Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

To watch him in his power doing work women did so often filled Delphine with a low electricity, and she brushed the side of his arm, above his elbow. Her hand was still in its glove. He put the iron down. Took her hand in his hand and then pulled off each finger of her glove while looking into her eyes with a steady gravity. When the glove was off, he lifted her hand in both of his and regarded it intently. He stroked her knuckles, scored with white scars, and at last, tentatively, brought her hand to his lips. He fit his mouth over the crease where her fingers came together at the palm.

Then he moved too quickly, in a way she didn’t like, with an arrogant sweep, and tried to pull her to him. She sidestepped his rough gesture and walked out of the room, still breathing the heady scorched scent of clean ironing. That was the first time they’d ever touched, or kissed, though it was more than a kiss and not yet a kiss. Walking home later on, she thought of his eyes as he pulled her glove off, and then she was suddenly home. She realized that she’d walked, tranced, down the long road, without seeing a thing around her. She had no memory of how she got to her door. And yet, though she couldn’t stop thinking of him in this new way, she avoided him. For when they were around each other now the stage was bare, all the scenery pulled away, and there was only the full burden of their attraction. It was too much, to let it happen all at once. They came together by the smallest incremental movements.

Weeks later, they still hadn’t kissed, hadn’t let their mouths touch. And yet one day in the dusty office filled with paperwork, Fidelis knelt before Delphine and with his hands smoothed the insides of her legs up to the tops of her heavy silk stockings, felt where they were hooked with metal garters, traced the slices of material up underneath her skirt. He spread her legs apart so wide she was embarrassed, there in the leather chair, and then he kissed the insides of her knees. She caught his hair back in both fists, pulled so hard it must have stung, but only stared down at him, his face immobile between her legs. She shoved him away with all of her strength, and pressed down her skirt.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.” He rose in one subdued, brutal motion and dusted himself off with broad unnecessary whacks at the legs of his pants. “Around you, I get these ideas.” He tried to recover his dignity, folded his arms, then unfolded them, sat down, and rifled the desk for a cigarette. When he couldn’t find one his threw up his hands as though to say, See? I can’t get anything I want? And Delphine finally laughed.

MANY DAYS, they couldn’t bear the tension and ignored each other entirely. They set a date four months away on which they would be married. At first it seemed a very long time to wait, and then it seemed to Delphine far too short a time and she thought maybe she would put it off. Fidelis bought their wedding license in the courthouse, showed her the paper casually, and they both signed their names with a dispassionate alacrity, as though they were signing banking documents. They were good at working together — quick and respectful and efficient. Delphine took over the bookkeeping and the ordering again, and she began to bring religion to the dusty office careening with papers.

One afternoon when Franz and Markus were eating in the kitchen, Delphine brought Fidelis in and pushed his shoulder. “Tell them,” she commanded.

Franz paused, frozen, his hand to his mouth, waiting for his father’s announcement. Markus continued eating, chewing serenely. Nodding, he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.” He took another bite, and asked the next important question.

“So does that mean Emil and Erich are coming home?”

“I wrote and sent money,” said Fidelis, with assurance. “Tante will make the arrangements.”

“Tell them,” said Delphine, again, shaking his arm.

Fidelis gathered himself, but before he could open his mouth, Franz beat him.

“Oh, I get it,” said Franz. “You two are getting married.” He forked half of a baked apple into his mouth, chewed it all up. “And as long as we’re making announcements, I’m going into the air corps. I’m enlisting.”

“There is no war!” Fidelis’s low voice nearly cracked with intensity — he still had his hopes. But Franz didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, there will be,” said Franz. “Just you wait. I see it coming, and when it does I’m…” He made a skimming motion with his hand, like an airplane taking off. He buzzed his hand into the wild blue yonder and then he grinned at them all, nodding to encourage their approval. Fidelis hunched his shoulders in distress and left the room.

“Do you have to be so happy about it?” said Delphine, annoyed with Franz for spoiling the announcement, but also suddenly aghast at his thirst for war.

“I’m happy about it,” said Markus. “It’s like you already live here.”

“Oh, that,” Franz said. “He can do what he wants.”

“You know what I’m talking about!” said Delphine. “Can you go and sit with him at least?”

“Dad wouldn’t want that.” Franz took a walnut from the bowl on the table, cracked it with his fingers, just like Fidelis. He tossed the meats up in the air and caught them on his tongue. “I’ll fly a Spitfire! We won’t get anywhere near German territory. I’ll be fighting other pilots — not Dad’s people. He knows that.”

“You have no idea what a war means!” Delphine tried not to raise her voice or drive him off. But his willful ignorance was making her passionate. “Forget that I’m marrying your father. Be realistic, Franz. They could put you in the infantry.”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, pityingly, at Delphine. “A bomber, maybe. But no. I’ll be a fighter pilot.” He made noises with his mouth and pretended to machine-gun Markus, who popped his lips back at him.

“God, you’re a hard soul!” Delphine cried, overcome.

“What do you want? The marriage is your business,” said Franz. He sulked. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Of course it matters,” said Delphine coaxingly.

“Well then, I think I’m leaving,” said Franz. “Don’t take this personal, but I don’t want to think about it.” He got up and sauntered away, shoved his fists in the pockets of his poor, tattered, imitation flight jacket. As he passed out of Delphine’s sight, he swore hard, kicked the dust. His eyes watered. Then he laughed sarcastically at himself. He had never been so miserable in his life.

* * *

WHENEVER FRANZ passed the place where he and Mazarine had swung from the road to enter their special place underneath the pine, his throat burned. A tension collected around his heart. For hours after, he would think about the pine tree, his ribs tightening and his chest shutting out the air. It was hard to take a breath. And yet suddenly his breath came out in huge, deep, surprising sighs. Food went dry in his throat and the weight dropped off him. The bones of his wrists jutted out, his cheekbones sharpened. Nor could he sleep right. His dreams were of reckless bargains. Torrents of water swept him from Mazarine or tumbled her over cliffs and through culverts, just out of reach. Things had only gotten worse as it became apparent that Mazarine Shimek truly meant her no and would not have him back. Mazarine, in the new clothing he had never touched.

She wore a soft plaid kilt of rust brown to school now — even Franz could tell that it was perfectly sewn. The hem swished just the right way around her legs when she walked, whirled softly when she turned. The colors of her pleated skirt were the browns and golds of the light that used to fall upon the two of them underneath the great pine tree. She wore crisp blouses that managed somehow to drape, as well, across her bird’s collarbone. The fabric joined across her chest with rich, glazed, mother-of-pearl buttons. She wore her hair in a braid now, twined through with a ribbon of heavy satin — sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. He could not help recording a list of these details — they were all he had of her right now. But Mazarine didn’t in any way return his regard. She didn’t speak to him, much less let him take her books from her arms and strap them onto her bicycle and give her rides, as though she were a much younger girl. He missed that the most, he thought. Even more than touching her he longed for the weight of her wobbling between his arms on the bicycle. Him steering and her laughing as she tried to balance. The farther away she kept herself, the more he knew this: he loved Mazarine — to the death, he thought wildly, beyond death.