouth made an O. Delphine then walked straight into the cluster of people on the street. “Please! Please! Don’t you have any respect for a man who fought the Hun?” She dispersed people with sharp waves and claps, the way she used to scare her chickens. The people staring upward suddenly were staring downward, pretending to examine their purchases. One of the ladies, cheeks delicately wrinkled, her eyes very round and her mouth a little beak of flesh, bent close to Delphine’s ear. “You had really best persuade him to rest, dear! He is in a state of male indiscretion! ”

That Delphine did not turn to look up at the window proved her both quick thinking and self-disciplined, although she did decide to hurry back into the room. “Oh dear,” she said in the tone of a resigned wife, “and to think, standing on his hands is the only way he can maintain his readiness. And we’ve managed to have two darling children!”