Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

This, at any rate, he could tell Delphine by way of a story. He could say it to her now. Maybe if he told it all, there would be a way out, an answer in the telling.

A light fog had risen and the smoke of it swirled in the high beams. As the car cut through the evening, Fidelis told all that had happened beginning, as he thought he must, with Johannes.

THE FIRST TIME Johannes saved his life, he had dragged Fidelis out of a pile of dead when the bullet that had slammed through his jaw knocked him senseless. The next time, he had shot an onrushing French soldier when his friend’s rifle jammed. Johannes had saved Fidelis twice only to die himself in the trembling of continual music. This happened in the war’s final days. Through two days and nights in the elegant ruin of an aristocratic house, Fidelis had stayed with Johannes. The place was a stop on the mad retreat, the place where all the wounded and the dying were dumped. All day and all night the walls trembled with the continual shelling, not far off. In the small eternities between each impact, the glass in the windows, smashed all over the sills, shook with a gentle brilliance like chimes in the wind.

They stayed upstairs because below in the cellars the wounded were being smothered when the fit sought shelter, and the reek was even worse, and the screaming and the cursing, the groans, the insane shouts. Fidelis thought it better for his friend to die in the rain and wind, in the random music. His guts blown, his throat filling, it was hard to say what killed him. Dysentery or the shallow, filthy wound or the murderous exhaustion of all of the retreating and despairing men. Johannes whispered, “Sing to me, old friend.” In a freezing room, in one corner of his shattered country, accompanied by the fractured ringing of glass, Fidelis sang. Afterward he’d laid Johannes out and wrapped a silk scarf his mother had given him for luck around Johannes’s face, but he hadn’t had the courage to stay behind and bury him. Fidelis walked on. And where he walked there was more chaos and dying, and he’d walked past that in hobnailed boots and past all he possibly could until he got back to his childhood bed, his mother, his eiderdown cover, his books, his father and sister and Eva. He told her about the death of her baby’s father, and then… He said to Delphine, “Es war einfach. Wir haben verheiraten.”

“You married,” said Delphine, her voice hushed, “so that the baby, Franz, would have a father.”

“Yes,” said Fidelis, because that was the simple answer. And because he thought it was the answer that Delphine had to hear, but it was not the only answer. His body and Eva’s had told them the answer before they’d known it, in that first meeting, when he saw her more naked than he ever would again. In the darkness now, his face became very hard. When he remembered these things, the sad weight of them closed upon him and he had to breathe in and out deliberately to loosen it, like tight bands around his chest. He certainly couldn’t explain this to the woman sitting next to him. Delphine did not seem to notice, anyway. She had removed her pumps and drawn her feet up on the seat, curved there in thought. She sat there neatly, the way an animal might crouch. He could feel Delphine’s awareness drift deep along some current he couldn’t fathom, and it was a long time before she came to her conclusion and spoke.

“So if we married it would be the same thing all over again.”

“Yes!” He was surprised she put it all together. But she hadn’t, not the way he thought, not the way it was a box of four people that strangely dovetailed. Delphine had reasoned that, since he’d married Eva not out of love but rather out of duty to the unborn child, this was not a thing that Fidelis wanted to repeat. And that was understandable, she thought, in a calm relief. Because who knew, after the child was grown, if the two would ever get along? And she herself did not know. Couldn’t read her own heart. Whether it was the sons or the combination of the father and the sons she loved. But at least, in that hour as they cut through the blackness, she admitted the possibility that he was included. And then, from behind them, Markus woke and the blankets rustled down around him as he leaned toward the front seat.

“Papa,” he asked, his voice thick with sleep, still miserable, “sing to me?”

Delphine didn’t know that there were times when Fidelis showed a certain tenderness to his sons, times he sang to them. When they had trouble sleeping, when they were very small, when Eva asked him to, and when they were ill, he sang the old German lieder to them in a restrained voice that filled the room with a comforting resonance in which they felt protected. He sang the one he knew was a favorite of Markus’s, and he sang it over and over just as Markus always asked. “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin. Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”

It was the song about the Lorelei, full of pictures. The women sat on the great rocks, combing their golden hair with combs of gold. Hearing their song, men sailed closer, their hearts were pierced and fascinated by the beauty of the Lorelei, and then they were drawn onto the killing reefs. It wasn’t a song that Delphine knew and only gradually did she piece the meaning together, and when she did she wondered at him, this Fidelis, who casually stuck chickens and stunned sheep, who brought down a dozen mutts in one noise and burned them up like trash, who mourned his wife with a gravity that added to the stillness he possessed already, but said nothing, who made of the complications already between them an indecipherable maze, and who sang to calm his sons. Gradually, she fell under the spell of his singing, too, with Markus, and at last she was lulled into the blackness.

Fidelis let the song drift, heard their honest drawn breaths, nodded slowly at the road, and hummed a new and simpler song, to keep himself awake. It was a song he’d sung with Johannes, drunk, in forgetfulness which he could not now forget, as the wheels turned them forward and forward, far from Germany, onto the wideness of the plains of America where the wars were not between the same old enemies he was used to, but were over before he’d got there, the great dying finished, and the blood already soaked into the ground.

W HEN DELPHINE had asked him the obvious question, Roy’s answer often was, “I drink to fill the emptiness.” Delphine hated that line. Once, she pushed him backward into a chair and yelled, “Hey, I’ve got news for you. Everyone does everything to fill the emptiness.” While it may or may not have been true, Roy was comforted to think that his personal emptiness was universal. He felt less special, especially when it came to the dark, fixed hole that his lost love had left in him, but he felt a kinship, too, with other empty souls. From then on, one of his favorite bottoms-up slogans was a toast to the great void. During the long sobriety that he enjoyed after Eva’s death, he’d taken Delphine’s remark as an earnest directive. Everything he’d done, he did to fill the emptiness. Unfortunately, nothing worked like alcohol.

“Nothing can fill the ache of the abyss,” he said one night to his singing cronies. The men were sitting on old crates and creaking chairs in the ruins of an arbor that grapevines had half pulled down with their quick-growing weight. Fidelis always kept them organized, singing song after song, practicing. When he was occupied elsewhere, as now, the men often drifted into gossip or even self-pitying monologues.

“Nothing can fill the nothing,” Roy went on lecturing, “except love or booze or a great religious impulse. And I ain’t got Minnie’s love anymore, or the lack of an imagination to believe in the God of the Lutherans or the Catholics! Nor do I got the depth to invent my own rattletrap version of the Lord Almighty.”