Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

TANTE DID NOT GIVE UP when the suit betrayed her, she couldn’t, not even when that first day she was nearly run over in it. Not even when she was sneered at and glared through in the county offices. She made the rounds. She went back to the bank so often that the tellers rolled their eyes at her approach. She even considered for a brief, mad moment approaching the owner of the pool hall and asking if he needed someone to clean. She got as close as the back entrance. But the smell of stale beer, sweat, piss, and worse, as well as the knowledge of what she’d find there for trash, was too revolting. What awful something might be hers to scrub and wash, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t overcome even the phantom of her disgust. So she went on searching. And to its credit, the suit held up. The fibers of the weave did not wilt or fray. The suit carried itself around her like a shield. Even when she’d failed for the day and dragged herself toward home, and some scrap of a meal, the suit rallied her and stiffened her resolve. Instead of starving that night, she went to her brother’s and straightened her back before she entered, swept in as she always had, snatched the food as though it was her due, grandly, because she had to claim it without humility, or she could not claim it at all, not in front of Delphine, whom she both depended upon and hated.

Ever since the hill, Tante had found that Fidelis was more sympathetic to her ideas about bringing the boys back to be raised in Germany. She couldn’t help pointing out that Fidelis’s sons had gotten themselves into tremendous danger. What might happen next? It could be worse! And they were boys, hell-bent, saint-worshiping, furiously happy, danger-loving boys, no doubt about that. They would get into trouble if they could. Tante felt it her duty to tell Fidelis that she doubted that, even with Delphine there for part of the day, he could keep a close enough eye on his sons. They were not safe. They were running wild and swatting themselves with the sign of the cross. And with the wages he had to pay in the shop he could barely keep shoes on their feet. You could see the newspaper linings inside of their old boots. She went on in this way until Fidelis left the room, but she could see that she’d made an impression of some sort. She played on his guilt over what might have happened, what came so close. Markus buried in the hill.

In the suit, the sun glancing off it in the afternoons, a heavy set of woolen underwear beneath keeping her snug, Tante made her way through the town, thickening her skin for the inevitable refusals. She went out. She asked for work. And then one day she actually got hired.

The place had just opened, whatever it was. At first it was hard to tell what exactly was sold there. A jumble of baskets and tobacco cans spilled out onto the sidewalk. A wide front window held bolts of new fabric and neatly cut piles of old, a large tin sieve with half-moon handles carved of horn, some handmade lace, rickrack, ribbons, and a brand-new sewing machine. A placard on the door said merely Notions. Tante stepped close, entered. On the other side of the half-painted, half-scraped door, there was a battered dressmaker’s dummy, more bolts of fabric — all sorts, from wools to calico — and a display of brilliant hat trims. There were also baskets of dyed feathers, ten kinds of machine lace, a fur collar that would have looked very fine sewed to her old black coat. There were used mason jars, odd pieces of silverware, rolls of chicken wire in a corner, a perfectly good rake hanging on the wall. Squash, cucumber and pumpkin vine seeds. Scrap paper. The variety of things for sale was bewildering, cheerful, a bold mishmash. Tante walked around the small shop once and then addressed a stern and orderly-looking woman behind the counter, asked her usual question. Whether there was work to be had. The woman walked out from behind the counter, hugely pregnant, and said, “I got to stop for a while. Can you sell?”

“I can sell!” said Tante, her voice stout and grim.

“Then just a minute,” said the woman. “I’ll get my boss.”

She went behind a muslin curtain, spoke to someone, and then out walked Step-and-a-Half.

At first, Tante didn’t register the situation, and she gave Step-and-a-Half the irritated once-over, the condescending twitch of her mouth, that, at best, she gave her at Waldvogel’s when Step-and-a-Half claimed her scraps. And she waited, staring past the saleswoman, for the boss to appear. Then she looked back at the woman behind the counter, and at Step-and-a-Half, who was regarding her with a tigerish amusement.

“Well?” said Step-and-a-Half.

“I’m here to see the boss,” said Tante, her eyes flicking all around the little room.

“You’re looking at the boss,” said Step-and-a-Half.

Tante heard that. Her head swiveled, and the complicated knots of her hair fairly writhed at her sharp movement. She thought that she couldn’t have heard right, and gave a short, barking laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“This here is my place.”

The woman behind the counter blew the air out her cheeks impatiently. “Well you said you was looking for work, didn’t you?”

Tante still couldn’t take it in, but she nodded dumbly in the affirmative. Then cleared her throat and said in meek puzzlement, “Yes.”

“Can you sell?” Step-and-a-Half asked the question now.

Somehow an affirmative answer emerged from Tante.

“And do you know a damn thing about all this stuff?” Step-and-a-Half swept her arm around the festooned store walls. The supercilious grandeur that had always seemed absurd when she was a scrap hauler now seemed more appropriate for the owner of sumptuous bolts of fabric, the huge variety of extraordinary pickings and leavings stacked in piles and lovingly displayed on nails or set off in a celebratory way on shelves.

Though she still had not emerged from her shock, Tante took up the challenge. “I know much!”

“And do you have to wear that thing?”

Step-and-a-Half nodded at the metal-buttoned suit, but Tante reared back and folded her arms and shut her astonished mouth. Her need for work smacked up against her pride and drove hard against the impossible image of this tattered and flamboyant scrap hauler now mysteriously turned respectable business owner. And potential boss. Things were turned right over in her mind. Her social pride was upset. And yet she could have stood that. It was the slight of her clothing, the specific suit, which she yet wore with honor and offended loyalty, that she couldn’t bear.

“This is a good suit, and most costly,” she informed her. Step-and-a-Half waved away her stiff words and kicked her foot at a graceful, womanly, black enamel electric Singer with delicate gold flower trim and an optional wood cabinet that fit beautifully beneath.

“If you can work the thing, you can sell the thing.”

“I’ll learn to work it,” was Tante’s promise. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gleaming instrument, the very latest model, streamlined and yet familiar. The whole room seemed to narrow to that machine, as though a spotlight were turned upon it. All else fell into blackness and insignificance, even the idea of working under Step-and-a-Half, a surprise so grave that the potential humiliation hadn’t even sunk in or truly registered with Tante. The lustrous, compact little businesslike machine with its sparkling needle and shining chrome flywheel was enough, for the moment, to still the larger picture. For it made sense of her dilemma. Tante touched the cool curve where the arm accommodated the cloth, ran her hand curiously over the carved oak of the cabinet.

“Sit down at it,” said Step-and-a-Half. “Mrs. Knutson can give you the rundown.”

Charmed and fascinated, Tante sat down at the machine and accepted instructions. Even when the person she despised most in the town, Roy Watzka, stepped past her bearing in his arms a bolt of purple felt to place in the window, she hardly acknowledged him. She was learning to thread the needle.