Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“When you fall,” he said, startling her awake, “you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless.”

“I think I’ll leave you,” said Delphine.

“Please don’t leave me,” said Cyprian.

And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed.

T HE TOWN OF ARGUS was the creation of the railroad, and the railroad had no right to be there. Yet once it crossed the river there was no stopping it from going on into the emptiness. What was hauled into the Argus elevators left on the train, going east or west, and what stayed became the town. First, there were the stores to supply the farmers with equipment and food, and then the banks to hold their money, and then more stores where bankers and store owners, too, could shop. Houses for the town people to live in were constructed. One church was raised, another. A school. More houses for the teachers and the railroad workers and the people who built houses. Taverns for their vices. A drugstore for their pains, and so on, until Argus became the county seat. After the courthouse was built, it looked as though Argus was as up-and-coming a place as anywhere in North Dakota.

Fidelis found work at once with the local butcher, Kozka, and he hired out as well to concerns in surrounding small towns. Not only that, but he custom butchered right at people’s farms, as long as he was fetched. He hadn’t a car at first, though he was later to own a succession of delivery trucks. When he started working for the Kozkas, their trade increased, for Fidelis had his father’s talent for making sausage and he’d learned his father’s secrets. He was given them, in fact, on the eve before he left. The secret was extremely simple, said his father. There is no ingredient too humble. Use the finest of everything. Even the grade of salt matters. The garlic must be perfectly fresh, never dried out. The meat of course, and the casings, the transparent guts of sheep. Clean. They must be exquisitely fresh as well. Fidelis, following his father’s dictum when he made up his first batch of Swedish sausages for the Scandinavian trade, did not use just any potato in the filling, but sought the finest in the area. He triumphed. On Thursdays, his sausage-making days, customers began to gather in order to buy links hot from the kettle, before they were even smoked, which made Kozka happy because the sausages weighed more then. As for Fidelis, he lived off sausage ends and bruised fruit, stale cookies and suspect trimmings. He made his own beer, washed his own shirts and aprons, and lived altogether sparingly until he’d saved enough to rent a bigger place. With the rest of his hoard, plus a windfall from his parents, he brought Eva over the empty sea into the emptiness of sky and earth.

She arrived on a wild spring day, along with the little boy, Franz, who walked off the train proud to carry his mother’s purse. Since the week Fidelis had come home from the war and heard the silky music of sunlight, he had not been afflicted with any similar confusion of the senses. And yet, as the result of extremely hard work at two jobs or even three at once, Fidelis had undergone the effects of sleep deprivation and found himself talking out loud when he thought he was merely thinking. In the excitement of their meeting, Fidelis spoke into the swirl of Eva’s hair. Alles, alles , he muttered without thinking, and Eva, knowing what he meant but appalled at her surroundings, could not help thinking, What “everything”? What was there? Even with the houses and shops, the land seemed barren as a moonscape. On the way to Argus, as the train took them cross-country, she had watched the signs of human presence diminish and felt a combination of horror and grief. Around dusk she had even thought that she saw, from the train window, wolves melting into the faltering shadows of small trees. She couldn’t be sure. But she did think that her husband’s offer of alles , everything, was farcical. Even in that moment that should have been sublime — their meeting, at last — her lips curled in disbelief. Yet she didn’t understand his meaning.

Once more in her presence, Fidelis felt the emotion of love move through his body like a great, rough, startling beast. It came out of him and then its power wrapped them both. In its grip, he surrendered and gave everything he was or could possibly be to the woman in his arms. When a man of such strength lets himself be overcome, the earth of his being shudders. He is immensely alone. Eva might have understood Fidelis then, if he’d had the courage to elaborate, but since he didn’t, she merely smiled into his face, kissed him, and decided with a certain bravado that although there was not a damn thing of interest or value in sight, there would be. And she, Eva Waldvogel, would see to it.

THE MAN WHO FIRST hired Fidelis Waldvogel became his chief and then only competitor in Argus. Pete Kozka was a good-natured but humorless block of a man, always in need of help since his ways were cheap and men quit. A tornado had touched down at his shop, once. Pennies from the change drawer had been driven neatly into the plaster wall. People came by just to see that. As rivalries go, that between the two butchers was amicable enough, based chiefly on pranks and boasts. Sometimes, though, things turned more serious. An ongoing joke that got out of control did a great deal, in fact, to sour relations between the two. This occurred after Fidelis left Kozka’s meat market and set up his own operation at the other end of town. Since Fidelis had never hidden his intention to do just that, Kozka suffered the move with a stoic shrug. At the time, too, it looked as though Argus might grow forever, even possibly become a major metropolis if the county itself continued to boom in land sales. Although it did not work out that way, when Fidelis made his move there was plenty of business to go around.

With a bank loan and the money from the sale of his share of a building that the Waldvogel family owned back in Ludwigsruhe, Fidelis bought up an old farmstead on the opposite side of town, as far from the Kozkas as it was possible to be and still live in Argus. This mark of consideration also did a great deal to ameliorate any potential hard feelings, at first. Of course, Fidelis could not have anticipated that, when the main highway was rerouted to take the pressure of traffic off the town’s clogged main street, it would pass directly by the new storefront that he tacked on to the sturdy farmhouse. Yet it wasn’t even the jealousy over business gained, however inadvertently, that made things go bad. It was a different sort of jealousy entirely, and one more primary even than money.

A dog’s love is something more or less complicated, according to the owner of the dog. Fidelis, for example, was faintly contemptuous of canine adoration, believing that it was based mostly on the dog’s stomach rather than the dog’s heart. Pete Kozka, on the other hand, held to the conviction that dogs, his own especially, were creatures of an unsurpassed fealty and that their loyalty was based on a personal love. Pete and his wife, Fritzie, raised purebred chow dogs with coal-black tongues and bitter temperaments. The progenitor of their line, the father of them all, was a snuff brown champion named Hottentot. He bred alternately with his first dog wife, Nancy, and his second mate, Zig, short for Ziguenerin, named for her passion for music — she slept near Fritzie’s piano, and had a musical howl any child could prompt by singing nursery rhymes in a minor key.

After Fidelis moved, what should have been an insignificant difference of opinion became another thing entirely when Hottentot began turning up at the back loading plank of Waldvogel’s Meats, where there were sometimes scraps. In addition to their differences over such things as the motivations of dogs, Pete and Fidelis also had a fundamental difference over the disposal of the waste, the odd bits, the offal and guts that are an important part of the butchering trade. While Pete kept every tiniest bit down to the tail’s tips in a barrel that he locked in the freezer and sold to a guts dealer each month, Fidelis’s way was to distribute the wastage, and he had, therefore, a commodious following of those who lived lightly on the earth — from dogs to itinerants and the hard-hit poor of Argus. The visitors at the back of his shop, as mentioned, included Hottentot.