Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Yet there came a day when Step-and-a-Half spoke to her. She came into the shop for her pickings one morning, and didn’t leave after the small ceremony in which Delphine handed her the sausage ends and trimmings. She picked through them with her usual discernment, then Delphine took her choices and wrapped them neatly. There was a kind of snobbishness about her, Delphine thought, an insistence on choosing the best of the worst. And why was she still standing there with the package in her hand, glaring, clearing her throat with a rusty scrape? Step-and-a-Half had a sharp, camphor-ridden, wolfish but not exactly unpleasant smell. This day she wore a fabulous scarf, a broad band of turquoise velvet, in a sort of turban around her head.

“Found a cat,” said Step-and-a-Half.

“Roy told me.”

Apparently, now, she kept a kitten in her stuffed cabin, a little gray thing with tiny fierce teeth. Maybe she wanted milk, thought Delphine. She asked Step-and-a-Half to wait, went to the cooler, and dipped a bit of milk into a cream bottle.

Returning, she handed the bottle across the counter. But Step-and-a-Half only took it with a small nod of incredulous thanks, as though offended by Delphine’s extravagance. She did not turn to leave. For a few moments, she squinted at Fidelis’s ornate diploma from Germany, as though she was reading it. The diploma hung in a heavy, carved wood frame on the wall behind the counter, but the words were German script and too small to make out. Finally, Step-and-a-Half dipped her regal head, crowned with the velvet wrap, and stated directly to Delphine, “They’re making a tunnel down to China.”

Delphine, startled, understood now that Step-and-a-Half was making crazy small talk.

“They’re digging their own graves. You better stop them.”

“All right,” said Delphine carefully, “I’ll stop them. I don’t want any trouble.”

Step-and-a-Half agreed with a sage look. Suddenly she lunged halfway across the counter and peered into Delphine’s face.

“I know his family, the Lazarres. Bunch of no-goods. You watch yourself around that Cyprian and hang on to your money.”

“Who asked you?” said Delphine, mystified. “And I’m the one taking his money, for your information.” She added the last just to stump the other woman, but it didn’t work.

“So you think,” said Step-and-a-Half, turning on her heel. With a swish of robes and a clatter of her man’s boots, she strode banging out the door.

AS THE DAYS grew short, Cyprian appeared at the shop every night and most often had a beer with Fidelis around dinnertime before Delphine finished with her work. Sometimes the three of them ate together after the boys came home — their faces flushed and ruddy with cold, wringing their chapped hands, sweaty from running, dirt sifting from their shoes. While the boys took their baths, Delphine would clear their plates and replace them with new. Then the three grownups would eat whatever Delphine had the time that day to make — riced potatoes, goulash, maybe a cake if she had the eggs. Unsold meat that wouldn’tlast, on the verge, she cooked up, too. Often, Tante joined them, and sometimes Clarisse came around, or Roy or any number of Fidelis’s friends and members of the singing club. Delphine and Cyprian usually left Fidelis and some assortment of people at the table, unless they were practicing, which meant they all stayed late. One ordinary night, as she was in the middle of a shop inventory and had a hundred small items to reorder swirling in her head, Delphine left just the two men, Fidelis and Cyprian, sitting together over the remnants of kidney gravy and mashed potato pie with nothing to distract them from each other but the bottles in their hands.

When Delphine left the room for the office, both of the men felt a sudden itch of a tension. After a silence, Fidelis said he wanted to try flying in an airplane, like Franz, and Cyprian answered that the automobile was good enough for him. Then they each took a drink and didn’t say anything for a while.

“But I wouldn’t want to be in a tornado again,” said Cyprian.

Fidelis nodded, but pointedly didn’t ask when Cyprian had been in a tornado before. The tornado suddenly seemed too loaded a topic to discuss, as did the merits of various makes of automobiles, Roosevelt’s visit to Grand Forks, the CWA, milk prices, whether there’d be anything to butcher if the drought continued or the liquor tax or the burning of a neighboring town’s opera house. The only topic that seemed safe was the food, what was left of it, so Fidelis said the kidneys weren’t too bad.

“’Not too bad,’” said Cyprian. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, she fixed them good.”

“Damn right,” said Cyprian, as though he’d won some challenge from Fidelis, put him under, or at least his remark. Fidelis couldn’t help it, a shiver of anger twitched up his back. He took a long drink, and so did Cyprian, and then the two laughed uncomfortably to try to right the disagreeable feeling that had suddenly grown between them.

“Did you read about the damn eclipse?” said Cyprian, hopeful, feeling that the heavens were the only subject that could save them.

“No,” said Fidelis, trying to keep his voice neutral.

“Supposed to be a dark one,” muttered Cyprian, who knew nothing of it himself. Then he came up with what seemed like an inspired path to follow, one that wouldn’t give out. “So the leaves are off the trees,” he said, “you getting much game in to butcher here?”

Fidelis readily took that up. “A deer or so, then Gus Newhall shot a bear up in the Minnesota northwoods. ‘Course he nearly brought down a goddamn Indian doing it, the guide was just ahead, as I hear it, Gus got overexcited and fired, nearly took the guide’s head off and—”

Cyprian froze with the beer half to his lips and slowly lowered the bottle, and then his black eyes looked into Fidelis’s light eyes, which was a dangerous thing, for now they couldn’t unstick their gaze from each other. Nor could they blink, for the first one who did would be obscurely beaten. Fidelis didn’t know what he’d done to land in the frozen deadlock, but there he was. He had learned not to blink during the war, looking through the sights of a rifle, so he wouldn’t miss the flicker of a careless instant of exposure, or ruin the steady press of his finger. And Cyprian had learned not to blink when he trained as a boxer, for that’s how two boxers sized each other up to start with. Stared into each other’s eyes. The best could move a deadly punch to the throat as fast as the eyelid dropped. So their stares held, and held, and as they did not move they breathed the harder. Their eyes dried out and burned and their noses stung. The tension grew immense, ridiculous, then unbearable. Delphine walked in just as, with a ringing report, Fidelis’s hand shattered the beer bottle he was holding. All three gazed down in astonishment at the spurt of bright blood. Fidelis said, “So Cyprian, what tornado were you in?”

And smooth as silk pie, Cyprian answered him, “Belleau Wood, where they burned the wheat and still we came on, blasted Germans from the trees. We kept coming, they couldn’t stop us. When those snipers hit the ground we finally got to use our bayonets.”

Delphine wanted to back out of the room, but instead she got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and dabbed the stuff on Fidelis’s hand while she talked to Cyprian. Lightly, she put things to rights. “I thought they declared an armistice way back when, so what’s all this about?”

Cyprian shrugged, and Fidelis, though he struggled with a sudden surge of anger, laughed and made a face at the sting of the alcohol. “Sure,” he said easily, suddenly feeling foolish at the degree of inexplicable hatred he’d felt for Cyprian, whom he had always liked fine up until this evening. “I wasn’t there at Belleau Wood. The war, that’s done with, finished.”