Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Eva would like this room, she thought. There was a small, ornate, feminine, wooden desk where Delphine paid the bills. A huge padlocked sea-trunk of bent blond pine, secured with iron bands, held two more quilts used on very cold nights. A small oval rag rug gave warmth, she believed, to the center of the plain board floor. She hadn’t decided whether the figurine of a dog, set on a rickety table pushed up underneath a window, was ugly or elegant. It didn’t matter. All of these shabby objects were bathed in the kind light of the rose-shaded lamp. In that light, Delphine gazed upon them with a warm satisfaction and shut her ears to the cold, subterranean creaking of the earth.

Yes, they were still down there, the Chavers. Not their bones but some vestige of their desperation. Half asleep, sometimes, Delphine talked to them, tried to explain. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have. I am so sorry. Go away.

When she heard someone knock on the door, she started and thought first of Ruthie. Then contained herself. It was just that they never had visitors. Though the town was growing, few came out that way, certainly no one ever at night. Delphine looked through the window before she opened the door and saw that Fidelis stood hunched into his woolen greatcoat. He was heavily scarved against the sharp spring wind and booted against the mud. For some reason he had walked. Delphine’s heart leaped suddenly in worry for Markus, and she lunged to open the door. Fidelis stepped in with a swirl of night air, and she swiftly shut the door behind him.

“Markus?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” said Fidelis, untying his heavy work boots. “He’s not sick, er ist sehr müde .”

He left the boots behind him on some newspapers set near the door.

“Dad’s asleep in the kitchen,” she explained, “so come, let’s sit in here.”

Obediently, he walked in his wool-stockinged feet to the chair. The socks were gray, the heels and the toes bright red, childish looking in a way that might have endeared Fidelis to Delphine, if she didn’t pinch off such a thought before it formed. Without asking if he’d like some, she put the water on the stove, for mint tea, and came back in to sit with him while she waited for it to boil. Fidelis told her there had been a letter from Germany. The boys had started school and were involved in a government youth group that Tante said was extremely hard to get selected for. She implied that she had had to use money that Fidelis sent with her to bribe government officials to admit the boys, though they had passed some rigorous tests. As for Tante, she had at first conducted sewing demonstrations with her American model machine. Then she’d realized it was inferior to the German model.

“That’s enough,” said Delphine. “I’m not interested in your sister.” She began to quiz him about the boys at home. Were they eating well? Washing? And the business. Were the people he had credited paying their bills? Some. Not enough. Were the suppliers giving him good prices? Obviously, from his answers, he did not have the time to spend with them in wangling better profit margins. Delphine frowned. “One or two percent here and there will make or break us,” she said, “you’ll find out!” She slapped the arm of her chair to hide her slip. Us? What was she saying?

“Just tea again.” She mocked his disappointed look, and said, “You drink too much beer anyway.” She rose and went into the kitchen, stepped around the sleeping Roy, and swirled mint leaves into the boiling water in her heavy brown teapot. She took out cups and put a lump of sugar in the bottom of each one. She brought the pot and the two cups, balanced, back into the living room and set them by the china figurine of the dog.

“Have you ever seen a dog like this?” she asked Fidelis.

It had long floppy black ears, white and black markings, a pointed muzzle, and sat alertly upon a green porcelain cushion.

Fidelis picked the dog up and turned it this way and that, almost playfully. “I don’t think another like this dog exists on earth,” he finally said, putting it back.

Delphine said nothing. She was startled by the frivolous tone in his voice. There was an awkward, flirtatious quality about him. It was upsetting for her to hear him say anything that was not tied to the store. She addressed him on safer topics, and for a while they managed to skate a comfortable surface. Then Fidelis asked with no warning whether she knew, yet, if Cyprian was coming back.

“No!” said Delphine, her voice caught in reluctance to be thrown, so suddenly, into the personal.

Fidelis leaned back now and looked directly at her. The rose light polished his features, lent to the whole of him an incongruous sweetness. He’d hung his jacket on the chair behind him and was now in his shirt sleeves. The light picked up the bronze of the hair on his forearms and she gazed down a bit dizzily at his heavy-boned wrists. He glanced at the darkened door of the kitchen, hitched his chair a little closer to hers.

“I gave Cyprian enough time,” he said. His voice thudded. The statement seemed ridiculous. But when he leaned forward, Delphine smelled the spice of him — white pepper and red, a little ginger and caraway. And the male scent of him, the wool and the linen of his shirt. The tart shaving tonic. She knew he rubbed cigar ashes on his teeth to whiten them and then brushed with baking soda. Knew he lathered his whiskers with Eva’s old bars of hand-milled French lilac soap. All of these little things about him were hers to know because she’d kept his house while his wife died. Then she’d cared for his sons. She’d told herself all along that these things had nothing to do with him, Fidelis himself, but now here he was, removed from the intimacy of his family. And yet she knew his habits while he’d hardly seen the inside of her house. He knew little of her. Nothing so personal as the type of soap she used. And what was she to make of this giving Cyprian time?

“Gave him? What do you mean, ‘gave’ him?

“Time,” said Fidelis, “to come back.”

“Well, yes,” said Delphine. His meaning dawned on her. A contrary ticklish energy seized her. She wanted to make things difficult for Fidelis. Why not? Why should he come here so easily and overfill the small pale gold room, her private nest? So she began to laugh, as though he’d said something very funny, and then she calmed herself and took a drink of her tea.

“Did you think he had deserted me?” She would never give away the reason they had parted. She would never tell that he’d left much earlier than people thought. “So like a man, to think that.” Perhaps she was a little under the influence of one of her drawing-room novels, in which people sparred over such topics as love, for it delighted her suddenly to be in the position she was in, to have Fidelis here trying to explain himself and her believing that she finally read his heart. So he had waited for her!

“Fidelis.” She shook her head, the curls of her brown hair lashed her shoulders, and she raised her eyes to his with a lazy knowledge. But when she looked into his face his expression was of such helpless ardor that she forgot her small artifice.

IT WOULD SEEM for months afterward that there had been a great collision, that two glaciers had through slow force smashed together, at last, and buckled. The two were dazed, a bit slow with other people, forgetful. Delphine kept her job at the courthouse, but cut the hours back and came into the shop to wait on customers each afternoon. She came to be near Fidelis. As before, she tended the kitchen and, if she had time, did laundry for the boys — not Fidelis. Since she’d left, he’d begun to iron his own shirts with a soldierly precision.

One afternoon, she found him at it when she arrived. That day, for some reason the whole place was quiet. She walked into the cold concrete-floored utility room, where the water was piped out of the wall into a double soapstone tub. There he stood, chilled in the loop of his undershirt, arms moving above the wooden board covered with a padded cloth. He had bought a modern plug-in iron, and was putting a crease in the starched, sizzling shoulder of a sleeve.