Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“More?”

With a sleepy, refusing nod, he gave her the bowl, too, and then slid down beneath the burst quilt. He closed his eyes with a great sigh of release. In moments, he was breathing deeply. His fair skin flushed a delicate rose from ear to ear. His lashes were thick and faintly red and his hair bristled pale against the tattered pillowcase. Delphine continued to sit in the chair, watching him, holding the empty bowl in her lap. She smoothed his hair back, but didn’t dare kiss him or tuck the covers up tight around him until he was asleep.

Walking out past some customers, Delphine overheard someone say that a bookkeeper’s job had opened at the lumberyard. It would be pleasant to work in the scent of fresh sawdust rather than raw blood, she thought as she left. Roy was still not home when she returned — that was perhaps a good thing. She locked the door, doused the lights, and went to sleep. The next morning, she put on her work dress, a somewhat worn hat, and her old coat. She did not want to appear in her very best — those things Cyprian had bought for her — since it wouldn’t look right. No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, she wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman, but not one who could not afford, say, a hat with a little green feather. A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.

The spring wind was a quiet and sustained moan, fluttering bits of paper and driving down needles of sleet. The skies were pale purple, the trees soft gray, leafless. There was a watery freshness to the morning light. Delphine’s mood lifted as she walked, for she had always loved this time of year, before the leaves came out, when the wind was wild. Clarisse, in her dramatic way, had had the opposite reaction. She had always fallen into a perverse and severe mystery and worn black to school. Traced her eyes with the soot from a burnt match, and rouged her cheeks, sometimes with circles so she looked clownishly tubercular. To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day — a hopeful time of the year. Walking down the nearly empty street, Delphine’s thoughts turned calmly optimistic. And that was good because when the creature stumbled toward her from the opposite direction, she was somehow prepared to deal with what she saw.

Gray, naked, hairless, more ghostly animal than human, the wild shape flitted around the corner of the drugstore. Then it jumped from the alley, howling, and threw itself down, clutching at the frozen mud. In the hoarse call it made, she recognized her father. He clambered toward her on his knees and then hopped up as if pulled by strings. He was blown against a storefront like a ball of Russian thistle. He twirled off a front stoop to sprawl in the runnel of a rain gutter. Delphine ran for him, but he saw her and with a start of horror stumbled backward, then turned and ran, streaking crazily back and forth across the street. His legs and arms were skinny and wasted, but his belly was round and frog white. His genitalia were small purple decorations underneath. He didn’t bother to hide them, or seem aware at all that he wasn’t wearing a stitch. He just wanted to run. It didn’t matter where. And he was quick and clever in delirium, Delphine knew. He was always very hard to catch.

Delphine chased her father up the main street, then he cut behind the Lutheran church. She chased him all the way around the building, hoping to trap him in the pastor’s yard. Cutting through a patch of blazing forsythia, he nearly ran down Mrs. Orlen Sorven, who threw her round arms up and hollered for help. They left her bellowing cries behind. Roy leaped a primrose gate and sprinted over to the little town park by the river. There, he vaulted picnic tables, sped around the swings. Luckily there were no children of an impressionable age, though a woman with a toddler hid its eyes and dropped her jaw wide. “He’s harmless,” called Delphine. Panting now, she chased Roy up the winding hill. Roy darted from there toward the fire station, then veered north probably to climb the water tower. Delphine closed in. She had the youth, the stamina, but was hampered by her respectable, job-seeking heels. When he eluded her, swinging around the gas pumps again on main street, weeping in terror at what his brain showed him, she reluctantly took off the shoes. She set them near the pump and then gave chase in stockinged feet, chagrined that her last pair would be ruined. Delphine tackled her father as he ran toward the town grade school. She bore him to earth and then the gym teacher ran outside with a towel around his neck and sat on Roy, putting the towel down first. Roy’s legs were streaked with filth and shit. Once caught, he was meek. Delphine took off her coat. She and the gym teacher threaded his arms into the coat’s arms and buttoned it down the front. Children and teachers gaped at the scene from the windows as Roy swayed to his feet and let himself be led along, step by step, toward home.

Once there, Delphine gave her father some water with sugar and salt sprinkled into it, put him to bed. She rolled him up in a sheet, and, although he hated to be confined, she safety pinned the sheet together in back and laid him on his side. She called Doctor Heech, who agreed to come and see him when he’d finished with his appointments. When she was sure that Roy was deeply asleep, she walked back to the lumberyard only to find that the job was filled just this morning, very sorry. And could you make sure your father doesn’t sleep again in the lumber piles? We’re afraid he’ll take a match to the pallets, build a fire. That’s a hazard, you understand.

“IF WE WERE to take a nice, sharp, carving knife and slice you open,” said Doctor Heech, drawing a line with his finger up Roy’s stomach to the breastbone from the groin, “and if we were to push aside your stomach and your guts and take hold of your liver… say we ripped it out and showed you the poor, abused, pulsating organ, we would surely find you’ve done tremendous violence to it.”

Doctor Heech shook his lank silver curls, touched his eyebrows, almost whispered in his reverence for the liver. He went on talking to Roy in a gloomy, dreamy, tone. “This piteous, innocent, earnest helpmeet. What you’ve done is quite unforgivable. Liquefied in places, surely reeking, here petrified, there pickled. Just by gently palpating…” With a faraway frown Heech jammed his fingers into Roy’s side and closed them on something deep in his midsection, causing Roy to yelp, then sob. “I can tell this noble liver of yours is kaput.”

“Leave it alone,” groaned Roy, pushing the doctor’s hands away. “God knows I tried.”

Doctor Heech huffed in disdain and turned to regard Delphine. “I heard you ran a fast fifty-yard dash this morning.”

“It was more like ten miles,” said Delphine. “Will he live?”

“He defies all physical laws,” said Heech, “so I would be foolish to make a prediction. But I don’t know how it is he keeps the flame burning in the wreckage as it is.” Heech looked down at Roy. Suddenly his assessing forbearance turned to rage and he roared out, “By God, you will live! I’ve put too much effort into your damn old carcass for you to die before you show consistent goodness to Delphine.” He jabbed a finger at Roy’s wasted face. “You will not die now! It would be disrespectful! I won’t allow it.”

“Taper him off,” he said to Delphine. “I don’t have to tell you how to do it. And give him this for the cough.” He handed her a bottle of strong cherry bright syrup. Then he put his hand on her shoulder for a moment and said to her, making sure Roy paid attention, “When he does croak, bury him in a packing crate. Don’t give him much of a funeral. Use the money on yourself.”