Louise Erdrich: The Master Butcher's Singing Club

At that point, he frowned, he did not look comfortable. He sat in each chair, frowning harder, until he came to the last chair. “Do you mind?” he politely asked Delphine. “I suppose not,” she answered. He then cleared off the tea things and set the first chair on the tea tray on her stomach. Now they needed a helpful member of the audience to pass the chairs up. One by one, leg upon wooden seat, Cyprian balanced the chairs. Climbed higher, higher. Finally, he had the sixth chair balanced and he sat down on it and took a cigarette from his pocket.

That was always when he noticed that he had forgotten his matches on the table, or rather, upon Delphine. (Someone in the audience always hollered the information, proud to make such a discovery.) Someone always offered to throw the matches up, but Cyprian politely declined any help, for already he had taken from his shirt collar a little collapsible fishing rod and unreeled the line. The end was fitted with a bobber, an ostentatious hook, and a sinker that was really a magnet and easily attracted the fixed matchbox.

Once Cyprian had possession of the matches, he slowly and luxuriously lighted his cigarette. Then with many flourishes he pulled out abook, and pretended to regale the assembled crowd with its contents — more or less off-color jokes, which he laughed at, too, and even kicked up his heels, so that the chairs swayed alarmingly and drew gratifying whoops of anxiety from the crowd. Cyprian did not fall, of course. Once he finished his book, he tossed it. Did a handstand, on the topmost chair. Everyone applauded until, most amazingly — and here is where Delphine wished for an accomplice to produce a drum roll — he came down the chairs, headfirst, dismantling his tower by piling each chair onto his feet, hooking one to the next, until he stood on his hands under the chairs, on Delphine’s stomach.

Let us not forget that all of this time she was beneath, wrists locked, neck in a vise, gut clenched, legs solidly planted underneath the feminine red skirt!

Balancing on her torso, with the chairs on his feet, Cyprian craned his neck until his lips met hers. His kiss was falsely passionate, which got a roar from the crowd and had already started a slow burn of resentment in Delphine. The chairs were still balanced above them. They looked into each other’s eyes, and that to Delphine was at first intriguing. But what do you really see in the eyes of a man doing a handstand with six chairs balanced on his feet? You see that he is worried he will drop the chairs.

THEY HOOKED UP with a vaudeville group and traveling circus from Illinois in the town of Shotwell, by the North Dakota border. “This is more my kind of place,” said Delphine to Cyprian, comforted by the horizon all around them. At the end of every street the sky loomed. There had been too many trees surrounding the towns before. The open sky was homey. As well, they met carousing friends. Cyprian knew a few of these people from fairs and other shows, and the first evening, he brought her along with him to the local saloon. The place was a low, dank sty. They sat in a booth in the corner, packed in with three other couples, and were immediately served hard liquor. Up until then, Delphine had never witnessed Cyprian drinking, though at times she detected a whiff on his breath. Presented with a shot glass and a beer, he tried to slug the first back, and choked. Delphine said nothing, just nursed her beer and quietly tipped the shot onto the floor. She was almost ashamed of her fierce contempt for alcohol.

After the first round, two of the other couples got up and danced. That left Delphine and Cyprian, and another two. The men were involved in some deep topic, though, and since Delphine and the other girl were at their men’s left elbows they could not really make an impact on the conversation or start talking to each other. Delphine pretended to watch the other dancers for a while. Bored, she went to visit the powder room, which was anything but a place to powder your nose, then she stepped outside to marvel at the sunset. The sky was roiling, the edges of the clouds were a startling green, and the light behind them an appalling threatful yellow. A man who passed by in the road said that it looked like a goddamn storm.

“What’s it to you?” said Delphine, smiling just because she always smiled at a man, and because she was happy to see a sky that reminded her of home.

“I’m a farmer, that’s what.”

“Well you should come and see our show,” said Delphine. “You should bring your whole family.”

“Does anybody take their clothes off in it?”

“Sure!” said Delphine. “We all do!”

“Oh mama,” said the man.

When Delphine stepped back into the saloon, the other girl was smoking grumpily in the booth and the men were gone.

“Where are they?” said Delphine.

“How the hell should I know?” said the girl. Her lips moved nervously, drinking and smoking, like two limp ropes. Painted with a glossy purple red, those lips gave Delphine a shiver up her back. The girl was ugly, Delphine decided, and that made her mean. Plus, she’d ordered two more drinks and Delphine thought at first she’d ordered one for her. But the girl drank both, one after the other, right in front of her.

“What’s wrong with you?” Delphine asked.

“How the hell should I know?” said the girl.

Delphine left the saloon and walked back out into the road, where the sky was changing as fast as Delphine herself used to when she was an actress. Not for the first time since she’d left her father, she felt lonely and out of sorts. Perhaps all that space was making her homesick. Maybe it was the beer, but the absence of Cyprian was certainly part of it as well. He was very attentive to her moods, and when she felt blue, she told him. He usually came up with some way to cheer her. For instance, the last time she’d entered one of these slumps he’d picked her pocket, for she always kept some money in an easily unbuttoned side vent of her jacket, and he’d bought her a spray of red hothouse roses. That was a thing she’d never had before, roses. She had dried them and kept the petals in a handkerchief just to remember. Then there was another time he’d bought her a little jar of peanut butter to eat with a spoon. That was a treat. He’d bought her an ice cream on a stick, and he’d also done little things for her that did not require money. He’d picked up pretty stones by the lake, and once a tiny black arrowhead that he said an old-time Ojibwe probably used to shoot a bird. She had tied it on a tiny cord, and still wore it around her neck. Now, Delphine decided that he probably had gone somewhere to buy her a gift. It cheered her to find two dollars missing from the stash.

They were staying in a tent this time. She went back to the camp cot, rolled herself in her blanket, and woke before morning because the storm had indeed come and blown through the tent’s unwaxed canvas walls and gotten her soaking wet. Luckily, the stuff in the middle was hardly damp, and she was able to string up a line between two trees in order to dry it all. Cyprian had not slept in the tent. Irritation pinched the back of her neck. But when he showed up he was so dear, so sweet to her, so fawning and anxious for her affection and, indeed, he had brought her the gift of a daisy cleverly carved of pure chocolate, that her annoyance collapsed. She smiled into his face and he held her to his chest, which was hard as a piece of armor.

“I love you,” she said. It was not the first time she had said it, but there was in her a great tearful lump of emotion that the words unblocked. Tears stung and she reared back, energized.

“Where the hell were you!”

“Nowhere,” he said.

He did not say this to her smoothly or in a manipulating way, but painfully, as though he really had been nowhere . Smoothing her hair back from her face, he kissed her forehead, right below the middle parting. Her hair was braided to either side. She looked, and felt, like a child. Cyprian’s voice was so astonishingly sad that she forgot her need to know and molded to him in a melt of sympathy. His arms tightened, to the point that she had to take tiny little breaths. That was all right. They were sitting underneath a tree. Delphine was always to remember that. Without her knowing what had happened, they were close, so close, and she could sense every fiber of his doubtless love for her singing through his skin and in his thoughts. She felt entirely safe. She did not want to move. He fell asleep, beneath the tree, but his arm stayed tightly flexed. Delphine was content to watch the world wake up around them, the earth brighten, the fields beyond fields of green wheat thrash to life underneath a powerful mirror.