Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“This is Mazarine,” said Franz, when Delphine appeared, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Both of you have z ’s in your names,” said Delphine.

Mazarine looked at Franz with a startled little bolt of delight. For all her fooling with their names on the back pages of her notebooks at school, she’d never made anything of the z that they had in common. And now this woman had given her a brand-new piece of old information. Z . Delphine laughed a bit, noticing the pleasure in the girl’s eyes. She turned away, but she had already softened because she could see that this Mazarine, who wore boys’ shoes and had one dress to her name, whose family was dirt-poor with that one bicycle their only wealth and with a bill run up they’d never pay, and whose brother Roman was a little hell-raiser, loved Franz. Why not? Any girl would, it was true. Franz was the type for whom girls developed easy crushes. He had the rich girls after him, doing errands at the shop for their mothers and craning their heads to see if he was working out in back. Delphine knew that Franz didn’t have the capacity for similarly shallow feelings. As he’d carried his mother to her room from the plane ride, she’d seen how much he loved Eva. From that, she had also seen that his attachment to his first love would be deep, maybe even dangerous.

Delphine thought that she’d have to strangle any girl who ever hurt one of the boys. It was seeing them so helpless and lost after Eva died. Even then, she had the thought that anything a woman did would echo back into the sorrow and love they felt for Eva. After she had given this Mazarine the once-over, she asked for a hand with some chores, just to ascertain if she was steady. There was an order to be wrapped for the freezer. Delphine showed the girl how to tear off just the right amount of paper, how to make the crisp folds, then draw down the string from the spool that hung from a hook on the ceiling and secure the package with a flourish. Mazarine did everything carefully and efficiently, and then asked whether there was more that she could do. So Delphine had her wipe down the shelves out front and clean off the canned goods. She did that. And came back again for more work.

“Mazarine, are you hungry?” said Delphine.

“Oh no,” she waved her hand, but gulped. There was hesitation, and Delphine realized that she shouldn’t have asked. It was probably a matter of pride with her to have eaten.

“Come back here with me,” said Delphine. She led the girl back to the kitchen, and heard a little intake of breath as Mazarine paused at the doorway. The afternoon light was slanting through the windows, falling richly on the blue bread bowls and picking out the luster of the polished copper trim on the bins of flour. The tablecloth with the fruits in the squares was on the table, just washed, the colors quiet and cheerful. There were apples in a wicker basket. Delphine remembered how she had felt the first time she had entered Eva’s kitchen, and a wave of feeling for Mazarine flooded through her. She made a meat sandwich, put a doughnut on the plate, an apple beside, poured the girl a tall glass of milk.

“Eat anyway,” she said.

Ten minutes later, when Mazarine returned to the shop, she asked if she could do something else.

“You don’t quit, do you.” Delphine grinned.

“No,” said Mazarine. Her voice was shy, but firm. Delphine remembered things she’d heard about the girl’s father, a roamer with something of a name for his bad temper. And the mother, pendulously fat in spite of the lack of food and laid up with sick headaches people said was lazy nervousness. The girl probably knew that the mother had run up a bill here, and this could be her way of doing what she could about it. Or maybe she was just trying to impress Franz. Or be close to him on the days he had to work. Maybe, thought Delphine, there would be some of Eva’s clothes from the trunks upstairs that could fit Mazarine. But then again, that might bother Franz. At the end of the afternoon, she gave the girl a package of smoked turkey drumsticks and some bacon, all wrapped together, and also told her casually, privately, that she’d taken money off her family’s bill. Mazarine flushed, but then raised her head and nodded sharply.

Maybe the girl could use some of her things, too. She had a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right, but they might look good on Mazarine. As the girl walked out the door with Franz, Delphine realized that she was starting to rescue Mazarine. Maybe she saw in the girl a capacity for self-sacrifice similar to her own and wanted to call out a warning. I should stop myself, thought Delphine. The girl really hadn’t asked for it. Plus she had a mother, however half-baked.

ON THE WAY HOME to the Shimeks, they stopped and hid Mazarine’s bicycle, walked through the high brush and into the trees, then up a slight rise to their pine tree. “We should bring a blanket here,” said Franz.

“I can just see us, a blanket on the back fender of the bicycle — try to explain that!”

Franz began to kiss her. He could smell the apple on her breath. Some grains of sugar clung to the dip in her throat just above the lavender collar of her dress. When he licked the sugar from her throat, Mazarine looked up into the branches and tried to hold herself together. She didn’t want to be the first to tell him how she loved him, so she bit her lip. When she felt as though she’d burst, she pushed Franz fiercely over and stared into his eyes a moment. Slowly, she brought her lips down far enough just to graze his. Then she pinched him, let him grab for her. When she fell in a sprawl, she let him lie on top of her, but only until his breath came quick and hoarse. While he still had his eyes closed she rolled away and ran, mocking him, hair flying, toward the road.

IN THE YEAR after her father was released from jail, it seemed to Delphine as though he was being slowly erased. He thinned all over. His skin softened to a ripe peachiness, his eyes blurred. His hair was a candy pale floss sticking straight up on his head. Roy diminished, became almost gamine in his appearance like a small, ancient boy. Those strange unfocused eyes regarded the world with too mutely affable a gaze. Before, the drink made him bold and loquacious. Now, he was dreamy, slow, forgetful and often disturbingly at peace.

Still, he was industrious enough. He spent his mornings at the shop, doing whatever came his way to be done. And then, taking as his pay ten cents and a slice of sausage, he went on to his afternoon position. He began helping Step-and-a-Half with her sortings and haulings, assisted her in picking through town leavings. Together, they ranged across the town plucking scraps from back porches. Step-and-a-Half and he had occasionally worked together between his binges. Now they saw each other every day. They made a strikingly odd pair — she tall and heron-proud, fierce-beaked, fabulous in her collection of skins and rags and he stooped and pale with the roses of shot veins, old whiskey in his cheeks, his skin ever more translucent and fine except for the purple onion of his nose. He began to improve her equipment. Roy constructed a clever light cart out of broken crates, bent hardware, and bicycle tires. One would push and the other holler as they passed up and down the streets collecting all there was to collect, which in those times was dire stuff unless you knew, as Step-and-a-Half did, the banker’s cook, and were accepted at the back doors of the greater and the lesser rich — the former bonanza farms swallowed into the town limits and the shop owners, who stayed in business by only the slimmest margins. By reason of her long-standing fidelity to her trade, she was welcome in these places, and so, now, was Roy Watzka.

Step-and-a-Half’s collaboration with Roy was an irritation to Delphine. She knew that she should have been glad that her father had joined in the pursuit of an honest trade. But to align himself with such a strange character, and thus make himself the subject of more talk, was hard to bear cheerfully, though she made a good show. And, as well, Delphine was sure that Step-and-a-Half disliked her for the mere fact that she had to all appearances taken Eva’s place behind the counter.