Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“She’s not coming back,” Delphine said, making certain.

Fidelis slightly inclined his head, his eyes dull blue, a little bloodshot.

“Look here, Fidelis,” she said, hesitant, for indeed she didn’t know that she wanted to return, “I won’t do much better than your sister.”

Fidelis looked as though he very much doubted that was true. Delphine turned away from him, considered. Her world right now was orderly and peaceful, the first time in her life it had ever been so. As a telephone operator she would be able to make connections, tell time, give numbers, and come home at the same time every night. More peace and routine. Probably more money, too. But then she thought of the boys, how Eva had taught her to handle things, and how she could make the household run smoothly while managing the store. Eva had showed her the tricks, the shortcuts, the patience with details, all of the skills she had gathered through painstaking trials and mistakes. Eva had given her a whole life’s worth of knowledge, had trained her, and she’d accepted, because she loved her — very simply, she had loved Eva. She remembered very well all of the times Eva had instructed her about Fidelis and the boys. Near the end, she had been wildly determined that Delphine would take her place. It had helped her to concentrate on lists and habits and little eccentricities of diet for Delphine to note. What had Eva told Fidelis? What had he promised? What did he think? Delphine opened her mouth to ask, but the words stuck.

So she just said, “All right, but here’s how it goes. I’ll be there eight each morning. I’ll work the busy hours and make lunch, then dinner. I’ll stay through six each night.” She made the terms. She set the rules in a firm, indifferent voice. Waited for his nod of agreement and when she got it, like a man would, she stuck out her hand to shake.

A FAMILY IN GRIEF has accidents and stumbles a lot. There are scabbed toes and the terror of eyes nearly put out. Falls off the roof, falls from bicycles, falls slipping in the sawdust of the meat-market floor. And too, the sorrow makes a path for every illness. Mysterious high fevers. Any local pox. Even the sturdy can catch diphtheria, pertussis, not to mention gross stomach flu and run-of-the-mill runs, plagues of snot or crusted eyes and infected ears, lice. Once it grew cold, it seemed that every possible small malady came the way of the boys and Delphine was hard-pressed to keep the hours she’d insisted on with Fidelis. Sometimes she just had to nurse them through a night. Sometimes she had to sleep at the foot of their beds. She became an expert at rendering a chicken into hot soup. She made a routine of daily checks behind their ears for eggs and nits. And even when they all were healthy and breathing hard in boys’ dead sleep, she stood in the doorway and worried. They had done this to her. Activated some primitive switch in her brain. She couldn’t turn it off. Sometimes before she left, with superstitious intensity, she counted their breaths and made sure they were breathing regularly. She counted exactly ten breaths each, then forced herself to turn and leave at that exact number, not one more or less.

Worry made more worry, made her restless. Sometimes at night she woke, beside Cyprian, and found that against her will her brain restored old scenes of shame or betrayal by girlfriends, boyfriends, long in the past. Or calamities her father’s drinking brought on the house. She relived them. Often, she woke Cyprian and made him talk to her, but she never told him that she’d waited with curiosity and daring all the next month after they’d made love, hoping and not hoping, imagining a child. And he never told her that he’d done the same, for with Markus around he couldn’t help thinking of it, and he’d always thought that he’d have children. He pictured himself with a son, a daughter, teaching them to add numbers, teaching them to balance, telling them where he was from, and all he knew. So when he talked to Delphine in the night, he thought he might ask whether she was pregnant, but did not, because it would raise the issue of sex, and he didn’t want the emotional complexity of that. He had to prepare himself, it required an effort. It was so much simpler to be neutral, and loving, and to stroke her face and hold her hand, to put her back to sleep with stories about his brothers and the stubborn old horse they shared. It was easier to be her brother, but he wanted children all the same, and he wanted to stay with Delphine. As the months passed, he knew she was not pregnant with his child, and so one night, in the moonless dark, staring up into a blackness that seemed a shaft into outer space, he asked her to marry him, for real, with a solid gold wedding band.

The darkness was so dense that night it swirled green around them, and for a long time she didn’t answer. But she wasn’t thinking it over, she was thinking how to tell him no. There was only one way.

“No.”

The long vowel floated over them.

* * *

THERE WERE GOOD THINGS. Delphine ran the shop with an almost joyous dispatch. She hadn’t known she’d like the work so much now that she was partly in charge. She didn’t mind the hard grind of cleaning, and she had the boys to sweep up and spread new sawdust, to scrub down the display cases and the floors, and Franz to wait trade when things were busy, after school. She began to take an almost embarrassing delight in selling things — a loop of the best liverwurst on this side of the Atlantic, or a piece of the Colby you couldn’t get just anywhere, or dried herring from a case recently cracked open, exuding brine and smoke. Eva had given Delphine the magical belief that everything that Fidelis made was unbested and every morsel the shop sold was of a superior quality only their own customers deserved.

This conviction was good for business, and Delphine had, as well, a shrewd eye for what would sell and when to knock down a price. She instituted a weekly drawing for one dollar worth of groceries, and that drew in customers. Except for the banker and the few other rich, who lived in green-lawned flamboyantly painted mansions on a bluff over which their unpredictable river had never yet risen, everyone was broke half the time. Many were worse off — so ravaged and destitute that they couldn’t afford any meat at all. Delphine was good at extracting money from the wealthy, and also good at trading carefully with the poor. She stocked barrels of dried beans, peas, made shrewd deals with farms and traded like a horse dealer for the items she was certain that she could sell. She began to deal with an ambitious wholesaler working out of the Cities, and stocked all sorts of new items that made people curious enough to stop in for a peek. Soaps she tried herself and could recommend, powdered health remedies, boxes of steel-cut oats, cider vinegar, walnut oil, pots of mustard. She had a dairy case set into the wall — before, they’d drawn milk from a can back in the cooler. Now she stocked cream, daily milk, butters of three grades, and fresh eggs from Roy’s chickens.

Roy was still not drinking. Perversely, this had begun to concern Delphine. Still, how could she quibble with the quiet work he did all around the house? He kept busy, even drove up north with Cyprian from time to time, and didn’t snitch from the stash they smuggled across the border and then sold. Sometimes Roy lied to her with a clear and listening expression — told the same sort of stories he’d once told Eva. How once he’d had a part in an Italian opera, or killed a bear, that he had learned to weave from a Navajo and could recite long prayers in Hebrew. Delphine thought she didn’t know him. Who was he, sober, anyway? Her father was a stranger, a man of whom she had no knowledge and did not know exactly how to approach. It used to be so easy. Their relationship consisted of times he’d crawl to her and beg for money, and she’d refuse. At least he still socialized with the other men in the singing club. Roy came to the shop after hours to sit around the table with the men and slice rounds of Fidelis’s sausage onto square crackers. Cyprian came too. They drove Delphine home after she finished in the kitchen. It was a routine, she later thought, she didn’t treasure enough. An even life, without any jumps or starts. No stalls either. It was the kind of life you didn’t know at the time you were living it was a happy life.