Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“Oh yeah,” said Cyprian, recovering his usual mildness. “All done with but for the beauty marks.” He tapped his throat, the roped white flesh.

LATER ON, when the two had returned to the farmhouse and settled into the bed, Delphine wearily unfolded herself, stretched her feet long underneath the quilt that Eva had sewed for her on her good days, tiny postage stamps of color. She was troubled by and wondered at the palpable strain in the kitchen — she’d felt it between the two men even before she entered, from the silence, and then there was the sharp explosion of the bottle, Fidelis’s hand slashed. And Cyprian had been poised on his chair as though he was cocked to explode. Now, he was breathing quietly beside her, quite sleepless.

“What were you two arguing about?” she asked.

“You,” he said, no hesitation in his voice.

“Well, that’s sure stupid,” said Delphine, feeling stupid herself.

“Maybe.”

Delphine laughed unpleasantly, surprised that he should be jealous when he treated her like his sister, and then obscurely angered that he thought he had any right over her at all. She simmered for a few minutes, her thoughts prickling.

“I think,” she finally said, though she had not actually thought this out herself, “we should stop sleeping together if you’re not going to love me like a woman. What do you think of that?”

As soon as he got up and left the bed, she missed the weight of him next to her, wanted to curve around his back and throw her arm over him. She always fell asleep in seconds if she took her breaths in unison with his. Restless, she lay for a time in the quiet darkness, and then she sighed and rose, wrapped her red robe around herself. She found him sitting at the kitchen table. “Oh hell. Please,” she said. “Come on back.” So Cyprian followed her back into the room and they lay together in the peace of the house, and in the blackness, Roy snoring beside the stove. But there was between them, even while they curled close as children, a sorrowing knowledge. Cyprian knew he had no right to his anger, and he knew as well that Delphine pitied him for it. What was he to do? And next to him, instead of falling asleep directly as she’d anticipated, Delphine was again restless. The inside polish of the fake wedding band on her finger was flaking away, and the base metal itched her finger. She couldn’t quite get comfortable. She turned and twisted, resented it when Cyprian’s breathing evened into a gentle rhythm, stayed awake a long time after he slept and listened to the quiet knocking of his breath.

FIDELIS WAS AWAKE overlong that night also. He had to shout from the kitchen three times for the boys to calm down and sleep — they were extra-excited about something. In the past, Eva would have found out what it was and told it to him. Fidelis wasn’t one to ask. They had their own lives and he didn’t pry into their business, nor did they come and tell him about the things they did. There was a wall of reserve between Fidelis and his sons, a formality that was part exhaustion and also the way things had always been in his own family. He had never spoken to his own father about personal things, not even when he was a grown man.

Late as it was, Fidelis had to rifle through the stacks of bills from his suppliers, figuring out which to fend off, which to string along, which needed immediate payment. He was dividing up the tiny amount of cash he had available to see whether he could figure or refigure a sum that would satisfy the lot. After he figured, he’d go back and reduce the amount on each bill, resign another to the bottom of the pile. Every so often, he put his fists on either temple, stared blindly at the mass of paper. Then he’d make some inner calculation, and adjust the bills into yet another mysterious order. As for the money that was owed to him, he’d given the job of collecting it to Tante. She was better at squeezing blood from rock, that’s what bill collecting and bill paying was all about during those desperate years.

The animosity he’d felt for the man who had turned out to be a sturdy, respectable baritone, and whom he thought of as Delphine’s husband, was still disturbing to him, too. At one point, weary of his piddling calculations, he stood up and paced around the kitchen. Four steps took him across the floor, and four back. Frustrated by the smallness of the room, he thought of walking the hallway outside, but he didn’t want to wake the boys now that they had finally settled themselves. So he continued his striding back and forth along the short course of kitchen tiles. Then in the center of the room Fidelis stopped, abruptly. He put his hand on his head and laughed.

So that was it! That was the thing about Cyprian! There was something. He had always known there was something about the man. And he hadn’t caught it. Not until they sat across from one another and stared their unblinking challenges into each other’s eyes. Thinking of that now tipped off Fidelis. Plus the way he had described Gus Newhall’s bear hunting. Fidelis recalled the staring match. The man’s eyes, that pitch black, the pupil melted into the iris, the flint-black stare. The deafened guide. It came to him. An Indian. Cyprian was an Indian. That’s all it was, all along, that uneasy feeling. Somehow he’d known and not known, the man was different. Thinking of Cyprian as an Indian now made things all right. Or almost so, for Fidelis also understood that the sudden antipathy between them was also and most strangely based on Delphine’s absence, or presence, or maybe sheer existence.

THE ENTRANCE to the boys’ dirt fort had become a grand thing, shored up out of the bed of an old wagon box, a horseshoe even nailed to a lintel constructed of a short piece of beam found underneath the sagging shack. The first part of the tunnel was reinforced, too, with boards knocked from the walls of the place and dragged through the short riffle of woods. There was a die-hard bunch who had remained with the construction — Markus, the twins, Emil and Erich, Grizzy Morris, and Roman Shimek. The others had fallen away, but that was fine with the core crew. They were at the best part. They had achieved the center of the hill and now were engaged in the satisfying toil of hollowing out their den, their clubhouse, their mighty chamber, their secret room.

The tunnel was a belly-wiggler for about twenty feet before the entrance to the room. The secret interior of the fort was at first extremely small. Markus used their tool of first attack, the blade of a hoe, and scraped out a slightly larger round than the tunnel. Roman Shimek had stolen a big square piece of canvas, and the boys used it to shovel the dirt into and then drag it out. Markus worked the hardest, digging away and hauling the dirt out himself even when the others sat in the grass resting or trying to figure out how to smoke the rust brown fake tobacco plants, rolling the stuff up in newspaper. He didn’t admonish them, reproach them, or care if they sat around outside the hill. What he was doing so absorbed him that it didn’t matter if they were in on it or not. To crouch and enter the impressive doorway, then crawl into the black heart of the earth, and to enter a chamber so quiet that he heard his blood sigh in his lungs, his heart’s rush and clench, his ears fizz with a humming and electric silence, this gave Markus a deep and almost violent satisfaction. When they left for home he was calm, and a little silly, and he slept the nights through for the first time since he had lost his mother.

No one discovered exactly what they were doing. It was, for sure, a wonder that the boys were not filthier when they came home, but it was a dry early November and most of the visible dust that filtered into their clothes and hair could be brushed away or smacked out or somehow disguised. And then, first thing they did upon returning was sneak past their parents, or, in Markus and his brothers’ case, Delphine. Sometimes she wasn’t even there, as she often left at her regular time each night. She drove home with Cyprian and left the boys’ dinners warming in the oven. Their father, working in the shop or at his cluttered desk, or drinking a beer or two with other men in the kitchen, didn’t notice them until they were cleaned up for the night. And then he noticed them in a way other than to really notice them. They were upright, breathing, not in any visible distress. In his exhaustion, this was enough.