Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“Pile ’em up,” was all he said, and the boys did as they were told, hunted down and carried back each dog and laid them together like a heap of rugs. One of them, Delphine noticed uneasily, was the big brown chow dog that had run wild on the Kozkas. Best, thought Delphine, to get rid of the evidence, and she said nothing. Fidelis came out of the shop with two tins of kerosene. He dribbled one can over the dogs and then he added pieces of wood, downed branches, refuse. When the bonfire was as tall as his shoulders, he poured the kerosene on the top of that. He made a torch of a long roll of paper and carefully tossed it onto the soaked wood.

There was a hollow pop, and the whole thing went up. The fire burned and burned, long into the dusk, and the boys kept adding junk. It smelled for a while like a regular fire and then smelled of roasting meat, then smelled of nothing. The hot fire consumed everything, and into the dark the boys, and Delphine, watched it dreamily, with an intensity they did not understand. For they didn’t want to take their eyes away; it was a mesmerizing thing. The timbers collapsed into coals so hot they consumed green wood. Even the bones of the dogs would be ash. There would be nothing left. The fire went on burning, they kept feeding it, and at last it grew so late that Delphine had to send the boys to bed.

Fidelis slept in a room across from the boys, but he slept hard and never woke. So every night, she gave the watch over to the dog, not Fidelis. She never said good-bye to Fidelis, or indeed, made it her business ever to be alone with him at any time. He was working late, now, to make up for his day under the box elder tree with the rifles. As she turned from the doorway to the boys’ room, after counting their sleeping breaths, she touched Schatzie and the dog looked up at her as always in agreement. Tired, she gazed a bit too long into the dog’s eyes and suddenly she couldn’t look away. She stood rooted, tears filling her own eyes, for it was Eva who stared back at her with an expression of extraordinary sympathy and calm.

Delphine’s back chilled. “I’m losing my damn mind,” she muttered out loud to break the spell. It seemed to work, although she didn’t dare look at the dog again. She turned her back on Schatzie and walked out into the yard, past the tangled garden where she’d harvested lumpy squash that day, down to the edge of the field. She stood there alone. All around her, the dark seethed with fall insect noise, with a humming life that rose and sank, surrounding her with inchoate music. She breathed deeply of the spice of weeds under the harsh smoke. “Oh hell, Eva,” she heard herself say. Then she was simply talking to her friend, nothing special. Laughing at the boys, the men, the customers. Speculating about the reasons people did things. Since the end, Delphine hadn’t wept, she had put all thoughts of Eva firmly from her mind, preferring to let the loss settle wordlessly into her. Tonight, as she stood talking in blackness, an alien sorrow that held some despairing comfort, too, bubbled into her, and she let herself cry with a lost, croaking, ugly sound, until the last coals collapsed into a dull, red foundation and the dark crept close to cover everything.

THAT’S THE WAY it will be, she thought, driving home, her thoughts gloomy and exalted, when I, too, experience the end of things. Those last coals of light going out, extinguished, and then the dark creeping to the corners of her vision. As she turned, a shape on the road, red eyes reflecting her head lamps, leaped away in a ghost arc. A dog. Abruptly, Delphine laughed. Well, maybe even Fidelis could not rid the world of feral dogs, and maybe they would still howl in the dark around her house. And maybe they would even come for Roy’s chickens. For no good reason, the thought of one dog escaping Fidelis’s seamlessly accurate shooting cheered her and she found her mood oddly buoyant as she entered the yard of the house. Getting out of the car, she heard the rocking rumble of her father’s snore. There was a light on in the kitchen, probably Cyprian playing solitaire or reading the cheap drugstore crime and mystery pulps he favored, or even practicing, as he did every day, some small feat for the show he was concocting.

Delphine walked in the door. None of these things. Cyprian was slumped on the table, waiting for her, sleeping in one lamp’s dull light. He was in his undershirt and she could see the lightning bolts of war scars, the tough shocks of muscles, the soft gold of his skin. Sleeping there, his face half in the dim glow, he was extraordinary. His face was of such a perfected geometry that he seemed a creature from a fabulous painting, a fallen hero in an ancient scene. Delphine put her hand on his back to wake him, and as he woke, he took her hand in his and held it to the side of his face. For a long while, he held it there, and then he spoke to her, telling her that if she married him she would never have another worry. He would never go with men, he would be faithful to her in the deepest way. The feelings, the things that drove him, that made him seek men, he would give those up. He would stop his thoughts. He would be different. And he could do it because he loved her, he said, and if she loved him back they would be happy.

Delphine sat down next to him, not across from him where she’d have to look into his eyes, but right next to him where she could put her arms around his shoulders. There was nothing she could really say in the face of his trust — if she hadn’t seen him with the other man, maybe she could have believed what he said. But she had seen him, and what he did was — she couldn’t name it exactly, she couldn’t put it into words except clumsily — what she saw was him . Truly Cyprian. If someone had an essence, his was in that quick stirring between the two men, their energy and pleasure, his happiness, even, which she had sensed from her hiding place in the leaves and which was still there, changing swiftly as she stepped out into the open.

Instead of answering his question, she told him what had happened that day, all about the morning’s discovery, the trap Fidelis had set. She felt him grow interested when she talked about the rifles lying calm across Fidelis’s lap, and she was encouraged and went on, distracting him. She told him about the long wait, and then about the shooting, how of a piece it was. Not one shot went astray and none was wasted. It was a great surprise to her, afterward, that Fidelis killed every dog with an ease and precision that she couldn’t register in the moment of it for the heat of the simple killing. Only afterward, she told Cyprian, she heard the shots as so regular and seamless they almost seemed one noise.

Cyprian nodded, took in everything she said with a silent and compelled interest, heard about the bonfire and how it was made and the silence of the surprised dogs, and understood the fury of calm that was the killing. All the time that he was listening to Delphine she couldn’t know it, but he was thinking something very different from what she might have imagined.

So Fidelis was a sniper. That was his thought. A German sniper. I wonder if he ever had me in his sights, without a helmet, my back turned. I wonder if he was the one who blew the brains out of Syszinski, or the hand off Malaterre, or the heart from the chest of the one I loved?

FIDELIS WALDVOGEL and Cyprian Lazarre never spoke of the war that they shared, yet it lay between them very like the Belgium mud once terrible and now grassed and green. The trenches covered, the tunnels collapsed, the armies of men desperate to live sowed instead through the layers of the earth. Sometimes when they drank together, one of them would have a thought about the war, for neither of them ever passed a day or even several hours of the day without remembering the war. A picture, a sound, a word. Something would enter, and either one of them would pause, wage a small interior struggle, and go on. And the other would have felt the impact, like the aftershock of far distant shelling, and be content or relieved to make a joke or take a long draft of beer.