Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Every day now, Markus checked the chinchillas, for the fur buyer was due any time, and he wanted their coats in top condition. Delphine didn’t understand how Markus could name the creatures, how he could be so careful with them, not to startle them, how he even seemed to love them, and yet didn’t express the slightest compunction about their imminent deaths. Delphine guessed she was learning about the nature of a butcher’s kid — to see the animals come and go. The only creature exempted from this fatalism was Schatzie, who had lain at the foot of Eva’s bed and now slept on guard in the doorway to the boys’ room every night. The white German shepherd was serene and intelligent, but bristled with protective inquiry at a sudden noise. Delphine had seen the dog go rigid, growling with authority, at the intrusion of a strange deliveryman. Sometimes the dog looked at her with eyes of clear amber so alert and watchful that she experienced a shiver of recognition. There was no question, this dog was not to be considered on the same level as the other animals whose fates were concluded swiftly once they left the stock pen, or the ones raised for fur.

Markus gloated over figures that his chinchillas would bring, and figured and refigured profits with his younger brothers, pencils in their small, thick fingers, biting their lips. Franz had declared from the first that he was too old for such schemes, so among the three younger, they were to realize all of the money, and they concentrated on the splitting of it in myriad ways, making this and that argument over whether to pool their money for some grand object, or divide it, or if there would be enough to get a new bicycle for each of them. Meanwhile, the valuable gray little animals skittered here and there, unknowing, in their baskets of frail hardware cloth, in and out of their clumsily shaped nesting boxes, softly growing fur, until one Friday night.

After a short appetizer of sheep’s offal, the wild dogs leaped and squeezed through the back fence. Schatzie barked in the front of the store. While Fidelis searched for burglars and tried the locks, the wild dogs feasted. They overturned the long line of cages, and plucked out the chinchillas one by one. They gulped them down or tore them to shreds, and then were gone, silently as always around the butcher’s house, but leaving their scrambled tracks.

“DELPHINE!” It was Markus, and she thought later with slight shame that it was a compliment he came to her first thing on the next morning, just as she entered the shop. His face was broken, sobs were tamped in his chest, a scrap of fur hung limp in his fist. “They got them, they killed them!”

She ran out back with the other two boys and saw it was true. The cages whirled all over the ground, ripped open like shopping bags, and there was not a chinchilla to be seen. Markus’s tattered scrap was the only remaining piece of evidence the dogs had left, and he held it now with an attitude of disbelief. He walked forward a little, staggered with the loss. There was the pie in the sky of big money, but also, Delphine now saw, these were in a way Eva’s odd legacy to the boys, the project she’d started, and whether they knew it and acknowledged it or not these creatures were of her own making. Wild dogs should not have had them. And Delphine could see, when Fidelis surveyed the ruin, that a similar feeling was building in him, an obscure anger that started low and crept over him like a heavy cape until he bowed his head a little, looked up from under his brows, and made a decision.

“Sei ruhig,” he said to his sons, and in a manner rare to him, he set a hand on each of their shoulders. Then he turned without a word to Delphine, and he stalked back to the slaughterhouse. He gathered old freezer-burned meat, some that had turned in the cooler, molded scraps from a side of beef he was curing for the banker, and he then carried the pans of this out to the edge of the field, dumped it. The boys watched him, Delphine too now, and next they followed to see him enter the little room on the side of the slaughterhouse where he kept his rifles. He loaded both guns, then filled a pocket with extra bullets. He put a chair on his shoulder and he brought this chair outside and set it underneath a tree. He remembered something and went back to the cooler. From its sighing interior he took three beers. He took a loaf of bread, baloney, some cheese and apples. Then he returned to the shade of the tree, in sight of the meat scraps at the edge of the field. From the yard, the boys and Delphine saw him set both rifles across his knees. At last, he opened a dark bottle.

Delphine went back into the house. The bell on the door rang, and it was Step-and-a-Half looking for the usual pan of scraps. Fidelis had just dumped the pan out back to lure the dogs. Delphine looked carefully through the glass at the thickly marbled and perfect cuts of expensive meat, and chose a nice piece of beefsteak. She wrapped it in white paper and twine, and she handed the package over with no explanation.

Step-and-a-Half gave Delphine a strange, barren look and inspected the package, weighed it in her hand.

“Take it,” said Delphine, a little roughly.

Across the older woman’s elegantly cut features there passed a look of raw suspicion, and she asked, “How much?”

“Just take it!” Impatient with the odd scruples of the other woman, Delphine was perhaps too sharp.

“I don’t think so,” decided Step-and-a-Half. This was, Delphine understood, a little too close to charity for her stomach, a bit too rich. Step-and-a-Half rummaged brutally through layers of clothes and pockets, then set down a nickel on the counter. It was the first time she’d paid money in Delphine’s experience. Delphine scooped up the nickel, made change of three cents, and tried then to give the pennies to Step-and-a-Half.

“Keep the damn change!” she growled in an insulted huff, then turned to stride out the door, muttering about the terrible price of things.

OUTSIDE, THE BOYS were crouched in the sun on the topmost timbers of the stock pen. Delphine watched them from the kitchen window as they chewed the ends of grass and quietly watched their father. She was surprised to feel a stirring of excitement around her heart, and then guilty as she looked at Schatzie sitting alertly in the shade. In her agitation she prowled to the window repeatedly to see if the other dogs had appeared. As the fall sun rose higher, overhead, the boys came in to eat and she spread the rolls with sweet butter, then wedged in slices of chicken from the old hen she’d stewed yesterday. They took sandwiches to their father, and their own lunches back outside, and sat waiting. More hours passed than anyone would have thought. It seemed when you weren’t looking for them, the dogs were always skulking around the field’s edge. And then when you waited, they did not appear. Maybe part of the rage Fidelis felt was that in the past he pitied the scraggly pack and fed the mutts. They’d taken advantage of him — a thing he could not allow.

It was late afternoon, and the boys were nodding off in the shadows of the grapevines, when Delphine heard the first crack of a shot. Fidelis had waited, had watched the dogs gather, and now he was shooting steadily. Delphine ran out the back door, climbed the stock-pen sides along with the boys, and saw the dogs go down. First the big solid brown caught a bullet that spun him like a top. The gray took one neatly in the head, skidded to a puzzled halt and slowly toppled. Two medium-size with long, matted fur were hit and ran off howling, to die before they reached the woods. A red dog growled and bit the air before a bullet clipped its jugular. There was a dingy white that crept belly down in the grass. A bullet creased its spine. It stopped. Six more were felled. The last, a speedy gray, loped desperately off and Fidelis sighted carefully along its sinuous back and bore it to earth. The last shot echoed across the field. Fidelis turned and gestured to the boys.