Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Only once, when things were quiet of an evening, and Cyprian was waiting for Delphine to finish with some piece of her work, when he and Fidelis were sitting at the kitchen table, did any piece of their subterranean knowledge pass into the open.

“You took fire,” said Fidelis, with a critical gaze at the scars radiating lightly upward from Cyprian’s throat, one line scored back of the ear to vanish in his shining, crow-black hair.

“And you, clipped here.” Cyprian indicated on his own chin the shattered area, a pit of little more than an inch, where the bullet had glanced downward through Fidelis’s jaw. They both stopped there, already weary. They could have gone on. Fidelis could have showed him the very bullet, dug from his shoulder, which he wore on his watch chain. Or the saber cuts on his back and across his arm. The astounded flesh of his hip where the caisson went over him the time he was taken for dead. Both men had sustained injuries graver than the obvious ones, hidden by their clothes and hidden, also, by the men they now were. But neither of their experiences had been the kind men built into stories and repeated at drinking tables with other veterans. Those stories were of times behind the lines, usually, of women and of other men, and if there was action or killing involved it was short and glorious. Neither Fidelis nor Cyprian had known glory, and though both had known the grandeur of horror, there was nothing to say about it.

TANTE WAS STEWING. Delphine could feel it like a waft of town sewer gas just down the street. Her standing in the town and among her Lutheran church group had diminished when her own brother asked her to leave his house and brought in this Delphine, a woman who — Tante was easily gathering up the information — was the daughter of the town drunk, under suspicion for murder, a Catholic, and even worse, a Pole, a woman married (if she was, and it was whispered she was not) to a too handsome foreign-looking man who shared her house, a former stage actress and need she say it, all but a blankety-blank. In addition to all of that, this Delphine had moved in on Eva’s sickness and befriended her because she knew a good chance when she saw one coming — an eligible widower with his own business and four bright sons — she knew what she wanted, said Tante with dark nods, oh yes, she knew what she wanted, that Delphine.

Tante wrote and sent off a flurry of letters to Germany, full of dark summons, and right away there came back answers that she propped on the cash register and dared Fidelis to ignore. He did read them, tightened his face, but said nothing. He was distracted. In his clothing drawer there was a cigar box containing a jumble of medals, including an Iron Cross. He had arrived in the country with only a suitcase full of sausages he sold and knives he kept, and he had worked fanatically. Only to see everything around him, here, falling into a collapse as devastating as German inflation, which caused his mother, so she had once said in a letter, to cart wheelbarrows of reichsmarks to the baker for her loaves. He’d left one Depression to encounter another. And then, after all, his parents had had a great stroke of luck. They managed in the worst year of all to recover a piece of property that was theirs before the war, a store building, and from the share that would have been his, they sent money.

With that money, he had bought the farmstead in North Dakota and opened the shop. He had worked skinning steers and butchering hogs eighteen hours a day to bring Eva, Franz, and then Tante to abide with him. His forbearing, kind mother, and his father, strict and distant, he missed. And his brother, who now shared the family business. But there was work and more work, always more of it, always he was behind what should be done. There was no question, now, of leaving even to visit his family. He read their letters and set them aside before they penetrated to the still center of his person, where he could feel such a thing as loneliness.

Tante took the letters back and slipped them into her purse with a grimace of dissatisfaction. She concentrated even harder on making him aware of her list of shocking true facts about Delphine. He waved her off. She bit her lip at his defense of the Polish woman. Fumed with frustration. To other people, she couldn’t go too far in her criticisms, she could not include her brother, lest his business be spoiled and his customers frequent the butcher on the other side of town. Some of her resentful angers had to simmer; then, as stews do, they thickened. She brooded on the grave injustice dealt her by her brother and fantasized returning to Ludwigsruhe. These imaginings, also, grew thick with detail and brimmed with improbable incidents. For instance, into her mind there came the picture of her return complete with boys — well, maybe not Markus, but the other three. Or the twins alone. That could be done.

The way she saw it, she could not return to Germany alone, having failed to find a husband in this new land of men unwinnowed by war. She had to return with something. Motherless children would do. As the heroic guardian of her brother’s children, she could reenter town life as their aunt, not an old maid aunt but an aunt with dependents. She would have some status. Otherwise, what was there?

Sometimes, in her spare little house, her sitting room dominated by the cheap teacher’s desk she’d bought secondhand at that, her mind jumped like a rat in a cage. She couldn’t keep doing bookwork like this, drying up a little more every day, becoming brittle as the pages she wrote on and stiff as the figures she added and subtracted. And yet, if the truth be known, what was all that attractive and important about having a husband? Her friends each had one, and all they did was complain about their men’s dingy remarks, their gross habits, their absences, or boast about the types of foods and quantities they ate. There wasn’t any real use that she could see in a husband, unless he was rich. And without a rich husband, she had only the books of three struggling concerns to balance — Krohn Hardware, Olson’s Café, and the butcher shop — and they could hardly pay her the pittance she asked. So it seemed to her that the only way out of her stark room was to find a rich husband, or to get rid of Delphine and somehow wangle Emil and Erich away from their father while they were still young enough to charm others and not so old as to give her any trouble.

Of course, there was another way. She could, herself, make money. She thought about it. Make money. Nothing occurred to her. She thought about it some more and came to believe it was her only hope. The wish for money began to turn in her brain with a frantic compulsion. She dreamed dollars, dreamed oceans, dreamed of walking off a steamer back to Germany wearing a fur coat. Money danced behind steel bars at night, just out of her reach. One afternoon, over her pale meal of bread and one white veal sausage, a thought struck her that seemed so crazy and outlandish she put it aside. But it came back. She found herself unable to think of anything else.

By the time she got up the next morning, Tante had decided to sell the last remaining piece of her grandmother’s jewelry, a cameo that her grandmother had left her, a large and spectacularly carved profile of a woman both demure and sensual. The carving was very fine, and the face sensitive and yet a little wild, the cream hair flowing into the pink of the shell. Tante had admired the cameo as a child, and when she took it from its hiding place, a tiny aperture in the wall behind her dresser, she remembered how she had touched it, softly, pinned to lace at her grandmother’s throat on a sunny day at a garden picnic. Times long past. For her it represented all that was secure and comfortable, all that was irreproachable and solid about her life in Germany before the war. She wore it often, too often, to remind herself. To give it up was no small thing. But she was determined. She put the cameo inside a sock and put the sock in her purse. She would sell it, and with the money she would buy a new and fashionable suit. Wearing that suit, she would go to the bank and not leave until she had a job that would eventually, somehow, because it was situated near a large amount of cash, all the money in the town, make her rich.