Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

There was a woman called the needle, so thin that when she turned sideways she was supposed to disappear (she didn’t). There was the usual fat lady — hers spread in pools beside her where she lay on a bearskin rug, as though she’d half melted. Seal-O was a young man with flippers for hands and completely turned-out feet. He had a mean personality and made fun of the boys’ worn and shrunken clothing. Seeing they were stung with shame, Delphine said to Seal-O, “You’re a fine one to talk. You should be balancing a red rubber ball on your damn nose.” He laughed at her in a nasty way, and she grabbed the boys before he said anything worse. They talked to Mr. Tiger, whose skin was really striped. He let them try to rub the stripes off, and they couldn’t. Girl Wonder Calculator made their heads spin. “How come you’re here,” asked Delphine, “not in the university?” There were a very bored strong man and a frightful person of no determinate gender who had another frightful half-a-person growing out of its belly. There was an exotic four-breasted mermaid, whom the boys were not allowed to see, but Delphine did see. She told them later that the top was real but the bottom was definitely made of rubber. And at last there was the Delver of Minds, a little off from things, in a solemnly draped tent.

The boys, as could be expected, had no interest in having their minds delved. Delphine bought them some cotton candy swirled on a paper cone, told them not to get lost, and paid a quarter to enter.

Of course, thought Delphine, the Delver of Minds was a woman. She looked up rather grumpily from where she sat next to a little charcoal burner that she stirred with a slim iron poker. Without a word, gesturing abruptly for Delphine to sit in the wooden chair across from her, the Delver busied herself with unwrapping and then sprinkling onto the charcoal some powdery substance, maybe a kind of incense, that gave off a penetrating spicy aroma. The smell was extremely pleasant, and Delphine breathed it in and looked curiously at the woman.

She had white hair but her face was young. Perhaps she was not much older than Delphine. Although she was quite delicate, and seemed a bit chilled even swathed in misty blue folds of material, she also had a broad-lipped mouth and powerful hands. Her wrists, as she laid out a pack of cards in some peculiar order, were bony and slender. But those fingers, thought Delphine, could crack walnuts.

“You’re watching me pretty close, miss,” said the Delver.

“I was just noticing your fingers — strong enough to crack walnuts open — that’s what I was thinking.” Delphine laughed.

“Crack walnuts. The man in question does that with his fingers. You can look at me all you want,” the woman said, putting away her cards, “but you paid to get your own mind read.”

“Well,” said Delphine, unnerved by the walnut reference, “go ahead then.”

“You’re in town on some desperate errand,” said the Delver.

“Pretty good,” said Delphine. “I’m here to send off the man’s boys, the man I work for.”

“They’re going to Germany.”

“What?”

“You’re in the meat business,” said the woman. “I looked at your hands, too.”

Nicked and gouged, already missing a tiny corner of a fingertip, scarred with small white nicks, roughed with lye and toughened from mixing hot spices for Italian sausages, Delphine’s hands had changed. She looked at them, lying there on the little copper table, as though they were the hands of an alien being. “I never noticed,” she murmured.

“No,” agreed the woman, “you never even tried to hide them when you walked in. Women around here wear gloves. That says something, too.”

“What does it say?”

“You’re not going to hide anything,” said the woman. “There are people who pretend to themselves they are honest, and there are people who actually tell the truth. You’re still between the two. But you’re heading toward the latter. I hear music. This man, you love him.”

“No,” said Delphine. Then she added, “He sings.”

“Oh, all right,” said the Delver. She closed her eyes and then pinched her fingers to her temples, as though she was suffering from a sudden headache. “There’s some kind of animal in your way. Oh, I can’t be right.” She began to laugh to herself. “I am seeing in your mind the picture of a large black bug… skinny at the middle like an ant.”

“Well, you are right,” said Delphine, too amused to be totally surprised. “It’s the boys’ aunt.”

“You hate her guts with good reason.”

“You could put it that way.”

“But she’s going.”

“She’s…” and now Delphine’s breath stuck, painfully. “She is taking the boys.”

“And you love them.”

“Yes,” said Delphine promptly.

“The man is too bright to look at, too dark inside to read. He is a widower. Marry him.”

“I can’t,” said Delphine, now obscurely irritated.

“You’re no coward, either,” said the Delver, “so the reason lies elsewhere.” She turned over the glowing coals and sprinkled a different powder onto them. A bitter and soothing scent rose between them. “You’re tired of holding them all up, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Delphine.

“Then let go of the ones you can do without. She won’t let you take them all, anyway. You will not prevail over her, or divide the sister from the brother, not if they’re blood.”

* * *

DELPHINE GATHERED the boys and walked away from the Delver’s tent — she’d said other things, statements Delphine needed to sort out. And her head now ached mildly from the smoke of the powder she had breathed. That afternoon, the boys were getting their passport pictures taken, anyway, and they were to meet at the hotel just before.

“Let’s get those strings of candy off you,” said Delphine, brushing Emil’s suit jacket, which she’d let out as much as it would go. She plucked away some spiderwebby bits of pink floss. Markus brushed Erich off and unstuck some pieces of straw from the elephants’ bedding from his wool socks. Erich grinned, his two front teeth looked huge and comical. His other teeth were still missing or only half grown in.

“Now you all look good,” said Delphine, but her voice stuck in her chest and came out half strangled.

As they walked back to the hotel, there entered into her mind the unwilling but compelled conviction that she had to talk to Fidelis alone. And she would do it. Never mind what blocks Tante threw, she’d make sure that she and Fidelis had the chance to talk this over before the four of them took off on that train — who knows, it could be forever, the way things were going. She’d kept track of what was happening over there ever since the purge of 1934. Details of that terror were still coming out and she collected them in her mind, would not forget the slaughter as Fidelis and Tante conveniently did when the Saarland was returned and then the Rhineland militarized. All they could talk about was the strength, the prosperity, their family’s increased holdings. The strange, compelling genius of the leader. At the bottom of a Minneapolis newspaper’s foreign section, a tiny blurb on a rampage of hate against Jews and glass breaking made Fidelis shake his head, but then say, after a few moments, that things had always been so. There was always this poison, a few who would express it. Johannes, er war Judn, he said, but didn’t translate or explain. Now, even though Delphine was convinced she could argue him down, even though she believed she’d thought more about the situation that the boys faced than Fidelis, she was afraid to talk to him. Even the thought made her heart beat uncomfortably fast, made her tough hands sweat.